Finding the Worm (12 page)

Like I always did, I slid the paper under the door of Principal Salvatore’s office when I got to school, and, like she always did, Miss Medina handed it back to me an hour later. Principal Salvatore had written on the back:

* * *

Quentin’s mom kept him home from school today, and when the gang went over to his house after school, Mrs. Selig answered the door and said he needed to rest. That kind of put a damper on things, and I was feeling pretty lousy about it, but then, right after dinner, the phone rang, and it was Quentin. He asked if I could come over, and I said sure, and I was sure Lonnie could come over too. But he said his mom wouldn’t let in more than one friend—and besides, he wanted to talk to me.

That sounded odd, but I wasn’t going to say no. I put my sneakers back on, grabbed my coat, and headed to Quentin’s house. His mom let me in, even though she wasn’t smiling, and I don’t think she was crazy about me being there. I headed straight for Quentin’s bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in his Yankees cap and pajamas when I walked in.

“What’s going on?” I said.

He reached into the pocket of his pajama pants and pulled out a folded-up sheet of loose-leaf paper, then handed it to me. “What do you make of this?”

I unfolded the paper. It was a list of five words, except they weren’t words:
zeetoosk, quilby, krestenfireyuk, horgonk
, and
fiffle
. I stared at them for a few seconds, then glanced up at Quentin. He had a big grin on his face. “What are these?”

“Words,” he said.

“Did you make them up?”

“No, I discovered them!”

“You didn’t
discover
them, Quentin.…”

“But they’re not in the dictionary,” he said. “I wrote them down while I was in the hospital, and my mom looked them up for me. She couldn’t find them.”

I could see it meant a lot to him. “All right, you discovered them. What do they mean?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out,” he said. “I got the last one,
krestenfireyuk
. That’s the gunk that builds up under the cap of a hot-sauce bottle. That’s the easy one. The others I can’t get.”

“That does sound like a pretty good definition for
krestenfireyuk
.”

“When I was lying there, I couldn’t do much. I couldn’t get out of bed.…”

“How did you go to the bathroom?”

“You don’t have to go at first because of the tubes. After the tubes come out, they give you this metal thing that looks like a toilet seat, but it’s got like a pan underneath—”

I waved my hand. “All right, I can figure out the rest.”

“Anyway, I was lying there, and the nurses kept coming in and asking me how I felt, but I couldn’t talk, because that tube thing was stuck down my throat, and I got mad—”

“C’mon, Quent, you never get mad.”

“Well, I did in the hospital,” he said. “I got mad because I couldn’t talk. So when the doctors took the thing out of my throat, I started talking and talking.” He let out a weak laugh. “I didn’t even know what I was saying. I just kept going. I like
words
, Jules. I like how they sound. You ever think about words? They come out of your mouth, and right away people know what you’re talking about.”

“I think about words all the time,” I said. “I think about them when I’m writing.”

“But also when you’re talking, right?”

“Well, talking happens a lot faster than writing. You don’t have as much time to think about words when you’re talking.”

His eyes got a frustrated look in them, like I was missing the point he was making. “But don’t you ever get the feeling that there’s stuff you want to say, but there’s not enough words?”

“Is that why you made up those new ones?”

“I
discovered
them! There’s a difference!”

“If you say so.”

His voice got low. “Look, I know I’m not so smart as you, Jules—”

“C’mon, Quent!”

“But I’m good at discovering words. I’m just not so good at figuring out what they mean. I thought maybe
you could figure out what they mean, and I could keep discovering them. Then, maybe, someday you could make a book out of them, and it could be all the words I discovered.”

“Do you mean like a dictionary?”

“It could be that, or else it could be like a story with my words in it.”

“If I use your words in a story, we’re going to need a dictionary too.”

“Then maybe you could write both,” he said.

That made me laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the things people are telling me to write at school.”

“You don’t have to do it right away. You could do it when you have time.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll figure it out as soon as I have time. You just keep coming up with the words.”

He put out his hand, and I shook it.

