I DIDN’T sleep much. By 5:00 a.m., I had to get out of the house. I took a shower, got dressed, and grabbed my backpack. Dad was in the kitchen when I got there, already dressed for work, frying eggs and ham slices. “You’re up early,” he remarked. “I heard you rumbling around your room last night. Trouble sleeping?”
“Yeah.” He’d placed my phone on the table for me. I plopped my backpack on the table and slipped the phone into my pocket. Then I pulled on my jacket.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
I shook my head. Yeah, I wanted to talk, but no way was I going to tell him that Mom had disappeared. He wouldn’t care, and that would just make me hate him all over again. Hefting my backpack onto my shoulder, I headed for the door.
“Here,” Dad said. “Take this with you.” He slapped eggs and ham between two slices of hot buttered toast, wrapped the sandwich in foil, and handed it to me.
“Thanks.” I opened the door.
“Brodie.”
I didn’t let him see me roll my eyes. “What?”
“Have a nice day.”
“Yeah, you too, Dad.”
I LEANED against the corner of the building, my backpack at my feet, my chin tucked in, and my hands deep in my pockets, shivering in the chill autumn air. The faculty parking lot lay spread out before me. I’d been there close to fifteen minutes now, long enough to see Principal Perry arrive and hurriedly let herself in. I kept waiting.
Cold and weariness made my eyes heavy. I was dozing like a zombie when the sound of another car engine reached me. I raised my head and saw the black Altima pull into the slot next to the principal’s car. Afraid I’d lose my nerve, I picked up my backpack at once and started walking quickly across the lot, my legs stiff and achy. Mr. Dakota got out of his car. He was wearing black cowboy boots, faded black jeans, and a white sweater vest over a gray plaid shirt, his hair loose around his shoulders. Pausing to tie back his hair, he looked to me more like just another kid at the school than ever, a mashup of jock and geek. He opened the rear door of his car and reached into the back seat for his jacket and backpack.
I didn’t want to startle him. Clearing my throat as I walked up alerted him to my presence. He turned around sharply and smiled. His face was full of such sweetness it made my teeth hurt. “Oh, hey, Brodie.”
“Hey, Mr. Dakota. How was your weekend?” I rattled that off because I didn’t know what else to say.
“It was fine. How was yours?”
“It was okay.”
We stood frozen, looking at each other for a beat. Mr. Dakota, with his jacket draped over his shoulder from one hand and his backpack clutched in the other, nudged the rear door shut with his foot. He had on a black tie and a tie pin with the US flag on it. Instead of red, white, and blue, the stars and stripes were a riot of all colors. Nice. He looked good. Really good. I got nervous looking into his eyes and dropped my gaze for a moment.
“Well,” he said, still smiling, “what’re you doing back here in the faculty parking lot? Most kids avoid teachers as much as possible.”
I shrugged, unsure of myself. I couldn’t go to Mom and didn’t want to open up to Dad, but I really needed someone in my corner right now. I wanted that someone to be Mr. Dakota.
Mr. Dakota frowned slightly, as if he’d just gotten a good look at me. “Is something wrong, Brodie?”
That was it, my opening. But what did I really know about this man? Could I trust him? “I just want to talk. Is that okay?”
“Sure it is. Come on. Let’s get out of the cold.” He moved toward the building, motioning with his head for me to follow.
After we stepped through the faculty entrance, Mr. Dakota led me straight to the cafeteria where he ordered black coffee and picked up a banana muffin. “What’re you having?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. I mean, I brought my breakfast from home.”
He paid for his food and we settled at a table somewhere in the middle of the cafeteria. Mr. Dakota put his backpack and jacket on the stool next to him and then peeled the lid off his Styrofoam cup of coffee. He took a sip and sort of hummed deep in his throat as it went down. “Mm. That’s good.”
I got the ham and egg sandwich Dad had made for me from my backpack and unwrapped it. The sandwich was cold now, but that was okay because I wasn’t all that hungry anyway. I took a bite, put the sandwich back down on the open aluminum wrapper—which I was using as a plate—and tucked my trembling hands under the table.
Mr. Dakota dug into his muffin, laid back like I was an old friend. There was no pressure from him; he didn’t goad me with “Okay, what’s up?” or anything like that. I’d told him I wanted to talk, and he was clearly letting me start the conversation at my own pace. I liked him for that.
But I still wasn’t sure I could trust him. I wanted to very much. He seemed nice, and it felt good just being there with him. I’d never had a favorite teacher, like some of the kids I knew. Nor had I felt the need to talk to a teacher outside of class, even about my grades. But something drew me to Mr. Dakota. It could have been the fact that I was just so lonely. Maybe it was that he gave off this whole cool big brother vibe. Should I tell him about Mom? Where do I start?
