Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception (19 page)

Hey-ya, Sammy? I didn't even think Billy Pratt knew who I was. I mean, everyone knows who
he
is—he's Billy Pratt, Class Clown.

Strike that. He's
school
clown. No one else even compares. You can't
not
know the guy. He's everywhere, just being funny.

Anyway, I didn't slow down out of shock or anything, I just said, “Hey,” back and kept on bapping up the steps.

“Cool board.”

Cool board? This was turning into a real conversation. “Thanks,” I told him, eyeing the one under his arm. “Yours, too.”

Now what was weird was that he didn't pass me by. I mean, if some guy's going to come bapping up behind you on the front steps, usually they'll just bap on past you. And if they do say hey to you, that'll take all of two steps and
schwap-bap-bap
, off they go. But Billy kept running along beside me—kinda
close
beside me—and at the top of the steps he
stays
beside me as I head to home-room. And I'm starting to feel kind of uncomfortable. Like, go be Billy Pratt somewhere else, why don't you?

But he hangs with me all the way to homeroom, jabbering away about some mouse that's living in the walls of his house, and how it does laps up and down the twoby-fours and makes a big old racket all night long, chomping and scratching and whipping its tail around.

“Its tail?” I ask him. “How do you know it's whipping its tail around?”

“You can just tell. It's got this thwacky sound.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
All night long. Maybe it's whipping on ants or something, you never know.”

“Ants? You've got ants, too?”

“Or roaches, maybe.”

“Oh, gross!”

“But that would make him whip his tail around, wouldn't it? He's probably going …,” he makes like he's grabbing his tail, then whips it through the air, shouting, “Take that, you dog! Outta here, vermin! Out of my wall! Out-out-out! Ooowwwww!” He shakes his hand like he's hurt himself, then grins at me. “Busy mouse.”

Now, I'm sorry, but I just couldn't help it. I cracked
up. And even after he took off, I kept on laughing. I mean, Billy is just so …
hyper.

But then after homeroom, there he was again. “Hey-ya, Sammy!” he says, walking right beside me.

I looked around like, Where'd you come from, because I'd never seen Billy Pratt outside of homeroom before in my life. And Marissa looks at me like, What's this? And Holly raises her eyebrows, too, but then they fall back and let Billy jabber away next to me, all the way to my next class.

Then at lunch, Billy comes and sits beside me at the patio tables, and that's when I start to smell a rat. “Hey-ya, Sammy,” he says. “What's for lunch?”

I look at him, then at Marissa, Holly, and Dot. None of them says a word, but they're all looking at me with their eyebrows up. “All right, Billy,” I say to him. “What's going on.”

“Waddaya mean?”

I dig out my peanut butter sandwich and shoot him a look. “I'm gonna start whacking my tail around pretty soon here.”

He makes an exaggerated hurt look. “Are you sayin' I'm
bugging
you?”

I squint at him and whisper, “I'm saying I'm not stupid, okay?”

He nods, and his eyes get a little shifty. Like he wants to check around but he's making himself not. “I know that.”

“So? You going to be straight with me?”

He shrugs and grins. “Just thought it might be fun to hang with you.”

But looking into his eyes, I can tell—he's lying. “You're talking turds, Billy.”

He laughs, then gets up, saying, “And here I thought you were cool.”

Then he blindsided me. I swear, I didn't see it coming, didn't in a million years
expect
it. I mean, one minute he's leaving, the next he's leaning over, smooching my cheek. I'm talking a mushy, gushy, air-sucking, high-decibel kiss. And then he's waving, laughing, “See-ya, Sammy!” over his shoulder.

I just sat there like a statue with bird poop on its cheek. And while I'm trying to come to grips with what's just happened, Holly's going, “What in the …,” and Dot's going, “When did you and Billy … ?”

But then Marissa says, “Wait a minute …,” and dashes to the end of the tables. And then Marissa—Little Miss Gross-out Germaphobe—starts digging through a trash can.

“What is she
doing
?” Dot asks.

Holly shakes her head. “It's got to be important.”

We watch as Marissa flies through crumpled scraps, opening them up one by one until she finds what she's looking for. In a flash she's back at our table, smoothing out a paper in front of me.

And with one look I know—Heather Acosta is at it again.

“What
is
that?” Holly asked.

I took the paper from Marissa. “How'd you find this?”

