by Tanya Kyi
Suddenly it was all too much. There was no use trying to convince these people — even Dad. They were already convinced that I was going to end up a convicted felon. I blew up.
“Yeah? What’s going to solve things then, Dad? Should I solve things like you do, by saying nothing? If that worked, Ted and I wouldn’t be moving into Mom’s apartment, would we? Don’t tell me how I should deal with things when you can’t deal with anything!”
He was quiet after that — typically. When we got home, I went straight to my room, slammed the door and stayed there.
Chapter Nine
Our morning classes were cancelled for an assembly. I was following Amanda up the bleachers when someone shoved me. I spun to find Brad grinning at his posse.
“Oops,” he shrugged, swerving past me and up to the highest row. I glared at his back and slid in beside Amanda.
Principal Harris adjusted the microphone with an ear-torturing squeal.
At our last meeting, I was too mad to even look at him closely. Now I saw that he was young to be a principal, with downy fuzz over the top of his head as if he were just starting to go bald. He looked like someone ordinary, from a Father’s Day commercial. I could picture him with his family, jogging along the road as his son pedaled a bike beside him.
Mr. Harris finally got organized in the middle of the gym and began making announcements. There was going to be a school-wide food bank drive. The music teacher was starting a grad choir for the grade twelves. And the smoking ban on school property was going to be enforced, effective immediately. This drew groans from the few stoners who hadn’t skipped the assembly.
The grade eight band played its newest achievement, a piece that should have been used to torture prisoners. A community nurse talked about hepatitis and the increased risks among young people. Then some drama students started preparing for a skit.
Bored, I flipped open my notebook. Ted had circled my mistakes and I hadn’t had time to correct them.
Amanda nudged me. She hates homework, so I figured she was just hassling me about doing mine. Then she nudged me again. When I looked up, Ms. Samuels was standing at the bottom of the bleachers staring up at us.
“Pay attention,” she mouthed, tapping her ear in teacher-like fashion.
I closed my book obediently and turned my attention to the skit. The set was a false wall painted with bricks and white ovals.
“Are those supposed to be urinals?” I whispered to Amanda.
She nodded, wrinkling her nose. “Gag me.”
The plot was fairly obvious. Cool guys were hanging out smoking. Dweeby guy entered. Got his head flushed in the toilet. Got punched a couple of times in the stomach. Got left behind as cool guys sauntered out. Then — big surprise — the students led a discussion about bullying and how to stop it. Except that no one in the bleachers would participate, so it wasn’t much of a discussion.
I had a brief moment of panic as we filed out of the gym and back to class.
“Did Ms. Samuels see me get pushed?” I whispered to Amanda.
“You got pushed? When?”
“Brad pushed me when we were climbing the bleachers.”
“How could she have seen that? There were a thousand kids around us.”
“Did she see the scene with Jaz in the hallway?”
“No idea. And why would it matter?”
“I just thought maybe that was why she wanted us to listen. Because we got bullied.”
“Hazard, are you totally losing it?” Amanda answered, popping her gum as usual. “You only get bullied if you let yourself get bullied. And we’re so far from that end of the food chain that we can’t even see it from here.”
I shrugged, relieved. Of course Ms. Samuels hadn’t seen anything. Teachers are always telling you to listen at assemblies.
“I’ve been thinking about Brad,” Amanda said, looking at me sideways.
“Thinking about wiping that smirk off his face?”
“More like thinking about dating him,” she winked at me.
I almost choked.
“Come on. He is hot. As in model-quality hot.”
“First, that would be like dating the devil,” I spluttered. “And second, there is no way — NO WAY — that Brad would date a sped.”
Amanda chewed hard a few times, considering. “He might date a sped who puts out,” she said.
“I’m signing you up for a mental institution.”
She shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll be a sped much longer.”
“What?” At the thought of Amanda leaving me alone in that classroom, my insides turned into spaghetti. “Where are you going?”
“Into regular classes. I told you my foster mom has decided that I have hidden potential.
After that scene with Jaz, I convinced her that you were all bad influences.”
My jaw dropped melodramatically. “We’re bad influences on you? Unbelievable.”
When we arrived back at the classroom, I could hear Ms. Samuels speaking. “If there’s anything you want to tell me, I’m here to listen.”
Amanda and I walked in to find her sitting across the table from Dodie, half reaching for her hands. She sighed like we were interrupting something, but Amanda, oblivious, flopped into a chair. I dumped my books on the table, and Ms. Samuels stood and started writing the lesson of the day on the board. Rob was already there, rocking silently as usual. Jaz’s chair was empty — he’d been suspended for a week.
When I got home from school, I found a locksmith’s van in front of the house. A man was working on our front door. My dad was in the living room, looking at a blank space along the wall where the camelback sofa used to be.
“What’s going on?”
“Your mom’s moved the rest of her things to her apartment,” he said.
“She’s taken the sofa?”
He nodded, still staring at the impressions the furniture feet had left in the carpet.
“And you’re locking her out of the house?”
He finally turned to look at me, squinting a bit as if deciding how much I could handle.
“I told her she couldn’t have you.”
