The Prisoner of Snowflake Falls (16 page)

Mr. Wingate pointed out that using his daughter's bike was the only immediate practical solution. “I realize that using Charlotte's bike may spark some undue embarrassment from your less enlightened peers,” he said. “Think of it as a valuable exercise in character building.”

When I asked Mr. Wingate if he would ever choose to build up his character by riding a girl's bike, he replied, “You are, of course, perfectly free to save for a more masculine bicycle.”

“I can't afford a decent bike on a paperboy's salary,” I said.

“You will also be working the afternoon shift at Top Kow Burgers,” said Mr. Wingate.

“You want me to ride a girl's bike and be a kitchen slave in some junk-food factory?” I asked, not believing my ears.

The more irritated I got, the calmer Mr. Wingate's voice became. “I am merely pointing out that you will be financially compensated for your job at Top Kow Burgers as well,” he said. “While it's not a great deal of remuneration, prudent saving will take you further than you might think.”

It was just like listening to Charlotte talk, if Charlotte were an older man trying to ruin my life. I looked at the schedule again and noticed that I had hardly any free time at all. “What's all this about Harley Howard?” I asked. “I hear he's a very cranky man.”

“Mr. Howard is a distinguished member of the Snowflake Falls business community,” said Harrison Wingate. “Unfortunately, he is losing his sight.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “But what's that got to do with me?”

“He has requested a volunteer reader. I took the liberty of offering your services, and Mr. Howard has kindly accepted.”

“I'm not even going to be paid?”

“Volunteer work is a vital part of your stay here,” he said.

“Doesn't the word
volunteer
mean that you agree to do something of your own free will?” I asked.

“Normally, yes.” Mr. Wingate nodded.

“Okay,” I said, like we were finally getting somewhere. “That means I can't actually volunteer for something I don't want to do.”

“We all have to do things we don't want to do, Henry. It's part of life.”

“When's the last time you had to do something you really didn't want to do?” I asked.

Mr. Wingate sighed. It looked like he was about to say something. Then he changed his mind and settled for, “We're not discussing me, Henry.”

“But what about school?” I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “That's starting soon. How am I going to find time to do my homework?”

Harrison Wingate almost smiled at this. “If you refer to your schedule, you'll see that I've budgeted more than adequate time, given your apparently exceptional
IQ
,” he explained. “In addition, you will be required to report to a special school liaison when you start attending Snowflake Falls Secondary.”

Mr. Wingate shuffled a few papers around. “Your supervisor at the school will be Ms. Penelope Pendergast,” he said. “Ms. Pendergast is a school counselor as well as head of the Home Economics Department. I'm sure she can find some way for you to help out around the school.”

I put my head in my hands and said, “This is all way too much!”

Mr. Wingate responded with, “Do you feel we're being unfair?”

When I told him yes through my fingers, Harrison Wingate gave my reply some thought. “Why do you think you're here, Henry?”

“Because I got caught baking cookies in Ambrose Worton's kitchen.”

“I mean, what is the purpose of you being here?”

“Punishment?”

“I suppose that's true, from one perspective,” said Mr. Wingate. “But that's not the perspective I was talking about.” For the first time, I could see a truly kind expression on the face of Mr. Harrison Wingate. “You're here because Judge Barnaby sees something valuable. Something worth cultivating despite your mistakes in judgment.”

I said nothing. Mr. Wingate took this as a sign to continue. “So how do we do that, Henry? How do we cultivate your worthwhile side?”

“I don't know,” I said honestly. “How?”

“Well, you already know enough about taking, don't you?” he asked. “After all, it's what you do.” He paused before adding, “The thing is, you're not so good at giving, are you, Henry? That's what we're here to teach you: how to start giving.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Ride Charlotte's bike without complaint, for a start. Did you know that Charlotte has taken quite a shine to you?”

“She's not going to try and cut my hair, is she?”

“That was an isolated incident,” said Mr. Wingate. “As punishment, Charlotte was forbidden to read the
Wall
Street Journal
for an entire week.”

