Slob (14 page)

Jeremy came into the kitchen wearing her jacket and a black ski cap pulled down around her ears. Her ice skates were slung over one shoulder. She stood in the doorway and watched me for a minute.

“I’m going skating with Arthur,” she said.

I waited for her to ask me if I wanted to come. She didn’t. Again, I felt her watching me.

“What?” I said.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “Even if you see the person who did it, even if the police can find him and catch him and stick him in jail, it won’t change things. Not really.”

“How can you say that? Of course it will change things!” I said.

“It won’t change things for us, I mean,” she said. “Or for Mom and Dad. It won’t make them less dead.”

“It will change things for the person who killed them, won’t it?” I said. My voice sounded all strangled, I was so angry. “Living in a prison cell for the rest of your life is a pretty big change, in my opinion. Jeez, Jeremy, I would have thought you of all people would see why this is so important!”

“It’s just—”

“It’s just that now you have a bunch of friends and you and Zelda are getting along, so everything is fine, right? Well things are not fine for me, in case you haven’t noticed. Things are pretty lousy, if you want to know the truth. I’m the butt of everyone’s jokes, someone is helping themself to my lunch, and Mr. Wooly is going to humiliate me in front of the entire class. Yet again.”

I knew what she was going to say—that even if the murderer was caught, people were not going to stop making fun of me. That I would still be 57 percent fatter than the average American twelve-year-old.

That’s not what she said.

She didn’t say anything. She just hiked up her skates higher on her shoulder and left the apartment.

The whole thing bothered me so much that I ripped off the white gloves, poured another bowlful of fake Cocoa Puffs, and scarfed it down. After that, I fished around the fridge until I found half a turkey sub that Mom had brought home from work and began to devour that too. My stomach was suddenly gripped with the familiar aching emptiness that came on right before a major food binge. The first time I had felt it was a few months after my parents were killed. Back then I ate a half pint of rocky road ice cream, and that made it better. After a while it would take a whole pint to fill the emptiness. Then a pint and a Snickers bar, and on and on. The way I was feeling now, I could make a clean sweep of a five-gallon drum of ice cream and still have room for a family-sized bag of pretzels. I was still chewing on the final bite of the sub and was just getting up to rummage through the kitchen cabinets for more food when I caught sight of the white gloves lying on the stack of
Retro TV Magazine
s
.
One glove lay on top of the other, just like two hands that were patiently waiting on their owner’s lap. Very narrow, delicate hands. It made me think of my mother’s own hands—long and slender and pale—and I shivered. At that moment it felt like she was sitting right there, across from me, waiting to see what I would do next.

I stood there for a second, staring at the gloves and feeling the awful ache in my belly. Then I sat back down again. I slipped on the gloves, picked up an issue of
Retro TV Magazine
, and resumed my search for the cheerleader episode of
Charlie’s Angels.
The painful feeling in my gut didn’t leave. If anything, it grew worse, but I just kept my butt planted in that chair and the gloves on my hand. As long as the gloves were on my hands, I reasoned, I could not eat.

I finished my search at a little past eleven. To my dismay, I found that the episode, called
Pom Pom Angels,
was on a total of twenty-three times in the past two years! I hadn’t counted on that. No doubt that particular episode was so popular because of the cheerleaders.

Well, I would just have to catch some more old signals, and with any luck they would be from really unpopular shows that were aired only once in the past two years.

I watched the Freakout Channel until three thirty. I was watching out of habit, really, since I now knew that the signal from Nemesis wouldn’t come in until the evening. At three thirty I took Honey out for a walk and came back and watched more TV until Mom said dinner was ready. My eyes were burning from watching all that TV, and I felt slightly nauseated. Apparently Jeremy was not feeling so good herself. She had come back from ice skating around four and hadn’t been out of her room since.

“Go tell Jeremy that dinner is ready,” Mom said as she gave the salmon burgers a final flip.

I knocked on her door. “Jeremy. Dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” she called back.

“You all right?”

“Yes,” she said. Then added, “I’m sleeping.”

“She’s sleeping,” I told Mom.

“Really? Is she sick?” I could practically hear Mom sorting through her brain’s stockpile of teas with healing properties.

“I think she’s just tired,” I said. Actually, I guessed she was mad about this morning, and that made
me
mad. She was the one who was being difficult. I suspected she was jealous, although I never would have thought her to be that type. People change, though. She should have just been thankful, she should be thinking of something more than herself. She should be thinking about our mom and dad and doing what was right.

After dinner I went back into my room and into the world of Freakout. By now, I probably knew just as much about these shows as Arthur. Speaking of which, when I turned on the TV, an episode of
Happy Days
was playing. After watching a few episodes, I was beginning to get the appeal of The Fonz. He was tough on the outside and nice on the inside. People love that. Somehow it’s even better than being nice all over.

Then came
B.J. and the Bear,
which is about a truck driver and a chimpanzee. Yes, it is as stupid as it sounds. And wouldn’t you know it, they had a marathon that night. Three
B.J. and the Bear
episodes in a row. I didn’t know if I could stand it. I pulled the scavenged junk box out of the closet and started messing around with some of the items, just for something to do. I picked up an old bike chain and turned it over in my hands. I’d always wanted to do something with it, but I never could think what.

Suddenly there was
pift.

My heart jumped and my head shot up. On TV a fuzzy Jan Brady was sneezing like mad. I watched long enough to get the gist of the plotline (six minutes). Jan was allergic to the family dog, Tiger, and they were going to have to get rid of him.

Okay. We were back in business. Now I had to slip on the white gloves again and start studying two years’ worth of
Retro TV Magazine
for every instance of
The Brady Bunch
on the Freakout Channel
.
Plus, there was a very good chance that this episode had been repeated several times. If only I had been able to catch two old episodes in a row, I would have a better chance at figuring out when these shows were first broadcast. But since there was no guarantee that I’d hold onto the signal for that long, I went to Arthur’s carton and started my long night’s work.

