Knack (Benjamin Brown Book 1)

by Tom Twitchel

  Suddenly, I was very tired. Tired of lying, tired of hiding and most of all working so hard at covering up all the lies. I felt resigned, and in a strange way, relieved. Physically, I felt more like a puddle than a human being.

  So, I took Mr. Goodturn for a walk down memory lane. I introduced him to Dennis, explained his relationship with my mom and recounted the worst summer of my life. The only detail I left out was Billy and, at the time, I wasn’t completely sure why. Maybe it was my shame for leaving him behind.

  When the story got to Seattle, I included the discovery of my knack with illusions and the alley confrontation with Mike. I described working in the parks and forging documents with my knack and how I slowly built the fantasy of my mother living with me. My relationship with Baffle and Maddy, I mostly kept to myself, but I did admit that Maddy knew a lot.

  He listened patiently and didn’t interrupt. When I wound down and came to a shaky end, he leaned forward and patted my knee.

  “Benny, you’ve been through a lot. I have to say, that wherever your mom is right now, if she could see the way you’ve taken care of yourself, and the fine young man you have become, she would be proud of you.”

  So I stood up, shook his hand, thanked him and went home.

  I certainly didn’t break down and start crying, all the while feeling relief flooding through me because I’d finally been able to let go of the biggest shame in my life.

  Who would do that?

  CHAPTER TEN

  There were things that happened during my final week as a freshman that were interesting.

  But there was a lot of dead air to plow through to get there.

  The final week of the school year feels like such a waste of time. Most of the faculty have checked out or tuned out and the students, those not suffering from senioritis, are thinking about escape and summer. Grades are posted, yearbooks are distributed, kids concentrate on getting signatures and last minute good news and bad news is communicated.

  The signatures and comments in my yearbook were representative of the generic platitudes that high school students have written for decades: “Have a great summer’, “See you next year,” “Fill-in-the-blank was so much fun,” “I’ll never forget the time we fill-in-the-blank” and on and on. My book probably had fewer signatures than most.

  I was almost a ghost at school, by design and intention. I never created problems for the teachers. I got straight A’s and had a perfect attendance record. But I didn’t participate in sports or clubs and never volunteered for anything. As a result, I didn’t have the number of relationships at school that generated a lot of signatures. Most of the stuff written in my yearbook was superficial drivel and unsurprising, except for one unexpected entry. Justine Winters wrote in my yearbook. Not epic on its surface but what she wrote made my head spin—just a little.

  Benny-

  I really enjoyed getting to know you in English class this year. You probably think I’m weird but maybe next year we can be weird together? There seems to be more to you than meets the eye!

  XOXO, Justine

  An adult would read that and think “How cute.” They wouldn’t remember what being fifteen was like. They also wouldn’t be able to appreciate that Justine Winters was very sweet, and pretty—in a girl-next-door kind of way. Long straight hair that my mom would call dishwater-blond and an oval face with a perfect set of teeth, made that way by braces she had lived with until freshman year. As excessive as it sounds, I spent hours rereading her note. Was it a joke? Was she punking me? Was it an altruistic attempt to be sweet to the class cripple? Although, to be fair, there were other kids at Roosevelt that had bigger handicaps than mine. Justine was smart, a little goofy and generally liked by everybody at school. She didn’t chase after the jocks, which made her popular with the nerds and meant that the cheerleaders didn’t view her as competition; she wasn’t catty and didn’t gossip at all, which made her like Switzerland in the high school morass of petty politics and backbiting. Justine played in the school band. I think she was in the clarinet section and was on the student council. She was quiet, hung with a small group of friends and got excellent grades. She and I traded places on the honor roll every semester. I had worked on one project with her that had earned us both an “A” but other than that, our interaction hadn’t been much more than just hi and goodbye. She had been the last person to sign my book and, in fact, had come to me to trade books. Who knew? It was a surprising boost to my spirits on the last day of my freshman year.

