Twerp Read online

  What I got mad at was how things never seem to work out just right. Nothing in the world is ever perfect. It’s like Shakespeare says: the elements are mixed. There’s always a smudge somewhere that ruins it, whatever it is. You scrub and scrub, but you can never quite get rid of the smudge. Plus, even if you did get rid of it, you’d remember that it used to be there, and then that would ruin it. What I mean is, nothing is ever pure.

  Except running a four-six in the final.

  Four-point-six seconds. Forty yards.

  That would be a pure thing. Time is pure. Forty yards is pure. Running is pure. If I ran a four-six, that would be that. It would be done and perfect, like a diamond. No smudge. I could tuck it away, and it would always be there to remember and think about and hold on to when the rest of the world got to me.

  I wanted it bad.

  Willie was waiting with the other two runners back by the starting line. The three of them were chatting, which I doubt they would’ve been doing if they thought they had a chance.

  “You sure you want to run this race?” Willie called to me.

  I smiled at that. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “The way you keep wandering off, seems like you’ve got other things on your mind.”

  “No, just this.”

  “ ’Cause you know you’re going to have to run your behind off.”

  “I know,” I said, still smiling.

  “I’m gunning for you, Julian.”

  “I know that too.”

  “We’re all gunning for you—me and my new buddies Scott and Wayne. We’re all three of us gunning for you. You better run your best race, or else we’ll run right up your behind.”

  Right then, as weird as it sounds, I loved Willie.

  “Runners to the starting line!” Greetham called out.

  The four of us walked over to the starting line. Then we waited. None of us spoke again, but Willie did this thing with his legs, kicking them out to the side as if to get them as limber as possible. It was the first time I’d seen him do it, the first time I’d seen anyone do it. I thought about doing it too because it looked like it might serve a purpose, but I didn’t want to steal Willie’s move.

  Then Greetham yelled, “Runners ready!”

  I took a deep breath and held it.

  “Set!”

  I said to myself, Four-point-six.

  “Go!”

  From the first step, I was out in front. After maybe six steps, I was clear. I couldn’t hear the runners behind me. For a split second, but not even a split second, I almost eased up, but I caught myself and began saying, Four-point-six, four-point-six, four-point-six. As I said it over and over, the beat got faster. As the beat got faster, I felt myself running faster. Four-six-four-six-four-six. Way back behind me, Willie started to yell. It was the bravest, most hopeless yell ever. It sounded as if he was yelling for my sake, letting me know the race was over, telling me to run that four-six for both of us. I put my head down and began to yell too, straining in a way I never had before, straining with my legs but also with my guts and my throat. I was leaning forward, way out over my body, lunging toward the finish line. Then an instant later I ran past it, and I eased up and listened ….

  Greetham called out, “Four-point-seven.”

  It felt like a stab in the heart when he said that. I looked up at the sky and took a deep breath. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, and the sun was washing across my face, and I was breathing hard in and out. I began shaking my head. Willie came jogging over to me. I heard his footsteps, and I turned to face him, but I couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. He gave me a hug and said, “Nice job.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He laughed at that, then patted me on the back and jogged off.

  I started walking away from the finish line, away from the rest of the runners and the cheers from the bleachers. I walked to the end of the track and then to the eight-foot fence that surrounded Memorial Field. Half a minute passed before the fact that I was still the fastest kid in school began to sink in. By then, I could hear kids from the bleachers spilling out onto the track, running across the infield, calling my name, asking me where I was going. It must’ve looked pretty weird to them because I was acting like I’d lost. They had no way of knowing I had lost. They’d heard Mr. Greetham call out “Four-point-seven.” It was just a number to them. If he’d called out “Four-point-six,” their reaction would’ve been the same. To them, the difference between four-seven and four-six was nothing.

  To me, it was like a stab in the heart.

