Flyers (9781481414449) (7 page)

As we were walking home that evening, I saw Ethan give a little wave—what Bo and I always called his aloha wave because it was the same whether he was coming or going. I looked way across the field we were in front of to see Mr. Lindstrom wave back at us. He had good eyes for an old guy, and didn't miss much when it came to anything going on around his land. You wouldn't even know he was looking at you, but if you waved at him—even Ethan's shy little wave—he'd wave back. At least he would to us. If he didn't know you, or knew you and didn't like you, you could end up with a different kind of gesture entirely.

I don't remember if I waved to him that day or not. I may just have let Ethan's wave do the job for both of us. Not that it made much difference at the time. I had no idea then that it would be the last time I'd ever see Mr. Lindstrom out and around like that.

On Monday morning
Pop dropped Ethan off at the middle school and then pulled around to let me off at the high school. “Give 'em hell, Gabe,” he told me, and roared out a laugh. He'd said the same thing to Ethan, and it was pretty much the same thing he said to both of us every day. He didn't mean anything by it; neither of us gave much hell to anybody as a rule. It was just Pop's way of saying good-bye.

“You give 'em hell too, Pop,” I said as I got out of the car.

“I fully intend to, Gabriel. I fully intend to.”

In Pop's case he probably would—or at least I hoped he would. He was on his way to the courthouse in Hudson Falls, where he was defending a guy accused of poisoning his ex-girlfriend's cat—an unpopular side to be on since nobody likes cat poisoners. To make things worse, all the TV stations and newspapers were jockeying for the easy moral high ground, which Pop says is often a simple matter of supplying the public with somebody convenient to hate. They kept showing videos of the cat during its happier moments, then of the girlfriend crying and holding its little cat corpse. Pop figured he'd have to fight tooth and nail to keep the focus on the real issue of the trial: whether the guy was actually guilty, which in Pop's mind was somewhat doubtful since at least one person who knew them insisted it was the
guy
who'd broken it off with the girl and she'd been pretty angry about the
whole thing. And this supposedly happened right before the poisoning took place. But that didn't stop the animal lovers. Every night on the evening news you'd see them out in front of the courthouse, their faces twisted in anger, demanding justice. Watching that always made my stomach feel funny.

I watched as Pop drove off—his smile slowly fading to reveal the look of wistful melancholy that lurked behind even his biggest and warmest smiles. That look had been there for as long as I could remember—long before my mother had headed for the hills, so it wasn't just the result of that. Her leaving didn't help matters, though, and since then I've often had the uneasy feeling I was watching him grow older right before my eyes. Pop wasn't young. He'd been in his mid-forties when he got married, and he turned sixty the year I turned thirteen. As I stood there I could see the way he hunched over the wheel as he rounded the corner and putted toward the elementary school on his way back to Main Street, and I wished there was something I could do to make his life a little easier. And I wished, too, that if he still felt he had to work, he'd at least take on some easier cases—cases where John and Jessie Q. Public didn't take such an active and angry interest. But I knew he wouldn't. Whenever I said anything about it, he'd laugh and tell me, “I've always been a little skittish about being in the majority, Gabriel. The comfort level there is too high for somebody as cantankerous as I am.”

Right. The world should be as cantankerous as Pop.

•   •   •

As if worrying about Pop weren't enough, before I even made it to homeroom I'd come to the awful conclusion that I was in love again. With Katie Lyons this
time. A freshman. I'd noticed her sweetly shy smile when I passed her in the hall the week before. Then on Friday I happened to fall in behind her on the stairs and noticed that from that angle she was pretty impressive too. Later that day I saw her at her locker and came to the conclusion that her hair was nothing short of spectacular. That's the way it works with me. I start by getting hooked on one part of a girl, and then, often as not, I can feel myself being reeled in by the rest of her. Next thing I know I'm like a fish out of water.

Since seventh grade I've been in and out of love exactly eight times. I try not to let it throw me as much anymore. Long ago I decided that (in addition to the fish-out-of-water thing) falling in love was a little like getting a bad cold—sometimes the symptoms persist longer than others, but it's only a matter of time before you feel like yourself again. Pop told me this was to be expected for somebody my age, an age he referred to as “the white-water section of life's journey.” He said that for
his
first twelve or thirteen years he'd been what you might call the model of Irish-Catholic boyhood, following the commandments, serving on the altar, and praying regularly to the Blessed Virgin Mary. But then he'd hit puberty running, as he put it, and that all changed; overnight he turned into a kind of hormonal Mr. Hyde. Naturally, he explained, this knocked a commandment or two for a loop and made it hard for him to look at the Blessed Virgin in quite the same light. He assured me that he eventually adjusted to this new world view and that, knowing me, he had every confidence I'd do the same, and probably in a lot less time than it took him.

