Hit and Run (5 page)

“Specifically, it's about ditching history class,” Mr. Gianneris said. He glanced at the file folder again. “In fact, it's about ditching the whole day on Friday.”

Blah, blah, blah. End of story: a week of detentions.

“Three-thirty to four-thirty, every day this week, Mike,” Mr. Gianneris said, “starting this afternoon.”

This afternoon was no problem. But what about the rest of the week? I thought about all the extra hours Mr. Scorza had just given me and about how he thought I was a hard worker. What kind of hard worker showed up for work forty-five minutes late because he'd been sitting in detention?

“But I have a job after school, four days a week,” I said.

“You should have thought about that before you decided to take some unscheduled time off.” Mr. Gianneris didn't even look up from the detention slip he was filling out.

It was decision time. I had three choices. I could suffer in silence, take the detention, and probably lose my
job as a result. Of all the miserable luck. I could explain the situation to Mr. Gianneris, get down on my knees and beg, if that's what it took, make him understand exactly what was at stake and how important it was. The thought was humiliating. Mr. Gianneris didn't like me. What chance did I have that he'd give me a break? Or I could ditch the detentions, just like I'd ditched school on Friday. I'd probably end up suspended, which would free me up for work, but would kill my school record. I watched Mr. Gianneris fill out the slip.

“Sir?”

The word worked magic, like I'd said “Open Sesame.” Mr. Gianneris looked up at me.

“Look, I know I messed up,” I said. I worked at sounding sincere. It wasn't hard. This mattered more than almost anything else I could think of. “But I just got this after-school job, and I'm supposed to be there at four o'clock Tuesday through Friday. It's real important to me. I'll do the detention, Mr. Gianneris. Only, maybe I could do it for five Mondays instead. And I swear I won't ditch again. If I mess up one more time, you can do what you want. Okay?”

I stopped talking then and held my breath.

Mr. Gianneris peered at me for what seemed like days. At first I couldn't tell whether it was the fact that I had a job, or the fact that I was asking for a favor, that accounted for the look of surprise on his face. Then surprise gave way to suspicion. Finally I saw on his face the same look I had seen on Vin's face back in sixth
grade health class, when we had started studying human reproduction—a look of intense curiosity.

“Where do you work?” Mr. Gianneris asked.

I told him.

“Tuesday through Friday?” Mr. Gianneris said.

“And all day Saturday.”

“I can call and check, you know.”

My heart raced. “The manager's name is Mr. Scorza. I've been working Fridays after school and all day Saturday for almost a year.”

“Five Mondays in a row instead of every afternoon this week,” Mr. Gianneris said slowly, as if he wasn't sure. Then he said, “A job is a good thing. It teaches a person responsibility.” He studied me again. “Are you a good employee?”

Mr. Gianneris looked down at the detention slip he had just filled out. Then, finally, slowly, he crumpled it up and tossed it into the blue recycle bin near the door. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out another slip.

“You'd better not disappoint me, Mike,” he said. “And I
am
going to check with Mr. Scorza.”

I couldn't believe it. He had cut me some slack. First Mr. Scorza had given me more hours, and now Mr. Gianneris had made it possible for me to keep them. It was the biggest run of good luck I'd ever had.

“Thank you, Mr. Gianneris.” I couldn't remember the last time I had thanked a vice principal. Probably never.

I spent the rest of the day looking over my shoulder, wondering what kind of trouble I'd be in with Riel on
Tuesday—or today, if I ran into him. I had a pretty good idea he'd be harder to deal with than Gianneris. I'm not sure why I thought that, but I did. I even thought that it might be a good idea to get that stupid paper done. Then at least I could wave it in the guy's face so that maybe things wouldn't go so bad.

But how do you find time for stuff like that when you've got classes all day and you leave every single one of them with another assignment and another deadline?

Okay, sure, I could have gone to the library at lunch-time and worked on that paper. Or headed straight home after my detention and stayed put until I'd produced the right number of words. But Vin was waiting for me like he'd promised, out in the school parking lot. He and Sal were going downtown and they wanted me to go with them, so of course I said yes. We were almost on the sidewalk when someone called my name. Jen. Vin rolled his eyes.

“So now I guess you're not coming,” he said.

I shrugged and headed over to where Jen was standing. She had a pile of books from the school library under one arm. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Vin and Sal weren't moving. They were waiting.

Jen's soft green eyes were as hard as emeralds. “You called my house, didn't you?” she said, like she had me on the witness stand and was trying to get me to admit to a major crime.

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“Why?”

I had only met her dad a couple of times, but all of a sudden he flashed into my head. Jen looked just like him. Had his same crisp lawyer tone, too.

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “What do you think?”

“You're not supposed to call my house.”

Now I was getting flashes of her mom, too. Jen sounded like both her parents at the same time, telling me what I could and couldn't do. Like she had any right.

“I missed you,” I said. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Yeah, well, my mom went ballistic.
Who's this Wyatt person? Why is he calling you?”

“Did you tell her?”

“No!” Like that would have been the dumbest thing she could have done. It made me mad.

Okay, so maybe I hadn't met her dad under the best circumstances. But I had apologized for what had happened, and not just because I had to. I really was sorry. If I had known that bike belonged to Jen's dad, I never would have gone near it. And, anyway, I wasn't the one who took it. I just saw it. I noticed that it wasn't locked properly. A guy with a bike that cost that much should be a little more careful when he leaves it on the street. I just noticed that the lock looked funny, and I nudged it and saw that it wasn't locked at all. It was two other guys, older guys who were hanging around, who took it. They weren't even friends of mine. They grabbed it, but Jen's dad said I had helped them, so when they took off, I got in trouble. It didn't help that he never got his bike back.
It didn't help, either, that he could have bought himself fifty more just like it any day of the week.

