Words That Start With B (5 page)

“Hey, where are you goin’?”

Terry DiCarlo steps out from his group of low-life grade eight thugs and stands between Benji and the door to the boy’s bathroom. His friends laugh like they’ve never heard anything funnier in their lives and turn to watch, arms crossed, tough guy looks on all their faces.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Benji mutters, keeping his head down.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Terry says, and he grabs Benji’s shoulder and slams him into the girls’ bathroom so hard that Benji falls through the door and into the bathroom. Inside, someone who sounds a lot like Mattie Cohen shrieks, “
Benji!
This is the
girls’
bathroom!”

Benji stumbles back out, rubbing his elbow, which is almost as red as his face. He keeps his back to the wall and inches away from Terry, like a dog who knows it’s about to be kicked. Anger fills me up and before I can stop myself, words are coming out of my mouth.

“I guess it’s true,” I say, nice and loud, so everyone who wasn’t already watching turns to look at us.

Terry narrows his mean eyes. “What? That your little
boyfriend would rather do your hair than take you out on a date like a real man?”

“No, it must be true that they’re keeping you back a year because you’re too dumb to read. Only an idiot can’t tell the difference between the words ‘girl’ and ‘boy.’”

“You think you’re funny? You little—”

But I don’t hear the rest of what he says. I’m too busy walking away. Behind me some people are laughing and others are egging Terry on, but I hold my head high and march over to my locker. He can’t hurt me, I’m a girl. Plus, I don’t care what Terry DiCarlo thinks.

When I get to my locker my hands are shaking so badly I can’t make the dial move where I want it to go. I feel angry and nervous and exhilarated, like I could take on a whole room full of Terrys or jump off a ten-storey building and land on my feet. Suddenly Benji is beside me, taking the lock from my jittery hands.

“Here, I’ll do it,” he says. His voice is wobbly, like it’s full of tears.

“That Terry DiCarlo makes me so mad,” I say. “What a jerk.”

Benji nods and pulls off the lock. I grab my books and coat and pretend to be busy shoving them into my backpack so he can wipe his eyes, which have started to get teary. Then I slam the door and we boot it out of there, as fast as we can without running. School is the last place you want to be when you’re upset because nothing is ever private. There’s always someone staring at you, ready to run off and tell everyone that you picked your nose at lunch or were crying at your locker.

***

Benji is even quieter than usual on the way home. I do impressions of Amanda and Min’s oral presentation on some ridiculous book about horses, complete with hair-chewing (Amanda) and baby-talk (Min), but his cheek doesn’t even twitch. I buy him the king-size Mars bar at the 7-Eleven but he just stashes it in his backpack. Normally he’d have it polished off before we got home.

Even Mom, Benji’s favourite person in the whole world, can’t seem to wipe the gloom off his face. When she pops her head around the screen and asks how our days were, he just shrugs. Mom’s eyebrows go up and she looks at me as if maybe I did something. I shrug. I don’t want to embarrass Benji any more by going into the details.

“Did someone’s dog die?” she asks.

No one says anything. She runs a hand through Benji’s hair, rubbing the ends between her fingers.

“You need a trim, Benji,” she says. “I’ve got fifteen minutes before Tracey arrives and she’s always late anyways.”

Benji gets up wordlessly and follows her into the Hair Emporium like a sad puppy. After five minutes she has massaged the words out of his head and Benji is blubbering about Terry. Mom is all honey and sweetness and understanding, but later, after he’s left and Power Hour has begun, she cleans like a maniac, shining the stations so hard I worry that she’ll take all the gloss right off.

“How long has this thing with Terry been going on?” she asks.

“I don’t know, awhile, I guess.”

The truth is Benji has always been the butt of people’s jokes, but after awhile people just got used to him and left him alone. This thing with Terry was new. Terry was so much bigger and meaner.

“Does your teacher know?”

I roll my eyes. “No, he’s too dumb to pick up on it. He’d probably just lock them in a room together and make them talk it out anyway.”

Mom frowns. “I still think he should know,” she says. “What about David?”

I snort. “Yeah, right. He’d just tell him to fight back.”

Benji’s dad was something of a hockey star in high school, always getting into fights, which is how he got his nickname, the Dentonator.

According to Mom, “Just about the only thing David Denton was good at was hockey, but he got himself a bum knee just out of high school. No NHL for him. It’s too bad, because he could have been great.”

Benji never says much about it. He’s heard the stories from his dad a million times, and he’s seen the trophy case and the newspaper cuttings. Front and centre on the Dentons’ fridge is the newspaper article from when his dad’s hockey team won the junior championships almost fifteen years ago. It’s so old the paper is discoloured, like milk gone sour.

