Well.
That was a fair point.
I sighed again. “What did you want to tell me?” I asked.
She took a bite from her apple. Today, I noticed, she was wearing a yellow-and-pink-checked dress with a rounded collar, like a four-year-old might wear for Easter. Where did she get these clothes? “I was going to tell you the real story of how I got my scar.”
Oh, brother.
I still had half a sandwich to finish, plus a whole bag of chips, and I had nowhere to be but a bathroom stall, so finally I gave in. “Fine,” I said. “Tell me. How did you get that mysterious scar of yours?”
Her eyes lit up, on either side of the scar. It really was a thing to look at.
“Lightning bolt,” she told me. “I was standing under a tree during a lightning storm—you know how they tell you never to do that?—and I got struck.” She made a slicing motion with her non-apple-holding hand. “Boom! I was out cold for an entire hour. When I woke up, I had this scar.”
I focused on my sandwich. A glop of tuna was threatening to fall onto my cardboard tray. I caught it with my tongue. “Were you all by yourself when it happened?” I asked as I chewed. Fallon nodded. “Then how do you know how long you were out for?”
“Good point,” she said. She took another bite of apple and chewed slowly. Swallowed. “I’ll work on that.”
“Don’t you ever talk about anything else?” I wondered. I’d been thinking about it, and actually I was pretty sure that Fallon Little wasn’t friendless. She wasn’t one of the loner kids like Ian Holt, who spent every recess huddled in a corner behind the handball court playing Connect Four by himself. Or even like Mindy Fitzgibbons, who made best friends with the librarian and hung out with her every day for all of elementary school. In fact—not that I’d spent a lot of time paying attention to Fallon, but just on remembering—it seemed like she always had someone to sit with at lunch, always had someone to partner with on projects. But I was pretty sure it was always someone different.
I was starting to figure out why.
“Like what?” Fallon asked. “What else is there to talk about?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Anything. Baseball. The Dodgers. How about that?”
She took another bite of her apple.
“Have you seen Field of Dreams?” Fallon asked me.
Well. I didn’t see that coming.
“Field of Dreams?” I said.
“Yeah. It’s a movie. About baseball. This farmer guy hears this weird voice and decides to make a baseball field, and then all these old baseball players who are, like, dead or whatever, come play baseball.”
“I know what it’s about,” I told her.
“But you’ve never seen it?”
“I saw part of it.” I didn’t want to tell Fallon that my mom had been trying to get me to watch it forever, because she said it was the best baseball movie of all time, but when she first tried to make me watch it when I was six, I got freaked out by all the creepy whispering—“If you build it . . .”—and I screamed until she turned the TV off.
“You should watch all of it,” Fallon said. “If you like baseball. Or The Sandlot. Have you ever seen The Sandlot?”
“No.” Talking baseball movies was way better than weird scar stories, but I was still trying to figure out which was worse, eating lunch with Fallon or starving in a bathroom stall.
“I have both of them,” Fallon said. “You could come over and watch with me sometime.”
I choked on the last of my sandwich when she said that.
“You okay, Trent?” she asked. She looked like she was about to start giving me the Heimlich, right there in the cafeteria, so I nodded and downed some apple juice until she seemed to believe I wasn’t going to die. “Well, what do you think? Want to come over sometime?”
I was still coughing a little bit, so luckily I didn’t have to answer right away.
Here’s what I knew for sure: Fallon wasn’t asking me over to her house, as, like, a date or anything. I’d seen the way girls acted when they liked boys that way (heck, hang out with Aaron for more than three seconds and you’d see plenty of it), and that wasn’t the way Fallon seemed to be acting.
She seemed, if I really thought hard about it, like she wanted to be my friend.
But here’s the thing I couldn’t figure out: Why me? Out of all the kids at Cedar Haven Middle, why me? I wasn’t particularly funny, or nice, even, and I was good at sports, but Fallon didn’t seem to care so much about that.
