Sidetracked Read online

  “Okay, okay,” he says, putting down his cell. He picks up the car keys and dangles them in front of my mother. “I’m going, right now. I’ll change and hit the road.”

  When Dad goes upstairs, Mom sits down at the table and rubs her forehead. “How was school?” she asks, in a halfhearted way.

  I’m about to answer with my standard “Fine,” but then I remember that there is actually something to tell her. “Charlie Kastner got knocked on his butt in gym.”

  “That’s a good place for him,” says my mother.

  “By a girl,” I add.

  “Really!” she says. “Who?”

  “I don’t know her name,” I say. “She’s new. She’s taller and faster than the boys.”

  “Wow. That can’t be easy for her,” she says. I’m not sure why.

  “We were playing soccer,” I tell her, “and Charlie would’ve crashed into me in about a second, but she caught him from behind and came to my—”

  Mom cuts me off when my dad appears in jeans and a T-shirt. “Matt, you’re going dressed like that?”

  “You want me to wear a tuxedo?”

  “Shouldn’t you look more respectful?”

  “I don’t think they care, Sheila.” He takes out his wallet and looks inside. “I don’t have a lot of cash. If there’s bail, do you think they take credit cards?”

  “Bail?”

  That sends my mom back into another nervous flurry and I head to my room. “Rescue,” I say to myself, finishing the thought I started in the kitchen. “She came to my rescue.”

  After a few minutes, Dad comes to my door. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Guess I’m off to save the day.”

  I get up and give him a hug. Rescue seems to be in the air. I sit on my bed and picture the scene from PE one more time—that girl coming down the field, her hair so wild, the way she sent Charlie flying and landing with a thud. It makes me smile.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, Mom hangs up the phone and tells me that everything’s fine. Actually, she says, “Fine. Just fine,” which usually means it’s really not. Or maybe it is, but she’s not happy about it.

  “Is Dad coming back with Grandpa?” I ask. “Is he taking him to Sunshine?”

  “I think for now he’ll stay with us.” She sighs. “I don’t know how Sunshine will feel about all this.”

  This could be the last straw for Grandpa at Sunshine Senior Living. It sounds like their patience was already running thin. I’ve heard my parents whispering about how he didn’t like it there, how he didn’t follow the rules. I have no idea what rules they have, but probably ending up under arrest in Atlantic City is breaking one of them.

  “You ready for school?” she asks in a trying-to-be-cheery voice. “I’m off to Maison.”

  My mom works at A La Maison: Home and Kitchen. She just calls it Maison, like it’s a good friend. We only live a few blocks from my school, but when my mom works the early shift I let her drive me. I think she feels guilty about leaving me to walk by myself. She’s afraid I’ll feel abandoned. Or maybe she thinks I’ll get distracted and forget to go to school at all, which is totally possible.

  So today she drops me off and calls, “Have a good day!” and as soon as she drives away I try to decide where to go that isn’t a hangout spot for Charlie Kastner or his buddies. The front steps are out, and the back steps, and the hallways, because you never know where those guys are going to turn up. But then I remember that the running meeting is this afternoon and I decide to go take a look at the new track.

  I cross the empty practice field and look down at an area that was filled with tractors and backhoes and cement mixers all summer. What used to be blacktop with weeds pushing up through the cracks is now a brand-new oval-shaped track, with thick green grass in the middle. The track is a bright tomato red, divided into lanes by lines painted in crisp white paint. It’s all so sharp and clear, it could be in a Pixar movie. There are smaller lines painted crosswise, too, and numbers and little triangles are sprinkled around like some secret code or ancient cave writing. I want to see it up close. I want to race right down and try it out.

  But I’m stopped cold at the top of the stairs. They’re the same old tippy, uneven stairs that have been here since cement was invented. I hate them. They smile up at me like an ogre with cracked, crooked teeth. Forget running: these stairs are going to knock me down and chew me up before I’ve even made it to the organizational meeting.

