by Cary Fagan
“That isn’t true.”
“Because we’re twins, everybody always thought I knew what he was thinking. But I didn’t. I never knew. He was always different from me. It didn’t mean we weren’t connected. I mean, he was always there with me, even before I can remember. Me as a baby, Jackson as a baby. Hearing him breathe in the crib beside me. Always there. That’s the thing that hurts, that there’s this space where he used to be, where the thing that I was always sure of used to be. Now it’s empty. And I want to get over it. I need to. I can’t stand living like this.”
She stood up. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I need to move.”
She got on her bike, which was leaning against the porch steps, and rode away down the sidewalk. I sat up to watch her disappear. What if she didn’t come back? What if my parents didn’t come home from work? What if all the things I thought were certain turned out not to be?
But I didn’t do anything, just lay back down and stayed there for a long time. I stayed there staring up at the clouds, which didn’t look like a dog or a shoe or anything else the way they had when I was little, but just like clouds.
22
Now or Never
I woke up.
I opened my eyes.
I screamed.
That is, I screamed inwardly. But it was the loudest silent scream I ever made. Because today was the last day of school and the last day to present our final projects. Which meant that it was the day I had to present.
I thought of dressing like someone who would use a tractor, but I didn’t have overalls or a straw hat, and anyway, I didn’t know if that was really how tractor drivers dressed anymore. Everything I knew stopped at 1962, the year that Your Friend, the Tractor was published, and I hadn’t even finished reading it. I put on my regular clothes and went downstairs, vowing not to tell anyone in my family that I had to present today.
I sat down at the table between George and Heather and poured myself a bowl of cereal. “My throat is feeling kind of scratchy,” I said. “I might be getting sick. I might have strep throat. Or maybe pneumonia.”
“I know what you have,” Heather said. “You have a case of faker-itis.”
“What?”
“You’re so funny, Hartley,” Mom said. “We know that today’s the big day.”
“Big day?”
“Don’t be coy with us, young man,” Dad said in a joking tone.
My father looked over at my mother and together they said—“It’s final project day!”
I jerked up in my seat. “How do you know that?”
“We got an email from your teacher,” Mom said. “She wanted to make sure that you were prepared. But I wrote back and said that you haven’t asked us for help, and that means you’re prepared. We know our boy.”
“So what’s your subject?” asked Dad. “You still haven’t told us.”
I looked down into my increasingly soggy cereal. “Tractors.”
“Ha, ha. You made that joke before. No, really. What’s it on?”
“I mean it. My project is on tractors.”
Dad looked at me.
Mom looked at me.
“Good luck with that,” Heather said, getting up and grabbing her backpack. She patted me on my head. “I mean it, Hartley. Because you’re going to need it.”
The whole way to school, George pretended to be driving a tractor. He made vvvrrr, vvvrrr noises and steered an imaginary wheel and shifted imaginary gears and, for some reason, deliberately ran into several trees. I sent him into school and then went around to my side. I didn’t need to go to my locker because I already had the tractor book in my backpack. I walked down the crowded hall and bumped into someone.
“Sorry,” I said.
The person turned to look at me. Zack Mirani.
“That’s okay,” he said, and immediately began an unconvincing coughing fit. For months I had let him avoid me, but this morning felt different. Maybe because it was the day of my final project. Maybe it was what Heather had said on the lawn yesterday. Maybe it was because I was just fed up.
I walked around him. “Hey, Zack.”
“What?” (Cough, cough.)
“It’s me, Hartley Staples. The guy you used to spend every lunch and every recess and every weekend with.”
“Oh, right. Hi.”
“So what’s the deal?”
“The deal?”
“With not talking to me. Just because my brother ran away from home? Maybe you think it’s contagious or something.”
Zack is taller than me. He has really black hair, cut short, and his features are all sort of pointy. He tried not to look at me, but somewhere over my head.
“I don’t think that.”
“You do. You think that I’m a pathetic loser and not worth hanging out with anymore.”
“I don’t think that.”
“I don’t even know why I’m trying,” I said. “I thought I already gave up. Never mind, Zack. Have a nice life.”
“Wait,” he said, and he put his hand on my arm. But he quickly let go again. “It’s not me.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s not me. It’s my parents. They told me that if I hung out with you anymore, or even talked to you, I couldn’t go to Camp Birch Bark this summer.”
I knew that Zack wanted to go to Camp Birch Bark until he was old enough to be a counselor.
“Is this for real?”
“It is. They gave me an ultimatum. They even called it that, an ‘ultimatum.’ You know where I have my lunch now? In the music room. Alone. Well, I guess I could talk to the cellos. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, Hartley. I miss hanging out too. At least you don’t have to feel guilty about it the way I do.”