  I stood at the fence, with my back to Memorial Field, and felt sick about what a fake I was. I knew it wouldn’t be long before Lonnie or Jillian or maybe even Greetham came up behind me and asked me what was wrong. I was trying hard to snap out of it, to pull myself together.

  That was when Eduardo showed up on the other side of the fence. He came out of nowhere, just like he had at Adventurers Inn. I put my arm over my eyes and pretended to wipe sweat from my forehead. But it was no use. As soon as I looked at him, a couple of tears leaked out.

  “You are unhappy to be the winner?” he said.

  I coughed. “I thought you were going to win.”

  “No, you are much faster.”

  “But I couldn’t catch you.”

  “I am hard to catch, Julian. For many years, I have played fútbol. I am very fast and very tricky, and very hard to tackle when I have the ball. But in a race, without a ball, you are faster. I thought you knew.”

  That made me smile, despite how I felt on the inside. “I didn’t know.”

  “Still, you should be happy you are the winner.”

  “I wanted to run a four-point-six.”

  “What time did you run?” he said.

  “Four-seven,” I said, “all three races.”

  “That is very fast, Julian.”

  “But not fast enough.”

  He paused for a second, then said, “Now I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do, Eduardo.”

  “You wanted to run a perfect race.”

  “I wanted to run a four-six, whether it was perfect or not.”

  “Then we will borrow Señor Greetham’s stopwatch, and I will time you next week. If you do not do this thing next week, we will try again the next week. And if not then, the next week. The summer is long. It is not an impossible thing to do.” He got a big grin on his face. “Then, afterward, I will teach you how to dribble. You will love fútbol. It is a beautiful game. You will love it very much, I think, Julian.”

  That cracked me up. The way he said it cracked me up. He cracked me up.

  “You’re a real fifth grader, Eduardo.”

  “Sí, Julian. I am … until September.”

  I shook my head at him, which made him smile. Then I turned and jogged back toward the infield.

  Well, I guess that’s it, Mr. Selkirk. I’ve kept this thing going longer than I ever thought I could, and I’ve learned a lot about myself and about life. I even read and liked Julius Caesar. So I’ve learned a lot about Shakespeare too, which should be a definite plus going into junior high in September. As for the summer, the only thing I know for sure is that I’m going to run a four-six forty if it kills me.

  You can take that to the bank.

  June 29, 1969

  It’s Not Fair …

  I don’t think it’s fair, Mr. Selkirk. School is over. Next week is the Fourth of July. If you stop and think about it, you’re not even my teacher anymore. So how is it fair that I have to keep writing? I’ve filled up nine composition books, which doesn’t even count the work I did in the rest of my classes. Nine composition books. That’s a lot of writing for a sixth-grade English class. That’s a lot of writing for a high school English class, if you ask me.

  I know I haven’t written about what happened to Danley Dimmel, and I know that’s the reason you haven’t given me a grade, the reason you’re making me sweat. Except you never said back in January that I had to w
rite about it. You never said the words “You have to write about what happened to Stanley Stimmel.” Maybe that’s what you were thinking, but you never said the exact words. Because if you had said it, what if I’d said no? I’m not saying that I would have, but what if I had? It’s like we had a deal, and we even shook on it, and then you changed it at the last minute. I mean, we shook hands, and I lived up to my end, and then you pulled the rug out from under me. Is that the kind of example a teacher is supposed to set?

  Look, I’m sorry about what happened to Danley. Maybe I haven’t said it outright, but that’s what I was trying to say when I wrote “It’s not like I meant for Danley to get hurt.” That was the second sentence in the first composition book. I can bring it in if you don’t believe me. I guess it’s kind of weak, reading it back. I could’ve said I was sorry outright. But it’s also the truth. I didn’t mean for him to get hurt. It wasn’t my intention. I did what I did, but I didn’t know it was going to turn out like it did.

