The Taming of the Drew (15 page)

He half-rose out of his seat again to look over the partition, giving me a moment of breathing space, then plonked back down in his metal chair, his left shoulder bumping me into the styrofoam wall.
 

“They’re just reading.” He said it like it was my fault we hadn’t caught Tio and Bianca naked on the desk.

Ew. Now I needed to go home and bleach my brain. “You have a serious problem — you know that, don’t you?”

“My sister is my business.”

“No. Your sister is her own business. She doesn’t hang around spying on you, does she?”

“So?”

“My point is, sounds like you’ve needed a chaperone a lot more than she ever has.”

He angrily flipped the pages of
Of Mice And Men
. “What do you know? This is total B.S.”

“Au contraire. I personally like Steinbeck.”

He glared at me.
 

“Fine,” I made a point of glancing at my wrist, where a watch would be if I had one, “you’ve got four more minutes.”

“Then what?” He sounded suspicious.

“Then it’s football time. You know, pounding, smearing people. That thing you do so well.”

He answered absently, “You’re such a girl. I’m not the pounder. I’m the quarterback.” He half-rose again from his chair to glance around the room. He nodded toward my bag. “I’m hungry. You don’t have any…you know, mints or anything? Stuff like crackers?”

“Excuse me?” I raised my eyebrows. “What do I look like, a
mom
with a diaper bag full of Cheerios?”

Shhh!
sounds broke out all around us like a defective helium factory. The people in the cube to our right leaned around the partition to glare.

“Sorry!”
 

He flicked on the computer and it hummed to awareness. “Go ahead, send your text to my mom. I want to see your twitter.”

It felt weird, when he put it like that. When I didn’t move, he turned. “What are you waiting for. Anyone in the world can see it — why shouldn’t I?”

I popped open the phone and stared at the screen. I shifted so he couldn’t see when I clicked a button and then wrote. He surfed his way around the internet, looking for my twitter feed and not finding it. I pecked and poked and dawdled. “You don’t want me to see it,” he said, frowning.

“No, it’s true — you’ve got more right to see it than anyone. It just feels weird tweeting a report with you staring at me like this.”

The bell rang and all I could think was…whew. He didn’t seem to notice me pushing the post button before I closed my phone.
 

He stood and picked up his bag, glaring over the cubicle at Tio and Bianca, who sat, head down, side-by-side, reading. “I’ll find that twitter account tonight,” he said, and left.

Mom had the hands-on-hips, I’ve-waited-long-enough look on her face when I got home. I flopped onto the couch, arms out, legs up, my head all the way back. “Kill me now,” I said. “It would be a mercy.”

Mom held up a piece of paper with a printed screen shot. “You’re tweeting messages about Eileen Bullard’s son?”

How is it that mothers who can’t program the timer on the coffeepot become tech geniuses the minute you do something questionable online?

She held up a finger before I could get a word out. “Don’t ask. I have my ways.”

 
An undercover double agent with implanted recording devices
had
to be feeding this woman info. It was the only rational explanation.

“You read them?” She even had today’s tweet printed out — the one I sent from tutoring. I could see silhouetted through the page the photo of the Dog studying that I snapped and twitpic-ed with my cell.

“Yes. So far, they seem fairly…benign.”

My mind freaked at the idea of what my mother would do if I had to write a “bad” one about Drew. I tried to keep my face neutral, and I might have succeeded because she continued.
 

“But I haven’t seen those locker room photos yet, and you better believe I will. I sent a written message to both the Deans this afternoon, saying it was my right as the mother of an assaulted minor to view them
all
. Before they destroy them.”

Was that where the camera was? On its way to my mother? Wouldn’t that be a good thing, to locate it, finally? My heartbeat pounded in my ears like high-speed conga drums. I hadn’t seen the photos myself, but now, having talked to the Dog, and met his sister, the images I took of Drew felt…downright pornographic. I
never
wanted my mother to see those.
 

My mom, without waiting for a response from me, turned back to the kitchen and said over her shoulder, “The Dean’s office called and said there’s some delay. Even so, I think it’s only appropriate for me to see the pictures before I choose what to do about the whole incident. I like a punishment that fits the crime.”

