Ms. Bixby's Last Day (16 page)

I shake my head in disbelief. The three of us stare at the dead phone in my hand, as if waiting for it to spontaneously come back to life.

“He could have actually killed us,” Brand grunts, and for
some inexplicable reason, this strikes me as funny. I start to giggle. Topher looks at me and smiles, and then it catches, as it usually does between the two of us, and he starts to laugh—high-pitched and giddy. Before I know it, all three of us are on our backs, staring up through the tree boughs, bodies convulsing, laughing like lunatics—like a bunch of stupid, punk, psycho kids.

“It's really not funny,” I cough, clutching my side. The laughter is somehow making my jaw hurt even more. I bring the napkin back to my lip and see that the bleeding has stopped at least, then wipe my eyes. The three of us lie there, taking shuddering breaths.

Finally Brand sits up and takes the torn paper sack and pulls out the bottle of amber-brown liquid, holding it up to the sunlight. “Better than wine?” he says skeptically.

I sit up on my elbows and look around to see if anyone is watching us. “You should put that away,” I tell him. “Better yet, you should just throw it away. There's a trash can right there.” I point to the corner, away from the alley. I don't want to go back in the direction that Hazel Morgan went, just in case he changes his mind and decides to finish beating me up. “It's not like we can take it home or back to school. We can't return it and get our money back.” Brand just keeps looking at the bottle, though, lost in thought. “Brand?”

“You can't always get what you want,” he says.

“What?” I ask.

“Sorry,” he says, snapping back. “It's a line from a song,” he says. “How's your lip?”

I stick it out even farther to show him. “It hurts,” I say.

“'Tis but a scratch,” Topher adds.

Brand gives him a smile, but not because of the line. He's obviously thinking something else. “And how's your ankle?” he asks Topher.

“It's all right,” Topher says. “As long as I don't have to chase after any more robbers.”

“Good,” Brand says, then unzips his backpack and stuffs the bottle of Jack Daniel's inside. “Because we are going to have to walk. I'm not sure we have enough money for two more bus rides
and
the last item on our list, even with the flopsucker's two bucks.”

“Wait, what?” I ask, but Topher and Brand nod to each other and stand up at the same time. And that's when I realize we aren't going back.

The thing Ms. Bixby said about gravity and falling in love? Albert Einstein said it first. Turns out Einstein said a lot of things you wouldn't expect. Like imagination being more important than knowledge, and education being what's left over after you forget
everything you were taught in school. I'm not sure I agree with any of those statements, even if they come from a man generally assumed to be a genius, but I figured I owed it to both Einstein and Ms. Bixby to do what she asked and think about it.

The best that I could come up with is this: There may not
always
be a plausible scientific explanation for why humans do what they do. Not everything can be plugged into an equation or reduced to the lowest common denominator. Not everything can be summed up by a letter grade on a report card or a check in a box. Not everything has a formula, and sometimes things just happen for no reason at all, good or bad, logical or illogical. Ms. Bixby would probably say there actually
is
a reason—we just don't always understand it at the time. Father Massey would probably say the same thing.

I suppose there is some strange comfort in it—this idea that the numbers are sometimes wrong, that there are still mysteries in the universe, and that you don't always have to know why you do the things you do. Sometimes, despite all evidence to the contrary, things can go your way.

The day Ms. Bixby told us about her diagnosis, I came home, changed out of my ketchup-stained pants, and looked it up. It was more than just curiosity. This was Ms. Bixby. The woman who argued with my father and put my ribbon on the
board. Who told me to be good and to be myself and to listen to rock music every now and then. I needed to know what she was up against.

I checked several different websites, just to be sure, but they all said the same thing: the one-year survival rate for individuals with advanced-stage ductal adenocarcinoma is 25 percent.

YOU HAVE TO SLAY THE DRAGON.

You can travel across distant lands. You can answer the riddles and follow the map and muster your forces, but sooner or later, you will find the dragon or the demon or the king flopsucker himself, and you will have to pull your dead smartphone from its case and slay him and steal his Jack Daniel's, even if it means a split lip and a swollen ankle.