I appreciated the thought, but didn't have nearly as much confidence in myself as Pop did in me. While
Pop had charged into puberty, I had the sense that I'd limped into it and, at the rate I was going, would be lucky to make it out at a crawl. Of the eight girls I'd practically lost my mind over,
Yd
only spoken to three, and of those three I'd only actually asked one out. And by the time I'd worked up the courage to go for it, the major symptoms I'd been experiencing had pretty much run their course and the date had turned out to be kind of anticlimactic. I could only hope this time things would be different.

I saw Katie soon after I'd completed a prehome-room girl-scouting trip down the freshman hallway. (Girl scouting was a term Pop used to describe the time when, in a beautifully mixed metaphor, his eyes started taking an interest in girls and asked his feet to lend a hand.) At first I thought Katie might be absent. She wasn't at her locker, but her next-door-locker neighbor, Heather Lutz (grandniece of Clutz, I'd heard), was and spotted me on my first pass by. I could feel her watching as I continued down the hall. To make sure this wasn't all in my head, I decided to test it out, acting as if I'd all of a sudden remembered something important and doing a quick U-turn. She was still watching me. And on my way by, I caught her giving the girl next to her what I took to be a there-he-is jab. I groaned inside. This was a complication I didn't need. If
she
liked me, and if she was a friend of Katie's (which she might not be since locker assignments were given out alphabetically), Katie might feel like she had to say no if I ever got around to asking her out. And that was a big
if
in itself.

I was well into this new line of worrying when I almost hit her head-on—Katie, that is. I saw her the last half second before we would have actually
collided. She was looking down adjusting her pile of books, and I don't even think she saw me swerve past her. From my particular angle at the time, the thing that struck me was her deep blue eyes. With just that split-second encounter before I veered left, those eyes were already imprinted on my brain. I knew in every fiber of my being that they were the most beautiful eyes I'd ever seen, quiet and enigmatic, as if they contained important secrets of the universe. I hurt—actually felt a wrenching emptiness inside—from just the thought of those eyes.

I stopped and stood for a second to let my head clear. And in that moment I knew without a doubt that Katie Lyons had become my number nine.

•   •   •

I saw Emmett when I was coming out of the gym at the end of fourth period. Instinctively I slammed on my brakes, forcing Bo and a few other guys behind me into a chain-reaction collision. My mind was still kind of reeling from the whole Katie Lyons thing, and I definitely wasn't up for dealing with a human suction cup like Emmett St. Andrews.

Emmett had appeared a month or so earlier, fresh from Salvation House in Albany, and for the last few weeks the whole school had been under a kind of drug siege. Not with real drugs, which had never been a big problem in Wakefield, but with drug
awareness.
Emmett, ex-druggie but still-practicing pain in the butt, was relentless. In addition to haranguing us in all our classes and at a Friday evening antidrug rally, he annoyed us more informally throughout the day as a peer pal and some kind of self-proclaimed role model. He'd left for a few weeks and was now back in town preparing for the final phase of his assault—the
upcoming field day that was to be the culmination of Wakefield's “Say No to Drugs” campaign.

The way I heard it, Wakefield had applied for and received a fifty-some-thousand-dollar grant to make us aware of drugs. The money was used for: 1. Bringing us Emmett, 2. Buying multiple copies of every antidrug poster ever made, and 3. Sticking up a few DRUG-FREE ZONE signs around school property. As far as I could tell, the only result of this expenditure, except for my being personally offended by having a boob like Emmett brought into my sphere, was a purely unintentional one. Owing to some confusion caused by the proliferation of posters showing fried eggs as “your brain on drugs,” one kid in the elementary school supposedly turned his mother in to the police after she cooked his breakfast one morning.

