Tangerine (36 page)

We all turned to see Grandmom and Grandpop walking up the driveway. Mom whispered again, "What are we going to tell them?"

I knew the answer to that. "We're going to tell them something bad, Mom."

Grandmom and Grandpop stopped at the top of the incline, framed in the rectangular opening. Grandmom said, "Caroline? Have we come at a bad time?"

Mom shook her head. "No. You're right on time. You're here right when you said you'd be."

Grandpop looked hard at Erik. He asked him, "What the hell happened to your eyes?"

Erik answered him in a surprisingly strong voice. "I got kicked in the face, Grandpop. Some kid kicked me in the face."

Grandpop glanced over at me, and then back at Erik. He gave him a short nod, like he understood.

Erik said, "Excuse me." Then he opened the door and disappeared inside.

Dad gestured to Grandmom and Grandpop to come in, too. They exchanged a worried look and then started forward. Mom and Dad led us into the kitchen and sat at the round table.

Grandmom and Grandpop looked me up and down. Then Grandmom asked her usual question, "How are you, Paul?"

"All right. I'm all right."

Grandpop clapped me on the shoulder. "That's good."

I dragged over a stool from the counter so the five of us could sit around the table. Erik wasn't anywhere to be seen. I figured he'd gone upstairs to his room.

Mom and Dad took turns talking, just as they had at the meeting. Grandmom and Grandpop didn't seem surprised by any of what they heard. They took it all in without even blinking.

When it was over, when we had told them every bad thing there was to tell, we paused and waited. Grandmom put her hand on her heart, sighed deeply, and said, "You know what I'm going to tell you, Caroline."

Mom closed her eyes.

"You're paying now for what you didn't do back then."

Mom agreed with her completely. "I know. I know."

But Dad wasn't so quick to surrender. He said curtly, "That's easy to say now. It's easy enough, seven years after the fact, to say I-told-you-so."

Grandmom replied flatly, "We're not saying that."

Grandpop leveled a stare at him. "We
did
tell you so. Erik did need help. He needed a doctor's help."

Dad countered with, "No. Erik did not need a doctor's help. He did not need drugs. He did not need to be one of those medicated kids who float around all the time like they're underwater."

"What drugs? We're not talking about drugs. The kid needed to know which end was up, that's all. First off, he needed to get his backside whipped for hurting Paul."

Dad looked away. He clearly wanted out of this conversation. I guess we all did, because we all sat for a long minute in silence.

Grandpop finally said, "OK, let me be the one to apologize. I don't have all the answers. I'm not saying I do." He said to Mom, "We're family. That's all I know. We'll help you any way we can." He said to Grandmom, "I think the best thing we can do right now is get down to Orlando and leave them alone."

Mom tried halfheartedly to talk them out of it. Dad didn't say a word. He drifted off toward the great room.

Mom said, "At least take a tour of the house. That's what you came here for."

Grandmom and Grandpop exchanged another look. Grand-mom said, "A quick tour."

I tagged along behind them on a fast lap around the ground floor. We passed by Dad sitting in his alcove in front of the IBM. I watched him as Mom pointed out things in the great room. He was sitting in a trancelike state in front of the screen, with the green light of the "Erik—Scholarship Offers" file washing over his face.

Mom described the top floor briefly, but she didn't take them up there. The tour ended in the foyer at the front door. Grandmom said, "It's a lovely house," and stepped outside.

Grandpop, however, was not quite finished. He signaled "just a minute," climbed the stairs, and turned left. He knocked, waited a moment, and then spoke quietly to Erik through the door. Then he came back down to Mom. He told her, "It's a beautiful house, all right. Nothing like those places I made you live in. Huh?"

Mom looked like she might cry.

Grandpop put an arm around her shoulder. "Good luck to you in it, honey. Good luck to you from here on." Then he hurried out to catch up with Grandmom.

Mom watched them drive away down the street until the ringing phone pulled her back inside. She picked it up, listened briefly, and answered, "We'll be there." Her eyes drifted over to mine. She spoke in a weary voice—a voice beyond anger, beyond upset. "That was your principal, Dr. Johnson. She wants to see both of us in her office tomorrow morning, at seven-thirty sharp."

