Gifted (10 page)

Mr. Zimmerman dropped his pencil onto his paperwork with the dejected look of a man who'd just found out that his ghastly play might never be produced. But
I
was feeling pretty dynamite, having just seen the glorious light at the end of
my
particular tunnel. So I gritted my teeth and placed a consoling hand between his shoulder blades.

“There's no reason why the show can't go on at home,
is there? The auditorium's better anyway. Fewer insects!” I could afford to be generous now.

Mr. Zimmerman brightened immediately and returned the gesture by placing a flabby hand on
my
back. I gritted my teeth again.

“You know something? You're right, George. You're absolutely right. You and I can finish the sets today, and if we do the play at home, who knows? Maybe we could make an even bigger production of it … we could add a few more numbers and schedule opening night on Veterans Day. That would work. That would give us a whole month!”

I didn't know what he meant by “us.” I thought,
a month from now, I'll be looking back on this as just another bad dream
, but I was content now to let it go. Because if I found a way to stay beside this man until bedtime, managed to stay awake all night, and lived to see the light of day, I knew I'd be able to blow the all-clear whistle until we got home, where my dad would, of course, take matters into his own hands.

The Music Man and I then attacked our meals in a companionable silence, and I was enjoying every mouthful until I happened to look past him out of the window. What I saw there made me choke and sputter. Framed in the glass, looking like a couple of killer apes who'd just spotted the monkey who'd made off with the bananas, were the heads of Sam and Jason. And the looks They gave me were looks of pure venom. Sam raised his hand to make a throat-slitting gesture, and I, to be civil, nodded. I understood completely. I was a dead man. We were clear on this point, and in a sense it was gratifying to know that after all this time, Sam Toselli and I were on the same page.

Even though
I
wouldn't be on it for long.

The heads turned and vanished from the glass only to reappear in the doorway atop a couple of physiques that I hadn't remembered being quite as humongous and brawny as I saw they were now. They were giants really, and as They stood at the head of Their table, no doubt giving Their buddies an update on my life expectancy, I wondered if brains could ever really triumph over brawn.

I felt Mr. Zimmerman's breath on my cheek and turned to look at him looking at me.

“Are they bullying you, George?”

My laugh, meant to sound melancholy, came out as a long, drawn-out fit of croaking.

“What's going on here?” Mr. Z asked, alarmed. “Did they have anything to do with the prank you played last night? Level with me. I want the truth from you, George.”

“Well …” I said, and I paused. The moment of truth had arrived, and what
kind
of truth I told him would either help me or hinder me. And that, by the way, is what separates us from the apes—the ability to work out a cognitive game plan quick as a wink instead of just standing around making throat-slitting gestures at people.

“The truth?” I said. “In a word?” I brought my face close to his, but not too close. “Force!”

“What?”

“Force!” I repeated, “or rather, coercion!”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“See Them over there?” I pointed a dramatic finger at the Bruise Brothers but kept it low, concealed behind my strawberry milk. “It was
Their
idea. All of it! They told me that if I didn't smear you, They'd kill me. I was acting in self-defense, Mr. Zimmerman. I was a puppet in Their hands. A puppet!”

The Music Man's eyes had expanded to doughnut dimensions, and I nodded gravely. I could almost make out the wheels of his mind grinding away in there.

He shook his head in disbelief. “George, this is more serious than I thought. For that kind of harassment, they would have been suspended, did you know that? Why didn't you come to me with this right away? I could have helped you. Now it's your word against theirs.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I will talk to Mr. Harris about it, and then, of course, talk to your father when we arrive at school. But in the meantime,” he bleated sternly, “I want you to use your very best manners in any dealings you may have with them. You're not exactly off the hook here. Not until we've gotten this thing settled, anyway.”

He got up, and I did, too, to trail him the way a duckling trails the wide backside of its mother duck, first to unload my tray in the dirty-tray receptacle, then to follow him out the door. I shadowed him pretty closely, but before I passed through the doorway, I turned to try out my very best manners for the first time.

I returned the wave of the Bruise Brothers, who were watching my exit intently, only my manners were so good that I used all
five
fingers in my wave, while each of Them felt it reasonable to extend only
one
. Then I hustled to catch up with my new bodyguard, feeling not altogether too bad.

Because the truth might very well have set me free.

My bodyguard and I ambled out into the bright sunshine, and after a few paces Mr. Zimmerman stopped, looked around him, and said, “We should bring the truck back here before we do any more work on the sets. Then we can just load them in as we finish them. What do you think, George?”

“That works for me!” I replied. If he had suggested skipping through a bed of hot coals on our way to visit the quicksand, I would have agreed, for as long as we stuck together, I knew I'd be safe.

We walked quietly through the Compound, Mr. Zimmerman probably resolving to get to the bottom of things a little better next time before meting out justice so quickly, while I mused on Hurricane Judith, that queen of storms, thinking that while the future might not look so hot for our important sand dune system, it was looking pretty radiant for me.

When we got to the parking lot, a stunning silver Chevy S-10 pickup stood alone and majestic under the
noonday sun. Again I marveled at how this man could possess such a macho vehicle. But when I noticed that instead of standard pinstriping, the truck had been decorated with a long, winding scale of musical notes, I decided I'd been a little too hasty in my judgment. The leopard hadn't changed his spots entirely.

The journey back was fun. The truck jogged along over the trail, and we bounced along inside it. Had I been a taller person, I probably would have arrived at journey's end with a skull fracture or two. But I enjoyed it. Not that we ran over anybody or anything, but it made me feel somehow important seeing kid after kid make a diving leap to get out of the way only to look up and see
my
smiling face in the window.

