Item one in the “Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse” department: first day, second semester. Wet snow, blustery winds, the streets and sidewalks skirted with grimy slush. Half past eight in the morning. I reported as ordered (as threatened) to the principal’s office, stood on the blue carpet in front of his desk as he tapped computer keys, making me wait to show me how unimportant I was.
“How many hours left, Vic?” he asked, finally looking up.
“Um, two, sir.”
“Nice try. It’s five.”
One day last semester, during lunch period, a couple of retards in the graduating class tried to paint a design on the chest of my new rugby shirt by squirting mustard and ketchup from plastic dispenser bottles. As soon as they started in, I dropped my plate of fries and shoved the nearest one into the condiments table. As if they had rehearsed it, they flung their bottles aside and started pounding on me.
The school has a zero-tolerance policy on fighting. The two goons got a week’s suspension; I got thirty hours’ “community service”—slaving for the principal. He told me he had let me off easy because I had been attacked first (assault with a deadly condiment). I would have preferred the suspension. Following his neatly typed list of instructions, I spent my lunch periods and an hour after school each day cleaning up the caf, shovelling snow from the sidewalks and wrestling huge recycling bins full of cans and bottles to the collection area behind the school. By the time the semester had ended, I had served most of my sentence.
The principal said, “I have an assignment for you. A little bit of time each day until the end of the week. Then you’re a free man again.”
“I can hardly wait to get started,” I said.
His lips parted slightly to reveal an even row of off-white teeth, but the rest of his face was like a plastic mask.
“We have a new student,” he said. “He’s in your grade. You are to show him the ropes. Make sure he finds all his classrooms, the cafeteria and so on. Try not to sour him on the teachers you don’t happen to like.”
“So I shouldn’t mention math class,” I interrupted, but he rolled on.
“At the end of each day you will escort him to his bus stop. On Friday afternoon, he will report to me and tell me how helpful you’ve been. You will be helpful, won’t you, Vic?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“He’ll meet you by the head secretary’s desk at 8:45.”
The fact that the principal wanted me to show a new kid around didn’t mean the kid was stupid. Our school was more than a century old and it had so many wings and additions stuck onto it that, until you’d spent a week or two, you needed a map to get from place to place.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“He’ll introduce himself,” the principal replied, giving me the same tight-lipped smile. “He’s a little … unusual. So you two should get on well together.”
“What do you mean, ‘unusual’?”
“Have a nice day, Vic.”
I stood at the entrance to the main office. Students streamed in the front doors, unzipping coats, shrugging off backpacks, jostling and calling out to one another, taking places in the alphabetically organized lines for their new timetables. Then I spotted him.
He strode into the school, a scuffed briefcase in one hand and a cane (that’s right, a cane) in the other. On his head, a checkered cap with a bill at the back as well as the front, with little ear flaps tied over the crown with ribbons. A long trench coat belted at the waist and buttoned to his Adam’s apple. And around his ankles, almost covering shiny black leather shoes, some kind of cloth wrapping. With buttons. He looked like an escapee from an old black-and-white movie on TV.
My first thought was that he must be crazy. He was asking for ridicule in a get-up like that. The kids would tear him to shreds before he got two steps down the hall.
He looked around calmly, then put down his briefcase and sat on one of the benches near the door. Twisting the cane between his hands, he broke it down into three pieces and put them in the briefcase. He bent, unbuttoned the anklet things, folded them and dropped them in after the cane. Next, the goofy hat. He stood, picked up the briefcase and, releasing the top button of his coat as he walked, headed toward me.
Bounced would be a better word. As if he didn’t look nutty enough, he walked funny, shooting upwards with each step as if he had springs under the balls of his feet. He marched straight down the hall in this piston-like manner and stopped.
“Excuse me. Are you, by any chance, Victor Kendall?”
I was expecting a reedy drone, but his voice was strong and confident.
And his accent was British. Really British.
“Vic,” I corrected him.
“How do you do. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Chumley N. Hyde-Barrington.”
He held out his hand and we shook like insurance salesmen.
“N.?” I said.
“For Nigel, I’m afraid. After my maternal grandfather. I understand you’ve been assigned to assist me,” he said.
