Cheating for the Chicken Man

by Priscilla Cummings

  Kate decided it was best to just chill for a while and hope Curtis could get it back. At least she had her cell phone in her denim skirt pocket and her purse was safely on her shoulder.

  When she got off the bus, Kate saw that a big combine had started harvesting the soybeans and was stirring up a huge cloud of dust. She hurried up the driveway. Inside the house, she listened to a voice mail from her mother letting her know that she and Kate’s grandmother would be home from the hospital around seven. Her mother asked her to take out a meat loaf from the freezer, do the evening check on the chickens, and be sure Kerry changed her clothes after school and did her homework.

  An hour, then. Kate had one hour before Kerry got home. Quickly, she took out the meat loaf, then changed into jeans and went down to the chicken houses to scrape a small amount of feed from the feeders and put it in a plastic bag. She avoided the field being harvested and walked over to Beck’s on the road.

  When she got to the coop next door, some of the little chicks ran to greet her, but the two with broken legs had died. She was relieved, because she knew they had to have been suffering. After dumping the chicken feed into two pie tins, she put the two dead chicks in the plastic grocery bag to take back with her.

  She returned home the same way she went, by walking along the road, and was surprised to see a green truck waiting in her yard. Was it Curtis? Quickly, Kate stashed the dead chicks under a bush. She was glad no one else was home.

  Curtis came to meet her as she walked up the driveway. Unbelievably, he had her backpack in his hand.

  “Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for getting it back!” Kate exclaimed.

  “It wasn’t too hard,” Curtis said. “Although I had to chase that joker’s bus all the way to the other end of the county. When he got off, he just handed it to me with this stupid little grin on his face.”

  “Well, I appreciate that you got it back so fast. I hope that now we can finally be done with all this.”

  “Me too. Like I said, I am truly sorry, Kate.” He nodded toward the backpack in her arms. “You want to see if everything’s in there?”

  “I’m sure it is,” Kate said, feeling the weight of the pack. “But I’ll check.” She set the pack on the ground and kneeled to unzip it and root around inside. “All my books are here: math, biology, English, my Chinese workbook . . .”

  She paused. A bad feeling was seeping into her veins. She kept looking. Where was her journal? She had written in it yesterday and stuffed it in her backpack. Yes. But that was her personal journal, she suddenly realized, not her school one. She had written about the culling and that she couldn’t do it, and she remembered how, frustrated, she had shoved the notebook into her backpack afterward.

  Afraid of what she may have done, Kate shot a worried look at Curtis. “I need to run up to my room to check something,” she said. “Can you wait a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  Kate rushed inside and up to her room where she spied a notebook on her desk. It was her school writing journal, not her personal one. For sure then, she had put her personal journal into her backpack! The journal in which she had confessed to hiding the chicks next door! The same one in which she’d written about J.T.’s project testing chicken manure!

  Kate covered her eyes with disbelief and sank down on the edge of her bed. Why had she ever written those journals in the same kind of notebook? Stupid! If Hooper had his hands on that journal, he could put her family out of business with one phone call to the chicken company!

  She rushed back to Curtis.

  “He’s got my journal!” she exclaimed. “He’s got my personal journal!”

  “Hey, calm down, Kate!”

  “You’ve got to get it back, Curtis! Please!”

  “Why is it so important?”

  Kate had to close her eyes to think. Did she really want to tell Curtis? What she had written was not meant for anyone else’s eyes—not ever!

  “Look, I’ll drive over there again and demand that he give it back. I’ll punch him out if he doesn’t. But really, Kate, what could Hooper possibly do with it?”

  What could he possibly do with it? Kate put a hand to her forehead imagining what he could do with it. Curtis—of all people—ought to know what Hooper could do with her personal information.

  Curtis jangled the truck keys in one hand and chuckled. “Don’t worry, Kate. I’ll get him to hand it over.”

  He still didn’t get it. Curtis didn’t know how serious this was. If she didn’t tell him what she’d written, he wouldn’t appreciate how important it was to get the journal back.

