The Bubble Wrap Boy (3 page)

I
stepped outside to something I wasn't expecting.

A round of applause.

Well, I say a round, but that would involve more than one person doing the clapping.

And of course there wasn't. There was just one.

My friend. Sinus.

Who neatly leads me back to another saying:

You can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends
.

It's the sort of saying that makes me want to ram my head through a reinforced wall. Whoever came up with that little gem has never walked a day in my size threes.

Choice, you see, hasn't ever come into it. It's not like I've spent the last nine years of school casing the playground, scratching my chin, and thinking,
Yes, today I will be friends with you and you and most certainly not YOU.

Nice idea, but never going to happen. That sort of choice only belongs to other, normal people.

And that's why Sinus and I gravitated toward each other and became friends.

Well, I say “friends.”

I think that's what we are. We've never exactly talked about what our hanging out means. It just kind of happened. We stood together so many times—in gym, on the playground, the last to be picked on every occasion—that eventually we ended up kind of joined. Like a couple of lepers.

I'm not sure if real friendship is based on stuff like this, but I liked him.

Kind of.

He didn't sneer at me or find new and exotic ways of insulting my height; he didn't jump on me as I piled things into my locker (sympathetically placed on the bottom row to maximize the gag). I had sneaker marks tattooed into my back those days: standing on the short kid was an Olympic sport, and
everyone
wanted that gold medal.

The first thing I noticed after the clapping stopped was of course Sinus's downfall, the thing that relegated him to the losers' section alongside me.

THE NOSE.

I haven't left the caps lock on by accident—there's no way you could ever refer to the monstrosity that sat between his cheeks in lowercase. It just wouldn't do it justice.

THE NOSE was so long, so hooked, and yet so bulbous that it defined him entirely. When people talked about it, their voices would rise in volume as their own caps lock kicked in. Old people would gape as he walked down the street; young kids would hide themselves in the folds of their mothers' skirts rather than face the deformity that was Sinus's nose.

In short, his nose made me relieved to be a mere shortie. There was always a tiny chance that I might grow, but his nose was never going to shrink. Maybe that's why I put up with him, because he had to do the
walk of shame
as often as I did.

His name didn't help him either.

Linus Sedgley.

Innocent at first, but add in the hooter and it was a gift to the bullies. Linus very quickly became Sinus, and the name stuck firmer than a fossilized booger under a desk.

Everyone called him that, kids
and
teachers. He showed me his report card once and you could see that three different teachers had used Wite-Out at the start of his name to hide their error. Old Man Gash, the English teacher, didn't even bother to correct himself, just wrote openly about the lack of drive that “Sinus” showed in his schoolwork.

If the label bothered him, he didn't show it. If anything, he adopted it. Texts were always signed off with his nickname—cards too—so I never called him anything but Sinus. That's who he was.

He was waiting for me against the theater wall, a shadow of his profile thrown huge against the bricks. It was eerie, like a bald eagle waiting to pick me off.

Fortunately, before the fear really kicked in, he spoke, breaking the tension.

“Bravo!” he yelled. “Encore. Encore.” Unsurprisingly, he spoke through his nose, nostrils flaring like a racehorse's as he pushed out every word.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” I made to walk past like I was angry, but he followed, playfully slapping me on the back.

“No, really. It was awesome. Once everyone wiped the blood off, it was all smiles. Hope someone got it on camera.”

“You're
really
not helping here.” I smiled weakly.

“We should stick it up on YouTube. Send it viral.” He stopped to gasp mock-theatrically. “We could release it in 3-D!”

I shot him a series of daggers that bounced harmlessly off his snout, and we walked on in silence until…

“So what's next, then?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you've broken theater as we know it. What are you going to ruin—I mean, revolutionize next?”

It was becoming harder to work out why I was walking with him. Being on my own would have been better than this.

“I don't mess everything up, you know.”

“Hmm.”

“I don't!”

“Example?”

“Soccer!” I blurted out before I could think. “What about the match I played? I was the only kid in school history to score a hat-trick his first time out.”

“That
is
true.” He nodded. “Shame none of them were at the right end, wasn't it?”

