Lost in the Sun

  “The bumper cars are closed,” I told her. There was a rope over the entrance part, and a sign that said CLOSED FOR REPAIRS—SORRY!

  “Oh.” Fallon waved a dismissive hand at the sign and rewrapped her ketchup-ed hot dogs in foil. Grabbed her soda off the stand. “They’ll never notice.”

  “But—” I began. We couldn’t just break into the bumper cars. But I didn’t want to say that, because that would sound lame.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” Fallon asked me.

  “Uh, we could get kicked out of the park,” I said. “They could call the cops on us.”

  Fallon only shrugged at that. “We’ve already gone on every roller coaster,” she said, like that was a good argument. “And my dad is the cops. Come on. It’s my birthday.”

  She grabbed my arm so quick, I barely managed to take my hot dogs and soda with me.

  It was surprisingly easy to sneak into the bumper car cage. We waited until no one was looking, and then we stepped over the rope and scuttled over to the farthest car, against the fence, squeezing ourselves inside.

  “Cheers,” Fallon said, clinking her soda against mine.

  “Happy birthday,” I told her.

  “You still owe me a cotton candy,” she replied, taking an enormous bite out of her hot dog. Then she turned to look at me, ketchup and mustard smeared all over her chin. “Do I have something on my face?” she asked, pretending she didn’t know.

  I laughed.

  It might’ve been the best birthday party I’d ever been to.

  “So,” Fallon asked me as I bit into my first hot dog. “What movie do you want to watch on Monday?”

  I frowned. “About that . . . ,” I said. She waited, head tilted to the side, for me to answer.

  It was a little weird, being squeezed in so tight inside a bumper car with someone when you weren’t actually going anywhere. Not bad, exactly. Just . . . weird.

  I sighed. It was time to tell her.

  “I think I’m going to start intramural baseball on Monday,” I said.

  “That’s great!” Fallon said. I guess I must’ve looked surprised at that, because she said, “I mean, not great about Movie Club. That stinks. But great for you, because you like baseball.” It seemed like she was studying my face for a moment. “Wait. Why do you think you’re going to join? If you want to do it, just do it.”

  Like it was that simple. Like everything in Fallon Little’s world was so simple.

  “I’m going to,” I told her. “I will.” I took another bite of hot dog. Swallowed. “I mean, I want to.”

  “So do it, nimrod. It’s intramurals. You don’t even have to try out. They let, like, monkeys on the team if they want to play. Anyway, you’re good at sports, so what are you worried about?”

  I squinted an eye at her over my hot dog. It was no use trying to explain things to Fallon. No one who felt so at home on a roller coaster would ever understand being petrified of something as stupid as clammy arms.

  “How do you know I’m good at sports?” I said instead.

  She swallowed. “Small town,” she reminded me.

  “Oh.”

  I finished up my first hot dog, then wadded up the foil into a tight ball. Fallon grabbed it from me and threw it at the trash can across the bumper car lot. She missed by a mile.

  “You,” I told her, “are not good at sports.”

  She laughed.

  We ate our second hot dogs without talking. When we were finished, Fallon tried to toss all the foil wrappers, one by one, into the trash can. She missed every shot. After that she grabbed the wheel of the bumper car and pretended we were driving for a while, making vroom-vroom! noises and beep-beep!s and crashes and Get outta our way!s.

  All at once, she set her hands in her lap.

  “Is it because of what happened with Jared?” she asked me.

  Just like that, I could feel tiny dots of sweat beading up on my arms.

  “What?” I asked, tugging the sleeves of my T-shirt down as far as they would go.

  Fallon was looking at me, right in the eyes. Not mean. Just thoughtful. Curious. “Is it because of what happened with Jared Richards last year?” she asked. “Is that why you’re afraid to play sports now?”

  It wasn’t last year, I wanted to tell her. It was this past February. Just seven and a half months ago. Not even long at all.

  But what I said was “You wouldn’t get it.”

