“Have you ever noticed that beauty parlors always have ridiculous names like that with bad puns in them?” Arthur said, jotting it down in his notebook. “A CUT ABOVE, MANE ATTRACTION, spelled m-a-n-e. My favorite so far, though, is CLIP JOINT. I mean, come on, who would want to call their place of business CLIP JOINT?” Arthur said with a laugh.
The bus was moving again. I could feel him looking up at me, but I pretended not to notice and stared over his head out the window.
“Look, I’m sorry about what happened this morning, James,” Arthur said. “It’s a common mistake, the Arthur/author thing. I’ve heard it a dozen times before—even from kids older than you. Please don’t feel bad.”
“I don’t,” I said.
In fact it seemed like ages ago that I’d called him Arthur in front of everybody. I didn’t feel bad about it anymore, but I was still sore about the conversation with Miss Miller.
My hands were sweaty. I wiped my left palm down my pant leg. Then I let go of the strap long enough to dry my right hand too.
Arthur turned his head sideways so he could look at the titles on the spines of my library books. “Pretty eclectic taste,” he said.
I didn’t know what eclectic meant, but I didn’t ask. Arthur pulled up his sleeve and looked at his watch.
“I need to get home and feed my cat.” That got my attention, and I looked at him. He smiled up at me, the light catching in his glasses making them shine like two silver coins. “Do you have a cat too, James?”
“No,” I said.
He tilted his head a little to one side, and my stomach lurched unexpectedly as the memory of Sapphy, the old Sapphy, doing that same thing flew through my mind.
“You used to have a cat, though, right?”
I had barely said two words to him. How could he possibly know about Mister?
“Do you have ESP?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
Arthur laughed, but it wasn’t a mean laugh. It was soft like the rest of his voice.
“Now that’s a great question,” he said. “Mostly kids ask me where my ideas come from and how many drafts I have to do before a book is finished. No, I don’t have ESP. I don’t even believe in it.”
“Then how did you know I had a cat?” I asked.
“You told me,” he said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, not in so many words maybe, but you did tell me. You perked up a little when I mentioned my cat. Then when I asked you if you had a cat, even though you said no, the way you said it gave me a feeling that maybe you did have one once but something happened to it. The only special power I put any stock in at all is the power of observation, and all that means is looking beyond the surface of things.”
I shifted uncomfortably and looked down at my feet. I was tasting butterscotch, and I knew why. I didn’t like that he could see inside me like that. It felt dangerous. And familiar.
“I wasn’t planning on having a cat,” Arthur went on. “I’m actually more of a dog person, but when this one showed up on my doorstep out of the blue one day last fall, all bones and big eyes, I didn’t have the heart to turn him away. I’m a sucker for strays.”
I knew it was dumb the minute it occurred to me, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was really a coincidence, the cat showing up on Arthur’s doorstep like that last fall. Maybe it wasn’t out of the blue. Maybe it was something else.
“Is your cat all black except for a little white spot right smack between his eyes?” I asked.
Arthur laughed that same soft laugh. “Good guess, but no. Jinx is an orange tabby,” he said. “Marmalade-colored with bits of white.”
I felt a sharp pang of disappointment, followed quickly by a flush of embarrassment. Had I actually thought it was possible that Mister wasn’t really dead, that he’d walked all the way from Battle Creek to Traverse City to find me, ending up on Arthur’s doorstep instead by accident?
We were getting close to my stop, so I began to gather up my books.
“You were listening today, weren’t you?” Arthur said as he handed me a book off the pile.
“In class, you mean?” I said.
“No. I mean when I was talking with Miss Miller after class.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” I lied.
“She told me your dad took off,” he said.
“Yeah, so?”
“Not that it’s any of my business, but for what it’s worth, I know something about how that feels. My parents divorced when I was in grade school. That’s where the idea for Losing Perfect came from.”
“Is that what happened to the parents in your book, they got divorced?” I asked. “I thought they got snatched by aliens or something.”
“No aliens. They just drop off the face of the earth. It’s kind of a metaphor, you know?”
“Oh,” I said. I knew what he meant. We’d talked about metaphors in class that year.
I leaned over and pulled the cord to let the driver know I wanted to get off at the next stop. Then, bracing myself with my hip against the edge of the seat to keep my balance, I gathered up the last of my books.
“Can I ask you something, James?” Arthur said.
I shrugged.
“Was that your dialogue I read, the one about don’t you dare?”
“Yeah,” I said uneasily.
“I thought so.”
“I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t think of anything else,” I said.
“Shouldn’t have done it? Why? You were the only one who got the point of the exercise.”
“I just wrote down something somebody said to me. It’s not like I thought it up myself or anything.”
“I know,” he said. “It was real. That’s why it was so good. Ever thought about becoming a writer?”
“Me?” I said. “I can’t write.”
“I used to say that too.”
