He didn’t bother reading the rest of it, which talked about how sad life was for the cats that get passed over. It also gave adoption information for Skylah, for anyone who might be interested.
“Denise thought it up,” I said, in case he’d missed that point the first time.
She’d taken an absolutely brilliant picture too —snapped at the perfect second.
Skylah was standing on her hind legs with her paw on my cheek, which made it seem as if she was trying to push me away. My eyes were closed, but the cat’s were wide and wild in alarm. It was like a reverse of the picture of Tamrah trying to get kissed, except, of course, the girl in this shot was a cat.
Steve sighed and shoved his phone back into his pocket. “You realize this totally messes up the plan with the kittens,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because, obviously everyone will think we got the idea from this.”
I knew immediately that he was right. “Sorry,” I said.
“Are you?”
“What do you mean, am I? What kind of question is that?”
“Well, what would you think if you were me?”
“What are you getting at?” I asked, maybe just a bit too quickly. “You think I’m cutting you out on purpose?”
“It sure looks that way.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“Right. And that’s why you kept quiet about it too — because it was all so innocent.”
“It only happened yesterday,” I pointed out.
“You mean when you dodged me after school?”
I stood there for a minute, trying to come up with something to say, which is not exactly my specialty under pressure. But, suddenly, I was mad too.
“You know what, if that’s what you want to think, go right ahead,” I told him.
Steve looked startled. To be honest, I was kind of startled myself. We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. Then he moved, fast and hard toward the door, shoving past me on his way out.
I hate arguing. Tension twisted my gut as I heard him pound down the stairs.
We’ve had arguments before where Steve has started to leave, but he’s never made it outside. I waited, listening for the front door. A minute, maybe two, passed and then there it was — the creak of hinges. He was really going this time.
My jaw stiffened in anger. If he wanted to act like a jerk, I sure wasn’t going to worry about it. For a second, I wished my window looked out over the front of the house so I could open it and yell some clever insult before he got out of hearing range.
I was imagining how he’d react to that when the door creaked again. Steve hadn’t made it off the front step.
My breath expelled in slow relief as I heard footsteps mount the stairs, slower and more subdued than the ones that had descended a moment earlier. I kept my eyes straight ahead as the door opened and his head popped in.
“S’up?” he asked.
I laughed as a grin broke across his face and he shoved the door wide and sauntered in.
“You’re the worst bluffer in history,” I said.
“I’m never bluffing,” he said. “I just get over things fast. But whatever — I have a better idea anyway.”
“A better idea for a picture?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?” I was starting to feel a little uneasy. When Steve takes his time getting to the point, it usually means I’m not going to like it.
This time was no different.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Steve insisted I would best appreciate his new idea if he could show me what he was talking about. We set off a few minutes later, heading toward the south side of town.
“So, before we get there I’ll give you the basic plan,” he said when we’d gone a block in silence.
“Okay,” I said.
A couple of minutes went by before he spoke again.
“Okay, so first, you have to promise you’re not going to be a humongous chicken about this.”
“What size chicken can I be?”
Steve snickered. He stopped walking and turned to face me. Maybe he thought his suggestion was so shocking I’d pass out right there on the sidewalk, and he’d have to save me from banging my chicken face on the curb.
“This is something totally original,” he said.
“Do I have to lay an egg? Because I don’t think I’m equipped for it.”
Steve ignored that. I could see by the glint in his eye he was psyched about this idea of his and didn’t want to waste any more time joking around.
“Skywalking,” he said, like that would mean something to me. It didn’t.
“Never heard of it.”
“I know! That’s the whole point. Like I just said, it’s totally original.”
“That is original,” I agreed.
And then, I hated to bring him down when he was so charged up, but I felt compelled to point something out.
“You do know you can’t actually walk in the sky, right?” I said.
“That’s what’s going to make this so amazing.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when Steve is serious. This was definitely making me wonder. I waited for him to say more, but he wasn’t quite ready yet.
“Come on,” he said. “It will be better if I show you.”
I have to admit my curiosity was growing as we made our way deeper into town, down along Front Street, past the specialty shops and cafes and on to the old train tracks that have been out of use for years. He stopped abruptly in front of the boarded-up train station.
“This is it. The perfect place,” he said. I noticed he still wasn’t rushing to give me a whole lot of details.
I looked around doubtfully. Aside from the tired stone of the abandoned station and the uncared-for grass and shrubs that surrounded it, there wasn’t much to see. Certainly nothing that would have made a good background for a photo shoot.
“The perfect place for what?” I asked.
“Skywalking, of course.”
“Right!” I said, whacking him on the back like we were sharing a big joke. He took a large unplanned step forward, waving his arms in circles to catch his balance.
“Hey,” he said. “What’d you do that for?”
