Slob

  “Wait!” I said. “I still have another week to look at the Retro TV Magazines.”

  Arthur didn’t stop walking. “So?” she called back.

  I hurried to catch up with her. “So this isn’t fair. I gave you my clothes. We made a deal.”

  “I’m not breaking it,” she said as she kept walking.

  “Yes you are!” I must admit I was screeching now. “You’ve got the box right in your hands!”

  “Not the box of Retro TV Magazines,” she said.

  “Well . . . well.” Okay, now I was sputtering, this was so ridiculous. “What else are they?”

  “The videos that Jeremy borrowed.”

  “Liar!”

  There. I had completed the moment of drama that had been so rudely interrupted in the lunchroom today. I did it without thinking, and I hadn’t really meant to be so harsh, but I tell you, I had had it up to here with being lied to that day (my hand is hovering about a foot above my head at the moment).

  To Arthur’s credit, she didn’t get all huffy about being called a liar. She did the sensible thing. She put the box down, took off the lid, and let me look inside.

  The thing was filled with videos. The spine of each video sleeve was labeled with a white sticker with neat black printing on it. Among them were Charlie’s Angels/Pom Pom Angels/October 14, 2006 and The Brady Bunch/Katchoo/ October 15, 2006.

  For several moments I was so confused that I didn’t say a word. Finally, I managed to utter, “When did Jeremy borrow these?”

  “This past Monday.”

  The same day the supposed old signals came through Nemesis.

  “But . . . why would she do that?” I said this out loud to myself.

  Now Arthur did get huffy. “Because they’re great shows, why else?”

  Yeah. Why else?

  “Thanks, Arthur,” I said, replacing the lid on the box, picking it up, and handing it back to her.

  “I’ll be by to pick up the Retro TV Magazines a week from Saturday,” she said.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking hard.

  Jeremy was in her room. When I knocked, she called back, “I’m busy!” I came in anyway.

  She was sitting in her rocking chair, rocking back and forth. She stopped abruptly when she saw me and frowned. “I said I was busy.”

  “You look it,” I said dryly. I folded my arms across my chest and stared at her.

  “What?” she said, not meeting my eye. She started rocking again.

  “I don’t need to ask you how you did it,” I said. “That part is obvious. You took that signal splitter I found at the Seventy-fifth Street demo site and you fed Arthur’s videos into my TV. To get the image all fuzzy, you messed with the video tracking.”

  There was some satisfaction in seeing the surprised look on her face. Actually, it was very satisfying, since I had been such a complete sucker for the past few days.

  “What I’d like to know is why you would do that to me,” I said. I was so angry that my voice cracked. I’ll tell you the truth, I was so angry I wanted to hit her.

  “Did you want to make me look like an idiot, is that why?” I said.

  She shook her head but didn’t say anything and didn’t look at me, she just kept rocking.

  “Stop rocking!” I screamed at her.

  She did, and now she looked up at me. With her hair all short like that, she looked older. Smarter. More serious. It was like she had been tricking me about everything, even her personality.

  “WHY?” I yelled at her so loudly that I made her jump a little.

  “Because . . .” she said, “because . . . because I felt sorry for you.”

  I think that was probably the worst thing she could have said. I turned around and walked right out of her room. Honey had been sitting outside the door, and I pushed her aside with my foot. I walked into my room, slammed the door, and furiously shoved my bed against it to keep it closed, since there was no lock on it.

  Then I began to tear Nemesis apart. I ripped out wires, yanked apart cables. I took all my anger out on the thing. It now seemed like a useless, silly toy. I couldn’t believe that I had ever thought it would work. I had been so stupid! And there’s me, crowing to Jeremy about getting the signal, there’s me, getting all excited about finding out Penny Marshall’s stupid birthday, there’s idiotic me, telling Nima all about my ingenious invention.

  “Owen?” Jeremy was outside, twisting the knob and pushing against the door.

