Lost in the Sun

Also by Lisa Graff

Absolutely Almost

A Tangle of Knots

Double Dog Dare

Sophie Simon Solves Them All

Umbrella Summer

The Life and Crimes of Bernetta Wallflower

The Thing About Georgie

P
HILOMEL
B
OOKS

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Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Graff.

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Graff, Lisa (Lisa Colleen), 1981–

Lost in the sun / Lisa Graff. pages cm

Summary: “As Trent Zimmerman struggles to move past a traumatic event that took place several months earlier, he befriends class outcast Fallon Little, who helps him understand that he can move on”—Provided by publisher.

[1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Guilt—Fiction. 3. Brothers—Fiction. 4. Disfigured persons—Fiction.

5. Remarriage—Fiction. 6. Tricks—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.G751577Los 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014027868

 

ISBN 978-0-698-17263-0

Edited by Jill Santopolo.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

To Daphne

When we were real little kids, Mom used to take Aaron and Doug and me to Sal's Pizzeria for dinner almost every Tuesday, which is when they had their Family Night Special. I think she liked it because she didn't have to worry about dinner for three growing boys for one night, but we liked it because there was a claw machine there—one of those giant contraptions with toys inside, all sorts, and a metal claw that you moved around with a joystick to try to grab at the toys. As soon as we got into the restaurant, Mom would hand us two dollars, which is how much it cost for three tries, and we'd huddle around the machine and plan our attack. We didn't want to waste that two dollars, so we usually took the whole amount of time until our pizza came up, trying to get one of those toys. (Back then, I had my eye on a fuzzy blue monster, and Doug was desperate for one of the teddy bears, but after a while we would've settled for anything.) Aaron, as the oldest, was the designated joystick manipulator, and
Doug, the youngest, would stand at the side and holler when he thought Aaron had the best angle on the chosen toy. I was in charge of strategy.

Mom would sit at the table, waiting for our pizza, and read her book. I think she enjoyed the claw machine even more than we did.

We spent six months trying for a toy in that claw machine. Forty-eight dollars. Never got a single thing. No one else had gotten one either, we could tell. None of the stuffed animals ever shifted position. But we were determined to be the first.

Finally the owner, Sal Jr., made us stop. He said he couldn't in good conscience let us waste any more money. Then he got a key from the back room, and unlocked the side window panel of the claw machine, and showed us.

“See how flimsy this thing is?” he said, poking at the claw. “Here, Trent, have a look.” He boosted me up, till I was practically inside the machine, and let me fiddle with the claw, too. After that it was Doug's turn, then Aaron's. “A cheap piece of metal like that,” Sal Jr. told us, “it could never grab hold of one of these toys. Not if you had the best aim in the world. Not in a thousand years. And you know why?”

“Why?” I asked. I was mesmerized. I remember.

“I'll tell you, Trent. Because, look.” That's when Sal Jr. grabbed hold of the teddy bear's arm. Yanked it hard.

It wouldn't budge. You could hear the bear's stitching rip, just a little.

“They're all packed in together super tight,” I said when I figured it out. “There's no room for any of them to go.”

“Exactly,” Sal Jr. told me. He locked the side window panel back up. “Consider that a lesson in economics, boys.”

We got two pizzas on the house that night, with extra everything.

Aaron was so mad about the claw machine, he hardly ate. He said Sal Jr. had been stealing our money from the start, so it didn't matter if he gave us pizza after, he was still a crook. Doug disagreed. He gobbled up his pizza so fast, you'd never even have known he wanted a teddy bear.

Me, though, I was more fascinated than anything. I felt like I'd learned a real lesson, a grown-up one, and it stuck with me. That's the day I figured out that no matter how hard you tug at something, no matter how bad you want it, sometimes it just can't be pried free.

I thought about that claw machine a lot after Jared died. Because there were days—who am I kidding,
every
day was one of those days—when I wished I could lift that moment out of my life, just scoop it up with an industrial-sized claw, and toss it into a metal bin. Remove it from existence, so that it never happened at all.

