Chapter 15

It was my father, who got the message from Mrs. Shrub, and he didn't bother calling the school, he just came right over. It was almost five o'clock and I'd long since missed the tryouts and was sitting in Mr. Guttag's office watching his secretary put on her coat when my father came in. He saw the tomato sauce from the pizza on my shirt first and must have thought it was blood; he looked really scared for a minute. "What's happened to you, Neil?" he asked. "Who did that to you?"

"Mr. Oxley?" Mr. Guttag came out of his office and he looked altogether different when he was talking to my father. He didn't look like he was going to throw punches or beat someone up with leather straps. He looked like somebody who might work at a bank or some other place ordinary people work who don't have to push kids around to make a living.

He almost looked as if he were going to smile, but instead he simply asked us both to come into his office and put us each in a chair, only this time it was more like we were going to have a tea party instead of a neck-wringing.

Even so, my father looked very uncomfortable, pulling at his shirt, his tie, and his belt, as if everything he had on was too tight. "Is this very serious?" he asked Mr. Guttag.

"I wouldn't have called your home if it weren't serious, Mr. Oxley," Mr. Guttag said. He leaned back in his chair so far I was afraid he was going to tip over and bang his head on the plant on the window sill behind him. "Mr. Oxley, your son assaulted another boy today," Mr. Guttag said. I know it's nothing to be proud of, but he made it sound like a hatchet murder.

My father's eyebrows went up. "It doesn't sound like Neil," he said.

Mr. Guttag looked at me. "He caused a terrible commotion in the cafeteria. My assistant principal, Mr. Peck, had a most difficult time restoring peace. Furthermore, this is the third time this week Neil has been sent to my office."

Now my father's eyebrows really went up. "I'm surprised," he said. "Really surprised. You never told us, Neil," he said, turning to me.

I looked at the floor, then I looked at the little golf club on Mr. Guttag's desk. Mr. Guttag picked up the card that had my telephone number and, as it turned out, all my sins listed on it, and he began reading. "He had a scuffle in Mrs. Bowring's English class Wednesday. He cut that same class yesterday, and today, even though he was suspended, and apparently with very little provocation, he attacked another boy with a pizza.

"Mr. Guttag, I assure you, I couldn't be more surprised," my father said. "Neil has never been a problem in school or at home. If you check with his last school, you'll be convinced that he has a spotless record, without any discipline reports."

Mr. Guttag listened to my father sticking up for me, and he looked very thoughtful. A couple of times he nodded and glanced in my direction. Then he picked up his little golf club to fiddle with, and cleared his throat.

"Is there a special problem here at school, Neil? Is something bothering you?" He had taken the spikes out of his voice and sounded...well, almost friendly.

I said nothing was bothering me.

Then Mr. Guttag turned to my father. "Could there be a problem at home?" he said.

My father cleared his throat and he lifted his hand to his moustache and he rubbed his fingers back and forth across it a couple of times. A big silence fell into the office like rain.

"There is a problem," my father finally said, kind of slowly. "With Neil's sister." His voice was funny, like it was going over bumps.

Mr. Guttag seemed very alert now. He squinted down at the card with my telephone number on it, as if he were going to find a sister listed in with the sins, and then he turned back to my father. He said, "We don't seem to have her listed here." He picked up a ball-point pen and aimed it as the card. "Older sister or younger sister?" he said.

"That's the problem," my father said, and then he said it again. "That's the problem."

Mr. Guttag looked at me, and he looked at my father, who wasn't saying much of anything else. "Is it something we can discuss?" he finally asked.

My father said, "I'd like to discuss it, yes. Neil, would you step out of the office for a minute, please?"

Why my father wanted to make a world-war spy secret out of Geraldine, I don't know. If everybody else would just keep cool and give her a chance to fit into the world better, she'd be fine. If she didn't think people were waiting to jump all over her for making mistakes, and would maybe try harder to listen to her reindeer talk and wouldn't point at her in the street and run away from her in the park, she'd stop crashing her head into walls and pulling curtains off windows.

I couldn't hear what my father was saying through the closed door, but I did hear his voice and Mr. Guttag's voice, and here and there, I understood a word or a sentence. One part of a sentence I heard got my ears up. It was louder than the rest of the conversation and it came from my father. "My wife refuses–" I heard him say, and I tried to figure out for myself what came next. "Refuses to send her back to the school"? Or maybe, "Refuses to give her up"?

I guess I was glad I wasn't in there listening; I didn't want to hear any of it. I just sat there in my chair drawing flags of the world on my notebook, waiting for my father to come out and take me home. Maybe I'd ask him to take us out to Lake Alfred for the weekend–I could show Gerri how to fish if we could get an extra pole; she might like that. But just as I had the thought, the office door opened, my father stepped out, and I could tell in a second by his face that he was in no mood for fishing.

He shook hands with Mr. Guttag, and Mr. Guttag come over to me and, no kidding, put his arm around my shoulder! I was nearly knocked over by surprise. He said he knew I'd be making no more trouble at Franklin Pierce Junior High and could see I was under what he called "stress" at home and said he understood perfectly. It all translated into his feeling sorry for me to have Gerri for a sister, but there was no setting him straight. He'd probably never even met anyone like her, so I don't think he could understand perfectly. I don't think he could really understand at all.

***

On the way home my father and I had a serious talk. Actually, it was my father who talked. I listened. He told me that he understood how my sister was disrupting my life, because she was disrupting his life too. He said he himself was very, very upset and didn't know what exactly could be done. He said that we were not going to continue living this way, that was for sure. I asked him what he meant and he didn't answer.

Suddenly, he remembered the tryouts. "Did you play well? Did you make mistakes? How did you do?" he asked.

Of course, I had to tell him I'd been sitting in Mr. Guttag's office the whole afternoon and had missed them.

"Well, they'll certainly let you try out Monday if you explain the circumstances, won't they?" my father wanted to know. I think he was more upset about my missing the chance to play in the Follies than he was about my throwing the pizza at Beef.

I said no, they were choosing the piano player today. In my heart I guess I knew I didn't have a chance against Wendy Wellington anyway.

Maybe I shouldn't have told him the bad news right then. I think it was too much for my father. A couple of weeks later, he moved out.