I was so dead.

By Wednesday, all the Greenbacks were frantic — no one could find the camera. We all had circles under our eyes and wild, sticking-up hair like the Dog (but if you ask me, I had a bad feeling Gonzo got his hair to look like that with gel).

We were sitting in the fairy circle at lunch, everyone peeling an orange or a cheese stick that we’d pulled out of Phoebe’s bag. Phoebe said, “Kate, I don’t get this sweater look you’ve got going — it’s April!”

Everyone turned to look at me. I felt my neck turtle-hunch down into my mother’s bulky, button-up cardigan.
 

“She’s cold,” said Viola, in a poor-puppy tone of voice.

I tried to make a joke of it, “Get near the Dog and the temperature drops fifteen degrees.”

The fact that everyone nodded in understanding somehow only made it worse. “Not that I care,” I added and popped a segment of orange in my mouth.

“It’s just hard to be around someone who’s so hostile and angry all the time, isn’t it?” said Helena, trying to be helpful.

“Has he said anything mean to you?” As she spoke, I saw Phoebe’s fist bunch out of the corner of my eyes and mentally starting calculating the dates until her next blow-off-steam outing — the short Uni dance wasn’t enough to be really therapeutic. Phoebe needed more before another month passed.

“It’s not that,” I said, “He’s not saying anything.”

Viola added, with a strange note of happiness in her voice, “Drew erased her!”

We all turned to stare at her.

“You
know
,” she said, like it should be obvious, “that’s why she’s trying to bulk up. He made Kate invisible — she’s not even a ghost. He could walk right through her and never notice.” Viola wore her empty glass frames today and she held the right corner and lifted them up and down on her nose. “You could see it, if you looked.”

We all thought about that for a minute.
 

Then Helena broke the spell by shaking her head, “So much for moving the Dog to Academy. No friends for him.”

“Hey, all I know is what he’s like around me in class. You don’t know what’s happening at lunch — that’s where people hang with their groups. Everyone knows that lunch is where life happens.” For some reason, my voice sounded defensive.

I realized that everyone was avoiding looking at me — picking at an orange peel, stringing their cheese, spiking up their hair (okay, that was just Gonzo).

“What?” I demanded.

Helena said, “He’s sitting all alone.”

“How can you sit by yourself in a packed cafeteria? Half the people can’t even get a chair!”

Phoebe and Helena exchanged glances, a lightning-fast, silent negotiation over who was going to tell me. Phoebe, clearly the loser, turned to me, “Here’s the way it works. He doesn’t get in line for food, he goes straight to a metal chair, pulls it out from a table at the start of lunch, plugs in his earbuds, crosses his arms and sits, taking up a lot of space. The whole table stays empty the entire lunch period. Everyone stays far away.”

“Everyone?” My voice slid up the scale of disbelief. How is that possible in a pod of 1,300 people?

Phoebe took a deep breath. “I heard
Dickie
stopped by and tried to chat.”
 

“Oh no — not that weasel-guy who calls himself Richard the Third?” Dickie’s private campaign to get himself nicknamed after a guy (England’s King Richard the Third) who slaughtered his own nephews never seemed to take — despite the obvious similarities in personality. Instead, everyone called him Dickie the Pharmacist behind his back. People whispered that he was the source of all things contraband at Legacy High. Had I gotten the Dog moved into a
worse
environment? “What?…” I swallowed hard. “What happened?”

Another non-verbal eye-battle, so intense that eyebrows got involved. This time Helena must have crumpled under the onslaught, because she finally gave a big sigh, turned back to me, and said, “Dickie asked the Dog what’s up. The Dog ignored him. Dickie said he knew where a good party was this weekend if the Dog was interested. More silence from the Dog. Then Dickie asked if he could sit down. The Dog turned those scary eyes on Dickie and said, ‘Do you have a roll?’”

“A roll?” I squeaked. Was this a euphemism for…something I didn’t want to think about?

Helena and Phoebe went at it again, clashing eye-swords. Phoebe lost again, turned to me and said, “That’s what Dickie thought too. Dickie said something about how he knew someone who might know how to get a such a thing, but then the Dog gave Dickie this kind of sneer and said, ‘A dinner roll, fool.’”