I looked at Brand and I knew what he was thinking. Whatever it was that made him want to go home before, he was over it. Maybe it was the whiskey. I hear that alcohol makes people do strange things, but I always assumed you had to drink it first. Or maybe he took us running into George Nelson again as a sign. Maybe he needed to beat his own demon
or something, and putting that thieving flipwad in his place was what did it.

All I know is that as soon as I saw the look on Brand's face, the soundtrack in my head cued, the violins swelled, and the trumpets blared, and I knew where we were headed.

“Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order?”

The girl at the checkout counter smiles at me. There's a hole in her nose where a ring or a stud is supposed to be, though I'm guessing she had to take it out for work, just in case it dropped in someone's Big Mac. She's obviously a few years older than me, but she has one of those sprightly round faces that make her look young, like a nymph or something. The name on her badge says
Clarisse
, a good nymph name. Her mousy brown hair is pulled into a ponytail, and she has a dimple in her chin. A chimple. I'll have to suggest the word to Brand.

I look at the menu board.
Yes
, I think,
I need a bottle of Robert Mohavi Nappy Musk Oreo something-or-other wine and a white-chocolate cheesecake that doesn't look like a four-hundred-pound pigeon just ate a berry bush and took a dump in my friend's
backpack
. Unfortunately, those aren't on the menu, and even if they were, we only have four bucks left, half of it in change.

“Three waters, one with extra ice, and a large fries to go,” I tell her.

The fries are the last item on the list. It might be the only one we end up getting right. After all, we are so close now. I can't imagine anything else going wrong today.

“Is your friend okay?” the girl asks. She's looking over my shoulder at Steve, with his fat bottom lip like a purple swollen leech. He's gone cross-eyed poking at it, maybe hoping that will make it deflate. He looks a little insane.

“He's fine,” I say. “Just a rough day.”

“We all have those,” she says, then she tells me my total is $1.63, and I pay with the two bucks from Hazel's wallet. “Looks like it will be a couple of minutes on the fries.” She asks me my name and hands me my waters and then smiles again. I'm sure she's just being polite because it's her job, but I linger at the counter a moment until Steve touches my sleeve.

“I think she likes me,” I whisper to him. He frowns. Or pouts. With the lip it's hard to tell.

I set the waters down on the table Brand has picked out for us, and Steve immediately pops the lid off his and soaks his lip in the ice at the top, shuddering appreciatively. It's lunchtime at Chez Mac's. You can tell by the uniforms: polos with company logos and name-tagged shirts stained with oil and grime. The PlayPlace is teeming with toddlers and mothers begging them to eat one more chicken nugget. When we first became friends, Steve's mom would bring us to one just like this and let us mess
around. We're well past the maximum height limit now, unfortunately. Growing up sucks.

“Does it still hurt?” Brand asks, pointing to the swollen crest of Steve's lower lip.

Steve gives him death-ray eyes and sucks on an ice cube. “Have you ever been punched in the face?”

Brand shakes his head. Of the three of us, I always figured Brand would be the first to get a fat lip. I would never have picked Steve—the boy has spent his whole life avoiding conflict. Until it socked him straight in the smacker.

“It's a rite of passage,” I tell him. “Now you just need to kill a bear with your bare hands and you'll be a man.”

“Bear hands?” Brand smirks. Steve isn't amused.

“At least he didn't break your glasses,” I say, looking on the bright side. The last time Steve broke his glasses, his parents made him do ten hours of community service to “pay” to replace them. I helped him pick trash up from the playground near our neighborhood. I felt obligated. It was mostly my fault, after all. That was the day we tried to make a bungee rig out of some heavy-duty fishing line, an old life jacket, and a five-hundred pack of large rubber bands. It almost worked.

I glance back at the counter to see Clarisse taking someone else's order, giving them the exact same smile as she gave me.