  Kate brought her hand down and her shoulders slumped. “I guess it’s my turn to tell you something.”

  ~24~

  DIFFERENT

  A long, wide piece of white construction paper covered the kitchen table. Kneeling on a chair, Kerry bent over the paper and drew in flowers, stars, and cats with a box of colored markers.

  “What else should it say besides ‘Welcome Home, J.T.?’” she asked. “And what else should I draw?”

  Kate’s grandmother set her hands on her hips and surveyed the colorful banner. “J.T. loves being outside. How about some trees and cornfields? And Tucker! You need to draw a dog!”

  “You’re right, Grandma! I forgot!”

  Kate’s mother, who was drying the dishes from dinner, smiled.

  It would be wonderful to have J.T. home again—and so soon, Kate thought. He’d only been in the hospital a week. Kate had returned once to see him. But she’d heard that Brady Parks had been there twice.

  Everyone was glad J.T. was recovering so quickly, and plans were being made for his homecoming meal: his favorite spaghetti, with coconut cake for dessert this time. To make the occasion even more special, both Jess and J.T.’s friend Ashley had been invited as well. Despite the excitement, Kate’s mind and emotions were a mixed bag. Four days had passed since her journal had been taken, and there was still no word from Hooper.

  At school the next day, a Friday, Kate and Jess walked downstairs from their last-period math class together.

  “Looking forward to the dinner tonight,” Jess said. “You sure there’s nothing I can bring? J.T. loves brownies. I could make him some.”

  “That would be really sweet,” Kate said. “Remember, no nuts.”

  “Right! But extra chocolate chips!”

  At the bottom of the stairway, the girls split up. Jess went on to field hockey while Kate pretended to rush off to catch her bus. Pretended because she skirted the front doors, then walked past the school office and down the hall that led to an exit near the student parking lot.

  Outside, she scanned the vehicles for Curtis’s green pickup. Dark clouds scudded across the sky, and it was beginning to sprinkle. Where is he? she fretted. She didn’t want anyone seeing her climb into his truck.

  When she spotted him backing out of a parking space, Kate stepped to the side and faked a cough. Curtis pulled up beside her and popped open the passenger door. Kate hopped inside.

  “I cleaned up for you,” Curtis said. “Hauled out a whole bag of trash from this junk heap!”

  Kate was not in the same jovial mood. This wasn’t a date! She still felt weird about accepting a ride home with Curtis. She was only doing it because he’d offered to stop at the hardware store so she could buy a bag of chicken feed and get it delivered to the Beck property for her chicks.

  Heavy splats of rain started hitting the windshield. Kate was glad. It would be more difficult for anyone to see her through the windows.

  “Have you heard from Hooper yet?” she asked. “Was he in school today?”

  Curtis shook his head. “No. He lives with his dad, but he spends weekends with his mom, and sometimes he goes early. I bet that’s where he’s at.”

  “But he’s been gone almost all week.”

  “I know.”

/>   “Where does his mom live?” Kate asked.

  “Somewhere down toward Salisbury, I think.”

  Kate sighed. Salisbury was nearly an hour away.

  “Did you try calling him?”

  “Yeah. He won’t answer.”

  They rode in silence for a moment as Kate struggled with her mounting anxiety.

  “First stop, Perkins Hardware, right?” Curtis asked.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “After you told me about J.T.’s project and how they might be putting all that bad stuff in chicken feed, I was thinkin’ I might stay away from those chicken nuggets for a while. Hey! If you’re gonna raise a flock of chickens, they may as well be healthy.”

  Kate turned to him. “You know, that’s what I thought, too. I could have kept on taking feed from the chicken house, but part of me was curious to see how they’d turn out if they ate feed that didn’t come from the company.”

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t get some fresh eggs out of those chickens.”

  “Huh. I never thought of that,” Kate said. “But why not? Although I’d have a hard time explaining it to my mother.”

