by Lisa Graff
I could hear the girl’s voice across the stretch of parking lot immediately. “Aaron,” she said. Her hoodie was soaked. “I’m just going to call my dad. This is ridiculous.”
It was Clarisse, I realized. I recognized her from her photo in the contact info on Aaron’s phone. Only she didn’t really look the way I’d imagined a girlfriend would look, because for one thing she was obviously furious.
When Ms. Emerson called, “Everything okay out here?” across the parking lot, both Aaron and Clarisse darted their heads up. And the looks on their faces, you would’ve thought we’d caught them robbing a liquor store, not standing in the parking lot of the library.
Something was up.
“Trent?” Aaron called into the rain. “What are you doing here?” He did not sound happy to see me.
“Ms. Emerson was driving me home,” I said. I pointed. “She’s my homeroom teacher.”
“Homeroom?” Aaron said. “It’s like, four thirty.”
“Five-oh-eight,” Ms. Emerson corrected, putting up a hand to shield her eyes from the rain.
The wind howled.
“Do you kids need help?” Ms. Emerson asked.
It was weird to hear someone call Aaron a “kid.” For as far back as I could remember, he’d always seemed like such a grown-up, bossing Doug and me around and lecturing us about “responsibility.” But right then, in the rain, with a broken car, and a wet and annoyed Clarisse by his side, he did seem a little like a kid.
“My car won’t start,” he said.
“We were at the library,” Clarisse said quickly when she saw Ms. Emerson’s eyes dart inside the empty car. “I was helping Aaron study for a test on Monday, and then his car wouldn’t start and . . .”
“The library closed a while ago,” Ms. Emerson put in.
“We’ve been stuck here forever,” Clarisse said. “Aaron won’t let me call anyone. He says he can fix it.”
“I can fix it,” Aaron grumbled.
“What’s the problem?” Ms. Emerson asked. And when Aaron described what had happened, she told him, “You probably just need a jump. I have cables in my trunk.” She turned to Clarisse. “Young lady, why don’t you help me get them?”
While Ms. Emerson and Clarisse walked back across the parking lot to the car, I told Aaron, “No way you were studying.” I had no idea what he had been doing, but I knew it was something awful. I could tell by his face how worried he was that I was going to figure it out.
But then in the backseat of the car, I noticed Aaron’s math book, and a notebook. The notebook was covered with Aaron’s scribbles. Numbers, all over. Crossed out and scribbled up the sides. I smooshed my nose harder against the window. There were tons of pages of scribbled numbers wadded up and tossed on the floor in the backseat.
“You really were studying,” I said.
“Shut up,” Aaron replied.
“What’s so terrible about that?” I asked. “So you were studying with your girlfriend. Who cares?”
“I’m failing trig, all right?” Aaron told me. He sounded like he was angry at me for some reason, like if I hadn’t found him in this parking lot, he wouldn’t be failing at all. “And I told you, Clarisse isn’t my girlfriend.” He coughed, clearing his throat. “She’s my tutor.” Across the parking lot, Ms. Emerson had turned on her car, and she and Clarisse were making their way back over to us. “If I don’t pass this test on Monday, I’m probably going to flunk the whole semester, and then I’ll have to do summer school.”
“So why the heck are you spending all this time trying to fix your stupid car?” I asked Aaron. “You should’ve called Mom. I bet she has jumper cables or whatever. Or Ray. You don’t have to stand out here in the rain. You’re already late to meet Dad for dinner.”
“Shut up.”
This was an Aaron I didn’t know. The Aaron I did know was calm and polite and mature and always in charge. He was funny. Charming. He pulled pranks. He didn’t stand in the freezing rain like an idiot staring down into the hood of a car freaking out about math tests.
Ms. Emerson parked in the spot right beside Aaron’s, and then opened the hood of her car, too. Then she showed us all how to hook up the cables, and how to jump Aaron’s car. “A useful skill is never learned too early,” she told me as she instructed me where to clip the cable.
Aaron’s car started up in seconds. Ms. Emerson had been right. It was a really easy fix.
Ms. Emerson said she’d drive Clarisse home, and I went with Aaron, after we transferred my bike. I wasn’t too sad about that arrangement, because Clarisse was growling like she wanted to murder somebody.
“She’s just in a bad mood,” Aaron said when I told him I was glad she wasn’t his girlfriend because she was awful. “It’s late and she’s mad at me for not calling someone. Plus, I think she was really cold.”
“She should get an actual coat.”
“Mm,” Aaron said as we headed toward home.
“Why wouldn’t you call anyone?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer.
“Aaron?”
“Mom has enough to worry about, all right?” he said. “She doesn’t need to know about me and stupid trig, or my car breaking down at the library.”
“But—”
“She worries all the time, Trent,” Aaron said. “You don’t see it, because you’re always so busy thinking about your own stuff, but Mom worries all the time. She worries about you. And it’s my job to take care of her, and I’m not going to give her one more thing to worry about. So just shut up about it, all right? And don’t you dare tell her.”
“But—”
“Shut up, Trent.”