“So now you want me to feel sorry for you?” I said. “Because you made the very, very difficult decision of choosing camp over me? Or because you couldn’t tell your parents that they were just wrong and that you were going to stay my friend anyway? Because you wouldn’t stand up to them?”
Zack still didn’t look at me, but his pointy jaw started to tremble. And then a tear began to slip down his cheek. Cripes. First Ms. Gorham and now Zack. Was everybody I knew going to start crying when they talked to me?
Even though I didn’t want to, I did start to feel kind of sorry for him. But it didn’t make things right. “Whatever,” I said. “At least I know the reason you pretend I’m invisible. Have a good time at camp.”
“Hartley—”
I walked away. Only now did I see that the hall was deserted. The bell must have rung without my hearing it. I hurried to Ms. Gorham’s class and slipped inside just as she was closing the door.
“Good morning, class. This is the final day of presentations. And you know what comes after that, don’t you?”
Everyone shouted at once. “PARTY!”
Ms. Gorham gave us two thumbs-up. “That’s right. We’re going to have our final project celebration. You all deserve it for working so hard. We’re going to have games and a movie and cake and ice cream.”
“I’m gluten-free,” said Lauren Engerer.
“I’m lactose intolerant,” said Gavin Luo.
“I’m allergic to nuts,” said Simon Asch.
“I don’t eat meat,” said Gerald Yacoubian.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got you all covered,” Ms. Gorham said. “Now who is our first presenter of the day?”
Stephanie Losurdo’s hand shot up. She went to the front of the class and gave her presentation on the skipping rope. She told us that people skipped rope in early China and ancient Egypt. She and her friends demonstrated various skipping methods. The toe-to-toe. The scissors. The swing kick. Then she presented the results of her playground study.
“People who have never skipped before,” s
he concluded, “are really bad at it.”
After her came Jeffrey Markowitz on the invention of printing. He was dressed in costume as the first printer, Johannes Gutenberg, in a shirt with puffy sleeves and a velvet hat.
“Writing out a whole book by hand takes too long,” Johannes Gutenberg declared. “There must be a better way. Wait a minute! Why don’t I invent the printing press?”
People applauded. Ms. Gorham said, “And now for the very last presentation. Hartley Staples, please come up.”
I grabbed my backpack and walked slowly to the front of the class. I turned around and looked at the class. Everyone looked back at me. Josephine Flax was scratching her nose. Even Zack looked at me.
“The tractor.”
“Very good,” Ms. Gorham said encouragingly.
“The tractor is a very interesting subject.” I unzipped my backpack and reached inside.
I felt the metal box.
What was the metal box doing in my backpack? Where was the library book? I felt around but the book wasn’t there. Somehow I had put the box in instead.
Beads of sweat broke out on my forehead. What was I supposed to do now? Without the book, there was no way I could talk about tractors. The only thing to do was talk about g.o.’s cards. Of course, I had already decided not to talk about them, but this was an emergency. I could tell the class how I found them. I could display them on the shelf below the blackboard and let everyone get a close look. Then we could have a discussion about what they meant.
Only I couldn’t. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t.
“Ms. Gorham?”
“Yes, Hartley?”
“The truth is that I don’t know very much about tractors. In fact, nothing.”
A few kids laughed, but Ms. Gorham frowned. “Are you sure that you don’t want to try?”
I just shook my head. Ms. Gorham rubbed her chin, clearly wondering what to do. I felt a lot of sympathy for her. It wasn’t easy being a teacher. She knew my family was having a tough year and didn’t really want to punish me. But everybody else had given a presentation.
I decided to make it easy for her.
“I guess you better send me to the office, Ms. Gorham.”
“I’m not sure if that’s necessary.”
“I certainly shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy the party.”
“Well…”
“And cake. There’s no way I should have cake.”
“Perhaps just a small piece.”
“Don’t feel bad, Ms. Gorham. You’re doing the right thing.”
I picked up my backpack. I could feel the whole class staring at me as I went out and closed the door behind me.
23
Almond Avenue
I walked down the hall to the office and sat on the bench.
Behind the counter, a secretary was talking to a parent on the phone while another was handing a Band-Aid to a boy with a scraped elbow. Somebody came in to sign out for a doctor’s appointment, while another student came back from her flute lesson.
I noticed that my backpack was still open so I bent over to close it. And what did I see but the book on tractors. It had been shoved behind the metal box. How had I missed it? I could have given my presentation after all. It would have been pretty lame, but at least I might have passed. Now I was probably going to fail eighth grade. I wouldn’t be able to go to high school next year with the other kids my age.
I didn’t have anything better to do, so I pulled out the book on tractors and started to read. I read for almost an hour before taking out my lunch. I kept reading even while I ate. One of the secretaries gave me a box of orange juice. Another gave me a chocolate chip cookie. Tractors were actually pretty interesting. They had been built to replace horses for farmwork. The first tractors, built a hundred and fifty years ago, had used steam engines like the early trains.
