The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (12 page)

We can’t possibly do anything even CLOSE to 31 points, Maxie scribbled on the pad. I see one move for 5, and another that would give us 14, but would also open up the triple. She was very fast with the numbers part of the game—faster even than Nate was. She did mental math at lightning speed, and it was coming in handy. If they traded some or all of their letters now, they would lose their turn and fall even farther behind.

They discussed it briefly, then put down LAIN, which gave them those 5 pathetic points.

Maxie wrote on the pad:

We are, like, doomed.

 

 

Nate couldn’t believe this was happening in their very first game. He had been working so hard for months, and everything had been building up to this day. What if it all came crashing down? What would his father say?

But in the next hand, the Big Apple Duo picked the X—a letter that everyone always wanted—and they placed it on a triple-letter square going in two directions, making the words XU and XI and earning a whopping 50 points.

Was it possible that they might win the game after all?

Yes, it was possible, and then it actually happened. New York beat Georgia by one point.
One point
.

Nate and Maxie shook hands with the Evangelical Scrabblers, then Maxie said to Nate, “Nice work,” and held up her hand for him to slap.

Wearily, he slapped his against it. He liked being with her, and the two of them were going to try to ride their skateboards while in Yakamee, but he hadn’t yet told her how he really felt about the game, or why he was even here. Nate turned away, a little bit dizzy.

“What’s the matter?” Maxie asked, but he didn’t answer. Yes, they had won, but not by enough. Though he didn’t even
like
Scrabble, he knew he had to get his father off his case. Winning games by such a narrow margin was not the way to do that.

“Nate,” he heard his father’s voice say from across the ballroom.

“Shhh,”
several parents warned.

“Nate!” called his father again, more urgently.

Maxie looked at Nate and said, “I think your dad wants you.”

“Yeah, well, my dad can wait.”

“What’s going on with you, Nate?” asked Maxie. “You invited me down here, and you seem so . . . angry or something.”

“Shhh,”
warned the parents again. “Games are still in progress!”

“I’ll explain later,” he said.

Nate turned and saw his father standing in the doorway. Nate nodded and walked toward him, but kept on walking when he reached him. There was a snack stand in the middle of the atrium, and Nate bought himself a can of grape Splurge, tipping his head back to drink.

His father hung over him.

“So what happened?” Larry asked.

Nate stopped drinking and looked at him. “What would you say if I told you we lost?”

Larry’s face darkened.
“What?”
he said sharply.

Nate shook his head slowly. “You’re incredible, Dad,” he said. In that moment he had seen what it would be like if they actually did lose a game. “I was kidding,” Nate said. “Maxie and I won.”

“You knucklehead! How could you mess with my mind like that? From the way you looked, I thought you actually lost!” Larry’s face had now broken into a big smile. “Let’s see the score sheet,” he said. He took the piece of paper from Nate and examined it carefully. After a moment he glanced up in disbelief. “A
one-point
win?” he said. “Are you serious, Nate? Don’t you think that’s a little close for comfort?”

“It’s a win, Dad,” said Nate. “That’s what matters.”

“Well, that’s mostly true,” said his father. “
If
you win all your games. If you lose one, your only chance to win is a big spread. You almost blew it here, Nate; can’t you see that? You’ve just got to play better next game, okay? You’ve just got to push yourself a little harder.”

“I played my hardest,” said Nate.

His father swallowed, trying to calm down. “I know you did. That wasn’t what I meant to say. All I meant is . . .”

“. . . ‘Just don’t let it happen again,’” said Nate.

Nate’s father laughed uncomfortably. “Yeah. Something like that,” he said.

They understood each other perfectly.

 

 

All around the ballroom, the first games were finishing up. Some players walked out smiling, or with fists pumping the air. “The Word Gurrrls rock!” cried a short, stocky girl who, along with her partner—both of them wearing matching sparkly cat’s-eye eyeglasses—laughed happily. Other players walked out slowly, barely looking up from the floor. A boy was sniffling as though he had lost his dog. But most of the players were calm and casual as they walked out. In many cases it was hard to tell if they had won or lost.