  Fallon returned her hands to the steering wheel. But she didn’t make any fake bumper car sounds. “It was an accident, right?” she said, tilting her head again to study my face. I nodded. Cold sweat, clinging to my arms. I wished I knew how to stop the sweating. “Then, Trent.” She shook her head, like she’d made up her mind about something for good. “It’s okay. That could’ve happened to anybody. It’s not like you did it on purpose.”

  I looked at her hands on the wheel. Calm hands. I bet Fallon wasn’t afraid of anything. “It doesn’t matter if it was on purpose or not,” I told her softly.

  I don’t know why I told her that.

  I hadn’t meant to tell her.

  “Of course it matters!” Fallon said. She said it so loud, I had to inch away from her in the bumper car, just to save my ears. She lowered her voice a little. “It’s not like you walked up and stabbed somebody, Trent. You hit a hockey puck while you were playing hockey. People do that all the time. You didn’t do anything wrong. You got unlucky.”

  I shook my head. She didn’t get it. No one ever got it. My mom didn’t. My dad sure as hell didn’t. Miss Eveline never had a shot at understanding. “But I still did it,” I said. “If I hadn’t been playing hockey that day on that lake at that second, then Jared Richards would still be alive. Annie would still have an older brother. His parents would still have a son. Who knows, maybe he’d grow up and solve world hunger or something. There’s one less person in the world, all because of me.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t really know all that,” Fallon said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean”—she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel—“if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t hit that hockey puck, maybe Jared would’ve fallen through the ice the very next second and died anyway. Or maybe, if Jared hadn’t been there, and you had hit that hockey puck, you would’ve hit someone else, and blinded that person for life. You can’t know. You just can’t know what would’ve happened.”

  She was sounding like my Book of Thoughts. Like a list of what-ifs. But in the real world, there were no what-ifs.

  “I know what did happen.”

  What Fallon was going to say next, what everyone always said next—Mom, Miss Eveline, everyone who’d ever tried to talk to me about it since February—was that I had to stop thinking about it so much. That I had to stop making myself feel guilty, because I wasn’t guilty, not really.

  So I stopped her before she could get there.

  “I did a bad thing,” I told Fallon. Staring off at the foil hot dog wrappers littering the floor by the trash can. Trying to ignore the tightness in my throat. “Whether it was on purpose or not, I did something bad. Somebody died. And if I just . . . stop thinking about it, if I don’t even feel bad, then what? If you do something bad, you’re supposed to feel awful.”

  Fallon shook her head. “I think you’re wrong,” she said. Like that was that. Like she just knew.

  I squinted at her. “What do you know?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest, rubbing them dry against the front of my shirt. I didn’t know why I’d even told her. “Just shut up about it, all right? I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  I figured Fallon was going to get mad then, about me telling her to shut up on her birthday. But she didn’t. She took a deep breath, through her nose, and let it all out through her mouth.

  “Sometimes,” she said, st
aring off at the same trash can where I’d been looking a second before, “bad things just happen, and it’s not anyone’s fault.” Outside the bumper car cage, kids were laughing and screaming, running around. Probably eating too much cotton candy. “And you can’t go on forever, thinking and worrying and feeling bad about something that just happened. It’s over, Trent. Let it be over.”

  My arms were mostly back to normal, then. But I guess I wasn’t.

  “Is that how you got your scar?” I asked her. I knew she didn’t want to talk about it, not really, even though she talked about it all the time. “Did that just happen too?”

  Fallon stared off at the trash can for what felt like a century.

  “No,” she said finally. “Someone did that on purpose.”

  And that was all she told me about that.

  We sucked on our sodas till they were just ice and someone who worked at the park finally noticed that there were two kids inside the closed-down bumper cars.

  “Hey!” the guy shouted at us, super angry. “Get out of there! What are you doing? Can’t you read?”

  Fallon grabbed my arm again and we lit out of the bumper car lot, ducking under the rope, laughing the whole time.

