Charlie steps closer to the truck to get a better look. He blows a raspberry at his face, then turns around and shakes his bottom at it. I don’t know what that means, but if I had to guess, it’s Charlie’s way of saying he looks ridiculous.
My dad ruffles Charlie’s hair. “How’s it feel to be famous, kiddo?”
Charlie head-butts my dad’s leg.
“Wow, honey,” my mom finally says.
Wow, honey could mean so many things. My mom has become an expert at using phrases this way. In her head, Wow, honey could mean:
“That is the craziest most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my life! But I won’t say so out loud because I don’t want to upset you!” or
“How wonderful! Our child’s face is on the side of a truck and now every looney-tunes pervert will know what he looks like! But I won’t say so out loud because I don’t want to upset you!” or
“Gee, I really thought I’d seen the worst of your ideas, but you continue to blow my mind by outdoing yourself! But I won’t say so out loud because I don’t want to upset you!”
But in my dad’s head, it probably just means, “Wow. Exciting!”
So my mom gets to be sort of honest, and they don’t get in a fight.
“It’s all about brand recognition,” my dad explains. “Everyone will love the commercial, but it’s Charlie they’ll remember. We’ve got to help them make the connection.”
Holden and I swap looks. Charlie is a brand? The thought of my little brother’s face riding through town every day with that stupid speech bubble makes me feel sick to my stomach.
I guess my dad was right about brand recognition because within a week of the ad coming out and the truck being on the road, people start recognizing Charlie at the restaurant.
“Look! It’s that cute little girl on TV!” people say when they see him.
My dad never corrects them. Charlie doesn’t, either. He just giggles and blows raspberries at them. And if the person is really excited, he does the bottom shake, too. While I admit this is kind of hilarious, it’s also a little weird and embarrassing. Ran says this is what makes Charlie so cool. Because Charlie accepts who he is and doesn’t care about gender issues.
I point out to Ran that Charlie is only three and doesn’t even know what gender is.
“That’s what I mean,” Ran tells me.
Did I miss something?
No one besides my dad would have expected that an ad with a sweaty fat man and his awkward-looking family waving under a big sign could draw such a crowd, but that’s what happens. They come in and beg Charlie to “say it.” But Charlie always refuses.
“He’s shy,” my dad explains, leading them over to the ice-cream counter and encouraging them to try the “Super Smacker Sundae,” which is the most expensive item on the ice-cream menu.
When my dad suggests printing up T-shirts with the Charlie image from the truck, my mom finally puts her foot down. “I don’t want strangers wearing his face on their chests,” she says. And even my dad has to admit when you put it like that, it’s kind of creepy.
But business keeps picking up anyway. My dad buys more spots for the ad, and pretty soon all we have to do is turn on the TV and when the commercial breaks come on, so do we. My friend Cassie tells me someone even put it on YouTube. We suspect my dad, but when we grill him, he acts all innocent and says, “What’s YouTube?” But the comments, which are all things like “Ben & Gary’s can’t hold a candle to Harry’s!” pretty much give him away. My dad refuses to get their names right. Sometimes he refuses to say Jerry. Or sometimes he refuses to say Ben. But he never says both their correct names together. I think it really kills him that they have such a cool company, with tie-dyed T-shirts and stuff that is so much a part of what my parents used to be, what my mom wanted them to be. Instead, we sell lame dinosaur T-shirts. My dad would never admit this, of course. But I can tell.
Every time I see the commercial, I’m horrified at the sight of us in our pathetic T-shirts. My dad has no sense of style. The only one who looks remotely cool is Holden, who somehow manages to appear calm and oddly above the T-shirt he’s wearing. I swear, Holden could be a model. Only in our town, people don’t become models. In our town, the closest you get to fame is being on local TV with your family wearing ugly T-shirts while your dad sweats and your mom smiles in a strangely vacant way as if she had to go somewhere else in her mind just to get through the moment. And then your three-year-old brother says, “See you at Hawee’s” in the most obnoxious voice known to mankind.
And that is definitely not the kind of fame you want.
Ever.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, Holden and I wait for the bus together. I’m so nervous that I keep swallowing in an attempt to avoid throwing up. I wish Ran were here waiting with us. He never worries about stuff like the first day of middle school. He’ll probably wear his black T-shirt that says CHILL in electric-blue letters.
My stomach twists. Chill, I tell it.
Holden stands on the edge of the road at the end of our driveway, finding stones to kick across the street. He’s good at it. He has this way of stomping down at the edge of a stone and sending it flying all the way across. I stand next to him and give it a try, but I end up stomping on the stone and hurting the bottom of my foot.
“That’s just sad,” Holden says to me, then kicks another one.
This is the first time Holden and I have ever taken the bus together. Middle-school students and high-school students share buses because both schools are in one big building — middle school on the first floor, high school on the second.
We hear a truck engine, and he stops kicking and looks up the road. “God, I hate the bus,” he says. “I can’t believe we have to take it.”
“What’s so bad about the bus?” I ask.
He shakes his head and looks for another rock. “Bunch of losers,” he mumbles.
