Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

  ROBBIE FORESTER

  AND THE

  OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD ST.

  PETER ABRAHAMS

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group.

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  Copyright © 2012 by Pas de Deux. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.

  Edited by Jill Santopolo. Design by Semadar Megged. Text set in 12.5-point Bembo.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Abrahams, Peter, 1947–

  Robbie Forester and the outlaws of Sherwood St. / Peter Abrahams. p. cm.

  Summary: After getting a strange charm bracelet from a homeless woman, thirteen-year-old Robyn Forester and new friends join together to fight injustice in their Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood.

  [1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Justice—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction. 4. Neighborhood—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Family life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 7. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A1675Out 2012 [Fic]—dc22 2010042330

  ISBN 978-0-399-25502-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO MY MAGICAL CHILDREN:

  SETH, BEN, LILY, ROSIE

  * * *

  Many thanks to my wife, Diana, for the idea; to my wonderful editor Jill Santopolo and my brilliant agent Molly Friedrich; and to Josh and Maddie Cohen for the generous gift of their time.

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  At first I thought it all began with a foul—if an elbow to the head’s not a foul, then what is?—but I figured out, maybe not as soon as I should have, that the beginning had come a little earlier. Just five or six hours, in fact, with me on my way to school and no time to lose. The second the doors of the subway car slid open, I jumped out, hurried along the platform, and took the stairs to street level two at a time. At the top, I was turning left, all set to run the block and a half to school, when I noticed something not right in front of the newsstand by the subway entrance. A homeless woman who’d been sitting outside for the past few weeks—homeless, please help read the writing on the coffee cup she always held—was out there again, only now she’d tipped over and lay on her side. It must have just happened, because none of the people around—and there were lots—had gone to her yet. So I did.

  I leaned over her. The woman was old, with white hair and a lined face, but maybe because her eyes were closed, I suddenly had this vision of how she’d looked as a young girl. She’d been really pretty. Something about that took away the fear I’d normally have had at such a moment.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  Her eyes opened—blue eyes, but so faded there was hardly any color at all, except for the whites, which were crisscrossed with red veins. “Do I look all right?” she said, her voice surprisingly strong and not at all friendly.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I know you,” she said. “You’re the girlie who dropped eighty-five cents in the cup. And sixty another time.”

  My parents said not to give money to street people, that there were better ways of helping, which maybe made sense but didn’t feel right. So all I thought at that moment was: eighty-five cents and sixty cents—not much.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but that was all I had on me and—”

  Before I could finish, strong hands were pushing me to the side and voices were calling “Get back, out of the way.” Two cops had arrived and were clearing space around the woman. I ended up behind some tall people. An ambulance came roaring up, siren blaring. I caught glimpses of EMTs hopping out, feeling her pulse, clamping an oxygen mask over her face, rolling her onto a stretcher, and hoisting her into the back of the ambulance. The crowd lost interest fast, everyone dispersing, giving me a clear view, and what I saw was the woman’s arm dangling down from the stretcher and something slipping off her wrist and falling into the gutter. I went forward and picked it up. It was a braided leather bracelet, possibly a charm bracelet, although only a single charm hung from it—a tiny silver heart.

  “You dropped this,” I called, just as the ambulance doors were closing. No one inside noticed me, except for the woman. Her eyes were looking right into mine and seemed to be trying to send some message, but I didn’t get whatever it was. The doors slammed shut, and the ambulance took off. I ran a step or two after it before giving up. Then I put the charm bracelet in my pocket and hurried to school.

  The foul I mentioned before happened after school on the basketball court, and real fast. Real fast was how things always happened on the basketball court, the mental part, too. Final seconds ticking down, Welland 18, Thatcher (that was us) 16, a typical score in the Independent School League, Seventh and Eighth Grade Girls Division, “independent” being a nicer way of saying “private.” The games went by in blurs, partly because of the speed and partly because Dr. Singh, my ophthalmologist, didn’t believe in fitting kids for contact lenses before they turned thirteen and I wasn’t about to wear my stupid glasses on the court, since that meant wearing those even more stupid safety goggles over them. Did that mean I’d rather let my team down than look like a bug? If so, I’d
have to live with it.

  Back to the foul. In this particular blur, a component blur within the blur of the whole game, Ashanti, our tallest and best player, had intercepted a pass and cut across the key, a step ahead of number ten for Welland, who was even taller. But as Ashanti rose for the shot, number ten leaped, too, twisting in the air, elbow up, and that elbow caught Ashanti smack on the forehead. And right in front of the ref, a chinless guy with sharp, darting eyes whom I’d seen around the neighborhood but couldn’t place at that moment. Right in front of his sharp, darting eyes: impossible to miss, but no whistle, no call. What was up with that?

