Sons from Afar (31 page)

Mr. Norton knew for sure, now. He looked at Andy. “I think that's about all the questions we have time for,” he said, and James could see Andy relaxing. “Except I have one. Do you agree with Camus's conclusion?”

Andy nodded his head, looking the teacher in the eye the way any practiced liar knows to do.

“So you agree that Sisyphus must be imagined to be unhappy.” Mr. Norton spaced out the first syllable of that last word. James knew why: because Camus's last sentence said just the opposite.

“Well, sure,” Andy said, watching the teacher's face. Then he decided to go on, trying to distract the teacher, smoke-screening, derailing. “I really like Camus. I'm going to read some more of him this summer. I'm glad I chose this essay because it was so—
magnifique
.”

That last piece of falsehood got Mr. Norton. He slammed both hands down on his desk, stood up leaning on them; he balled his hands up into fists and leaned on his knuckles. If he hadn't been so angry, it would have been funny. But he was angry, and his voice swelled up with it. “You're lying, Andrew Walker. You've cheated on this assignment and now you're trying to bull your way out of it.”

“No, sir—” Andy started to say, but Mr. Norton didn't let him get words out.

“My only trouble is that you so obviously don't have the knowledge to do this by yourself. That's the only thing that's slowing me down at all.”

“It's not true,” Andy talked right back. The school was pretty strict about cheating, and he was frightened. The A-track courses, you could get thrown out of them if you cheated, which made a difference to your whole school career. And sports, too—you could be suspended from a team for cheating. “I didn't. Just because I'm not a brain, like some people—I didn't claim to really understand this essay, it's awfully hard, you know—and because I'm not one of your pets. I know I'm not, but you can't say I'm cheating just because you don't like me.”

James could have admired the way Andy was trying everything. Mr. Norton just stood there, steaming angry and getting angrier.

“You're lying,” he said.

“You can't say that without proof.” Andy got aggressive. “You have no proof.”

Mr. Norton didn't say anything. Andy was right, of course.

James raised his hand, but Mr. Norton didn't see him. So James just spoke out: “I gave him the notes. It was me.”

He didn't want to raise his hand, he didn't want to speak up, but there was nothing for it, if he was going to not let Andy do this to his ideas. He hadn't realized when he started this that he'd have to finish it this way, but this was the only way to finish it. The kids around him made noises, but he didn't know what they signified. He was looking at Mr. Norton, who had turned his head to look at James.

“I read the essay and gave Andy my notes,” he said.

“Did he pay you?”

“No.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“No.”

“Then why—”

James wasn't having anything to do with Andy Walker. He just talked to the teacher. “It doesn't matter why, because it's what I did.”

Mr. Norton looked like he had no idea what to do. He dismissed everybody else in the class—and the other kids moved out of there pretty fast. Mr. Norton brought James and Andy to stand in front of his desk. “I'm going to report this,” he said.

“Thanks a lot,” Andy said. He looked at James, to include him in the sarcasm.

James just looked back. He figured Andy might try to get him, to beat him up or something, and he might succeed; but Andy couldn't scare him this way. Andy wasn't anything like as dangerous as those men, for one thing. James had seen worse than the expression in Andy's eyes. Andy and his friends and everyone else might lie in wait to beat up on James—which scared him, he couldn't kid himself about that. But other than that, since they already thought he was a total dork, what harm could they do? Pain hurt, but shame hurt worse, deeper.

When he couldn't make James look away, Andy turned around and sulked out of the room. He slammed a fist into the door frame as he went by it.

Mr. Norton sat down and studied James. “I have to report this.”

“I know,” James told him.

“Has he been cheating off you all year?” Mr. Norton asked. “I've thought so, but—” He waited.

James didn't say anything.

“Kids,” the teacher said; then, “You're right not to say, I guess.
I'm not arguing with you.” James didn't say anything, but he could appreciate Mr. Norton's predicament. The teacher couldn't punish Andy without including James. There was all the difference in the world between them, but they had to be treated the same.

