Fruit (9 page)

But I never do. Instead, I’ll always say, “Maybe,” and hope that my dad forgets about it.

But the other day, I overheard Margaret Stone and Julie Tilson talking after school about becoming locker partners for grade 9.

“I don’t want to share a locker with Lisa,” Margaret
said. “And I just know she’s going to ask me. So why don’t we agree to be locker partners and then when Lisa asks me, I can say, ‘Oh, sorry. Julie already asked me.’”

“Okay,” Julie said. “I guess that’s not really lying, is it?”

I never even thought about having a locker partner for grade 9! Later, as I was delivering the paper, I couldn’t stop worrying about how I was going to find someone in time. September wasn’t that far away.

And here I thought I’d figured everything out. I knew that things would be different for me by the time high school started. I planned to start my life over as a whole new Peter Paddington. I’d be thin and wear all the right clothes and I’d be very popular. When I walked down the halls, everyone would say “Hi Peter!” but I’d pretend like I didn’t hear them. I’d head straight for the cafeteria to eat my lunch with my new friends. I wouldn’t have to go home for lunch anymore and I wouldn’t have seen an episode of
I Love Lucy
in I don’t know how long.

The thing is, I never thought about sharing my locker with anyone. But after hearing Margaret and Julie, I realized how stupid I was. But I can’t just go up and ask a boy in my class to be my locker partner next year. You have to be friends first before you ask personal questions like that. But what boy would I ask? Who could I pick to be my boy friend?

My biggest problem is that I don’t know how to make boy friends. I never know what to say around other boys and I’m afraid that if I
do
say something, I’ll sound stupid. I guess I’ve always felt weird around other boys. It’s like all the other boys are normal, except for me.
Sometimes, I’ll spy on everyone at recess from behind the library curtains. I’ll watch Eddy and his Short Group members playing King’s Court from the library window. Or I’ll watch Craig Brown and his friends playing touch football in the field. Or Brian Cinder and his goons leaning up against the side of the school. And I’ll think to myself, “They don’t have Bedtime Movies. They’re not fat. They don’t have taped-up nipples.” It’s like being a boy is the easiest thing in the world for them.

But enough is enough. I have to swallow my fears and find myself a boy friend on the double. There’s no time to lose.

I sat down at my desk and wrote out the names of all the boys in my class. Then I pretended having conversations with them.

“Hi Brown. Would you like to teach me how to play football?”

“Hi Sean. Want to look at pictures of mutilated people this weekend?”

“Hey Eric. Got a light?”

But instead of each one saying “Sure” or “Let’s meet up after school,” all I could hear was Brian Cinder’s voice.

“Peter Paddington is just one of the girls.”

Then I came to Andrew Sinclair’s name. He’s the most attractive boy in grade 8. He has long eyelashes, blue eyes, and really thick brown hair. I wonder if he conditions it. I put Miracle Whip in my hair once, because I read that mayonnaise is a good conditioner. But I guess I left it in too long. My hair was greasy for days and I smelled like an egg salad sandwich gone bad.

Andrew is also very fashionable. He wears button-down shirts and khaki pants and penny loafers. But instead of pennies, he puts dimes in them. He’s that kind of guy. Andrew is rich, too, so he can afford to buy designer clothes I see in magazines.

When Andrew came to our school, all the girls had crushes on him. I think it was because he was new. Most of the time, people move
away
from Sarnia, not
to
. Margaret Stone liked him the most. She bought him little gifts, like rabbit’s foot keychains and chocolate-scented stickers, and left them in his desk for him to find.

Margaret never said she was the one leaving the gifts, but everyone knew it was her. She even made a friendship pin for herself with Andrew’s initials on it, although I heard her tell Eddy Vanderberg that “A.S.” stood for “Absolutely Smart.” She made all of her Goody-Goody friends write Andrew notes in class. Margaret would never look over at Andrew while he read the notes. Instead, she’d pretend to be doing her work or arranging her scented stickers into smell categories.

Sometimes, Andrew wrote back to the Goody-Goody girl who had sent him the note, sometimes not. Depending on his mood. I saw one of his notes back once. It fell out of Margaret’s coat pocket one afternoon and I picked it up before anyone saw me.

