Allan shrugged. “I’m only telling you what I heard.”
“You can’t believe every stupid thing you hear.” I tried not to think about Tony’s big belly. “I’ll give you my half of the candy if you’ll help me with another record attempt,” I told him.
He eyed the candy bag in his hand, then looked at me suspiciously. “What do I have to do?”
“Okay. Well…” I chose my approach carefully. “There’s this record that is currently held by two Russians—”
“Russians!”
“Yup. And they’ve had the record since 1931. And I think we could break it, Allan.”
“I’m not eating raw eggs.”
“You don’t have to,” I said quickly. I knew Allan hadn’t eaten eggs since he’d seen me eat—and throw up—seven raw ones in less than a minute.
“So what is the record then?”
This was the tricky part. “Face-slapping,” I said, and moved on quickly before he could object. “The two guys who have the record now are called Vasily Bezbordny and Goni Something-or-other. I mean, we can’t let that record stand, right? It’d be…it’d be unpatriotic.”
“But whose face are we supposed to slap?”
“Each other’s.” I grinned at him. “We don’t have to do it hard though. The record is for duration, so we just have to keep doing it.”
“For how long?”
I decided not to answer that directly. “Well, a while. But I thought we should do a test run. Say, twenty minutes or half an hour. Because when I did the rocking-chair one, there were lots of things I hadn’t thought of. Peeing, for one. And food. I didn’t have any food close enough to reach, so that would have been a problem.”
Allan looked dubious. “And if we do half an hour…”
“Then we come up with a plan. Write to the Guinness Book of Records officials and plan the real thing.” I grabbed his arm. “Imagine it, Allan! I bet it’d be in the papers and everything. ‘Two Canadian boys beat Russians to set new world record’!”
“Hmm.”
“And the candy,” I reminded him. “My half of the candy.”
“For the test run? Or the whole deal?”
“Just for the test run.”
He sighed. “Okay, Jack. I guess I could do it.”
We took the candy and two glasses of water up to Allan’s room.
“Sitting or standing?” I asked. “What do you think would be easier?”
“Sitting,” Allan said.
We positioned ourselves a couple of feet apart and sat cross-legged on the floor. “So we take turns,” I said. “You slap me, I slap you…”
Allan shook his head. “This is crazy.”
“Why don’t you go first?” I offered. “Go ahead.” I braced myself, but the slap, when it finally came, was not much more than a pat. “Allan, come on. You have to slap me.”
“You said we didn’t have to do it hard.”
“Well, harder than that! It has to be a slap.”
He bit his lip. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Don’t be such a wimp,” I said. “Come on. Do it.”
Allan slapped me hard enough to turn my face to one side. I blinked; then I grinned at him. “Good job.” I slapped him back.
“Ow.” Allan put his hand to his cheek.
“Come on,” I said. “Hit me back.”
Slap.
Slap.
Slap.
My face was stinging, but we were getting into a rhythm, and I was thinking we could really do this, maybe, we could beat the Russians. Then, as I lifted my hand to slap back, Allan’s face started to crumple.
And then three things happened at once. My hand, moving too quickly to stop, made contact with Allan’s face. Smack. His bedroom door swung open. And Allan burst into tears.
Mrs. Miller stepped into the room, rushed over to him and put her arm around him. She was looking at me, and the expression on her face was not one I had ever seen her wear before.
“I wasn’t hitting him,” I said.
“I saw you,” she said. “So don’t lie to me, Jack. I saw you slap his face. Look at him.”
His left cheek was bright red, and you could see the outline of my hand. “I know,” I said. “But the thing is, it was for a reason.”
She interrupted me. “I don’t care what the reason was. There is nothing that justifies hitting, Jack. It is just completely unacceptable.”
I touched my own cheek. “He was hitting me too.” But I knew my face didn’t look like Allan’s. Not that I was hitting harder. It’s just that my skin is more of an olive-tan color, and Allan’s is that pale and freckly kind that goes red easily.
“If it wasn’t for your family’s situation, I’d send you straight home,” Mrs. Miller told me. “Honestly, Jack, I wouldn’t have expected this of you.”
“He said it would be patriotic. He said we had to beat the Russians,” Allan said, sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“Beat the Russians? By hitting each other?” Mrs. Miller shook her head. “Allan, come downstairs with me. Jack, I’d like you to stay up here and think about what you have done. You owe Allan an apology.”
I considered trying to explain about the record. But if Mrs. Miller knew about that, she’d probably make us promise not to do it again.
Especially if she found out that the record for face-slapping currently stood at thirty hours.
Six
The Millers ate dinner without me. I could smell chicken potpie and hear the clinking of plates and cutlery being set on the table. I was starving. Also, sitting up in Allan’s room by myself, it was hard not to think about Mom. Maybe your family is cursed. What a rotten, mean, stupid thing to say. Remembering it made me wish I’d slapped Allan a little harder.
I wondered if Mrs. Miller had really said it would be a miracle if Mom recovered from losing Annie. I hoped Allan had made that up. How would Mrs. Miller know, anyway? She wasn’t a doctor.