  I almost turn back, but I try to think of Mrs. T’s saying, “Don’t say ‘can’t.’” It’s an annoying saying, because sometimes I really can’t, but this time, maybe I can. I grip the metal railing and lower myself down one step at a time. Just one at a time. And despite the ogre’s best attempts to pull me down, I somehow make it in one piece.

  Surrounding the track is a waist-high chain-link fence. It’s unlocked, so I open the gate and step in. The track smells just like it looks, all rubbery and new. Its surface makes me think of the sponge painting we did in second-grade art. I almost expect it to squish and ooze red when I press down. I wonder if Mrs. T knows all this—I bet she does.

  I lift my heels and bob up and down, then I bend my knees and lay my hands flat, to get a better feel. I always like to know how things feel. There’s even a name for it. Mrs. T says I’m a “tactile” learner.

  I hear a voice. A girl’s voice. When I look up, I see it’s the new girl from PE.

  “Friedman, right?” she says.

  “Um . . .” I say.

  “It’s a pretty simple question. You are Friedman, right?”

  “Yes.” I don’t like being called Friedman. Any sentence that starts with “Friedman” usually ends with an order or hysterical laughter.

  I stand up and brush my hands off on my pants.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Trying out the track.”

  “You’re supposed to run on it, not do handstands,” she says, not in an un-nice way, but maybe she’s just warming up.

  “I wanted to see how it felt,” I say.

  “You joining the track team?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “I might.”

  “Aren’t you playing soccer?” I ask. She looks annoyed. I feel like I’ve said the wrong thing. I hope she doesn’t beat me up.

  “I don’t really like soccer. I went to soccer camp last year. The girls get mean and then they end up hating you.”

  Just for a second, she looks different. A little sad. I think about what my mother said, how it can’t be easy for her, being better than the boys. And a ton better than the other girls. I wonder if you can be as miserable being good at something as you can being bad at it. Maybe things are reversed somehow, when you’re a girl.

  “Do you have a first name?” she asks me.

  “Joseph.”

  I forget to ask hers, but she tells me anyway. “I’m Heather,” she says. “We just moved here.”

  “Where from?”

  “A place called Cherryfield, Maine,” she says.

  “That must be pretty different from New York.”

  She nods. “It’s the blueberry capital of the world.”

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Aren’t you going to ask?”

  “Ask what?”

  “Why it’s called Cherryfield and not Blueberryfield?”

  “Should I?”

  “No,” she says. “Not really. It’s just that everybody does.” She reaches down to touch her toes.

  “I’m allergic to blueberries,” I tell her. “I get itchy, way back in my throat.” I demonstrate my scratching technique by sticking my finger in my ear, wiggling it around, and making a clucking sound with the back of my tongue. This is probably not something you should do on first meeting. “So, why is it?” I ask her.

  “Why is what?”

  “Why is it called Cherryfield if it’s the blueberry capital of the world?”

  “Oh. Because there used to be cherries. Before the b
lueberries.” Then she says, “You want to run?”

  “Run?”

  She moves her arms and legs in a running motion. “Run. On the track. Now.”

  “I’m slow,” I say.

  “After gym class, I’m not expecting Usain Bolt.”

  “Who?” I ask, but she’s already off, bounding along like there’s nothing to it.

  She’s a quarter of the way around the oval before I even start running. When I finally get going, I’m surprised by how the track feels hard and soft at the same time, kind of cushiony. It makes me try tiny steps and then bigger steps and even a jump. Then I try zigzagging across the lines, out and back, holding my arms out to feel the air go by.

  Heather is running straight and fast and she doesn’t even slow down when she goes around the curve. She makes it look fun and easy, so I take the middle lane and try running the same way. There’s something about the painted lines, all clean and sharp, that dares me to go faster, and I speed up, for about ten seconds, until I’m out of breath and have to stop.

