Ms. Emerson had a lot of plants.
“Trent?” Ms. Emerson said again as I was leaving the room. She had a habit of that. She didn’t say one word to me the whole time I was in the room, but as soon as I was about to leave, suddenly she got chatty.
I swiveled around. “Yeah?”
“The plants will be thirsty again tomorrow,” she said. And with that, she shooed me out the door.
• • •
I could’ve gone home after the plant watering, probably. I bet no one would’ve argued too hard if I’d just not gotten in the car to go to the St. Albans Diner. No one wanted me there anyway. But I didn’t want to be at home.
So I wandered. Down Maple Hill as fast as I could. Trailing circles through the park, past the screaming little kids in their puffy coats.
Down to the lake.
I hadn’t been to that side of Cedar Lake since that day last February. The Jared Richards day. As I pulled my bike up into the reedy grass, where it started to get muddy at the edge of the bank, I noticed that it smelled different. Warmer. Muddier. Thicker. It sounded different too. Birds still chirping, the ones who hadn’t left yet for the winter. Water lapping, just a bit. Wind blowing.
I found a log, at the edge of the water, and I sat.
November was when it started to get cold in Cedar Haven. It was coldest at the lake.
I sat there a long time, in the bitter wind, and I stared at the lake, my Book of Thoughts open on my lap in front of me. But it turned out I didn’t have too many thoughts.
Instead of thinking, I tossed rocks into the water. One. Plop. Two. Plop. Ten. Plop. Fifty. Plop. After a while, the tossing turned to skipping. Rocks across the surface—shick shick shick. I aimed for more skips, then more and more. I got up to five, but couldn’t get any higher.
I guess what I thought about, actually, was Fallon. I thought about how scared she’d looked, the night before in the stockroom, telling me about her dream. And I wondered what that would feel like, to not know if you had a scream in you or not.
I knew I had plenty of screams in me.
I’d never had a dream like Fallon’s, but I knew what nightmares were. For a while back in February, and all the way into March, I’d had the same one over and over. I was out on Cedar Lake, right near this spot, and it was completely frozen, just like the day Jared died, only in the dream there was no one there but me. I was walking along the ice in my bare feet, wondering how I’d gotten onto the lake in the first place, and where I could get some shoes or socks at least, when I started to hear this pounding noise, and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until I started to feel the ice thumping underneath me, and then I looked down. And there was Jared, underneath the ice, trapped, pounding to get my attention, and I knelt down on the cold, cold ice, and I tried to break through the ice with my fingernails, but it was too thick, I couldn’t do anything, and we were pounding, both of us together, trying to break the ice, but neither of us was doing anything, and I couldn’t get him out in time.
I could never get him out.
When I ran out of smooth round rocks to skip, I spied my Book of Thoughts sitting on that log by the water. And I don’t know why, but I picked it up, and I threw it, as hard as I could.
It hardly even made a splash.
I stood at the edge of the lake for a long time, imagining I could see my Book of Thoughts sinking, sinking, down to the bottom of the lake.
When my fingers were numb and my brain was empty, I headed home.
SEVENTEEN
When I walked into P.E. the next day, Thursday, and Mr. Gorman was standing at the door with his clipboard, I didn’t even wait for him to ask me his stupid question—Am I going to like the kid I meet today? I just told him, “Nope.” And made my way to the bleachers.
Noah ended up there again, too. I bet his uncle didn’t like him too much either.
I didn’t talk to him, because we weren’t exactly friends anymore, but when he started looking really bored in the middle of the volleyball game, I lifted my book up so he could read the back cover.
• • •
Fallon was acting weird again at lunch.
She spent most of the period doing her homework. Instead of talking to me. She worked on pre-algebra, the whole lunch period, while she ate her sandwich.
Was I really more terrible than pre-algebra?
When I poked her in the side enough, she looked up and said “What?” and I told her I was bored and wanted to talk to her. Fallon sighed huge like I was seriously upsetting her homework time.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked me.
I shrugged.
So eventually Fallon started going on and on about this girl Keisha in her art class, how she was thinking about hanging out with her, but she wasn’t sure, because what if Keisha was a snob, and did I think Keisha was a snob? She didn’t give me a chance to answer.
Anyway, I didn’t really know Keisha.
It sort of seemed like, to someone who didn’t know any better, that Fallon was still mad at me. Only, two things I couldn’t figure out.
The first thing was, when I asked her if she was mad at me, she said, “No.” And “Shut up.” And then she told me to stop asking her if she was mad at me, because she wasn’t at all, but all my asking was making her mad at me, and if she was mad at me, she’d tell me, wouldn’t she? Only it didn’t really seem like she would.
And the second thing was, if you were mad at a person, wouldn’t you stop having lunch with them altogether? I would think you would. So either Fallon wasn’t actually mad at me, and maybe I was just going crazy or something, or she was mad at me, and she figured having lunch with someone she was mad at was better than having lunch by herself.
I was starting to think it was probably the second one, which kind of sucked, if you asked me.
Two minutes before the bell rang, I asked her, “What’s the real reason you won’t watch movies with me anymore?”
