His mother grabs his face, turns it toward her, and wipes his chin with the Wet-Nap as if he were two years old. “Hold still,” she says as she swipes at his cheeks, then releases his face and tucks the damp tissue back inside her purse. “And that,” she says, after snapping closed her handbag, “is what average will get you.”
T
HE NEXT MORNING MEAD WAKES UP
feeling hotter than a furnace. He splashes cold water on his face and dresses for school anyway. At the breakfast table he can barely get down his eggs and toast. “Are you feeling all right?” his mother asks and tries to touch his forehead but Mead pushes away her hand, still mad about yesterday. “I’m fine,” he says, scoops up his schoolbooks, and hurries out the door before she can touch him again. The November air is cold and feels good on his face, but Mead has walked barely two blocks when he is overcome by a wave of dizziness.
A horn honks and he looks up. His Aunt Jewel rolls down the window of her car and says, “Teddy, you’ll catch your death walking to school in this weather. Hop in.”
Normally he would say no and keep going, but today he makes an exception, opens the back door and crawls inside. Percy is sitting in the passenger seat up front. He turns around and says, “You look horrible, cousin, like you’re gonna puke or something.”
“Percy,” Aunt Jewel says, “please don’t talk like that. It’s crude.” Then she glances at Mead in the rearview mirror and says, “You do look awfully pale.”
“I’m fine,” Mead says and tries to stop shivering in his aunt’s overheated car.
She pulls up in front of the junior high and Percy starts to get out.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she says and Percy goes, “Oh, right,” and pulls his woolen hat on over his head.
“I mean a kiss,” she says and points to her cheek. Percy glances back over his shoulder at Mead. “Oh, right,” he says again, kisses her, and bolts from the car.
Mead cannot help but feel jealous. He wonders what it would be like if he and his cousin were to switch mothers for a month. What it would be like to have his Aunt Jewel fuss over him the way she fusses over Percy, who obviously does not know how good he has got it. A month, that’s all it would take to knock some sense into his cousin’s head, to let him know how lucky he is. Maybe then he wouldn’t jump out of the car quite so fast.
Mead scoots across the backseat to get out when his aunt says, “Wait a second there, young man,” then reaches over the seat back and presses her cool palm to his hot forehead. “Why, you’re burning up, Teddy. You can’t go to school.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine, you’re sick as a dog. I can’t believe your mother let you leave the house in this condition. You stay right where you are, I’m taking you home.”
And just like that, the energy goes out of him. Mead could not get out of the car if he wanted to but he no longer even wants to. As his aunt pulls back out onto the road, Mead lies down and closes his eyes. The heat overcomes him and he falls asleep and dreams that he is down by the creek again with Freddy and his evil cohorts. “Drop your pants or else,” Freddy says but just then Mead’s Aunt Jewel appears at the top of the hill and yells, “Get away from my son, you no-good thugs, or I’ll call the police.” And off they run.
Mead wakes up when his Aunt Jewel wraps her arms around him. “Come on, you,” she says and lifts him out of the backseat, which is an amazing feat when you consider the fact that his aunt is barely five-foot-two and cannot weigh much more than he does. Too weak to object, Mead wraps his arms around her shoulders and lets her carry him to the house.
“What happened?” Mead’s mother says when she pulls open the front door.
“You have one very sick little boy on your hands,” Aunt Jewel says and carries Mead to his bedroom.
“He said he was fine when he left here fifteen minutes ago,” his mother says.
Jewel sets Mead down on his bed. Takes off his coat. His shoes. “You can’t always take them at their word, Alayne. Especially boys. Percy never knows when he’s sick until I tell him.” Mead lies back and his aunt pulls the bedsheets up over him. “Let him sleep for a couple hours and then feed him some chicken soup.”
“I know how to take care of my own son, Jewel,” Mead’s mother says, an edge creeping into her voice. “I’ve been doing it for ten years.”
“I know, Alayne. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply —”
“Thank you for bringing him home. You can go now.”
Aunt Jewel leaves and Mead falls asleep. When he wakes up, he sees it crouching next to his bed for the first time: the six-legged creature. Startled, he sits bolt upright and gasps. “Are you feeling better?” it says and, thinking that he is hallucinating, Mead rubs his eyes and looks again. This time he sees his mother. “Well, are you?” she says.
Mead nods. “I think maybe my temperature has gone down.”
