You Will Call Me Drog (14 page)

On her way out to the library the next morning, Mom stopped and squinted at me like I was a page of blurry print she needed to read.

“I’m glad your appointment with Dr. Mann is Monday, Parker.”

I called after her as she went out the door. “Mom, could you bring me a book back?
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam?
”

Her eyebrows scrunched into a what-next look. “I guess so,” she said. “We must have a copy. Is it for school or something?”

“Sort of.”

“Not for school, for fools!” Drog said.

Mom shook her head and left.

“Gee thanks, Drog,” I said. “That helps.”

Saturday again. No Wren. No aikido. No bike. And Dr. Mann to look forward to. Wheee.

I went back to bed and lay there as long as I could stand it. Then I got up and went downstairs. Mom had left me a list of one-handed chores. And a ten-dollar bill to pick up some masking tape and staples at the hardware store.

I bit the top off of a banana and peeled the sides down with my teeth so I could eat it, then I started unloading the dishwasher, one dish at a time.

But my big job for the weekend was to decide.

What would be so bad about quitting aikido? I really liked doing it, but maybe Drog was right about all the harmony and blending stuff. Aikido sure hadn’t helped
me
lead a life of harmony. I’d never had so many people mad at me, and before aikido I’d never gotten into a real fight.

And how about awareness? All I seemed to be more aware of was the anger and worry and disappointment around me. And people following me.

Still, the dojo was the one place I could pretty much be myself, Drog and all. I wanted to be there with Wren and Big Boy. I just didn’t want to go if Sensei disapproved of me.

I dragged the garbage can out to the street.

Why not just do what Sensei said? Shut my eyes and do it, like I was swallowing a maggot on a dare. Who cared what Wade Hunt thought, anyway? I might never see him again.

But Sensei said “with your whole heart.” I was supposed to mean it, that was part of the deal.

Apologize to that jerk and treat him like he’s right? How could I humiliate myself like that? I went into the mudroom and stomped on about a hundred soda cans to flatten them, then threw them one at a time into the recycling bin. Could Sensei himself do what he was telling me to? Well, Sensei wouldn’t have gotten into a fight in the first place.

I took a break and heated some chocolate milk in a pan. Then I poured it into a mug, spilling some, and plopped a marshmallow into it. It was almost cocoa. I broke off a chunk of cheese and stuck it between two pieces of bread. It was almost lunch.

Something kept nagging me. Something about the fight. Aikido is self-defense, Sensei told us from the beginning. Fighting should be the last choice. Maybe there was no way I could have cooled things down and gotten Wade to leave Charlie alone, like Drog said.

But the truth was, I didn’t even try. I really wanted to fight him. I was right to try to protect Charlie, and if Wade attacked me for that, I had the right to defend myself. But I was wrong to hit first.

I was definitely going to have to apologize. I gagged just thinking about it.

I grabbed my jacket and the ten dollars and headed for Carlson’s Hardware. Mom could have picked up this stuff on her way home, but she probably wanted to make sure I got out of the house. Or maybe she thought a trip to the hardware store would get me going working on something.

I opened the front door at Carlson’s and ran right into Wren’s dad’s chest. We both stepped back, and my face went hot. He shifted the package he was carrying to his other hand and searched me with his velvet eyes.

“Well, hello, Parker,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Been busy?”

I pulled Drog out long enough to show but shoved him back in my pocket before he could say anything.

“Yeah, kind of,” I said.

Mr. Rivera nodded. So he knew. Wren told him. Of course.

We looked at each other some more.

“I’ve just finished putting the roof on Wren’s house,” he said. “You should see it. And I’m starting on a TV cabinet and some shelves for the Sloats. Come by sometime.”

It felt like a question.

He waved and left the store.

I went home and dropped the bag of tape and staples on the kitchen table, then debated whether to watch a movie or play a video game, anything to keep from imagining facing Wade Hunt with “sorry” drooling out of my mouth. If only...

Oh just do it, Parker. Go!
I zipped my jacket back up, scribbled a note to Mom and cut through the backyards to Wren’s.

