Jimmy Stone's Ghost Town (3 page)

"Oh," I heard Dad say from down the hall,
"and leave that damn dog in your room."

I sighed, lowered my chin to my chest, and
pointed back toward my bed. Trex whined quietly and walked back
into my room, his tail between his legs.

When I reached the living
room, I heard the TV blaring. Dad must have turned the
volume
way
up,
which he usually did when he was falling asleep on the couch. The
second sign that he was probably falling asleep: some stupid
infomercial about knives playing on the screen. I know he wasn't
really watching it because Dad must have told me about a thousand
times how he'd never buy a knife off the television. "They're all
crap," he'd say. "Knives aren't something you can just buy without
touching them, Jimmy. They’re something you have to hold in your
hand first."

I sat down in the faded,
green chair right next to the TV, reached over and turned the
volume down, and looked across the room at my dad. He was sprawled
out on the couch, his legs hanging over one of the arms and his
hand with the beer in it draped over the back of the couch. I knew
he saw me turn down the television, and I was sure that he wasn't
very happy about it. He looked at me close and squinted - his way
of saying that I should have let
him
turn down the TV.

I sat, with my hands in my lap, and didn't
say anything. I just looked around the room and waited for Dad to
tell me what, I guess, he thought was really important.

"Do you know why I asked you to come down
here and talk to me, Jimmy?"

Oh geez. I had no idea what he wanted me to
say to that question, and I certainly wasn't about to say no, so I
just sat there and didn't say a word.

"Charlotte," he started again. "Your mother.
Your grandmother." He paused and looked down at his chest. "They're
all gone, Jimmy. They're not coming back to live with us
again."

"I know, Dad. You told me all about
Charlotte and Mom, and we haven't seen Grandma in a long time."

Dad took a long gulp of his beer, swung his
legs off the arm of the couch and onto the floor, and sat up closer
to my chair. He took another sip and dropped the empty bottle onto
the coffee table in front of him.

"Exactly," he said and stared at me.

The only thing I could think to do was stare
down at my shoes.

"If they're not coming back," he said,
really leaning in close to me this time like it was the most
important thing he's said to me in months, "then why are we still
here, Jimmy?"

I was pretty close to completely checking
out at that point. He was talking to me like I was someone that
could answer his question. I had no idea what he even meant. How
could I have possibly answered that?

"Why?" I asked.

"Exactly," he said again and stared even
harder at me.

"Ok," I said. "Is that all then, Dad? I've
got some homework to do."

"We're moving, Jimmy."

"Moving?"

"Yes," he said. "We're moving."

"Moving," I said. If I had
laser beams that shot out of my eyes, I would have probably burned
a hole through my shoes
and
the floor by then. I couldn't bring myself to
look up at him.

"There's no reason for us to stay. It's just
us now, Jimmy. Charlotte. Your mother. Your grandmother. They're
all gone and they're not coming back. I think it's time for us to
move."

"But what about my
school," I said, "and my friends?" He didn't have to know that I
hated going to school and I had
maybe
one or two friends.

"Let me tell you something, Jimmy." He got
up from the couch and went back to the kitchen for another beer.
"Friends are a dime a dozen. You'll have plenty of friends." He
popped the top off the beer and threw back a huge swallow. "And
don't worry about school. We'll find you a good one."

He dropped back onto the couch, grabbed the
remote, and turned the volume back up to where it was when I came
into the room.

I pulled myself up from
the ratty, old chair and shuffled down the hallway to my room,
mumbling the word "moving" to myself the whole way there. I sighed
and laid down on the bed next to Trex. I guess I had to tell him
about the
great
news.

Chapter Five

Dad and I (oh, and Trex
too) have been living in "rural Pennsylvania," as he calls it, for
the past two years. Rural Pennsylvania? More like
Bored
sylvania. There's
nothing to do here, and it's not bad enough that I miss Mom - have
missed her like hell for the past two years (I'm in
fifth
grade now so I'm
allowed to say "hell" now, or at least Dad doesn't seem to care),
but there's not even a movie theater anywhere near us. If I want to
go see the newest movies - not that I'd know what they were; Dad
won't let us get cable and thinks that the "Intraweb" (another word
he seems to have made up) is just "another way for you to rot your
brain" - I have to go with Dad so he can drive us into the middle
of town. And the chances of getting Dad to drive me twenty-five
minutes to go see a movie were almost nonexistent.

If it weren't for Trex,
I'd probably die of boredom. It's that boring, and I'm not even
kidding you. I'm not allowed to have video games or iPods or any of
that stuff that everyone at school is always talking about either.
Every time I ask Dad for one (even for the smallest little bit of
something
cool
),
I get the same response: "What do you want all that junk for,
Jimmy? We've got all this land all to ourselves. We've got cows and
sheep and even a few horses. What more could all those kids at
school want?"

"I don't know, Dad," I'd
say. "Maybe something
cool
and not totally lame like sheep and
cows."

"Why? So they can be in the house all day
getting fat and brainless?" This was always the point in the
conversation where he'd stop talking, look at me hard, and go to
the 'fridge for another beer. "You should be outside, or cleaning
out the stables, or playing with your friends anyway."

It was at that point in our exchange that I
knew I was defeated. I may be young, but I wasn't stupid, and I
knew that there was no way I was going to win that argument with
Dad. He's the kind of guy that won't back down, and he'll stick to
what he believes forever. If it were up to Dad we'd probably all
still be using lanterns to light our houses. "To hell with that
electricity crap," he'd say. "It can only make us lazier and
stupider."

Yeah, exactly. He'd
actually say
stupider
.

