Guy Wire

  I stopped listening. I know she meant well, but I have about zero tolerance for my mom’s New-Agey junk. How do you wind a positive thought around someone, anyway? All I could picture was Buzz tangled up in a yo-yo string.

  “At least give it a try, Guysie. It can’t hurt. Besides, it’s better than just sitting here worrying. Come on. Think about Buzz. Maybe some great time you had in the old fort. Or at camp. Or school. You guys have had a million terrific times together.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture Buzz. I sure had looked at his silly old freckled puss enough to have it memorized. But for some reason the first thing I pictured wasn’t his face; it was his left sneaker. Why? And then I remembered. One of his shoes must have come off when the car hit him. I had seen it lying on its side in the gutter, with the laces still tied, a few feet away from where Buzz was lying on the pavement. As I pictured the empty shoe, I heard my own ridiculously happy voice coming back to me as I shouted to Buzz, “That’s it, gum ball. Prepare to die!” The horrible relevance of those words made me sit up with a jolt.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother asked.

  “I’m trying to think of positive stuff, but it’s not working,” I explained, still shaken by the image of that sneaker and the memory of those fateful words. Prepare to die! How could I have said that? I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it.

  My mother put her arm around me, and I leaned against her again.

  “Think back to the very beginning, Guy. When Buzzy first came to town. Do you remember that?” she said.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact we were kind of talking about that right before he—before the…”

  I felt my chest tighten.

  “Try not to think about the present, Honeybunch. Go back to the beginning. To the very first time you and Buzzy met each other. What a lucky thing that turned out to be, huh?”

  I closed my eyes and let myself travel back in time. Memories spun in and out of focus, clicking into place like a slide show. My mom was right; meeting Buzz had turned out to be a lucky thing. The luckiest. But it hadn’t exactly started out that way….

  Chapter Three

  The summer before second grade started, I turned seven, and when I blew out the candles on my cake, I made the exact same wish I’d made the year before. And the year before that too. I wanted a best friend more than anything in the world.

  Lana Zuckerman had Autumn Hockney. Max LeMott had Frankie Arches. Even Barry Madison, who was creepy and had a rotten front tooth, had a best friend. But I’d never had one. Not ever. I was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with me. People seemed to think I was a perfectly likeable, regular kind of kid, despite the fact that both of my parents were notoriously weird. So I figured that finding a best friend had more to do with luck—and that for some reason I was just unlucky.

  My second-grade teacher was named Mrs. Hunn. She was pretty nice and hardly ever yelled at us unless we did something really bad like throwing wet paper-towel balls on the bathroom ceiling. She had neat stuff on her desk, which she didn’t mind if we looked at as long as we didn’t touch it. There was a framed picture of her waterskiing with her husband in Florida. A statue of the Empire State Building that had a thermometer in it that worked. And a little glass bell, which she rang whenever she had an announcement to make to the class.

  I remember one day in the fall of that year—it must have been October, because I think we were making jack-o’-lanterns out of orange construction paper—Mrs. Hunn rang her bell, and when I looked up she was standing in front of her desk with her arm around this boy I’d never seen before. I knew right away that this was the new kid she’d been telling us was going to be joining our class. My heart sank. I’d been kind of hoping that my luck might change and he would turn out to be potential best-friend material. But that was obviously not going to be the case.

  First of all, instead of jeans and a T-shirt, which is what all the rest of us boys had on, he was wearing a suit. A little blue jacket with matching pants, a bright white shirt, and a red-and-white-striped tie with a tiny tie pin shaped like a horseshoe stuck in it to hold it down flat against his shirtfront. His shoes were the lace-up kind, and they were two-toned—brown on the toes and heels and white on the sides. He had a white handkerchief sticking out of his jacket pocket. I repeat, a handkerchief. His pale face was splattered with a fistful of muddy freckles, and it was hard to tell what color his hair was because it was parted in the middle and flattened down on his head like a dark, wet helmet.

  “Class, this is our new student, Fennimore Adams.”

