The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (2 page)

There was another new kid that fall; his name was Andrew Tanizaki, and he had a face like a tired old man. People sometimes called Andrew the “Chinaman,” despite the fact that his grandparents were originally from Japan, and that Andrew and his parents were from New Jersey. Duncan Dorfman and Andrew Tanizaki sat together every day at lunch. No one else came to sit with them. It was just them, Duncan and the Chinaman, sitting across from each other in the cafeteria at 10:45 A.M. with their damp red trays.

If only Duncan liked Andrew Tanizaki more! But this was what the conversation between them at the lunch table was like:

Andrew: Do you play the video game Starpod Defenders: Team Zero?

Duncan: No.

Andrew: Well, I do, and I beat level twelve. Only two other players in North America have done that. One is five years old. The other one has no hands. He was born that way, you know. Handless.

Duncan: Oh.

Then there was an awkward silence, except for the chewing of food. The chewing went on and on.

One day, after they sat uncomfortably like this for a while, Duncan finally stood up to get himself a glass of apple juice, and as he walked across the cafeteria he felt something go
slap
against his back. He reached around, but didn’t feel anything, so he just got his juice and walked back to his seat. There was distant laughter, and the sounds of people shouting something, but Duncan paid no attention. As he reached his table, though, the shouting became harder to ignore.

“LUNCH MEAT!” people were calling out. “HEY, LUNCH MEAT!”

After a few seconds, Duncan Dorfman realized they were talking to
him
.

He stood still, his face growing pink, but he had no idea of why they were saying this, or what it meant. It was as if the kids at this school shouted strange, random words at new kids in order to freak them out. Maybe in previous years they had shouted at other new kids, “HEY, BLOWFISH!” or, “HEY, MONKEY WRENCH!”

But then Andrew Tanizaki stood up and hurried over to Duncan. “Uh, Duncan? You have lunch meat on your back,” he whispered.

“What?”

Duncan reached around himself again, feeling all over the places on his back that he could reach. This time, his hand found the edge of something cold and damp, and he pulled it off slowly and fearfully, as if taking off a Band-Aid.

Someone had flung a piece of baloney at his back, and it had just stayed there, sticking to his yellow shirt. And now, like Andrew Tanizaki, aka the Chinaman, Duncan Dorfman had a nickname, too: Lunch Meat.

Just as the lunch meat had stuck to his shirt, the name stuck to Duncan.

“Yo, Lunch Meat!” kids said to him every day at school. Even a sixth-grade girl who had seemed to be a nice person called him that one day, her face formed into a sneer.

After a few days, kids stopped calling out to Duncan as much; they seemed to lose interest in this new boy who was becoming not so new anymore. But still the name was there; he had been branded Lunch Meat. He eventually returned to his grim routine of mostly being ignored, except once in a while when someone called out the nickname for no particular reason.

Life was joyless—that was the best word for it. Duncan slogged through the days, and at night he couldn’t wait to go to sleep. He would lie in bed and listen to his mother and his great-aunt have one of their whispery conversations about whatever private thing it was they talked about when he wasn’t around, and then he would finally fall asleep. It might have gone on and on like this all year.

But inside him, it was all getting to be too much.

On a cold, slushy morning in October, five weeks after school began, sleet was
pinging
the windows outside the cafeteria, and someone across the room was calling out, “Hey, Lunch Meat!” and Andrew Tanizaki’s jaw was biting down squeakily on a hot dog. All of it—the depressing weather, the nickname, the sounds, the loneliness—finally became unbearable.

Duncan wondered if there was a way out. He could get on a bus and go somewhere . . . but where? He had no money. He had no father. He had no one and nothing other than a nice but overprotective, migraine-getting mother who worked long hours at Thriftee Mike’s. He thought about how much she had wanted him to hide his special ability from everyone.

That was when it hit him.

In order to have a decent future at Drilling Falls Middle School, he had to ignore what she wanted.
Sorry, Mom,
he said to himself. And then he sat up a little straighter and told Andrew Tanizaki, “I have a power.”

The words were forbidden, but it was almost as if he hadn’t said anything at all. Andrew barely looked up from his food. “Yeah, right,” he finally said.