  I took the green paper that said SLOB on it out from under the amplifier and put it back under my drawer. I took the satellite dish off the tripod.

  “Let me in, Owen!”

  I wouldn’t, but she threw all her weight against the door again and again until it opened just enough to let her slip through. She stood there for a minute, looking around. I think she was stunned. Nemesis was in ruins all over my floor and I was sitting in the middle of it. A fat Buddha surrounded by garbage.

  “Oh, I forgot to congratulate you,” I said bitterly. “President of GWAB. That’s sensational. You should be really proud of yourself.”

  “I’m not their president,” she said. “I’m not even a member anymore.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “That’s why you chopped off all your hair.”

  “I did that for you,” she said.

  “For me?” I was so outraged that I swallowed a glob of spit and choked a little. “When did I ever tell you to chop off your hair?!”

  “You didn’t, but it was for you anyway.” She sat down heavily in a clear spot of rug, hugged her knees to her chest, and put her forehead down on her knees for a moment. Then she lifted her head suddenly. “Didn’t you ever wonder how I was able to become a GWAB member and not cut my hair?”

  “Yes,” I said. I had wondered about it, but not very hard.

  “It’s part of the initiation, you know,” she said. “Everyone has to do it. But I wouldn’t. They were going to kick me out, but Arthur said that maybe they could find something else for me to do. So they had a meeting and they came up with an idea. I had to steal your lunch from the lunch closet for two weeks straight. That was mean. I know it was, Owen, and I told them it was, but they said it had to be something that I wouldn’t want to do or else it wouldn’t count. I talked them down to just stealing your cookies.”

  My mouth fell open, just like they always describe in books, but it really did. “You stole them? You did? Not Izzy?”

  “Izzy? Why would Izzy steal your cookies? And anyway, I thought you thought it was Mason Ragg.”

  “I did,” I muttered, thinking about poor Izzy, trying to remember what I had said to him at lunch and wincing when I did.

  “Look,” she said, “it wasn’t supposed to turn out the way it did. I even tried to get the cookies back to you. That first day I left them on the table you and Izzy usually sit at, but of course that day you didn’t and Mason did and then, oh, it just all became this huge mess. I felt awful about the whole thing, and I just wanted to make it up to you.”

  “And making me think Nemesis was working when it wasn’t was supposed to make it up to me?” I said incredulously.

  “It made you happy,” she said.

  “Well, yeah. Maybe temporarily. But come on, Jeremy, didn’t you realize I was going to find out sooner or later that it was all a prank?”

  “You said yourself that picking up signals was a long shot. When you hooked up the deli’s surveillance camera’s receiver to Nemesis and nothing happened, you wouldn’t have thought someone was playing a prank with the old Freakout shows. You just would have figured that you just couldn’t pick up those particular signals, right?”

  It was so logical that I had a sudden urge to throw a satellite dish at her.

  “Aren’t you smart,” I said glumly. “So how did you figure out how to bypass the Jaws of Anguish?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “It snapped shut when I put my hand in. But, you know . . .” she held up her arm and smiled. “Skinn
y wrists. I slipped right out. Then I set it again. It was a good trap, though. If it had been Mason, it would have got him for sure.”

  I know she was mostly just trying to make me feel better, but it did.

  “Did you eat the facial hair bleach?” I asked, pretending to be upset. I really was hoping that she’d had just a tiny taste.

  “Facial hair bleach? Eww, no! Did you put facial hair bleach in the cookies?”

  “One time.”

  She thought for a minute and then said, “Maybe that was the time Izzy caught me.”

  “Izzy knew?”

  “Well, I was at the lunch closet and I had your lunch sack in my hands and was about to get the cookies out when I heard someone coming. So I ran away, but I was still holding the lunch sack. I ditched it in the boys’ bathroom. When I turned around, there was Izzy. He’d seen everything. I made him swear not to tell you. He was really upset. He told me all about Mason Ragg and how you thought it was him and how he carried a buck knife—”

  “Switchblade,” I corrected.

