Double-Crossed (4 page)

“Oh, at Children's Hospital?” Mr. Ballard asked.

Oscar nodded.

“Excellent institution,” Mr. Ballard said. “It's in my district. Who's the doctor?”

“Dr. Mandel is his name, but I call him Dr. Superpower.”

“Ah, yes,” Mr. Ballard said with a laugh. “Very appropriate. Al Mandel is a super guy. A member of our club and a pretty good golf player, too. He's got a five handicap.”

“No sir, I am the one with the handicap,” Oscar said.

Mr. Ballard let out a huge laugh and slapped Oscar on the back.

“I like your sense of humor,” he said. “In the meantime, Sammie, where is your grandmother? I'm having a fund-raiser here next weekend, and I want to see if she'll whip up some of those chicken skewers and cheesy thingamajigs she's so famous for.”

“She's in the kitchen,” I answered.

“I bet she's slicing cantaloupe,” Spencer said, pretending to be looking in the kitchen but craning his neck to see if he could spot Charlie in the house. “She always does that for parties.”

“Great!” Mr. Ballard said. “Sliced cantaloupe is a real vote-getter in my book.”

“Sara says we're good for tonight,” Alicia shouted as she came running out of the kitchen. “Oscar, you're going to meet the Truth Tellers.”

“The Truth Tellers!” Mr. Ballard said, reaching out to shake Alicia's hand vigorously. “I remember that group. You kids performed at the city council open meeting. You were great. Real crowd-pleasers.”

“Thank you, sir,” Alicia said. I was surprised to see that she suddenly got shy, but then, Mr. Ballard is a big man with a big voice and a big personality. He can be intimidating.

“Say, what are you kids doing next Saturday?” he asked. “I'm having a fund-raiser here and I'd love to have you perform. I'm raising money for the schools' arts programs. We have to make up for those budget cuts, and you guys might help motivate people to give. What do you say?”

“Dad, do you have to put everyone to work raising money for one of your causes?” Spencer said, embarrassed by his father's larger-than-life behavior.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Mr. Ballard said, letting out a big, friendly laugh. “We all care about our schools. We all need to pitch in. So . . . what do you say, ladies?”

“We'd love to,” Alicia answered. “Wouldn't we, Sammie?”

“Well, we'd have to ask Ms. Carew first. She's our teacher.”

“How could she say no?” Alicia added quickly. “This is a big chance for us to be seen, and to do something important at the same time.”

“It's settled then,” Mr. Ballard said. “Next Saturday. Here at the club. Six thirty. I know you'll come up with something great to help out the schools. Maybe we can even contribute something to this young man's recuperation. Now, where's that grandma of yours?”

Without waiting for an answer, he hustled off toward the kitchen, passing Charlie and the girls as they streamed outside.

“Hi there, Sammie,” he said, and waved to Charlie.

Spencer laughed, and I caught a short but wonderful glimpse of his dimple.

“That's my dad,” he said. “He's got a way of knowing everybody and knowing nobody at the same time.”

“That's an interesting observation,” I began, but then noticed that Spencer had already left my side and was hurrying over to Charlie and the other girls, leaving me standing there with my interesting observation dangling in midair.

You could say I felt like a total idiot, and you'd be right.

So there we were, the three of us—Oscar, Alicia, and me—definitely feeling like outsiders in my own home. I heard a horn and turned to see Ben Feldman getting out of his dad's Mercedes, dressed in his usual plaid Bermuda shorts, leather flip-flops, and polo shirt with the collar popped up.

“Text from Jared,” he said, waving his cell phone at me. “He says there's a volleyball game starting.”

Without another word, he blew by us and found Spencer and the SF2 girls. Together, moving like a single unit, they all headed out to the beach volleyball court. As they passed, no one stopped to ask if we wanted to join in.

But that was okay, because we didn't.

We had our own party to go to.

One of Us

Chapter 4

“Oh, crud! It's only you!” Sara Berlin said, throwing open the front door to her apartment. “We thought you were the pizza!”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Alicia said as we stood there in the hallway. “If I put some pepperoni on my face, would that help?”

“One hundred percent!” Sara laughed.