“Dear Andrew,” it read. “How R U? Someone in this class likes you
VERY MUCH
!! Do you know who it is? If you do, write her initials on the back of this paper and send it back.”

I flipped the note over to read what Andrew had written.

“I am fine. But U are bugging me! If it’s who I think it is, then her initials are P.U.!”

I felt bad for Margaret after that, but I don’t think what Andrew said was wrong. She
had
been bugging him a lot. You have to be careful around boys, because if you get on their nerves, they’ll treat you like dirt. Instead, it’s better to be vague and pretend like you don’t care about them at all. That drives them crazy. Or so I read.

I watched Margaret very closely after that. I wasn’t sure how upset she’d be. Maybe she’d try to kill herself by sticking her friendship pins into her wrists. But then I heard Margaret asking the Goody-Goody girls to send notes to Eddy Vanderberg. Maybe she thought she had more of a chance with a midget.

Andrew doesn’t play sports. That’s another thing we have in common. He doesn’t collect stickers, and I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t listen to heavy metal. He spends most of his recess time hanging out with Sean Dilworth. I don’t know what Andrew sees in him. I think the truth is that Andrew doesn’t want to be friends with Sean, but he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to. Maybe Andrew secretly wants to be my boy friend, too.

I’m not sure about that, though. He’s a bit of a mystery. Sometimes Andrew comes into the library at recess. I’m always afraid I’m going to have a heart attack or do something stupid while he’s in there. The last time he came in was October 12th. I hid behind a trolley of books and watched as he signed out a book on the Loch Ness monster. He didn’t notice me, which was fine with me because I had a big zit on my chin and even though I take
my job seriously, being a professional library helper isn’t the coolest thing in the world.

Andrew’s mom married John DeLouza after they moved to Sarnia. I saw the wedding picture in the
Observer
. Some people say that he’s in the Mafia. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but thought I’d better find out. Otherwise, when Andrew and I are boy friends, he might try to get me to rob old ladies or something. This afternoon, while I was delivering my papers, I saw Daniela sitting in her parent’s car, listening to the radio full blast. She does that a lot and says it’s the only place she can get privacy.

I knocked on the window and yelled, “Is there a Mafia in Sarnia?”

“What?”

“Is there a Mafia in Sarnia?”

“What?”

“Turn off the radio and roll the window down!” When she had, I asked again. “Is there a Mafia in Sarnia?”

Daniela gasped and her eyes popped out of her head.

“What are you, crazy?” she whispered, hopping out of the car and pulling me into her garage. “Don’t go fuckin’ saying those things in public. They have spies everywhere.”

Daniela told me there’s a Mafia that rules every city in Ontario. She said her Uncle Tony is part of the Sarnia gang.

“They meet at the Basilico Club the first Wednesday of every month,” she said. “I eavesdropped on them once. There was a group of them, maybe ten or so, sitting around this small table in one of the rooms. They were
smoking these big fuckin’ cigars and playing cards. The whole time, they talked about killing a bricklayer named Silvio who had screwed one of the guys’ wives. They said they were going to kill him and fuckin’ chop him up and stick him in the deep freezer at the club.”

“Did they do it?” I asked.

“How the hell should I know? You think I’m stupid enough to go looking in that deep freezer? Let’s just say that some serious shit goes down. Business deals, murders, all that stuff. They got the Sarnia police chief by the balls. He doesn’t do anything without fuckin’ clearing it with them first.”

Daniela started to give me the creeps. She was grabbing onto my arm like there was no tomorrow and her eyes looked like golf balls. I told her I had to go.

“Don’t breathe a word of what I said to you,” she said before I left. “They’re probably watching us right now. Holy fuck, I’m a dead woman!”

Then she ran back into the car, locked the door, and turned the radio up. I stood there in her garage for a few minutes, looking around to see if I spotted any hidden cameras or noticed anything moving behind the boxes. I started to freak myself out and hurried down the driveway. When I passed Daniela in the car, she didn’t even look at me. Instead, she stared straight ahead, mouthing the words to “Gloria,” which was playing on the radio.