At long last there was a knock at the door, and Mrs. Miller stepped inside. “Jack, you’d better come down and have something to eat,” she said. “I hope you’ve had time to think over what happened earlier.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. We weren’t fighting or anything though.”
“Allan told me what you were doing.” She shook her head. “Honestly, Jack. I thought you’d have learned your lesson after that business with the eggs.”
I followed her down to the kitchen and watched her dish me up a plate of chicken potpie. Allan and Mr. Miller were watching television in the living room.
Mrs. Miller set a glass of milk down beside me. “There you go, Jack.” Then the telephone rang in the hallway, and she hurried to answer it. I could hear her talking softly, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Maybe it was Mom. Maybe Mom was feeling better and she and Dad were coming to get me.
I hoped Mrs. Miller wouldn’t mention the face-slapping incident.
I gobbled up my dinner—I was starving—and wondered if Mrs. Miller would offer me a second helping. Usually she did, but she wasn’t too happy with me today. Then I thought about Mom and Annie and everything, and it seemed all wrong that I was thinking about food at all.
When Mrs. Miller came back into the kitchen, she was frowning. “Jack. That was your father.”
I swallowed a lump of potato. “Is he coming to get me?” I asked.
“Not tonight,” Mrs. Miller said. “You can stay with us. Tomorrow’s Friday, so I’ll take you and Allan both to school, and then we’ll see about the weekend. Maybe by then…”
“Maybe by then Mom will be feeling better?”
“Hopefully.” She shook her head. “We’ll have to see.”
My heart was thumping and the word cancer kept sli
pping into my thoughts, burning hot and scary inside me. No one was telling me what was wrong, and that meant it had to be something bad.
Maybe your family is cursed, Allan had said. Maybe he was right after all.
The next morning, Mrs. Miller drove me and Allan to school. I wanted to walk but she insisted, so I slid onto the cold bench seat beside Allan, rubbed a clear patch on my fogged-up window and watched the houses and trees flash past. Instead of dropping us off like she usually did, she parked the car in front of the school and came in with us. She tried to hold both of our hands, but I quickly rearranged my schoolbag and jacket so that I didn’t have a hand free. Mrs. Miller put her arm over my shoulder instead and ushered us into the classroom as if we were in kindergarten.
On her way out, she stopped by the teacher’s desk and spoke in a low voice to Miss Thomas. I squirmed in my seat. It didn’t seem right for the teacher to know about what was going on in my family when I hardly knew anything myself.
Halfway through the afternoon, someone knocked on the classroom door and then opened it without waiting for Miss Thomas to reply. It was Mr. Kirkpatrick, our principal. He was tall and white-haired, with a tidy mustache and beard. We all called him the Colonel because he looked exactly like Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken.
He beckoned to Miss Thomas. She gestured to us to keep working and stepped into the hallway. I figured he was here because of me, and I could tell Miss Thomas was thinking the same thing because she looked right at me before she pulled the door closed.
I sat still, barely breathing, as if somehow I could protect myself from bad news by being invisible. Inside, my heart was flopping around like a fish out of water. Had my mom gotten worse? Could she even have died? Maybe they were going to call me out into the hallway any minute to break the news. But surely my father would want to do that himself. Perhaps my father was even in the hallway with them. I strained to listen, but I couldn’t hear a thing through the closed door.
I had a crazy urge to get up and run away, out of the classroom, away from the pale fluorescent lights and all the other kids crowded around me. I felt panicky, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air, or like I might start crying.
“Psst.” Allan kicked the leg of my chair. “Psst. Jack.”
I ignored him. Whatever he was going to say, I didn’t want to hear it.
And then the door opened and Miss Thomas stepped back into the classroom. Her eyes were red and swollen. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice shook slightly. “I have some terrible news.”
I looked away from her, horrified, and stared down at my desk. I couldn’t believe she was going to tell me in front of the whole class. My face was burning hot. I closed my eyes and wished I could disappear.
“The president of the United States has been shot,” Miss Thomas said. “President Kennedy is dead.”
I opened my eyes slowly. Miss Thomas was silent, watching us, tears shining on her cheeks. Some kids were quiet and stunned-looking, and a few started to whisper to each other. Near the back of the room, Richard pushed his chair back with a screech. “No way,” he said. “That’s crazy.” The girl beside me, Alison, buried her head in her arms and started to cry.
I had to duck my head to hide my relief.
Seven
The Colonel decided to close school early, and Miss Thomas sent us home. She couldn’t stop crying. As we spilled out into the schoolyard, everyone started talking all at once: “Who shot him?” “Was it the Russians?” “Now what is going to happen?” Alison was still sobbing. “He was so good-looking,” she kept saying. Like that had anything to do with it. Besides, Alison cried about everything. She cried during Duck and Cover drills. She cried if she failed a spelling test. She cried when the other kids teased her about her crying. She was a very annoying person.
