Trout and Me (5 page)

“Yeah.”

“He says your attitude is better. Not great but better. He says you’re becoming more of a citizen.”

“What’s that?”

“Just a good guy.”

I could tell bad news was coming. Good news first to soften me up, and then slammo, the bad news explodes.

I sat up against my headboard.

“What else?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. Baker is worried about Trout.”

I shrugged.

“Why doesn’t he call Trout’s father?” I said. “Not you.”

“Because he’s worried about the effect Trout could have on
you,”
she said in that way she has, her voice soft enough, almost friendly. But that doesn’t mean she’ll put up with disagreement from me.

“Like what effect?”

“Like getting in more trouble instead of less.”

So there you have it. “The Trout Problem.” Before the end of fifth grade, “The Trout Problem” got so awful I was forced to do something surprising, something I can’t believe I had the courage to do, even now, a year later, with Trout gone.

The next morning Trout called me with a plan. He called very early, even before I went in the kitchen for breakfast, and told me he’d already left his house and was calling from a phone booth. He wanted to meet me outside school at eight o’clock.

“What’s the plan?” I asked, still in my pajamas.

“It’s going to be really funny,” he said.

“Like how funny?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you now,” he said. “Just meet me on the blacktop behind the school.”

So I got dressed in a hurry, brushed my teeth, and went downstairs for breakfast with my book bag already packed and ready to go.

“Why so early?” my mother asked. She was suspicious, I could tell. She worries about me, not that anything bad will happen to me but that I’ll cause trouble. Every
afternoon—this is what Meg told me—she’s afraid some teacher is going to call the pharmacy to tell her more bad news about me, like Ms. Becker did when the invisible cream turned into ASS.

“Where did you get that cream?” my mother had asked that evening. “Max?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to tell her Trout had given it to me and I’d already told Mr. O’Dell about Max, so I said nothing at all, and by the next day, my mom sort of forgot it. But she did say, because she worries all the time, “You should never put anything on your face unless you know what it is. It could’ve been poison.”

“It’s not
so
early to go to school,” I said. “I just promised to meet some guys from fifth grade on the blacktop behind school.”

I poured milk on my cereal and pretended to be interested in eating, which I wasn’t. I only wanted to get out of the house and meet Trout and find out about his plan.

“Benjamin.” My mother sat down at the table beside me, speaking quietly so Meg, who was making toast, wouldn’t hear what she was saying, even though I tell Meg everything. “Are you leaving early to meet Trout?” she asked.

I considered lying. I thought I could name a few guys in my class who I might be meeting before school, but my mother seems to know what I’m thinking about even
when I don’t say it. It’s as if she can see straight through the skin and bone to my brain. So I didn’t make up a story. I mean, I didn’t lie exactly, but I didn’t tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” as my father would say.

“I’m helping Trout with his math homework,” I said, finishing my cereal, dumping the extra milk in the sink.

“I see.” My mother gave me one of her looks.

I could have said, “I can tell you don’t believe me,” or “I’m almost telling the truth,” or I could have said, “I’m meeting Trout Trout on the blacktop and we’re going to make plans to get kicked out of school,” but instead I followed Meg out the front door and down the back stairs.

“What was
that
all about?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Mom didn’t believe I was going to be helping Trout with his math homework.”

“She’s right,” Meg said. “You’re flunking math.” My sister is straightforward and I like that. She says what she thinks and doesn’t seem to care whether what she thinks will make a person mad.

“I mean, I’m meeting Trout, but he didn’t say anything about math homework.”

“So Mom’s worried about you meeting Trout because he’s a troublemaker and you made up a reason, right?”

“Right.”

“I see.”

“That’s what Mom said. ‘I see.’ What is it with you guys?”

Max was stopped in front of our apartment waiting for Meg, smoking a cigarette as usual.

“Want a ride to school?” Meg asked.

“Nope, I’ll walk.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.

That’s another one of Mom’s expressions. Meg climbed into Max’s red Ford truck.

“Just don’t get kicked out of school,” she called.

“You can’t get kicked out of public school,” I said. “It’s the law.”

“Wrong, Ben. You can get kicked out of any place. Maybe not forever, but for long enough.”

