The Life and Crimes of Bernetta Wallflower

by Lisa Graff

  And just like that, the pedaling got harder.

  Then the steering started to get hard, too, because I started thinking more thoughts. That was the problem with me. I could never stop thinking. I’d told Miss Eveline, my old counselor back at Cedar Haven Elementary, that, and she’d said, “Oh, Trent, that’s silly. Everyone’s always thinking.” Then she gave me the Book of Thoughts, so I could write my thoughts down instead of having them all poking around in my brain all the time and bothering me. I didn’t see as how it had helped very much so far, but I guess it hadn’t hurt either.

  Those guys had been playing pickup all summer, that’s what I was thinking on my way to the park. I’d seen them, when I was circling the field on my bike. Just popping wheelies, or whatever. Writing down thoughts, because what else was I supposed to do? At first I’d waited for them to ask me to join in, and then I’d figured maybe they didn’t know I wanted to, and now here I was wondering if I even wanted to play at all. Which was a stupid thing to wonder, obviously, because why wouldn’t I want to play? I hadn’t swung a bat the entire summer, so my arm was feeling pretty rusty. And what with sixth grade starting in three short days, I knew I better get not pretty rusty pretty quick if I wanted to join the intramural team. Because the kids on the intramural team, those were the guys they picked from for the real team in the spring, and the competition was tough, even in sixth. That’s what my brother Aaron told me, and he should know, since he landed on the high school varsity team when he was only a freshman. The middle school team, Aaron said, that’s where you learned everything you needed to know for high school. Where you practiced your fundamentals. Where the coaches got a feel for you.

  But here I was, the last Friday before sixth grade began, not even sure I was up for a stupid pickup game in the stupid park.

  This is what I mean about having too many thoughts.

  So like I said, it was tough, getting to the park. It was tougher still, forcing myself through the grass toward the field. The grass was only an inch high, probably, but you’d’ve thought it was up to my waist, what with how slow I was moving.

  When I got to the edge of the field, sure enough a bunch of the guys were there, my old group, warming up for a game. A couple new guys, too, it looked like. And all I had to do—I knew that all I had to do—was open up my mouth and holler at them.

  “Hey!” I’d holler. I could hear the words in my head. “Mind if I join you?”

  But I couldn’t do it. It turned out opening my mouth was even harder than pedaling. Maybe because the last time I’d opened my mouth and hollered that, well, it hadn’t turned out so well.

  So what was I supposed to do? I dumped my bike in the grass and flopped down next to it, and just so I didn’t look like a creeper sitting there watching everyone else play baseball, I tugged out my Book of Thoughts and started scribbling. I guess I was glad I’d brought it now.

  This one wasn’t the original Book of Thoughts. I’d filled up that one in just a few weeks (I don’t think Miss Eveline knew how many thoughts I had when she gave it to me). I was on my fifth book now, and somewhere along the line I’d switched from writing my thoughts down to drawing them. I wasn’t a super good artist—I never got things on the page exactly the same way I could see them in my head—but for whatever reason, I liked drawing my thoughts better than writing. Maybe because it felt more like a hobby and less like the thing the school counselor told me to do.

  Anyway, I drew a lot these days.

  After a while of drawing I decided to look up. See how the game was going. See if any of the guys were about to ask me to play (not that I was sure if I wanted to). They didn’t look like they were, so my eyes got to wandering around the rest of the park.

  I saw the side of her face first, the left side, while she was walking her fluffy white dog not far from where I was sitting on the side of the baseball field. I didn’t recognize her at first, actually. I thought she might be a new kid, just moved to town. Thought she had a good face for drawing.

  Big, deep, round brown eyes (well, one of them, anyway—the left one). Curly, slightly frizzy brown hair pulled back away from her face. Half of a small, upturned mouth. She was dressed kind of funny—this loud, neon-pink T-shirt blouse thing with two ties hanging down from the neck (were those supposed to do something? I never understood clothes that were supposed to do something), and zebra-print shorts, and what looked like a blue shoelace tied into a bow in her hair. The kind of outfit that says, “Yup. Here I am. I look . . . weird.” But that wasn’t the first thing I noticed about her—her weird outfit. The first thing I noticed was that the left side of her face was awfully good for drawing.

  Then she tilted her head in my direction, and I saw the rest of her.

  I recognized her right away. Of course I did. Fallon Little was a very recognizable person.

  The scar was thin but dark, deep pink, much darker than the rest of her face. Raised and mostly smooth at the sides, with a thicker rough line in the center. The scar started just above the middle of her left eyebrow and curved around the bridge of her nose and down and down the right side of her face until it ended, with a slight crook, at the right side of her mouth. That was where her top lip seemed to tuck into the scar a little bit, to become almost part of it.

