Terrific. He nodded without looking at her.
"You're new to the school, right? Mrs. Nederhauser tells me that your father trains dolphins for a living...?"
"Yeah, sort of," Bobby said.
"Sort of?" She cocked her head at him.
"Well, it's more than training dolphins," Bobby explained. "See, he's in business with a couple guys from down south around Texas or Louisiana. A seafood business. Shrimp. But it costs a lot of money to bring the shrimp up north because they've got to ship them in refrigerated trucks. The cost of that shipping was really killing the business."
"I'm sure," Miss Davenport said, nodding. She had huge blue eyes that never seemed to blink.
"So my father and friends came up with an idea. They would try to use dolphins to herd the shrimp up north!"
She gave him a quizzical look.
"And it worked!" Bobby thumped the desk. "Now they have three dozen trained dolphins that herd shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico right up the Gulf Stream. My father has a crew of boats that harvest the shrimp right off New Jersey No trucks needed! That cuts out the middle man and allows Dad to sell the shrimp a lot cheaper than anyone else."
"Wait a sec," Miss Davenport said. "Let me get this straight. You're telling me that your father trains dolphins to herd shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico up to New Jersey? You're not pulling my leg, are you?"
"No, ma'am! It sounded crazy when he first thought of it, but it worked! The great thing is the shrimp never have to get frozen at all. And the shrimp they harvest are nice and plump from feeding in the Gulf Stream all the way north. You should taste them."
His stomach growled—all of a sudden those juicy shrimp really sounded delicious.
"Amazing," Miss Davenport said. She slowly shook her head and jotted something down on a piece of paper. "How does he do it? Train the dolphins, I mean."
"Dad had to hire a dolphin specialist for that," Bobby explained. He liked the sound of that: dolphin specialist. "I guess it took a lot of time. But after they trained one group of dolphins they discovered the most amazing thing. The female dolphins had babies, and after that Dad never had to train the babies—the parents taught their own babies how to herd the shrimp! You know how smart dolphins are. So now they don't even have to train them at all!"
Miss Davenport smiled and shook her head.
***
At the end of school, right after the final bell, Bobby saw Mom and Dad standing outside the main office. Dad was wearing a suit and tie; Mom had on her white nursing outfit. Neither one of them seemed happy to see him. Seeing your parents in school, he realized, almost always spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
"Hi," he said. "Whats up?"
"Miss Davenport called," Mom said. "Your new guidance counselor. She asked us to come in for a talk."
"I think it's time we all go get an ice cream," Dad said.
"Somebody die?" Bobby muttered, following them out of the building. Mom and Dad took him out for ice cream whenever he got an A on a report card. Or when it was time to have a Serious Talk.
A strained silence inside the car. Mom swiveled her head around to look at him.
"How was your day?" she asked.
"Okay" he mumbled and that was it. Nobody said anything else until they arrived at Meg's Ice Cream Shoppe. They took a booth at the far end of the restaurant. As soon as the waitress took their order, Mom got up to use the rest room. Dad cleared his throat.
"I got a call from Miss Davenport," Dad said. "She said you told her an outlandish story today. About how I train porpoises to herd shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico up to New Jersey."
Bobby lowered his eyes to avoid his fathers stare.
"That's the best one I've heard in a while," Dad said. "Well, she's a psychologist. She's trained to watch for stuff like this. So she did a little detective work, you know, talking to your other teachers. And it turns out you've been spreading around a bunch of different stories about your life. And about me. Let's see, you told one class that I run a silk farm. Spider silk. You told somebody else that I've just been named the head of the spider department at some big museum." Dad leaned back and folded his arms. "Maybe you'd like to tell me what other unusual jobs I have. Hmmm?"
Bobby sighed, looked away.
"Would you like to tell me what's going on?" Dad asked.
"I don't know," he mumbled.
