Twerp (13 page)

We laid him on the ground and huddled around him. After half a minute, he came back behind his eyes. He knew where he was and what had happened. He curled up like a baby, with his hands over his crotch, and began
to moan. He had tears in his eyes, but how could you hold that against him? It wasn’t like he was bawling. It was more like the tears were being squeezed out of him.

“You’re going to be all right,” Lonnie whispered to him.

But then Eric opened his mouth, and it was full of blood.

That made us step back.

Howie tugged on Lonnie’s sleeve. “He’s not all right.”

Lonnie turned to me, and I knew the drill from when Quentin lost his eyebrows. I sprinted home and yelled to my mom to call an ambulance. She started to ask questions, but I cut her off and just said, “Eric got hurt.” That got her attention. I almost told her to send the ambulance to Ponzini, but then I remembered that the name would mean nothing to her or to the ambulance driver, so I gave her the street address on Parsons Boulevard and told her we were in the vacant lot behind the building. She said she’d be there right after she called for help.

I ran back outside.

Eric was sitting upright by the time I got back to Ponzini. He wasn’t doing it on his own, though. Shlomo and Howie were holding his shoulders, and Quentin and Lonnie were talking to him. There was still a lot of blood around his lips and on his chin.

“The ambulance is on its way,” I called to them.

Lonnie turned to me as I knelt down next to him. “I don’t think it’s too bad. I think maybe he just bit his tongue.”

Eric didn’t react to what Lonnie said. He wasn’t listening at that point.

“You don’t think it’s his balls?” Shlomo said.

Lonnie said, “I’ve never seen a guy fall like that. It could be his balls. It could be his balls got knocked up into his mouth. I’m not sure. How long till the ambulance gets here?”

Just then, we heard a siren. It was coming down Parsons Boulevard. Another five minutes passed before the doctors figured out how to get through the building and back to Ponzini. Then, at last, two of them rushed through the rear exit of the parking garage. My mom was right behind them—which kind of embarrassed me. But what could I do? Tell her not to come?

Right off, the doctors made Eric lie back down. He was still too woozy to answer their questions, so Lonnie told them what had happened. The doctors kind of smiled at one another when he explained how Eric fell. I didn’t like that much. It seemed kind of unprofessional, in my opinion. Then one of the doctors stood up and walked back out to the ambulance. It was a relief, in a weird way, the fact that he didn’t seem in too big a rush. He returned a
couple of minutes later with a canvas stretcher. They lifted Eric onto it and hauled him out of Ponzini. We followed them through the parking garage and watched them load him into the back of the ambulance. He was starting to come around by then. We heard him telling the doctors his phone number. One of the doctors climbed into the back of the ambulance after him while the other climbed behind the wheel to drive. The siren started to blare. Then the back door of the ambulance slammed shut from the inside. That was the last we saw of Eric till he came home that night.

It turned out that there wasn’t much wrong with him. He just got bruised real bad where you don’t want to get bruised. Plus, he
had
bitten his tongue like Lonnie said. We were thankful that he was all right. But believe me, I’d hate to be Eric the Red from now on. He’s never going to hear the end of it.

April 17, 1969

I’ll be the first to admit it: I don’t
understand girls. Plus, out of all the girls I’ve ever met, I understand Jillian the least. I mean, it made sense that she wanted nothing to do with me after the barbecue. I figured Eduardo must have had his talk with her, and she was real upset, so she’d decided to avoid me.
That
made sense. But then, this afternoon, she waltzed up to my table as I sat down for lunch in the cafeteria. There I was, saving seats for Lonnie and the rest of the gang, and I looked up, and she was standing right next to me, carrying her lunch tray, smiling as though nothing had happened.

“Mind if I sit down, Julian?”

“The guys will be here in a few minutes.”

“I’ll move when they come.”

“All right, but it might be kind of weird.”

She set her tray down on the table and slid in next to me on the bench. “Are you mad at me, Julian?”

The question stunned me. “Why would
I
be mad at
you
?”

“You didn’t talk to me last week.”

