Lost in the Sun

  “Just for a little while, Trent. I can’t . . . I don’t know how to help you anymore. A boy needs his father. Maybe it would be good for you. We’ve talked about it before, but now . . .”

  It wasn’t fire, what I felt inside then. It was cold. Icicles. The slushy black snow on the bottom of tires.

  “You don’t want me anymore?” My voice was a whisper.

  “Oh, Trent.” Both hands on her face now. She looked wrecked. What kind of horrible kid wrecks his own mother? “Of course I want you here.” She sounded like she meant it. “Of course I do. But you’re not happy here.”

  How could she possibly think I’d be happier at my dad’s than I was here?

  “I hate him,” I told her.

  She pulled her hands down from her face. Rested them on the edge of the sink behind her.

  “Since when do you get into fistfights, Trent?”

  The slush in my chest began to melt. Just like that. Turned back into fire.

  “Jeremiah called Fallon ‘Bride of Frankenstein’!” I told her. Maybe I was shouting.

  “You’re going to go around punching everyone who says something mean?” she asked me. It was not, obviously, a real question that I was supposed to answer.

  “But . . .” I didn’t say anything after that. There was nothing to say.

  Mom looked at me for a long time, searching my face for answers. Finally she sighed a huge sigh and sat down in the chair next to me. She tugged at the legs of my chair until I was facing her, my knees pressed up against hers, and she smoothed back the hair on my forehead, like she did sometimes when I was sick. Only I didn’t exactly feel sick.

  “Why did you beat up Jeremiah?” she asked. “I want the real reason.” Her face was calm. No squinched-up mouth at all.

  So I thought about it. I really did.

  “He hurt someone,” I said finally. Softly. It was the only thing I could think to say that might make any sort of sense to my mom. “He hurt Fallon. And people who hurt someone deserve to get hurt themselves.”

  “Trent,” my mom said softly. “You are not in charge of righting the world’s wrongs.” I looked up at her. “You are not in charge of punching Jeremiah Jacobson into being a nice person. That is not your job, do you understand me?”

  I nodded at her, because I knew I was supposed to nod right then. But I wasn’t sure she was right about that. If someone hurt my friend, why shouldn’t I try to fix it?

  “Your job,” my mom went on, “your only job right now, is being in charge of yourself and your life and taking care of you the best you can. That includes”—she counted off on her fingers—“not failing school.” She glared those death-ray eyes at me. “And not beating people up. And if something important is going on with you, you need to tell me about it. Can you do that?”

  “Can you do that?” I asked.

  All right. It wasn’t the smartest thing to say, probably. But I guess the fire that was rolling around inside me just decided to come shooting out in words.

  Mom blinked at me. “Excuse me?” she said.

  Well.

  Once I started, I wasn’t about to stop, no matter how much trouble I knew I was digging myself into.

  “When were you planning to tell me about Ray?” I asked her.

  Mom’s mouth wasn’t a pinprick then. It was a wide-open O. I’d caught her off guard, that was for sure. I could tell she didn’t know what to say.

  “You are not allowed to talk to me like that, young man.” That’s what she finally decided to say. Which is when I knew I’d gotten her good, because that was avoiding the question if I ever heard it.

  “Even when I’m right?” I said.

  “Go to your room.” Her words were thin, angry.

  “Love to,” I replied. And I marched off, just as angry.

  • • •

  I stood in the hall while she called my dad. Even though I knew I shouldn’t have. I stood in the hall and listened. I could only hear Mom’s side of the conversation, but I didn’t really need to hear the rest.

  “This is something we talked about, Tom,” Mom said into the phone. “He needs you. I think he really needs you.”

  “But—”

  “I understand that, but—”

  “Don’t you put this all on Kari. There are two of you in that house, and I know damn well that if you wanted to do something—”

  “You had three sons first, Tom.”

  That last sentence, when Mom said it, she wasn’t arguing anymore.

  She’d already given up.

  I was just slinking back to my room, silently, so Mom wouldn’t hear, when I noticed Doug, peeking out from his own room, watching me. He’d been listening too.

  He looked like he felt really sorry for me.

  “Shut up,” I hissed at him. And I closed myself inside my room.

  • • •

  It shouldn’t have felt so terrible, knowing that my father didn’t want me, especially since I didn’t want him either.

  But it did. It did feel terrible.

  I curled up on my bed, still in my jeans and T-shirt. I didn’t even have the strength to pull the covers over me. I just lay there, curled up in a tight little ball, trying to squeeze the fire out.

  Sometimes you only get one chance. That’s what Dad had told me.

  But what were you supposed to do when that chance had come and gone?

  SIXTEEN

  The next day I was in a rotten mood, and I guess you can probably figure out why.

  As soon as I got to P.E., I didn’t even bother to give Mr. Gorman an excuse for why I couldn’t participate (it was volleyball, like I was so sad to miss that). I just headed straight up to the bleachers. I’d brought a book with me, one I’d snagged from Aaron’s room a couple of days before. It was a Mike Lupica book he’d read when he was my age, and so far it was pretty good. Actually, I was so into the book that it took me a while to realize I wasn’t alone on the bleachers.