“Think they'll notice?” Steve asks, looking down his glasses,
still trying to see his own chubby lip. He means his parents, of course. They will definitely notice. They notice everything, and this is hard to ignore. Mrs. Sakata can scan the room and tell you when the throw pillow on the couch has been moved two inches to the right. “Just tell 'em you got hit by a swing at recess,” I suggest.

“Probided they don't pind out that I wadn't eben
at
recess,” Steve says, dunking his lip back into the cup. Brand looks past the PlayPlace toward the door. His eyes bug out and he emits a low whistle, like the sound of a dropping bomb.

“That could be harder than you think,” he says.

I follow his gaze, seeing the open door and the teenage girl walking in. She's not green-skinned, wart-nosed, or wearing a cone-shaped black hat, but she might as well be. That's how I picture her most of the time.

Cue the screeching
Psycho
violins.

Christina walks in the door and Steve erupts like Vesuvius, half a cup of water gurgling back up, spit-sprayed across the table, showering Brand and me both.

“Seriously?” I say, wiping my face with my sleeve. Steve coughs twice more and then immediately ducks down in his chair, underneath the table.

Christina's coal-black hair is pulled into a tight ponytail and she's wearing a sweater the color of blood, even though it's
nearly summer. She's also wearing a scowl, which isn't a surprise. I don't know that I've ever seen her smile. Even when she's playing the piano—the thing she supposedly loves doing more than anything in the world—she's frowning. I always figured it was because she was concentrating, but Steve says it's because she's afraid of making a mistake. Of course he also says that she does smile sometimes, just never when I'm around.

Maybe she won't see us, I think, maybe we just blend in with the backdrop. But Christina has too much of her mother in her; she spies us almost instantly. Her eyes narrow to razor slits.

Cue the theme from
Jaws
.

She's coming straight for us, practically stomping up to us in her black boots. Brand pushes his backpack, the one with Mr. Daniel's, farther under the table with his foot. I can hear Steve muttering from down below. My guess is he's praying for divine intervention. A bolt of holy wrath to disintegrate his sister in the middle of the restaurant. Or maybe to make himself disappear. Teleport back to the safety of room 213, where he's supposed to be.

“Steven?”

That voice gives me chills. Christina is standing by our table, hands on her hips. She looks so much older than seventeen. Steve doesn't move, even though she can clearly see him. It's McDonald's. It's not like there are tablecloths. Brand looks
out the window and pretends he doesn't even notice her despite the fact that she's standing right next to him. I look at Christina and smile. She doesn't return the favor.

“Steven Sakata, get out from under the table.”

Slowly, painfully, Steve emerges, pulling himself up and slumping in his chair, still trying to hide behind his cup. I scoot as close to him as I can. United front, like always.

Christina checks her phone. “What are you doing here? It's twelve thirty on a Friday afternoon. Why aren't you in school?” Her red knit sweater heaves with each breath. I hate it when people make a big production of breathing impatiently, like they're huffing and puffing to blow your house down.

Steve doesn't answer, so I answer for him. “We could ask you the same thing.”

Christina raises her eyebrows. She has big eyebrows that don't really match her narrow face, probably the only thing about her that keeps her from being obnoxiously pretty, though I would never tell her that. Instead I once told her they looked like fuzzy black caterpillars somebody stepped on and pasted to her forehead. She told me to grow a brain.

“It's called work-study,” Christina says. “Though you're probably not familiar with either of those terms. I was on my way to the animal clinic.” She looks directly at Steve. “Do Mom and Dad know where you are? And what happened to your lip?
Is that blood?” She points to Steve's shirt, the spot of crimson on olive green.

Steve looks dumbly at his shirt and then shrugs. Christina groans in disgust. “You know what? Forget it. I don't even
want
to know. How about we just call Mom right now and tell her where you're at? She can take off work and come get you. I don't have time to give you a ride.”

Steve is still speechless. Like his busted lip is blocking the words. It's okay, though. I can handle this.