  “Don’t you need a rooster to get eggs?”

  Kate smiled sheepishly. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Curtis threw her a confused look.

  “Oh, my gosh, you don’t know!” She stifled a grin. “Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh because a lot of people don’t understand. But hens lay eggs all the time—with or without a rooster around. That’s how we get the eggs we eat! You do need a rooster to fertilize the eggs and get more chicks.”

  “Ah, okay. I get it,” Curtis said. He thumped the steering wheel. “Cool!”

  Curtis chuckled, but not Kate. Talk of roosters was only a reminder that in factory farming for chicken meat and eggs the male chicks were killed soon after they were hatched because only females were useful. She remembered her father once saying that a baby rooster was “an unwanted byproduct.” Kate never asked him how they were killed. There were some things in the family business she didn’t really want to know.

  “But one day,” Curtis said, wagging his finger, “you could get a rooster if you wanted a bigger flock, right?”

  Kate rolled her eyes and allowed herself to lighten up. “Boy, we’d really be in trouble then. In the eyes of Valley Shore Chicken Farms, I’m already a thief. If they find out their chickens were turned into laying hens, they’d go ballistic.”

  “Well, your secret is safe with me,” Curtis assured her.

  Something about that statement wiped away any of the humor they had just shared. What in the world was she doing laughing with Curtis Jenkins?

  *

  At the hardware store, Kate and Curtis both went in so Curtis could carry the heavy bag of feed out to the truck. From there it was only a ten-minute drive to the Beck place. Curtis drove slowly, splashing through puddles along the bumpy, overgrown driveway. Once he had to stop to move a branch out of the way. When they were behind the abandoned farmhouse, Curtis parked and carried the bag of feed until it got so heavy he couldn’t. Together, they pulled the bag through the tall grass the rest of the way.

  Kate held the door open for Curtis and then closed it against the rain. “These are my refugees. Fifty-five of them now,” Kate said, shaking the water from her hands as the chicks eagerly gathered around her feet. She pointed to the three older birds. “I don’t know about them. They don’t do anything but sit there.”

  “Hmmmm. Antisocial,” Curtis observed.

  Kate picked up a jug of water and poured some into two pie tins. “Can I ask you something, Curtis?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  Kate stood with the jug in her hands. “Why did you ever become friends with Hooper Delaney in the first place? I mean, he’s kind of sketchy, isn’t he?”

  “People thought I was kind of sketchy, too,” Curtis responded. “When I first moved here and was new, no one was nice to me. But I know it’s because I had a chip on my shoulder. I was mad at my mom for leaving my father, and Justin had just gone off to the army. Hooper, he was a loner, too, so we just kind of hung out together. I played a lot of computer games with him, and he came over a few times. He didn’t seem to care if I had a crazy family.”

  “What do you mean, crazy?” Kate asked. She screwed the top back on the jug and set it down.

  “You know, when my brother first came home, he did a lot of weird stuff. Like this one time my mom closed the kitchen cabinet too loud, and Justin threw himself on the floor thinking it was a bomb going off. He broke his front tooth! Hoop was there that day, and he didn’t freak out or anything. Maybe because he didn’t have much of a family himself. No brothers or sisters. He always said he’d rather live with his mother, and I know it’s because his father’s real strict.”

  “He kind of scares me,” Kate said. “Do you think he’s the kind of kid who would, like, go off the deep end and do something violent?”

  Curtis thought about it for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I don’t think so—but who knows? He’s got some personal problems going on, for sure. He has trouble talking to people and writing, which is why he hit you up for help on those reports. Math is a breeze for him.

  “Aside from that, I think he’s just lonely,” Curtis said. “He’s got an aquarium with fish, and every one of those fish has a name. He’s got this one goldfish named Starlight that’s, like, ten years old. I told Hoop one day that he ought to go down to the pound and get a dog or something.”

  Kate dumped the rest of an old bag of feed into two other pie tins for the chicks.

