The Secret Sheriff of Sixth Grade

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  His favorite sport was soccer. Uh-oh—I hadn’t had the world’s greatest luck with the soccer players in our class. What if he started hanging out with them?

  At that point, I asked if I could use the bathroom. He said, “Sure, use mine.” His personal bathroom was bigger than my bedroom. I was pretty sure his tub was bigger than my bedroom. And everything was so nice and fresh smelling. He had three different kinds of hand soap!

  I was practically paralyzed by the glory of it. Plus, how was I supposed to choose? Was I more of a squirt-out-of-the-little-mermaid guy? Or a no-nonsense, yellow-antibacterial-bar man? Or perhaps a half-seashell type?

  In the end, I tried all three. I left there feeling intimidated, but very, very clean.

  After the interview, we played video games on the system in his room until dinner. Of course, he destroyed me at everything, because I had zero experience with this stuff. My idea of high-end gaming technology was a checkerboard that still had all of its pieces. But I had fun anyway—or at least I did until he said, “This is boring! I’m sick of these games! I can’t wait till Christmas! When we get back from the Bahamas—”

  That was the moment I decided his parents couldn’t drive me home.

  I made up a lame excuse about how my mom didn’t like me to be home alone when she was working late. I asked to use a phone, and called Aunt Cat. She said she could pick me up after dinner. It all worked out fine, at the moment. It was only later that I realized something: I had called her “Aunt Cat” and Nate had seen her when she picked me up. Now Nate knew my aunt was my aunt. What if he somehow saw her at school when she was supposedly being my mom?

  And, of course, the next Monday, Nate started asking when he could come over to my house. I told him every lie I could think of: My mom had the flu. Our kitchen was being redone. I had a late dance class. (Why the heck not?) In the end, though, I couldn’t make him fail English just so I wouldn’t get humiliated, so I asked if we could just do the interview at his place again. I would bring the snacks and some show-and-tell items.

  He told me not to worry about the snacks, and we arranged to meet at his house that Saturday. I had to take two city buses and then walk several blocks, and I was basically dying by the time I staggered up to his door with a gigantic cardboard box in my arms and a knapsack on my back, but at least he hadn’t seen my apartment. Or interacted with my mother.

  I had left her a note, but I suspected she would still be out cold when I got home. Just another fun weekend of quality time at the Falconer estate.

  Nate’s mom had come through again on the snack front. As we worked our way through a constant flow of chips, dips, vegetables, and juices I couldn’t even describe, much less name, I answered all of Nate’s basic questions. Then he asked me what I had brought.

  First, I opened the backpack, took out a folder, and showed him a picture I had drawn of my father’s medal. I had spent hours getting the details right from memory. I had even drawn the medal’s three-colored ribbon, and the plush, velvet-lined case the medal had come in. Plus, one day in school when we had free computer time, I had typed out the commendation letter that had come with it. I knew every word by heart.

  “Wow,” Nate said. “But why didn’t you bring the real thing?”

  “Um, I can’t because of my mom.”

  This was technically true. But boy, I wished with all my heart that I could have shown him the real thing. Everybody loves a good medal. Including me.

  I paused for a moment, and considered showing him my sheriff’s star, which was in my pocket, as usual. But a plastic star seemed pretty lame compared to an actual medal, so I skipped that and opened the box, which contained wood chips, a paper envelope full of seed-and-nut mix, and—of course—my own personal gaming system, Freddy. He might not have had controllers, or 3-D graphics, but he was warm and cuddly, and he always stood up on his back legs whenever he saw me. Even if I was probably going to break out in hives soon from spending a whole afternoon with him.

  “Uh, what’s that?” Nate asked.

  I picked Freddy up, and held him up in the light. “This is Freddy. He’s my hamster. I rescued him from the pet store. He was going to die, because—”

  “Ew! What’s wrong with his leg?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It got bitten off by the other hamsters when he was a baby. He was the smallest, weakest one, so they—”

  Just then, Nate’s mother walked in, saw Freddy crawling up my arm, and shrieked like she had seen a giant rat.