“Are you serious?”
“Did you want to move?” he asked, suddenly confused.
“No!”
“Well, your stuff is staying here. She could ask for a custody hearing, I suppose.”
“What would happen then?” I asked.
“As long as both of us are fit to raise you, then I think the judge would ask your opinion on the matter. You and Ted are old enough to decide where you’d like to live.”
It felt strange for Dad to be talking to me like an equal, answering my questions so seriously. I turned to leave, but then thought of one last thing. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I took the afternoon off.”
I couldn’t remember my dad ever taking time off before.
“Just to change the locks?”
He looked slightly sheepish. “Your mom has strong opinions. It’s always seemed easier to let her have her way. But I didn’t want you two coming home to find your things gone.”
I nodded, feeling suddenly proud of him. “Thanks.”
This time when I turned to leave, he stopped me. “We’re going to need a new couch.”
He looked so serious that I almost laughed. “Dad, we’ve needed a new couch since the ice age. The brown one was ugly and the new one was embarrassing. It would almost be less embarrassing if we sat on the floor for the rest of our lives.”
“Well, since you apparently have such refined taste, I thought you could choose one.” He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and extracted a pile of bills.
“I’m suddenly the home décor expert?” I asked, eyeing the cash.
“You could at least suggest a color.”
“Red,” I said immediately.
“Not a chance,” he answered, grinning a bit.
I looked at the room. The beige walls weren’t really that bad, especially
with the disgusting seascape picture taken down. “A light to medium green,” I finally decided. “Think Zen. And it would help if we got rid of those end tables and got some in pine. Or better yet, metal and glass.”
Dad nodded, as if trying to imagine the new arrangement. After a minute he handed me the wad of cash. “Take this and pick something out. If I hate it, we can always send it back.”
Upstairs, I dialed Mel’s number with eight-hundred dollars clutched in my hand.
“I don’t think so,” she said when I asked her about couch hunting with me.
“What?” I blinked in surprise. I’d known Mel since grade six and she’d never turned down a shopping opportunity.
“I’ve got some things to do,” she said coldly.
“What’s your problem?”
“Well, let’s see…she’s average height with about a cup of hairspray in her hair and a wad of gum in her mouth.”
“You’re jealous of Amanda?”
“I’m not jealous,” she said. I heard her suck a deep breath through her teeth, as if she were trying to stay calm. “I just don’t know who you are anymore. A month ago I knew everything about you. Then I don’t see you for weeks, you blow off my calls and you take me to a tattoo parlor. It’s like you’ve been replaced by an alien.”
“Whatever.” She was right, I knew. But I couldn’t just hang around a new school without making any new friends.
“I’ll call you some other time.” She hung up and I stood scowling at the phone for a few minutes. I hadn’t even been able to tell her about Dad changing the locks.
I considered calling her back and telling her, just to make her feel guilty for not asking how my life was going.
I didn’t. Instead I stuffed the money in my wallet and headed downstairs to make grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. Dad had been trying to cook and was coming closer to killing us every night. If I started early enough, maybe he wouldn’t invent any new dishes.
Chapter Ten
It didn’t take long for Mom to find out about the new locks. Walking home from school on Monday afternoon, I could hear her voice from two houses away. I wasn’t sure if I should hurry or turn around and run in the other direction.
“You listen to me, young man,” she was screeching as I approached the driveway. Ted was standing in front of her, hunched into an oversized sweatshirt. He still had his backpack on and the front door was closed.
“You give me that key,” Mom continued. “I’m still a part of this family, and your father has no right to shut me out of the house. This is no time for you to start playing favorites, Theodore Hallard.”
Ted didn’t react until she used his full name, which he hates. I saw him cringe. I was cringing too, thinking of all the neighbors watching this scene from behind their blinds. I could just imagine the old woman across the street peering out her living room window with her chin jutting out and her nose wrinkled all the way up to her eyebrows. Soon she would be out in her yard, pretending to garden and really just waiting for a chance to say, “In my day we didn’t air our dirty laundry on the street.”
Mom still hadn’t seen me. I seemed to be frozen in place at the bottom of the driveway.
“Well?” she hissed at Ted. “What’s it going to be?”
If I were him I would have been bawling, but Ted didn’t even blink. Maybe he was playing his alien video games in his head.
Whack! Mom slapped him, hard, then swiveled on her spike heels and stalked down the driveway toward her car — and me. I was still frozen. She didn’t stop, though. She just walked right past me, got in her car and squealed away.
My feet suddenly free again, I walked up the driveway to where Ted was still standing.
“Thanks for your help,” he said bitterly, rubbing his cheek and glaring in the direction Mom’s car had gone.
“You didn’t have to stand here and let her scream,” I told him. “You should have told her to get lost.”
Ted opened his mouth to defend himself, then snapped it shut, jerked his key out of his pocket and let himself in the house.
“You get lost,” he said, slamming the door in my face.
I should have followed him in to apologize. Instead I stepped into the backyard where the neighbors couldn’t see me, threw my bag on the porch steps and burst into tears. Big, sucky, little-kid tears.