“How about
you
stop being such a kiss-up, goody-two-shoes, tattle-telling little miss know-it-all and leave him alone,” I say, though the “little” doesn't really apply. She's about six inches taller than me, made worse by the fact that we are all sitting down and she's hovering over us.

“How about
you
stay out of it for once, Topher. You're probably the one who put him up to this in the first place, whatever
this
is. I swear, when Mom and Dad hear that you have been skipping school . . .” She doesn't finish the thought, leaving the punishment to Steve's imagination (the rack is not completely out of the question). Instead she holds up her phone again.

Brand sucks in a sharp breath. We've just jumped from DEFCON 3 to DEFCON 1. If Steve's parents get involved, then we are totally gefragt, like a one-legged man in a kicking contest. If she calls, Steve will bail. Then we'll be forced to abort the
mission. No man left behind. Christina holds her phone to her lips and commands it to “Call Mom's Work.”

Calling Mom's Work,
the phone responds.

This requires drastic measures.

Steve is catatonic, paralyzed by the thought of his parents coming to get him. It's up to me to do something. I quickly run through my options. I could tackle her, wrestle her phone away from her, and smash it against the table, except I know that she is crazy strong from all those years in gymnastics; I arm-wrestled her once a year ago for a dollar and ended up on the floor, both her
and
Steve laughing at me. We could simply make a break for it, all three of us, head for the fire exit right behind us and hope she doesn't pursue, except I'm not sure I can run on my swollen ankle. I could just dump my water all over her phone in the hopes of short-circuiting it, though I can't imagine what level of wrath that would incur. Steve says she sleeps with her phone underneath her pillow. I'm pretty sure she would rip my head off.

Brand looks at me as if to say,
What now?
I'm leaning heavily toward plan B, ankle or no ankle, when Steve starts muttering to himself—the word
no
, over and over again, like some religious chant. I make a head motion to Brand, something intended to mean
Let's make a break for it
, but he just gives me a perplexed look. We really should have worked out some emergency signals ahead of time. It's too late anyway. I think I can hear the sound
of ringing coming from Christina's phone.

Then it happens. The unimaginable.

“No,” Steve says, loud enough for Christina to hear this time, standing up abruptly, causing the whole table to shake and nearly knocking over his water.

“Excuse me?” Christina says.

“Hang up. This isn't about you.” Steve's fat lower lip is trembling now, but his voice doesn't waver. His sister rolls her eyes, ignoring him, pressing the phone to her ear.

Steve explodes.

“I said hang up!” he shouts, slamming his hands against the table.

He has her attention now. He has the whole restaurant's attention. All conversation stops. All faces turn to us, midchew, midslurp, mid ketchup-packet squeeze. The toddlers in the PlayPlace stop running, stuck halfway up their tubes. I look over at the counter. Even Clarisse with the pretty smile and the extra nose hole is looking at us.

Christina lowers her phone, ending the call. She glances nervously around, cheeks on fire. She leans across the table. “Stop it, Steven,” she hisses, teeth clenched. “You're making a scene.”

“This isn't about you,” Steve repeats, softer this time, suddenly aware that he's the center of attention, which isn't exactly
his favorite place to be. “Not everything is about you.”

“What are you even talking about?” Christina says, still keeping her voice down, though you can tell it's a struggle. “You're being irresponsible. You're obviously hurt. You're skipping school. You're going to get in trouble if you haven't already.” She says “if” as if she already knows the kinds of things we've been up to. Of course the fat lip
is
sort of a giveaway.

“I don't care,” Steve shoots back, which I can't imagine is at all true, but maybe, right now, in this moment, he really doesn't. “I'm doing something important. And I really don't care if you like it or understand it or approve of it—I just need you to get out of the way and let me do it.”

Our heads—Brands and mine—swivel around to Christina, tennis match style, ready for the return volley. She hesitates. She actually seems taken aback for a second, but she quickly regains her composure, her voice cool and even. “Listen, I don't know what these two have put you up to, but whatever it is, it's obviously not good. So why don't you just let me call Mom and she can pick you up and take you back to school.”