Number 8 (12 page)

Valerie gives a shame-faced grin. “Can't help myself. Sorry.”

“Well, I'm not,” I say. “I wouldn't mind trying that, if you feel like it.”

Valerie goes over to the keyboard and we're just beginning on a new song, “A Natural Woman,” when Lilly and Mitch drift back in.

“We'd better be going now,” says Lilly loudly over the keyboard.

Valerie stops midnote and turns around. “Okay,” she smiles, “it was lovely to meet you.”

“Thanks for having us,” says Mitch, and shakes Valerie's hand. “And thanks for the music—I enjoyed it.”

I always liked Mitch. We stand smiling at each other for a moment.

Then into the silence the phone rings like a siren. We all jump.

Jackson rushes into the kitchen to get it.

“Don't!” calls Valerie, but we hear him pick it up.

“Hello,” he says.

We stand around, listening. The clock on the wall ticks like a heartbeat. Valerie's strange reaction—fear, it looked like, her face tightening at the first ring—makes us hold our breath to hear.

“Hello?” Jackson repeats. “Hello hello,
hello
…”

Another pause, then the firm click of the phone back on the wall.

“No one there,” Jackson announces as he walks into the room. He looks at Valerie. “Just that slow breathing again.”

Valerie nods and looks down at her hands on the keyboard. When she looks up her face is exhausted, the light switched off.

“It's happened before?” asks Mitch, frowning.

“Yeah,” says Jackson. “About five times a day—not a good number. Just this breathing, in, out, in, out, as if the person's waiting for something, but they never say what. It's freaky, especially when it happens late at night.”

“Why don't you call the police?” says Mitch. “They could trace the call maybe.”

“No, no, we don't want police involved,” Valerie says quickly. “It's probably just kids, they'll get sick of it soon, I'm sure.”

“Kids, you think?” says Mitch thoughtfully. “I know exactly who it might be.”

We all look at each other. I'm guessing we're all thinking the same thing. Everyone remembers Badman and Mr. Wall.

“No!” I say. “He wouldn't do anything that bad, would he? That's harassment; you can be charged for that.”

“He's done worse,” says Mitch.

“Yeah, so I hear,” grunts Jackson. I notice his jaw clenching tight.

Suddenly the phone rings again, tearing open the quiet. In the split second it takes to register it, Mitch has dashed to pick it up. Valerie's hand, flung out to catch him, drops to her side.

“Listen, you idiot,” Mitch yells into the phone, “we've called the police. We know who you are. You do it again, you're dead meat!”

“Oh, don't say that!” shouts Valerie, running into the kitchen. She grabs the phone from Mitch and crashes it back onto the receiver on the wall.

Mitch looks at her in surprise.

She tries to smile but her lips finish in a straight line. “I don't want to scare them too much…” she shrugs apologetically, “they're only kids.”

“Well, I bet they won't do it again now.”

Valerie nods slightly. “Thanks, Mitch.”

We stand around awkwardly on the cork floor, until Valerie gives us a funny half-wave and trudges up the hall. I watch her slow progress and imagine something huge and monstrous has just climbed on her shoulders, bending her back beneath its weight.

After Mitch and Lilly take off, Jackson goes really quiet. He's staring at the floor, picking at a loose thread. His shoulders are slumped, his body folded up. The way he's sitting, he looks burdened, a bit like Valerie. He couldn't still be mad about my comment at the beach? Or is he thinking about Badman and the phone calls? Or maybe he's just deciding what a crap afternoon this turned out to be…

“I better be going, too,” I say finally.

He just nods.

He walks me to the door, out to the garden. I hear him sigh a couple of times. At the gate, I have to say something or I'll explode. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he frowns. “It's just—oh you know, Mom goes on and on, doesn't she.”

“I thought she looked really exhausted, actually.”

“Mm. She hasn't been herself these last few days.”

“I guess she must get tired standing up all day, serving.”

“Maybe.” Jackson kicks at the weeds springing out from the cracks in the path. Then he kicks his foot another three times.

“That makes four,” he whispers to the grass.