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  Oops. Yelling at the ref was a complete no-no, also a technical, and in all the years I’d been playing basketball, now almost three, I’d never heard a player do it. But it was so obvious! And wrong! The ref didn’t seem to have heard my yell—he was missing everything, an equal-opportunity goof-up—and meanwhile things were happening, such as Ashanti starting to fall, the ball coming loose, and big number ten turning to chase after it. Somehow the ball came bouncing right into my hands, out in three-point land.

  “Shoot, Robbie, shoot!” That was the coach, Ms. Kleinberg, shouting at me from the bench. She’d played for Dartmouth and even tried out for the Olympic team, getting cut in training camp. Ms. Kleinberg had a fantastic shot; I’d seen her hit forty-seven in a row from the free-throw line. But shooting wasn’t my thing. Passing was my thing. I always looked to pass the moment I got the ball.

  But no one was open, at least no one in my field of vision—not a very clear field, on account of my unaided eyesight, minus three in the right, minus two-point-five in the left.

  “Shoot!”

  I just stood there, felt a sweat smear on the ball, not mine, since I hadn’t yet worked up a sweat. This was actually the first time I’d touched the ball in the second half. I was a seventh-grader and new to Thatcher and not a starter, and also didn’t deserve to start—don’t get me wrong about that. In the first half, I’d come in with about five minutes left, made two successful passes, and been called once for traveling, probably adding up to my best performance of the season, so far. For some reason, Ms. Kleinberg had decided to push her luck and send me back in at the end of the game, crunch time. Since then, I’d mostly been running up and down the floor, never too far from the ball but also never a factor. I was fine with that; I liked running.

  Number ten closed in.

  “Two seconds! Robbie! Shoot!”

  Two seconds? Not a good moment for weird distractions to be happening, but a weird distraction was happening: suddenly my head hurt, my forehead, in the exact same spot where number ten had elbowed Ashanti. Was pain even the right word? This… feeling, maybe a better name, was like a tiny low-powered electric ball. It seemed to be pressing just behind my forehead, pressing, pressing, and then with no warning, two tiny electric currents seemed to emerge, one hooking up to each eye, and the pain, or feeling, vanished immediately. And all at once, my vision cleared, and I could see perfectly, more clearly than at any time in my life, every detail sharp and focused! And not only that—

  Number ten was almost on me, her long arms up, hands high.

  “Shoot!”

  And not only that, but I saw—or thought I saw, since it was so impossible—the strangest thing: a narrow beam of light, reddish light, very faint, with golden highlights, that seemed to glow right out of my eyes. It shaped a long, rising arc, then sloped down into the basket, dead center. Somehow I knew it was no longer a matter of shooting the ball—normally so big and unmanageable—but simply lofting it up onto that red-gold glowing beam. So I did, just lofted the ball onto the beam. The beam vanished at once, and then there was only the ball, soaring over number ten’s outstretched hands, curving through the air with lots of backspin, just like a shot launched by someone who knew what she was doing, and then—swish. Nothing but net, from three-point land.

  Bbbbzzzz. The buzzer buzzed. Game over. Thatcher 19, Welland 18. A buzzer beater? I’d just won the game with a buzzer beater, like in the kind of daydream fantasy I didn’t even have anymore, at least when it came to sports. The kids were around me now, pretty pumped, although not too pumped, which seemed to be the Thatcher way.

  We went into the locker room. In my old school, PS 501, the Joe Louis School, there hadn’t been a locker room—the kids made do with the bathroom near the gym—but the Thatcher girls’ locker room was nice, with a steam bath, individual shower stalls, fluffy white towels.

  Ms. Kleinberg patted me on the back. “Nice job,” she said. “More, more, more.”

  “Um,” I said, giving Ms. Kleinberg a careful look. Now that the excitement, what there’d been of it, had died down, I had a chance to think, Hello? That beam, red and gold? Anybody? But nobody said a word about it. Meaning no one else saw it except me? Whoa.

  “No foul?” said Ashanti, kicking off her shoes. “Is he blind or something?”

  “That’s life,” said Ms. Kleinberg, handing her an ice pack. “Have a good weekend, everybody. Practice Monday.” She went into her office.