Sometimes I think Holden imagines a whole other world for himself, being part of this other life of rich kids from the private school nearby who treat our restaurant like another McDonald’s and not a place you can only afford to go to for a special treat, like most people around here. I bet he imagines driving to Boston to go school shopping instead of having to shop at the crummy outlet mall near our house.
“Fern,” he says, expertly kicking another stone across the road. “I need you to promise me something.”
“OK,” I say. Holden likes me to promise stuff. He’s always making me swear to things, like not telling anyone (especially Sara) about the shoe box he keeps full of cutout J.Crew models wearing outfits he tries to copy.
“You have to sit at the front of the bus, behind the driver.”
“Isn’t that where all the nerds sit?”
He looks up the street again, all tense. “Nah. It’s not like that on this bus. Trust me. All the losers sit in the back.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I swear. So when we get on, sit in the second or third row behind the driver. No matter what. Don’t pay attention to where I sit, OK? Act like you don’t even notice me.”
“But — why?”
He won’t look at me. “Listen. There’s stuff . . . stuff you don’t understand. People are horrible enough in grade school. But in middle and high school? Those same jerks will look like your best friends compared to the new crop. You have to figure out how to survive. Sitting at the front of the bus is one way. Pretending you don’t know me is another.”
“Why not know you?” Holden looks so cool and put together, I can’t imagine not wanting to be seen with him.
He sighs. “I just have a feeling. OK?”
I give him the tell-me stare. This is what we call the face-down. It’s when we look each other in the eye to see if we’re being straight. When our eyes meet, I can see how hard it is for him not to turn away. He looks scared.
“OK,” I say. “I promise to sit at the front.”
Brakes squeak in the distance, and the top of the bus appears at
the end of the road. It looks like a big yellow monster peeking up over a hill. When it stops in front of us, the door folds open. Holden makes me go first. The bus driver looks down at us as we climb the steep steps onto the bus. She has a woolen blue and gold ski hat on, which are our school colors. But instead of our school name, it says trudy trudy trudy all around it. She nods but doesn’t say hello. There’s sweat beaded at her forehead. I wonder why she’s wearing the hat if she’s so hot. Maybe she doesn’t have any hair underneath. Maybe she has cancer and lost all her hair like Ran’s mom. I look away from her and scout out a seat.
The first two seats behind the driver are taken, so I slip into the empty third. I don’t turn around to watch Holden, but I can see him in the driver’s huge mirror. He’s going toward the back, where he said the losers sit.
The second he sits down, two boys in the seat behind him cuff his ears. Holden’s face turns bright red.
I can’t help it. I swing my head around, desperately wanting to help. But he gives me a death glare that says, Turn around. Now. I quickly face forward again, but I can’t help watching in the mirror. He stares hard out the window as the two boys lean over the seat and say things in his ears I can’t hear. The bus lurches forward, my heart breaking a bit more with each bump in the road. Every time I hear laughter behind me, I cringe.
After a few stops, a girl I’ve never met before sits next to me. I think she’s older. She doesn’t say hi, and neither do I. I squeeze the straps on my backpack and try to focus on the dark green vinyl seat in front of me instead of the bus driver’s mirror. There’s a rip in the seat and someone wrote F school below the rip. There’s some sort of glue on the rip to try to keep it from tearing anymore, I guess. F school, I repeat in my head. F those boys back there.
When we get to school, I know Holden won’t want me waiting, so I follow the crowd inside and start looking for my homeroom.
I feel a hand on my shoulder and swirl around.
“Hey, Fern,” Ran says. He smiles the way he always does when we meet up. A certain smile that’s just for me.
“Hey,” I say.
“You seem sad.”
I look down at his chest because I know if our eyes meet, I will cry.
I was wrong about his chill T-shirt. Instead, he’s wearing a light-green one that says be in purple letters.
He doesn’t take his hand off my shoulder. I wish I could say the words that describe what I’m feeling. But all I can think of is hurt.
Our friend Cassie comes over to us and blushes as soon as Ran looks at her. When Ran underwent his transformation from strange sick kid to cool, very cute, and mysteriously-odd-but-in-an-acceptable-way kid, Cassie and every other girl in my class fell in love with him. I think of any of them, Cassie would have had the best chance because:
Cassie is really pretty but doesn’t act like she knows she is, even if she does.
Cassie is nice to everyone, including pre-transformation Ran and me.
Like Ran, Cassie is always in a good mood.
Unfortunately for Cassie, she made the mistake of calling him Randy at lunch last year, and ever since he’s sort of looked at her in a suspicious way.
“Hey, guys,” she says.
“Hey,” we both say. She doesn’t notice anything is wrong with me. Probably because she is staring at Ran.
“Come on,” Ran says. “Let’s sit together.”
Cassie looks like she might pee her pants in glee. We follow him into our homeroom, where everyone is talking and looking at each other at the same time. Some faces I recognize and some I don’t. We sit in the back row, in the corner. I blink to keep from crying and try to take deep breaths. A group of girls in the front stare at Ran, then whisper to each other. Ran is so busy taking notes in his new daily planner, he doesn’t even notice.
BE, I think. Just BE.
