by Ruth Lehrer
Worm knew when he failed the math test that he was too dumb for the dumb group, so he looked around for someone to beat up, something he was very good at.
Out in the schoolyard, Worm ran right up behind Duck-Duck and pushed her from behind. She tripped forward onto the concrete and hit the ground with her face. Worm kicked her backpack into the mud, and then he began kicking her too, he was so mad about being dumb. I started running toward them, willing Duck-Duck to stay down on the ground. She looked so freaked out, like it was the first time anyone had hit her. There was mud on her yellow dress, and her hands and face were all scraped up from the concrete. And then I saw the big tears in those blue eyes too, another mistake.
I charged and hit Worm in the stomach as hard as I could. The stomach is a good target because it hurts like hell. It also doesn’t leave a black eye or draw blood, so no teachers can see what happened. Worm doubled over like he was going to puke, and I hit him again so he couldn’t catch his breath. I grabbed Duck-Duck by her arm and her backpack and pulled, hoping she wasn’t so freaked out that she wouldn’t be able to run. I’d seen kids just sit there and cry instead of run. Duck-Duck got up, but she looked bad. She had blood and snot all over her face, and she had this stunned look like people get when they’ve just seen their cat get run over.
Duck-Duck and I just about got away, but Worm ran over to the gym teacher. People think you’re a rat if you tell, but you’re worse off if the other guy tells first. Teachers always side with the story they hear first.
The teacher spotted us. “You,” he yelled, aiming a sausage finger at me. “Get over here.” I stepped in front of Duck-Duck.
“Did you hit him?”
“Yup,” I said. “I hit him.” Mr. MacNamara wasn’t chatty. He never wanted to sit down and talk it through with you like the other teachers did. He never asked why.
“Detention. Now.”
First rat outweighed truth. If I argued, I’d get another day of detention.
Duck-Duck didn’t seem to know we were screwed. She stepped out from behind me. She had lost the dead-cat look.
“Fishkill was just protecting me,” she said. “Norm performed an unprovoked act of aggression.” She brushed off her dirty dress and rubbed her dirty cheek and then her nose with her fist.
If Worm or I had done that, we would have been outed as babies and suck-up pretenders. But Duck-Duck didn’t even know she was acting like a suck-up baby, and Mr. MacNamara fell for it. He coughed and shuffled his feet. “You both get detention,” he said, gesturing to me and Worm.
“Fishy was acting in good faith,” said Duck-Duck. “The Good Samaritan law states you can’t blame a person for ill effects if their intent was to help. Look it up.” Blood was smeared across her nose, but she sounded like a grown-up, all logical and patient.
Mr. MacNamara apparently thought so too. “All right,” he said. He gave me the evil eye, but all he said was “You’re off the hook this time. Just walk Miss Farina home.” He was still gripping Worm’s shoulder, and maybe he sent Worm home too, but I didn’t stick around to find out. I quick grabbed Duck-Duck’s arm and started moving.
“I gotta teach you how to fight,” I said.
When we got past the school field, I turned to Duck-Duck.
“Don’t you know to stay on the ground when someone’s kicking you?”
Law of the jungle, my grandfather used to say when I came home bloody. He was wrong about that, though, because in the jungle, monkeys have other monkeys and rabbits have other rabbits. Even birds stick up for other birds. No one stuck up for me.
Duck-Duck didn’t answer me, maybe because she was busy wiping blood and snot off her face.
Duck-Duck’s version of the afternoon confused me. She didn’t tell her mother about the tears or the mud. Instead, she talked about how huge Worm’s feet were and how the words PinPoint Correctional Facility were sewn onto his canvas jacket. All I noticed was how his shoe went into her ribs and how he lost his balance when he tried to kick her again.
“You think the jacket means he’s a felon?” Duck-Duck asked as Molly cleaned her scrapes.
“He’s twelve. I doubt he has a criminal record,” said her mother. “Maybe his father works at the prison.”