But I knew that wasn't something I could ever do—and not just because I didn't have a magic claw machine with the power to erase events from history. No, I knew I could never disappear that moment, because just like with the claw machine, there were so many events pushed up around it that there'd be no way to get it to budge. Everything that had happened before, and everything that happened after, those moments were all linked. Smushed together.

Still, I couldn't help thinking that if I had it to do over, I never would've hit that hockey puck.

It's funny how the simplest thing, like riding your bike to the park the way you've done nearly every summer afternoon since you ditched your training wheels, can suddenly become so complicated. If you let it. If you start to think too hard about things. Usually, when you want to go to the park, you hop on your bike, shout at your mom through the window that you'll be home in an hour, and you're there. You don't think about the pedaling, or the balancing, or the maneuvering of it. You don't consider every turn you need to make, or exactly when your left foot should push down and your right foot should come up. You just . . .
ride.

But suddenly, if you get to thinking about things too hard, well, then nothing seems easy anymore.

When I'd left the house, with my baseball glove tucked into the back of my shorts, and my ball in the front pocket of my sweatshirt (next to my Book of Thoughts, which I wasn't going to take, and then
I was, and then I wasn't, and then I did), the only thought in my head was that it was a nice day. A good day for a pickup game in the park. That there were sure to be a few guys playing ball already, and that I should get going quick if I wanted to join them.

And then I got to pedaling a little more and I thought,
Do
I want to join them?

And just like that, the pedaling got harder.

Then the steering started to get hard, too, because I started thinking more thoughts. That was the problem with me. I could never stop thinking. I'd told Miss Eveline, my old counselor back at Cedar Haven Elementary, that, and she'd said, “Oh, Trent, that's silly. Everyone's
always
thinking.” Then she gave me the Book of Thoughts, so I could write my thoughts down instead of having them all poking around in my brain all the time and bothering me. I didn't see as how it had helped very much so far, but I guess it hadn't hurt either.

Those guys had been playing pickup all summer, that's what I was thinking on my way to the park. I'd seen them, when I was circling the field on my bike. Just popping wheelies, or whatever. Writing down thoughts, because what else was I supposed to do? At first I'd waited for them to ask me to join in, and then I'd figured maybe they didn't know I wanted to, and now here I was wondering if I even wanted to play at all. Which was a stupid thing to wonder, obviously, because why
wouldn't
I want to play? I hadn't swung a bat the entire summer, so my arm was feeling pretty rusty. And what with sixth grade starting in three short days, I knew I better get
not
pretty rusty pretty quick if I wanted to join the intramural team. Because the kids on the intramural
team, those were the guys they picked from for the real team in the spring, and the competition was tough, even in sixth. That's what my brother Aaron told me, and he should know, since he landed on the high school varsity team when he was only a freshman. The middle school team, Aaron said, that's where you learned everything you needed to know for high school. Where you practiced your fundamentals. Where the coaches got a feel for you.

But here I was, the last Friday before sixth grade began, not even sure I was up for a stupid pickup game in the stupid park.

This is what I mean about having too many thoughts.

So like I said, it was tough, getting to the park. It was tougher still, forcing myself through the grass toward the field. The grass was only an inch high, probably, but you'd've thought it was up to my waist, what with how slow I was moving.

When I got to the edge of the field, sure enough a bunch of the guys were there, my old group, warming up for a game. A couple new guys, too, it looked like. And all I had to do—I
knew
that all I had to do—was open up my mouth and holler at them.

“Hey!” I'd holler. I could hear the words in my head. “Mind if I join you?”

But I couldn't do it. It turned out opening my mouth was even harder than pedaling. Maybe because the last time I'd opened my mouth and hollered that, well, it hadn't turned out so well.

So what was I supposed to do? I dumped my bike in the grass and flopped down next to it, and just so I didn't look like a creeper sitting there watching everyone else play baseball, I tugged out my
Book of Thoughts and started scribbling. I guess I was glad I'd brought it now.

