The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (15 page)

He knew he’d missed out on having a father who could also lie on the floor on an air mattress once in a while when you had a bad cough. But if you’d never had something to begin with, then after a while you forgot what you didn’t have. If your father had died of panosis before you were born, then you always thought of yourself as someone whose father had died of panosis before you were born. It was just your
story
; it was just part of who you were.

His mother dropped back to sleep now, and Duncan went into the bathroom to change out of his bloody, ripped pants and into a fresh pair. Then he grabbed a sweatshirt from his overnight bag and slipped from the room.

 

 

Two flights down, April Blunt sat on the bed she was sharing with her sister Jenna, who was thunking a basketball against the wall. “Don’t you think the people in the next room might not like that?” April asked her.

“Might not like what?”

“The basketball hitting the wall sixty times a minute.”

“Oh,” said Jenna, stopping. “I hadn’t realized.”

Instead, she began to spin it on her finger. Jenna could never keep still. It was similar to the way April couldn’t keep still inside herself now. Something kept knocking against her brain, reminding her how much she wanted to show her family that Scrabble was a sport, an amazing sport. Reminding her how much she wanted them to be interested in her.

But still, though she knew it was crazy, she also wanted to find that boy from the motel pool. He wasn’t here at the YST; she was pretty sure of that by now. But maybe, she thought, if she and Lucy won the tournament and their picture appeared in the papers and on the Internet, the boy from the pool would see it, wherever he lived, and a tiny lightbulb would pop on in his brain.

I know that girl,
he would say to himself.
We met once. She told me the anagram ROAST MULES, and I never figured it out.

ROAST MULES,
he would think . . .
ROAST MULES . . . I have to get in touch with her.

But this was a ridiculous, demented fantasy, April knew as she sat on her hotel bed with a basketball spinning near her head
.
The boy would never reappear.

 

 

Three more flights below, Nate Saviano walked down the long hallway with his skateboard under his arm, heading for the vending machine. His earbuds were in his ears, and he was listening to his favorite band, The Lungs.

Nate wished he could get on his board now and skate forever, and never have to think about anything else. He pictured himself and Maxie Roth doing ollies and heelflips while yelling out math problems to each other. That was how he wanted to spend a lot of his day. Skating and doing math.

The music poured into his ears, but in the distance, Nate thought he heard a voice. He turned around and saw his father waving and calling from the other end of the hallway.

Nate grabbed the earbuds from his ears.
“What?”
he yelled.

“I thought that maybe before Funswamp you and I could go over a few word lists.” His father tentatively held out a stack of index cards.

“Dad,” said Nate. “I’ve been playing
all day
. I’m wiped.”

“Okay,” said Larry. “Say no more.” Even from all the way down the hall, Nate could see his disappointment. The sight of this bothered him, and so Nate sighed, then headed back toward the hotel room.

One more day,
Nate told himself.
One more day, and then I will be done forever.

If only it could be that easy.

WHAT THE GATOR KNEW

A
s the coach buses pulled up to the amusement park, an irritating song groaned from the loudspeakers strung up over the entrance:

And then the song began all over again.

Duncan pressed his face against the bus window and looked out. The amusement park was lit up with hundreds of brilliant lights. WELCOME YST! read a banner over the archway.

All the players from the YST were given wristbands and ushered out of the buses. “Stay in groups of at least two!” they were told. “Don’t get lost!” And, of course, “Have fun!”

If there was anything word-related or educational about Funswamp, it was well hidden. As everyone pushed through the turnstiles into the park, Duncan Dorfman could smell the sweet stink of cotton candy, and the aroma of shining hot dogs as they turned on the rotating rods of their grills.

Funswamp was sort of the opposite of the Scrabble tournament, and yet it filled up another part of him that had long been empty: The amusement park part; the part that craved
junk.

“Whoa, look at this place,” Duncan said to Nate, who stood beside him.

“Yeah, it’s totally cheesy,” said Nate. He had been to many amusement parks in his life, but this one was probably the worst ever. Nate took in the sight of the cruddy-looking rides, and the adults dressed as reptiles and amphibians walking around having their pictures taken with kids.

“I
wuv
you,” said a seven-foot-tall alligator, hugging a child.

“I wuv you, too, Scaly,” said the child. “Can I touch your scales?”

“Sure, but be careful, little one, because they’re rough!”

The Scrabble kids had until ten P.M., at which point they needed to be back on the buses. Nate’s father wandered over to the water-balloon toss, and Nate’s mother and Dr. Steve and Eloise headed to the frozen custard stand. “Have a great time, Nate,” called Dr. Steve.

Carl Slater’s mother sat at the entrance of a kiddie helicopter ride, secretly lighting a cigarette into her cupped hand. Other parents stood in clusters, knowing that they needed to give their kids freedom tonight. Playing in a tournament took a lot out of you. You needed to unwind, or else you might fall apart.

Duncan felt a little concerned when he thought about his mother lying in the hotel room with a migraine, but April yanked him by the arm and insisted he go with her on the gator coaster, and so he forgot about his mother for a while.

April pulled up the safety bar on the first car, locking them in. “Lucy can’t handle roller coasters,” she said. “She basically turns into a vomit machine. It’s her one weakness. Other than that, she’s pretty perfect.”

“I don’t mind going on this ride,” Duncan said. “It really doesn’t look so bad.”

“You
did
see the second hill, right?”

“No,” said Duncan. He had only seen the first hill, a gentle rise that wasn’t very high. “What do you mean?”

April didn’t say anything.

“April, tell me what you mean!” Duncan said again, but it was too late; the roller coaster cars were already rumbling slowly up a gentle hill. He wouldn’t be able to get off now. They reached the top, trembled there for a moment, then rushed downward. The wind lifted Duncan’s and April’s hair; neither of them needed to scream, for the hill was low and the ride was brief.

