Even though I still wanted to nail this Quinte kid, whoever he was, I felt bad for him when I saw his house. It reminded me of the place my sisters and I had been living in since Dad and Mom split up last yearâa fixer-upper that never really got fixed up, a broken-down house with a broken-down family inside it. Maybe there was something broken inside Quinte's house too.
Maddy rang the bell and a woman answered it. I smelled hamburgers cooking. A tv blared somewhere in the background.
“Hi, Mrs. McFarlane. This is my friend Connor. We were just heading to my place, and I thought I'd drop by to say hi to Quinte.”
Maddy beamed a smile at her. You'd never know we were going to question her son on suspicion of vandalism.
“That's so sweet of you, Madhavi,” Mrs. McFarlane said. “He's in the basement. Go on down.”
In the basement rec room, a chubby teenage kid was sitting on the sofa, playing a video game. He was wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. I shot a look at Maddy. She nodded and sat down next to Quinte. I stayed standing. I didn't want to act like I was the guy's pal or anything, not if I was going to rat him out to the cops.
“Hi, Quinte,” said Maddy.
“I'm smashing aliens,” said Quinte. He didn't look at her. On the tv screen, a video-game caveman was hitting little green creatures with an enormous club. More creatures were parachuting down from a spaceship, which was shooting laser beams at the caveman. Quinte was really getting a kick out of it, shouting sound effects as he whacked the aliens with his caveman avatar.
“Can I play?” asked Maddy.
“No. It's the rule. Only one player,” said Quinte.
The spaceship sent out a beam of purple light, which frazzled the caveman into a pile of digital dust. A message flashed on the screen. THE ALIENS HAVE CONQUERED!
“No fair!” Quinte complained. “You ruined my game.”
“Sorry, Quinte,” said Maddy. “This is my friend Connor.”
Quinte looked up at me, but not really
at
me. His eyes were focused somewhere about six inches to the left of my head. Maddy was rightâQuinte was a different kind of kid. He was not all there, or something.
“I smashed four hundred and ninety-eight aliens,” he said. “When you smash five hundred, you get a bigger club.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“You get a bigger club if you smash five hundred aliens,” Quinte continued, “and if you smash a thousand, you get a rocket launcher!”
“Cool. I love to smash stuff,” said Maddy. “Smashing stuff's coolâright, Connor?”
“Yeah, really cool,” I said. I wasn't sure where she was going with this.
“Did you see Baghdatis at the Australian Open?” Maddy went on. “He smashed four rackets in a row. Totally mangled them.” She laughed, as though destroying a two-hundred-dollar racket was the funniest thing in the world. “It was awesome.”
Quinte got a gleam in his eye. “I smashed a tennis racket,” he said.
Maddy shot a look at me. Now I understood what she was doing. It was too easy to trap this kid.
“Smashing rackets is cool,” said Maddy. “I love smashing rackets.”
“Yeah, but you're not allowed to tell,” Quinte said. “It's a secret.”
“Who says it's a secret?” said Maddy.
“The other guys. I got fifty bucks. Fifty bucks!”
“What other guys?” I asked. But Quinte drew back, as though he didn't trust me to keep his secret. He picked up the video console and started smashing aliens again.
Maddy tried to talk to him some more. But she couldn't get him back on the topic of the tennis racket. He just kept talking about aliens and the type of weaponry used to smash them. Finally, we left. Maddy called goodbye to Mrs. McFarlane as we let ourselves out the front door.
“He's guilty,” I said when the door closed behind us.
“That's pretty obvious,” said Maddy. She started walking away from the little house and past the houses of the richer neighbors, with their well-kept lawns and big, shady maple trees. I kept pace beside her.
“So let's call the cops,” I said.
“Nice, Connor. Throw him to the wolves,” said Maddy. “You know he's not right in the head.”
“What else are we supposed to do?”
“I don't know, Connor. Maybeâ¦I don't know.”
She sat down on the curb and started fiddling with a twig she'd picked up from the sidewalk. “What about those other kids on the video?” she said finally. “I bet they put him up to it. He said he got fifty bucks.”
