Watch Me (2 page)

“Does it even work?” I said.

Drew held it up to his ear. He shook it. Finally, he turned it over and looked at the back. It was as rusted as the front, but I could make out some letters and numbers.

“It's junk,” Drew said. “What a bust.” He shook his head. “Make sure no one is watching us, Kaz.”

I looked up and down the alley, but I didn't see anyone. Drew took all the
ID
out of the wallet. Most of it was plastic cards. He broke them into pieces. The rest was paper, which he ripped up. He walked down the alley and dropped all the pieces down a drain grate.

“What did you do that for?” I said.

“We don't want someone to find the wallet and connect it to that woman,” Drew said. “We don't want the cops to know that we're not from her neighborhood.”

He tossed the purse into a Dumpster.

“Let's get out of here,” he said.

We walked to my street together. By then my legs were all wobbly. I kept thinking
about that old lady and the noise her head had made when it hit the pavement.

“What if someone saw us?” I said.

“The cops have serious crimes to solve,” Drew said. “Purse snatching isn't a big deal, especially this purse. It's not like there was thousands of dollars in there, Kaz. It's five bucks. The cops aren't going to put a bunch of ace detectives on the case. It'll probably take them a couple of hours to even show up. Maybe they won't even go to her place. Maybe they'll make her go down to the police station and file a report.”

Maybe.

“She looked right at you, Drew.”

“She's old,” Drew said. “Her glasses came off. She probably just saw a big blur. Besides, we don't live anywhere near that neighborhood. I've only been over there once since my mom got transferred. No one knows us around there. If she tells the cops that some kids took her purse, they'll check out the local schools— assuming they check out anything at all. They'll never find you.”

You
. Because I was the one who'd taken the purse. Me—not Drew.

“You'll be fine, Kaz. Besides, you take stuff from stores all the time.”

“I do not,” I said. “Not
all the time
.” Sometimes I took stuff. Usually I did it when I was mad about something. It made me feel better. I don't know why. It just did.

“What I mean is, you've never been caught,” Drew said. “Right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” But that was different. Stores weren't old ladies. Nobody ever got hurt. “But—”

“It's kind of late to worry about it now,” Drew said. “If you were going to get all nervous about it, you shouldn't have taken the purse in the first place.”

He was right. It
was
too late to worry. What was done was done.

Neil came through the front door at the same time he did every weekday. Usually he headed right into the kitchen. That was one of the things my mom liked about him. He didn't sit around waiting for her to show up. Instead he made supper. I was in the living room, watching
TV.
I slumped down on the couch, hoping he would walk right past me.

He didn't. He stopped, looked at me and said, “What are you up to, Sport?”

Was he blind? What did he think I was up to? I pretended I hadn't heard him.

He didn't go away. Instead he glanced at the
TV.

“Watching the news?” he said. He sounded surprised. “You must really be bored. Why don't you get a start on your homework?”

That was typical Neil. No matter what I did, he had a problem with it. This was a perfect example. Neil liked to sit at the table at supper and talk about what was happening in the world—what wars were going on, what the politicians were doing, what the big issues in the city were. He usually gave me a hard time because I didn't care about stuff like that. So you'd think he would be happy that I was watching the news. But, no, he was making fun of me and telling me to do something else.

“This
is
homework,” I lied. I hoped that would make him go away. It didn't. He stepped into the living room.

“You're doing current events in school now?” he said. “What's the focus? National? International?”

“My teacher wants us to see what's going on in the city,” I said.

“And?”

“And what?”

“What's going on? What have you learned?”

So far, I'd learned that it looked like Drew was right. I had been flipping through all the local news stations, but I hadn't seen anything about the woman in the park. Not a thing.

The weather came on. I flipped off the
TV,
got up and brushed past Neil on my way to my room. He didn't try to stop me. I guess he thought I was going to do my homework.

If Neil hadn't already been reading the newspaper the next morning, I might have taken a look at it. Might have. But probably not. I don't like newspapers. I don't like magazines either. Or books. I don't like reading. It's too hard.

Neil glanced at me while I got myself some cereal. My mom was finishing a
cup of coffee while she slid her feet into her shoes. She always leaves before Neil. She has to take two buses to get to the hospital where she's a lab technician. Neil can walk to work from our place. My mom pulled me toward her and kissed me on the cheek, which told me that she was in a good mood.

“All your homework done, Kaz?” she said.

I nodded. “Is it okay if I eat in the living room?” I said. “I have to watch the news.”

She grinned. “Finally an assignment that's fun for you, huh?” she said. She knew how much I hated to read. She also knew how that made me feel about school.

Neil cleared his throat. My mom glanced at him before turning back to me.

“They're having sign-up for hockey at the arena tonight,” she said. “If you want, we can go up there after supper and check it out.”

That again.

“I already told you, I don't want to play hockey.”

“But it would be fun,” my mom said. “and maybe Drew would be interested. That way you'd already know someone—”

“No.”

“Maybe you should give it a chance, Sport,” Neil said. “Hockey would be good for you. When you're part of a team—”

“No!”

Neil stood up. He didn't like it when I yelled.

“It's okay,” my mom said. She was smiling, but I could tell she was upset. “We don't have to talk about this now.”

She kissed me on the cheek again. Then Neil walked her to the door. I heard them talking before she left, but I didn't care. I took my cereal into the living room, flopped down onto the couch and flipped on the
TV.
a few minutes later, the local news came on. There was still nothing about the old woman. What a relief.

I got through the morning and then caught up with Drew outside the cafeteria. He
was dumping his lunch—a sandwich and an apple—into the garbage.

“Let's grab some pizza,” he said.

I shook my head. “I don't have any money.”

Drew checked the money in his pocket.

