You Will Call Me Drog (2 page)

I slipped out onto the front porch to wait for her and shivered.

“Don’t expect me to speak a word to that creature,” Drog said. “Imagine! Calling Drog a doll!”

A freight train wailed in the distance. Probably headed for Chicago. Normally, I liked that sound, but right then it felt like a far-off scream. I stared at the nightmare on my hand and wanted to scream myself.

Hurry, Wren!

Finally she came around the corner, hopscotched up the walk, and flopped down on the porch steps.

“Show me!” she said, like this was going to be exciting.

I sank down next to her and held up my Drog hand.

Silence.

“Drog, tell Wren about the emir. About his gold-dust ice cream.”

I waited. Wren waited. Those painted eyes gazed into space.

“I thought you said it talks, Parker. Here, let me try it.”

“Um, that’s the trouble, Wren. I ... can’t get him off.”

“Oh, come on,” she said and pulled on his head.

Drog stuck to me like cement.

“Hey, why won’t you let me try?”

“Wren, listen. I can’t get him off. And he really does talk. It’s just—I guess he only talks to certain people.”

Her eyebrows scrunched together. “Stop it, will you? This isn’t funny.”

“Stop what?”

“Whatever it is you’re doing. Or at least let me in on it.”

“I can’t, Wren. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”

“Parker. This puppet does not talk.”

“Yes he
does
, you have to believe me! But he told me ... he wouldn’t talk to you.”

“Oh.”

She sat back and picked at some loose paint on the porch step.

“Is that why you asked me over? To tell me you’re having private conversations with this puppet?”

“No, Wren, I—”

“I knew we should have left it at the junkyard. Now it’s got you making up stories and being ... a pig.”

Her eyes shut halfway, and she studied me, waiting. For what?

Then she hauled herself up, zipped her jacket, and jammed her hands in the pockets, “Well you can talk to
your
puppet all you want. I’m going back home now.”

“Wren, wait. You don’t understand. I need—”

She turned back toward me. “You need to take that
Drog
back where you got it.”

Then she was gone.

Please, Wren. Don’t leave me alone with this. You can’t!

But wishing hard into the space she’d left behind didn’t bring her back.

“Now look what you did!” I said to Drog.

“What?” he crooned. “I did you a favor.”

Mom opened the front door. “Did I hear Wren? Sounded like arguing out here.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t think much of this puppet I found.”

“Oh, is that all?”

I shook my head. “He doesn’t think much of her, either.”

She smiled, like I was making a joke.

“Gotta do my homework,” I mumbled and ducked inside.

I did have days of assignments to do, mostly math, but there was no way I could start any of it. I holed up in my room and tried to watch TV with the sound off. All I could see, though, was a hideous talking puppet where my hand ought to be. And no Wren. She wasn’t just any friend. How could she leave me with this?

When she moved to town the summer before third grade, Wren Rivera was like no kid I’d ever known. Instead of growing up in Ferrisburg with us, she’d lived in a kind of rough neighborhood near Chicago. She was half Mexican and part German and part something else I forget, and she had a father who worked out of his garage and drank hot chocolate instead of coffee and made tacos stuffed with mashed potatoes and chili peppers for their Sunday breakfast. No one else we knew called their father Papa.

Wren wore her hair in one long braid and carried an egg-shaped stone in her pocket that she said was probably an agate. Everybody was curious about her, but nobody thought about being her friend.

Except me. One Saturday she was read-walking a book on Illinois rocks and minerals down the aisle at the library and ran right into me. We ended up at her house that day, looking over the rocks in her collection—flints, quartzes, a geode—even a fossil worm. None of them came from a rock shop. She found them all herself and looked them up.

Right then I knew we were more alike than any other two kids in town. We both really go after something we’re interested in until we’ve done everything we can about it. We get each other into it, too. Without me, Wren would never have gone poking around in the junkyard. Without her, I might never have thought about what was inside of rocks.

She told me she found her pocket stone in a streambed on the way to Ferrisburg. A couple of mineral stains and markings on it that I barely noticed made her think it was an agate. She hoped so, because it would be her first. I asked her why she didn’t just break it open and see if it was, but she said, “Right now I just want to believe it is.” She wished it could be a fire agate or a crazy lace, but those you could only find in Mexico or the Southwest, she said.

She brought out a whole book just on agates and showed me the pictures. The fire agates glowed like opals, and the crazy-lace patterns looked like rings and veins of colored parsley or holly leaves.

There were lots of other cool ones too. Most had bands of color coming out from the center—like wavy growth rings or lava flows or raccoon eyes. The colors might be milky blues and grays or bright orange and red and moss green. And they all had formed inside totally ordinary-looking rocks.

I wasn’t in a hurry for Wren to crack open her stone, either. As long as she didn’t, almost any one of those patterns or colors in the book could be inside—or something else completely. It was more fun to think about that way.

I might not even have gotten started with carpentry if it wasn’t for Wren. That first day, she took me out to her dad’s shop in the garage, where he was working on this amazing project, a whole miniature house for her, open on one side, with everything made of wood—a winding staircase, inlaid floors, and cabinets with little drawers that pulled out. Wren was helping him sand and glue and decide what went where. To me that garage full of sawdust and oiled tools was a magic shop, and Mr. Rivera was the magician who would teach me secrets.

Wren and I spent what was left of that summer hanging out in her dad’s shop and building a tree house in the crabapple tree at my house. One day, when we were up in the tree daring each other to eat the sour fruit, Wren told me a secret.

“I’m learning Spanish,” she said. “Online. Only don’t tell Papa.”

“Okay. But why not?”

“He wants me to wait until I can take it in high school and learn it right. He won’t even speak it to me, except for a few words. He says his Spanish isn’t good.”

