Cheating for the Chicken Man Page 12

  Kate: No! Our deal is done.

  Curtis: U stop u know what happens.

  Fuming with anger, Kate marched up the hill and stomped into the kitchen where Kerry looked up expectantly. “Are you ready now?”

  Kate’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t, Kerry. Not now!”

  “You said!”

  “I know I did, but something’s come up.”

  “But we were going to make a necklace!”

  “Kerry, please—”

  “You promised!” Kerry wailed.

  “All right!” Kate held up both hands. “But just one, okay?”

  Kerry’s face showed instant relief. “First, you have to pick a color.”

  Kate surveyed the piles of beads, but what she was really trying to decide was whether or not she needed to deal with this new assignment from Curtis. If she didn’t, would the bullying start again? Would things get worse? Just when they were getting better for J.T.!

  She felt trapped. What’s the word for this? she wondered, staring over Kerry’s head. Blackmail? Extortion? She would have the text message to prove it! But then she’d be in trouble, too. And would that really help J.T.?

  “How come you’re mad?” Kerry asked.

  Kate shook her head. “I’m not mad.”

  “Then how come you’re standing up, and you’re not smiling, and you’re not talking?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said, putting a hand over her eyes. “I guess I’m tired.”

  “But we just got up!”

  Kate took her hand away and suddenly felt sorry for Kerry, who had been waiting so patiently for her. “How about blue?”

  “Okay!”

  *

  When the necklace making was over, Kate rushed to her bedroom and closed the door. She reread the text. The new assignment is what role did the nile river play in early civilization? 2 pages doublespace due tuesday.

  What was she going to do?

  She sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the floor. She got up and paced the room. She lay on her bed and looked out the window. She even folded her hands in prayer. But no clear answer appeared.

  Her eyes fell upon the pile of books on her desk. Kate was not a cheater. She was an honest person who worked hard and got straight A’s. She needed those grades so she could get a scholarship and go to college and make her mother proud.

  She chewed on her lip and decided to ignore Curtis Jenkins. If he texted again, she wouldn’t read it.

  Her phone dinged again. Kate couldn’t help but glance at it. This time the message was from Jess: “I know what I’m going to be for Halloween!” No reference to the sleepover. Did she think Kate had forgotten?

  She set her phone aside and sat at her desk, frustrated about what to do, then flipped open her assignment notebook to scan the work that was due: twenty problems in math and three pages of dialog in Chinese. A chapter in biology and preparation for the lab they would start on Tuesday studying the effect of acid rain on the germination of seeds. Kate needed to buy dried beans and paper towels for the experiment. She texted her lab partner, Marc, reminding him to bring Ziploc bags and stick-on labels. Then she made two notes: questions for the newspaper interview with Mr. Ellison and pack a clean uniform for the field hockey game.

  Kate’s day of homework was interrupted only when her mother gave her the food list and asked her to go to the grocery store with Aunt Helen because something had come up for Jess’s mom. Once again, Kate didn’t see anyone else her age with a list and her own cart at the store. At least she knew the aisles by heart and could do it quickly: produce first, then tuna and canned goods, then cereal, then dish detergent, then cat and dog food, then milk and bread.

  In the meat section, she paused. Her friends always thought it was strange that Kate and her family raised chickens but if they wanted to eat one, they had to buy it at the grocery store. No one understood how they didn’t actually own the chickens they raised. She held a package of chicken breasts in her hand, noticing how pink and plump the meat, how it glistened underneath the plastic wrap. What did J.T. say? Burst blood vessels? Chicken was on the list, but Kate set the package back and decided that for one meal this week, they could do soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

  All day the text message from Curtis followed her. In late afternoon, she closed the door to her bedroom again. No thoughts of Curtis in here, she told herself. Grabbing her school journal from the nightstand, she plopped onto her bed and leaned against her pillows.

  What my room says about me:

  You can tell the minute you walk into my room that I love pandas because on the wall over my desk is a poster of the panda named Tai Shan who was born at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Tai Shan means “peaceful mountain.” After Tai Shan was born, we checked the zoo’s Giant PandaCam every day. We watched Tai Shan grow from the size of a butter stick to a toddler panda who curled up in a bucket for a nap and played with a soccer ball.

  Kate stopped writing. Thoughts of Tai Shan didn’t end happily, because the panda cub belonged to China, which took him back a few years later. Kate had cried watching his plane leave on the evening news.

  She didn’t understand why the Chinese cared so much about pandas but didn’t seem to care about what was happening to the elephants. Kate had read an article online and seen a special program on television that said the Chinese love for ivory statues and trinkets was one of biggest reasons so many elephants were being killed—so their tusks could be sold on a black market. Sometimes whole herds of elephants were wiped out so poachers could hack off their tusks. Just thinking about it made Kate’s eyes go bleary with tears. Someday, she was going to help stop this. It was the reason she was taking Chinese in high school. Someone needed to explain it to them! Someday she would have a job in which she could help protect beautiful and endangered animals like elephants and pandas. Someday.

