“Aaron’s boss, Zoey, is in love with him,” I told Fallon, leaning over so I couldn’t see Aaron’s eyes in the rearview.
“Oooooh-oooooh!” Fallon said. I think that was the bit of information she needed to loosen up a little, because suddenly she seemed much more relaxed. Much more like herself. “Is she cute?”
“She’s very cute,” I said.
“Hey, back there, settle down now!” Aaron called. “I’ll have none of this nonsense.”
“Carry on, driver,” I said, in my best fake snooty British voice. “You do the driving, and we’ll do the talking.”
Fallon joined in too. “Oh, Edward,” she said in her own accent. I assumed I was supposed to be Edward. “Isn’t there some sort of screen you can put up so the driver can’t hear us? I do hate when the help tries to talk to you.”
“You two are seriously bizarre,” Aaron told us. But Fallon and I were too busy laughing to care.
• • •
It took a while to unlock the rowboat from the boathouse. The whole thing was closed up for the season, the boats all piled up on their metal racks with a giant chain wrapped around them—so some nutter wouldn’t break in and steal one to take out on the freezing cold lake, I guess.
All right, so maybe my plan was sort of crazy.
Anyway, with the three of us helping, we managed eventually. The boathouse was dark, and the light was burned out, and I was sort of afraid of spiders (since these were actual creeping, nasty spiders, and not the stupid fake plastic ones Doug had plastered all over my room), but I pretended not to be. When Fallon found a spider crawling all the way up her arm to her shoulder and simply said, “Oh, hello there” in the calmest voice I’d ever heard, and let it walk onto her hand, and then set it carefully on the windowsill, I pretended that’s exactly what I would’ve done too. Not scream like a little girl.
“So what are we doing?” Fallon asked. “We’re not actually going to go out on the lake, are we?”
“Apparently,” Aaron said, tossing us each a neon-orange life vest. He grabbed one for himself, too. “We are.”
Fallon looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. “Why, exactly?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” I promised.
Fifteen minutes later we were out in the boat rowing. We’d even managed to get inside and push off from the shore without any of us getting our feet wet. Aaron was in charge of most of the rowing, although Fallon and I helped a little.
“All right, little brother,” Aaron said. “Where to?”
I pointed straight ahead, to the little spit of island with the clump of pine trees.
Sitting there, waiting for us.
Aaron was sitting behind me in the rowboat, so I couldn’t see his face. But when he answered, “Sure thing,” he didn’t sound a bit surprised. He picked up speed with his oars.
The shore of the island was rockier than I’d expected. Full of tiny round pebbles, all of them smooth, perfect gray ovals. Fallon hopped out of the boat first, since she was in front, and did her best to scramble up the slopey shore. “Careful!” she warned us. “It’s slippery!”
I hopped out next.
“Um, actually,” I said to Aaron as he moved to get out too. “Would you, um, mind leaving us here for a little bit? Just, like, an hour maybe?”
At that he looked surprised. “Leave you here?”
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging like it was no big deal, even though I’d known all along this was going to be the trickiest part of the plan to get Aaron to agree to. “Just, you know, row back to shore and then stay there a while and then come back to get us?”
“You want me to leave you all alone on a deserted island for an hour?” Aaron said. He’d never sounded more like an old man.
“Forty-five minutes, then,” I said. “Please?”
“What are we going to do on the island?” Fallon said.
Aaron was looking back and forth between us. “You two aren’t going to make out or anything, are you?”
Well. I didn’t see that coming.
“Um, no,” I said. Fallon’s face had turned bright red.
“Because if I leave you two here, and you start making out and stuff, you are seriously going to be in for it. You guys are twelve.”
“Sheesh, Aaron, I know we’re twelve,” I told him. He did think he was an old man.
“I don’t want to make out with Trent,” Fallon said.
