Charlie and Me

by Mark Lowery

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An imprint of Bonnier Publishing USA

  251 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010

  Copyright © 2018 by Mark Lowery

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Yellow Jacket Books is a trademark of Bonnier Publishing USA,

  and associated colophon is a trademark of Bonnier Publishing USA.

  Manufactured in the United States of America BVG 0718

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-4998-0756-1

  yellowjacketreads.com

  bonnierpublishingusa.com

  For my family

  Leaping Dolphin

  Your life is a leaping dolphin

  Bursting out from

  Blackness,

  Blankness

  Into brilliant sunshine.

  Twisting,

  Flipping,

  Straining

  In whatever direction

  You choose.

  And scattering

  Infinity and one

  Tiny droplets of water,

  Each one briefly containing

  A tiny, distorted reflection

  Of yourself.

  You are a leaping dolphin.

  A glorious example

  Of what it means

  To be alive.

  By Martin Tompkins

  Age 13

  Contents

  Stage 1

  Cookies and Belly Buttons

  Walrus-Flopping

  Invisible Boys

  You Only Live Once

  Stage 2

  The Station

  St. Bernards

  Poetry

  Moving

  Stage 3a

  Near Miss

  We Love You, North End

  Ham and Jam

  Dolphin

  Some Weirdo on the Train

  My Brother

  Stage 3b

  Poems and Puke

  Tattoos

  Dolphinwatch

  Crime

  Happiness

  Stage 4a

  Reggae

  Toilets and Tickets

  Classic Economy Budget

  Fat Men and Toilets

  Sand Dune

  Stage 4b

  Kick in the Shins

  Hairy Mountains

  Poems and Announcements

  Lost

  Stage 4c

  Pains and Memory Loss

  Surprises and Phone Calls

  Anything’s Not Possible

  The Worst Car I’ve Ever Seen

  Not

  Stage 4d

  Cakes and Old People

  Dolphin and Chips

  Drop-Off and Search

  My Brother Charlie

  Stage 5

  Hugs and Rolos

  Hooked

  Hiding and Escaping

  Emptiness

  Stage 5

  (Adjusted and Clarified)

  Hurt and Empty

  Rescue

  Weird Relief

  Questions and Escapes

  Stage 6

  Questions and Surfboards

  Nets and Swimming

  Escape and Demands

  Stage 7

  The End of the Line

  Going Home

  Cold Tea

  The Curtains

  Shadows

  Almost There . . . But Not Quite

  Stage 8

  Disappointments and Solutions

  Flames

  Stage 9

  Quiet and Cookies

  Arriving and Parking

  Cookies

  The Truth

  Leaping Dolphin, Part 2

  Stage 1

  886 Plungington Road to Preston Station

  via Farook’s Supernews

  Distance–1.5 miles

  Walking

  Cookies and Belly Buttons

  My little brother Charlie’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of the corner shop, humming with his eyes closed. He does this kind of thing a lot.

  “Hurry up,” I say, giving him a friendly kick with my raggedy old Reebok. “We’ve got a train to catch.”

  Charlie wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Give me a minute, Marty,” he replies. “I’m just charging up the laser in my belly button.”

  He says this kind of thing a lot too.

  My brother, Charlie, doesn’t have a laser in his belly button. I know this for a fact. Not that I’ve ever studied it. But if you share a small bedroom with your brother for ten years, then you end up pretty well acquainted with his whole body whether you like it or not.

  Charlie isn’t like ordinary kids. He is one in a million. In fact, he’s one in a Charlillion. A Charlillion, by the way, is a number he invented that is one more than infinity. I tried to explain to him that you can’t have one more than infinity. Infinity means it goes on forever. Charlie called me a banana-brain. He can be very childish when he wants to be.

  At poetry club in school, Mr. Hendrix sometimes plays a game to warm us up. You’ve got to talk about a topic for thirty seconds without stopping or repeating yourself. Here’s what I’d say about Charlie:

  “Lazy eye, massive head, snores like a hippo, often ill, weird taste in food, terrible memory, always out of breath because of his asthma, skinny, cheeky, can’t do anything for himself or concentrate for more than two seconds, brain’s inside out, no understanding of danger. My absolute best friend in the whole entire world.”

  I’d have to stop there. You could talk about Charlie for a Charlillion seconds if you wanted to, and you’d never run out of things to say.

  “Which cookies do you want?” I ask him. Mr. Farook is watching us carefully from behind the counter. Each time I glance over he’s there, leaning right back so he can see along the aisle. I smile at him, but his face stays blank. I’m starting to feel queasy.

  Charlie pushes his milk-bottle glasses up on his nose and squints at me through his lazy eye. His good eye has a Peppa Pig patch on it so that his lazy one learns to work harder. Peppa Pig is one of Charlie’s favorite shows, despite him being at least six years older than the average viewer. “Why can’t we have one of the cookies from your backpack?”

