Jumping the Scratch

  WE SPENT THAT WHOLE MORNING WORKING WITH Arthur. After doing the descriptions, he talked to us a little about keeping a writer’s notebook.

  “I take mine with me everywhere I go,” he said.

  “Perhaps you could give the children an idea of the kinds of things you write down in your notebook,” Miss Miller said. “Ideas for new books?”

  “Sure, if one happens to come to me. But mostly it’s random things I hear or see. I keep a couple of running lists, too.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black notebook. He opened it and began to flip through the pages. “Here’s a list of good words to describe how people walk: stride, shuffle, limp, swagger—” He stopped and flipped through more pages. “I’ve got pages of beauty parlor puns, names people call their pets, strange restaurant behavior.”

  “Fascinating,” said Miss Miller.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, closing the notebook and slipping it back into his pocket, “but I do think keeping a notebook handy is a good idea.”

  With the remaining time we had together that morning, Arthur decided to work with us on dialogue.

  “Do you all know what dialogue is?” he asked.

  Mary Lynne raised her hand, of course, but Arthur called on someone else, a boy named Kevin Kaminsky, who had a red birthmark on his forehead and rode the same bus I did.

  “A dialogue is when two people are talking to each other,” Kevin said.

  Arthur nodded and went on. “I’d like you all to write down a few lines of dialogue from a conversation you can remember hearing in the past day or so. I want you to write down all the words, exactly the way you remember them, but I don’t want you to tell us who’s speaking,” he explained.

  “Can it have cusses in it?” Larry Baywood asked.

  “Absolutely not.” Miss Miller chimed in before Arthur could answer the question himself.

  “Should we use quotation marks?” Mary Lynne asked, shooting a quick look over at Miss Miller to see if she was pleased with the question.

  “I’m more interested in the words than the punctuation, but if you want to use quotation marks, that’s fine,” Arthur said.

  “Does spelling count?” Kevin asked.

  Arthur shook his head.

  “Can one of the two people talking be yourself?” someone else asked.

  He nodded. “As long as you don’t tell us who’s talking,” he said. “And don’t put your names on your papers either. These are going to be anonymous dialogues.”

  Miss Miller came and stood right behind me. I knew why she was there. She wanted to make sure I wrote something down this time. It made me so nervous, her standing that close to me, I couldn’t think about anything other than the fact that she was there. All around me pencils scratched away, but my mind was a total blank.

  Someone knocked at the door, probably a message from the office or a stack of forms to be handed out at the end of the day. Miss Miller went to answer it, but before she did, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Don’t you dare put me to shame again. Do you hear me? Don’t you dare.”

  A few minutes later Arthur clapped his hands and asked us all to pass forward our papers. I opened the clip at the top of my board and passed the top sheet to the front along with the others.

  “I’m going to read these dialogues aloud now,” Arthur told us, “and then we’re going to see if we can tell what kind of person is speaking, based only on the words.”

  It was harder than it sounded. The first dialogue went like this:

  May I have something to drink, please?

  What would you like to drink?

  I would like some orange juice, please.

  “What can you tell about the two people who are having this dialogue?” Arthur asked.

  “One of them is thirsty,” said Larry.

  Everyone laughed, and Larry looked pleased with himself.

  “Okay. But who is thirsty? Is it a little boy? Is it an old woman? A talking rabbit?”

  “It’s me,” Mary Lynne called out, “and my mom. This morning at breakfast.”

  “Okay. So much for being anonymous.” Arthur laughed. “But here’s the point. If you hadn’t just told us it was you and your mother having this dialogue, there’s no way we would have known it just from listening to the words, would we?”

  “Those are the exact words we said,” Mary Lynne said defensively. “I remember perfectly. It’s not my fault you wouldn’t let us say who was talking.”

  “Let’s read a few more,” Arthur said, quickly moving on.

  He read several more dialogues, all of which had the exact same problem. The words sounded as if anybody could have said them. When Arthur picked up the next paper in the pile, his eyebrows went up, and he smiled.

  “Ah. Here we go. How about this one?” he said. “Don’t you dare put me to shame again. Do you hear me? Don’t you dare.”

  “That’s somebody old and mean talking,” a redheaded girl named Emily said.

  “How do you know?” Arthur asked.

  “Because a kid wouldn’t say it that way. A kid wouldn’t say, ‘Don’t you dare.’”

  “If it was me, I’d say, ‘Knock it off or I’ll cream you.’” Larry agreed.

  “Exactly,” said Arthur. “The message says, ‘Knock it off or I’ll cream you,’ but these particular words tell you the person who’s talking is old and mean.”

  I was afraid to look at Miss Miller. I knew she must be furious. I hadn’t meant for this to happen. I just wrote down the only thing I could think of.

  Mary Lynne’s hand was up again. “That’s not a dialogue,” she said. “There’s only one person talking. You said a dialogue is two people talking.”

  “The point is that by using these particular words, this writer was able to tell us—”

  “Mary Lynne is absolutely correct, class,” Miss Miller interrupted, her eyes shining and pink splotches staining both of her cheeks. “Whoever wrote those words obviously wasn’t listening when Mr. Stone gave the assignment.”

