Husky Page 8

  Ryan and Brian nod, looking down at their sneakers, and mouth sorry to me, without even looking up once or meaning it. They don’t want to say it, and I don’t want them to either. It’s all a disaster that makes me hate Allegra even more. Why couldn’t she just let it go? That’s what you have to do with tough boys. Wait until they finish and leave.

  The quiet of the moment is broken when Allegra’s phone dings.

  “My mom just texted and everything is ready for our girls’ day!” And she squeals really loud and Sophie squeals too. And they both high-five and shake their hands together and they shout, “Birthday Makeovers! Birthday Makeovers!”

  I Wait. And Wait. And Wait. And nothing happens. Sophie is going on a Birthday Makeover with Allegra. It’s a girls’ day, and even though I sort of awkwardly said I was a girl, I am not invited. Nope. Not me. Not the creepy armpit starer. Not the fag.

  And Sophie sees me sitting there. And tries, I guess, to save me, but just makes it worse.

  “It’s not even on my actual birthday,” says Sophie. “It’s just a girl thing. I mean, do you want a makeover?” This makes Ryan and Brian laugh so loud they sort of start pushing each other to get the other one to stop.

  I say no, but no one hears me. Sophie’s trying to get the boys to stop and Allegra’s on the Internet and I say it out loud but no one cares.

  The answer in my head is yes. Yes, I want a makeover. I want to be made into something else. Someone completely different from myself. Someone who gets invited places and gets the jokes on people’s phones and doesn’t feel weird about coming into a room, like, ever. Because the person I would become would be beautiful and popular and know everything about music and phones and Facebook or anything that is important to know to be popular and liked. And I would be all of that. If I got to go, I would be made over into that.

  But I’m not allowed to go. I’m a boy. A weird, hallway-lurking, doesn’t-get-why-a-kitten-lady-falling-is-the-funniest-thing-ever, armpit-staring, fat-kid boy who listens to opera and will probably never have a phone because they are crazy expensive and Nanny doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. No day at a spa or whatever can fix that.

  So I leave.

  I make up some excuse that really no one buys. Sophie especially. But why would she want me to stay in this room after this? It’s just not a nice feeling. Why doesn’t she get that?

  “C’mon, stay. We’re going to order Thai or something,” Sophie says to me.

  But no. I have to go. I make up another excuse: It’s the Big Bake tonight, and my mom wants me there, because it’s the last one before school and I should go, I, like, never get to see her as it is.

  And that one, the one that is so close to the truth, convinces Sophie, and she says she’ll walk me out. She never does this. Maybe she does know something is wrong. Maybe she’s going to invite me when we get to the door. Or maybe she will tell me how much she hates Allegra and just wants her out of the house, but she’s too nice to say anything. I mean, she is totally annoying and awful, right?

  But when we get down to the front door, Sophie just looks at me and says, “It’s not on my actual birthday. It’s not.”

  That does not make it any better.

  And I’m sort of shocked about that. It’s like I don’t even know who Sophie is right now, because my friend, my best friend, since-I-was-a-baby best friend, would not do this. But she’s not doing anything. And that’s the trouble.

  “It’s fine,” I say, and I clearly, like, so clearly, don’t mean it.

  “It’s Allegra and her mom, they just wanted something for the girls, like me and Ellen . . .”

  Now, Ellen’s going?!

  “It’s, like, fine, really.” And I walk away. I don’t turn back or anything, which I’ve never done to anyone ever. I don’t even turn around when she says good-bye to me, I just sort of wave over my shoulder from the sidewalk. I walk away. So far away from Sophie. I never ever thought I would have to, but right now there’s nowhere I would rather be than away from here and her.

  CHAPTER 10

  I get home and go right upstairs to my room. I stomp the whole way up. I know, because Nanny yells at me the whole way. “What did I tell you about walking like that? Pick up your feet!” There’s more but as I get higher and higher away from her, I stop listening and when the door is closed, she is gone.

