The Bad Kid

by Sarah Lariviere

  Or what if Alma showed up, and she seemed real, and sick, but there was something about her that in person I just didn’t like. Well, that wouldn’t be such a big deal. At least Mother Fingerless’s fund-raising wouldn’t go to waste.

  But what if Alma showed up, and she seemed real, and sick, and I liked her, but she didn’t like me?

  Or she didn’t show up at all?

  I looked at the note from Brett. Being is born of not being.

  At least I still knew one thing for sure. Philosophy was invented to drive people insane.

  I looked around. Next to the ring-tossing booth, a crowd nodded their heads in a regular rhythm. In the middle was Laliyah, rhyming. Wow. She was sharing her poems.

  A group hooted over beside the fried-dough truck—that was Money and his shell game. Laying eyeballs on that kid outside his house felt wrong. Like seeing Santa Claus on the beach. Only he was Bad Santa, dealing broken toys from the back of some van.

  Beside the dunking booth, Rita the Producer was taking notes. I’d kinda forgotten she was coming, but I was impressed. Rita was teaching me a key thing about successful Manhattan players. Once they decide to do something, they really do it.

  Nearby, Mother Fingerless was dancing on her empty table. Kicking up her heels and laughing because she was a good person. Mother Fingerless believed in people. She even believed in me.

  Way back by the fence was Brett, by himself, looking awkward.

  Brett.

  I checked my phone—five forty-five. How could I wait fifteen minutes? Thwack, thwack, thwack replaced think, think, think as I kicked my chair. My stomach cramped with twitches and stitches.

  If Alma showed up, what would she do? Give a speech? Like, to everybody who came out to meet her? After that, I guessed we’d talk in private, like she said.

  What if we became friends in real life? Maybe Alma could help me become a good kid. A regular, boring cheeseball, like her. And then my mother would like me better, and we’d all have dinner together, especially when Alma was coming over. And there would be more microwave popcorn and television and all that, as a family.

  Or what the heck. A Broadway show.

  And then, when Alma got 100 percent better, me and Lala and Brett and Money could team up with her to raise money to heal other sick kids. We’d be, like, the stars of the school or something. Helping other kids turn from bad kids into good kids.

  Like heroes.

  Mrs. Ramirez took the stage. Her orange suit shined in the gold light of the hot afternoon. Rico and Jamie stood next to her. It was unclear why the Ramirez boys were standing there, but they looked smooth.

  “Hush, hello, good evening, hush, good evening.”

  When Mrs. Ramirez grinned, I grinned too. I couldn’t help it. If Alma didn’t show up for some reason, I’d describe the carnival in an e-mail. Maybe it’d inspire her to write a poem.

  Maybe I’d write one.

  Mrs. Ramirez’s voice boomed through the parking lot. “I want to thank everyone in our community for contributing to this extraordinary event. Give yourselves a round of applause.”

  The crowd applauded. I clapped too, and kicked my chair for extra noise.

  “Now,” she went on. “There are a few important events on the horizon.”

  That’s when I noticed Lala, trying to catch my eye. She was crouched near the corner of the stage, waving for me to come.

  Now? I mouthed.

  Lala nodded.

  Cutting in front of the stage while Mrs. Ramirez had the microphone struck me as a terrible idea, so I stayed put. But Lala kept making bigger and bigger motions, like a haywire crossing guard. People were starting to look.

  I sighed. Move like a rodent, Claude. If you don’t get seen, you don’t get whacked . . .

  I ran in a semi-bent-over way to the stage and ­scuttled along the edge. Lala yanked me up and dragged me beside the porta-potty. She shoved her phone in my hand. I read out loud:

  “‘My heart’s broken to miss the fun / Hope you are enjoying the warm sun / Please have another one / When I am well, we can have some fun. Of course I had an emergency treatment today. They said they’ll let me out when I’m healed but that it doesn’t look good. Enjoy the festival. I’ll be fine. Promise. Love, Me. Alma.’”