  Noah Gorman was there too. Standing just in front of me, eyeing me carefully.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him, lowering my book. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  But Noah didn’t punch me or spit on me or yell at me or any of the other things I thought he might do. Instead, he sat down on the bleachers. One level below me. “I don’t want any trouble, either,” he said.

  Whatever.

  I guess I was getting pretty into the book again. The next time I looked up, Noah was staring at me—and you could tell he’d been doing it for a while, because as soon as I noticed him, he got all embarrassed and spun around in his seat super quick.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said. He pretended he’d been watching the volleyball game, which is definitely not what he’d been doing, since he’d been facing a totally different direction. The squeak of sneakers and shouting and balls bouncing echoed off the walls. I hadn’t even noticed until right then.

  I went back to reading.

  “Is that a book about baseball?”

  That’s what Noah Gorman asked me.

  I looked up at him. He was turned around again, staring at the cover of my book.

  “Um,” I said. There was a picture of a kid pitching a baseball on the front cover, so the answer to Noah’s question seemed pretty obvious. “Yeah.”

  I went back to reading.

  But I was only at it a few minutes when Noah interrupted me again.

  “Why are you reading a book about baseball?” he asked me.

  I set the book down in my lap. Squinted at him with one eye. “Because I like baseball,” I told him. He should’ve been able to guess that, really, since we used to be friends and everything.

  “Oh,” he said. I watched him awhile, to see if he’d say anything else. But he didn’t, so I lifted the book to
my face again.

  “I figured you didn’t anymore, since you didn’t join intramurals.”

  That’s what Noah said to me as soon as I had gone back to reading. Lucky for me, it wasn’t a question, so I didn’t have to say anything back.

  I turned a page in my book, then realized I hadn’t finished the one before it. I thought about turning back to it, but Noah was still staring at me, so I thought that would be weird. But pretending to read a book when someone was staring at you turned out to be pretty weird, too. I was almost glad when Noah said something else, because it saved me from having to pretend to read anymore.

  “I hate baseball,” he said.

  I huffed as I looked up from my book, like I was super annoyed he’d interrupted my really important reading. But I asked him, “So why are you on the team then?” Because I guess I was curious or whatever. I’d always thought Noah hated baseball, but then he’d gone and joined the stupid team.

  “My uncle’s the coach,” Noah told me. “I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

  I wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but Noah seemed to think it was true, so maybe it was.

  I flipped back to the previous page in my book, so I could finish reading from where I’d left off.

  “You already read that page,” Noah told me.

  I set my book back down in my lap.

  “What are you, the reading police?” I asked.

  Noah blinked at me, like he was thinking about something important. “You shouldn’t have beaten up Jeremiah,” he said.

  I went back to reading. He interrupted my book for that? “Jeremiah’s a jerk,” I muttered as I read. I had to read the same line over three times, though, because thinking about how big a jerk someone was at the same time you were reading turned out to be sort of hard to do.

  “Yeah,” Noah agreed. “But you still shouldn’t have beaten him up.”

  He didn’t say anything to me after that, for the whole rest of P.E. I looked up once, when I was turning a page, and he’d stopped staring at me. Turned all the way around to watch volleyball.

  During lunch, I noticed that Noah wasn’t sitting at the table with Jeremiah. He was all by himself at a table near the lunch line.

  “What are you looking at?” Fallon asked me.

  I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. And I took another bite of my beans.

  • • •

  Fallon wasn’t particularly chatty at lunch. Which was weird, because she was always chatty. Instead of chatting, she poked at her burrito with her spork (it wasn’t a particularly delicious-looking burrito).

  “Are you mad at me?” I asked her finally.

  She didn’t look up from her burrito. “No,” she said. Poke. Poke. “Why would I be mad at you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. “But you’re sort of acting like you’re mad.”

  “Well, I’m not,” she said. Poke. Poke.

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  She still didn’t talk to me.

  “What movie do you want to watch today?” I asked. Movies always got Fallon talking.

  Fallon set her spork down on her tray. “I can’t do Movie Club anymore,” she said. Only she wasn’t exactly looking at me. “My parents are making me do drama instead. I have to be in the play. We have rehearsals every day after school. The Wizard of Oz. Isn’t that lame?”

  I squinted at her. Studied her dark brown eyes, darting all over the cafeteria, at everything but me.

  She was lying.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. But why was she lying? “That’s pretty lame. It sucks, actually.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Fallon went back to poking at her burrito, and I went back to eating mine, but I wasn’t hungry. I wanted to ask her about her dream, about the screaming. I wanted her to talk to me the way she had in the stockroom. But somehow I knew she wouldn’t talk about that.

  After five minutes or so of not really talking, I pulled my Book of Thoughts out of my backpack.

