Slob (7 page)

“Our apartment building faces the roof of the Fuji Towers too.”

Nima nodded. He was trying not to look confused.

“The thing is, I want . . . I
need
to see a particular thing that happened in the past,” I explained to him. “Something that happened almost two years ago.”

“At Black Baron Pub?” he asked, still confused.

“No, no. Somewhere else.”

“So your machine Nemesis,” Nima said slowly, “she will show a moment that have already passed?”

“With the help of the Fuji Towers roof, yes.”

There was a pause during which I waited, not breathing, for him to ask the question that I desperately didn’t want him to ask:

A slow smile twisted up one side of his mouth.

“What?” I asked nervously.

“Maybe Nemesis can show me at Pema’s cousin’s house last week, looking most depressed. Looking like so.” He cupped his chin in his hand and looked most depressed.

I smiled. “And we’ll show it to Pema.”

“And she will weep with happiness.”

After I left Nima, I was in a much better mood. My stomach had lost that empty feeling, and the sound of Mr. Boscana’s voice was no longer ringing in my ears. I decided to go to visit the demolition site after all. It was a big one. You could tell it was a brand new site because the plywood fence around it was still a pale yellowish color and there were no posters taped to it or things scrawled on it. I walked around it once, scoping it out casually. Then I walked to the end of the block, turned around, and walked by it again slowly, this time letting my hand drag along the wooden fence. I put pressure on the boards at every seam to see if there was any give. There wasn’t. In a way I was relieved. I’d never scavenged without Jeremy before. I wasn’t entirely sure I had the guts to do it alone.

Just as I had satisfied myself that that there was no way in and had passed by the final board, I noticed something off to my right. Next to the demolition site was a community garden with a six-foot chain-link fence around it. The high wooden slabs of the demolition fence butted up against the chain-link fence, all except for one spot toward the back. The wooden fence hadn’t quite been long enough to reach the length of the site, and since there was already a chain-link fence right there, they hadn’t bothered to close off the foot-wide section.

I hesitated. It would mean scaling the chain-link fence, then trying to squeeze through the opening. I had images of myself being wedged between the wooden board and the adjacent building and of firefighters arriving to pry me free. Or worse, if someone called 911 and Mom found out about it. I started to walk past, then stopped again, stared at the opening. I could fit. I’d have to suck in my stomach and do some wiggling, but I was fairly sure I could get in there. What if there was an amplifier just sitting there? I had to try. I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t.

I opened the gate to the community garden and walked in. There wasn’t much of anything growing at this time of year, just some odds-and-ends flowers and weeds. There was garbage too, probably tossed into it from the tenement building next door. People can be such pigs when they think no one’s looking.

I walked to the back of the garden, and I took one quick look around. No one. Then I glanced up at the tenement building, but the way the sun was hitting its side, I couldn’t make out much inside the windows. I took a deep breath and started to climb. As you might have guessed, I’m not much of a climber. I made a huge racket what with the fence jangling against the post and my foot slipping once so that I yelped like a dog whose paw had been stepped on. Swinging myself over the fence was a fumbling “oof—oh, crap—ouch” production. It’s amazing that I didn’t have the entire 20th police precinct circling me by the end of it.

On the other side of the fence, I squeezed between the wooden board and the building, and let me tell you, it took some major breath-holding. There was one point where the edges of the board held me in a vise, pinching my belly and my butt so hard I thought for sure I’d have to start screaming for help. But then I had visions of Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s hole and all his woodland friends pulling his paws to uncork him. I have no woodland friends. The best I could hope for was a couple of snickering pedestrians poking at me with Zabar’s baguettes. I sucked in my breath harder, wiggled, and, finally, I was through.

