by Richard Peck
That’s right, we confirmed. Esther nodded.
“You really are the most extraordinary people,” Hilary said. “Nothing you do makes sense.”
We went for the macaroni and cheese—in fact, every day that week. Lynn did a half portion, but she drew the line at greens. Esther ate everything in sight. I don’t know where she puts it. I checked the lunch Dad had packed me to see if I could salvage anything. I couldn’t. We went for sugary drinks. If the seventh graders got to us before Reginald could, we were dead people anyway.
We were just tucking in when guess who loomed up? Perry Highsmith. Big seventh grader now. Remember him? Behind him were Aidan Cooper and Jeff Spinks. Remember them?
Perry planted his hands on our table. He leaned in. “Sixth graders, am I right? Just for openers, let’s see a couple of bucks all around. For the seventh-grade fund. Cash. We don’t take PayPal. That’s just a rumor. And I’ll be back for a look at your phones after you’ve enjoyed dessert.”
We felt Perry’s hot breath. He and Hilary were nose to nose. “Oh my dear boy, those sideburns simply aren’t working,” Hilary said. “I’d try again in a year or two.”
I thought we were dead people.
Perry flushed an ugly color. “Shut your mouth, Harry Potter, and open your wallet. Two bucks or you’ll be wearing a cast on the other leg.”
Hilary drew up. “I am a subject of the Queen of England,” he said, “and a citizen of the United Kingdom. The sun never sets on us, and an attack upon one is an attack upon all.”
“We only take U.S. money,” Perry said, “and we don’t make change.”
Ah, but change was coming. Something like a dark cloud fell between Perry and the ceiling light. Black-clad shoulders like giant bat wings unfurled over him. Eighth graders reached for their phones. Perry looked around, and up. And up. Reginald was there. Aidan Cooper and Jeff Spinks were walking backward to the nearest exit.
Perry made a small sound. Part of a word.
“What’s he called?” Hilary asked.
“Perry Highsmith,” I said.
“Listen as carefully as ever you can, Perry Highsmith,” Hilary said. “Standing over you, inches away, is another Englishman. His name is Reginald, and he is my muscle. Though a man of few words, he can cause you pain that leaves no mark. Only memory.”
“Ooooo,” said the food court, because Hilary’s voice was high but carried a mile.
“And so,” said Hilary, “you are barred from this lunchroom for the rest of the year, Perry Highsmith. Until next May. Have your mother pack your lunch. Otherwise, any moneys you manage to extort in this rather badly run school will be useful for your medical expenses. There will be casts on parts of your body you didn’t know you had. See him out, Reginald.”
Reginald pointed Perry to the exit. Aidan and Jeff were already there.
That took care of it. A wave of applause swept the food court. Eighth graders. Seventh graders even. People who’d been conducting shakedowns twenty minutes ago were applauding. And from that day on, sixth graders thronged the place. The steam table people kept running out of food because they’d never done this much business. They couldn’t keep the sugary drinks on the shelves.
In a blast from the past, Reginald even made it into the weekend edition of the Trib:
BRITISH BODYGUARD PROTECTS STUDENT IN MIDDLE SCHOOL
Just How Safe Are the Leafy Suburbs Behind Their Façade of Complacent Calm?
The Trib picture of Reginald was scary, so we didn’t get au pairs. But by Friday people were fist-bumping our foursome on their way to the salad bar.
• • •
I forget all the things we learned just in that first week. We knew Hilary’s mother was Lady Christobel in her own right. We asked him about his father.
“Daddy? Lord Horace?” he said. “He’s a baron. Lady Christobel married down a bit. When he pops his clogs, I shall be Lord Hilary Calthorpe.”
“Awesome,” we said. “What are you now?”
“I’m the Honourable Hilary Evelyn Calthorpe. But you never say the word. It’s only for addressing a letter to me. ‘The Hon. Hilary Evelyn Calthorpe,’ if you write.”
“Where is your daddy?” we inquired.