“Let’s go,” I said to Allan. I wanted to get away from all the buzzing and figure out what this meant—whether things would all go back to normal and this would become one of those things we would only hear about on the radio at Tony’s candy store, or whether this was one of those times the adult world crashed into ours in a way that might actually matter. We walked down the main street, heading back toward his house.
“I guess the Americans will get a new president,” Allan said.
I didn’t say anything, because it seemed kind of wrong to think about that right away. Anyway, a new president wouldn’t make Kennedy less dead. “It’s so strange,” I said, thinking out loud. “I can’t believe someone shot him. Why would anyone do that?”
Allan shrugged. “Not everyone liked him, you know. My dad always said Kennedy was soft.”
“Soft? What does that mean?” It was a word Dad had used about me, back when he was trying to make me play baseball, but I couldn’t see how it fit here.
“I don’t know. Something about the Communists.”
“Huh.” I wasn’t that interested in what Allan’s dad thought. I walked quickly, keeping a few steps ahead of Allan, and tried to think of another record I could attempt to break. There were an awful lot that were plain impossible. I wasn’t going to be the world’s richest billionaire or the world’s best lion tamer. I figured bomb defusing was well out of reach too: the record for that stood at eight thousand bombs in twelve years. That guy might have done even more, but then he got blown up by a grenade.
There was a record for lowest income, which seemed like a possibility, since technically I had no income at all except for a measly allowance—less than half of what Allan got. But the Guinness Book of Records gave this record to the forty-two surviving Pintibu people in northern Australia, who survived by eating rats and drinking water from soak holes.
I didn’t even know what a soak hole was.
When we got back to Allan’s house, Dad’s car was in the driveway. Allan pushed open the front door and I followed him through. I could hear Dad’s low voice coming from the living room, but I couldn’t make out his words. Then I heard Mrs. Miller’s higher-pitched voice rising above his.
“My God, Frank! It’s just so awful. I can’t believe it.”
Dad mumbled something and then I heard Mrs. Miller sobbing. “And so young,” she said. “I can’t believe it. It seems so unfair.”
I strained to hear Dad’s reply, but his words were lost in Mrs. Miller’s noisy sobs. “It’s terrible,” she said. Her words were broken up by gasps. “A woman—just doesn’t get over—something like that. And after everything she’s been through…”
She? Everything she’s been through?
My mother. A chill flashed down my arms and down the back of my legs, and I stood frozen to the spot. Blood running cold, I thought numbly. I’d never understood what that meant before. I shivered, and all the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end.
If something had happened…if she was worse… I didn’t want to know. Before I had time to think about what I was doing, I spun around and ran out the door.
“Where are you going, Jack?” Allan called after me.
I ignored him and kept running. I ran through the quiet streets, past my own silent house and down the old rail trail that led past the woods. I had a special place, sort of a tree house—well, just a few planks, really. David and I had found it years ago. Someone had nailed three boards to an old willow tree that had fallen down and lodged itself in the V-shaped space between the branches of another tree. All you had to do to get up there was crawl along a long, sloping trunk that was at maybe a forty-five degree angle to the ground. David and I used to sit up there and read comic books in the summer holidays. Now he was living in an apartment in Mississauga, and no one else even knew about our secret place. It wasn’t anything so great, I guess, but it was still a good place to be alone.
I turned off the rail trail and followed the hard dirt path, crossing a rough wooden bridge and disappearing into the woods. Then I
slowed to a walk. It was cold out, but my back was slick with sweat under my coat and sweater. I hoped Allan would make up some excuse for why I wasn’t with him, but more likely he was telling his mom and my dad that I had run off. Sometimes I thought he liked to get me in trouble.
A barely visible track branched left off the main path and I turned onto it, my eyes lifted, scanning for my place…and I saw a flash of red, high in the bare branches. I stopped walking and squinted up at it.
“Hey there,” a voice said, and a face appeared from amongst the branches.
A girl.
“What are you doing up there?” I glared at her. “That’s my tree house.”
“Did you build it? I bet you didn’t. It’s been here for years. I can tell—the wood’s all rotten.” She swung her legs over the side, letting them dangle, and bent her head down so I could see her. She had a dirty face and a mess of dark tangled hair above a red sweater. “Anyway, you can’t own a tree.”
“I’ve been using it for four years,” I said. “Me and my friend David have been using it since we were eight.” I pointed to the spot where we had carved our initials into the smooth wood of the trunk. “See? DH. That’s David Harris. And JL. That’s me.”
She shrugged. “So?”
“So I’ve never even seen you before.”
“We just moved here,” she said. She spoke fast, her words running together. “From Toronto.”
I rubbed my thumb across David’s initials and stared up at her. “You sound American.”
“I am. Well, I used to be. We moved to Canada when I was seven. Which was five years ago, in case you were wondering.”
She was the same age as me then. “Where do you live?”
She jerked a thumb in the opposite direction of my house. “Over in the new development. Mohawk Meadows.”
“Really? How come you don’t go to my school?”
Record Breaker Page 3