Trout and Me (9 page)

He told me about his mother first. How his mother had gotten a boyfriend and moved to Hawaii and left Trout with his father when he was seven years old.

“Do you visit Hawaii?” I asked.

“Once when I was eight,” he said. “It wasn’t fun.”

“Hawaii wasn’t fun?”

“My mom really didn’t want me there. She wanted to hang out with her boyfriend, so she kept saying didn’t I want to go home early and I said no and so I stayed. But she didn’t ask me the next year. She comes to visit on Christmas, but that’s all. And now she has a new baby.”

He told me about his father and how his father is a salesman and travels a lot and changes jobs and moves to different towns. Every time Trout moves to a new school, it’s okay for exactly a week and then he’s in trouble again.

“So I don’t have friends because kids are afraid they’ll be in trouble if they hang out with me,” he said. “Or,” he went on, “maybe they don’t even like me.”

“And since you move all the time, you don’t have time to make friends.”

“Right.” But he was thinking of something else. “It’s not just that we move all the time because my father gets a new
job. We move because I get in some kind of trouble at school and my father gets embarrassed because I’m not perfect or the school says I have to go to a special school and then my father looks for another job in another place. So it’s my fault, sort of,” he said. “At least, that’s what my dad says.”

The end of my cigarette was getting too wet, so I turned it around and pretended to smoke the other end. I didn’t know what to say to Trout. His story was the saddest story I’d ever heard. I began to think that here he was, my best friend, and I hadn’t known anything at all about him, not about his mother or his father, and worst of all, not about the terrible life he’d had.

“I think you should come with Meg and me to dinner tonight,” I said. “It’s my parents’ anniversary, so they’re going out together.”

Trout didn’t answer right away. He thought about it and then he decided that it’d be okay since Meg wasn’t my parents and so we walked to the corner of Euclid and Main and he used the pay phone to call his father. His father must have said no because Trout said it didn’t make any sense for him to go home unless his father was going to be there for dinner, too, and why should he stay home alone. And that he’d be home by eight or his father could pick him up at our apartment.

Meg took us to a Japanese restaurant called Mikado, where you sit on the floor and eat with chopsticks, and we sat in the back of the restaurant at a small table on the
floor, just the three of us, and we talked. I was surprised. Trout told Meg all the same stories he had told me and told her that his tattoo was a fake. He drew it on with Magic Marker every morning and washed it off at night. He told her about his learning disabilities and flushing Ritalin down the toilet at night. And then he said he was never going back to Stockton Elementary again. All he did was skip school one day and now they were changing him to the other fifth grade and next year he was being sent to a school for dummies.

Meg listened quietly. Every once in a while, she got a sad look on her face and she’d touch Trout’s arm or shake her head or say how awful his life sounded. Then she had a plan.

The plan was simple. Every morning we’d meet at the corner like we already did and walk into school together, promising each other to be quiet and well behaved all day long. For every hour of the school day we were not in trouble, Meg would give us a surprise. And so, if there were eight hours of no trouble, that meant eight surprises.

“What if one of us is bad and not the other?” I asked.

“No surprise. That’s the deal,” Meg said. “It’s up to both of you.”

“It’s a deal,” Trout said.

And “that was that for this,” as my father would say.

Meg’s plan worked. At least we thought it was working. We didn’t miss tutoring. We didn’t interrupt classes or get sent to Mr. O’Dell or have to sit outside the classroom for rudeness or talking out of turn. We even did all our homework.

Every afternoon at around five o’clock, we’d meet Meg, sometimes at The Grub and sometimes at home, to tell her about our successful day. And she’d get us our prizes. One day it was eight M&M’s each. Another day, it was eight stickers each. Another, it was eight pencils. And once it was eight cents each. So we thought we were doing really well.

But as it turned out, we were wrong. I don’t understand how things happened the way they did. But they did.

We should have caught on. That’s what I said to Trout later.