She just rolled her eyes at me. “I told you,” she said. “My parents are making me be in the school play. The director cast me as a tree. A tree, can you believe that?” Fallon took another bite of her sandwich while I watched her, trying to figure out what the truth was. “Just let it go, okay?” she told me. “Stop acting so weird.”
I definitely wasn’t the one who was acting weird.
• • •
Fallon was in the play. I snuck into the auditorium after the final bell rang that afternoon. Slipped through the door and stood in the back. No one noticed.
Fallon was there all right. But she wasn’t on stage. She was sitting in the corner of the room, all by herself, tossing a handball at a wall. She wasn’t talking to anyone. She wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t telling jokes or making up stories or quoting movie lines or doing any of the things I thought of when I thought of Fallon Little. She looked pretty miserable, actually.
I guess she’d been telling the truth, about her parents making her be in the play. About being a tree and everything. Only, it didn’t make any sense to me why her parents would do that. I know I hadn’t talked to them a whole lot, but they seemed like people who cared about what their daughter wanted.
And she very clearly didn’t want to be a tree.
• • •
I don’t know why, but after I went to the auditorium, I went to Ms. Emerson’s room to water her plants. It’s not like I really cared if the wrinkled old crone hated me or anything. And it didn’t seem to be working too much anyway. She hardly looked up from her papers the entire time I was there, watering all four billion of her plants.
Until, finally, she did.
“What do you do, Trent,” she asked me, with her wrinkled-old-crone voice, “after you leave school every day?”
I jumped. I couldn’t help it. I’d almost forgotten she was there.
“I don?
??t know,” I said. Ms. Emerson got up from her stovetop desk and walked over to hand me a roll of paper towels, to mop up the water from the watering can I didn’t realize I’d spilled. I took them. “Just stuff.”
Ms. Emerson watched me mop up my puddle for a moment, and then she said, “I thought I saw you yesterday. On your bike, by the lake.”
I wadded up a new paper towel and inched it into a corner by the window. “I ride my bike a lot,” I said.
“It seems a little cold for bike riding,” Ms. Emerson replied. “Seems like it might make more sense to do something at home.”
“I have a good jacket,” I told her. And I walked over to the trash can to throw away the wet paper towels. Ms. Emerson was still staring at me, though, so I felt like I had to say something else. “Anyway, sometimes it’s nice not to go home right away.” That’s what I said. Then I got back to watering. There were still a lot of plants to go.
Ms. Emerson didn’t say anything after that, the whole rest of the time I was there, until I was at the door ready to leave. That’s when she said, “Trent?” I turned around, hand still on the doorknob. “The plants will be thirsty again tomorrow.”
Talk about a wrinkled old crone.
• • •
When I came in to homeroom the very next morning, I noticed that Ms. Emerson had acquired about a thousand more plants. Seriously, there was hardly room for all of them on the shelves along the windowsills. She stopped by my oven station as she was handing out flyers for class elections.
“I hope you don’t mind, Trent,” she said quietly, so no one else could hear. “But I’m afraid I brought in several more plants last night. I know it will require much more effort on your part to keep them hydrated, but I simply couldn’t help myself. They needed a home. Do you think you can stay a little longer than normal after school?”
“That’s okay,” I told her. “Sure.”
“I appreciate it,” she said.
Ms. Emerson was right. It did take a lot longer to water all the new plants. I didn’t finish till almost five o’clock.
“The plants will be thirsty again on Monday,” she told me as I left.
Ms. Emerson was crazy for sure. But I guess I was starting not to mind so much.
EIGHTEEN
I’d been absolutely dreading Saturday all week. The community basketball program. Spending my entire day helping some moron first-grader with a turtle-shaped lunch box learn to dribble, just so I didn’t fail sixth grade. I could think of about four hundred things I’d rather be doing.
But as soon as I got to the Cedar Haven Community Center Saturday morning, I discovered that I hadn’t been dreading the day nearly enough.
“I have exactly the basketball buddy for you,” the lady in charge—Julie—told me. “One of the older elementary kids. Just signed up for the program.”
It was not a first-grader with a turtle-shaped lunch box.
“This is Annie,” Julie said, all smiles, bringing me over. “Annie, meet Trent. He’s going to be your basketball buddy all month.”
I seriously hated this town.
Annie went from wary smile to angry glare in one-point-two milliseconds. I tried to keep my face emotion-free, but honestly I felt sick inside. Burning fireball of rage mixed with terror mixed with icy panic. It was like an emotion-slushie in there.
The whole time Julie explained the drills she wanted us to do that afternoon, and how much fun we were going to have and how we were going to be best buddies, just you wait and see, I pretended to look at the Community Center floor. The floor was not very interesting, but it was a whole lot better to look at than Annie, who was busy glaring at the side of my head. Even without looking I could tell that’s what she was doing, because all the warmed-up glary air she forced at me with her eyes was making my cheek burn.
“So there you go,” Julie said, tossing us each a basketball. “Your hoop’s on the far end, over there.” She pointed. “Ask me if you have any questions, and I’ll come check on you guys in a few.”
