Finding the Worm (22 page)

I started to run, and the rest of them started to scatter, and just like that, Lonnie had invented piggyback tag.

It was more fun than you’d think. For one thing, Beverly had her arms wrapped around my neck, and she was holding on tight, and even if she was still mad at me, which I was guessing she was, she seemed to forget about it. For another thing, for once, I
wasn’t
the fastest guy in Ponzini. That was Lonnie, by far, because he was bigger and stronger than the rest of us, and because Quentin was still real skinny on account of being sick. You should’ve heard that guy laughing—Quentin, I mean. He was just about squealing, which makes sense, if you think about it, given that we were playing piggyback tag.

After the first few minutes, we rested up and switched off, and Quentin got on my back, because he said he wanted to know what it felt like to be fast instead of just quick. I told him not to expect too much, but the thing was, I was warmed up by then, and Quentin felt like a feather, and he kept saying into my ear that he wanted to go faster, even when no one was chasing us, so I was running as fast as I could, and the wind was swirling around us, rushing by our faces, and then it got in right behind us, and it was like getting a hard push, and then, for a few seconds, it felt like I wasn’t carrying him, and I was almost running full speed, and he was laughing and squealing, and I could feel his heart beating into my back.

It was the greatest game of tag I ever played.

Quentin was itching to skip the bus
ride home this afternoon. You couldn’t blame him, since the temperature was about sixty-five degrees and the sun was out for the fourth day in a row.

If Quentin hadn’t been stuck in the wheelchair, we’d have walked home without thinking about it. But we
did
have to think about it, because he
was
stuck in the chair. Except then Quentin pointed out that if we walked home, we wouldn’t have to haul the chair onto and off the bus. That clinched it. So at three o’clock, the six of us gathered in front of the school, as usual, and then we walked right past the bus stop and kept going down Twenty-Sixth Avenue. Eric started off pushing
Quentin, and Howie called, “Next!” and Shlomo called, “Next next!”

The going was pretty slow for the first couple of blocks. Even without a wheelchair, the going is always slow at three o’clock. Twenty-Sixth Avenue gets jammed up, because both schools, P.S. 23 and McMasters, let out at the same time, and kids from kindergarten to ninth grade spill out onto the sidewalk, and they hang around in groups, or they wander toward their buses, or else they start walking home, and meanwhile the crossing guards are blowing their whistles, trying to keep them out of the street, and it’s just chaos.

We’d gotten two blocks down Twenty-Sixth Avenue, to the corner of 146th Street, when we heard a shout behind us. I recognized Devlin’s voice even before I turned around. “Where are you guys going?”

Then I turned around.

He had about a half dozen of his ninth-grade friends with him, staring us down. Tagging along with them were at least another dozen kids, with more hurrying down the block toward us. They were coming in waves, from both McMasters and P.S. 23. The looks on
their
faces, the late arrivers, even more than the looks on the faces of Devlin and his friends, were the giveaway. They were waiting for something big to happen.

Lonnie stepped out in front of us. “You guys got a problem?”

“Nah,” Devlin said. “We just want to see the freak show.”

“Then why don’t you look in the mirror?”

“Don’t be like that, man. We came to make friends. Hey, look, it’s Barf Boy and the king of Egypt.…”

“C’mon, Devlin, why don’t you go home?” I said.

“Who said you could use my name, Twerpski?”

“Okay, what do you want me to call you?” I said.

That seemed to confuse him.

Lonnie picked up on it right away. “How about knucklehead?”

But Devlin ignored him. “How about you and me, Twerpski?”

“He’s not a fighter, knucklehead,” Lonnie said. “How about you and
me
?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” Devlin said. “Twerpski’s not a fighter … he’s a
writer
.”

That got to me, the way he said “writer,” and I stepped out from behind Lonnie. “You’re right, Devlin. I’m a writer. Too bad you’re not a reader. Then maybe we could pass notes.”

“That’s real funny—not!”

“Wow, nice comeback. Did you make it up yourself?”

“Shut up, Twerpski!”

“See Devlin think,” I said in a flat Dick-and-Jane voice. “Think, Devlin, think.”