“I’ve got one more question,” I said. “You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want.”

“You want me to take off the wig?”

“No!”

“ ’Cause I’m not taking off the wig.”

“I don’t want you to take off the wig, Quent.”

“Then what’s your question?”

“It’s just that … when I first heard how sick you were, I thought … even though I didn’t want to think it—”

“You thought I might die?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Me too.”

“You thought about it too?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I guess what I want to know is, when you were in the hospital, were you scared?”

“Not all the time,” he said.

“But you
were
scared, right?”

“It really wasn’t so bad. It didn’t hurt that much, not even the needles. I guess I got scared sometimes just because—” He cut himself off and took a breath. “Just because I had so much time to think about it. Like a couple of times, I got scared to close my eyes, so I tried not to fall asleep. That was the worst thing.”

He looked up at me like he’d said enough, like he wanted me to let it go.

Right then Mrs. Selig knocked on the door. She didn’t come in, but she said through the door, “Quent-Quent, it’s getting pretty late. Don’t you think your friend should be heading home?”

I smiled at Quentin. “
Quent-Quent
?”

“She says stuff like that,” he said.

“I guess I’ll be heading home.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

“You think you’ll go back to school this week?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. My mom says next Monday.”

“Oh.”

“But I can go out before then. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Then we’ll come by tomorrow, after school.”

I slipped the paper with Quentin’s words into my pocket and stood up.

“You’re not going to forget about them, right?” he said.

“No.”

“You can wait until you have more time. Just don’t forget about them.”

“I won’t forget them, Quent. I’ll give them a hundred and ten percent.”

That cracked both of us up, because it sounded like Jerry Manche. Quentin was still laughing as I shut the door to his room, said goodbye to his mom and dad, and left.

Thirty-Fourth Avenue is starting to
feel like Thirty-Fourth Avenue again. It’s like the time Quentin was in the hospital was a bad dream, and the entire block is waking up from it. I mean, it
wasn’t
a dream. For one thing, Quentin’s got a pinball machine in his bedroom. For another, he’s not back to how he was. He gets winded real fast, so there’s a lot of stuff we used to do—even just walking-around kind of stuff, let alone playing wolf tag—that we can’t do for now.

To be truthful, it would be easier if he’d let us push him in the wheelchair. But he shot down that idea the first time I suggested it, and no one’s brought it up since. So we’ve been hanging out mostly in Quentin’s room, and
the few times we did get him out of the house, we had to take it real slow and stop for him to catch his breath every couple of minutes. He’s getting stronger, though. The plan is still for him to go back to school on Monday, but I’ll believe that when I see it. I don’t know how it’s going to work.

As for the pinball machine, it was fun for maybe three days, but after that we got pretty sick of it. That sounds ungrateful, for sure, but … well,
it’s a pinball machine
. It gets old fast. You want to know the weird part? The fact that it’s free, that we don’t have to drop in a dime to start a new game, makes it
less
fun. Lonnie shakes the thing until it tilts every time. I’m not sure he’s ever actually finished a game. It’s like a joke with him. He starts up a new game and then tilts just for the heck of it.

The last time I took a turn was on Thursday, after school. I don’t even know why I bothered. After the first five minutes, I got bored, but I kept hitting the bonus flag, which kept making the center post come up between the flippers, which meant the ball couldn’t roll down the center chute to end the game. It just went on and on. I tripled my highest score, but I felt like a prisoner. Finally, I just waited for the post to go down and let the ball slide between the flippers on purpose.

The only one who stuck with it was Shlomo Shlomo. Mr. Selkirk, my sixth-grade teacher, used to say that
writing was my “thing.” Turns out pinball is Shlomo’s “thing.” What I mean is he took to that machine like a woodpecker to a tall tree. (Or like Beverly Segal to a tall tree.) The look on his face when he turned and noticed the pinball machine was love at first sight. Like one of those cartoons where the boy cat sees the girl cat, and his eyeballs go
boi-yoing-yoing
. It was comical to watch.

