Number 8 (6 page)

“It was you, wasn't it, Bruce?
You
who made that disgusting comment!”

Badman is staring so hard at the floor, you'd think he'd fall through it.

“Stand up, young man.”

He stands, clutching the neck of his guitar.

“Tell me, Bruce, do you think you can be so rude to another performer and still have your turn?” Her voice has frozen into ice, quiet and deadly. And then it cracks. “Well, that's not how Homeland High School works! Look at you, a seventh grade boy, and still behaving like a infant! Everybody, look at Bruce.”

Three hundred pairs of eyes look at Bruce. I gaze over his head, out the window.

“I want you to apologize to your school, Bruce, for your rude and inconsiderate behavior.”

Badman shifts his feet. His face has turned a dull purple.

“Do you understand the word ‘apologize,' Bruce?” Mrs. Reilly speaks in slow motion, as if she's training a dog. “Maybe this is too hard for you. Can anybody be so kind as to tell Bruce what this very difficult word means? What about one of our little elementary school visitors?”

“Sorry,” blurts Bruce.

“I beg your pardon, Bruce,” sneers Mrs. Reilly. “We didn't hear you.”

“I'm SORRY!” says Badman. His eyes are glittering, catching the sunlight from the window. He's holding them wide open so the tears won't spill. I know that trick.

Mrs. Reilly stares at him. I can see her hesitating. She really wants to stretch out the agony, see if she can totally break his back as well as his tear banks. But another teacher in the hall coughs restlessly and she pulls herself up straight.

“Well, Bruce, we don't accept your apology. Now leave the hall and go to the principal's office at once. Tell Mr. Phillips that Mrs. Reilly sent you. And leave that guitar here.”

“No!” yells Bruce. “It's real expensive—it's my father's!”

“Do as I say or you will have another suspension! And you will have to apologize again to the school and to Lilly and Ez for disrupting our concert tryouts.”

“Oh, Mrs. Reilly—really, it's okay,” I say. “We don't mind!”

Mrs. Reilly whips around like a cobra striking. “You be quiet—
I
mind. Now, get out of my sight, Bruce Bradman.”

We watch as Badman carefully leans his guitar against the wall, whispering something to the other kids sitting near it. He's probably telling them he'll stick toothpicks up their fingernails if they even breathe on it.

“OUT!” screams Mrs. Reilly.

He pats the guitar one more time and slouches through the door.

“Now, girls, quickly, get on with your song. We're running late.”

Wow, what a great way to begin a performance. I glance at Lilly. She's taking a deep breath, going into fake-smile mode as if nothing has happened. Mrs. Reilly bends over the CD player. The instrumentals come on; it sounds like artificial sweetener, the kind that leaves a nasty, chemical taste on your tongue.

Lilly nudges me, beginning her first note. For a moment I'm so angry I'm scared I might blow up. My throat feels like concrete, too. How can you sing like this? I feel like a traitor—to music, to myself most of all. Badman was right: this stupid song deserves a fart in its title. But then I look at Lilly's face, and she's starting to wobble—she can't hold a tune on her own—and there are tears in her eyes and I burst out with the nerdy words.

Lilly gives me a shaky smile and as we sing I'm thinking about Badman waiting in the office. He's probably picking his nose, pretending he's not. I'm thinking what a damn shame it is that Badman is such a fool. He's the best guitarist this school's ever seen, but now he won't even be allowed to try out for the concert. There's no hope in heaven that I could sing with his band now. Even if
he
wanted me to. Which he probably wouldn't, seeing as, he says, like Bart Simpson, that girls have “cooties,” and holds his nose
clothes-peg style when any female walks by. Well, any female except for Lilly.

Truth is, I hate him and his crappy behavior, but I hate Mrs. Reilly and this song even more. It's weird that no matter how awful Badman is, it doesn't seem to make any difference to how I feel when I hear him play.

As we sing the last line, I realize that most of me has been absent for the entire song, sailing away into fantasy land. The rest of me is slogging away, getting the notes out right, dying quietly like I do in math.

And that's no way to make music. Is it?

“Norton's given me loads of extra math homework,” I hear Esmerelda groan behind me.