Every word that came out of his mouth made him sound as if he thought he was better than you. As if he was looking down on you.
“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it,” I answered, thinking, I’m stuck with this weirdo for a week. “Let’s get our timetables, then I’ll show you around.”
He stood behind me in line and I pretended he wasn’t there. Everybody around him did exaggerated double takes, or stared, or just smirked and laughed. A few dropped prickly comments in stage whispers. He stood like a post, eyes forward, as if he was alone on a deserted beach.
I knew the gods were against me when I read our timetables. Not only had we been assigned lockers side by side, we shared two classes, math and English—probably the principal’s idea of a joke. With the new kid bouncing along behind me like an aristocratic kangaroo, I showed him his classrooms and then took him to the lockers.
He removed his trench coat and put it inside. He was wearing a sports jacket, a white shirt and an ascot. (That’s right, an ascot.) He snapped the lock shut, picked up his briefcase and looked at me expectantly.
“The last thing I need to show you is the caf,” I said. “Then you can be on your way.”
The caf was a zoo, jammed with students milling around, waiting for first class to start. Maddie and Phil were at our usual table. Phil had a solitaire hand laid out and Maddie sat beside him, offering advice, as usual.
“Hey, guys,” I said. I pointed over my shoulder with my thumb. “Meet Chumley Nigel Hyde-Barrington the Fourth.”
Maddie’s big blue eyes widened and her jaw dropped. Phil, always cool, merely allowed his eyebrows to rise a little. The new kid stepped forward like a soldier volunteering for a difficult mission and put out his hand.
“How do you do.”
From his seat, Phil shook with him. Maddie struggled for control, her face pink, her lips pressed together as she bit back a laugh. She extended her hand like a queen.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” she squeaked.
Maddie wasn’t ordinarily a squeaker. She was a stocky (she’d cut out my liver if she heard me use that word) reddish blonde who always seemed as if she’d forgotten to take her hyperactivity medication. Most of all, she was LOUD, as if she spoke in capital letters.
“What kind of name is Chumpey, anyway?” Phil asked, getting the name wrong on purpose, I was sure.
“It’s Chumley, my dear chap. British, actually. And Victor is making a jest at my expense, I’m afraid. I am not, nor have I ever been, ‘the Fourth.’”
Then he kissed Maddie’s hand before sliding onto the bench across from her. I sat down beside him.
“Are you like this ALL the time?” Maddie demanded.
“I beg your pardon?”
Phil smirked and tossed me a look that said, This should be fun.
“Can you BELIEVE this guy?” Maddie elbowed Phil and put on a phony (and bad) English accent. “I say. PIP PIP. I BEG your pardon, OLD BEAN.”
I looked at CN, as I had already begun to think of him. There wasn’t a trace of anger on his face. He even smiled.
“People in glass houses,” he said.
“HUH? WHAT did he say?” Maddie appealed to me. But Phil cut in.
“Bad news on the academic front, Vic. Maddie and I both have Quinn for math again.”
“So do we,” I said.
“Oh, GOOD,” Maddie drawled, rolling her eyes. “We can all be TOGETHER.”
I dragged CN around like an anchor for the rest of the day, pointing out as much as I could and giving him as little advice as possible. He asked no questions. When classes were finished he retrieved his old-spy-movie coat from his locker, put his cane together, pulled his cap tightly onto his head as if he was afraid a sudden wind would come along and buttoned up his anklets.
“What are those things, anyway, and why do you wear them?” I asked.
He looked up and smiled. “My dear chap—”
“Listen, man. Get this straight. I’m not yours, I’m not a chap, whatever that is, and if you keep saying dear to people of your own gender someone around here is going to put you on the floor.”
Way to go, Vic. I thought. No way this loser is going to give you a good report now. I waited for his reaction. He slowly buttoned the second anklet, stood, belted his trench coat—and laughed.
“Fair enough, Victor—Vic. These items of apparel are called spats. Useful for keeping the footwear unsoiled. A trifle out of date, one knows. But I rather fancy them. So there it is.”
There what is? I wanted to ask, but instead I muttered, “Let’s go,” and led him out of the school to the bus stop. He knew where it was, but the principal had said to escort him there.