I didn’t see how any of this was my fault—Aaron’s car breaking down, or him almost failing trig. If it weren’t for me, he’d’ve been stuck in that parking lot until morning. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I knew it.
So why did I feel guilty anyway?
TWENTY-ONE
When I got to the Community Center on Saturday morning, Julie was waiting for me, standing next to Annie.
“Hi, Trent,” she greeted me. “I was just telling Annie here that we have a new volunteer today. So if the two of you are still interested in switching, I can arrange that.”
“Oh,” I said, because I guess I was surprised. Then I looked at Annie, who shrugged, so I shrugged, too.
“So that’s a ‘no,’ then?” Julie asked.
“I guess not?” I said slowly. And Annie nodded to agree with me, but the nod was mostly toward her shoes and not Julie.
“We’re fine,” Annie said.
“Well, great then,” Julie told us. “All right, when the rest of the group gets here, I’ll explain our first game.”
“Just so you know,” Annie said, looking up to talk to me when Julie had wandered off, “I’m not done hating you.”
But she didn’t actually look that mad, the way you would if you truly hated someone.
“Good,” I told her. “Because if you were, they might make you stop being the president of the club.”
“Exactly,” she said.
The new volunteer, it turned out, was Noah Gorman. Julie paired him up with another volunteer and a really little kid who looked like she could use extra help.
The first game was a relay race, where we had to dribble two balls at once while running to the far side of the gym, and then on the way back we had to cross the balls at least once before passing them off to our buddy, and then it was the second person’s turn. Everyone was terrible at it. There were basketballs flying everywhere, and kids knocking into each other, and two second-graders got so confused about whose basketball was whose that for a second it looked like they were going to wrestle each other for it. Annie and I came in third. Noah’s team was dead last.
He waved at me across the gym when he saw me. I waved back.<
br />
One thing was for sure. Basketball Buddies was way better than volleyball.
• • •
When Julie let us out for the day, after our afternoon snack (another thing this program had going for it over P.E. class), Annie and I left the Community Center together. And there was Doug, sitting on his bicycle, waiting for us.
Well. Waiting for Annie, anyway.
“Hey, Annie!” he greeted her, waving her over. “Want to help me get some stuff for a”—his eyes darted at me—“thing?”
I knew it was a prank. I’m not a moron.
Annie stuck her hands into her pockets. “I can’t,” she said. “Rebecca wants me to help her set up for her hamster’s birthday party. She would’ve invited you, too, but her mom said she could only have one friend over this afternoon.”
“Oh,” Doug said. I could tell he was disappointed. “That’s fine. Anyway, I should work on the . . . thing.”
“I know it’s a prank, Doug,” I said from where I was kicking up my bike’s kickstand.
“It’s not a prank!” he said, way too loudly. Which meant that it was definitely a prank.
Annie left, and I waved good-bye to Noah, and there was Doug, looking sad and pathetic on his bicycle. I rolled my bike over to him and punched him in the shoulder, the way Aaron always did to me. “You want to go to Rosalita’s?” I asked him.
He looked up at me. “Yeah?” he said, rubbing his shoulder.
“Yeah. I have some money from the store last weekend.”
“All right,” he said. “But I’m not going to tell you about my prank. That’s a secret.”
“Deal,” I said.
It wasn’t far to Rosalita’s. We locked our bikes outside and ate indoors instead of ordering from the window, because of how cold it was. Marjorie even gave us an extra taco to split, just because she liked us.
It wasn’t until we were chowing down on our meal that I realized something.
“Hey, why aren’t you at Dad’s?” I asked Doug. I did the math in my head, and it was a Dad weekend for sure.
He took a long slurp of his soda, then pushed it away from him and picked up his second taco. “You’re not the only person who’s allowed to hate going there, you know,” he said. Which, okay, surprised me.
“I thought you and Dad got along fine,” I said.
“You’re not always there,” he replied. Which I guess was true.
We went back to tacos.
After a while more of eating, Doug said, “You’re being nice to Annie, right?” He took another slurp of soda. “Because she needs people to be nice to her. Because of everything that happened. You know, with her brother.”
I clenched my jaw tight. “I know what happened with her brother, Doug,” I said.
He darted his eyes up at me, his mouth still around his soda straw. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yeah, I guess so.” He leaned back in his seat. Used his fork to push around a couple stray pieces of shredded lettuce on his plate. “I just feel bad,” he said. “That’s all. So I always try to be extra-nice to her.”
“Why would you feel bad?” I asked him.
“Because.” He sighed big, like he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about it. He popped two lettuce pieces into his mouth and talked while he was chewing. “I was the one who told you they needed an extra for hockey.” He wouldn’t look at me.
“Doug,” I said. “That’s stupid. Anyone could have told me that. That doesn’t make it your fault her brother died.”
“Yeah, but”—Doug went for another piece of lettuce—“they only needed another person because I convinced Brad not to play. I wanted to hang out with him, so I told him not to. And if I never would’ve done that, then . . .” He didn’t finish his thought.
He didn’t need to.
