The birds and the bees? “You mean human reproduction?” I said.
Silence for a second. Then, “Yeah.”
Jeez. “We’re having supper, then we’re going to watch videos,” I said, in case he hadn’t heard me right the first time.
More silence. It seemed different this time, though, like maybe he was relieved. “Be good,” he said. “And be home by midnight, okay?”
Rebecca lived a few blocks from Riel in a house that her father, a real handy guy, had expanded and renovated. It was nice. Everything at Rebecca’s house was nice. Her mother was an art teacher at a private girls’ school. All the walls at Rebecca’s house were painted bright colors, and there were lots of pictures hanging on them. The best part, though, was the sunroom her dad had added to the back of the house. You could sit out there summer and winter and look at the sky and the grass or the snow, whatever season it happened to be. We ate in the sunroom that night at a little round table Rebecca had set with what she said were her mother’s best dishes. She put a candle in the middle of the table and dimmed the lights. The flame from the candle lit up her coppery hair, making it almost red in some places, pure gold in others. She looked great. She was also a good cook. She made spaghetti with little meatballs, garlic bread, and a salad. After we ate, I helped her carry everything back into the kitchen. I wanted to help her clean up, too, but she was nervous about her mother’s dishes, so she washed and dried, and I just stood around and watched. That’s when I told her about Mr. Henderson.
“He sounds creepy,” she said. “Did you tell Mr. Riel?”
She called him Mister because he was her history teacher. She got kind of tense whenever she was around him, for the same reason. I kept telling her he was a nice guy. I had the impression she already knew that, but she couldn’t get past the fact that he assigned her homework and graded her tests, and once, when she wasn’t prepared for class, he had told her he was surprised that someone like her had slacked off. “What do you think he meant, someone like me?” she had asked me. “Does he mean he thinks I should never slack off because I’m not smart?” Her average in his class was eighty-three. I told her that for sure Riel thought she was smart, but that he expected smart people to act smart. Acting smart, I told her, was showing up on time, doing your work, and always being prepared.
“He said I should report it to the director of the community center,” I said.
“Did you?”
“I feel funny about it,” I said. “I mean, what am I going to say? I saw Mr. Henderson go through a girl’s backpack? He’s just going to deny it. And, besides, he didn’t take anything.”
“Maybe not this time,” Rebecca said. “But what if he does it again?”
I knew she was right, the same as I knew Riel was right. But I had already messed up by going into Emily’s backpack myself—and getting caught. If I told Teresa Rego what I had seen, she would probably want to check with Emily to make sure that nothing was missing, and then Emily would say that she saw me, not Mr. Henderson, looking not only in her backpack but in her wallet. She’d say I never even mentioned Mr. Henderson. Jeez, I never should have touched her stuff. I never should have lied about it. I never should have mentioned Mr. Henderson to Riel. Or to Rebecca. Except that there was something not right about it all.
“You should at least talk to the girl,” Rebecca said. “Tell her what happened.”
“You mean just walk up to her and say, Excuse me, Emily, but the janitor at the community center seems to have a thing for you?”
“Emily?” Rebecca said. “So you know this girl?”
“I talked to her once.”
“Oh?”
That’s all she said. Oh. Then she gave me a look, and the next thing I knew I was telling her everything—that I had gone into Emily’s backpack myself, that she’d caught me looking through her wallet.
“She was kind of snotty at first,” I said, “but by the end she was okay. She didn’t report me.”
“Because you told her you wanted to find out who she was,” Rebecca said. “Because you told her you were interested in her.” She was still giving me that look.
“I only said that because she thought I was trying to steal from her.”
“It never occurred to you to tell her the truth? It never occurred to you to say what you saw Mr. Henderson do?”
“I thought she would think I was lying.”
“So, instead, you lied to her?”
“No.” Jeez, it wasn’t like that. Except that it was, sort of. “Mr. Henderson would have denied it. And I have a record. The only reason I’m at the community center is because I took something.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Who is this Emily anyway?” she said. “Does she go to our school?”
I shook my head. “Her name is Emily Corwin. She goes to private school.”
“Corwin? Emily Corwin?”
“Yeah.” The look she was giving me now was scarier than the one she had given me before. “Why? Do you know her?”
“Emily Corwin with long blond hair, kind of skinny?”
“I don’t know about skinny, but she looks good in a bathing suit.” I regretted the words as soon as I had said them. Rebecca crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a sharp look. “The first time I saw her was at a swim meet,” I said. “And, anyway, it was a Speedo bathing suit.”
“Instead of, say, a thong bikini?” Rebecca said.
Jeez, that wasn’t what I meant at all. “Besides, she’s only in ninth grade.”
“A whole year behind you, you mean,” Rebecca said. “If only she was in tenth grade and had been wearing a thong bikini.”
“I’m not interested in her,” I said. Then I said, “How do you know her anyway?”
“How do I know Emily Corwin who you’re not interested in even though you told her you were interested?”