“I do.”

Andrew took his pinky finger and reached deep into his own mouth, trying to loosen a tiny piece of hot-dog skin from between the tight clamps of his braces. Then he folded his arms across his chest and said to Duncan Dorfman, “Show me.”

THE SO-CALLED POWER IS REVEALED

G
ive me something to read,” Duncan told Andrew.

“Why, am I boring you?”

“I don’t mean to read to
myself
,” said Duncan. “Something I can read out loud.”

“I already know you can read,” said Andrew Tanizaki. “You don’t have to prove it to me.”

“Tanizaki, just give me something, okay?” Duncan said impatiently.

Andrew reached into the clogged backpack he took everywhere and pulled out a creased little booklet. It was a Starpod Defenders instruction manual; Andrew had doodled cartoons all over it. Pictures of alien heads floated everywhere, all of them with long antennae coming out of their straight black hair.

“Now open to a random page,” said Duncan.

“There’s no such thing as random,” Andrew said. “My brother says—”

“Do you want me to do this or not?”

Without waiting for an answer, Duncan closed his eyes and turned his head away as Andrew opened the booklet and slid it toward him.

“Okay,” said Andrew. “Here.”

There was silence, or at least there was silence at their end of the table. All around them, kids talked and shouted and laughed. The seven-foot-tall cafeteria giantess blew on a whistle, then Duncan heard her yell, “IF YOU DO NOT SIT DOWN, YOUNG LADY, YOU WILL HAVE LUNCH WITH PRINCIPAL GLOAM!”

After a second, Duncan realized that the sounds of the whistle and the voices were fading. It was as if he and Tanizaki were on a train carrying them far away from Drilling Falls Middle School. Duncan felt the fingertips of his left hand grow warm, then warmer, then actually
hot
, as if he had one of those hand warmers in his pocket that his mother used to buy him.

Now, just the way it had happened in the bedroom with the dumb book about Jimmy and the gopher and the rocket ship, the fingers of his left hand became hotter and hotter. It was as though his brain was sending his fingers an urgent message: MUST—HAVE—HEAT. They grew so hot they began to hurt, and soon they
pulsed
as though someone had slammed a car door on them. When it seemed as though he couldn’t stand the heat any longer, it leveled off, and Duncan let out his breath in relief.

“Are you okay?” he heard Andrew Tanizaki say, and Duncan just nodded. With his eyes still shut, he ran the fingertips of his left hand across the surface of the open booklet and read aloud:

Duncan paused. “And I also want to add, Andrew,” he said, “that you drew some doodles. They’re pretty good, too. They’re these little cartoons of aliens trapped in what I think is supposed to be the Mindvault. Am I right?”

There was no reply. Duncan stopped talking and opened his eyes. The world seemed as bright as Thriftee Mike’s, and the sounds of the cafeteria rolled back toward him.

He turned to face Andrew, who was just staring at him, and who then muttered in a shocked voice, “Yeah, you’re right. What the heck
is
this, Dorfman?”

Duncan Dorfman hadn’t let his power out in order to impress Andrew Tanizaki. Impressing him wouldn’t improve Duncan’s loneliness or nothingness at school. He had done it because he knew that if something unusual happened at their cafeteria table, the kids at the next table would know about it, too.

So after Duncan Dorfman read the instruction manual from Starpod Defenders aloud without looking at the words, he wasn’t surprised to see a boy across the way glance over.

Carl Slater was a smirking kid with a rust-colored buzz cut that always looked freshly mowed. He sat in the cafeteria at the next table every day with a bunch of other kids, playing Scrabble
^®
. They were all members of the Drilling Falls Middle School Scrabble Club, though anyone who saw the way they behaved might have thought they were looking for trouble rather than a friendly game. The year before, Carl Slater had gotten into trouble so many times at school—he’d talked back to his English teacher; he’d accepted a dare to steal the notebook of a girl named Ariel Berk; he’d stood behind the cafeteria giantess and walked with his arms stretched out like Frankenstein’s monster—that the principal, Mr. Gloam, had insisted that he join a club and devote himself to it.