  “Perhaps,” Arthur said, “but they were obviously listening closely when those other words were said to them, because they heard not only the words but the true feeling that lay behind them. That’s what good dialogue is all about.”

  Miss Miller pressed her hands together and turned to Mr. Stone with a tight smile. “Well, time has certainly flown this morning. I’m sorry to say, Mr. Stone, that as wonderful and informative as this has been, we’re going to have to wrap up now. Fifth-grade lunch period begins in a few minutes, and then I know you’ve got another class to visit this afternoon. Let’s all thank Mr. Stone for spending time with us this morning.”

  Everybody clapped, and Arthur clapped for us too.

  “You were great,” he told us. “I hope you had a good time and maybe even picked up a couple of useful tips.”

  “I’m sure they did,” said Miss Miller. “Those who were listening.”

  We were dismissed, and everyone rushed to the closets to grab lunches and jackets before heading out. As usual, I hung back, waiting for the crowd to leave, before walking over and pulling my own lunch down from the shelf.

  Miss Miller was watching me, and as I stood at the closet, she leaned over to Arthur, and in a voice that sounded like a whisper but was somehow still loud enough for me to hear all the way across the room, she said, “Broken home. Absent father. You know the story.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said nodding. “I’ve heard that story before.”

  “Haven’t we all?” Miss Miller agreed.

  I yanked my jacket off the hook and got out of there.

  13

  MOST OF THE KIDS ATE LUNCH IN THE CAFETERIA AT long tables with seats attached, but I had a spot of my own, outside on a bench at the far end of the school yard, where nobody bothered me. As I headed across the yard, I thought about the exchange I had just overheard between Arthur and Miss Miller. It made me furious. What right did the two of them have to stand around talking about me a
s if they knew the first thing about me, all the while both of them calling me James? “I’ve heard that story before,” Arthur had said. What a jerk. I guess being a big-shot writer made him think he could know what somebody’s story was even though he didn’t know the first thing about that person. He’d probably take one look at Sapphy and think he knew her story too. He was no better than Miss Miller, and they could both rot, for all I cared.

  When I reached the bench, I sat down and took out my sandwich, scraped the peanut butter out into my napkin, and ate the bread in a couple of quick, fierce bites. Then I picked up the can of cherries and turned it around, inspecting for dents. I only kept the perfect ones; the dented cans I tossed out without even bothering to open them first. I had long since stopped eating the cherries; I couldn’t stand the smell of them or the feel of the soft, waterlogged globes barely contained in their slimy skin casings. I’d open the good cans, dump out the fruit, and bring the empties home. Later, after my mom had left for work and Sapphy was asleep, I’d wash them out, peel off what remained of the labels, and add them to the stash I kept behind the couch. My secret protectors.

  I had begun saving cherry cans when school started up again after Christmas vacation. I figured since I slept out in the living room and didn’t have a door of my own to close, I needed some kind of warning system. I set up a ring of empty cherry cans around my bed each night, and that way, if Old Gray tried to sneak up on me while I was asleep, he’d knock over the cans, and the noise would wake me up, so I’d have time to get away.

  Finding no dents in the cherry can that day out in the school yard, I clamped the opener onto the lip and started to crank. I held it tightly between my knees as I worked the opener slowly all the way around the lid until it came loose and dropped down half an inch to settle on top of the cherries like a floating raft. Using my pointer finger, I placed a little pressure on one side of the lid. I had just slid my thumbnail under to pull the edge up and lift out the sharp metal circle when Audrey Krouch showed up.

  “Hey,” she said, “pretty quick thinking before about the squished fingers, huh?”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I told her.

  “I know. I just figured I’d save you from getting bawled out twice in one day,” she said, sitting down on the bench beside me.

  I looked nervously across the playground to the basketball courts, where Larry Baywood was hanging out, shooting baskets with his friends.

  “I usually eat alone,” I said, hoping Audrey would take the hint and leave.

  “I know,” she said. Then she opened her lunch box and pulled out a bag of chips, which she ripped open using her teeth.

  “How come you didn’t write a description?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “I couldn’t think of anything to describe.”

  “Liar,” she said, taking a chip from the bag and putting the whole thing in her mouth before biting down. She finished chewing and licked the salt off her fingers. “You were thinking about something. You just weren’t writing it down.”

  “How do you know?” I asked uneasily.

  “I wasn’t reading your mind, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Then how do you know I was thinking about something?” I asked again.

  “’Cause your lips were moving,” she said.

  I put my hand up to my mouth. “They were?”

  She nodded and ate another chip. “They always move when you think,” she said. “And when you read, too.”

  “So?” I said defensively.

  “So nothing. I’m just saying your lips move, that’s all.”

  “You shouldn’t go around trying to read people’s minds or their lips either,” I said.

  “It’s a free country,” said Audrey.

  “You say that too much,” I told her.

