The principal had brought her into the classroom at the start of the period, but somehow it seemed like he was following her into the room.
“Good morning, Mr. Pembleton,” Principal Wilson said to their teacher while the serious girl stood at the front of the room, sizing things up. “Sorry to interrupt,” he continued. “But I have a new student for you. This is Matilda San—”
“If I may, Principal Wilson,” the girl said, stepping forward to address the class. “Good morning, my name is Matilda Sandoval. I like to be called Matty, but, well, no one ever does.”
Mr. Pembleton and Principal Wilson looked at each other quizzically, unsure whether or not one of them should reclaim the floor, so to speak.
“I’ve lived in four different cities in the last three years,” the new girl, Matilda, continued. “For any mathletes in the room, that’s a new school roughly every two hundred and seventy-three days.”
Oliver caught her giving a slight nod to two boys in the back who were presently checking her long division.
“My passions are modern surveillance techniques and staying current on the latest advances in computer encryption. I also enjoy true crime novels, play a passable flute, and am dreadful at any sport involving a ball.”
She then turned her attention to the teacher. “Mr. Pembleton, shall I take that empty desk by the window?”
“Pardon? Who?” Mr. Pembleton stumbled, caught off guard at suddenly having his class returned to him. “Oh, yes. That will be fine, Matilda.”
After Matilda passed Oliver on her way to the desk she essentially assigned to herself, Frankie leaned over to him. “Well, that was different.”
“Yeah,” Oliver said absently as he watched the new girl take her seat. She sat up straight in her chair, folded her hands, and looked dead ahead as Mr. Pembleton resumed class. But her shoulders sagged a bit, and Oliver sensed that even though it was still just the morning, she’d already had a long day.
“Hey, Oliver. How old do you have to be to trade penny stocks?” Frankie asked, reading a pop-up ad on his phone.
It was lunchtime. The boys sat at the end of a long cafeteria table, by themselves.
“I’m guessing thirteen, at least,” Oliver said. “Still pushing for that dog?”
“Uh-huh,” Frankie said, putting his phone down on the table. “But between the twins acting like little maniacs and my dad starting his new catering business, it’s ‘not a good time,’ which is parent-speak for—”
“Not enough money,” Oliver said, finishing the thought.
At the other end of the long table, a big kid in a Clash T-shirt and Doc Martens walked over and knocked a lunch tray to the floor. Oliver recognized him as the kid he’d collided with on the way into school this morning.
“That’s Billy Fargus,” Frankie said. “A girl in homeroom was telling me about him.”
“What’s his deal?”
“Lunches,” Frankie said. “He has a thing for eating ones that belong to other people.”
“Great.”
“Yeah. Apparently, he picks on a different kid each day. So I guess the good news is you only have to give up your lunch once and then you’re done.”
Oliver and Frankie watched as Billy Fargus reached across the table and proceeded to rifle through another student’s food. When the kid started to protest, Billy leaned over and whispered something in his ear. The kid’s eyes got big and he gave up the sandwich.
Oliver and Frankie shared a look.
“Then again,” Frankie said, “I imagine the anticipation will get stressful.”
“Hi there. May I sit?” It was the girl from earlier that morning, and she’d already plopped down at the table. “Oliver and … Frankie, right?”
“Yeah,” Frankie said guardedly. “How did you—”
“Hi,” Oliver said, a step behind.
Matilda plowed ahead. “So, like I mentioned earlier, I move around a lot. As such, I like to cut to the chase, making-friends-wise.”
Oliver was still confused but kind of charmed at the same time. Frankie, less so.
“And you’ve, what?” Frankie said. “Settled on us?”
“Well,” Matilda said, giving Frankie a quick once-over, “judging by your clothes, you’re clearly not hung up on labels or social status, which suggests a more accepting, nonconformist personality.”
Frankie looked at Oliver. “Did she just take a shot?”
“Wow,” Oliver said. “That was really good.”
Frankie, unimpressed, started digging through his lunch.