But Jen didn't dump me because of it. She said she believed me. But she made me promise never to call her house. She said it would make her parents angry. Now, though, it sounded like she was ashamed of me or something. Why didn't she just tell her mother to mind her own business?

“Well?” Jen said. “Aren't you going to apologize?”

“For what? All I did was make a phone call—”

“We had company.”

Jeez, why was she so mad?

“She grilled me for twenty minutes. I could see her friend was feeling uncomfortable. And poor Patrick was wondering what was going on.”

Whoa! “Patrick?”

“My mom's friend's son. He just started at a private school here. That's why his mother was in town,” she said. “I
told
you I had to entertain him.”

“You said you had to entertain the friend's
kid
. You didn't say that
her
name was Patrick.”

She went from pink to red in about one second flat.

“I thought you'd get all upset if you knew I was hanging around with another guy all night,” she said.

She had that right. The worst part, though, was that she hadn't trusted me enough to tell me.

“Mike, I need my parents to relax a little,” she said. “I don't need them to be watching me every second. You can't call me at home anymore, okay?”

“Bet it's not a problem if Patrick wants to call you,” I said.

She answered by not answering. I didn't explode. I didn't yell at her. I didn't say anything. I just turned and walked over to where Vin and Sal were waiting. And, oh yeah, on the way there I plowed my foot so hard into the passenger door of a car, probably a teacher's car, that the car alarm started to bleat. That's when I ran. Vin and Sal caught up with me half a block later.

Billy wasn't home when I got there, but a miracle had happened. The fridge had food in it. Actual non-beer food. There was a package of hot dogs, with an eight-pack of fresh buns in a plastic bag on the counter. There was a loaf of bread, a container of coleslaw, a carton of eggs, an unopened package of bacon, a jug of milk, a couple of oranges, and a store-made apple pie. A note, in Billy's writing, was stuck to the fridge door. “Mike: Check the freezer,” it said. I did. Squat in the middle sat a container of ice cream. Not the cheap stuff, either, but one of those premium ice creams. I couldn't help smiling. What Billy didn't know about nutrition would fill a cookbook. But he tried. Well, sometimes he tried.

I fried some bacon and then a couple of eggs. I set the eggs on a slice of toast, topped them with bacon, and pressed on a second slice. I put it on a plate with a generous serving of coleslaw and carried it and a big glass of
cold milk into the living room, where I flipped on the TV and sank into Billy's recliner.

I had just eaten the last bite of my sandwich and washed it down with the last of the milk when someone knocked on the front door. Probably it was one of those gas salespeople or maybe one of those door-to-door religious types. But there was also a fraction of a chance it was Jen coming to apologize, which is what got me halfway to my feet. Before I got up all the way, I heard the door open. Good thing this wasn't a bank. I had forgotten to lock up. I hadn't even shut the inside door.

Someone called, “Hello?”

I set my plate and glass on the floor and poked my head out into the hall. When I saw who was standing in the doorway, I groaned.

“Well, well, Mr. McGill,” Riel said.

“What are you doing here?” I said. What I was thinking was, Are teachers even allowed to do this? Are they allowed to just show up at your house? Wasn't there some kind of law?

Riel stepped into the hall and let the screen door clatter shut behind him, as if he'd been invited in, which he hadn't been.

“I looked for you all day, Mr. McGill,” he said. He had a kind of lopsided way of smiling, but there was something behind it—and something in his eyes—that made me think he wasn't smiling at all, at least, not all the way. “You want to know why?”

I shrugged. I wished he'd go away. I couldn't believe he was even here, standing in my front hall, looking at me and looking all around at the same time.

“Apparently,” Riel said, “it's not standard operating procedure at Eastdale Collegiate to send students home in the middle of the day to retrieve forgotten assignments. Ms. Rather and Mr. Gianneris—you know them, right?” Sure, I knew them. Ms. Rather was the principal. “They have this idea that if you send students—well,
certain
students—off school property during school hours and trust them to return, that you're pretty much giving them a day off. Apparently they frown on that.”

“They give you a detention, too?” I said.

Riel grinned, like it was a fine joke. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, something like that. They slapped my wrist, that's for sure.” He looked straight at me. He never blinked, and his eyes never skipped away, not even for a split second. It was like he was staring right into me, or like he was trying to, and it made me want to look somewhere else, except that if I did, I was pretty sure Riel would read something into it, nervousness or cowardice, and there was no way I was going to let him do that.

“You have that paper ready?” Riel said.

Hey, wait a minute! Teachers couldn't just show up at your house after school hours and demand homework you owed them, could they?

“I, uh…”

“You what, Mr. McGill?”

Then there were more footsteps on the porch, and
Billy shouldered his way through the door. Dan and Lew were with him. So was Carla, Billy's current girlfriend, and some other girl I didn't know.

“Hey, Mikey, what's going on?” Billy said. He checked the expression on my face before turning to look at Riel. “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?” he said, puffing himself up so that he could feel taller than Riel, even if he couldn't actually
be
taller. Billy was average height and tried to make himself taller by wearing boots with thick heels. Even then, Riel had a big advantage on him.