“Yeah, well, I really can’t write,” I said. “And besides, I wouldn’t want to.”
I realized too late that I should have thought before I said that. He might be offended. I blushed and swallowed, but I noticed I wasn’t tasting butterscotch anymore.
“I’ll tell you something about writing—it changes how you feel about things,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
Arthur thought for a second.
“You ever get a splinter?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure plenty of times.”
“Well, you know how the second you pull it out, you feel this great sense of relief? It’s kind of like that.”
The bus stopped.
“This is me,” I said.
Arthur smiled and lifted his hand.
“It was good talking to you, James,” he said.
The doors opened, and as I started down the steps with my books tucked under my arms, I hesitated. I knew I would probably never see him again, and I also knew that I had been wrong. Arthur wasn’t like Miss Miller. He wasn’t like her at all.
“You getting off or what, kid?” the driver asked impatiently.
I stepped off the bus onto the road, but before the doors closed, I stuck my head in and called back to Arthur:
“My name isn’t James, it’s Jamie.”
14
AUDREY KROUCH WAS STANDING AT THE BOTTOM OF the driveway, drinking a bottle of orange pop, when I got there. She had changed out of her stiff dress into a pair of jeans and taken her tight ponytail out, her limp hair hanging loose now, a big bump in it where the rubber band had been. She had her glasses on.
“What happened to you?” she asked, eyeing my torn jeans. “Did you miss the bus?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Then I fell down running for another one.”
“You’re still coming over, though, right?” she said. “To get hypnotized?”
It had been a long day, and I’d forgotten all about that.
“I don’t know,” I said, and I started walking along the ditch toward the field.
Audrey followed me. “Aw, come
on,” she said. “It won’t take very long. We can stop in the laundry shed, and I’ll get you a bottle of pop on the way to my place.”
We were in the field by then, pushing through the tall weeds.
“You should have heard Larry Baywood on the school bus this afternoon,” Audrey said. “When you didn’t show up, he started calling me the Black Widow and told everybody I probably ate you alive the way the spiders do. Guess what I did?”
“Beats me,” I said.
“Laughed like a hyena right along with the rest of them. I acted like it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life, and that shut him right up. Pretty smart, huh?”
I had to admit I would never have thought of doing that.
“I think we ought to come up with a nickname for him since he’s got them for us,” she said. “You got any ideas?”
I shook my head no, but a few minutes later, as we went over the top of the hill and the trailers came into view, I asked her, “Do you know what padiddle means?” She said she didn’t, so I explained why I thought it would make a good nickname for Larry.
“That’s mean, making fun of somebody for having a deformed eyeball,” she told me, pushing her glasses up her nose.
“I wouldn’t say it to his face,” I said, feeling a little ashamed.
She grinned at me.
“I would.”
Audrey kept bugging me about coming over, so finally I gave in and said I would. I didn’t really believe she could hypnotize people, but I figured at the very least there was an orange pop in it for me.
“I have to drop these books off at home first.”
“Can I come with you?” she asked.
“No. Meet me at the shed.”
She had just headed off in the opposite direction when I heard a lawn mower start up and stopped dead in my tracks. Old Gray was close by. I stood completely still until I was sure exactly which direction the sound was coming from. Then I continued walking home.
It was easiest to keep track of him when he was mowing or using the leaf blower. Otherwise I could never be sure exactly where he was, and even though I didn’t go anywhere near the office, there was always a chance I could run into him by accident coming or going from one of the trailers. It had happened several times. Once or twice he had tried to stop me, get me to talk to him, but I’d run. I’d been dumb enough to let it happen once, but I was never going to let it happen again.
I pushed open the door with my shoulder and dropped the heavy books and my backpack just inside on the floor. Sapphy must have been taking a nap in her room, because Marge was sitting at the kitchen table with her feet up on a chair, drinking one of my mother’s diet colas and reading the Star.
“Where are you running off to in such a hurry?” she asked.
“Nowhere,” I said, backing out the door and letting it slam closed behind me.
Audrey was waiting for me outside the shed when I got there.
“Somebody’s inside,” she said. “We better wait.”
I looked in and saw a woman with pink curlers in her hair just starting to fold a huge pile of laundry. Audrey and I sat down on a bench outside the shed and started tossing pebbles at the metal trash can.
Ping!
“So what’s the deal with your aunt? Is she crazy?” Audrey asked as she leaned down and scooped up a handful of gravel.
“Who told you that?”
“No one, but I’ve seen her. She walks around outside in her pajamas,” she said, closing one eye and taking aim before letting a pebble fly.
Ping!
“Yeah, well, lots of people walk around outside wearing strange things,” I said, giving her a pointed look.
“I told you already, these help me see.” She pushed up her glasses.
“Well, my aunt Sapphy’s not crazy. She got hit in the head and lost her memory, that’s all.”
“Forever?”
“Not if I can find her magic trigger,” I said.
Ping!