“I've got it covered,” he said. “We'll go to the two-for-one place.”

See what I mean about Drew? He never pressures me. He never gives me a hard time. Things are easy around him. He was the best friend a guy could have. We walked up the street to the pizza place and got a couple of slices. It was a nice day, so we walked around eating them. I had a good time. I didn't think about the old lady or her purse even once.

Then we went back to school and everything went wrong.

It started with Rufus. It almost always started with him. He'd been giving me a hard time from the first day I met him.

After lunch on the second day of school, I'd found a note on my locker. It was on school letterhead, but the writing was all scribbley. I have a hard enough time reading without trying to figure out someone's crazy handwriting. But the note looked official, like it came from the office, so I tried.

Rufus's locker is right across from mine. He saw what I was doing and asked me if I needed help. I wanted to say no, but I also wanted to know what the note said. All I knew about Rufus at that point was that he was friends with a couple of the guys I used to go to elementary school with. But I didn't think he knew anything about me. And he sounded like he really wanted to help.

“Okay,” I said finally.

Rufus took the note from me. “It's from Ms. Everett,” he said. Ms. Everett is the principal at my school. “It says she wants you to come down to the office to discuss how come you're so stupid.”

He said it as if he was reading it off the letter. I stared at him.

“I'm not kidding,” he said. “That's really what it says.” He was frowning, like he was as surprised as I was about what the note said. He glanced around and spotted one of his friends. “Hey, Tad! Come here.”

Tad was standing a couple of lockers away with a few other guys. They all knew
me from elementary school, and they all came down the hall toward us. Rufus handed him the note.

“What does this say?” he said.

Tad squinted at the note and then at me.

“It says that Catastrophe has to go to the office so that Ms. Everett can figure out why he's so stupid,” he said. Tad had been calling me Catastrophe since fifth grade. I hated it. He handed the note to one of his friends. Before long, they had all read it, and they were all nodding and looking serious. Finally one of them burst out laughing. The next thing I knew, they were all laughing.

I grabbed the note from one of them, wadded it up and threw it into the garbage. My face was burning, and I knew it was bright red. That just made them laugh even harder. Drew fished the note out of the garbage can later when I told him what had happened.

“It's just scribbles,” he said after he'd smoothed it out. “Rufus was just trying to get you going. He's a jerk.”

Ever since then, I tried to stay out of Rufus's way, but it wasn't easy. He was always after me. He made me wish I was invisible. One of his favorite tricks was to sneak up behind me—in the schoolyard, in the hall, in the washroom, at the bus stop, anywhere he could find me—and pull my hood off. In class, where I wasn't allowed to have my hood up, he made a big deal of staring at my neck and the side of my face. In gym class, he liked to grab me and pull my T-shirt up so that everyone could see my side and my back. He got a big kick out of saying that he knew dogs that were smarter than me. He said even a stupid dog knew better than to run into a burning building instead of out of it.

The more I tried to dodge Rufus, the more he came after me. A person can only take so much—at least, this person can. So sometimes when he hassled me, it ended in a fight. I admit it: Most of the time when that happened, I was the one who threw the first punch. But that doesn't mean I was the one who started it. I never started
anything. I never would have hit Rufus if he hadn't teased me or pulled down my hood or found a million ways to embarrass me. The thing is, he only ever did it when there were no teachers around. And whenever I lost my temper, he always got his friends to say that he hadn't done anything, that
I
had attacked
him
. That meant that I was the one who got in trouble. Always.

Like the day after I took that woman's purse.

Drew and I went back to school after lunch. I had a special reading period in the resource room with Ms. Larch, a teachers' aide. Halfway through, I glanced up and saw Rufus looking in through the window in the door. He was making faces at me. I tried to ignore him, but it was hard. Ms. Larch noticed that I wasn't paying attention. She glanced at the door. Rufus wasn't there anymore. A minute later, I took another look, and there he was again, grinning at me and making stupid faces. That went on for maybe ten minutes. But when the bell rang and I went out into the hall, he
was gone. At least, that's what I thought. I started down the hall to my locker. All of a sudden, I tripped over something and landed face-first on the floor. My books and my binder went flying. Behind me, kids laughed. When I twisted my head around to see what I had tripped on, there was Rufus standing in the doorway to a classroom. I wasn't one hundred percent positive, but I was willing to bet anything—anything at all—that he had tripped me on purpose. Everything in front of my eyes turned red and then black. I flew at Rufus and caught him right at the knees. He crashed to the floor. Everything went quiet in the hall. Then I hit him.

I hit him just as Ms. Larch came out of the resource room. She saw the whole thing. At least, she thought she did. She saw me fly at Rufus and hit him. She didn't see what had happened before, and, for sure, none of Rufus's friends were going to tell her. Ms. Larch told me to get up. A girl—Jana King—picked up my binder. A bunch of the pages had fallen out. She picked them up
too, and stood there staring at them and frowning. Great, someone else was taking a good long look at how stupid I was. I grabbed the binder and the papers out of her hand. Ms. Larch saw me do that too.

“Jana is just trying to help,” she said. She told me to apologize to her. But by then, the vice-principal had turned up. He talked to Ms. Larch and then walked me down to the office.

Ms. Everett looked disappointed but not surprised to see me. She shook her head, gave me a detention and told me that she was going to have to call my mom. She asked me if I had anything to say for myself.

I did. “Please don't call her,” I said. My mom would freak if she heard I'd been tagged for fighting again. Neil would be even worse. He'd lecture me all night.

“I'm sorry, Kaz,” Ms. Everett said. “But you know the rules. You're lucky I don't suspend you.”

I didn't feel lucky.

That afternoon, instead of going home like everyone else, I went to detention. Two other kids had detention that day: Jonathan Morris and—big surprise—Jana King.