Finding the Worm (17 page)

It was an awful cough. It came from his guts, not from his throat. On the other hand, when he wasn’t coughing, he was smiling. Not just smiling, he was grinning like a fool. Not even Lonnie knew what to make of it.

As the coughing died down, Lonnie slipped his hand behind Quentin’s head and helped him sit up. When Quentin had caught his breath, he looked up at Beverly and said, “I was winning.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Did you fake that?”

“No!”

“What happened?”

“I ran out of gas … but I was winning.”

“What difference does it make, who was winning? I thought you were dead!”

“That was great. It was just … great.…”

Beverly jumped to her feet. “You’re an idiot! You’re all idiots!” Then she turned to me and said, “And it’s
your
fault!”

“That’s right!” Eric said.

“It’s
not
my fault,” I said.

Beverly rubbed the tears from her eyes and stormed out of Ponzini.

Here’s the thing about writing stuff
down, and the reason I recommend it: when you read back what you wrote, stuff makes more sense. When I first started to write about what happened last week in Ponzini with Beverly and Howie and Quentin, I felt like the whole thing was Beverly’s fault—maybe because she said the whole thing was my fault. But after I wrote it down and read it back, I got a different feeling about it. It
wasn’t
Beverly’s fault, what happened. Not really. I’m not saying it was my fault, but it wasn’t hers.

She took it real hard, though. She didn’t hang out with us over the weekend, not for a minute. Then, on
Monday and Tuesday, she wouldn’t ride the bus with us—which she’d been doing ever since Quentin came back to school. She walked to school, even though it was pouring rain both mornings. She walked right past us at the bus stop. She didn’t even nod in our direction.

But you know who took it even harder than Beverly?

Quentin.

I don’t think he’d ever had anyone get mad at him, let alone
stay
mad at him. He couldn’t take it. He kept asking me how long it would be until Beverly wasn’t mad anymore, and I kept telling him I didn’t know. That didn’t sit well with him. After she walked past us on Tuesday morning, he followed her halfway down the block, trying to apologize, but she wouldn’t even turn around. If Lonnie hadn’t chased him down and brought him back to the bus stop, he likely would’ve missed the bus.

Last night, he showed up at my house with a note. He wanted me to copy it over so that he could give it to Beverly. (If you’d ever seen Quentin’s handwriting, you’d know why he needed me to copy it over.) Here’s what the note said:

I copied over the note while he sat on my bed and waited. I fixed up the punctuation, but I kept the words the way he wrote them. So even if Beverly recognized my handwriting—which she likely would because of how many classes we had together—she’d know it was really and truly Quentin’s note.

He read it after I was done and nodded.

“How are you going to get it to her?” I said.

“I’ll slide it under her door,” he said. “I got an envelope.”

“Can I see it?”

He unfolded the envelope from his back pocket and showed it to me. On the front he’d written “
FOR BEVERLY
,” which you could just about make out, because he’d written it in capital letters. His print capitals weren’t as bad as his cursive.

“How are you going to get into her building?”

“I’ll wait for somebody to come out,” he said.

“You want me to go with you?”

He shook his head. “You did enough already.”

This morning Beverly walked past us again at the bus stop.

But she said hello to Quentin.

After a week, Beverly’s freeze-out
started to get to me too. If it was just the thing at the bus stop, I could’ve taken it a lot longer. But I also had to deal with her in homeroom and then in half of my regular classes. That was the worst of it, because none of the other guys were there, so the icicles were pointed straight at me. I’d stop by her desk and start talking, just to see if I could get something back, and she’d stare straight ahead. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye.

“Let her cool off,” Lonnie told me. Which was kind of an ironical choice of words.

But another weekend came and went, and she didn’t come around, and even though—if you think about it—I
hadn’t
done anything wrong, I started to feel like I had. I decided to make things right. I didn’t have a plan, just a gut feeling that if I could talk to her for couple of minutes, with no one around, she’d at least hear me out.