“What?”
 

Viola, of all people, said, “Drew’s really hungry. I gave him a piece of gum yesterday in the hall and I think he swallowed it.”
 

We stared at each other, eye-whites showing in horror, all of us — Tio, Gonzo, Helena, Alex, Phoebe, Robin — it was like we all realized it at the same time.

“No,” I said, my voice low. “No way. Tell me his mother wouldn’t be that harsh.”

Helena said, “You did say she’s pretty determined. You paid at the dance, remember? And that was in front of all his classmates, which I’d say is even harsher.”

“He’s had no lunch money?” I wailed it. “Why didn’t he just
make
lunch?”

All our eyes, all 16 of them, swiveled like submarine scopes and locked onto Phoebe’s grocery bag, lying at the base of a tree. Phoebe had to plan weeks in advance to get lunch-food out of her house.

See, the morning rush to school is a pretty intense family time. If you get up and barge into breakfast-making in order to slap together a lunch, that makes a pretty gigantic statement. Especially if you’ve never done it before in your life.
 

Especially
if you’re too proud to cave to your mom and her (in your opinion) ridiculous rules.

Gonzo said, “I heard he had trouble at post-season football practice yesterday. Fumbled a snap and then he was the only one who couldn’t keep up with the coach’s punishment — twenty gut-sprints for the whole team. You could tell everyone was pretty pissed off at him.”

We stared at Gonzo, and after a heartbeat of silence he blurted, “What, I can’t walk by the field and watch a little football on my way home?”

No one had to point out the fact that his home is in the exact opposite direction. He knew we all knew, which is probably why his cheeks seeped a pink color that drifted down to his neck.

“What are we going to do? That camera’s still out there, and now the Dog is being stalked by Dickie the Pharmacist!” I bent, elbows on knees, and shoved my hands in my hair. “All I’ve done is make everything worse.”

If I couldn’t do something, if I didn’t think of
something
, I would end up destroying everything I cared about. Before I stupidly snapped those photos, we Greenbacks were working hard and earning almost enough (okay, not nearly enough) money from safe things like book sales and rummage sales. Now that I’d stupidly taken those pictures, I could end up suspended, Tio tossed out of school (a target for a new school to mock), with all the trees slaughtered.
 

And the Dog, isolated, angry and addicted to who knows what.

It was all my fault.
 

What could fix this? What?

Chapter 5

I had a flicker of inspiration. The breeze picked up and the treetops, like they approved of my idea, started a hula dance high above.

“I’ve got it! What the Dog needs is friends, right? Tio, Gonzo — you’re guys.”

Everyone carefully didn’t look at Alex and Robin.

I added, “And you’ve got stuff in common with him — you know, Bianca and…stuff.”

“Don’t you dare,” said Tio, his face darkening like a thundercloud. “Don’t you
dare
suggest I go ‘hang’” — he actually did air quotes — “with the Dog. You show up with that overbearing jerk, both of you spying on me in tutoring for three straight days and now you think we’re going to be buddies? Are you deranged?”

“Tio,” something caught in my chest, like a stitch when you’ve run too far. “I told you — the Dog said he’d pound you and stop the tutoring if I didn’t get him inside as his partner.”

Tio seethed, and I knew the whole thing made him feel even more like a child.
 

“Tell me what you want me to do,” I asked. “I’ll do it, I swear.”

But that only seemed to make Tio angrier. I realized for the first time how horrible it must be for him. He had Bianca alone for a few minutes every day — with her overprotective brother hanging over the wall of the cube. So close, and so impossible at the same time — like some truly evil form of torture. No wonder Tio never said a word to Bianca during tutoring.

“Tio, maybe you can get the Dog to relax around you. You can be really charming.” Tio snorted, one of the least charming noises in the world. “You’d be with Gonzo,” I said. Oh God, I had to get them to do this. If it worked, it would help on so many levels. We both turned to Gonzo, who was now a cherry red, all the way up to his tufts of spiky hair. “You can talk football, right?”

Gonzo said, “I don’t know anything about football. Believe me when I say this.”