“HELP!!” I shouted. And again, “HEY, HELP!”
My voice echoing.
“What is it? Who’s there?”
I heard footsteps, and a girl called out. “Mouse? That you?”
Lisa’s face at the grating.
“Get me out of here,” I said. “Get a hockey stick or something like that. Long and thin and strong. Do you have a hockey stick?”
She laughed. “Listen to you,” she said.
I waited. Was she going to get a stick? No. Stupid girl. She was trying to lift it straight up. I could make out her fingers on the underside of the bars. Her breath was coming in gasps.
The grate shifted slightly. Huh.
“Hang on!” I climbed up another rung, ducking my head so that my shoulders and back were against the underside of the grating.
“Now!” I said, lifting with my legs.
The thing began to move. I pressed harder. We got the grate up high enough to slide it to one side. Lisa let go and stood up, gasping.
—
“Thanks,” I said. We were walking home together. She was chewing gum. I felt better, the weight off my chest.
“I’m going to stop calling you Mouse,” she said. “You got all bossy there. I think you must like me or something.”
I took a careful breath.
“How did you get down the hole, anyway? I didn’t even know there was a sewer there. I was walking through the park, and I heard a voice rising out of the ground. Like a spirit, you know? Only it was you, Mouse.”
The workman I’d seen here yesterday, with the hard hat. He must have checked this part of the vacant lot, found the open drain and put the lid on.
“I fell in,” I said. “It was an open hole.”
“But you’re okay now?”
“Yeah.”
We came to her place.
“You going to cross the street, Fred?”
My hands were clenched in my pockets. Something inside me going BOOM.
“You going to beat me up if I don’t?” I said.
She shook her head.
“I don’t know why I said that, back when I first moved here, about not walking on my sidewalk. Pretty dumb, huh? You can walk here anytime, Fred. You can even come inside. You want to?”
“I, uh, should be going home.”
“Sure.”
She spat out her gum and turned up the front walk to her house.
Mom had an announcement at dinner.
“I’m going to Montreal,” she said. “There’s a conference. I’ll be gone for two nights. You’ll have a babysitter—a college girl who will sleep over. Her name is Elvira. She’ll be in charge when she’s here. When she’s not here, Isabel will be in charge.”
I took a moment to digest that. Mom was leaving us.
“Huh,” I said.
Izzy wanted to know why we needed a babysitter at all. “I’m fourteen,” she said. “I can look after Fred. I’m legal.”
“Not overnight,” said Mom. “That’s too much responsibility when you’re fourteen.”
“What about Grandma?”
“Mother lives too far away.”
Izzy and Mom looked at each other. I could tell that Izzy wanted to say something but didn’t.
“Our babysitter’s name is Elvira?” I said.
“Yes,” said Mom.
“That’s a stupid name.”
—
We were watching TV in the living room after supper. Durango Bot. You know—The bot you love to hate? I put my hand down without thinking so Casey could sniff it. Of course he wasn’t there.
Izzy and I got up to pee at the same time. I called first to the bathroom. She said no way. We ran up the stairs together, shoving. I got my hand on the bathroom door first. She pulled me back. We fell on the floor together and started fighting. Seriously, punching and kicking and everything. She pulled my hair. I swore at her. She kicked me in the knee. It hurt like anything. I punched her, which is hard to do when you’re lying down. She screamed at me, calling me Harry. She cocked her fist, drew back and punched me, only she missed and hit the door frame behind me instead.
“Owwwww.”
She sat with her hand in her lap and her face screwed up in a knot.
“Owwwww.”
Mom came up from the kitchen to ask what was going on.
“Owwwww. My hand is killing me,” said Izzy.
Mom went back downstairs to get some ice. I helped Izzy to her feet.
“Why did you call me Harry?” I asked.
She made a face.
“Did I? Sorry.”
“You mean Harry the Horse, right? Why are you mad at your boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
She went downstairs.
My urge to pee came back. I’d forgotten all about it.
