by Lisa Doan
“Just that sometimes, some people, some younger and less experienced people, should ask my advice,” Mark said, handing the green beans to my dad without even a pause in front of his own plate.
My mom was starting to transform into her she-wolf face. I had hoped I wouldn’t have to tell her about the voting frame-up, but that dream was over. “What he’s talking about is—”
“He got caught nominating himself for king of the dance,” Mark said. “Seven thousand times. It’s all over social media.” Mark patted my arm. “If you had come to me, I could have told you to disguise your handwriting.”
I was pretty sure that was more of Mark’s bad advice.
“Is that true, Chadwick?” my mom asked, staring at me with her piercing she-wolf eyes.
“No,” I said, “it’s not true. It was only two hundred and fifty-five times, and I didn’t do it any of the times. I got framed by Terry Vance. Principal Grimeldi totally fell for it and made me publicly apologize.”
“But why would she think you did such a thing?” my mom asked.
“Because she doesn’t believe that Vance is gaslighting me.”
“I thought about going for king of the dance in sixth grade,” Mark said, “but I only voted for myself once. If I had decided to vote more than once, I would have changed my handwriting.”
The she wolf turned to her oldest cub and said, “That’s enough advice from you, mister.”
“What’s gaslighting?” my dad asked.
“Terry is doing all this stuff to make me think I’m crazy,” I said.
My mom snorted, like she does when she thinks boys and men just don’t get it. “Get over it,” she said. “You people have been making me think I’m crazy for years. How do you think I feel when I find an empty milk carton in the refrigerator? Or the whole loaf of bread is gone except for the ends? Or how about when I do the laundry and there are three hundred socks and not one matching pair? Or how about when I see a box of Ring Dings still sealed, and when I pick it up it’s empty because it’s been opened from the back? And how many times do you think I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and fallen in because somebody left the seat up? A lesser woman would have cracked years ago.”
I looked to my dad to see what he would say to these complaints, but he was studying his fingernails like they had just appeared on his body. I had no idea my mom was going crazy right in our own home over milk and bread and laundry. I supposed I actually did know how she felt about falling into the toilet and finding empty boxes that still looked unopened, but it was hard to remember to put the seat down and it was hard to keep Rory from devouring the Ring Dings. I guessed what made it so hard to remember was knowing that she could never find out for sure which one of us was responsible for any particular crime.
“I always put the seat down,” my dad said.
“So you say,” my mom answered. “One of these days I’m going to put a surveillance camera in there and find out who’s doing it. Now let’s get back on topic.”
The conversation after that was long and filled with exchanges like: “I didn’t do it.” “Why do they think you did it?” “Because my name was on two hundred and fifty-five votes.” “Wouldn’t it be easier to just admit you did it?” “I already admitted it, to the whole school.” “But you’re saying you didn’t do it?” “That’s what I’m saying—I didn’t do it.”
Finally, my mom said to my dad, “If he’s being wrongly accused, we need to go in and speak to Principal Grimeldi and demand a full investigation.”
“No!” I cried. “Don’t do that. You’ll just make it worse. Remember the investigation into the chicken salad sandwich? That went nowhere, except my last name got changed to Mayo-man.”
My mom’s lips pressed together in a thin line. I probably shouldn’t have brought up the sandwich. The investigation into the chicken salad sandwich had concluded that the anonymous note was just a harmless joke and a coincidence. Final report: the chicken salad had already gone bad before entering the school premises. The chicken salad made by my mom. My mom, condemned as the maker of bad chicken salad. For all she told me to take responsibility when something happened to me, she was still steaming over it.
My dad leaned back in his chair and chewed on the end of his unlit pipe. He had quit smoking years ago, but he still carried it around like a body part. “I concur with Chadwick,” he said. “Let the boy work out his own problems.”
“Oh really?” my mom said. “So would that be like the time you left him alone with a chemistry set? All by himself? And we will never get that cobalt stain out of the carpet?”
