Bystander (2 page)

One of the other boys, the heavy, raw-knuckled one, snorted, “You any good at homework? We could use somebody to do our homework.”

The hatchet-faced boy laughed. His large front teeth protruded slightly and his black hair was limp and ragged. Eric instinctively disliked him.
Weasel,
he thought.

Griffin smiled at Eric. “Don't pay any attention to these guys,” he said. “They think they're funny. Anything for a laugh, right, Cody?”

The ugly one, all beaked nose and buckteeth, blew a bubble and let it burst. “Good times,” he chirped. “Good times.”

“I feel sorry for you,” Griffin said to Eric. “You
move here—and all
we've
been trying to do is figure out how to
break out
of this place!”

Griffin had a way about him, a certain kind of natural leadership that Eric respected. Words came easily to Griffin, his smile was bright and winning. Eric felt almost envious; Griffin seemed to possess a quality he lacked, a
presence.

“So, tell us,” Griffin continued, commanding the court. “Why did you move here?”

“Well, it wasn't my idea,” Eric confessed. “My parents . . . sort of . . .”

He trailed off. Better keep that part to himself.

“You don't talk a lot, do you,” Griff noted.

Eric tilted his head, shrugged, embarrassed.

“He's a shy boy!” the big one squealed.

“Shut up, Drew P.,” Griff said. “Get me that ball, will ya?”

And Drew P. did.

“Droopy, Droo-pee,” Cody chimed in a mocking, singsong voice.

“Get a life,” Droopy snapped back.

Griffin shook his head, as if the dialogue disappointed him. He explained to Eric, “His name is Drew
Peterson. The other day we started calling him ‘Droop' and ‘Droopy.' Get it:
Drew P
.” Griffin smiled. “I don't think he's crazy about it.”

Eric didn't respond, just listened and nodded.

Griffin weighed the ball in one hand. “You mind if we keep this?”

“What?”

“The ball, Eric,” Griffin said. “You don't mind if I keep it for a while, do you? As a souvenir?”

“Yep, yep, yep!” Cody chirped.

Eric started to answer. “I, um—”

“Um . . . what?” Griffin interrupted, his face a mask now, hard to read. “You think maybe you have a choice?”

The two other boys moved a little closer to Eric, one on each side. They seemed to grow in stature. A little taller, a little fiercer, the way a dog looks when its hackles are raised.

Eric did the math. Three against one, not counting the girl. She wasn't doing anything, just standing by, watching.

No, no choice,
Eric thought.
No choice at all.

HE DID NOT WANT TO PART WITH HIS BASKETBALL. BUT
Eric knew that if he caved right now, just a week before school started, he'd be a marked man for the whole year. It was funny, almost. School hadn't begun, but he was already taking his first test.

“Actually, um, I
do
mind,” Eric finally said. He didn't whine it or say it with a whimper. He just told it flat out. The sky was blue, the grass was green, and he would certainly miss the damn ball. “But you guys can play with it,” Eric quickly added. “I mean, I was about to head home in a few minutes, but—”

Griffin laughed out loud. “Dude, hey, we're just busting on you.” He passed the ball back to Eric, a one-handed fling. “I don't even like basketball.”

“Come on, Griff, let's go. I'm bored.”

It was the girl.

She said, “It's too hot. Let's find Sinjay and get invited into his pool.”

Griffin looked at her, nodded once. “Yeah, I guess.” He turned back to Eric. “So,” he said, landing on the word with emphasis, like it was a complete thought, a summarizing statement. So. “You
really
didn't see a kid come through here? For sure?”

Eric looked him in the eye and blinked. “I'm just shooting around. I'm like in my own little world out here.”

“Okay, I'll take your word for it.” Griffin looked around, slowly rubbed his hand across his chest and belly.

Eric could see the doubt in Griffin's eyes. He volunteered, “I mean, I think I would have noticed somebody if—”

“I gotcha,” Griffin replied, sharp and dismissive. “Loud and clear. You didn't see him. Nothing wrong
with that. We're just looking for one of our buddies, that's all. You can understand that, can't you?”

Eric said that he could.