“This is it,” I said, then added uselessly, “your bus stop.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, looking the pole up and down as if he’d never seen one before.
“Um … Look, er, Chumley. You know where everything is now, right? The caf, your classes, the whole thing.”
He nodded.
“See, the thing is,” I went on hopefully, “you won’t really need me the rest of the week, will you?”
“Dreadfully sorry, old—ah, sport,” he said. “Know I must be a terrible bore. But I’m afraid you’re stuck with me until Friday at, ah—” he looked at his watch, a cheap discount store version, “at four on the clock. That was the bargain, if I’m not mistaken.”
Bargain, my butt, I thought. In a bargain both sides get something out of it.
“Perfect,” I said, turning away.
CN was the biggest pain in the rear end that I’d ever met in my life. Everything about him, his stupid clothes, his snotty accent, the impression he gave that he could walk on water, that you weren’t fit to wash his undies—all that, along with his weakness, filled me with scorn and contempt. I made it through that first week, barely, without killing him, then brushed him off.
But I shared two classes with him. So, without really wanting to, I watched him from a distance. The teachers didn’t know what to make of him. They treated him carefully, as if at any moment he might fall down foaming at the mouth. He was always polite, but you could see they didn’t trust his good manners, sensing mockery just under the surface.
The kids kept up the attacks—ridicule and sneers and half-concealed giggles from the girls, not-so-gentle jostling and name-calling from the guys. CN let it all bounce off. And what amazed, confused and sometimes enraged me—he took it with his chin up. No trading insult for insult, no hurt looks, no revenge. You’d have thought he was in the middle of some invisible force field that nothing could get through.
To be insulted and humiliated like that and not respond—how, I asked myself, could he put up with it? What a jerk, a weakling, a coward.
It was Maddie who came around first. She saw Chumley, at first, as a pathetic loser, then, gradually, as a creature who needed to be mothered. “He’s not THAT bad,” she admitted one day when I was ragging on about him, and I knew that her heart had gone soft. CN’s fair good looks didn’t hurt. Maddie began to get that glint in her eye—Phil called it the fox-in-the-henhouse stare—whenever CN was near.
Phil caved in next. “He’s okay, I guess.” Which, from Phil, was the ultimate stamp of approval. One day he even asked CN for his help with a math problem. And he got the help, with no strings or conditions, no You-wouldn’t-talk-to-me-for-a-month-and-now–you-want-my-help? guilt trip from CN. “Certainly, old sport. Delighted,” was all he said.
And me? I didn’t join the chorus of approval. One afternoon when CN had put up with another snarky comment from a girl named Liz, just as he was closing his locker door beside me, I said under my breath, “Why do you let people talk to you like that?” surprised at my shaking hands and the fury in my voice.
He looked at me, surprised. “Simple psychology, old sport. If I let her get to me, I give her power over me.”
“What are you talking about? She just called you a limey fag.”
“Quite. But as I am not, as she so delicately put it, a fag—and even if I were, I would take no offence, because there is no dishonour in being gay—no harm done.”
“That’s not the point, you moron. She insulted you. It doesn’t bother you that she acts like you’re a notch above swamp gas on the evolutionary chain?”
“Not a whit.”
“Jeeze, you’re something else. And what’s this crap about her having power over you?”
“If I allow her to trouble me, she wins. If I take her seriously, I relinquish control of my life to her. Why should I give her the satisfaction?”
“But doesn’t it piss you off when somebody takes a shot at you? Not that you don’t ask for it, Mr. Spats-and-ascot-and-Queen’s-English.”
“Not at all,” he said, ignoring my own jab and snapping his lock shut. “I simply consider the source.”
How do you reason with someone like that?
Quinn, assistant head of the math department, was one of those teachers who thought that making kids look stupid was a way of motivating them. She was a thin, angular, black-haired crow, totally without a sense of humour. She tested us every Friday, and on Monday she stood at the front of the room, the blackboard behind her covered in formulas and equations, our graded tests cradled in one arm. She lectured us on the importance of discipline, slashing the air with her free hand as she rambled.
Then she handed out the tests. One at a time. Starting with the one that had the highest mark. As this ritual unfolded, the tension in the room was as thick as oil. She called out a name, the victim walked up to retrieve the work and returned to his or her desk. The first few kids she would greet with smiles, the middle group were rewarded with a blank face, and the final bunch—my group—got the cold Quinn stare.