I should have been a miner—or maybe a grave-digger—because I was shoveling myself in deeper and deeper. So I did the only thing I could think of—I took the dish towel out of Rebecca’s hand and folded it over the towel rack. Then I kissed her. For the first time. And while I was doing it, while I was feeling her lips and smelling how fresh and clean she was, I wondered why it had taken me so long, why I hadn’t done it before.
Rebecca put her arms around my waist and leaned forward and kissed me back. When she pulled away, which she did just a little, she was smiling.
“I knew you’d be a good kisser,” she said. She smiled. “I’m sorry. I guess I came across sounding jealous.”
“That’s okay.” I’d never had a girl be jealous because of me before.
“She’s a year behind because she had some kind of family problem.”
“Emily?”
“Yeah, Emily. She’s the same age as you and me, but she missed a year at school. I know her from junior high. I was on the basketball team at my school.” Rebecca is tall for a girl. Almost as tall as me. “We played against her school every now and again. Everyone on her team was always watching out for her, you know, on account of this family problem of hers that nobody wanted to talk about. Something about her mother dying.” She looked at me then, her eyes all sad, thinking about my mother. “Sorry,” she said.
I shrugged. “It was a long time ago.” Not that it stopped me from thinking about my mother. Not that it stopped me from missing her.
“I didn’t know anything about Emily at first, except that she was on the other team and I wanted to win,” Rebecca said. “So this one time I blocked her hard, and she fell. Then she started crying. Crying! It was the league semifinals. I wasn’t trying to be mean or to hurt her. I was just trying to win.” People think girls aren’t as competitive as boys, that they don’t play just as hard. But they do—at least, the athletic ones like Rebecca do. “She was crying, and I said to her, ‘Didn’t your mother teach you to be a good sport?’ And all of a sudden she’s crying even harder and running off the court and all the girls on her team are gathering around her. And then one of them com
es up to me and tells me that I’m cruel. Cruel? I didn’t even know Emily. How was I supposed to know about her mother? I’m still not sure what happened, except she died. After that, whenever our team went up against theirs, Emily would steer clear of me on the court.” Rebecca shook her head. “They lost almost every game they played against us. Plus, the school she goes to now? My mom teaches there. She says Emily’s dad is a real pain. He’s one of those flashy rich guys, always with the manicure and the big diamond ring. He heads up the school fundraising committee. My mom says he acts like that entitles him to run the place.”
Quick impression: Rebecca didn’t think much of the Corwin family.
“I guess this means you don’t think I should bother telling her about Mr. Henderson,” I said.
Rebecca gave me a third, sharper look. “I don’t have a lot of respect for Emily,” she said. “Okay, I have none. At least, I didn’t back in junior high. But if some old guy had gone through my stuff and had followed me to the subway, I’d appreciate knowing about it.” She thought about what she had said and her expression changed.
“What?” I said.
“If a guy as cute as you told me that some old guy had been going through my stuff, I’d probably appreciate it a lot.”
“Yeah? So?” I didn’t know what she was getting at. But maybe that’s because I was focusing on the first part of what she had said: Rebecca thought I was cute.
“You like me, don’t you, Mike?”
“Yeah.”
“So when you tell her, maybe I’d better be there. You know, so she doesn’t get the wrong idea.”
Oh. I smiled, and then I kissed her again.
Sunday. The one day in the week when I could actually sleep in. The one day in the week when Riel lets me.
I got up around noon and went downstairs to find something to eat. Riel was just coming up from the basement, carrying a basket full of fresh laundry. He was whistling. Nothing made him happier than clothes fresh from the dryer.
“I didn’t hear you come in last night,” I said.
“It was late.” He passed me in the hall and continued up the stairs. “Your bed made?” he called over his shoulder.
“Not yet.” I had just rolled out of it.
“So I’ll leave your laundry outside your door, okay?”
Whatever. I went into the kitchen, wishing I could open the cupboard and find a box of Cocoa Puffs or maybe Frosted Flakes. But Riel didn’t buy that kind of stuff. “It’s bad for you,” he said the one time I asked him. So I settled for bread (seven grain) with peanut butter (organic) and (yes!) the last of the strawberry jam Susan had given him last summer. I glanced through the Sunday paper while I ate.
“Hey,” I said when Riel came into the kitchen with a pile of clean and folded dish towels, “you know those bones they found? Well, they found the rest of the guy.”
Riel grunted something. He was stacking the dish towels in a drawer near the sink.
“It says it looks like the guy was shot. It says they can tell from the damage to a couple of the bones. It says they’re looking for the bullet that did it,” I said. “You know what that means, right?”
Riel looked at me and waited.
“It means I was right when I said the guy was murdered.”
“Just because he was shot, that doesn’t mean he was murdered,” Riel said. “It could have been an accident.”
“Sure. Some guy accidentally shoots some other guy and buries him in a shallow grave in the woods. That makes sense.”
Riel shrugged. “Doesn’t sound too likely, does it?” It was the closest he came to admitting I’d been right. “Hey, what did I hear about a fire at the community center?”
“Some kid stole some cigarettes and was smoking them in the art room,” I said. “And it was in the old part of the community center where the sprinklers weren’t working. Nobody was hurt, though.” I got up to get some juice.
“Did you tell Teresa about your supervisor?”
