Crash (12 page)

As backyards go, ours is pretty big. Bigger than Uncle Herm’s
or Mike’s, anyway. Bigger than Webb’s whole property. There’s ten or fifteen trees and lots of bushes and stuff along the edges.

And the dollhouse. I thought I saw something on the front of it. I went over. There was a cardboard sign Scotch-taped to the front. It read MOUSE HOUSE.

I knelt down to look inside. Furniture was in there—tiny chairs and tables and beds and a kitchen stove. The dining room table was about two inches long and had four chairs around it with legs as skinny as toothpicks. On top of the table was the very end tip of a slice of pizza.

As I got up from the Mouse House, something in the bushes caught my eye. I looked closer. It was a pile of sticks, about the size of a heaping plate of spaghetti. Ten feet away, you’d never see it.

I walked along the line of bushes. There was another stick pile … and there … and there. All along the three sides of the yard.

As I headed for the house I saw another one under a tree, right next to the trunk. I checked out the other trees. About every other one had a pile. Before going into the house, I turned to look back. Not a stick pile in sight. The ones by the trees were on the far sides; you couldn’t see them from the house even in broad daylight.

I don’t know why, but I just stood there for a minute. The leaves were long gone from the trees. Some of the bare branches were forked and jagged. They looked like black lightning against a sky smeared with raspberry jam.

This morning, when I left for school, I stopped to check Mouse House. The pizza tip was gone. The tiny tabletop didn’t have a crumb.

F
EBRUARY 1

My mom had gone off to work as soon as she woke up. My dad was away on business. Mrs. Linfont wasn’t in yet, and me and Abby were in the kitchen with four boxes of cookies from Hannah’s Bakery.

Abby smacked one of the boxes. “I told her not to get anything. I told her I won’t take them in.” She clawed one of the balloons my mother had gotten at the party store. It popped. I was waiting for her to attack the big HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ABBY sign. “I won’t,” she growled again.

“So don’t,” I said.

“I won’t.”

I reached under the sink and pulled out a plastic bag. “Take these.”

The grump fell from her face. She looked at me, she looked in the bag, she looked back at me. “What are they?”

“What do you think?” I said. “Catfish cakes.”

Her eyes bulged. “Scooter made them?”

She looked so happy, I almost lied. “No,” I said. “I did.”

She looked at me, like, What’s this alien life form doing in my house? She looked into the bag again. She pulled one out. Her whole face squished in on her nose. “These aren’t catfish cakes. They look like baby doodles.”

Catfish cakes are mostly just regular brownies. What Scooter would do then was make catfish faces by squeezing a string of white icing onto each one. I had made them in Mike’s microwave the day before. Maybe I’m not the world’s greatest artist, but—“They look like catfish faces to me,” I said.

I had thought she would be glad. Instead, she slammed the brownies down, blubbered, “Well, they’re not!” and stomped out of the house.

Mike took his football laundry bag to school today. “I got news for you,” I told him, “the season ended three months ago.”

He grinned. “I got news for you.” He pulled me over to the lockers. He opened the bag a little. I looked in. It was the Jetwater Uzi.

“You’re gonna get suspended,” I said.

He closed the bag. He stared at me. “You’re really acting weird.”

I felt my neck getting warm. “What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know. You’re just acting different. Like when I said let’s trick Webb, you told me you weren’t interested. And like this.” He swung the bag in my face. “You never woulda said”— he made his voice prissy—“you’re gonna get sus-pen-ded.”

I pushed the bag into his face. “I didn’t say it like that.”

He backed off. “You said it. It’s like you don’t want to do nothing no more. You’re a dud, man.”

I grabbed a fistful of his shirt, pushed it up to his chin, forced his head back. “Am I a dud now?”

We had never fought each other for real, but we both knew who would win if we did. He looked down his nose, his face practically tilted to the ceiling. He croaked, “You ain’t a dud.” He gulped. “Let me go, man.”

I pushed him into the lockers and went to homeroom.