On the first Monday of the semester Chumley got the top mark. And the second week. But that same day, after Quinn had finished her little humiliation exercise, Maddie, who always did fairly well, put up her hand.
“Yes, Maddie?”
“Do you HAVE to do this?” she asked. “I mean, couldn’t you just hand the tests back in RANDOM ORDER or something?”
Murmurs of agreement rippled across the room, bringing a scowl to Quinn’s already pinched face.
“The way you’re doing it,” Maddie rushed on, “it makes some of us feel REAL BAD.”
“There’s no reason to feel really bad,” Quinn said. “If people feel really bad about their marks, they should study harder.”
Phil tried to come to Maddie’s rescue. “But aren’t our marks private?” he asked.
“No, Mr. Lawyer, they are not. All of you,” Quinn said to the class, “had better get used to this because, at mid-semester and after the final exams, your grades will be posted on the bulletin board. I’ll say this one more time: if you want to feel better about your results, improve them.”
During this exchange, I was watching Chumley. Quinn’s methods were probably all right with him, I thought, since he had aced both tests so far. Chumley looked on, his face calm. It was impossible to know what he was thinking.
As he had the first week, he loaned his test to Phil and Maddie so they could see how he had arrived at the correct solutions. I took a gander too, even though I was hopeless in math. I was one of those Quinn wouldn’t admit existed: I could study and practise until my teeth fell out and I would never ace a math test. I was lucky to pass.
Chumley’s test paper was beautiful. You’d have sworn he had cheated. His answers came in the order the questions were given—he didn’t do the easy ones first, as Quinn always suggested—and they were perfect. No corrections, just line after line of clear, neat, legible numbers and letters. He was so confident, he wrote the tests in ink. With a fountain pen.
But in the third week, something changed. Chumley came second in the Monday ritual, earning a sympathetic smile from Quinn, as if to say, I’ll let you away with this only once. He hadn’t done the last problem.
“What HAPPENED?” Maddie asked.
“Maybe old CN isn’t perfect after all,” I said.
Chumley smiled. “Not to worry, my dear,” he said to Maddie.
The following Monday saw Chumley walking to the front of the class after five kids had gone up before him. Quinn didn’t make eye contact with him. Chumley’s test showed why. This time, he had left off two questions. But as before, the solutions he did complete were perfect.
“He’s up to something,” Phil said at lunch the same day, after Chumley had left for the library.
“Up to what?” I said. “So he didn’t know the answers. It happens.”
“Vic, the guy can knock over any problem you give him. I’ve seen him work. There’s something going on.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“Don’t buy WHAT?” Maddie asked.
Chumley kept up the routine, and one day he got a special mention from Quinn. “For the first time in this class’s dubious history,” she said before she began her Monday routine, “someone actually got a zero!”
And after she had distributed all the tests except one, Chumley stood, buttoned his sports jacket, straightened his ascot, and walked forward. When he got to the front, Quinn wouldn’t hand him his test.
“What do you mean by handing in a blank paper?” she demanded.
“The Scriptures,” Chumley said, “admonish us that the first shall be last and the last, first.”
A rare look of astonishment passed across Quinn’s face. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Apparently not,” Chumley replied. Then he slid the paper from her hand and walked slowly back to his seat, his face as calm as a summer morning.
“That was beautiful!” Phil crowed around a mouthful of fries and gravy.
“Philip, I do wish you’d swallow your cud before speaking,” Chumley said. “And thank you for the compliment.”
“I STILL don’t GET it,” Maddie put in as she struggled with the cap on a bottle of juice.
“He got zero on purpose,” I said. “Right?” I looked at Chumley, who just smiled that satisfied-cat smile of his.
“But THAT’S the part I don’t GET!”
“As CN would say,” Phil explained, “it’s elementary, my dear. He’s trying to teach Quinn a lesson. He’s been doing it in stages, getting a lower mark each week.”
“WHAT LESSON?”
In a way, Quinn was like Maddie. She didn’t get it. Or pretended she didn’t. Her mean-spirited ritual continued.