My skin crawled at the memory of the goals going in my own team's net, the pain in my head as the last one ricocheted off my ear.

“Didn't they carry you off on a stretcher after the third?”

I nodded.

“Perforated eardrum, wasn't it?”

Another nod, and a blush to go with it.

I saw Sinus stifle a laugh as he spoke. “Probably for the best though—got you off the field before your own teammates ripped you limb from limb.”

“Yeah, thanks, Sinus. I'd like to see you try and head the ball without bursting it.”

“I wouldn't even try.” He shrugged. “Why do I need to make an idiot of myself when you do it well enough for us both?”

My head raced back to other humiliations: nearly setting fire to the science lab with a single piece of magnesium ribbon; nearly losing a finger to the bluntest of compasses; how I managed to give the whole class food poisoning after sampling my simple jelly doughnuts. I mean, how unlucky could I be?

Sinus knew the answer.

“You must be cursed. I think it has to be something like that, and unless you break the spell you'll be like this all your life.”

I stared at him, wide-eyed. “Wow. Thanks for the summary, pal. You've restored my confidence in a single sentence.”

“No problem. You're a friend. You'd do the same for me, I'm sure.”

I thought hard about how I could ridicule him, about stuff other than his ridiculous, showing-up-from-outer-space nose. Such as the fact that his pants were always two inches too short for his legs, or that he always had enough wax in his ears to fuel a power outage in the dead of winter.

Or I could simply go for his other weakness. The fact that he was just so…weird.

You see it wasn't
just
the nose that bought him the outsider tag. That alone would've seen the ridiculing stop by junior high, allowing him to slip into being one of the anonymous freaks who simply didn't exist to the others in our class.

The reason he was teased so much was that he was just so dang weird, in particular when it came to his wall fetish.

I don't know what it was about bricks and mortar, but it clearly fascinated him. He'd stand there smiling at any wall bigger than thirty square feet, head cocked at an angle, eyes boring into it, like he could knock it down with the power of his mind alone. He knew not to stand too close and stare though—he'd done it once, only to be shoved face-first into the brickwork, his nose left so battered and bruised it looked like the last piece of meat left on the supermarket shelf.

I thought hard about reminding him about this, or any of his other weirdnesses, as he really cut me down to size now, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

What was the point? Insults bounced off him. We walked in silence to Sinus's front wall, where he stopped and stared at it for a while.

“So I'll see you tomorrow, then?” I asked.

“Yup,” he answered, without looking up.

“Walk to school?”

“Yup.” His eyes didn't move from the bricks.

“I'll meet you here, then. Usual time.”

“I'll be here.”

“Sure you will,” I mumbled as I walked off, leaving him standing, trancelike.

I'd managed seventy feet before realizing I should tell him to keep tonight's debacle to himself.

As I turned, he was still staring at the wall.

“Probably best not to mention to my mom what happened,” I shouted. “You know, with the play. You know how she gets.”

He nodded, although he wasn't watching me, and, besides, he knew the score with my mom. One loose word from him and I wouldn't be allowed out of the house until Christmas.

T
he day after Shakespeare's latest tragedy started much the same as any other, with me tumbling headfirst over the baby gate at the top of the stairs.

I swore loudly as my shoulder bounced off the first step, the bluest word I could mix on my palette, followed by a kaleidoscope of filth for every other step, all fifteen of them.

By the time I reached the bottom, Mom had raced to meet me, face adopting the standard-issue panicky look she favored this and every morning.

“What's up, Charlie?” She leaned in too close, features distorting.

“I fell down the stairs!” Talk about stating the obvious.

“Again? But how? I closed the gate to stop that from happening!”

My insides crumbled at the thought of having this conversation again.

“No, Mom, I fell
because
of the gate. Why do you do this to me? I'm not a baby anymore. I'm fourteen. Exclude the gate as a reason and you'll find I haven't fallen down the stairs in over ten years!”

“What nonsense,” she fussed as her hand scoured my head, checking it for bumps. “You went all the way down only last week.”

“BECAUSE THE GATE WAS SHUT!” I hollered. “Take the gate away and I can manage them just fine. Please, Mom. Please. I don't need it there anymore.”

