The Seventh Most Important Thing

by Shelley Pearsall

  She shoved a roundish package covered with way more tape than paper into his hands.

  “It’s a baseball! Did you guess? Did you guess?” she shouted before he had the wrapping half off.

  “Thanks, Barbara. That’s really nice,” Arthur said, his voice cracking only a little. He tossed the baseball in the air and caught it. “It’s perfect.”

  “I bought it with my own allowance money,” she said proudly as Arthur’s mom winked at him. “I’ve been saving all year.”

  —

  Later, when his mom and Barbara were busy doing dishes in the kitchen, Arthur went upstairs and put the baseball on top of the dresser. He shoved the coins in the back of his closet, though.

  It was weird how much they bothered him. He wasn’t sure why. When his father’s motorcycle cap and coat had been in the downstairs closet, they hadn’t bothered him at all. In a way, they had made him feel as if his dad was still there.

  But the coins made his throat clench up the minute he looked at them.

  Arthur knew his mom was just trying to make up for what had happened in November. He knew she still blamed herself for some of it, even though he’d tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault—she wasn’t the one who’d lost her cool and hit someone with a brick.

  It made Arthur realize how you couldn’t always know what things would be important to people and what wouldn’t. His mom had thrown out his dad’s motorcycle cap, thinking it didn’t matter, but it was way more important to Arthur than the silver coins she’d saved. And the flowerpot had been worthless to someone in Mr. Hampton’s neighborhood, but it had turned out to be the perfect Christmas gift for his mom.

  In other words, there could be a lot of reasons why people decided to save some things and why they threw others away—reasons that might not make any sense until you dug much deeper.

  Which, Arthur thought, might be a small clue to the Junk Man’s list.

  TWENTY

  Just to get out of the house, Arthur took a walk to Mr. Hampton’s garage on the Saturday after Christmas. It was one of those deceptively sunny but frigid end-of-December days. Arthur’s breath made clouds. The snow-covered sidewalks crunched like icebergs under his feet.

  He passed by an older guy who was walking a dog wearing a ridiculous sweater. Arthur normally didn’t wave to people, but since it was just after Christmas and they were the only ones around, it seemed like the right thing to do.

  “My wife knitted it,” the guy said, waving back.

  Arthur smiled politely and kept going. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find at the garage when he got there, or why he felt the need to go there at all during his two weeks off. It wasn’t as if Officer Billie would deduct an hour from his probation for visiting the garage. But his curiosity about what Mr. Hampton was doing had gotten the better of him.

  Officer Billie had said the guy was going away for the Christmas holidays, but Arthur didn’t believe it. A trash picker didn’t seem like the kind of person who would take vacations or have a regular family somewhere. It seemed more likely he wanted to work at the garage without being bothered.

  Arthur figured if he stopped by unexpectedly, he might get a glimpse of what the guy was up to. The purpose of the Seven Most Important Things still bugged him. He wanted to see what else he could find out.

  —

  Of course, the walk turned out to be a complete waste of time.

  The garage was locked up and looked as deserted as always. The grocery cart sat in its usual place outside the garage door, with its wheels buried in clumps of snow and ice. Maybe Officer Billie had been right. It didn’t seem like anybody had been around the place in days.

  Groovy Jim’s shop was dark and closed up too. There was a folding iron gate across the doorway, which made the place look a lot more unfriendly than it usually did. A handwritten sign behind the gate said: BACK NEXT YEAR.

  It took Arthur a minute to figure out the sign meant he’d be back in a few days, when the new year arrived. Not in 365 days.

  Since there was nobody around and nothing to see, he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked home, feeling like an idiot. A cold idiot.

  —

  When Arthur returned home, he found Barbara sitting in the middle of the living room floor, munching on a sugar cookie. She was wearing her pink plaid coat and mittens. Crumbs were everywhere.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “Where’s Mom?”

  “She went next door to borrow something. I was playing outside. Then I got hungry, so I came in.” Barbara chewed on her crumbly cookie. “Oh, and I talked to your friend too.”