  Fallon had had the scar for as long as I’d known her. She’d moved to Cedar Haven back in first grade, and she’d had the scar then. Some people thought she’d been born with it, but no one knew for sure. If you asked, she’d tell you, but you knew it was a lie. A different story every time. Once I’d been sitting next to Hannah Crawley in chorus when Fallon described how she was mauled by a grizzly while trying to rescue an orphaned baby girl.

  (Hannah believed her, I think, but Hannah was pretty dense.)

  Fallon Little saw me looking at her, from across the grass.

  And she winked at me.

  Quick as a flash, I turned back to my notebook. Not staring at Fallon Little and her fluffy white dog at all.

  Drawing. I’d been drawing the whole time.

  Still, while I was drawing my thoughts on the paper, I couldn’t help wondering how I’d never noticed the rest of Fallon Little’s face before. It was like I’d just gotten to the scar, and then stopped looking.

  Like I said, it wasn’t a terrible face.

  I guess I was concentrating on my drawing pretty hard—I do that sometimes, get lost in my Book of Thoughts—because when I finally did notice the baseball that had rolled into my left leg, I thought it was the one from my pocket. Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense, obviously, because how would the baseball jump out of my pocket and start rolling toward me? Plus, my baseball was still in my pocket, I could feel it.

  But sometimes my thoughts didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  So it wasn’t my baseball, obviously. It came from those guys in the field. Which I figured out as soon as a couple of them started walking over to retrieve it. Jeremiah Jacobson. Stig Cooper.

  And Noah Gorman.

  Noah Gorman didn’t even like sports, I knew that for a fact. I used to be the one who dragged him to pickup games, so what was he doing here without me? Not that I cared. Not that it mattered if Noah wanted to spend all his time with Jeremiah Jacobson, the biggest jerk in the entire world.

  Jeremiah Jacobson was pretty scrawny (my brother Aaron could’ve snapped him like a toothpick—heck, give me another month and I could do it), but he acted like he was the king of the whole town. His parents owned the only movie theater in Cedar Haven, so he never shut up about how he and all his stupid friends could get in to all the free movies they wanted. Free popcorn and sodas, too. Even candy. I heard that there were pictures up behind the counter of Jeremiah and all his friends, so the high school kids who worked there would always know not to charge them. It might’ve been a lie, but you never know. Maybe that’s why Noah was hanging out with him now—for the popcorn.

&nb
sp; Anyway, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that when those guys came to get their ball, they weren’t going to ask me to join the game.

  “Hey, you,” Jeremiah said, as soon as he was within hollering distance. “Give us back our ball.”

  Seriously, that’s what he said. “Give us back our ball.” Like I had stolen his idiotic ball or something, instead of him practically chucking it at me, which is what happened. Didn’t even use my name either. Trent Zimmerman. We’d lived in the same town since we were babies. And it was a small town.

  Well.

  As soon as he said that, I got that fire in my body, the one that started like a ball in my chest, dense and heavy, then radiated down to my stomach, my legs, my toes, and out to my neck, my face, my ears. Even all the way to my fingernails. Hot, prickly fire skin, all over.

  I snatched the ball out of the grass and clenched it tight in my fiery hand. Then I stood up so Jeremiah could see just how tall I was.

  Taller than him.

  “This is my ball,” I told him as he and the other guys got closer. That was a lie, obviously, but they were pissing me off. And when I got pissed off and the fire was up to my ears and down to my toes, well, I wasn’t exactly in charge of what I said. “Go find your own.”

  I didn’t look at Noah. Who cared what he thought about anything? He was hanging out with Jeremiah Jacobson. His thoughts didn’t matter anymore.

  Jeremiah cocked his head to one side. “You serious?” he said. “That’s our ball. Don’t be a turd.” Only he didn’t say “turd.” “Give it back.”

  “Yeah,” Stig said, “give it back.” Stig Cooper was the fattest kid in town. Dumbest, too. Not to mention an enormous jerk.

  Noah stood just behind the two of them, shrugging at the ground, like he didn’t really care if he got the baseball back or not.

  “Make me,” I told them.

  I think Stig might’ve actually tried to fight me, and even though he was thick like an ox, I bet I could’ve taken him easy. Quick and mean, that’s what Dad said about me when he was teaching me how to defend myself. He meant it as a compliment.

  Stig didn’t get the chance to get pummeled, though, because Jeremiah Jacobson, for all his faults, was a lot smarter than Stig was, and he could always find a way to get to you that didn’t involve punching.

  My Book of Thoughts. I’d left it in the grass, like some kind of moron.

  “Hey, look,” he told the other guys, snatching the book off the grass, “I found the little girl’s diary.” And he held it over his head and started flipping through the pages. Even though I was taller, I couldn’t grab at it, because Jeremiah’s bodyguard, Stig, kept blocking me. “The little girl’s an artist,” Jeremiah said as he flipped. Stig hooted like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and Noah Gorman didn’t laugh and he didn’t help with the bodyguarding, but he didn’t go away either. The ball of fire in my chest was getting hotter and hotter, till I almost couldn’t stand it. But I couldn’t get that notebook.