  Kate wiped at her eyes. She didn’t write this down, but she had often wondered if her love for animals wasn’t because of the tortured feelings she had about what her family did for a living. She knew she was “conflicted.” Her third-grade Sunday school teacher had told her so when Kate blurted out in class once how she hated the way her family made its living.

  Below the panda poster was a sparkly frame holding a photograph of Jess and Kate, each carrying a candle, the night they were inducted into the Junior National Honor Society. Kate knew if anyone ever found out about the cheating, she’d be asked to leave the honor group.

  The other framed photo on Kate’s bureau was of J.T. and his friends Brady and Digger. They were eight or nine years old and stood by the steam locomotive they rode for Brady’s birthday. The boys were laughing and had their arms around one another’s shoulders; Digger was making rabbit ears behind J.T.’s head. The world was wide open. Not so long ago, those boys had had dreams, too. . . .

  Kate pulled out her cell phone: U stop u know what happens.

  ~15~

  SPECIAL DELIVERY

  Kate! Wake up!” A hand shook Kate’s shoulder. Was it the middle of the night? Kate blinked her eyes open in the dim light.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” her mother whispered.

  “Mom!” Kate pushed herself up on one elbow. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I walked out to get the morning paper.”

  Kate sat all the way up. “You walked all the way down the driveway?”

  “Shhhh!” Her mother was not smiling. “Yes. I did.”

  “But, Mom, that’s great!”

  Her mother was shaking her head. “No, because I saw that someone has smashed down our mailbox. It’s on the side of the road!”

  “They did?”

  Her mother leaned closer. “There was chicken manure and feathers stuffed in the box.”

  Kate gasped and put a hand up to her mouth.

  “They l
eft this note,” her mother said, handing Kate a piece of paper.

  The note, written in black marker, read Special Delivery for the Chicken Man, aka the Baby Killer.

  Kate was horrified. Chicken Man was bad enough, but Baby Killer?

  “Do you know what this means?” Kate’s mother asked, her frightened eyes glued to Kate’s.

  Kate took her hand from her mouth and started to move her head back and forth. “No—”

  “Kate, what’s going on?”

  Kate’s eyes moved away from her mother’s. Her head stopped moving.

  “Chicken Man,” her mother said. “Isn’t that what the boy in middle school called J.T.?”

  Kate couldn’t deny it. She nodded.

  “Is this the same boy, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, unsure how to answer. She met her mother’s eyes again. “Maybe.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  The pain on her mother’s face was clear. It was a bad situation, no question about it. But Kate was glad to see that her mother cared.

  “Is it Curtis Jenkins?”

  Her mother had remembered his name!

  Kate swallowed hard. She didn’t want her mother to get depressed again. “It’s probably just kids fooling around,” she hastened to say. “Really, Mom, you shouldn’t worry.” She pushed her covers aside. “I’ll go clean it up now so he won’t see.”

  “We’ll both go,” her mother said.

  Pulling a sweatshirt on over her pajamas, Kate stepped into flip-flops and followed her mother downstairs. It was not yet seven o’clock, and everyone else was sleeping. At the back kitchen door, both Tucker and Jingles squeezed through and rushed ahead of them. Outside, the sky was clear; it promised to be a sunny, crisp day. Hundreds of geese were already eating in the nearby cornfields.

  “Get a garbage bag and a shovel from the garage,” Kate’s mother directed her. “I’ll get some work gloves and a hammer.”

  They must have looked odd, Kate thought, as they set off down the driveway, Kate in pajamas, Mom still in a robe, her long hair gathered into a loose braid, and the dog trotting alongside them.

  When they got to the mailbox, Kate pulled on the work gloves and, with her mother holding the garbage bag open, kneeled to scoop up handfuls of chicken manure and feathers.

  Sickening . . . despicable . . . hateful. These were some of the words that came to mind as Kate worked. Had Curtis driven over during the night and smashed it down? With what? A baseball bat? A sledgehammer? It seemed like a cruel and violent thing to do.

  While Kate tied up the garbage bag, her mother dug out the old posthole. It took some effort, but the two of them managed to get the post back in and the mailbox up. Kate shoveled in dirt around the base and stomped on it. The mailbox still had a big dent, but at least it could hold mail.

  “I’ll ask Uncle Ray to get a new one at the hardware store,” Kate’s mother said. “Maybe he can put it up sometime this week.”

  “We’ll definitely need a new one.”

  “We won’t say anything to your brother,” Mom added.

  “No,” Kate agreed. “We won’t say anything.”

  *

  As far as she could tell, J.T. never did find out about the mailbox, but the episode was far from over. The next day at school, Kate was summoned to the office at the end of second period. She was surprised to see her mother standing at the front counter. She wore a green corduroy skirt, one she used to wear to church, a freshly pressed blouse, and a shawl. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, and she clutched her big black pocketbook, the one that looked like a saddlebag.

  “Mom, what are you doing here?”

  “I came to talk with Mr. Roberts.”

  “The assistant principal?”

  “Yes.” Kate’s mother motioned for Kate to follow. “Let’s go out into the hall.”

  Kate looked around. What was going on?