April and Lucy came out chatting with their opponents, a boy and a girl from Ohio. All of them seemed to be in a good mood.

Duncan and Carl had beaten the Tile Hustlers by 96 points. After the two teams had traded those early bingos, the Drilling Falls team had picked what was left of all the good letters throughout the game. Carl was practically rocking back and forth on his heels now that the game was over, thrilled that he’d drafted Duncan Dorfman to be his partner this year. Poor Brian Kalb had been left in the dust. With Duncan’s fingertip talent, Carl was surely thinking, they were going to go all the way.

Carl pulled Duncan over to the side of the atrium, beneath a palm tree. “Dorfman, I want to buy you a soda,” he said. “Any flavor you want. And I’ll even throw in a straw for free. You did a great job in there,” Carl went on. “Your fingertips are awesome, and you’re so subtle about it. You’re on
fire,
man. Slap me five. With the left, obviously.”

Carl held up his hand, and Duncan awkwardly held up his own hand and lightly thudded it against Carl’s. “Ow
oooh
,” Carl howled, as though the heat of Duncan’s hand had burned his own.

Duncan didn’t know how to tell Carl this, but he hadn’t used his power to draw any of those tiles from the bag. He hadn’t needed to. Duncan had simply drawn good tiles by chance. You never knew what kind of letters you would get in a game of Scrabble. Sometimes they were terrible, but sometimes, if you were lucky, they were great.

Before the weekend, Carl had reluctantly accepted that Duncan would use his fingertips during the tournament as little as possible. But Drilling Falls’s tiles in this first game had been so good that Carl had
assumed
that Duncan had deliberately picked them.

Now, standing in the atrium after the game, Duncan made a silent promise to himself that he wasn’t going to use his fingertips unless it was an absolute
emergency
. He wouldn’t use them unless he and Carl were basically on the Scrabble equivalent of the
Titanic
, sinking fast. Otherwise, it would be cheating.

Besides, Duncan liked not knowing which letters would appear on his rack. He even liked experiencing the misery that hit you when your letters were horrible, or the excited feeling you got when they all came together in several good combinations, or in one astonishing, knock-it-out-of-the-park bingo.

Duncan wanted to play the game the way everyone else did. He had been brought all the way down here because of his fingertips, but he had played the first game like a regular player. Selfishly, he didn’t want to give that up. He was about to explain all this to Carl, but then he stopped himself, sensing that Carl would be furious. Maybe it was better to keep it to himself. After all, they had won the first game. This was supposed to be a
happy
moment.

“Thanks,” was all Duncan said.

By now, all the games were finished, and the players were on a break. Some of them rode the escalators up and down, and one boy was climbing up the down escalator.

Nate Saviano, standing unhappily by the snack stand with his father, said, “I’ll see you later, Dad.” Then he went over to the big glass wall and sat down on the floor, looking out at the day. Outside, non-Scrabble people walked by in shorts and bathing suits. Cars went past with surfboards strapped to their roofs. This was Florida, but the sunshine and the ocean seemed far away.

From across the atrium, the bald guy with dark glasses stood and watched Nate. Behind his shades, he narrowed his eyes.

WHY ARE YOU HERE?

T
hat man is totally staring at Nate,” April whispered to Duncan and Carl during the break.

“Who’s Nate?” Duncan asked.

“The cool kid with the long hair and the skateboard. The one from New York,” said Lucy.

“Maybe it’s his dad,” Carl said.

“No. I saw him with his dad earlier,” April said. “His dad has a beard. This is someone else.”

“Maybe it’s his bodyguard,” Carl said.

“That’s ridiculous. And anyway, bodyguards usually have earpieces so they can talk to each other,” said Lucy. “This guy has no earpiece. He isn’t protecting Nate, I’m sure of that.”

They all looked across the room at the bald man with dark glasses. “You know, you really can’t be sure that he’s even watching Nate,” said Duncan. “Maybe his eyes are closed. Maybe he’s asleep standing up.”