Almost lost my nerve, though, when I saw her bike leaning up against the side of the garage shop. I could hear the high-to-low whine of the power saw inside and the
plunk
of a sawn-off piece falling to the concrete.
Keep your intention, Parker.

I stepped into the wedge of light coming from the doorway. Wren was leaning over the miniature house with a white plastic bottle and a brush in her hands. She looked up first, and the thought I saw flick across her face for a second almost made me turn around and leave. She wanted her dad to herself.

Wait, what if she’d always felt that way, and just shared him with me anyway because I was her friend? What about now?

Wren tried to smile. I lifted my chin to say, “Okay if I come in?”

She shrugged. “Papa, look who’s here.”

Mr. Rivera looked up then and broke into a grin. But he had heard something in Wren’s voice, so he said, “Great! We could use some help. Right,
Corazon
?”

Wren just stood there with the bottle, so I walked over. At the base of the miniature house was a bucket of small pieces of wood. They had made grooves in each piece to look like shingles, and Wren was gluing them one by one onto the roof.

Without saying anything, she handed me the brush and showed me how much glue to brush on the end of a shingle and how to tuck it up under the last one. I couldn’t get them in tight enough one-handed though, so she nudged me aside and redid them herself. I ended up just putting the glue on and handing the shingles to her.

Mr. Rivera bent over the sawhorses, sawing and measuring. None of us talked.

“Wren!” her mom called from the house. “Come help me, will you?”

Wren looked sideways at me, almost like it was my fault that she had to leave and I didn’t.

“Coming!” she called back. She took the glue bottle and brush from me, put them back on the shelf, and left.

Mr. Rivera motioned me over and had me steady a board for him while he clamped it into the vise. “Now you can do this,” he said, and handed me a smoothening plane.

It was a little hard to work at first, but then I got the strokes going while he sanded another piece. Whisper-thin curls drifted down onto my sneakers.

“Wren must hate me.”

I didn’t really mean to say that out loud.

Mr. Rivera stopped sanding and rested his square hands on the board.

“Parker, Wren could never hate you. I think she doesn’t understand what’s happening. With her friend.”

“Well that makes two of us,” I said.

Smiling only with his eyes, Wren’s dad held up three fingers.

“I tell her don’t worry,” he said. “Things work out. I tell her you’re a good boy.”

He went back to sanding, and I listened to the grains rubbing across the wood. Would things work out? If Mr. Rivera knew everything that had been going on, would he be so sure I was a good boy?

I picked up the plane again and tried to focus on the clean feel of wood until the shop clock told me I was way overdue for supper.

Mom got home late that day herself, with things on her mind, so she didn’t notice.

“Sorry, Parker,” she said. “Dr. Mann’s office called. He has to go out of town on Monday, after all. He can’t see us until the following week.

Us?

“What a pity,” Drog said.

“His receptionist offered to refer us to someone else if it was urgent, but since you got along so well with Dr. Mann ... Parker, I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be okay, really.”

She sighed. “I’ve heard that before, haven’t I? Oh, by the way, here’s your
Rubaiyat.”

She pulled the book out of her bag, dusted it off with her sleeve, and handed it to me.

I went up to my room, climbed up the drawer handles to my ledge, and curled up with it while Mom fixed supper.

“Don’t bother to read that,” Drog said. “Dreadfully boring.” He immediately took a nap. Or pretended to.

True,
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
was hard to get into at first, with all these old-time words like “methought” and “per-plext” and names I couldn’t even try to pronounce. But after a while I started to catch the rhythm, and some of the lines sounded great, like, “A hair perhaps divides the False and True,” or “I came like Water, and like Wind I go” or “There was a Door to which I found no key: There was a veil past which I could not see.”

I couldn’t tell what the whole thing was about, though. There was a lot in it about drinking wine and about clay pots, and plenty of dust-to-dust stuff, like in the Bible. “Ruby” was mentioned once, but only to describe the color of the wine.

“Not one word about a yacht, Drog,” I said, but he just snored.