My grandfather worked as a prison guard for thirty years. Keely said Grandpa loved barbed wire because of that. Even after he retired, it was like Grandpa still needed walls and people to hate.
“He kicked me, Mom,” said Duck-Duck, and Molly flinched.
“And then Fishy whammed him in the stomach,” Duck-Duck reported.
I was pleased, but I took a peek at Molly, since she was probably one of those parents who thought you shouldn’t fight back because the eye-for-an-eye thing was wrong. She looked like she was trying not to laugh.
“It’s good to have friends,” was all she said.
Later, Molly called the school and talked to the teacher and the counselor and the principal and even Worm’s father. It was a little weird to see a mother getting involved in kids’ business like that, but Duck-Duck didn’t seem to mind.
“Have you ever been to the ocean?” Duck-Duck asked. “Have you ever seen a whale?” We were camped out in her pink room, doing homework. Outside, it was raining, and the early fall leaves were weighed down with pounding water.
I had seen the ocean once on a third-grade trip to Plymouth Rock. It was much different from the Birge Hill river.
In the spring, the river would flood, merging with the swamps out behind the house, eating little bridges, chewing up sheds. It even killed fish. When I was in third grade, it covered the roads and trapped us on Birge Hill: prisoners for two whole days. After day and night, day and night with Grandpa, Keely grew as gray as the water. I pretended I was Harry Potter and hid under the porch stairs with my raincoat and a can of sardines. From my hiding spot, the river drowned out the thump-thump of Grandpa’s bed against the wall.
I once saw a coffin floating downstream. At least that’s what it looked like. Maybe it was a planter.
Once I saw Keely walk out into the current up to her waist and just stand there for an hour, staring at the water. I didn’t know if she wanted to go farther or if she just forgot to come in.
I’d never seen a whale.
“Sure I have,” I said. “They’re endangered.” That was the kind of thing Duck-Duck would know. I said it so she wouldn’t ask me what the whale looked like.
“Exactly,” said Duck-Duck. “The Grrs need a socially responsible project. Maybe we should save the whales.”
“I thought gangs were supposed to shoot people and make people bleed,” I said. “Not save whales.” Besides, it wasn’t the whales in Salt Run that needed saving.
“How about we make next month Shotgun Month? This month is Socially Responsible Month,” said Duck-Duck. “Don’t worry. We’ll get to everything.” She turned on her computer. “How about liberation of animal prisoners?” She double-clicked and started searching.
“Animal prisoners?” PinPoint Correctional, where my grandfather had worked, was a men’s prison. Women were sent across the state. I didn’t know where they sent animals.
“Pet stores!” said Duck-Duck. With a triumphant click, she brought up a picture of Pet Paradise at the mall.
Keely stopped going to the mall because after her car died, it was too far, and so I’d hardly ever been. Grandpa said we shouldn’t go, because the mall was where crackhead teenagers did it on benches.
“Enough bad PR, and the pet-store industry will crumble like a doggy biscuit,” said Duck-Duck. “But you have to have a perfect plan or they can sue you for libel, slander, and defamation.”
Keely never had plans. Duck-Duck was full of them.
“Step one: deflect responsibility onto the target entity.” Duck-Duck cut and pasted the pet-store website logo and then wrote a letter worthy of a twelfth-grade English class.
Duck-Duck printed out the page to proofread. “We can send a copy to all the newspapers. I bet we can figure
out how to post it to the pet-store website too. We just have to make sure not to leave any fingerprints, so it can’t be traced back to us.”
“But the pet store didn’t acknowledge any of those whereases,” I said.
“The beauty of it,” said Duck-Duck, “is that it will take ages before people figure out the letter is fake, but by that time, everyone will have accepted that even pet-store owners think pet stores are bad. People will show up for their free Kibbles, and there will be a scene. It’s great political theater.”
I read it again. “Isn’t slavery always cruel?”
“Sometimes you have to spell things out. Lots of people don’t read carefully.”
This was true.
“Snakes don’t have fur,” I said, reading it again. “And what about birds?”