“Asleep standing up?” said Lucy. “Is that physically possible?”

“It’s rare,” said Carl, “but it happens. I saw something about it on
Freaks of Science
, on the Learners’ Channel.”

“We should tell Nate to be on the lookout for a creep,” April said.

Why would a man in dark glasses stare at a kid at a Scrabble tournament unless he was a threatening person? There had to be other explanations, but April couldn’t think of any right now. She and Lucy, along with Duncan and Carl, approached Nate and told him their suspicions.

“Staring at me? Where?” said Nate, looking around the atrium.

“Over there,” said Duncan, tipping his chin.

“Don’t look at him right now, Nate,” Lucy warned. “It’ll be too obvious. Only look at him when he’s looking away.”

“How about now?” Nate asked. “Can I look now?”

“Oh, wait,” said April. “Too late! While we were talking, he just left.”

In that moment, the bald guy had slipped out of the atrium and pushed through the fire doors, and Nate didn’t get a chance to see what he looked like. “You were all probably imagining things,” Nate Saviano said. “But thanks for looking out for me.”

Soon a gong was struck, which meant that round two was about to start. The three teams agreed to meet up afterward and have a quick snack together on the patio. “Whoever gets there first,” said April, “grab a big table.”

April and Lucy found themselves playing their second game against two brothers from Idaho. Although the Spuds took an early lead, April and Lucy eroded it bit by bit, and ended up winning.

Nate and Maxie played their second game well, too, though so did their opponents. Near the end, the opposition from Missouri fell badly behind. When it was over, they all shook hands across the board. The game had been completed quickly, and the ballroom was still quiet and vibrating with concentration. Nate and Maxie went out into the atrium to find their parents and tell them the outcome.

Larry Saviano was pacing in circles around the snack stand. When he saw Nate he snapped to attention like a dog that’s heard its master’s car pull into the driveway. “Well?” he said. “No jokes this time. My heart can’t take it.”

“We
won
!” Nate yelled into his father’s face, part resentful, part excited.

His father threw his arms around him. “I knew you could do it,” Larry said. “You’re on your way, kid.”

Inside the ballroom at table eight, Duncan Dorfman sat gazing at his tiles. They weren’t particularly good letters, he knew. Surely Carl expected that on their next turn, Duncan would use his fingertips to pick something better from the bag. But the thing was, it
still
wasn’t necessary.

Duncan and Carl’s round two opponents were two tiny kids, a boy and a girl from Wyoming named Tim and Marie. Everyone in the tournament was in fifth through eighth grade, but these kids looked as if they were only in
second
grade. They wore cowboy hats that were too big for their heads, stitched with embroidery that spelled out the name of their team, the Wranglers. Duncan realized Tim was the boy who’d raised his hand before the tournament to ask what would happen if you had to urinate.

Before the game began, the Wranglers kept talking about how excited they were to be here. They could have never afforded to come, they explained. “But our whole town raised money at a bake sale to send us here,” said Tim.

Duncan wondered how these kids had been chosen by their town to come to Florida. Wasn’t anyone else better at Scrabble? The Wranglers played as though this was one of their first games ever. They kept making phony words, and Duncan didn’t even think they were doing it on purpose. It started when they picked up some tiles from their rack and laid down FITO.

Marie said confidently, “FITO. Eleven points.” Tim entered it on their score sheet.

Duncan and Carl looked at each other, confused. Duncan scribbled to Carl,

 

Carl wrote:

 

 

The word hardly seemed worth challenging, since Duncan and Carl weren’t completely sure. And it was only worth eleven points, after all.

But then, two turns later, the Wranglers put down SLEFT.

Carl smirked at Duncan. “Hold!” he said. These kids from Wyoming were either bluffing their way through the whole game, or else they didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. Duncan felt sorry for them, but Carl wrote him a note that read:

 

Duncan nodded. “Challenge!” Carl said, pressing the center button on the timer to pause it.