Twerp Read online

  There was only one thing I wrote that Lonnie didn’t like. He said I made it sound as if the pigeon dying was his fault. Which it wasn’t. I was the one who chucked the rock, so I’m the one who killed the pigeon. Lonnie only put the idea in my head.

  Now that that’s cleared up, I’ve got another story to tell. Lonnie’s the one who reminded me of it when he read about the writer’s block I had last week. He said I should write about the time Quick Quentin lost his eyebrows.

  The thing about Quick Quentin is that he’s just a great guy. That’s an ironical nickname, by the way. He’s a slow runner. Plus, he talks kind of slow. But he understands what he has to understand. He lives in the Hampshire House down by Union Street—which is also where Eric the Red and Howie Wartnose live. (That’s not Howie’s real last name, obviously. His real last name is Wurtzberg, but Lonnie called him Wartnose once and it stuck, even though he has a regular nose.)

  That’s our group: Lonnie, me, Quick Quentin, Eric the Red (because he has red hair), Howie Wartnose, and Shlomo Shlomo (because his mom always calls him twice for dinner). Lonnie’s the one who thinks up nicknames for us. So far I don’t have one, unless you count Julian Twerp. He called me that a couple of years ago after I intercepted a pass he threw during a football game. He was just frustrated. He didn’t mean anything by it, and it never stuck. I’m sure it only came to him because “twerp” sounds like my last name, Twerski. But it hurt, kind of, since that’s also what Amelia calls me when she gets in a bad mood. Twerp. Anyway, I’m sure Lonnie will come up with a good nickname for me sooner or later. That’s what he does. It’s one of the things that keeps us tight as a group. I mean, it’s not like we’re an official club. You don’t get a membership card or a decoder ring. It’s nothing like that. But it’s hard for an outsider to join in because there’s so much history. The time Quentin lost his eyebrows is a good example.

  It happened on the playground out behind the Hampshire House. After Ponzini, that’s where we hang out most often. We’d hang out there even more, but it’s a regular playground with a swing set, a slide, and a couple of seesaws, so there’s always moms and their kids hanging out too. I don’t hold it against them. That’s where I’d want to hang out if I were a kid. What I mean is, that’s where I’d want to hang out if I were a tyke. My granny would always call me her “tyke” on account of I’m younger than Amelia. That made me a tyke, at least in her eyes. She was still calling me that when she passed away a couple of years ago. Except by then I was ten years old. What could I do? She was seventy-five years old. Even if I could change how she thought about things, what would be the point? She didn’t mean it as an insult. Now she’s dead and gone, and she’s not going to come back to life, so it’s a dead issue.

  Well, the day Quentin lost his eyebrows was the fifth of July last year. I remember the exact date because it came right after the Fourth of July—which, I guess, is a stupid thing to say because the fifth of July always comes right after the Fourth of July. But the Fourth last year was a total washout. It rained from morning till night, so none of us had a chance to shoot off our fireworks, and on the fifth we were still walking around with pockets full of firecrackers and cherry bombs. Lonnie, I remember, had a couple of M-80s—which means he had, like, a half stick of dynamite in his jacket pocket.

  The weather on the fifth wasn’t much nicer than on the Fourth. It was overcast and real hot, which worked out well for us because the playground was muddy and the benches were wet. That kept the moms and their kids home. The entire back of the Hampshire House was ours. I remember it was Lonnie, me, Howie Wartnose, and Quick Quentin. Plus, Bernard and Beverly Segal were there. Bernard and Beverly are brother and sister. They hang out with us sometimes—mostly because Howie has been sweet on Beverly since the first time he laid eyes on her three years ago. He’s never been the same since, and that was back in third grade. I mean, it just ruined him. There are times you can see his eyes go out of focus. That’s what it’s like. One second he’s good old Howie, yakking it up, and then the next second, he notices Beverly Segal walking up the block, and he’s like a zombie, shuffling his feet back and forth, staring down at the sidewalk or straight ahead at nothing. You want to tell him to let it go. Because of him, the rest of us have to put up not only with Beverly—who’s all right by herself—but also with Bernard, who’s still in fourth grade and almost as big a waste of human ingredients as Victor Ponzini.