“I have a question,” Annie said, before Julie could make a break for it. “Do you have anyone else? Another buddy you can sign me up with?”
Julie paused for a moment. You could tell she’d never been asked that question before.
“I’m sorry,” she said, glancing between the two of us. “All the buddies have already been paired up. But I know you two will get along like gangbusters. Don’t you think so, Trent?”
“Um,” I said.
“That’s the spirit!” Julie squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t forget to have fun, you two!”
I was pretty sure we were going to forget to have fun.
Annie and I were silent the whole way to the basketball hoop. I didn’t know what Annie was thinking about—probably how to get out of this basketball program she’d signed up for. But I was thinking about what would be worse, spending every Saturday for the next month with Jared Richards’s little sister, or repeating sixth grade.
It was a close call.
“Um,” I said, when we got to the basketball hoop on the far end of the floor. Because one of us had to say something at some point. “So do you want to go first?” I asked her. “Julie said you’re supposed to demonstrate your rebound shot. Or I could do it first, as an example, if you want.”
“I don’t like you.”
That’s what Annie said to me.
My head shot up. “Oh.” Because what exactly are you supposed to say about a thing like that? “Look, I’m sorry about the soup thing the other week. I . . . I shouldn’t have splashed soup at you. Or whatever.” But we both knew that wasn’t really what I was apologizing for.
Annie was staring at me. Just staring at me, like I was a painting on a wall. She had her basketball gripped tight in both hands. “I know you’re the one who hit the hockey puck,” she said.
I looked down at the basketball in my hands. Suddenly I felt like an idiot for holding a basketball while I was having this conversation. It didn’t seem like the kind of conversation you should hold a basketball during. But what was I supposed to do—toss it at the wall? That would be even more awful.
“I’m sorry about that too,” I told Annie. Which was the truth.
“Did you do it on purpose?” she asked me. Still staring.
“No!” My hands were starting to get sweaty on the ball. “Of course not. It was an accident.”
She thought about that. “I hate you,” she said at last.
I cleared my throat. “I think I’d hate me too, if I were you.” That’s what I told her. And it was still the truth.
I could tell from the look on her face that Annie wasn’t expecting me to say that. “Is that supposed to make me hate you less?” she asked me.
I shrugged. “Nope. It’s just the truth.”
“Well. It doesn’t matter. I still hate you.”
“Join the club.” I don’t know why, but I started dribbling my basketball then. It still felt weird, but at least it was something to do. “There’s a whole ton of people who hate me. You could be the president.”
“Yeah?” Annie asked. She seemed honestly interested. I started dribbling down the court, and she followed me, doing her best dribble. “Like who?”
“Oh . . .” I reached the edge of the court, and then did a pivot-turn to head back the other way. I passed Annie and dribbled around her. “Like, you, my dad, my stepmom, most of my teachers, my best friend, my brothers. My mom, at the moment. Probably my mom’s new boyfriend. Maybe a dog or two.”
Annie was at the edge of the court, trying to turn. She lost control of the ball, though, and it rolled off toward the wall. She went to fetch it. When she retrieved it, she ran back until she was standing right beside me, and we took up dribbling again.
“That’s a lot of people who hate you,” she said after a minute.
“Yep,” I said.
“I told you.”
“But I could be president?”
“Definitely. You could start charging anyone who wanted to join, and then you’d make a whole lot of money.” I stopped dribbling and watched her for a second. “You’re getting a bad angle on the ball when you dribble,” I told her. “And don’t take such big steps when you walk.” I showed her. “Yeah, that’s better.”
It was a weird thing, but talking to the person who hated me more than anyone else in the world turned out to be not so terrible. Because I knew that no matter what I did, there was no way she could hate me more than she already did. So I could just be myself.
And in the meantime, maybe I’d teach her a thing or two about basketball.
“Hold on,” I said, when she started to get the hang of dribbling and walking. “You can’t do that—that’s traveling.”
“What’s traveling?” she asked me.
We worked on dribbling until Julie came over and told us that that wasn’t the drill we were supposed to be doing. So then we shot hoops for a while. Annie was pretty good at that, actually. She got three in a row right away. We started trading off, one shot after another, so I could get some hoops in, too.
I was just lining up a shot when Annie told me, “Doug doesn’t hate you.”
I wasn’t expecting her to say anything, so when I threw the ball, it went off at a bad angle. “What?” I said, rushing to retrieve the ball before it bounced into the next court over.
Annie waited until I was back on our court. “Doug doesn’t hate you,” she said again. “You said before that your brothers hate you. But Doug doesn’t. He likes you a lot.”
That was news to me. All I’d done lately was refuse to help Doug with his pranks. If I were him, I’d hate me for sure. “Why would he like me?” I asked her.
Annie threw the ball. Didn’t score, but it was close, just a little low. “Beats me,” she said as I ran to grab the ball. “Sometimes I think he’s kind of dumb.”
I laughed at that.
“Try again,” I told her, passing her the ball. “You get a do-over, since you were talking.”