I finally got my chance yesterday, after school. I was standing in line for the bus outside McMasters with the rest of the guys, and I noticed Beverly at the end of the block, about to turn the corner. I nudged Lonnie and pointed her out. He understood what I meant. As the bus pulled up, I trotted off to catch up with her.

She carried her textbooks and school supplies in a blue backpack, which always looked big enough to flip her backward, but she also had a brown cardboard box tucked under her right arm. It was the size and shape of a pizza box, but she was holding it sideways, against her body, so I knew there was no pizza inside. She heard my footsteps coming up behind her and glanced over her shoulder. When she saw it was me, she turned back around.

“I just missed the bus,” I said. “Can I walk home with you?”

“Not if you’re going to lie to me.”

“I didn’t miss the bus. I was thinking maybe we could talk.”

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Whatever you want to talk about.”

“I’m not the one following you home.”

“I’m
not
following you home.”

“Then what would you call it?” she said.

“We live on the same block. We’re going in the same direction.”

“So what’s your point?”

I took a deep breath, but I didn’t answer her. I let maybe ten seconds go by. Then, at last, I said, “What’s in the box?”

“None of your business,” she answered.

“C’mon, Beverly.…”

“C’mon, what?”

“I’m just trying to have a conversation.”

“I don’t want to talk about what’s in the box,” she said.

“Then what
do
you want to talk about? We can talk about anything.”

She looked me in the eye for the first time. “Why won’t you race me?”

“I already told you—”

“Why won’t you race me
really
?”

It was a tough question to answer, because the real answer was the one she thought was fake: I didn’t want to race her because I knew who’d win, and I knew it wouldn’t be close. It was like when Principal Salvatore first called me into his office about the painting. You keep telling people the truth, but they don’t want to hear it because it’s not deep enough.

“What do you want me to say, Beverly?”

She took a deep breath. “Did you ever race a girl—even once?”

“Not that I can remember,” I said.

“Do you know what that makes you?”

“No.”

“That makes you a male chauvinist,” she said. “It means you think boys are better than girls.”

“I know what it means … and, for your information, I don’t think boys are
better
than girls. I just think they’re
faster
than girls.”

“Tell that to Eric and Howie,” she said.

“Do you honestly think that racing Eric and Howie is the same as racing me?”

“Here’s what I think, Julian. I think that you think I’m not
worth
racing. You don’t care how hard I worked to get faster, how many times I ran around the track at Memorial Field, how many blisters I got on my feet. The only thing that matters to you is that I’m a girl, so I’m not worth racing.”

The way she said that, you could hear the hurt in her voice. She
had
gotten faster. I mean, maybe she could’ve beaten Eric a year ago, but there was no way she could’ve beaten Howie. She’d gotten a lot faster, for sure … it just never crossed my mind that she’d
worked
at it. I figured it just kind of happened, like she woke up one morning faster than Howie.

“All right,” I said.

She stopped and looked at me. “All right, what?”

“Let’s race,” I said. “Here to the end of the block.”

“I don’t want to race you
now
.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No one will believe it if I win.”

“You’re not going to win, Beverly.”

“I need witnesses,” she said.

“Fine, when
do
you want to race?” I asked.

“Friday, after school, in Ponzini.”

“Are you going to bring your cheerleader friends?”

She smiled. “Maybe.”

“They’re going to be disappointed.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

I started to walk again, but she didn’t. Instead, she knelt down on the sidewalk and started to pick at the tape on the edges of the pizza box.

“What are you doing?”

She looked up at me. Her mouth crinkled at the edges. “Do you want to know what’s in the box or not?”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“No, I want to show you.”

I waited for her to pick through the tape on the second
corner. After she did that, she slid open the box and pulled out a canvas painting. It was wrapped in layers of brown paper, but you could see the edges of it, where the paint had dripped over. She was real careful unwrapping it. She was also careful not to let me see the picture until she got the brown paper completely off.