“Thanks,” Matilda said, turning her attention to him. “Now, you.” She took a moment or two appraising Oliver. “Your body language, posture, and overall withdrawn bearing suggest a recently dissolved family unit. Within the last year, for sure. And by the looks of your well-balanced lunch, I’m guessing Dad did the actual, physical separating?”
Oliver looked away, stung.
“Hey,” Frankie cut in. “Back off!”
Matilda blinked in surprise, like someone who’d been caught daydreaming.
“It’s okay, Frankie,” Oliver said.
“No, it’s not,” Matilda said, crestfallen, as she looked down and wrung her hands anxiously. “I’m sorry, Oliver. I don’t mean anything by it. I just … I should go.”
She was up and off before Oliver could gather himself to stop her. On her way out of the cafeteria, Oliver watched her sidestep the shaggy janitor Oliver had bumped into earlier, who was now cleaning up the downed lunch tray.
Matilda gave the boys a wide berth the rest of the day. Oliver felt bad and nearly convinced himself to go up and talk to her, just to tell her no hard feelings and all that. But pretty much everything about her intimidated him, and he feared what other unflattering truth bombs she might uncover from the way he walked or his speech patterns.
He saw her again after school, sitting by a tree on the front lawn and scribbling furiously in a black composition book.
Oliver gave Frankie a nudge. “I wonder what she’s writing,” he said.
“I don’t,” Frankie said. “The girl’s strange.” He looked down self-consciously at his shirt. “I mean, this works, right?”
As the boys started walking home, Oliver stole one last glance at Matilda, who was still under the tree, writing.
Frankie’s house was first, but when they reached the drive, Frankie just stood there, stalling.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to go in,” Frankie said, as if they were staring at Frankenstein’s castle and not a two-story Craftsman on one of the least ominous blocks in northern Illinois.
“C’mon,” Oliver said.
“I’m serious, man,” Frankie said. “It’s chaos in there. We’re talking Lord of the Files, pre-K edition. I actually prefer school. The quiet …”
At his house, Oliver always saw quiet as the enemy. It wasn’t peaceful or contemplative. Quiet was words never said. Quiet was lonely.
When Oliver’s parents got divorced, his father had said that they’d still be a family. That was a lie. When his dad said he was moving to Phoenix, he’d insisted that he would still be a big part of Oliver’s life. That was an even bigger lie.
Oliver’s mom had lied, too. But those lies were different. When his dad moved out, she hadn’t said it was because he was small and selfish and twenty-eight-year-old fitness instructors don’t come along every day. She’d said sometimes people grow apart.
That’s when things had started getting quiet.
The front door burst open and Frankie’s dad leaned halfway out. He wore a chef’s apron covered in sauce and had a very frazzled expression on his face.
“Frankie, great! You’re home,” he said with a heavy sigh of relief. “I really need some help in here. Mom’s still at the lab, the twins just threw up on each other, and I’ve got three burners going.”
Frankie gave Oliver a look. “See what I mean?”
“Oh, hey there, Oliver!” Frankie’s dad sai
d. “Tell your mom not to cook tonight. Once Elaine gets home from work, I’m sending her over with a new primavera I’ve been working on.”
“Okay,” said Oliver. “Thanks, Mr. Figge.”
Oliver suddenly felt very tired as he continued on to his own house. It had been a long day, and a strange one, too. Between that weird orientation video, a menacing (though, to be fair, equal opportunity) sandwich bully, and a strange girl who could tell everything about him by the contents of his lunch and the way he sat in a chair, middle school sure wasn’t shaping up like he’d expected.
The Flying Figge Brothers * Matilda Finishes Unpacking * I Didn’t Realize This Was a Party Line * A Not So Private Conversation * Tears of a Sullivan * That’s Certainly One Way to Make Friends
Frankie sat on his bed staring out the window as he briefly contemplated climbing through it and living a life on the run. There wasn’t any big dramatic reason for this train of thought. He hadn’t gotten in trouble with the law or school, and he hadn’t just had a blowout fight with his parents. The reason Frankie imagined running away was, in fact, not a very compelling one:
His mother had left to bring food over to Oliver and his mom.
