You Will Call Me Drog (4 page)

The phone rang. Dad. He talked to Mom first.

In the summer Dad drives down from Moline every other Saturday to pick me up for the weekend, but during the school year he mostly just calls and I don’t see him much. Except when he makes a special trip to take me to the dentist. I guess he thinks Mom wouldn’t remember to do that. Mom’s a free spirit, he says, and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment.

Mom looked up over the phone at me and shook her head. She didn’t say anything to him about Drog. Then it was my turn.

“Hello, Son. What’s new?”

“Nothing much.”
I’ve just got a sarcastic green puppet superglued to my hand, that’s all
.

“What have you been doing lately?”

How lately?
“Oh, hanging out with Wren.”

“Don’t you ever play with the boys? Soccer or something?”

Here we go
. “Sometimes. At school.”

By “playing” Dad means going around with a bunch of boys and doing whatever they do. Or joining a team. But doesn’t playing mean doing whatever you want? I like to decide what to do when the time comes, just fool around and make things up. Wren’s like that too. And she’s fun and easy to be with. At least before Drog she was.

Dad thinks I should have dozens of friends. He’s got about a hundred programmed into his phone. He doesn’t even count Wren, because she’s a girl.

“... done your homework yet, Parker?” Dad was saying.

“Um, no, but I’ve just got some English and math. No tests.”

“I loved math when I was a kid.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.
And I bet I know exactly what you’re going to say next: the great thing about math—

“The great thing about math is, every problem has a solution,” he said.

I put the phone on speaker and doodled on the message pad. A boy with curly hair and a banana in each ear.

“Here’s a story problem for you,” Drog said. “If Parker gets a dollar for each time his dad tells him he loved math—”

Dad cleared his throat. “Did you say something, Parker?”

I stuffed Drog into my pocket.

“I said ... I got an A in art. We made Egyptian gods out of clay. I made the god Bes. Mine’s the bes’, get it?”

There was silence for a moment. “Well, good. Put your mother back on, please. I’ll talk to you again next week.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t stick around to hear Mom’s end of the conversation. Her voice always sounded tired talking to Dad. I hauled my book bag upstairs.

“Now, let’s see, where were we?” Drog said.

“We?”

“Aha, you speak French?”

“No, I—”

“Do you speak any languages at all, Boy? Other than this clumsy English, I mean?”

“No.”
And I barely get Bs in English
.

“Well, I suppose that would be too much to expect in these dreary times. Oh, the stories the emir and I used to tell together! And his son! Now there was a boy I could respect. Each day we acted out the most elegant tales in different languages: Farsi, Arabic, Svengali, Gelato—”

“Drog, I ... I’ve got stuff to do for tomorrow.”

With my free arm, I swung my book bag onto my desk, reached in for my English 6 book, and stared at my way-overdue assignment.

“Let me see,” Drog said.

I brought my Drog hand up next to the book.

“English. Excuse me, you do speak English, don’t you?” Drog said.

“Yes, but—”

“Then surely to study English is a ridiculous waste of your time.”

“Oh, right! Tell that to Mrs. Belcher!”

Drog snickered. “Why would I tell anything to anyone named—ha-ha!—Belcher? What a disgusting name.”

I made up a few quick sentences, then turned to my math problems. Drog peered at the page.

“What rubbish!” he said after a minute. “This book is based on erroneous principles. It can only confuse you.”

“You’re the one who’s confusing me! Why do you talk like that, anyway? ‘This book is based on erroneous principles.’ Why don’t you just say what you mean?” I scribbled any old answers and slammed the book shut.

“You don’t learn real mathematics from books anyway,” Drog said. “Why, you should have been with the emir and me the time we journeyed up the Silk Road to meet his good friend Cue-ball Khan of Mongolia. That was no ordinary khan, believe me, because he was seven feet tall. What a grand impression he made, coming through the mountain pass, seated in a carved jade saddle, the weight of which only one horse in Mongolia could bear!”

I’d have covered my ears, but I only had one hand. I wanted to choke his skinny neck with that one.

