Five Times Revenge

by Lindsay Eland

  “Sure. I’ll see you later on tonight. What time does it start?”

  “Seven.”

  “See you then.”

  When he got home, Adam grabbed himself a leftover donut and some milk. He took them to his room and then dialed Dutch’s number.

  “Hello, Walker residence,” an old, wrinkled voice said.

  “Hi. I was wondering if I could talk to Dutch? This is Adam, his friend from school. You took me home one time.”

  “Oh, I did, did I? Well, I wish I could say that Dutch was here, but he isn’t. He walked down to the store for some soup. I can have him call you back?”

  “He can call back if he wants to. But could you just tell him that we’re going to the school tonight at seven for Pearl’s concert?”

  “Concert? Oh that’s wonderful. Maybe I’ll tag along.”

  “Great. Thanks, Mr. Walker.”

  “You bet. Seven at the school.”

  “Yep. Bye.”

  “Bye now.”

  He’d already talked to Perk and no need to call Pearl. He dialed Ray’s number.

  “Hello?” The voice on the other end was low and gruff, a lot like Ray’s but older sounding.

  “Hi. Can I speak with Ray, please?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Uh … Adam. I’m a friend of Ray’s.”

  The voice laughed. “Friend? Really?”

  For a moment Adam didn’t really know what to say. “Yeah. Can I … can I talk to him?”

  “Sure, Ray’s friend.” There was a pause and then a few expletives followed by “RAY! Get out here. You’ve got a friend on the phone. But don’t be on long, okay?”

  Adam listened as there seemed to be some sort of struggle, an “OUCH!” and then a breathless voice answered, “Hello?”

  What was going on? “Hey, Ray,” Adam said. “This is Adam.”

  “Oh hey.” The words came out fast and choppy like they were afraid to be held down.

  “Who was that? Your dad?”

  “No, brother. What’s up?”

  “Um.” Why was he calling again? “Oh yeah. Pearl has a concert tonight at seven and I thought we should probably go. Maybe we can measure the roof or something while we’re there?”

  “Uh, yeah … about the car.”

  Pause.

  “What about it?”

  Yelling started from somewhere in the background.

  “Never mind, I can tell you tonight.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’ll just see you there.”

  “Cool. So, I guess just dress up a little. Perk will have the—”

  “Sorry, Adam.” The yelling was louder, closer. “I gotta go.”

  The phone clicked off.

  What was that about?

  He swiveled around in his desk chair and stood up, trying to ignore the feeling inside his stomach. Ray was all right. He was sure of that. Right?

  And the prank with the car was a go. Ray probably just had a question about something.

  Right?

  CHAPTER 51

  Perk

  Perk clicked off the phone and then turned on his computer. He jumped from one file to the next on Mr. Parmar’s home screen, searching for the school codes.

  “Do you want to play a game of Monopoly, Perk?” Tommy asked. He held out the half-torn game box. “Please, please, please.” Tommy had stayed home sick that day with a cold and a cough. He stood there, his nose running and his lips chapped to a deep red.

  “Maybe later, Tommy,” he said, turning back to the computer. “I have to go to Pearl’s recital in a little bit; we don’t have time to start a game.” Where were they?

  “Can I go to the recital? I’ve never been to one before. I feel good. Watch.”

  Perk didn’t turn around but clicked on another file. It had to be here somewhere. He remembered seeing it. “What?”

  “I’m fine. I wanna go, too.”

  “Just a second.” He was close; he felt it. Perk clicked on one document after another in the School Documents folder.

  Tommy tapped him on his shoulder, but Perk held up his hand for him to wait. He grinned at the codes that popped up. “Bingo.”

  “Perk!”

  There was a sudden crash behind him and Perk spun around in his chair. “Tommy! What are you doing?”

  The Monopoly game—all the paper money, the pieces, the cards for Community Chest and Chance, and all the little houses and hotels were scattered across the floor.

  “What did you do that for?”