“Even though I’ve got this learning problem?”

“Especially because of that.”

The rest of the way to school, I thought about what Meg had said. I’m not a bad kid—not like a juvenile delinquent. I don’t break the law, but I am always in some kind of trouble at school, like the invisible cream. Not bad, but just enough to give me butterflies. There’s always the thing I didn’t do right or say right. I come to school with unfinished homework or I get punished for lost papers or talking out in class or arguing or falling out of my chair or writing notes during homeroom.

The thing is, I
try
to be good. It’s as if I can’t help
myself, as if there’s some other person inside my skin. And he’s the guy with learning disabilities who can’t sit still.

Trout was standing at the corner waiting for me. He was carrying a large plastic bag from my mother’s drugstore and drinking a grape Slurpee.

“So here’s the deal,” he said, motioning for me to follow him. We stopped just beyond a grove of trees in the park next to school and Trout dropped the plastic bag on the ground and opened it.

“Look,” he said.

I looked.

The bag was full of Super Balls. There must have been a hundred of these tiny bouncy rubber balls in reds and yellows and blues and greens. I’d never seen so many in my life.

I like Super Balls. I have a few at home, like three or four, and I like to lie on the couch at the end of the day, bouncing a Super Ball on the hardwood floor to see if I can get it to hit the ceiling.

“So whaddya think?”

“About the balls?”

“Cool, right?” Trout asked.

“Yeah, pretty cool,” I said. “They must have been expensive.”

“Forty-nine cents each. I put them on my father’s credit card,” Trout said.

“He lets you have his credit card?” I asked.

“Of course not, banana brain.” Trout raised his eyebrows. “I took it out of his wallet this morning while he was taking a shower,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll put it back tonight.”

“And he won’t notice?”

“He’s got plenty of credit cards,” Trout said, slinging the bag of Super Balls over his shoulder, heading in the direction of school. And I followed him.

Trout didn’t tell me his plan for the Super Balls until we were standing in the corridor outside homeroom and he was stuffing the bag from the drugstore into his locker.

“So this is what we’re going to do.” He shut the door to his locker. “Just before lunch when the bell rings and everyone is rushing down the hall to the lunchroom, we stand on the steps leading to the library and dump the balls in the hallway.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

“So what happens?”

“So there’ll be all these balls bouncing down the hall and all these kids running to lunch and it’ll be very funny.”

“Not if we get caught.”

“We won’t get caught.” Trout leaned on my shoulder. “We’ll ask to be excused to go to the bathroom just before the bell, like eleven forty-five, and no one will notice. The hall will be empty and then the bell will ring and we’ll dump the balls just as the kids are dismissed for lunch. Get it?”

“I get it.”

“And you’ll help me out, Ben?”

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know if I really wanted to dump Super Balls in the hallway between homeroom and the lunchroom. It seemed pretty easy to get caught in the first place, and in the second, it didn’t sound funny enough to get into trouble.

I couldn’t decide until fourth period, when we have advanced reading. Fourth period, the Super Ball deal was sealed.

Everyone, including me, has advanced reading even though I really should be in “behind reading” instead of advanced, but there is no behind. Ms. Ashford teaches advanced and we read long books at home, one chapter a night, and we have a discussion in class. I don’t like Ms. Ashford and I don’t like reading discussions and I usually don’t even read the chapter, unless Meg or my mom has time to help me out, since reading is hard for me. If I do read the chapter, I will have forgotten what I read by the time I’ve finished because I’m such a slow reader. By
the time I’m at the end of the chapter, I can’t remember the beginning. And that’s just the way it is. Which is why I don’t like Ms. Ashford, because she always calls on me first just to be sure to embarrass me, knowing very well the trouble I have reading long books.

So we’re supposed to be reading the second chapter of this book called
Holes.
I’ve already read the first chapter and I liked it a lot, but last night I completely forgot about advanced reading, so today, when Ms. Ashford called on me, I mumbled something about forgetting and she said something like, “How are you ever going to learn to read, Ben, if you don’t do your assignment?”

“I forgot,” I said.

