The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS | A division of Penguin Young Readers Group Published by the Penguin Group

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Meg Wolitzer

 

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SCRABBLE is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. Neither the author nor the publisher is associated with Hasbro, Inc., and Hasbro, Inc., has not authorized or endorsed the use of the SCRABBLE name and any other intellectual property owned by Hasbro, Inc., on or in connection with the publication of this book.

 

 

Wolitzer, Meg.

p. cm.

Summary: Twelve-year-olds Duncan Dorfman, April Blunt, and Nate Saviano meet at the Youth Scrabble Tournament where, although each has a different reason for attending and for needing to win, they realize that something more important is at stake than the grand prize.

ISBN : 978-1-101-52947-8

4. Scrabble (Game)—Fiction. 5. Contests—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.W8338Fin 2011
[Fic]—dc22 2011005228

 

Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/youngreaders

 

 

PART ONE

LUNCH ME AT AND THE CHINAMAN

O
n the night before his first day at his new school, in the small, squirrel-colored living room of his great-aunt’s house, Duncan Dorfman’s mother warned him not to show anyone his power. “Whatever you do, Duncan, keep it to yourself,” she said. “If you don’t, I’m afraid something bad will happen.”

He had no idea why she was so worried. It wasn’t as if people ever paid that much attention to him. In his last school, Duncan hadn’t stood out in any way. He’d made a few friends, though no one who would particularly miss him now that he’d moved away. Besides, it wasn’t as if the thing he could do was even useful.

“It’s not a
power
,” Duncan told his mother as they sat in the living room that night. She was laying out his clothes for school, which embarrassed him because he was twelve, not five. “A power,” he said, “is when you can lift a car off a baby, or save the planet from destruction. That kind of thing.”

“Then what would you call it?” his mother asked. She smoothed the creases on the ugly mustard-yellow shirt she had bought for him with her employee discount at Thriftee Mike’s Warehouse.

“I don’t know.” What
did
you call the thing he could do? It didn’t have a name. But he didn’t want to upset her, so he promised that whatever the thing was, he would keep it to himself.

A week earlier, the two of them had gotten on a bus in Michigan with several suitcases and taped-up cartons, and then they had traveled for nine hours. At some point the bus stopped at a bad-smelling rest stop, and Duncan and his mother got out and bought French fries that seemed to have been cooked in oil left over from an ancient civilization. And then they got back on the bus and both of them gratefully closed their eyes, their heads knocking together occasionally in sleep.

Finally they arrived in Drilling Falls, Pennsylvania, the town where Duncan’s mother had grown up. There was nothing exciting about Drilling Falls, and she had said she didn’t have many happy memories of growing up there, but they had nowhere else to go. She had lost her job as the manager of a gift shop in Michigan, and when his great-aunt heard this, she had invited them to come live with her.

Aunt Djuna was a box-shaped old woman who wore a green sweater over her shoulders, and who, as she liked to tell people, never ate anything with a face. You would walk into her front hall and a yam or bean aroma would hit you, the same way that the smell of brownie mix or roast chicken would float your way in other houses.

His mother often said, “We should be very grateful to Aunt Djuna. We should kiss the ground she walks on. She gave us a home, and found me a job.”

Thanks to Aunt Djuna, Duncan’s mother now worked at Thriftee Mike’s Warehouse, a superstore with bins of random items like double-A batteries and pig-shaped staplers. Though very few people had spent any time with Thriftee Mike himself, he was a real, thirty-year-old man named Michael Scobee, who lived in the rich section of Drilling Falls. Duncan had heard him described as an eccentric millionaire who wore high-top sneakers and ate junky cocoa-and-marshmallow-flavored cereal for breakfast. No one really knew much else about him, because he only came to the store once in a while, very late at night, when no one was there except the security guards. He wasn’t supposed to be “good with people,” and so he stayed away during the day.

“That’s fine with me,” Duncan’s mother had said. “I don’t need to see him.”

The employees at Thriftee Mike’s wore red smocks with name tags that read, I’M THRIFTEE SUE or, I’M THRIFTEE PETE. Or, in Duncan’s mother’s case, I’M THRIFTEE CAROLINE. Caroline Dorfman was a nice person, pretty, blond-haired, and funny, but she worried all the time—mostly about Duncan. She’d raised him all by herself, because his father Joe Wright had died of a rare disease called panosis before Duncan was born.

