Twerp Read online

  The idea to use the circus axle to walk the fence was Lonnie’s, but the first guy to climb up and do it was Quick Quentin. Lonnie dared him, and Quentin did it like it was nothing. Once I saw Quentin do it, then I had to do it, and then Lonnie did it himself. Howie Wartnose was going to go next, but then Victor Ponzini showed up—he must have been watching us from his bedroom window—and begged us to let him try it, so we did.

  He got about two steps, dropped the axle, then keeled to the left and fell off. He landed flat on his stomach, then rolled onto his back, gasping for air. He kept mouthing a word that we couldn’t make out. There was no sound, just his mouth widening and tightening. You know that thing a fish does when it gets yanked out of water? That’s what his mouth looked like. But then Ponzini managed to suck in enough air to form the word: “Wind …” We leaned in closer. “Wind … wind … wind …” That was when we figured out what he meant. He’d gotten the wind knocked out of him. That cracked us up for some reason. Of course, it was mean to laugh while he was still lying on the ground. But the way he was gasping the word “wind” just seemed real comical. Maybe you had to be there.

  After that, Lonnie began to call the fence Ponzini’s Fence, which is how the lot came to be called Ponzini. It doesn’t quite make sense, if you stop and think about it, but for whatever reason, the name stuck.

  Victor Ponzini was the first person to fall off the fence but not the last. It took Howie Wartnose three times to make it across, and he got scraped up pretty good the first two tries. Shlomo Shlomo lost his balance, dropped the axle, and tried to jump down—except the axle hit the fence, seesawed back up, and hit Shlomo in the chin as he was jumping down. The poor guy wound up with three stitches and a tetanus shot. He never tried again after that. Beverly Segal fell off, but then she tried again a couple of weeks later and became the first and only girl to walk the entire fence.

  I think it was watching Beverly Segal walk the fence that made Eric feel as if he had to do it too. He was the only one of us who’d never tried. But the thing was, he had a real phobia about it. He didn’t even like to hop the fence, which we had to do from time to time to get back a ball during stickball. Even Lonnie laid off him about it. I mean, you don’t want to force a guy to do what he can’t do.

  But for whatever reason, Eric stepped up last Thursday and asked Lonnie for the circus axle. Maybe we should’ve tried to talk him out of it. But how can you talk the guy out of it without making him feel worse? Put yourself in Eric’s place. I mean, Beverly Segal did it. If you’re Eric, even if you fall flat on your face, I think you have to give it a shot.

  So Lonnie went and got the axle while the rest of us helped Eric climb the fence. You could feel how scared he was going up. I had hold of his left leg, right below the knee, and I could feel the tremble running down his calf. I didn’t think he was going to be able to stand, but when Lonnie held out the circus axle, he grabbed the end of it and used the leverage to hoist himself upright. I still had hold of his left sneaker, which was as high as I could reach, and Quentin still had hold of his right sneaker, but at that point there was nothing we could have done if he lost his balance.

  Eric nodded at Lonnie to let go of the circus axle, and then he pulled it up to his hips, into balanced position, and then Quentin and I let go of his sneakers … and Eric was on his own. It took him a couple of seconds to gather himself, but he got the hang of it pretty fast, letting the axle drift up and down instead of adjusting with his hips. That’s the trick. If you feel yourself tilting to one side, you lift the axle on that side until you come upright again.

  The worst thing you can do, of course, is panic. To be honest, that’s what I thought was going to happen to Eric. I was afraid that he’d built the thing up so much in his mind that he wouldn’t trust his feet. The fence doesn’t move. When you stop and think about it, walking the fence is just like walking a straight line—except you’re six feet up in the air. If you put one foot in front of the other, and you do it again and again, there’s nothing to it.

  So how do you not panic? You don’t look down. That seems like common sense, but it’s the difference between guys who make it across and guys who don’t. If you keep your eyes straight ahead and let the circus axle do the work for you, you’ve got it made. But if you look down, and you start smiling at your friends, and you start thinking about how their eyes are on you, thinking about how spastic you’re going to look if you fall, thinking about which side to jump down if you feel yourself falling—then you’re dead meat.

  That’s what got Eric the Red. Looking down, I mean. He was doing fine for the first ten steps, working the axle like a pro, but then Quentin and Howie started yelling at him, telling him he was halfway across, which wasn’t true, and he knew it wasn’t true, which made him glance down to give them a sarcastic look. Then Lonnie shushed all of us and told Eric to focus on what he was doing, which was good advice, but that made him nod down at Lonnie, then look forward, then shake his head, then look forward … and that was the beginning of the end. His knees began to wobble, first the right and then the left. He recovered for a split second, but then his hips started to go. By then, his eyes were bulging out of their sockets. Full panic. He let go of the circus axle, which clanged down on the fence and then clattered to the ground. His arms were flailing in circles.

  “Jump down!” Lonnie yelled.

  It was more good advice. The trouble was that Eric was keeling to the right at that moment. The natural thing for him to do would have been to jump in that direction, but that would have landed him in one of the private backyards. The rest of us were standing in Ponzini, to his left, so Eric took it in his mind to jump back toward us.

