Okay for Now (18 page)

going to be like him? Or am I already like him?
And then you get angrier, because maybe you are,

and you want to..."

He stopped. He wiped at his eyes. I'm not lying. My brother wiped at his eyes.

"Go upstairs," he said. "There's something on the dresser. Put it somewhere he can't find it."

I started up the stairs.

"And Douggo," he said. "Even if you're a jerk, you still got guts."

Yup. My brother said that. I'm not lying.

And you know what was on the dresser, right?

I carried the baseball downstairs.

"How did you—"

"Drunks keep everything they want to hide in their cars."

Flipping baseball cards. Wiping at his eyes. Flipping baseball cards.

I went down to the basement and put the signed baseball in the pocket of Joe Pepitone's jacket.

When I went back into our room, my brother was deep under the covers, his face turned away.

"Thanks," I said.

He didn't answer. But I got it.

On Monday, it was like I was walking into the center of the picture.

I got a new brown-paper book cover for
Geography: The Story of the World
and decorated it with

an Arctic Tern on one side, and a Yellow Shank on the other—right in the middle of the paper. When

Mr. Barber walked by my desk holding his coffee, he opened my book and flipped through the pages,

which were perfect. "Thanks for taking care of it so well," he said. And when I nodded, he smiled,

then hit me lightly on the shoulder. Like Joe Pepitone would do.

I turned in my Chapter Review Map on the culture of China to Mr. McElroy and added a list of

Chinese characters and their meanings that I wrote myself to make up for being late. Not bad for

someone who at the beginning of the year could hardly ... well...

In English, when we got to Chapter 38 of
Jane Eyre—
which I had read twice already because of

Miss Cowper's County Literacy Unit—Miss Cowper turned to me and said, "Let's have Douglas

finish the novel for us," and I looked at her, and I started to sweat, and I looked down at the page. You

know how many words in
Jane Eyre
have more syllables than any word has a right to?

But you know what? I got it. I really got it. Most of it.

Lil Spicer said I was the best reader of all. Which was a lie. But so what? So what?

I raised my hand in Mrs. Verne's class, and even though it took a few tries, she finally called on me,

and I'm not lying when I'm telling you that no one else in the class had even imagined a
z
axis. Mrs.

Verne was pretty impressed and said that I must have a fabulous visual imagination.

Did you get that?
Fabulous.

In PE the Wrestling Unit was still going on, but the So-Called Gym Teacher didn't say anything

when I ignored the lined-up platoons and went outside to run. It was November now, and most of the

trees had dropped their leaves off and were all bare and dark. But as long as the So-Called Gym

Teacher was going to let me run, I'd run. And it didn't hurt any that James Russell and Otis Bottom

started to run with me. I didn't ask them to. They just saw me going outside and decided to come

along, I guess. We mostly ran without saying anything.

And in Mr. Ferris's class? Imagine yourself handing in lab reports that get Clarence rocking his

little wooden hooves off, and you have it.

So after school on Monday, I asked Lil if she wanted to walk over to the Ballard Paper Mill, and

she said, "Why?" and I said I'd show her how to throw horseshoes, and she said, "How hard can it

be?" and I said, "Harder than you think," and she said she guessed she'd try and so we went down

behind the mill to the horseshoe pits. The shoes were there, just like Mr. Ballard promised.

I showed Lil how to hold the shoe at the top, how to stand with her heel at the post, and how to

swing her arm a couple of times, and she threw the first one about ten feet, which isn't, in case you

don't know, even in the neighborhood of how far it has to go. Then she threw the second one ten feet

again and got so disgusted that she threw the third one as hard as she could and it hit on its side and

rolled almost all the way to the post. Then she figured that she had the technique down and she threw

the last one as hard as the third, except that she didn't let go until the end of her swing, and the

horseshoe went straight up into the air and she screamed and ducked and I bent over her and held her

so it wouldn't hit her when it came down except it came down next to us instead of on top of us and

when we stood up, she looked at me like—like I'd done something noble and heroic.

You know how that feels?

Fabulous.

Then we collected all the horseshoes and walked over to the other post and she said, "Why don't

you throw one?" and so I did.

It was perfect. I swung my arm twice, let the horseshoe go just right, and it flew up, slowly,

gracefully, and then it turned once and let its two ends come down and it landed flat and skidded on

the sand just enough to ting the post.

It was a beautiful sound that...

Well, I'm lying.

I missed the stupid post by a mile.

But it doesn't matter, because something else happened when we finished throwing horseshoes that

was even better.

Reader, I kissed her. A quiet walk back we had, she and I.

CHAPTER SIX

The Snowy Heron
Plate CCXLII

BUT THE THING about being a Yellow Shank is this: once you move into the middle of the picture,

you're that much closer to the dark woods.

By the middle of November, it was pretty obvious that November in stupid Marysville, New York,

is about the crummiest month there is for running. You never know; things could always get worse.

But in November the valley traps thick clouds and holds them low, so the air is always wet and cold,

and every day, right around the time I went outside to run with James Russell and Otis Bottom, every

day, and I'm not lying, it rained. And it rained the kind of gray rain that's only a few degrees short of

being snow and goes down your back and pretty soon—like, right away—your sweatshirt and T-shirt

and all the rest are wet through and they're so cold that you don't want them touching your skin but

what can you do?

