Twisted (8 page)

When I walked into homeroom, Chip Milbury acted like I didn’t exist. That was a good thing. Bethany did, too. That was bad. But she was busy handing tissues to Stacey Peters, who had just been dumped, so I forgave her.

When the bell rang, I dropped my notebook so the papers would scatter all over. This made me late to class, but it guaranteed that Chip would be in front of me. One-on-one I could handle Chip Milbury no problem. But Chip had an army on his side. I was still the slightly weird kid who only had one friend.

As my Calculus teacher yelled at me for being late, I realized that I needed to work out again. My hard-earned landscaping muscles were beginning to melt. I’d start doing push-ups. I’d run. Maybe Bethany would let me pick her up and practice lifting her.

I’d have to phrase that in just the right way so she didn’t slap me.

I was called down to the principal’s office at the beginning of second period.

Mr. Hughes looked terrible. All of the buttons on his phone were blinking red. His walkie-talkie lay on the desk, crackling. When the secretary showed me in, she reminded him that he had a meeting with the superintendent in five minutes.

“We’re keeping this short,” he told me after she had closed the door. “My spies tell me there was an altercation in the boys’ locker room after school yesterday.”

Chip had an army. Mr. Hughes had a spy network. I needed to beef up my recruitment efforts.

“Were you a part of that altercation?” he continued.

“No,” I said, happy to tell the truth. The
altercation
was the attack on Yoda. I was part of the
aftermath
. A technicality, perhaps, but an important one.

“You’re sure?”

“Did someone see me there? Did someone file a complaint?”

He stared at me for a full minute. The seconds dragged on the clock behind him like the hands were stuck in tar. “No,” he finally admitted. He tapped a piece of paper on his desk. “I am required to report any trouble you get into to your probation officer.”

I nodded. “I’m seeing him this afternoon, sir. Should I ask him to call you?”

Another half minute of silence, then, “No. But your grades are not what one would hope for.”

How was I supposed to answer that? I kept my eyes on him and focused on blinking regularly, but not too fast, so I wouldn’t look like a liar or a cheat.

“You’re walking a fine line here, Tyler. You don’t have any room for error.”

Blink.
“Yes, sir. I know that, sir.”

“I don’t want to hear any more rumors about you. You keep your nose clean.”

“I’ll try my best, sir.” I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve. He didn’t notice.

Bethany sat with us at lunch again. She did not put her foot in my lap, but she had the choice between sitting next to Hannah or me, and she sat next to me.

Her arm bumped mine four times.

After lunch I sniffed my sleeve. It smelled like her. I wanted to strip and rub it all over me, but the lunch ladies were already giving me funny looks.

After school, I took the C bus into town to the county courthouse to meet with Mr. Benson, my probation officer. He was a big guy, ex-Marine plus sixty pounds, gray in his buzz cut, thick glasses, and a smile that reminded me of a hungry possum.

The waiting room was the size and temperature of a meat locker and was lit by blinding fluorescent lights. There was a bored secretary at one end and a coffeepot that looked like it had last been used in the late 1980s. Old copies of
Highlights
magazine and
Good Housekeeping
were piled on a metal table in the corner.

I sat.

How did I end up with hardcore stuff like a judge, trial, and probation officer? Look up the laws about property damage.

It’s a good thing they never found out what I really wanted to do. Spray-painting the school was Plan B.

The Foul Deed: Plan A involved a bomb, an entertaining smoke bomb that would have forced them to close school on a beautiful spring day. It seemed like a surefire way to become a hero.

Then I found myself dreaming about a real bomb. About blowing up the building. But don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t going to hurt anybody. I planned on using a timer so that at three o’clock in the morning the entire building would explode into small, standardized pieces.

I just wanted to make a statement.

After a week of planning, I started having nightmares about explosions and timers that went bad. All that broken glass was bound to hurt someone. The fire might spread from treetop to treetop until it hit the neighborhoods around the school, then the stores on Grant Boulevard, and then the Buckeye Mall would go up in flames and the police would corner me and there’d be a tense standoff with their weapons drawn, and as I raised my hands over my head, one of them would think I was reaching for a weapon, and they’d blast away.

I’d be the next dead boy on CNN for sure.

By deciding to spray-paint a few harmless slogans, I actually saved hundreds of lives and countless millions in damages. But when they arrested me, I realized that people might not understand if I explained that part. I never told anyone. I thought about it from time to time, but I never told.

The secretary looked up from her nails when Mr. Benson’s door opened. A woman my mom’s age hurried out.

