TROUBLE FROM ALL SIDES
Justin realized he had a problem as soon as he saw the grade he had gotten on his math test. He was even more worried when Mr. Jackson told him to come by during study hall. But when Coach Donovan showed up for the conference, Justin knew he was in serious trouble.
Mr. Jackson was Justin’s favorite teacher. He was such a good math teacher that last semester he’d helped Justin pull his grades up enough to try out for the varsity team. But that was before Christmas. This semester, which was almost half over, his marks had been pretty pathetic. The score on this latest test was more than pathetic. It was a disaster.
Tapping his grade book, Mr. Jackson said, “There is no excuse for this, Justin.”
Justin glanced nervously at the coach, who was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He looked like he wanted to slap Justin upside the head. But when Coach Donovan spoke, his voice sounded more disappointed than angry.
“I have never had to drop somebody with your promise from the team before, Justin. But then, I’ve never put a freshman on the team, either. The last freshman to play on this school’s varsity team was Booker Wilson, and that was nearly twenty years ago. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe you’re just not mature enough.”
For one awful minute Justin thought he was going to prove how immature he was by bawling. Then he got control of himself and found his voice. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “It’s just, my dad’s here right now, and, well, I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
Mr. Jackson and the coach exchanged looks. “Well,” Mr. Jackson said finally, “You do have time to bring these grades up before the end of the term. But you’re going to have to buckle down.”
“Consider yourself on probation,” Coach said. “Any more goofing off and your days as a member of the varsity team are history.”
“Yes sir,” Justin said. He meant his voice to sound strong, but it came out like a whisper. “Yes sir, I will.”
Justin wanted to talk to Brad, not because Brad could do anything about it, but just because at a time like this you wanted to be with a friend. He didn’t see Brad in the lunchroom, though, so after lunch he walked down to the seventh-grade lockers. When he couldn’t find Brad, he went back down the hall to his own locker. He was pulling out books for the next class when his friend ran up.
“Justin! Look at this!” Brad didn’t sound like himself. He spoke in a tense, overexcited whisper. His face looked bad, too. Since Friday he’d developed half a dozen zits, and his eyes were all puffy, like he hadn’t slept much the night before. Brad thrust something into Justin’s hand.
It was a blue bandanna wrapped around something heavy, Justin couldn’t tell what. He carelessly unrolled it, and caught the object before it fell to the floor. It was the biggest, meanest-looking switchblade he had ever seen.
“Cripes!” Justin yelped. “What’re you doing with this?”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, Justin spotted a man wearing a white shirt and tie coming toward them. Without even looking to see which teacher it was, he whipped the bandanna around the knife and tried to hand it back to Brad. It was no use. Brad was waving his hands in the air like a wild man, saying, “You won’t believe my loony parents! They’re gonna—”
Justin stuck the bandanna-wrapped knife under his books and lunged for his locker, hoping to slide everything out of sight. But before he could get to it, a fat, freckled hand covered with reddish-gold hair reached out and slammed the locker door shut. It was a hand he knew very well: it belonged to Mr. Simmons, his social studies teacher.
“I’ll take that.” Simmons’s other big hand reached under the books and took the knife. “You will come with me now, Justin. You, too, young man.” Apparently he didn’t know Brad’s name. Justin snuck a look at his friend. His face was so white he would have looked like a ghost if it hadn’t been for the red zits.
Seconds later they were in Principal White’s office. When Mr. Simmons showed him the knife, the principal looked at it like it was a live rattlesnake. Brad told them right away that it didn’t belong to Justin. He admitted that it was his and started babbling about why he had it. Mr. White didn’t say a word; he just pointed to the wall that separated his office from that of the vice principal.
“Mr. Bowls,” he said in a strained voice, “handles matters of discipline.”
Justin and Brad spent the entire rest of the afternoon in the vice principal’s office, being beat over the head with scary words like “press charges,” “call your mother,” and “automatic suspension.”
When Justin got home, Kate was waiting for him on the porch. “What happened?” she asked in a frightened voice. “I saw Mr. Simmons taking you to the office.”
“None of your business.” Justin headed for the kitchen.
Kate followed. “How did they find out?”
“Find out what?” he snapped.
Kate sat down at the kitchen table and started biting her nails—something he hadn’t seen her do in over a year. “You’ve got to tell me! If we’re in trouble …”
That was when Justin realized that his sister thought the trip to the principal’s office had something to do with the goatnapping.
“We are not in trouble,” Justin told her. “Brad is.”
“Oh. For what?”
“Bringing a knife to school.”
“A pocketknife?”
“A switchblade. A honkin’ gigantic switchblade.”
“Oh my gosh! Why did he do that?”
Justin sighed. “I’ll tell you if you promise not to spread it all over school. In fact, promise you won’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t, Justin. I absolutely promise!”
Kate had gotten Justin in trouble more than once by tattling. But he knew that if she said she wouldn’t tell, she wouldn’t. He took a deep breath.
“It started a couple of weeks ago when Brad discovered his dad was carrying a pistol around in the glove compartment of his car. And, well, it freaked him out because of how his parents are always fighting. Especially since the divorce. So he told his mom, and then she got a gun. Brad was afraid that one of them might, you know, lose it. So he got a knife.”
“That’s nuts! What good is a knife if both of them have guns?”
“I know,” Justin said. “It doesn’t make sense. I guess he’s just scared. He probably would’ve tried to get a gun but he couldn’t, not right away at least. He figured a knife was better than nothing. Only they took it away from him, so now he’s back to nothing.”
“He never should’ve brought it to school!” Kate exclaimed. She stared at Justin for a moment, then asked, “How come they dragged you in with him?”