  So it was maybe eight o’clock, not quite dusk, but without the sun it felt later, and the six of us were out behind the Hampshire House, when Lonnie came up with the idea of lighting our leftovers. Right off, Howie whipped out about ten sheets of firecrackers. That caught Beverly’s eye—it was probably more firecrackers than she’d ever seen in her life. She asked if she could set one off, meaning one single firecracker, but of course Howie melted to gooey cheese at the sound of her voice, so he handed her an entire sheet. Twenty-four firecrackers. She just stared at them. She didn’t have a match, so there was no way to set them off. But she half smiled at Howie, and he went from gooey cheese to buttermilk in about five seconds, and mumbled, “You’re welcome.”

  The only problem was that Beverly still hadn’t thanked him. So she had to spit out a late thank-you because she thought he was being sarcastic and telling her off, like, Hey, weren’t you supposed to thank me? Then Howie came back with something real intelligent, like, “Oh, no … no, no … I, er, I didn’t … I didn’t mean, er … no …”

  It was just sad.

  That was when Lonnie pulled out a book of matches, maybe because he couldn’t stand watching Howie make a fool of himself for another second. So we started setting off our firecrackers. We set them off an entire sheet at a time, with the joint fuse that comes in the package, because it wasn’t like Lonnie had a million matches. First Howie did a couple of sheets, then Quentin, then me.

  When Beverly tried, her hand kept shaking, and she couldn’t get the fuse lit—it’s harder to light up the joint fuse than to do it one firecracker at a time. It was comical to watch, but after half a minute Lonnie got tired of it. “Here,” he said. He grabbed her hand and steadied it, and she managed to set off her sheet. She was dancing around the thing, whooping like an Indian as it was going off, and Howie was just kind of looking at her, gazing at her, if you know what I mean, knowing that his firecrackers got her excited—but also, you could see it in his eyes, ticked off that Lonnie had grabbed her by the hand.

  After a couple more minutes, we were down to our last three matches. Which was a problem because Quentin still had a cherry bomb, Lonnie still had both M-80s, and Howie still had three more sheets of firecrackers. That was when Lonnie had one of his brainstorms. He looked around and noticed a paper cup on the ground under one of the benches and told Bernard to grab it for him.

  Bernard was glad to do it. I think he was glad Lonnie remembered he was still standing there, off to the side, twiddling his thumbs. So he snatched the cup and handed it to Lonnie, who used the bottom of Bernard’s T-shirt to clean out the mud that was caked inside. Then Lonnie wedged the cup into the wet ground, and he broke open his M-80s and dumped the powder into the cup. Quentin caught on to the plan, and he cracked open his cherry bomb and did the same thing. Howie came forward too and started breaking open his last three sheets of firecrackers—except he had to do it one firecracker at a time. Quentin knelt down and lent him a hand, and the rest of us were getting more and more excited by what was about to happen. I mean, this thing was going to be a bomb when it went off.

  Meanwhile, Bernard started whining that he still hadn’t set off even one firecracker. He must have figured we owed him that much because Lonnie used his shirt to clean out the cup. To shut him up, Howie handed him one of his last firecrackers—the cup was filled to the rim with powder now anyway. Lonnie handed Bernard the matchbook, but he told him he could only use one match. Because, again, we only had three matches left.

  Right off, I knew Bernard wasn’t going to be able to light the firecrac
ker with just one match. No way. Guys like Bernard Segal can never do that kind of stuff. That’s just how the world works. So while Quentin and Howie were patting down the powder in the cup, I could hear Bernard behind me … scratch, scratch, scratch.

  Finally, I’d had enough. I stood up and said, “Here, let me strike it for you.”

  “No!” he yelled. “I want to do it!”

  “You can still light the thing. I’ll just strike the match.”

  “No!” Bernard’s eyes were wide, and he looked like he was about to bawl. He was shaking his head, his mop of ratty yellow hair going back and forth.

