The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin (8 page)

I sit back and reread the letter a few hundred times. My heart flutters in my chest. It is definitely good. Real good. Next I just have to put my e-mail address ([email protected]) so she can contact me. But how do I sign off? What do I write before my name? “Yours truly”? Am I eight hundred years old? “Sincerely yours”? What does that even mean anyway?

I check out the rest of her page while I think on it. I find some of Leigha’s poetry:

OK, maybe she’s not a great poetess, my future girlfriend. How to end my note to Leigha? I could write:

But that seems a little desperate, even with that question mark to soften the blow.

Too weird. Can’t decide. I leave it blank. I put the page in my math binder and decide to sleep on it. Will my dreams feature those eyes, so sad, so beautiful? That killer ass?

It is the middle
of the night when my light flicks on. “What is that noise?” Mom signs, wiggling her hand by her ear.

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” I sign. Trying to keep it light. I know what it is, though. Ace is barking. I can feel it. I hid him in the laundry room off to the side of my basement lair and had set my alarm to wake me in the middle of the night to check on him, but I guess he got bored waiting for me.

“It sounds like a dog,” Mom signs.

I shrug. Dad joins her at the foot of my bed. He has sleep in his eyes. He gives me a suspicious look and walks toward the laundry area. What was I thinking? Of course they were going to find out. And now I am about to lose my new best friend. Christ, I’m pathetic.

Dad is walking back toward my bed. He has Ace by his side. Mom is gasping, covering her mouth with her hand. Dad
points to the dog with a question mark on his face. The gesture means “Care to explain?”

“I have never seen that dog before,” I deadpan. I love the sign for “before.” You pull your hand back toward you, like you’re pressing rewind on life. If only.

Dad walks over to me and plucks a black hair off my sleeve. Evidence. He holds it up, then compares it to Ace’s back. Ace thinks this means Dad is going to pet him, and he gets so excited that he spins around in a circle. His tail whacks my night-stand, disrupting my messy stack of books. This spooks Ace, and he starts barking at a wobbling Poe anthology. I am having to reconsider the possibility of Ace becoming a service dog. He is afraid of literature, and his only discernible skill seems to be whizzing on stuff. Oh, and now he’s humping my mom’s leg. Nice, Ace. Nice. This audition is not going well at all. I clench my jaw.

Then Dad starts laughing. “He likes you,” he signs to my mom (an easy sign). Then, to my surprise, Mom starts laughing.

“Or at least my leg,” she signs.

“He
loves your
leg,” I sign. Might as well join in, even if it is a weird thing to say. Ace keeps smiling, like he’s in on the joke. Or maybe he just does love that leg. I know when to strike.

“Can we keep him?” I sign, gripping my fingers tightly as I make the sign.

The parents exchange looks, each raising their eyebrows. I look at them and raise my eyebrows. It’s like we’re having an eyebrow-raising contest—and I am determined to win! Ace stops humping and raises his eyebrows too. We all laugh. Mom
is ready to break! Then she has a bunch of questions for me. Will I clean up after him? Feed him? Walk him? Bathe him? I nod yes. Yes. Yes! She is annoyingly skeptical.

“Every day,” I promise.

They give me a look.

“What?” I sign. I know what they mean. I’m not the poster boy for daily exercise. They smile. Ace barks. He’s in. He’s in!

Dad scratches him on the ear, and we all go back to sleep.

Arf!

“First order of business,”
Mr. Arterberry is saying as I try to shake the sleep out of my head and focus on history. “Everyone needs a buddy for the field trip to Happy Memory Coal Mine.”
Sheesh
.

I scan the room, watching as pairs of eyes lock in silent agreement like pieces in a puzzle that know instinctively where they belong. Stepcoat and Spark. Chambers and Jonker. Even Escapone and Carlson sign up as buddies, some sort of default twosome in a united front against normalcy. Phimmul and Pennington. Hmm. Interesting. Not Pat and Leigha? Why aren’t they buddies? And why couldn’t her second choice be yours truly, whose pure-ish devotion is hers for the taking? I’ve watched the two of them, the way Pat looks at her, licking his lips. He’s very animalistic. He’s a disgusting beast. Doesn’t she see that?

So, where else will my puzzle piece click? Where, oh where, but with Devon Smiley? He gives me a serious look and then a nod and then a smile. I do something with my mouth, maybe a grimace. But it is official. We are coal mine field trip buddies. Just not in a romantic way.

Arterberry is writing out the list of buddies, squinting down his nose at a black binder. Devon walks up and hands me a note. A note? After getting caught chatting the day before, I would have thought he’d be more sensibly paranoid.

Me and “Dev” Smiley.

I try to focus on Arterberry’s lecture. It takes me forever to realize that the one word he keeps saying is “bituminous,” which is a type of coal. I pick up “anthracite,” another type, more easily. But I keep getting lost. So I go back to the text and lose myself in that world: tough guys doing dangerous work amid fires and explosions and cave-ins. Strikes, murders, sabotage, men shot on picket lines, fighting for their rights in our
very backyards. Does any of this flow through my own veins? I try to figure out my connection to this world, but, let’s face it, I barely know my place in this classroom. In my own family. In my own self.

