Twerp Read online

“You said you’d talk to her. I trusted you.”

  “Trust love, Julian.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “I lied for you.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  Eduardo smiled down at me and tapped me on my left shoulder. He looked me straight in the eye in a real serious way. “Do you know what that means, Julian?”

  “What?”

  He turned and sprinted off. After he had run a good distance, he spun around and called back to me, “It means … Tag, you’re it!”

  You know that saying about seeing red? Until that moment, I thought it was just a saying. But right then, for the first time, it made perfect sense to me. It wasn’t so much that I saw the color red. What I saw was heat. Or rather, I felt heat behind my eyes, which made the world look reddish. The benches, the swings, the faces of the fourth and fifth graders looked reddish. Even the air looked reddish. The reddest thing of all was Eduardo. He looked as if he was glowing red, like a cinnamon gumdrop. He was waving at me, daring me to chase him, grinning the entire time. That grin … that was the reddest thing of the reddest thing. It set every nerve in my body on edge.

  Without even thinking about it, I charged after him. I didn’t just want to tag him. I wanted to tag him so hard I’d shove him to the ground. He turned and started to run, but I closed on him real fast. Too fast, as it turned out. Just as I put out my hand, he veered hard right, and I shot past him.

  “¡Olé!” he yelled.

  When I turned to face him again, there was that grin. That was what I saw. Nothing else. I put my head down and rushed him a second time. I could hear his footsteps in front of me, dancing left and right. But at the last second, there was no sound. I looked up, and I was past him again. I don’t know whether he’d faked right or left, but I had missed him, and he was still standing in the same place. He hadn’t moved a foot in either direction.

  “¡Olé, Julian!”

  That was when I heard the laughter. Fourth and fifth graders were laughing at me.

  “Hey, toro!” Eduardo called.

  “What?”

  “¡Toro! ¡Toro!”

  For a third time, I sprinted after him. Except this time, I kept my head up. He took off but let me get real close, swiveling his hips side to side. I was inches from him, not even a fingertip away, but when I leaned forward, he veered just out of reach.

  It was too much to take, getting that close. I lunged just as he broke hard right. I tried to cut back with him, but my feet got tangled, and I started to fall. When I say I started to fall, what I mean is it wasn’t the kind of fall that happens at once. That fall had a story—a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was me against gravity. I thought I might right myself, get back my balance, except I was too far gone. It took me nine full steps to fall, and I was fighting it the entire time. But after the ninth step, I surrendered. I put out my hands and tumbled forward. I rolled with it, head over heels, skinning both of my palms, but given how hard I was running, it could have been worse. I ended up sitting on the ground, staring at my palms.

  Not a second passed before I heard Eduardo standing above me saying, “Are you hurt, Julian?”

  I didn’t even look up at him. “I’m fine!”

  That brought another wave of laughter from the fourth and fifth graders.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said I’m fine!”

  I jumped up … or at least, I tried to. What I didn’t realize was that the fall had landed me under the first row of monkey bars. As I jumped up, I clanged my head against an iron bar. I heard the clang inside and outside my head at the same time, even before I felt the pain.

  The next thing I knew, I was rolling on the ground, clutching my skull, moaning like I’d been shot. It was pure instinct. It wasn’t as if I’d decided to roll around or grab my head or moan. There was no decision involved. I felt Eduardo trying to hold me still. But I kept twisting and squirming. Then, at last, he got a grip on me. He forced my shoulders to the ground.

  “¡Julian! ¡Julian!”

  My head was pulsing with pain, and I could still hear ringing in my ears. But the worst of it was that I could feel tears rolling down my cheeks. I was crying … in front of fourth and fifth graders. The shame of it washed over me. If I hadn’t been crying already, the shame would have made me cry.

  “Open your eyes, Julian. Say if you can see me.”

  It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I slowly opened my eyes. Through the tears, I saw him. He had a strange, stretched-out look on his face. I realized at once he was crying too.

  “Say how many fingers I have up, Julian.”