“You could make dinner tonight,” I say.

Jackson breaks into a grin. “Yeah, I've already thought about that. I do a mean pasta with chilli. Enough to blow your head off. We've actually got chilli growing in a pot on the porch. Did you see it? Red-hot pasta with garlic is Mom's favorite dish.”

We smile at each other and I think of my mother telling Daniel that the fried egg messes he makes on Sunday mornings are
her
favorite meal.

“Hey, thanks for today, Ez,” Jackson says, and takes my hand. His eyes are electric again. We both look at my hand
lying in his, and my heart starts to beat too fast. I don't know what to do. How long should I keep my hand there?

Suddenly he leans forward and his lips bump against my nose.

I laugh out loud. I can't help it. I'm so nervous I just want to run.

He grins back at me, opening the gate. He's about to say something more but he stops. I follow his gaze, out onto our street.

There's Badman, doing a wheelie on his bike in the middle of the road. “Hey, Ez,” he waves.

“Hi,” I mumble, looking away.

“You should see my new fireworks! I got a new Golden Eagle and a Dragon Slayer, and tons of Black Cats. When are you gonna see them?”

I shrug, wishing the road would open up and swallow him.

“When are we going to see the back of
you?
” yells Jackson. He puts his arm tight around my shoulder, staking his claim like that explorer we studied last term.

Badman does a wild Freddie Krueger laugh, then takes off, pedaling like a maniac up the hill. At the top he does a wide circle and flies back down, his feet in the air. As he nears us he looks straight at Jackson and gives him the middle finger, shouting something about a fire burning in the sky.

I don't like Mondays.

Monday is a mean day, almost as mean as an odd number.

“Forget the weekend now,” teachers say, “you're here to work until your brain blurs and you can't remember who Homer Simpson is.” Well, not really, but that's how it feels. Have you ever been to a school where they do
sports
on a Monday?

Mom thinks Dad hated Mondays, too, says that's why he became a fisherman. “No Mondays at sea, just dawn and dusk.” Mom has a special pile of songs for Monday-itis. “Drives out the evil spirits,” she says, “makes you dance instead of moan!”

Well, I don't dance, but sometimes I hum a little to “I Don't Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats. Mom's favorite is a sixties song, “Friday on My Mind” by Stevie Wright, which I have to say isn't bad, but after Mom showed me a recent photo of poor Stevie in the
Good Weekend,
I decided I couldn't listen to it again. There he is at fifty, all worn out and medicated because of a golden staph infection he got in the hospital, and he's just sitting staring out from this threadbare old armchair, his hands all empty in his lap, his feet in grandpa slippers.
I felt so sorry for him with his empty hands. He looked as if his whole life was now one long Monday.

There are so many people to feel sorry for in the world, if you stop and think.

And I've got enough to do just getting through Mondays since Norton came up with his new “Cooperative Math.” He's been moaning how 5/8 of the class were so far behind (expressed as a percentage that's 62.5) and he thinks he's going to divide us into groups so that those who've got a clue (3/8 or 37.5%) can help the others.

This would have been okay but he went on to choose leaders in the groups, like me and Asim. In the practice run last week he strolled around the room, slopping praise thick as maple syrup all over the leaders, telling the rest they should listen to us and be grateful for our “advanced comprehension.”

Somebody should tell him that a better title for his Cooperative Math would be “How to Make Enemies.” Or maybe “How to Make Even
Worse
Enemies in Case Yours Don't Hate You Enough.”

Just because you can do certain kinds of math problems doesn't mean you know how to explain them. And it doesn't mean you can do all kinds of math. (Well, maybe Asim is an exception here.) But if you're Jackson Ford, you can't cope with
any
kind of math when someone like Badman is in your group.

I couldn't believe it when Norton read out the names. “Jackson Ford, leader of yellow group.” He pointed at a small huddle of glum math-haters. In the middle, towering over them by a head, was Badman. He stood with his legs wide apart and his arms crossed against his chest. He looked like a bull tied at a post. (You couldn't help wondering
what he'd do when someone let him go.) He glared right at me and thrust out his chin. Muttering something to Joe, who seemed to be in yellow group, too, they looked at me and laughed.

