Trollhunters (12 page)

Tub shrugged. “One in a million doesn’t. And we have a million.”

He shooed Cat #37 from where it was curled up asleep in the drying rack.

I snatched the sponge from the faucet and began scrubbing the measuring glass.

“If you don’t help me, I’m going to have to tell my dad.”

Tub glanced at his grandmother, who was facing the opposite counter. With the stealth of a secret agent, Tub tiptoed across the linoleum, extended an arm toward Grandma’s ear, and
succeeded in cranking down her hearing aid. He relaxed and sighed, then returned to the sink with exasperated slowness.

“Fine, tell your dad. You two can bond over it. No hugging, though, since you’ll both be in straightjackets.”

I held the medallion away from my chest. Tub took it and leaned in to give it a hard look.

“Looks fake. That language even looks fake. What’s it supposed to be, Chinese?”

“No.” I girded myself for mockery. “It’s Troll.”

Tub let the medallion drop to my chest.

“It was nice knowing you, pal.”

“Tub!”

He threw down his towel.

“I’m serious, Jim. You need to put this crap
away
. You walk into school on Monday talking to me, or anyone else, about the city’s pesky troll problem, and you’re
not exactly going to get a lot of people saying, ‘Gee, thanks for the warning.’ It’ll spread faster than mono. You think things are tough for us now? Jim, this will be the end.
I’m sorry if you had a crazy nightmare. I really am. But I can’t let you ruin our lives.”

Cat #31 sidled up to his leg and he shook it off.

“Butterscotch chips make cookies extra special,” Grandma said from another time zone.

In frustration, I reached for another dirty dish and ended up pulling the plug on the sink. The water gurgled and the bubbles started sliding away. Not having to worry about Grandma overhearing,
I cursed my best curse and leaned against the sink.

“All right,” I said. “I’ve got a proposal. Indulge me for one night. Just one night. You’ve still got that archery set, right?”

“Yeah, I got it, but—”

“And I know you have the nanny cam, right?”

“Well, sure. That thing wasn’t cheap. Grandma really thought she’d catch the babysitter stealing cookies. Didn’t have the heart to tell her it was me.”

“Okay, you find that stuff and bring it with you to the play tryouts at noon.”

“The play tryouts? Wait, Jim, no. I’m not doing any of this.”

“I’ll give you Dino-Mountain.”

That shut him up. Every kid dreams of unattainable gifts—expansive race-car sets, towering doll houses, futuristic clubhouses that cost more than your parent’s car—and one year
I received exactly such a holy grail: Dino-Mountain, a plastic play set as high as my chest, complete with caves and tunnels from which one of ten different dino-troops could attack.

“I…” Tub started. The offer had caught him by surprise. “Come on. I’m too old for Dino-Mountain.” He did not sound entirely convinced of that.

“And a bag of sour worms. No, a case. A full case. Tub, that’s like eight bags.”

“Jim…”

“Anything you want. Just name it. It’s yours. I just want one night of help and then, tomorrow, I swear I’ll never mention it again.”

Tub looked at the floor, where Cat #40 and Cat #17 were swiping at each other’s tails. He knocked them aside with his ankle, though his heart was not in it. His cheeks were pink beneath
the freckles. My offers had embarrassed him.

“A fiver,” he murmured. “Just a fiver. You know. For Steve.”

I reached out and gripped his shoulder.

“You got it, Tub. Noon at the school, okay?”

“Fine, whatever.”

I tossed the sponge onto the counter and wiped my hands on my jeans.

“I have to go dig out some sports equipment from my attic.”

“Sports? No one said anything about sports. This deal’s getting worse by the second.”

“I’ll explain later.”

I approached Grandma Dershowitz to crank up her hearing aid and say good-bye, but was distracted by the slurping noise of the final suds being sucked down the drain. I cradled my hands to my
chest, wondering how I had made such a stupid mistake as plunging them into a sink with a drain the perfect size for an extending tentacle.

Because
Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line
was an outdoor production, the auditions were held on a knoll just to the side of Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field, where the
football team was packing in an extra weekend practice beneath the jumbotron installers. Two doomed lines of would-be headliners, girls and boys, paired off to read for
RoJu
’s title
roles while Mrs. Leach, the drama coach of the exhausted hair, frowsy hairbands, and floppy sweaters, took notes.

Opposite of where the team was scrimmaging, at the north end of the field, Dad rode his industrial lawn mower around the end zone. The thing had cost a bundle when he’d bought it five
years before, but I had to hand it to him—it had already paid for itself. The monstrosity was twice as big as a regular mower and painted a garish gold. The back wheels had been lifted from a
defunct monster truck called the Destruckshunator and the huge, eight-wheeled mowing deck stuck out like the wings of a 747. The sixteen-inch discharge chute shot out grass with machine-gun force.
Seriously: I’d stood too close before and been
bruised
by the flying grass.

Thankfully, Dad hadn’t noticed me when I’d arrived for the auditions. In his goggles, work gloves, steel-toed safety boots, allergy mask, and hair net, he looked like a frantic alien
nerd piloting a gigantic moon rover, hell-bent on destroying our grassy planet one blade at a time.

I’d been last in line, but now it was one o’clock and I was just one actor away. Studying the pages in my sweaty hands was difficult; Tub had yet to show and I kept visualizing him
arriving with Sergeant Gulager, who would haul me off to the nuthouse for my own safety. Just as distracting was the current Romeo’s butchering of the Bard.

“It is my soul that calls upon my name?” Shakespeare’s unfamiliar rhythms had the kid doubting the most fundamental precepts of English. “How silver-sweet sound?
Lovers’ tongues by night? Like softest music? To attending ears?”