  There was total silence. Then Kevin Brudhauser, the official class bully, spoke up. “What planet are you from?” he asked, grinning and looking around for approval as some of the other kids laughed.

  “Fennimore comes to us all the way from Tennessee, Kevin,” she said, giving Kev such an evil eye that it wiped the mean smile right off his face. “From a town called…” She hesitated as she tried to remember the name.

  The boy piped up: “Pigeon Forge, Ma’am. It’s south of Knoxville a piece.”

  When he spoke, a couple of the kids snickered, because he had a thick southern accent that made his words sound strange and twangy.

  Mrs. Hunn went on to say the usual stuff about how she expected us all to give him a warm Cedar Springs welcome and show him the ropes until he was comfortable in his new surroundings. I just kept looking at that candy-cane-striped tie and those shoes and thinking, It’s a good thing geekiness isn’t contagious, because this kid could be fatal.

  “Guy, I would like you to be Fennimore’s lunch buddy today,” Mrs. Hunn said.

  Oh, man, I groaned to myself. Why me?

  Then she turned to Fennimore and asked, “Did you bring lunch from home, dear, or will you be wanting hot lunch today?”

  “My mama packed a lunch for me today, thank you kindly, Ma’am.”

  His mama? Ma’am? Why did I have to be his lunch buddy? Couldn’t somebody else do it? It was bad enough that my mother packed me the weirdest lunches in the whole world. Now I had to eat my weird lunch with the weird new kid.

  When the lunch bell rang, I shuffled slowly over to Fennimore’s desk and waited while he put away his binder and spelling book.

  “Come on,” I said, when he was finally ready. I led him down the hall to the cafeteria, walking a little in front of him just so nobody would get the wrong idea and think we were friends.

  “This cafeteria smells exactly the same as the one back in Pigeon Forge,” he said when we walked through the doors.

  “Uh-huh,” I said without looking at him.

  “Wanna hear my theory?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “I think there is this huge underground cave somewhere full of lady robots with hair nets and big moles on their chins. They program them to mix up giant vats of disgusting stuff like barbecued beef and pour it into big barrels. Then they load the barrels onto planes and drop them out of the sky like big beef bombs, splat! into cafeterias across the country.”

  I laughed. Even though it was hard to look at Fennimore in that ridiculous suit and feel anything other than pity for him, I had to admit, those barbecue beef bombs were pretty funny.

  “I don’t eat hot lunch,” I said. “My mother packs mine.”

  “Mine too,” he said with a smile, holding up his blue lunch box.

  We sat down at a table near the door and put our lunch boxes out on the table in front of us. I watched as Fennimore opened his. He pulled out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut into two neat triangles, a box of apple juice, and a banana.

  “I always used to trade with my best friend, George, back in Pigeon Forge,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. But I didn’t open my box. I was thinking about two things. One, I was trying to imagine what George was like. Probably some polite little nerd in a dorky suit. And two, I was trying to avoid having to show Fennimore what was in my lunch box.

  “Do you like to trade?” he asked, leaning over tow
ard me and reaching for my lunch box. “Let’s see whatcha got.”

  “No,” I said, putting both hands on the box and sliding it quickly over to the edge of the table, where I held it tightly against my chest.

  “No problem,” he said. “Some people don’t like swapping. George always said my lunch was too boring to trade anyway. You probably got something way more interesting than PBJ, huh?”

  “Maybe,” I said, knowing full well that whatever my mother had packed was guaranteed to scoot right past “interesting” directly into the category of “totally bizarre.”

  Fennimore unwrapped his sandwich and bit off the soft point of one of the triangles. He smiled at me as he chewed, but I looked away. He seemed nice enough, and he had made me laugh with his lunch-lady robot theory, but there was no getting around the fact that Fennimore was a dork. The helmet hair alone was clear proof of that. And I wasn’t about to befriend a dork. Life was hard enough as it was.