Mom and I had to leave a half hour earlier today in order to be at Tangerine Middle School by seven-thirty. I packed my books and my lunch like I was going for a normal day. What did I know?

Mom drove tensely, silently, angrily. I can't say that I blame her. In just one week both of her sons had gone from success to failure, from public praise to public shame. I tried to picture Mom in our climate-controlled storage place: Finding that gym bag. Not recognizing it. Wondering whose it was. Deciding to open it to find out. Staring at the items inside. Pulling them out one by one. The awful truth appearing to her gradually, like a slowly developing Polaroid.

We pulled up in front of Tangerine Middle at seven twenty-five. Absolutely nothing was happening. None of the karate kickers were on the sidewalk. None of the gangstas were hanging out. None of the buses were pulling into the loop. I had never been there so early before.

We walked through the front doors and climbed the stairs to the main office. Dr. Johnson was just inside the glass doors talking to two other adults—Tomas Cruz and a woman who I recognized from the soccer games. She looked a little like Victor, so I guessed she must be Mrs. Guzman.

Dr. Johnson shook hands with my mother, very seriously. She looked at me and said, "Paul, why don't you wait out in the hallway for a few minutes? We'll call you."

Dr. Johnson led the adults to her inner office. I drifted back through the glass doors, into the hall. I heard light footsteps on the stairs, so I started watching the second-floor landing. A familiar brown ponytail appeared. Then a familiar face. I said, "Theresa! Hi."

She didn't really look at me. She came to the top of the stairs and said, "So there you are."

I said, "Did they call you in, too?"

"No, not me. Just Tino and Victor. They're inside."

"They are? I didn't see them."

"Yeah. They're in there. Dr. Johnson probably put them in the nurse's room. That's where they usually wait."

"Oh? Why are you here?"

"Me? I'm always here early. For my job."

"Office aide?"

"Yeah, right. That's me."

Theresa and I stood together, with our backs to the glass wall of the office. We stood for a whole minute like that, in silence, like two strangers waiting for a bus. Then I remembered, and I reached into my backpack. I pulled out the science report, laser-printed in four colors, with a clear plastic binder. I handed it to Theresa. "Here. I was hoping I would run into you. I finished putting together the report. I hope you like it."

Theresa took it and studied the title, printed in tall orange letters with black shading. She read it out loud, "The Golden Dawn Tangerine."

She leafed through the report, looking at the pie chart for "The Varieties of Citrus Grown in Tangerine County" and the bar graph for "The Decline of Citrus Acreage in Tangerine County." She whispered, "This is beautiful. This is an A-plus for sure."

Theresa looked me in the eye and smiled, but not for long. Suddenly, like they had sprung a leak, her eyes filled up with big tears that rolled down her cheeks. She shook her head from side to side and demanded to know, "Why did you do this?"

"What? Do what?"

"All of it!" She held up the report. "All of this! All of it! Why did you come to my school? And come to my house to work? And jump on some coach? Are you crazy? You messed up your whole life. Do you know that?"

I had never seen Theresa angry or upset. Now she was both. I tried to calm her down, but she went on, "Listen! You're not one of these guys. Do you understand that? You're not one of these guys who're sitting in the office all the time waiting to get punished. You don't even belong here. You don't live in Tangerine. You live in Lake Windsor Downs. And you're going to have to keep on living there. You're going to have to go to that high school. You're going to have to face that coach and everybody else who was in that gym. Tino and Victor don't have to do any of that. Tino and Victor are going to walk away from all of this." She looked away, shaking her head at my absolute stupidity. She took several deep breaths, then she looked back at me and repeated, calmly, "So why did you do it? Why did you jump on that coach?"

I raised up my shoulders and let them fall. "I've thought about that a lot over the last three days. I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff. Probably too much. But that night, in the gym, I didn't think at all. I just did it."