  Usually I can still hear her even with the door closed, but tonight, I’m too far away. It’s the only way I can say it. I’m not there. I mean, I’m in my room, and standing in the middle of my floor, but everything else is away somewhere really dark and angry. That’s where I really am. I want to break everything. I want to turn over the bed and bust the windows and break my computer and rip up all my clothes. I want to ruin everything. Because to me, everything is already ruined.

  But I sit. I don’t know what else to do. I sit down on the right side of my bed and think about everything. It’s all coming so fast over me, it’s almost hard to put it all together. Or to take it all apart. Sophie stopping me, and Ryan laughing, and making fun of Charlie, and Allegra actually defending me, and Nanny yelling, and Mrs. Martinez getting her arm rubbed, and Mom going out without me, and that terrible thing I said to Crimple Lady who called me fat with the cookies, and why is Charlie so nice to me when I called him an ostrich, why does he laugh at everything I say, he wouldn’t have laughed today, not like the other boys did, laughing at me and calling me a fag.

  And the worst part about any of it, all of it, is that there’s nothing, Nothing, I can do now. Nothing. I can’t do anything about it now. And feeling that nothing makes me madder. All I want to do is throw it all against the wall and break it. But I can’t. So I just start punching the bed. Punching with both hands and bouncing on it, punching down everything I am feeling with two fists and my butt. Harder and harder. Never really letting up, just punching and bouncing, until I just throw myself onto the bed flat. And then the bed breaks.

  Breaks. Crash. Smash. Broken.

  The whole right corner collapses to the floor with a big thud and bang. And it shocks me at first. Honest. But it also sort of makes me happy. I wanted to do something and I did it. Something stupid and ultimately awful, but I did it. Or my fat butt did it, which is worse. But for a second, it feels good to have actually done something, even if it was ruining my own bed.

  The next second is not so good.

  “What have you done?! What’s broke? What’s crashed? Answer me, Ducks, I’m coming up.” And Nanny pounds up the stairs, yelling all the way, but I just sit there and don’t answer. I know she will be angry, and I know she will yell and give me a talk about everything I’m bad at or how I don’t appreciate the things I have. A whole list of things I did wrong. But I just sit there and wait. And look at what I did this time.

  The door swings open and Nanny looks right at the bed. “What’s wrong with you, Ducks, look what you’ve done! Is the leg broke? Is that it?” I don’t say anything back. And Nanny gets down on her knees to look. “I can’t see the thing. Are you just going to sit there on the broken bed? Get up!”

  But I don’t move. I don’t move at all.

  “If I’d done something like this, my mother would have skinned me alive, you ungrateful thing, you!” Nanny screams, trying to fix the bed.

  I don’t answer. I just keep looking at the ceiling.

  “What happened here? You answer me, right this minute, I want to know what happened. Now,” Nanny says, scrunching up her nose to show how serious she is.

  But I don’t answer. I can’t.

  “Davis Anthony . . .” Nanny starts with my full name, which is always the sign that she is about to go nuclear, so I stop her.

  “It just broke,” I say, gritting every tooth.

  “It didn’t just nothing!” Nanny yells back.

  “I just got into it,” I lie.

  “Gentle as a lamb, I wager. Were
you bouncing on it?” Nanny asks.

  “No,” I lie again.

  “All right. Get up, then.”

  I stand and help Nanny lift the mattress to see what broke. It was just a slat that had come loose and we fix it. “You have to be a bit more gentle, please. We’re not made of money,” Nanny says, patting at me. Then she puts her hand on my face, and her hand is so soft, like paper almost, and warm. And it’s the first nice thing I’ve felt all day. And, I don’t know why, but I start to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Crying big ugly tears.

  “It’s all right, love. But you can’t stomp around like that. Everybody knows you’re here. You don’t need to announce it.” Nanny smiles. But she’s wrong. Nobody knows, and nobody cares, really, and it’s only going to get worse. Nobody except Nanny now. I keep crying, these hard-to-breathe tears, and she puts her arms around me.

  “See, it’s fixed, pet. There’s no need for this,” says Nanny, and she holds me close for a long time, and we’re not saying anything to each other, it’s just her hand on my face, and me leaning in but not too much. The house is quiet and the bed doesn’t even creak under us. We don’t move and we don’t say a word, until I start to catch my breath.