  He held up three fingers on his right hand.

  As bad as I felt, that cracked me up. It seemed like such a dumb, pointless thing to ask. I squinted at him and said, “Six.”

  Then I smiled. It hurt like crazy to smile, but I couldn’t help myself.

  That made Eduardo start to laugh. “You have a hard head, Julian.”

  He put out his hand, and I took it to sit up. Now here’s the weird part, or at least, the part that made the least sense. As much as my head hurt, which was a lot, what I felt at that moment was mostly relief. The truth had come out: I was no longer the fastest kid in P.S. 23. Fourth graders and fifth graders knew it, which meant that sixth graders were sure to find out about it. There was nothing I could do or say to keep it a secret. So I nodded. I wasn’t sure whether I was only nodding to myself or whether my head was actually moving up and down, but either way, I had accepted the truth. Sitting there on the ground, under the monkey bars, I had accepted the fact that I was now the second-fastest kid in P.S. 23.

  April 26, 1969

  Buddying Up with Beverly Segal

  Here’s the question I’ve asked myself over and over since last week: Why should I care about being the fastest kid in P.S. 23? I do care. Don’t get me wrong. But why should I? It’s not like the school is the world. Which means that even if I were still the fastest kid in P.S. 23, or even in District 25, or in the borough of Queens, or in the entire city of New York, that would still leave an awful lot of the world unaccounted for. No matter how fast I got, there would always be some guy somewhere who was faster. Lots of guys, if you think about it. I mean, think about those guys in the Olympics. Even the guy who finished dead last in the hundred-yard dash would blow Eduardo right off the track.

  What I’ve figured out, in other words, is you’ve got to be philosophical about stuff. Maybe that’s not what you wanted me to figure out, Mr. Selkirk, because it’s got nothing to do with Danley Dimmel. But maybe it’s even more important. I know I wrote some mean things last week … like when I said the only reason I’ve kept this thing going was to get out of doing the Shakespeare assignment. I guess I was mad that you were talking to Jillian about me. But writing down my thoughts has made me into a more philosophical person. Really and truly it has. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry for what I said. Maybe I don’t have the “writing bug,” but I do like writing.

  Anyway, news traveled fast about the fall I took running after Eduardo and about how I couldn’t catch him. I don’t think Eduardo said a word himself, but that kind of thing is like dynamite to fourth and fifth graders. It rattles their universe, like waking up one morning and watching the sun rising in the west instead of the east, or like finding out there’s another number between twelve and thirteen. They thought that Julian Twerski was the fastest kid in their school, and then they saw the ugly truth firsthand. It must’ve thrown them for a loop.

  Around the block, the only guy who ragged me was Shlomo Shlomo … and with him the ragging wasn’t so much about what happened in the playground but about the fact that he’d been the first one to tell me how fast Eduardo was. He kept after me with, “Didn’t I tell you? I told you! Maybe from now on you’ll listen when I tell you stuff.” Eric the Red shrugged at the news, then muttered under his breath, “Well, at least you didn’t get your balls crushed.” Howie Wartnose patted me on the shoulder
and let it go at that. Quick Quentin said that it wasn’t a big deal, that I was still the fastest guy on the block, and that was what mattered to him.

  The only guy with no reaction whatsoever was Lonnie. Which kind of confused me at first, but then made sense the more I thought about it. He and I are so close that the news must have hit him real hard. He must’ve felt like he was the one who’d taken that nine-step fall. When I remembered how he’d been bragging on me at Jillian’s barbecue, I realized how much I’d let him down.

  Meanwhile, life goes on. Friday was the class trip to the Metropolitan Museum. That’s not the kind of thing I go for—I mean, class trips are fine until about third grade. But as you get older, class trips can be kind of humiliating. It would be one thing if your teacher just sent you out and told you to meet up at the museum. But instead you get herded like sheep into the school bus, and then you get that long serious talk about how scary Manhattan is, and how if a stranger starts talking to you, you’re supposed to scream your lungs out. Then you’re dropped off at the museum steps, and you have to do that stupid count-off just to make sure no one jumped out of the bus at the last tollbooth.