I followed Mr. Benson inside and took my chair. He shuffled papers on his desk and smiled his hundreds of big teeth at me. He told me that he’d had a great report from Mr. Pirelli and another nice one from Joe, the head custodian at school.

I nodded.

“How are your classes going?”

“Great,” I said.

“How’s your dad?”

“Why, did he call you?”

“No. It’s just that people like your father want to send their kids to summer camp, not to a probation officer. I wanted to make sure things were okay.”

“He’s fine,” I said. “He works a lot.”

“Well, give him my best.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper. “That’s that. Work hard at school, keep your nose clean, and come back in a month.”

Again with the clean-nose thing. Authority figures had a pathological fear of boogers, that’s how I saw it.

The explosion hit us as soon as I opened the door at four thirty on Friday afternoon. Good thing I was in front. Hannah didn’t have the body mass to absorb that much punishment.

“OhmyGodwherehaveyoubeendon’tyouknowwhattimeitisyou’renotdressed!”

Mom was screaming so loudly she set off car alarms three streets over. She was decked out in black velvet pants, pearl earrings, a necklace of jingle bells, a sweatshirt covered with stoned-looking reindeer, and antlers.

Reindeer.

“Uh-oh,” Hannah whispered.

There was no nice way to say it: our mom was a Christmas freak.

Everystinkingthing about Christmas was holy. Not just the church stuff; you could understand that. But the rest of it—decorations brought down from the attic as soon as the Thanksgiving dishes were done, carols playing 24/7, candles with the choking stench of “Holiday Cheer,” cookies that were not for eating, but for “atmosphere”; it was nauseating.

Worst of all was the stupid family photo that always went on the front of our Christmas card. Seventeen years’ worth of those pictures were lined up with military precision on the walls of the living room. In the first one, I was a month old. I looked like a deformed vegetable swaddled in a Santa suit.

Hannah and I sprinted upstairs to change while Mom stomped around in the kitchen.

“Where is your father?” she yelled again as she slammed down the receiver of the kitchen phone.

If he was smart, on a plane to Tokyo.

I pulled the sweatshirt over my head. “Why don’t we just Photoshop him in?”

“Only if we can add a mustache and cross his eyes,” Hannah called from the bathroom.

“I can hear you both,” Mom yelled up the stairs, “and you are not funny. Do you know how hard it is to get time with Davis Gunnarson?”

I tugged at the bottom of the sweatshirt, but it stayed at the level of my belly button. I looked in the mirror hung on the back of my door. Not cool.

“I’m not wearing this!” I shouted.

“Wear it or die,” Mom shouted back.

Hannah pushed my door open, almost smacking me in the face with it. “Let me—oh, snap!” She couldn’t say anything after that, because she was writhing on the ground, pointing at me, and laughing so hard she could barely breathe.

Fifteen minutes after we walked in the front door, we were breaking the speed limit to get to the photography studio of Mr. Davis Gunnarson. Is there anything more embarrassing than being driven around by your mom? Yes, if you’re wearing a reindeer sweatshirt that is two sizes too small.

“I left messages for your father on every number I have for him.” Mom accelerated to make it through an intersection as the light turned red. “I e-mailed him directions to Gunnarson’s, too.”

“Why can’t we just use your camera and take the picture in the kitchen?” Hannah asked.

“Or use your studio?” I added.

“No way,” Hannah said. “It smells like dog poo.”

Mom did most of her pet photography in clients’ homes, but she rented a small, climate-controlled garage for people who wanted to pose their pooch in front of a fake backdrop of a Hawaiian beach or the Egyptian pyramids. And no, I am not making that up.

“The studio does not smell like dog poo.” Mom’s eyes darted left and right as she coasted through a stop sign. “It’s perfectly clean. But my equipment isn’t good enough. I’d need better lights, the right filters.”

I rolled down my window for some air. “You should buy them, then. You take good pictures. Better than this guy, I bet.”

“You think?”

“Hell, yeah. It’s time to give up the doggies and kitties.”

“Don’t swear,” she said automatically. She hit the turn signal, checked the rearview mirror, and sped past a taxicab. “I’ve thought about it.”

“If you don’t kill us in the next five minutes, I’ll help you find the space.”

“That would be nice.” Mom made a hard left into a parking lot and hit the brakes. “We’re here.”

Dad wasn’t.

We waited for an hour, but he didn’t show.

Mom had a fit, then rescheduled.

If Dad ever explained why he didn’t show up or call, I didn’t hear about it. When the mail arrived the next day, it had interim notices from all of my teachers. He came out of his lair long enough to ground me until the end of time. Again. He also confiscated the power cord to my computer.