  Arthur stopped pulling off his boots. He stood in the hallway with one boot on and one off. “What friend?” he said, because he didn’t have any friends. Not since his dad’s accident and being in juvie. Even before that, he hadn’t had a lot of friends. He wasn’t the kind of person who liked to hang out in big groups.

  His best friend, Ben Branson, who’d lived a few doors down the street, had moved away at the end of fifth grade. They used to play kickball together and trade baseball cards. He still had a couple of his Roger Maris cards.

  “Was Ben back here?” he said, glancing out the window. Despite being good friends, they’d never bothered to write much after he left.

  “No. Your friend with the shopping cart. You know,” Barbara said impatiently, glaring at her brother as if he were a dope, “the old man you threw the thing at but now you’re friends with again. That’s who.”

  Arthur stared at his sister. What in the world was she talking about?

  “The Junk Man—Mr. Hampton—was here?” he said slowly.

  Barbara nodded and took another bite of her cookie. “Well, he didn’t have that old cart with him, but I knew it was him when I saw him across the street, so I waved and said ‘Hi, mister.’ And he came over and shook my hand and told me ‘Merry Christmas.’ ” Barbara stuck out her hand to demonstrate. “So I said ‘Merry Christmas’ too, and I told him how you were my brother and how you weren’t bad anymore now.” She smiled proudly. “And I said how you had promised not to throw anything else again. Wasn’t that nice of me?” she added.

  Arthur couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It seemed like way too bizarre a coincidence that he’d been trying to find out more about the Junk Man and maybe, at the same time, the Junk Man had been trying to find out more about him.

  “Oh, and I also asked him if his kids got lots of stuff from Santa for Christmas. And he said he doesn’t have any kids. Isn’t that sad?” Barbara gave an exaggerated frown. “But he said it was okay. He likes being by himself.”

  Arthur shook his head. How could his little sister have found out more about the Junk Man in five minutes of blabbering than he had?

  “What else did he tell you?” Arthur pulled off his other boot. He pretended not to seem too interested in the conversation so his sister wouldn’t clam up.

  “Well, he told me he doesn’t live in our neighborhood. He lives in three little rooms in a building farther away. And I asked him why he always pushes a shopping cart around, and he said it isn’t a shopping cart, it’s a chariot, but you just can’t see the horses. Isn’t that funny?” Barbara laughed. “A chariot—but you just can’t see the horses!

  “And the best part of all”—she stood up and reached into her coat pocket—“he gave me a pretty silver bead to keep.”

  She held out her hand.

  And there, in his sister’s pink mitten, was the missing silver temperature knob from the toaster.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Arthur had no idea what the silver toaster knob was supposed to mean or why Mr. Hampton had given it to his little sister. He thought he might get some answers when he went back for his first Saturday of probation in January, but nothing had changed. He arrived at Mr. Hampton’s garage on January 4 and found the same list and the same cart. Nobody around. No other notes.

  Arthur figured maybe it had just been a coincidence—maybe the guy happened to be taking a
stroll past their house and had the toaster knob in his pocket, so he decided to give it to Barbara.

  But then something happened at school that made Arthur begin to wonder even more about the connections between his work for Mr. Hampton and his life.

  —

  It all started when Arthur forgot his earth science textbook in his locker. It was a couple of days after they got back to school from the Christmas holiday. They were having an open-book quiz. He needed the book.

  Normally, he tried to avoid going to his locker to get anything during lunch, when the ninth-grade varsity football players liked to hang around in the gym hallway and goof off. A lot of them were the size of Slash from juvie. Or bigger. Arthur knew it would only be a matter of time before they’d try to test the brick-throwing “juvie kid” for fun. Just to see how tough he really was.

  He didn’t want them to find out he wasn’t very tough at all.

