The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (10 page)

DECEMBER 12th

W
elcome to the Grand Imperial Hotel, the finest hotel in all of Yakamee,” said the friendly woman behind the desk in the marble lobby. “How may I help you? Wait, don’t tell me! Y’all are here for the Scrabble thingy.”

“Yes, in fact we are,” said Caroline Dorfman.

“You and everyone else in this place,” said the woman.

The big hotel lobby was packed with people. Many of them were kids, and many held Scrabble sets under their arms, or wore T-shirts that said the name of their Scrabble team. Most were headed toward the escalator, where a sign read: YST ON MEZZANINE LEVEL, with an arrow pointing up. Everyone’s voices were loud, because there was a rushing waterfall in the lobby, and a man in a white tuxedo playing a white piano.

But mostly they were loud because December twelfth had finally arrived.

“The reservation is under Dorfman,” said Duncan’s mother. “If possible, we’d love to check into our room right away and go take a little rest.”

“Are you
serious
, Mom?” said Duncan. “We don’t have time. Registration is going to close at one!”

Many of the players traveling by car, bus, or train had arrived the night before, but the Drilling Falls team had taken a plane at the crack of dawn that had gotten them here with little time to spare.

“Now, let me see, Ms. Dorfman,” said the woman behind the desk. “I can give you a nice classic regular with two queen-sized beds on twenty-three. Although,
hmmm . . .
” She scrunched up her mouth as she looked at her computer monitor. “It says here that this guest room is by the ice machine. And maybe y’all don’t want the buckety sound of
thunk-thunk-thunk
disturbing your sleep at night.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” said Duncan’s mother. “My son will need his sleep for the tournament.”

“I wonder why everybody makes ice cubes
round
these days,” said the woman. “A few years back, the ice people just up and changed the standard shape.”

“You know, that’s true,” said Duncan’s mother. “I never thought about it before.”

The ice people?
There was no time to discuss this boring subject right now, Duncan thought. But the two women looked as if they were settling in to discuss something deep and urgent, like global warming. He would have to put a stop to it.

“Mom,”
hissed Duncan. “I have to go find Carl and register!”

The Dorfmans had flown with Carl and his mother early this morning, though the Slaters had sat in first class, where they were handed rolled-up warm washcloths, and served omelets from a cart with a little flame that cooked them. As soon as they all arrived at the hotel in Florida, where the Slaters rushed through some kind of VIP check-in, Mrs. Slater had gone upstairs. Carl had slipped away, warning Duncan to hurry up and meet him at the registration table “ASAP,” and Duncan saw him step onto the escalator, heading up to the mezzanine.

“Oh, all right,” said Duncan’s mother, blinking at Duncan as if she’d almost forgotten he was the reason they’d come here in the first place. “You go on. I’ll catch up with you in a little while.”

He couldn’t believe she was letting him go off on his own; she almost never let him do that. Duncan walked quickly away from the front desk. He got on the escalator and rose up toward the roar of other kids, and the sound of tiles being shaken in their bags, and whatever else awaited him this weekend.

 

 

Right behind Duncan Dorfman, a gloomy-looking boy with long dark hair and a skateboard stepped onto the escalator. Someone who appeared to be his father stood beside him. Behind them was another man, along with a woman holding a baby girl. The father had one of those beards that you could hide objects in, if he were in a “Find the Hidden Pictures” puzzle. A spoon could be hidden in his beard, and a cricket.

“So the big day has come,” the father was saying. “Are you excited, kid?”

“Oh, sure, Dad,” said his son. “Thrilled to death.”

Although he didn’t want to show it, Nate Saviano actually was a little excited. For most of the plane ride down from New York first thing this morning, he’d been in a horrible mood. He had traveled here with his father, his mother, Dr. Steve, and baby Eloise. They’d taken up all the seats in row fourteen except one; some poor lady had to sit directly in the line of smell-fire from Eloise’s diaper. Maxie Roth, who incredibly enough had agreed to be his partner, had taken the bus down yesterday with her parents, and was already here, somewhere. Nate had to find her right away. He and Maxie had played a few games together since he’d invited her to be his partner, but all the pressure was on Nate to win the games for them. Maxie knew she was just a seat-filler, though Nate thought she was an extremely cool one.