I spent Sunday combing through the real-estate listings and found two properties for Mom to look at. She didn’t sign a lease for either one, but she asked me to please work a little harder at bringing my grades up, and bought me a new power cord.

On the last day of September, we had to attend a senior assembly about college. I sat next to Yoda, who slept. He had already filed his applications. Now it was just a matter of seeing who wanted to throw more financial aid at him.

Chip Milbury and his minions were sitting two rows behind us. I stayed alert in case they decided to lob hand grenades. Chip hadn’t retaliated yet, and that made things worse.

The speaker said that college deadlines were firm, correct spelling was important, and choosing a college was a serious decision.

After the assembly, I walked with Yoda to Hannah’s field-hockey game. Her team had sort of adopted him as a community-service project after he’d quit football. They thought his glasses were cute. Whenever he kissed my sister (horrifying, yes) the team would all say, “Awwwww!” the way girls do when they see puppies, ponies, and baby ducks.

The coach liked his ability to spot weaknesses in the opposing team. They hadn’t lost a game since Yoda sat at the end of the bench, stat tracker in hand.

Hannah was playing center forward with astounding brutality. The referees didn’t care, and the other team quickly learned it was less painful to stay out of her way. By halftime she had taken four shots and scored twice.

The second half opened with another lightning-fast breakaway by Hannah and Sue-Jen Parks, giving-and-going all the way to their enemy’s goal. Sue-Jen caught a stick to her shin just above the pad and crumpled, but the play continued, with Hannah sprinting across the field just as a defender wound up to fire the ball as hard as she could.

She shot a fraction of a second before Hannah’s stick made contact. The ball lifted off the field and traveled in a direct line to my sister’s face.

Yoda was off the bench before the ref blew the whistle. I was right behind him.

She was only knocked out for a second. She demanded to be put back in the game, even though the ball had snapped the frame of her goggles. The coach ignored her and told us to take her to the trainer’s office.

The office was like an emergency room, with a moaning soccer player bleeding from the mouth on one table and a shivering football player whose foot was stuck in a bucket of ice on another. We laid Hannah down on an empty table. I left messages for my parents at their offices and on their cell phones while the trainer, a short woman with red-rimmed glasses, checked out Hannah’s head.

When she finished poking and asking questions, she washed her hands.

“Well?” I asked.

“Nothing critical, but she needs to be seen by a doctor.”

Hannah tried to sit up. “It’s just a little headache. I have to get back.”

Yoda gently pushed her down. “Forget it.”

The trainer finished drying her hands. “He’s right. Your doctor will order an X-ray of the skull to rule out fractures. He might want an MRI, too, if he suspects bleeding on the brain.”

“Her brain is bleeding?” Yoda asked, the color draining from his face.

“Shhh, not so loud,” Hannah said.

“I doubt it,” the trainer said. “But doctors like to order tests, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. So no more field hockey today. Are you eighteen yet, Tyler?”

“In November,” I said. “Why?”

She glanced at the clock. “If you were eighteen I could release her to you. We’ll keep trying to get ahold of your parents.”

To say I was shocked when my father showed up an hour later doesn’t come close.

Dad never showed up for emergencies, not ever. Not when I fell off my bike and needed stitches, not when I fell off my skateboard and needed pins in my arm. Not when Hannah had pneumonia so bad that after they saw the X-rays they put her in intensive care and Mom sobbed in the plastic chair and there was nobody to take me home because I was only five.

But it was Dad standing over Hannah, brushing the hair off her forehead and talking to the trainer about what he should do next.

“Where’s Mom?” Hannah asked, as confused as I was.

“Her van broke down outside Hamilton,” Dad said. “Shhh.”

Hannah’s good eye found me and asked,
WTF?
I shrugged. Dad was looking even rougher than usual, like he was in training for a marathon or was on chemotherapy. But he was there and that counted for something. Half a point, maybe.

Then his cell phone rang. He glanced at the number.

“I’ll be right back,” he told the trainer. “Have to take this call.”

He stepped outside and closed the door, but we could hear him when he started yelling.

“Is he talking to Mom?” Hannah whispered.

I listened. “No, somebody named Stuart. It’s work.”

She closed her eyes.

When he came back in, the trainer gave Dad a piece of paper with instructions on it. We helped Hannah to her feet. She batted our hands away and grumbled.

Hannah rode with Dad to the ER so a doc could check her out, just in case. Yoda wanted to go, too, but Dad gave him the evil eye and said this was a family matter.

I wound up driving Yoda home in his car because he was so freaked out. Exploding Death Stars was one thing; watching your girlfriend get knocked out cold was another.