Ms. Bixby's Last Day (10 page)

Topher opens his pack and puts the book he just bought inside, then pulls out his sketchbook. A thick spiral job with rough, cream-colored paper that only people who are serious about drawing have. He flips to a blank page near the front and starts to draw something. I lean across Steve to get a look. If I were anyone else, any of the other kids from our class, I'd get
a flash of teeth and a protective growl. Topher's sketchbook is his prize possession, like Batman's utility belt or everyone else's iPhone. Steve and I are the only ones allowed to look, as far as I know, and I've only recently been added to the list. I watch him sketch out the rough outline of a few bookshelves, followed by a figure huddled between them. The head, the ears, the glasses, the marching wrinkles. It's a pretty good likeness. Topher makes the head much too large, caricature style, but he manages to get Mr. Alexander's mischievous expression right.

“That's pretty good,” I say.

It's actually
really
good, as usual, but Topher's a dude and my friend, so I'm not about to gush on him. Not that I would gush on anyone.

“Yeah,” Topher says, which is kind of like
thanks
and
I already knew that
all at once. “I just wanted to get it down while I could still picture what he looks like.”

“There's another bus that will take us within a block of where we need to be that's supposed to be here in seven and a half minutes,” Steve says, but I'm busy watching Topher flesh out his sketch of Mr. Alexander. It's mesmerizing, watching him make something out of nothing, like he's got a direct wire going from his brain to his hand, through the pencil and straight to the book. It's something I wish I could do. One of many things I wish I could do.

“Don't forget Scout,” I say.

“Right.”

Topher etches in the headlight eyes and crooked beak of the owl, fills in the feathers and the hooked talons, then pauses to review his handiwork.

“Cool,” I say.

“Yeah,” Topher says again, studying his sketch intently, shading in a few spots. That's the difference between artists and the rest of us, I think. Artists know where to put the shadows. “At first I thought he was a deranged psychopath who opened a bookstore to lure in little kids. But then we started talking about the book, and he asked us if we like riddles, and you . . . well, you were squaring, I guess.”

“Exactly.”

“Though cubing sounds better. Shape-wise.”

“Cubed is to the
third
power,” Steve says. “Nobody goes to the bathroom to do a number three. There is no number three.”

I smirk with satisfaction. It's not often he takes my side over Topher's. Steve dives back into his phone, and Topher tucks his pencil behind his ear and riffles through the first half of his sketchbook. I've seen most of these pictures before. Mostly superheroes and their nemeses. A few landscapes. An unfinished drawing of a caveman being eaten by a dinosaur. A
picture of Kyle Kipperson getting eaten by a dinosaur. Then a picture of someone who looks a little like me pinning someone who looks a little like Trevor Cowly to the ground, except I'm dressed up like a ninja and Trevor looks like Doctor Octopus. I look good as a ninja.

“That's me, right?”

“No way,” Topher says. “This guy is infinitely cooler than you. Did you miss the part where he's a ninja?”

“Yeah, but it's
based
on me, right?”

“Inspired by real-life people, perhaps,” Topher says, “but artistically enhanced for pure, unadulterated frawesomeness.”

“Hey, look at this alligator coming out of this toilet. That can't be real, can it?”

Steve shows his phone to Topher. While he's distracted, I reach over and grab the sketchbook to get a better look. Maybe it's
not
me. It's hard to tell with the mask on. Topher grabs Steve's phone and presses his face into it as I flip through a few pages, pausing at some other stuff I haven't seen before. There's a drawing of a person in a gladiator getup battling a six-headed dragon and another of a winged fairy decked out with machine guns and hand grenades, like
Die Hard
meets
Peter Pan
. Topher lets out an “ew” as he and Steve find more things crawling out of toilets. I reach the front of the sketchbook and go back the other way.
The pages after the riddle-posing bookstore owner are blank: home for the future works of Christopher C. Renn.