“I thought you might take off. You know, and do some skywalking.”
Steve rolled his eyes. “You can’t do it here,” he said. Which was when I noticed the way his chin was turned up, and when I followed the angle of his gaze I found myself looking at the roof of the train station.
There was no way I was getting on that roof.
This isn’t easy to admit, but I have acrophobia, which means I’m afraid of heights. No, afraid isn’t a strong enough word. I’m terrified at the very thought of heights. I avoid exhibition rides if they’re more than a few feet off the ground and I nearly barf when I see someone skydiving out of a plane on television.
You’d think that Steve, being my best friend, would know this. He doesn’t. Because I’ve worked hard to hide my fear from everyone, him included.
“Count me out,” I said. “This place is ancient. The roof could be rotten.”
“It’s not,” he said. “It’s as solid as can be.”
“You were up there?”
“Yep. Last night, when I had the idea. And it’s perfect.”
“How’d you get in?”
“There’s an old coal door into the basement around the other side. One jiggle and the padlock pulled out of the old wood.”
He kept talking, but I was busy thinking about how I was going to get out of this without admitting how petrified I was at the thought of being on the roof.
“The problem is, I have that inner ear thing,” I said, offering my standby excuse. “But you can go ahead — it sounds cool.”
&n
bsp; “I knew you’d say that,” Steve told me. He stretched his arm out, pointing toward one part of the station’s roof. “But there’s a flat section.”
“So? It’s still up in the air.” My stomach did a nauseating flip.
“Yeah, but there’s no slope on that part, so even if you got dizzy you couldn’t fall off,” Steve said. “We don’t need to be near the edge — we could film from the middle of the flat part.”
I found myself wondering if it could work. My acrophobia really only kicks in when I look down. Maybe if I couldn’t see over the edge of the roof, I’d be okay.
Steve was watching me closely. He could tell I was wavering.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. Remember those clear Plexiglas cubes my mom brought home from her job last year?”
I only took a second to picture the cubes he was talking about. There’d been a dozen or more, all a uniform size of about twenty inches square.
“Those things that were piled in your living room for weeks?”
“Exactly. Mom was going to use them for organizing stuff, but she never got around to it.”
“So where are they now?”
“In the basement.”
“And?”
“And they’re clear. As in, see-through.”
“Yeah, I’m familiar with the properties of ‘clear.’” I said.
“So, picture this — it will be a video.”
“Taken by—?”
“We’ll find someone,” he said. “It will be dusk out — with the moon just showing up, and we’ll be up there, walking around in the sky, above the roof.”
“On the Plexiglas cubes,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“I think they’d probably be visible in the video,” I said.
“Not if there’s a little fog or mist.”
“That might work,” I said. It did sound cool, and I was talking myself into believing I could handle being up there as long as it was flat, and I didn’t look down.
At the same time, I figured I’d better leave myself an out, in case I needed one when the time actually came.
“And anyway, if I can’t do it — because of my ear thing — you can go ahead.”
“Except it will get more attention if you’re in it,” Steve said. He sounded as if that was something unpleasant I’d just forced him to admit.
I knew he was right. The recent postings on Strandz had turned me into a pretty popular guy.
Besides, my confidence was growing. Probably because my feet were still flat on the ground at that moment.
So I agreed to do it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
You know how cars have mirrors that say objects are closer than they appear? Well, being on the outside of things can make them seem a lot more fun and interesting than they really are.
Being in the spotlight had transported me to the other side of the social wall. I was in, and that was great, but there were things I didn’t like so much. For example, the feeling that I was being watched — and judged — so much of the time.
That might have been why there was a sense of unease in me at school the next week even though the cat kiss picture had elevated my social status another couple of notches. Mostly because it did what Denise had hoped for — something I, quite frankly, had barely given a thought.
She told me about it at lunchtime, waving at me from across the cafeteria and hurrying over to show me a picture of a young couple holding a cat. Her face was pink and flushed, her eyes bright and shining. It made her look kind of cute.
“Look!” she said, thrusting her phone at me.
“Hmm,” I said. I had no idea what her point was as I looked down at a picture of smiling strangers holding a cat.
“It worked!” she told me. “This is Skylah’s new family.”
I looked closer, as if I was double-checking that the cat in the picture was really Skylah. Not that I’d have been able to tell the difference if it wasn’t. One black and white cat looks pretty much like any other black and white cat to me.
“That’s great,” I said.
“And that’s not all,” she said excitedly. “Two more cats who have been waiting ages for their forever homes were adopted too.”
“That’s great,” I said again. Denise didn’t seem to notice I’d turned into a human echo.
“Okay, so I’ve gotta go,” she said in a sort of dreamy, happy voice. “I just wanted to tell you the awesome news about Skylah and the others.”