  But he knew it would be an instant detention if he didn’t have the textbook. And he didn’t like disappointing Mr. C. So he ate his lunch quickly, tossed his trash in the garbage, and headed to his locker, hoping to get there before the jocks.

  His locker was halfway down the gym hall, just past the water fountains. As he came around the corner, he noticed a big group of guys gathered at the end of the hall. They were huddled around something.

  “Crap,” he said under his breath.

  He considered turning around and going back to the cafeteria. He’d just blow off the quiz, he told himself. Who cared?

  But the group had already spotted him. If he didn’t want to look like a total wimp, he had to keep walking toward his locker.

  He tried to seem preoccupied with what was outside the hallway windows—as if he wasn’t paying attention to the jocks and didn’t care what bad stuff they were doing. He’d just go to his locker, get his book, and leave. They could do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t his problem.

  It was the laughter that forced Arthur to take another look. He’d heard that kind of raucous laughter before. In juvie, it always meant trouble.

  In the middle of the jocks’ huddle at the end of the hallway, he noticed one of the big gray trash cans from the cafeteria. As he watched, one guy reached behind his back for a basketball and suddenly whipped the ball at the side of the can. It hit pretty hard. The can wobbled and the ball ricocheted down the hall.

  More wild laughter erupted from the group.

  Arthur couldn’t figure out why a cafeteria garbage can would be sitting in the hallway. Or why the jocks would be gathered around it, laughing and whipping basketballs at it.

  Until he saw the top of somebody’s head appear.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Arthur couldn’t remember exactly what he’d yelled at the group. He thought it was something like “Stop it, what are you doing?” with maybe a couple of swearwords added in.

  It was called a fight, but it really wasn’t.

  The jocks said Arthur threw his books as he ran toward them. They said he tried to kill them with his Great Works of Literature textbook and with the large and deadly U.S. history textbooks he was carrying, which could kill just about anyone.

  This was not true.

  Arthur did not throw his books. He dropped them as he got closer because he wanted to have his hands free to defend himself. He had learned a few things in juvie.

  He might have dropped the textbooks with more force than he needed to because he thought the slam of the books would get the guys’ attention and make them take off. (In hindsight, a pretty idiotic idea.) But he wasn’t dumb enough to throw anything at anybody again.

  Arthur ran toward the guys with only one thought in mind, really: Saving whoever was in the garbage can. Or at least getting the person out.

  Normally, Arthur wasn’t the saving type. He wasn’t sure why this scene bothered him as much as it did. If it hadn’t been for his probation sentence, maybe he wouldn’t have noticed the kid in the garbage can at all. Or maybe it was some leftover guilt about what he’d done to the Junk Man still hanging around.

  Whatever the reason, this weird burst of anger came over Arthur when he saw what was happening. Did the jocks think it was funny to throw someone in a trash can? Was it some kind of prank?

  Without thinking much about the consequences, he rushed toward the group. His long legs churned up the distance. He was a decent runner when he was angry.

  “Look out for the juvie freak!” the jocks laughed as they backed toward the sides of the hallway, leaving the garbage can behind like an abandoned island in the middle of the hall.

  Stupidly, Arthur didn’t pay much attention to where the guys went. All he cared about was that they’d left the person inside the garbage can alone. When he got to it, he peered into the shadowy depths, not knowing what to expect.

  A pale, round face surrounded by a lot of other round faces stared up at him.

  It took Arthur a minute to realize that only one round face was a kid’s. The others were basketballs. The kid had been dumped into one of the big trash cans of balls from the gym.

  “Want to play some ball?” the kid said, trying to smile as he looked up.

  Arthur could tell he’d been crying. He had smeary square glasses that looked way too fragile and professor-like. Glasses that seemed to say Please beat me up.

  “What are you doing in there?” Arthur snapped. As if the kid had a choice.

  “I don’t know.” The boy’s eyes blinked fast behind his glasses.

  “Well, stand up and I’ll help you get out,” Arthur said, feeling more irritated as time went on. He was mad at everything—the nerdy kid, the jocks, himself for getting involved.