I mean, the first week of Meg’s plan, Billy Blister had a birthday party and invited all the boys in the class, at least all the ones I know except for Timbo Wirth, who’s a juvenile delinquent, and Trout and me.

“So did you get invited?” I asked Trout at recess, when all the boys were talking about Billy’s birthday party.

“Nope,” he said. “Billy doesn’t like me.”

“Well, he likes me and I didn’t get invited.”

Trout shrugged.

“Maybe he forgot.”

“Maybe,” I said.

I didn’t ask Billy how come he didn’t ask us, although I wanted to. But Mary Sue told me on the way home from school one day that she heard Billy was having an all-boys birthday party and I wasn’t invited and neither was Trout because of the parents.

I shouldn’t have asked Mary Sue anything since she has such a bad character, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know.

“What about the parents?”

“Billy’s parents,” Mary Sue said. “They said you couldn’t come because Trout is such a bad influence on you. A lot of parents feel that way.”

“Wrong,” I said. “Trout isn’t a bad influence on anyone.”

But later that night, after Meg had given us our prizes for good behavior, I did ask my mom what she thought I
should do. And she asked my dad and he said he couldn’t stand the way people are like sheep and move around stupidly in herds and never think for themselves.

“What does that have to do with Billy’s birthday party?” I asked my mom when she came in to kiss me good night.

“Just that some of the parents of the kids in your class don’t understand Trout, so they don’t want their children to play with him.”

“Idiots,” I said.

“I think so too. But what happens is one set of parents tells another set of parents about Trout and on it goes, and pretty soon everyone is telling his son not to play with Trout. It’s very sad and wrong.”

I decided not to tell Trout what my mom or Mary Sue said. Already he had enough unhappiness with his mother in Hawaii.

During the second week of Meg’s plan, Mr. Baker called my parents to say how well I was doing now that I was taking Ritalin. Which I wasn’t, but my parents didn’t give Mr. Baker that information.

“Just like I used to say to you, Ben,” my mom said. “It’s
your
behavior. You ought to be able to change it without taking medicine. Or at least it’s worth a try. And you have.”

The next day Mr. O’Dell called me in to the office to tell me how well he thought the Ritalin was working.

I would have liked to tell Mr. O’Dell that it was all me
by myself making the difference in the way I behaved. But I didn’t.

“So I wanted to see you today about Trout. Not you. How’s that for a change?”

“Good.” I didn’t trust Mr. O’Dell for a millisecond. He always had something up his sleeve.

“Trout may be leaving Stockton Elementary at the end of this year.”

“He didn’t tell me,” I said.

“He didn’t?” Mr. O’Dell asked.

“Nope. We already planned some stuff we’re going to do next year in sixth grade like try out for the traveling soccer team. I mean, he didn’t tell me anything about leaving.”

“Well, he will.”

“How come he’s leaving?” I asked.

“To go to another school. At least that’s what I’ve heard from his father.”

“Nobody told him,” I said.

“What I wanted you to know is that I think sometimes you are left out of things like birthday parties because some of the parents are concerned with the lack of supervision at Trout’s house.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “That doesn’t have to do with Trout. That’s his father’s fault.”

“I just thought you should know.”

And then we talked about other stuff at school and what it would be like to be a sixth grader, but I forget what
we said since all I was thinking about was telling my dad what Mr. O’Dell had told me.

That night my dad said Mr. O’Dell shouldn’t have said anything about Trout to me. It was unprofessional. “Bad character” is what my dad probably thought, but he didn’t say that.

“So what’re you going to do?” I asked.

“Call him,” my dad said. “He should be fired.”

“Roger,” my mom said.

“I mean it, Jane.”

“Are you going to tell him that?” I asked.

“Probably not. But I am going to tell him he shouldn’t be speaking to my son about another student. Those matters are private.”

“Are you going to tell him I’m not taking Ritalin?” I asked.

“Of course not. It’s not his business.”

Later that night Trout called me and said he might have to change schools.

“How come?”

“My dad says that Mr. O’Dell wants me to go to another school.”

