The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

  Chapter Two

  THE SO-CALLED POWER IS REVEALED

  Give me something to read,” Duncan told Andrew.

  “Why, am I boring you?”

  “I don’t mean to read to myself,” said Duncan. “Something I can read out loud.”

  “I already know you can read,” said Andrew Tanizaki. “You don’t have to prove it to me.”

  “Tanizaki, just give me something, okay?” Duncan said impatiently.

  Andrew reached into the clogged backpack he took everywhere and pulled out a creased little booklet. It was a Starpod Defenders instruction manual; Andrew had doodled cartoons all over it. Pictures of alien heads floated everywhere, all of them with long antennae coming out of their straight black hair.

  “Now open to a random page,” said Duncan.

  “There’s no such thing as random,” Andrew said. “My brother says—”

  “Do you want me to do this or not?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Duncan closed his eyes and turned his head away as Andrew opened the booklet and slid it toward him.

  “Okay,” said Andrew. “Here.”

  There was silence, or at least there was silence at their end of the table. All around them, kids talked and shouted and laughed. The seven-foot-tall cafeteria giantess blew on a whistle, then Duncan heard her yell, “IF YOU DO NOT SIT DOWN, YOUNG LADY, YOU WILL HAVE LUNCH WITH PRINCIPAL GLOAM!”

  After a second, Duncan realized that the sounds of the whistle and the voices were fading. It was as if he and Tanizaki were on a train carrying them far away from Drilling Falls Middle School. Duncan felt the fingertips of his left hand grow warm, then warmer, then actually hot, as if he had one of those hand warmers in his pocket that his mother used to buy him.

  Now, just the way it had happened in the bedroom with the dumb book about Jimmy and the gopher and the rocket ship, the fingers of his left hand became hotter and hotter. It was as though his brain was sending his fingers an urgent message: MUST—HAVE—HEAT. They grew so hot they began to hurt, and soon they pulsed as though someone had slammed a car door on them. When it seemed as though he couldn’t stand the heat any longer, it leveled off, and Duncan let out his breath in relief.

  “Are you okay?” he heard Andrew Tanizaki say, and Duncan just nodded. With his eyes still shut, he ran the fingertips of his left hand across the surface of the open booklet and read aloud:

  “FAQ’s.

  Question 1: What happens if I reach a new level and get stuck inside the Mindvault?

  Answer: If you reach one of the master levels, you should feel proud! But for those who are really impatient, cheats for reaching the next level can be found inside the Conestar Satellite.”

  Duncan paused. “And I also want to add, Andrew,” he said, “that you drew some doodles. They’re pretty good, too. They’re these little cartoons of aliens trapped in what I think is supposed to be the Mindvault. Am I right?”

  There was no reply. Duncan stopped talking and opened his eyes. The world seemed as bright as Thriftee Mike’s, and the sounds of the cafeteria rolled back toward him.

  He turned to face Andrew, who was just staring at him, and who then muttered in a shocked voice, “Yeah, you’re right. What the heck is this, Dorfman?”

  Duncan Dorfman hadn’t let his power out in order to impress Andrew Tanizaki. Impressing him wouldn’t improve Duncan’s loneliness or nothingness at school. He had done it because he knew that if something unusual happened at their cafeteria table, the kids at the next table would know about it, too.

  So after Duncan Dorfman read the instruction manual from Starpod Defenders aloud without looking at the words, he wasn’t surprised to see a boy across the way glance over.

  Carl Slater was a smirking kid with a rust-colored buzz cut that always looked freshly mowed. He sat in the cafeteria at the next table every day with a bunch of other kids, playing Scrabble®. They were all members of the Drilling Falls Middle School Scrabble Club, though anyone who saw the way they behaved might have thought they were looking for trouble rather than a friendly game. The year before, Carl Slater had gotten into trouble so many times at school—he’d talked back to his English teacher; he’d accepted a dare to steal the notebook of a girl named Ariel Berk; he’d stood behind the cafeteria giantess and walked with his arms stretched out like Frankenstein’s monster—that the principal, Mr. Gloam, had insisted that he join a club and devote himself to it.