“So that’s why you’re always hanging out with Annie?” I asked Doug. “Because you feel guilty?”
Doug chewed some more, looked up at the ceiling. “Well, that and ’cause she’s nice,” he said.
I reached for my second taco, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I just kept staring at Doug. I couldn’t believe that all this time, while I’d been feeling so guilty about Jared and that hockey puck, he’d been feeling the exact same way.
“You couldn’t have known,” I told him. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He slurped at his soda and didn’t say anything. I slurped at my own soda and didn’t say anything either.
“Thanks for the tacos,” he said at last.
“Now what’s this big prank of yours?” I asked him.
Doug threw a shred of lettuce at me. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
• • •
“So?” I asked Aaron on Sunday night, when Mom and I got home from Kitch’N’Thingz and Aaron had returned from his solo weekend at Dad’s. He was in the kitchen tidying, even though he’d been gone all weekend so none of the things that needed tidying were his. “Are you ready for your big test tomorrow?”
Aaron didn’t say anything, just looked up from where he was standing at the sink, rinsing dishes to put in the dishwasher.
“Your trig test,” I said. “Did you study some more? Are you going to pass it?”
“Maybe instead of being nosy,” he replied, his eyes darting past me to the door. No one was there to hear us, so I guess that’s why he went on. “You could help me with the dishes.”
Well.
I started gathering Doug’s cereal bowl from the table—what else did I have to do?—and pushed past Aaron to rinse the empty milk carton for recycling.
He still didn’t answer my question, though.
“I’m sure it wouldn’t be so bad,” I said after a little while of tidying, with Aaron not talking to me. I didn’t like when he wasn’t talking to me. “If you had to take summer school, I mean.” I’d had to take summer school once, for extra reading help back in fourth, and it wasn’t as terrible as I’d worried it would be.
“What do you know?” Aaron snapped.
“It’s just one class,” I said. “And in summer school they make everything easier anyway, so—”
“If I have to go to summer school,” Aaron said, “I have to cut back at Swim Beach.” He held a plate over the sink, right in front of the stream of water from the faucet, but not under it, so it didn’t get rinsed. He was staring at me, not the water. “If I work fewer hours, I get less money. And if I get less money, how am I supposed to pay for college, huh, genius? You tell me that. If I ever get into college in the first place.” He went back to rinsing the plate. He scrubbed it with a sponge, kept scrubbing even after all the food was off.
“Hey, Aaron?” I said softly. “Aaron?” He didn’t answer, just kept rinsing.
“I don’t need you to tell me that it’s okay, all right?” he said. “It’s not okay.”
“Uh.” I blinked. “I was going to tell you that I think that plate is super clean now.”
Aaron closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then slowly set the plate down on the counter and turned off the faucet. He flicked driplets of water off his hands, and turned around to face me.
“I’m sorry I exploded,” he told me.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“It’s not your fault I’m failing trig.”
“Duh,” I replied.
Aaron laughed.
I picked up the plate and started drying it with a dish towel. “So?” I asked him again. “Are you ready?”
Another deep breath. For a while I thought he might blow up at me again, but when he did answer, he sounded much calmer than before. “I think so. Maybe. I guess we’ll find out on Monday.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you,” I told him.
TWENTY-TWO
On Monday, Fallon sat with me at lunch, like usual.
“How’s the play going?”
I asked her.
“Fine,” she said.
“How’s art class?”
“Fine.”
I was starting to figure out why my mom got so annoyed when she asked us about school.
I tried another tactic.
“Why can’t you ever get hungry at the beach?” I asked her.
She rolled her eyes at me. “I’m not really in the mood, Trent,” she said.
“Well, what are you in the mood for?” I grumbled.
We didn’t talk much after that.
I was getting pretty sick of this Fallon—the moody, grumpy one who never talked to me anymore. I was beginning to wonder if it was even worth it, trying to be her friend.
“Hey, here’s a joke I bet your uncle never told you,” I said after a while of not talking. I don’t know why. Because not talking at the lunch table was worse than not playing volleyball, probably. “I read it in one of Doug’s joke books a million years ago. It’s terrible. You ready?”
She plopped a stewed carrot into her mouth and didn’t say anything.
“What will a pirate pay to cut off your ears?” I said.
She chewed. “What?” she asked. She didn’t really seem that interested.
I put on my best pirate voice anyway. “A buccaneer,” I told her, squinting one eye like I was wearing an eye patch or something. “Get it? A buck-an-ear.”
“That’s awful,” she told me.
But her eyes were lit up, on either side of her scar. And she was smiling at me.
“Right?” I said.
She was worth it, I decided. Fallon Little was definitely worth it.
• • •
I went to Ms. Emerson’s room that day after school, just like I always did. I filled up the watering can at the sink just like always, too.
But then I set it down.
Ms. Emerson was at sitting at her stovetop desk, as usual, grading papers. She sure had a lot of papers to grade all the time. I wondered if she’d had nearly so many when she was a home ec teacher. Probably not. I wondered if she’d liked teaching home ec a lot better.