I took a deep breath and held it for four. Yellow all right. I'm as scared as mustard. Cowardy custard. You're gonna get busted.
Bad.

This morning Mom played the Boomtown Rats and a new song, “Blue Monday.” It has bass heavy riffs to give me courage. I didn't tell her, but nothing made any difference. I sat on the kitchen stool and listened to the three-note bass pattern like she told me to, and ate my Wheaties.

She ought to know I don't like sets of three, anyway, even if they
are
the most common rhythmic pattern in rock and roll. Mom thinks a dose of loud rock will fix anything. I just want to get Monday over with. I hope I can do it without my lungs collapsing in a coughing catastrophe.

As I'm putting my bag down in the corridor outside our classroom, Asim walks up. He starts to say something but the bell screams just then and all I can see is his mouth moving like an actor in a mime show. I make out “math,” or at least I think I do, and see the frown between his eyes. He doesn't need to say any more.

I know Asim doesn't like the new system either. He hates being singled out, negative or positive. He thinks the kids sneer at his ability, as if it's something peculiar about him, like his accent. He doesn't want to be different. I tell him it's just Badman and his sidekick who think like that, but
because they're so loud, it's as if they're holding the only microphone in the band.

“We could see Norton at recess,” I whisper close to him as we walk into class. “You know, tell him we just want to change some people in the groups—”

“No, no, no,” Asim is shaking his head in this agitated way. I let it drop.

He doesn't like making waves. He thinks any change is sure to be for the worse. Or maybe I'm the one who thinks that. In any case, his Temporary Protection Visa is coming up for renewal and he's still in limbo land. The government could decide not to extend it and send him and his father back to Iraq. In a couple of months, his whole life could change. Even though I know him so much better now, I still can't understand how he lives with that. What I do know is he thinks any trouble, no matter how small, could go against his character assessment.
You
try and tell him that some kid protesting about a dumb math class is hardly going to get the government's attention. No, he just wants to put his head down and melt into the background. Sometimes I think he feels he's still in a war, and he has to get up and pull on his khaki every morning for camouflage.

Anyway, I understand how he feels. And he's my friend. I just wish there was someone to stand with me on this. Norton won't listen to just one kid.

As soon as we're settled at our desks, Norton gives us a lecture on scale. A tickle starts in my throat. I'm not great at scale and measurement and space. I just like numbers. I clear my throat and try to breathe deep. “Don't cough or you're a dead man,” I tell myself. Next thing I know everyone's scraping back their chairs. We're dividing into the groups and I've heard nothing Norton said.

“Red over here,” yells Norton. “Yellow at the back. Leaders, come and get your papers.”

I look at the questions on the paper.
The distance between town A and town B on the map is 9.5 inches. If the scale is 1:100,000, then they are how many miles apart?
and
I have a 1:40 scale model of a car. The real car is 13 feet long. How long is my model?

I start to panic. Calm down, I tell myself. You're over all that. You can do math now, remember? But 40 what? 100,000
what?
How do you know what to multiply or is it divide by? I try to think what Norton was saying before the cough got in the way.

I make my way over to the table at the back. Badman and Joe have already taken up two chairs each. That leaves the rest of the group, three girls, cramped together on the other side of the desk. I decide not to mention the unfair seating arrangements and sit at the top.

“Good mo-r-n-i-n-g, Mr. Jack-a-s-s,” Badman says in that long drawn out chant we use for teachers. Joe smirks and the others giggle nervously.

I ignore him. “So who knows how to do this first question?” I say quickly.

There's a short silence while the girls study the paper. Badman is slowly tearing off the corners of his paper and putting them into a little pile. I look at the question again. “I don't really know where to start, myself,” I begin. “What's the unit of measurement here?”

Something wet and hard hits me right in the eye. A small scrunched up white ball lands on the table near my hand. Badman's flicking spit balls. I can feel my right eye starting to water.