"You don't know," Dad said, folding his arms. "Well, Miss Davenport is a little worried about you. She said it could be just a matter of adjusting to a new school. But she also used words like closed off, unstable identity, at-risk adolescent"
"Aw, c'mon," Bobby said. He lifted his spoon off the napkin and looked at his face, distorted, in the metal.
"Your mother's worried," Dad said. "All you seem to read and write about is spiders. She thinks you're a little obsessed with that tarantula of yours."
The voice in Bobby's head replied, Right now Thelmas the best friend I've got. He decided that it would not be smart to say this out loud. Definitely not.
"I don't know what to think of all these stories you've been telling about me," Dad was saying. "Amazing jobs. Inventor of this. Director of that. Trouble is, I don't have a job like that."
"I know, I know."
"I'm production manager at a container plant. We make cardboard boxes. And I'm not ashamed of that. It's a job. I get paid well. And it takes a lot of money to run a family."
Bobby sighed. He had heard the money lecture before, but he knew he couldn't stop it now. It was like a machine with a button that, once pushed, couldn't be stopped but had to run through until it was finished.
"All my adult life I've had this goal to earn my own age in salary. Well, I'm forty-three now, and for the first time in my life I'm doing that, plus a couple grand." Dad looked down at his hands. "It's not training dolphins or winning the Nobel Prize by studying the deadly three-headed vampire from Katmandu. But it's a good job with good benefits. And that's why we moved here."
"I know, I know," Bobby said. Mom returned just as the waitress showed up with their cones, each lying in its own small dish.
"Who gets the nonfat blueberry yogurt?" the waitress asked.
"I do," Mom said. She put the dish in front of her and didn't touch it.
"I'm worried," she said after the waitress left. At that moment Bobby noticed all the tiny lines, like the finest webs, around her eyes.
He sighed again. "But there's, like, nothing to worry about. I'm okay. Really."
"I worry that you're isolated from people," she said. "Nobody calls you."
"I've only been here a few weeks," Bobby said. "It takes time to make friends." That sounded like something you'd hear on TV. It takes time to make friends. He licked his ice cream. Heavy on the green dye, light on the pistachio nuts.
"I know it's been hard for you," Mom said in a soft voice. "Leaving all your friends behind."
"Yeah."
"We all miss Naperville," Mom said.
"Wish we'd never left," Bobby muttered, glancing at his watch. In Naperville it was exactly 3:00 P.M. The long final bell. Kids racing for the door and all that sweet outside air. Bobby squirmed. How much longer before he could make his own exit?
"Help me understand all these make-believe stories," Mom said.
"We were just talking about that," Dad said.
"The other day when the car broke down you told the mechanic a story that scared him near to death. That doesn't sound like the Bobby Ballenger I know. You were always interested in the truth about things. What's going on?"
"I don't know," Bobby said. All at once he was tired of their questioning. Who knows why I did it? Who knows why people do anything? "It's like, I was bored, kind of."
"And angry about having to move," Mom put in.
Bobby shrugged. He'd eaten his cone too fast. The ice cream had numbed his tongue and planted the seed of a headache in the front of his head.
"I don't know if we should be worried about you or not," Mom said. "Miss Davenport said that so
metimes when adolescents start telling all kinds of made-up stories it can be a warning sign. Like a cry for help."
"Not," Bobby said. "I've always liked to make up stuff."
Dad motioned to the waitress.
"Could we have some water, please?" He looked at Bobby. "I remember when you were five years old you wanted to be an astronaut. For a whole year it was nothing but space, spaceships, asteroids. You wanted to change your name to Astronaut and you cried when we couldn't find you an astronaut costume for Halloween."
Mom nodded.
"And in first grade you were a paleontologist," Dad said. "That year it was nothing but dinosaur books, dinosaur movies, dinosaur pictures. The meat eaters and the plant eaters. You were a pterodactyl for Halloween."
Mom nodded hopefully The waitress set down three small glasses of ice water.
"I'm no psychologist," Dad said, shrugging. "But for me, that's what adolescence was about. Figuring out who I was. It's hard work. Maybe you're going through that now."
"Maybe," Bobby said, shifting in his seat.