The place was amazing! A field of rubble, studded with treasure: microwaves, sink tops, an exercise bike, several floor lamps, a shower stall, a bunch of computers, five dining room chairs, a dog kennel, three air conditioners, four vacuum cleaners, a mountain bike in mint condition except for a flat front tire, a beautiful spill of wires and cables, and so much more. It took my breath away. Fully half of one of the tenements still stood. It looked like it had been chopped in two by a giant’s ax, and the giant had smashed the front half to bits but left the back half alone. You could see right into the ruined rooms, with curtains still hanging, televisions still sitting on their stands, but everything dark and gloomy. All that talk of ghosts with Nima now gave me the heebie-jeebies. I could imagine one of those fuzzy figures in The Black Baron Pub recording walking through those rooms, pausing to pull aside the filthy, tattered curtains, then settling on a broken chair. It made me goose pimply, so I told myself I was an idiot, opened my backpack, pulled out my tools, and got down to work.

Before a half hour was up, I had managed to fill my backpack. I even found a silver ice-skate charm for Jeremy, who happened to be a stellar ice skater, and a set of brand-new ratchets for myself. Still, nowhere in that mess of rubble was an amplifier. I left my heavy backpack on the ground and moved closer to the half-standing tenement. That was where there were some thicker piles of brick and mortar chunks. Crouching low, I pushed away rubble to inspect what was underneath.

That was when I heard the loud plink-plinking noise. It sounded like it was coming from an enormous wind chime. I froze where I was, kneeling on a knoll of bricks, listening. The sound came again, and this time I was fairly certain it was from inside the still-standing, sliced-in-half tenement.

My instinct was to make a run for it, but I had left my backpack several yards away, in the opposite direction of the hole in the fence. It would take me too long to scramble over the wreckage, retrieve my backpack, then squeeze myself out through the fence again. I estimated that it was better to hunker down and wait to see what was coming. Hopefully, the person wouldn’t notice me amidst the piles of debris. Then my mind began to stray back to the image of the ghost passing through the rooms.

The plink-plinking came again, louder this time, and I tell you, I nearly fainted from fear. The fact that I didn’t makes me think that it must be amazingly difficult to faint from fear.

I saw no figure of ghostly light. Instead, a figure of darkness appeared within the depths of the ruined tenement’s third floor. It was black and bent, a giant bug with massive feelers stretched out in all directions. Mom had once been to Puerto Rico and she told me that she had seen cockroaches the size of kittens. They had nothing on this thing. It shuffled along, disappearing behind the exposed beams, keeping in the shadows, plinking as it moved.

I couldn’t run now even if I wanted to. I was paralyzed with terror.

Then I saw the others.

There were two more of these bug things, creeping along in the shadows, their feelers extended. It was too much for me. I couldn’t hunker any more. I bolted back to my knapsack, snatched it up, and ran, not caring that my backpack was plinking like mad.

Oh. My knapsack was plinking.

Much like the giant cockroaches. Which meant they were probably hauling scavenged items, same as I was.

I was at the fence when I realized this. I stopped and turned around, looking up at the tenement’s third floor. From my present angle, I couldn’t see very well into the interior, but it didn’t matter. One of the giant cockroaches was standing a few yards away from me, having just emerged from the bottom floor of the tenement. He was staring at me with an alarmed look on his face. He did have a face. It was filthy and bearded. He shifted his weight, and his feelers plink-plinked. They were made of old metal pipes that were sticking out of a sack strapped to his back. Most were lead, but some were copper, which fetched a tidy sum at the scrap-metal dealers.

Just as I remembered the words of that young, nicely dressed guy at the Ninety-third Street demo site—how the metal scavengers weren’t beyond using violence to protect their territory—the figure held something up for me to see. He had been holding it in his hands the whole time, but I had been so focused on his face and feelers that I hadn’t noticed it. It was a large bronze-colored sheet of metal with tiny white rectangles all over it. I stared at the thing. It was so oddly familiar. Then I realized what it was. The cover of the building’s mailboxes. The metal scavenger had ripped it off the wall. I could see the names on those little rectangular pieces of paper: Tess Bailhouse, J. Rodriguez, R. S. Anderson, Robert/Shelly Weinstein . . . I might have some of their stuff in my backpack. Bits and scraps of their lives. It made me feel ooky. It made me feel like one of those grave robbers who dig up caskets and slip the wedding rings off dead people’s fingers.

