Brett McCarthy (5 page)

fea•si•ble

As I stared at my bedroom ceiling the night of October 16th, two questions kept a steady drumbeat in my head. First: What was the feasibility of hiding my identity at school the next morning? Could I slip on dark glasses and a hat every time I saw Bob Levesque?

Feasible:
capable of being done or carried out; likely.

Second: How had the Pelletiers broken the news to Diane and Merrill that they were splitting? Was it feasible that Diane didn’t know yet? Was it likely that she already knew and hadn’t said a word to anyone?

Morning and October 17th finally came, and I stumbled to the bathroom. The big raccoon circles under my eyes, the direct result of no sleep, were the bad news. The good news: I wouldn’t need a disguise at school after all, because no one would recognize me.

Not wanting to face Mom’s inevitable “My goodness! Do you feel all right?” when she saw my eyes, I raced through a quick shower, packed my gym bag (we had a soccer game that afternoon), and grabbed a box of blueberry Pop-Tarts. I shouted goodbye toward my parents’ bedroom as I headed out the door and walked to school.

Pop-Tarts are sort of okay toasted and totally gross un-toasted, so after the third one I needed a drink, badly, to wash the saturated-fat gunk down my throat. I also needed to wipe off my shirt; it’s hard to walk and eat breakfast at the same time. So I headed to the outdoor water fountain behind the main school building.

If you had asked me to list the Top Ten People Brett McCarthy Didn’t Want to See at the Water Fountain, I couldn’t have come up with anything nearly as bad as I actually encountered. Rounding the corner at a full run, I crashed into some tall guy’s T-shirted back.

“Hey, watch it!” he exclaimed. There was something sickeningly familiar about the “Hey, watch it!”

Of course, it was Bob Levesque. Who else on the planet could possibly be standing at the back-lot water fountain—what I believed to be the least-frequented place in the entire school, except for maybe the custodian’s supply closet in the basement? If I hadn’t known it before, I sure knew it then: Brett McCarthy was the unluckiest piece of dead meat in Maine.

Bob took a step back. A semicircle of tall, cool guys, followers of the Greek God Levesque, stared at me. A sort of haze hung around their heads, and the place smelled. On the ground in front of them were discarded cigarette butts, and I realized, with the typical delayed reaction of an uncool kid who finally
gets
what the cool kids are up to, that this was where they came to smoke.

Then the kicker.

“Well, if it isn’t Josephine,” sneered a particularly annoying voice.

Jeanne Anne. She wasn’t smoking (I’ll give her that), but she was standing alongside Darcy Dodson, a.k.a. Darcy the Ditz to me and Diane. The meanest, skinniest member of the Mescataqua Junior High Cheerleading Squad, and one of Jeanne Anne’s neighbors.

“Hey, Josephine. Slow down and have a smoke,” said one of the Demigods. The others laughed.

“No way,” said Darcy. “She’s one of those super jocks. You know, protects her lungs, eats health food.” I wondered if Darcy considered Pop-Tarts health food.

“Whatever,” said another deity from the semicircle. “As long as you aren’t a narc. You aren’t going to tell anyone about our little…uh, meeting. Are you, Josephine?”

I shook my head. Speech was not a possibility. My teeth seemed permanently cemented shut by the pastry and blueberry goo.

Then the bell rang and the deities dispersed, dropping their cigarettes in the dirt and grinding them out with their heels. Jeanne Anne walked up to me.

“See you around. Josephine.” She looked at Bob and raised her eyebrows knowingly at the “Josephine” before sauntering off. Then it was Darcy’s turn. She jabbed a red-lacquered fingernail into my chest and smirked.

“Next time try eating the food instead of wearing it.” She and Jeanne Anne burst into hilarious giggles, then disappeared around the corner.

As soon as they were out of sight, I lunged for the water fountain. I must have sucked down a gallon before coming up for air—that’s how long it took to clear my throat. When I lifted my head, I saw I wasn’t alone.

Bob was still there. It was a little strange to see him without the usual crowd of adoring fans. He seemed serious, which, unbelievably, only made him look better.

“You’re Brett McCarthy, right?” he asked quietly. I nodded.

“You know, Brett,” he said, “my mother is a nice person. She doesn’t deserve to have people play stupid jokes on her and waste her time. That was a real loser thing to do.” Then Bob Levesque, God of Hotness, Loyal Son, turned and walked away without a backward glance.

Leaving me, Low-Life Insect, Deadest Meat on the Planet, wondering how I was ever going to make it through school that day.

As it turns out, I wouldn’t have to.

un•prec•e•dent•ed

Here’s the most important thing to know about junior high: Bad news travels fast and good news is a well-kept secret.

And at Mescataqua Junior High, really bad news, the juicy kind that ruins lives, travels at the speed of sound.

I don’t know how she did it, but between four-thirty p.m., October 16th, and eight a.m. the following day, Jeanne Anne managed to torpedo my reputation. Granted, I had played a role in my own destruction. But the instant I saw her with Darcy the Ditz, I knew I was sunk. They had obviously walked to school together that morning, something Jeanne Anne would have arranged the night before. Which meant that before the sun had even set on October 16th, Jeanne Anne had told Darcy about the whole Levesque thing. And Darcy, no doubt, would have done a global message to everyone on her Way Popular Buddy List.