  After a few minutes I guess the quiet is too much for Nanny, and she says, “You’re tired and you’re hungry. That’s your trouble. It’s that sleeping-in you do. Come down, I’ll cook something up for you.” Nanny smiles and gets up. She doesn’t like tears on anybody.

  “Okay,” I say, wiping my face.

  “It will put everything right. It will, it will.” Nanny sighs as she goes downstairs.

  I sit for a minute on my bed and wait. I don’t know for what.

  We get a pizza from Angelo’s and ice cream, Neopolitan, because Nanny likes the mix. We eat the pizza in the front room, and it is weird, but we do really start to talk. Like, I sort of start to tell her things. Real things.

  “Oh, this is a lovely treat for us, isn’t it, Ducks?” says Nanny, wiping some pizza sauce from her mouth.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “And why not? We deserve it, don’t we? You with school coming up in how long?”

  “Like ten days.”

  “Is it? Oh, everything goes so fast, don’t it? Well, wait until you’re older, Ducks, it’ll all fly by. Just fly.” Nanny smiles.

  And I don’t know why, but probably because I’m a big dummy, I ask, “Why can’t it just do that now? Like, I want it to just be over.”

  “What to be over?” Nanny asks.

  “The whole thing, like, summer and then school and grades and everything. I just want to be done with it.”

  “And then what will you have to do, I wonder.”

  “I could do what I want,” I answer.

  “And what is that?” Nanny asks me.

  “I don’t know.” Because I don’t, honest.

  “Well then, make it up. Go on. What would you do if you could do whatever it is you want, Ducks? Whatever. Go on.” Nanny waves her hand to tell me to start. So I do.

  “I think I would play music all day. All over the house. Loud, all the time,” I start by saying.

  “Well, the neighbors won’t like it, and I’ll be a little . . . that is, if I get to be here with you.” Nanny smiles.

  “Of course.” It seems like a silly question, but it makes me think, Of course I would want her here. How could I think of a place without her? My yelling Irish grandmother. There’s not an opera I could play at the loudest volume in the world that would make the world as loud a place as she does. And it makes me sort of sad to think that she doesn’t know if she would be there.

  “Well, thank you.” Nanny smiles. “So go on. Loud Oohs and Aahs. No neighbors and me.”

  “And Mom,” I say.

  “Oh, good. Who else?” Nanny says.

  “And Ellen and Hannah.”

  “Which one is that?” Nanny asks.

  “Ellen’s little sister.”

  “Oh, the little one with the curls, oh, she is nice, I’m glad you’re keeping her.” Nanny smiles.

  “And Sophie,” I say.

  “I was waiting for her. And what would you do?”

  “I would . . . just be happy, I guess.”

  “Well, half them things you got right here, right now. All of them in fact, so what’s the trouble?”

  I know, but I say I don’t.

  “See, Ducks, you want everything to be perfect, when there’s no such thing, no such thing in this world. There are bits of it, sure, but not a whole perfect thing.”

  I don’t see anything even close to perfect right now.

  “It’s like the Neopolitan here. The strawberry they give you is not great. The chocolate’s a little too dark for my taste. But mix ’em up, and it’s my favorite thing ever. The good goes with the bad, and it makes something wonderful. But you need both the good and the bad,” Nanny says, pointing at me and the sort of eyes I’m making.

  “All right,” I say.

  “Is it?” Nanny asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Listen to her philosophizing over ice cream. Your Nanny’s lost it.” She laughs.

  CHAPTER 11

  Before I go to bed, Nanny lets me watch an opera DVD. So I pick Carmen.

  But maybe Carmen was the wrong choice.

  Carmen is a French opera by Georges Bizet, and it’s all about love and jealousy. It takes place in Spain, but they sing in French, which doesn’t make sense, sure, but you sort of have to go along with it. Don José is in the army, and he falls in love with Carmen, a gypsy girl, who every person in the world is already in love with. She’s just that beautiful. But Carmen doesn’t really believe in love. She thinks it’s silly. She just happens to be good at it. She sings a whole song about how good she is at love, and how because she’s so good, she can’t be good to just one person, she needs to go and be good to a lot of people. A lot. Don José gets jealous and goes crazy, and when Carmen goes off with a bullfighter, he stabs her. Operas are like that. Lots of people go crazy, and somebody almost always dies, and somehow it’s always all about love.