“Come in, kids,” Sara's mother yelled from inside. “Sara, where are your manners?”

Four members of our Truth Tellers group were gathered in the living room. Bernard of the red hair, Keisha of the black hair, Etta of the green-streaked hair, and Will Lee of the short hair. Actually, everything about Will is short, but maybe that's because he's only in the sixth grade. He's hoping for a seventh-grade growth spurt. When we do our Truth Teller monologues, he talks a lot about how annoying it is to be short, especially because he always has crushes on the tallest girls in class. Nobody laughs at him, though. We just reassure him that good things come in small packages.

Sara's mom was at the kitchen counter pouring pink lemonade into red plastic cups and handing them, one at a time, to Sara's little brother, Timmy, so he could serve the guests. I had never met him, but Sara had told us in Truth Tellers that he is autistic. As soon as we came in, Timmy walked up to me and handed me a cup. Then he saw Oscar and stared at his leg a long minute. Without a word, he took the cup away from me and handed it to him.

“
Gracias
,” Oscar said, taking the lemonade.

“Drink it!” Timmy said, jumping up and down and clapping his hands. “It will make your leg all better.”

Oscar took a big swig as Timmy watched him, fascinated.

“
Delicioso
,” Oscar said. “Now I am stronger than Iron Man.” That seemed to make Timmy happy, and he skipped back to his mom to get another cup.

“Everybody, this is my cousin Oscar from El Salvador!” Alicia said, holding out her hand to introduce Oscar like he was the star of the show. “He's here to get an operation that we hope will fix his clubfoot.”

There was a chorus of hellos from everyone in the room, except Will. He walked up to Oscar to shake his hand.

“
Buenas días
,” he said. “Oh, wait, that means good morning. Sorry. Maybe I should just stick to Korean.” Then he bowed to Oscar and said, “
Ahn-nyung
.”

Oscar bowed right back at him and repeated, “
Ahn-nyung
,” and they high-fived. It occurred to me how different this welcome was from the way Oscar was greeted by the SF2s. In Sara's house, nobody stared at him, nobody frowned at him, nobody made snide remarks, and nobody judged him. I was so proud of my friends; I just wanted to slobber all over them.

Okay, you're right. Slobbering is for dogs. Maybe just a few hugs would do.

“Listen up. I have a major announcement to make,” Alicia said. “We just got invited to perform at Councilman Ballard's fund-raiser at the Sporty Forty next Saturday night . . . to raise money for the arts programs in our schools.”

“Wow,” Keisha said. “How cool is that?!”

“I am definitely going to add some pink to my hair for the occasion.” Etta grinned. “Show those folks what some cutting-edge hair art looks like.”

“And I know exactly what I'll talk about,” Bernard said. “How music changed my life—and I'll do it to a drum beat.”

He pulled out his drumsticks, which he always carries in his back pocket, and started tapping out a reggae rhythm on the arm of his chair. Mrs. Berlin looked up from the lemonade and gave him a look—you know the one, that special look parents give when you're about to destroy their personal property.

“I don't want to dampen your musical enthusiasm,” she said, “but that's called a chair. It's used for sitting in.”

“Sorry,” Bernard answered, putting his drumsticks back into his pocket. “I got carried away.”

Bernard gets carried away a lot. We're all used to it, but I guess Mrs. Berlin wasn't.

We decided to call Ms. Carew, our faculty sponsor whose room we meet in every Monday after school, to ask her permission to do the fund-raiser. Most teachers won't ever give you their cell phone numbers, but Ms. Carew isn't like most teachers. “This makes me so proud and happy,” she said when we got her on the phone. “I'll send out an e-mail tonight to all the Truth Tellers, asking them to prepare something very special for the evening.”

She said congratulations to each of us, and when she got to me, I introduced her by phone to Oscar. Just before she hung up, she suggested we do an Acceptance Circle for Oscar. It's something we do whenever there is a new person at one of our Truth Teller meetings. So we sat down in a circle and Keisha began.

“Welcome to Truth Tellers,” she said to Oscar, giving him a friendly grin. Keisha has a mouthful of braces, and in school, she tries not to smile because Jared and Sean think it's funny to call her Metal Mouth. But at Truth Tellers, she lets it all hang out. We don't care how much metal she has in her mouth.