  The second significant event took place later that day, during my last period. Rusty Witkowski had lit up in class and had the brilliant idea of getting into a fistfight with our history teacher, Mr. Anderson, on the last day of school, during the last class of the day. I mean seriously, how dumb can you be? It had been like watching a car wreck take place right in front of you: too compelling to look away and surreal in its dramatic consequences.

  The remainder of the day was all about that. Rusty’s high school career at Roosevelt was in serious jeopardy. Most of the guys in the class refused to bear witness or pretended that they hadn’t seen much. The majority of the girls in the classroom defended Mr. Anderson, as did one male student—me.

  Due to my low profile and the fact that I was an honor roll student and very articulate, the vice-principal, Mr. Conroy, told me that my description of the events carried a lot of weight with him. Great, put that on my tombstone: “He was a good witness.”

  So, one captivating (and kind of exciting) cryptic note, and one bizarre event to end the year. One was known only to me (and Justine) and the other was discussed endlessly through social media, the more so when it was discovered that Rusty had been expelled.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him; it felt like justice.

  A third thing happened that day, and it was the coolest thing that happened on my last day as a freshman. It occurred when I got back to my neighborhood and I went to the pawnshop, which had become my routine on pretty much every day. There were days where the two of us would get to talking or working on my knacks and I wouldn’t get home until it was time to go to bed.

  Mr. G was amused by my end-of-year drama. We went up to his living area and he offered to take care of the CPS paperwork that Miss Hoch had left behind. He also gave me some depressing pointers on finances and how I was setting myself up for a problem by not having medical insurance.

  Sensing that the grownup stuff was wearing on me, Mr. G. changed the discussion and we spent the rest of the afternoon working on my knacks. My scope of control was still relatively small. While it frustrated me initially, I tried to get focused on precision. Since it was still light out late at night and warm outside, we took my training up to his rooftop garden. The entire expanse of the roof had been converted to an amazing landscape. Garden paths, a greenhouse, Japanese laceleaf maples and dozens of ornamental evergreens created a virtual forest that afforded us privacy and an environment that felt safe.

  We were working on my telekinesis knack. I was scooting leaves and pine needles around on the ground. Mr. G “ahemmed” to get my attention.

  A mysterious smile twisted the corners of his mouth and crinkled the edges of his eyes.

  “What?” I asked.

  Getting up from his cast iron chair, he leaned toward the ground and scraped a pile of leaves together. Straightening up, he wiped his hands off on his trousers and stood facing me, his hands on his hips.

  “Lift the whole pile, Benny, into the air and keep them there.”

  Looking from his smiling face to the small pile of leaves, I shook my head.

  “I can’t pick up the whole pile, all the little leaves, and keep them suspended in the air. They’ll fall to the ground. I can’t control that many objects at once.” The image of Luke Skywalker and Yoda arguing in the swamps of Dagobah flickered in my mind. Yeah, like I’m a Jedi knight.

  His smile tightened a little but didn’t disappear. “Remember that you’re focusing on influencing the space around the leave
s. Start out by thinking of them as one object.” He waved a hand at the leaves and nodded.

  What did I have to lose? Nothing really, so I focused on the pile and the space beneath it and around it. The center of the small pile poofed up and several leaves swirled briefly and fluttered back to the ground.

  “I told you. There are too many. I can’t make them all move at once,” I said.

  He scraped the pile together again and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  We repeated the process several times with variations of failure. Each time the pile would break apart at some point and the leaves would scatter.

  “Mr. Goodturn, this isn’t working. Maybe I just don’t have enough power or control or…something.” I kicked a toe at the last failed attempt that had landed at my feet.

  Frowning, but not angrily, Mr. G looked up at me. I’d gone through a growth spurt and was now a lot taller than he was.

  “Benjamin, would you give up on a homework assignment so easily?”

  I laughed, “Maybe if it was math!”

  Tisk-tisking, he bent to scrape the leaves together again.

