Truth and Lies (5 page)

Many heads ducked to many books. All around me, fingers ran down lines of text in search of an answer. Jeez, I hated Shakespeare. Why couldn't we read a play in regular English, something you had at least half a chance of being able to skim?

“Mike?” Ms. Stephenson said.

I glanced down at my book, but what was the point? I wasn't going to be able to come up with the right answer. I shrugged at Ms. Stephenson and tried to look like I was sorry.

Ms. Stephenson sighed again. She also taught drama, so her breath came out like a rush of wind. She looked around again.

“Salvatore?” she said. “You look like someone who
can tell us something about the subject of madness. Would you enlighten us all, please?”

Sal had been hunched over his desk, looking like he usually did these days, like a guy who never slept, a guy who was being eaten alive by something.

“Salvatore?” Ms. Stephenson said.

Sal's head bobbed up. His eyes were red around the edges. He seemed to be making an effort to focus on her.

“Madness,” Ms. Stephenson prompted. “I'm sure
you
can tell us what has driven Ophelia to madness.”

Sal spasmed to a full upright position, like he'd been jolted with a stun gun. He swept the room with wild eyes. Then he jumped to his feet. He stared at Ms. Stephenson, his mouth open. For a moment it looked like he was going to say something, maybe even shout something. Then he grabbed his backpack from under his desk and bolted from the room. A couple of guys—guys in the back of the room—laughed.

“Talk about madness,” someone said. More people laughed.

I stared at the door. What was with Sal? I didn't even think about it, I just stood up. Ms. Stephenson gave me a sharp look.

“Sit down,” she said. She crossed to the phone on the wall beside the door. She was going to call the office. Well, let her. I grabbed my backpack and hurried after Sal.

I heard Ms. Stephenson call my name. I knew her next move would be to report Sal and me both to the
office, but I didn't care. I paused in the hall for a moment and listened. I heard footsteps, faint, fading, off to the right. I headed for them and rounded the corner just in time to see a door ease shut at the far end of the hall. Sal was half a block up the street by the time I pushed my way out into the morning sun.

“Sal!” I shouted. “Hey, wait up!”

He didn't stop. He didn't even slow down. I had to really pump it to catch up with him.

“Hey, Sal!”

Sal kept pounding up the hill. He didn't glance over his shoulder, didn't give any sign at all that he had heard me. I had to grab his arm to get his attention. He shook me off like he was shaking off a bad smell.

“Hey, what's the matter with you?” I said. I was breathing hard now, trying to keep up with Sal as he motored up the hill. “Sal, hey!”

He kept ahead of me, his back to me, still pumping away so that it took a while for me to realize that his shoulders were shaking.

“Jeez, Sal—”

“Leave me alone,” he said.

I picked up my pace and passed in front of him. He turned his head away, but not before I got a good look.

“You been crying?” I said. If I'd thought for half a second, I would have kept my mouth shut and saved him the embarrassment. But I was so surprised. Tear streaks were pretty much the last thing I'd expected to see on his face.

“I told you, leave me alone,” he said. He spun around and shoved me, catching me off guard. He hit me hard on the chest and sent me flying backward so suddenly that I lost my balance.

My hands flew out to try to break my landing. They hit the sidewalk at the same time as my butt. My tail-bone jarred against the concrete. The palms of my hands burned as they slid along the rough surface. I sat on the sidewalk, stunned at how hard he had shoved me, stunned that he had shoved me at all. I held out my hands and looked at them. The skin was scraped right off in places and grit was hammered into the wounds. It stung so bad that my eyes started to water, but there was no way
I
was going to cry, not with Sal standing right there.

He stared down at me. Then he reached out and took me by one wrist and hauled me to my feet. He didn't say anything. We walked up the hill side by side and kept going until we hit Danforth. I nodded toward the doughnut shop on the corner.

Sal shook his head. “It's on Carl's list.”

Carl was the hall monitor at school. He was a retired firefighter and a nice enough guy if you weren't cutting class and he wasn't out checking all the regular places kids went when they were supposed to be sitting at a desk in math or French or history.

“No one's home at my—” I'd been going to say, at my house. But it wasn't my house. “At Riel's.”

Sal nodded. He didn't say anything on the way and I didn't push him. When we got there, we didn't go inside.
Instead we circled around the house and sat on the back porch. For five minutes, maybe ten, Sal was quiet. Then he said, “The cops were at my house last night.” His voice sounded funny, kind of high and trembling. “It's my dad.”

Sal's dad had been in prison in Guatemala, where Sal's family is from. Sal said he had never been the same afterward. He'd been a university professor back home, but the only job he'd been able to get in Canada was office cleaner. He worked nights at a downtown office building, emptying other people's garbage, cleaning other people's toilets, dusting other people's desks. Sal said he hated it—it made him depressed.

“He's been getting worse,” Sal said. He raked his nose with the sleeve of his jacket. He looked down at the floor of the porch, not at me. “He's been talking to himself a lot lately,” he said. “He was like that when he got out of prison. He never talked about what happened to him in there, but he used to sit in the dark in his study, and he used to mutter to himself. He's doing it again now. My mother tries to act like everything's fine, but I can tell she's scared. My aunt keeps trying to talk him into seeing a shrink, but he won't.” Sal's aunt was a doctor.

I didn't know what to say. I had met Sal's dad a couple of times. Mr. San Miguel was a small, wiry man who always seemed to be in fidgety motion. Once he had talked to me for a long time in Spanish. The only Spanish I understood was
si
and
gracias
and
una cerveca, por favor
, which I had learned from Billy after he went to
Mexico once. Later, when I asked Sal what his dad had said, Sal said it was a poem. Sal's dad had recited a poem to me in Spanish. Weird.