“That’s my point,” Ms. Ashford said, and she looked at me with her eyes half closed, as if she couldn’t stand to see me with her eyes wide open. “You are always forgetting.”

That’s when I told Trout I’d do the Super Balls with him.

Lunch for fifth and sixth grade is at twelve and the bell rings at eleven-fifty and it takes a few minutes for everyone to be dismissed and head to the lunchroom. So at eleven forty-five by my watch, after I had finished correcting my vocabulary test and handed the corrections in to Mr. Baker, I asked to be excused to go to the boys’ room.

“Trout has already been excused,” Mr. Baker said.

I was sitting in my chair and started to wiggle so he’d know how much I had to go to the bathroom. Then he said, “Okay, Ben, hustle up. And since the bell’s about to ring, go straight to lunch.”

Trout was already standing on about the seventh step to the second floor with his bag of Super Balls. The stairs to the second floor are at the end of the corridor, and all of the fifth- and sixth-grade students have to walk by this staircase in order to get to the lunchroom, which is at the end of the hall.

Trout was completely relaxed, his chin in his hand, watching down the hall where our classroom is, waiting for the bell.

“You stand right next to me, and when the bell rings, we wait two minutes and then, like lightning, we turn the bag upside down so the Super Balls spill out, and you’re going to die laughing.”

I looked up the stairs to the second floor, where the principal’s office is located, and the younger grades and the library, straining to be sure no one was walking around, and to my great relief, no one was. I was actually excited. My heart was beating too fast and my mouth was dry and I was suddenly very glad that Trout wanted to be my friend. That he had chosen me. Someone brave enough to have a tattoo of a question mark on his chin.

When the bell rang, Trout stayed absolutely still.

“How do you know it’s two minutes before you should dump the balls?”

“I’ve done this before,” Trout said.

“Super Balls?”

“Yup.”

“And what happened?”

“I’ll tell you at lunch,” Trout said.

And just then, the kids from five and six began pouring out of their classrooms and we dumped the balls, and suddenly the hall was a jumble of moving color and kids were heading through the maze of rubber balls and the building rang with laughter.

“Follow me,” Trout said the minute the balls had hit the floor below. “Don’t look.”

I couldn’t help myself. He had left the drugstore bag on the seventh step, and when I looked, it was lying there in a pile of white plastic.

“Shouldn’t I get the bag?”

Trout shook his head.

“It’ll call attention to us,” he said, leaning over the top railing, looking down at the mass of kids running through bouncing Super Balls, and laughed.

“Look, Ben,” he called to me.

And I was laughing and laughing.

“Let’s go down and check it out,” he said.

“Not me,” I said.

So we watched from the steps. We weren’t alone. A
bunch of other kids from the fifth and sixth grade had run over and were looking down the stairwell at the commotion of kids rushing through the clouds of Super Balls. Mr. O’Dell came flying down the stairs behind us from his office, calling, “Quiet. Quiet everybody. Get yourselves under control.”

And then he stood in the hall with his hand on his forehead. There was nothing he could do. The balls were out of control and so were the kids.

“So tell me what happened when you did it before,” I asked Trout at lunch.

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Were you living in Georgia?”

He shook his head. “Mississippi,” he said.

“And you did it alone?”

He gave me a fishy look. He had opened his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and was scraping off the jelly. “I lied,” he said under his breath.

I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“I never did the Super Ball thing before. I read about it in a games book last night and so …”

“You don’t think we’ll get caught, do you?”

“You asked me that already. Who’d catch us?” Trout asked crossly. “No one was in the hall to see anything. I checked.”

I walked home alone that day. Trout had tutoring and
Meg had choral practice and I don’t really have a pile of friends. That’s the trouble with learning disabilities. I’m kind of quiet and a nice guy and I don’t push other guys around and don’t complain. But most of the time while the other kids in my class are hanging out together, I’m in tutoring. Besides, kids don’t like to hang out with a guy like me who’s always in what my dad calls “hot water.” They think it’s funny when I fall over backwards in my chair or spill my milk all over the lunch table or make farting noises in my armpit during library. But they don’t exactly want to spend time with me. It’s like they think learning disabilities are catching.