But since the trip back is always a lot faster than the trip going, it was soon time once again to hike up the sleeves, spit on the hands, and simulate getting down to work. There were sets to build and backdrops to paint, and by gosh, I was going to prove to my music teacher once and for all that I had no mechanical ability whatsoever so that he'd take his time and think long and hard before he would ever ask for my help again.

I would dazzle him with my ineptitude.

I read a poem once on how the best laid plans of mice and men almost never pan out for them, written by a poet who must have spent considerable time with Mr. Zimmerman, for he would assign me only simple tasks, such as painting his submarine-tank a basic gray, that even I couldn't foul up, try as I might. I gave the submarine-tank two lavish coats and left it to dry, then painted other boards whatever colors Mr. Z had directed—some
that would represent atmospheric conditions with Sky Blue paint, tempestuous seas on other boards with Pollution Green paint—and I let these bake away in the sun. It was mindless work, really. My brain relaxed, and I forgot all about the world around me, until I climbed onto the tailgate to help load the dried boards into the truck and saw that the world around me had edged in a little closer than I would have liked.

I could see the Compound, and there were dozens of kids nearby, but my corrective lenses held my focus on only two—
Sam Toselli with his bulky arm draped across the delicate shoulders of Allison Picone
. Mr. Zimmerman had wandered off after mumbling something like “Okay, that's it, George. You can get down now,” which I didn't really hear, and I stood there leaning on the particle-boards, watching the two share what appeared to be an intimate laugh—until everything went dark. In my emotional anguish I had relaxed my grip on the backdrops, and the heavy boards came crashing down, knocking me over the side of the truck.

I lay there, dead in the sand, looking up into black space until sunlight emerged in a kind of spinning spiral. I knew then that I couldn't be dead after all, because the gruesome face of Brooke Walters suddenly formed the eye of the spinning spiral, and after a long career in Sunday school, I knew that a face such as hers could never be found in Heaven. I tried blinking the apparition away, but it leaned right over me, so I brought myself painfully to a sitting position and Brooke started squealing.

“Allison wants you to stop looking at her. She thinks it's weird.”

What? She saw me staring? She must have seen me fall!

“I wasn't looking at her,” I lied, reddening.

“You stare at her every day of your life, George. Stop it! She thinks you're WEIRD!” Then she made a face even more horrible than her normal one and strutted away.

Weird?
I thought.
How am I weird?
I looked down at the ink sketch of the snail's reproductive parts on my knee. My pants had ripped there, and the snail seemed to be mocking me now.
Oh my God!
I realized.
I
am
weird!
I groaned and flopped back down on the sand, then groaned a second time when the big clumsy feet of my music teacher tripped over my legs. He went crashing to all fours, like a cartwheeling hippopotamus, sending a volley of sand into my face.

“George!” he cried after he'd stopped wheezing. “What happened? Did you fall down?”

I might have asked him that, but I didn't, because there was sand up my nose. So I just offered him a gurgle.

Now, you're not supposed to yank an accident victim by the arm and haul him to his feet and then start whacking him with your flabby palms to get the sand off him, but Mr. Zimmerman must have missed the class on basic first aid because that's exactly what he did.

“Did you lose your balance up there?”

I nodded slowly.

“Well, nothing seems to be broken. Do you want me to take you to the nurse?”

I shook my head vigorously. I did not want to go out into the Compound and have people look at me, one person in particular. For Mr. Zimmerman had been wrong, part of me
had
broken, and Nurse Kobb would never have been able to fix my broken heart, not even with a dozen Ace bandages.

“Then why don't you just rest awhile,” he said. Together we limped over to the wall, and I sat down under the shady overhang of the mess hall roof. Mr. Z stood gazing at me with such tender concern in his eyes that I almost laughed out loud. Then I remembered that my life's dream considered me weird and let out another groan instead.

“Is there something I can get for you, George?” he asked.

“How about a little ginger ale,” I replied, really more for his benefit than mine. He looked like he was going to start wringing his hands if I didn't give him something useful to do.

After he shoved off, I unzipped my backpack and very nearly put my headphones to my ears until I remembered that music would only remind me of Allison. Not that the two of us ever had a “song,” per se, but she'd been on my mind so much since the second grade that basically every song I'd ever listened to, I'd listened to while thinking of her. So in a sense you could say we had thousands of songs.

I reached for
A Tale of Two Cities
instead, and such were my amazing powers of concentration that when I got to the page I had marked, I was absorbed within seconds in the classic Charles-being-drugged-in-his-prison-cell scene. So absorbed that when my drink order arrived, I think I waved it aside with a careless hand and mumbled something about leaving the man a handsome tip.

I was at my favorite part in the whole book. The part where the imposter prisoner, Sydney Carton, meets up with a fellow prisoner, a poor little seamstress with a sweet, spare face. And instead of telling the man, “I think you're weird,” the lovely creature asks only to hold his
brave hand. When they step out of the tumbrel, Sydney Carton says to her, “Keep your eyes open upon me, dear child,” and, in a spirit of gallantry, lets her go
first
to the guillotine. I knew right then that in spite of my aching heart, I would have done no less for Allison Picone—such was my undying devotion.

My conscious mind was immersed in the book, but my subconscious mind noticed out of the corner of its eye that the Music Man was still close at hand. I was maybe ten feet away from the end of the building, and he was standing at the corner talking to a person or persons unknown, hidden by the adjoining wall. It struck me as odd because no one
ever
talked to him. Not even the other teachers. The guy was a lone wolf.

They must have been discussing my accident because his eloquent hand gestures seemed to illustrate the
George Falling Out of the Truck
story. I heard the Bruder's motherly voice say, “Poor little George. That's too bad,” and saw Mr. Zimmerman limp off over the horizon. As I continued to read, the thought crossed my mind that I would probably be receiving a get-well plant from that kind lady before very long, but what I heard next made the words on the printed page dance and blur between my hands.