Marissa asked, “Did you
write
it?”

“No!” I scanned the patio area and spotted Heather's wicked red head jetting away. “There she goes! That sneaky, creepy, mentally deranged … tarantula!”

“Oh, boy,” Marissa says, sitting down. “Oh,
boy.
”

“What is going on?” Dot asks.

“Here,” Marissa says, shoving the note her way. “I just saw Casey chuck this in the trash.”

“Dear Casey … Meet me at our lunch table on the patio. There's something I have to tell you. Hang ten, Sammy.”
Dot looks at me all wide-eyed. “You didn't write this?”

“Me? Sign off ‘hang ten'? That chowderhead probably thinks that's something you do on a skateboard.”

“You think Heather wrote it?”

“Yes!”

“Whirling windmills!” Dot cries. “You've got to
do
something!”

Marissa nods. “Casey looked pretty upset, Sammy.”

“He saw Billy here?” I asked. “He saw the whole thing?”

“I think so.”

I slammed my fist on the table. “How does she
do
that? How does a person manage to pull something like that off?”

“But I don't get it,” Holly says. “
Why'd
she do it?”

I sighed, then looked at Marissa, then at Holly and Dot. And since Marissa's giving me the You've-Got-to-Tell-Them nod and Holly and Dot are just sitting there with big question marks on their faces, I break down and tell them. About Casey and the kiss, Heather and the fish, my skateboard coming back, and Billy Pratt. And when I'm all done, Dot jumps out of her seat and says, “You've got to find Casey and tell him!”

“I know,” I tell her, staying put.

“No! You've got to go
now.
”

“But if I track him down, he'll think I
like
him.”

All three of them lean in like a flock of buzzards. “Well,
don't
you?”

“You guys are crazy, you know that? What kind of
mess
would that be? How can you like someone and not give them your phone number? How can you like someone and not tell them where you live? How can you like someone if you can't trust them with really basic stuff?”

They were all quiet a minute, kind of shrugging and looking down. And finally Holly says, “So what you're saying is, you can't like
any
one, right?”

I snap, “Yeah, so it's a good thing I don't like him, okay?” But to tell you the truth, what she said sank in heavy. Sank in hard.
No
, my living situation wasn't temporary. Grams wasn't going to marry Hudson and move into his big house, like I'd started daydreaming might
happen. His porch would always be
his
porch, not
our
porch. And I knew my mother wasn't going to sashay home anytime soon. To her, life on a soap opera was way more meaningful than life in Santa Martina. No, things were the way they were, and they were going to stay that way for as long as I could see.

“You okay?” Marissa asked. “Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine.”

“You've got to talk to him.”

“I will.” I folded the note and put it in my back pocket. “Later.”

Heather was her usual smug and hateful self in science. And I really wanted to let on that I was wise to her, but I made myself keep quiet. The less she knew about what I knew, the better. But believe me, by the time I got to art, I was in a really bad mood. And one look at Miss Kuzkowski just made it worse. She was standing in front of her “Art Teaches Nothing, Except the Significance of Life” poster, wearing her beret and holding her precious wooden palette in her left hand while she poked paint onto a canvas with her right.
Jab-jab-jab. Whoosh-whooshwhoosh. Jab-jab-jab. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
The class was piling in, but she didn't stop. She was
into
it, shuffling all around her easel.
Jab-jab-jab. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
And her punches and slashes of brown and yellow and purple made me understand that it was true—she was definitely the Splotter's disciple.

When the tardy bell rang, she took a break from her jabbing and whooshing and said, “Hey, gang! Your
reports are still due on Friday, but as of today, we're back to projects.”

Who cared? Right then I wanted nothing to do with art or paint. I just wanted to go home.

But as she explained what the new project was, well, I began to get an idea. A very
bratty
idea.

See, our assignment was to paint joy.

That's right, joy.

She didn't care what medium we used—watercolors, oil paints, acrylics, colored pencils—she didn't care. She just wanted joy. “Get to it!” she cried, then went back to punching on purple splotches.

So while everyone else is thinking and talking out their ideas, I get up, get a recycled canvas, splot out some red and white oil paint on a sheet of waxed paper, mix them into pink, and thin it out with turpentine. Then I get to work.

