The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

  All around the room came other pocks. There was very little talking anymore. Parents and family members sat behind velvet ropes along the sides of the ballroom, or they waited out in the atrium, where you could actually talk without someone angrily saying “Shhh,” like a murderous librarian.

  Duncan held his breath as he drew all seven tiles in one big scoop. He and Carl had decided that, for the first turn, Duncan would simply draw tiles the regular way. He had gotten Carl to agree that he would keep pulling tiles like that until it became necessary to use his fingertips. Exhaling slowly now, he looked at the letters as he placed them on the rack. He had picked:

  M

  O

  I

  S

  O

  E

  R

  Together they looked like:

  MOISOER

  At first glance, it didn’t seem to be a great rack. There were certainly some interesting words that could be made from these letters: ISOMER, MOROSE, and even ROMEOS. But it would be a waste to use the S in any of those words. Duncan realized that if the Tile Hustlers played a word witha T in it—a common letter, there were six in each game—he and Carl would be able to make the eight-letter word ROOMIEST. Duncan scribbled a note to Carl, telling him this, and Carl squinted in understanding and nodded.

  Duncan and Carl watched the board to see what the other team would do. Please let there bea T in their word, Duncan thought. Please let there be a T. Then we can start the game with a bingo.

  The boy without the freckles began to lay down tiles. But when he was done, Duncan and Carl saw that he had placed the word DREAM. There wasn’t a single T among its letters. Too bad, Duncan thought. He and Carl had no good options now.

  But Carl sat up straight. He took the pad and scribbled something on it, then pushed it toward Duncan, who read:You’re not going to BELIEVE what we missed! Like, DUH!

  Carl Slater began picking tiles up off the rack. You were always supposed to discuss a move with your partner before you played it; you weren’t supposed to simply plunk down tiles wherever you liked. Duncan didn’t like that Carl was doing this, but then he saw what Carl had played, and he didn’t mind at all. Right under the AM in DREAM, Carl had placed the R and an O, making the tiny words AR and MO. Then he kept laying down letters horizontally. OMIES, he played. His word was:

  ROOMIES

  It was simple slang for “roommates,” and Duncan and Carl had become so focused on getting that T for ROOMIEST, that they’d almost missed what was right in front of them. Their opening move was worth a huge 69 points: 19 for ROOMIES, AR, and MO, plus a 50-point bonus for using all their letters. Carl hit the timer.

  “Nice,” the freckled Tile Hustler said quietly.

  “Thanks,” said Carl.

  From then on, the game was played at a rapid pace. Back and forth the two teams went, laying down their tiles, writing down scores, hitting the timer. A few moves later, their opponents ended up puttinga T at the end of ROOMIES to make ROOMIEST after all. They kept going, using an A already on the board for the word OAR, until they had played the bingo DECORATE.

  “Wow, great,” said Duncan.

  “Thank you,” said the boy who’d laid the tiles down.

  A girl at the adjoining table said, “Shhhhhhh!” There was a rule in Scrabble that you were supposed to talk as little as possible during games, which was why players wrote notes to each other. There was even a word for talking too much: “coffeehousing.” But once in a while you ignored the rules and coffeehoused anyway.

  Behind the velvet rope at the side of the ballroom, a bald guy in dark glasses turned around to face Nate’s half-sister, Eloise, who had been sitting in her mother’s lap, making razzberry sounds with her lips, spit flying.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Nate’s mother. “I’d really appreciate it if you could keep your baby under control. The back of my head feels like it’s on an ocean voyage. Plus, I’m trying to pay attention.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nate’s mother said.

  Another mother, a small Indian woman in a pink sari sitting beside the man, turned to him and politely asked, “Which is your team?”

  The bald man seemed surprised by the question. “My team?” he said. “They’re . . . over there. Excuse me,” he said. Then he slipped out of the ballroom and into the atrium.

  The two mothers watched him go.

  “Strange man,” murmured the mother in the sari.

  Nate’s mother nodded. “I think we should keep an eye on him.”