  Because the trash can was so big, it was a struggle to get the short kid over the side and onto the floor again. Finally, Arthur had to half lift him out by his armpits, which was embarrassing—especially since he was pretty sure the boy was a seventh grader like he was.

  Once the kid’s feet were safely on the ground—feet that were wearing polished brown loafers, by the way—Arthur couldn’t help shoving the trash can toward the wall where some of the jocks were standing. Just to pay them back. Because brown-loafer, gold-glasses kid probably never would.

  This was a mistake.

  Of course, the can tipped over and basketballs went rolling everywhere. And one of the jocks behind Arthur took the opportunity created by the chaos to ram him into the wall of lockers. (Arthur didn’t see what happened to gold-glasses kid.)

  And of course, this was the moment when the varsity coaches and various other official people arrived.

  Nobody needed to tackle Arthur, because he was already sprawled on the linoleum. Without asking him why he was there, or letting him explain anything, they hauled him away to the office, one red-faced, huffing coach on each side.

  Arthur figured Officer Billie would probably count this as messing up. Big-time.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The kid was called Squeak.

  Arthur remembered that as he sat in the office. Squeak had been in one of his classes back in elementary school. He couldn’t recall the kid’s real name. Arthur figured everybody called him Squeak because of his size, but he wasn’t sure. He knew he’d never talked to him before.

  Why had he gotten involved?

  Arthur shook his head, more annoyed with himself than anyone else. He already had enough problems.

  The door of the vice principal’s office opened up on Arthur’s left. He forced himself not to look. Let Vice make the first move. Let Vice speak to him first.

  Squeak came out of the office and passed Arthur. He could hear the faint creak of his leather loafers and a snuffling sound that he assumed was the tail end of the kid’s crying. He was a real shrimp for a seventh grader, Arthur noticed again, feeling bad for his nonexistent hormones.

  Squeak didn’t say anything to Arthur. He slipped into the noisy hall like some kind of invisible spirit.

  “Mr. Owens.” Vice stood in the doorway of his office, arms folded. “You�
�re next.”

  Vice’s small, windowless office smelled of stale coffee and body odor.

  “Sit down, Mr. Owens.” Vice pointed to one of the leather chairs by his desk. Arthur slid into it, careful not to make eye contact with Vice, careful not to think the chairs were nice.

  “Well,” Vice said. “We’ve had quite a day today, haven’t we, Mr. Owens?”

  Arthur shrugged and mumbled, “Guess so.”

  Vice leaned back, twisting and untwisting a paper clip with his fingers. “Although I find this very hard to believe, Reginald says you were not one of the instigators today. Is that correct?”

  The kid’s real name was Reginald?

  Jeez. Arthur tried not to shake his head at the bad luck the kid had. Abnormally short. Gold glasses. And a name like Reginald.

  “I’m waiting on an answer,” Vice said. “Spit it out. I don’t have all day.”

  “I was just trying to help,” Arthur replied sullenly, still looking down at the floor. “That’s all.”

  “And by ‘help’ you mean what?”

  Arthur shrugged again. “Just getting him out of the trash can. What else?”

  “So you go around helping people all the time, do you?” Vice said sarcastically.

  “Maybe,” Arthur retorted.

  Vice tossed the deformed paper clip onto his desk. Arthur heard the tiny ping of it landing. “Here’s what I have a problem with, Mr. Owens: You are a convicted felon. You’ve been in jail….”

  Arthur kept his eyes on the office floor. He pictured all of the layers of cement, dirt, rocks, magma, and continental plates below his feet as Vice went on talking. He couldn’t be bothered to correct the vice principal’s lies. It didn’t matter, he told himself. Let people believe what they wanted.

  “From what I can gather, Reginald is the only one who says you were helping him,” Vice continued. “Every other person in the hallway says they saw you tormenting him—putting him in the garbage can and throwing balls at him.”

  Arthur’s eyes shot upward. “Well, they’re wrong.”