Cheating for the Chicken Man (8 page)

A MATTER OF TIME

K
ate rushed straight to the girls' room, where she entered a stall and closed the door. Two girls standing near a sink looked startled when she burst in. The smell of cigarette smoke lingered in the air. After latching the door, Kate pulled out the bullying report form and a book to write on, tucked in her skirt and sat on the toilet. She coughed a little so the girls might think she was sick, then focused on the questions and began filling in the answers with a pen.

What did th
e alleged offender d
o or say?

Easy enough. Kate described the banner strung across the hallway.

Did
a physical injury re
sult from this incid
ent?

If there was a
physical injury, do
you think there will
be permanent effect
s?

Was the student v
ictim absent from sc
hool as a result of
the incident?

No. No. And no.

If none of these things had happened, maybe the report wouldn't be taken seriously. Kate frowned and pressed a hand to her forehead. But wasn't the whole point of the form to stop those things from happening?

D
id a psychological i
njury result from th
is incident?

Maybe. It was possible! But how would Kate know? She tapped the pen on the palm of her hand as she read the next question.

Is
there any additional
information you wou
ld like to provide?

Yes, there was. Kate wrote about how Curtis had bullied J.T. in middle school and how her brother had just returned from nearly a year in juvenile detention. He served time for what he did, Kate wrote. He wants to start over, but how can he with Curtis picking on him all the time?

When she finished, Kate started to read everything over again, but the buzzer sounded and lunch was over. She clicked her pen and put it away.

Walking fast, she went directly to the office to hand in the form. The secretary she had spoken with earlier took the paperwork. “That was fast,” she said. “I'll be sure this goes to the right person.”

Kate heaved a sigh of relief.

It was just a matter of time, then.

*

Throughout her first geometry class (mostly review), then Chinese (
ni hao
—“hello”) then field hockey practice, Kate tried to focus, but she was distracted with worry.

“Why didn't you come back to lunch?” Jess asked, looking anxious as the two girls changed up for practice.

“I guess I lost my appetite,” Kate said.

Jess leaned in and whispered, “Sorry about Sam and Lindsey. That was mean.”

Kate shrugged. “Don't worry about it,” she said, closing up
her locker. She walked away to stand in front of a mirror where she made two short pigtails to keep the hair out of her face. There were larger concerns on Kate's mind. She didn't want J.T. to be involved in a fight after school.

Throughout practice, Kate kept glancing at her watch. When the drills ran longer than J.T.'s meeting, she ran to the sideline.

“You have to leave? What for?” Coach Dietrich asked.

Kate knew this wouldn't be easy. Her coach was really nice. Just last week she'd had the entire team over to her town house to cook hot dogs on her grill. She had made all kinds of salads and even bought ice cream for the girls. But she was totally serious on the field and incredibly strict about practice.

“You didn't bring me a note,” Coach Dietrich said before Kate had a chance to say anything more.

Nervous, Kate pulled on one of her pigtails. Should she say she had a dentist appointment? No. Kate didn't want to lie. “It's a family thing,” she said, forcing herself to maintain eye contact.

The coach studied Kate. “All right,” she said. “Just this once, Kate. Go ahead.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much!”

Kate whirled around and started running back to the gym when the coach called out, “Tomorrow let's try you out in a halfback position, okay?”

Turning, Kate smiled broadly. “Oh, my gosh, yes! Thank you so much!”

Back in the locker room, Kate skipped the shower and just grabbed her stuff and a bottle of cold water from the cooler
by the coach's door. Rushing out to the front of the school, she saw J.T. sitting alone on a bench near the flagpole. Their grandmother was picking them up that day, since Jess had to go straight from practice to an orthodontist appointment.

“Hey, how was science club?” she asked, still breathless, but relieved she'd arrived before anything bad could happen.

J.T. was bent over his homework. “Okay.”