"Are you all right?" Mom asked.
"Yes, I'm fine. Really. Can we go now?"
"Just one more thing," Dad said. "Don't you think you better go back and tell all those people the truth about those stories you've been telling?"
"Yeah, I guess so," Bobby said after a moment.
"Good," Dad said. "Ill let you decide how to do that."
"Okay," Bobby said uneasily. What a relief it was to get out of that place. It always made him nervous when his parents thought they had him all figured out.
Six
October 1
Spiders can use a strand of silk web like a balloon to float away. This is called gossamer flight.
No way a couple hundred baby spiderlings could find enough food to survive in one small area. Spiders had to invent some way of spreading out so they could find new places to hunt and live.
Gossamer flight just may be the most amazing thing spiders do. Here's how it happens:
Spiders like to "fly" on warm sunny mornings when there might be an updraft in the air. The little spider climbs to the top of the tallest object it can find. It stands on tiptoes and turns around to face the wind.
The spider squeezes out a little drop of silk from its spinnerets. This thread gets quickly hauled out by the wind and used like a sail. The wind lifts the thread. When the pull from the thread is strong enough the spider lets go and floats away.
Ballooning spiders have been found floating up to nine thousand feet in the air. Scientists have found that the stomachs of swallows contained lots of small black spiders.
Gossamer flight happens all around the world—in China, Brazil, Greece, and Australia. They float through the air and land on islands in the ocean. One explorer at the top of Mt. Everest found tiny jumping spiders at 22,000 feet!
In some places, the threads of the ballooning spiders get mixed together and whole sheets of gossamer (spider silk) rain down on fields, trees, the sides of mountains. I'd love to see that! Scientists used to think that the threads were all from the same species—the gossamer spider—but now they know that lots of spiders use their silk to travel by air.
Imagine it: the spider floats way up in the air, clinging to that strand of silk. Air currents are much stronger at high altitudes than they are on the ground. Pretty soon the spider has flown hundreds of miles from home. What a trip!
I'd love to balloon out of here.
I can picture myself doing it, floating back to Naperville, to our old stucco house on Locust Street. Wouldn't Mike and Chad and Cody be amazed to see me come parachuting down from the sky?
But spiders don't go ballooning for fun. They do it to survive. Most young spiders use this aerial flight at some time in their lives. But not big spiders like tarantulas. Even as a baby, a spider like Thelma would be way too heavy to balloon up into the air.
Thelma and I are in the same boat—both stuck in New Paltz, New York. We can't leave. Our only choice is to try to find a way to survive right here.
Bobby survived as best he could. At school he stood up and told Mr. Niezgocki's class the truth about his fathers silk farm. He apologized to them, and he apologized separately to Mr. Niezgocki. He also apologized to Mrs. Nederhauser, Miss Terbaldi, and Miss Davenport for the stories he had told them.
The apologies were a lot easier than he'd imagined. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. A few kids in Mr. Niezgocki's class gave him funny looks, and Chick Hall smirked, but most just shrugged it off.
He had thought that apologizing would make him feel better. Lighter. It didn't. Still, he decided he wouldn't tell any more stories. From now on he would concentrate on being Bobby Ballenger. No more lies.
***
That night after supper he got a phone call.
"Hi, could I speak to Bobby please?"
"That's me."
"This is Lucky Prescott. From Mr. Niezgocki's class?"
"Oh, yeah."
"I figured we better get cracking on that research project we're supposed to do together. I figured I'd better give you a call."
"Yeah, right."
"I was thinking maybe I should come over so we can work on it. It's due Monday, you know."
"When?" he asked, stalling. He had absolutely no interest in doing a research project with her, or any other total stranger.
"I don't know. Tomorrow afternoon sometime?"
"Hmmm," Bobby said. He couldn't see any way out of it.
"If we're going to do it, we might as well do it right," Lucky said. "We can do something about spiders if you want."
"What about spiders?"