  “Rachel,” said Dr. Steve to his wife. “Look at Nate; he’s smiling! His team must be doing well. That’ll make Larry happy.”

  But Nate’s father Larry Saviano wasn’t watching. He had said he was too worried to stay behind the velvet rope, so throughout the first game he had been pacing the edges of the ballroom, glancing all around him. Right now he was on the other side of the room.

  Nate, actually, wasn’t smiling at all. His mouth was pulled into a tight line that from a distance might have looked like a smile, but wasn’t. Nate had quickly realized that his opponents, the Evangelical Scrabblers—a brother and sister, Kaylie and Josh—were a strong team. Right before the game began, the Evangelical Scrabblers had stood beside the table holding hands and looking upward, their mouths moving in silent prayer. Nate and Maxie had watched, surprised. Nate knew it wasn’t the chandelier they were looking at, or even the ceiling.

  Kaylie had picked a B to start, while Maxie picked an L.

  Nate banged down on the clock button to start the other team’s timer, and right away the Evangelical Scrabblers moved their tiles around on their rack and busied themselves writing notes to each other. Within seconds, they had put down the word WINDOW, for 34 points.

  “WINDOW,” Kaylie joked in her Southern accent. “My favorite opening.”

  Maxie looked at her blankly. “What?” she said.

  “It’s a pun,” Josh said in a similar accent. “A Scrabble pun. Get it? A window is an opening. And, see, this is our opening move.”

  “Ohhhhh,” said Maxie, smiling. “I get it.”

  Then both teams fell silent, concentrating hard. Maxie fiddled with her multiple ear studs. The game, as it turned out, was balanced in terms of the quality of tiles. But then near the end, the Evangelical Scrabblers played FIFE, and the first F landed on a triple-letter square that counted both across and down. The turn was worth a solid 31 points. The Big Apple Duo suddenly fell behind.

  Sweat popped out all over Nate’s neck, and he told himself: Think, think! He and Maxie moved their tiles around on the rack, but time was passing. Nate began to see that unless something good happened fast, the game would be lost.

  Their rack, unfortunately, looked like this:

  ALALAIN

  Maxie moved the tiles around again. But what turned up was:

  INALALA

  and then . . .

  LILNAAA

  The tiles were rotten, and they didn’t combine well with any of the letters that were already on the board. There was nothing to do, Nate understood, except dump as many of them as they could. All these tiles were one-pointers.

  We can’t possibly do anything even CLOSE to 31 points, Maxie scribbled on the pad. I see one move for 5, and another that would give us 14, but would also open up the triple. She was very fast with the numbers part of the game—faster even than Nate was. She did mental math at lightning speed, and it was coming in handy. If they traded some or all of their letters now, they would lose their turn and fall even farther behind.

  They discussed it briefly, then put down LAIN, which gave them those 5 pathetic points.

  Maxie wrote on the pad:

  We are, like, doomed.

  Nate couldn’t believe this was happening in their very first game. He had been working so hard for months, and everything had been building up to this day. What if it all came crashing down? What would his father say?

  But in the next hand, the Big Apple Duo picked the X—a letter that everyone a
lways wanted—and they placed it on a triple-letter square going in two directions, making the words XU and XI and earning a whopping 50 points.

  Was it possible that they might win the game after all?

  Yes, it was possible, and then it actually happened. New York beat Georgia by one point. One point.

  Nate and Maxie shook hands with the Evangelical Scrabblers, then Maxie said to Nate, “Nice work,” and held up her hand for him to slap.

  Wearily, he slapped his against it. He liked being with her, and the two of them were going to try to ride their skateboards while in Yakamee, but he hadn’t yet told her how he really felt about the game, or why he was even here. Nate turned away, a little bit dizzy.

  “What’s the matter?” Maxie asked, but he didn’t answer. Yes, they had won, but not by enough. Though he didn’t even like Scrabble, he knew he had to get his father off his case. Winning games by such a narrow margin was not the way to do that.

  “Nate,” he heard his father’s voice say from across the ballroom.

  “Shhh,” several parents warned.

  “Nate!” called his father again, more urgently.