So if you think the
transition from living with Mom, Dad, and almost-Charlotte in a
place where I had friends (well, maybe not, but at least I
knew
the people I went
to school with), to living in the middle of Boredsylvania with Dad
and Trex where I knew
nobody
was easy, all you have to do is remember
everything that I just told you. If you didn't sympathize with me
already, you sure do now, huh?

I've already spent a year
in my new school, Boredsylvania Elementary (all right, fine, its
real name is Steckel Elementary), and I still have zero friends. I
don't even have someone that I could really even call a buddy or a
pal. I'm lucky if my
teachers
even remember my name (not that it's all that
hard, right?). It would be a hell (there I go again - being
in
fifth
grade
does have its benefits) of a miracle if any of the kids remembered
it.

I promised myself, though,
that this year is going to be different. I'm going to make friends,
and I'm going to have fun, and I'm
not
going to spend all my free time
at home with Dad and Trex. I couldn't. Not again. Not another year
of sitting home every single night, doing my homework, and falling
asleep with a book in my hand or the radio on (yeah, imagine that,
radio is okay with Dad for some reason - "Radio's been around
forever, Jimmy, and it's not going to disappear anytime soon," is
what he'd say). There's just no possible way that I can live
through another year of that.

Maybe if Mom was still around and
almost-Charlotte had come home to live with us things would be
different. Maybe Grandma would still be around, and maybe Dad
wouldn't be working (or drinking his beer) all the time. Maybe I'd
have made some friends in my old school and started hanging out
with the "cool crowd." And maybe we would never have had to move to
this horrible place.

But I guess there's no use in wondering
about all that stuff, right? I mean, we're here now and we've been
here for over a year. It's a new school year and this is going to
be the one where everything changes. I can feel it already.

"You can feel it too," I say, "right,
Trex?"

He lifts his furry head to look up at me and
yaps quickly to show that he obviously agrees with me.

"Yeah, me too," I say and
scratch behind Trex's floppy ears. "I can just
feel
it."

Chapter Six

So my plan was for this school year to start
off on a different foot. Remember how I told you that I just felt
like this year was going to be different? Well, it's been two weeks
and I'd say that where I'm sitting right now probably tells you
everything you need to know about how the year's going so far.

I'm squatting over the toilet in the very
last stall of my tiny school's only boy's bathroom, and my feet are
starting to get numb. I've been in this same position for almost
the entire recess break and, if it doesn't end soon, my teacher
might need to come in here and oil me up like the Tin Man just so I
can move my legs ever again. If I stay in this exact spot, and be
as quiet as I possibly can, no one can even tell there's someone in
the bathroom. Sure, if they tried to open the stall, they'd find it
locked from the inside, but how many kids my age are gonna do
that?

If you're wondering why I'm squatting over
the toilet and being all super quiet, it's really not that
complicated. I'm hiding from Billy Coogan and his buddies. I
figured that this was one of the last places they'd look for me,
and by the time they thought about it as a hiding place, asked the
lunch aide for permission to go inside to the bathroom, and made it
all the way across the halls to the Boy's Room recess should be
ending.

From what I've overheard from the other
kids, Billy Coogan - his buddies call him Coog - and his group of
bullies choose at least one sorry-looking boy every year to pick
on.

Billy's version of "picking on" consists of
(but is definitely not limited to) the following forms of
humiliation: giving their chosen target wedgies in front of as many
people as possible ("atomic wedgies" are permitted but only for
special occasions), shooting spitballs across the lunch room at
target (extra points for hitting the face or for actually sinking a
shot into the target's chocolate milk or lunch of choice), various
verbal assaults on target (including calling the target names such
as "fartface," "butthole breath," and "stinky mcstinkerson"), and
various physical assaults on target which, if executed correctly,
are the deadliest of the bunch. You have no idea what a few good
trippings can do to your reputation, especially if they get you to
drop all your books at the same time. Not to mention the most awful
and humiliating of all the Coogan Boys attacks: the dreaded
pantsings. If they manage to pants you in front of the other kids
(especially the girls), you might as well just quit school, move to
Idaho, and grow potatoes for the rest of your life because there's
no way you're ever going to have friends again.

Only being in Boredsylvania Elementary for a
year and two weeks, I've personally never seen them pants anyone,
but I've overheard a few horror stories. This one kid, Ryan
Clevgraft (everyone calls him Clev), somehow happened to become
their chosen target last year and now he has zero friends, eats
lunch at the rejects' table, and basically hides in the back of the
classroom all day. The Coogan Boys are bad news, and they have the
power to ruin your life in just a few days.

So you can imagine how I
felt when I started to realize, in the first few days of school,
that Billy and his buddies were setting their sights on me as this
year's target. It wasn't a definite thing at first. Apparently,
Billy usually took a few days to check out the different options.
He'd have his boys bring him notes on who might be a good
candidate, take a look at the choices himself, and then decide on
who they'd terrorize for an entire school year. I guess it was a
very scientific process. All I knew is that I
definitely
didn't want Billy to
choose me.

I watched, in horror, as the Coogan Boys
chased Stevie Rample around the playground, during recess, for the
first few days. Then I guess they got bored and were onto Darren
Eckles for the next few, and then it was Johnny Kevner, and then
Kurt Timpano. I saw a lot of the other kids (mostly girls) laughing
at the targets during that first week or so. Apparently, they were
amused by all these attacks. I stood, perched up in what the other
kids called the "Crow's Nest" of the playground, and I will tell
you that I didn't laugh. Not one chuckle, giggle, or snort came out
of my mouth as Coogan and his clan terrorized the other boys. Not a
single one. And you want to know why? I didn't laugh because I knew
that any day could be my day. I knew that all it took was for one
slip up and the Coogan Boys would forget all about those other kids
and head straight for me. The thing was, though, that I never
really imagined it would happen.