During the trip his father had wanted him to look over some word lists “just for the heck of it,” but Nate shook his head no, and instead he’d watched the tiny TV screen at his seat. He’d even watched the video of the safety demonstration, in which oxygen masks dropped down from above the seats, and all the passengers in the video calmly reached for them, as though getting glasses from a kitchen cabinet.

Then Nate watched some dumb show on the little kids’ channel. That terrible kiddie singer Kazoo Stu came on, singing his big hit about wanting someone to take the kangaroo out of his hair. To spite his father, Nate even watched it a
second
time. By late tomorrow afternoon, this period of his life would be over forever, and he’d never have to form the words KEF or OORIE or QANAT again.

But now that he was here at the hotel in Yakamee, Nate had to admit he was impressed by the number of Scrabble players around him. Since Nate had started being homeschooled this fall, he had rarely been around large groups of kids. As the escalator rose to the mezzanine, Nate took in the size of the crowd, and he was amazed.

There were many, many kinds of kids, all of them in motion. What they had in common was Scrabble.

“Whoa,”
said Nate to his parents as they all stepped off the escalator.

They walked out into the atrium, which was jumping with players. Palm trees actually grew indoors here; the scene was wild. A woman with a clipboard came over and said, “Have you registered?” Nate shook his head no. “Better hurry, then,” she said. “You’re among the last of them.” Maxie Roth was waiting for him by the table with her own parents. Her hair was magenta with a new skunky white streak through it. She held her own skateboard under her arm. When she saw Nate, she flashed him a peace sign, and he flashed one right back.

Someone took a picture of Nate and Maxie, then slapped name tags onto their shirts. They were team #64, the Big Apple Duo—a boring name, Nate thought, but they hadn’t been able to come up with anything better.

“Your partner, Maxie, is certainly very
alternative
looking,” Nate’s mother said after the picture was taken. “And neither of you smiled. It looked like a mug shot! Those boys over there are smiling,” said his mother, nodding toward a team that was having its own picture taken. They were called the Surfer Dudes, Nate would find out later. They both wore Hawaiian shirts and shark’s-tooth necklaces, and had golden blond hair that looked a little greenish. They were massively big, and their smiles glinted. They were smiling as if they owned the world and all its oceans and landmasses.

“I didn’t feel like smiling,” he told his mother.

“Well, even so,” said Larry Saviano. “You want to look nice, Nate.”

“I do?”

“Of course, wise guy,” said Dr. Steve. “If you win, they’ll put your picture in the paper.”

“
If
they win?” said Nate’s father. “You mean
when
they win.”

“Way to keep up the pressure, Larry,” Nate’s mother said to her ex-husband. “Way to turn your son into a basket case.”

His parents glared at each other the way they always used to when they were married and had an argument, and Nate felt his stomach get tight.

“I just want him to have fun,” Larry Saviano murmured, but Nate knew this wasn’t entirely true. His father had everything resting on Nate and Maxie winning the championship.

“PAIRINGS!” a man shouted, and approximately two hundred kids swiveled their heads in his direction.

“‘Bearings?’ What’s that mean?” asked Dr. Steve.

“
Pairings,”
said Larry. “It means they’ve posted the teams that will be playing together for the first round.”

All the kids in the atrium swarmed toward the bulletin boards that had been set up by the doors of Ballroom A, where the games would be held. Nate found himself wedged between a slightly chunky, wavy-haired, nervous-looking boy and a small redheaded girl.

He got a good view of the pairings sheet, and he traced downward with his finger until he located his team. “There we are,” Nate said to Maxie. “We’re playing team number eighty-eight, the Evangelical Scrabblers from Butterman, Georgia.”

There would be three rounds packed into today, then a tournament-wide trip to the amusement park Funswamp tonight, then three rounds tomorrow, plus the final round between the two top teams that all the other players would watch live on a movie-theater-size screen, and which would simultaneously appear on
Thwap!
TV. Nate and Maxie were turning to go back to his family when the redheaded girl spoke up.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m April.” She pointed to her name tag, which read: APRIL BLUNT, TEAM #41, THE OREGONZOS. PORTLAND, OR.