“No, I mean do you feel better now that you’ve embarrassed me. That was the point of all this, wasn’t it? To get back at me for yesterday?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry that you threw up, Teddy, I really am. I just had to make sure that you understand the importance of doing well in school. You and I aren’t like your father and his whole side of the family. We’re cut from a different cloth. I want you to have the educational opportunities I never had. To fulfill your true potential. I only did it for you.”
“Fine. Got it.” Mead says, closes his eyes, and rolls away. “Do you think maybe I could have some soup now?”
The straight-backed chair scrapes across the floor as she gets up to leave. But she doesn’t come back with soup; she comes back with two aspirin, a cup of herbal tea, and his schoolbooks. Placing them on his bedside table, she says, “I spoke with Mr. Belknap just now. He’s willing to change your C to an A if you’ll do a project for extra credit.”
“Fine,” Mead says, pops the two aspirin into his mouth, and washes them down with the lukewarm tea. Just so long as it has nothing to do with that creek.
M
R. BELKNAP GIVES MEAD A LIST
of projects from which to choose and tells him that, if he would like, he can also submit it for inclusion in the county science fair.
“Are prizes awarded?” Mead asks.
“Yes, indeed,” Mr. Belknap says. “First prize earns a blue ribbon and one hundred dollars. Second prize —”
“I don’t care about second prize,” Mead says. “I plan to place first.”
And so he picks the project he figures will give him the best shot at winning the blue ribbon: running a mouse through a maze. The mouse part is easy. Mead just goes to the pet section of Woolworth’s —where eleven of them are running around inside a glass aquarium bedded with sawdust —and observes his prospective subjects for a few minutes before choosing the most active and inquisitive one of the bunch: a white mouse with a single gray spot the size of a dime on its hind end. He also buys a wire cage, a running wheel, a bag of sawdust, and a water bottle. The maze part is harder. Because he has to build one. And because he has no skills when it comes to anything involving power tools. Like his mother said, Mead is not like his father and that whole Fegley side of the family. He is not good with his hands. And so he goes to someone who is.
“You want me to do what?” Percy says.
“I’ll give you half my prize money when I win.”
“And what if you don’t win?”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
And so Mead starts going over to his cousin’s house every day after school. The house his father and Uncle Martin grew up in. The house his grandfather Henry Charles built with his own two hands. There’s a shed on the property where Uncle Martin stores some of the overflow inventory from the store (i.e., the older stuff that didn’t sell) until Goodwill or the Salvation Army can come by with a truck to pick it up. The place where it all started: Henry Charles’s workshop. The shed where the man built his first chest of drawers for the president of the local bank and, several years later, his first casket for the same customer. And the rest is history, or at least Fegley history.
Percy clears a bunch of cardboard boxes off the workbench. Christmas ornaments and old baby toys and toddler clothes that Mead’s Aunt Jewel does not have the heart to throw out. Or, in his cousin’s words: junk. Buried underneath all this junk is a band saw that requires some maintenance before it can be used. But Uncle Martin is happy to help out, crawling under the old saw with a wrench in one hand and an oil can in the other as if it were an old car in need of a tune-up. Then he takes the boys to the lumberyard, going over Mead’s blueprint for the maze with the owner, the two of them knocking heads like a couple of old geezers. Percy rolls his eyes and sighs a lot but Mead kind of enjoys it. Kind of enjoys having his uncle take an interest in what he is doing.
“All right, Dad,” Percy says when they get back to the shed. “You can leave now. Teddy asked
me
to help him, not you.” And he nearly pushes his father out the door. “You have no idea,” he says to Mead after Martin is gone, “what it’s like having that man for a father. He’s always sticking his nose into everything I do. I can hardly breathe around here without him getting involved.”
“Excuse me,” Mead says. “You have met my mother, haven’t you?”
“Oh. Right. So maybe you do know.”
And then they begin in earnest. Percy dons a pair of goggles and sends the first piece of wood through the band saw. Shavings and sparks fly through the air. Mead measures and Percy cuts. And, piece by piece, the maze begins to come together.
M
EAD IS SITTING IN HIS BEDROOM
, drawing up the chart he will use to track the progress of his experiment, when his mother bursts in and plunks down on his desk four packages of Kraft American Cheese Slices, individually wrapped. “Does this belong to you?” she asks, all accusatory-like, as if she just found a stash of pot in his underwear drawer.