Griffin's face brightened. “Hey, I've got an idea,” he said, snapping his fingers. “This will be really fun, Eric. You will definitely enjoy it. We'll give you one shot, from right there”—he pointed at the foul line—“and if you make it, you get to keep the basketball. If you miss”—he shrugged—“we take it.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Drew P. said.

“Yep, yep, yep!” Cody called out. That's when Eric recognized the voice. Cody was doing a pitch-perfect imitation of Petrie from
The Land Before Time.
Eric's younger brother, Rudy, had spent a full year obsessed with those videos.

“Come
on
, Griff,” the girl persisted. “This is so lame.”

Eric considered his options. There weren't any good ones. “Okay,” he relented. “One shot. But what do I get if I make it?”

“Ho-ho!” Griffin exclaimed. “Now you're bargaining, huh? I like that, Eric, very ballsy.”

“I bet a dollar he makes it,” the girl said.

“I'll take that bet,” Cody said.

Griffin eyed her appraisingly, eyebrows arched in mock surprise. “You like the looks of him, huh? The new boy in town?”

She made an “oh, please” face, like the very idea was stupid. “Let's just get this over with, Griff.”

So Eric dribbled once, twice, took a deep breath, and laid a brick. He missed everything, the backboard, the rim, the works. His heart sank.

“Air ball!” chortled Drew P.

“You owe me a dollar, Mary!” Cody claimed.

Mary. Her name was Mary.

Griffin grabbed the ball. He set it on the ground, rested his foot on it, stood pondering the possibilities, then gently rolled the ball to Eric.

Eric bent to pick it up and murmured, “Thanks.” The word slipped past his lips as a reflex, just tumbled off his tongue without thinking, a verbal somersault of ingrained manners,
thanks
, and Eric kicked himself for saying it. What an idiot. Thanking these guys for
not
stealing his ball! Actually
thanking
them! How pathetic.

“I am disappointed in you, Eric. I really thought
you'd make that shot,” Griffin said. He lifted his bike off the ground, climbed back onto it. “We'll see you in school, Eric. Who knows? Maybe we'll have a few classes together. Wouldn't that be special? We could go to the library and do homework together!” He let out a friendly laugh, like it was all a big fat joke.

“Yeah,” Eric replied.

The gang of four pulled away. Griffin gestured toward the pet cemetery, and they headed for a gap in the fence.

Eric let out a deep breath. He felt the tension seep out of his neck and shoulders.
Good riddance,
he thought. No wonder his shot fell short. Too stressed. The girl, Mary, was right. It was hotter than hell out here.

Eric didn't hear Griffin's return, not until the boy was almost on top of him.

“Hey, man,” Griffin said, startling Eric as he pulled up behind him, back tire skidding. The others hadn't followed. It was just Eric and Griffin now, no one else. “I don't want you getting the wrong idea. You know we're just fooling around, right? I was never going to take your ball or anything like that.”

“I know,” Eric said.

“Because you looked a little worried there for a minute.” Griffin laughed.

“No, no,” Eric protested. “I knew you were just having fun.”

Griffin flashed a smile, that hundred-dollar smile he could turn on in an instant. He reached out his fist. “Are we cool, buddy?”

Eric tapped his fist against Griffin's.

“Sure.”

“Welcome to Bellport,” Griffin said, lifting both hands, arms out wide. “You ever need anything, anybody ever gives you trouble, you just come find me. My name is Griffin Connelly. Everybody knows me. I'll watch out for you. Okay?”

Eric nodded.

“I'm a good guy to be friends with,” Griffin said. He placed a firm hand on Eric's shoulder. “But I'm a lousy enemy.”

Eric had already figured as much.

“Maybe we'll hang out someday, I'll show you around town,” Griffin offered. “Of course, it will take all of five minutes, because there's nothing to do
around here. By the way,” he said, leaning in close, “my friend Mary, she said you were cute.”

Griffin grinned and gave Eric a knowing, heavy-lidded leer. Then he rose up on his pedal and rode away.

HIS MOM HAD CALLED IT A NEW BEGINNING. SHE SAID HE
should think of it as a fresh start. Those were her exact words, like she had memorized them from some drugstore greeting card. “You're just going to have to trust me on this,” she said.