One morning toward the end of the semester, I got to school late—not a rare thing for me, but this time it wasn’t my fault. My bus had broken down. It was too far from home to go back and take the day off, too far from the school to walk. So we all had to wait until the company sent out another bus.
I got to school about halfway through the first period—English. I sauntered down the hall, enjoying the break in routine, climbed the stairs to the second floor where my locker was. Up there, every third locker had a sheet of paper taped to it. Some kind of Students’ Council event, I figured, ignoring the sheet on the locker next to mine—Chumley’s. I got my stuff and hurried into English.
The atmosphere in the class was, I don’t know, charged. Things looked normal on the surface—Mr. Singh had everybody working on their independent studies. They were reading, making notes, drafting their research papers. I took my seat. Tammy, who sat next to me, looked up. Her eyes glittered with excitement. She stole a quick glance toward Singh, then slowly slid a sheet of paper from under her notebook. It was a list of some kind. Across the top, in a zany handwritten font I’d never seen before, it read, “Blue-Box Boogie.”
“Alarm clock failure?” Singh’s voice pulled me away from the list.
“Better than that, sir,” I said. “The yellow monster died.”
A few kids snickered.
“A masterful example of metaphor. I take it you mean a bus breakdown.”
“Exactly,” I replied.
Singh smiled. He was cool. Most of the time. “Feel ready for some heavy scholarship?”
“Got my stuff right here,” I said. “Ernest Hemingway.”
“Yuck,” some girl at the back commented.
I opened my novel and pretended to read while I took a good look at the paper Tammy had given me.
I worked at a variety store after school and on weekends, so I knew an inventory when I saw one. And I had carried many blue recycling boxes to the alley behind the store. Along with notations for numbers of cans of soup and spaghetti sauce and sardines, jars of cheese spread and pickles and mayonnaise, I read line after line, stretching to the bottom of the page, listing the brand names of red and white wine, whisky and cans of imported beer. The titles of at least four gossip mags were there, too.
When I read the last line, I laughed out loud.
Singh looked up. “I had no idea that Papa H. was a humorist.”
“Sorry, sir.”
I looked again at the sentence. “Contents of the blue recycling box of Ms. J. Quinn over a two-week period. Compiled by the masked avenger.”
I looked across the room to Chumley.
Math was next period, and I had never seen kids in such a hurry to get there. The word was out. When Quinn came through the door of the math office into the classroom, her face was without expression. But she had no tests under her arm.
She assigned a list of problems from the text-book, warned us to work quietly and returned to the office, leaving the door open a crack. There wasn’t much math done. Whispers swished back and forth. The air of expectation built with every passing minute.
Quinn, it seemed, was a heavy drinker. Lots to gossip about there, but no big deal really. And she liked celebrity mags. So did half the girls in the school and probably some of the guys. I couldn’t have cared less if Quinn went home every day, poured a whisky, put her feet up and lost herself in a gossip rag. But the thing was, in her lectures about hard work and discipline, Quinn was always putting down soap operas and comic books, labelling them trash for simpletons. The mathematical mind, she would say, is a disciplined mind, with no room for self-indulgence.
The class dragged, and Quinn didn’t appear. Who put up the list? everybody wanted to know. In the swirl of talk around me, name after name was mentioned. But I knew who it was. I looked at Phil and he nodded. Even Maddie, intelligent-but-not-always-with-it Maddie, knew.
At the end of the period, after the bell rang, Quinn finally appeared, carrying a small cardboard carton. She set it on the corner of her desk.
“The quizzes are in there,” she said. “Pick yours up on your way out.”
The next week, Chumley aced his test.
“Care to join me in my humble repast, Vic?” Chumley asked in his nasal British twang as he unscrewed the cap of his thermos and poured a cup of steaming soup.
“No, thanks, I’ll pass.”
Chumley unwrapped his sandwich, cheese goo on whole wheat. “Speaking of which, shall you, do you think?”
It was the last week of classes before final exams. Phil and Maddie were already geared up, arranging study schedules. They and Chumley were very serious about doing well. And me? I went along for the ride. I wanted to pass, but that was all—just to avoid summer school.
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“Your confidence and enthusiasm overwhelm.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a humble guy.”