But then, up ahead, Duncan saw what was coming. The track was almost vertical. It seemed to take forever to reach the top, and when they did, the whole snaking chain of cars paused for an agonizing moment, with Duncan and April right in front.

“Oh my God,” Duncan said.

The coaster plunged down so fast that neither of them had a chance to say another word. Their mouths opened into two letter
O
’s, perfectly round and worth one point apiece, and they both screamed
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”
all the way to the bottom.

After recovering, they went on the Ferris wheel together, which carried them above the park. “This is unbelievable,” Duncan said, looking down.

“Yeah, it’s an amazing view,” said April.

“No, I mean the whole weekend.”

“Oh, I know,” said April. “I definitely want to come back next year, no matter what happens tomorrow. Whether we make it to the finals or not.” She looked out over the park, her hand shielding her eyes.

“That stuff you were telling everyone,” Duncan suddenly said. “I think you’ll get what you want. Your family will have to see how good you are. And that the game
is
a sport. At least, it is to you.”

“Thanks, Duncan. I think you’ll get what you want, too,” she said, but he thought she was just being polite.

If the Drilling Falls team didn’t win, then everything in Duncan’s life would be miserable again. Carl would drop him; it would be as if their friendship, their partnership, had never happened. Duncan and his mother would stay in Aunt Djuna’s house for good. He would be Lunch Meat once again, and probably forever.

Tomorrow, during one of the games, when it was no longer possible to win through luck or skill, Duncan would finally have to use the power in the fingertips of his left hand. He wouldn’t be able to put it off any longer.

A moment would arise, and he’d go for it, and afterward he would feel a little ashamed. What had started off as a strange and uncommon skill had become something that made him unhappy. He just wanted to play Scrabble the regular way, like everyone else at the tournament. Was that too much to ask?

Duncan lifted his left hand now and studied it in the nighttime light of the amusement park. It looked like an ordinary hand, like a miniature version of Duncan himself: a little bit chunky and pale.

“I’m not sure I
should
get what I want,” he said to April.

“Why not?”

“You have to understand what a weird year this has been,” he said, but then he didn’t know what else to say. “At first, they called me Lunch Meat.”

“Who did?”

“Everybody,” he said bitterly.

“But why?”

He told April about the piece of baloney that had been flung onto the back of his ugly yellow shirt.

“What a stupid name,” she said. “
Lunch Meat
. It isn’t even clever. It’s just . . .
nothing.
”

“
I
was a nothing,” he said. “And then things changed.”

“What do you mean?”

He was desperate to tell her all about his power, to confess everything to her and see what she said. But he couldn’t tell her, of course, because she might be furious with him. She might even turn him in. She might lose respect for him, too.

“Maybe it’s not right to get what I want,” he said. “Other people want things, too.” He thought of how April had been practicing Scrabble with Lucy for months and months. And then, of course, there were Nate and Maxie to think about. Nate Saviano needed to free himself from his father’s death grip. It would devastate Larry Saviano if Nate and Maxie lost, and it would make Nate’s life really difficult. “Everything’s so
complicated
,” Duncan said.

“Everything’s always complicated,” April said. “Welcome to the world, Duncan.”

“We can’t
both
win,” Duncan said. “One of our teams might win the final round, but of course that would mean the other one loses.”

“Or else neither of us might win,” said April. “Face it, there are lots of other good teams here. Nate and Maxie could win, easily—look at how Nate plays, and how both of them do that amazing mental math. Or the Surfer Dudes; they’re very solid players.”

April squinted out over the park. Though she’d insisted that she’d given up on finding the boy from the motel pool—the boy from the past—she was obviously still looking for him. Maybe he was out there in the night. Probably, though, he wasn’t.

You never really knew for sure what was going to happen next in life, Duncan thought. That was part of the pain, and the fun. You never knew the end of the story until it happened.

 

 

“Maxie, watch this!” Nate Saviano called, chucking a small beanbag toward the center hole at the beanbag-toss booth. But the edge of it caught on the wood and instead of going in it slid down the board.

“Nice try,” said Maxie, and she picked up another beanbag and sailed it through the center hole.

A bored teenager with a gigantic Adam’s apple handed her a stuffed animal that was meant to look like Scaly the Gator.

“Thanks. It can be our shared pet,” said Maxie.

“We can have joint custody,” said Nate.

“You can feed it and walk it,” Maxie said. “I’ll just do the easy stuff, like teach it tricks.”

They tossed the alligator back and forth as they walked through the park. It actually did feel a little scaly, Nate thought, yawning. He was tired from the long day, and he wanted to be sure to get a good night’s sleep tonight—though probably his father would try and convince him to stay up late studying ING endings or something.

When the evening was almost over, the life-sized Scaly the Gator approached the group of kids, calling through his snout, “Last chance to go on the Lazy Swamp Ride before the park closes!” He managed to herd several players over to the line for the ride.

Nate and Maxie saw their friends heading there, and they joined the cluster and slipped into the very first two-person boat, which waited in a man-made channel of water.

“Here we go, just us and our pet,” said Maxie, placing the stuffed animal between them.

Duncan and Carl got into the boat right behind them, trailed by the girls from Portland, and the Surfer Dudes, and then a few other teams. The man in the gator costume called out, “Everyone make sure your seat belt is on!” Then he pulled a lever, and the caravan of boats entered the tunnel. Suddenly it was dark, and the whole place smelled of machine oil. Nate heard the sound of water dripping, and kids giggling and talking in other boats.

Up ahead, a light clicked on in a life-sized diorama, revealing two animatronic alligators in rocking chairs, rocking back and forth. One of them was missing an eye; it had probably rolled off into the water months earlier.