  Tommy wiped at his runny nose. “You weren’t listening to me!” he cried.

  Perk bent down and started picking up the pieces. “I was doing something. You have to be patient.”

  “You’re always doing something! And I want to go to Pearl’s recital! I’m going!” He crossed his arms across his chest.

  Perk looked up at his brother, exasperated. “Well, you can’t, Tommy. You’re sick and you need to stay home and rest. Mom and Dad will be home soon; maybe they’ll play with you?”

  “No, I want you to play with me. You need to stay home.”

  “I can’t. I have to go. It’s really important.”

  “You’re mean!” Tommy kicked the board and then tromped back to his room, slamming the door behind him. Perk could hear him start to cry.

  Perk cleaned up the game, stuffing everything unceremoniously into the box. He glanced down at his watch, then back toward Tommy’s room where he was crying harder.

  The front door opened. “Perk? Tommy? I’m home!” His mom. Perk got up and grabbed his coat.

  “You leaving to meet your friends?” she asked, setting down her briefcase.

  “Yeah. I won’t be long. Tommy’s pretty mad that he can’t come.”

  His mom patted him on the back. “Don’t worry. Dad and I will bring him around.”

  “You could make him chocolate milk?” Perk suggested. “He’d love that.”

  “That’s a good idea. Now you go and have fun. I’m glad that you’re getting out with your friends a little more.”

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks.” He wanted to say that Tommy was his friend, too—his best friend—it was just because Tommy really wasn’t feeling well.

  But instead he grabbed his jacket and jogged toward the school.

  He’d be back before Tommy was even asleep.

  CHAPTER 52

  Ray

  It was intermission and Ray was standing on the school roof.

  Adam stood below him, his shadow long in the parking lot lights. Dutch hadn’t shown up, so Perk was the lookout by the maintenance room in case someone wondered why the door to the roof was open.

  Ray stretched the tape measure down the outside wall of the school to Adam, but he already knew the height. Fifteen feet.

  “I can’t reach it,” Adam called up. “Lower it down farther.”

  Ray got on his knees, scuffing the black pants he’d worn. Great. “Do you have it?”

  Adam pulled at the tape. “Got it.”

  “What is it?” Ray called down.

  “A little over fifteen feet,” Adam said. “I’ll meet you inside.”

  Adam’s end of the tape measure snaked up into the end Ray held, and Ray made his way back down the ladder and into the maintenance room where Perk waited.

  “You done?” Perk asked. He walked out into the dark hallway and shut the door. They started back to the auditorium.

  Ray shrugged. “Yeah, fifteen feet.”

  Adam pushed through the front doors of the school and walked toward them. “So what do you think?” Adam asked Ray. “That isn’t too high, right?”

  “It’ll be close.” Ray rubbed his arm and winced as he ran across the bruise his brother had given him. He might as well get it over with. “I just don’t know if it’s going to work.”

  Even in the dim light of the auditorium he could see Adam’s face fall and Perk’s eyebrows furrow. They had been counting on him to find a way. “What do you mean?”

 
He had to keep going whether he wanted to or not. “My dad has some jacks that might work on getting it up to the roof—maybe—since the car won’t fit on just one. They’re not wide enough for the entire car, so the front will have to go on one and the back will have to be supported by another. Even if we’re able to maneuver both the jacks up at the same time, there’s a huge chance that the car will fall or at the very least get scratched or dented.”

  Adam clapped him on the back. “But it can be done?”

  Ray shrugged. “We’ll have to test it.”

  “Yeah,” Perk said. He ran his hands through his red hair. “I think testing it is a good idea. Then we can see if we’re going to have to come up with something different.”

  “Something like marshmallows?” Adam shook his head. “It’s the lamest idea out there. Nothing is as good as this. We’ll have to try and make it work.” He looked up as the lights to signal the end of intermission blinked. “It’s about to start. We’ll talk about this later.”