  “So,” said Lala.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Stupid,” said Lala.

  Suddenly Lala hugged me so tight she almost knocked me over.

  “I’m glad you’re a real person, Claude,” she said into my neck.

  “You too, Lala,” I said, feeling exhausted.

  Even at a carnival, Alma Lingonberry was the ultimate roller coaster.

  MY INTESTINES

  Those who overcome others are powerful; those who overcome themselves are strong.

  —Lao Tzu, philosopher

  When Lala ran off to help her mom with the raffle, I wandered between rides, not ready to talk to Mother Fingerless, not ready to face Brett, hoping Rita the Producer would catch a taxi back to Manhattan, wishing I could hop a train to somewhere far away, maybe Westchester.

  I was sick of this. Feeling lost and confused. Like I was getting tricked. Like I was Cutie Cat, and somebody was torturing me by waving one of those cat toys in my face just to watch me jump around. I mean—maybe cats love that.

  I definitely didn’t.

  Now Alma was in the shadows again. What would happen next? I’d get some cheesy e-mail, asking me how I was doing? I’d tell her some more personal stuff and be all happy that somebody out there in the big sloppy world cared how I felt about everything? And then what? She’d make a plan to meet me and flake again? But she’s sick, I’d tell myself. You can’t get mad at her for that . . .

  I went into a yellow tent. Patterned quilts hung side by side on a drooping clothesline. The chopped-up shapes and colors of the patches reminded me of a kaleidoscope. How every time you turn the lens, you see things differently.

  The last time I’d dealt with something that was hiding in the shadows of my brain, it was trying to tell me that Grandpa Si probably hurt other people as much as him getting killed had hurt me. I’d had to face that shadow alone, and it was starting to look like I was gonna have to face the Alma shadow alone too. I had a hunch she never planned to step into the daylight, where I could look her in the eye.

  A blue ribbon that said FIRST PRIZE was pinned to a gigantic black-and-white quilt with a perfectly symmetrical snowflake in the middle. The snowflake had twelve points. It made me think of a clock.

  Somebody had sat still and worked on that thing for like a hundred years, probably. Every bit of it was perfect. Every tiny stich. One perfect thing in a world that made no sense. One place where every detail got wrapped up.

  But you know what, Claude? Real life hardly ever gets wrapped up in a perfect package. And someday even this quilt will be gone. Disintegrating, and falling apart. Nobody can stop time and weather and sweat and moths and life, just plain old life, from ruining it.

  I left the quilt tent and wandered behind the Italian sausage truck. A guy blared a bullhorn in my face. “Guess your weight! Guess your age! Win fabulous prizes and raise money for the community fund!”

  I ducked the bullhorn and kept walking.

  Perfectness doesn’t last, I thought. Unless the perfect thing is the fact that nothing ever gets wrapped up. And everything rots and disintegrates, and new things get made all the time, and both things are always happening, at once. That’s how New York City is. And what’s more perfect than that?

  There was a line for the Ferris wheel. With all the commotion, nobody seemed to notice me sneak my way to the front and hop into the last open cage. Then I felt guilty about cutting and decided to hop back out.

  “No standing!” said the operator. He clamped on my metal seat-belt thing, clanked the door shut, and locked it.

  A Ferris wheel might be even better than an empty subway car for thinking about things you don’t want to think about. For facing shadows in the late
afternoon. The crackling noises the wheel made as it turned could have been coming from my own brain. I rose higher and higher above the parking lot, so high I felt like I could finally see clearly.

  Like I could trust my gut.

  Imagine it is you. There you are, just you and your je ne sais quoi, and all this blank space on a screen in front of you, and a nice person you’ve never met sending you messages saying Tell me everything about yourself.

  Would you do it?

  Of course not. But say you did.

  Why would you do that?!

  I’ll tell you why. Because you feel like talking to somebody.

  Maybe nobody knows the real you anymore. Not even you. Maybe you want to test out some new versions of yourself and see how it feels. Maybe, just maybe, to part of you it doesn’t even matter who is listening.