  I didn’t want to make the kid bawl, so I took a couple of steps back. But that didn’t calm him down. He was even more frantic to strike the match, and he kept scratching it and scratching it against the matchbook. It was no good. He wasn’t even close to getting a spark. Plus, the match was getting bent up and useless. So of course Bernard kept gripping it higher and higher, until he was holding it almost by the match head. Which meant that if he ever did spark it up, he was going to burn himself.

  Sure enough, just as I was thinking that it would serve him right, the match head sparked up. It flamed right between Bernard’s thumb and forefinger, and he yelped and got rid of it. And I was watching the flaming match head shoot through the air. It didn’t even occur to me to look where it was going.

  Right for the paper cup.

  Howie noticed it out of the corner of his eye, and he dove out of the way. But poor Quentin, he was still patting down the powder to a perfect flat surface inside the cup. He had no idea what was flying in his direction.

  The match head landed smack in the middle of the cup just as Quentin started to lean back and admire his handiwork. There was a split second—not even a split second, like half a split second—where nothing happened. Quentin was smiling at the thing, and the match head was glowing against the black surface of the powder, and it was real and unreal at the same time.

  But then, a split second later, the fireball came. It wasn’t loud, not a bang or a pop, just kind of a whoosh. Quentin’s face lit up. His entire head was surrounded by flames and smoke. It was like something you’d see in a comic book. You know, like The Adventures of the Human Fireball. Again, it was only for a split second. Not enough time to realize what was going on, or to think about the consequences—like maybe Quentin was going to be dead once the smoke cleared.

  His hands went up to his face, and he started rolling around on the ground. Right off, we scrambled over to him, all of us, even Bernard, but Quentin wouldn’t take his hands away to let us look at him. He was just rolling from side to side, cussing and moaning. To be honest, I was kind of relieved that he was reacting like that. It meant that his head hadn’t gotten blown off and that his arms and legs still worked and that he could still get words out of his mouth.

  It took maybe a minute before Lonnie could pry Quentin’s hands away from his face. As soon as he did, the rest of us took a step forward. I didn’t know what I was about to see—whether he was going to have a monster face with gooey bubbling flesh or what. I held my breath, then exhaled when I could still recognize Quentin. He was lying still now, with his hands at his sides. His face looked like someone took a handful of grease and dirt and smeared it from the peak of his forehead to the tip of his chin. Even his ears were smeared over. But at least he was still recognizable.

  “Can you open your eyes?” Lonnie asked him.

  “No,” Quentin said, just loud enough for us to hear.

  “Try to.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do you mean you can’t because you’re blind?”

  “I can’t do it!”

  “That’s all right,” Lonnie said, calm as can be.

  Quentin calmed down too. “What happened?”

  Lonnie ignored him. “How do your eyes feel?”

  “I don’t know. Sticky.”

  “Sticky how? Your eyeballs or your eyelids?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You need to open your eyes.”

  “I can’t, Lonnie.”

  “If you can’t, I’ll do it for you.”

  “No!”

  “Quentin, I’m going to open your eyes. You can help me or not, but I’m going to do it.”

  Lonnie sounded so sure of himself that Quentin didn’t answer. But he didn’t resist either. He lay still with his hands at his sides. Lonnie licked the tip of his thumb and forefinger, then reached toward Quentin’s face. He was real gentle—as gentle as I’d ever seen him—as he cleared the gunk from Quentin’s eyelids.

  “Hey, are you still all right?” Lonnie asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me doing that, does it hurt?”

  “Nah.” Quentin half smiled.

  “You think you can open them yourself now?”

  “Maybe.”

  His eyelids fluttered for a second, then came open.

  “Do you see me, Quent?”

  He smiled fuller this time. “Yeah.”

  “How many fingers do I have up?”

  “None.”

  “Yeah,” Lonnie said, “it was a trick question.”

  “I think maybe I’m okay,” Quentin said.

  I could’ve kissed him when he said that. No, honestly, I could’ve knelt down next to him and kissed him on both cheeks. Except I knew he wasn’t okay. The smell of singed hair was hovering all around us, and I could see filthy clumps of hair high on Quentin’s forehead that were no longer connected to his scalp.

