The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (21 page)

“Players, it’s time to get set up at the table,” said Dave Hopper.

Everyone took their places. A makeup woman came around with a powder puff, “to get rid of the shine,” she said as she lightly patted it against Duncan’s face. The powder made him cough, reminding him of the awful day when he’d shot the Smooth Moves cigarette ad at the Slaters’ house. The cigarette ad was just one more unpleasant detail that awaited him in Drilling Falls.

In the final seconds before the live TV broadcast began, Carl turned to Duncan and said, “Dorfman, I have something to say to you.”

“Okay,” said Duncan.

“Make it right,” said Carl in a low, intense voice.

“What?”

“You heard me. Make it right.”

“What do you mean by that?” Duncan asked. “Tell me what you mean, Carl.”

But it was too late to find out. The cameraman said, “Five, four, three, two, one . . .” and the red light on the camera snapped on.

Make it right, Duncan thought as he was thrust onto national TV. He tried to smile, but the white light was too bright. As soon as he looked down at the board, having just looked into the light, he couldn’t see a thing. Everything appeared as its ghostly opposite.
Calm down,
Duncan told himself.
Just calm down
.
Don’t have a freak-out.
Soon his vision returned to normal.

He took a few deep breaths and watched as Lucy Woolery drew the first tile from the bag. It was a C. Lucy smiled slightly, then quickly hid it.

Carl reached in and drew a W.

Duncan sat up straighter in his chair, his arms hugging his chest. The camera was trained on the board, and Duncan’s eyes were, too. Out there in the ballroom on the other side of the wall, all 196 eliminated players sat in rows of banquet chairs, watching the game on an enormous screen. They’d all been given bags of popcorn and cans of soda, as though they were spending a relaxing afternoon at a movie.

For the four players in this little room, the final round was the opposite of relaxed. The game felt surreal to Duncan. The Oregonzos played their first word, then the Drilling Falls Scrabble Team played theirs. The words intersected and fed off one another; points were added to points. Both sides played with confidence.

Duncan saw Carl stare meaningfully at him from time to time, as if asking:

But it wasn’t necessary yet. Duncan and Carl chugged along, writing notes to each other on their pad, making good words and slightly less good words. Neither team had made a bingo yet. There were no blanks on the board. Anything could happen, Duncan knew, and probably many things would.

When the bag was half empty, Duncan reached in with his left hand and pulled out four tiles. He lined them up on the rack next to the three that were already there.

The letters, he saw, were astonishing.

Surely, on
Thwap!
TV right that second, the announcer was saying in a hushed and excited voice to the audience, “Folks, the Drilling Falls team has just drawn an incredible set of letters! Wow, baby, wow! Home run!”

Duncan and Carl were staring at this rack:

A

E

N

T

P

L

R

Carl gave Duncan a knowing look, and nodded. Then, on the pad of paper, Carl wrote:

Duncan realized that Carl had once again assumed that Duncan had deliberately selected these letters. Carl still didn’t seem to remember that chance could also bring you a winning rack. Duncan didn’t feel like letting Carl know that the tiles had been drawn the way anyone in any Scrabble game might have drawn them. Besides, there wasn’t time for that right now. The clock was running down.

Both boys had seen the word PLANTER. But the problem was, Duncan realized after a second, there was nowhere to put it.

Ugh
.

It was a classic homeless bingo. They looked and looked, searching the board for a place to hook a letter, perhaps the P at the start of the word, or the R at the end of it, but there was nothing.

“What are we going to do?” Carl said under his breath. Duncan cracked his knuckles in anxiety, then realized how loud it had probably sounded on TV.

He was frantic now, but also powerless. The letters simply did not fit. Then Duncan told himself to calm down and think. He knew, of course, that you could also add another letter to your own seven in order to make an
eight
-letter bingo. Was there any single letter on the board that could fit seven letters around it?

The A could do it.