This one wasn't the original Book of Thoughts. I'd filled up that one in just a few weeks (I don't think Miss Eveline knew how many thoughts I had when she gave it to me). I was on my fifth book now, and somewhere along the line I'd switched from writing my thoughts down to drawing them. I wasn't a super good artist—I never got things on the page exactly the same way I could see them in my head—but for whatever reason, I liked drawing my thoughts better than writing. Maybe because it felt more like a hobby and less like the thing the school counselor told me to do.

Anyway, I drew a lot these days.

After a while of drawing I decided to look up. See how the game was going. See if any of the guys were about to ask me to play (not that I was sure if I wanted to). They didn't look like they were, so my eyes got to wandering around the rest of the park.

I saw the side of her face first, the left side, while she was walking her fluffy white dog not far from where I was sitting on the side of the baseball field. I didn't recognize her at first, actually. I thought she might be a new kid, just moved to town. Thought she had a good face for drawing.

Big, deep, round brown eyes (well, one of them, anyway—the left one). Curly, slightly frizzy brown hair pulled back away from her face. Half of a small, upturned mouth. She was dressed kind of funny—this loud, neon-pink T-shirt blouse thing with two ties hanging down from the neck (were those supposed to do something? I never understood
clothes that were supposed to
do
something), and zebra-print shorts, and what looked like a blue shoelace tied into a bow in her hair. The kind of outfit that says, “Yup. Here I am. I look . . . weird.” But that wasn't the first thing I noticed about her—her weird outfit. The first thing I noticed was that the left side of her face was awfully good for drawing.

Then she tilted her head in my direction, and I saw the rest of her.

I recognized her right away. Of course I did. Fallon Little was a very recognizable person.

The scar was thin but dark, deep pink, much darker than the rest of her face. Raised and mostly smooth at the sides, with a thicker rough line in the center. The scar started just above the middle of her left eyebrow and curved around the bridge of her nose and down and down the right side of her face until it ended, with a slight crook, at the right side of her mouth. That was where her top lip seemed to tuck into the scar a little bit, to become almost part of it.

Fallon had had the scar for as long as I'd known her. She'd moved to Cedar Haven back in first grade, and she'd had the scar then. Some people thought she'd been born with it, but no one knew for sure. If you asked, she'd tell you, but you knew it was a lie. A different story every time. Once I'd been sitting next to Hannah Crawley in chorus when Fallon described how she was mauled by a grizzly while trying to rescue an orphaned baby girl.

(Hannah believed her, I think, but Hannah was pretty dense.)

Fallon Little saw me looking at her, from across the grass.

And she winked at me.

Quick as a flash, I turned back to my notebook. Not staring at Fallon Little and her fluffy white dog at all.

Drawing. I'd been drawing the whole time.

Still, while I was drawing my thoughts on the paper, I couldn't help wondering how I'd never noticed the rest of Fallon Little's face before. It was like I'd just gotten to the scar, and then stopped looking.

Like I said, it wasn't a terrible face.

I guess I was concentrating on my drawing pretty hard—I do that sometimes, get lost in my Book of Thoughts—because when I finally did notice the baseball that had rolled into my left leg, I thought it was the one from my pocket. Which didn't make a whole lot of sense, obviously, because how would the baseball jump out of my pocket and start rolling
toward
me? Plus,
my
baseball was still in my pocket, I could feel it.

But sometimes my thoughts didn't make a whole lot of sense.

So it wasn't my baseball, obviously. It came from those guys in the field. Which I figured out as soon as a couple of them started walking over to retrieve it. Jeremiah Jacobson. Stig Cooper.

And Noah Gorman.

Noah Gorman didn't even
like
sports, I knew that for a fact. I used to be the one who dragged
him
to pickup games, so what was he doing here without me? Not that I cared. Not that it mattered if Noah wanted to spend all his time with
Jeremiah Jacobson,
the biggest jerk in the entire world.

Jeremiah Jacobson was pretty scrawny (my brother Aaron could've snapped him like a toothpick—heck, give me another month and
I
could
do it), but he acted like he was the king of the whole town. His parents owned the only movie theater in Cedar Haven, so he never shut up about how he and all his stupid friends could get in to all the free movies they wanted. Free popcorn and sodas, too. Even candy. I heard that there were pictures up behind the counter of Jeremiah and all his friends, so the high school kids who worked there would always know not to charge them. It might've been a lie, but you never know. Maybe that's why Noah was hanging out with him now—for the popcorn.