We're on the bus going home. It feels like a hundred and twenty degrees in here. My legs are sticking to the seat.

“Why?” asks Catrina, who's sitting next to Ez. “There's loads of kids worse than you at math. Me, for instance.”

“My mother wouldn't think so,” replies Ez.

“Oh,” says Catrina. There's a little silence while she thinks this over. “Geez, Ez, I hope
my
mother never gets that interested in my school work.” And she gives a kind of shiver that makes her knees dig into my back.

I clear my throat and turn around to Esmerelda.

“You can come over to my place if you want, and I'll help you,” I say. I raise my eyebrows at Asim, who is sitting next to me, to see if this is okay with him.

He smiles, and nods. He likes Esmerelda, too. He likes the way she can mimic anybody's accent perfectly, even his, and make him laugh, and how she looks in her stretchy black gym pants.

Esmerelda groans again. “Thanks, but I have to report home first. I'm under surveillance, it feels like. Some nerdy cousin I've never met is coming over to coach me. He's
some kind of math genius. Still, maybe later, if I say I'm going to study with you guys…”

“Why don't you come and study my firecrackers?” Badman calls to Esmerelda from across the aisle. “I got some new fireworks, too. There's one called Great Flaming Balls and it shoots fire thirteen feet high. It's the best!” He nudges Joe sitting next to him. “Come and see my
balls
, get it?” and the two of them laugh their heads off.

Ez just stares at him as if he's speaking Transylvanian.

“But fireworks are illegal, aren't they?” Asim says suddenly.

“Ooh,
cry
about it why don't you,” sneers Badman.

Asim looks out the window.

Badman's a bastard. He makes that remark about crying all the time. Especially to Asim, who does cry a lot. He can't help it, after what he's been through. Badman wouldn't have lasted a minute, I think, in a real war.

Asim and I get off early, at the next stop, because we want to go to the mall. We wave to Ez and make our way to the front. When we're standing on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the road, I see Badman doing this girly wave back as he moves into my seat.

It's strange, I'm thinking, how Esmerelda acts around Badman. She couldn't like him, and she's so—well, queenly—the way she looks down her nose at him and narrows her eyes as if he's made a bad smell. But she never really lets fly with him the way I've seen her do with other boys who annoy her. It's as if she doesn't want to
totally
demolish him. There's something about him she likes, I'm thinking. Something she wants.

“Have you ever wondered why girls seem to like the bad boys?” I ask Asim.

He frowns at me. “That is not my experience. Are you talking about Badman? It could not be true! Ez likes the Badman?”

“Mmm.” I kick an empty can of Coke along as we walk. I'd really love one now, the sun is beating down like a hammer on my back.

“But he shows no respect to her. And he is cruel.”

“Yeah.”

Badman is a racist bastard. He makes fun of Asim's accent—not in a well-meaning way, like Ez—but spitefully, watching to see him break. Kids say that once, he shoved a firecracker up a cat's butt and lit it. Just to see what would happen. “Cry about it,” he said when Asim protested.

And once, Asim told me, Badman walked out of school, just like that, and rang a neighbor's doorbell. The neighbor was this old guy, Mr. Wall. Everyone at school knew Mr. Wall had lost it—he was always out roaming the streets, looking for his wife who'd died twenty years ago. Kids often had to bring him back home. He was the type whose short-term memory had grown so bad he wore five shirts, one on top of the other. So when Badman rings the doorbell and Mr. Wall appears, Badman goes like this: Are you Mr. Wall?

“Yes, I think so,” says the old man.

“Are there any other walls here?”

“No,” says Mr. Wall, looking about in a confused way.

“Well, you'd better get out before the roof caves in! Ha ha!” And Badman shoots off, with poor old Mr. Wall running after him, into the traffic. Four cars piled up and the police came and everything.

Badman got suspended for that. And he already
had
a red card for blowing up the school garbage cans.

“But Ez has never been to the Badman house, has she?” Asim asked.

“No, I don't think so. She told me about his dad going away to New Zealand, but never about his mom or what his house was like.”

“Yet she has been to
your
house,” Asim reminds me, smiling.