This afternoon, a block from school, a gang of kids were yelling and hooting near a stop sign. As I got closer I could see between the heads enough to know it was Deluca and Webb. I could hear the splatter of the Uzi. I kept walking. I knew what was happening. Mike was firing away, sogging Webb from head to toe, and Webb was standing there taking it, like the day he refused to have a water-gun fight with me. I could tell when Mike was missing high: the shots would ping off the stop sign.

Was Mike right? Was I a dud? Why wasn’t I joining the mob and hooting with the rest of them? Why wasn’t I grabbing the gun and pumping a couple rounds into the victim myself? In fact, I did feel like grabbing the gun, but I felt more like shooting Deluca than Webb. Did that make me a dud? Did others see me that way?

Crash Coogan. The Crash Man. Suddenly the name didn’t seem to fit exactly. I had always thought my name and me were the same thing. Now there was a crack of daylight between them, like my shell was coming loose. It was scary.

When I looked back, the mob was a block behind me.

Tonight when I came back from the bathroom to go to bed, I found a note on the blanket. It was from Abby:

F
EBRUARY 13

Scooter talks.

One word: “A-bye.”

At first I thought he was telling us to go, saying good-bye, even the minute we got there. But it turns out that’s all he says. It’s his only answer.

“Hi, Scooter.”

“A-bye.”

“How are you feeling today?”

“A-bye.”

“Do you like your therapists?”

“A-bye.”

“How many days in a year?”

“A-bye.”

In the car Abby said, “Can’t he say anything else?”

My mother sighed. “For now, I guess not.” Her voice sounded even more tired than usual; each word seemed to drag itself from her mouth.

Abby wouldn’t let it go. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know exactly. I guess to him, it means everything.”

Abby grumped, “I wish he could say more. I hope he can tell us Ollie Octopus stories again.”

“Let’s try to concentrate on what he
can
do,” said my mom, “not on what he can’t.”

“Don’t get old, kids,” said my father.

It was quiet the rest of the way home. As we were pulling into the driveway, Abby piped up: “It must have been terrible not to have a single word. And now he has one. And he can use it for
anything
! I’m going to be happy about that.”

She bounced out of the car—and she did, she looked happy.

Tonight after dinner, I was taking the trash outside when I heard footsteps running up the street. It’s no big deal for somebody to go running past our house; half the people in town seemed to jog around. But these feet weren’t jogging, they were sprinting.

I looked. The sprinter went zipping past our house. It was too dark to tell much. But a couple houses up there’s a streetlight, and for just a second there he was, out of the dark and back in: a kid, skinny.

Webb.

The first thing I thought was: Somebody’s after him. I ran to the sidewalk, looked down the street, listened. Nothing.

After Deluca drenched him with the Uzi, Webb was out of school for two days. I heard he almost had pneumonia.

I looked in the other direction. The footstep sound got slower, then stopped. That meant he was walking, maybe coming back. I went in.

F
EBRUARY
28

My mother turned the paper bag upside down. Two glittery red high-heeled shoes tumbled onto my study desk.

“Mrs. Linfont found them when she was dust-mopping under your bed today. She said she didn’t want to be snoopy, but she thought it was kind of unusual. And she couldn’t imagine they were a present for me.” She squinted at me. “They’re not, are they?”

“No,” I said, “and she is a snoop.”

“I guess you’re right. Does that make me a snoop, too?”

“Yeah,” I said. I put the shoes back in the bag.

She didn’t go away. “So, is it a secret?”

I glared at her. Then I told her why I got them.

“So why are you keeping them?”

I told her that, too.

“Well, that’s very sweet of you. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you have to worry anymore about your grandfather making it. It’s just a question of how well he’s going to get.”

She was looking at me funny. “Let me see those again.” She pulled out one of the shoes. She studied it.

“What are you grinning at?” I said.

“Where did you get these?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I told you, I was in a hurry.”

“Shoes usually come in a box.”

“Not these. They were sitting on the counter.”

“How much did you pay for them.”

“Six dollars.”

She started to giggle and wag her head.

“What?” I said.

“You know where you got these?”

“At a store. I told you.”

“You did something you said you’d never do, Mister Price Tag.” She tried to squeeze my nose, but I pulled away. “You … went shopping at Second Time Around.”

When I woke up next morning, my first thought was:
I was in a thrift shop.
I hope it doesn’t show at school.