Any idiot could see that Benji was not going to follow in his father’s footsteps. My mother calls him “a delicate child.” He’s short for his age, scrawny, with little wrists, bony shoulders and skin so pale you can see the blue veins underneath. Not exactly hockey material.

Benji doesn’t even like to watch hockey, let alone play it. One year the Dentonator signed him up for peewee hockey, hoping to toughen him up. He only lasted one year, most of which he spent on the bench watching the other boys slamming into the boards, the net and each other. After a practice or a game he’d come over to our house bruised and
crying because his toes were so cold they hurt. Mom would make us hot chocolate while Benji sat huddled on the floor with his feet on the air vents, defrosting. If it was really bad, she’d crank the heat up and drape a blanket over his knees so the hot air came rushing on and puffed out the blanket like a hot-air balloon.

At the end of the season, the coach told the Dentonator that Benji just didn’t have what it takes to be a hockey player. Boy was he mad. He called the coach all sorts of names and raged about finding a better team with a better coach. But in the end he never bothered. Even Benji’s thick-headed, hockey-crazed father had to admit that his son was never going to play in the NHL. And so Benji’s hockey career came to an end.

“As thick as he may be, I still think David should know about Terry,” Mom says. “And your teacher, too.”

Oh, right. I know exactly what the school will do. They’ll make Terry and Benji sit down with a mediator and talk it out. Then after school Terry will hunt Benji down and cream him anyway. I pretend not to hear her over the hum of the DustBuster.

“Clarissa! I’m talking to you.”

Mom stops rubbing the finish off the countertops and stares at me, hands on her hips, cheeks rosy from her maniacal scrubbing. Figures — my cheeks get all splotchy and shiny when I’m working hard, but she still looks beautiful.

“I heard you,” I mutter.

“Do you want to do it, or shall I give them both a call?”

“I will,” I say quickly.

“Good.”

Mom is cleaning at a much calmer pace. I breathe a sigh of relief and go back to my DustBusting. That was a close
one. I have no intention of telling the Dentonator or Mr. Campbell about Terry DiCarlo, at least not yet. It would just make things worse. I know she thinks she’s doing the right thing, but she has no idea what goes on at school. How can she? She was the Dairy Queen! She probably just smiled at anyone who was giving her a hard time and they melted on the spot and offered to carry her books for her. She has no idea what school is like for regular people. Life must be so much easier when you’re beautiful.

Later that night the doorbell rings and my mother yells, “Clarissa, there’s a young man at the door for you.”

I assume she means Benji, until I walk through the kitchen and see her and Denise smirking behind magazines.

“What?” I say.

They just shake their heads and glance at each other over the tops of
Cosmo
. It makes me so mad that when I open the door, I practically shout, “What is it?” only to find Michael Greenblat staring at me. He steps back a little and I feel bad about yelling at him.

“Oh, hi,” I say, in a much more normal tone of voice.

Michael’s face relaxes into a smile. “Hi, Clarissa, how are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s good, that’s good.”

Then we stare at each other for a few seconds, Michael just smiling away and me wondering what he came for and whether or not I’m supposed to ask him in, even though I don’t really want to.

“Are you having a good night?” he asks finally.

“I guess.”

“Me too.”

We look down at our feet and I’m just about to tell him I have to go, when he says, “I wanted to give you something,” and pulls a rock out of his coat pocket.

“A rock?” I ask.

Michael looks offended. “It’s not just a rock, it’s a geode,” he says. “I found it this summer at the cottage. Actually, I found a whole bunch of them at this old cave. But this is the best one. They’re pretty rare.”

He puts the geode in my hands. It’s warm from his pocket and looks like an egg cut in half. The outside is pretty boring, just a regular old rock, grey and bumpy, but the inside is full of tiny little crystals that are just a little bit pink, like strawberry lemonade.

“That’s all quartz on the inside,” Michael explains.

“Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?” I ask. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“You don’t do anything. You just look at it,” he says.

“Oh.”

“Besides, I want you to have it.”

I don’t know what else to say, and apparently neither does Michael, because he scuffs the toe of his shoe against the doorframe and doesn’t say a word. We don’t talk much in school unless it’s for a project or something. I start to get the feeling that if I don’t say something soon, he might stay there all night.

“Well, thanks.”

Michael brightens a little. “You’re welcome.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay. Bye, Clarissa.”

I barely close the door before Denise is beside me.

“Was that your boyfriend?” she asks.

Ugh. “For your information, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Well, who was it?” she insists.

“It’s none of your business,” I snap.

“What did he give you?” Mom asks.

“He says it’s a geode.”

“A geode?”

Mom takes the geode and turns it over in her hands.

“It’s pretty,” she says, passing it to Denise.

“Looks like a rock to me. But not the good kind.” Denise wiggles her fingers and cackles at her own joke. She doesn’t seem to notice that she’s the only one laughing.