“Maybe,” I told her. “Probably not.”
Fallon nodded as she took another bite of her apple, like that was exactly the answer she expected. “Okay,” she said. And she grinned, apple flecks showing in her mouth. “Then how ’bout you draw me a picture?”
• • •
I thought about breaking another one of Ms. Emerson’s plants, just to get detention, but I figured two phone calls in one week might be too much for my mom. Also, the wrinkled old crone would probably just kill me instead. (I’d been ignoring her, mostly, in class. Not answering questions, scribbling thoughts instead of doing homework, that sort of thing. You could tell the wrinkled old crone hated me back, because she didn’t seem to mind so much about the ignoring.)
Anyway, there were other ways to miss dinner.
First I went to the Episcopal church on Summit Avenue, because they had the best parking lot for practicing wheelies. Then I biked down Bufflehead Lane (mostly because I really liked the word bufflehead) and wound my way in and around the fallen leaves on the street, until an old lady honked her horn at me and told me to stop being a nuisance on her block. Then I biked past the high school, where someone had set up a collection of lawn gnomes from who knows where on the front lawn. After a while I wandered over to Knickerbocker, although I pedaled really fast as I passed the Richardses’ house. I soared down Maple Hill, closing my eyes, for just a second, as I went. There was just enough wind pushing me back against the road that between the pushing and the soaring, I could almost believe I was flying.
Floating.
Two tacos, that’s what I had for dinner. They were two for five dollars if you got them from the take-out window of Rosalita’s. Mom and I picked food up there a lot when we were working late at Kitch’N’Thingz, because it was right down the block, and Marjorie, who ran the window, was always really nice.
“Nothing for your mother?” she asked when she handed me the bag.
I shook my head, sliding five dollars from my shift last weekend across the wood counter. “She might come by later,” I said. Which, then, I wished I hadn’t said, because maybe it would come true and Mom would go over, and then Marjorie would tell her she saw me, and then Mom would be mad that I wasn’t having dinner with my dad like I was supposed to on Wednesday nights. But I figured there was no fixing it now. I waited until Marjorie was busy at the fryer, and I turned left instead of right, the way I would normally go to get back to the store. And I hopped back on my bike and headed to the park.
It wasn’t the worst, eating delicious tacos on a bench in the park. Even if I was all by myself. And it was a little chilly, too, especially since I was just in my sweatshirt and jeans.
Friday I’d have to remember to wear a jacket or something.
I guess I did a real good job with the wandering, because Aaron and Doug were already there by the time I got home. Aaron slugged me in the arm and called me an idiot, and said that he was done—“absolutely done”—covering for me with Mom and Dad, and if I was going to miss dinner one more time, I was going to have to explain it myself.
He didn’t say anything about Dad being super sad to miss me or anything, so I could figure out how that went.
Mom had to work late, so it was just me and Aaron watching the game—Padres again. Although you could hardly call what Aaron was doing “watching,” because he had his head ha
lf buried in his trigonometry book the whole time. Normally Aaron was nearly as fanatical about baseball as Mom, but I didn’t bother asking why he didn’t feel like watching, because knowing Aaron, he’d only use the opportunity to lecture me about responsibility or something. Doug didn’t care so much about baseball. You could tell he didn’t care because he spent most of the first inning poking me in the back, saying he needed to talk to me “in private.” He was working on another prank, obviously.
“Doug, quit it,” I told him. “I’m trying to watch the game.”
Doug finally stalked off until Aaron’s cell phone rang and Doug snatched it off the table before Aaron could get it and immediately started gushing like a baby. “Aaaaaarooooon,” he said, like our brother’s name was a million syllables long. “It’s a giiiiiiiiiiiirl calling you. Who’s Clariiiiiiiise?”
Aaron hopped off the back of the couch, his trigonometry book tumbling to the floor, and grabbed the phone away from Doug. “Give me that.” He went to his room to take the call, and Doug plopped into Aaron’s seat beside me.