“I said shut up!”

“Hear Devlin yell. Yell, Devlin, yell.”

“You’re dead!”

He charged at me, but I dodged him.

“See Devlin miss. Miss, Devlin, miss.”

He charged me again and dove at my legs, but I jumped to the right, and he landed on his stomach on the front lawn of the house behind us.

“See Devlin fall. Fall, Devlin, fall.”

He scrambled to his feet. His face was beet red, and his hands were balled into fists. He charged me a third time. I dodged him again, and he tripped and fell onto the sidewalk. This time, he came up with two skinned palms, and his right pant leg was torn at the knee. The tear was a perfect flap, and you could see the first traces of blood starting to gather in the hole. The sight of the blood was like a jolt. It reminded me of when we egged Danley Dimmel, of how bad I felt afterward.

“Devlin, this is stupid. I don’t want to fight you—”

That was as far as I’d gotten when one of Devlin’s friends hit me from behind and knocked me to the ground. I fell on my stomach, with my legs on the sidewalk and the rest of me on the lawn. The next second, I felt Devlin jump onto my back. I could tell it was him because no
other human being is that bony. After that, there was total confusion.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lonnie rush over, but at least three of Devlin’s friends jumped him, and then I saw Howie, Shlomo, and Eric jump them, and then the rest of Devlin’s friends piled on, and that was when I started to feel Devlin’s fists hitting me in the back of the head and neck and shoulders. I turtled up as tight as I could, with my face in the grass, my hands cupped behind my neck, and my forearms over my ears, and waited for Devlin to get tired.

Getting beaten up doesn’t hurt as much as you’d think. Once you get past the first shock, it kind of feels like a hard massage. I’m sure it would’ve been much worse if I’d landed on my back and Devlin was whaling away on my face. But to be honest, after the first few seconds, I was lying there thinking,
Okay, he’s beating me up. So when is this thing going to be over?

It was maybe ten seconds later that someone tackled Devlin and knocked him off me. The two of them rolled away, and I jumped up and backpedaled several steps.

As I was doing that, I heard Devlin yell, “Whoa!” and right afterward, there was a sudden hush as the fighting stopped, and Devlin and everyone else were staring in the same direction.

Quentin was kneeling on the lawn, about three feet
from Devlin, trying to catch his breath. His wig had come off and was lying on the grass between the two of them. He didn’t have a single hair on his head.

“Holy crap!” Devlin said. Before Quentin or anyone else could react, he snatched up the wig and flung it over his shoulder into the next yard. “The king of Egypt is a cue ball!”

There was a roar of laughter.

Quentin’s eyes were raging. He caught his breath enough to climb to his feet, and he took a step toward Devlin. “C’mon, fight me!”

But Devlin was standing with his hands on his hips, laughing at him. “No way, Cue Ball.”

“Fight me!” Quentin cried.

“Where’s my pool stick?”

Another roar of laughter, even louder than before.

Quentin rushed him, and Devlin caught him and shoved him back to the ground. He tried to get back up again but started coughing.

That was when the look on Devlin’s face changed. His eyes narrowed, then got wide. I don’t know how much he figured out at that moment, but you could tell he figured out something.

He glanced around at his friends. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

He started to walk away, and the entire group followed him. They walked down Twenty-Sixth Avenue without saying another word. The rest of the crowd started to drift away too.

Then it was just us.

“Everybody okay?” Lonnie said.

Eric said, “Is my lip bleeding?”

It wasn’t.

My neck was a little stiff, but otherwise I felt fine … like I’d just gotten a hard massage.

Quentin had stopped coughing. We watched him stand up, but none of us helped him. You could tell he didn’t want to be helped. He took a couple of steps to the left, stopped, then took a couple more to the right. He was looking side to side. “Anyone see where my hair went?”

That cracked up the rest of us, how casual he said it after what had just happened. We started glancing around, and Shlomo noticed the wig between two bushes in the next yard. He ran and got it, brushed the dirt off, and handed it back to Quentin, who pulled it onto his head, even though it looked slightly off.