While I delivered the rest of my papers, I kept wondering if I should believe Daniela. She can be a bit of a liar sometimes. But even if it’s true that Andrew’s step-father
is
in the Mafia, I don’t care. It means that having
Andrew as my boy friend will be dangerous. I’ll just have to be careful, that’s all.

During recess, I signed out the same Loch Ness monster book as Andrew and another one called
Crimes of the Century
. I figure I’ll read them and then Andrew and I will have things to discuss.

“Someday, they’ll find Nessie. That’s my dream, anyway.”

“Why can’t people understand that being in the Mafia isn’t just about killing people? It’s about families sticking together.”

I decided to ask Andrew to the movies and figured it would be the best thing to do on our first friend meeting. Maybe after the movie, Andrew would ask me to go for an ice cream float somewhere. Then we’ll talk all night long about what we want out of life.

I knew I’d be too nervous to ask Andrew to the movies in person. So I took the phone book from the telephone table in the kitchen and went to my room. I found his number and memorized it. I wrote out what I was going to say, then sat in front of my mirror, practising.

“Hi Andrew. It’s Peter. Peter Paddington. How are you doing? You were just about to call me? Well, how about that! Listen, I was wondering if sometime, you maybe want to go to the movies. Great! How’s Saturday night? My dad can drive.”

When I went to pick up the phone and dial, I froze. What if Andrew said no? What if he laughed at me or
told Sean Dilworth? I couldn’t set myself up for something like that. I put the receiver back down.

I watched Andrew out of the corner of my eye the next day. He was wearing a blue and white striped shirt, stonewashed jeans, and his brown penny loafers.

“Would you do that to me, Andrew?” I asked him through a mental telepathy message during geography. “Would you hurt me like that?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m not like the other guys. I’m different. You know that. Trust me, Peter.”

“I wish I could,” I said. “I wish I could.”

Michelle Appleby turned and gave me a look. Was she able to hear our mental telepathy messages? Or did I say something out loud? Either way, I bent my head down and concentrated on colouring South America with my yellow pencil crayon.

By the time spelling rolled around in the afternoon, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to call Andrew. I couldn’t. It wasn’t worth the risk and when I saw that one of our words in the lesson plan was “destiny,” I could only sigh and nod.

“What would ours have been?” I wrote in the margin of my workbook. I would never know.

When I got home from delivering papers, I went to my room with two Wagon Wheels and a glass of milk and stuck my desk chair under the doorknob. Then I pulled off my sweatshirt and my T-shirt and carefully pulled off the masking tape around my chest. I usually try to change the tape twice a day to keep it fresh, like a Band Aid. Then I crumpled the tape into a ball, pulled out my bed, lifted
out the floor vent grate beneath, and placed the tape inside the metal tube. This could be dangerous if I was a stupid person, because the tape ball could go rolling down to the furnace and cause a fire. Good thing I’m smart and make sure to stick the end piece onto the metal so it stays put. Even better that I’m a genius and take the tape balls out every other day and put them in my coat pocket and drop them into the garbage can outside of the Shop ’N’ Bag. Otherwise, the balls would get all clumped together and stop the heat from getting into my room. In some weird kind of way, I guess it’s lucky that someone like me would have deformed nipples. If it had happened to someone stupid like Brian Cinder, I doubt he’d still be alive to tell about it.

Anyways, just as I was about to wrap some new tape around myself, my nipples stopped me.

“You’re really starting to bug us,” they said. “If you don’t pick that phone up and make yourself a boy friend, we’re going to tell your parents about how you tape us up every morning. We’re going to tell everyone your secret!”

“You’re evil!” I said and shook my fists at them. But I knew they were right. Calling Andrew was the only way my nipples — and the rest of me — would ever become normal. I had to do it. I finished taping my nipples up, put my T-shirt and sweatshirt back on, and sat down on the floor.

“I hope I remember his number,” I said to myself as I put the phone down beside me. Then I unwrapped one of the Wagon Wheels, ate it, and rehearsed the lines again. My heart was beating a mile a minute, but somehow I
managed to pick up the phone and dial. It rang once. Then again. And again.

“No one’s home,” I thought and just as I was about to put the receiver down, an older man’s voice said, “Hello?”

I gasped. It was John DeLouza! I hadn’t even thought about someone other than Andrew answering the phone.