“It was very sad,” she would say quietly, but she didn’t like to say too much else about it. All Duncan knew was that his parents had been young when he was born, and that they hadn’t been married. That was about the extent of his knowledge.

Duncan’s mother got migraine headaches when she was under stress. Usually, right before the headache came on, her vision would be clouded with a silvery light she called an aura. The next thing Duncan knew, she would say, “Oh no, another aura. I’m sorry, Duncan, I’ll see you later, honey, okay? Make yourself a PB&J for lunch. And we have plums!” Then she’d go into her bedroom and lie in the dark until the migraine passed. Over the years, Duncan had brought up the subject of his father less and less often, because he knew it really upset her.

Just like now, when she asked Duncan not to show anyone his so-called power, he knew he should do what she wanted, or else she might get agitated. The only reason Duncan had shown it to her in the first place was that it had taken him by surprise. He had been in his new bedroom two days earlier, sitting on the bed flipping through an old book—something dumb about a kid named Jimmy who builds a rocket ship with his best friend, a gopher—when suddenly Duncan discovered that he could do the strangest thing.

It had shocked him, so he’d gone out into the hallway, where his mother was unpacking boxes from the move, and he’d said to her, “Mom, check this out.”

That was his first mistake.

She’d looked up, distracted, smiling, a mermaid lamp in one hand. He’d showed it to her, and in her astonishment she dropped the lamp to the floor, cracking off a piece of the mermaid’s tail. “Oh my God, Duncan,” she’d finally whispered, “you have a
power.
”

“No I don’t,” he said. Duncan Dorfman wasn’t that kind of person. He wasn’t powerful in any way at all. He thought of himself as ordinary—
less
than ordinary. He was a little thick-chested, wavy-haired, and, these days, nerdshirted. He wasn’t good at sports or science. He couldn’t tell a joke well. He didn’t know everything about every dinosaur that ever existed, or every rock. He didn’t have any passions, let alone any powers.

“Well, I think you do,” she insisted. “And it’s the kind of thing that could get attention. That’s the last thing we need while we’re starting from scratch here in my old town. Please don’t show it to anyone else, okay, honey?”

“Okay,” Duncan said, though her fear didn’t make sense to him.

“No one,”
said his mother.

“What shouldn’t Duncan show anyone?” Aunt Djuna asked as she came into the hallway with an armful of root vegetables that poked out like the snouts of strange little animals.

“Oh, nothing, Djuna,” said his mother, shooting him a keep-quiet look.

There were other secrets in this house, too, Duncan thought. Just the night before, when he was lying in bed, he had heard his mother and Aunt Djuna whispering together in the living room. As he fell asleep, he’d heard fragments of what they were saying:

“. . . I realize it’s not perfect,”
his mother said.

And his great-aunt said,
“He deserves better . . .”

“I know, I know,”
said his mother.

In the morning at breakfast, when Duncan asked her what they had been talking about—what wasn’t perfect, and who deserved better—she said she couldn’t remember. “I’m sure it wasn’t anything important,” she said, and he let it drop.

And now here they were, at nine P.M. on the night before school was to begin, and secrecy was in the air again.

“Remember, keep it to yourself,” his mother said, handing him his stiff yellow shirt and green pants. From across the room, Aunt Djuna, now fast asleep in the big old recliner, made quiet yipping sounds. It was almost bedtime, and Duncan promised his mother again that he wouldn’t tell anyone.

Duncan tried. He seriously did. But sometimes your talent—your tiny, weird skill, or even your power—just has to get out.

 

 

For five more weeks, though, it stayed in. Not only that, but he almost forgot about it. During that time, Duncan Dorfman became just one of three hundred seventh graders in the Drilling Falls Middle School. Every morning, he walked through the halls in the overflowing crowd of kids, floating along like a leaf carried on a breeze. Then, after thumping his heavy backpack into locker #299, he headed for class. No one knew him, and no one cared.

And even though, that first day, the homeroom teacher had said to the class, “Listen up, people! Be sure to include our new students at lunchtime!” no one did.