“Romeo!” his Juliet responded. An easy line, for sure.

“My…niece? Nice? Nessie?”

“Niesse,” Mrs. Leach said for the thirtieth time that day. “It means young hawk.”

A conflagration of footballs converging on the same target drew my attention to a rotund figure slumping through the end zone. It was Tub, on foot, as his previous nine bicycles had been stolen
from school bicycle racks over the past nine years. He was carrying a duffel bag and grimacing against the half-dozen balls thumping down around him from shoulder-padded bullies. Only the last one
struck him, on the shoulder.

“Enough monkey business, men!” Coach Lawrence hollered. “Though that
was
a real bull’s-eye, Jorgensen-Warner!”

Tub threw his duffel bag down beside a table. On it were the tattered scraps of the free donuts promised by the flyers. Tub lifted a thin sheet of deli paper spotted with powdered sugar with the
same delicacy one might handle a war-torn American flag. He set it down, wobbled backward a few steps, and plopped down on the grass, grinding his jaw like he always did after a tightening. He
looked to the grassy stage and gave me a morose nod.

“Sleep well upon thine eyes?” the boy continued. “Peace in thy…breast? Breast? Can I say that?”

Mrs. Leach rubbed at her eyes and the kid skulked away in surrender. She consulted her sign-up sheet while Dad’s mower droned on in the distance.

“Jim Sturges Jr.” She peered through her glasses at the makeshift stage. “We’re out of Juliets. Claire, can you read with Jim?”

My heart sunk. Of course Claire Fontaine was to get front-row seats to my degradation. I took a deep breath while she set aside her pink backpack, uncrossed her legs from the grass, and brushed
off. It was no secret that Claire had Juliet locked. Sure, she read with impressive poise, and her swings between melancholy and ecstasy were convincing enough to have every boy pledging his
nonexistent sword to her defense. But it was the authentic accent that sealed the deal. Next to that, everyone else sounded like the absolute worst: a regular high school kid.

Claire took her place next to me, knocked the mud from her boots, and gave me a kind, if brief, smile. The wind was doing wonderful, wild things to the hair outside of her beret.

“Act two, scene two, page two,” Mrs. Leach said. “Let’s do this.”

Tub gawped at me, the donut scandal forgotten. I cleared my throat, looked at the spinning letters upon the page, and dove in.

“Oh, are you going to leave me so unsatisfied?”

One line in and I was blushing.

“What satisfaction could you possibly have tonight?” Claire asked.

“I would be satisfied,” I said, “if we made each other true promises of love.”

No doubt these lines were masterpieces of meter and meaning, but for all the feeling coming out of my mouth, they might as well have been ingredients from a cereal box. Claire, of course, turned
Juliet’s lines into things as natural as breath, one word as full as rainwater gathering on the tip of a petal, the next dry and windswept as the desert outside of town.

I looked at her in wonder and saw that she was reciting by heart and that her eyes were focused on the football field. There at the nearest corner was a helmetless Steve Jorgensen-Warner running
drills. Just drills, and yet he executed them with supernatural grace, vaulting over lesser humans and grinning like he’d just as soon keep going until he conquered the world. Claire was rapt
and I couldn’t blame her. That sort of movement was a kind of poetry, too.

“Oh, blessed, blessed night,” I whispered from a script I hadn’t realized that I’d memorized, too. “Because it’s dark out, I’m afraid all this is just a
dream.”

Was it, in fact, a dream? I lowered my eyes and regarded the chewed, dirty fingernails holding my script, the scuffed shoes on my feet, and realized that these were the symbols of my pitiful
little life: worn-out, insignificant, ready to be thrown beneath Dad’s industrial mower. With one hand I touched the medallion beneath my shirt, a different symbol entirely, and thought of
that dark world beneath the surface. Which dream was preferable, the wild danger down there or the slow suffocation happening up here?

Mrs. Leach took her glasses by the frame, lips parted to demand an end to this pitiful farce. But my voice continued, louder now, my despair as real as anything Romeo could come up with.

“A thousand times the worse for me, to want your light! / A lover goes toward love as schoolboys from their books. / But love goes from love, like boys toward school with heavy
looks.”

Mrs. Leach released her glasses.

Claire turned away from the football field and gave me a curious look.

“It is my soul that calls upon my name,” I continued. Until then, anguish was something I’d felt in my heart and head. Now it had a voice and I let it flow. “How
silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears.”

Claire smiled with not just a corner of her lips but her whole mouth.

“I shall forget,” she said softly, “to have thee still stand there, remembering how I love thy company. Romeo!”

“Romeo, indeed,” Mrs. Leach said.

The drama coach was standing and clutching her hands to her bosom. Like any good teacher, she knew that keeping decorum was priority one. But her flashing eyes revealed that she was rapturous. I
expanded my gaze. The other auditioners sat there with stunned looks upon their faces. Even Tub’s face was void of sarcasm. Two water boys on their way to the football field had paused with
their bag of thermoses and were staring at us, enraptured. Mrs. Leach turned to a wardrobe parent, who was clapping her hands with tears in her eyes.

“Mrs. Dunton, take some measurements. I think our Romeo might just wake up this town of football fans.”

“Yes, I think so,” Mrs. Dunton replied. She tilted her head a little. “If we can make him taller, that is.”

The wardrobe lady approached, unspooling her measuring tape and running it from foot to inseam and waist to armpit, making disappointed
tsk
s at every step. I had learned in math class
just how much taller Claire was than me, but Claire herself didn’t seem to care. She crossed her arms over her frayed jacket and a dozen bracelets slid down her wrists. Her dark hair blew and
caught on her lips, and she spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the gridiron warriors and the roaring mower.

“Very interesting, Mr. Sturges.”