“The last postcard was from Acapulco. He was hang-gliding. So if you think about it, I could become Lord Hilary any moment now. A stray puff of wind. An inconvenient coral reef. Anything.”
Lynn hung on Hilary’s every word and brought him desserts. He could manage the wheelchair fine and wouldn’t let Reginald push him. But Lynn was always hovering to help. And there wasn’t any more talk out of her about marrying Raymond Petrovich and living in the Bay Area.
Hilary made a real study of us, and what he liked best were girls. He’d never been in a school with girls. “We tend not to know anything about the opposite sex until marriage,” he said. “And often not then.”
“You’ll find the girls here a lot more mature than the boys,” Lynn said.
“And yet you hide it so well,” said the Hon. Hilary Calthorpe.
We thought he was weird. He thought we were weird. It was great. It was what multiculturalism ought to be.
21
After school Mom and I had a little talk in her office. The weekend Trib was on her desk. She tapped the JUST HOW SAFE ARE THE LEAFY SUBURBS headline.
“Why do I somehow see you mixed up in this?” she said.
“Mom, I am. I’m in a lunch foursome with Little Lord Calthorpe. He’s not a lord till his daddy pops his clogs or hits a reef, but that’s what everybody calls him. He’s the Honourable Hilary Evelyn Calthorpe, but you never say it.”
Mom watched my mouth, trying to decode what was coming out.
“You’re in a lunch foursome?” Mom said. “Who are they?”
“Hilary, Esther Wilhelm, Lynn, me.”
“Lynn who?”
“The former Lynette. New school, new name. She was never really a Lynette.”
Mom looked at me thoughtfully. “A lunch foursome. Where is my little boy? You’ll be playing bridge next.”
“Mom, it could happen. Golf, even. I could tee off at any time. And we can eat in the food court since Reginald has cleared out the criminal element. It’s suddenly the hottest place in town. You can’t get a table.
“Mom, we’re feeling a lot better with British muscle on the case.”
“I wish I did,” she said. “Sit down, Archer. I’d like to run a concern past you. The British Consulate people believe that the school my taxes pay for is too dangerous to attend without a . . . hit man.”
“Basically,” I said. “Also Hilary’s in a wheelchair. He was differently abled by an Uber car because we drive on the wrong side of the road.”
Again, Mom watched my mouth.
“But they’ll probably keep Reginald on even after Hilary’s back on his feet. Reginald has diplomatic immunity. You know what that is, Mom? He could break you in half, and they couldn’t touch him.”
Mom sighed. “Archer, spell this out for me as simply as you can. Why can’t the school protect its own students with its own resources?”
“That’s easy. Bullies have parents too, and schools don’t have diplomatic immunity.”
Mom searched the ceiling in her thoughtful way. “I suppose when you get to high school, Archer, you won’t tell me a thing about it.”
“Not a word, Mom. My secrets will be safe from you. I’ll let you know when graduation is, so you can come. But not a peep out of me till then.”
“All things considered,” Mom said, “I think that’ll be the best way.” Then she went into what she really wanted to talk about. “Speaking of high school,” she said, so it was going to be about Holly.
“Mom, I haven’t seen Holly in days.”
“Neither has the school,” she said. “I got an actual call from them, not an e-mail.
She’s checked out of school half the time for college visits. She and Janie Clarkson seem to be hitting the open road in the Clarksons’ Lexus, making lightning raids on colleges, collecting admissions forms.”
College? Holly?
“How can Holly go to college? Look at her record.”
“Well, I know she failed chemistry. I thought they ought to let her repeat it.”
“Mom, she blew up the lab. You had to pay for the windows. Some of her classmates still don’t have their eyebrows back.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Mom said, and right then the front door banged downstairs. Holly was home from high school, or somewhere.
“Is Uncle Paul coming for dinner tonight?”
“I believe so,” Mom said.
“Is Mr. McLeod coming with him?”