  I like Carmen. The music is great, and when you get a really amazing singer like Maria Callas or Marilyn Horne as Carmen, and she hits the low notes, it sounds like a snarl. And I love the snarl. It’s a big nasty snarl of Carmen being so cool that she doesn’t even care to sing, she can almost grunt. Or snarl. It’s the sound you wish you could make right in some people’s faces. Some people, like Allegra. Something low and evil that would frighten even Ryan and Brian. A big grunt of being that good at something that you don’t even have to try anymore. I wish I had that. I only stand there and then go home.

  I fall asleep watching Carmen.

  And that’s what I dream about. It’s all in my head.

  In my dream, I’m walking down the hall of my school in a big gypsy shawl like Carmen’s, and the music from the opera is playing through the halls. But in a strange way I can hear Jock asking me, “All right, Davey, where does this go?” I hear him, but I never see him. I keep walking, but as I walk all these kids are coming toward me, and they all look like Allegra. They all have her face and they all have a cell phone, which they stare at as they pass me, bumping into me and not letting me pass. One after another after another bumps into me harder and harder. I’m trying to be Carmen, I guess. Because I have the shawl, so I must be her. I must. But as I struggle to make it down the hall there are only more and more of the Allegras, and it’s harder and harder to get through them. They’re all bashing into me and barely letting me past. My shawl starts to get caught, and I don’t know if I’ll get out alive. But I can still hear Jock: “Davey boy, where does this go, now?”

  As I pass I can see that all the Allegras’ mouths are open, and they are singing the chorus part, responding to the Carmen part that I guess I’m singing, but I can�
�t even tell if my mouth is moving. I can’t see if I’m Carmen. So I just keep walking, trying to get to a place where I can see if I am Carmen or not. A big snarl is coming up, I know, so I think if I am Carmen and then this snarl is mine, I can use it. So as one Allegra bumps into me, I snarl a big fat low note right in her face. But nothing. She doesn’t react. She just keeps looking at her phone, mouthing the lyrics to the chorus part, and walks past me. Farther down the hall I see Ellen, but she’s not looking at me. She’s staring at Charlie, who is standing across from her, smiling that doofy smile he makes. First it’s at Ellen, but then it’s at me. Right at me. I try to snarl at him or even say his name or something, but nothing comes out. He just keeps smiling. So I fight my way through the sea of Allegras, almost getting strangled in the shawl, until I get to the big double doors of the gym. And I push my way in.

  It’s quiet. And dark. And then I hear Jock again: “Davey boy, where does this go?” In the center of the room is a small circle of light. I go over to it, but when I step in, the music changes to the end of the opera, where Don José is angry and about to stab Carmen. Is this the part Jock is asking for? Is this where it’s supposed to be? I look around to see who’s around me. And there is Sophie as Carmen. And Ellen as Carmen. And Mom as Carmen. They’re all singing her part. And it gets to the stabbing part and I feel hands on me. It’s Ryan and Brian, and they have a knife. I try to move but I can’t. So I start asking the Carmens, “Is this it? Is this where I’m supposed to be?” But they don’t answer. And now Paolo’s grabbing me too, with a knife of his own. And I know it’s coming, the stabbing part. I try to say that I’m not Carmen, and I drop my shawl. I don’t want to be stabbed, but it’s too late. They do it. All of them. Ryan and Brian and Paolo take the knives and plunge them into me. Mom and Sophie and Ellen just stand there watching. The stabbing doesn’t hurt, and I sort of expect to pop like a balloon but I don’t. I do the opposite. I start getting bigger and bigger, blowing up like a balloon. And they all keep stabbing, trying to pop me, but nothing works and I get bigger and bigger and bigger until I knock them all over and out of the pool of light and out of the gym and even out of the school. I’m huge. I fill every inch of the school, and it starts to crack around me. Until. Until.