Sons of Liberty (3 page)

“Do it.” Liza’s voice clipped his conscience. “That kid deserves it. Him and his fancy Sunfish.”

Trust Liza to keep her grudge against Briggsie’s Sunfish. Rock dusted some loose snow off the ice-ball. She’d been so bent out of shape, Rock remembered, since she’d been nuts to sail all last summer, borrowing other people’s boats, baby-sitting like a maniac to pay for sailing lessons from Indio Whepple, who worked at the Sheffield Yacht Club and was one of the best skippers on the South Shore. And then to see Briggsie, fat and tan as a soft brown apple, bobbing around in the harbor in his shiny new birthday-present Sunfish, but too scared to take it out on the real water. The unfairness had just about killed Liza, it really had.

Anyhow, making Briggsie cry was all part of the weekday morning. Regular as brushing your teeth.

“Yo, Briggsie! Beware the Detonay-tor!” Rock steeled his eyes to watch the Detonator as it left his hand, plunging through the air to where it clocked its moony-faced target neat in the forehead. He allowed himself the moment’s satisfaction of watching Briggsie’s face crumple before he took off his glasses and stuffed them into his jacket pocket.

“Hey—Rock—you scuz!” Briggsie yelled. Then, as he touched his fingers to his head, his mouth erupted in a horror-movie scream that stopped the game completely. Kids dropped their weapons and gaped at Briggsie. Rock squinted to see the bright shock of blood trickling from the torn skin just beneath Briggsie’s hairline.

“Rock, you totally—” Cliff sprinted to Briggsie in a flash, tugging off his wool scarf, which he then began to wrap like a tourniquet around Briggsie’s forehead.

“It’s all my fault!” Liza squealed happily, jumping up and down as kids began to lump around Briggsie and Cliff. “I did it, I invented the Detonator.”

“Bus!” shouted one of the younger kids, pointing down the road.

“Come on, Cliff.” Rock could barely believe it. “That was Mom who hand-made you that scarf.”

“Stuff it why don’tcha, Rock.” Cliff lifted his eyes to glower at his brother before returning to his task.

“He’s gonna need stitches, maybe,” someone advised. “He should go home.”

“I don’t need to go home,” Briggsie sniffled. “I’m okay.” Rock was almost impressed. Maybe Briggsie wasn’t so much of a wimp after all.

“Yeah, you don’t need to go home,” Liza agreed. “Sorry about that, Briggsie.”

Rock stubbed the toe of his boot in a snowbank and said nothing.

“You’re a dirty player.” A third-grader, Carleen Kirschner, flapped her scarf fringes at Rock as kids began shuffling into the bus line. “In the end, it’s always you who plays dirty.”

Rock felt the muscles of his face go stiff under her frank gaze, and he turned to look down the road, observing the bus’s labored progress down Carpenter Drive.

“I invented the Detonator, anyway,” Liza said loudly, to nobody in particular. “So it’s mostly my fault, actually.”

“Yeah, but I’ll be the one ends up in Mr. Faella’s office,” Rock grumbled.

“Home away from home,” Liza said, and despite Briggsie’s whimpering and Cliff’s scowling and Carleen Kirschner’s needling words, the two of them started cracking up. Rock could sense how their laughter made other kids uneasy, so he laughed even harder, taking a strange comfort in the sound. Everyone just needs to loosen up, he thought, annoyed. It’s not like Briggsie had to be rushed to the hospital.

The collar of Mr. Faella’s snowflake sweater was beginning to unravel. Rock knew that his wife had knitted it for him a couple years ago, when she was in the hospital getting her chemotherapy treatments—some way-too-personal information Rock had accidentally overheard from the secretaries’ gossip during one of his routine trips to office detention. Now Mrs. Faella was dead and her husband’s snowflake sweater was falling apart. Two crummy and depressing facts Rock wished weren’t permanently stored in his brain.

He studied the principal’s desk objects. They’d become pretty familiar to him: the sparkling purple geode paperweight, the miniature plastic figurine of Fozzie Bear riding a skateboard, the glass block filled with colorful paperclips.

Mr. Faella’s office, and it wasn’t even eight thirty.

“I’m a prince, and I’m your pal,” Mr. Faella said every year to every class, squeaking the word
principal
onto the blackboard. “If you can’t remember anything all year, at least remember that.” It hadn’t made sense, though, because not only was Mr. Faella neither a prince nor any kid’s pal, but if you attached the two words you ended up with
princepal,
which wasn’t even the right spelling.