  “Sorry about the trash!” Fallon called over her shoulder.

  After that I decided to buy her a cotton candy. I knew I didn’t technically have to, like Fallon kept saying, but I guess I sort of wanted to anyway.

  • • •

  The Dodgers lost to the Cubs, 7 to 6. Which meant that they missed the playoffs by one stupid game. Which meant that their season was over. Kaput.

  And that wasn’t even the worst thing that happened that night.

  Just after ten o’clock, when I was already in bed getting ready to sleep, Mom knocked on my door and then came into my room. “For you,” she said, holding out her cell phone. I took it, and looked at the screen.

  Dad.

  Mom waited in the doorway while I put the phone to my ear.

  “Hi,” I said.

  I didn’t really mean it.

  “Trent. Nice to finally talk to you.”

  “Why are you calling so late?” I asked.

  All the way off in Timber Trace, my dad sighed. I probably could’ve heard it even if he hadn’t been on the phone.

  “I thought you’d like to know,” he said slowly, “that you have a baby sister. Jewel Annabelle Hoffsteader Zimmerman. She was born at seven fifty-six p.m., and she weighs seven pounds, four ounces. Both she and Kari are doing fine. Doug’s here too. He got to be at the hospital for the birth. Kari went into labor at the picnic.”

  Dad said that like he thought it was such an amazing treat, about Doug being there for the birth. Like I should feel bad that I was riding roller coasters all day instead of sitting in a stinky hospital, waiting for a baby to be born. I would’ve bet a million dollars Doug would’ve gone for the roller coasters if he’d had the choice.

  “Trent?” my dad said.

  I ran my tongue between my teeth and my gums. Looked at my mom in the doorway. She was trying not to look back.

  “Was there anything else?” I asked.

  He sighed again. A pause. Then another sigh. “I just thought you’d want to know, Trent. About your sister.” He paused again. “Most people say congratulations.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. I felt bad for the baby, that was the truth. She had my dad for a dad and she didn’t even get my mom. She had Kari. “Did you and Doug win the egg race?” I don’t know why I asked that last part. What did I care?

  “No,” Dad said. And then he must’ve been finished talking to me, because he said, “I’ll talk to you later, Trent.” And he hung up the phone before I had the chance to say “Bye.”

  I pressed End on the phone, and Mom came to retrieve it from me.

  “Good news, huh?” she said. But I couldn’t tell if she believed it or not.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Having a sister will be nice.”

  I shrugged.

  Mom kissed me on the forehead. “Your father loves you, you know.”

  “What kind of name is Jewel?” I asked.

  Mom smiled a real smile then. “I love you too.”

  “Sucks about the Dodgers.”

  “Yeah. There’s always next year. Get some sleep, all right, mister? We’re leaving for the store bright and early tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Night, Mom,” I said.

  “Night.”

  “Mom?”

  She turned.

  “I love you too,” I told her.

  ELEVEN

  As I walked into the gym for P.E. first period on Monday, Mr. Gorman was standing in the doorway as always, holding his clipboard. “Am I going to like the kid I meet today?” he greeted me.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I told him.

  I couldn’t play tennis, since I had a pulled muscle in my neck from all the roller coasters on Saturday. That’s what I told Mr. Gorman. Anyway, I figured I better save my strength for intramurals that afternoon.

  I wasn’t really in the mood for drawing thoughts, so while everyone else pretended to be having a great time whacking tennis balls with rackets, I sat outside in the dirt by the tennis courts and read Mom’s latest Sports Illustrated that I’d snagged from home. I wondered who the intramural coach would be, if it was a teacher I already knew. Anyone had to be better at leading a team than Noah’s uncle. All he did was look up from his clipboard occasionally and say, “Great! Keep hitting the ball!” Like if he didn’t say that, maybe they’d start swallowing it instead.

  Where did the school find these people?