She considered it for a nanosecond.

“I'll talk to your dad about it. See what we can do. Although we do have your
problem
to consider too, don't we?”

If there's one thing my mom loved, it was a problem. Especially if it meant she could smother me just that little bit harder. I feel Mom's arms around me a lot. Hugging, squeezing, stroking. Even when she's nowhere near me, I can still feel her arms, tight around my chest. Sometimes she makes it hard to breathe. I won't let her anywhere near me at school. The last thing I need is to be punished with the walk of shame for being Mommy's brave little soldier.

The problem she was talking about wasn't even a problem. About eighteen months ago I'd had a fever. No big deal, just the flu and a temperature that made me a bit delirious in the middle of the night. She'd heard me stumbling down the stairs to the kitchen, found me sweating and swearing as I tried to stick my head inside the chest freezer. All right, so it wasn't my sanest moment, but I had a temperature of over a hundred—I wasn't playing with the fullest deck.

Three hours later and I was feeling fine, apart from the embarrassment Mom heaped on me.

“You could have suffocated!” she'd yelped. “What if you'd fallen in and the lid had come down on you? We'd never have known.”

“The freezer's full to the brim with an ark's worth of meat, Mom. Noah couldn't squeeze a pair of wood lice in there, never mind me.”

“This is a big joke to you, isn't it? Well, I don't see anything funny in it at all, Charlie. Not a thing.”

So began a new wave of motherly paranoia like none before.

Every time I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, there she was. On the occasions I tried to steal a late-night cookie, I'd find her behind me, arms readied to perform the Heimlich in case of a Chips Ahoy! choking disaster.

I know, I know. It's not normal, but the problem was it was pointless arguing with her. The more I tried, the harder she dug her heels in.

When it came to me, she worried about
everything,
about whether
everything
was safe.

Take Christmas, for example. The happiest time of year, peace on earth and all that. A time for families doing things together, like decorating the tree.

Not in our house.

I was five years old before I was allowed to hang a bauble on a branch.

Christmas trees were dangerous, you see. Pine needles were sharp, and all it took was one slip, one miscalculation and that was it—I could lose an eye.

I begged her so hard one year that she finally caved in, agreeing to let me help as long as I wore swimming goggles.

SWIMMING GOGGLES!

Can you imagine how I looked, goggled up in my own living room, with the nearest swimming pool over five miles away?

It took a bit of the magic away, I promise you.

In the end I sat and watched Dad do it: a rare moment when he wasn't frying rice in the kitchen. She never made
him
wear goggles, or even his glasses. No, her paranoia only stretched as far as me, her only child.

I tried to ask Dad why she was so overbearing, but I couldn't drag anything out of him either.

Better with a wok than he is with words,
Mom always said about him, and I suppose she was right. It wasn't like he didn't understand. He and Granddad had arrived in England from China when he was twelve, so he could speak English. He just chose not to, or to pretend not to understand. He could stay out of things that way. Out of Mom's warpath, let her do the talking for them both.

“Can't you have a word with her?” I'd begged him.

He flashed me a look that said,
Really? Have you met her?

“But if anyone can change her mind, it's you, Dad.”

“It's not that bad, is it?”

“Not that bad? She won't let me do anything. Or go anywhere.”

“Stop exaggerating.”

“What? Exaggerating? Dad, I wasn't allowed to go to a fireworks display until I was eleven because it was
perilous.
I had to twist her arm to even let me watch them through the double-pane windows. I mean, what would she have said if I'd asked for a sparkler?”

“She's your mom.”

Man, I hated it when he said that. It was his stock answer. It said everything and nothing at the same time. It was the equivalent of
Shut up and get on with it. Nothing's going to change
.

“And that's it, is it? That's the gem of wisdom you can offer me?”

He shrugged sadly and patted me on my arm, his hands rough and calloused from years spent holding a steaming hot wok.

“I've got stuff to chop,” he added, pointing to the safety of his kitchen.

“Don't let me come between you and your sweet and sour balls.” I sighed and headed back up the stairs, kicking the stair gate as I reached the top.

It hurt.

I hated that stupid gate.