Well, what do you say to that? So Eric nodded, looked at the floor, and said, “Sure, sure, sure.” Yes, he trusted her; yes, he loved her; yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. What did she want from him? Rainbows and unicorns?

So she sold the house, Eric said good-bye to his
friends, and the fractured family headed east. They drove in a car behind a rental truck through Maryland and Pennsylvania, into New Jersey and New York, and finally across the Throgs Neck Bridge and onto Long Island. His brave new world.

Bellport was his mom's old hometown. She still had a few friends there, from back in the day. The support she claimed she needed; and, most important, the promise of a good job selling medical supplies for some big company. “
Bueno
bucks,” she commented. Plus, his mother confessed, “I always missed the ocean when we lived in Ohio.” The salty Atlantic. There was even a bicycle path you could take all the way to the Jones Beach boardwalk. She couldn't wait to smell that briny breeze again.

Eric didn't care. And it was getting harder to pretend he did.

The way he figured it, there was no such thing as a new beginning. You get one life and it rolls out like a long hallway carpet. It begins on the day you are born and keeps on rolling until you drop. There's no refresh button, no start-over option. At night when he was alone in bed, that's when Eric felt it the most.
Fooling nobody, not even himself, no matter how hard he tried. Eric missed his dad and he couldn't stop thinking about it.

Not lonely, but worse: alone, abandoned.

He promised himself that if he ever saw that man again, Eric would turn his back and walk away. See how he liked it. Stick in the knife and give it a twist.

Eric had seen other families break up. He got that part of it. He just didn't want it to happen to
his
family. And definitely not the
way
it happened, with his dad flaking out. Lots of dads moved out. But usually they bought a house in the next town, or an apartment down the road. They had weekend visits, dinners at lonely Italian restaurants on Wednesday nights, coached Little League, and bankrolled big summer vacations. Not Eric's dad. He just lost it, stopped going to work, stopped functioning, and eventually just dropped out of sight. Gone, Daddy, gone. He left and never came back, even though he kept saying he
would
—or was it that he
might
?

His mom said that his father went off looking for something, as if he were searching for a lost lottery ticket. “He'll be back,” she used to promise. “He's just
struggling right now,” she said. “It's not his fault.” But weeks became months, the months became years, and his father never found it, that missing something. He never showed up again, either. Which led them to Bellport and the necessity of “a fresh new start,” like Eric's actual life was some kind of “new and improved” fabric softener.

How does a father do that? Just screw up everything?

He sent CDs, though. That was the big joke. Every once in a while, a padded envelope arrived in his father's handwriting addressed to Eric. He made these random CDs, mostly filled with classic rock, stuff like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers, music the dinosaurs used to listen to back in the Jurassic, songs he felt Eric might like. And he was mostly right about that; the tunes were pretty good. His father phoned sometimes, too, but never seemed to say anything. It was like he was in a fog, his thoughts confused. He just wasn't the same man anymore.

For sure, he never said the one thing Eric wanted to hear.

He never said, “I'm better now. I'm coming home.”

Some dad, huh? Just swell.

He called yesterday. Eric didn't even know why. It was a question he kept wanting to ask, if he had the courage: “Why you calling, Dad? What's the point?”

The phone got passed around from his mother to his little brother, Rudy, and finally to Eric. The conversation was brief and awkward. As if his father was tired, talked out.

Eric kept thinking of it this way: It was like his father was a great bird that had flown away, and all Eric could do was watch that bird drift into the distance, smaller, smaller, until it seemed to vanish completely, lost in the clouds. It felt a little like death, a wisp of smoke vanishing in the air, gone but not forgotten.

So, okay, the phone calls didn't go real well.

Or maybe Eric just wasn't very nice.

“You probably hate me,” his father observed.

Eric didn't answer. He recognized the code. He knew it was really a question, a desperate request, and he heard the ache behind it. The answer his father was looking for was something like “Oh no, Daddy. Don't
worry about us! You're still the World's Greatest Dad!” Like on those coffee mugs you see at the mall, the lamest Father's Day gift ever.