I looked up at him and said, “I’m set for that test you’re gonna give us on the novel.”
“Good. So you’re all caught up on the reading assignment?”
“Actually, I finished the book this weekend.”
An even bigger smile spread across his face. “That’s amazing, Brodie. With some of my students, I have to just about turn flips to coax them through a novel. Which is completely worth it in the end, but still….”
“Any other time, I would’ve been one of those students, but I was totally into Ordinary People.”
Mr. Dakota leaned toward me with this eager look in his eyes. “So what was it that pulled you in?”
I shrugged, suddenly feeling shy, but I didn’t draw back or look away from him. Aside from his thick eyebrows, Mr. Dakota didn’t have even a hint of hair on his face, which was part of what made him look so young. Yet there was also know-how in his face, not the kind you’d expect a teacher to have from years of learning and training but that comes from having lived through hard stuff. He knew about life and how to navigate it.
“I guess it was that I identified a lot with Conrad. You know. His life changed so much and so fast, he just didn’t fit in it anymore. I know what that’s like. I mean, I don’t have a brother who died or a mother who hates me, but Conrad was like a purple polka dot space alien who’d been dropped down in the middle of an earth suburb and expected to blend right in. That’s how I feel sometimes.”
Mr. Dakota didn’t stop smiling or anything, but his face changed nonetheless. I couldn’t put my finger on just what the change was at first. Then I spotted it, the flicker of melancholy free-floating in his bottomless brown eyes, a speck nearly lost in the overall glow of his face.
“Yeah, I’ve felt that way too.”
That did it for me. I folded the aluminum foil around my cold breakfast and pushed it aside. Then I pressed my palms flat against the table, bracing myself. “Mr. Dakota, I’m ready now. I want to talk to you about my mom.”
I TOLD him about Mom’s drinking, losing her job, and disappearing on Friday. He listened without interrupting, his only reaction a furrowing of his brow that could’ve been concern or annoyance. My bet was on concern. When I finished, he leaned back and slowly exhaled in a long, nearly silent breath.
“What do you think I should do, Mr. Dakota? I tried her phone again this morning before I came to school, and she’s still not answering. Should I call the police?”
Mr. Dakota shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that just yet,” he said. “You said your mother told you she needed space. She’s probably still upset about losing her job and took off somewhere so she could be alone.”
“She lives by herself. You can’t get any more alone than that.”
“Your mother doesn’t live with you?”
“She and my dad divorced almost a year ago. My dad got custody of me.”
“Well, what does your dad say about your mom being out of touch over the weekend?”
The question reminded me I was angry at Dad. I tried not to let that show. “It’s no big deal to him. But this isn’t like my mom, Mr. Dakota. I swear. She doesn’t just disappear for days without saying anything. She and I talked every day before this happened. I left her fifty messages yesterday. Even if she did take off somewhere to be by herself, she would have called me by now. This is really freaking me out.”
My voice was shaking by the time I finished. I didn’t tell him the part about how it was my fault she got fired because I made her go to work that day when she knew she should’ve stayed home.
Mr. Dakota took a swig of coffee, his mouth moving as if he’d started chewing something. He looked at me thoughtfully. “Let’s try this, Brodie. You write down your mother’s full name and address for me. I’ll make some calls this morning when I get the chance. Come see me on your lunch period, and I’ll let you know if I find anything on where your mother is.”
I almost jumped across the table and hugged him. “Thanks, Mr. Dakota.”
HIGH SCHOOL ghost. That was me.
I drifted along halls and haunted classrooms, a vague, misty form that everybody looked through, ignored except when teachers called my name on the roll. I did get hesitant, embarrassing glances when I passed a couple of Abe’s friends outside the gymnasium, as if I were some strange new species of animal that might be a carnivore on the hunt. Crossing paths with Fawn was even worse. It hurt deeply when she looked the other way, when she wouldn’t even flash a smile at me.
That was my life, stuck inside a box of my own making. People tether each other to the networks that make up society, and my lifelines were severed at the moment. In the traffic between classes, I tuned in on the other kids’ chatter, checking out the rumors and gossip. It kept me from being completely adrift. It also kept thoughts of Mom and Dad from plunging through my head like spikes.
But when I walked into Mr. Dakota’s room, I was ready for news about Mom. He was at the blackboard, erasing stuff from the previous class. I kind of paused in the middle of the room, looking at him hard. He turned from the board, saw me, and shook his head just a little. Like telepathy, I got the message: not now. But he knew something. I could tell. I’d just have to wait until this period was over.
The breath seemed to catch in my throat.