Suddenly, flipping through, I feel a hole open up inside me. So many pages left. All that potential he's got. I have nothing like that. Nothing I can do that makes me stand out. I am about to close the book when something catches my eye. About three-quarters of the way in, as if tucked away.

Surrounded on both sides by pristine pages is a portrait of a woman. But not just any woman. Even in black and white, you can tell exactly who it is. It's the hair—the one lightly shaded stripe that strikes down across her bangs. The slightly snub nose and shallow cheeks. The inquisitive eyes. She looks sad in the picture. It's actually beautiful, the way he's captured her. All the details, the silhouette. He must have spent a lot of time on this drawing. A
lot
of time.

“Hey, where'd my book . . .”

I glance over at Topher. He seems frozen in place. He sees the sketchbook, the open page, the portrait. Then all at once his face flares bright red and his hands shoot out as he catapults across Steve's lap, nearly knocking the phone out of his hand. I pull the sketchbook out of reach before he can grab it, scooting to the edge of the bench.

“Is that—?” Steve starts to ask, but he can't finish the
question because Topher shouts over him.

“Give it back!”

“Hang on,” I say, holding it up over my head, still studying the portrait, wondering why it's even in there.

“You're squishing me!” Steve shouts as Topher nearly crams an elbow in his mouth reaching for me, scrabbling for the book, clawing at my shirt. Muppet dog goes crazy, erupting in a fury of yaps, and I see the old lady grunt and stand, muttering something about “juvenile delinquents.”

“Give it back, Brand!”

“I will. Just hang on! I'm still looking at it.”

“Screw you. Give it back, now!” Topher stands up and I stand too. Steve hastily stuffs his phone in his pocket and slides his backpack with the precious cheesecake out of the way.

“I will, all right? Just chill.”

But Topher doesn't chill, and I don't let go. There's something about this picture. Finding it here, secreted away in the back of his sketchbook. I'm not sure what it means, why it matters so much, but all of a sudden I'm sweating, nerves humming, irritated. I feel like something's been taken from me without permission, even though it's
his
drawing. Obviously he can draw her. She's his teacher too. But she can't possibly mean the same thing to him as she does to me. I hold up the sketchbook even
farther as Topher steps in. He's not grabbing for it anymore. I see his fingers clinch.

“Give. It. Back.” His jaw is tight. The words barely make it out between his clamped teeth.

“All right, I will,” I say, lowering the sketchbook to where he can get it, except I still can't let go, I'm still looking at the picture, and Topher only manages to grab hold of half of it. I hear the rippled unzipping of the thick pages tearing free from the metal coil. See one half of the sketchbook come loose in Topher's hands. My half, the half with her face, flies out of my hand, rustling in the air for a moment before slapping against the pavement, pages spread.

Topher screams. Then I feel the weight of him on my chest.

We hit the sidewalk, cold and rough, and all my breath escapes me. I keep my head up, but my shoulders slam home, my elbows scrape along the concrete, rubbed raw. Topher lands on top of me and I'm surprised at how heavy he is for how skinny he looks. He raises his half of the sketchbook above my head like it's a giant stone slab that he intends to bludgeon me with. I reach out and just manage to reach the other half, holding it between us like a shield.

“Fine! Take her!” I say.

I meant take
it
, but that's not how it comes out, so I try
again. “Just take it and get the hell off me!” I'm grunting. He's got one knee pressed into my gut. I can hardly breathe.

Topher doesn't move. He doesn't grab the other part of the sketchbook. He doesn't hit or kick or yell. He just holds me down. His lip quivers. Out of the corner of my eye I see Steve point and say something about a bus.

And that's just what we look like when it pulls up. Me on the ground. Topher on top. And Ms. Bixby in between.

IT'S A TWENTY-SEVEN-MINUTE BUS RIDE FROM
Woodfield Shopping Center to the corner of State Street and Third. Twenty-seven minutes, barring extraneous traffic, blown tire, or hostile takeover. Twenty-seven minutes can feel like hours when you are caught in the middle of two friends.

