Nothing to Lose (5 page)

“You will.”

“I’m not going to. Maybe you can get her to do what you want, but not me. Not me.”

I tried to keep my voice from shaking, but I could tell he heard it.

Still, I said, “Not me.”

“Then there are going to be problems, because when I fight, I always win.”

My mother came back then, broom and dustpan in one hand, a bottle of Fantastik in the other. “It’ll just be a second.”

Walker smiled and patted the seat beside him. “You know what? It can wait until after.” He put his hand on her butt and guided her toward the seat. “I’d rather we all eat together as a family.”

I pushed my bloody plate away. “You eat. I’m not hungry.”

He watched me leave, not saying anything.

Fifteen minutes later Mom knocked on my door. “It’s key lime pie.”

“No way.”

“Please, Michael. You know—”

“There is no way,” I said, “no way in hell I’m eating pie with him. You want to pretend, you just go ahead.”

“Please. Walker’s trying, Michael. He really wants to be a family. We all just need to try a little harder.”

“You try. Let me know when you’re finished.”

“You have no idea how hard this is.”

She kept talking, but I’d stopped listening. Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe his abuse of her wasn’t a problem. Maybe she even liked it. Maybe she wasn’t drowning, looking to me for rescue. Maybe instead, she was like a scuba diver, used to navigating rough waters, enjoying her swim with sharks.

The guy by the Whack-a-Mole wears a blue Florida Gators sweatshirt, but he’s too young for college. He’s my age. It’s Julian Karpe.

“This is a cool game,” he says to some guy. “Someone told me the secret once.”

I feel a sucking feeling in my stomach’s pit. I know who told him, and I know when. I walk to the side of the game by the hanging Barneys and Blue’s Clues dogs. Part of me hopes they’ll hide my face. The other part wants to go over to Julian, to say hi.
Hi, it’s me.

But maybe it’s not Karpe at all. Sure, this guy sounds like Karpe, looks like him a little. But he’s taller now, more filled out, and less of a geek. I put my hand to my own face. How have I changed in a year?

“Michael.” Not a question. It’s Karpe. I remove my hand from my face and stare at him.

He looks back, suddenly unsure. “It’s you—right, Mike?”

No hablo inglés.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me.”

Karpe starts to clap me on the shoulder, then stops. “I wondered if you’d be here.”

I say nothing.

“After what happened, after you … disappeared, the police came around school. They asked if I knew where you were, but I said I hadn’t seen you in close to a week. No one had.”

“Are you going to play?” I ask.

“I wasn’t sure where you went anyway. I suspected, but I never knew for sure until now.”

I look to see if anyone’s listening, but it’s barely three on a Monday, and you could bowl on the sidewalks without hitting anyone. Karpe’s finished talking, so I say, “Thanks,” because I know he expects it. Because he deserves it, even.

“No problem. I figured you’d done nothing wrong. If you wanted to leave, you had your reasons.”

I say, “If you’re not going to play—”

“My stepmother’s a lawyer, you know.”

I manage a laugh. “Yeah? Well, my stepfather was a lawyer too. So what?”

“No, I mean… I mean maybe she could help you. Angela—that’s her name—she does pro bono stuff sometimes. That means helping people for free, people who need help.”

“Why would I need a lawyer?” But I know.

Karpe keeps going. “And she says there’s this thing called attorney-client privilege. If you told her anything, I mean, about your mother, she’d have to keep it secret.”

He takes something out of his pocket, which turns out to be a business card. I know somehow he came here just to bring it. I also know I won’t call his stepmother.

He says, “What I mean is, maybe she could tell you if there’s something you could do to help your mother. Do you ever worry about your mother, Mike?”

“Don’t call me that!” I glance around.

But he hands me the card. I look at it. “Thanks.”

“Think about it.”

He walks away. The sun’s starting to sink, and the fair lights begin to rise—neon pink, yellow, and green, clashing with Karpe’s electric blue and orange sweatshirt. I’m alone again, listening to that old song that always brings the past back, brings Kirstie and my mom too close, too real. Karpe looks back at me, and I wave, showing the business card. When he turns away, I start to crumple it. Then I change my mind and shove it into my pocket instead.

That night there’s a fight outside my trailer. Normally I wouldn’t notice. There’s always something going on outside, always someone awake so you never have to be alone. But tonight I turned in early. I plan on going to the library again tomorrow. I’ve run through all the K. Andersons I pulled the first time. I need to try some more states.

And something else. I’m thinking about what Karpe said about helping my mother. I let his words wash over me during the day, but now, lying in bed, not really tired enough to sleep, the thought keeps coming back to me.
Help her. Help her.
Playing in my head like a CD with a scratch on it, where it just keeps going back and playing the same part over and over.

Outside, people are bumping against the trailer walls, yelling. Finally I go out in T-shirt and boxers. There are four guys, including this one, Victor, who always reminds me of Walker Monroe.

I say, “Can you maybe move over there, guys? I have to get up early.”

The others start to go along. They like me okay. But Victor swaggers to the door, kicking dropped beer bottles. He’s shorter than me, but solid, and he likes to throw his weight around. Usually I avoid him.

“Need your beauty sleep, huh?” He turns to his friends. “Hey, Birdman here thinks this is the Plaza Hotel.”