Then I got lucky.

There was a commercial break on TV, and a fuzzy lime green screen came on with the words
Freakout Pop Quiz
in hot pink bubble letters. Then a voice read out the pop quiz question while it was spelled out on-screen: “What famous
Laverne and Shirley
star was born on this day, sixty-three years ago?”

I waited through a bunch of commercials, terrified every second that I’d lose the signal before the answer came on. I didn’t. “The answer to today’s Freakout Pop Quiz is . . . Penny Marshall, who played Laverne on
Laverne and Shirley.”

I was so happy I could have done that embarrassing little dance.

Now all I had to do was to check the Internet for Penny Marshall’s birthday. Once I found that out, I just had to do a simple calculation to figure out the day, month, and year of this broadcast. Presto!

Well, not quite
presto
since we didn’t have the Internet at home. I’d have to wait till I got to school to check it.

Jan Brady was gone, and in her place was a chimpanzee doing a handstand on a pool table.

I’d lost the signal.

 

 

Jeremy left for school without me the next morning. She must have snuck out while I was in the shower, because her door was closed when I walked into the bathroom and when I came out, the door was open and she was gone. She’d never left without me before, and I won’t lie, it hurt my feelings. At first. Then it just started making me angrier with her, and by the time I got to school, I decided that I wouldn’t wait for her after school. I just hoped that she would notice.

I arrived at school early to sign up for the computer workstation. There’s only one computer in our classroom, and it’s hooked up to the Internet, so it’s always the most popular workstation. I was the first one on the list today. I was shaking with nervousness. Everything rested on this one piece of information.

Mason Ragg slunk in, late as usual. He looked the same as always—from the top of his wild uncombed head to the tips of his busted-up sneakers, every inch of him seemed to say, “Oh yeah? Go ahead, I dare you.” It was almost unbelievable to me that only the day before yesterday, I had seen him fleeing from me with terror in his face.

He caught me staring at him, but this time his eyes swerved away quickly.

For no reason at all, I felt like a bully.

Well, maybe there was a tiny reason.

I started thinking about this whole karma thing. It occurred to me that I might have collected some pretty rotten karma lately. After all, I had attempted to clap Mason’s wrist in a spiked handcuff and possibly poison him with facial hair bleach, and the whole time he was innocent. I assumed that these were fairly serious crimes, karma-wise.

I looked at the computer screen as it was slowly booting up. If I ever needed some good karma, it was now.

I stood up and walked over to Mason, who was sitting in the art station, drawing on a piece of paper. His back was to me, so I was able to get a good look at his drawing. It was a wolf howling.

“Wow, that’s good,” I said. It really was. The wolf’s fur was drawn with these careful, fine little strokes. It was hard to believe Mason could do something that delicate.

Mason’s head swiveled around. Thankfully I had a view of the unscarred side of his face this time. It was like the half man/half woman that you’d see in old-time circus pictures. He gave a totally different impression if you saw him from the left side or from the right. From this view, Mason Ragg just looked like an unkempt kid. Nothing sinister in the slightest.

“I don’t have your (really bad curse word) cookies, if that’s what you want,” he said.

“I know you don’t,” I told him.

“Then what do you want?” He didn’t look mad. He looked nervous. Of
me!
Owen Birnbaum. Professional Boulder.

“I want Penny Marshall’s birthday to be before October 25.”

No, I didn’t say that.

“I want to tell you something,” I said. An opportunity for improving my karma had just popped into my head. “First of all, could you still be exempt from going to gym class?”

“I guess,” he said cagily. “If I wanted to be.”

“Then ask for an exemption today,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because Wooly has it out for us,” I said. From the corner of my eye, I could see the computer screen light up and the little
ta-dring
sound. “He thinks that we somehow knew there was going to be a fire drill on Friday and we deliberately put ourselves last so we could get out of the triathlon. He’s going to make us do something totally humiliating today, you can count on it.”

This didn’t seem to impress Mason the way I had hoped. He turned back to his drawing and started working on it again.

“I
did
know,” he said.

“Know what?”

“I knew about the fire drill.”

“But how?” I asked.

“I hear things,” he answered mysteriously.

“So you put us last deliberately?” I asked.

Mason nodded. His pen was adding tiny slashes of fur to the wolf’s cheek.

Two things occurred to me:

1. I had really misjudged Mason. He was actually a pretty nice guy.

2. I had a hell of a lot of work to do in the bad karma department.

“Everyone wanted to see you make a clown of yourself,” Mason explained. He drew a full moon in the left corner of the page. “I hate clowns,” he said.

Oh.

Well, maybe I had slightly less work to do in the karma department.

“Anyway,” I said, edging toward the computer station, “just remember about the exemption.”

He nodded without looking up.

I walked away hoping it was enough to erase all the bad stuff I had done. It
felt
like it was enough. In fact, I thought it was downright heroic considering that when Wooly saw that Mason wasn’t in gym class, he’d pour out all his wrath on me. And believe me, I’m no hero.

I sat down in front of the computer and signed on to the Internet. I typed in
penny marshall birthday
in the search engine. Before I hit Enter, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and thought, Pleasepleaseplease.

Then I hit Enter.

There it was, right on top of the page. I didn’t even have to click on a website.
Penny Marshall Date of Birth Oct. 15, 1943.

I did the math. That
Brady Bunch
episode was aired on October 15, 2006. Ten days before my parents were killed. The timing was right. It was perfect, in fact, since it gave me ten days to hook Nemesis up to the deli’s surveillance camera receiver and attempt to capture the signals from the night of October 25.

Amazing what some good karma could do.