Tony Rozwell's in the back, singing, “La-la-la-laaaa! Lala-la-laaaa!” and someone shouts, “Knock it off, Rozwell, you're annoying!”

“La-la-la-laaaaa! La-la-la-laaaaaaaaa!”

Miss Kuzkowski calls, “Tony!”

“Just trying to feel joy, Miss K! Looking for my inspiration! La-la-la-la-laaaaaa!”

“Tonyyyyyy,” she warns.

“Turn on the radio, Miss K! That'll shut him up!”

Emma watches me and says, “How do you know what to do? How can you be painting already?”

I just smile at her and keep on going.

“I have no idea what to paint. How come everyone else always knows what to paint but me? I am so lame at this.” She looks at my canvas. “What
are
you making?”

“Joy,” I tell her. “Don't you feel it?”

She looks at the ridiculous circles I'm painting, one around the other, around the other, all in pink. “Nu-uh,” she says. “They're just circles.”

I smile at her again and say, “Oh, no, Emma. This is joy.”

“Miss Kuzkowski!” she calls, her hand shooting in the air. “I don't know what to paint!”

“La-la-la-laaaaaa! La-la-la-laaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

“Somebody turn on the radio!” Brandy calls from the back of the class. “Or I'm gonna have to burp!”

Miss Kuzkowski lets out an impatient sigh and cranks on some music. Then she comes over to Emma, whose hand is flagging around like crazy, and says, “Okay, Emma, how can I help you?”

“Sammy says that's joy. Can we do that? Just paint anything and call it joy?”

“Hmmmm,” Miss Kuzkowski says, watching as I paint the next, bigger circle. “What's your plan here, Sammy?”

“Plan? How do you plan joy?”

She blinks at me.

I blink at her.

Then I move on to the next, bigger circle.

“But …” Her eyes narrow down on me. Her beret seems to grip on tighter. “You're not being facetious, are you, Sammy?”

“Facetious? Miss Kuz
kow
ski!” I hold out my painting, which now looks like the ugliest psycho pink eye you'd ever want to see. “Don't you feel
joy
from this?”

She cocks her head, then very slowly starts to shake it.

“Miss Kuzkowski!” I point to the center dot. “This is how joy begins. As a little warm spot in your heart. That's why I chose pink. Then it radiates outward, filling the world, the galaxy, the
universe
with jubilance, warmth, delight! It's like a pebble tossed into a pool, where the ripples go out, out, out, changing the … the landscape, the mood, the perspective on existence!” I look at her with wide eyes. “Don't you
see
it?”

“Wow,” she says, taking the psycho pink eye from me. “Sa
man
tha!”

Emma is squinting away, shaking her head. “So that right there is joy? We can turn that in and get credit?”

“No,” Miss Kuzkowski says, turning to face her. “
Sammy
can turn this is. This is
her
joy. You come up with your own joy.” Then she smiles at me and hands back my psycho pink eye. “
Very
nice.”

When she's gone, Emma shakes her head and says, “I hate art.”

“Me too,” I tell her. “Me too.”

I did look for Casey after school. Sort of. When I headed for the bike racks to meet up with Marissa, I kept one eye on the buses waiting at the front of the school, but didn't see him.

Not that it would have done any good anyway, but I
was feeling pretty bad about what had happened. Bad and sort of responsible. I mean, maybe I wasn't the one who had made things such a mess, but still, I was the one who could fix them.

Or, with the way things had been going, make them worse.

The whole situation just made me frustrated and mad and confused and …
irritated.
And it didn't help matters any that I was being whipped around in the wind, waiting for Marissa, who was just not showing up.

Finally I couldn't take it anymore. So I crammed a “Gotta get out of here—catch up” note under her bike's brake grip, then tore off campus.

I had a tailwind, so I flew down the sidewalk even faster than I had the day before. I hopped curbs. I blasted down one driveway and blasted up the next. I didn't slow down for anyone or anything. And when I heard the buses growling in the distance behind me, I pumped even harder. I wanted to get
away
from school, but the buses gaining on me made me feel like I was being chased by it. Chased by wicked diesel-spewing schoolhouse demons in ugly yellow trench coats.

They roared past me anyway, and when they did, I finally let up. And at the corner of Broadway and Cook, I waited a few minutes for Marissa, but then decided it would be better for her if I just headed home. Even after a hard ride, I was still too dangerous to be around.