Joe says the guys he knows at college who play defensive line take a nap every day. They can’t go out on weekends because they have to eat a special extra-protein meal at nine p.m. on the Friday before game day. Plus a carb feast for breakfast. Girls can’t get too excited about snuggling up to those jelly bellies.
You know how that is. Everyone complains if they have to sit next to a fat person on the bus or in the auditorium. Even as skinny as I am and still dropping weight, it takes me less than two seconds to decide those guys might be thinking it’s not so bad to be me.
“Daniel Landon?” The woman in the white lab coat is a total stranger, but not much older than me. She looks like one of the really smart girls Joe might hang with at college. Fingernail polish, short hair, crisp and efficient. “I’m your algebra exam proctor. Don’t bother asking me any questions because I’m not a mathematician. I’m a chemist.”
I shrug. “Chemistry’s junior year, right?”
“Maybe you’ll be in my class next year.”
“Probably not.”
She bristles. “Chemistry is required to graduate. You don’t plan to graduate?”
“That’s a tougher question than you might think. Maybe I ought to just take the Algebra II test.”
Although she thinks I’m being flip—I can tell from the little huff that escapes from her lipsticked lips—she checks her watch and hands me the test. “Fifty minutes. No extensions.”
She doesn’t yell or lose her cool. She’s probably not a bad teacher, but I’ll never know.
When I finish, Mom’s not waiting out front. Mack is.
“Your mom said she’d pick you up at my house. If I’d walk with you.” After a short silence, he adds, “Think your ankle’s up to it?” I start walking. The ankle can fall off for all I care. He catches up and walks for a while before he stops moaning about the new format for morning announcements and the changes in the cafeteria menu.
“Hey.” He punches air by my arm. “Are you mad at me about something?”
“You’re supposed to be my ears and eyes at school, remember? If Yowell’s hanging around Meredith, that would be important for me to know.”
“He’s just a friend.”
“Not anymore. He’s turned into a wolf.”
“Whoa, I didn’t realize this thing with you and Meredith was that serious.”
“It’s none of your goddamned business. Just keep Yowell away from her.”
Neither Mack nor Mrs. Petriano can talk me into coming inside. I’m legitimately waiting on their front porch for my mother, but it feels more like spying. No movement at the Rilkes. Although Mrs. Rilke’s van is in the driveway, no one comes in or out. No music wafts over from the basement. Mack raps on the living room window.
“Your mother called to say she’d be another fifteen minutes. Sure you won’t come in? Mom made brownies.”
“No.” I can’t believe when I’m this close I can’t have ten minutes alone with Meredith. “Thanks.” It’s a lame afterthought, Mack’s gone anyway.
Mack’s mother brings out a plate of brownies and a glass of milk in one of those double-sided glasses that aren’t supposed to sweat. Everyone who lives at the river has some of those perspiration-free glasses. When Mack and I were about ten, we smashed one with a brick to see what was inside. Just air, it was disappointing. We were trying to invent a way to wear our swim trunks to school so we could skip out at recess and swim in the river without being caught afterward with wet jeans. The possibility that those glasses were filled with some kind of fluid that absorbed moisture occurred to us almost simultaneously.
Mack and I do that sometimes. Stephen King–ish, but I like it that my thoughts aren’t totally off base. It’s weirdly comforting to know there’s another guy who thinks kind of like I think, even if it’s only once in a while.
The experiment didn’t work and I had to wash windows to pay Mom back for the glass we broke. It turns out, from a little online snooping by Mack, that the guy with the patent is raking it in. Then Nick had the brilliant idea we should have stripped off the swim trunks and gone back to school in our jeans. Duh. He surprises me sometimes with that kind of practical solution.
Mrs. Petriano waits to be sure I eat part of a brownie. “Your mom didn’t sound good, Daniel. Is there something I can do to help?”
“Invent a cure for cancer.”
She goes back inside. I’m such a jerk. Even though I’m not hungry, I eat four of the brownies to try to make it up to her. When Mom drives up, she’s got Nick in the car. She doesn’t even say hello or ask about the tests.
Once I’m in the backseat, I raise my eyebrows in the visor mirror at Nick, who’s riding shotgun. Silent, he signals back with the same eyebrow lift. A warning that Mom’s on a rampage. My stomach twists so tightly I think I might be sick on the way home.
“Mom, can we stop for a Coke somewhere?” Fizz helps sometimes.
She bursts into tears.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It turns out that the Social Services witch in the black sedan is mad because she doesn’t think my parents are cooperating. The school board issues a whiny one-page decision on the school attendance issue. It says I’m excused from attendance pending further investigation. But, here’s the kicker that upsets my mother so much. They withhold their decision on whether my parents are breaking the law.
Things are calm for a week or two. Dad cooks dinners because Mom’s practically living at the library, using the free Internet to research the junk Miss T. Undertaker’s feeding her about alternative cures. Mom comes home late at night, the Whaler putt-putting from the dock to the boat in skipped beats like a scratched CD. I hear my parents in their cabin shuffling through the printouts. Everything’s in terms of success rates and dollars. The treatment-center names sound like Christian-novel titles: the Haven, Outlook of Peace, Crossroads.
Out of the blue, it seems, the county attorney files papers at the courthouse against my parents for neglect, a very definite accusation of criminal wrongdoing according to the statute number recited in the notice that’s stuck in the cabin door. It’s waiting for us when we come home from the weekly white blood cell testing at Riverside Hospital, Essex County’s “leading medical center.” Read leading as only.
There’s an article in the newspaper about us. The county attorney is quoted as saying if my parents had gone ahead in June with the treatment recommended by the doctors, I would have been back in school already. He accuses my parents of contributing to my delinquency, a.k.a. my truancy. They don’t actually issue a truancy charge, though the threat is obvious from the article. The veiled accusation that my parents are killing me is the part that drives Mom wild. Ridiculous, if they only knew my mother.
The lawyer my parents hire, Henry Walker, is practically dead. He mumbles and you can’t understand a word he says. Every time they come away from his office they’re like zombies themselves. Walker goes to court with them twice, but nothing happens. With the obvious intent to keep me out of the controversy, my parents don’t talk about what it really means, and I resort to scouring the newspapers. The Rappahannock Record has a tiny column on legal news in Tappahannock, but personal information is protected in cases involving juveniles, according to Mrs. Petriano, who catches me with their copy one afternoon while I’m waiting for Mack to come home from school.