  “We’ve got to get you cleaned up,” Lonnie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  With that, Quentin tucked his legs in and pushed himself up onto his elbows. He sat in that position for maybe half a minute, blinking his eyes and licking his lips. He looked woozy. You’d be woozy too if an atom bomb went off in your face. You’d likely be pretty mad too, asking how it happened, who did what. But not Quentin. That’s not his way.

  Lonnie asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Let me just sit here for a while,” he mumbled.

  Then Lonnie looked up at me. “We need a bar of soap and, like, ten paper towels. Half of ’em wet. How fast can you get that?”

  I didn’t even answer him. I just took off and ran like crazy … out of the playground, then up the block in the direction of my house. The sidewalk was deserted, so I got up to a good cruising speed. I had to dodge old Mrs. Dong as I yanked open the front door to my house and hurtled up the stairs. She started laughing and jabbering at me in Chinese. She must’ve thought I was out of my mind. The only thing that slowed me down was getting the key out of my back pocket and fitting it into the lock. But a second later I was inside.

  “Is that you, Julian?” came my mom’s voice from the bedroom.

  “I need paper towels,” I called back.

  “What for?”

  “I just need ’em.”

  She started to laugh too. “All right, take as many as you want.”

  I spun that roll of towels round and round. I didn’t even bother to count the sheets. I tore off what I needed and ran half of them under warm water. I was gasping for air at that point, but wetting the towels slowed me down enough to catch my breath. When I was done, I snatched the bar of Ivory soap next to the sink and tucked it into my pocket.

  My mom called out, “Is everything all right?”

  I didn’t answer her. I had what I needed.

  “Julian? Are you still there?”

  “I took the soap too, Mom.”

  “What’s going on?”

  But by then I was back out the door, back down the stairs, back outside, and I was making a beeline for the back of the Hampshire House. I had the damp end of the strip of paper towels hugged close to my body, the dry end streaming out behind me like the tail of a comet. I felt like a comet too—that’s how fast I was going. I remember a car honking at me just for the heck of it. Like, Go, man, go! That was how
it sounded to me at the time. But looking back, it could have been sarcastic too. Like, Slow down, you moron! I guess you hear what you want to hear.

  The first thing I saw when I turned into the playground was Quentin sitting on one of the wooden benches. That was a good sign, even though it meant his pants were getting soaked in the leftover rainwater—like he didn’t have enough problems. He still looked wobbly and out of it. His shoulders were slouched forward, but at least he was sitting up on his own. Lonnie and Howie were standing in front of him, telling him he was all right. Beverly and Bernard had taken off, which was just as well. Without Beverly around, Howie would be in his right mind.

  Lonnie tore off a couple of the wet paper towels and began to wipe Quentin’s face. He started with his cheeks and chin, then did the bridge of his nose. You should have seen the crud that came off! He did Quentin’s forehead next. He tried to be gentle about it, but tufts of hair fell off. Even if he wiped underneath them, the tufts stuck to the paper towel, or else they came loose and drifted to the ground. If Quentin noticed, he didn’t react.

  Lonnie told him, “Now close your eyes, Quent.”

  Quentin closed his eyes.

  Lonnie took the rest of the paper towels, first the damp ones and then the dry ones, and went to work on Quentin’s eyes. He used every last one I brought because, you could tell, he didn’t want to put pressure on the eyelids. He was just dabbing, not rubbing. But after a couple of passes, Quentin’s eyebrows were starting to go. There was nothing Lonnie could do. His eyebrows were gone whether Lonnie stopped wiping or not. By the time Quentin’s face was clean, not a hair of either eyebrow was left. It was creepy to look at. Not that he was messed up or deformed. He just looked stunned. Like he was stuck in a constant state of Yikes!

  Quentin noticed the hairs on the paper towel and figured out what had happened. He felt for his eyebrows, and then—I swear!—he started to crack up. It was the craziest laugh ever. Maybe he was so relieved to be alive that losing his eyebrows seemed like a minor thing. Whatever the reason, the fact that he was cracking up cracked up Lonnie and Howie and me, and for a minute the four of us were in hysterics. It was as if we were cracking up at ourselves, at the fact that we were cracking up.