Stealing the Game (15 page)

“What if it feels right for one person and wrong for the other?” I said.

“It’s like that song in
A Chorus Line
. You know the musical?”

“About dancers. I haven’t seen it. My mom loves it, though. She’s always trying to get me to see the DVD.”

“Well, there’s this song about being twelve and thirteen, and the girl sings, ‘Too young to take over, too old to ignore. Gee, I’m almost ready, but what for?’
That’s how I feel most of the time. Like I’m, you know, on the verge of doing something great, but I just can’t find the door that opens to that thing I’m supposed to do. My
mom keeps saying to slow down, I’ve got plenty of time, enjoy my childhood, happiest days of my life. Blah, blah, blah. But then I’m supposed to act mature, study for my future, grow
up. And I’m like, ‘Make up your mind!’”

I nodded. That’s exactly how I felt. I just hadn’t had the right words before. Those were the right words.

“And now I’m sitting here with you and I don’t even know you but you know about my comic books and you planted stolen merchandise on me and we’re talking about kissing
and it’s making me feel weird even though I was the one trying to make you feel weird.” She took a deep break and sighed. “I hope fourteen is a lot better.”

We looked at each other. I didn’t know what to say, but for the first time, I didn’t feel like I had to say anything. Brooke had forgotten about winning and I’d forgotten about
not humiliating myself.

“That was the longest, most grammatically incorrect sentence I have ever uttered,” Brooke said. “And if you ever repeat it to anyone, there will be severe
consequences.”

“Your lousy grammar secret is safe with me.”

She smiled. “At least my mom would be happy that I remembered that song.”

My phone rang. Theo. I debated whether to just press
IGNORE
, but my curiosity won out over my not wanting to shatter the moment I was having with Brooke.

“I have to answer,” I told her. “Family stuff.”

“Of course,” she said. She quickly jumped up, grabbed her comics bag, and started to leave.

“You don’t have to go,” I said lamely.

“I’m already late,” she said. Then she grinned and waved like a magician conjuring a spell. “None of this ever happened. The comics, the store, talking about kissing, and
me quoting
A Chorus Line
—
especially
that—none of it happened. It was all just a dream.” And she spun around and hurried away.

I watched her a moment, thinking maybe I should go after her. But the phone buzzed again in my hand and I answered.

“What?” I said.

“You’re not going to like this,” Theo said.

I sighed. Why should this be any different from the rest of my wonderful day?

“
BAD
news,” Theo said. “Your brother definitely has been lying.”

“That’s not news,” I said. I could still smell Brooke, a combination of fresh-baked cherry pie and root beer. I shook my head to focus on Theo’s voice.

“The news is that not only hasn’t he been attending Stanford Law School for the past year, he hasn’t even been living at the address he says he has.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “We’ve sent packages to that address. Food, birthday presents. He Skyped me from his apartment holding the
Arkham Asylum
Xbox
game I sent him. He gave me a FaceTime tour of his place, showed me his roommates, John and Herb.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, dude. There are no John and Herb living at the address you gave me.”

“Maybe you wrote it down wrong,” I said. My voice was rising with fear and anger.

He read back the address I’d given him. It was correct.

“Four undergraduate girls live at that address. The lease is in the name of Elizabeth Graham. I checked with the university and she’s definitely enrolled. She’s a senior and
she’s lived at that address for two years.”

I was walking through a quiet neighborhood on my way home. I’d stayed out about as long as possible without causing suspicion that would release a barrage of parentally concerned
questions:
Where were you? Who were you with? Were there drugs? You can tell us anything. But seriously, were there drugs?

“Hey, did you hear about Roger?” Theo said, interrupting my thoughts.

“What about him?”

“The Garage Bandits hit his home today while everyone was at work or at school. Got a couple old laptops and four mountain bikes. His dad was royally pissed, man. Those bikes were worth a
couple grand. They even took his little sister’s bike, which she just got for her birthday last week.”

“So?”

“That’s a coincidence,” Theo said.

“What?” I said.

“That they broke in the week after she got a new bike.”

I paused. “Yeah, that’s weird. You thinking maybe it’s not a coincidence?”

