Chapter 4
No one lets me eat at lunch. They keep bugging me with questions like Did the guy have a machete? Did the cops really clap for you at the station? Was your Dad stabbed? Did he lose a finger? Did you lose a finger?
At first it’s fun but after a while the questions grow stupider and stupider and now I’m starving.
By art class my cool status has waned and things are back to normal. Jonah and I are sitting side by side on tall stools, canvases resting on easels in front of us. The classroom is plastered with pictures of lakes and forests and mountains for this week’s assignment: “idyllic landscapes.”
“So what else is wrong with you?” Jonah asks, his face crinkled up as he scrutinizes me.
“Nothing. I’m hungry is all,” I say, frowning at the tree I’m painting. Something weird is going on with the leaves. I adjust the edge of my canvas, which is crooked against the rickety wooden easel. The leaves still look weird.
“Are you suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?” he presses, rearranging his paintbrushes for the millionth time and tapping his foot in perfect rhythm. Tap-tap-tap, pause-pause-pause.
“No, it’s nothing.”
Jonah is too good when it comes to reading me. This morning at home, I found an informational packet about the local middle school resting on my desk, and promptly threw it in the trash. I’m trying to force the whole changing-schools situation out of my mind. I will find a solution. Maybe Jonah will rob a bank for me. He could definitely mastermind it.
“So you rode in a cop car?” he says. “What was it like? Did you feel like a criminal?”
Tap-tap-tap, pause-pause-pause.
I shrug. “It was kind of boring. Like a taxi crossed with a jail. No door handles, and a big metal barrier separating us from the cops. All of the cool stuff was up front. I could barely see it.”
I give up on the tree and start to work on a pond, dipping my brush into the paint set that rests between us on a small table.
“Huh,” Jonah replies, fussing with his brushes again. He hasn’t made very much progress on his canvas. Just a vertical brown line for a tree and a horizontal gray squiggle that might be a cloud. Or a sickly flying worm.
Tap-tap-tap, pause-pause-pause.
Jonah has OCD, or “obsessive-compulsive disorder” in adult-speak, which basically means that he’s constantly rearranging everything into neat and orderly categories. He taps on stuff a lot, has a hard time controlling his impulses (which lands him in the principal’s office on occasion), and generally avoids any and all cracks on the ground when he’s walking. He’s also über-brilliant and makes me snort milk out my nose at lunch at least once a week from laughing so hard. And my bedroom at home is very tidy and organized thanks to his weekend visits.
“Hey, Puddles, watch out!” grunts a beastly voice behind us. A fat hand shoves Jonah on the shoulder, hard, knocking him into our tray of paints.
Robin Christopher.
Robin picks on Jonah a lot and I’m not sure why. As Jonah’s best friend I know I’m obligated to stand up for him, but Robin Christopher is huge, so I usually just stand there showering evil thoughts upon him and feeling like a puny idiot.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” His Neanderthal laugh follows him to the other side of the room.
Nobody understands what Robin’s problem is. The running theory is that he’s messed up because his name is backwards; it should be Christopher Robin, the name of that nice British boy from the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Instead it’s twisted around, making him the opposite of the storybook character.
Robin calls Jonah “Puddles” and is trying to get other kids to do it, but no one likes Robin so they blow him off. The name Puddles comes from an ill-fated day with an incident involving me, Jonah, Wendy Friml, and our science teacher, Mr. Patterson. The only one who got stuck with a nickname after that one was the teacher.
Although my actions triggered The Incident, I swear that I was an innocent bystander in the whole thing:
We were in the lunch line and I went to grab a red apple. I turned too quickly and grabbed Wendy Friml’s elbow by mistake. (In my defense, she was wearing a red, fuzzy sweater and kind of looked like an apple.) Wendy screamed and I jumped out of my skin, dropping my tray in the process. Then the girls behind Wendy screamed, because that’s what girls do, more trays and food were dropped, and Jonah laughed so hard that he literally peed his pants right then and there. I’m talking down his leg, mess on the floor.
Mr. Patterson came over to see what was going on and slipped on a warm yellow puddle, crashing down in a tumble of science-teacher plaid and khaki. Both he and Jonah had to change their clothes. So far it’s been the high and low points of sixth grade.
Poor Mr. Patterson. At the beginning of the school year he had said, “Call me Mr. P,” but now of course when we say “Mr. P” it sounds like “Mr. Pee” because, well, he was covered in Jonah’s pee two months ago, and people start to giggle. A few days after it happened he announced, “I’d prefer to be called Mr. Patterson from now on.” Which really just made it worse.
Jonah is tapping on his stool harder and faster, staring at the mess that Robin Christopher left in his wake. The paints that were neatly organized in rows between us are now smeared in a messy rainbow. Jonah’s mouth puckers up and I know he’s upset, so in a panic, I lie.
“Hey, I asked the officer if sometime I could bring my buddy down to sit in the front of a cop car and check it out, you know, sort of like an educational tour, and he said yes. So let’s call him next week.”
Jonah lights up and starts planning out a way to hijack a cop car while making it look like an innocent mistake.
I know lying is wrong, but how bad can it be when it makes your best friend smile and forget all about the brute who just pushed him around?
That night I lie awake thinking, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, flipping through the pictures in my mind methodically, one at a time. Snapshots of a time sequence from yesterday.
I don’t think about Mr. Pee or Jonah or bullies or cute Jenny Miller or even my moment of artistic fame at the police station.
All I can think about (and I curse Milton Edwards until midnight for planting this in my brain):
What the heck did happen to my ice cream cone?