At last the bell rang. A cheer went up in every classroom. School was over for the year. People began streaming into the halls. I wished that I could feel as happy as everyone else.
After thanking the secretaries, I went around to pick up George. He was holding a box of things that he had made in school.
“I have my music shakers,” he said as we began to walk home. “I have my map of the world and my tin-foil sculpture and my potato-stamp pattern and my bead necklace…”
Imagine having to tell your parents that you needed to repeat eighth grade. Your parents who were already dealing with a missing kid. I could feel a stomachache coming on just thinking about it. Boy, were they going to be disappointed in me.
When we got to the house, Heather was just leaning her bike against the side of the porch. High school had already been over for a week. “So they finally let you out,” she said.
“This has been a real red-letter day,” I said.
“A what?”
“A red-letter day.”
“What does that mean?”
To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure. Today I got up in front of my whole class and made a fool out of myself. Today my former best friend told me that he had chosen Camp Birch Bark over me. It just seemed like the right expression, whatever it meant.
“Are you going to be home?” I asked.
“Where do you think I’m going—Paris, France?”
“Then you can stay with George. I have something to do.”
“Like what?”
“It’s been a red-letter day,” I repeated, “and I have something to do. And I’m borrowing your bike.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mine’s too small.”
“Oh, no, you’re not.”
But for once in my life, I was too fast for her. I grabbed the bike, pushed it off, and hopped onto the seat. It was a bit large for me, so that I had to stretch to reach the pedals. But I got up a good speed, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, I saw her and George standing on the driveway watching me go.
I stayed on the sidewalk, riding past the Whirton Middle School and the Whirton High School. It wasn’t easy stopping for a stop sign. I had to brake and then reach out and grab the pole.
I knew where I wanted to go. Almond Avenue. I just wasn’t a hundred percent sure that I knew how to get there. I thought it might be the street ahead, but when I got there and read the sign, I was wrong. So I kept going for two more blocks and then thought maybe I ought to give up, only I didn’t want to give up, so I went two more.
And there it was. Almond Avenue.
I turned to the right but the numbers were too low and so I had to check for traffic before rolling onto the street to make a U-turn so that I could go the other way. I passed the intersection again and looked at the house numbers to make sure I was going in the right direction. The houses were smaller than the ones on our street, with tiny wooden porches and front gardens, but they were just as neat. I didn’t have far to go to get to number 146, Gretchen Oyster’s house.
When I got off the bike, it fell on top of me.
I almost expected the front of the house to be a collage, with people and fish floating across the front. But it was an ordinary house, painted a nice blue-gray and with a yellow door. As I stood looking at it, I remembered my sister asking if I was a stalker. Standing here and staring might seem to someone like weird behavior, so I walked up to the door. Walking up to the door was normal behavior.
The door didn’t have a knocker, and there was no bell either, so I knocked. Probably too softly for anything but a mouse to hear.
I knocked again.
I knocked louder.
“Don’t break it down,” said a voice from the other side.
The door opened. It was her. The girl with the blue hair. Gretchen Oyster.
“Oh, hi,” I said.
“We don’t buy Boy Scout fudge, if that’s what you’re selling.”
“I don�
�t think the Boy Scouts sell fudge.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m looking for you, actually.”
“Me?” She eyed me suspiciously. “Is this a trick? Did somebody send you? Because if Noreen and Layla and Starr sent you—”
“Nobody sent me.”
“Well, you look kind of familiar.”
“That’s probably because I chased you the other day.”
“Chased me?”
“You’re Gretchen Oyster.”
“How do you know my name?”
“My sister, Heather, told me. You don’t actually know her; she’s a year ahead of you in school.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“Let me try again. You’re g.o. The initials. I have some of the cards you made.”
Something changed in her. She got all stiff and alert. Quietly she said, “You do?”
“I have up to number 8.”
“You have all of them?”
“Except for number 3. I never found that one. I really like them. I don’t know if I understand them, exactly, but I think I appreciate them.”
“Huh. Really. Thanks, I guess. Good-bye, then.”
She started to close the door. I said, “Wait.”
She opened the door again. “Do you want something?”
“I don’t know,” I said disconsolately. Suddenly, coming to meet Gretchen Oyster seemed like the most ridiculous thing I had ever done. What did I expect to happen? Maybe I was like some person who thought that if they could only meet their favorite movie star or musician, their life would be better. But of course it wasn’t better. It wasn’t even any different at all.
“You look kind of ill,” she said.
“I have a stomachache.”
“You better have a glass of water. Come in.”
It seemed more like an order than a suggestion so I followed her. She took me to the kitchen and told me to sit down at the table. It was a small kitchen, with flower wallpaper on the walls and an old gas stove and glass jars with spices and things in them lined up at the back of the counter. She filled a glass at the tap and gave it to me.