  Mr. Gorman didn’t particularly seem to like the kid he met that day, but I didn’t bother to ask.

  • • •

  During social studies, the wrinkled old crone handed me a stack of worksheets and asked if I would hand them out for her. I could tell just by the look in her eyes that she expected me to say no (or worse). Maybe she wanted me to say no (or worse), because I hadn’t had detention since the very first day of school, and she was probably just itching to see me suffer.

  But I didn’t tell her where she could stuff her stupid worksheets. Partially because that was probably exactly what she wanted me to do, and partially because I had intramural baseball after school, so I didn’t need her dumb detention anyway.

  “Sure, Ms. Emerson,” I said, smiling. It really freaked her out, you could tell. “I’d love to.”

  • • •

  So anyway, the day was going pretty well.

  And then it was time for lunch.

  All the outside lunch tables were taken by the time Fallon and I got there. Totally filled. The one we usually sat at, that one had people at it, too. Three people.

  Jeremiah and Stig and Noah Gorman, to be exact.

  I grabbed Fallon’s elbow so hard, she almost dropped her tray. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s eat somewhere else.” Noah had already spotted us—I saw him look at us, just ten feet away, then shoot his eyes down to the table. Jeremiah’s back was to us, and I didn’t think Stig had seen us yet either.

  “There’s nowhere else to eat,” Fallon said. “Let’s just sit down.” She yanked her elbow free. “It’s a big table.”

  What was I supposed to do, just let her go? Of course not. Those guys would eat her alive if she didn’t have me with her, I didn’t care how brave she thought she was. So I followed her.

  There may have only been three of those guys, but they were spread all the way around the table, taking up the whole thing, like they thought they added up to twelve people. Maybe they did think that, for all I knew. They were all morons.

  “Hey,” Fallon said to Jeremiah and the other guys. Pretty nicely, too, if you ask me. “Would you mind scooching over, please? Thanks.”

  Jeremiah turned arou
nd, to see who was talking to him. When he saw it was Fallon, with me behind him, he rolled his eyes. “Get lost,” he told us.

  “No,” Fallon said carefully. She blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think we will.” All I wanted to do was stare at the lumpy mashed potatoes on my tray. I could feel the heat in my chest starting up. But I didn’t stare at my potatoes. I kept my eyes focused on Fallon.

  “Fallon,” I whispered, “we should go.”

  Fallon ignored me. “Scooch over,” she told Jeremiah again.

  By this time, obviously, Stig had noticed us, and Noah couldn’t pretend he hadn’t. But they were clearly waiting for the boss man to tell them what to do.

  I was surprised, I guess, by what he said.

  “You heard her,” Jeremiah said to his buddies. “Scooch over.”

  They looked as surprised as I felt by that, but I guess when the Boss Moron tells you to do something, well, you do it. So they scooched, and Jeremiah scooched, and suddenly there was plenty of room for us.

  “Thanks so very much,” Fallon told them.

  I saw it before she did. And I tried to stop it, I really did. But there wasn’t time.

  Just before Fallon sat, right next to Jeremiah, looking so nice and friendly you just knew he was up to something, Jeremiah let out a fake sneeze and plopped a heaping forkful of mashed potatoes on the seat next to him, exactly where Fallon was about to sit. And there was no time to stop it from happening—not for me, because I was too far away, and not for Fallon, who was halfway to sitting when she must’ve figured out what was going on—so gravity just plopped her PLOP! smack in the pile of potatoes.

  The fire in my chest then, it moved on to the rest of me. Felt like my intestines were boiling. My fingertips twitched with heat. I wanted to punch Jeremiah in the face. I wanted to pull him off that bench by the collar of his shirt and smack him between the ears. I wanted to throw him on the floor of the cafeteria and kick him and yell at him and tell him to pick on people who actually ever did something to him, and not the one nice person in this whole stupid town. And then when I was done beating the crap out of Jeremiah, I wanted to beat the crap out of his friends, too.