  “Do something useful with yourself, Mr. Slater, or you will be suspended,” said Mr. Gloam. “Simple as that.”

  The principal said it couldn’t be a sport. He wanted Carl to focus on using only his brain for a change. The Scrabble Club, at that point, was very small: basically two kids in a room with an old board. It was Carl’s mother’s idea that he join the Scrabble Club. She thought it would help him get into college someday.

  On the first day, Carl had to be dragged in. But soon he found that he was surprisingly good at Scrabble, and then he convinced his friends to join, too. Because they always did what Carl Slater said, the Scrabble Club was quickly filled with loudmouthed kids, slightly wild kids, kids like Carl Slater. And they all got pretty good at the game and began to compete in local tournaments against other schools’ Scrabble Clubs.

  The year before, Drilling Falls Middle had sent Carl Slater and Brian Kalb off to the YST—the Youth Scrabble Tournament—which was held down in Yakamee, Florida, every December. They’d had a good time, and placed fortysixth out of one hundred teams. Carl and Brian had returned home with a small trophy showing what appeared to be a gold-plated pizza deliveryman holding up a pizza box—but was really a person holding up a giant Scrabble tile.

  The first-place winners of the tournament had taken home ten thousand dollars, Duncan had heard someone at school say. If Duncan had ten thousand dollars—or half of it, anyway (kids’ tournament Scrabble was usually played in teams of two)—he would give it to his mother, and maybe they could rent their own place.

  Carl Slater liked to tell people that the letters in his last name could be moved around to spell ten different words, both ones that were ordinary, and ones that weren’t. These included:

  ALERTS

  ALTERS

  ARTELS

  ESTRAL

  LASTER

  RATELS

  SALTER

  STALER

  STELAR

  TALERS

  All of which, Carl explained to anyone who would listen, were words you could play in a game of Scrabble. Carl was both popular and mean, smart in the way that an animal in an Aesop’s fable is smart. He was a good athlete, too, but lately he’d become much more obsessed with Scrabble than sports. If Duncan hadn’t shown Andrew Tanizaki his power, then Carl Slater would never have seen it; but Carl, of course, saw everything. When he noticed something peculiar going on at the lunch table across from the one where he usually sat, he needed to find out more.

  Now he squinted at Duncan in the cafeteria, finished his lunch, then stood up and walked over, sitting on the bench beside Tanizaki and directly across from Duncan.

  Carl’s friend Mitchell Farley called, “Yo, Carl, what are you doing?”

  “Busy,” said Carl, waving him off.

  “BUSY is an anagram of YUBS,” said Mitchell. He was always looking for a way to improve his Scrabble skills.

  Carl just looked at him. “YUBS isn’t a word, Farleyface,” he said coldly. “But BUYS is. BUYS is an anagram of BUSY.”

  “Oh. Right,” said Mitchell.

  Carl Slater turned to Duncan and said, “Hey, Lunch Meat, what were you and the Chinaman just doing?”

  “Nothing,” said Duncan.

  “Some kind of sad, sad magic trick that you found inside a cereal box?” asked Carl.

  “No,” said Duncan. “It wasn’t a trick.”

  “Seriously, Dwarfman,” said Carl, “I saw what you were doing. You, like, you memorized the Chinaman’s video-game booklet.”

  “I didn’t memorize it. Tell him, Tani
zaki.”

  “Um, Duncan?” piped up Andrew in a nervous voice, and he stood up. “I just remembered I have to go see the nurse about that nosebleed I had last week—”

  “WHY ARE YOU STANDING UP?” cried the cafeteria giantess, casting her long shadow across the table. “SIT DOWN, OR YOU’LL BE EATING WITH PRINCIPAL GLOAM!” she said, and Tanizaki shrank back down. Her shadow lurched elsewhere.

  “I read the words with my fingers, not my eyes,” Duncan said. “It’s this thing I can do.”

  “So, like, you’re telling me you can feel the words underneath your fingers?” said Carl Slater, not taking his eyes off Duncan.

  Duncan nodded, trying to appear calm. “Yeah. But only the left hand. The right hand doesn’t work.” Then he added, “And I can feel pictures, too.”