Topher is slumped in the seat next to me, his sweaty head pressed against the seat. Brand sits across the aisle, checking his elbows. They're pink, stripped of skin and spotted with blood from where they hit the pavement. I can't look at them for more than a second: blood makes me queasy. So do brussels sprouts, millipedes, and mayonnaise, but blood especially.

This bus smells like ammonia. Or that stuff they use when someone vomits in the halls at school, which also makes my
stomach turn. The bus driver is a man this time. His name is Bob, and he has shaggy hair and a beard that reaches to his chest. He looks like he belongs on a motorcycle, or at least in an advertisement for motorcycles. I've never actually met anyone who rides a motorcycle. My parents think they should be outlawed because they are too dangerous, along with cigarettes, horror movies, and any boy who might want to date my sister. The thought of my father on a motorcycle is funny to me.

Topher has both halves of his sketchbook in his lap, the cover creased and torn on one corner. More of the pages are coming loose from the binding, which is also bent. I feel bad. I know how much that sketchbook means to him. The drawing of Ms. Bixby is tucked away in there somewhere.

I glance from Topher to Brand and back again. There's nothing worse than being stuck between two people who are mad at each other.

That's not true. Dying of starvation is worse. Being stranded in the void of outer space with only ten minutes of oxygen left in your suit is worse. Earthquakes. Alzheimer's disease. Ductal adenocarcinoma. These are all worse. But being stuck in between is still bad. When my parents argue, they will sometimes put my sister or me in the middle, use us to prove a point, to try to admit that one or the other of them is right. When that happens, Christina often ends up trying to negotiate peace. I usually find
some reason to escape to my room or go call Topher.

There's nowhere to escape to when you are stuck on a bus, jerking along cracked city streets, heading south toward downtown. I'm not excited by the idea. Just yesterday a postal delivery worker found a dead cat stuffed into a mailbox downtown, presumably not Princess Paw Paw. It doesn't sound like an ideal place to spend the day, but unfortunately everything we still need is downtown, including Ms. Bixby.

Up near the front a mother with two toddlers is spilling crackers all over her lap. Judging by the dark-purple stain on her blouse, she isn't having a good day. The two kids complain about being thirsty and having to use the bathroom. Then they start to fight over who has more crackers. She flashes me an apologetic smile. I'd like to tell her that I understand how she feels, but I don't talk to strangers.

Brand and Topher continue to pout on either side of me. I wish I knew what to do in these situations, but I don't, so instead I take my phone back out, boot up Minecraft, and go crush some creepers, ignoring the warnings that my battery is already starting to run low. That's the nice thing about phone batteries, I think. They at least
warn
you when they are about to fail. They give you time to prepare. Topher and Brand, on the other hand—I didn't see that one coming. It was just a picture, hardly worth fighting over. It wasn't even Topher's best
work. I like his dinosaur drawings better.

This bus really smells bad. And those kids are loud. Brand winces every time he pokes his sidewalk burns. I wonder if taking this second bus is going to put us too far behind schedule, if we will be able to get back to the school in time to get home. I don't want to have to call my sister for a ride. We shouldn't have gone to the bookstore. I shouldn't have told Brand about the shark. I wish I could get the rest of the snot off my shirtsleeve; I guess it's just going to dry there and be crusty. I still think the cheesecake should be in a cooler. Things are not going according to plan, and I feel a little light-headed because of it.

I'm in the middle of making some Minecraft explosives when Topher finally stops chewing on his lip and says something.

“It's not what you think.”

I'm not sure if he's talking to Brand or me, because he's still looking straight ahead. I go with me because he's mad at Brand. I'm not sure if Brand is even listening; he's staring through the dirty glass at the blur of buildings now, his elbows cradled in his hands. Of course if Topher is talking to me, I'm not sure what to say, because I'm not sure what he thinks
I
think.