The scrap metal scavenger glanced at my backpack, sagging and lumpy with my loot. He smiled at me with brown teeth, and he raised his eyebrows.

“We done all right,” he said, giving the mailbox cover a proud shake. He wasn’t alarmed anymore. He had taken my measure and had decided I was on his team.

That made me feel even ookier.

I squeezed through the opening in the fence and climbed the garden fence in about two minutes, no wiggling, no stumbling. I don’t know how I did it.

 

 

By the time I got home, Jeremy was already there with her friend Arthur.

“Hey, where were you?” Jeremy said. “We waited outside the school for, like, twenty minutes.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table with an open notebook in front of Arthur, who was scribbling something in it.

“I didn’t feel well,” I said. “I left school early.” I didn’t want to talk about my day. It had been too strange.

Jeremy scrutinized me. “You don’t look sick,” she said.

“I feel better now.”

“Good. We’re furious,” Jeremy said. “Aren’t we furious, Arthur?”

“We are totally . . .” Arthur stopped writing for a moment and searched for the right word. “Furious.”

Arthur is the president of GWAB. She actually does look like a boy, and it’s not just because she has her hair cut short with tiny sideburns showing or because of the red polo shirt and chinos she always wears. She has a sort of heavy, bully-boy jaw. I think that makes the difference. Jeremy could cut her hair as short as Arthur’s, but she would just look like a girl with short hair.

“What happened?” I asked. “Oh, was it Shackly? I told you he wouldn’t go for the name thing.”

“He says we have to retake the test tomorrow, and if we don’t write our girl names on our tests, he’s going to mark them with Fs! And that test is 50 percent of our entire grade!” Jeremy said. She was all bright-eyed. It was partly from anger, I’m sure, but I think it was partly from pure joy. She loved stuff like this. Fighting for hopeless causes.

“He
will
fail you guys, you know,” I warned them.

“Let him.” Jeremy smiled. “Mr. Shackly is going to be in for a little surprise tomorrow.”

I looked at the two of them. Arthur was writing away in the notebook.

“What are you two doing?” I asked suspiciously.

“Oh, we’re just drafting an e-mail, that’s all,” Jeremy said. She jabbed Arthur in the ribs and Arthur snorted and nodded. “Yes, just a simple e-mail,” Jeremy continued. “Which Arthur is going to send to all the major television networks tonight. We think the news shows will be very interested to know about this situation.”

I sincerely doubted that, but I didn’t want to be the one to burst their bubble.

“Arthur will be our television spokesperson, of course,” Jeremy went on to explain. That was even more dubious, since Arthur generally never said more than a few words at a time. “We’re actually hoping that she gets on
Good Morning America
or David Letterman or something. That way Arthur will actually appear in her own collection.”

At the mention of this, Arthur looked up from her writing and smiled. It was a nice smile. By the way, Arthur nearly always wears the same clothes every day, even though everyone teases her about it. It’s because she won’t buy girls’ clothes and her mother refuses to shop in the boys’ department for her. So she is stuck with one boy outfit that another GWAB member gave her out of pity—the red polo shirt and chinos.

“What’s her collection?” I asked.

“Arthur collects
Retro TV Magazines,"
Jeremy explained.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“They give the TV listings, just like
TV Guide,
” Jeremy said, “but they pay the most attention to the retro shows. You know, plot summaries, trivia, stuff like that. Arthur’s had been collecting them since—how long, Arthur?”

“Since I was six.”

“Really?” I said. That was actually impressive.

Weird, but impressive.

I left them to their work, and went to my room and sat down heavily on the edge of my bed. I usually went right to work on Nemesis, but the day had taken a toll on me. I felt completely unmotivated. And it was all because of Mason Ragg. Who, I now reminded myself, would be eating my three Oreo cookies tomorrow unless I found a way to prevent it.

That got me to my feet.

I went to my desk, pulled out my yellow graph paper notebook and a mechanical pencil, and started to draw. At first it was really just crazy doodles—a huge guillotine hanging from the ceiling above my lunch sack, a dagger that shot out of my lunch sack the second someone touched it, stuff like that. I got it out of my system, then I really settled down to business.