  Heather comes around and passes me, but then she stops for a second to look at something in the grassy field in the middle of the track. It’s a cement circle about the size of a kiddie pool. I walk over to where she’s standing and she says, “That’s the discus ring.” She points to the other side of the field. “Shot put’s over there.”

  “Oh,” I squeak out. That’s about all the breath that’s in there.

  “I’m doing shot put in winter, and in spring I’ll do discus, like Stephanie Brown Trafton.”

  “Who?”

  “Stephanie Brown Trafton. She won the gold medal for discus throw in the 2008 Olympics.”

  I’m about to say, “Really?” but then I think it must be a trap. I know from experience that kids say things that sound logical, and then I go, “Really?” and then they laugh their heads off, because it’s not true at all. Now that I think about it, she might have made up the whole Cherryfield thing, too. So, even though I’m out of breath, and light-headed and shaky, this time I see it coming. I’ve never even heard of this Stephanie Whoever-Whoever. I put on a “Yeah, sure” kind of voice and say, “If she really won a gold medal, I bet I would’ve heard of her.”

  “Yeah?” says Heather, and she takes a step toward me. “Well, maybe nobody’s heard of her because she’s not what people want to see. She’s six foot four and two hundred something pounds and she throws things farther than most guys. Everybody wants to cheer for little gymnasts and pretty volleyball players in bikinis. Maybe that’s why nobody’s heard of her, even though she won an Olympic gold.”

  Heather is now about five foot ten of angriness, but she’s blinking her eyes in a way that reminds me of me, when I’m trying not to cry. I want to tell her I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I just thought she was trying to make me look stupid, like everybody else. But I don’t have a chance. She shakes her head and starts to run again, much faster than I can go. At the end of the track, she crashes through the chain link gate and takes the cracked stairs back up, two at a time, and she’s gone.

  Chapter 5

  So this girl named Heather just got here and yesterday she saved my life, and I’ve already made her hate me.

  I take my seat in Social Studies and try to pay attention to Mr. Hernandez, who’s telling everyone to settle down and listen, but I keep thinking about Heather. I wonder what it takes to make someone un-mad at you. Maybe if I don’t say anything else stupid she’ll give me another chance.

  It’s not like it’s the first time something like this has happened. I seem to have a talent for doing exactly the wrong thing, especially where girls are concerned. There was this time in third grade, when a girl named Mary Liz sat next to me. Mary Liz was good at everything. Our teacher would always hold up her paper and say, “Look how neat Mary Liz’s paper looks.” Mary Liz always raised her hand at the right time. She never spoke out of turn. She never, ever had to erase so much that she went through the paper and saw the shiny, pretend-wood desk peeking through.

  One day, Mrs. Jaworski told us we were going to start learning cursive writing, even though Lee Han raised his hand and said, “My cousin says they don’t even do script anymore at his school.”

  “Well, you’re here at this school, aren’t you?” said Mrs. Jaworski. “And we choose to teach cursive.” Then she gave him one of those teacher stares that don’t leave you any choice but to give up. I didn’t even know that “cursive” meant script, so I was behind before we even started.

  I sat next to Mary Liz. She was watching carefully as Mrs. Jaworski demonstrated cursive writing on the Smart Board.

  “In cursive writing,” said Mrs. Jaworski, “we slant our letters to the right, all at the same angle. Your letters should look like flowers, leaning toward the sun.”

  We all started writing and I tried, I really did. But my letters looked like somebody had stomped in the flower bed wearing army boots and left a bunch of broken stems and squashed petals.

  Mrs. Jaworski walked around, looking over our shoulders. Every now and then she would pick up somebody’s paper and hold it up. Of course, she held up Mary Liz’s.

  “Now, everyone, look how well Mary Liz is writing. Beautiful, Mary Liz.” Mary Liz didn’t smile. She just looked like she wanted Mrs. Jaworski to put the paper back down so she could write more beautiful words.