  But it did matter. It mattered who was sending those e-mails. Who was taking Mother Fingerless’s money. Who was reading Lala’s poetry.

  That’s what I could see from the top of the Ferris wheel.

  It mattered. What was in my heart, and who I shared it with.

  It mattered who I chose to call a friend.

  The Ferris wheel creaked slowly, lowering me toward the parking lot. The crowd came into focus. I might never know the whole story about Alma Lingonberry, or about anything else in my life. The details might not get wrapped up in a perfect package. But I finally felt like I had nothing left to hide, and, in a deeper way, like nothing was hidden from me.

  Being is born of not being.

  And speaking of not being . . .

  When I got off the ride, Lala and Brett were waiting.

  “Why were you on the Ferris wheel?” said Lala.

  “Because it’s rad,” said Brett, inspecting it.

  Lala frowned. “Too bad Alma had to miss all this. If she’s back to being real, I mean.”

  “She’s not real, Lala,” I said. “There was no emergency treatment.”

  Lala played with Brett’s message like she’d been having a conversation with it. “I know.”

  A salsa band started to play.

  Brett cleared his throat. “We’ll meet at the park at noon tomorrow.”

  “Sorry, Brett. I’m not gonna feel like hanging out,” said Lala.

  “We’re not going to hang out,” said Brett. “We’re going to figure out how to catch the jerk who’s ripping off my mother.”

  I looked up.

  “Can I walk you home, Claude?”

  Sometimes you gotta figure out who your friends are. Other times the answer is right in front of you, looking at you with highly magnified brown eyes.

  However, when the king penguin smiled our private smile, I couldn’t smile back.

  I just couldn’t.

  Brett fidgeted with his backpack, pulling on loose threads. “Thank you for your letter. It was my fault, though. Definitely.”

  My cheeks felt like they were filling with warm water. “No it wasn’t, Brett,” I said.

  Brett took my hand and nudged me with his elbow. “It doesn’t matter, Claude. Let’s go home.”

  I was so relieved, I started crying. Really crying.

  “Aw!” said Lala, scooping us into a squishy group hug. “I never even knew you broke up!”

  TRUE FRIENDS

  We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.

  —Pema Chödrön, teacher

  As I walked up our hill yet again on Sunday, I was so happy to see his penguin head from the back, I almost ran. Toward Brett this time, not Staten Island.

  He felt me coming and turned around. I waved with four fingers, and I had a big cheesy grin, and he broke into one too, with his dimples, the craters on the face of the man in the moon.

  We didn’t say anything right away. For now it was enough to sit together on our bench without being annoyed. Just being friends again, watching Manhattan from our side of the river. True friends who understood each other even when we didn’t.

  When Lala showed up, she plopped on the bench beside me. “Andrew couldn’t make it.”

  Brett and I exchanged a look.

  “How did you get that boy to leave his house to come to the carnival?” I asked.

  “I threatened to break up with him,” said Lala.

  Brett laughed his deep laugh. “You two have such a healthy dynamic.” Then he opened his mouth like he was gonna keep talking, looked at me, looked at Lala, and groaned.

  “Whoa. Am I observing that you’re maybe gonna hurl?” I asked.

  Brett scrunched his eyes closed, like it was gonna hurt to talk. “You guys, I have to tell you something.”

  Lala put her hands on my knees and leaned over my lap to see Brett better. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “You’re Alma.”

  Brett opened his eyes. “Yeah, Lala. I’m Alma. No—listen. My ma doesn’t even have e-mail. I’ve been helping her send Alma money from the library computers.”

  “What?” we said.

  I added, “Even though you thought Alma was my dad?”

  “Weirdly, that made it easier,” said Brett. “I told myself that when I finally got the nerve, I’d tell your father I knew what he was up to, and get Ma’s money back.”

  “If you knew Alma was fake, why did you help her send the money in the first place?” asked Lala.