“You didn’t talk to me either,” I said.

“I didn’t talk to you because you didn’t talk to me.”

“I didn’t
not
talk to you.”

“You didn’t even smile at me,” she said. “Did I do something wrong?”

“I didn’t mean not to smile at you. I guess I just had stuff on my mind.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Just stuff. Nothing special.”

“The girls in class think you’re
so
smart.”

“I’m not
so
smart,” I said. “I’m just maybe regular smart.”

“That’s not what Mr. Selkirk says.”

“What does he have to do with it?”

“He thinks you’re
real
smart.”

“Did you read his mind?”

“Why else would he let you get out of the final paper on
Julius Caesar
?”

“How did you find out?” I said.

“Word gets around, Julian. He thinks you’re writing a book.”

“I’m not writing a
book
.”

“He thinks you are,” she said. “He thinks you’ve caught the ‘writing bug.’ ”

“That’s just stupid.”

“Why is it stupid?”

“There’s no such thing as the ‘writing bug.’ Plus, anyway, how do you know what Selkirk thinks?”

“Because I asked him if
I
could write a book to get out of
Julius Caesar
, and he said no. When I said that wasn’t fair, he said that writing was your thing. So then I said maybe writing was my thing too. But he shook his head. He told me he thought you were going to be a famous author. Those were his exact words. I swear on my mother’s life.”

“Well, what does he know?”

“He said you’ve got the writing bug bad.”

(I don’t know why you said that to her, Mr. Selkirk. Plus, I don’t know why you think that. Because, in my opinion, there’s no such thing as the writing bug, and even if there is, I don’t have it. That’s the truth. If you don’t believe me, listen to what I said next.)

“Writing doesn’t mean squat to me,” I said. “I could stop doing it tomorrow. I’m
going
to stop doing it at the end of June. You think I’m going anywhere near a composition book over the summer?”

“I’m just telling you what he told me,” she said.

I stared down at the table and shook my head.

“So you’re not mad at me?”

“No, not at all,” I said.

That was when it happened: she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

I must’ve given her the weirdest look ever. “Why did you do that?”

“You said you weren’t mad at me. Are you mad at me now?”

“No, but why did you do it?”

“Because I wanted to do it.”

“That’s it?” I said. “You wanted to do it, so you just did it?”

“I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“I don’t
mind
—”

Right then, Eric, Howie, and Shlomo showed up at the table with their lunch trays. I was afraid for a split second that they’d seen what had just happened, but they were too busy yakking it up even to notice Jillian was sitting next to me. They just slid down in their usual places without missing a beat. Quentin and Lonnie were a couple of steps behind them. Lonnie, of course, noticed Jillian right off. His face was red as a tomato, then, a second later, pale as a sheet.

As he was about to sit down, Jillian stood up. “I guess I’ll get going.”

That caught their attention. They glanced up but none of them spoke.

To break the tension, I introduced her. I said, “Guys, this is Jillian.”

Quentin was the only one who managed to squeeze out an actual “Hi.”

I turned to Jillian. “These are the guys …. You already know Lonnie.”

“Hi, Lonnie,” she said. She nodded in a general way and walked off.

The second she was out of earshot, Shlomo let out a wolf whistle. That cracked up the rest of them, except for Lonnie. He sat there stone-faced, probably still shaking off the shock of finding her there.

Then Howie said, “Is that your new
girlfriend
, Julian?”

“What? No!”

“Then who is she?”

“She’s just a girl from my class. That’s all.”

“Then how come she was sitting so close to you?”

“She had a question about English,” I said.

Shlomo said, “All right, but don’t let it happen again. She might give Eric a boner. In his condition, that could be fatal.”

That cracked us up again and got us back to normal. Except for Lonnie, that is. I snuck a glance at him, and he still looked stunned. Which was real ironical since he was the one who wanted
me
to sit at
Jillian’s
table. Here
he’d had a perfect chance to ask her to stick around, to eat lunch with us, and he couldn’t get out a single word. I figured at least he had let go of that idea. So maybe, as awkward as it was, something good would come out of it.