“Cue-Ball’s right-hand man was a mathematician named Zed, who measured the distance between stars and used the numbers to predict when it would be a good time for the khan to sell horses or take another wife or go to war. You see, Boy? You should quit school and travel the world with me. Now
that
would be an education.”

I jammed him into my pocket and headed downstairs to drop my backpack by the door.

Mom was still on the phone, but not with Dad.

“No, Nicole, I don’t think it’s the imaginary friend thing...”

I crouched down on the step to listen.

“After all, he’s eleven now, almost eleven and a half. Besides, it doesn’t seem to be a friend at all. That’s what’s got me worried.... I know, but he’s always been such a levelheaded kid, even through the divorce.... Yes, apparently he even slept with it on. Do you think ... I hate to hear him talking to himself.... Well, he
is
answering back.... Oh I’m sure you’re right. That’s what Mr. Fairweather said. No sense overreacting.”

What if Mom knew I tried to drown Drog? Would she think she was overreacting then?

I uncrouched and tiptoed back up the stairs, avoiding squeaky number four.

That night I managed to sleep all night, but Drog still haunted me. I dreamed I looked up into the puppet sleeve to see what was in there besides my hand. But as soon as I lifted the edge, a hollow voice that came from all around me said, “Are you sure?” Then there was this sucking, whooshing feeling and I was completely inside, floating alone in a huge darkness, with Drog and the glove way out there somewhere. I tried to touch down or reach out, but there was no floor or side, no up or down.

I held my breath, because the darkness around me wasn’t empty, exactly. It was full of mist. A white mist of ... loneliness. I couldn’t tell if that was Drog’s, or mine, or everybody’s in the whole world, but I was desperate not to breathe any in. I remember thinking,
This is forever
.

Nooooooooooooooo
, I screamed, but no sound came out.

I woke in my bed, cold with sweat from that horrible dream, and pulled the comforter up under my chin. The iron radiator clanked, and a faint pink morning light began to color my room with relief. I even laughed to see Drog back to normal size on my hand and to hear him snoring.

He woke up then and acted like he’d been awake first.

“What’s so funny?” he said. “Get up and get going, Boy. Amuse me.”

“Hey, Parker,” Charlie Sloat, a fifth-grader, called out. “What you got in your pocket? You playing with something in there?”

Everybody who could hear, which was just about everybody on the playground, cracked up laughing and came over. My face flamed. I pulled Drog out.

“Take it off,” Charlie yelled. “Take it all off!”

One of the girls said in a mocking voice, “He
can’t
.”

“Yuck!” Charlie said. “Gonna get finger jam!”

His friend Logan stepped up to look Drog over. “Is it true that puppet talks? For real?”

“Yeah.”

“That is so cool! I’ll give you ten dollars for it!”

“It is not cool! You don’t want him, believe me. And you haven’t got ten dollars.”

“Have too.”

“Logan, forget it. He only talks for me, anyway.” I turned away.

“See, you’re making it up. Liar!”

Bad enough to be teased by my sixth-grade class. But fifth-graders! Okay, so now if I left Drog out I was weird. And if I hid him in my pocket, everybody would think I was doing something embarrassing.

A stray soccer ball rolled by my feet, but I let it go on into the street. Why should I bother to kick it back?

Everyone
knows
there’s no such thing as a talking puppet, right? So when I tell people I have one, do they say, “Oh, well, we must be wrong, tell us all about it, Parker?” Nooooo. They’d rather believe I’m lying or that there’s something wrong with me. Instead of changing their minds about talking puppets, they change their minds about me. Even my mother. Even my best friend.

I guess telling the truth only works when you have something usual to say. But what else was I supposed to do? Pretend to be a liar or a weirdo like everybody thought?

Mrs. Belcher gave me in-room detention for coming to school with Drog on. Kind of an all-day time out. That way I could listen in and do my work behind the bookcases without distracting the class.

Wren floated a note down over the top of my bookcase cage:

Did I!