  On the other hand, it’s not like Danley’s the first guy who ever got egged. You should drop by Thirty-Fourth Avenue on Halloween. Eggs are flying back and forth like it’s a war zone. I’ve gotten egged. Lonnie’s gotten egged. Shlomo Shlomo has gotten egged more times than I can even remember. It never crossed my mind that getting egged in December would be different than getting egged in October.

  It never crossed Lonnie’s mind either, or else he never would’ve mentioned the idea. I know that for a fact. He’s a practical joker, for sure, but he’s not cruel. You could even make the case that he was going out of his way to include Danley, that he was making him part of the group for a day. Like I said before, it’s not like Danley has a lot of friends around here. He sits on his stoop at the end of the block, on the corner where Thirty-Fourth Avenue hits Union Street, twiddling his thumbs. Half the time, I swear, the guy’s talking to himself. He lives on the block, but he might as well live on Neptune. It’s sad that he’s that way, but whose fault is it? Lonnie’s? Mine? Danley is the way he is because that’s the way he is. It’s no one’s fault.

  Until last December, when the thing happened, the longest conversation I’d ever had with him was a couple of years ago when I said hello and he asked me if I wanted to play Battle. Just like that, out of the blue. That was the entire conversation. I said hello because I’d walked past him a thousand times, and it seemed stupid to walk past him over and over and never say hello, so I said it, and he looked up from his stoop, and then he said, “Want to play Battle?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I just kept walking.

  But it was such a weird question that it stuck in my mind. I mentioned it the next day in Ponzini, and Eric the Red said Danley had asked him the same thing. Same with Howie Wartnose and Shlomo Shlomo. It turned out that asking to play Battle was what Danley did. It was like his thing, like calling himself Danley instead of Stanley. Quentin said Danley asked him to play Battle every time he walked past him. The only guy he never asked was Lonnie, which made no sense either since Lonnie walked past him at least as often as the rest of us.

  “You think he wants to fight?” Howie said.

  “It can’t be that,” I said. “He’s got this gooey look in his eyes.”

  Quentin nodded. “He definitely doesn’t want to fight.”

  “Well, what the heck is he talking about?”

  Then I had a thought. “Maybe he means Battleship.”

  Lonnie nixed that idea. “He doesn’t mean Battleship. In the first place, you think a guy like that carries around paper and pencils? In the second place, it’s too complicated. He doesn’t have the brains for it.”

  We went back and forth for a few more minutes, but then we got sidetracked into a different conversation, and the subject never came up again. I thought about it from time to time, the weirdness of it, but I just chalked it up to the guy being slow—and maybe lonely too since he’s never had a friend—so maybe he just doesn’t know how to act.

  Still, it’s not like I had a grudge against him. I had no opinion about him one way or another. Except then, last December, Lonnie came up with Scrambled Dope Day. How he came up with it, I’ll never know. But that’s the kind of thing Lonnie does. That’s what makes him so interesting to be around.

  It was a nothing of a Thursday morning, after Christmas and before New Year’s. The entire gang was out back in Ponzini—Lonnie, Quentin, Howie, Eric, Shlomo, and me. The six of us were standing around with our hands in our pockets. I mean, it was freezing cold, and we were shuffling our feet to keep warm, and then out of nowhere Lonnie announced it was Scrambled Dope Day. That’s it. Then he just clammed up. He wouldn’t tell us what he was talking about. So we gave up asking and played wolf tag for a couple of hours just to fight off the cold, but our minds were on Scrambled Dope Day the entire time.

  We had lunch at Bella Pizza on Northern Boulevard, and it was about the quietest hour we’d ever spent together because we figured any minute Lonnie would clue us in. But he still wasn’t talking. By the time two o’clock rolled around, we were whining and yapping at him like a pack of wiener dogs, begging him to tell us about Scrambled Dope Day. Howie Wartnose pulled me aside at one point and said, “Shouldn’t we be celebrating or something?”

  That made me slap my head in disbelief. But still, I was dying to know what Lonnie had in mind.

  It was about three-thirty when he gathered us into a tight huddle in Ponzini and told us his idea: “Scrambled Dope Day is the day we egg Danley Dimmel.”