“I think we should go around the circle and each say a word that describes Oscar,” she suggested. We call this First Impression, and it's one of our favorite exercises to make a new person feel at home.

I remembered when I went to my first Truth Teller meeting and they did First Impression with me. At the time, I thought they were totally bonkers. I had never heard of an exercise to loosen up your emotions and help you discover your true feelings. Back then, the only exercises I knew were stretches to loosen up my hamstrings. A lot had changed in just two months. Now, playing First Impression seemed totally normal, and I knew the exact word I wanted to begin with. It was just the right one for Oscar.

“Brave,” I said without hesitation.

“Artistic,” Alicia added.

“Handsome,” Etta commented, smoothing back her green-streaked hair with a hand clustered with silver and turquoise rings.

“Overcoming,” Bernard said, “which may not technically be a word to describe someone, but we all know what I mean.”

“Tall,” Will said. Of course, Oscar wasn't tall, but when you're as height-obsessed as Will is, you measure everyone against yourself. I could tell Oscar liked being called tall, because he reached out and gave Will a friendly punch on the arm. Poor Will, it nearly knocked him over.

“I like this game,” Oscar said when everyone had finished. “Okay,” he continued, getting into the spirit of things. “Here I go. Bernard, you are musical. Will, you are funny. Etta, you are colorful. Keisha, you are smiling. Sara, you are curly.”

Everyone laughed. Sara has this huge head of black curly hair that poofs out around her face like a lion's mane. There is no doubt that she is curly.

Then Oscar looked at me and thought for a long minute.

“Sammie,” he said softly. “You are beautiful and bright like a star.”

I could feel myself blush. There was so much emotion in his voice. The room got really quiet while I searched for something to say. I wanted to let him know how much his words meant to me, but I was also embarrassed, and to be honest, a little overwhelmed. No boy had ever told me I was beautiful before except Julian LaBonge, and he only said it because we were acting out a scene from
Romeo and
Juliet
and it was right there on page 16 of the play. Alicia's warning for me to be careful and to not hurt Oscar echoed in my mind. I couldn't come up with the right balance of saying something nice but not saying something too nice.

Thankfully, the front door opened and Sara's father came bursting in carrying two pizza boxes. I was so relieved. He couldn't have arrived at a better time.

“One pepperoni and one pineapple-olive-green pepper!” he called out cheerily.

Pineapple-olive-green pepper? Seriously? We all knew right away who the culprit was. Bernard. He has never ordered a regular-sounding pizza in his life. We can always count on him to order weird things, like the shrimp-anchovy-garlic combo, or spinach, almonds, and apricots.

“
Were you absent on the day they handed out taste buds?” Sara asked him.

“Don't judge it until you've tried it,” Bernard snapped back.

“In general, that's a good life rule,” Mr. Berlin said, putting the boxes on the dining room table. “Although, I'm not so sure it applies here. There's a mighty powerful aroma coming out of that box.”

We tore open the boxes and dug in. I did take a slice of the pineapple-olive-green pepper, and I'm here to tell you it is just as bad as it sounds. Don't try it at home, kids. Oscar took one bite and looked like he wanted to spit it out.

“Is this what you eat in America?” he whispered to me.

“Only if your name is Bernard.”

“Good. Then I'm glad my name is Oscar.”

After the pizza, we watched a really bad, but in a good kind of way, old movie called
Zombie High School
. Afterward, we had a Who Can Do the Weirdest Zombie Walk contest. I love it that the Truth Tellers always come up with such fun and creative things to do. When it was Oscar's turn, he put some tomato sauce from the pizza box on his face so it looked like blood, crossed his eyes, and limped around the room, walking into walls. We all laughed hysterically.

“See, my bad leg is good for something,” he said.

Then he lurched around the room some more, his arms out in front of him, making zombie sounds. The more he bumped into furniture, the more he moaned and groaned, the more we howled. By the end of the night, no one even had a thought about his clubfoot or his limp. He was just Oscar, King of the Zombies.

And one of us.