  Then she turned around and ran out of the room screaming, “Honey, there’s a GIANT RAT in Nathan’s room!”

  Well, that explained the shriek.

  Nate turned to me and grinned fiercely. “All right, I kind of like him!”

  But then Nate’s dad came charging into the room, holding a tennis racket aloft in one hand and a golf ball cocked behind his head in the other. He looked like he was about to go to war against the Montvale Country Club.

  “Where is it?” he snarled. “Isn’t this just great? And you know there’s got to be more where he came from. Rats are like ants. If you see one, it means you have a hundred. Oh, this is just what I need. First, the Grumman account is giving me problems all week, and now on my one day off, I have to deal with this?”

  “Dad,” Nate said, “there’s no rat. My friend just brought his hamster over for a project we’re doing. For school.”

  “Oh, isn’t this just like your mother. She overreacts to every . . . little . . . thing!”

  I was thinking, Yeah. But she isn’t the one who barged in here ready for battle.

  Then, suddenly, Mr. Ferguson turned his attention to me, and smiled. “I’m sorry about this confusion. You must be Nate’s new friend from school.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The one he was telling me about. Bowen, is it?”

  I felt like someone had just kicked me in the stomach. My insides froze, even as I struggled to keep a smile on my face.

  Nate said, “Uh, no, Dad. This is my other friend, Maverick.”

  “Well, I guess you two should get back to work, then. It was nice meeting you . . . ”

  “Maverick.”

  “Maverick.”

  “It was nice meeting you, too, sir.” I put Freddy back in the box. The poor little guy was scared. He was shaking, and he had peed all over my forearm.

  Well, at least I knew where the good soap was.

  * * *

  When we had written up our reports, Mr. Kurt made a display in the hallway. He attached each person’s biography to their collage, and then gave us a whole class period to walk around and “learn more about our sixth-grade buds.” I had come to school late that day because the power in our apartment had blinked and my alarm clock hadn’t gone off. That had made me miss the bus, which meant a three-mile walk to school. I arrived just as Mr. Kurt was giving the instructions.

  A bunch of black jackets clustered around my collage right away. I heard Bowen’s voice from the center of the pack. In a high, mocking tone, he said, “I’m Maverick! I’m so poor, I can’t even afford a whole rodent!” All the guys in the black jackets laughed in unison, and then turned toward me on their way to the next collage.

  The closest black jacket to me was being worn by Nate Ferguson.

  You know what schools are really for?

  They’re for showing kids like me our place.

  It’s miserable on Thanksgiving when your mom is an employee at a big-box store, because you know she is going to have to work all day. It had happened to me in fourth grade (when she had just started at ArtMart) and fifth grade (House’N’Home), and sure enough, it happened again in sixth grade. I woke up that morning all alone in our apartment, and wished for the millionth time that my mother could ever hold a steady job long enough to get some seniority. Or a raise. Or, you know, anything good at all.

  There was a note on the table: Left at three a.m., home by eight p.m. Sorry I didn’t tell you in advance. Just found o
ut! Food in freezer. Love you, Mav —Mom

  That was a double shift. At least she’d be racking up the extra pay. Maybe I might even get a Christmas present this year.

  I considered calling Aunt Cat, but then she would have just gotten mad at my mom for leaving me alone and working all day on a holiday. Being bored and mildly depressed was better than starting a big flare-up between the adults.

  The day stretched ahead of me, empty and endless. Even kids with friends are supposed to hang out with their families on Turkey Day, so seeing other kids would have been out of the question even if I hadn’t completely failed with Nate.

  Well, he had tried to talk to me after the pathetic and awkward biography thing, but I wasn’t going to get slapped in the face twice. If he wanted to be one of Bowen’s MU clones, then he could just go ahead. It was a free country.

  So I’d sat all by myself at lunch, while he got to hang out with his entire soccer team. Boy, I really knew how to punish a kid.

