Jake and Lily (6 page)

I
’m happy for you. I’m glad you felt so great. But let me tell you something you don’t know, since all you want to do is tell everybody what a bad brother I am these days. When you went past us laughing and flapping your arms and shrieking, “Beatcha, Bumpsters!” I had a little grin on my face. I was kinda proud, like,
Death Rays, meet my sister.
You didn’t catch that, did you?

N
o, I sure didn’t. Must have been the littlest grin of all time. What good was it if nobody saw it? And what did you
say
? Huh?
Death Rays, meet my sister.
Did you say it out loud? Huh? Go ahead, tell the readers. Tell them how you opened your mouth and shouted it to the world and stuck up for me. Tell them how you went to war for your sister. Go ahead. Do it now. I’ll give you the next page to answer….

N
o answer? Didn’t think so.

So today he goes out riding with his bumpy boys again, and sure enough I run into them pedaling their bumpy butts down by the park. I’m ready to smoke them again but a funny thing happens—they don’t speed up. They just go cruising along like I’m not there.

I called, “Hey Jake! I’m going to the comic shop. Wanna come?”

He called back, “Later.”

“Where’re you going?” I called.

“Nowhere.”

I didn’t like his answers. I didn’t like the way the summer was going so far. Most of all I didn’t like being alone. So I caught up with them. I pedaled
alongside. I didn’t say anything. I just stared straight ahead, minded my own business. They turned a corner, I turned a corner. Finally they turned into the parking lot of Mike Ivey’s Auto Repair. They stopped. I stopped. Nobody said anything. They just glared at me, all but Jake. He stared at the sky, the ground, everywhere but me.

Finally the Big Bumpster spoke up. “What’re you doing?”

“What’s it look like?” I said.

“You can’t come with us.”

I sneered. “First of all, genius, I can go anywhere I want. It’s a free country. And second of all, I’m not going
anywhere
with you. I’m going with my brother.”

“Not now you’re not.” He was chewing licorice. His teeth were outlined in black, like a cartoon.

I foot-wheeled my bike up to his. “You gonna stop me, snow face?” Up close, I couldn’t help noticing he was bigger than he was the day I trashed him at the snow fort.

He got all smuggy. “I don’t
have
to stop you. He’s with
us
. That’s the way it is.”

“You think you can buy off my brother with a
couple stones?” I said.

One of the assistant morons butted in. “He’s one of us, girlie. He’s a Death Ray.”

I laughed. “Yeah, right.”

The assistant moron shoved his face into mine. He grinned. “Ask him.” On the assistant moron’s face were more freckles than the French Creek sky has stars. I looked at Jake. I gagged out the words: “Are you a Death Ray?”

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. I knew the answer.

They saddled up and rode. I couldn’t move. The world was suddenly tilted, like it was trying to dump me off. I guess the world didn’t know something—I don’t like to get dumped. I went after them.

When I caught up, the Bumpster snarled, “What part of we-don’t-want-you don’t you understand?”

“I don’t care if he’s ten Death Rays,” I said. “He’s my brother first. And I’m his sister. You can’t change that, moron.”

“Yeah, well, I got news for
you
. You’re something else too.”

“Oh really.”

“Yeah. You’re a
girl
.” He sneered the last word.

“That so?”

“Yeah, and this is boys only. It’s a boys-only gang and we’re going to our boys-only hideout. So until you change your sex, girlie”—he spit licorice juice on the ground—“scram.”

They took off. Their tires flung gravel on my shoes. “Jake?” I called. “Jake?”

But Jake was riding.

D
id I feel bad? There’s Lily calling after me and I’m riding away. Sure I felt bad. I’m not a monster. But here’s the thing she doesn’t get: it’s no big deal. Nothing strange is going on here. Nothing evil. Nothing tragic. The only thing going on here is growing up. When guys get older they start to hang with each other. It’s, like, the herd instinct. It’s normal. No big deal. She thinks I’m the villain. I’m not the villain. I’m just a kid trying to grow up.

What does she want? Does she want me to spend my whole life with nobody but her?
Oh look, there’s Jake and Lily. They’re seventy-nine years old and they still play poker and ride bikes together. They still hear each other five miles away. Still sleep in the
same bedroom. You can’t tear them apart. Aren’t they adorable. Twinny-twin twins.

Personally, I think Lily is starting to lose her marbles. Maybe she’s allergic to something in the air and it’s making her goofy. When Bump reminded her she’s a girl and told her to scram and we rode away, she says she called after me, right? Called my name. That’s not the only thing she called. She called, “I’m
not
a girl!”