Okay, maybe not. But even paranoids have enemies. And as I headed into the building that morning, things looked bad.

For starters, no one was at The Junior. This was unprecedented.

Unprecedented:
new, having no example.

We always waited by The Junior for each other, even if the bell had rung. For the first time, I walked into school alone.

That’s when I saw it: the looks and nudges kids gave one another in the hall as I trudged in. I heard it in the whispers behind my back as I fumbled with my locker. And I felt it, like a kick to my gut, when I walked into first period and saw Diane seated near Jeanne Anne, their heads close together, talking.

When Jeanne Anne saw me, she straightened up, signaling Diane to be quiet. Not good.

“Hey, how’s it goin’?” I said, plunking into the seat alongside Diane. She smiled. She looked like her normal, gorgeous self. Not like someone who had stayed up all night staring at the ceiling. Jeanne Anne, seated in front of us, looked straight ahead at the blackboard.

“Great,” Diane said.

“I didn’t see you out front,” I continued.

Diane raised her eyebrows. “Well, I hear
you
were out back.”

“Gee, I wonder where you heard
that.
” I raised my voice just a bit. Jeanne Anne, back rigid, didn’t turn.

“Some people are so boring, the only thing they can talk about is…other people,” I continued. Jeanne Anne still faced forward.

“And some people are so
desperate,
” I went on, “they’ll even walk to school with losers, gossiping the whole time.” That did it. She spun around.

“
Look
who’s talking!” she practically shouted. “The overweight human sweatshirt! Who has nothing better to do than hang out with her garbage-collecting grandmother and math-team weirdos!”

The “overweight” alone didn’t justify what followed, especially since I know it’s not true. The fact is I’m big-boned, and fairly muscular for an eighth-grade girl. And the “math-team weirdo” bit? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time Michael had taken heat for being Gifted and Talented. But “garbage-collecting?” My Nonna?

“You ugly cow,” I said as my fist connected with her nose. Blood spurted.

Unprecedented. In the annals of Brett McCarthy screwups, a collection that seemed to be rapidly growing, this was a first. And in the history of Mescataqua Junior High, a fistfight between two girls was also unprecedented. Although it wasn’t much of a fistfight. Jeanne Anne never hit back. She screamed for tissues while her nose bled all over Diane’s language arts binder and the rest of the class chanted, “Cat fight! Cat fight!” Language arts teacher, who suddenly materialized from nowhere, thrust a box of Kleenex into some girl’s hands, and ordered her to take Jeanne Anne to the nurse’s office.

“You,” he said, pointing a stubby index finger in my face. “Gather up your things. Let’s go.”

Our destination was the principal’s office, where, following a long lecture about the Mescataqua Junior High School Zero Tolerance Policy on Violence, I was formally suspended. Three days starting today, no school. Which also meant no soccer, and we had two big games that week. As I waited for Dad to pick me up, my soccer coach, Mrs. LaVoie, came in and sat down beside me. Like I said, bad news travels fast.

“Brett, I want to say I’m surprised, but I’m not,” she said gently. “I’m shocked. Dumbfounded. This is completely uncharacteristic. Is there something going on that you want to talk about?”

In addition to coaching soccer, Mrs. LaVoie teaches language arts at our school. She was my sixth-grade L.A. teacher, and she and I are each other’s biggest fans. Not only are we really into soccer, but she gets my word thing and speaks to me like I’m an intelligent human being. Mom and Dad love her because she called a special meeting with them to discuss my “talent with language.” She always asks me if I’ve been doing any writing, which makes me feel guilty, because I’m not. But it also makes me feel good that she believes in me.

So there I was, sitting in the principal’s office, shattering her illusions that I was anything special. I’d like to say I was cool. I’d like to say I took my punishment bravely, unremorsefully, if there is such a word.

Instead, I burst into tears. I blubbered. By the time Dad got there, I had stopped crying, but my raccoon-circled eyes were now puffy and red as well. Dad spent some time in the hall talking with Mrs. LaVoie before leading me out, arm across my shoulders.

“It’ll be okay, Brett,” he said when we got in the car. “Remember: ‘It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.’ William Ernest Henley.” I saw him attempt a smile. “In other words, honey, we’ll work this out. Things can’t get any worse.”

But they did.

awk•ward

Suspension, if you want my opinion, is ridiculous. First, you take the worst kids in the school system. They do something awful, like smoke dope. Call in a bomb scare. Hit Jeanne Anne. Then you kick them out for days, with zero supervision. Most of these kids have working parents who aren’t home during school hours. So these troublemakers have the run of the town, time on their hands, and nobody watching.

Is it really true that school superintendents, who make up these rules, have PhDs?

There was no sign of Mom and Nonna by the time we arrived. This put Dad in an awkward position, forcing him to choose between staying home with his violent daughter or hurrying off to teach his morning class.

Awkward:
showing lack of expertness; lacking social grace and assurance.