“Nice shot. What the heck is a magic trigger?” Audrey asked, brushing the dust off her hands and turning to give me her full attention.
“It’s too hard to explain.” I hoped that would be enough of an answer to satisfy her, but of course it wasn’t.
“Does it have anything to do with guns?”
“No.”
“Magic potions?”
Audrey was a bottomless pit of questions. I decided to change the subject, grabbing up the first thing that came into my mind.
“Where does your mom get her hair cut?”
Audrey gave me a strange look.
“Why do you care?” she said.
“Does she go to Shear Magic by any chance?” I asked.
“No. I think she goes to a place called Snippity-doo-dah.”
I laughed and wondered if that one was on Arthur’s list.
“Does this have anything to do with magic triggers?” Audrey asked me.
“No, I was trying to change the subject.”
“Why? You haven’t finished telling me about the magic triggers yet.”
“I don’t feel like talking about that right now,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s private, okay? And besides, even if I told you, you’d just keep asking me more questions about it.”
“What’s wrong with asking questions?”
“I don’t like to answer them.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why you never raise your hand in class even when you know the right answer.”
I sighed.
“Is there anything you don’t think you know?”
“Yeah, I don’t think I know what a magic trigger is. Not yet anyway.”
The woman in the curlers finally finished her folding and emerged with a basket piled high with clean laundry. We waited until she was out of sight; then we went inside, and Audrey walked over and kicked the machine.
“How’d you learn how to do that, anyway?” I asked, taking a swig from the ice-cold bottle of pop she had handed me.
“I figured it out by accident. I was in a bad mood one day and felt like kicking something. I got lucky and hit the right spot. Don’t tell anybody though, okay?”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Can you imagine what would happen if the manager found out? What’s his-name in the office, you know, the guy with the gray hair.”
“Call me Old Gray,” he said the day I helped him hang up his Christmas lights. “That’s what all my friends call me.”
“I know who you mean,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice even. “I think his name is Mr. Greene.”
“Yeah. Anyway, what if Mr. Greene found out and called the cops on me? My mom would hit the roof. You want another one before we go?” Audrey asked, nodding toward the pop machine.
“No, thanks.” I held up my half-empty bottle. “I haven’t finished this one yet.”
We turned right out of the shed and started walking toward Audrey’s place. I didn’t even have time to think about how weird it had felt when she brought up Old Gray, because right away she was firing more questions at me. One thing I will say about Audrey Krouch’s questions, they weren’t like anybody else’s.
“How much would you charge to eat a pinecone?”
“What kind of thing is that to ask a person?” I said.
“What’s wrong with it? All I want to know is how much you’d charge,” she said.
“Why would I charge anything?”
“You mean you’d eat a pinecone for free?” she asked.
“No, I mean I wouldn’t eat a pinecone at all.”
“I would, for a million bucks. Wouldn’t you?”
“For a million bucks? Sure,” I said.
“How ’bout for a thousand?”
I tipped my bottle up and drained the last couple of inches of sweet pop.
“Yeah, I’d do it for a thousand,” I said, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. “But who’s going to pay me a thousand bucks to eat a pinecone
?”
“There are a lot of kooks in the world.”
“I can think of one I know right now,” I said, shooting her a sideways look.
“Very funny. This is it.” She pointed to a white trailer on our left, the last one in the row. “The car’s not there, which means my mom isn’t home.”
“Maybe she’s out getting you pinecones for dinner,” I said.
Audrey laughed and ran on ahead and up the steps of the rickety little porch of unit number fifteen. When I caught up with her, she was fumbling with her house key, which was tied to the zipper of her backpack with a long gray shoelace. She put the key in the lock and jiggled it a few times until finally it turned.
It’s funny how every house has its own special smell. Funnier still how hard it is to describe that smell, even when it’s your own house. I could draw you a picture of our place in Battle Creek, where every window and door was and how the furniture was set up, but when I try to think of how to describe what it smelled like when I walked in the door, the only word I can come up with is home. Audrey’s house smelled oniony, like her.
The layout of the trailer was identical to Sapphy’s, but it felt completely different. For one thing, it was dark. There were heavy curtains on all the windows, and the furniture was big and hulking. It was like a cave crowded with boulders.
“You want something to eat before we start?” Audrey asked. “My mom made a cake last night. Chocolate with marshmallow frosting. There’s probably some left, unless she ate it for lunch.”
I’d seen Audrey’s mom around. Lucille Krouch was a large woman with short, frizzy hair dyed bright orange. She had a gap between her front teeth and a loud laugh, and she drove a big old boat of a Chevy, which rode so low to the ground, it sometimes scraped bottom.
I shook my head. Now that I was actually standing alone with Audrey in her oniony living room, I was feeling pretty nervous.
“Maybe I should go,” I said, taking a step toward the door.
“Why? You want to get hypnotized, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on. It won’t take very long.”
“How long?” I asked.