“See?” I told Aaron. And I wasn’t even offended, either. This wasn’t about making out. This was about friends. “It’s nothing like that,” I said. “I promise. I just . . . We need some time. And it has to be just us.” I stretched out my navy-blue glove then and reached for Fallon’s hand. I wasn’t entirely sure she was going to offer it.
But she did.
She looked down at our hands—my navy-blue glove and her red-and-purple knitted mitten—and squeezed just a little tighter. “Please, Aaron?” she said. “We’ll be okay.”
Aaron puffed his cheeks and let out a giant breath. I saw it, a cloud of white smoke in the crisp, cold air.
“Thirty minutes?” Fallon bargained.
“I’ll give you twenty-five,” he said at last. Fallon let out a tiny squeal and I did a happy dance, but Aaron—old man that he was—just grouched at us. “I’m going to row straight back to shore, then turn around and immediately come back here. You better be waiting exactly on this spot when I get back.”
That was good enough for me. Perfect, even.
“Thank you,” I told him.
We waited there, standing on the rocky shore, Fallon’s mittened hand in my gloved one, until Aaron and his boat were hardly the size of a dime.
“So,” Fallon said, turning to me. She had that look she got on her face when she was excited about something, really, truly. The look she got when she found a terrible mistake in a movie. “What are we doing? What’s this great plan of yours?”
“We,” I said, raising her hand and squeezing it just a little tighter in mine (this was the moment of truth), “are going to scream.”
Okay, so I thought she was going to be confused. I expected that.
She looked very, very confused.
“Scream?” she said.
I nodded. “You said you were worried you couldn’t. So”—I shrugged—“we’re going to find out.”
“Here?” she asked.
“Why not?” I swept my non-mitten-holding hand across the expanse of the lake. “There’s no one around to hear us.”
Fallon bit her lip. She was thinking, I could tell. “We’re going to scream?” she repeated, thinking it over.
“As loud as we can.”
Fallon stretched her neck out as though she was examining the lake. There were a few stray birds who either hadn’t left for warmer temperatures yet or were never going, sitting on top of the cold water. There was Aaron, a quarter of the way to the shore. There was the wind, with a bit of a howl to it. Other than that, empty. Still. Quiet.
She cleared her throat. “You’ll scream too?” she asked, examining the water.
“If you want me to.”
“All right,” she said.
I wasn’t sure exactly how I thought it would go, with the screaming. I guess I hadn’t thought things through too hard, after convincing everyone it was a good idea and getting to the island. If anything, I thought maybe Fallon would have a little trouble with the screaming at first. Maybe she’d start out quiet, like a whisper of a scream; maybe she wouldn’t want to be truly loud at first. Maybe she’d have trouble with it, because it was something she’d been worried about for so long.
But I should’ve known that whatever I expected was going to be wrong. Fallon never failed to surprise me.
As big as the ocean. As steep as a roller coaster. As sharp as a cannon. As loud as a runaway train. As sweet as a swi
m in a deep, deep pool.
It was sudden, Fallon’s scream. And it was loud, and it was long.
It was wonderful.
I joined in, as loud and as long and as wonderful as I could scream, too. We screamed, the two of us together, alone on that island. Because we could. Because no one could hear us. Because it was perfect, to be alone on an island, with your best friend, screaming at the top of your lungs. We held hands and hollered at the nearly frozen lake. And the screaming turned to laughter, and back into screaming, and I don’t know how Fallon felt about it—that was a thing you could never know for sure—but as I watched her, she tilted her head far back on her neck so her whole body got in on the act, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, she was feeling brave.
I hoped so.
We screamed until our voices went hoarse, until our throats scratched and burned. And this probably wasn’t true at all, but I could’ve sworn that some of the ice that had settled along the edges of the lake began to crack and break apart, just a little, with the screaming.