“Indeed.”
I picked up my burger and took a bite, watching Chumley eat. He held the spoon with his baby finger curled, dipped into the tomato soup, pushing the spoon away from him across the bowl, brought it to his mouth and sipped delicately. He had tried one day to get Phil to stop slurping, but that was a lost cause. Phil ate the way you’d shovel dirt into a hole.
Chumley was in tight with us now. Everybody tolerated him, kind of like a harmless crazy uncle living upstairs. Phil had accepted him long ago—“He’s got style,” he’d said—and it was clear to everyone but Chumley and Maddie that she was in love with him.
But I was still cautious. There was something about Chumley that got on my nerves—not the accent or the eccentric clothes, not the high marks. Not even the sense I still got that he considered himself a superior being. It was a kind of phoniness. He gave the impression he was rich and privileged, could have gone to a private school but chose not to—that kind of thing.
Maybe it was the clothes that gave him away. He wore a jacket and ascot, but it was the same jacket and ascot day after day. His shirt collars were sometimes frayed. His leather shoes, always polished, were worn down at the heels. He was trying to put one over on us, and nobody but me seemed to mind.
Following a trolley bus on a bicycle, especially at rush hour, is easy. One afternoon, from the shadows beside the school, I watched Chumley climb on board the A3, cane in one hand, his trusty briefcase in the other. A few minutes later, I zipped along half a block behind the bus as it headed deeper into the heart of the city, where the streets grew more crowded, narrower and dirtier, the mantis arms on the bus roof sparking on the overhead wires.
Finally, in a neighbourhood I wasn’t familiar with, when the bus pulled away from the stop I saw Chumley standing on the sidewalk. He had taken off the spats and funny hat and he had put the cane away. Even the ascot was gone. Weaving among the shoppers, Chumley walked past a bank and some fruit and vegetable stands and pushed through the doors of a dollar store.
I waited for three changes of the traffic lights, then locked my bike to a parking meter and followed him in. I made my way carefully among aisles of plastic toys, watering cans, cheap knockoffs of watches, calculators and cameras. I spotted him at the back of the store. With a few aisles of men’s clothing between us, I stood watching him.
A man came through a curtain at the back. He was dressed in grey coveralls and carried a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other. He smiled when he saw Chumley, nodded, and stashed the cleaning equipment in a closet.
Even before he spoke, I knew he was Chumley’s father. He had the same fair hair (with a bit of grey), the same nose, the same slight build. But I was surprised when he said, “Hi, Charlie.”
And shocked when I heard the reply. “Hi, Dad. Ready to go?”
Because it was said without the slightest trace of an accent.
The man removed a windbreaker from the closet, pulled it on and closed the door. They ambled out of the store together. I unlocked my bike and followed from a safe distance. Chumley-Charlie and his father strolled down the street and turned a corner, chatting away. They passed a church, a playground, an abandoned factory with boarded-up windows, then turned onto a street of rooming houses and decrepit bungalows. They entered a small house with a cracked cement porch. The place seemed to slump under its own weight as if it was sinking into the ground. So the guy who had convinced all his teachers to call him Chumley was a fake. On my way home, pedalling against the spring wind, I tried to figure out how he had managed to change his name on the school records, then I remembered that on the first day of the semester, when he had dropped Chumley on my shoulders like a sack of potatoes, the principal never did say his name. The new kid had introduced himself as Chumley N. etcetera and we had believed him.
Why had Chumley-Charlie come all the way across town to our school? There must have been half a dozen closer to his house. Had he been thrown out of other places for bad behaviour? Had he flunked out? Not likely. And why the act—the accent, the barely concealed snobbery, the costume? It wasn’t as if he had been trying all this time to blend in. I didn’t have the answers, but I had discovered a few things. I knew where he came from, and I knew he was a phony. And I didn’t intend to keep it a secret.
Friday was the last day of classes. On Monday exams would start, and after a week of agony we’d be free for the summer. In the hall after first period, Maddie came rushing toward me, clutching her books to her chest.
I said, “I’ve got something to—”
“We need to TALK, Vic,” she gushed. “Meet me at my locker before lunch. It’s IMPORTANT!” And she was gone in the stream of bodies.