“I’m Nate.”

“Hey. I’m Lucy,” said her partner, who had just joined them. She was a tall black girl with springing dreadlocks. Then Lucy said to April,
“So?”

“So nothing,” said April. “It’s not him.”

“Not who?” asked Nate.

“Nothing. Not important,” April said. Then she said, “Nate, can I ask you something? Who taught you to play Scrabble?”

“My dad did,” he said. “He was a Scrabble player when he was my age. He played in this tournament.”

“Oh, wow. Well, that’s that.”

“That’s what?” asked Nate.

“Sorry, never mind,” said April. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t somebody I once knew. But I didn’t really think you were.”

“Whatever,” said Nate. They wished each other good luck in their games and said they’d see each other later.

As Nate and Maxie walked away, April told her partner, “I didn’t really think it was him. I wanted it to be him, I guess.”

“What about that one?” asked Lucy, pointing toward the boy with the wavy brown hair and a T-shirt that read: DRILLING FALLS SCRABBLE TEAM. The boy looked a little clueless and lost.

“Oh, it’s pretty unlikely that that’s him,” said April. “But he looks nice,” she added.

“Let’s say hi, then,” said Lucy.

“Okay, sure.”

“He looks like he could use a hi.” They walked over and introduced themselves. “We’re April and Lucy from Portland, Oregon,” Lucy announced, and the boy seemed startled to be spoken to by them.

“I’m Duncan. From Drilling Falls, Pennsylvania,” he added after a moment, as if he weren’t happy about this fact.

“Nice to meet you, Duncan,” said April. “Who are you playing first?”

“A team called the Tile Hustlers, from somewhere in Maine.”

“Hope you know how to hustle them back,” said Lucy. “Are you very experienced?”

“Experienced?” Duncan felt like an impostor here, even though he had improved so much since he’d begun, and now loved the game. Still, it was strange to be wearing one of the T-shirts that Carl Slater’s mother had had specially made. She’d given it to Duncan recently, on the day he’d spent at the Slater house unhappily posing for photographs of himself and Carl playing Scrabble for the Smooth Moves cigarette ad.

An unfriendly young woman had come up to Duncan in the Slater living room that day with a makeup kit in her hand. “You need color,” she’d said. “You look like death. No offense.”

Before he could respond, she’d started brushing powder all over his face. He’d opened his mouth to object, but some of the powder got sucked inside, as if he was in a sandstorm. The whole day had made Duncan feel horrible, including the moment when he’d had to hand in the release form on which he’d forged his mother’s signature. He’d carefully written:

No one even bothered to check whether or not it looked real. Mrs. Slater didn’t seem to care.

Duncan had asked Carl to tell his mother not to bring any of this up—the ad, the release form, or the money—to Duncan’s mother over the weekend in Yakamee. “She’s really sensitive,” he’d said vaguely, and Carl had said not to worry, his mom wouldn’t say a word.

Maybe, Duncan thought, the ads would never appear anywhere, and he would never have to tell his mother what he’d done. She still thought the trip had been paid for by the school. Not only that, but she still had no idea of the real reason Duncan had been invited to participate. She knew what the fingertips of his left hand could do, but she didn’t know that anyone else knew. To Duncan’s relief, none of this information had made its way back to her over the fall.

“I’m not experienced at all,” Duncan admitted to the girls at the tournament now.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Lucy. “In case we end up playing each other today, I mean. But I bet you’re good.”

“I don’t know about that. How about you two?” he asked.

“We’ve been playing for a while, but this is our first tournament. We mostly just like the game,” said Lucy, but Duncan knew she was probably being modest. He had a feeling the two of them were extremely good.

“I like your T-shirt,” April said to him. Then she casually asked, “Do you have a lot of shirts with things written on them?”

“No, just a couple,” said Duncan. “I mostly wear regular shirts. My mom brings them home from the store where she works. Unfortunately,” he added.

“Why unfortunately?”