This Is Not a Werewolf Story (3 page)

“Fank you, Mr. Tuffman,” Sparrow says with big eyes.

“No
fanks
to you, that's what Mr. Mousie says.”

Sparrow puts the mouse back in its cage.

“I'm still talking to you, so look at me. Look at me when I'm talking to you,” Tuffman says.

Sparrow's lower lip starts to wiggle.

“When you clean these cages, it's your duty to protect these animals. Do you understand the word ‘duty'? Do you? Answer me.”

Sparrow can't say a word. He's shaking, and I want to grab Tuffman by the throat and make him shake too.

If I met him one weekend in White Deer Woods—when the woods magic was happening to me—I could scare him pretty good. He wouldn't even know it was me.

The idea of me pouncing on him in the woods must have made me smile a little.

“You hear something funny, weirdo?” he asks me.

His eyes paralyze me.

“Nothing about this is funny. I don't like to see
animals in cages. It ain't natural. But you kids want your pets. You make an animal helpless, then you darn well better help it. You turned it into a baby. You're its parents now.”

The room is so quiet.

“I can see why a kid like you wouldn't understand.” His voice gets meaner.

My face burns.

“How could you understand how parents are supposed to act? What kind of mother walks out on her kid? And your dad sticking around was hardly better. I read your file.” He digs a finger in his ear. “Parental neglect. That's what the state social worker called it. It says she found you eating on the floor like a dog. It says you didn't know what soap was.”

I'm not going to cry.
That's all I can think.
I'm not going to cry in front of Mary Anne.
I pay attention to my mouth. As long as you keep your mouth straight, nobody can tell you're sad.

“Is your old man still forgetting to come get you on weekends?”

“His dad comes.” Sparrow sticks up for me.

From the corner of my eye I see Mean Jack yank Sparrow back. “Let it go,” Mean Jack says in a low voice.

“That was a real pain for the dean, you know? All the other parents remember to get their kids on the
weekends. Except your dad. How can a father
abandon
his son? That's what the dean would say.”

It's funny. Words are air and spit. But they can hit you harder than any fist or belt or slap. They leave bruises in your belly and on your heart and in your mind that will never turn yellow and purple and fade. That will ache every time you remember them.

And he's lying about the dean. I know he is.

“What kind of kid can parents like that make? You tell me, Raul. What kind of kid did your mom make?”

He's not going to stop until I talk or cry. My mouth slips.

“We understand,” Mary Anne says. She steps in front of Tuffman so that me and Sparrow end up behind her. She looks him straight in the eye. “I know you'll agree that we ought to finish our task here. If we were all to miss breakfast, I'm sure Dean Swift would expect a faithful account of every deed and every
word
.”

Tuffman's eye twitches. Mary Anne's playing hardball. Dean Swift wouldn't like it if he knew someone was telling stories about my parents like that. Especially since they're true.

Tuffman opens the door to leave and then turns back.

“Sparrow,” he says, “do you know what a loser is? A loser is someone who loses things. Things like games, or races, or mice. Try harder. Try harder not to be such a loser.”

The door slams. The room moves again. Mr. Baggins's wheel squeaks. Gandalf stretches.

Mean Jack looks from me to Sparrow. “Forget about it, you two. The guy's a schmuck, don't know his head from his—”

The door opens again and slams shut. Before any of us can stop him, Sparrow has flown out of the room, sobbing.

Tuffman made Sparrow cry.

All my sad turns to mad. I must look like I'm about to charge after Tuffman and drop him. Mary Anne grabs my arm and pulls it down, like it's a leash on a lunging dog.

“Whatever you do will just make it worse,” she says.

She keeps her hand on my arm, and I know she's trying to say she feels bad about what Tuffman said to me. The tears jump from my throat to my eyes.

“Yo. Forget about the jockstrap. He's just trying to get under your skin,” Mean Jack says. “We got bigger fish to fry here. Has anyone seen the snake?”

Mary Anne's face goes white.

Mean Jack takes charge. “Me and Mary'll finish up spring cleaning here. Raul, you go collar Sparrow. Last thing we need is this story getting back to the authorities.”

Last thing
you
need, you mean. But it's hard to hate a kid who just saved you from bawling in front of your
crush. And he's right. Forget about Tuffman. It's my fault anyway. I let him get under my skin. I let him see what I was thinking. I have to be careful. Words aren't the only thing that can give my secrets away.

“Come on, Bobo,” I say.

She stands up and stretches. I hear her joints crack. As we head out the door, she puts her nose in my hand.
Thank you,
she's saying. You always know what a dog really means. Did you ever think of that? A dog
can't
lie.

There's a drawer in my mind where I put things I don't like. I shove everything Tuffman just said in it.

I know where Sparrow is, and I'm not gonna let him sit there and cry all alone in the dark.

When Sparrow feels bad he runs to Fort Casey. He's stealthy. Nobody but me ever sees him go. He dashes across the big field in the middle of the fort and heads for a bunker built into the hillside. The Blackout Tunnel is the darkest, blackest, scariest place you can imagine. If by some freak occurrence a prehistoric man-eating, bone-gnawing dinosaur survived the asteroid, then
that's
where it'd be living. Put your hand in front of your face. Now bring it so close that it's almost touching your nose but isn't. If you were in the Blackout Tunnel, you wouldn't be able to see that hand.