I waited for her at the beginning of lunch period. I had been looking forward to giving her and Phil my news at the same time and bursting Chumley-Charlie’s bubble in a dramatic announcement, but I’d have to change my plans and tell Maddie first.
She came charging down the hall. She spun the dial on her lock, yanked open her locker, dumped her books inside like an armful of unwanted garbage, slammed the door, snapped the lock closed and grabbed my arm.
“Come ON,” she said, dragging me toward the doors to the playing field.
A few kids had already taken spots on the bleachers, munching sandwiches and crunching potato chips in the noonday sun. Maddie pulled me to the top row and sat down.
“OKAY,” she said, letting out a deep breath. “Vic, I need to ASK you something. You have to PROMISE to be HONEST.”
“Um, sure, Maddie. What’s up?”
“You have to PROMISE,” she repeated.
“Okay, okay. I promise. Even though I don’t know what I’m promising.”
Maddie’s eyes sparkled and danced. She fixed me in her gaze and said, “What do you think about CHUMLEY? I mean, REALLY?”
The air rushed out of my lungs. Damn, I thought, she found out about him. She knows. So much for my big exposé. Before I could get a word out, she charged ahead.
“Because, I’m thinking of asking him to the PROM!”
“The prom? You’re going to ask him to the prom?” I said stupidly.
“Is there an ECHO around here?” she said. “Come on, GRANDPA, dig the WAX out of your ears.”
“Maddie, look. There’s something you’ve got to know about Char—Chumley. I found out a few things.”
Out on the field, a couple of guys were tossing a football back and forth, calling out to one another. Below us, someone had turned on a boom box, and some kind of classical music pounded out of it, so loud it put my nerves on edge.
“The MORE you can tell me, the BETTER,” Maddie said. “Because I really LIKE him.”
“Yeah, I know you do. That’s why I have to tell you this.”
“Tell me WHAT? Spit it OUT.”
“Chumley is—Hey! You guys wanna turn that crap down a little?” I shouted. The boom box owner gave me the finger but lowered the volume anyway.
“Chumley LIKES that kind of music,” Maddie said. “Now COME ON, Vic. What do you THINK?”
I pictured Chumley walking down the sidewalk behind his father to the peeling door of the run-down house on a street of run-down houses. I pictured his cane, his pathetic hat, his ridiculous briefcase, the ironic way he raised one eyebrow to make a silent comment about whatever was going on. I saw him sitting on the bus for an hour each morning, on his way to our school, putting on his costume as the bus neared his stop, composing himself for the daily routine in which he pretended to be someone else.
“Okay, Maddie. You asked. You’re my friend, so I’m going to tell you the truth. Chumley is—”
“The thing is,” I went on, “Chumley is … special. He’s … well, kind of delicate.”
“You mean, like, SENSITIVE?”
“Yeah.”
“I KNOW. It’s one of the things I LIKE about him. He’s not afraid to be sensitive.”
“Yeah, that’s it exactly. So, what I mean is, at first, he might not seem like he wants to go to the prom with you. But I’m sure he does.”
Maddie’s smile seemed to make her freckles vibrate. “You’re SURE?”
“I’m certain.”
“THANKS, Vic. I KNEW I could count on you!”
I was at my locker, stuffing books into my backpack for the weekend study grind. Chumley bounced down the hall, lowered his briefcase to the floor and opened his locker.
“Greetings, my good man,” he said.
“Hey, CN.”
“Girded your loins for the exams, yet, old sport?”
“You know, CN, one of these days it would be nice to know what you’re talking about.”
“Look,” I began. “I was wondering. Any way you’d be willing to give me a hand prepping for the math exam?”
Up went the eyebrow. Chumley’s eyes searched my face, hunting for sarcasm. Then he smiled. “Certainly, old thing. Delighted.”
I nodded. “That’d be great. And one other thing. Maddie is going to ask you to the prom.”
His mouth dropped open, and for the first time since I’d met him, Chumley betrayed surprise. “The prom? Me?” As fast as he’d let his mask slip, he had it back in place. “Indeed?” he said.
“Yeah, indeed. And listen, old sport, old chap, old thing, do yourself a favour.”
“What would that be?”
“Say yes.”