“Fair enough,” said Duck-Duck, and she added birds and changed the wording to “all beings of feathers, scales, and fur.”
In addition to sending it to the newspapers and posting it on the website, we put up flyers. Duck-Duck thumbtacked them to coffee-shop announcement boards along with the girls’ soccer schedule. She would slide the pet-store flyer out at the last minute and tack up both, “so if we’re being videotaped, it won’t be obvious.”
The next week, there were two articles in the Sunday paper. One was entitled “Animal Rights Extremists Hack Website” and the other “Confusion at the Mall.” Duck-Duck said Molly read the newspaper at breakfast. She thought her mother was looking at her funny afterward, but maybe it was her imagination.
“I don’t know why she’d suspect it was me,” Duck-Duck complained. “Besides, I didn’t even really hack the website. I just posted the letter in the comments section using the company font and logo so it looked like their own writing.”
I thought it was kind of cool that Duck-Duck’s mother thought her daughter was smart enough to be an extremist. It made me like Molly a little more. I was still worried Molly was suspicious of me because I never invited Duck-Duck to my house.
“Lunch,” called Molly from the kitchen. Just hearing her voice made me smell baked chicken, but I tried to act cool. Normal people didn’t care so much about what was for lunch.
“What’s for lunch?” said Duck-Duck, skipping down the hall with a little hop. I walked behind her. I hoped we looked like extremists.
Molly was ladling out bowls of soup. Even before I saw the red-orange glow, I felt sick to my stomach. I froze in the doorway.
I was back in fourth grade, the year of tomato soup and sardines. Grandpa said he’d gotten a deal, but maybe he just stole them. Cases and cases of canned tomato soup and sardines, stacked in tippy piles in the trash shed. Even after he died, there were still sardines left. The Social Service lady didn’t like it that food was in with garbage. I didn’t care about that so much — it was all in cans anyways — but she didn’t seem to get that that was all we ate for a year straight. I’d look at tomato soup and I’d get this chunky feeling in my throat and start to feel like you do when they talk about backed-up sewage flowing into the river. It got so the sound of the can opener made me gag. “What’s the difference?” Grandpa would say. “A fruit, a meat — that’s all you need to live. Food is fucking food.” At school they gave us lessons in food pyramids and talked about grains and vegetables as if they just popped through a mail slot in your refrigerator every day. Each time we peeled another can open, I would think about those pictures of cows and chickens, apples and nuts. I started worrying that my insides would turn red and my poop would smell of fish.
That year, Yodels probably saved my life. I could barely swallow more tomato, and I was afraid I would starve to death if I couldn’t eat the soup and sardines anymore.
The first Yodel was left on a cafeteria table by Cruisey Pike. He took off after someone who had swiped his phone, and he never came back. I pulled the Yodel out of its plastic wrap and shoved half of it into my mouth. The sweet chocolate skin hit my teeth first. Next came the chocolate cake. Finally, the cream middle landed softly on my tomato-burned tongue. It was dumb, but I almost cried, it was so good.
The next time, I bought a Yodel three-pack at the corner store. I had found 159 cents of dropped change in the lunch line and some undigested dimes and quarters in the soda machine. I hid the Yodels in my rock box, eating each one slowly. When Grandpa died and the Social Service ladies started coming, we got food stamps, and Mom bought milk and bread. After a while, I didn’t need to eat Yodels so often. I still carried one around with me, though, just in case.
“Fishy?” said Duck-Duck. “You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
I took a deep breath to ward off the waves of nausea. I reminded myself that I was in Molly’s kitchen, not on Birge Hill. “Sure,” I said. “I mean, I’m fine.” I could feel sweat pop out on my forehead. I looked away from the red bowls.
“You don’t look so fine.” Molly was looking at me now too.
I couldn’t figure out how to explain myself. Maybe I should say yes, I saw a ghost. It seemed simpler than anything else.
“I don’t like tomato soup so much,” I said. “It’s no biggie. I’ll just have saltines.”