The one thing the cold made me do was pick up the pace, so even James Russell was panting by the

time we got back, and Otis Bottom kept looking at me like he was wondering why we had to go so

all-fired fast. But I couldn't exactly go to Mr. Ferris's class in a sopping wet T-shirt, and I had to

change it before everyone else came back to the locker room because of you know why. James

Russell and Otis Bottom figured it out, I guess. They never said anything when I took my dry clothes

over to the bathroom stalls.

But the week before Thanksgiving, things got darker in PE. The So-Called Gym Teacher announced

that we were going to start a new unit—Volleyball—and Everyone, and he meant Everyone, was

going to Cheerfully Participate because this was a Team Sport that required Every Single One of Us

to be a Part of the Team.

Terrific.

So we strung up nets while he sat in his office and we used masking tape to mark off the boundaries

and we knocked the balls around some and then served overhand as if we knew what we were doing,

and the So-Called Gym Teacher came out of his office and said we were supposed to practice passing

back and forth, which he'd never told us, and he went back into his office and we passed back and

forth until we all got sick of it and then we started dodge ball with the volleyballs until the So-Called

Gym Teacher came out of his office again and hollered and that was pretty much the end of the period.

One more blah day of PE at Washington Irving Junior High School.

Except that in English the next day, a runner from the Principal's Office came in and handed Miss

Cowper a note. She read it, and looked at me. "Douglas, Principal Peattie would like you to stop by

after school."

Every eye in the classroom turned toward me. They probably figured that my twisted criminal mind

had made me do something awful again.

"How come?" I said.

"If you mean to say 'Why has Principal Peattie requested to see me?' my answer is 'I do not know.'

But I'm sure he will tell you."

"I'm sure he will," said about twenty-two voices around me.

"That'll do," said Miss Cowper, and with one last look at me—a little worried, maybe?—she

turned back to the chalkboard.

Lil leaned over. "What did you do?"

I shrugged. "Do I have to do anything?"

"Pretty much you don't have to go see the principal unless you've done something."

"All right. I'll tell you. Principal Peattie has a mad wife and he's hidden her in the school attic,

except that every so often she escapes."

"The school," said Lil, "doesn't have an attic."

"In the basement. I went down by accident and there she was. And she came at me, Mrs. Peattie,

like she was going to bite me to death or something. But I got away, and now Principal Peattie wants

to keep me quiet. He'll probably lock me up too. And then, Lil, you alone will know the terrible

secret."

I should tell you that I was revealing this terrible secret to Lil while Miss Cowper was trying to

teach us the Wonders of the Adverb and that when she asked if Lil and I had anything we'd like to

share with the whole class, we stopped, quickly understanding that Miss Cowper was watching us

angrily and would beat us mercilessly if we did not cease immediately. And I'm giving you that last

sentence just to show that you can too talk and learn at the same time.

Principal Peattie made me wait for half an hour—again. I guess it was his technique. Then he

opened the door and told me to come in, and to sit, and then he sat down behind his desk and

underneath the Brown Pelican and looked at me like I was personally responsible for causing all the

problems of Washington Irving Junior High. He shook his head a couple of times before he began.

I'm not lying—this Brown Pelican, he was beautiful. He could have been as funny-looking as the

Large-Billed Puffins, because he was mostly bill. Put him next to the Arctic Tern, and you could

hardly imagine him flying. The feet, the curve of the neck, the colors—he could have been a hoot. But

he wasn't.

When you looked at him, it didn't matter how he was put together. He was noble. If you were a

bird, you could imagine bowing down to him.

"Principal Peattie has been speaking with Coach Reed," Principal Peattie said.

You had to wonder what the Brown Pelican's voice would be like if he could speak. Something

deep, but still able to laugh. Warm. Easy.

"Coach Reed says—Douglas, would you mind terribly giving Principal Peattie your full attention?"

You could imagine the Brown Pelican standing over the Black-Backed Gull at the moment when the

gull most needed him and saying that maybe the sky won't be lost after all.

"Listen, kiddo, you look Principal Peattie in the i" eye!

I did. It wasn't easy.

"I said, Principal Peattie has been speaking with Coach Reed."

You remember that feeling of cold, freezing rain down your back I was telling you about?

Principal Peattie held up a piece of paper. "Coach Reed has had the secretary type up this report

for your Permanent School Record."

Just so you know, I should tell you this: I did not say,
I didn't know the So-Called Gym Teacher

could write a report.
I did not say that. Even though I was tempted. Sometimes I really do get it.

"He tells Principal Peattie that you have been cutting his class for weeks."

"I've been running," I said. "He sees me go out every day at the beginning of the period."

"Has your class been doing a Running Unit?"

"
I
have."

"The rest of your class hasn't, and guess what? You're not the teacher." He looked down at the piece

of paper. It was a blue piece of paper, which I guess made it all-fired important. "It says here that

you've missed the entire Wrestling Unit."