Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator (7 page)

“You did what?” she says, almost laughing.

“It’s not funny!” I say. I feel like a toddler.

“Okay, you’re right.” She smooths her hair, smooths the creases in her dress. If she thinks she can smooth everything away, she’s wrong. I scowl. “Settle down,” she says. “Have a seat.”

“I don’t want to have a seat!” I say. I realize I’m yelling.

“Guy,” she says. “Oh, honey. I understand.”

Bullshit
. “How can you understand? How can anyone understand unless they learn that their whole life is a lie? What else don’t I know?”

“That’s it,” she says. “I promise. And really, it’s not like what you think.”

“What I think is that Dad had a kid and never told me about it. I have a brother I never knew!”

“Well then, I guess it is what you think,” she says.
Is she trying to be funny?
“I wanted to tell you a long time ago,” she says. “But your father … he made me promise. It was a serious sore point for him. You know he loves you—he hated that he had a child he lost touch with. But his mother didn’t want anything to do with your father. Your father tried to have a relationship with him, but it just didn’t happen. And the boy—well, the man—he has had some … problems over the years. I don’t think anyone in the family had seen him for decades before the funeral.”

“What? He was at the funeral?”

“Yes, that strange man in the beard.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Your father never wanted you to know. And honestly, I don’t want anything to do with him. He’s not well.”

“What do you mean, ‘not well’? What do you mean, he has problems?”

“Drug problems,” she says. “That’s part of the reason why your father never wanted you to know about him, really. I mean, that sounds awful, but really it’s just that he didn’t want you to try to get close to him. He’s crazy, his mother is crazy—they’re all crazy, to be honest. I was surprised he’s not in a room with padded walls, to tell you the truth … Now, I know it’s a lot to take in, but please try not to worry about it. And please don’t contact him.”

“Try not to worry about it? Who were those other guys at the funeral? More secret relatives?”

“I honestly don’t know,” she says. “Your father lived a lot of lives before me. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go back to that Forensics Squad. I don’t like you digging up ancient history, obsessing on death. It’s not healthy.”

I say nothing. What I think is this:
Dumb move, Mom. If you
wanted to make sure that I did stay in Forensics, that’s all you’d have to say
.

I spend the rest of the evening doing my best to ignore Mom and the world. I go up to my room and just pace and think and then eventually fall asleep. So then, of course, when it’s time to actually go to bed for the night, I’m wide-awake. All these weird thoughts are running through my mind. How can I really write a book of my dad’s advice if I don’t know anything about his life? What good would it accomplish? Am I trying to bring him back from the dead with this project? Just saying that word—“dead”—or thinking it, rather, is still hard for me. As that dreaded word enters my mind, I feel my eyes go dark, like I can’t process the word while thinking of it. How could I have avoided it for the past sixteen and three-quarters years? Just as life is all around, so too is death.

“Okay,” I tell myself. “Quit being so glum, GL. You’re gonna end up wearing bondage pants and looking like a raccoon if you keep up on this morbid path.” Working on this book will allow me to spend time in the company of the man, or pretend to, anyway. And once it is completed, I could leaf through the pages, drown myself in his words, and live the lie that he is still alive.

But what do I know about the man? What do I
really
know? I know his father’s name was Guy. That I definitely know. It is a conversation we had many times whenever I would complain. Why would I complain? Because it’s the twenty-first century and my name is Guy! “It’s a good name, Guy,” Dad would say. “A warrior name. The name of my father. The name of Guy Fawkes. The name of Guy de Maupassant. The name of Sir Guy of Gisborne.” (I have no idea who these people are.)

I also know his mom’s name was Lana. “Lana Langman.” Every time her name came up, Dad would do the “say it ten times fast” challenge. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Sounds like total gibberish. Still cracks me up. Good stuff. But I don’t know enough!

I get up and grab a notebook. I flip to a blank page and stare at it, its white rectangular form looking to me like a tombstone of pure marble. It is up to me to write an epitaph. Maybe this book isn’t just going to be a list of funny/wise things Dad said. Maybe it’s going to be more. Maybe it’s going to tell all of it. All of him. Maybe all of me. I begin to write. My sweaty fingers struggle to grip the pen as I write those all-powerful words:
CHAPTER ONE
.

It’s clear that there are some holes in this book. And there is only one way to fill in the gaps. First I have to find my long-lost brother the possible psychopath. I have some serious research to do.

I ponder that mystery for a while, then another mystery presents itself. It begins like this: At the next session of Forensics Squad, Mr. Z writes on the board
THE FORENSIC ART OF HANDWRITING
. Woo-hoo. Who among us doesn’t love handwriting? I mean handwriting?! It’s like writing! With your hands! I’ll stop now. The Big Z begins with a few prepared remarks. “You can try, but you can’t really change your handwriting,” he says. “Once you learn how to form letters, it’s hardwired into your brain in a complicated process. Even people who lose both arms and end up writing with their mouths eventually develop a handwriting—or should I say mouth-writing—style that is very similar to the way they wrote when they had their hands …”

This
is
sort of interesting, and I look around the room to see everyone’s reactions. TK casts his eyes about suspiciously and then puts his pen in his mouth and starts writing something. He shrugs and seems pleased with the results of his experiment. Maureen has a very serious look on her face. Raquel is not paying much attention at all. As usual, she is flipping through her purse, as if it’s a magical container that somehow holds all the crap in the world in its minute interior. Maybe it does.