  While she worked, Curtis kept talking. “It was Hooper’s idea, you know, to pick on J.T. in eighth grade. I’m not sayin’ that just to lay blame on him ’cause I’m the one who bullied J.T. But Hoop, all along he was pushin’ me. I don’t know why I went along with it. I didn’t think too much about it. Just did it. That chip on my shoulder, I guess.”

  Kate had kneeled to shake the pie tins and even out the feed, but then she paused. When she stood up again, she asked, “But why J.T.? Why did you guys pick on him?”

  Curtis kind of shrugged and bounced his shoulders while widening his eyes as if to say who knows? But Kate didn’t buy it.

  “Why?” she persisted. “Out of all the kids in school?”

  Curtis crossed his arms and tried to think back. “You know what? I think it’s because we saw him in the cafeteria one day praying before he ate an ice-cream sandwich. It just hit us both that that was kind of weird.”

  Kate looked down. “He went through a period when he prayed all the time,” she said. “When my dad first got sick. I don’t know, I think my brother’s faith kept him strong for a long time.”

  Curtis snorted. “Sorry! I didn’t mean no disrespect, Kate. I just don’t get it. But then, I never went to church or anything like that. Maybe Hoop and I, we just saw him as kind of different, you know? That’s all. It wasn’t anything more than that. I was angry, Hoop was angry, and J.T. was different. A bad combination, I guess.”

  Different. Kate sat on an upturned bucket to think about what Curtis had said. How unfair, how cruel the boys had been—and for no good reason.

  Curtis flipped over another bucket and sat on it. “Now let me ask you something,” he said. “Did you ever know somebody who became a complete stranger?”

  Kate looked at him. Her mother, she thought immediately, although she didn’t say so.

  “I never realized how angry I was at the world for what happened to my brother until that night we were texting,” Curtis said. “Do you remember? You were asking questions about Justin and then you said we both had a brother we loved a lot. My brother, he was the most important person in my life, but then he went and killed himself, and nobody even knows why.”

  “Nobody knows?”

  “All w
e know is he came home from the war a changed person. He had that PTSD thing. Do you know what that is?”

  Kate nodded. “I think so. Post-Traumatic . . .”

  “Stress Disorder,” Curtis finished. “You know that Creative Writing profile we have to write? I’m writing about Justin, and this is how it starts. Curtis looked up and closed his eyes. ‘In the middle of the night, if I hear the closet door slam in my brother’s room, I know it is Justin trying to hide.’”

  “Gosh,” Kate sympathized.

  “Yeah.” Curtis opened his eyes. “He had nightmares and woke up sweating and scared that someone was coming to get him.”

  “Wow,” Kate said.

  “Thing is, we were getting help. We were close to getting one of those service dogs that would even sleep with him. But then he went and shot himself.”

  Curtis paused. “You know, I wasn’t going to take that essay you wrote for me in Creative Writing. The first one. I knew it was wrong. I knew I’d been doing wrong for a long time, picking on your brother. But then Hoop got on my case, and things snowballed in the other direction. I just didn’t think too much about it.”

  Pretty lame excuse, Kate thought as she stood and slowly crumpled the empty feed bag. She felt bad for Curtis because of his brother, but a stream of images and snatches of sound also ran through her head: a school locker full of feathers, chicken manure in a smashed-down mailbox, a carton of milk exploding on J.T.’s chest, a cruel banner strung up across the school hallway. And a boy’s voice yelling, “Chicken Man!” There had been a mountain of pain and humiliation heaped on her brother for a long time.

  Kate leveled her eyes at Curtis. “Someday,” she told him, “you need to apologize to J.T.”

  “I know,” Curtis readily agreed. “I will. I can promise you that.”

  ~25~

  HOMECOMING

  Tucker saw them first. Outside on the porch, the dog started barking, and Kerry ran to the front window. “They’re here!” she shouted to Kate, who was in the kitchen spreading garlic butter on the French bread while Jess cut cucumbers for the salad.