  I have to admit it was kind of a letdown. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting that. Except the more Lonnie talked it up, the more I got the spirit. Yeah, it seemed a little mean, given how Danley was. But getting hit by a few eggs never killed anyone, and Scrambled Dope Day sure sounded like more fun than standing out in the cold, doing nothing. Plus, Lonnie came at us with logic. His basic point was why should egging be just a Halloween thing? If it was all right to throw eggs the last day of October, why wasn’t it all right the last week of December? And if it was all right to throw eggs the last week of December, didn’t it make more sense to egg a dopey guy like Danley Dimmel than to egg each other?

  Scrambled Dope Day might have been a bad idea, but Lonnie made a good case for it, and after a few minutes we were all in. Not that we had worked out the where and when and how. But Lonnie pulled out the five-dollar bill he kept in his shoe, which got us revved up, and said the eggs were on him.

  “Not for long!” Howie Wartnose said, and the rest of us laughed because we knew what he meant.

  As we started up Parsons Boulevard in the direction of Waldbaum’s Supermarket, Lonnie took me aside and told me to stay behind. He told me he had a special job for me. It was up to me to get Danley to Ponzini. He told me to get him there in half an hour, not a minute sooner or later. He looked me straight in the eye and asked me if I could do that, and I told him I could. Then we synchronized our watches, and the rest of them headed off to Waldbaum’s.

  After they were out of sight, I stood on the corner of Thirty-Fourth and Parsons and tried to figure out how I was going to get Danley to follow me back to Ponzini. It wasn’t a place he ever went. Like I said, he stuck to the stoop in front of his house.

  I figured the first thing to do was talk to the guy. Maybe an idea would come to me. So I walked toward Union Street, and there he was, sitting out on the stoop, bundled up in a hooded sweater and jean jacket, staring down at the sidewalk. You can spot him a mile off because he’s gigantic, and because he sits slouched over like he’s watching the concrete dry. Except the concrete on Thirty-Fourth Avenue finished drying about a hundred years ago. But that doesn’t matter to him. He sits on that stoop and stares straight down. I stopped right in front of his house, but he was so focused on whatever he was staring at that he didn’t even notice me for half a minute.

  That’s when I said, “Hi, Danley.”

  He looked up and grabbed his chest like I’d almost given him a heart attack. He fiddle
d with his hearing aid for a second, maybe turning it on, or maybe just turning it louder. Then came that nasal voice of his. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to talk.”

  That caused him to sit up straighter. “You want to talk to me?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “You know who I am, don’t you?”

  “You live up the block.”

  “My name is Julian,” I said.

  He smiled. “I know what your name is.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not a retard, you know.”

  “Who said you were?”

  “That’s what people think on account of I ride the bus. But I’m not. It just takes me longer to get stuff. Maybe I’m not so smart, but I’m not … that.”

  “I ride the bus too.”

  “Not the same bus.”

  “What I mean is, riding the bus doesn’t make you …”

  “What?”

  “The thing you said.”

  He smiled like he’d never thought of it that way before. He took his hands out of his pockets and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  I said, “You’re in junior high, right?”

  That made him roll his eyes. “Yeah, eighth grade.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t like the teachers. They talk down to us.”

  “Then why don’t you go to McMasters instead?”

  “I take the test every June. It says I have to stay where I am. I guess maybe I am that thing.”

  “C’mon, you’re not that thing.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of how you talk.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You say words the right way.”

  “Like Stanley instead of Danley?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But I like Danley. It’s different.”

  “Do you see my point? If you were that thing, you wouldn’t think like that.”

  He waited for me to keep going, but I was drawing a blank. He got a weird look on his face that seemed to say two things at once, as if on the one hand, he couldn’t figure out why I was talking to him, but on the other hand, he didn’t want the conversation to end. Then, at last, he smiled at me and said, “Want to play Battle?”