  “Really? I thought it was a buck knife.”

  “Switchblade. And it isn’t really a switchblade, it’s a key holder.”

  “Oh. Weird. Anyway, Izzy said I was going to get you killed, and I promised him I’d fix it all if he just didn’t say a single word to you about it.”

  “He kept his promise,” I said.

  Jeremy smiled. “I figured he would. He’s a really decent guy. Anyway, that’s when I wrote the note about following Mason. I knew that if you followed him, you’d see he wasn’t the one stealing the Oreos and you’d stop trying to catch him, and that might prevent a hideous buck knife attack. Switchblade attack. Whatever. But see”—she rubbed her hand across her cropped hair—“it was all for nothing. I cut it anyway. Well, the GWAB members cut it, actually. They passed the scissors around and all took a few snips. I wanted to punch them the whole time. But I just couldn’t do it anymore, sneaking around and lying and seeing you get all excited about Nemesis. It felt too crappy. And anyway”—she eyed me cautiously—“Mom’s gone. It’s not like she’s going to care.”

  I looked at the sad little red cap of hair, with a hank of it tufted up at the top.

  “Dad would have said you looked like a pumpkin,” I said.

  “Ha-ha,” she said dryly. Then she said. “Probably”

  “And Mom would have tracked down every member of GWAB and made them sorry they ever learned how to use a pair of scissors,” I said.

  “Yeah, she would have. Mom was tough.” Jeremy lifted her eyebrows and smiled. She looked around at the bits and pieces of Nemesis and her smile disappeared. “Maybe we could put it back together. We don’t have to give up yet.”

  I nodded.

  “You know,” she said, “I always thought there was a chance Nemesis really could work. I thought if anyone could do it, you could.”

  “Thanks, Jeremy.”

  “I’m not Jeremy anymore, remember.”

  “Oh, right. I kind of got used to you as Jeremy.”

  “Yeah, me too. Maybe I’ll hang on to it for a while longer.”

  17

  There’s this thing called The Three-Month Rule. It works, it really does. The rule is that it takes three months for things to really change.

  For example, it takes three months to:

  1. Go from 57 percent fatter than the national average to only 10 percent fatter than the national average

  2. Grow out a bad haircut

  3. Realize that your radio telescope doesn’t work and turn it into something entirely different

  4. Become pretty good friends with someone you had previously thought was a psychopath

  5. Have people stop making fart noises when you walk by them

  There are some things that can happen more quickly than three months. One of them is to patch up a misunderstanding between friends. Well, with some people it might take three months, but Izzy happens to be one of those forgive-and-forget types. He did sulk a little when I sat down with him at lunch the day after I had accused him of being a thief.

  “Oh, so now I’m your friend again?” he said.

  “Jeremy confessed,” I said. “She told me that she was the one who was taking my Oreos. I’m sorry, Izzy. I’m sorry I called you a thief or thought anything rotten about you.”

  “Oh, man,” He raked his hands through his hair. “Did you tell her that I didn’t snitch on her? Oh man, she probably hates me.”

  “She knows you didn’t snitch,” I assured him.

  He blew out a puff of air that sounded like a pneumatic bus door opening up. Then he remembered me and opened up his huge paws in a pleading way. “I was between a rock and a hard place, man.”

  “Understood.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. But let me ask you this. How long have you had a crush on my sister?” I said.

  “What?” He narrowed his eyes at me.

  “It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out,” I told him.

  He blushed, then shot me a shy look. “A while, I guess. Does she still like that Andre dude?”

  “Andre’s not worth one of your hangnails, Izzy. Jeremy is no dope. She’ll figure that out.”

  Which brings me to the last item on my list . . .

  It takes three months for a girl to:

  6. Really appreciate a guy like Izzy and figure out that a guy like Andre is not worth one of Izzy’s hangnails

  So three months later takes us right into January. It’s one of those January thaws in New York City where the temperature creeps up to over forty degrees and you actually see a few people walking around in khaki shorts. Everyone heads to Central Park to squeeze in a little Rollerblading or bike riding or . . .