I tried to imagine being liked by someone whose idea of a fun time was reading a newspaper that was all about business. I could hear the fear in my voice as I asked, “Did she actually tell you she likes me?”

“She didn't have to,” said Mr. Wingate. “She's lending you Gwenivere. It probably seems silly to you, but she loves that bike.”

“What kind of person names their bicycle?” I asked. “Besides, you know what she said to me the other day? She said she didn't need any friends. She said all the friends she needed were sitting on the shelves at the library.”

“I wouldn't take some of the things Charlotte says too seriously, Henry. Everybody wants to be liked, whether they admit it or not.”

The next thing I said just popped out without my thinking about it. “Do you want to be liked?” I asked.

It was a very personal question. But Mr. Wingate chose to answer it very sincerely. “In grade eight, I wanted to be liked more than anything,” he said.

I guess I could tell he really meant it. Because I just had to ask, “Did anybody do it? Like you, I mean?”

I could see Mr. Wingate think for a minute. “No,” he said. “I honestly don't think anybody did. But Charlotte has something I didn't have at her age.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“You, Henry,” he said. “She has you. All I'm asking is that you try your best to be kind to Charlotte.”

“But why does it have to be me?” I asked.

“Because I believe you know what it's like to be lonely. Don't you, Henry?”

I was watching him get a little anxious as he waited for me to say something back. For a second, it wasn't hard to imagine what he looked like as the kid nobody liked in grade eight.

“Just promise me one thing,” I said. “Don't let her come near me with a pair of scissors.”

ELEVEN

A
s far as I'm concerned, the best thing about being a career criminal is that you get to sleep in. Besides my Uncle Andy and his associates, this was probably the thing I missed most about my tree-house life. Now, with Oscar as my roommate, I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever really sleep again, let alone sleep in.

It didn't take me long to discover that there were really two Oscars. There was the daytime Oscar, who spent most of his time coloring on the walls, banging on pots and pans, or throwing my underwear all over the place. He also liked to hang on to the bottom of my right leg until I had to drag him across the kitchen floor just to get myself a drink of water.

Theodora spent most of her free time scrubbing Oscar's artwork off the walls. One day, she pointed to something she was scrubbing off the hallway wall and asked, “Doesn't that look a little like Oscar holding on to your ankle?” To me, it looked like a meaningless scribble. But, knowing how mothers are about their kids, I pretended to agree with her. This made Theodora very happy.

The only good thing about the daytime Oscar? He was so busy wreaking havoc that he hardly talked at all. It was the nighttime Oscar who wouldn't shut up.

The nighttime Oscar liked to keep me up half the night practicing all the words he refused to say in the daytime. During the day, Theodora would point to something like the kitchen stove and say, “Stove.” Of course, the daytime Oscar would get that dumb, squinty look and say nothing. But as soon as the lights were out, the nighttime Oscar would keep repeating all sorts of words that came close to regular English. I became an unwilling expert on what I like to call Oscar-speak. He would shout words like “stofe,” “fwidge” and “nana” over and over until it just about drove me crazy.

It was almost like he was trying to impress me with his astounding nocturnal word power. Every time I whispered, “Shut up, Oscar!” he would just laugh. Then he would politely adjust his scream to the type of ear-piercing squeal that nobody could hear but me and maybe a few neighborhood dogs.

In between, it was a constant stream of Oscar-speak. “Ca-Pooter!” Or maybe “Lectwisity! Lectwisity! Lectwisity!” Sometimes I would manage to doze off for a minute or two only to be woken up by Oscar shouting things in his sleep between snores. Often they would be his favorite nighttime words all strung together. (“Ca-pooter-lectwisity-nana!”) No matter how much I tried to prepare for this, it startled me every time.

I could have requested another set of earplugs from Theodora, but there was no way I was going to let some screechy little kid get the better of me. So I decided to try and tough it out. Unfortunately, this attitude did not do that much for my overall mental alertness.