You believe it?

N
o I didn’t.

did i?

Y
eah, you did. Tell Mom and Dad to take you to an allergy doctor. Or a shrink.

Anyway, the point is, whatever my sister thinks, we’re harmless. We’re just four kids who call ourselves the Death Rays. The name is supposed to be funny, but of course she doesn’t get it. We don’t go around zapping people. We ride bikes and hang in our hideout. It’s nothing fancy. It’s just a cool tree. You ride down by the tracks and you walk your bikes over the tracks and into the woods between the tracks and the creek. It’s somewhere past the stone bridge, but that’s all I’m going to say. There’s this funny kind of tree—or maybe it’s a bush—whatever. The branches don’t stick up in the air but they bend and come down to the ground until the
whole thing looks kind of like a big leafy umbrella. What you do is, you poke your way through the branches and—presto!—you’re inside this kind of dome-shaped natural hut. I mean, it’s just begging you to come in and hang out.

So that’s what we do. We sit down. We talk. We tell jokes. We compare penknives. If we picked up stuff at a store, we eat: Twinkies, hoagies, sodas. The four of us. Me. Bump. A freckled kid named Nacho. And a tall skinny kid named Burke.

Really evil, huh?

When we’re not in the hideout, we’re riding around doing stuff.

Like skipping flat stones across the creek.

Like ringing doorbells and running.

Like spit-bombing cars from the Airy Street bridge.

Like picking out someone on the sidewalk downtown and walking really
really
close behind them until they notice us and then we run and laugh our butts off.

But mostly we go goobering.

Goobers. That’s Bump’s name for somebody that’s funny. Funny-different. Funny-weird. A
laugh magnet. No—a laugh target. When he spots one he calls out, “Goober!” If Bump were a hunting dog, his nose would stick out and his tail would go straight up.

Of course, we’d been coming across goobers all our lives. We noticed them, but just barely. They maybe registered 0.2 on a scale of 1–10. They weren’t important enough to give a name to.

Bump changed all that. He hauled them onto the stage. He threw the spotlight on them. Suddenly they were 10s.

Already this summer we’ve found some real winners:

Not all goobers are discovered just haphazard as we ride around. Bump goes out scouting on his own. He’ll spot a goober and check its location. All he says next day is, “Follow me.” Sometimes we ride clear across town, to neighborhoods we don’t even recognize. When he stops, he doesn’t have to say anything. There’s no “Goober!” call. We just sit there leg-leaning on our bikes, waiting for it to appear.

But what happened today was different from every other goober spotting so far. First thing this morning Bump said, “Let’s go to the hideout.” He was acting funny. Quiet. Something was on his mind. He just sat on the ground chewing his black licorice. He’s always got a wad in his mouth.

When we were all seated in the hideout, nobody said anything. Until I spoke up: “What’s wrong, Bump?”

So far Bump’s face had been a blank. Now suddenly his mouth cracked into a smirk. “Wrong?” he said. “Ain’t nothin’
wrong
. It might be the
rightest
thing ever.”

Now he really had our attention. “What’re you talking about?” I said.

“I saw something,” he said. Now he seemed puzzled. He looked up, as if he was trying to see through the domed leafy roof of the hideout.

“What?”
Nacho and Burke said together.

“Where?”
I said.

Bump was shaking his head. “I…I…” He couldn’t seem to find words.

I tried to help him out. “You saw a goober?”

He laughed out loud. He wagged his head. “Goober? Goober ain’t even good enough.”

I poked him. “C’mon, Bump.
What?
”

He brought his eyes down from the leaves. He looked at each of us. He had a dreamy, blinky look, like he had seen a miracle. “Last night…after dinner…I was just riding….”

“Yeah? Yeah?” we said.

“I saw something…. I saw something and I…I almost rounded you guys up right then”—he stared at us—“
right then
. But”—he shrugged—“I didn’t. I rode home. I almost got run down by a car, I was so…so…”

“What’d you see, Bump?” said Nacho.

“You gotta tell us,” said Burke.

“That’s the thing,” said Bump. “I’m not even sure. I mean, I
thought
I was sure. Then I went to bed, and when I woke up this morning and the sun was shining through the window and all, I thought,
Nah, couldn’t be. Musta been a mirage. A hallu
—”

“Hallucination?” I helped.

“Yeah. I figured it couldna been real.”

“So what’re you going to do?” said Burke.

Bump took a deep breath. “I’m gonna check it out again. Today. And if it
is
real”—he spit out the licorice wad—“you ain’t
never
gonna forget tomorrow.”