  In the hall, Mom led her toward the front doors and then stepped to one side. “We had a talk, in Mr. Roberts’s office. I told him what happened to our mailbox. I showed him the note. I said we knew who did it.” Her eyes began filling with tears.

  “Mom?” Kate touched her mother’s arm.

  “Mr. Roberts says there is nothing school can do about it. They can’t do anything about an incident that happens off school grounds.”

  Kate nodded, although she already knew this.

  “At least now the principal’s office is on notice to keep a lookout for Curtis doing something here,” her mother said.

  “Wow, Mom. I didn’t think you’d actually come to school.”

  “I want to help him, Kate.”

  “I know you do. I do, too!”

  Her mother shook her head. She rummaged in her giant purse for a tissue. “I’ve been an awful mother. That poor boy has needed my help for so long, and I’ve let him down. I’ve been so neglectful. So wrong.”

  “He knows you love him, Mom,” Kate said, trying to comfort her.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said, dabbing at her eyes.

  Outside, a white taxicab was pulling up to the curb.

  “Oh, gosh. That’s for me,” Kate’s mother said, sniffing, balling up the tissue. “I need to get home. We’ll talk again later, okay? We’ll think of something, Kate. There has to be a way we can help him.”

  Kate hugged her mother and watched her walk out to the cab. It was huge that her mother had called a taxi and come all the way to school. Kate hadn’t even known there were taxicabs available out in the country! Where had it come from? Chestertown? Easton? It must have cost a lot of money. Money they didn’t have. But Grandma wasn’t here, and she knew Mom didn’t want to ask anyone else to drive her.

  As she stood at the window watching her mother, Kate’s heart broke and her own eyes misted over. Once again, she thought back to the day they had buried her father, how J.T. had been on the knoll with his trumpet, and nobody ever found out about it. And the first paper she’d written for Curtis? Mr. Ellison had never caught on. So it was possible, after all. You could keep a secret if you were careful.

  Standing at the window watching the taxi drive off, Kate took a deep breath. There was only one way she could think of to help J.T. and her mother. She needed to research and write a paper on the Nile River’s role in early civilization. Two pages. Doublespaced. Due tomorrow.

  ~16~

  BACKSPIN

  They agreed to meet before school at the water fountain on the second floor. That end of the building, near the chemistry labs, didn’t have lockers or homerooms. Neither Curtis nor Kate thought anyone would see them there.

  Curtis was waiting. He leaned against the wall, but straightened up when he saw her.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting forward the paper she’d written on the Nile River.

  “Thanks,” he muttered, quickly folding the paper and slipping it inside the math book in his hands.

  Wasn’t he even going to look at it? To be sure it was two pages? Or that it had a separate cover sheet with his name on it as he’d requested in a subsequent text?

  “That’s it,” Kate declared. “No more.” She turned to go.

  “Wait,” he said. “I just wanted to ask you something. For our Creative Writing class—”

  Kate swung all the way around. “No!”

  Curtis threw up his hands. “I’m not asking you to write it!”

  Kate stared at him.

  “I just wondered, can you help me get started with it?”

  “What? The describe-your-room piece?”

  Curtis nodded.

  Too bad he was such a creep, Kate thought. With a haircut, he could actually be sort of cute.

  “Look,” he said, opening his hands. “I just don’t know where to start.”

  Kate glan
ced at her watch. They had ten minutes before first period. She could ignore him. Just turn and go, which was what she wanted to do. Or she could stay for five minutes and be nice. Maybe some of her nice would wear off on him.

  “Like, how do you do it?” he asked again.

  Was this for real? Kate wasn’t sure. “Just dive into it,” she said with a slight shrug, still unsure of his motive. “Try something, and if that doesn’t work, try something else.”

  Curtis stared at her expectantly.

  “Like, where is your room?” she suggested. “Do you share it with—”

  “It’s in the basement,” Curtis told her.

  “The basement,” Kate repeated.

  “Yeah. I have the basement to myself.”

  “Okay. Well, is it nice and cozy down there?”

  Curtis smirked. “It’s really damp, for one thing.”

  “Eww,” Kate sympathized, although she couldn’t care less if Curtis Jenkins was uncomfortable in his own bedroom.

  “No, I like it! I mean it’s damp, but it’s also cool—as in not hot—and I hate being hot. So all the time I hear the sump pump running ’cause the groundwater, it comes in through a pipe in the walls and gets pumped back out into the yard. We’re on a really low piece of land, so it’s, like, running all the time.”

  “That must be pretty annoying,” Kate said.

  “Actually, I kind of like it,” Curtis said. “It drowns out everything going on upstairs. You know, like the TV blasting away and my mother yelling at her boyfriend.”

  Curtis laughed, but Kate didn’t think it was funny. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like having a mother with a boyfriend, never mind a mother who yelled at her boyfriend. Kate’s parents had had disagreements, but she could think of only a couple times when they’d actually raised their voices at each other.

  There was a lull in their conversation, and Curtis kicked at the floor with the toe of one sneaker.

  “Write down what you just told me, Curtis. ‘I sleep in a damp, cold basement, but I like it’—and then explain why.”

  “Okay!” His eyebrows arched. “I’ll try that. I will.”