The A was just sitting there, part of the word ARCH. Duncan tried to figure out what eight-letter bingo he could possibly form around that A. He picked up a few tiles on his rack and moved them. With the A in the mix, he saw that he could make:

PRENATAL

He knew that word meant “before birth.” Right now, thinking about it, the word made him feel
strange
. It was as if he was being hypnotized, as Lucy had hypnotized Larry Saviano’s former partner, Wendell. He imagined himself as a tiny baby who hadn’t even been born yet, floating inside his mother’s womb. Caroline Dorfman and Duncan’s father, Joe Wright, must have been scared but excited, knowing that they were going to have a baby.

Then Duncan moved the letters around some more. It was so peculiar, but they also scrambled to make:

PARENTAL

Now he imagined his young parents several months later, eagerly awaiting his birth. Maybe they went out and bought a crib for Duncan’s room, and a mobile with ducks on it. Maybe they sang songs to him while he was still inside the womb. Surely Duncan’s father couldn’t wait to meet his son.

Duncan restlessly moved the letters again. This time they spelled out yet
another
word. It was:

PATERNAL

This word meant “having to do with fatherhood,” and it made Duncan Dorfman push back a little in his chair. He thought of Joe Wright looking forward to becoming a father, but dying tragically of a rare disease before he ever had the chance.

It was too sad to believe, Duncan thought. It was so
incredibly sad
that his father had died of panosis before he was able to become paternal. Before he could hold little baby Duncan in his arms.

It was too sad to believe, Duncan Dorfman thought again. And then he realized that he actually
didn’t
believe it.

He didn’t believe it at all.

After all, PANOSIS had been no good; Dr. Steve had confirmed that it wasn’t a real disease. Then why had Duncan’s mother always told him that his father had died of panosis?

Maybe panosis was just a made-up word told to a child thoughtlessly, in a hurry, when he’d begun to ask his mother a lot of questions. And once she’d said it, she’d needed to stick to it:

Duncan realized, too, that his mother’s migraine headaches had something in common. Each time she got one, she seemed to have just been thinking about or talking about Duncan’s father. Yesterday, she’d told Duncan that her migraine had come on right after talking to Nate’s father, Larry, about being a single parent.

Thinking about Duncan’s father always caused Caroline Dorfman a lot of stress.

Why?
he wondered. Why would it cause her so much stress?

Why would she need to make up the name of a fatal disease?

Why didn’t any of this make sense?

In a way, Duncan knew, he had questioned the story about his father for some time. His mother had always been so
vague
about Joe Wright—what he was like, how long he had been sick with panosis. But Duncan had never wanted to bring it up and upset his fragile mother.

And then there had been all the whispered conversations she had at night with Aunt Djuna.
“I realize it’s not perfect,”
she had told his great-aunt.

And Aunt Djuna had said,
“He deserves better.”

Yes, he deserved to know the truth. It was only now, during the finals of the Youth Scrabble Tournament, in front of a live TV audience, that Duncan could really concentrate on what the truth might be. Now, of all times, it came together and took on meaning.

PRENATAL . . .

PARENTAL . . .

PATERNAL...

The words were like a trail of clues, leading to a wild conclusion, perhaps a
wrong
one, but a conclusion nonetheless:

Duncan’s father was alive.

 

 

He didn’t even know he had fainted until he saw April’s face above him, looking frightened. “Duncan?” she was saying. “Duncan? Are you okay?”

“I think so,” he said, but he realized he was on the floor. This was like falling off a skateboard, but much stranger.

Someone helped him sit up and gave him a glass of water. The
Thwap!
TV announcer had cut to a commercial, and now the television crew was gathered around him, murmuring to themselves. A man with a headset came over and said, “Duncan, we’ve got a doctor coming in here in just a moment. He’s Nate Saviano’s stepdad.”

“Oh, he’s nice,” said Duncan, “but I don’t need a doctor. I’m fine now,” he added, and it was actually, suddenly true.