  Ray knew that Adam didn’t mean for the words to fall heavy, but they did. They felt like weights resting on his shoulder. Sure, there was still hope they could pull it off, but Adam had never worked one of the jacks; he didn’t see the way they jerked up and shimmied, not to mention the noise they made.

  They found their seats. Ray’s stomach constricted.

  If it didn’t work, he’d disappoint his friends. No one had ever believed in him like Adam, Perk, Pearl, and Dutch. He didn’t want to be a disappointment.

  But he would be.

  And really, he was disappointing himself.

  Only when Pearl began to play did he forget about it for a moment or two. She was good. Or at least she sounded really good. The notes her bow played across the strings filled the auditorium and reached out to him.

  Music had always been his least favorite class in school and it was just background noise at his house or the shop. Nothing more. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it; he really hadn’t thought about it before.

  But what Pearl played and how she played made him think about it.

  Like she was singing through all those strings and telling everyone something, sharing a secret, giving them something.

  She did not disappoint.

  Would he ever know what that was like?

  CHAPTER 53

  Pearl

  The ground had dropped away from underneath Pearl’s feet. And even as she lay in bed, she still felt like she was falling.

  She rolled over. She didn’t want to look at the flowers the boys had given her at her recital. All the boys but Dutch, who hadn’t come. But who cared about him or the flowers? She had cared; she’d thought it was sweet and nice. But that was before. After, her parents fought and took her to dinner and told her they were getting a divorce.

  A divorce dinner.

  A dinner with a divorce at the end of it. On the night of her recital.

  Everything was different.

  She was different.

  There were two Pearls now.

  Before-the-divorce-Pearl and After-the-divorce-Pearl.

  Before-the-divorce-Pearl had played her violin pieces perfectly and Before-the-divorce-Pearl had been so excited when she found out that Adam, Perk, and Ray had come and Before-the-divorce-Pearl didn’t even mind that Dutch hadn’t made it or that they were also there to measure the school roof. Before-the-divorce-Pearl had loved bowing in front of the clapping crowd and seeing her parents sitting next to each other. Before-the-divorce-Pearl was excited to go out to dinner with her parents.

  Then the divorce dinner happened.

  And then After-the-divorce-Pearl was born and she didn’t care anymore.

  After-the-divorce-Pearl didn’t care about the flowers that the boys had given her or about the plan to go to Ray’s dad’s garage or about Parmar or Hill.

  After-the-divorce-Pearl hardly cared about anything at all.

  And curling up in a ball on her bed in the dark was the only thing that she knew she could do.

  CHAPTER 54

  Dutch

  1. Gramps had forgotten to give him the message until it was too late

  2. It was too late to go to Pearl’s recital

  3. He missed the recital

  “I’m sorry that I forgot, Dutch,” Gramps said. “I didn’t have a piece of paper to write it down on and then—” He stopped and coughed into his handkerchief. The handkerchief he never left home without. He never forgot that.

  “It’s fine,” he said. Dutch turned away, sat down at the computer, and turned it on. It wasn’t fine, but how could he tell him that?

  But being mad or upset at Gramps was something he had only felt a few times in his life—like the time he forgot to sign a permission slip for Dutch to go to the art museum with his fifth-grade class. Everyone went but him; he had to stay behind and shelve books in the leveled book room.

  And he hated being mad at Gramps. He knew his grandpa wasn’t feeling well and that he forgot things and that he really did love Dutch.

  But he’d missed Pearl’s violin recital. He didn’t get to sit by his friends or hear Pearl play or stand up and clap for her or hand her flowers afterward. Real flowers, not paper flowers. The anger soured in his mouth.

  Dutch went to the chat forum for relatives of dementia. He visited the site almost every single day now, even though he still had never posted anything. He liked looking at the different ideas people had on how to help their “loved one.” That’s always how they addressed them: “their loved one” or “my loved one.”

  But right now Dutch didn’t care about routines, puzzles, games, exercise, and diet.

  He clicked off the site.