Neither of us have ever had a dog, because our moms are both allergic. Mom’s allergies haven’t bothered her much since Dad left, but when it comes to dogs, she says we’ve got enough to handle as it is, whatever that means. But Wren and I have gotten to know all the dogs in the neighborhood and we take them for walks sometimes. When one of them has a litter of pups, we like to go pick one out and pretend it’s ours.

“Draw
me
,” Drog said in art period. But Mrs. Belcher told us to draw something from memory, putting in as much detail as we could. I drew my left hand, because I wasn’t sure I was ever going to see it again.

It was hard. I remembered the scar on my index finger I got from a firecracker. And the place on my thumb where I had a wart burned off. But how did the other fingers go? I could draw a hand, but not
my
hand. Already I forgot what it looked like. I gave up and drew Drog. I could do him without looking. That awful stare.

As soon as the last bell rang, I grabbed my book bag and waited at the door so I could catch Wren coming out before she changed her mind. The other kids steered around me like I was the wrong end of a magnet.

“Vamos!”
Wren said, but she was smiling. It took me a minute to figure out she didn’t mean “Go away,” she meant “Let’s go.”

The Taylors’ dog, Kona, was all brown, but the five white pups looked like someone had splashed a bucket of rust-colored paint over them. We picked one that nosed into things more than the others. Wren held him to her cheek for a minute, then handed him to me. I took him with my free hand.

With Wren being friendly again, and with a freckly, wriggly puppy on my lap gumming my finger, my chest eased up for the first time since Sunday at the junkyard. It felt like a month since Sunday.

But then Wren asked me, sort of in a whisper, “The puppet, what did you call it?”

My stomach twisted. “Drog.”

“Drog. It didn’t talk to you, did it? Not really?” She stroked the puppy’s ear.

I wanted say, “No. I’m sorry I ever said that.” But I had to say, “Yeah, Wren, he did. He still does.”

She pulled her hand back. “Are you going to keep on doing this, then?”

“Doing what?”

“You know, leaving me out. Pretending you can’t help it.”

“Pretending? Why would I pretend?”

“I don’t
know,”
she wailed.

That made me mad. I was the one with the big problem, so why was she upset? All she had to do was believe me and help me think.

“It’s not so great for me, you know,” I snapped at her. “I feel like I’m
his
puppet!”

“Well, don’t be then. Be you. Take that stupid thing back to the junkyard.”

I didn’t answer. Whatever you could say about Drog, he wasn’t stupid.

She took the puppy from me and said she wanted to go. I felt like I had a chunk of apple stuck halfway down my throat.

The minute I got home and shut the door to my room, I pulled Drog back out of my pocket. Maybe I just wanted to see how bad I could make myself feel.

“That’s right,” he said. “Spend the whole afternoon having your selfish fun. And what about me? I’m supposed to just stand on my head in your pocket while you play? With puppies? How excruciatingly cute!”

Selfish? Look who’s talking.

“I thought Wren would like it better if I kept you out of sight, that’s all,” I said. “Why won’t you talk for her, anyway?”

“Humph! One has to have some standards. Good riddance, I say!”

“But Wren’s my friend.”

He sighed like he was trying to be patient. “Don’t you see, Boy? Now that you have Drog, you don’t need friends.”

Those words sucked the air right out of my mouth and started something roiling in my stomach, forcing its way to my throat. I ran to the toilet and threw up everything I ever ate.

I dragged back to my room then and fell onto my bed. Squiggly things danced around under my eyelids, and I could hear my blood rushing around inside, knocking against my skin. My bedside clock went
Chick tick chick tick chick tick
. A little torture machine.

Then my eyes shot open.

Suddenly I knew what to do about Drog! How to make him stop talking, anyway. And Wren actually gave me the idea.

I took him out again.

“That’s more like it, Boy,” he said. “Let’s do something interesting.”

“Ha! You can’t do anything, Drog. You’re just a ...
doll
.”

He stalled for about one minute, and then he laughed. “Ha-ha! Good one. You’re a bit sharper than I thought. Won’t work, though. You know why?”