“You think Aaron has a girlfriend?” Doug asked me.
I shrugged.
“You gotta hear my prank,” Doug said. And I couldn’t really argue, because it was a commercial anyway.
“Fine,” I said. “Shoot.”
“Okay.” Doug was bouncing already, even sitting down. “Rebecca has a hamster, right? So what if I borrowed it, and me and her and Annie let it loose in Aaron’s room, and then while he was sleeping, it would, like, nibble at his toes? It would totally freak him out.” I guess he saw me rolling my eyes, because he said, “What? You don’t think that’s good?”
“That’s a horrible prank, Doug. No way will Rebecca let you borrow her hamster. And anyway, it would just get lost or end up in the toilet or something, and then Rebecca would hate you.”
Doug stuck his lip out, pouting. But I guess he couldn’t really argue with me. “You got any better ideas?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
I did. I had plenty of good prank ideas. Hiding all of Aaron’s underwear. Tying his doorknob to the bathroom across the hall, so he couldn’t get out of his room. Reprogramming his voice mail to something embarrassing. I was full of ideas. And I hadn’t done a good prank in a long time.
But if I told Doug any of those things, he’d just want to do them with his friends. With Annie.
“The game’s back on,” I told Doug. And he stuck his lip out again like a little baby, but really, what did I care?
SIX
Friday morning when Mr. Gorman asked me, “Am I going to like the kid I meet today?” I just shrugged and told him, “Neck cramp” and made my way up to the bleachers. I spent the whole period doodling Jared in a buffalo stampede in my Book of Thoughts. If Jared really had been smushed in a buffalo stampede, I thought, instead of hit with a hockey puck, probably everybody would like the kid they met today.
One thing I knew: Mr. Gorman hadn’t called my mom to ask for any doctor’s notes. I was certain about that, because if he had, Mom would’ve shouted my head off about it. Instead, he just kept adding checks to his clipboard.
I bet I had more “screw-up” check marks than any kid in the history of P.E.
• • •
That afternoon I had lunch with Fallon, just like I had the day before, too. It wasn’t horrible. It was sunny outside, so we sat at one of the outdoor tables, the ones with the built-in benches and the tops of grated metal.
“I still think you should come over and watch Field of Dreams,” Fallon said, for about the four hundredth time. “I bet you’d really like it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I poked a finger up through one of the holes in the metal grate of the table and bumped my tray up and down. “Oooooh!” I howled, like I was some kind of ghost. The Lunchtime Poltergeist or something. “The tray is moooooving!”
It was stupid, but Fallon laughed.
I had to admit, I sort of liked when Fallon laughed.
“Fine,” I said at last.
“Fine what?” Fallon asked.
“I’ll watch your stupid movie.”
Her face lit up. “Really?” she squealed. Actually squealed.
“It’s long, right?” I asked. “Like I wouldn’t get home till at least five o’clock?”
“We could watch it as soon as we got to my place,” she said. “Not even make any snacks. If you need to get home early.”
“No, that’s okay. Late is fine.”
Fallon grinned at me. “Great,” she said.
It was the first lunch we’d had together where she didn’t bug me to draw any pictures.
• • •
I called Aaron from Fallon’s house and told him I wasn’t going to make dinner with Dad because I was working on a school project with a friend.
“You know, you’re not the only person with other stuff going on in your life, Trent,” Aaron told me in his best fatherly voice. “But sometimes you have to do the responsible thing and show up when you promised you would.”
“I’m sorry you’re missing a date with your girlfriend or whatever,” I said, sounding a whole lot like Doug when I said it—but that’s what Aaron got for all his “responsible” talk. “If you’re so upset about having to go to dinner, you should whine to Dad, not me.”
“You are being completely immat—” Aaron began. But I hung up on him before he could finish his sentence.
Fallon’s mom wasn’t home, only her dad. He was practically big enough for two people, though. He hardly even blinked at me when Fallon introduced me, just looked me up and down from the doorway with his arms crossed and said, “Mm-hmm.”