Anyway, it didn't take a genius to figure out that when those guys came to get their ball, they weren't going to ask me to join the game.

“Hey, you,” Jeremiah said, as soon as he was within hollering distance. “Give us back our ball.”

Seriously, that's what he said. “Give us back our ball.” Like I had
stolen
his idiotic ball or something, instead of him practically chucking it at me, which is what happened. Didn't even use my name either. Trent Zimmerman. We'd lived in the same town since we were
babies.
And it was a small town.

Well.

As soon as he said that, I got that fire in my body, the one that started like a ball in my chest, dense and heavy, then radiated down to my stomach, my legs, my toes, and out to my neck, my face, my ears. Even all the way to my fingernails. Hot, prickly fire skin, all over.

I snatched the ball out of the grass and clenched it tight in my fiery hand. Then I stood up so Jeremiah could see just how tall I was.

Taller than him.

“This is my ball,” I told him as he and the other guys got closer.
That was a lie, obviously, but they were ticking me off. And when I started to get ticked off like that, soon the fire would be up to my ears and down to my toes, and well, then I wasn't exactly in charge of what I said. “Go find your own.”

I didn't look at Noah. Who cared what he thought about anything? He was hanging out with Jeremiah Jacobson. His thoughts didn't matter anymore.

Jeremiah cocked his head to one side. “You serious?” he said. “That's our ball. Don't be a turd.” Only he didn't say “turd.” “Give it back.”

“Yeah,” Stig said, “give it back.” Stig Cooper was the fattest kid in town. Dumbest, too. Not to mention an enormous jerk.

Noah stood just behind the two of them, shrugging at the ground, like he didn't really care if he got the baseball back or not.

“Make me,” I told them.

I think Stig might've actually tried to fight me, and even though he was thick like an ox, I bet I could've taken him easy. Quick and mean, that's what Dad said about me when he was teaching me how to defend myself. He meant it as a compliment.

Stig didn't get the chance to get pummeled, though, because Jeremiah Jacobson, for all his faults, was a lot smarter than Stig was, and he could always find a way to get to you that didn't involve punching.

My Book of Thoughts. I'd left it in the grass, like some kind of moron.

“Hey, look,” he told the other guys, snatching the book off the grass, “I found the little girl's
diary.
” And he held it over his head and
started flipping through the pages. Even though I was taller, I couldn't grab at it, because Jeremiah's bodyguard, Stig, kept blocking me. “The little girl's an
artist,
” Jeremiah said as he flipped. Stig hooted like that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, and Noah Gorman didn't laugh and he didn't help with the bodyguarding, but he didn't go away either. The ball of fire in my chest was getting hotter and hotter, till I almost couldn't stand it. But I couldn't get that notebook.

Then all of a sudden, when Jeremiah had flipped through maybe five or six pages, he stopped flipping. He didn't give back my thoughts, though. Instead, his eyes went wide at me and his face went long and he said, “What's
wrong
with you?”

Well.

“Give it back,” I said, still trying to pummel through the Wall of Stig to get my notebook. “It's mine.”

“What's in it?” Stig asked.

Jeremiah went back to flipping. “He's like, sick, or something,” he said. “It's all messed-up stuff.”

It's not messed up,
I wanted to say.
It's just my thoughts.
But of course I didn't say that.

“It's all, like, people getting attacked,” Jeremiah went on. Still flipping. “A guy getting eaten by a shark, a guy smushed under a tree, a guy falling off a building.”

It was a tightrope, like in the circus. The guy was falling off a tightrope, not a building. I knew I was no great artist, but that seemed obvious.

The grass on this end of the park must've been super fascinating, because that's what Noah was staring at.

“What's wrong with you?” Jeremiah asked me again.

It was the kind of question you really couldn't answer.

“Leave him alone.”

Well.
That
was a voice I hadn't expected to hear.