“Do something useful with yourself, Mr. Slater, or you will be suspended,” said Mr. Gloam. “Simple as that.”

The principal said it couldn’t be a sport. He wanted Carl to focus on using only his brain for a change. The Scrabble Club, at that point, was very small: basically two kids in a room with an old board. It was Carl’s mother’s idea that he join the Scrabble Club. She thought it would help him get into college someday.

On the first day, Carl had to be dragged in. But soon he found that he was surprisingly good at Scrabble, and then he convinced his friends to join, too. Because they always did what Carl Slater said, the Scrabble Club was quickly filled with loudmouthed kids, slightly wild kids, kids like Carl Slater. And they all got pretty good at the game and began to compete in local tournaments against other schools’ Scrabble Clubs.

The year before, Drilling Falls Middle had sent Carl Slater and Brian Kalb off to the YST—the Youth Scrabble Tournament—which was held down in Yakamee, Florida, every December. They’d had a good time, and placed fortysixth out of one hundred teams. Carl and Brian had returned home with a small trophy showing what appeared to be a gold-plated pizza deliveryman holding up a pizza box—but was really a person holding up a giant Scrabble tile.

The first-place winners of the tournament had taken home
ten thousand dollars
, Duncan had heard someone at school say. If Duncan had ten thousand dollars—or half of it, anyway (kids’ tournament Scrabble was usually played in teams of two)—he would give it to his mother, and maybe they could rent their own place.

Carl Slater liked to tell people that the letters in his last name could be moved around to spell ten different words, both ones that were ordinary, and ones that weren’t. These included:

ALERTS

 

ALTERS

 

ARTELS

 

ESTRAL

 

LASTER

 

RATELS

 

SALTER

 

STALER

 

STELAR

 

TALERS

 

All of which, Carl explained to anyone who would listen, were words you could play in a game of Scrabble. Carl was both popular and mean, smart in the way that an animal in an Aesop’s fable is smart. He was a good athlete, too, but lately he’d become much more obsessed with Scrabble than sports. If Duncan hadn’t shown Andrew Tanizaki his power, then Carl Slater would never have seen it; but Carl, of course, saw everything. When he noticed something peculiar going on at the lunch table across from the one where he usually sat, he needed to find out more.

Now he squinted at Duncan in the cafeteria, finished his lunch, then stood up and walked over, sitting on the bench beside Tanizaki and directly across from Duncan.

Carl’s friend Mitchell Farley called, “Yo, Carl, what are you doing?”

“Busy,” said Carl, waving him off.

“BUSY is an anagram of YUBS,” said Mitchell. He was always looking for a way to improve his Scrabble skills.

Carl just looked at him. “YUBS isn’t a word, Farleyface,” he said coldly. “But BUYS is. BUYS is an anagram of BUSY.”

“Oh. Right,” said Mitchell.

Carl Slater turned to Duncan and said, “Hey, Lunch Meat, what were you and the Chinaman just doing?”

“Nothing,” said Duncan.

“Some kind of sad, sad magic trick that you found inside a cereal box?” asked Carl.

“No,” said Duncan. “It wasn’t a trick.”

“Seriously, Dwarfman,” said Carl, “I saw what you were doing. You, like, you
memorized
the Chinaman’s video-game booklet.”

“I didn’t memorize it. Tell him, Tanizaki.”

“Um, Duncan?” piped up Andrew in a nervous voice, and he stood up. “I just remembered I have to go see the nurse about that nosebleed I had last week—”

“WHY ARE YOU STANDING UP?” cried the cafeteria giantess, casting her long shadow across the table. “SIT DOWN, OR YOU’LL BE EATING WITH PRINCIPAL GLOAM!” she said, and Tanizaki shrank back down. Her shadow lurched elsewhere.

“I read the words with my fingers, not my eyes,” Duncan said. “It’s this thing I can do.”

“So, like, you’re telling me you can
feel the words
underneath your fingers?” said Carl Slater, not taking his eyes off Duncan.

Duncan nodded, trying to appear calm. “Yeah. But only the left hand. The right hand doesn’t work.” Then he added, “And I can feel pictures, too.”