“I find this extremely depressing,” Mr. Norton said.

“Think of it as absurd,” James advised him, getting a smile from the round face as he left the classroom. James gave himself the same advice, entering the hall.

It was going to be bad, whatever the trouble was he was in. Just how bad he didn't know, James thought, hoping it wouldn't be too bad. Knowing he shouldn't be hoping for anything. He moved stiffly along. He needed to stop in at his locker before the next class. Anyway, it wasn't as if he could lose popularity by this move. And if they threw him out of A-track French, he could earn his way back in, he was pretty sure of that. His record was clean up until now, that should count for something. His record would be clean from now on: That was the kind of student he was, the kind of person.

Celie Anderson was hanging around in the hall. Probably, Andy had taken out his feelings on her. James was sorry about that. He turned his torso, just to nod his head at her. He couldn't just turn his head, because of his ribs.

She was looking at him, her eyes big and filled up with emotion. She approached him, so he waited. “You shouldn't have—”

At those words, James stopped being cool, stopped not caring. He wished she hadn't waited, to yell at him. It was no good being pretty on the outside if your inside was all ugly that way. He wished hers wasn't that way, because—because her hair brushed against her cheek? he asked himself, sarcastic. Because she's pretty? He didn't want to hear whatever it was Celie Anderson planned to say.

“Don't say it, okay?” he asked.

“No, it's not okay,” she told him. She sounded firm, not angry. James was surprised she insisted on talking to him. “You shouldn't have helped Andy. He always tries to slip through things, everybody knows that. I thought you were better than that.”

“No you didn't,” James reminded her. “You didn't think about me at all.”

When she blushed, a faint pink color spread up her cheeks and her eyelids went down to hide her eyes. Her eyelashes were so long they almost touched her skin.

“I'm sorry,” James said, because you didn't say the truth at someone, right out like that.

“No, you're right,” she said, surprising him again. Maybe she just hadn't realized what she was doing. “Anyway,” she changed the subject, “I wanted to ask you after your report, if you'd say that your book was more of a fairy tale than mine, even though mine was much more like a fairy tale.”

That was more than enough apology for James. “Yes, I would,” he answered. He wanted to just say yes, yes, for a while, to her, because—he'd been so afraid of what she might have been like inside herself, he was so glad to find out she wasn't.

“I'd have been misled by Saint-Exupery's style,” she said. They were walking along the hallway together, somehow. James could barely think. “I was fooled by it. Style does that, in writing. Like looks, or appearance things in people.”

“Agreed,” James croaked out. He gave himself a mental shake, to get his mind back again, working. Do you think about things? he wanted to ask her; I never thought you had ideas, too, along with—but he knew how insulting that would sound.

“I guess you have to be careful if it's a stylish writer,” she said. “I've read it,
The Hunchback
, so I could really see what you meant. I read it in English,” she added, as if not to seem too smart. Was
she afraid of being smart? James wondered. “Esmeralda really is much more like a fairy-tale character than the Little Prince is.”

“Not her. It's Quasimodo I was thinking of,” James argued.

“You're kidding. Do you really think that?” James nodded, because he did, and she looked up at him, smiling a little. “I'm tempted to say you're just identifying with Quasimodo—but that's not true, I bet. Do you ever have any ordinary ideas, the kind most of us come up with, James?”

He had her interest now, and he couldn't believe it, but he had to go to his locker so the conversation was over. He turned away.

Celie turned with him, holding her books close up against her chest.

“What's the matter with you? You're moving pretty funny.”

“Just my ribs are strapped.” James liked the way that sounded.

“What happened? Were you in a car wreck?”

“A fight.”

“You don't look like the kind of person who fights. Where was this?”

“In Baltimore.”

“What were you doing in a fight in Baltimore?”

She looked like she was about to laugh. He didn't understand girls: She actually looked like she liked the idea of him being in a fight.