“But you want to start now.”

She nodded. “I can’t help it. Spanish is fun. It makes everything sound like you’re singing.
La violeta, las mon-tanas, la jirafa. Muy delicioso, no?
”

I laughed and answered “
Si
,” one of the only Spanish words I knew. I could hear what she meant, but some of that singing had to be from the way she said the words.

“Papa says if I do well in Spanish class, he’ll take me on a trip to South America or even Spain so I can practice.”

“You’ll do it. Wren. I bet you do well in everything.”
Not like me
.

Her face got red. And then I told her a secret of mine.

“After Mom and Dad got divorced,” I said, “I used to climb up here every day, even if it was raining. That way I could cry all I wanted and only the wind would hear me.”

I couldn’t help crying again right then, just thinking about it. Wren listened and rolled her pocket stone against her knee for a while, then she scrambled down and ran home. In a few minutes she came back with one half of her prize geode and put it in my hand.

“Keep it, amigo,” she said.

The thing was dull and rough like a ball of concrete on the outside, but inside was a small cave full of icy pink crystals pointing toward the center. She said that the day she cracked that geode open, the field trip leader told her, “You are the first one to see this in a hundred million years.” And half of it was mine.

That
was Wren. We might get mad at each other sometimes, but Wren stood by me. Even when Dad got married again and I said some stupid things for a while. How could she give up on me now—over a stuck-up puppet?

She couldn’t. By morning she’d be back on my side, and between the two of us we’d figure out what to do. Meanwhile, I was on my own.

“Bedtime, Drog,” I said, trying hard to sound matter-of-fact. It was only eight-thirty. “I can’t sleep with you on, so—”

I yanked on him again, but he held tight. Does he even sleep? I wondered. I flicked off the light and sank down on my bed. If he did, maybe he’d come loose and I could get him off me.

“Now, then,” Drog said. “I shall tell you a bedtime story.”

“A bedtime story? I’m not a little kid.”

“Excellent. Because this isn’t a little kid’s story. It’s about Farina, the emir’s favorite dancing girl. Raven hair down to her toes, skin like silk, bones like water, and spangles where she jangled, if you know what I mean. Whew! My lights flicker just thinking about her.”

I kicked my shoes across the room. “Drog, I—”

“One day the emir clapped his hands to summon her, but she didn’t appear. Found her in the linen closet, but she would not come out.”

“Why not?”

Drog ignored me.

“‘Alas, I can no longer dance for you,’ she said.

“No one refuses a summons from the emir, you understand. But he had a weakness for her, so he said, ‘Oh please, you shall have apricots and pomegranates, pendants of lapis lazuli—’”

It was creepy how the puppet switched voices like that.

“Farina lifted her skirt to show him her once-delicate feet. They were now bright orange and webbed like a duck’s.”

“How come?” I asked.

“Sorcery, most probably. One of the emir’s jealous wives must have—”

He nodded off right in the middle of his own sentence. He even started to snore. But as soon as I tried pulling him off, he contracted on my hand.

I let him get back to snoring. Then I pretended I just accidentally rubbed him against the bed frame in my sleep. He tightened again.

No more accidentally. I scraped him against the bed and the desk. I yanked on his head, his hands, his shirt. My heart boomed,
ga-whomp
,
ga-whomp
. Could an eleven-year-old have a heart attack?

I reached back to smash him against the wall, but he squeezed my hand so hard I thought my fingers would pop.

“My, my, my,” he said. “You don’t understand, do you?”

“No! I don’t understand!”

“Very simple,” he said, easing up. “You stop trying to get me off, I stop squeezing.”

“Parker?” Mom called from her room. “Anything wrong?”

“Ah,” Drog whispered, “are we going to cry for Mama?”

I had to answer her. “No, Mom. It’s—I had a nightmare.”

She came to the door. “Want to tell me about it?”

I shoved Drog under my pillow. “No, that’s okay. I’m all right.” I couldn’t believe I said that.

“Sure? You don’t sound all right.”

I nodded, so I wouldn’t have to speak.

“Well, good night, then. Take it easy, honey.”

I waved with my free hand.

She leaned against the doorjamb a minute, then left. I took Drog out again.

“That’s more like it,” he said. “This is just between you and me.”

“What is?” I said, clenching my teeth to stop their chatter-racketing. “Why are you doing this?”

“Why? Drog doesn’t need a reason.”

“But why me, Drog? Haven’t I been a pretty good kid?”

“I have no idea. Why would you want to be a good kid?”

Some words raced around way in the back of my mind, and then I remembered what they were:
If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off
. That’s from the Bible, I think. It gave me an idea.

My problem was with my left hand, not my right, and I sure didn’t want to cut either one off. Just Drog. I waited for him to go back to sleep. Waited a few extra minutes to be sure. Then I kept my left arm as still as I could so I wouldn’t wake him up while I felt all around on my desk with my right hand—pencils, marker, bike key, then the cool metal of the scissors.

Drog woke right up. “Do you really think your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing?”

I held on to the scissors and opened them.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” he said.

My hand stopped in midair. His voice sounded so icy. So superior.

“Well, you’re—you’re not me,” I said.

“Oh? I am now, ha-ha! Anyway, as I was telling you, at the sight of those ugly duck feet the emir went into a rage. . . .”

I dropped the scissors onto the desk and fell back on the pillow.

What if what Drog said was true? What if he was becoming a part of me, some kind of jabbering mutant growth? I had to get out of this.
Think, think
.

My sheet twisted up and my eyeballs dried out—and then I heard the sudden quiet and let out my breath. Drog was asleep.

For once, I was glad Dad wasn’t around to know what was going on. What would he do if this happened to him?