  “Listen,” I said suddenly. “Now that you know where the cafeteria is and everything, you don’t mind if I leave you here and go outside, do you? I sometimes like to play basketball during lunch with my friends when the weather’s nice. So I’m gonna go now, okay?”

  “Oh, sure. Okay,” he said. He sounded a little disappointed, but how sorry could I feel for him? After all, he had a normal lunch in his lunch box and a best friend back home. He was pretty lucky. Me, I didn’t even want to think about what ridiculous thing my mother had packed me for lunch, and it was depressing to think that even someone who had a silly name and walked around dressed up the way he was could have a best friend when I didn’t have one.

  “See you later,” I said as I picked up my lunch box.

  “Okay,” he said.

  When I got outside, I found a bench far away from the basketball court and opened my lunch box. As soon as I saw the contents, I was glad I’d decided not to open it up in front of Fennimore. There was a tortilla stuffed with raisin bran cereal; three slices of American cheese, which she had cut out in the shapes of the letters GUY; and a can of guava juice. Occasionally my mother puts in something good for dessert, but this time she’d packed a long, hard skinny thing covered in brown sticky stuff, which was coated with tan crumbs. I had no idea what it was. As usual she’d written a note and taped it to the inside of the lid:

  Dear Guysie—hope you like my latest invention. I call it Rabbit Delight. Don’t worry, it’s not made of rabbit—it’s a carrot covered with butterscotch sauce and peanuts. Enjoy!

  Love,

  Mom

  I unrolled the tortilla and dumped out the raisin bran. Then I put the cheese inside it and rolled it back up and ate it. I tried the guava juice, but it was repulsive so I threw it and the Rabbit Delight in the trash. It wasn’t exactly a satisfying meal, but believe it or not, I’d had worse. Sometimes the only normal thing in my lunch box was the napkin.

  When I looked up, I saw that Fennimore was standing near the basketball court looking over toward me. I felt sort of bad, because I’d told him I was going out there to play ball, and he could probably tell that I’d just wanted to eat my lunch alone. He raised one hand and kind of half waved at me. I didn’t wave back. I was not going to let my guilty conscience talk me into making the mistake of befriending this kid. My mother’s public displays of wackiness already kept me plenty busy trying to maintain my image as just a normal, regular, seven-year-old boy. I couldn’t afford to rock the boat.

  I wanted a best friend more than anything in the world—but the one I’d been wishing for every time I blew out the birthday candles was definitely not Fennimore Adams.

  Chapter Four

  When we got back to the classroom after lunch, Mrs. Hunn rang her bell for the second time that same October day.

  “Boys and girls, settle down. Settle down, please. As you know, our second-grade play, The Princess and the Pea, begins rehearsals this afternoon. Up until this morning we had absolutely no volunteers for the costume committee, but I’m very pleased to announce that we now have an enthusiastic chairperson who has volunteered to create original costumes for our entire production. Isn’t that exciting news!”

  “Who volunteered?” asked Frankie.

  “Mrs. Strang. Guy’s mother,” said Mrs. Hunn.

  “Oh, man,” I said to myself. Could this day get any worse?

  “As many of you know,” Mrs. Hunn continued, “Guy’s mother is a very, um, creative person, and I’m certain that her costumes will make a wonderful addition to our production.”

  “She’s creative all right. Did anybody see what she did last Fourth of July?” Kevin said loudly. “She’s nuts!”

  I wasn’t about to disagree with him. What she’d done was wrap red, white, and blue crepe paper all the way around our station wagon and herself and drive through town honking her horn and waving sparklers out the window. To make matters worse, she had convinced my father to dress up as the Statue of Liberty. He stood up on the passenger seat with his head sticking out of the sunroof, wearing an old green bathrobe and a cut-up wastebasket crown on his head.

  “That’s nothing. What about what she wore to the first-grade class picnic!” said Lana Zuckerman, the tallest, meanest girl in the class. “Remember that?”