  “Hey, I can draw a picture for you, if you want,” I told her. “Anything you want, even a scar picture.”

  Poke. Poke.

  Not looking at me.

  I tried again. “I thought maybe I could draw one of that totally tragic typewriter accident you were in when you were a kid. Remember that?”

  Fallon pushed back her tray and stood up. Just like that.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  Still not looking at me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  She picked up her tray and climbed out from behind the bench. “See you later, Trent.”

  And just like that, she was gone.

  • • •

  During social studies, when Ms. Emerson asked me why I hadn’t turned in my homework, I told her, “Bite me.”

  The classroom went good and silent, let me tell you.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  I looked up from my oven station, toward the clock on the wall. The final bell was going to ring in forty-two minutes, and then what was I supposed to do with myself? Not go to dinner with the dad who didn’t want me, that was for sure.

  “I said, ‘Bite me,’” I told her. “Are you hard of hearing or something?”

  A couple of kids started snorting, but they hushed up quick when Ms. Emerson stood up from her stool.

  She leaned forward across her stovetop, arms right on the coils, and looked at me.

  Everyone in the classroom sucked in one deep breath.

  Finally, after a moment that threatened to stretch on forever, Ms. Emerson smacked her lips together, like she’d made up her mind, and, still looking at me carefully, said, “You know, Trent, sometimes I do have trouble with my hearing. Thank you for your considerate question.” Then she stood up to her full height, clapped her hands together, and said, “Now, class, who can remind us where we left off yesterday with our maps?”

  And that was all there was of that.

  • • •

  After school I really wanted to talk to Fallon. Find out why she’d been acting so weird, why she’d been lying about joining Drama Club. But I didn’t know where she was. She might’ve gone straight home, but if I went there and she didn’t want me around, her cop of a dad would probably snap my head off.

  And then I thought about where she’d gone when she was upset before.

  I slammed shut my locker, took a deep breath, and walked back down the hall the same way I’d just come.

  “And to what do I owe this pleasure?” Ms. Emerson said as I opened the door to her room. She was sitting at her stovetop desk, glaring at me. She made the word pleasure sound like a nasty word.

  “Uh.” I shuffled my feet. “Is Fallon here?” I darted my eyes around the room, like I thought she might be hiding somewhere. “Fallon Little.”

  “No,” Ms. Emerson told me. She went back to grading papers or whatever it was she was doing.

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought she might be here.”

  “You are free to check all the ovens,” she told me without looking up from her desk.

  I figured that meant Fallon really wasn’t there.

  I meant to close the door and leave then. I really did. But for some reason I just stood in the doorway for a second, like a moron, gripping the doorknob tight in my hand. I don’t know why. Maybe I was avoiding going outside in the cold. Maybe I was just thinking.

  “Trent?” Ms. Emerson asked, finally looking up from her papers. She asked it not in the way you would say someone’s name if you wanted to ask them a question, but rather in the way you would say it if you wanted to know why the heck they were standing in your doorway, gripping the doorknob, staring at the wall.

  “Why wouldn’t you give me detention today?” I asked her.

 
“Why did you want it?” she replied.

  Well.

  “Fallon comes in here sometimes, right?” I asked her, instead of answering her stupid question that didn’t have an answer anyway.

  “She does,” Ms. Emerson confirmed. “She is, for one thing, a student of mine.”

  “Well, when you see her,” I said, my hand still tight around the doorknob, “can you tell her I want to talk to her? She has my phone number.”

  “I am perfectly capable of doing that,” Ms. Emerson said. “Although perhaps such information would be more suitable coming from you.”

  There was something peculiar about the way wrinkled old crones talked. Like they were trying to give you an English lesson with every sentence. Anyway, I understood her fine, it just took me a second.

  “I think Fallon’s mad at me,” I told her. I don’t know why I told her that. It was none of her business. “I mean, whatever. Thanks, I guess.” That time I started closing the door for real. “Bye.”

  “Trent?”

  That time she said my name like there was a question after it. Or more of a statement, maybe.

  I opened the door a little wider.

  “I find that when people are angry, there’s usually not much to do to alter their emotions. But there are often things you can do to cool them down a bit.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Cooling down Fallon’s anger. Maybe that would be useful. “Like what?” I asked.

  “Well.” She thought for a second. “My plants could use watering.”

  The other eyebrow went up. “How is watering your plants going to make Fallon like me again?” I asked.

  “Oh, I meant me,” Ms. Emerson said. “And it won’t sway me completely in your favor, of course. But, as I said, it might help me dislike you slightly less.”

  Well.

  “Watering can’s over there,” she told me, pointing. Then she gestured toward the sink. “The water should be tepid.”

  I watered Ms. Emerson’s stupid plants. I don’t know why. Who cared if the wrinkled old crone liked me or not? But I guess I didn’t really have anything better to do. So anyway, I watered them. The spider plant on her stovetop desk, and the fern by the door, and all the millions of pots of flowering green things along the windowsill.