  Anyway, I toasted a frozen English muffin for breakfast, and then sat down to watch the New York Thanksgiving parade. Which is only THE most boring and pointless thing in the world. I mean, why would I, an eleven-year-old living in the middle of nowhere, care about seeing a bunch of giant-size cartoon characters float through the streets of a big, fancy city I would probably never get to visit, with occasional interruptions for musical performances from Broadway shows I would also never see?

  It was nearly as irrelevant to my daily life as school.

  Just when I was so bored of the parade that I felt like my brain might explode, the horrible, half-broken door buzzer went off. It sounded like a dying goat: BA-a . . . a . . . ah. BA-a . . . a . . . ah.

  I jumped up and rushed to answer it before whoever was there had a chance to push it again. Mom was always telling me to look through the little peephole and see who was there before I opened the door, but I was too short to do that without pulling a chair over, and then it was embarrassing when I did open the door and the guest saw the evidence of my insanely ridiculous shortness.

  Which I know didn’t make sense, because of course they could just look at me and see my insanely ridiculous shortness. But whatever.

  Imagine my surprise when I opened the door and found myself face-to-face with Johnny. He was wearing a big, puffy down jacket. Next to him was a box that was nearly as tall as he was. Something spiky and silvery was sticking out of the top.

  “Hey,” he said. “Is your mom home?”

  It was pretty cold there in the doorway, but I felt myself starting to sweat. What was he doing here? I hadn’t seen him since the night he’d hit my mother, and I hadn’t exactly been praying for a reunion.

  “Um, no, she’s not home. She’s working.”

  “Whaddya mean, she’s working? She told me she’d be here. I brought over a tree. It, uh, fell off a truck.” He winked at me.

  Two thoughts flashed through my mind. The first was, Okay, it’s the twenty-first century. Who still winks? The second was, Oh, my God. He just said the tree fell off a truck. My mom said our TV fell off a truck. Does that mean the coolest object in our house came from Johnny? Yuck!

  I must have stood and stared like an idiot for just a little bit too long, because Johnny said, “Well?”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, while thinking, Why am I sorry? Why am I always polite to people, no matter how much I hate them? Why don’t I just go ahead and offer him some tea and cakes while I’m at it? “I woke up and found a note. She must have gotten a text last night after I went to sleep. She’s supposed to work a double shift.”

  “Well, can I come in and leave this here?”

  I wasn’t really sure what the etiquette was for this unusual social situation. I mean, where do you direct a question like this? Hey, my mother’s abusive ex-boyfriend just brought over a tacky fake Christmas tree. Do I let him in? Should I offer him a beer? Am I supposed to hang out and watch football with him for six hours until Mom gets here?

  In the end, I just stepped aside.

  After Johnny set the box in the living room, right between the couch and the TV, he left without saying another word. Then I spent several hours getting really, really mad. I mean, on the one hand, bringing someone a Christmas tree is theoretically a nice gesture. But . . .

  There were a whole lot of “buts”:

  —But he hadn’t even said hello to me. Or good-bye. Or “Sorry I busted up your mom’s face.”

  —But he had put the tree right between my seat and the parade. What kind of jerk move was that? I mean, I hated the parade, but he didn’t know that. For all he knew, I had been waiting all year to watch the cast of the newest Disney show lip-synch their hearts out.

  —But my mom hadn’t said anything about him for two months. What was he doing back in our lives at all?

  —But when I opened the box to move it, I saw that the tree was a butt-ugly monstrosity. I assumed it had been stolen from somewhere. Were we supposed to be grateful to him for bringing us the lovely gift of this illegal, all-silver, spray-painted, fake-branches-sticking-out-at-all-angles, metallic horror?

  —But why was I the only kid in the world whose mom couldn’t find a guy smart enough to know that trees are supposed to be green? Geez.

