Twerp (22 page)

I know I haven’t written about what happened to Danley Dimmel, and I know that’s the reason you haven’t given me a grade, the reason you’re making me sweat. Except you never said back in January that I
had
to write about it. You never said the words “You
have
to write about what happened to Stanley Stimmel.” Maybe that’s
what you were thinking, but you never said the exact words. Because if you
had
said it, what if I’d said no? I’m not saying that I would have, but what if I had? It’s like we had a deal, and we even shook on it, and then you changed it at the last minute. I mean, we
shook hands
, and I lived up to my end, and then you pulled the rug out from under me. Is that the kind of example a teacher is supposed to set?

Look, I’m sorry about what happened to Danley. Maybe I haven’t said it outright, but that’s what I was trying to say when I wrote “It’s not like I meant for Danley to get hurt.” That was the second sentence in the first composition book. I can bring it in if you don’t believe me. I guess it’s kind of weak, reading it back. I could’ve said I was sorry outright. But it’s also the truth. I
didn’t
mean for him to get hurt. It wasn’t my intention. I did what I did, but I didn’t know it was going to turn out like it did.

On the other hand, it’s not like Danley’s the first guy who ever got egged. You should drop by Thirty-Fourth Avenue on Halloween. Eggs are flying back and forth like it’s a war zone. I’ve gotten egged. Lonnie’s gotten egged. Shlomo Shlomo has gotten egged more times than I can even remember. It never crossed my mind that getting egged in December would be different than getting egged in October.

It never crossed Lonnie’s mind either, or else he never would’ve mentioned the idea. I know that for a fact. He’s a practical joker, for sure, but he’s not cruel. You could even make the case that he was going out of his way to include Danley, that he was making him part of the group for a day. Like I said before, it’s not like Danley has a lot of friends around here. He sits on his stoop at the end of the block, on the corner where Thirty-Fourth Avenue hits Union Street, twiddling his thumbs. Half the time, I swear, the guy’s talking to himself. He lives on the block, but he might as well live on Neptune. It’s sad that he’s that way, but whose fault is it? Lonnie’s? Mine? Danley is the way he is because that’s the way he is. It’s no one’s fault.

Until last December, when the thing happened, the longest conversation I’d ever had with him was a couple of years ago when I said hello and he asked me if I wanted to play Battle. Just like that, out of the blue. That was the entire conversation. I said hello because I’d walked past him a thousand times, and it seemed stupid to walk past him over and over and never say hello, so I said it, and he looked up from his stoop, and then he said, “Want to play Battle?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I just kept walking.

But it was such a weird question that it stuck in my mind. I mentioned it the next day in Ponzini, and Eric
the Red said Danley had asked him the same thing. Same with Howie Wartnose and Shlomo Shlomo. It turned out that asking to play Battle was what Danley did. It was like his thing, like calling himself Danley instead of Stanley. Quentin said Danley asked him to play Battle every time he walked past him. The only guy he never asked was Lonnie, which made no sense either since Lonnie walked past him at least as often as the rest of us.

“You think he wants to fight?” Howie said.

“It can’t be that,” I said. “He’s got this gooey look in his eyes.”

Quentin nodded. “He definitely doesn’t want to fight.”

“Well, what the heck is he talking about?”

Then I had a thought. “Maybe he means Battleship.”

Lonnie nixed that idea. “He doesn’t mean Battleship. In the first place, you think a guy like that carries around paper and pencils? In the second place, it’s too complicated. He doesn’t have the brains for it.”

We went back and forth for a few more minutes, but then we got sidetracked into a different conversation, and the subject never came up again. I thought about it from time to time, the weirdness of it, but I just chalked it up to the guy being slow—and maybe lonely too since he’s never had a friend—so maybe he just doesn’t know how to act.

Still, it’s not like I had a grudge against him. I had no opinion about him one way or another. Except then, last
December, Lonnie came up with Scrambled Dope Day. How he came up with it, I’ll never know. But that’s the kind of thing Lonnie does. That’s what makes him so interesting to be around.