The aftertaste of throw-up burned my throat. “Why?”

“Because you’re not that girl. I know you know I’m not a doll.”

“I hate you, Drog!” I said.

“Now you’re talking! Hate me all you like, Boy. It makes no difference. You and I were meant for each other.”

I glared at him. He glared back until I blinked. Then, although I would have given anything not to, I started crying.

I’d never felt so hopeless, except maybe the morning Dad and Mom told me they were getting divorced, but they would both always love me, blah blah. That same tight twisting in my chest that crying couldn’t help, but I had to cry anyway.

“Get lost, Drog!” I said, catching my breath, “Go ... go back to whatever dark hole you crawled out of. I wish I’d never seen your pukey green face, I wish—”

“Mercy, get a grip! Bad enough that I’m stuck with someone so awfully young and boring and ungrateful, but a crybaby? This is too much.”

Fresh anger stopped my tears. “What do you mean
you’re
stuck with
me
? If you don’t like it, at least
you
can do something about it!”

“Think so? Haul your head out of the wishing well now, Boy, and blow your nose. I don’t care to lie around listening to you snivel and regurgitate.”

I wanted to blow my nose all right. On him.

“Hmmm,” he went on. “What could we do that would be exciting? Maybe we should get involved with something ... illicit. A smuggling operation perhaps. Not guns, of course—too messy. Diamonds, rhinoceros horns, art objects, that sort of thing. You meet the most interesting people.”

“Smuggling? In Ferrisburg?”

Drog sighed. “You have a point. How can you bear to live here, thousands of miles from the bounding main? From anywhere, actually. Oh, If only you knew the adventures I’ve had! I assume you’ve heard of the mysterious Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam?”

It did sound kind of familiar, but I didn’t know where from.

“The Ruby Yacht would have been the eighth wonder of the world if it hadn’t disappeared. That boat had a will of its own, never liked to stay long in one place. I am proud to say it was once my privilege to ... liberate it.”

Oh great. Another story, with Drog the hero.

“I was then in the employ of a sultan who coveted that fabled yacht more than life itself. But at the time it belonged to Omar Khayyam of Persia. My job was to distract Omar with stories while the sultan’s agents bribed the crew with gold and sailed Omar’s gleaming white pleasure boat, its deck and masts studded with Burmese rubies, away in the dark of night.

“When we presented the ruby yacht to the sultan, he ordered a great feast and entertained us with dancing girls, hundreds of them. What a night! But the sultan himself only wanted to spend time on the yacht, sailing it back and forth on his private lake. Then one day he died. And the next day the yacht vanished.”

“What happened to it?”

“Who knows? Perhaps it is roaming the world still. Shall we go in search of it?”

I looked him in the eye. “Did you take it, Drog?”

“Would I be here talking to you if had? No, the sultan lost interest in puppets long before he died—”

“So he gave you to the emir, right?”

“You have too good a memory, Boy. But perhaps ... Ferrisburg also has some dancing girls?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so. Must Drog play with puppies, then? What sorry fortune. I might be content if I could have dancing girls.”

And maybe you’d shut up for a while.

I leaned over to the computer. “Wait,” I said. “Let me type in ‘dancing girls’ and see what happens.”

“I don’t want to write to them, Boy. I want to watch them.”

“Shhh.”

I couldn’t believe what popped up on the screen. Eight squares like windows, and in each one a naked lady shaking her behind all over the place. You couldn’t see their heads.

“Aha!” Drog said.

But they were animations, not real people. After a while everything repeated and you could tell which way they were going to move next. It got boring. Even Drog thought so.

“Let’s see some real dancing girls,” he said.

I checked on the links. Go-go. Hootchy-kootchy. I clicked on Belly Dance.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Drog said as pictures of long-haired women with bare middles and sparkling tops and skirts came on the screen. “Let’s see them dance.”

But we couldn’t. They wanted you to order a belly-dancing video for $14.99, so the site just had photos. I switched back to the naked bottoms. I didn’t hear Mom come to the doorway.