Kate dropped her stuff on the ground and collapsed beside her brother on the bench. “Are there some nice kids?” She took a swig of water.

“Don't know, Kate. Not really there for friends. I've got a project I really want to get done.”

“Oh.” Kate took another long drink and then held the cold plastic bottle against her face. She wondered what project he was talking about, but he had his graphing calculator out and seemed pretty engrossed in his homework, so she didn't ask. Instead, she took out her American history textbook and a yellow highlighter.

The blare of a horn interrupted them. Kate and J.T. looked up to see Curtis Jenkins slow down in front of them in a green pickup truck. Hooper Delaney sat beside him. If he was old enough to drive, then Curtis was at least sixteen and a half, Kate thought. He must've had to stay back a year, which didn't surprise her at all.

“Yo!” he called out while his truck rolled to a stop. He actually stuck his hand out the window and held it up as though in greeting.

Kate stood up defiantly. Was he going to pick a fight?

Just then, the front doors of the school opened. A kid and what appeared to be a parent walked out. The doors closed heavily behind them.

“Let's go inside,” Kate urged J.T. “We can watch for Grandma from the window.”

But J.T. didn't move. Calmly, he turned his attention to homework again.

As the other people came down the sidewalk, Curtis pulled his arm back in. “Later!” he called before slowly moving on.

Relief. But only for the moment, because what did “later” mean?

J.T. was doing a great job of ignoring the situation, Kate thought, a little annoyed. Maybe he had escaped this time, but Kate knew Curtis wouldn't quit. She was glad—
very gl
ad
—she had turned in that form.

Suddenly, Kate noticed that J.T. was not only staring at something behind her, he was slowly standing up, the calculator still in his hand.

The kid who had come out of school was Brady. Brady Parks and his mom stood a few feet away.

Kate stopped breathing. The boys hadn't seen each other since that day in court over a year ago. She watched Brady's eyes flick from Curtis's departing pickup truck to J.T. Had he heard Curtis call out? Did Brady catch who it was?

Time seemed to stand still. It was Mrs. Parks who spoke first. “J.T., it's good to see you,” she said with a gentle smile. “Welcome home.”

God bless Brady's Mom, Kate thought. She let out her breath.

Brady was wearing the Corsica High soccer uniform, green
shorts and a gold and green top. He must have made the team and just come in from practice. His face was sweaty—his hair, too, and some of it was stuck to the side of his face. He took an uncertain step forward. “Yeah, welcome back,” he said to J.T. “And hey, thanks for that letter.”

“You're welcome,” J.T. replied. “Thanks for writing back. It meant a lot.”

The two boys looked at each other. Kate wondered what they had written to each other and what they were thinking. There didn't seem to be any anger. Were they glad to see each other? Or were they just being polite?

The tense moment became almost unbearable when Brady glanced at Kate. Already flushed, she felt even more blood rush to her face. When Brady actually smiled a little and the corners of his mouth turned upward, she was so overcome with emotion she had to look away.

“Well, see you around, both you guys,” Brady said.

J.T. nodded. “Yeah, see you around.”

Both you guys
. Brady's words echoed in Kate's head.

And that was it. Brady and his mom left.

*

“Let me see: soup, bread, salad, iced tea. That's it.” Kate's grandmother surveyed the tray she had placed in Kate's hands that evening. Somehow, it had become Kate's job to deliver dinner to her mother whenever she had a headache.

Kate accepted the tray with a glum expression, but only because she was still distracted by events at school.

Her grandmother misread Kate's thoughts. “I know, I know. We're enabling her, aren't we?” she said. “We should stop and
force your mother to come downstairs if she wants to eat.”

Kate wasn't sure what
enabling
meant, but she had a pretty good idea it had something to do with making it easy for her mother to avoid facing her problems.

“I tell you what. We're going to stop this right now.” She took the tray out of Kate's hands and placed it on the counter. “Run up and tell your mother dinner's ready. If she's hungry, she can come down and eat.”