It was a nothing of a Thursday morning, after Christmas and before New Year’s. The entire gang was out back in Ponzini—Lonnie, Quentin, Howie, Eric, Shlomo, and me. The six of us were standing around with our hands in our pockets. I mean, it was freezing cold, and we were shuffling our feet to keep warm, and then out of nowhere Lonnie announced it was Scrambled Dope Day. That’s it. Then he just clammed up. He wouldn’t tell us what he was talking about. So we gave up asking and played wolf tag for a couple of hours just to fight off the cold, but our minds were on Scrambled Dope Day the entire time.

We had lunch at Bella Pizza on Northern Boulevard, and it was about the quietest hour we’d ever spent together because we figured any minute Lonnie would clue us in. But he still wasn’t talking. By the time two o’clock rolled around, we were whining and yapping at him like a pack of wiener dogs, begging him to tell us about Scrambled Dope Day. Howie Wartnose pulled me aside at one point and said, “Shouldn’t we be celebrating or something?”

That made me slap my head in disbelief. But still, I was dying to know what Lonnie had in mind.

It was about three-thirty when he gathered us into a
tight huddle in Ponzini and told us his idea: “Scrambled Dope Day is the day we egg Danley Dimmel.”

I have to admit it was kind of a letdown. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting that. Except the more Lonnie talked it up, the more I got the spirit. Yeah, it seemed a little mean, given how Danley was. But getting hit by a few eggs never killed anyone, and Scrambled Dope Day sure sounded like more fun than standing out in the cold, doing nothing. Plus, Lonnie came at us with logic. His basic point was why should egging be just a Halloween thing? If it was all right to throw eggs the last day of October, why wasn’t it all right the last week of December? And if it
was
all right to throw eggs the last week of December, didn’t it make more sense to egg a dopey guy like Danley Dimmel than to egg each other?

Scrambled Dope Day might have been a bad idea, but Lonnie made a good case for it, and after a few minutes we were all in. Not that we had worked out the where and when and how. But Lonnie pulled out the five-dollar bill he kept in his shoe, which got us revved up, and said the eggs were on him.

“Not for long!” Howie Wartnose said, and the rest of us laughed because we knew what he meant.

As we started up Parsons Boulevard in the direction of Waldbaum’s Supermarket, Lonnie took me aside and told me to stay behind. He told me he had a special job
for me. It was up to me to get Danley to Ponzini. He told me to get him there in half an hour, not a minute sooner or later. He looked me straight in the eye and asked me if I could do that, and I told him I could. Then we synchronized our watches, and the rest of them headed off to Waldbaum’s.

After they were out of sight, I stood on the corner of Thirty-Fourth and Parsons and tried to figure out how I was going to get Danley to follow me back to Ponzini. It wasn’t a place he ever went. Like I said, he stuck to the stoop in front of his house.

I figured the first thing to do was talk to the guy. Maybe an idea would come to me. So I walked toward Union Street, and there he was, sitting out on the stoop, bundled up in a hooded sweater and jean jacket, staring down at the sidewalk. You can spot him a mile off because he’s gigantic, and because he sits slouched over like he’s watching the concrete dry. Except the concrete on Thirty-Fourth Avenue finished drying about a hundred years ago. But that doesn’t matter to him. He sits on that stoop and stares straight down. I stopped right in front of his house, but he was so focused on whatever he was staring at that he didn’t even notice me for half a minute.

That’s when I said, “Hi, Danley.”

He looked up and grabbed his chest like I’d almost given him a heart attack. He fiddled with his hearing aid
for a second, maybe turning it on, or maybe just turning it louder. Then came that nasal voice of his. “You
scared
me.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to talk.”

That caused him to sit up straighter. “You want to talk to
me
?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“You know who I am, don’t you?”

“You live up the block.”

“My name is Julian,” I said.

He smiled. “I
know
what your name is.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not a retard, you know.”

“Who said you were?”

“That’s what people think on account of I ride the bus. But I’m not. It just takes me longer to get stuff. Maybe I’m not so smart, but I’m not … 
that
.”

“I ride the bus too.”

“Not the same bus.”

“What I mean is, riding the bus doesn’t make you …”

“What?”

“The thing you said.”

He smiled like he’d never thought of it that way before. He took his hands out of his pockets and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

I said, “You’re in junior high, right?”