“Fifty bucks to smash things. That must've been his idea of heaven.” I sat down next to her.
“Connor!”
“It's true. Besides, it doesn't even make any sense. Why would they pay him fifty bucks to smash things?”
Maddy shrugged. “Maybe he didn't want to, and they paid him to go along with it.”
“Didn't want to smash things? Are you kidding?” I asked.
“Yeah, you're right,” Maddy said.
“And besides, why pay him to trash the club? I mean, I could understand if they paid him fifty bucks to steal a stereo or something. But trashing a tennis auction? What's in it for them?”
Maddy shrugged. “I don't know.”
“I still say we turn him in to the cops.”
Maddy fiddled with her stick some more, drawing doodles in the loose dirt on the sidewalk.
“I wish we knew who those other kids were,” said Maddy.
“Maybe he'll rat them out.”
“Yeah, and maybe he won't. And maybe he'll go to jail. Did you think about that?”
“Okay,” I said. “But what about the club?”
“How's ratting out Quinte going to help the club?”
“You could sue him.”
“Yeah, like he's got any money, Connor.”
I couldn't think of an answer to that. So I sat there awkwardly, saying nothing. I hated the feeling of arguing with her. I wanted her to know I wasn't mad at her. I was mad at the guys who had vandalized the club and put it on the brink of bankruptcy. For what? Cheap kicks?
“I don't know what we're going to do, Connor,” said Maddy. “But I know we can't just lay it all on Quinte. We've been neighbors since forever. We used to play together when we were little kids. My parents are friends with his parents. They come over to our place for barbecues, for God's sake. I can't just rat him out. How would I face his family?”
She looked at me with her chin in her hands, her face cupped in her long, slender fingers, and her dark hair falling around her shoulders.
“Okay,” I said. “We'll think of something else.”
But I didn't know what else we would think of, if we threw away our prime suspect.
I wished I knew who had given Quinte fifty bucks. I wished I could figure out why. I thought back to the question one of the cops had asked the day we'd discovered the vandalism.
Do you know anyone who would want to target the club?
As though I didn't have enough problems, my mom was on a crusade. It was her first crusade since the divorce, and she was really throwing herself into it.
I had seen Mom on crusades before, so I knew what to expect. The fridge could be empty for weeks. Rats could be dancing the macarena on the living room sofa. And Mom would be on the phone, giving heck to some city official, blind to the chaos around her.
At the moment, Mom was on a crusade to save the Tree.
The Tree was a gigantic oak growing on the huge front lawn of a little, old house at the end of our street. When I say gigantic, I mean gigantic. It was so big, if two people stood on either side of it and tried to reach their arms around the trunk, they wouldn't be able to touch each other's fingers.
The little, old house had been owned by a little, old woman who used to come out and sit under the oak tree and watch the world go by. But the woman had died, and her kids had sold the property to a developer. The developer wanted to cut down the oak, knock down the house and build condos on the property.
Mom was on a crusade to stop him.
So when I got home that evening after my encounter with Quinte, I wasn't surprised to find the fridge empty and my mom at the kitchen table, half-buried in a pile of reports and reference papers. I was lucky there were no rats partying on the sofa.
“Fish sticks in the freezer. Sorry, I didn't get around to shopping today,” said Mom, barely looking up.
“Where are Cyn and Tara?” I asked. I didn't see any sign of my sisters.
“Babysitting. You're on your own for dinner,” Mom said. “I have to go to a meeting tonight.”
I could figure out what the meeting was about by the report in her hand, titled “Preserving the Urban TreescapeâAn Analysis of Municipal Green-Space Policy.”
“Mom, I thought we were painting tonight,” I said. “The real estate agent's coming tomorrow. Remember?”
“I forgot. Don't worryâI'll call her and put her off till next week.”
“But Mom, the house really needs a paint job.”
“Connor.” Mom lowered her reading glasses and looked at me. “This house gives me a royal pain in the butt. I have no intention of spending the night painting it when I have more important things on my hands.”