Izzy had punched me because she was mad at Harry. Okay. So why had I been fighting her? It wasn’t just the bathroom. I was mad too. But why?
I didn’t know.
“What’s the matter?” asked Freddie.
“Huh? Nothing.”
“Sure there is.”
We were walking down by the lake with Casey between us, Freddie and I. It was a little early in the season for boats, but the path was full of skateboarders, joggers and those people who walk fast with their hips swinging out. Man, they look stupid. I was wearing a pair of mirror sunglasses I’d picked up from the Goodwill store on Roncesvalles (my Roncesvalles—the right-side-up one) for two dollars. They changed my face. With them on I looked different from Freddie.
I had Casey’s leash. He was pulling, the way he does, wanting to run after every seagull and smell every piece of garbage. I found that I actually resented the constant tug on my arm. Yeah, resented.
“Stop it, Casey,” I said, and yanked him away from a french fry.
“See,” said Freddie. “Something’s wrong.”
—
We got to the park with the dinosaurs. One of my favorite places along the lakefront. We’d come here a lot when I was small. There’s a drinking fountain, swings and giant dinosaurs to climb on. Lake Ontario was too cold to swim in except on the hottest days, and kind of greasy to the touch, but you could wade out up to your knees and stare at the ducks and sailboats, and the horizon, flat and faraway.
Stegosaurus had a long tail that made a great bumpy slide. Triceratops’s broad back was good for standing on. Mom would cover her eyes, pretending to be scared but really laughing. When we got down, she’d buy ice cream.
Doesn’t sound like Mom, does it? She laughed a lot back then. That was before she went to work at the insurance office.
I noticed that Stego’s tail had all the spikes at the bottom. The one at the park back home was missing one.
Casey barked even more than he usually did. I wished we hadn’t brought him.
I know, I know. Here was this, what?, this miracle, a chance to visit my dog alive again, and I wanted to get rid of him. What was that about? I’d missed Casey so much when he died and now I was taking him for granted. Like seeing him wasn’t enough. I was upset with myself, but I couldn’t help the way I was feeling. You can’t, can you?
“Shut up, Casey!” I called. He kept barking. Stupid dog.
“Remember Monday, when I had the dentist appointment?” Freddie said. He was hanging on one of the triceratops’s horns, feet dangling. I was trying to leap onto the dinosaur’s back from a standing-still position.
“Did you come around?” he asked. “Because this policeman saw me walking Casey and drove me home to make sure I lived there. He said I’d run away from him. That was you, eh?”
“Yeah. Sorry. Did you get in trouble?”
“No. But he did say he’d never seen anyone run so fast.” Freddie dropped to the ground, staggered but stayed upright.
I jumped like a flea, way higher than my own head, landing on my feet on triceratops’s back with my hands out for balance. My new sunglasses fell off. I swore.
“I don
’t know what’s wrong,” I said, even though Freddie hadn’t opened his mouth. “I’m mad, but I don’t know why.”
—
We walked along the shore, skipping stones. The afternoon sun was ahead of us, slanting across the water on our left, turning it to gold. On our right was the hum of the expressway. The dragon came out of the sun, treetop level, flying right at us.
“Yikes!”
It was a shock—and yet not a shock. Like seeing a wasp in your room. You know there’s a nest in the tree near your window. You know they’re around. But you still jump when one flies out of your closet.
This dragon was silver colored, like the lame one in High Park. Bigger though. Bedsheet-sized wings.
“It’s carrying something!” I said.
“Uh-huh,” said Fred. “She probably is.”
She, that’s right. Dragons were girls.
She turned inland, flapping her wings slowly. And now I could see what she was carrying.
“It’s a woman. An old woman!”
I saw her clearly for a second. A dragon claw grasped her around the middle. Her legs hung down, ankles together, knees oddly apart. She wore a sweater and a black kerchief. Somebody’s bow-legged baba.
The big leathery wings flapped once, twice, and she was gone.