  I clutch my backpack to my chest, squeezing the hard corners of the special-leftover-from-Christmas cookie tin that I took from home. Of course Charlie saw me steal the cookies. He sees everything, even though his eyes are terrible. Maybe he doesn’t have a laser in his belly button. Maybe it’s a security camera.

  “They’re special,” I say. “They’re for when we get there.”

  “Get where?”

  “Where we’re going.”

  I don’t want to tell him where we’re going until we’re on the train. He’ll only get excited. And trust me, an excited Charlie is not what I need in my life at quarter to seven on a Saturday morning. Imagine filling a puppy with blue Smarties and Lemon Fanta, then bouncing it up and down on a trampoline; that’s Charlie when he’s excited.

  “Are there any of those chocolate wheel cookies in the tin?” he asks.

  “They’re called Wagon Wheels, Charlie. Of course I have them,” I say.

  “What about the ones with all the jam in the middle? They’re my favorite. Eighty percent cookie. Fifteen percent jam.”

  “What’s the other five percent?” I ask, just because he’s always
got a weird answer.

  Charlie sniffs hard. “Dreams.”

  Told you. Brain inside out. I shake my head.

  He settles on a pack of the cookies filled with jam and dreams, or as they’re known to the rest of us, Jammie Dodgers (an excellent choice), and we go to pay.

  When I get my wallet out, I accidentally flash my wad of twenty-pound* notes at Mr. Farook, which is a mistake. His big, furry eyebrows shoot up on his forehead. The guy’s like a bloodhound for money. The police should use him to sniff out where criminals hide their cash.

  “Going somewhere special?” he says, nodding at my backpack.

  I’m trying to figure out how to answer this when Charlie butts in.

  “Switzerland,” he says seriously. “I’m getting my belly-button laser upgraded.”

  By the time Mr. Farook can reply, we’re out on the street.

  “Nice work, boss,” I say, giving Charlie a fist bump. He flashes me his cheekiest, squintiest, one-eyed grin and we set off walking to the train station.

  *At the time of this printing, 1 pound is the equivalent of 1.33 US dollars.

  Walrus-Flopping

  There’s one thing everyone needs to know about Charlie: He is a miracle.

  He was born early—about fifteen weeks before he was supposed to. Mum and Dad never let me visit him when he was in the hospital because I was only three, but I’ve seen a photo: a minuscule, scrawny red alien in a fish tank with a woolly hat on and Ping-Pong-ball eyelids. There are tubes sprouting out of his mouth and wires attached to his chest and machines blinking all around him. Dad’s finger is in the corner of the shot, and it’s almost as long as Charlie’s whole body.

  They kept him in the hospital for three months because he was so sick. A machine had to breathe for him because his lungs were a pair of useless wet sponges. His heart kept breaking down, so he had to have four emergency operations on it. And, after all that, he caught a really serious infection from one of his breathing tubes. A couple of times the doctors told Mum and Dad to go in and say goodbye because this could be “the Night.”

  It makes me feel sick when I think how close he came to . . . you know . . .

  But somehow, he fought and fought and stayed alive. He was even in the newspaper because the doctors thought it was so incredible. We’ve still got the clippings in a frame on the mantelpiece: “Meet Charlie the Miracle Baby,” “Fighting Fit Charlie Back from the Dead,” “Alive and Kicking.”

  The day he finally came home is one of my earliest memories. I can picture Dad holding me on one knee with Charlie in the crook of his other arm. “Meet your baby brother, big guy,” he said, black rings around his eyes and his voice catching in his throat. “You’re gonna have to look after him.”

  So I guess I always have: holding his hand to cross the road, cutting up his food, tying his shoelaces for him because he’s so clumsy, making sure his bag’s packed in the morning because he always forgets everything, biting the bruises out of his apples because he’s got a weird thing about them, teaching him to throw and catch because he’s terrible at it, and even sitting with him through all of his millions of appointments and checkups at the hospital.

  A few years ago, Mum told me I was the best big brother in the world. It was cool of her to say so, but I don’t see it like that. Charlie’s a laugh, but he can be like a lost kitten sometimes—bumbling through life all confused and unaware of what’s going on around him. It’s not like I’m a good person or anything. I just have to help him out.

  Still, Charlie doesn’t always like me to help him. He likes to do things his own way. Mum says he’s a free spirit, but I call him a loon. In the nicest possible way, of course.

  Even when he was a baby he was like that. It took him ages to learn to walk, but he never let it hold him back. He used to do this strange lopsided crawl—the walrus flop, Dad called it—which was surprisingly fast. One time, when he was nearly two, Mum put him in his playpen (aka “the Cage” because it was the only way to keep him still) and went upstairs to do something.

  When she came back down ten minutes later, he’d disappeared. The front door was open. She thought he’d been snatched, and she ran outside in a blind panic. And there he was, walrus-flopping across the road, cars slamming on their brakes and swerving out of the way.

  When trying to piece together what’d happened afterward, Mum thought that he’d been so bored that he’d bitten his way through the seam of the plastic mesh wall of the playpen. Then he’d yanked the wall back to make an escape hole, crawled across the living room, somehow opened the front door, and made a break for it.