More and more, Lecturing Brett ended up on Mom’s to-do list. It’s funny: Dad can lecture to an auditorium full of students, but spend fifteen minutes asking his teenage daughter how she managed to get herself thrown out of school? No way.

Don’t get me wrong. Dad’s a great guy, in a flaky, professor-like way. But it seemed like ever since I’d started wearing a bra, he’d forgotten how to talk to me. Unless it was about a poem.

So after assuring him that I really hadn’t become a juvenile delinquent, and that if it weren’t for Jeanne Anne I would still be an upstanding honors student with an unblemished record, he decided to go to work.

“You won’t burn the house down while I’m gone, right?” he joked as he headed out the door. At least I think he was joking. He stuck a note on the fridge for Mom, saying he’d be home early and would she please call him before speaking to me.

I figured I had two options: Sit there and wait for Mom and The Lecture of a Lifetime, or hide at the Gnome Home until dinner.

I decided to delay the inevitable.

Nonna’s house was unlocked and smelled like warm chocolate. I found a pan of just-baked brownies taking up space on her cluttered kitchen table, along with loose-leaf notebook pages covered with pencil drawings.

I carved a hunk of brownie from the pan, poured a glass of milk, and sat. As I chewed (double fudge with raspberry chips), I leafed through the drawings. Someone had sketched a candle. Little squares arranged in a circle. Then I saw something familiar.

“It’s Spruce Island light,” I said, so surprised that I announced it to the empty room. The old lighthouse—and I’m talking really old, like, built when Thomas Jefferson was president—on Nonna’s island.

For as long as I can remember, one of Nonna’s defining maverick qualities has been her desire to restore Spruce Island light. She’d tried to have it added to some registry of historic places. Tried to have the Coast Guard recommission it. Tried to convince the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine that rebuilding a decrepit lighthouse would be a wonderful project for future sailors. But the lighthouse remained as it always had: a shell of a stone tower with a rusty catwalk on top, surrounded by weeds, with hidden caches of old nails and broken glass.

“If she ever pulls this off, it will be a Pyrrhic victory indeed,” Dad once said. I’d asked him what the heck
that
meant, and he explained that Pyrrhus was an ancient king of Epirus who defeated the Roman army only after a great many of his soldiers had died. So, Dad said, a “Pyrrhic victory” is won at excessive cost. In other words, it would cost Nonna a bundle to get the light fixed.

Do other kids’ dads talk like this?

As I sifted through the papers, I heard a car door slam. Through the kitchen window I saw Mom and Nonna emerging from the car. Uh-oh, I thought. Time to retreat. I ducked into the living room, crouching behind the sofa as they walked in. Not very dignified, but I could see them if I peeked around the corner.

Mom carried grocery bags and began unloading them onto the counters. Nonna settled into a kitchen chair. That’s when I realized I’d left my half-finished glass of milk on the table. And the pan with one enormously missing brownie.

“You know, Eileen,” Mom said, “maybe it is just allergies, or some sort of infection. But the MRI will rule out anything bad, and we won’t have to worry.”

“He’s overreacting,” Nonna said. “This is why health care in this country is so expensive. All these ridiculous tests for nothing.” I saw Nonna pick up my milk glass and frown.

“Well,” Mom said briskly, “better safe than sorry. I should go home and check the answering machine. The hospital may have called to let us know when we can come in.” Mom left. I watched Nonna place the milk glass back on the table.

“Okay,” she said, in a voice clearly intended to carry into the next room. “I know only one person who cuts brownies from the middle of the pan. Come out and explain why you’re home from school.” Awkwardly, I crawled on all fours from behind the sofa.

“Thanks for not giving me away,” I said.

Nonna frowned. “How long have you been here?”

“Five minutes. Dad brought me home because you and Mom were out. Where were you guys?”

“Are you sick?” Nonna continued.

“No. Suspended.”

“Suspended!” she repeated. “What for?”

“I hit someone,” I said. “Nonna, what were you and Mom talking about?”

“Your mother doesn’t know, does she?” Nonna said, narrowing her eyes. “Brett. You know I don’t like you to keep secrets from your mother.”

“It’s not a secret,” I sighed, flopping into the kitchen chair. “I just haven’t told her. Yet.” I picked up one of the loose-leaf sheets. “Speaking of secrets, what is this?”

Nonna passed her hand over her eyes. She seemed tired. “Honey, stick to the topic.”

Just then the car pulled into the driveway again. The Return of Mom.

“Oh, no,” I exclaimed, jumping up and backing into the living room. “Nonna, I really don’t want to deal with Mom right now.” I looked pleadingly into Nonna’s eyes. She shook her head again but waved me toward the sofa.

“Tonight,” she said as Mom’s footsteps crunched along the walkway gravel. “You tell her tonight.” The door opened.

“Hey. They can see us right now.” Mom made this announcement as she leaned into the kitchen.

“Okay,” said Nonna, pulling herself up from her chair. “Let’s do it.” From my hiding place I could see Mom glance toward the cluttered table, the brownie pan. She smiled.

“I can see you haven’t lost your appetite,” she said cheerfully, holding the door open for Nonna.

“Don’t be so sure,” Nonna said.