Word of these adoptions spread like an uncontained fire. And by the end of the day, when I got to my locker, I was swarmed.
Swarmed by girls, that is. (I’d have been a whole lot less excited if it had been bees.)
Girls to my left, girls to my right, crowded around me, leaning in, smiling, talking. It was enough to make a guy dizzy. In a good way.
They all seemed to be chattering at the same time, but the messages got through in spurts and blurts. I was amazing, the saver of cats’ lives, the kind of guy who didn’t mind putting himself out there for something he believed in. I, Derek Cowell, was a true animal lover and all round wonderful human being.
No one said a word about Denise’s part in the whole thing. I decided it was only right to set the record straight.
“It wasn’t all me,” I said, trying to be heard over the din of praise. “I had help, you know.”
“He’s so humble,” someone else declared. And the whole lot of them let out admiring murmurs.
“He’s the real hero,” said someone from behind me. There was more nodding and agreeing with that, as though I’d won first place in some vague contest.
I made a serious effort to look humble and as I did, my eye was caught by Steve’s amused face watching the whole scene from a few feet away. I grabbed what I needed from my locker and edged my way toward him through the cluster of girls.
A moment later he turned to me on the sidewalk, a Grinch-like grin spread across his face. “Is this unbelievable or what?” he asked.
I laughed. “I’d have gone around kissing cats long ago if I’d known this was going to happen,” I said.
“And it’s a perfect build-up for our skywalking video!” he said. “The more popular you get, the more views it will get.”
The skywalking plan! My enthusiasm took an instant dive and ended in a crash landing. After I’d agreed to do the roof thing, I’d researched a few things about acrophobia.
My hope had been to find out how I could get over it, but what I’d learned was not encouraging. The condition has no quick fixes. There are things a person can do, but they take time and I didn’t have years, or even months, to get ready.
I’d known from the start that the longer I waited, the harder it was going to be to get out of this crazy video idea. The problem was Steve. He was psyched, talking about the progress he was making getting things organized and ready.
He’d never have believed the truth at that point even if I had come clean. Who would? It would look as if I was inventing a phobia to get out of sharing the limelight with him.
There might have been a time when I could have said, “Look, man, I can’t. That’s all. I just can’t.”
But it was way too late for that.
Apparently, I was going to have to find a way to get on that roof.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ilanded home in a bad frame of mind, worried about the train station plan and still drawing a blank on how I could extract myself from it. Engrossed in those thoughts, it barely registered that Anna was slinking up to me. It wasn’t until she spoke that she got my attention.
“So, did you have a good time at the party last Friday?”
I froze, wondering how she’d found out, and waiting to see what the little gangster was going to demand this time. But she never got a chance to tell me, because Mom’s voice in the
hall stopped that extortion scheme in its tracks.
“What party? What is she talking about, Derek?”
Busted.
The way Anna’s face crumpled you’d have thought she was the one in trouble. I narrowed my eyes at her and drew a finger across my throat, although I had to drop my hand in mid slash when Mom appeared in the doorway. Switching from a threatening glare to an innocent face, I turned my attention to Mom.
“Oh, right. Steve and I were bored, so we went to this girl’s place for a bit.”
“You went to a party,” she said. Only, the way she said it sounded as if I’d done something sinister, like knocking down an old lady and stealing her purse.
“Kind of.”
“You don’t ‘kind of’ go to a party,” Mom said.
I looked down at the floor and mumbled, “Sorry.”
Mom crossed her arms in front of her. Never a good sign. I braced myself for a grounding, which didn’t take long coming.
“You can be sorry this weekend,” Mom said. “No phone, no computer and no leaving the house.”
Trying for a lighter sentence is always worth a shot, and I’d have done that if Kim and Steffie hadn’t come through the front door just then. There’s no way to look manly when you’re begging for mercy, so I dropped it and headed to my room until supper.
Steffie stayed and ate with us, which is pretty common at our house. Not that she’s here a lot, but that someone is. Mom has this philosophy that if anyone extra is around when we’re about to eat, we set another place at the table and make them welcome. She says it’s the kind of hospitality she grew up with and she hopes we’ll carry the tradition on someday. The girls all say they will. I find that hard to believe considering the way I’ve seen them act when someone uses a few drops of nail polish or a swipe of lip balm without their permission.
Steffie was sitting right across from me at supper, which was both good and bad. It made it easier for me to look at her without being obvious about it, but she was also more likely to notice if I did something my sisters would describe as gross. That’s a long list and it’s hard to keep track of everything on it.
As soon as grace was said Steffie gave me a sweet smile and said, “So, any new photos we should watch for?”
The Rise and Fall of Derek Cowell Page 6