“He was showing it to me. I saw a teacher coming and tried to hide it. Old Simmons. He thought it was mine. Luckily they believed Brad. Not at first, but after he told them the reason.”
“That’s awful!” Kate said, and Justin could see that she felt genuinely sorry for Brad. “They’ll probably expel him.”
“They suspended him. Which means his parents will go ballistic and blame each other and something terrible will happen, just like Brad was afraid it would. Only now it’ll be his fault.”
As if he hadn’t been interrogated enough by the vice principal—and afterwards by Kate—he was grilled all through supper about his weekend with Charlie. Mom hadn’t said much about it when she picked him up at the bus station the night before, just asked if he’d had a good time. Tonight, though, she wanted to hear about everything they had done. Kate wanted to know what kind of a place Charlie lived in, and Chip wanted to know what it was like at the racetrack. “When the car Dad worked on wins,” he asked, “do they give him a silver cup like they give the jockeys who win horse races?”
Justin gave short answers to their questions. He wished he could just tell them all to shut up and leave him alone.
“You look tired,” Mom said to him.
“I am,” Justin admitted. “I didn’t get much sleep at Dad’s.”
“Oh?” In a flash, Mom’s tone of voice turned suspicious.
“It was the neon light outside our bedroom window,” Justin explained. “It kept flashing on and off and there were no curtains.”
“Well, go to bed early tonight,” Mom said as she left the table and headed off to take her bath.
Chip, who had already had his bath, flopped down in front of the TV. Justin asked Kate to hurry up with the dishes—it was her night to wash and his to dry—because he had a lot of homework.
When they finished, Justin went into the living room to get his books and Kate sat down beside Chip on the sofa. A couple of minutes later Mom walked in, wrapped in her terry-cloth bathrobe. She said to Chip, “Didn’t I tell you to go to bed? You’re not supposed to be watching that program anyway.”
Justin glanced over at the TV screen. It was a cop show. One of the characters was saying, “We got a full set of prints from the windowsill. If they match those of the suspect, this time we’ll put the punk away.”
“Can I just watch to the end?” Chip asked Mom.
“No, you may not. Go on now, it’s past your bedtime.”
Mom gave each kid a quick kiss and went on to her room. Chip edged out into the hall, then stopped. Kate and Justin could see him through the doorway, standing there, his eyes still glued to the screen. Kate grabbed the remote and snapped off the TV.
“It’s just make-believe!” she told Chip.
“You mean they don’t catch thieves by their fingerprints?”
“Only if they’ve been arrested before, and if their prints are on file.”
“Oh.” Still Chip stood there, staring at the blank TV screen.
Justin put down his books. “Listen, mutt. Let’s say somebody breaks into a place, and later the police find fingerprints on the windowsill. That doesn’t do them any good unless they know whose fingerprints they are.”
“Then how do they catch people?”
“Well, like Kate said, if the person had been arrested before, his fingerprints would be on file. Then the police could look in the file and find the prints that matched the ones they found on the windowsill. But if the person had never been arrested, and never got into trouble again, the prints wouldn’t mean anything,” Justin said, hoping that what he said was true.
“Oh,” Chip said again.
Kate, looking worried, put her arm around Chip’s shoulder and led him off to bed. Justin knew what she was worried about, because the same thing had occurred to him. If Chip got so scared that he told Mom about the goatnapping, then they’d all be in real trouble.
When Kate came back, Justin gave her a questioning look.
“He won’t tell,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I told him that if anybody finds out, Little Billy would get sent back to Grimsted’s.”
Justin picked up his book bag and slung it over one shoulder. “That’s probably true,” he said.
“Justin?”
“What?”
“Did Dad let you drive his car while you were there?”
“No. But he said that if I go live with him he’ll get me one of my own.” Justin immediately wished he hadn’t let that slip out. He hadn’t meant to tell anybody, but it had been on his mind all day. He started toward the kitchen, hoping to avoid any more questions. No such luck.
Kate blocked his way. “Where does he live anyway?”
“That’s just it,” Justin admitted. “He’s always on the move.”
It was clear to Justin that if he went to live with his dad he would never be anywhere long enough to get on any school baseball team. And making the varsity team had been his lifelong dream. He went into the kitchen and dumped the books out of his bag onto the table, hoping Kate would take the hint. She didn’t.
She stood in the doorway, chewing on the end of her stringy blonde hair. “Are you going to? Go live with him, I mean?”
“Well, if I get kicked off the team I’m sure not sticking around here.”
“What’ll you do about Little Billy?”
Justin dropped his head onto the pile of books. “Kate, will you please shut up? Don’t you think I have enough problems?”
The words came out angry and Justin knew he had hurt her feelings, because she turned around and left without another word. His sister thought he was angry at her, and he was, but not just her. He was also angry at Brad, at Chip, at Mom, at Coach Donovan, at Mr. Jackson, at Mr. Simmons, at the vice principal, at just about everybody he could think of.
He turned out the kitchen light and headed to his room. He didn’t even bother to open his math book.
Justin didn’t feel any better the next morning. In study hall he worked hard to catch up in math, but he had missed more than he realized—not just homework, but things explained in class when he wasn’t paying attention. Justin tried to focus, but it was no good. As soon as he finished reading a problem, he’d just have to read it again, because all the other stuff on his mind kept crowding out the math.
Then there was ball practice. It didn’t go at all well, and not because he wasn’t trying. Justin honestly did his best, but his best wasn’t that good. It just seemed like he’d lost his coordination or something.
And of course, there was no Brad around to hang out with. Justin felt totally alone. Maybe he was to blame for some of his problems, but there was trouble coming at him from all sides, and it wasn’t all his fault.