“Oh, that poor boy,” my mother says. “I hope you were nice to him.”

“I
was
nice to him!”

Denise laughs. “Oh, Clarissa, you’re a real heartbreaker, just like your mama.”

“You should have invited him in,” Mom says.

“There’s always next time,” Denise adds.

Right. Like I would ever submit anyone to that kind of torture.

“If you don’t mind, I have homework to do,” I remind them.

“Don’t forget your geode,” Mom says, grinning.

I snatch it away from her and stomp off to my room, slamming the door shut behind me. I don’t know why I’m embarrassed — it’s Michael who should be embarrassed. Who does he think he is, giving me geodes? I consider giving it back to him tomorrow, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Besides, it is kind of pretty. I hide it at the back of my sock drawer where no one will see it and ask questions.

When the phone rings, I’m not surprised to hear Benji’s voice on the other end.

“Was that Michael Greenblat?” he asks.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than spy on people from your window?”

“What did he want?”

“He gave me a geode.”

“Wow. He must really like you.”

“He does not.”

“Remember his summer writing assignment? All he could talk about was his rock collection and going to visit real stalactites and stalagmites. He wants to be a geologist.”

I snort.

“A geologist?”

“It’s a person who studies rocks.”

“I
know
what a geologist is, Benji. I just think it’s a stupid thing to be.”

“Well, Michael doesn’t, and he must really like you if he gave you one of his geodes. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not going to do anything except hang up and pretend this conversation never happened.”

“I think he’s nice.”

“Good
night
, Benji.”

“Good night, Clarissa.”

“What do the following people have in common?”

Mr. Campbell leans over the overhead projector and scribbles three names in big, sloppy red letters: Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne. Every hand of every boy in the classroom shoots up. I continue to X out the eyes of the people in my history book.

“Clarissa?”

Figures. Mr. Campbell only calls on me when my hand is not up.

“They’re not real.”

“Yes, that’s true: these are all fictional characters. Anything else?”

“They’re all boys.”

“Yes, that is very observant. They are all men. Anything else? Michael?”

“They’re all superheroes.”

Mr. Campbell grins and high-fives Michael like he is some sort of genius. Mr. Campbell doesn’t seem to notice that he has red overhead marker smeared all over the side of his arm. “Exactamundo!”

I swivel in my chair to roll my eyes at Benji, who, thanks
to this week’s back-to-basics seating arrangement, is sitting behind me.

Benji leans forward and whispers, “Your ears are going red.”

I whip around and shush him. “They are
not!
” But even as the words come out of my mouth, I feel my ears getting warm. Ever since Michael came over to my house to give me that stupid geode I’ve been watching him and thinking about him. Not a lot, but more than I used to, which was never.

Michael has floppy hair that my mother would call sandy blond and a mole on the back of his neck that is sometimes hidden by the collar of his shirt. His favourite sport is baseball and he has at least six different Blue Jays T-shirts. I don’t
not
like sports; there are just a million other things I’d rather be doing. But I could learn to like baseball. Maybe Michael will be the youngest Blue Jays player ever. I could go to every game and sit in the stands and cheer him on. Then one day, after he’d hit the winning homerun in the World Series, I’d run out onto the field and jump into his arms. And Michael would get down on one knee in front of the entire stadium, the
TV
crews and practically the whole wide world, and propose to me, Clarissa Louise Delaney. I like that dream a lot. Maybe more than I actually like Michael.

“Now what’s the difference between a hero and a superhero?” Mr. Campbell asks.

“Easy,” Michael says. “A superhero has a superpower, like superhuman strength, or controlling the weather and stuff.”

“You’re absolutely right, Michael. A superhero is aided by something beyond the normal capabilities of human beings. As Clarissa said, they don’t exist, they’re not real.”

A few people actually groan, like this is surprising news.
Like maybe superheroes were just in hiding all this time. Cripes. Some people are so slow.

“Now
heroes
are everyday people, like you and me, who have done something extraordinary without the help of a superpower. Who can give me an example of heroism?”

People shout out their examples and Mr. Campbell scrambles to write them all down, smearing his arm with more red marker.

“Going to war.”

“Saving someone’s life.”

“Firefighters!”

“Starting up a charity!”

Thankfully, the bell rings.

“Time’s up folks!” Mr. Campbell caps his marker and makes a big show of wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, like he’s exhausted by all that writing. “Phew! What a list! Great job, everyone. I think all of these suggestions are really terrific. But I want to hear from each of you individually. For your independent project, I want each and every one of you to write a two-page essay about a modern-day hero, someone living today who adds something to our definition of heroism. It could be anyone at all. Think outside the box.”

Finally, home time. The only box I’m thinking outside of right now is the Oreo cookie box.