  From across the table, Andrew Tanizaki watched with quivering, hamsterish excitement. By now, everyone else who’d been sitting at the Scrabble table had come over, and a few people from other tables came over to see what was going on, too. Someone took out a blindfold and wrapped it around Duncan Dorfman’s head, tying it with a sharp jerk. It was really a pair of gym shorts; Duncan could smell the big, stinking gym beneath the slippery fabric. He smelled a thousand long-ago dodgeball games, and he imagined himself getting smacked in the head and the stomach with ball after ball.

  Someone else put a magazine under his hand and said in a nasty voice, “Read, Lunch Meat.”

  The table became quiet. If Duncan was ever going to have a chance to rise up from his loneliness and his loserdom and the fact that he was just Lunch Meat—a boy who was forced to sit with the Chinaman, a boy who was stuck here in Drilling Falls in a peculiar-smelling little house with his mother and his great-aunt—then this was the moment.

  This was it.

  Though his mother desperately didn’t want him to stand out, he knew what he had to do. No one in this school imagined that Duncan Dorfman had anything special to offer. But maybe they were wrong, Duncan thought, and he felt his fingertips crackle once again with heat. He made his voice get loud as he said, “Road Rage Magazine. Inside: Hot wheels and hot babes—we’ve got ’em!”

  The kids around the table started to laugh; someone clapped. It wasn’t just Duncan’s fingers that burned; his face did, too. He couldn’t help but show off a little as he sat in the good kind of spotlight for the first time in his life, and so he added, “Then there’s a picture of a guy driving a sports car. And a woman in a bikini is lying on the hood, drinking . . . a glass of lemonade, I think. At least, there’s a slice of lemon on the side of the glass.”

  “He’s seen it before!” someone insisted.

  Someone else said, “He’s memorized it! He’s got, like, one of them photogenic memories!”

  A third person yelled, “What a big dumb fake! Fakey McFakester!”

  A book was angrily shoved at Duncan, so he began to read it aloud, despite having gym shorts on his head. He read, “Was Christopher Columbus really the hero that people say he was?”

  The kids around the table howled; it was like lunchtime at a school for wolves. Duncan Dorfman was handed math books; diagrams of spores; sheet music from the school’s a cappella group, the Drilltones. He quickly went from being unknown to being surrounded.

  “I have plans for you, Lunch Meat—I mean, Dorfman,” whispered Carl Slater. “You ever hear of the YST? The Youth Scrabble Tournament?”

  “Yeah,” said Duncan.

  “Well, it’s coming up on December twelfth.”

  “I don’t really play Scrabble.”

  “With your skill, you could be in it this year. You get what I’m saying?”

  “No,” said Duncan.

  “Think about it, Dorfman. You could pick letters from the bag like they were cherries from a tree,” said Carl. “The tiles used in tournaments are called Protiles, and they aren’t engraved with letters; they’re just stamped in ink. There’s no way to tell what letters they are when they’re in the bag. There’s no way for a normal person to tell, I mean. But you could do it. You’re not normal. You’re a freak, Dorfman. But in a good way,” he added quickly.

  “Is it legal?” Duncan asked doubtfully.

  “No, Dorfman, you’ll probably be arrested. The cops will put you in handcuffs and you’ll be sent to death row.” Carl paused, sighing. “Is it legal? Of course it’s legal! Jeez! The rules of Scrabble don’t say anything about some freaky fingertip power. Think of the glory, Dorfman. Think of the cash.” He paused. “I hear that you and your mom have no money, am I right?” Duncan didn’t say anything. “I hear that your dad died of some disease,” said Carl.

  “Panosis,” said Duncan.

  “Whatever. And that you and your mom live in some cousin’s house for free, because she feels sorry for you—”

  “Great-aunt.”

  “Fine! Great-aunt! And that your mom works at Thriftee Mike’s, and that your life is a little grim.” Duncan felt his shoulders tense up, and he opened his mouth, but Carl said, “Relax, Dorfman. I’m not mocking you. I’m just saying this doesn’t have to be the case anymore. We’ll talk later at your locker, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Duncan, but he felt deeply uncomfortable, and almost about to throw up, or faint and fall down on the floor.