Which meant that his dad was alone downstairs with the twins. And any minute now, he’d be needing help.
Frankie didn’t want to help.
It was chaos downstairs. Bedlam. Anarchy. And so noisy.
Frankie’s twin brothers, Seamus and Hugh, were a little under two years old, but already they were totally out of control. He’d never seen them walk—they went directly from a rodent-like, scampering crawl to constant, maniacal running. The only time they ever stopped was when they collided into something heavier than they were, like a wall or the couch or Frankie. They climbed on everything, touched everything, broke everything. They were impossible to contain, and no amount of baby-proofing would ever be sufficient to protect them or the house. While you tried to stop one of them from removing the cover to the light socket, the other would be trying to play red rover against the ottoman.
And they never left him alone. Their two favorite words were “Frankie” and “watch.” For example, one of them, probably Hugh, would yell, “Frankie!” Seamus would answer with, “Frankie, FRANKIE!” Then, together, they’d howl, “FRANKIE, WATCH!!” and start hurling couch pillows at the ceiling fan.
Still, at least they acknowledged him. If his parents didn’t need him for something, they barely even registered Frankie’s presence anymore, though he honestly couldn’t blame them. Their hands were too full with his berserk brothers to even think to stop and ask him how his day had been. He accepted that they were doing what they had to do to survive.
Frankie heard a scream downstairs, followed immediately by a crash. Or maybe it had been a crash, followed immediately by a scream. It was hard to tell anymore.
Three, two, one, Frankie thought.
“Hey, Frankie!” he heard his dad call up the stairwell. “Think you could come down here and give me a hand?”
Matilda’s mom had picked up the ingredients for make-your-own-pizzas for dinner. Matilda used to love pizza, but not anymore.
Matilda remembered reading once about conditioned response. It was like that experiment with the dogs, where the guy would ring a bell right before he fed them. After a while, the dogs knew that the bell meant food, and their mouths would water before the food was even brought out.
The thing about a conditioned response, though, was that it could work the other way, too.
Whenever Matilda’s dad would get a new assignment and they’d have to suddenly pack up and move to some new city, he would bring home pizza, with all her favorite toppings, to help break the news. This most recent move had been the hardest yet. About eight months ago, her dad had been promoted to a desk job and transferred to Washington, DC. It was the best of both worlds for the Sandovals. They could finally put down some roots, and even more importantly for Matilda, it meant her dad was finally out of the field.
Then, six weeks ago, her dad brought home pizza, and … Hello, Lake Grove Glen.
Now whenever Matilda saw pizza, it had the opposite effect that it did on those drooling dogs. Pizza made her think about moving again, starting over again, not knowing anyone again.
Pizza made her stomach drop.
She picked at her slice for a while, hoping her parents wouldn’t realize that she hadn’t eaten much of it, and then went upstairs to finish unpacking.
Matilda usually unpacked and set up her new room immediately, but this time she found herself dragging it out. She didn’t hold on to much, just the barest essentials. Other than her clothes, all she had was her computer, one picture of her and her parents on vacation in Canada (before Dayton and, well, before), and some books, most of which were nonfiction and highly technical.
Her walls were mostly bare except for two posters, one of a popular boy band and the other a movie poster from Moonglow, a teen supernatural romance franchise that was apparently all the rage with girls her age. Matilda had zero interest in the content behind either of these posters but displayed them in the hopes of tricking her parents into believing that she had some “normal” interests. She didn’t want them to worry about her being weird. Well, too weird, at any rate.
Matilda took the last book out of the last cardboard box and put it on the bookcase, an action that might have felt significant if she hadn’t done it so many times in the last couple of years.