Quentin wanted to walk the rest of the way home, but Lonnie made him sit back down in the wheelchair. “I think you had plenty of exercise for today, Sugar Ray.”

* * *

It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I’m wide awake. I’ve been awake at three o’clock in the morning before, when I was sick with the flu, or when I had to get up and pee, or when I rolled over in bed and opened my eyes and happened to notice the clock on my desk. But I’ve never been
wide
awake at three o’clock in the morning. For sure, I’ve never been sitting at my desk, writing, at three o’clock in the morning.

I started writing at eight o’clock last night, and I got into bed at ten, and the entire thing was written down, and then I woke up at one o’clock and couldn’t fall back asleep.

What do you expect?

If you’d seen the way Quentin looked without his hair, you’d be up at three in the morning too. You know what else? You’d spend an hour standing outside your parents’ bedroom, staring at them while they were sleeping. What I mean is … I don’t even know what I mean. It’s three o’clock in the morning! If I knew what I meant, I’d write it down and get back into bed.

You want the world to make sense. But it just doesn’t. I’m sure if I said that to Rabbi Salzberg, he’d tell me to stop thinking about it and concentrate on my bar mitzvah. If you translate that out of rabbi-talk into plain English, here’s what you get:
You’re thirteen years old, and there’s stuff you can’t understand, so stick with what you can understand
.

Except what Quentin’s going through, the fact that he’s
bald, the fact that he got a tumor in the first place, how can you understand that? You can’t. Not if you’re thirteen. Not if you’re a hundred and thirteen. There’s no way to understand it,
because it doesn’t make sense
. It’s like the square root of negative nine. You know the answer’s got something to do with three or negative three, but you can’t make either of them work.

There is no answer.

Rabbi Salzberg didn’t cut me off as I
was telling him what happened with the big fight. He was itching to do it. He leaned forward twice and was about to cut me off, but then he leaned back and let me get the whole thing out.

I was standing up when I started, but I sat down on the creaky wooden chair in front of his desk halfway through. I got pretty worked up by the end, when I was talking about Quentin’s wig. Afterward, he waited while I caught my breath.

He said, “It’s very brave, how your friend came to your defense.”

“Yes.”

“But—”

“Please don’t tell me to worry about my bar mitzvah,” I said.

“Ah.”

“I know that bad things have to happen to good people. Really and truly, I get that. I know it’s not a test if you can’t fail. But if God wanted to test Quentin, couldn’t he have come up with something a little less drastic than a brain tumor?”

“Ah.”

“Plus, doesn’t God know in advance how the test is going to come out? I mean, doesn’t he already know Quentin is going to be brave?”

“God knows what each of us can bear.”

“So what you’re saying is God looked down at Quentin and at me, and God said, ‘Well, that guy over there is brave, so let’s give him a brain tumor, and that guy over there is not so brave, so let’s have him write two hundred words each week on why he scratched up a painting, even though he didn’t do it.’ That can’t be what you’re saying, is it?”

“Two hundred words? I don’t understand, Mr. Twerski.…”

“Why do I have my life, Rabbi? What did I do to deserve it? That’s what I want to know.”

“We don’t question the will of God.”

“How can you
not
question it? Am I that much weaker
than Quentin? Why did God put so much on his plate, and so little on mine? Let’s tell the truth, Rabbi. You and I both know Quentin’s not going to be back to normal for a year, maybe more.…”

As the words came out of my mouth, the look on Rabbi Salzberg’s face darkened. It only lasted for a second—like if you were playing with the dimmer switch on a light, turning it down and then right back up—but it was noticeable.

“There are things we can’t run away from, Mr. Twerski.”

I felt a chill in my chest and began shaking my head. “No.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“His bar mitzvah is in November.”

“No, it isn’t, Mr. Twerski,” he said.

“I can help him study for it. I know he’s behind—”

“Mr. Twerski, there will be no bar mitzvah.”

“How do you know? You’re not a doctor!”

“The Seligs are part of this congregation.…”

By then I was crying. “You jinxed him!”

“You have to prepare yourself, Mr. Twerski.”

“That stuff you said last time, you jinxed him!”

“There is no jinx. There is only God’s will.”