“It's just a picture,” Topher continues, which
is
one of the things I was just thinking. “It doesn't mean anything. It's not like I have a crush on her or anything.”

A crush? On Ms.
Bixby
? That wasn't at all what I thought.

Now, suddenly, it's all I can think.

I pause my game. “Oh,” I say. “Right.” I still stare at the phone. I'm sort of afraid to look at Topher.

“It's not like that at all,” he continues, looking at the seat in front of him, refusing to look at me too. “I just . . . I don't know. I thought that if I drew a picture of her, she would, you know . . . always
be
there somehow.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

Uh-huh is what my parents say to each other at the dinner table when they pretend to be listening to each other. Except I'm not pretending. I'm really listening. I'm just not really understanding. Ms. Bixby is a thirty-five-year-old woman. And our teacher. Topher is twelve. And my best friend. These two things are incongruent.

“I thought it would be like a way of, you know . . . preserving her,” Topher says. He looks over at me finally, waiting for my response, to say something reassuring. To
get
it.

I think I got it. “Like formaldehyde,” I say.

My sister had to dissect a frog last year in biology. She said they kept the frogs in formaldehyde, which is this chemical that preserves living tissue so that it rots slower. Unfortunately, formaldehyde causes cancer. Not that the dead frogs care. Judging by the look on Topher's face, I obviously don't get it.

Topher groans and slumps up against the window, and now
I'm afraid he's mad at me too for thinking the wrong thing, even though he's the one who made me think it in the first place.

“I get it.”

Brand's voice is barely more than a whisper. And I'm not entirely sure I hear him right. But then he turns and looks at us. Actually, he looks past me and directly at Topher. “It makes perfect sense,” he says. Topher looks over my head at Brand, and I feel like I'm suddenly in the way. “It's like Shakespeare,” he adds. “How he wrote all those poems and thought that it would make him immortal or something.” Ms. Bixby taught us a little about Shakespeare. We read a sonnet by him in class.

It didn't work, I want to say, Shakespeare still died, but Brand keeps talking. “You draw her and she's, like, with you forever. I think it's cool.”

“Really?” Topher asks. He looks at me for confirmation.

“Hmm,” I say.
Hmm
is what you say when you can't say the thing that the other person wants to hear. I learned that from my parents too.

“Seriously,” Brand says. “I was just jealous 'cause . . .” It takes a few seconds for him to finish the thought. “Honestly, I just wish I could draw half as good as you.”

“Half as well,” I correct. Brand ignores me. I turn around to Topher. “I get it too,” I say. “Totally.” I really don't. I still think it's a little strange to be drawing pictures of your teacher. I'm just
glad that Topher doesn't have a crush on Ms. Bixby. That would be worse.

There is a long, quiet moment, and then Brand reaches across the aisle with his fist. “I'm sorry about your sketchbook.”

I look at Brand's fist, hovering right in front of my face. For a moment I think Topher is going to leave him hanging. For a moment I hope he does, but then Topher rolls his eyes and finishes the bump. I have to lean back to avoid getting punched.

“You're a total dufkus,” Topher says.
Dufkus
is a Brand word. Like
dork
and
doofus
and a few other things all rolled into one. It's not a good thing, but it's not near as bad as being a flipwad. “And you're
so
buying me a new one.”

“It was fourteen ninety-five,” I say. I know because I'm the one who bought it for Topher's tenth birthday. That and a set of charcoal pencils. He told me it was the coolest present he ever got and promised his first sketch would be of me. It wasn't.

“In that case, I regret to inform you,” Brand says, “that I just spent all
my
money on cheesecake.”

“It's all right. You can just owe me,” Topher says.

Up ahead the bus driver finally calls out our stop. The lady with the juice-stained shirt collects her children and ushers them out the door, trailing cracker crumbs behind them. The three of us stand, Topher tucking both halves of his sketchbook in his bag, zipping it tight, me shouldering the cheesecake again,
taking my place in the back of the line as I follow the path of crackers off the bus, trying hard not to think about the thing Topher told me I was thinking, about Ms. Bixby and how he didn't feel about her. About crushes and living forever.