Then she went back downstairs to say good night to her parents. They were in the living room, watching television. Her mom sat on the couch while her dad was parked on the floor in front of her. He had his left arm up halfway, like he was resting it on a car door, while Matilda’s mom, holding his elbow, gently rotated his shoulder, first clockwise and then counterclockwise.
Her father wore a sleeveless workout shirt, one that obscured but didn’t completely cover the circular scar on his chest, just below the collarbone. The one from a bullet that missed his heart by an inch and a half. In movies when the hero gets shot, it’s always conveniently “in and out,” but her dad’s bullet wasn’t one of those. It bounced around inside him, breaking his scapula and his collarbone before resting in his deltoid muscle until an ER doctor yanked it out.
Dayton.
“Hey, sweetie,” her mom said as her dad subtly fixed the shirt to hide his scar. “Come join us.”
Matilda’s dad got off the floor, and three of them sat on the couch and watched television. Then her mom got up to make some tea.
“I have to go out of town next week,” her dad said when it was just the two of them. “Work trip.”
“Okay,” Matilda said. “How long?”
“Three days, two nights,” he said. “I should be back for dinner on Thursday.”
“Flying or driving?”
“Driving.”
They did this whenever Matilda’s dad had to travel, which was a lot. He wasn’t allowed to talk about his work much, so they came up with this game to make up for it. Matilda got five questions, which he could decline to answer if he had to, but under no circumstances was he allowed to lie.
“So it’s not far, then,” Matilda surmised. “In state?”
“Out of state.”
Matilda bit her lip. “Will you be changing time zones?”
Her dad didn’t answer right away.
“Well?”
“I’m thinking,” he said defensively. “Yes.”
“Interesting,” Matilda said, staring intently at her father’s eyes.
“Are you looking for micro-expressions?”
“Yes.”
“Stop it,” he laughed.
“No,” she said. “It’s fair game.”
“Fine,” he conceded. “You have one left.”
“Got it. Your destination—is the population over or under two hundred thousand residents?”
“Over.”
“Okay,” she said, satisfied.
Matilda gave her dad a hug and a kiss go
od night and went up to change and brush her teeth. It was weird playing the game with her dad now. Before it was just a goof, so when she couldn’t figure out where he was going, it didn’t really matter. But since he got shot …
At least she knew he wasn’t going back to Dayton; it had a population of roughly one hundred and forty thousand people.
Matilda climbed into bed but wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet. Seeing her dad’s scar and playing their old game was sending her thoughts where she didn’t want them to go. Deep down she just knew that this move to Lake Grove Glen meant that her dad was back in the field.
Of course, once she let the thought in her head, she couldn’t shake it. She considered getting out her laptop when her mom poked her head in the door.
“Knock, knock,” her mom said, coming in and taking a seat at the foot of Matilda’s bed.
“Tucking me in?” Matilda said.
“I could if you’d like.”
“That’s all right.”
“Tell you a bedtime story?” her mom pressed. “Or, hey, you could tell me one.”
“Okay,” Matilda said. “There once was a little girl who traveled the world with her wonderful parents. And even though they moved around a lot and none of the places they went were ever very interesting, the little girl was still very happy because she was loved so very much, and in the end that’s all that ever really matters. The end.”
Matilda’s mom looked at her in a hard to read way. Then she said, “Kinda asked for that, didn’t I?”
“I’m okay, Mom,” Matilda said. “Really.”
Matilda’s mom kissed her on the forehead. “I know you are,” she said, getting up from the bed. On the way out she did a double take at the posters Matilda had hung.
“Moonglow, huh?” her mom said.
“Well, it’s no Big Trouble in Little China,” Matilda said.
It was a little family joke. Big Trouble in Little China was her dad’s favorite movie of all time. He had a framed poster of it hanging in his office and a collector’s coffee mug as well. Matilda had watched it with him once, on her computer while he was recuperating in the hospital. Even though the plot was a little over the top in her opinion, she’d pretended to like it because her dad had been shot and almost killed and they both just needed to feel like everything was okay again.
Connect the Dots Page 2