I think of my old school for some reason, of the battle lines drawn in the sand, now washed away by the ocean of time. See, Leigha? I’m a poet too. Shit.

Lunch is fried ravioli
. It is a strange food that does strange things to my normally ironclad gut. As soon as I eat a piece, I feel it expanding like one of those pills that you put in water and watch as it turns into a sponge dinosaur. I go back for seconds.

Straight ahead in my line of sight is Kevin Planders. Unsurprisingly, he is sitting alone. Possibly because he is a loser, but maybe because he is eating a confusing lunch of ketchup packets and beef jerky.

Shouldn’t be so harsh. Planders is just another fellow outsider. Maybe he isn’t a bad guy if you get to know him. Sure there is always something unsteady in his large, glassy eyes. And, yeah, there is something not quite right in the way his lips move all the time and his face contorts wildly in response to whatever snuff film is playing in his head. Actually, maybe
Kevin Planders
is
a bad guy if you get to know him. Some people are just crazy, and although I’d like to be a saint and befriend him, I have my own considerable ass to cover.

Purple Phimmul is also in full view and wearing some sort of intricately beaded dress. I lock onto her gaze for a second and am met with an angry glare. Geez. Why so pissy, missy? She looks like she’s going to stick her tongue out at me. For some bizarre reason, I find myself winking at her. What the hell was that? She seems to be thinking the same thing because the look on her face is total surprise. Then she starts laughing and turns away.

OK, must move along. What else is on? There’s a bit of commotion over at Pat’s table. D. JONKER is trying to sit down, and Pat keeps subtly sliding his chair out of reach. He doesn’t even look at Derrick, just slides the chair a little to the left, then a little to the right. D. JONKER is smiling at first but then becomes very frustrated and screams something that would have gotten him suspended for sure if he wasn’t a member of the defensive line squadron or whatever you call it. (I hate football.) Is this about that party? I jot in my notebook: D. JONKER ON THE OUTS WITH P.C.?

As I write, I look up to see Derrick storm off. Then he lands—right at my table. It is like a meteor crashing onto my deserted island. He doesn’t even acknowledge me, however. He just looks right through me, chugging his little jug of milk and chomping his fried ravioli with a clenched jaw. Then, to my shock, he pulls out an AP English book,
Great American Writers
. He spreads it on the table, half under his tray. Is he afraid
his friends will make fun of him for reading? I pretend to be still looking in my notebook, but I can see that he’s opened to a chapter on Emily Dickinson. Something from one of her poems comes to mind: “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?” Then he moves on to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I suddenly want to tell him about how I totally get that story, about how the DEAF CHILD AREA sign under my bed has been taunting me like a pocket watch under the floorboards. It is a little insane, but I go for it.

“I know exactly how the narrator feels in that story,” I write. I float the note over his book. He looks at it like I crapped in his milk carton.

“Dude,” he says, “don’t write me notes.”

We stare at each other for a long moment. For some reason I am not intimidated. Somebody who reads unassigned Poe and Dickinson at lunch just isn’t a tough guy, no matter how much he wants to be. We could really be friends, I think.
Dude
. But then the bell, presumably, sounds. I see a sudden mass exodus, and with it the possibility of friendship dissipates into the air. Story of my goddamn life.

Before we even begin
getting changed for swimming, Fatzy comes storming into the locker room. He is brandishing a clear plastic bag that contains something wet and brown and, uh … poopish. He holds it up like a lawyer presenting the surprise piece of evidence sure to nail the killer. We all look at it with collective confusion.

“Don’t pretend
(something something)
what this is, Smiley,” McFatpants says. All eyes go to Devon, who clearly has no idea what Fatzy is talking about.

“Come again?” he says, cocking his head like a confused dog struggling to grasp the commands of a lunatic master. Fatpants then adjusts the bag so its contents become clearer. Ah, a swimming suit. He points, his finger shaking with anger, at the waistband. There, someone, presumably Mrs. Smiley, had written “Devon
” in humiliatingly permanent marker.

“Do you know how
(something something)
emergency plumbing services to
(something something)
remove this from the drain?”

So, Devon’s shorts clogged up the pipes. The school had to spend a lot of money to get a plumber to fish them out. And now Fatzy is furious—with Devon!

Devon tries posing the logical question: “Why would I flush my own swimsuit down the toilet?”

“Well, then, who did?” Fatzy asks.

Devon pauses. Clearly, he does not want to rat out those actually responsible for the old flag-and-flush. Will someone step up and fall honorably on his sword? Of course not.

“Are you telling me that someone other than you
(something something)
flushed your shorts down the toilet?” Fatzinger asks.

Devon nods.

“And that you have no idea who it was that did this?” Fatzy yells. “Someone pulled off your shorts and flushed them down my toilet without you noticing who it was?”

Devon nods again. And get this! He ends up being the one who gets punished. I am thunderstruck. What is this delusion that makes people think that kids who are good at sports are somehow also blessed with a whole host of other positive traits? It should have been obvious to Fatpants that Pat is constantly torturing Devon.