Fallon rolled her eyes at that. “Dad’s a cop,” she told me, loud enough for her father to hear. “He likes to be intimidating.”
I gulped.
Fallon’s dad worked the night shift, so she said he didn’t start work until 11:00 p.m., and then he slept while she was at school. Which would explain why he was making eggs and coffee in the kitchen (glaring at me while he did it, I swear).
“We’re going to watch a movie in here!” Fallon called to him, tugging me away from the phone in the kitchen. “Don’t be weird, okay?” He grunted at her. Fallon started up the movie, and her dad finished cooking his eggs and then sat at the kitchen table to eat them without saying a word. I noticed he had a good eye on us where we were sitting on the couch, through the partition between the kitchen and the living room.
I bet Fallon’s dad made an excellent cop.
We didn’t so much watch Field of Dreams as chatter all the way through it. Well, Fallon chattered, bouncing up from the couch every two minutes or so to tell me something interesting. (I mean, something she thought was interesting. Sometimes it was an interesting thing, other times not so much.)
“There!” she said, pausing the movie. She ran over to the TV. Her fluffy white dog, Squillo, who’d been sleeping on the couch, jumped up too and started yipping. “You see that? The time on the scoreboard? It says eight forty-one, right?”
I had to squint to see it, because the clock on the scoreboard was so tiny. But Fallon was right. “Yep,” I said. (This was one of the not-very-interesting things.) “Eight forty-one.”
“Okay, watch this.” She unpaused the movie and let it play forward while Squillo ran around in excited circles. Fallon’s dad was still pretend-reading his tablet in the next room over—the world’s slowest eater of eggs. I tried to focus on the movie.
The shot cut away, to the main character, Ray, and the writer he drags to the game with him, sitting in the stands. Then a second later it cut back to the scoreboard. Fallon paused the movie again. “Look!” she shouted. She was bouncing, hard as Doug. “Boom!”
Squillo yipped.
I squinted. It took me a second to see what she was talking about, b
ut after a bit I spotted it. “The clock says ten thirty,” I told her. I was kind of impressed with myself for figuring it out, actually, even though I never would’ve noticed it in a million years if Fallon hadn’t made me look for it.
Fallon grinned at me. “Right? The clock changed two whole hours in a split second. Total continuity error.”
I didn’t know what a “continuity error” was, but I wasn’t about to ask.
“A continuity error is when something doesn’t line up from one shot to another,” Fallon told me. Like she thought she could read my mind or whatever. She plopped back next to me on the couch, and Squillo followed her and settled down between us. Fallon started the movie up again. “Like clocks flipping back and forth,” she went on, “or if a guy’s wearing a hat, and then the next time you see him, he’s not. Movies have all sorts of stuff like that. It’s awesome. Wait, there’s another one coming up that’s great.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “How many times have you seen this movie?” I asked.
“Field of Dreams?” she said.
“No, Transformers Four.”
Fallon laughed. “I don’t know. A couple times, maybe. I’m really good at spotting this stuff. I’m training myself to be a script supervisor in Hollywood.” She scratched Squillo behind the ears. “That’s my dream job. It’s the person who keeps track of every single take, and what all the actors are wearing, and what the set looks like, and the lighting and everything, and makes sure there are no errors at all.” Squillo rolled onto his belly, and Fallon began scratching him there, his paws up in the air like he was really enjoying himself. “I’m going to be amazing at it.”
I snorted. Leave it to Fallon Little to go and declare herself amazing before she’d even started something.
But I had to admit she might be right.
“Okay, this one’s good,” she told me a few minutes later. “Look, you see how the ground is super wet right as Ray and Terence are leaving Fenway Park? Like it’s just been raining?”
I leaned forward on the couch. I was pretty sure I knew where she was going. “Only they were just at the game, and it hadn’t been raining at all,” I said.