“He’s not six anymore,” my dad said, fumbling with his pipe. “And anyway, there’s a chair over the stain so nobody can see it.”
“I can see it,” my mom said. “In my mind.”
I didn’t know why my dad sometimes got the idea that he could win one of these discussions, but hats off to him for trying. I wolfed down my dinner and left them arguing about when they were going to get new carpet.
As I lay in bed that night, I mulled over what had happened. How did Vance pull it off? How did he get my handwriting? The only thing he’d stolen from me was “Video Games—Fun to Do and Good for You.” That was typed. He couldn’t forge my name from typing.
Oh. No.
What was the one thing I always forgot to do? Put my name in the header. I forgot to put my name and class on the top of the essay, just like I always did! How could I forget that I forgot to do that when I always forget to do that? I added my name after I got to school. In black pen. That was how he forged my handwriting. All he had needed was to see how I wrote my name. That was why he had never tried to turn in that paper.
But how did he manage to stuff 255 extra votes in the ballot boxes without anybody noticing?
He’d had access to the blank ballots. He must have taken them home the night before and filled them all out. Then he had them stuffed in his pockets. When he’d walked the ballot boxes to the principal’s office, he’d just shoved them in there. The only problem he would have had was distracting Bethany, which would have been easy enough. He could have just said, “Your hair looks weird,” and she would have thrown her box to Terry and run into the nearest bathroom to find a mirror. And that’s how he’d ended up nominated! He’d voted for himself just enough times, then used me as a pawn to distract people from wondering how it was possible that only weeks ago Terry Vance was a brooding loner and now he was nominated for dance king! He got to be nominated and drive me crazy.
The crocodile and I were engaged in a monumental battle of wits that would end in madness for one of us. As it was looking at the moment, that one of us would be me.
* * *
The article in The Eagle’s Eye was the lead story. Skip had gotten a picture of me that looked like I was about to be run over by a car—kind of surprised and horrified at the same time.
It’s Rigged!
Voter Fraud Uncovered at Wayne Elementary!
Chadwick Musselman has been accused and convicted of voter fraud during the nominations for queen and king of the fall dance. Musselman has issued conflicting statements about the incident. He initially admitted wrongdoing, and then claimed he was framed by Terry Vance, who he calls the Nile crocodile. As a journalist, I only deal in facts and am totally against speculation, but I have to speculate that Musselman may have ties to local gangs. It’s a well-known fact that they make extensive use of nicknames. Nile crocodile sounds suspiciously like a name a gang would use. This entire incident could be linked to a gang war.
Stay tuned for more on this developing story and next week’s exposé—“Local Gangs—Who Are They? Where Are They? What Tattoos Do They Have?”
I crumpled up my copy of The Eagle’s Eye and casually threw it into a trash can. Hopefully, there weren’t too many copies circulating. Maybe I would get lucky and find out that Skip’s dad had run low on toner.
Cassie Beachman shoved past me and said, “Voter fraud? I
s that really what our founding fathers fought for?”
As I searched my mind for some kind of reason why the founding fathers would be on my side, Ken Trainor stepped on my sneaker, leaned over me, and said, “Not exactly sportsmanlike.”
My low toner hopes had been crushed. I could see what was happening. I was becoming the school pariah. Every school had one, and mainly it was just a roll of the dice about who got to be it. I was taking the place of Jimmy Kellerman, former pariah, who was best known for being pro runny nose and anti regular bathing.
The rest of the way to class, kids looked away or stared and laughed at me. Except for Hiram Heskell, who informed me that I was dead to him because he couldn’t condone criminal activity. He planned to become a judge someday and didn’t want any unsavory associates in his past coming back to haunt him.
Just yesterday, I could walk down the halls completely invisible. I was one of the anonymous middle of the herd. Now I had been driven out onto the plains to graze alone.