“Like saving the Tree,” I grumbled.
“Yes.” She stared at me. “Like saving the Tree.”
Mom started gathering up her papers and shoving them into a file folder.
The house gave me a royal pain in the butt, too, mainly because it was the result of my parents' divorce, which was the rottenest thing that had happened in my life.
After Dad left, Mom got half the money from the sale of our old house. She used it to buy this house, which she got for a “good price” because it was a “fixer-upper.” But after we moved in, we found out the house needed way more “fixing-upping” than the real estate agent had told us about. The plumbing, the wiring and the foundation all needed work. Pretty soon the money was gone, and Mom still owed a huge mortgage. It was one of those weird mortgages where you pay basically nothing for the first year, and after that the monthly payments jump into the stratosphere. Mom couldn't afford the payments, and now we had to sell the houseâfast.
I was no real-estate whiz. But even I could figure out that we would get more money for the house if we painted it. Try telling that to Mom, though, when she was on a crusade.
“Mom, we need the money⦔
“Connor,” she snapped. “Do not lecture me about money. I am perfectly capable of supporting my family. I have a job. We are not going to starve. We are not going to be living in a cardboard box on the streets. It's not going to kill us to rent an apartment for a while. Frankly, I couldn't care less if this bloody house fell down around my ears. But that Tree out there”âshe pointed at the windowâ“
that
is worth saving.”
“Fine,” I said. “I'm painting.”
I stomped out of the kitchen, grabbed a can of paint from the front hall and took it into the living room. The walls were a hideous shade of pastel purple. Mom said the color had been trendy in the 1980s.
I jacked open the can and started slapping paint on the wall. I heard Mom let herself out the front door, but I didn't call goodbye. I didn't know why I was so angry all of a sudden. Maybe I was mad about losing my house. Maybe I was mad about losing my dad. Maybe I was still mad about losing to Rex at the Donalda or mad about losing my club to a bunch of idiots who got their kicks destroying other people's property. Maybe I was just tired of being a loser all the time. Maybe I was sick of comparing myself to Rex. Rex, the top-ranked junior in the province. Rex, whose dad was a hotshot businessman. Rex the winner. Connor the loser.
Sometimes, when I was hitting practice balls at the club in the early morning when no one else was there, I would fantasize about going all the way. I would dream of winning the provincials, winning the nationals and hitting the international junior circuit.
But playing international tennis costs a truckload of money. With coaches, equipment, airfares, hotels and meals, you had to figure about a hundred grand a year in expenses. And juniors didn't win any money in tournaments. No one won cash until they turned pro.
Tennis was for rich boys like Rex, I told myself as I slopped the thick white paint over the sickly purple wall. Why did I even think I could compete?
Mom got home at around eleven o'clock and flopped down on the living room sofa. I was up on a ladder, finishing the last corner of the room.
“This looks great, honey. Thanks,” she said. “I'm sorry I got mad at you earlier.”
“That's okay.” I ran the brush down the corner angle. “How'd the meeting go?”
“Great. There's lots of community support. The head of the neighborhood association is on side. He's going to bring an application to have it designated a heritage tree. Of course, the mayor's in the pocket of the developers. But I'm optimistic.”
“That's good, Mom,” I said. I finished painting the corner, came down from the ladder and sat on the floor next to her.
“One day, I'll be a pro tennis player and we won't have to worry about money anymore,” I said.
She smiled. “It's good to have a dream, honey. But let's keep saving for college, just in case.”
“Sure, Mom.”
I didn't tell her about my plan to win a tennis scholarship to an American college. She would think it was impossible. She wouldn't believe anyone would pay a kid's college tuition just because he could whack a ball with a racket. To her, there were more important things in life than sports. To her, saving a single oak tree on a tiny street that no one had ever heard of was worth a hundred times more than winning the trophy at world-famous Wimbledon.
I took the brushes to the sink and cleaned them. Then I hit the sack. I had to be up at five the next morning to train for the provincials.