It wasn’t because Ted told me to get lost — which had happened about a million times before. It was because of Mom yelling, because of the smack of her hand hitting Ted’s face. The sound rang in my ears like an echo. It was an echo. Amanda’s hand had made exactly the same sound earlier that day when she slapped Dodie.
This is how it happened:
When I’d walked into homeroom, Rob was at the end of the table, in his own world as always. Dodie was standing with her shoulders hunched and her arms folded over her chest. Amanda was facing her, standing too close.
“Look what Ms. Dodie Doorknob has on today,” Amanda sneered.
“Nice shirt,” I said, raising my eyebrows. It was a nice shirt and it actually fit her. Maybe she’d taken my advice and started buying her own clothes. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken my advice, because the shirt had obviously caught Amanda’s attention.
“Probably stole it,” she said, leaning closer. Dodie took a step back.
“I don’t steal things,” Dodie whined. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Amanda echoed in a singsong voice. “I wouldn’t do that.”
I threw my books on the table and walked over to finger the sleeve of Dodie’s shirt. “It’s just polyester. She probably picked it up at the thrift store.”
I wasn’t really that mean. Not as mean as Amanda was being. But Dodie’s lip started to quiver and she hiccuped. Soon she was sniffing and wiping tears and snot off her face.
“You’re getting it dirty,” Amanda teased, grabbing at a sleeve. She caught the fabric with one of her rings. The tearing sound seemed loud in the classroom.
Dodie squealed as if she’d been attacked. I could tell her sobbing was making Amanda angrier.
“It’s not worth it,” I said warningly. “And Ms. Samuels is going to be here any second. Just leave her alone.”
Amanda looked at Dodie once more, looked at me and rolled her eyes. “I can’t handle this many dorks in one room. This is my last day here. Just came to collect my books. No more slumming with the speds for this chick.”
Dodie kept sobbing. She was seriously annoying. I could tell Amanda was ready to pounce again. I tried to make her stop.
“Will you get over it? It’s a shirt. The world is not coming to an end.”
She ignored me and sniveled louder. Amanda stepped closer again.
“Hello? Earth to Dodie? It wasn’t even that nice in the first place. Nice compared to your cardigans maybe, but let’s not use that as a common fashion denominator, okay?”
Dodie didn’t look up, just stood there hiccuping. Then she was bawling and pretty soon sobbing big, messy sobs. I could tell that the more she acted like a baby, the more it made Amanda mad. Soon she was going to be wailing so loudly that the whole school would turn up in our classroom. Then Amanda slapped her. Hard.
She jerked backward and her eyes popped wide open. She stopped crying, though. For a minute she stood absolutely still. Then she turned and ran from the classroom.
My eyes followed her out the doorway — and found Brad. He was stopped in the hall outside, obviously soaking in the scene. Amanda saw him too. She immediately gathered her books and sashayed by me.
“Like I said, I’m done with this loony bin. On to bigger and better things.” She didn’t stop to acknowledge Brad on her way out, but I could see his eyes follow her down the hall.
When Ms. Samuels finally arrived, Rocker Rob and I were the only ones left in the room.
Chapter Eleven
Dodie wasn’t at school on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Ms. Samuels asked about her, but I shrugged. Amanda wasn’t there to answer.
> “How should I know?” Jaz scowled, newly returned from his week off.
Our class was actually more peaceful without Dodie. I knew that if I looked at her, I’d feel guilty for not stopping Amanda. I mean, she was unbelievably annoying, but Amanda had taken things too far. At least with both of them gone I could put the entire incident out of my mind. Besides, I had to concentrate — I had an essay due for history. Ms. Samuels had already read a first draft, and she was helping me rewrite it paragraph by paragraph.
“Think of each part of a paragraph like a part of a hamburger,” she said, drawing a giant burger on the board. As if on cue, Jaz’s stomach growled. I couldn’t stop a giggle and even Ms. Samuels smiled.
When she turned back to the board, she started drawing arrows to her illustration. “The top half of the bun is your topic sentence,” she said. “That’s where you tell the reader exactly what they’re going to find inside.” She added a few little sesame seed dots to the bun while she spoke.
“The meat of the burger is the meat of your paragraph. Explain your first sentence. Offer facts to support it.”
“Your conclusion,” she said, “is the bottom of the bun. This is where you summarize what you’ve said.”
At some point, without realizing it, I had started to like Ms. Samuels’ class. I mean, I still tried to duck into the room without anyone seeing me, as if I were visiting a sexually transmitted disease clinic. (Not that I ever have.) Once inside, though, things were starting to seem more achievable.
She might not have been a sped anymore, but that didn’t stop Amanda from turning up at my locker after school. She was just in time to find me contemplating the eight crisp hundred-dollar bills in my wallet. I took one of them out and waved it under her nose.
“A little shopping?”
Her eyes goggled and she tried to grab the bill. “When did you win the lottery?”
“This isn’t for me. It’s for a new couch,” I told her, pulling the bills out of her reach. “I can spend up to eight hundred dollars and we’ve decided that it should be green.”
Amanda groaned. “Eight hundred dollars to spend and you have to buy a couch? It couldn’t be jewelry?”