I slipped into the bathroom, closed the stall door, and opened my Instagram. The last photo I had posted was of me doing a backflip off the diving board at the pool. (Swagger that!) For weeks, no comments had been posted, except for my mom writing, “Wow kiddo!” and Rory writing, “Chadwick flips out,” and Marilee writing, “I saw it with My Own Eyes.” (I’d had to buy Marilee three frozen Snickers to get her to post that comment. One Snickers was the usual onlooker fee, another one was a consultation fee on wording, and the third one was a posting fee.) Now there were eighty-seven comments. Most of them were short, as they said things like,
“Loser!”
“Seriously?”
“Disgusting!”
Jana had written “SO Disgusting!” twice.
The only full sentence was from Jimmy Kellerman. It said, “Join the club, bonehead!”
* * *
On the bus, Rory said, “Consider it an act of loyalty that I’m sitting next to you. Nobody likes voter fraud.”
“Are you kidding me? I didn’t do it—Vance framed me. That’s why he stole my essay. He was never going to turn in that paper. He wanted to forge my handwriting.”
Rory let out a low whistle. “That guy is a mastermind. He goes from loner to hanging with popular girls in weeks and still finds time to frame you. A pretty meteoric rise, if you ask me.”
I ignored Rory’s admiration of Terry’s cunning. “What am I going to do about it?”
“Do nothing,” Rory answered. “It’ll blow over. Remember when Susie Cotton walked around for practically an hour with the back of her skirt tucked into her underwear?”
“No.”
“Exactly. It was in the second grade, but who remembers that now?”
“You do,” I said. “Anyway, that was four years ago. I can’t wait four whole years for everybody to forget about this. I need a plan to expose Terry Vance once and for all.”
“You could always go to private school,” Rory said. “Remember Ben Bailey? He transferred to private school and by the next day everybody was like, Ben who?”
“That’s all you got?”
“I just gave you a viable option right off the top of my head,” Rory said.
“Not viable,” I said.
Rory’s only other idea was to ask Susie Cotton to re-enact the skirt-tucked-in-underwear incident to take the focus off me.
We got to my house and raided the kitchen. “There has to be an answer,” I said. “This is the United States of America. A guy doesn’t just get framed and that’s it, nobody does anything about it.”
“That’s not true,” Rory said, clawing through kitchen cabinets and grazing his way through the refrigerator. “Remember that show we saw about all those guys who were wrongly convicted? Some of them were on death row.”
I stared at Rory.
“So at least you’re not on death row,” he said, wandering into the den with a bag of Cheetos, a package of sliced ham, a Snack Pack chocolate pudding, a box of baggies, and a Yoo-hoo.
I wasn’t on real death row, but I was on social death row. I had gone into sixth grade with high hopes. Terry Vance and all his stupid pranks would be left behind. I would swagger and lurk near Jana Sedgewick until she eventually realized that she liked me. It was true that I had counted on a lot of factors coming together while I was lurking near Jana, like that I would experience an extreme growth spurt, suddenly get better at sports, and develop the kind of jovial and confident personality the popular guys had. But without the crocodile watching my every move, it had all seemed possible. I would make the quantum leap from “Who’s that guy?” to “Hey, Chadster and Jana—come and sit closer to Marilee on the bleachers!” Instead, Vance was gaslighting me and I had just made a public announcement admitting to voter fraud.
“If I can’t figure out a way to expose him, my life is over,” I said.
“Don’t be so depressed, Chadwick,” Rory said. “I’ll stick by you. Unless the peer pressure gets too intense. Peer pressure is—”
“In your notebook,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I’ve got one ally, except if he happens to crumble under peer pressure.”
“Exactly,” Rory said. “Hey, why don’t you just be nice to Terry? Maybe you could give all this up and be friends? He’s probably tired of it too—it’s got to take up a lot of time. I mean, even if he didn’t write your name on all those ballots, he knows you’ll think it was him. It just goes on and on.”
“Just be nice to Terry Vance?” I asked. “After years of torture, just be nice to him?”