“I don’t know yet. What do you think?”

“You’re the detective, dude. I’m just a guy trying to figure out what’s going on with his brother.”

“Right. Sorry to drop the bomb on you, man. But it looks like Jax is mixed up in something he doesn’t want you or your parents to know about.”

That much I already knew, so I thanked Theo and hung up. Within seconds my phone buzzed with a text message from Jax.

Good news, SP. Got you a rematch with the Undertakers!

“
OH
my God!” Dad shouted, looking at my face as I walked through the front door. “What happened? Are you
okay?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Accident at basketball.”

“Accident? What kind of accident? Did the backboard fall on you?”

Mom walked over to me and calmly studied my face, looking into my eyes. “Pupils aren’t dilated. You dizzy?”

“No.”

“Did you vomit?”

“No.”

“Any loss of memory?”

“No.”

“Did you fold your laundry this morning like I asked?”

“No.”

She kissed my cheek and smiled. “He’s normal. No concussion.” I forgot to mention that Mom did a year of medical school before deciding to become a lawyer. She said she
preferred the musty smell of courthouses to the medicine-y smell of hospitals. She patted my cheek. “And fold your laundry already, young man. It’s been sitting in the hamper for two
days.”

Yeah, about laundry. I like to just fish out the clothes from the clean hamper as I need them. Saves the whole fold-and-put-away step. Mom does not agree with my genius plan. “I’ll
do it now,” I said, anxious to get away so I didn’t have to answer any more questions.

Dad didn’t look convinced about my health. “Maybe we should take him to the emergency room. Just to be safe. Get some X-rays, maybe an MRI.”

“I’m fine, Dad,” I told him.

“Are you a doctor?” he asked.

“Are you?” I answered sharply. I immediately wished I hadn’t, but Dad had a tendency to worry too much over every little thing I do. Mom was always the calm one, cleaning out
my bloody wounds while Dad cringed. On the other hand, when I was sick it was Dad who spoiled me by fetching me ice cream from the store or sitting and watching whatever shows I wanted. If I really
wanted Dad to flip out, I’d tell him that I shoplifted earrings that afternoon. And if I wanted him to start climbing the walls and walking on the ceiling, I’d tell him about
Jax’s lies. Or that Jax had arranged for us to play the same vicious guys again. I didn’t even want to think about that possibility. What would I come home with then—broken ribs,
missing teeth?

“No, wise guy, I’m not a doctor,” Dad said. “I’m just a dad who’s concerned about his son. Sue me.”

Mom laughed. “If you do, I know a good lawyer.”

Dad frowned at her. “Really? Lawyer jokes at a time like this?”

Mom put her arms around Dad. “He’s already iced it, sweetheart. The nose doesn’t look broken. He just needs a couple Advil, more ice, and a good dinner.”

“Good dinner” consisted of Chinese takeout they’d brought home after work. Over my orange chicken and spring rolls I answered all of Mom and Dad’s questions about school,
even though they were the same questions I got most every day.
Who’d I hang out with? What questions did the teachers ask? When’s my next quiz?
Dad studied me like he was my
lawyer visiting me in jail and wanted to know if any of the other prisoners had tried to shank me. Mom pretended to be focusing on her curry chicken and fried dumplings, but I could tell she was
weighing every answer as a sign of how it would affect my getting into Stanford.

Sometimes I think my greatest work as a comic book writer is the elaborately positive life that I manufactured for my parents. Thanks to my creative answers to their questions, they thought I
was hugely popular in school, high-fiving guys on my way to class, every girl’s object of affection, and the favorite student of every teacher, even the ones whose classes I was struggling
in. In my carefully constructed Bizarro World, girls talked to me all the time, and I had deep friendships with kids of every race, religion, and creed (though I’m not sure what
creed
means). Actually, that last one was mostly true. Basketball brings all kinds of kids together, and I got along with everyone on my team. But I wasn’t close friends with
anybody. Nobody I would confide secrets in unless I had to, like I’d had to with Theo. No one knew about me being a designer baby. Heck, no one even knew I drew comics.

I was friendly to everyone but friends with no one.