  Okay, I can’t take it anymore. I’m trying to set the scene for you and make this very literary, but really there is something I’m dying to show you. I’m going to skip over all the literary stuff, if you don’t mind. I’ll just let you know that Mom and I went shopping at Macy’s and bought some new clothes for me. I had stuck to a diet, and although it was torture at first, it became easier as the weeks went on. Now I was swimming in my old clothes. That’s not the thing I’m dying to show you, but I thought you should know that. Jeremy was out at the ice-skating rink with Izzy. Good luck renting a pair of skates in size 13, I thought, but he’d squeeze into a size 10 just to get a chance to flop all over the ice with Jeremy by his side. They’re just friends, good friends, but I wouldn’t be sorry if they dated one day. You know, when Jeremy was eighteen or so.

  After Mom and I went shopping, I told her there was something I wanted to show her. We took the bus back uptown and got off by the Museum of Natural History. In January it’s not usually all that crowded outside the museum, but it was today. Good weather and all. There was a big crowd gathered off to the left side of the steps and that was where I led Mom now.

  “What?” she said, smiling at me. “What is it?”

  “Just wait,” I said.

  Some of the people in the crowd were clearly in a line formation, but others were standing around watching something. We joined them. I grabbed Mom’s hand and inched us through the crowd to get a better look.

  The momo cart was festooned with its usual flags, and Nima was smiling his usual good-natured pirate smile. What wasn’t usual was a loud clicking-tonk-tonk-slapping noise. Nima saw me almost right away. His smile spread even wider, and he waved me over. I pulled Mom with me.

  “This man here, my friend Owen Birnbaum,” Nima announced to the crowd as he put his arm around me, “this the man that built she!”

  His arms spread wide toward the contraption that was clicking-tonk-tonk-slapping on his cart.

  My satellite dish was now a momo Ferris wheel, painted with a bright yellow sun in the center and red and blue rays coming off the sun, like the design on the Tibetan flag (Jeremy had helped me with the painting part). Around its edges I had attached little metal brackets that served as tiny seats for momos. As
fast as Nima could make the momos, a pivoting metal arm made of scrap pipe with a pair of food tongs soldered to the end snapped them up and placed them on the Ferris wheel, which spun slowly, turned by a bicycle chain and a washing machine motor attached to the back. The little momos traveled up, up, up. Then as they started their downward ride, the little bracket seats made a fast flipping motion. The momos flew into the air, one after another, like tiny circus performers, and landed in Nima’s large steam pot.

  Do you know what the crowd did? They applauded.

  It wasn’t the Nobel Prize, but it was still pretty nice.

  Mom applauded too, after looking a little stunned. Nima gave us a heaping plate of momos and we sat down on the steps of the museum.

  “Owen, you’re a genius,” she said.

  “Not quite. I’m one point short.”

  It was one of those perfect days. I love those days. But they also make me nervous because I know that lurking behind every perfect day are a few less-than-perfect bits and pieces. One of those pieces was underneath my desk drawer. I hadn’t known what to do with it after I destroyed Nemesis. I couldn’t throw it away, yet I couldn’t look at it either.

  But because today was a perfect day, I opened the drawer up and took out the little green paper with SLOB written on it.

  When people die, all the things they’ve ever touched or have ever belonged to them should be buried with them. Like the Egyptians used to do. It doesn’t seem fair that a person’s writing should still exist on this planet while the actual person is gone.

  SLOB

  It was the last thing my mother ever wrote. In a perfect world, the last thing your mother ever wrote would be something like, My darling son, I love you more than I can ever say. I’ll always watch over you.

  But my mother worked in a deli. The last thing she wrote was an order she took from a customer. The customer who killed her.

  SLOB

  Our deli’s shorthand for salami on an onion bagel.

  All of a sudden I knew what to do. I put the piece of paper in my back pocket and yanked on my coat and hat.