“About the fire? She was there. I didn’t have to tell—”
Riel shook his head. “You said you saw your supervisor—Mr. Henderson, right?—go into a girl’s backpack. Did you tell Teresa about it?”
“Not yet.”
He gave me a peeved look. “I thought we agreed that’s what you would do.”
“I forgot.”
That earned me an even more peeved look.
“When you say you’re going to do something, you should do it.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t even know which girl’s backpack it was. There was a whole pile of them and he just looked in one. And he didn’t take anything. And he saved that kid from the fire.” I told Riel about that. I told him because I didn’t want to have to tell him what I had done.
“Still,” Riel said, “people have no business touching things that don’t belong to them.”
Neither did I. That was the problem.
“Mention it to her, will you, Mike?” Riel said.
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Mike.”
“Okay.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Wow,” I said.
“Your mouth is hanging open,” Rebecca said.
She was right. I closed it. “Look at that one.”
Rebecca grabbed my hand and lowered it. “Don’t point. It’s rude.”
“But look at the size of that place,” I said. “How many bathrooms you think they have in there?”
Rebecca shrugged. “Five,” she said, “maybe six.” Like it was no big deal.
We were on our way to Emily Corwin’s school. To get there, we had to walk up a street that was lined on both sides with … mansions. It was the only word I could think of to describe the massive, beautiful houses, all of them on even more massive properties that were either fenced in or half-hidden behind stone walls, all of them with three- or four-car garages and little signs that warned that the place was protected by a security alarm system. I’d never seen houses like these up close. I wasn’t even sure I knew they existed.
“I bet some of them have swimming pools,” I said.
“Probably,” Rebecca said.
“I bet some of them have maids.”
“Probably chauffeurs, too,” Rebecca said. “You know what else some of them have?”
“What?”
“Stuck-up kids who think they’re better than everyone else.”
Oh.
“They’re just houses, Mike. Houses that belong to people who have more money than they know what to do with.”
Must be nice, I thought. But I didn’t say it.
We turned a corner, and Rebecca said, “There it is.”
The school looked old, but well kept up. It was a big stone building set back from the street, surrounded by a rolling lawn. A high stone wall ran around it with an iron gate that Rebecca said they locked at night. It was open now, though, and on the other side of it I saw girls. Girls hanging around the front of the school, talking. Girls over by the parking lot, one of them unlocking a candy-apple-red Suzuki Tracker. Girls coming down the driveway, heading home to the big houses we had just passed. Rebecca marched up to the gate and then right through it. I caught her by the arm.
“You sure it’s okay?” I said.
“They’re just people, Mike. Just because they think they’re special doesn’t mean you have to think so too.”
“You don’t like rich people, do you?”
“I don’t like the ones I’ve met so far,” she said. “Come on. You want to find her, don’t you?”
Yeah, I did. But now that I was here, I didn’t know where to start. There were so many girls, all of them with creamy rich-girl skin and thin rich-girl legs and shiny rich-girl hair—I don’t why it is, but rich girls always have great-looking hair—and Mountain Equipment Co-op backpacks over coats and jackets that looked expensive. All those rich girls either ignored me or looked at me like, Who did I think I was? Like I didn’t belong. Or maybe I just imagined that.
“She’s probably gone home already,” I said.
“Let’s find out.” Rebecca stepped in front of two girls who were walking toward us. “Excuse me. I’m looking for Emily Corwin. Do you know if she’s still around?”
The way the girls looked at Rebecca, it was obvious they knew that she didn’t belong here either. But one of them said, “Yeah. I think she’s in the music room.”
“Thanks,” Rebecca said, her voice cool. Thanks, as in, Thanks for condescending to talk to me. Or maybe I imagined that, too.
Rebecca walked up to the front door and yanked it open.
“You sure we can go in?” I said.
Rebecca shook her head again. “Get a grip, Mike. My mother works here, remember? I’ve been here a million times.”
She smiled and said hi to a gray-haired old guy in a little office just inside the front door.
“That’s Lawrence,” she said. “He’s the porter.”
“Porter?”
“The guy who watches the door, makes sure no one comes in who shouldn’t.”
I glanced back at Lawrence. He looked like he was well past mandatory retirement age.
“What does he do, wrestle trespassers to the ground?”
“He’s got a button under his desk,” Rebecca said. “He presses it.”
She led me up some stairs, down one hallway and then along another. Through a door to another hallway, I saw guys in hard hats. I wondered what was going on. Rebecca glanced through the window.
“They’re renovating the pool,” she said. “Making it bigger. In the meantime, the swim team has to practice at our community center.”
Our community center?
“You really know your way around here,” I said.
She shrugged and pulled open a door. I saw a girl inside with long blond hair. She was fastening the clasps on a small instrument case. It looked like maybe a clarinet case. The girl was definitely Emily. While she was putting her instrument away, she was talking to a guy who was in the room with her. She was saying, “If you don’t go now, Neil, I’ll scream. If I scream, teachers will come running. They won’t just throw you out, either, Neil, because I’ll tell them you were harassing me. I’ll see to it that they call the cops. You’ve got to the count of five. One … two …”
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