The guys laugh, drunk. Everyone calls me Birdman because the first week after I left home, I found this baby crow at a fairground in North Carolina. It had fallen from a tree, an ugly thing with hardly any feathers. It reminded me of the little bird in the book
Are You My Mother?
, which Mom used to read me (but when I said that, no one knew what I meant; none of the other carnies had mothers who read to them). I took it back to the trailer and tried to feed it bugs and stuff. Someone heard it chirping and told everyone. They all ragged on me. The bird had died anyway.

The story and the name stuck—made me sound like a wuss. But new guys thought the name had something to do with the Birdman of Alcatraz, so that made me scary. It was good having an identity anyway. It made me part of things in this place where no one has a past or much of a future.

Now, I say, “I don’t think it’s the Plaza, Vic. I’m just trying to sleep. Thought maybe you could just take it over there, that’s all. Be decent.”

Victor gets closer, moving to stand on the trailer steps so he’s in my face. I smell booze—not just beer like the other guys—and that reminds me of Walker too.

“Make me, Birdman. My mama didn’t teach me no manners, so I guess it’s up to you.”

“Aw, quit it, Vic,” one of the other guys, my friend Johnny, says.

Victor ignores him.

“How ’bout your mama, Bird Boy?”

“Don’t talk about my mother.” But Victor doesn’t know. That’s what I like about the fair. No one knows or wants to know. The only one who knew was Kirstie, and Kirstie isn’t here.

“Did your mama teach you manners, Bird?”

“Quit it.”

“Or did she teach you to fight?” He pushes my shoulder. “Wanna fight, pretty boy? Little boy? I’m ready.”

I feel my fists clench involuntarily and I raise my arm. I can tell how it would feel, hitting him. Satisfying for a second, fists crashing into his face, not just once, but again and again, hitting him until there’s no hitting left.

I back away.

“Just … go over there. Would you, please?”

I go to close the door. Victor begins to follow me, but something—the look on my face, maybe—stops him.

“Faggot,” he says.

I shut the door.

They stay into the night, their own fight over, concentrating instead on keeping me awake by pounding the trailer. I pull my pillow over my head, but in my mind, I see the photograph of my mother.

I don’t go out again. Eventually the others come in to sleep. When my alarm goes off at five thirty, I let it ring long enough to wake everyone.

After one day in the school cafeteria, I went back to eating by the roach coach with my former teammates.

Tedder Dutton, a junior jock I didn’t like much, was doing an impression of Miss Hamasaki, our English teacher. Lest the term
impression
leave anyone thinking of
Saturday Night Live
or
Mad TV
, I’ll clarify. This impression consisted entirely of Tedder reading a poem from our English book in this phony accent, pulling his eyes back like a six-year-old pretending to be Asian.

“The roods are rovery, dalk and deep,” he recited.

His friends laughed, and Tris said, “You have to wag your butt when you do it.”

“She doesn’t talk like that,” I said. Then, to Tris, I added, “This is what happens when siblings mate.”

“Hey, Daye, why do you always bring your lunch?” Tedder demanded. “The smell of peanut butter makes me want to regurgitate.”

The two players laughed some more. I shrugged. “Healthier, I guess. I could complain that I’m sick of the sound your arteries make when they harden—but I’m too nice.”

“Right,” he said. “Gotta keep healthy for foot— … why
do
you have to keep healthy, Daye?”

I told him to bite me. Dutton was the type of guy who’d let you do his sister if he could think of some way that it would improve his stats (“And if you haven’t
seen
his sister,” Tris had said). He’d get my position now that I was out. By my definition he should’ve been kissing my ass for allowing him to replace me. But Dutton saw it differently.

“Can’t believe you ditched the Dolphins like that,” he said.

“You did great in practice yesterday, Tedder,” Tristan cut in. “Though you could pass to me a few times, instead of grabbing all the glory.”

“Yeah, right,” Tedder said. “You get glory when you earn it, second string.”

Glory.
There was this scrimmage last year, J.V. versus varsity. It had been third and fifteen, and J.V. was at the forty. The defense bore down on me, and I’d thrown this near-impossible pass to Tris. I could still feel my arm on the follow-through, and Deion Jacobs landing on me. I could hear our side cheering when Tris caught it and ran it in for a TD.

“Remember that scrimmage last year, Tris?” I said. “I passed to you.”

Tris grinned. “Yeah, that was cool.”

“But that was last year,” Dutton said. “This year, we have a way better D. You guys would’ve taken the L-train against this year’s team.”

“Don’t know about that,” Tris said. “Jackson got, like, huge over Christmas break. He juicin’?”

“Stephawn Jackson on ’roids?” Dutton looked shocked. “Nah, I think he gained twenty pounds—mostly in his forehead—by doubling up on his Flintstone vitamins.”

Tristan laughed. “Hey, Mike, you going to Lucas’s party Saturday?”

I looked from them to my sandwich. I wanted to go. Vanessa would be there. But the knowledge of what could happen at home if I went—it was always there like an old song that sticks in your head, where you can’t stop hearing it no matter how hard you try.

Tris was looking back at me.

You don’t know them anymore. You don’t even know yourself.

Finally I said, “Wasn’t invited.”

“You don’t need an invite.” Tris slapped my shoulder. “We’re all going.”