That made him roll his eyes. “Yeah, eighth grade.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I don’t like the teachers. They talk down to us.”

“Then why don’t you go to McMasters instead?”

“I take the test every June. It says I have to stay where I am. I guess maybe I
am
that thing.”

“C’mon, you’re
not
that thing.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of how you talk.”

“What do you mean?”

“You say words the right way.”

“Like Stanley instead of Danley?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But I like Danley. It’s different.”

“Do you see my point? If you were that thing, you wouldn’t think like that.”

He waited for me to keep going, but I was drawing a blank. He got a weird look on his face that seemed to say two things at once, as if on the one hand, he couldn’t figure out why I was talking to him, but on the other hand, he didn’t want the conversation to end. Then, at last, he smiled at me and said, “Want to play Battle?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You know … Battle.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a deck of cards.

“It’s a card game?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you ever play it?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “What are the rules?”

“You put down a card, and I put down a card, and then whoever comes out higher wins.”

“You mean like War?”

He shook his head. “No,
Battle
.”

“I don’t want to play Battle, Danley.”

“Why not? My dad used to say a game of cards never hurt nobody. He used to play cards with me all the time. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“What happened to your dad?”

“My mom kicked him out. But he used to bring me hot dogs with sauerkraut.”

“Oh.”

“Also, one time, he let me drink beer. I drank half a can of beer by myself. I could’ve kept going too, but he took away the can and drank the rest himself. Did you ever drink beer?”

“No,” I said.

“It tastes
bad
.”

“Then why did you drink it?”

“I don’t know.” He started to smile again. “I must be a retard, right?”

That cracked both of us up. He was laughing and shaking his head. For the first time, I felt kind of wrong about what I was doing.

“Why don’t you ever hang out with us?”

He tilted his head to the side. “You mean with you and your friends?”

“That’s right.”

“Your friends play too rough.”

“What are you talking about? You’re bigger than the rest of us put together. If you played Johnny on the Pony, you’d kill us.”

“I’m real strong,” he said. “I weigh two hundred and eleven pounds.”

“You’d break us in half!”

That got him laughing again, even harder than before.

“You should think about it. I could take you to Ponzini—”

“What’s Ponzini?”

“That’s the lot where we hang out. It’s around the corner on Parsons.”

“I walked up Parsons before,” he said. “But I never saw a lot—”

“It’s behind the apartment building. You can’t see it from the sidewalk. That’s the point.”

“What do you do there?”

“Whatever we feel like doing. Whatever comes to mind. It’s
our place
.”

He thought it over for a split second. He leaned forward as if he was going to stand up, but then he sank
back down onto the stoop. “C’mon, let’s play Battle. You could get good at it if you practice.”

“Danley, it’s freezing cold out. I’m not going to sit on that stoop and play cards.”

“C’mon, I’ll let you win.”

Then, at once, I had an answer. “How about if we play tag first, and then we play Battle?”

That caught his attention. “Can we play Battle first?”

“It’s too cold to play Battle first,” I said. “We’ll play tag first to warm up, and then afterward we’ll play Battle.”

“How long do we have to play tag?”

“Just until you catch me.”

He laughed at that. “I can’t catch you.”

“How do you know?”

“I know how you run. Plus, look at me.”

“Your legs are a lot longer than mine.”

“C’mon!”

“You never know until you try,” I said.

“I just have to tag you once?”

“Just once.”

“And then we play Battle, right?”

“As soon as you tag me,” I said.

“You promise?”

“I promise, Danley. As soon as you tag me, we’ll play Battle.”

He smiled and put the deck of cards down on the stoop. Then he stood up. I’d hardly ever seen him standing up, and for a second I got scared. There was just so much of him! His shadow seemed to go halfway up the block. Sure, he was shaped like a pear and had rounded shoulders. But if he jumped off the stoop, he’d be right on top of me. It would be like getting away from a falling tree. Once he took a step down, though, I relaxed. It was a slow, heavy step, almost like a slow-motion step. He took a couple of slow, heavy steps toward me, and I didn’t move. I let him get real close, and then he lunged and I dodged him. He turned, laughed, then lunged again, and again I dodged him. He lunged a third time, and I jumped backward, then ran about ten yards up the block.