James took out the books he needed. “It wasn't me, really, it was my brother. I was on the outskirts of the action. My little brother—” he closed the locker door and turned back to Celie Anderson, who was leaning up against a locker just looking at him; Celie Anderson waiting for him so they could walk on together. “Sammy was the center of it. He was—he was really something.”

“You like him a lot?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure,” James said. “Don't you?”

“What, like him? I don't even know him.” James knew she was teasing him, and he liked that, too. “I asked because—I don't like my sister too much. But she's older.”

“I've got an older sister. She's something too,” James said. He'd like to hear about Celie's sister.

“Maybe you've just got a better family life,” Celie told him.

If she knew, James thought, not saying anything. He knew, although he didn't know why, that she was finding him interesting. He knew that she liked what he'd done in French class. He began to hope that they might be friends. Probably, she wouldn't ever like him as a boyfriend, but friendship was what he wanted anyway. To be friends with her. Anyway, he thought, looking over at her profile, her hair brushing against her cheek as she walked beside him, that was what he wanted first.

*   *   *

That evening, he told Gram. They were having spaghetti made with fresh sausage from Tydings's grocery store and tomatoes from Gram's shelves. He told his family just the facts, or mostly the facts. “They'll probably call you in for a conference,” he concluded. “I'm sorry for the trouble.”

Gram nodded. She hadn't said anything, just listened hard. Nobody had said anything, except Sammy who'd enjoyed hearing what James had done. “Good-o,” Sammy had said, when James explained about the questions he'd asked Andy. Maybeth watched James's face as he confessed the trouble he was in, but she didn't seem to see anything to worry about.

It was Gram who had cause to be worried, James knew. “I can imagine what Dicey will say,” James said, to tell Gram that he could understand how she must see it.

“And she'd be right,” Gram said. “Your grandfather,” she looked at the children sitting at her table, “he was always one for ideas. That's one of the things I first liked about him, when we
were courting. He seemed so attached to ideas—it was as if he was attached to bigger things than other people. Because ideas are bigger. But instead of tools, what happened was, he got to turning them into weapons.”

James could see what she meant, and he nodded his agreement, looking straight into her straight glance. He heard the warning and he'd be careful.

“It'll be on your record?” Gram asked him.

“Permanently,” he said. There was nothing he could do about that. He didn't know how much it would matter. But it was better than having the shame permanently on his back.

“Well, it's what Ophelia says. We know what we are, but we know not what we will be,” Gram said.

That, James knew, was the end of it, whatever might get said in the conference, whatever Dicey might say. That was the end of it for Gram—she'd told him what she thought, and warned him. She trusted him to listen and to take warning. He wished there were words to tell her he had listened and heard; but she probably already knew, anyway, or could make a good guess; he could trust her, he knew.

“Ophelia,” Sammy said. “That's Shakespeare.”

“You get a little smarter every day,” Gram told him. “And show-offier.”

“I didn't say I'd read it,” Sammy argued.

“No, you didn't,” Gram agreed.

“He wrote that song about full fathom five,” Maybeth explained to Gram.

“Just the words,” Sammy corrected.

“Oh,” Maybeth said, not minding being corrected.

“I've never heard of this Camus,” Gram asked James. Well, it would be interesting to hear what she thought of it, James thought.

“I'll get a copy for you. I'd like to sing with the chorus next year, instead of playing baseball. Is that okay with you, Maybeth?” She might not want him around, and he thought he should give her a chance to say so.

“Yes. Yes, please.” Maybeth wanted him around, there was no question. “We need tenors.”

“What about me?” Sammy asked. “I can sing tenor.”

“You're playing tennis,” James reminded his brother.

“But I like to sing,” Sammy protested.

“Tennis,” James announced firmly. “You've got to. Because you're going to be very good at it. But mostly because”—he looked around the table, feeling fine, never mind the disciplinary question hanging over him—“Tillermans can do anything. Anything they want to. Even sports. Right, Gram?”