Kate did as she was told, and everyone except for her mother ate. Afterward, Kate helped with the dishes and then launched into homework. She finished assignments for English and American history, then texted Jess about some math problems. She gathered her outfit for the game, putting a clean uniform in her field hockey bag and plucking some green and gold hair ribbons from a basket on her bureau. Finally, she sat cross-legged on her bed, her school journal open to an empty page on the pillow in front of her. The assignment for creative writing was to “describe a special place.”

Whenever I need to
get away, I follow
the dirt path betwee
n corn and soybean f
ields all the way do
wn to the river to s
it on the fallen loc
ust tree. The trunk
that juts over the w
ater is my special p
lace. Straddling it,
I love to dangle my
bare feet and daydr
eam. . . .

Kate paused and thought back to once when J.T. came with her and they shared their dreams. It must have been more than a year ago, because it was before J.T. got into trouble.

“For sure I want to go to college,” Kate had told him. “Then I want to be a linguist.”

“A linguist, what's that? Someone who makes linguine?” J.T.
had asked.

“Ha, ha. Very funny,” Kate replied. Her smile faltered. “Are you kidding? You don't know what a linguist is?” It wasn't often Kate knew something that J.T. didn't.

Her brother grinned. “Someone who studies language.”

“Okay, but did you know that elephants have a language?”

J.T. dropped his chin and looked at her over his glasses.

“Seriously,” Kate said. “Elephants make these rumbling sounds that are so low humans can't even hear them. They talk to one another!”

“And what are they saying, Kate?”

“Maybe they're saying, ‘Watch out for that man with a rifle. I think he wants to kill me so somebody can carve an ivory statue out of my tusk.'”

“Sad,” J.T. acknowledged.

“It is! I really want to help them. I'm not afraid to go live in the jungle! For a while anyway. If I had to. If there was, like, a house or something. But do you think I'd need to be a linguist or a scientist to study elephant language?”

“I don't know,” he told her, “but for sure you'd have to be crazy.”

Kate had laughed. But she knew J.T. took all of her “animal passions” (his term) seriously. He had helped her make an impressive graph for her fifth-grade report that demonstrated the speed with which the ice caps were melting and the polar bears vanishing. And he was the one who came up with the idea of a trip to the National Zoo to see the baby panda when Kate turned eight.

“So what do
you
want to do?” Kate had asked her brother.

After handing Kate his glasses so he could hang upside down from their tree, J.T. confided to her how he wanted to be a professional hacker, one of those cyber experts at the National Security Agency who helped protect the country.

“You got to keep that a secret, though,” he told her, pulling himself back upright on the branch, his face flushed red with the blood that had run to his head. “Promise me? Because you know Dad wants me to take over the farm. I hate to let him down, but, man, I do not want to raise chickens.”

No! Kate shook her head vehemently. Neither did she! She had handed him his glasses back . . .

What would become of their dreams now? Kate wondered, still holding the pen over the single paragraph she'd written in her school journal. Would their precious hopes be swallowed up by all the larger worries?

Frustrated because she didn't have the answer, Kate paused to look out the window at the foot of her bed. While it was dark out, there was moonlight, too, and she thought she saw someone running across the yard. On her stomach, she scooted closer to the window. Was it her brother? It looked like him. Why would J.T. be running at night? Where had he been?

Down the hall, Kate's mother was silent behind her closed door and Kate's grandmother was reading a story to Kerry. Kate stepped into her flip-flops and rushed downstairs.

Outside, the early September evening was still warm. Crickets chirped in the soybean fields, and the chicken smell was faint. She spotted her brother, a dark profile, sitting on the gas tank down by the tractor sheds. When she got closer, she could
see Tucker curled up on the ground and noticed that J.T. was facing in the direction of Brady's house next door. It used to be you could see a dirt path made by the two boys going back and forth through the field, but not anymore.