  “Wait,” I said, and then used my knack to bunch the leaves together into a tight pile. Something fell into place in my head when I moved them. It’s hard to explain. It was like getting your lips twisted the right way the first time you whistle or that moment when you find your balance the first time you ride a bike with no one holding it for you. In my mind, the pile made up of dozens of leaves took on the order of a single geometric object. The multiple surfaces of the leaves became cohesive planes and angles in three dimensions.

  I shoved the pile together and then influenced it vertically, thinking of it as just a linear movement of the whole mass instead of thinking about all the independent surfaces.

  Rising from the ground, the pile started to flatten and move apart. I focused on the space around it, thinking of a sphere instead of an evacuated space on one side of the pile. The leaves moved into a tighter mass and hung there. Then, I spun the spherical influence and the leaves began to rotate.

  “Bravo! Bravo! Look at what you did!” Mr. G exclaimed.

  My attention faltered and the leaves flew apart and became a miniature blizzard of green. Before they could fall to the ground, I refocused and envisioned an inverted cone around them. A few fell to the ground, but the majority stayed aloft and as I spun the conical influence I was exerting, they began to spin, looking like a tiny tornado of foliage.

  The rest of the afternoon went by so swiftly that we were both surprised when his hanging garden lights came on at dusk. Instead of being tired, I was pumped. My ability to control numerous objects and manipulate them had just made a huge leap.

  Anybody will tell you, when you stop to smell the roses look out for the thorns.

  BOOK FOUR

  My Summer of Discontent or Rip Van Brown

  CHAPTER ONE

  School being out, I had wasted no time in inviting Baffle over for some gaming the next morning. Hey, it’s what guys do. When I opened the door, I wasn’t ready for what I saw.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he raised his hand for a high five, which I obliged. That wasn’t the problem. It was what he was wearing. He had on wrap-around sunglasses, which were silly looking by themselves. The ankle-length trench coat he was wearing, in the middle of summer mind you, was the big issue.

  “Hey. Sooo, what’s with the coat?”

  “Cool, right?” he said as he walked in and headed for the couch.

  I distractedly closed the door with my knack and tried to choose my words carefully. We hadn’t seen each other in weeks and I didn’t want to start off by insulting him. Not many people can pull off the look he had chosen and on Baffle’s short and pudgy frame, it looked ridiculous. His ginger colored hair and freckles didn’t help.

  “Aren’t you warm? It’s like eighty degrees today,” I said.

  “Nah. I’m good. Are we gonna talk about my clothes or are we gonna play?” he sat on the couch, his coat awkwardly wrapped around his legs. He picked up a controller off the coffee table and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  It was clear that he wasn’t interested in discussing his new look. I decided to leave it alone for the moment. Grabbing a controller myself, I sat down and we fired up the game console. We zoned out and for a while, it was like old times. We traded zingers, trash-talked and complimented each other on slick moves. When we took a break after a couple of hours, Baffle finally removed his coat. The warm day and tense gaming had plastered his hair to his forehead with sweat.

  “Seriously, what’s the deal with the coat?” I asked.

  Baffle scowled at me. “Are we back on that? Geez, you sound like my parents. I like it. Okay?”

  Obviously, I had hit a nerve. “Fine, fine. It just doesn’t look like you. You know? Besides, you’ll have to ditch it when school starts in the fall. They’ll never let you wear that on school grounds.”

  “Yeah? Well, school’s boring. I know more than all of my teachers do. If I tried to have a deep discussion with my math teacher about algorithms, he’d probably have an aneurysm. I’m thinking about testing out.”

  “What? You’re going to drop out? That’s… What do your parents say about that?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Baffle’s perfect GPA and phenomenal academic record had always been his proudest achievement. He lorded over me how easy it was for him to ace every test he ever took. He considered his intelligence to be almost like a superpower, and frankly, his brain was just this side of scary.