  I mean, we’re sixth graders!

  As for the museum itself, I’ve got nothing against it. I like art as much as the next guy. Maybe not as much as Amelia likes art, but I like it. Not the kind of art where the guide needs to explain it to you, where he’s got to tell you what it is and why it’s good. There’s lots of junk in the museum that’s there only because it’s old, and because it came from ancient Greece. I mean, so what? Junk is junk. I don’t need to hear a guy in a blue uniform going on and on about a miniature statue with a broken-off head, about what it’s supposed to represent and what it says about life in ancient Athens. For all he knows, it could’ve been some Greek kid’s Gumby.

  What I like are big paintings, the kind that take up an entire wall. I also like when the stuff in the painting looks exactly like the stuff in real life, so it’s like a photograph—except it came from the painter’s brain instead of from the world. It’s creepy to think of it that way. You’re looking into the mind of a guy who’s been dead for centuries, and you’re feeling what he was feeling, or at least what he wanted you to feel, noticing how good he was at what he was doing when he was alive. It’s creepy because it reminds you that sooner or later you’re going to die, that whatever you’re good at now won’t matter because you’ll be dead and gone and no one will care … unless, of course, you’re a painter, in which case, if you luck out, maybe a class of sixth graders will walk past your painting and think about you.

  One painting I liked a lot at the Metropolitan Museum was by an Italian guy named Caravaggio, who lived from 1571 to 1610. It’s called Judith Beheading Holofernes. That thing is just gruesome. It shows an Israelite woman cutting off the head of an Assyrian general. Now, when I say the painting shows her cutting off the guy’s head, I mean it shows her doing it, right down to the gushing blood as she saws through his neck. But the worst thing is the expression on Holofernes’s face. He knows what’s happening. His mouth is wide open, and his eyes are bugging out, and the knife is halfway into his neck, and he can feel it going through him. Meanwhile, Judith is holding him by the hair, taking her time, sizing up the job, calm as can be, going about her business. I’m telling you, if you saw something like that happen in a movie, you’d run out of the theater screaming your head off … which, I guess, means you’d wind up like Holofernes.

  (I hope that counts as the museum writing assignment, Mr. Selkirk.)

  I started the trip buddied up with Freddie Nalvin, but once we got to the museum there was a lot of trading off, so I wound up with Beverly Segal—who’s in the other class that made the trip. It wasn’t personal. Freddie carries around a handkerchief because his palms sweat a lot, but he’s a good guy, and it wasn’t like we were going to hold hands. But Beverly was desperate to switch because she started out with Hank Feltscher, who’s as crazy about her as Howie Wartnose is. About half the guys in the sixth grade are stuck on Beverly, to be honest. It’s hard to think of her that way since she and I grew up together. She’s not the prettiest girl around, but she’s got a nice face with soft eyes and a big smile. Plus, she’ll do stuff. She’s always up for a game of Ringolevio or Johnny on the Pony. Most girls won’t get involved because of the tackling and sweating. But Beverly will jump right in and mix it up. If there were such a thing as Track and Field Day for girls, she’d come in first for sure.

  That’s why the other girls hate her. You should hear the rumors that follow her around. There’s one about how she went behind the bushes at Memorial Field with Howie Wartnose—which is a total joke, if you know the two of them. I think Howie would drop dead of a heart attack if he ever went behind the bushes with Beverly Segal. You’d have to bury him right there, behind the bushes. He’d die with a stupid grin on his face, though. That’s for sure.

  But here’s the thing. If you get to know her, Beverly’s fun to talk to. I don’t think I was bored for one minute, and it wasn’t because of the art. She and I were shooting the breeze the entire time, walking from room to room, taking in paintings and sculptures, but also arguing about sports, about whether Bobby Murcer could get a hit against Tom Seaver, about whether Joe Namath could throw a football farther than Johnny Unitas … and meanwhile, we were paying no attention to the poor museum guide.