Except how can you hold it against him? Challenge the Yankees is the first thing Shlomo’s been better at than the rest of us.

Lonnie’s always had basketball. The guy can dribble between his legs like it’s nothing. Eric’s got baseball, on account of his dad coached Little League and taught him to switch-hit, even though Eric’s still afraid of getting beaned. Howie’s got football, or at least defense in football, because he loves to tackle people. He’ll tackle you even if you’re just playing tag. Not in a mean way, he just gets carried away.

On the other hand, Quentin, before he got sick, was a great wide receiver, because he had soft hands. I don’t think I ever saw that guy drop a pass. Plus, he even started to get faster in the last year. Before he got sick, I mean. It used to be that the only guy he could catch in tag was Shlomo. But then he started to catch Eric, and once he even caught Howie. So I guess, in a way, he
was
Quick Quentin, or at least he was getting to be Quick Quentin
before he got sick. So let’s say Quentin gets the edge on offense in football, and Howie gets the edge on defense. Plus, you should see Quentin with a yo-yo! It might not count as a sport, but he can make that thing walk the dog and rock the cradle and go ’round the world.

Challenge the Yankees isn’t a real sport either, of course. But it’s Shlomo’s thing, so you’ve got to respect it. That doesn’t mean it’s not annoying. The rest of us will be yakking it up at one end of Quentin’s room, but we can’t even hear one another because Shlomo’s at the other end grunting and moaning, and meanwhile the machine is buzzing and dinging and clacking. He’s in his own world … challenging the Yankees. Lonnie joked that from now on, when Shlomo rings the doorbell, he should forget about Quentin and ask Mrs. Selig if the pinball machine is home.

You want to know how carried away Shlomo got with Challenge the Yankees? On Friday afternoon, he almost forgot about Sabbath! He
did
forget, actually. It was Lonnie who remembered. He slid up behind Shlomo just as the sun was going down, and tapped him on the shoulder. Shlomo hunched over the machine as if he was protecting his lunch. “C’mon, lay off!”

Lonnie said, “I just thought—”

“I got a good score going!”

“Yeah, it looks like you do.”

Shlomo still hadn’t taken his eyes off the game. “What do you want?”

“Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing?”

“No …”

“All right, let me put it another way,” Lonnie said. “Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be … 
Jew-ing
?”

“What?”

“Do you know what today is?”

“Of course I know what today is. Today is—”

That was when it hit him, the fact that the sun was going down. It was like all of a sudden, he could
feel
the shadow across his face. His neck got real stiff, and his shoulders went up. He took a half step backward, but even then he couldn’t quite let go of the flippers. I don’t know what would’ve happened if, right at that moment, the telephone hadn’t rung. Even before Mrs. Selig picked it up in the kitchen, Shlomo knew it was his mom.

We all knew.

Shlomo let go of the flippers, grabbed his coat, and ran home.

The one other thing that happened last week was that my autographed picture of Bobby Murcer came in the mail, just like Jerry Manche had promised. It was signed, “For Julian. Looking forward to meeting you in April. Sincerely, Bobby Murcer.” As soon as I read that, I started
to feel bad. What I mean is I feel bad the guy’s going to make a trip out to Flushing even though he’s not Quentin’s favorite player. (He sure as heck wouldn’t be making the trip just because he’s
my
favorite player.) But whose fault is that? Quentin was only trying to do something nice for me. He had no way of knowing that the Yankees would do what they did, that he’d wind up with a pinball machine and a visit from Bobby Murcer.

What makes it worse is that Murcer seems like such a nice guy. Last year, he got into a fight with Ray Oyler of the Seattle Pilots because of a hard slide at second base, which caused both teams to run out onto the field and start fighting, but the
Post
said that at the bottom of the pile, Murcer was already apologizing to Oyler for slugging him. That’s the kind of guy he is. So you just know he’s going to come out here and be real sincere and make a big deal out of Quentin—not realizing that Quentin’s favorite player is Willie Mays. The whole thing just feels wrong.