“Call the police!” I said. “Call somebody! Do something!”
“Why? It’s her time.”
Freddie looked puzzled. Calm, but puzzled. He had his regular smile on.
“We should try to save her. Call the police! The air force! Freddie!”
He looked at me.
“It’s her time,” he said again. “When your time comes, there’s nothing to do.”
He said this as if explaining a really simple thing—not simple like Go Fish, more like gravity. When you drop something, it falls.
Ahead of us, a mom stopped to pick up a floppy hat that her kid in the stroller had flung to the ground. She put the hat carefully back on the kid’s head and resumed pushing. Didn’t she see the dragon, or didn’t she care?
She was smiling. Freddie was smiling. The rollerblader who went past me then was smiling. The kid flung the hat away again. And anyway, the dragon was gone now. Like the wasp that has flown out the open window of your bedroom.
I wanted to save Baba, but I didn’t know how.
“It’s terrible. And I don’t get it,” I said.
I felt like Purvis Stackpole in math class.
I spoke to him the very next morning before class. Purvis, that is. His hair was wet and his mouth open. I hung up my raincoat in my own locker and said hello to him. I’d never done that before, but I liked what his upside-down self had said about Freddie and I’d been meaning to be, well, nicer.
“So how’s it going, Purvis?”
“Fine. Yeah, yeah. Fine.” He sniffed.
“Good.” I got out my books and closed my locker. “On your way to class?”
“I can’t yet. Lance told me to wait for him,” he said.
“Lance Levy?”
“Here he comes!”
I didn’t get it. What did Lance care about Purvis? He was rich and an athlete, one of the cool kids. He wore a matching outfit today—black-and-white pants, shirt and knapsack. He used an umbrella like a walking stick and strode down the hall like he owned it, like a, a, like an emperor.
“Morning, Lance!” said Purvis.
Lance stopped, shook the umbrella over Purvis’s shoes and made an after you gesture. Purvis cleared his throat and sang “Happy Birthday” all the way through. Happy birthday dear La-ance, happy birthday to you. When he was done, Lance fist pumped.
“Yesss.”
Purvis grinned. “Can I go to class now?”
Lance waved him away.
“Is it your birthday?” I asked him.
“No—but that retard doesn’t know. Yesterday I told him that today was my birthday and I wanted him to sing me the birthday song. And he remembered. A riot, eh? Guy doesn’t know the two times table, but he remembered my birthday.”
Lance’s hair gleamed. His teeth shone. His chin dimple winked. I wanted to destroy him.
—
The tables and rolling bookshelves had been pushed to the sides of the school library, leaving a big empty space in the middle. That’s where we were sitting. The library was hot. I was between Mike and Velma. Velma’s skirt rode up when she plumped herself down on the hard carpet, and I caught a glimpse of the blue gym shorts she wore underneath.
Standing beside the librarian was a stranger with glasses, a sweater and a smile. Ralph Brody. The author. I recognized him from the picture on the back of his book. We’d read it in class, last term, and now he was coming to talk about it. The book had started off okay, with cave kids trekking across Africa trying to find a lost gemstone, fighting off saber-toothed cats. Then it got dull.
On the whiteboard the librarian had written: WELCOME MR. BRODY. Her name was Miss Cook, and she was old and thin and mean, her voice leaking out of her like battery acid. Ralph Brody was chatting with the kids in the front. He lived in the neighborhood, he said. His daughter had gone to this school. “What am I taking you guys away from?” he asked. “What do you normally have at this time of day?”
“Math,” said Purvis. He was bouncing up and down on his knees in the very front row. “We have math right after announcements,” he said.
Ralph Brody snapped his fingers and said it was too bad that he was taking us away from math class. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” he said. He was kidding, but Purvis took him seriously. Purvis shook his head emphatically and said, no, really, this was better.
Miss Cook introduced Mr. Brody, who had taken time out of his busy schedule to talk to us. She told us to be respectful and to sit on our bottoms and to give Mr. Brody a big John A. welcome. We clapped.