  Ashanti sat in front of her locker, dropped the ice pack on the floor, gave me what seemed like an angry look. “An elbow in the head is life?”

  “Does it hurt?” I said.

  “What do you think?” said Ashanti.

  Ashanti was intimidating, but a question I thought was important had occurred to me, so I pressed on. “Does it feel kind of like a tiny electric ball?”

  Ashanti squinted at me in a scary way. “Huh? Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “No,” I said. “No, no.” I moved to my own locker, which looked out of focus, meaning my vision was back to normal. I took out my glasses and put them on. Very cool glasses from the Smith Street Eyeware Boutique, one of the coolest opticians in Brooklyn, which probably meant in the whole world, but I hated them. Other ophthalmologists handed out contacts left and right. How come I got stuck with Dr. Singh? And as for the red-gold beam, either some new eye screwup was in the mix, or I’d imagined it. What other explanation was there? No one had seen it: therefore, not real. The imagination played tricks on you. That was one of my dad’s big beliefs. He was writing a novella about it, or possibly a memoir.

  I closed my locker, glimpsing my face in the mirror that hung on the inside of the door. Nonna—the name for Grandma that my grandmother on my mother’s side had finally chosen for herself, after tryouts for Mummymum, Nana, and Gretchen (her given name)—had gazed at me on her last visit (she lived in Arizona and didn’t visit often) and said, “She’ll be a beautiful woman, one day.” Kind of a mystery who Nonna had been addressing, since there’d been just the two us in the room, but that wasn’t the point. The point: was this supposed day coming anytime soon, the day of my beauty revealed for all to see? No sign of it yet. I clicked the combination into the locked position and was turning to leave when I felt a strange warmth in my pocket. I reached in and took out the braided bracelet. The tiny silver heart was more than warm—in fact, almost too hot to touch. My locker was near the heating vent: maybe that was the explanation. But that silver heart was kind of pretty. I slipped the bracelet on my wrist.

  Home was two subway stops away, but it was a nice day—nice for winter, meaning sunny, not too cold, and none of that wind funneling through the gaps between buildings and down the streets, like icy invisible streams—so I started walking. Twenty-two blocks—twenty-five if I took a detour past Joe Louis—from the edge of one cool neighborhood, where the adults looked a lot like my parents, through the main portion of the walk where they did not, and finally to the edge of another cool neighborhood, mine, where they did again. The difference wasn’t skin color—Ashanti, for example, lived practically across the street from me—or the manner of dress, although that was part of it; it was more something else, some attitude thing, much harder to define.

  I passed some nice brownstones, the fixed-up kind with freshly painted trim, nothing crumbling, plants in the windows. Two nann
ies stood in front of one of them, each push-pulling on a stroller, back and forth, back and forth, in a machinelike way. The babies slept, one drooling, one not. Then came a grocery store with brightly colored fruit in the window, all arranged in neat rows. I crossed the street to the first block where walking at night wasn’t a good idea, passing a boarded-up building, a warehouse, an old greasy sofa in the gutter. A veiled woman with just a little slit to see through went past, her dark eyes lighting on me for a moment. Rowdy boys on bikes blew by, fluttering the veiled woman’s robe. My backpack got heavier—there was homework at Thatcher, lots—but I turned left at the next corner and took the detour anyway. Not that I liked going by Joe Louis, exactly; it was more a matter of just being drawn to it.

  It was past dismissal by the time I reached my old school, a brick and glass building of no distinction, very different from Thatcher, which was a grand nineteenth-century affair on the outside, bright and modern on the inside, thanks to the work of a famous architect who was also an alum; there were lots of famous alums from Thatcher.

  Some of the kids from my neighborhood got sent to private school right from kindergarten; others made the switch later—third grade, maybe, or fifth. But the plan had always been for me to be a public school kid from start to finish; my parents believed in public schools. “Just wait,” some of their friends had said. I’d heard that plenty of times. My parents had waited and waited and then been in the very last group to cave. Nothing I said or did had budged them, and I’d thrown everything I’d had at them, emptied out the cupboard of bad behavior. “Your friends from Joe Louis will still be your friends,” they’d told me. Which had already turned out to be false. And “Don’t worry—you’ll make new friends at Thatcher.” Which hadn’t happened yet, most of the Thatcher kids having been there together for years. Didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, I told myself, stopping by the chain-link fence and gazing through at the small, paved school yard with its single backboard, no net on the basket, windblown trash and broken glass heaped in the corners.