When we didn’t have any screams left inside us, we collapsed back onto the cold, pebbly shore and sat there, not saying anything at all, just watching the lake lap icy waves near our toes. And we were still sitting there, not too long, in silence, when we heard a sharp splash! behind us, and the sound of boots on rocks. And we turned, both of us I’m sure expecting it to be Aaron, sneaking up on us around the side of the island where we wouldn’t see. But it wasn’t. It was an old man in a gray wool cap, with a thick beard. He had some sort of rubbery overalls on, and giant boots. Out fishing, probably.
“You kids okay?” he asked us. He was all a-huff. Out of breath. “I heard you screaming, from way out there.” He pointed. “Never heard screaming like that in my life. You were loud.”
And Fallon—she didn’t even answer. She rolled over on her side, right in the pebbles, laughing. Sucking in air with the giggles like she couldn’t get enough.
The fisherman looked at us like he thought we might be lunatics. “Is she okay?” he asked me.
It was Fallon who answered. Although I don’t think her answer would’ve made much sense to anyone but me. “I can scream,” she said, still laughing into the rocks. “I can scream.”
“She’s fine,” I told the fisherman. “We both are.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Monday morning, Aaron and I were sitting at the breakfast table, waiting. He was trying to get me to try his coffee, which he said was good, but I’d tried coffee before, and I already knew it tasted like boiled garbage.
“You want eggs or something?” Aaron said. He was bored, I could tell. He kept looking at his watch. “I could make you eggs.”
It seemed to me that Aaron had changed a lot, the past year. Doug, he was always the same—even when you looked at photos of him when he was two, it was the same old goofy Doug, trying to make everybody laugh. But Aaron, he had gotten way bigger. Taller. I was pretty sure he was shaving at least three times a week already. He told me he’d teach me how, but I had nothing there to shave.
“Since when do you know how to make eggs?” I asked him.
“Dad taught me,” he said. “It’s easy. I make them for dinner sometimes when I visit on weekends.” He took a gulp of his coffee and wiped his chin with his hand. Then suddenly he sat up straight in his chair. “That’s him,” he whispered. “You ready?”
“Yup,” I said.
It had been my idea, after all.
As Doug came stumbling out of his room with his hair slabbed down on one side of his head, Aaron and I shot up from our seats and began frantically stuffing papers into our backpacks.
“Oh man, Doug!” Aaron called to the doorway. “Did you just get up?”
Doug rubbed his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “My alarm just went off.”
“Wait, seriously?” I said. “We thought you’d been up for a while.”
Doug yawned, still standing in the doorway. “Nah, I just got up.” He scratched at the sliver of skin between his pajama bottoms and his sleep T-shirt. “So what time is it?”
Aaron, still busy flipping through his chemistry folder to make sure he’d brought his homework, waved over his shoulder at the clock on the wall. “It’s late,” he said.
The clock on the wall read 7:48. The clock on the stove did, too. The one on the microwave said 7:50.
Doug’s eyes went huge. “Mom’s gonna be so mad!” he said.
“Mom already left for work,” I told him. “You’re gonna have to walk to school.”
“No, wait,” Aaron said. And I did my best not to smile, because this part had been my idea, too. “I can drive you. But only if you’re ready in like”—he darted an eye at the clock on the stove—“one minute. I’ve already been late once this week, and Mr. Vallera’s gonna kill me.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Doug said. And I was kind of surprised, actually, that he hadn’t started to catch on to anything yet, because even though Doug was usually pretty easy to prank, this one had been going on a while. “Here, let me just . . .” And he raced down the hallway to his room and came back not three seconds later wearing a pair of jeans that had clearly been crumpled in a ball on his floor. He had on the same T-shirt he’d been sleeping in, and as he walked, he was trying to cram his bare feet into already-laced-up sneakers. “I’m ready!” he called, doing his best to hoist his backpack onto his shoulders.
Aaron and I shot each other a quick glance. We hadn’t really figured that things would go this well. But we did what any seasoned pranksters would do in such a situation—we improvised.
“Can you drive me too?” I asked Aaron. No way was I missing any of this. “I’m right on the way.”