  Maxie looked at Nate and said, “I think your dad wants you.”

  “Yeah, well, my dad can wait.”

  “What’s going on with you, Nate?” asked Maxie. “You invited me down here, and you seem so . . . angry or something.”

  “Shhh,” warned the parents again. “Games are still in progress!”

  “I’ll explain later,” he said.

  Nate turned and saw his father standing in the doorway. Nate nodded and walked toward him, but kept on walking when he reached him. There was a snack stand in the middle of the atrium, and Nate bought himself a can of grape Splurge, tipping his head back to drink.

  His father hung over him.

  “So what happened?” Larry asked.

  Nate stopped drinking and looked at him. “What would you say if I told you we lost?”

  Larry’s face darkened. “What?” he said sharply.

  Nate shook his head slowly. “You’re incredible, Dad,” he said. In that moment he had seen what it would be like if they actually did lose a game. “I was kidding,” Nate said. “Maxie and I won.”

  “You knucklehead! How could you mess with my mind like that? From the way you looked, I thought you actually lost!” Larry’s face had now broken into a big smile. “Let’s see the score sheet,” he said. He took the piece of paper from Nate and examined it carefully. After a moment he glanced up in disbelief. “A one-point win?” he said. “Are you serious, Nate? Don’t you think that’s a little close for comfort?”

  “It’s a win, Dad,” said Nate. “That’s what matters.”

  “Well, that’s mostly true,” said his father. “If you win all your games. If you lose one, your only chance to win is a big spread. You almost blew it here, Nate; can’t you see that? You’ve just got to play better next game, okay? You’ve just got to push yourself a little harder.”

  “I played my hardest,” said Nate.

  His father swallowed, trying to calm down. “I know you did. That wasn’t what I meant to say. All I meant is . . .”

  “. . . ‘Just don’t let it happen again,’” said Nate.

  Nate’s father laughed uncomfortably. “Yeah. Something like that,” he said.

  They understood each other perfectly.

  All around the ballroom, the first games were finishing up. Some players walked out smiling, or with fists pumping the air. “The Word Gurrrls rock!” cried a short, stocky girl who, along with her partner—both of them wearing matching sparkly cat’s-eye eyeglasses—laughed happily. Other players walked out slowly, barely looking up from the floor. A boy was sniffling as though he had lost his dog. But most of the players were calm and casual as they walked out. In many cases it was hard to tell if they had won or lost.

  April and Lucy came out chatting with their opponents, a boy and a girl from Ohio. All of them seemed to be in a good mood.

  Duncan and Carl had beaten the Tile Hustlers by 96 points. After the two teams had traded those early bingos, the Drilling Falls team had picked what was left of all the good letters throughout the game. Carl was practically rocking back and forth on his heels now that the game was over, thrilled that he’d drafted Duncan Dorfman to be his partner this year. Poor Brian Kalb had been left in the dust. With Duncan’s fingertip talent, Carl was surely thinking, they were going to go all the way.

  Carl pulled Duncan over to the side of the atrium, beneath a palm tree. “Dorfman, I want to buy you a soda,” he said. “Any flavor you want. And I’ll even throw in a straw for free. You did a great job in there,” Carl went on. “Your fingertips are awesome, and you’re so subtle about it. You’re on fire, man. Slap me five. With the left, obviously.”

  Carl held up his hand, and Duncan awkwardly held up his own hand and lightly thudded it against Carl’s. “Owoooh ,” Carl howled, as though the heat of Duncan’s hand had burned his own.

  Duncan didn’t know how to tell Carl this, but he hadn’t used his power to draw any of those tiles from the bag. He hadn’t needed to. Duncan had simply drawn good tiles by chance. You never knew what kind of letters you would get in a game of Scrabble. Sometimes they were terrible, but sometimes, if you were lucky, they were great.

  Before the weekend, Carl had reluctantly accepted that Duncan would use his fingertips during the tournament as little as possible. But Drilling Falls’s tiles in this first game had been so good that Carl had assumed that Duncan had deliberately picked them.