“Yeah,” and I smile back at him. “Three times. If she comes today it'll be four. Hope so, then it'll be an even number.”

We buy a Coke each and some doughnuts. The ones with jelly and cream inside are delicious. We finish them by the time we reach home. I have to say that a really good bakery only five minutes walk from home is one of the better things about living on Valerie Avenue. The
best
thing, though, is eating the cakes with a friend. See, Asim lives just two doors down from Esmerelda, at number sixty-four. How lucky is he? A double whammy of luck. I told him that if he was anyone else, I'd be too mad to even speak to him. As it is, I'm just glad.

I let Asim and myself in with my key. Mom isn't home yet; she's got lunch shift at the pub three days a week, and dinner on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Lunch shift means cleaning up afterward and driving Polly home—an older waitress whose bad knees, Mom says, can't cope with public transport.

First thing, we go to the fridge and get another drink. We take apple juice and some rolls and cheese and lettuce outside and sit on the wicker chairs, looking out on the lawn. Mom bought the chairs at a sale last week, and we've covered them with some nice Indian cushions with little mirrors like cats' eyes. Plus there's an awning over the porch, which
we've decorated with tie-dyed sarongs, so we have shade and atmosphere. Sometimes at night we eat out here, with candles and tall citronella flares stuck in the plant pots to keep away the mosquitoes. Mom says when she's saved a bit we can have a party for Christmas.

This is what Asim and I have been doing for two weeks now, sitting out here, watching the grass grow. When we finish eating, we kick a soccer ball, trying for a goal between the mango tree and the maple. Every day we look at the mangoes, and ask ourselves if those right at the top might be ripe. Neither of us has ever climbed a mango tree. I've got a feeling that today we might find out what it's like.

We go into the kitchen and find a big blue plastic bowl.

“You climb first,” says Asim. “I'll hold the bowl.”

I step up into the hollow near the base of the trunk where it splits off into three thick branches. The wood is smooth and cool under my bare feet but harder than I'd imagined. Hard as steel. Grabbing a thin shoot I lever my other foot onto a higher branch. Up close, I can see wrinkles where the branches bend. There are scars on the smooth gray skin, battle wounds. A green light wraps all around me, the sun filtered through the forest of lime leaves brushing my face.

“Can you reach the mangoes?” Asim calls up.

“Almost.”

Where smaller branches have been cut off there are growths like eyes, ringed one circle inside another. I stare, mesmerized. It's like seeing into the eye of the tree, into its soul. As I look, I get the feeling some wizened creature, something wise like an owl or an ancient reptile, is holding its breath, looking out at me.

“Jackson?”

“You should come up!” I swing my other leg over and sit
for a moment in the heart of the tree. I've found a perfect seat. I could sit here forever; the silence is like a secret and I'm right inside it.

But when I stand, everything is different. My heart starts to hammer. I'm up too high. I can see over the neighbor's fence (the one who sneezes), right into her window. She's on the telephone, talking about the new driveway she's going to put in. Her voice is harsh like a red line. I hold on tight to the branch above me. Two, three, four mangoes are hanging near, but higher than my hand can reach. I go further, pulling myself up onto the next branch. Now my heart feels like it's going to jump out of my chest. My feet must be almost ten feet above the ground!

I've never been this high—well, only in the city, looking out from my window on Trenches Road, or an office block or something. But that's so different, another world, with that firm floor under your feet fooling you into thinking it's the ground. Here my toes can bend over the branch, into nothingness.

I fix my eyes on the mangoes and count them out loud, equal-spaced, in common 4/4 time. If you chant numbers long enough they turn into pure rhythm, a song. I lean against the solid branch at my back. It feels rough but strong as a man's arm. It doesn't sway with my weight. I like that. I know it can hold me and suddenly I feel incredibly safe with the hard living wood under my feet and the naturally occurring set of four swinging above me and the common time spreading through my body like warm milk.

The leaves rustle below me and I see Asim's face poking up.

“Hi! Put your foot here and then swing over to that branch,” I say, pointing to my left. “You can sit there and
we'll be on the same level.” I finish the count at eight sets of four. Beautiful.