Aaron pretended to think about it. “Okay,” he said, and he tilted his head back to slam down the rest of his coffee. “Everyone get in the car.”
We raced to Aaron’s beat-up car in the driveway, and I thought Doug would catch on then—the pitch-black sky, the silent neighborhood, no Mr. Normore walking his wiener dog across the street, or the mailman in his tiny white truck.
But no. We piled into the car.
And I swear it wasn’t until we’d pulled onto the boulevard and were halfway to Cedar Middle that Doug, his face still marked with pillowcase wrinkles, leaned forward from the backseat and poked his head between me and Aaron and said, “Aaron, your clock’s wrong. It says four thirty-five.”
And I kept it together, I totally did. But Aaron, he cracked. He let out one wicked garumph! of a snort. And, okay, then I lost it too.
“Wait . . . ,” Doug said slowly, looking outside the window at the dark world around him as in the front seat Aaron and I dissolved into total bellyaching laughter. “Oh, man,” he said, finally realizing. “Oh, man.”
“It was Trent’s idea,” Aaron said, making a U-turn on the empty boulevard and heading back toward home.
Doug sat back in his seat. “It was pretty good,” he admitted.
I smiled to myself as I stared out the window, watching us near our street in the black predawn. “Thanks,” I said.
“No way I’m getting back to sleep,” Aaron said. “I never should’ve downed that coffee. But I was so committed to the moment.”
I laughed. The way Aaron was with pranks, you’d think he was going for an Oscar.
“It was good,” Doug said again. And I could tell, without even looking at him, that the wheels in his brain were spinning.
“Uh oh,” Aaron told me. “Looks like someone’s planning his revenge. I’d be on the lookout, little brother.”
I settled into my seat as the tip of our roof appeared around the corner. “Bring it on,” I said.
• • •
That morning, when I walked into the gym for P.E. first period, I’d made up my mind. I passed Mr. Gorman, holding his clipboard in the doorway, and without him even asking, I told him, “You’re going to li
ke the kid you meet today.” That’s what I’d worked out I was going to say when Ray was helping me with my swing over the weekend. Then I went to the locker room with the other guys and dressed for P.E. That’s what I’d worked out I was going to do, too. Ray said visualizing what you wanted to achieve was an important part of any sport.
I bet most athletes didn’t have to visualize lacing up their sneakers without their arms getting all clammy, but anyway, it worked, so I guess I couldn’t complain.
I even served twice in volleyball. (I’d only visualized that happening once, so it was a nice surprise.)
Noah looked a little lonely up there on the bleachers, but I figured he’d be okay. After all, he had a good book.
• • •
“You want to come over and watch a movie this afternoon?” Fallon asked me at lunch. She was flipping through my new drawings in my Book of Thoughts. I had lots from the lake, and not to brag, but they were pretty good. I was getting better. “It’s been a while. Have you ever seen Rikki-Tikki-Tavi? It’s weird.”
I was pretty stoked Fallon wanted to watch a movie with me again, but I guess I was surprised, too. “Don’t you have play practice?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I’m thinking of quitting. It turns out I kind of hate being a tree.”
“You shouldn’t be a tree,” I told her. “Anyway, I do want to see another movie, but I probably can’t do it till the weekend. Is that okay?”
She looked up from the notebook. “You got plans or something, Zimmerman?” she asked.
I knew I should speak truths, but I wasn’t totally ready yet, so I decided not to say anything. “Maybe,” I said. “I’m not totally sure.” And that wasn’t really a lie.
“Well, this weekend should be fine, anyway. My dad said next time you come over, you have to stay for dinner and he’ll make you his famous Bolognese.”
“It’s a deal.”
Fallon came to the last picture in the Book of Thoughts then, my favorite so far. It was a close-up of Fallon’s face, the way she was when she didn’t know anyone was looking at her. I thought I’d done a really good job on that one. Her frizzy hair. Her big brown eyes. The way her lip curled into her scar just the tiniest bit. She studied it a long time, and then she shut the book.