  Actually she was the tallest kid, boy or girl, in the whole grade, and she would have been the meanest too, except that Kevin had that position filled. If you’d told me then that a few years later my parents would get divorced and my mother would get remarried to Lana Zuckerman’s father, I would have found the nearest cliff and thrown myself off it. But anyway, Lana was on a roll, reminding everybody about that embarrassing class picnic the year before.

  “We all saw your bare buttonhole, Guy!” She laughed, and so did everybody else who knew what she was talking about.

  At the picnic my mother had showed up wearing a vest she’d made by taking a bunch of my baby photos, punching holes in the corners, and sewing them together with yarn. I don’t mean just any baby photos. I’m talking photographs of me sitting on the potty, having my diaper changed, and rolling around in the backyard wearing nothing but a Big Bird bib. My bare buttonhole, as Lana called it, had been on display for everyone to see.

  “Class, that’s enough now. As I said, we are all most fortunate to have Mrs. Strang on board for our production.”

  When I got home that afternoon, my mother was in the kitchen frosting a cake.

  “Hi, honeybunch,” she called as I came in the back door and dropped my book bag in the corner.

  “Why didn’t you ask me if I wanted you to make costumes for the play?” I asked.

  “Well, why wouldn’t you want me to?” she said, pausing for a second with a rubber spatula full of chocolate frosting in her hand. “You can’t do a play without costumes, and Mrs. Hunn practically kissed my feet when I volunteered.”

  I looked down at my mother’s feet. Her toenails, each one painted a different color, were sticking out of the fronts of her tropical-fruit sandals—just one of her many exotic creations. She’d taken a pair of regular white shoes and hot-glue-gunned plastic fruit—strawberries, grapes, and pineapple chunks—all over them. I tried to imagine Mrs. Hunn kissing them.

  “This production of The Princess and the Pea is going to be unlike any production ever done before,” she announced proudly.

  “I believe that,” I said. “Let me guess, are you planning to hot-glue fruit all over everybody?”

  “I don’t know about fruit,” she said. “But maybe some little green peas would be cute!”

  “I was kidding, Mom,” I said.

  My mother smiled at me and handed me one of the beaters. I ran my tongue along the chocolatey edge. Then I gagged and hurried to the sink to spit out what I had thought was frosting but what I knew the second it collided with my tastebuds was definitely not.

  “What is that?” I said as soon as I was able to speak.

  “Chocolate pâté,” she said.

  “What’s pâté?” I asked as I grabbed a gla
ss, filled it with water, and swished out my mouth.

  “Liver,” she said.

  “Liver?” I said, “You’re making a liver cake?”

  “It’s not supposed to be a dessert; it’s more of an appetizer. I made it up,” she said.

  “Yeah, I can tell.” I tried to wipe the last of the sickening flavor off my tongue with a wet paper towel. “Next time warn me, will you?”

  “I’m sorry, Guysie. How about a cookie?”

  “What’s in them—brussels sprouts?” I asked.

  “No surprises. I promise,” she said as I opened the cookie jar and pulled out a cookie.

  “Milk?” she asked.

  I nodded, and she poured me a glass of cold milk. We heard a car door slam. My father was home.

  “Wuckums!” my mother called as she ran to the door to greet him.

  My father’s real name is William, but he couldn’t say it when he was a kid so he called himself Wuckums instead. It probably stuck because it actually fit him much better than William.

  “What’s that wonderful smell?” he asked, whiffing the air in the kitchen. “Kind of chocolatey yet at the same time—do I detect a hint of liver?”

  “It’s chocolate pâté. I invented it myself,” my mother said proudly.

  “How exotic! Just like you, my little dump truck,” my father said, kissing my mother’s cheek with a loud smack.

  I often wondered what it would be like to have a father who called his wife “darling” instead of “dump truck,” not to mention a mother who knew that liver and chocolate don’t go together.

  “How was your day at school, Guychik?” my father asked.

  “Tell him the big news!” my mother said excitedly.

  “What big news?” I asked.

  “About the play, silly,” she prompted.