"I don't know ... you're the expert. Maybe something about poisonous spiders...? My father's friend in Atlanta got bit by a brown recluse."
"No way. Really?"
"Yeah, he was cleaning out his attic," Lucky said. "Never saw the critter till it was too late. Boy, did he get sick! Twice they had to give him the last rites. He didn't die, but his face got all messed up—he had to have surgery to make him look sort of normal again."
Bobby swallowed. The brown recluse was probably the most dangerous spider living in the United States.
"How about I come over tomorrow after lunch? See if we can't get started on this thing. We could work over here, but I'm going out for a run anyway and I think I come near your house. You live on Sumac, right?"
"Yeah. First yellow house on the left."
"See you tomorrow?"
"All right," Bobby said. He hung up and let out a sigh.
"Who was that?" Bobby's father asked. He was sitting at the breakfast bar, thumbing through the newspaper.
"That was a girl in my class. Mr. Niezgocki put us together to work on a class project. She's going to come over tomorrow so we can work on it."
"That's nice," his mother said, smiling over at him.
"She's black," he added.
"Hmmm," his father said, nodding casually.
"When she's coming?" Mom asked.
"Tomorrow after lunch," he said. "And I'd really appreciate it if nobody made a big deal about it."
***
The next day Lucky showed up in a gray Atlanta Braves sweat suit with purple sweatbands on her wrists and forehead. Dad and Mom looked up from where they were working in the garden.
"Hi," Lucky said.
"Hello!" Mom replied.
"Hi!" Dad grinned, showing his dirty hands. "I'd shake hands but..."
"Isn't it kind of late to be planting?" Lucky asked.
"We're putting in iris bulbs for next spring," Mom explained. "They're from my garden back in Illinois. We brought a little bit of home with us."
They walked into the kitchen.
"So you're a runner," Mom said, washing her hands in the sink. "I run, too. How far do you go?"
"Somewhere around three miles," Lucky said. "Weekends I might do a little more. I'm going out for the cross-country team. Lucky for me I inherited my daddys strong legs."
"I just bro
ke three miles," Mom said. "I usually get up real early to run. Six, or six fifteen."
Bobby stood there, hands jammed in pockets. For a panicky moment he wondered if Mom and Lucky would set up a date to go running together.
"Wow," Lucky said. "No way I could run that early!"
"I figured you two might like something to nibble on," Mom said, setting down a plate of brownies and tall glasses of milk.
"You make these?" Lucky asked, leaning forward.
"Who me?" Mom asked. "No! My husband is the chef around here. I got these at a bakery near the hospital where I work."
Bobby sat down at the breakfast bar, glaring at his mother. He had asked her not to do anything special for this visit. But of course, she didn't listen. She never did. He picked up a brownie and nibbled on one corner. Lucky sat across the table from him.
"No way my ma would let my father into the kitchen to cook," Lucky said.
There was a sudden rumble on the stairs; Breezy poked her head into the room.
"Bobby," Mom said, "aren't you going to do the introductions?"
"My sister, Brianna," Bobby mumbled.
"Breezy" she corrected him, extending her hand.
"I'm Lucky," she said, shaking it.
"You are?" Breezy asked. She looked confused.
"I mean that's my name, Lucky," Lucky explained.
"Oh, Lucky's your name" Breezy said, smiling. "Hey, that's cool. Mmmm. Brownies."
"Don't you have play practice or something?" Bobby asked her.
"No rush," Breezy said sweetly. Ignoring his glare, she sat down, taking the seat directly across from Lucky.
"Have you lived here a long time?" Mom asked.
"No, ma'am," Lucky said. "We just moved here this summer, from Atlanta."
"Like us!" Mom said. "Bobby probably told you that we just moved here from Illinois. What do your parents do?"
"Mom's a nurse. She just took a job at Whispering Pines. It's a nursing home for people with Alzheimer's. My father's a news anchorman on TV. Roland Prescott."
"Roland Prescott!" Mom exclaimed. She and Breezy stared at each other. Lucky nodded, her mouth full of brownie.
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