I head out the front door. I take the path the new kid took, but nobody is going to call security on me because
1) I'm not what they call a “flight risk”—meaning I've never tried to run away—and 2) Dean Swift believes in what he calls “personal liberty”—which as far as I can tell is a fancy way of saying that kids should play outside a lot and grown-ups shouldn't bug them much. Over the front door he had me carve a sign that says
Silva Curat!
which is Latin for
The forest heals!

I'm warning you. Do
not
ask him about the forest and its wondrous ability to Heal children. His eyes will pop up round as boiled egg yolks, and he'll talk until your ears bleed.

I agree with him, though. Only, I would've carved something different. I would've carved
The forest has secrets.
I should write Mary Anne a note and ask how to say that in Latin. But then she'd want to know the secrets.

I look around, remembering the feeling I had earlier this morning when the crows gathered. It's gone but I know it's near. Today's Thursday. Woods magic happens Friday at sunset. Everyone likes the weekend. But I like it most of all.

Bobo lopes up ahead. The path drops off and she jumps down onto the driftwood pile. Her hind legs give way and I wince for her. She forgets how old she is. But a second later she's at the water's edge, barking at the waves.

A gleam down near Bobo catches my eye. It's black and shiny. As I get closer I see it's a helmet. It must have
gotten knocked off the kid's head when he got tackled.

I pick it up. Bobo sniffs it. Her eyes ask,
Good to eat?
I scratch her ears.
You'll break every one of your last five teeth on it, dog.

I set the helmet on a driftwood log so I remember to grab it on the way back.

Sparrow doesn't want to come out of the Blackout Tunnel.

“Come on!” I yell. Even if I didn't have Bobo, I wouldn't go in there. It reeks. My nose sniffs. I don't want to but I do, because that's how my nose works. I smell wet cat, reptile cage, park toilet, and something else—something familiar. After a few more sniffs I smile.

“Get out already, Sparrow,” I yell. “It smells like Tuffman's breath in there!”

Sparrow's sputter of a laugh echoes off the walls and pings toward me like a bouncy ball. That's all it takes with Sparrow. Make him laugh and his worries are over.

He races out, drops to his knees. and throws his arms around Bobo. She licks his face like it's the most important thing she'll do all day long.

“What took you so long?” he asks.

All the way back to the school he won't stop talking. It turns out it wasn't just my joke that got him to come out. He'd also found an awesome bone.

“Is it human?” he asks me for the fiftieth time as we head down from the fort to the beach. “I fink it's someone's pinkie finger bone. Maybe the monster ate all of someone but was too full for the pinkie. This is all that's left. Poor guy. In heaven with no pinkie.” He looks at me and grins. “It's a monster that only eats PE teachers.”

We could use a monster like that around here.

I think it's the jawbone of a raccoon that a coyote must have dragged in there, but I let him ramble on and on about the very exclusive diet of his monster.

Why burst his bubble? I've seen some things in White Deer Woods that nobody would believe.

In fact,
I
am something that nobody would believe.

I shake that thought away. It's best to keep my worlds separate, even in my head. Look what happened with Tuffman. Just thinking about woods magic can get me in trouble.

On the way up the zigzag path Sparrow wears the new kid's helmet. He's so small, it covers his head and rests on his shoulders.

“I'm Darth Vader,” he says. He holds the bone like a lightsaber and waves it in front of me. “Raul,” he says in a gravelly voice. “I am your father.”

I smile but I must look sad, because he takes the helmet off.

“You wanna hold the bone?” he asks after a second.

I nod. Of course I wanna hold the bone.

After I drop Sparrow off at the dean's office to find out about the bone, I look at my watch. Twenty minutes left before the dining hall stops serving hot food.

But to get to the dining hall you have to walk by the wood shop. Every day I do the same thing. I take one step into the wood shop, just to breathe in the smell of sawdust, and I'm hooked. I get busy carving or sanding, and before I know it an hour has slipped by.

Dean Swift told me once about the scientific method.

“Everything you need to know is in front of you, Raul,” he said. “You have to figure out the design. When a scientist wants to come up with a theory and prove it, he reads and wonders and observes. The truth is there all along, sitting hidden in the facts.”

It's the same with a carving. The carving is in the wood, waiting for my knife to free it.

The fishing pole I'm making for Sparrow is almost done. This is my favorite part, where I take the fine-grain sandpaper and rub the birch wood until it's soft as sugar.

My mom's hands felt that way when she would rub my back before I fell asleep. I miss her. It makes me feel bad to say that. I bet it makes you feel bad to read it. I don't want my story to make anyone sad.

So I'll tell you part of my secret: I miss her a whole lot less now than when I first got here.

Tuffman can talk all he likes. They all can. The words burn, but they're smoke, not fire—just the ashes of the truth, just what's left of it.

The truth about my mom is beyond words.

I finish sanding Sparrow's new pole. It's a beauty, way better than the last one I made for him. He broke the last one using it as a drumstick.

Do you want to know what the other drumstick was?

A lightbulb.