Today with Brooke had been the closest I’d come to spilling everything. But, in the end, I hadn’t. I’d sipped my lemonade and iced my face. If this were English class, Mr.
Laubaugh would say that icing my face was a perfect metaphor for how I kept people at a distance, like I was freezing them out. I immediately thought of Brooke, how she’d appreciate that idea
and I should text it to her—and how I never, ever would. Point made.

Suddenly the doorbell rang and I grabbed the interruption as an excuse to escape more questions about my imaginary life.

“I’ll get it,” I said, jumping up and racing to the front door.

“Wait,” Dad said, as if he’d forgotten to tell me something. But too late. When I pulled it open, Hannah Selby stood in the doorway with a learning-is-fun smile.

She brushed past me into the house and said, “Where are we doing this?”

“Doing what?” I asked.

Mom and Dad appeared in the doorway looking guilty.

“We told Hannah to start the tutoring tonight, Chris,” Dad said.

“No point putting off getting those math and science grades up. Right?” Mom added.

I just stood there, forcing myself not to yell at them.

“Right,” I said coldly. But the glare I shot Mom and Dad told them I felt betrayed. The way fans felt when Christian Bale said he wasn’t going to play Batman anymore.

Mom cleared off the Chinese food and set us up at the kitchen table. “Study hard,” she said as she left the room. I could tell she felt bad. Good. She should.

“We will, Mrs. Richards,” Hannah said. She unpacked a bunch of books, tablets, and pencils from her briefcase. Then she sat down and looked directly at me. “What happened to
your face, Chris?” she asked.

“Basketball,” I said.

“Wow. Middle school is a lot more violent than I remember.”

“It wasn’t at school. It was at the park. We played some club team called the Undertakers.”

She laughed. “Really? They call themselves that with a straight face, huh?”

“They’re pretty good, so they can get away with calling themselves pretty much anything.”

She touched my face with her fingertips as she examined my bruises. Her fingers felt cool and soft, kind of soothing. In a gentle voice she said, “You’ll get them next time.
It’s your house, right? No one comes to your house and gets away with disrespecting you.”

I didn’t say anything. This was not the first time I’d gotten hurt playing basketball. I’d had cuts, bruises, sprains, black eyes, bloody noses. And, to be honest, I usually
thought they made me look cool. Like a battle wound or something. But this wound wasn’t the result of a fair battle—more like a sneak attack. That didn’t count.

Hannah pulled up her right pant leg. A three-inch scar like a fat white worm curled around her knee. “Cleats during a soccer game in college. Tore a huge flap of skin open.” She
tugged up her right sleeve and exposed a jagged reddish scar on her forearm. “Field-hockey stick in high school. Took twenty minutes to stop bleeding.”

“This reminds me of that scene in
Jaws
where they compare scars,” I said.

She laughed. “That’s the best scene in the movie.”

“Except the opening where that girl gets attacked and she’s being jerked around the water like a swizzle stick.”

Hannah frowned as if she’d swallowed a bug. “Like a swizzle stick? That’s a good simile—and a disturbing one.” She pointed to my backpack. “Want to start with
science, or math?”

“Science.” My policy was to postpone as long as possible anything to do with math.

“Okay. Get your textbook out. Who’s your teacher?”

“Ms. Kaiser.”

She thought for a moment. “Then you should be on Chapter Fifteen.”

“How’d you know?” I said, surprised.

“I tutor a lot of students from your school.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

She named a bunch of kids. I knew most of them. It made me feel like less of a loser to know that so many other kids were also being tutored.

I slowly rummaged in my backpack, stalling. I knew she was hired for an hour, so every minute I burned up with idle chatter and slow-motion movements was one minute less of algebra. “Have
you heard about all the garages being broken into?”

“Yeah. Officer Rollins stopped by a couple houses where I tutor to warn the parents.” She grabbed the science book out of my hands. “You done stalling? I promised your parents
a full hour, and that’s what they’re going to get.” She took out her phone and started the timekeeping function. “The hour starts…now.”

Turned out it wasn’t so bad. Hannah was good at explaining things, even something as complex as the periodic table, which to me looked like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Even so, my eyes
started to close sometime during her explanation about gases and solids.