  “I’m sorry, Dutch,” Gramps said again. He rubbed his wrinkled hands through his white hair.

  Dutch stood up. He didn’t want to hear an apology. Saying sorry didn’t bring back the evening.

  He walked into the tiny kitchen, took a pair of scissors and a stack of paper and cut what seemed like a thousand pieces of paper into squares. Now his grandpa would have something to write on when someone called, now Dutch would get a message from his friends. When he was done, he took the stack and set them by the phone. Then he took the top piece of paper, taped it to the phone and wrote in all capitals: REMEMBER TO GIVE DUTCH MESSAGES FROM HIS FRIENDS!!!!!!

  He walked back into his room and turned off his light and lay staring up at the blackness.

  He felt like blackness right then.

  CHAPTER 55

  Perk

  Was he missing something? It was after school, and Perk surveyed his stuff again where he sat in the school library. Computer, power cord, backpack, homework, snack. His phone was beside him. Nope, he had everything. It was Monday and Tommy was at his school for his art class. Perk didn’t have much time before he had to leave, but he’d make it if he ran. Meeting everyone at Ray’s shop wasn’t until later that night.

  The thought scratched him like an annoying tag on one of his shirts.

  He looked back down at his computer and reread the e-mail that Parmar had sent Mr. Charles W. Braynard, Director of Admissions, Beaumont Camp for Boys that afternoon.

  From: Bill Parmar

  To: Charles W. Braynard,

  Subject: Beaumont Camp for Boys

  Dear Mr. Braynard,

  I am following up on Hill Robert Parmar’s application for Beaumont Camp for Boys for this upcoming summer.

  My son, with his high academic achievements; his volunteer work at the special needs building, animal shelter, and nursing home; and his participation in extracurricular activities sets him above the other applicants, I’m sure.

  I am also sure that his video interview further enlightened you about his impeccable upbringing and demeanor.

  If you have any questions that I can answer, do not hesitate to e-mail me at the above address. Once approved, we will pay promptly.

  Sincerely,

  Bill Parmar

  Principal, Anderson Middle School

 
; Perk smiled at the letter. Mr. Braynard would definitely be enlightened.

  But—ugh. The feeling that he was missing something still nagged at him. What was—

  His phone pinged and a text message lit up the screen.

  Where are you? School called to ask if someone meeting Tommy at home. He’s upset. Hurry. Can’t be home for another hr.

  His heart hit the bottom of his stomach like his mom’s homemade pizza—and his mom was horrible at any sort of cooking, most of all, pizza.

  It was Tuesday, not Monday. Tommy didn’t have art class after school.

  Perk glanced down at the clock on his computer to double check, then started shoving things into his backpack. He was awful, horrible, terrible.

  He should’ve been home to meet Tommy’s bus a half hour ago.

  One long half hour ago.

  It might as well have been forever ago.

  Brothers didn’t forget brothers.

  But Perk was the exception.

  CHAPTER 56

  Adam

  Adam rode his bike back toward the restaurant, the bag of groceries for his mom hanging off the handlebars.

  He smiled into the warm air. In just a few hours they were going to Ray’s dad’s garage to test the idea for the car with the pump jacks. It would work. They’d just have to be careful, that was all.

  Then by next week—the day of the spring dance—they would have gotten Hill and Parmar back for what they did to Tommy and to Dutch and to all the other kids.

  Adam stopped at the stop sign and looked down either side of the street, his gaze catching on the high school, where three people stood beside the yellow school bus.

  He squinted to see farther.

  Tommy?

  It couldn’t be.

  And who was that with him?

  Adam turned his bike and rode down the sidewalk, recognizing Tommy’s bus driver and Mrs. Pell.

  What was this about?

  “Hey, Tommy,” Adam said, hopping off his bike and letting it clang to the cement.

  Tommy turned to him, his nose red and crusted with green mucus, his shirt chewed and wet around his neck. “Adam!” he cried, and hugged him.