  He split the difference.

  He came straight down on the bar at the top of the fence, with one leg on either side. Right on his crotch. You could hear the air go out of him, a long, loud “Oooooomph.” For a second, no one moved. Not even Eric. His eyes were shut, his hands gripping the top of the fence. Then he opened his eyes, turned his head to the right, and puked. It was disgusting to watch, but he puked his guts into one of the private backyards.

  Afterward, his head sank down onto his chest. His eyes were still open, and he was still holding on to the bar at the top of the fence, but he was out. You could see the glaze over his eyes. There was no one home. He started to roll to the right, away from us, but Lonnie lunged forward and grabbed his left leg. Quentin and I jumped up onto the fence and caught him by the waist. The three of us managed to ease him down from the fence on the Ponzini side.

  We laid him on the ground and huddled around him. After half a minute, he came back behind his eyes. He knew where he was and what had happened. He curled up like a baby, with his hands over his crotch, and began to moan. He had tears in his eyes, but how could you hold that against him? It wasn’t like he was bawling. It was more like the tears were being squeezed out of him.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Lonnie whispered to him.

  But then Eric opened his mouth, and it was full of blood.

  That made us step back.

  Howie tugged on Lonnie’s sleeve. “He’s not all right.”

  Lonnie turned to me, and I knew the drill from when Quentin lost his eyebrows. I sprinted home and yelled to my mom to call an ambulance. She started to ask questions, but I cut her off and just said, “Eric got hurt.” That got her attention. I almost told her to send the ambulance to Ponzini, but then I remembered that the name would mean nothing to her or to the ambulance driver, so I gave her the street address on Parsons Boulevard and told her we were in the vacant lot behind the building. She said she’d be there right after she called for help.

  I ran back outside.

  Eric was sitting upright by the time I got back to Ponzini. He wasn’t doing it on his own, though. Shlomo and Howie were holding his shoulders, and Quentin and Lonnie were talking to him. There was still a lot of blood around his lips and on his chin.

  “The ambulance is on its way,” I called
to them.

  Lonnie turned to me as I knelt down next to him. “I don’t think it’s too bad. I think maybe he just bit his tongue.”

  Eric didn’t react to what Lonnie said. He wasn’t listening at that point.

  “You don’t think it’s his balls?” Shlomo said.

  Lonnie said, “I’ve never seen a guy fall like that. It could be his balls. It could be his balls got knocked up into his mouth. I’m not sure. How long till the ambulance gets here?”

  Just then, we heard a siren. It was coming down Parsons Boulevard. Another five minutes passed before the doctors figured out how to get through the building and back to Ponzini. Then, at last, two of them rushed through the rear exit of the parking garage. My mom was right behind them—which kind of embarrassed me. But what could I do? Tell her not to come?

  Right off, the doctors made Eric lie back down. He was still too woozy to answer their questions, so Lonnie told them what had happened. The doctors kind of smiled at one another when he explained how Eric fell. I didn’t like that much. It seemed kind of unprofessional, in my opinion. Then one of the doctors stood up and walked back out to the ambulance. It was a relief, in a weird way, the fact that he didn’t seem in too big a rush. He returned a couple of minutes later with a canvas stretcher. They lifted Eric onto it and hauled him out of Ponzini. We followed them through the parking garage and watched them load him into the back of the ambulance. He was starting to come around by then. We heard him telling the doctors his phone number. One of the doctors climbed into the back of the ambulance after him while the other climbed behind the wheel to drive. The siren started to blare. Then the back door of the ambulance slammed shut from the inside. That was the last we saw of Eric till he came home that night.

  It turned out that there wasn’t much wrong with him. He just got bruised real bad where you don’t want to get bruised. Plus, he had bitten his tongue like Lonnie said. We were thankful that he was all right. But believe me, I’d hate to be Eric the Red from now on. He’s never going to hear the end of it.

  April 17, 1969

  The Truth Comes Out

  I’ll be the first to admit it: I don’t understand girls. Plus, out of all the girls I’ve ever met, I understand Jillian the least. I mean, it made sense that she wanted nothing to do with me after the barbecue. I figured Eduardo must have had his talk with her, and she was real upset, so she’d decided to avoid me. That made sense. But then, this afternoon, she waltzed up to my table as I sat down for lunch in the cafeteria. There I was, saving seats for Lonnie and the rest of the gang, and I looked up, and she was standing right next to me, carrying her lunch tray, smiling as though nothing had happened.

  “Mind if I sit down, Julian?”

  “The guys will be here in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll move when they come.”

  “All right, but it might be kind of weird.”

  She set her tray down on the table and slid in next to me on the bench. “Are you mad at me, Julian?”

  The question stunned me. “Why would I be mad at you?”

  “You didn’t talk to me last week.”

  “You didn’t talk to me either,” I said.

  “I didn’t talk to you because you didn’t talk to me.”

  “I didn’t not talk to you.”