“What are you staring at?” said Velma.
“Nothing,” I said.
—
Ralph Brody did not have a PowerPoint like Jack Stevens, the author who visited us last year. That guy was amazing. He had film of himself playing hockey with NHL stars, wrestling with an alligator, swimming in JDQ’s pool in LA and walking on a tightrope. “Writers are cool,” he told us. “A writer can do anything. Anything at all.”
Ralph Brody took a sip of coffee, smiled pleasantly and started talking about our insides. We all had stories inside of us, he said. “You,” he said—pointing at Purvis. “You have a story inside of you.”
Purvis twisted his head around, thinking that the author had meant someone behind him. Then he pointed to himself.
Me? he mouthed.
“You,” said Ralph Brody.
He told us that before we could tell our story we had to know ourselves. He took an eraser and wiped the MR. BRODY off the whiteboard. Wrote in RALPH.
“That’s who I am,” he said. “I’m Ralph. It’s important for me to know that. I have to know who I am before I can write anything, because I am writing Ralph’s story.”
He pointed into the middle of the room.
“What’s your name?”
“Janessa,” said Janessa. Kind of hesitating.
“Okay. You’re the best one to write Janessa’s story, because you know it best. You,” he pointed to Purvis, “will write the story of…what’s your name?”
“Purvis Stackpole.”
“The story of Purvis. Sounds exciting. And you,” to the librarian, “can write the story of Shirley.”
The class gasped. Miss Cook had a first name?
She closed her mouth in a thin tight line.
“The idea,” said Ralph Brody, “is to know the characters you are writing about. A lot of the time that’ll be you. Know yourself. Tell your story. I don’t mean your daily story—getting up and going to school and having lunch and going home and dorking around online and hanging out with your friends and going to bed. That’s your life, all right—it’s real, and it works for you. But it’s not a story. Stories are about the part of your life that doesn’t
work. Stories begin when something goes off course.”
He told us that stories come from pain, things going wrong in our lives. “We’ve all been sad,” he said. “We’ve all been angry and scared. These are the bad places inside us, where stories begin.”
He took a sip of coffee. I stared at our librarian. Shirley. Shirley Cook. Huh. She was the same mean old lady she’d always been. And yet she wasn’t.
Ralph was talking about sad stories. “They’re about loss,” he said. “Someone loses something. But you have to know where to start the story. If your story is going to be called Purvis Loses His Leg…”
We laughed.
“…then we have to know him before he lost it. Stand up, Purvis. There you go. Now, you can’t have Purvis hopping onto the basketball court in the big scene, winning the game with a one-footed jumper. You have to set it up. First he has both his legs. Like now. Then something goes wrong—a buzz-saw accident, say. Sorry, Purvis. Or a case of flesh-eating disease. Creepy, eh? Anyway, Purvis loses one of his legs. Stand on one leg, Purvis. Come on. Hop. There you go. Excellent. And then…”
Purvis fell over. We laughed some more. “Hey, this guy is pretty good,” Mike whispered to me.
“And then,” said Ralph, “he deals with it. Maybe he falls over, hits his head and dies, and the story ends tragically. Maybe he becomes a hopscotch champion. Maybe he learns to work with an artificial leg and runs across Canada and becomes a hero. Remember, a sad story can’t be sad all the time. There are good bits along the way. Funny bits, powerful bits. The idea behind the sad story is that you have something, you lose it and then you deal with it. Who here has a dog? Anyone? I like dogs. Cats, not so much, dogs, yes. You? What’s your name?”
“Fred.”
I didn’t realize I was putting my hand up, but there it was.
“Great. Let’s do a dog story. Stand up, Fred.”
I made my way to the front of the class. Ralph’s face was sharp, animated. He looked like a fox or an elf. He asked me my dog’s name.
“Casey.”
“Good name for a dog. What kind of dog is Casey? A big, woofy, drooly dog? Little, yappy teacup dog?”
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