  I dragged the box to the corner of the room, went back to the couch, eventually found a football game, and tried to concentrate on the lovely violence. But I was too mad for even violence to calm me down. Even after watching an entire game, and half of another, I was still ticked off. It was terrible.

  It got so bad that I contemplated grabbing the whole box, chucking it in the Dumpster behind our building, and not mentioning Johnny’s visit at all, but I figured he had probably texted her about it. Besides, I knew my mom, and I knew that then she would feel so terrible for lying to me that she would go out and spend money we didn’t have on a nice, real tree. And a nice tree stand. And ornaments, and tinsel. By the time she was done feeling guilty, we would be out of spending money for a month.

  The last time she had gotten back together with an abusive boyfriend behind my back, she had blown a bunch of cash taking me to an amusement park, and then our electricity had gotten turned off.

  So instead of doing what I desperately wanted to do, I decided to surprise my mom by unpacking the tree and setting it up as a surprise for her. Am I a tough guy or what?

  It didn’t take long, because the whole tree basically snapped together in, like, three steps. All I had to do was follow the handy diagrams that were included at the bottom of the box. Well, it was either that or learn to read the instructions, which appeared to be written in Chinese. I decided the pictures would be more practical.

  When I was finished, our so-called tree looked more like the mutant offspring of a broken space-age lamp and a millipede, but unfortunately, I was pretty sure I had put it together correctly. I washed my hands, and then played with Freddy for a while—I didn’t want to get any toxic metal dust from the “tree” on his fur. Usually, holding Freddy made me feel better (well, aside from the itching and sneezing), but I was so sad that even he couldn’t cheer me up. Plus, he kept pushing himself into my chest like he was trying to dig a nest in my body. I think he was freaked-out by the tree.

  Smart rodent, right?

  After a while, I realized it was getting close to eight o’clock, so I decided to make my mom’s long day easier by setting the table and microwaving two TV dinners for us. We didn’t have two turkey ones, but there was a turkey one and a chicken one, which I thought was sort of close. I had just finished up when I heard Mom’s key in the door.

  “Hi,” I said. “Dinner’s ready!”

  “Thanks, honey,” she said, dragging herself into the kitchen. She looked exhausted. I mean, she basically always looked that way, but after a double shift on a holiday, she looked sort of yellow under the artificial lighting, and much older than usual. My day had been mostly boring, with a bunch of frustration and some anger and fear thrown in. But until I took a look at my mother, I hadn
’t really stopped to think about what hers had been like. She looked defeated. I hated it.

  We spoke at the same time.

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry about Joh—” she began.

  “Apple juice?” I asked, shoving a glass into her hand.

  Some people might think I was avoiding confrontation. Others might choose to believe I simply place a high value on post-work hydration. You can be the judge.

  I kept my mom eating and drinking for a while, but it was pretty inevitable that she would eventually have to say something about Johnny. I mean, it would have been kind of hard to ignore the big old glittering insectoid object in the corner, plus obviously I had been right and they had been in touch with each other during the day. Right after dinner, I cleared away the trash and glasses from the table, then fled to the couch, where I flipped channels until I found the first Christmas specials of the season.

  But my mom followed, right after she poured herself a drink that was not apple juice. It was strangely perfect: just as the TV’s speakers started blaring, “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch!” she asked, “So, now can we talk about Johnny?”

  “What do you want to talk about? I don’t want to fight with you on Thanksgiving, especially after you worked hard all day.”

  “Oh, Mav, I’m sorry. I should have told you I was seeing him again. He started calling me a few weeks ago, and I put him off and put him off. But he’s been really sweet. I honestly think he’s changed.”

  I didn’t mean to, but I must have accidentally let out a bit of a snorting noise.

  “No, I’m serious, Maverick. He’s been attentive and courteous, and he brought this lovely tree . . . ”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I mean, it’s not your usual Christmas tree . . . ”

  I raised my eyebrow farther.

  “All right,” she said, “it’s a pretty awful tree. But don’t you think it was thoughtful of him to bring it here and put it together for us?”

  I snorted again.