“Apparently not. I didn’t like to ask.”
“Mom, I hope Uncle Paul doesn’t mess this up, with Mr. McLeod. You can wait too long, you know, and all the good ones are gone.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Lynn Stanley. But it’ll work out, Mom. Dad and I are on the case.”
“You? Your dad?” Now Mom looked really worried.
• • •
According to Hilary, the greatest talent the English have is for “administering less well-organized peoples.”
And that would be us. At lunch he’d say to Esther, “Sit tall, Esther. Throw back those shoulders. Be as tall as you can be. Don’t crouch. It’s too late to be short.”
I figured her best chance was a basketball scholarship to the U of I when the time came. But dribbling down the court in big shoes wouldn’t be Hilary’s idea.
“You’re not jealous, are you?” I asked Lynn. “Hilary and Esther?”
“No, you buffoon,” she said. “He’s prepubescent, and she’s seven feet tall and weighs twelve pounds. Give me a break.”
Besides, his best talent was for administering the unorganized, so we all had a turn. He didn’t play favorites.
But I don’t care what Lynn said; she watched Hilary like a hawk. She missed one thing, though. We thought he lived in the consulate on Michigan Avenue and came out from Chicago every morning. Then somehow we learned he didn’t.
“Live in the consulate?” Up went his eyebrows. “That would be rather like living over the shop, wouldn’t it?”
“Queen Elizabeth lives over the shop, doesn’t she?” said Lynn. “More or less? Of course it’s Buckingham Palace.”
“Cousin Elizabeth? Yes, I suppose she does, really.”
Cousin Elizabeth?
“You’re a cousin of the Queen of England?”
“Lots of people are. She has cousins by the dozens. And we’re twice married into the Harewood family, who would be her aunt Mary’s people.”
Lynn made a quick note on a food court napkin:
Google Harewood fam.
“So you could end up on the throne?” we asked.
“I shouldn’t think so,” Hilary said. “I’m ninety-second in line.”
But that didn’t explain where he lived.
“Here in this town,” he said. “Why would I be driven all the way out here from Chicago?”
“Because we’re the center of the universe?”
“Hardly,” said Hilary. “We’re used to rather large houses, so Lady Christobel is renting one nearby. It belonged to a couple now divorced, I believe. The Showalters?”
“Noooo,” we said. I saw it all again in my mind. The marble floors, the chandelier gleaming on Jackson Showalter’s skinned head.
“We’re cursed,” Lynn said. “We’re doomed. We’ll never be free of those people, and that includes Natalie.”
• • •
We told Hilary a few things. All he’d noticed about Ms. Roebuck was that she was the worst-dressed teacher in the system.
“Maybe she’s paying off a college loan,” Lynn said, but it was worse than that.
What I thought was awesome about Ms. Roebuck was her allergy to the computer. She could set it off by walking by it, as we know. And the printer. And forget scanning.
This reminded Hilary of a chauffeur his family had once. “He was allergic to the steering column of the car. He once drove Lord Horace’s Jag into the fountains of Trafalgar Square with all my brothers and sisters in it.”
“We thought you were an only child,” we said.
“I am now,” said Hilary.
And one time Lynn said, “Archer has a gay uncle.”
“Who doesn’t?” said Hilary.
“It’s his uncle Paul, and he’s been seeing our teacher from last year, Mr. McLeod,” Lynn said. “The two best-looking guys in, like, Illinois.”
“Wow, wow, wow,” Esther said out of the blue, which made Hilary look.
“Archer’s worried their relationship isn’t going anywhere.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Lynn. It is what it is and it’ll work or it—”
“He’s worried,” Lynn said.
And now it must be October, because all around us in the food court eighth graders were taping up posters and black and orange balloons and artificial fangs. It was all about the school Halloween party, a big Memorial Middle tradition.
In elementary school, Halloween wasn’t that big a deal. Cookies in shapes, a paper cup of apple juice, and make your own mask. But here it’s an event: in the evening with music, dancing if you can, major costumes.