  Carl Slater left the table just as Duncan was carried off into the sea of kids. Somewhere in that sea, Andrew Tanizaki’s head bobbed up, then went under. It would be a long time before the two of them would sit at the same lunch table again.

  Chapter Three

  A FISH OUT OF WATER IN A FAMILY OF JOCKS

  All the way across the country in Portland, Oregon, April Blunt sat in her bedroom making flash cards. Her hand wrote out card after card about photosynthesis, but her mind was focused not on plants, but on a person. She didn’t know his name, his e-mail address, his phone number, where he lived, or anything else. They had met once at a motel pool when she was nine, and had spent a couple of hours together. He was a mystery to her, but still she’d been thinking about him off and on for all this time.

  The boy was the first person who had ever been impressed by her Scrabble skills. But it wasn’t just that. He’d also made it clear in their brief time together that he liked hanging around April when she talked about Scrabble. She didn’t bore him. Looking back, she realized that he was the first person who’d let her feel like the best version of herself. Later on, other people did that, too, including Lucy Woolery, who became her closest friend and Scrabble partner. But he was the first one, and she thought about him often.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said to Lucy, who was sitting at the foot of April’s bed, making her own far neater flash cards. “The boy I met back then was a lot more interesting to me than photosynthesis.”

  “I like photosynthesis,” said Lucy. “It’s plants breathing, basically. How sick is that? But of course he was more interesting. Especially since you don’t know who he is or what happened to him.”

  A vague picture of the boy who April had met at the motel pool was vacuum-packed inside her brain forever. She and this boy had had a great time during the couple of hours they had spent together. They had talked a lot, and she’d taught him to play Scrabble, and then it was over, bam.

  “It’s amazing that you still think about him,” said Lucy. “Can’t you find out where he is?”

  “You can’t look someone up if you don’t know their name,” said April.

  “Yes, you can,” said Lucy. “My parents do it all the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ll be at dinner, and my mom will say, ‘Paul, who was that actor? The one with the scar on his lip who was in that movie about the deranged zookeeper?’ Then they’ll send me off to get my laptop, and I’ll type in ‘actor,’ ‘scar,’ ‘lip,’ and ‘zookeeper.’ And up pops the name.”

  “But this is different,” said April. “I can’t just search for this kid under ‘Boy Who I Met at a Motel Pool Three Years Ago and Who Liked Listening to Me Drone on Abo
ut Scrabble and Who I Never, Ever Saw Again.’”

  “That’s true,” Lucy said.

  “If I don’t know this boy’s name, I can’t get any information. It’s just one of those things.” April paused. “You meet somebody, and then your parents say, ‘Okay, great, I’m glad you’ve been having fun. But now it’s time for us to go.’ And because you’re a minor, you have to leave with them, and you and the other person never see each other again. It’s actually kind of sad the way kids have no control over their own lives. We’re just basically . . . puppets being ordered around by cruel puppeteers.”

  “Yeah,” said Lucy. “It’s totally tragic. The tragedy of the tormented, underage puppets.”

  April took a pillow and thumped it down on Lucy, who laughed hard as some small, curling feathers swooped through the air.

  The house was quiet on this clear October Saturday, though out in the backyard there was shouting as usual. “Hut one, hut two, hut three, HIKE,” someone cried, and everyone in the family moved their solid, sporty bodies across the crunching grass.

  The Blunts were a family of jocks. All of them had thick, strong necks, except for April, who had always seemed different. The three other Blunt children had weighed over nine pounds at birth and had had broad shoulders, full heads of hair like carpeting, and mashed faces that already gave them the appearance of being jocks.

  April was born weighing four pounds, eleven ounces. She didn’t have a single hair on her head. “You were like a little goldfish,” her father sometimes said. If he hadn’t actually witnessed the moment she popped out into the world, he would have sworn that they had been given the wrong baby.

  But April was a Blunt. As she got older, she still looked nothing like them (she was small, with red hair and nearly see-through pale skin), and acted nothing like them, either, but she was one of them—the one who did not “get with the program,” as she often said to her best friend.