Ironically, right before I spotted Emmett I'd started thinking the morning might be taking a turn for the better. My first three classes had slid by without adding any new worries to my list, and I'd managed to get in five miles on the track during my study hall. Even though track season was over and done with, I still had my permanent pass to go to gym. Running has a way of clearing my head, and I was even thinking that the next time I saw Katie, I might actually talk to her. Only now there was Emmett as large as life and standing there in all his boobocity. I knew from experience that a conversation with him could do a wicked number on my mental state.

Emmett was listening (“active listening” is what he called it) to a couple of junior high kids. The younger kids, and even a lot of the older ones, really thought he was hot stuff because he'd “been there,” as he always put it when referring to his drug days, and I figured
some of them would end up “being there” themselves so they could be just like him. I hoped the junior high kids didn't have anything major they needed resolved because when Emmett spotted me after the pileup in the gym doorway, he jettisoned his active listening skills (which consisted of rephrasing a speaker's words—nonjudgmentally, of course, and acting like he cared) and started giving the kids the bum's rush.

“I hear ya, man,” he said to the earnest-looking kid who'd been doing most of the talking. “I hear ya. Be cool.” He held up a hand to be slapped, and that slap was the last and only thing the kid got from a rapidly receding, caring but nonjudgmental Emmett.

“Oh, God,” I said to Bo as Emmett approached. “I'm not up for this.”

Bo laughed and lifted my arm so that my hand would meet Emmett's hello slap.

“Gabe, my man,” Emmett said, parlaying the slap into a hug.

I stood there and got hugged. The only thing on me that moved was my stomach, which I could feel tightening. I knew the reason I was on Emmett's A-list, and it made me want to punch him in the head. It so happened that Emmett had been on the scene with us a few weeks earlier when Pop had caused a commotion on Main Street. Emmett had been staying at Bo's house that whole week because Bo was the head-honcho-captain-commander-in-chief or some such thing of our social worker Bob Chirillo's peer leadership group, which specialized in talking about and putting on skits about drugs and drinking and suicide and other cheerful matters. The fact that Bo was even
in
peer leadership was strange, because in real life he's the last guy who would sit around discussing any of
these things. But Bo's pretty much into every school activity there is—sports, band, politics (he's class president), student council, you name it—and that's the kind of person peer leadership recruits.

Anyway, that whole week Emmett had been at the school talking to us—no, Emmett's word was
educating
us—not only about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but also about things like model cement and Wite-Out used “inappropriately,” and that Friday evening was the big drug awareness rally in the school auditorium. And because Emmett was the type who really got off telling everybody how far down he'd been, and how his family was dysfunctional, and how many different drugs he'd taken in his life and in what combinations, and how many times he'd woken up in alleyways in neighborhoods that were tougher and meaner than anything we'd ever seen living in a nothing-happening place like Wakefield, and because Bob Chirillo and Ray Phineas, our Barney Fife D.A.R.E. officer, were both in seventh heaven basking in Emmett's reflected glory and whenever they could adding their own two cents worth, which generally grew into folding money, the panel discussion ran way overtime. So I didn't get to check on Pop as early as I should have, and he overdid it at Willie's. Charlie did manage to get Pop's keys so he wouldn't drive, but Pop, after a while, had set off for further adventures on foot.

And it just so happened that right after the rally let out, Pop was coming out of the Cloud Nine tavern and, by this time, was feeling no pain. Our village's traffic light—the only one we had unless you counted the one out by the Kmart plaza, which was technically outside the village limits—had already switched to its blinking mode for the night, and traffic was starting to back up
behind the flashing red. Pop, who tended to be public-spirited with or without the inspiration of alcohol, must have thought he could be of some assistance here and waded out into the intersection and began waving his arms in the hope of getting things moving. The actual effect of this was to clog things up even more, and by the time we reached the intersection in Emmett's Grand Am (with the personalized SAY NO plates), traffic was backed up toward the school as far as you could see. I ignored (but didn't forget) Emmett's head-shaking and sigh of disgust as we all saw what was going on at the intersection. Bo and I jumped out of the car, grabbed Pop, and although Emmett wasn't exactly thrilled by the transaction, poured him into the backseat. We barely made it out of there before we saw the flashing lights of the Chief's car trying to squeeze past the stalled traffic. Later, after we got Pop safely home and had come back into town for his car, I felt a hand on my shoulder as I started to get out of Emmett's passenger seat. The hand was attached to Emmett. His face was twisted into the caring attitude that people like him get, and I knew he was up for some active listening. “You want to talk about it, my friend?” he said.