On the other hand, the fact that she had showed up at our table in the first place made no sense. Why would she do that after Eduardo had talked to her? Unless, of course, he’d chickened out and hadn’t talked to her. That didn’t seem likely, given what I knew of him. But the only way to find out for sure was to track him down after school. So that’s what I did.

As soon as school let out, I went looking for Eduardo at the playground at Memorial Field, and that’s right where I found him. I mean, that guy loved to play tag. He wasn’t hard to notice in a wild scramble of about a dozen fifth graders, including Paulo and Hector. There might even have been one or two fourth graders in the group. I was ashamed to be seen in the vicinity, to tell the truth. But what choice did I have? I waited at the edge of the playground and waved a couple of times until Eduardo caught sight of me.

He waved at me. “
Julian
, come join us!”

“I need to ask you something!” I yelled back.

He called time-out, then jogged over. “What is it, my friend?”

“I talked to Jillian today.”

“Yes.”

“She acted kind of weird.”

“Yes.”

“It’s just that … did you talk to her?”

He gave me a sly grin. “About what?”

“You know.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,
Julian
.”

“What you and I talked about in your room.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“So you
did
talk to her about it?”

“No,
señor
.”

That made me gasp. “Why not?”

“
Julian
, you are so young ….”

“You
said
you’d talk to her. I trusted you.”

“Trust love,
Julian
.”

“You
lied
to me.”

“I lied
for
you.”

“What does that even mean?”

Eduardo smiled down at me and tapped me on my left shoulder. He looked me straight in the eye in a real serious way. “Do you know what
that
means,
Julian
?”

“What?”

He turned and sprinted off. After he had run a good distance, he spun around and called back to me, “It means … 
Tag, you’re it!
”

You know that saying about seeing red? Until that moment,
I thought it was just a saying. But right then, for the first time, it made perfect sense to me. It wasn’t so much that I saw the
color
red. What I saw was heat. Or rather, I
felt
heat behind my eyes, which made the world look reddish. The benches, the swings, the faces of the fourth and fifth graders looked reddish. Even the air looked reddish. The reddest thing of all was Eduardo. He looked as if he was glowing red, like a cinnamon gumdrop. He was waving at me, daring me to chase him, grinning the entire time. That grin … that was the reddest thing of the reddest thing. It set every nerve in my body on edge.

Without even thinking about it, I charged after him. I didn’t just want to tag him. I wanted to tag him so hard I’d shove him to the ground. He turned and started to run, but I closed on him real fast. Too fast, as it turned out. Just as I put out my hand, he veered hard right, and I shot past him.

“¡Olé!”
he yelled.

When I turned to face him again, there was that grin. That was what I saw. Nothing else. I put my head down and rushed him a second time. I could hear his footsteps in front of me, dancing left and right. But at the last second, there was no sound. I looked up, and I was past him again. I don’t know whether he’d faked right or left, but I had missed him, and he was still standing in the same place. He hadn’t moved a foot in either direction.

“¡Olé, Julian!”

That was when I heard the laughter. Fourth and fifth graders were laughing at me.

“Hey,
toro
!” Eduardo called.

“What?”

“¡Toro! ¡Toro!”

For a third time, I sprinted after him. Except this time, I kept my head up. He took off but let me get real close, swiveling his hips side to side. I was inches from him, not even a fingertip away, but when I leaned forward, he veered just out of reach.

It was too much to take, getting that close. I lunged just as he broke hard right. I tried to cut back with him, but my feet got tangled, and I started to fall. When I say I
started
to fall, what I mean is it wasn’t the kind of fall that happens at once. That fall had a story—a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was me against gravity. I thought I might right myself, get back my balance, except I was too far gone. It took me nine full steps to fall, and I was fighting it the entire time. But after the ninth step, I surrendered. I put out my hands and tumbled forward. I rolled with it, head over heels, skinning both of my palms, but given how hard I was running, it could have been worse. I ended up sitting on the ground, staring at my palms.