“Ready?” she said.

“C’mon, I’m cold.”

“Ta-da!”

She held the painting out in front of her, and I gasped: it was the painting of the Bowne House.

“Beverly, where … 
how
did you get that?”

“How do you think?”

“You
stole
it?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “I’m actually Catwoman, and I steal art from junior high schools. I’m going to add this to my collection. You have to pinkie-swear to keep my secret.”

“I’m serious, Beverly. Where did you get it?”

“I painted it, you idiot! It’s mine!”

“C’mon!” I said.

“You don’t even know I paint, do you? We’ve known each other since third grade, and you don’t know a thing about me.”

“How would I know you paint? You’ve never talked about it.”

“You’ve never asked about it,” she said.

“How would I know to ask about it if you’ve never talked about it?”

“Fair point,” she said, then held up the painting again. “So, do you like it?”

“Do you know how much trouble I got into because of that painting?”

“Why would you get into trouble because of a painting?”

“Principal Salvatore thinks I’m the one who scratched it up,” I said.

“You mean the
JF
?”

“He thinks it’s
JT
.”

“Well, it looked like
JF
to me. I don’t know why anyone would want to do that. I figured it was just some idiot ninth grader, but I didn’t know anyone whose initials were
JF
. I guess it
could’ve
been
JT
. Anyway, it’s no big deal. I fixed it, so your troubles are over.” She pushed the canvas closer to my face, and I looked in the lower right corner. The scratches were gone. The signature, now that I knew what to look for, clearly read “bsegal.” “Do you want me to tell Principal Salvatore I fixed the painting, so he can forget about it?”

“It’s not that simple,” I said. “He’s going to kick me out of Fast Track unless I write him an essay on good citizenship.”

“Then write the essay!”

“But that would be like admitting I scratched up the painting—which I didn’t do.”

“So you’d rather get kicked out of Fast Track?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I need time to think about it.”

“Let me talk to Principal Salvatore—”

“No!”

“Why not?” she said. “I know you, Julian. I know you didn’t scratch up the painting.”

“This is between him and me!”

“But he doesn’t know you—I do. Plus, it’s my painting, so I’m already involved.”

“Promise me you won’t talk to him.”

“But—”

“Please, Beverly, promise me you won’t.”

She shook her head. “All right, I promise.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled in an odd way. “You never told me whether you liked it.”

I didn’t know how to answer. “It’s all right.”

“That’s it?”

“What do you want me to say? It’s nice. It looks like the real thing.”

“You used to stand in front of it and stare.”

“I did not.”

“C’mon, Julian. I saw you doing it.”

“I look at lots of paintings,” I said.

“Yeah, but you don’t stand and stare at them.”

“Why did you paint the Bowne House?”

“I like Quakers,” she said. “I did a book report on them. Did you ever hear of Mary Dyer?”

“No.”

“I thought you knew about Quakers.”

“Not as much as you do,” I said.

“She was a Quaker who got hanged,” Beverly said.

“Did she live in the Bowne House?”

“No one lived in the Bowne House except the Bowne family,” she said. “But John Bowne let a group of Quakers meet there. They were being persecuted by Peter Stuyvesant, who was the governor of New Amsterdam. He had a wooden leg.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?”

“Because it’s
interesting
,” she said. “Don’t you like knowing stuff?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Don’t you want to know why Mary Dyer got hanged?”

“All right,” I said. “Why did Peter Stuyvesant hang Mary Dyer?”

“
Peter Stuyvesant
didn’t hang her,” she said. “Mary Dyer had nothing to do with the Bowne House. She got hanged in Massachusetts. John Winthrop was the guy who hanged her. He didn’t want Quakers in his colony,
so he kept kicking her out. But she kept coming back and preaching. She stuck with what she believed, no matter what. She kept coming back and coming back, so in the end he hanged her. He also dug up her dead baby.”