The first grown-up party of life.
Hilary may have noticed all the orange and black going up around us. Or not. He said to Esther, “Esther, you have to stop wearing that backpack. It’s giving you a case of Dowager’s Hump. Borrow a purse from your mother. There’s no earthly need to carry all those books around. You never open them.”
Then lunch was over. The bell rang, and Hilary jumped out of his skin. “I wish to heaven they’d stop ringing that thing,” he said.
Reginald appeared out of nowhere, and we all scattered to fourth period.
• • •
And so went our days. They began for us all when Hilary drove his battery-powered wheelchair down the ramp out of the consular van. He seemed battery-powered himself: a mechanical mini British schoolboy in one gray sock and the uniform of a faraway school. We forgot all about how life used to be.
22
Then it’s that Friday night or the next one. Uncle Paul and I are in his Audi. We’re in rush hour traffic, looking for I-55.
Just as he’d walked in our house for dinner, Holly called on Janie Clarkson’s phone. The Clarksons’ Lexus had broken down on the shoulder of an access road. Both girls were screaming.
Mom handed the phone to Uncle Paul. “Have you called the automobile club?” he asked.
“Have we?” said Holly.
“Certainly not,” Janie said. “My dad can never know we took the car, and he won’t if we get it back in time tonight.”
“Tell me what’s wrong with it,” Uncle Paul said.
“It was going,” Holly said. “Then it stopped.”
Could it be out of gas? Uncle Paul told them to stay in the car, lock the doors, and wait till we got there. We took a can of gas, and Dad stayed behind to cook dinner.
Now Uncle Paul and I were starting and stopping in the traffic. It was the calm before we found Janie Clarkson and Holly. It was great. I was in no hurry.
“Uncle Paul,” I said. “Can I have this car in three years for my sixteenth birthday?”
“It’ll be four and a half years before you’re sixteen,” he said, “and no.”
“Shall we talk about cars and the Cubs?”
“We can if you want to.”
“How’s Mr. McLeod?”
“I think he’s good. He has another year of course work on his degree. He has to rewrit
e the report on his student teaching. Apparently it reads like science fiction.”
“That’d be us,” I said. “What else? About Mr. McLeod?”
“The last I heard he was applying for part-time work on a road crew for the county. And this may be his weekend for the National Guard. He’s got a lot going on.”
“So you don’t see much of him?”
“I don’t see him at all, Archer. And you know something? I think it’s just as well.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Because I’m eleven?”
“No. It’s just that he and I aren’t compatible. I mean, I keep in shape. I watch what I eat. I go to the gym. But he runs seven miles before daylight and then goes to work on a road crew.
“You know what he’s saving his money for?”
“A better car?”
“No, he wants to compete in a decathlon. He’s saving up for the Gay Games in Paris.”
Paris. I pictured Mr. McLeod sprinting under the Eiffel Tower, someplace like that. Look at him go.
“A decathlon is two days of knocking yourself out. It’s javelin. It’s shot put. It’s pole vault and long jump. It’s a half marathon. It’s gymnastics—the bar, the horse. It’s volleyball. Ten events. It’s exhausting. You see where I’m going with this?”
“Not too well,” I said. “We know he’s a jock.”
“He’s twenty-six. I’m thirty-four. He’s a kid. I’m an old man. Just naming the decathlon events put a couple years on me and gave me a shin splint.”
“Do you have to compete to be compatible?” I asked.
“Don’t confuse me, Archer. And stop growing up. Just be a kid.”
We were seeing I-55 signs now. It was getting darker. The world was taillight red.
“It’s just not workable,” Uncle Paul said. “Ed’s going to be starting a teaching job next fall, and where? He doesn’t know. It could be anywhere. Who’s not going to hire him? And sooner or later his Guard unit’s going to be deployed. He’s got places to go, and I’m already where I’m going. We’re in different places, Archer.”
“Okay,” I said, “but—”