  The three hours just zoomed by.

  The one thing that was awkward, buddied up with Beverly, was strolling past nude statues. I’m sure it would’ve felt awkward even with Freddie Nalvin, but two guys can at least laugh about it. With a girl, you don’t know how that’s going to go over, whether it will make matters worse. Beverly must have been thinking the same thing because after about the sixth statue, she turned to me and said, “So I guess underwear wasn’t invented until later.”

  That cut the tension, and I was grateful.

  By the time the trip was over and we’d shuffled back onto the buses, I was looking at Beverly Segal in a different light. I could kind of understand why Howie Wartnose was so nuts about her. She was the kind of girl who made you forget that she was a girl. You could just talk to her, and she would come back with answers that made sense. She said what she meant. You didn’t have to figure the angles with her. She was just a good sort.

  May 2, 1969

  Betrayals

  You know the old saying “No good deed goes unrewarded”? My dad has a different saying: “No good deed goes unpunished.” What he means is that doing a favor for another person should bring you good luck, or at least get you a favor in return, but that’s not how life works. The favor I did for Beverly Segal is a perfect example. She wanted to get rid of Hank Feltscher, so I traded buddies and spent the entire museum trip with her. If that doesn’t count as a good deed, I don’t know what does. Except now it turns out Howie Wartnose is mad at me because he thinks I’ve got a thing for Beverly Segal. Which isn’t true. He should be grateful that I got between Hank Feltscher and Beverly since Hank Feltscher actually does have a thing for her. That would be the logical way to look at it. But that’s not how Howie Wartnose looks at it.

  So now Howie won’t sit at our table in the cafeteria if I’m there. To be honest, I didn’t even realize there was a problem the first couple of times … until Quentin clued me in. After that, I tried to make things right. I tried to talk to Howie after school, but he turned his back and kept walking.

  I’m not too worried about it, though, because Lonnie’s on the case. He sat next to Howie on the bus every morning for the entire week, and the two of them were talking a mile a minute. Lonnie can be real persuasive, so I’m sure Howie will come around.

  But that’s not the only grief I got about buddying up with Beverly. Monday morning, before I even knew what was going on with Howie Wartnose, I walked into homeroom and found Jillian sitting at my desk. She had her hands folded together on the desktop in a real sarcastic way, like she was still in second grade. She was also smiling a fake
smile.

  She looked up at me when I came over, but she didn’t move from my seat. “How was your weekend, Julian?”

  “It was all right. How was yours?”

  “Just fine.”

  “You’re sitting at my desk.”

  “Oh, am I?”

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “What could be wrong, Julian?”

  “Well, you’re sitting at my desk. I don’t mind, but it doesn’t seem right.”

  “I wanted to see the world the way you see it.”

  “I don’t think sitting at my desk is going to—”

  “No, it’s working,” she said. “Now I see things the way you see them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now I see how beautiful Beverly Segal is.”

  “You think I think Beverly Segal is beautiful?”

  “Why else would you buddy up with her?”

  “Beverly is from the block. She and I have been friends for years.”

  That was when Jillian’s eyes welled up. “So she’s your girlfriend?”

  “No, she’s not my girlfriend!”

  She brushed away her tears with the palms of her hands, then said in a low voice, almost a whisper, “Why do you hate me, Julian? I don’t understand. What did I do wrong?”

  I glanced from side to side as she spoke. The room was still filling up. There were about a dozen conversations going on, so no one was paying attention to Jillian and me. But that wasn’t going to last much longer.

  “You didn’t do a thing wrong,” I said.

  “Then why don’t you like me anymore?”

  “Anymore?”

  “Lots of guys think I’m beautiful,” she said.

  “I don’t like anyone, Jillian.”

  “But you wrote me a love letter,” she said.

  “I told you—the letter wasn’t from me.”

  “But it sounds like you. I can hear your voice. I can hear your heart.”