Rock checked out Liza. Her face was still flushed pink from the outdoors and excitement. Crazy enough, but he knew she loved being in the principal’s office. Liza would rather be anywhere than in room 7A, Mrs. Zukoff’s seventh-grade class, practically flunking every subject. Liza’s life with Mrs. Zukoff was a long, scribbled road of
Please see mes.

On his other side, Cliff cleared his throat and exhaled a breath of anger through his nostrils. Rock squirmed in his chair, gently scraping it nearer to Liza. He hated sitting so close to the wasps’ nest of Cliff’s rage.

“So, what do you think, Heathcliff?” Mr. Faella finally broke the silence that had fallen on the group immediately after his boring, wordy lecture about manners and decency and the honor codes of Sheffield Junior High.

“ ’Scuse me?” Cliff straightened himself in his seat.

“What I mean to say is, what do you think should happen to your brother? I’d asked you to join us because I feel that Rochester’s improvement might be expedited if we opened the doors on his behavioral problem, made it more a family affair. And I thought you might have some perspicacity.”

“What about me?” Liza piped up. “I have the most perspirwhatever, since it was my idea, that rock. Brig—Mitchell, I mean, he even had to go to the nurse’s office. He might have a scar. And it was all my—”

“Your idea, I know, Liza.”

“Eliza Beth.” Liza leaned forward. “It’s Eliza Beth, my real name. Since you’re calling everyone …” She rippled her fingers at Rock and Cliff, but then her voice melted into silence at Mr. Faella’s frown.

Mr. Faella closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, displacing his glasses. “Eliza Beth,” he repeated.

“Mr. Faella, look, I gotta go.” Cliff shifted to the edge of the chair, hands gripped over his knees, poised but not quite daring to stand up. “I gotta catch that changeover bus to the high school. They said they’d wait for me specially. I don’t know what Rock’s supposed to do except for apologize. And maybe do some extra stuff, help around the school. I don’t know.”

“So first, you think, an apology?”

“I dunno.”

Rock felt the odd shift between the two: Mr. Faella’s reach for something, any little thing, that would help him understand Rock, and then the equally firm pull of Cliff’s unwillingness. Tug, tug, tug, went the silence. Mr. Faella finally rolled back his wheely chair and stood up. Even at full height, he was shorter than Liza.

“Eliza Beth Vincent. Rochester Kindle.” He spoke slowly; their names in his mouth sounded rich, the black oil of their crime tasted in each syllable. “You will formally apologize to Mr. Briggs, and then you will both use your recesses all next week to help out the maintenance department. And yes, I will be calling your parents.”

Cliff had already bolted out the door by the word “maintenance.” Mr. Faella twisted his wedding ring, staring hard at the empty space that had been Cliff, before leveling his gaze on Rock.

“Your brother was no trouble at all to us, Rochester, in all his years here at Sheffield Elementary and Junior High. Remarkable soccer player, won the science fair two years in a row. It’s unfortunate that your own career here has been so problematic.” He glanced at the door again, as if half-hoping Cliff would return.

“I’m a good soccer player, too,” Rock said. “I play on Scudder’s Pizza, in the intermediate league.”

“You know that’s not my point.” Mr. Faella stretched his arms high over his head before pulling the fingers of both hands slowly through his velvety greased hair. He closed his eyes.

“Go on, now. Both you kids. Go.”

Rock and Liza moved aimlessly, meandering down the halls to their classrooms.

“Hey, Liza, you didn’t have to go with me to Mr. F.’s office. Now you’re in all this stupid trouble, and I wouldn’t’ve said
jack
about the Deton—”

“Don’t matter.” Liza turned and put her hand on 7A’s doorknob. “Timmy’s away working down in Mount Vernon till next week. And Ma won’t even remember to tell him, by Monday.” She opened the door. “So I’m home free. Scout’s honor.”

Relief lapped the edges of Rock’s stomach. If Liza was home free, then it was no big deal.

He watched Liza in, and then turned to look at the door of his own classroom, Mrs. Lewin, 7B. He should be in eighth grade; he was more than a year older than Liza, but he’d done second grade over, since he’d spent most of that year getting in fights instead of learning how to spell and subtract and whatever else it was that second-graders did; it was hard to recall, even after two times through.

A better idea than going into Mrs. Lewin’s room turned Rock away at the door just as he was about to enter. He ducked his head and slinked quickly away from 7B and down the hall, then up the stairs to the library.