“Yes.”
“And what’s wrong with the food I buy you?”
“It’s not for me; it’s for my science experiment.”
“What experiment?”
“The one Mr. Belknap assigned me for extra credit.” And he holds up the wire cage containing the mouse.
His mother studies the small rodent as she might a long-lost orange found in the back of the refrigerator with a full beard of white-and-blue mold sprouting on its skin. “And what exactly do you plan to do with this mouse?”
“Win first prize in the county science fair,” Mead says.
His mother picks up the packages of Kraft American Cheese Slices. “All right. But that filthy rodent goes the day after the fair, got it?” She marches out of his room.
T
HE MAZE TAKES EIGHT AFTERNOONS
to build. Eight afternoons spent hanging out with his cousin Percy. Aunt Jewel pops in and out of the shed with cookies and lemonade but the rest of the time it’s just the two of them. They don’t talk much, except to compare notes on the progress of the maze. Percy seems to be enjoying himself as much as Mead is —maybe more —even though he has next to nothing to gain from it. No grade. No ribbon. No mother to get off his back. Which Mead finds somewhat puzzling. So on the sixth afternoon, he asks, “Why are you doing this?”
“Dovetail joints? Because they hold better than glue. I know it’s taking a bit longer but it’ll be worth it in the end. Trust me.”
“No, I mean why are you helping me?”
Percy gives Mead a why-are-you-even-asking-me-that-question look and says, “Because you asked me to, cousin.”
“I know, but would you jump in front of a train if I asked?”
Percy stops sanding and looks at Mead. “How fast is the train going?”
“All right, never mind. I’m sorry I asked.”
Percy goes back to sanding then says, “Do you ever think about the future?”
“All the time.”
“Me, too. What do you see?”
“World peace.”
Percy gives Mead his stop-being-such-a-smart-aleck look.
“Okay,” Mead says. “Maybe not world peace. I’d be satisfied to just graduate from high school in one piece and get on with my real life.”
“Me too,” Percy says.
“Really? But you have it so good. You’ve got tons of friends. A great mom.”
“Well sure, things are great now but I’m talking about the future. Does it ever scare you? The thought of life after high school?”
“No. Quite the opposite. I can’t wait.”
“It’s just that when I look at my dad —at his life —it just seems so, I don’t know, lonely. There’s no one standing on the sidelines cheering him on.”
“You’ll just have to learn to cheer yourself on.”
“I suppose,” Percy says, picks up two notched pieces of wood, and slides them together. His dovetail joint is perfect. Setting it aside, he reaches for another piece of wood and starts cutting more notches. “That’s why,” he says.
“Excuse me?” Mead says.
“You asked me why I’m helping you and I’m telling you, okay?”
They don’t talk for the rest of the afternoon, except to compare notes on the progress of the maze.
W
HEN THE MAZE IS DONE
it looks like a whatchamacallit from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. Three separate mazes, all starting at the same point, loop around, cross over, and dip under one another, ending at three different locations. The shortest route, accessed through a hinged door marked
A
, offers three wrong turns, a bridge, and two tunnels to reach the end where a single one-inch square of American cheese will be waiting. A second door, marked
B
, leads to a maze twice as long as
A
and features twice as many wrong turns, bridges, and tunnels. When successfully completed, the same one-inch reward will be at the end. Following this logic, the third door, marked
C
, leads to the longest and most difficult maze of them all, and offers the same reward.
“So what exactly do you hope to prove?” Percy asks.
“My hypothesis,” Mead says, “is that mouse, like man, wants to do the least amount of work to gain the largest amount of reward, his life choices based primarily on monetary gain. Only in a mouse’s world, money equals cheese.”
“Sounds kind of cynical, if you want to ask me.”
“I didn’t ask.”
M
EAD BEGINS WITH AN EXPERIMENTAL RUN
, the baseline against which he will gauge all future runs. He places the mouse in the starting box, opens door
A
, and starts his stopwatch. The furry critter feels its way along the freshly glued plywood walls, noting every nook and cranny with its whiskers. It peeks around each corner it encounters, exploring all the options, including the dead ends. It crawls through a tunnel and up into the red tube that arches over maze
B
, sniffing high and low. In just thirty seconds, the subject completes the first three-quarters of the maze, then it suddenly turns around and heads back toward the start.