“That’s the point,” Rory said. “It has been years. Who even knows who started the whole thing?”
I looked at Rory, dumbfounded. The guy appeared to know nothing about my life, even though he’d been there the whole time. “The crayon?” I said.
“What crayon?” Rory asked.
“The sunset-orange crayon that I took from him?” I said. “Remember? Then he started staring at me, then he grew to an enormous size and tables were turned?”
Rory’s eyes squinted like he was trying to peer into the distant past. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I remember the staring and the growing. I don’t remember the crayon. Are you telling me this years-and-years obsession is about a crayon? How could this all be about a stupid crayon?”
I had sometimes wondered that myself, but the endless death spiral between me and Terry was indeed about a crayon. In the first grade, I had been bigger than Terry. He hadn’t scared me at all. So, that fateful day when we were all coloring pictures of turkeys and pumpkins and pilgrims for Thanksgiving, I had looked everywhere for the exact color I wanted—sunset orange. My pumpkin had to be that color. No other color would work. The only sunset-orange crayon I saw happened to be in Terry’s hand. I had boldly marched over to his desk and grabbed the crayon from him. I’m not totally sure why I didn’t see that it would be a bad idea, except I was not yet known for my sense of justice. Or common sense. Or ability to realize that other kids might grow bigger than me. Or realize that they might grow bigger and have a really good memory.
The crocodile, who back then was just plain old Terry, hadn’t said anything when I took the sunset-orange crayon. But his eyelid had started to twitch and he’d turned away so I couldn’t see his face. I had wondered if he was going to cry and slunk back to my table with the crayon before the teacher noticed and I got in trouble.
That day, about halfway through quiet time, I began to get a squirmy “you did something wrong” kind of feeling.
I didn’t like the squirmy feeling and wanted to get rid of it, so I decided to forgive myself right then and there. And also, lay full blame at our teacher’s feet. I mean, what kind of first-grade teacher doesn’t provide more sunset-orange crayons for that kind of project? It was pretty irresponsible.
Terry didn’t blame her, though. He blamed me. He started to stare at me all the time, blaming.
I’d be eating lunch and just know that someone
was watching me, and I’d look around and there he was. Staring.
I’d be swinging on the monkey bars and Rory would swing past me and whisper, “Terry is staring at you again.”
One time, we were in our line to go outside, which was supposed to be in alphabetical order with me in the middle and him at the end, and I turned around and he was right behind me. Staring.
He started to really creep me out and I wished I had a time machine so I could go back and just color that stupid pumpkin purple or red. My mom wouldn’t have cared—everything I made looked good to her.
While I was getting creeped out, Terry was growing. And growing and growing. I came back to school after summer vacation in the third grade and he towered over me. He sat behind me on the bus and whispered, “The tables have turned.”
That year, I sat on a lot of tacks and was always pulling off pieces of paper taped to my back that said, “Idiot.”
“Seriously, Chadwick?” Rory said. “A crayon?”
“Wait a minute,” I said, ignoring Rory’s extremely poor memory of the turning points in my life, “The Eagle’s Eye. I’ll write an editorial and get Skip to print it. I’ll present the facts like a court case. That’s so much better than trying to explain to people what happened and then they are barely listening to what you say. It will give me the kind of platform I’ve always needed. I can explain all about what Vance has been up to. Maybe I can really get the whole Nile crocodile nickname thing going.”
Rory leaned over the coffee table, filling baggies with Cheetos so he would have something to eat at his house. “But really? A crayon?” he asked.
I left Rory packing up my family’s food and muttering about the crayon. I knew he would let himself out of my house just like he always lets himself into it.
I went to my dad’s home office, fired up the computer, and composed my defense. It was lucky that I had already gotten experience writing “Video Games—Fun to Do and Good for You.” I felt like I was a natural at persuasive writing. I laid out my case, fact by fact, so that there could be no denying who the real villain was. Tables turned again, Señor Vance.