“Then last night, in the middle of the night, he started shouting that they were coming,” Sal said.

“They?”

“I think he meant the army,” Sal said. “When he was arrested that time, when he was in prison, it was the army. Soldiers came to the house to arrest him. They beat him up right there in the kitchen. My mother tried to stop them and they kicked her in the stomach. They beat him and they dragged him out of the house and we didn't see him again for three years. My mother never said so, but I'm pretty sure she thought he was dead.”

I couldn't think of anything to say. I knew Sal's father had been in prison, but Sal had never gone into details. For sure he had never talked about soldiers coming to his house and beating up his father in his own kitchen. He had never talked about his mother getting kicked in the stomach either.

“He started shouting that they were coming and he grabbed the weed whacker and ran out of the house,” Sal said. “This was, I don't know, two in the morning. He was out there in the yard, in his pajamas, yelling. And then the guy who lives next door came out. That guy never liked my dad. He started yelling for him to shut up, and my dad was yelling that no one was going to take him away again, no one was going to hurt his family again, but it was all in Spanish, you know, and
that guy next door, he's English, he doesn't know any Spanish. So he's just yelling at my dad to shut up, it's two in the morning and normal people are trying to sleep. And he tries to grab my dad and shove him back into the house. And my dad, I don't know what he was thinking, but he goes after the guy with the weed whacker. Then the guy's wife calls the cops, and next thing you know there's cops and cop cars and people everywhere.”

“Did they arrest him?” I said.

Sal shook his head. “I think they were going to. The guy next door sure wanted them to. But my mother talked to them. She convinced them not to arrest him.” He kept staring at the floor. His voice dropped to a whisper. “He's pretty bad,” he said. “I think he's pretty sick, you know?”

Yeah, I knew. I remembered what Sal had said about Mr. Ducharme.
He's crazy, you can see it in his eyes
. I wondered what Sal saw in his father's eyes.

“Hey, Mike?” Sal was looking at me now for the first time since we'd left school. “Don't tell anyone, okay?”

“No problem,” I said.

“I mean it,” Sal said. “It's bad enough, what's going on. But—”

Maybe it was because he hadn't slept much the night before. Maybe it was because he was worried. Maybe it was those things that made him look so white—Sal, whose skin is normally darker than mine, not brown exactly, but darker. It wasn't dark now, at least his face wasn't.

“You promise?”

“Yeah, I promise.”

We sat on the back porch for a little longer. Then we walked over to Coxwell and had lunch at McDonald's.

“You want to go back to school?” I asked when we'd finished.

Sal shook his head. “I can get my mom to write me a note, say I was sick. What about you?” he said. “You gonna get into trouble with Riel?”

I said no, mostly so Sal wouldn't feel bad. Riel would probably hear that I had walked out in the middle of English class. He'd be mad. I'd have to tell him something. But what?

“I better go back to school,” I said.

Sal didn't try to talk me out of it the way Vin would have if he and I had left school in the middle of the morning.

I was tagged by the hall monitor the minute I pushed open the door into school.

“Returning to the scene of the crime, huh, Mike?” Carl said. He shook his head, as if I were an arsonist who had come back to watch the fire I had set. Whatever.

He escorted me to the office—where I had been planning to go anyway. I knew Ms. Stephenson had reported me. I wasn't dumb enough to think I could sneak back into school and nothing was going to happen.

Mr. Gianneris gave me a detention, which he agreed to let me serve during lunch on Monday so that it wouldn't interfere with my job. Mr. Gianneris was a lot like Riel that way. To him a job was a VERY BIG
DEAL. He wasn't going to mess it up for me if he could avoid it.

For once Mrs. Kiros showed up on time to relieve me. I slung my backpack over one shoulder and headed home, cutting through a parking lot north of Danforth, then crossing the street. You could go for blocks from parking lot to parking lot in this neighborhood. As I moved from one to the other, I had to cross an alley lined on both sides with garages. As I glanced up it, I was startled to see Vin with a group of kids. I automatically raised a hand to wave, then caught myself and shoved my hand into my pocket. Vin hadn't seen me, and I wasn't sure I wanted him to. He didn't call me much anymore. Okay, so he didn't call me at all anymore. That bothered me—a
lot
. But there was nothing I could do about it. Then, just as I was wishing I was hanging with Vin and wishing at the same time that I could slip by unnoticed, he called to me.

“Mikey!”

I turned around and did my best to look surprised—
Whoa, what are you doing here?

Vin broke away from the rest of the gang, seven or eight of them, and came smiling toward me.

“Hey, where you going?” he asked. “Come on, you want to hang out with us?”

I had to get home. Riel was expecting me. If ever I
couldn't get home on time, I was supposed to call. But I didn't have a cell phone. Riel wouldn't let me
waste
—his word, not mine—my money on one. So if I had to make a call, I'd have to find a pay phone down on Danforth.

“Hey, come on,” Vin said. He threw an arm around my shoulder like he was my best pal, just like the good old days, and led me up the alley to where the rest of the gang was.

“I am not!” someone wailed. A girl. A little on the plump side. Not exactly pretty and wearing a lot of makeup to try to cover the fact. Orange hair. Tight jeans. One pierced eyebrow. Nose stud. Runny nose, swiped with the back of her hand. Downturned mouth. Smeared red lipstick.

“It's not a big deal,” another girl said. Cat.

“But it's not true,” the first girl said.

“If it isn't true, then why did he say it?” Cat asked. “Why would a nonentity like Bradley Tattersall tell all his loser friends in the—what is it, the
science
club?—why would he tell them that you watched a movie with him in his basement, on his couch, if it wasn't true?”