“Rock, what are you doing out of class?” Ms. Manzuli, the librarian, looked up from her desk. She was sort of beautiful and awful-looking, Rock had decided long ago, with skin so pale it looked as if the sun had never once basted it, and hair the soaking-red color of cafeteria spaghetti sauce. She always wore shapeless clothes that seemed like she shopped for them at retirement homes, but her body underneath was strong and young.

Rock never got along too well with teachers, but he was always impressed by Ms. Manzuli; how she could tell him anything he needed to know, like stuff about baseball or Saturn or different types of poison oak, and how she could zip to the exact location of any book in the entire library without cheating by looking at the Dewey decimal chart.

“Mrs. Lewin said it was okay for me to come,” Rock lied. He looked her straight in the eye. But Ms. Manzuli didn’t seem to weigh the truth of Rock’s story. She just smiled, white teeth shining in white skin.

“Okay, then, what brings you to these parts, Mr. Kindle?” she asked, leaning over her desk and propping her chin in her hands.

“I was thinking, um. I have a paper, that midterm Revolution paper. It’s due at the end of this month.”

“Aha, so maybe you need some extra reading?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

But she was already bounding away from her desk, toward one of the blond-wood bookshelves.

“You’re my best history buff, Rock. The other day I was telling my husband about you. He’s ravenous for any book about the big wars, too, although I confess to being more of a queens-and-kingdoms type of history reader myself …” She chatted lightly as she bent and peered at spine titles, occasionally pulling a book off the shelf and placing it into Rock’s hands.

Rock felt squeamish, thinking about Ms. Manzuli telling her husband how Rock liked history books. Mr. Manzuli probably thought Rock was some big library nerd. He better not have said any jokes about him. Rock clenched his hands.

“That ought to keep you, for a while anyway,” Ms. Manzuli finally pronounced, after half a dozen titles were stacked in his arms. “Let me know how it goes, okay? I’m interested to see what you do with this paper. I could really see you becoming a wise old history professor one of these days. Then I could say, ah yes, I knew Professor Kindle when he was brilliant young scholar at Sheffield Junior High.”

“Ha,” said Rock, half smiling. Ms. Manzuli was sort of freaky sometimes, the way she’d just let her imagination go on talking. Now she looked up at the wall clock. “But I guess you should probably get back to class now. Come back soon.” She waved. “And give me updates.”

“So you hurt Brian Briggs’s kid. What you do that for?” His father’s eyes shone as they stared at Rock from over his beer that night at supper. “Your ignoramus principal calls me down at the yard to say you’re gonna to be washing windows for a week. I said to him, Well, if my son’s got a grudge against Brian Briggs’s kid, then I’m not one to interfere. Huh.” He nodded emphatically and sipped from his glass. “Not exactly the answer he was looking for. But now I got to ask. Did you have to settle a score? Did you need to do it? Hurt that kid? What’d that kid do to you, Rock?”

Rock was quiet, studying the little bit of zucchini bread left on his plate. Maybe his dad was serving up a trick question. A test. Rock tried to think. Had he needed to hurt Briggsie? A shuffle of images: Briggsie’s pained face, the school nurse’s slash-down mouth, Cliff’s bloody wool scarf, Liza’s thumbs-up, her smile. The Sunfish; the lobster dusted with ashes.

“You needed to do it, didn’t you, Rock? You can tell me.”

Rock felt everyone at the table looking at him: his worried mother, annoyed Cliff, silent Brontie, and of course his father, whose expression was impossible to crack.

“Yeah.” Rock exhaled slowly. “I think so. That kid, Briggsie, he puts me down. Some snob. Thinks he’s the greatest.”

“Well, then.” His father swallowed and stared thoughtfully into his drink. “Maybe you rightfully took the law into your own hands.”

“Yeah,” Rock answered uncertainly. “I guess I did.”

Rock had trouble sleeping that night. What his dad had said about taking the law in his own hands—it made him feel reckless, like an outlaw or a rebel. Rock couldn’t tell if he liked the feeling. Those colonist guys who protested about the British—Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere—they were rebels, too. Sons of Liberty, they called themselves. But it wasn’t really the same; it wasn’t exactly about liberty, what Rock had done. It was more about just being kind of a jerk.

He tried to kill the bad feeling by saying a few prayers, asking God to take care of all his grandparents; and Misha Kindle, the best dog ever to live; and even Ms. Manzuli, just in case she did any prayers for him. He also asked God to help out Mom, maybe talk her into getting some friends, a new haircut—something to cheer her up. He yawned.