  “Yeah, well, you’re not exactly perfect yourself, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  I missed the bus that afternoon after school. I’d gone to the library to return some books and to see if there was a copy of Losing Perfect I could check out. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to read it. Arthur had been such a jerk, maybe I was hoping I’d find out it wasn’t as good as it had seemed when he’d read it to us in class.

  “I’m afraid one of your classmates was in here during lunch today and checked out the only copy we had,” the librarian told me.

  “Who?” I asked, even though I was sure I already knew.

  “Mary Lynne Pierce,” she said. “I believe she mentioned something about doing a book report for extra credit. Perhaps you could ask her to let you know when she’s finished with it.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, remembering what Audrey had told me about the wart on Mary Lynne’s finger. I didn’t know if you could catch warts from touching pages in a book or not.

  I picked out about a dozen books, some by writers I already knew I liked, others based on the descriptions on the backs of the books or the pictures on the front. I got so caught up, I lost track of the time, and when I finally finished checking out my books, the bus was gone. Wondrous Acres was a long way from school. Much too far to walk.

  I tried to go back inside so I could call home. I knew my mother wouldn’t appreciate being woken up, but the only other alternative was taking public transportation, and I didn’t have any money with me to pay the fare. The main door of the school was locked. I knocked and knocked but nobody came. Then I remembered that Miss Miller had mentioned there was going to be a teachers’ meeting after school that day, so I realized everybody must be in the auditorium. I tried the side door and the one off the gym, but all those were locked too, so I shoved as many of the books into my backpack as would fit, and splitting the rest, carrying some under each arm, I walked down the street toward the nearest city bus stop. I was hoping the driver would take pity on me and let me ride for free if I explained what had happened.

  I was half a block away when I saw the blue and white bus pull into the stop up ahead and open its doors for a crowd of waiting passengers. Running as fast as I could, with the books under my arms and my backpack thumping heavily against my back, I raced toward the bus. I would have made it in time, but just as I got there, I tripped over an uneven place in the sidewalk, and my feet went out from under me. Books flew in every direction, and I came down hard on the rough cement, tearing open both knees of my jeans. It knocked the wind right out of me, and I had to lie there for a minute before I could even think about trying to stand up.

  Several people bent down and started picking up the books, and someone held out a hand to help me up.

  “Are you okay? That was some fall.”

  The soft voice was instantly familiar. I looked up to find Arthur standing over me, offering his hand. Quickly I scrambled up on my own and brushed off my pants, wincing as I touched my skinned knees. People began to hand me back my books and get on the waiting bus.

  “Can I help you carry those?” Arthur asked. “Looks like you’re bringing home half the library with you.”

  I shook my head. He smiled. Then he shrugged and pulled some change out of his pocket and stepped onto the bus. I hesitated. I wanted to get home, but I didn’t want to ride with him. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him.

  “Are you coming, son?” the driver called out from inside. “I got a schedule to keep here.”

  I could have waited for the next bus, but they didn’t run very often, and this driver seemed like he might be a nice guy. He’d called me “son.” I tightened my grip on the books and climbed up the steps.

  “I missed my school bus,” I told him as soon as the door hissed closed behind me. “I don’t have the fare, but if you give me the address, maybe I could send it to the bus company tomorrow.”

  The driver scowled and shook his head. I guess I’d read him wrong.

  “First you hold up everything and now you expect a free ride?”

  Arthur was sitting right behind the driver’s seat, so he heard everything. He stood up and reached
in his pocket.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, and came over and dropped some coins into the slot before I could object.

  “I’ll pay you back,” I told him.

  “Forget it. It’s no big deal,” he said, and sat back down.

  The seats were all full except for the one beside him. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed rude not to sit next to him after he’d paid my way, but I really didn’t want to. The bus jerked forward, and I nearly lost my balance. With both arms full of books, there was no way to hold on.

  “Why don’t you put your books down here?” Arthur said, patting the empty seat next to him. There was no other choice, so I stacked the books up on the seat and then stood in the aisle, one hand on top of the pile to keep it from tipping over and the other holding on to the strap hanging from the bar above my head.

  “My car’s in the shop, so I got stuck taking the bus today,” he said. I didn’t say anything back, hoping that would be the end of it. “So you missed your bus, huh?” he went on, clearly hoping to engage me in a conversation.

  “Yeah,” I said, and looked around again to be sure there really weren’t any other empty seats.

  “It’s going to take me twice as long to get home,” Arthur said, “but at least I can write in my notebook. It’s not safe to scribble and drive at the same time, plus this will give me a chance to look for good signs.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was to be left alone. Arthur reached into his pocket and pulled out his notebook and a pen. He started flipping through the pages. I looked past him, staring out the window, as we lumbered along down Main Street, stopping every two blocks or so to let people on and off.

  “There’s a keeper,” Arthur said suddenly, pointing out the window.

  We were stopped at a red light, and I looked out at the row of storefronts he was pointing at. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me.

  “Check out the name of the beauty parlor,” he told me.

  I hadn’t even noticed the narrow little shop wedged in between the dry cleaner’s and the hardware store. There was a white sign hanging over the door that read SHEAR MAGIC, the middle of the M made out of a pair of opened scissors.