Something Mr. Zant says catches Raquel’s attention. She suddenly is very interested. In fact, she raises her hand. Mr. Zant seems a bit stunned to see her offering to participate. “Yes!” he says
with too much enthusiasm, pointing at her with the double-gun hand gesture.

What she has to say is: “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I can totally write with my feet.”

Mr. Zant laughs. It is pretty funny to consider, and rather unexpected. He doesn’t know what to say. “My notes don’t mention foot-writing” is all he can come up with, turning his cards over in his hands as if some answers of his own might be hidden there somewhere. “But I assume it’s somewhat similar to handwriting. Or maybe you could fool forensics experts by writing a ransom note with your foot!” She giggles. “But let it be clear that I am not advocating kidnapping, class,” he adds with a honking laugh.

“I might kidnap
someone
,” she says, under her breath. And I sort of feel like she’s looking in my direction. But maybe not actually talking to me. Or about me. What is going on here? Who does she like? I can’t think about it for much longer, because I suddenly get very distracted. “Want me to show you?” she asks. “I can write on the board with my hand and then my foot and you can judge the difference,” she offers.

“Wow, you can even write on the chalkboard with your toes?” Mr. Zant says. “This I have to see.”

He throws the cards onto his desk, letting them cascade in a messy splay. We have clearly moved beyond little-card territory and know it. He pulls his teacher’s chair around to the middle of the board and brushes it off. Then he positions the chair so that a person’s feet could reach the bottom of the board. Raquel gets up, sits in his chair, then slowly removes her shoe. Her foot is tan and flawless like the rest of her. Her nails, however, are painted a shocking shade of neon blue.

I suddenly pray that I’m not called up to the board for any reason.

Raquel kicks her foot into the air like a dancer. I can’t stop staring at that foot. It makes me blush. Is it weird to be turned on by a foot? What the hell?

“Oh,” Mr. Zant says. He seems a little distracted by this foot as well, but tries to regain the clinical tone of a scientist while half stuttering and saying “uh” literally every other word. “First, uh, we, uh, need, uh, to, uh, get, uh, a, uh, sample, uh, of, uh, your, uh, regular, uh, handwriting, uh, as, uh, the, uh, control group, uh.”

“Right,” she says, picking up the chalk in her right hand. “What should I write?”

“Just, uh, whatever, uh, comes, uh, to, uh, mind, uh,” he says, still unable to get the “uh” under control while Raquel’s bare foot dangles in his chair.

“Write ‘Raquel is a flirt,’ ” Maureen mutters from the corner. She doesn’t mean it, of course, but Raquel writes just that in big, loopy handwriting.

Raquel is a flirt
.

“Okay,” Mr. Zant says, somehow able to actually complete two syllables without uh-ing. “Now write the same words with your foot for the comparison sample.”

Raquel holds her foot up in the air, supporting her thigh with her hands, fireman-carry style. Mr. Zant full-on blushes as he positions a long piece of yellow chalk between her first and second toes. She leans back, tosses her hair, and slowly begins to draw letters on the board. Truth is, the handwriting (foot-writing?) is actually oddly similar to the script she had written by hand.
Raquel
is a flirt, Raquel is a flirt
it says in near-identical writing. Something about it seems wrong to me, however. I remember the note she had given Anoop back at the beginning of Forensics Squad.

“Don’t forget to dot the ‘i’ with a heart!” I say, loudly because I am nervous. Raquel gives me a confused look.

“Oh my God, gross,” she says. “I never do that. Not since like fifth grade, anyway.” I look over at Anoop, who is suddenly staring intently at his notebook, making intricate scribbles with his pen.

“Mr. Zant,” I say, raising my hand and addressing him although I am stressing certain words that I want to make sure Anoop hears. “Doesn’t that shoot a hole in your theory—that handwriting never changes? She
used
to write a heart over the letter ‘i’ instead of a dot, and now, suddenly, she’s stopped doing that. Never does it, in fact. Isn’t that
interesting
?”

Anoop gets up and runs out, muttering, “Bathroom.”

“Yes, uh, that is interesting, Guy,” Mr. Zant says. “I suppose that is one of those exceptions contained within every rule. Perhaps some more forensics research needs to be conducted on the evolution of handwriting in preteen girls with regards to the ‘i’ heart. Feel free to take that up as a research project. I’ll help you get it into a good journal!”

From behind me I can hear Maureen snickering. “What?” I say.

“The day you’ll see Guy do the hard work required to publish a scientific paper is the day you’ll see me … um …”

She apparently can’t think of the right unlikely event in her own life to compare with me writing a scientific paper. Unfortunately for her, everyone else
easily
can think of several things.

“Wearing a dress?”

“Not being a weirdo?”

“Kissing a boy? I mean an actual living boy?”

“Writing a three-page paper rather than five when the assignment is to write a three-to-five-page paper?”

“Going out into the sun without melting?”

“Ceasing to be a medium-sized, omnivorous mammal native to North America?”

This last zinger, delivered in loud volume, is mine. It’s probably rude and not even all that funny, but ever since Maureen came to school with two dark circles of makeup around her eyes (apparently in an attempt to look Goth, although probably not doing it quite right), I like to find every reason to accuse her of being a raccoon. That kind of thing cracks me up. I even memorized the definition of “raccoon.” See, I’m not lazy when inspired.