Something about what I said seemed to worry them even more.
“No problem,” said Molly. “I’ll make you a sandwich.” She gave me that see-through-you look, as if it might actually be a problem but she was doing it anyway.
She made me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and no one said anything more about tomato soup, but I got the feeling they were watching to see if I would turn the color of sardines again.
By the end of October, I was spending almost every afternoon at Duck-Duck’s. At her house, they opened all school mail together and talked about it, as if everyone had a vote on the field-trip form, as if everyone had a real opinion about the soccer-practice schedule.
When he was still breathing, Grandpa handled all school mail I didn’t hide from him. It didn’t matter if it was addressed to Keely or me. He opened it with a knife, read a line, and announced his opinion.
“ ‘Reminder: Parent-Teacher meetings,’ ” he would read. “Tell your teacher, if I wanted to meet her, she’d already have the black eye to remind her.”
He’d open another envelope: “ ‘After-school girls’ soccer practice.’ What’s practice gonna do for them? Make them all bull dykes who can kick?”
It got so that I didn’t even have to see what was inside the envelope. I could still hear Grandpa’s voice. Once he wrote on the meeting-request form under Preferred Time: “Never.” Under Other Times Available, he wrote: “When Hell freezes over.”
I made sure that form got lost.
“Is your mom coming to parent-teacher night?” Molly asked me.
She didn’t ask about my mother much, but when she did, I kept my head low and my homework pencil moving on my math problems.
“Fishy?” said Duck-Duck. “If your mom’s going to the parent meeting, you could come here. We could make cookies and popcorn and tell her we ate chili.” She gave her mother a little blue-eyed laugh, and her mother smiled back at her.
“Umm,” I said, “probably not. Mom is pretty tired after working so much. She just comes home most nights and goes to bed.”
“I thought you said she worked nights,” said Molly.
I redid the word problem very slowly so all the percentages added up to one hundred.
“She does. That’s why she can’t go to parent-teacher meetings,” I said. “Sometimes when she has late nights, we go to the diner in the morning,” I added, “before I go to school. We get pancakes and syrup and orange juice.”
Molly didn’t say anything to that, but I could tell I was in trouble. Yet somehow I couldn’t keep quiet.
“Last night she made fried chicken,” I said. “It’s a family recipe. Then I did homework and she corrected it for me.”
“That’s nice.” That was all Molly said, but it sounded off, like she didn’t really think it was nice.
“She’s a great c
ook,” I said. “She almost won best lemon meringue pie at the county fair one year.”
“You’ll have to bring us a taste sometime,” said Molly.
And still I couldn’t shut up.
“She made me a chocolate-raspberry cake for my birthday last year. It had real raspberries inside and it said Happy Birthday, Fishkill on top.”
“I’ll call and ask her if she’s going to the meeting,” said Molly. “What’s your number?”
I redid the word problem. The paper was starting to get holes where I had erased too many times.
Molly was pouring a glass of milk, but I knew she knew I had heard her.
“I’ll call her for you,” I said, “but I’ll have to leave a message. I don’t think she’s home yet.”
I picked up the phone and dialed. “Yup, just the machine,” I said after a pause. “Hello, Mom. Molly wants to know if you’re going to the parent-teacher meeting. Hope you had a good day at work. See you soon.” I hung up.
“Thanks,” said Molly.
“No problem,” I said.
“It’s time I drove you home,” she said. “Chrissy and I are visiting friends this evening.”
“But we can see each other on Sunday. We’re going to the farmers’ market,” said Duck-Duck. “They have live mushrooms in a terrarium. You can come with us.”
“Maybe,” said Molly. “Chrissy, why don’t you vacuum the living room. I’ll just be gone a few minutes.”
Molly and I drove to my house in silence. When we got there, Molly stopped in front of the fence and turned off the car. Not a good sign. She got out and walked around to open my door. When I climbed out, she put her hand on my arm, gripping it tightly. I knew she wasn’t just being friendly.