  Now, standing in the atrium after the game, Duncan made a silent promise to himself that he wasn’t going to use his fingertips unless it was an absolute emergency. He wouldn’t use them unless he and Carl were basically on the Scrabble equivalent of the Titanic, sinking fast. Otherwise, it would be cheating.

  Besides, Duncan liked not knowing which letters would appear on his rack. He even liked experiencing the misery that hit you when your letters were horrible, or the excited feeling you got when they all came together in several good combinations, or in one astonishing, knock-it-out-of-the-park bingo.

  Duncan wanted to play the game the way everyone else did. He had been brought all the way down here because of his fingertips, but he had played the first game like a regular player. Selfishly, he didn’t want to give that up. He was about to explain all this to Carl, but then he stopped himself, sensing that Carl would be furious. Maybe it was better to keep it to himself. After all, they had won the first game. This was supposed to be a happy moment.

  “Thanks,” was all Duncan said.

  By now, all the games were finished, and the players were on a break. Some of them rode the escalators up and down, and one boy was climbing up the down escalator.

  Nate Saviano, standing unhappily by the snack stand with his father, said, “I’ll see you later, Dad.” Then he went over to the big glass wall and sat down on the floor, looking out at the day. Outside, non-Scrabble people walked by in shorts and bathing suits. Cars went past with surfboards strapped to their roofs. This was Florida, but the sunshine and the ocean seemed far away.

  From across the atrium, the bald guy with dark glasses stood and watched Nate. Behind his shades, he narrowed his eyes.

  Chapter Eleven

  WHY ARE YOU HERE?

  That man is totally staring at Nate,” April whispered to Duncan and Carl during the break.

  “Who’s Nate?” Duncan asked.

  “The cool kid with the long hair and the skateboard. The one from New York,” said Lucy.

  “Maybe it’s his dad,” Carl said.

  “No. I saw him with his dad earlier,” April said. “His dad has a beard. This is someone else.”

  “Maybe it’s his bodyguard,” Carl said.

  “That’s ridiculous. And anyway, bodyguards usually have earpieces so they can talk to each other,” said Lucy. “This guy has no earpiece. He isn’t protecting Nate, I’m sure of that.”

  They all looked acros
s the room at the bald man with dark glasses. “You know, you really can’t be sure that he’s even watching Nate,” said Duncan. “Maybe his eyes are closed. Maybe he’s asleep standing up.”

  “Asleep standing up?” said Lucy. “Is that physically possible?”

  “It’s rare,” said Carl, “but it happens. I saw something about it on Freaks of Science, on the Learners’ Channel.”

  “We should tell Nate to be on the lookout for a creep,” April said.

  Why would a man in dark glasses stare at a kid at a Scrabble tournament unless he was a threatening person? There had to be other explanations, but April couldn’t think of any right now. She and Lucy, along with Duncan and Carl, approached Nate and told him their suspicions.

  “Staring at me? Where?” said Nate, looking around the atrium.

  “Over there,” said Duncan, tipping his chin.

  “Don’t look at him right now, Nate,” Lucy warned. “It’ll be too obvious. Only look at him when he’s looking away.”

  “How about now?” Nate asked. “Can I look now?”

  “Oh, wait,” said April. “Too late! While we were talking, he just left.”

  In that moment, the bald guy had slipped out of the atrium and pushed through the fire doors, and Nate didn’t get a chance to see what he looked like. “You were all probably imagining things,” Nate Saviano said. “But thanks for looking out for me.”

  Soon a gong was struck, which meant that round two was about to start. The three teams agreed to meet up afterward and have a quick snack together on the patio. “Whoever gets there first,” said April, “grab a big table.”

  April and Lucy found themselves playing their second game against two brothers from Idaho. Although the Spuds took an early lead, April and Lucy eroded it bit by bit, and ended up winning.

  Nate and Maxie played their second game well, too, though so did their opponents. Near the end, the opposition from Missouri fell badly behind. When it was over, they all shook hands across the board. The game had been completed quickly, and the ballroom was still quiet and vibrating with concentration. Nate and Maxie went out into the atrium to find their parents and tell them the outcome.