Theresa wiped her cheek on her sleeve. "Yeah? Well, you really messed up. Tino and Victor got caught anyway. They always do."

We fell silent again and settled back into our positions against the wall. I tried to lighten the mood. I said, "Maybe this is all your fault. You're the first one I met here. You're the one who took me around."

She didn't know if I was kidding or not. She said, "So how's that make it my fault?"

"You introduced me to Tino and Victor."

"Yeah. Well, you said you wanted to play soccer."

"But you didn't have to do that. You could have let me sink or swim on my own."

Now she smiled, slightly. "Yeah. I could have let you sink." She pointed to the office. "Dr. Johnson told us that some kids were coming here from Lake Windsor because their school fell down a sinkhole. I don't know. I guess I figured you'd all be looking down your noses at us. And some of those kids were. But not you. You acted like you were happy to be here. You liked it here. Then you said you wanted to play on the soccer team ... I don't know. I guess I felt sorry for you. Especially when I thought about what Victor and those guys might do to you."

The door to Dr. Johnson's office opened. Theresa and I both looked in that direction. She said, "Whenever Luis talked about you, he called you Paul. I'm gonna start calling you that, too." She took me by the arm. "Come on, Paul."

She led me into the office. Dr. Johnson walked out and said, "Theresa, would you go ask Ms. Pollard to come up here and to bring Paul Fisher's file with her?"

Theresa gave me a silent squeeze on the arm and took off to do the errand. I peered into the inner office. I could see Mom's profile. She was crying. Dr. Johnson said, "OK, Paul, come with me. You can wait in the nurse's room. We'll be calling you boys in one at a time."

She led me down the short hall and opened the door to the nurse's room. Tino and Victor were in there, sitting in black chairs against the white wall. They seemed smaller, younger, than I remembered. Like little kids. They certainly weren't nervous. I guess they had been in here too many times.

Tino continued to stare straight ahead, but Victor popped up in his seat and started in on Dr. Johnson. "Oh no, Dr. Johnson! You're bringin' the wrong boy in here now. Fisher Man was just sittin' up there with his mama and papa. He just fell outta those bleachers like he fainted or something. He's lucky he landed on that dude. That broke his fall." He turned to Tino for support. "Fisher Man fainted out there in the grove last week. Am I right?" Tino ignored him. "Dr. Johnson, he might have a brain tumor making him faint like that. That boy needs an X-ray."

Dr. Johnson shook her head and said quietly, "Things are bad enough, Victor. Don't make them worse. Now come along with me."

Victor opened his eyes wide and looked at me. Then he got up and followed Dr. Johnson out of the room. I sat down in his chair, next to Tino.

He surprised me by speaking right away. "When you get in there, don't be runnin' your mouth like that fool Victor. All you say to Dr. Johnson is 'Yes, ma'am,' 'No, ma'am,' and 'Thank you, ma'am.' Understand? You take your three weeks' suspension, and you go home."

I said, "Three weeks? You figure that's what it'll be?"

"Yeah." Tino shifted around in his chair, but he still wasn't looking at me. He went on, "And you can tell Tuna for me that we weren't disrespecting his brother or anything like that. We just had to take care of business."

"I think he knows that."

"Yeah, well, you tell him I said so."

"OK."

Suddenly Dr. Johnson opened the door and signaled that it was Tino's turn to follow her. I was left in the nurse's room by myself, staring at the eye chart. It seemed like it was about two minutes later when she came back for me.

I followed her into the inner office. Mom was sitting in the same spot. Her eyes were red, but she was no longer crying. Dr.

Johnson stood behind her desk, held up a thin white booklet called
The Student Code,
and said, "I've already explained this to your mother, Paul. The school board has set down its policies in this booklet, and we are all obliged to follow them. It is my duty to explain to you what violation you committed and what penalty you will receive." She held the booklet out in case I wanted to read it. She explained, "Your violation is called a 'Level Four Infraction,' in this case, 'assaulting a teacher or other School Board employee.' This is the most serious level of infraction. The penalty for this and for any other Level Four Infraction is expulsion."