I went to my desk. Fawn was already seated at her new spot in the back of the room. She and Janie Calipiri, who was also in Drama Club, were throwing lines at each other from Othello with over-the-top dramatics, cracking each other up. I wasn’t the kind of person to get up on a stage in front of a whole auditorium full of people—especially not the kids in this school. But I suddenly wanted to be in that play. Then Fawn would have to look at me, talk to me.
The bell rang. Mr. Dakota closed the door and started conducting class like always, his attitude cheerful and enthusiastic as ever. I forced myself to focus, to push all thoughts of Mom way down so the worrying and wondering wouldn’t turn my brain into spaghetti.
“Okay,” Mr. Dakota said, seated on the edge of his desk. “We’re deep into the novel now. Before we get into the plot again, let’s talk about the narrative style. What have you noticed so far about the way the story is written?”
“That it’s confusing as hell,” Sean Davidson blurted out behind me. “I don’t get this stuff, I just don’t. I don’t like the way the author’s telling this story.”
“What exactly don’t you like about it, Sean?” Mr. Dakota responded. “A lot of this is stream of consciousness and—”
“I think it’s the way the author keeps switching from third person to first person,” Janie said. “That’s just annoying. It’s like, pick a side and stick with it.”
“Well, it’s not annoying to me,” Fawn added, “but I do think the author should’ve just used first person. The book is about Conrad.”
Mr. Dakota said, “Is it only about Conrad, Fawn?” but I stepped all over his question.
“It’s not just about Conrad,” I said, forcing myself to look at Mr. Dakota so I wouldn’t turn around and stare at Fawn. “It’s about his dad and the changes he goes through almost as much as it’s about Conrad. If the author just wrote from Conrad’s point of view, we never would have known exactly what was going on in his father’s head. And another thing, in the third-person part, Conrad comes across sometimes as somebody who has it all together again and is doing okay. That’s what he wants everybody to think. But then, when we go into his thoughts, we see how close he is to a complete meltdown. The way it’s written, you get to see Conrad and his dad objectively, from the outside, and then more intimately from the inside.”
“And that, class, is exactly what the narrative style of this novel accomplishes,” Mr. Dakota said. “Is it possible this could have been done only using first person or third person? Yes, and when we read our next novel, one of the things you’ll be doing is comparing and contrasting the narrative style with this book. So keep in mind what Brodie just said.” He looked right at me, beaming as he flashed a thumbs-up. “Great job, fella.”
I didn’t get a lot of praise from teachers in class, and coming from Mr. Dakota for the second time, it felt especially good. I couldn’t help flicking a glance over my shoulder at Fawn, who was used to being the star student. She was looking down at her desk, not at me or Mr. Dakota, frowning as if somebody had just coughed cold germs in her face.
THE BELL rang, signaling the end of the period.
“Okay, gang, good discussion today,” Mr. Dakota called out over the hubbub of chairs scraping across the floor and kids getting ready to vacate. “Tomorrow you’ll have a test on the chapters we’ve covered so far. It’s a big test, so your homework tonight is to review what you’ve read. See you tomorrow.”
My lunch period was next. I got up with my backpack in hand. My heartbeat was suddenly pulsing hard in my ears.
Mr. Dakota looked right at me. “Brodie, would you hang on a minute?”
I sat down again. Fawn and Janie went past my desk. Fawn had this odd twist to her face, but I couldn’t even guess what she might be thinking. As soon as the other students cleared the room, Mr. Dakota closed the door.
I couldn’t wait any longer. “You found my mom?”
“Yes, Brodie, I did.” His voice was low as he crossed the room and sat at the desk next to mine. Once there, he didn’t hesitate or try to add any candy coating. “She’s at Eastside Hospital. She was admitted last night.”
The information cut through me, blazing like a flash of fire. “Why is she there? What’s wrong with her?” The questions trembled out of my mouth in a whisper.
“The person I spoke with wouldn’t tell me. You should let your father know and ask him to take you to the hospital. The two of you can find out what’s going on with her.”
Maybe I looked like a person who’d just taken a hit to the head. Mr. Dakota’s face suddenly got worry lines in it. He reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Do you want me to have the office contact your dad and arrange for him to come for you now?”
I felt strange, numb. “No. I’ll take care of things. Thanks, Mr. Dakota. For finding her.”
I needed his hand on my shoulder. Mr. Dakota pulled it away, and that was like having the floor crack open under me. I stood up, left the room, went to my locker, stuffed my backpack inside, and closed the locker door.
Somebody, maybe a teacher, yelled, “Hey, wait!” at me as I marched out the main entrance. I didn’t even look back.
After I burst through the main doors, some instinct prodded me, and I finally looked back over my shoulder. Someone was hurrying after me, arm extended, yelling something. Definitely a teacher.
I broke into a run.