  Then all of a sudden, when Jeremiah had flipped through maybe five or six pages, he stopped flipping. He didn’t give back my thoughts, though. Instead, his eyes went wide at me and his face went long and he said, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Well.

  “Give it back,” I said, still trying to pummel through the Wall of Stig to get my notebook. “It’s mine.”

  “What’s in it?” Stig asked.

  Jeremiah went back to flipping. “He’s like, sick, or something,” he said. “It’s all messed-up stuff.”

  It’s not messed up, I wanted to say. It’s just my thoughts. But of course I didn’t say that.

  “It’s all, like, people getting attacked,” Jeremiah went on. Still flipping. “A guy getting eaten by a shark, a guy smushed under a tree, a guy falling off a building.”

  It was a tightrope, like in the circus. The guy was falling off a tightrope, not a building. I knew I was no great artist, but that seemed obvious.

  The grass on this end of the park must’ve been super fascinating, because that’s what Noah was staring at.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jeremiah asked me again.

  It was the kind of question you really couldn’t answer.

  “Leave him alone.”

  Well. That was a voice I hadn’t expected to hear.

  “Go away, Fallon,” Jeremiah told her. Like he was in charge of the whole park.

  She stood right in front of him with one hand on her hip, her fluffy white dog yanking at its leash. She didn’t look afraid of him in the slightest. “Not until you give Trent his notebook back.” Her little dog yapped.

  The fire was up to my hairline now. “I’m fine,” I told her. I didn’t need a girl defending me.

  “Go away,” Jeremiah told her again. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “Yeah,” Stig agreed. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  Noah looked like he was going to write a love poem to the grass, it was so interesting.

  “It does too have to do with me,” Fallon argued. Her dog yapped again. (I really wished he’d take a chunk out of Jeremiah’s leg. But it wasn’t that kind of dog.) “Those are drawings of me.”

  “What?” Jeremiah said, flipping his gaze from the pages to Fallon and back.

  “What?” I said, even louder.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I asked Trent to draw some theories about how I might’ve gotten my scar, because I don’t remember. Amnesia,” she explained, as though we’d even asked. Her little dog yapped. “So he made some pictures.”

  Jeremiah looked at the notebook one more time. A drawing of a guy standing at the very tip of an exploding volcano. “Is that true?” Jeremiah asked me. “You drew all these pictures of her?”

  On the one side of me was Jeremiah Jacobson and his bodyguards, holding my Book of Thoughts. And on the other side was stupid, nosy Fallon Little and her yappy dog. And what was I supposed to say? Those drawings weren’t of Fallon, that was for sure. But if Jeremiah and Stig and Noah knew the truth, they’d think I was even sicker than they already did.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what it is.” And while Jeremiah and Stig were busy hooting with laughter, and Noah was still focused on his love affair with the grass, I managed to snatch back my Book of Thoughts and stuff it safely into the front pocket of my sweatshirt. “Take your stupid ball,” I told Jeremiah, tossing the baseball at him. He caught it easily.

  Fallon was grinning big, like she’d helped me out so much. “You boys can leave now,” she told them.

  Jeremiah just rolled his eyes. “Tell your girlfriend there’s something on her face,” he told me. And then he and his bodyguards walked away.

  When they were safe back on the field, I jumped onto my bike and was ready to pedal my way home when I heard Fallon say, “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  I didn’t turn around. “I didn’t say thank you, by the way,” I grumbled.

  I could almost hear her shrug. “You owe me one now.”

  “Whatever,” I replied. I pushed my right foot down hard onto the pedal.

  “Trent?” she said.

  I sighed and stopped pedaling. Did turn around, then. “I’m going home,” I told her.

  She didn’t seem to care about that. “What are the drawings of, really?” she asked. She had scooped up her yappy white dog and was staring at me now, those two big brown eyes, one on either side of that deep pink scar.

  “None of your business,” I replied.

  She nodded, like that was true. Her little dog yapped. And I pedaled away for real. “See you later, Trent!” she called after me.

  “See you,” I told her. But I didn’t mean it.

  The pedaling home was hard, harder than it had been on the way to the park, because my whole body was fire now, all over. I couldn’t believe I’d let anybody see m
y Book of Thoughts. That was just mine, and no one had ever looked at it before, not even Miss Eveline at school. Stupid, I told myself, with every push of the pedals. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Those drawings weren’t of Fallon and her lame scar. I wished they were. I’d rather have thoughts about that. Instead my thoughts, every page, the whole five volumes, were all about nothing but Jared Richards.

  The kid I’d killed in February.

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