AFTER SCHOOL I TAKE MY SAME SEAT on the bus. When Holden gets on, he doesn’t even look at me as he heads straight to the back. Sure enough, the same boys sit behind him again. They lean forward and ping his cheek with their fingers. They make kissy faces behind his back. I think about Sara’s word. Fag. And I wonder how many times he’s heard it hissed in his ear.
When the bus stops at our driveway, I get off first and start walking. I don’t wait for Holden, knowing I’m supposed to pretend I don’t notice him. As soon as the bus pulls away and the sound of the engine drifts off, I turn to face him. I don’t know what I’m going to say, but when I look in his watery eyes, I keep my mouth shut. There’s a welt on his left cheek. He walks right by me, past the front walkway, and around the side of the house. I follow, keeping the same distance he put between us on the bus. He disappears into our neighbor’s yard and into the pine-tree cave.
When I reach the cave, I stand outside, waiting to be invited in. Waiting and waiting.
“Go home,” the cave says.
I bend down to peek inside. His forehead rests on his knees so I can’t see his face. But I can tell from the sound of his cracked voice that he’s been crying.
“No,” I say.
I wait some more.
“Fine,” he finally says.
I bend down and crawl in. The familiar smell welcomes me. I sit next to him and look up at the hundreds of crisscross branches above us. They’re like interlocking fingers protecting us from the world.
“Well,” he says quietly, “how was your first day?”
I sigh and think about the rush of my first day of middle school. It was pretty much like any first day of school, except that it was in a new place with twice as many people and every time I had to change classes, at least one person pointed at me and someone else would say The Line in a high-pitched, fake-Charlie voice. When Ran was with me, he acted like he didn’t hear anything. I figured I should follow his lead, since no one knows better than Ran how to deal with people giving you a hard time for stuff that is out of your control.
“As expected,” I finally say. “You?”
“Pretty much.”
“How many people said it to you?” I ask.
“Six, I think. You?”
“At least.”
He shakes his head, and we’re quiet for a while. But it isn’t our usual comfortable quiet. I know the words I need to say aren’t the kind we can share without speaking.
“Holden?” I finally say. “Why do you sit at the back of the bus if those jerks do that to you?”
He rubs out the design he was making in the needles with his fingers. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m not Charlie.”
He shakes his head and leans back against the tree trunk, closing his eyes.
“Why do they hurt you?” I ask, leaning next to him.
He’s quiet for a long time, then he finally sits up again and puts his back to me. His shirt is covered with needles and pieces of bark.
“I think you know,” he says.
I watch the curve of his back rise and fall. I want to touch him and feel his breathing, but I’m afraid I’ll feel the hurt. And it seems like a private thing he doesn’t want to share. Or maybe he’s just protecting me from it.
I think of Sara’s words again and Charlie’s singsong echo.
“It’s not a good reason,” I say.
“No?” He finally turns to me, and I can see the truth in his tears.
“I don’t think it is,” I say. “People are so stupid.”
He smiles a little. “So you don’t care? That I’m . . . you know.”
I roll my eyes. “Why would I care? Why should anyone?” But I wonder why neither of us can say the word. Gay, I think. You’re gay. I know what that means. But I don’t know how he knows he is, or how it feels, or why people hate him because of it.
“Fern,” he says. “You’re not like anyone. Other people, they don’t get it.”
I shrug. “They’re idiots.”
Holden puts his arms over his bent-up knees and rests his chin on them. “Yeah.”
“We have to do something. We coul
d tell Mom and Dad.”
“No. Can’t you see Mom marching down to the school and causing a scene? And Dad would . . . I don’t know what Dad would do. Try to teach me how to fight or something. Be a man. They’d want to know why it happened. And then we’d have to talk about me being . . .” He pauses and pulls at the rubber on his shoe.
“You can say it,” I whisper.
Slowly, he looks up at me. I search his eyes and give him the tell-me stare. He breathes in and out a few times.
“Gay,” he says.
I put my hand on his knee. “It doesn’t matter,” I tell him again. “It doesn’t change anything.”
He moves his leg away. “It’s one thing telling you, but I just don’t think I’m ready to officially come out yet, you know? I know Mom will be fine with it. But Dad . . .”
“They love you. They can help.”
“I don’t need anyone’s help,” he says, moving even farther away from me.
I lean back against the tree and breathe in Christmas again.
“Yes, you do,” I whisper.
My mom always thought I’d be a good friend. A hero, like the Charlotte’s Web Fern. I would like to be Holden’s hero. I really would. I would like to stay his Phoebe forever, so he always has someone to come back to. But when he moves away from me this way, I feel like he’s taking a step toward leaving us for good.
BACK AT HOME, Sara and my mom are in the kitchen, blasting Grateful Dead tunes and making homemade pasta while Charlie sits on the counter, playing with a ball of dough. There are bits of dough in his hair.
“Ferny!” he yells when he sees me.
“Hi, honey,” my mom says, easing a long sheet of dough out of the machine. “Could you set the table?”
“How was school?” Charlie asks, all serious.
My mom folds the pasta and starts to feed it back into the machine. “Oh, right! How was it, Fern? Did you like your classes?”