At five thirty in the morning, the radio alarm clock would go off and the Biggie's jingle (“I like Biggie's! I like Biggie's! We're the best because we're big!”) forced me out of bed in the dark—all groggy and sleep-deprived—to fulfill my sentence of delivering newspapers to the eager readers of Snowflake Falls. Oscar would be staring at me, no matter how early I managed to get up and stumble around. Fresh from a few hours of serial snoring, he would shoot me an early morning grin and run through his collection of barnyard noises.

I got so desperate that I even made Oscar “a Lenny sandwich special,” consisting of sardines, raw onion and peanut butter on pumpernickel bread. I figured that either he'd hate it and be all mad at me or—at the very least—it might keep his mouth pasted shut until he actually fell asleep.

Do you know what? He loved it. I mean, he ate the Lenny special like there was no tomorrow, gumming his way through it while looking up at me with this weird, almost adoring, smile. Theodora was so grateful to me for making Oscar actually chew and swallow that she started baking completely inedible pies and cakes as my “special reward.”

Not only did I go to bed with an upset stomach, but Oscar repeatedly tortured me with a whole new word, which he stretched out like it was the most delicious word in his entire vocabulary. “Saa-mm-ich!”

After a few nights of sharing a room with Oscar, I began to get a little wonky from lack of sleep. It is a scientific fact that sleep deprivation can cause you to imagine all sorts of strange things. I think I was beginning to get what you might call paranoid.

Remember how Judge Barnaby said that people would be watching me to make sure I obeyed the law? Well, I began to notice that various citizens of Snowflake Falls were actually taking notes on me as I went about my business. It got to be that I couldn't scratch my nose without somebody writing it down. Do you have any idea what it's like to be watched all the time? The other day, I was in the grocery store and picked up an apple to check for bruises. Right away, some individual I didn't even know said, “You're going to pay for that, right?”

A few minutes later, I saw a lady look at me and then write something down on a pad. When I accused her of writing a secret report on my behavior, she looked startled and said she was just reminding herself to buy broccoli. I felt so bad that I went straight to the produce section and got her the nicest-looking bunch of broccoli I could find.

I started to think that everything was a secret test of my probationary conduct. I was in Wingate's Department Store when I noticed that twenty dollars had dropped out of a woman's purse while she was paying for something at the cash register. You have to understand that this is money that had dropped on the floor. To a thief, floor money practically falls into the category of winning the lottery.

The woman didn't notice her lost money at all. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to put my foot over the bill, pretend that I was bending over to tie my shoelace and then pocket the money. But I was so messed up that I just gave her the twenty dollars back. She rewarded me with a very pleasant smile.

I said, “You're going to write this down, aren't you?”

“Write what down?” she asked, totally puzzled. Making me realize that my honest act was completely wasted.

You see what I mean about lack of sleep? It was beginning to make even the simplest tasks seem difficult. For instance, prior to rooming with Oscar, I had absolutely no trouble riding a bicycle. Now, I had to concentrate on pedaling as if I was operating a crane or a small biplane. Even so, I could never get the hang of riding Charlotte's totally humiliating bike. It turned out that the side streets of Snowflake Falls were full of lumps, cracks and potholes. To make matters worse, the noble Gwenivere was too small for me to comfortably maneuver. No matter how hard I tried, I kept knocking my knees against the handlebars.

I was forced to pedal Gwenivere while wearing a heavy bag of newspapers on either shoulder. The two bags were so heavy that they made me swerve all over the road. One bag was for the
Vancouver Chronicle
, which was shipped to town by ferry. This was the “big city” daily that many Snowflakers subscribed to for all their worldly news. The other bag contained a bunch of advertising flyers as well as a weekly local paper called the
Flurry
. It featured such thrilling headlines as “Why Are There So Many Cracks in Our Sidewalks?”

But this was nothing compared to the fact that Charlotte made me wear her adjustable pink bicycle helmet whenever I was riding Gwenivere. The helmet had a whole bunch of stickers on it. But not enough to hide the fact that it was pink. There was a yellow glow-in-the-dark sticker on the side in the shape of a stop sign that read
Safety First!
There was a whale-shaped sticker that read
Save the Whales
. And there was a sticker in the shape of a teddy bear that read
Have you
had your special hug today?