  Mary Liz went back to work, and I couldn’t help watching her. The pencil she wrote with was longer than mine. It’d probably only been sharpened once in its whole life. She gripped it tight, looping and twirling, forming those perfect words, all lined up in pretty rows. She had nail polish that was this pearly blue-green, just a little spot of it at the end of each finger. Every few words she lifted the pencil to look at her paper. A few times, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear before she got back to work, writing little flowers leaning toward the sun.

  “Joseph,” called out Mrs. Jaworski. “Are you writing or daydreaming?”

  “He’s staring,” said Adele Sapperstein.

  “Oh?” asked Mrs. Jaworski. “And what is it that’s so interesting, Joseph?”

  Teachers ask me that all the time. Sometimes I actually have an answer, but they never give me time to tell them, because they don’t really want to know.

  Adele answered for me. “He’s staring at Mary Liz.”

  “Really,” said Mrs. Jaworski. “Well, maybe if you spent less time staring at Mary Liz and more time concentrating on your writing, your paper would look better than this.” She picked up my paper and held it up for the class to see.

  Everybody was laughing, at my paper and at me, and somebody said, “Joseph loves Mary Liz,” and then everyone laughed harder.

  And that’s when Mary Liz looked like the most horrifying thing that could ever happen was happening to her. She looked at me and she was mad. She was so mad at me. Sometimes I think maybe I’m why she moved away, she looked so mad.

  I took my paper and crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. Mrs. Jaworski got angry with me, which didn’t make any sense at all, since she was the one who’d said it was terrible.

  I ended up out in the hall, which was not that unusual, but mostly I remember that day because of how Mary Liz looked at me.

  And now I’ve done it again.

  I hear the sound of chairs scraping the floor, and everyone in my Social Studies class is gathering their stuff and going to the door.

  “Where are we going?” I ask nobody in particular.

  “To the library,” says a girl named Carly. “Don’t you ever listen?”

  I don’t even bother answering that. I just pick up my backpack and follow the others to the library.

  Chapter 6

  Our librarian is Mrs. Fishbein. She has white hair and always wears skirts. There’s a rumor that she lives here in the library, eating nothing but Cup O’ Noodles. She has dozens of them stacked on shelves over her desk. I happen to know the rumor isn’t true, because sometimes I ride my bicyc
le through the school parking lot after all the cars are gone, and I see her leaving and walking toward the bus stop. I haven’t told anybody, mostly because I don’t know who I would tell and also because it’s nobody’s business.

  There are odd things about Mrs. Fishbein, though. For one thing, her office is filled with piles of yellow cards. They’re there because she doesn’t like computers. She told us that when they first delivered the computer system, they had to take away the card catalogue cabinets. She gave them up “kicking and screaming.” Those were the words she used, “kicking and screaming.” She made them take out every last catalogue card and pile them in her office. Every single one.

  She also kept the stampers and stamp pads, and the green cards for signing books out. What if there’s a disaster and we’re all plunged back into the Stone Age, she once explained. Then who’ll be laughing: the whole world with their empty screens and dead keyboards, or her, safe in the library, with books you can hold in your hand, catalogue cards to find them with, and lined green cards for signing them out?

  The thing is, if the world is in ruins, I wonder if we’re really going to be worrying about sign-outs and returns.

  Anyway, when we get to the library, the chairs are set up in a horseshoe. It reminds me of third-grade story time, but in seventh grade nobody reads you stories.

  I take a seat in one of the chairs. They’re the gray, slippery kind. The kind your rear just can’t get a good grip on. I feel myself sliding and do my best to hold on.

  Once we’re all sitting down, Mrs. Fishbein says, “As Mr. Hernandez explained, each of you will be researching a topic of your choice.” It’s news to me. “And even though there is a lot of information online, there is still value in doing some of your research in the library.”

  I see Jessica Yu roll her eyes and Jordan Glazer stifle a laugh.

  “And in the library,” Mrs. Fishbein continues, “even if computers have replaced the card catalogue, you still need to find books on the shelves. And that’s where the Dewey Decimal system comes in.”