  “You didn’t even smile at me,” she said. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “I didn’t mean not to smile at you. I guess I just had stuff on my mind.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Just stuff. Nothing special.”

  “The girls in class think you’re so smart.”

  “I’m not so smart,” I said. “I’m just maybe regular smart.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Selkirk says.”

  “What does he have to do with it?”

  “He thinks you’re real smart.”

  “Did you read his mind?”

  “Why else would he let you get out of the final paper on Julius Caesar?”

  “How did you find out?” I said.

  “Word gets around, Julian. He thinks you’re writing a book.”

  “I’m not writing a book.”

  “He thinks you are,” she said. “He thinks you’ve caught the ‘writing bug.’ ”

  “That’s just stupid.”

  “Why is it stupid?”

  “There’s no such thing as the ‘writing bug.’ Plus, anyway, how do you know what Selkirk thinks?”

  “Because I asked him if I could write a book to get out of Julius Caesar, and he said no. When I said that wasn’t fair, he said that writing was your thing. So then I said maybe writing was my thing too. But he shook his head. He told me he thought you were going to be a famous author. Those were his exact words. I swear on my mother’s life.”

  “Well, what does he know?”

  “He said you’ve got the writing bug bad.”

  (I don’t know why you said that to her, Mr. Selkirk. Plus, I don’t know why you think that. Because, in my opinion, there’s no such thing as the writing bug, and even if there is, I don’t have it. That’s the truth. If you don’t believe me, listen to what I said next.)

  “Writing doesn’t mean squat to me,” I said. “I could stop doing it tomorrow. I’m going to stop doing it at the end of June. You think I’m going anywhere near a composition book over the summer?”

  “I’m just telling you what he told me,” she said.

  I stared down at the table and shook my head.

  “So you’re not mad at me?”

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  That was when it happened: she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  I must’ve given her the weirdest look ever. “Why did you do that?”

  “You said you weren’t mad at me. Are you mad at me now?”

  “No, but why did you do it?”

  “Because I wanted to do it.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “You wanted to do it, so you just did it?”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “I don’t mind—”

  Right then, Eric, Howie, and Shlomo showed up at the table with their lunch trays. I was afraid for a split second that they’d seen what had just happened, but they were too busy yakking it up even to notice Jillian was sitting next to me. They just slid down in their usual places without missing a beat. Quentin and Lonnie were a couple of steps behind them. Lonnie, of course, noticed Jillian right off. His face was red as a tomato, then, a second later, pale as a sheet.

  As he was about to sit down, Jillian stood up. “I guess I’ll get going.”

  That caught their attention. They glanced up but none of them spoke.

  To break the tension, I introduced her. I said, “Guys, this is Jillian.”

  Quentin was the only one who managed to squeeze out an actual “Hi.”

  I turned to Jillian. “These are the guys …. You already know Lonnie.”

  “Hi, Lonnie,” she said. She nodded in a general way and walked off.

  The second she was out of earshot, Shlomo let out a wolf whistle. That cracked up the rest of them, except for Lonnie. He sat there stone-faced, probably still shaking off the shock of finding her there.

  Then Howie said, “Is that your new girlfriend, Julian?”

  “What? No!”

  “Then who is she?”

  “She’s just a girl from my class. That’s all.”

  “Then how come she was sitting so close to you?”

  “She had a question about English,” I said.

  Shlomo said, “All right, but don’t let it happen again. She might give Eric a boner. In his condition, that could be fatal.”

  That cracked us up again and got us back to normal. Except for Lonnie, that is. I snuck a glance at him, and he still looked stunned. Which was real ironical since he was the one who wanted me to sit at Jillian’s table. Here he’d had a perfect chance to ask her to stick around, to eat lunch with us, and he couldn’t get out a single word. I figured at least
he had let go of that idea. So maybe, as awkward as it was, something good would come out of it.

  On the other hand, the fact that she had showed up at our table in the first place made no sense. Why would she do that after Eduardo had talked to her? Unless, of course, he’d chickened out and hadn’t talked to her. That didn’t seem likely, given what I knew of him. But the only way to find out for sure was to track him down after school. So that’s what I did.

  As soon as school let out, I went looking for Eduardo at the playground at Memorial Field, and that’s right where I found him. I mean, that guy loved to play tag. He wasn’t hard to notice in a wild scramble of about a dozen fifth graders, including Paulo and Hector. There might even have been one or two fourth graders in the group. I was ashamed to be seen in the vicinity, to tell the truth. But what choice did I have? I waited at the edge of the playground and waved a couple of times until Eduardo caught sight of me.

  He waved at me. “Julian, come join us!”

  “I need to ask you something!” I yelled back.

  He called time-out, then jogged over. “What is it, my friend?”

  “I talked to Jillian today.”

  “Yes.”

  “She acted kind of weird.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s just that … did you talk to her?”

  He gave me a sly grin. “About what?”

  “You know.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Julian.”

  “What you and I talked about in your room.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “So you did talk to her about it?”

  “No, señor.”

  That made me gasp. “Why not?”

  “Julian, you are so young ….”