Cecelia Flowers had a crush on me once. I know because she gave me a folded piece of pink construction paper with a strawberry scratch-and-sniff sticker on the front and a message inside. The message read:
I lik you
.

We were five, so I didn't hold her spelling against her. Instead I told her I liked her back, in part because her pigtails reminded me of tornadoes, but mostly because it seemed like the polite thing to do and I was taught to use good manners. We held hands during recess that afternoon, and I let her borrow my favorite Transformers Optimus Prime pencil. The next day, I tried to hold her hand again and she stuck out her tongue at me. I assumed that meant she didn't like me anymore. I asked for my pencil back and she said she lost it.

She was my first and only girlfriend.

I understand Newton's laws of motion, and HTML, and basic trigonometry, but girls are confusing. They don't follow set patterns. They are an equation full of variables:
x
+
y
=
z
, where
x
=
q
and
y
is constantly changing and
z
is whispering about you behind your back. I know because sometimes I catch
girls whispering about me behind my back. I know because I overhear my sister on the phone complaining about all the kids at her school, even the ones she insists are her friends. Except she doesn't whisper, which is good, because otherwise it might be hard to hear, even with my ear pressed up against her door.

From my experience, boys are easier to get along with. We have basic needs: potato chips, video games, and movies where national landmarks blow up. That makes us compatible. Compatible means going together without conflict. Strawberries and whipped cream are compatible. Sunshine and swimming pools are compatible. Hydrogen and oxygen. Han Solo and Chewbacca. Cereal and milk.

My sister and I are not compatible. Only five years separate us, but she sometimes pretends it's more like twenty. Ever since I was born, I've literally felt her standing over me, starting when I was first learning how to walk and she followed right behind with both hands on either side, ready to catch me. When I was growing up, she quizzed me and corrected me, told me when I was coloring outside the lines, and pointed out words I didn't know. My parents thought it was sweet the way she hovered over me, tying my shoes, correcting my homework, saying, “No, Steven,” the same way my mother did. They thought it was her way of showing affection, but I knew it was her way of letting me know which one of us was in charge. From those first
moments stumbling through the kitchen as a toddler, unsure of my footing, wobbling and having her arms wrapped around me—I've never questioned it.

Dad says there are tigers and there are sheep. My sister is a tiger. I can only assume I'm a sheep. Not compatible.

My parents aren't either. That's why my mother spends the weekends in her garden, weeding the flower beds, tending to the strawberry plants, or just sitting on the patio looking at the sky. My father spends that time indoors. They are like vinegar and bleach: highly toxic when combined. It doesn't take much to trigger a reaction—an unemptied dishwasher, a random remark—and the shouting begins.

Topher knows. He's been over when my parents are arguing. That's usually when we sneak out the door and bike through the neighborhood. Sometimes we go back to his house. Sometimes we walk down to the pond and try to capture tadpoles, armed with nets and empty margarine tubs. That's where we were the day Topher swore off marriage forever.

My parents were arguing over the credit card bill. We could hear them from my bedroom. Christina popped her head in, giving me a look that was both annoyed and concerned. “I'm going to Nat's house to study. You dweebs want me to drop you off somewhere?”

I shook my head, hoping to leave it at that, but Topher said,
“We would, Chris, but I really doubt there's room for three on your broomstick.” My sister drives a Subaru, actually, purchased for her sixteenth birthday. She also hates to be called Chris. She and Topher have that in common, at least.

“You're such a turd,” Christina said, then looked at me. “You okay?”

I nodded again and she left, but not without trading glares with Topher again.

“How do you stand her?” Topher asked.

“Could be worse,” I said. “The sand tiger shark eats its own siblings while it's still in the womb.”