  Then there was the day when he was four and he decided he didn’t like his eyebrows. He said they were freaking him out. So, being Charlie, he shaved them clean off with Dad’s razor. There was blood everywhere. He looked like he’d been attacked with a potato peeler.

  And how about when he played the Innkeeper in the school nativity? We still watch the DVD every Christmas. He only had one line to remember: “Sorry. No room at the inn.” But this is Charlie we’re talking about. After telling Mary and Joseph that they could stay in the Honeymoon Suite (who knows where he got that from) and that the donkey could have its own room, he pulled the baby Jesus out from under Mary’s dress, held Him up by His ankle and announced: “Behold! The King of the shoes!” On the DVD you can almost hear the teacher slapping her forehead offscreen when she says, “It’s King of the Jews. And put Him back; you’re a day early.”

  Invisible Boys

  After leaving Farook’s, we walk quickly along Plungington Road toward the station. It’s still insanely early, so the late-September air is cool and there aren’t many people about—a few shopkeepers and café owners pulling up their shutters and setting up signs outside their shops, a couple of students staggering home from the night before.

  I try not to look at any of them. I’m expecting someone to stop us and ask us what we’re doing out at this time, or ask us if our parents know where we are, or call the police. But no one seems to notice us. They’ve all got their own lives to think about. We’re invisible.

  This is a good thing. We need to get to the train station and onto a train without Mum and Dad realizing we’re gone. If they find out what I’m doing, they’ll go ballistic. They’re so protective of Charlie it’s unbelievable. He’s not even allowed out on his scooter without an armed guard and a full set of injections.

  As we walk, I start to relax a bit. Every step gets us closer to safety. Once we’ve got our tickets, we’ll be on our way. Break things down into little bits and they don’t seem so scary anymore.

  “Jammie Dodger?” says Charlie, offering me the pack.

  I take one, and we clink them in midair. “Breakfast of champions,” I say.

  For a short while, we walk alongside each other, munching on our cookies and not saying anything. It’s rare to have silence when Charlie’s around, and it doesn’t last long.

  “You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” he says. He’s found a stick, and he’s dragging it along some railings outside a church.

  “Somewhere good, I promise,” I say, but it’s still too soon to let him know. I need to change the subject. “How about I test you on your times tables?”

  I always try to help him with his homework. He struggles at school because he can’t focus on anything and he’s a bit hyperactive. Mum says this is common with kids who were born early. She’s always having fights with the teachers about it because he can’t be expected to learn like everyone else, can he? And if they let him use his imagination instead of trying to stuff his poor little head full of useless information, then maybe he’d have a chance in life.

  She’s very sensitive when it comes to Charlie. And she’s sort of right—everyone thinks he’s dumb, but in some ways he’s mega smart. His brain’s just wired up differently, that’s all.

  Even so, the teachers have got a point. When he was in second grade, he got a letter home saying, “Charlie did not complete today�
�s spelling test because he was pretending to be a tortoise.” Dad thought this was hilarious and stuck it on the fridge.

  “Times tables? On a Saturday?” says Charlie, flinging the stick down. The baggy sleeves of his sweater swing around afterward. “Child cruelty! I’m calling the RSPCA.”

  “What?” I say. “The animal charity?”

  “Yeah,” replies Charlie as though this is what he meant all along. “I’ll tell ’em you keep a . . . a pig in a shoe box and . . . you throw darts at it and you make it smoke cigarettes. They’ll lock you up, and then I’ll be safe.”

  I scoff. “Come on. Which times table are you learning at the moment?”

  “The one times table,” he says immediately. “One times one is one. Two times one is t—”

  “Yeah right!” I interrupt, giving him a friendly jab in the arm. “Nobody learns the ones. Let’s do the eights. One times eight is eight. Two times eight is . . . ?”

  Charlie looks off into the distance and scratches his head. “Er . . . fourteen . . .”

  “Try again.”

  “Twelve . . . no seventeen.”

  “It can’t be seventeen,” I sigh. I try to be patient with him, but I’m pretty good at math and working with Charlie can get seriously frustrating. “We’ve been through this. Seventeen’s not in any of the times tables. It’s a prime number.”

  This was a mistake. Immediately he’s talking about something else.

  “Prime number? Is that like a prime minister?” he says, and before I can answer, he’s off. “If I was a prime minister, I’d make everyone wear top hats.”

  We reach a crosswalk, and I push the button. “What? Why?” I say, my brain struggling to catch up.

  “I like ’em. Plus then I’d be taller than everyone.”

  “But they’d all be wearing top hats too.”

  He thinks for a second. “Yeah. But only the prime minister would be allowed to wear high heels.”

  “In-credible,” I say, puffing out my cheeks and pressing the button again. Without warning, Charlie just steps out into the road even though the orange hand is still showing. I drag him back right before a car roars past. Luckily I’m always expecting him to do things like this. “Careful!”