  “I said I’m thinking about it, not doing it for sure. I have to decide what that might mean for my college choice. But if I do decide to get a GED, they won’t have anything to say about it. I’ve done the research and I know what kind of leverage I have if I need it.”

  I could tell we were on shaky ground, so I tried a different approach.

  “Okay. Well, I really need you next year. My AP classes are going to be tough. I was counting on you.”

  His frown smoothed out and his shoulders relaxed. “Yeah. You’ll need help with your math, that’s for sure.” He grinned. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair and looked around.

  “You got anything to drink? I’m dying here.”

  Getting up and heading to the kitchen, I grabbed a couple of sodas out of the fridge. I handed him one as I sat back down. He popped the top and the can foamed as he tried to suck the soda off the rim before it overflowed. Several large drops hit the table, almost splashing my yearbook.

  “Oops. Sorry.” He smirked.

  I hopped up to slide the book away from the soda spill and ran over to the kitchen to get a paper towel.

  “Mom would give me serious crap if she came home and saw soda everywhere,” I said while I mopped up the spill.

  “You’re so lucky she works all the time. It’s like you live on your own.” That made me do a double take, but it was apparently just an offhand comment. “My parents are on my case twenty-four seven. You’re so lucky, smart, got the magic stuff going on, no parents getting up in your business.”

  “They love you though. At least they’re around. It gets old not having my mom around much,” I replied. I wadded up the paper towel and tossed it over my head toward the kitchen intending to pick it up later.

  “See?” said Baffle, watching my failed attempt to hit the sink, which was over twenty feet away. “If I pulled a move like that, my mother would go off! I’m sick of being their lab rat. Every case study they get into that deals with teenage angst or family dysfunction ends up getting all over me. Besides, they’re soooo embarrassing! Not to mention one-dimensional. Niche dominance is not dominance at all. It’s self-delusion.”

  “Sorry man.” I raised my soda and we clinked cans in an unspoken toast to the difficulty of dealing with parents, but I couldn’t help feeling that Baffle’s situation was way better than he could appreciate.

  Taking a huge swig, he leaned forward to pull my yearbook closer.

  “Anything good in here? Mine was fu
ll of lame crap,” he said as he started to page through it. He found his inscription, where he had written a deliberately clichéd entry that covered half a page. He smiled.

  “You hear that Witkowski got expelled?” I asked. I figured that was a fairly neutral way of seeing where his connection with Rusty stood.

  “Of course I did. He’s already transferred to another school. Probably start for the football team too.” He flipped more pages without looking up at me.

  “I saw the whole thing Baff.” Maybe that was too direct, but his knowledge of what Witkowski was up to indicated a familiarity that bothered me.

  Still poring over the yearbook, he replied, “Yeah. I know. I don’t think everyone knows what was really going on. Mr. Anderson is so full of himself. He thinks he’s all that. But the one Rusty’s really pissed at is Mr. Conroy. That jarhead really had it in for Rusty. Miss Black would have cut him a break. Besides, Rusty’s not as bad as some people think. Some people think he’s okay.”

  Who in the hell were those people, I wondered. His lowbrow cronies? The cows back on the farm? Baffle was deflecting my comments about Rusty and I was confused by it. Mr. Conroy had been sad when he interviewed me. He seemed more like he had been trying to figure out a way to keep Rusty in school, not the other way around. And the Miss Black crack? Our “fashionista” principle probably would have been the first in line to tar and feather Rusty. She had no patience for knuckleheads and was cutthroat when it came to protecting her school’s reputation.

  Baffle flicked over a couple of pages and stopped on a two-page layout that featured a collage of kids acting up in the halls, mugging for the camera at a pep rally and candid shots in classrooms. Sighing, he turned the page.

  “You and I have been friends since junior high, Benny. You ever think about what’s really gonna happen when we graduate?”

  “No. I mean, yeah, but I’m stressed enough with just keeping my grades up. I don’t think about it too much. I need a scholarship if I’m going to get into college. We can’t afford tuition at a university.”