He sounded as if he might be crying and Trout doesn’t cry about stuff.

“What school?”

“He didn’t say anything to me. Maybe he told my dad.

But something weird’s going on at school, like the more I try to do well, the worse things are.”

“I thought things were great,” I said. “I mean, we’re hardly ever in trouble.”

“I know,” Trout said. “But my dad says things aren’t going very well. That a lot of the parents of fifth graders think I’m a criminal.”

“A criminal?”

“You know, like a criminal. Not a guy they want their kids to know.”

And then last Saturday, there was an end-of-the-year picnic at the Baileys’ farm and Jonno Bailey said to me I could come but his dad didn’t want the responsibility for Trout, because the Baileys had a lot of animals and farm equipment and just about anything could happen with Trout around.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know, accidents,” Jonno said. “Stuff like that.”

“No problem,” I said. “I can’t come to the picnic anyway.” But I thought about Trout and what was happening to him for no reason, how he was getting blamed for being a boy he wasn’t. It was kind of scary, especially now that he was trying so hard. Like me. As if Trout and me had been chosen to take the blame for all the bad things that happened.

And then on Monday night, the last week of May, two weeks before the end of school, some of the parents in the fifth grade called a meeting with Mr. O’Dell at Mary Sue Briggs’s house and invited all of the other parents, including mine and Trout’s father.

The meeting was about Trout.

“What do you think has happened?” I asked my dad.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Remember I told you about this group of parents trying to get Trout moved to a special school?”

“I remember.”

“They have a ‘bee in their bonnet’ about Trout for some reason.”

“What’ll happen?” I asked my mom.

“You guys have cleaned up your act,” she told me. “I don’t think anything will happen. What can the parents do if nothing is wrong? Answer me that.”

But I was still worried.

Monday night, Trout came for dinner.

“We can’t just let him sit home by himself while this meeting is going on, since he knows he’s the subject of it.”

“How did he find out?” I asked. “I didn’t tell him.”

“Mr. O’Dell called his father and his father told him.”

My parents went to the meeting early, but they got
take-out for us and we sat in front of the TV eating lasagna and waiting for Mom and Dad to come back. I don’t even know what was on TV, we were so upset. Especially Trout.

So we just sat there side by side picking at our lasagna, which was kind of glumpy and cold, waiting for the bad news. I don’t remember if we talked much. Probably not.

But at nine o’clock, just about the time we were expecting my parents to come home, my dad called.

“I’ve got a proposal for you, Ben,” he said. “And you’ve got about two minutes to think about it.”

The meeting was not going well, he told me. The things the parents had to say about Trout weren’t true and weren’t fair, but it made no difference. They were a large group and they could very well force Mr. O’Dell to send Trout to a special school for children with emotional difficulties.

“Do you know what I mean by emotional difficulties?” he asked me.

“I think I do,” I said. “I think it means to be upset and a little crazy.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Do you think Trout is upset and a little crazy?”

“He’s upset because people are mean to him. But I think he’s normal, I mean as normal as me. Just a kid with learning disabilities.”

“That’s what I think,” my dad said.

“He hasn’t really done anything terrible, Dad. Just pranks.”

“And he’s different. Sometimes people take off against a kid who’s different. They’re looking for kids all made from the same jelly mold. You’re not like that and neither is Trout.”

“You mean, it’s not that he’s done bad things, but they’re afraid he could
do
bad things.”

“That’s right, because he’s not just like their child, so they don’t understand him. And someone needs to tell the fifth-grade parents that he’s a great kid, just a little different than some of the other fifth graders.”

Which is when he gave me his proposal.

“A person who knows Trout very well needs to speak to the parents. Someone who might help change their minds about him.”

“And that would be me?”

“That’s what I’m hoping, Ben.”

“You mean, come right now and talk to a bunch of parents without even having a speech written to read.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said.

“What should I say?” I asked, my blood turning to thin water.

“Say what you believe, Benjamin. That’s all you can do.”