“Are you sure?” asked the man nervously. “Because you fainted, you know.”

“I know,” said Duncan. “What’s happening with the game?”

“Both of your timers are paused,” the man said. “You’ll resume playing when you’re ready. If you can’t continue, we’ll cut to a taped sporting event. Boxing, I think. Humboldt versus Suarez. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m ready,” said Duncan.

Make it right,
Carl had warned him before the game started, and Duncan now knew how to do that. After he swore to all the adults around him that he was perfectly fine—that he had simply been overexcited because of the game—the players took their seats at the table again, and the red light of the TV camera came on.

The game resumed where it had left off. The bingo PATERNAL was selected and played by Duncan, and then it was April and Lucy’s turn. Back and forth both teams went, and the game was tremendously close the whole way. Something needed to be done to pull Drilling Falls ahead. To win.

It was now or never.

Carl pushed the tile bag toward Duncan and whispered, “Here you go, dude. Do it for Drilling Falls.”

Duncan reached his left hand into the opening of the velvet bag, his fingers fishing around inside. A new calm had settled over him.

Make it right,
he thought. Duncan knew that he didn’t want any more lies. He wanted only what was real. Yes, of course he wanted his team to win, but he wouldn’t do it in some phony, cheater’s way that would make him feel bad whenever he thought about it for the rest of his life.

Also, he wouldn’t pretend to Carl that he had done it that way, either.

Make it
right.

Duncan Dorfman took that phrase literally.

He removed his left hand from the bag. Making sure that Carl was watching, he plunged his right hand in instead.

“What are you doing?” mouthed Carl, practically hysterical. “This is
it
, man, this is the moment! Wrong hand, dude, wrong hand!”

Duncan calmly felt the tiles. None of them bloomed into hot life, of course; his right hand had never possessed that skill. He felt absolutely nothing on those plastic squares. Their surfaces were cool and flat, and Carl could tell this by Duncan’s expression.

“You know what you are?” said Carl. “You’re a nothing. You’re just . . . Lunch Meat.” He hissed the words close to Duncan’s ear, which grew red, as if it were on fire.
“Lunch Meat,”
Carl repeated, taunting him, and the cameras and the microphone picked up this moment, too.

Now everyone watching this show on TV would know Duncan’s nickname, and they would call him that whenever they teased him.

But when he pulled the letters out and looked at them, he immediately stopped thinking about being teased by Carl or anyone else. He saw that, by pure luck, the tiles happened to be pretty good. He had drawn the Z, among other letters, and the board was still open. Duncan sensed that April and Lucy simply wouldn’t be able to catch up now.

It was a mixed feeling. Triumph, along with a touch of sadness and regret. Duncan looked at April Blunt’s eyes across the board, but they didn’t reveal a thing. She seemed to be just watching the game carefully, as curious as anyone about how it would turn out. She could handle what happened next, which didn’t mean she wouldn’t be disappointed. But she and Lucy would indeed be okay. After all, everyone said, it was only a game.

Moments later, as if in a daze, Duncan laid down the last of the Drilling Falls team’s tiles, and he and Carl won by 28 points.

They all shook hands across the board, the camera catching every moment. Duncan Dorfman and Carl Slater, from the town of Drilling Falls, Pennsylvania, became the new champions of the Youth Scrabble Tournament, with only forty-one seconds left on their clock.

Someone opened the door to the ballroom. As Duncan and Carl were led through, they could hear the cheering.

PART THREE

MAKING IT RIGHT

L
ater, after the ceremony at which the big check and the trophy were handed to the winners, after the applause and the interviews with TV news shows and websites and newspapers and call-in satellite radio shows, Duncan Dorfman was wiped out. He had never had a day as big as this one, and he knew he would probably never have one as big again. He had come from nothing and nowhere and won everything. Or at least, thirty percent of it.