  “Ma is such a handful when she’s lonely,” said Brett. “She’d get giddy every time she clicked send to give Alma thirty-five bucks. Once, she even kissed a librarian.”

  “The one with the turquoise hair?” I asked.

  “How did you know that?” asked Brett.

  I shrugged.

  Brett moaned. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you, Brett,” said Lala.

  “But why did you think Alma was my father in the first place?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Brett. “It happened sometime around when I decided all criminals are identical. They never get better. They get worse. They do one thing wrong, justify it by saying they deserve whatever they took, or that they’re helping their family, or their country, or whatever. They decide not to feel what it feels like to take advantage of people, so they can keep doing it. Eventually, they can’t feel anything at all. Even for their own son.”

  When I thought about what to say, I realized that having a father who isn’t around is probably like having a person you love who is dead. What people say doesn’t help much. What helps is when they listen.

  The way Brett pressed his lips together, his dimples looked extra deep. “Even though I’ve never met him, I’ve always been sure my father is the same as me. He wants to be happy. He just went the wrong direction and couldn’t figure out a way back. My Chinese philosophy book says we’re all connected, struggling with the same types of problems. We’re not that different. So I’ve been sending it to him, some philosophy. The parts I think he could relate to. But he’s never written me back. Not once. It hurts.”

  “Of course it does,” said Lala.

  Brett looked toward the Manhattan skyline. “And then I get this letter from my father’s mother. I was hoping I could at least get to know her. But my grandmother told me to stop harassing her. She said I didn’t exist to her. I don’t exist.”

  I felt an ocean rise up in my chest. “That’s . . .”

  “Yeah. Horrible. So I decided to stop wasting my time on hopeless people. Fathers, colonialists, you know . . . you, Claude . . .” He looked at me, then back at Manhattan. “Everybody.”

  Brett’s situation was different from mine, and mine was different from Lala’s, but we all had one thing in common. Something had happened that had showed us that life could be extremely unfair. But if we only thought about the unfair parts, we’d get lost. We had to focus on the parts of ourselves that could bounce back from anything.

  From anything.

  “I should’ve thought about the bigger pict
ure, with Ma,” said Brett. “How many people are getting taking advantage of? Say whoever is being Alma has, you know, twenty or thirty people sending cash on the regular. Or more.”

  “We still don’t know what my parents are doing with her flyers,” I said.

  “Sometimes I feel like this whole world is mangy,” said Lala. “Where do we even start?”

  We walked across the park under thick knots of tree branches. When we left on Forty-Fourth Street, the sidewalk felt sturdy underneath my feet. I knew that if we just kept going, the sidewalks of Brooklyn would keep being there, supporting us. No problem.

  “We start here,” I said.

  Brett nodded. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right?”

  Lala grabbed his elbow. “Is that Chinese philosophy?”

  Brett shrugged.

  “I get it!” said Lala.

  “Me too,” I said. “What’s happening?”

  Brett tried to smile but ended up frowning at his sneakers.

  I nudged him. “You wanted your mother to be happy, Brett. There’s nothin’ wrong with that.”

  “I feel like an idiot,” he said.

  “Feeling like an idiot is a regular part of life,” I said. “That’s my philosophy.”

  Brett gave me the penguin eye. “Kinda deep.”

  “Maybe I’ll write you a philosophy book,” I said. “And put that in it. Along with never let your mother talk to strangers online.”

  Brett burst out laughing, which made me think I was getting the hang of joking around about touchy subjects. Anyway, a laugh ain’t a bad sign.

  As we walked along together, we decided that our next step was figuring out what my parents were doing with those Alma flyers, once and for all.

  With or without the giant magnifying glass, it was unavoidable: I was officially a kid detective. And it was time for me to conduct some tough interviews. First up was the maître d’ with the bad attitude who’d given me the slip one too many times already. After that I’d pay a visit to the gangster who was getting cozy with the FBI. Outsmarting my parents wasn’t gonna be easy, but last time I checked, easy wasn’t part of the job description.