Cheating for the Chicken Man Page 14

  Kate pondered this question the next day in English class while Mrs. Langley collected homework.

  Why was Curtis making her write all these papers about ancient Egypt and Animal Farm and yet, when she quietly slipped these assignments into his hands, he didn’t look at her and seemed almost embarrassed?

  “Books closed. Eyes up here,” Mrs. Langley instructed.

  But Kate turned to look out the window instead.

  She thought back to the time she had talked to Curtis about his room in the basement and his brother, Justin. She recalled his description of the funny-sounding lures he used in fishing and how he explained the backspin in pool. Why did he seem so normal then? Why did he change when Hooper showed up?

  A light rain was starting to hit the classroom windows. Kate wondered: If she was nicer to Curtis, if she talked to him more and got to know him better, would it make a difference?

  The rain came harder, and Kate narrowed her eyes, thinking. Jess was on her mind, too. She needed to talk to Jess and clear the air—

  “Miss Tyler!” Mrs. Langley’s voice rang out. “Is the view out that window distracting you?”

  Kate swung her head around. “No, ma’am.”

  “Then tell us, Miss Tyler, how you would sum up chapter five?”

  Kate swallowed hard. Her mouth went dry, and her heart beat fast. She hadn’t been listening. “Chapter five,” she repeated, scrambling while her mind reeled backward. She had finished the book last night. There were only ten chapters in the book, so chapter five was about halfway.

  “Yes, chapter five,” Mrs. Langley confirmed.

  “Umm. This is the chapter,” Kate began slowly—she’d have to take a chance. “The chapter where Squealer makes the incredible statement that all animals are created equal. But then he goes on to say that the animals might not make the right decisions, so they should trust Napoleon to make the decisions for them. This is so hypocritical, because if all animals were created equal, then Napoleon could make a mistake just as easily as they could.”

  Mrs. Langley was frowning. “And remind us. Who is Napoleon?”

  “The pig who takes over,” Kate replied.

  “And what book are you referring to?”

  Kate felt her insides drop and the blood rush to her face. “Animal Farm,” she murmured so softly it was almost a whisper. She was talking about Animal Farm, not To Kill a Mockingbird, which is what her class was reading. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes. I think we need to have a chat,” Mrs. Langley said, peering over her reading glasses at Kate. “After school, Miss Tyler.”

  Kate pressed her lips together and blinked her eyes, holding in the tears. She pushed her back against the chair and entwined her hands together tightly in her lap. She was so embarrassed. So. Incredibly. Embarrassed. Was somebody going to figure out now what she’d been doing? Had she just given herself away?

  *

  At lunch, Kate wanted to hide out in the library, but she stood bravely at the edge of the huge cafeteria, her eyes desperately scanning the crowd for Jess.

  “Hey!” Kate said, approaching her friend from behind.

  Jess turned and acknowledged Kate with a quiet “Hey.”

  “Can I sit with you guys?” Kate asked, noting that Olivia was already at the table setting down her tray, and that Samantha and Lindsey were there, too.

  Jess shrugged. “Sure,” she said, pulling out a chair.

  “Kate, you should get hot lunch today. It’s Walking Taco,” Olivia piped up.

  “Yeah, your old favorite,” Jess said.

  True. Walking Taco had been Kate’s favorite lunch at middle school. A bag of Doritos on a tray with hamburger meat, salsa, and cheese. What you did was dump the meat and other things into the bag and shake it up. You could eat straight from the bag if you were in a rush. Or, you could sit down and eat it with a fork. But Kate didn’t eat meat anymore, and Jess knew that—so why did she say that?

  Kate was not going to give up. She wanted Jess to know she was sorry. She pulled out the chair beside her friend and rummaged in her backpack for the granola bar she’d brought.

  Lindsey was wrapping an apple core in a napkin. “Hey, Jess,” she said, “can I have one of those Rice Krispie treats you brought?”

  Jess’s eyebrows went up. “No! They’re for the game this afternoon.”

  “Please,” Lindsey begged. “I’m starving.”

  But Jess shook her head. And Kate wondered if she’d remembered to pack a clean uniform and her green and yellow ribbons for the game.

  “What’s your quote for tomorrow morning?” Samantha asked.

  Jess seemed pleased by the interest—but was Kate the only one noticing a silly smile on Samantha’s face?

  Leaning to one side, Jess pulled a pink index card from the front pocket of her backpack. “I was trying to find something about forgiveness,” she said after she retrieved the card.

  Kate cringed a little, assuming that comment was directed at her.

  “I wanted a quote about how everybody needs to let go of negative things and move on,” Jess said. “But I’m not sure I found the right thing.”

  If Jess only knew the whole truth, Kate thought, as, slowly, she broke off a tiny piece of her granola bar and slipped it into her mouth. She honestly wondered right then if it would be easier to not have any friends for a while.

  “I don’t know,” Jess said, focused on the quote. “Maybe I need to rethink this one.”

  Olivia snatched the card out of Jess’s hands and put up an elbow to keep Jess from taking it back. “If you can’t live through adversity,” she began reading aloud, “you’ll never be good at what you do. You have to live through the unfair things, and you have to develop the hide to not let it bother you and keep your eyes focused on what you have to do. Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg.”

  For sure it seemed thought-provoking, Kate thought, especially the last part: keep your eyes focused on what you have to do.

  Jess grabbed it back, and for a moment, no one spoke or offered an opinion.

  “See, I’m just worried it doesn’t have anything about forgiveness in it,” Jess said to break the silence.

  If Jess was so hung up on forgiveness, then why wasn’t she forgiving Kate for their argument at the fair? Why was she acting like she was still mad?

  “Well, I think it’s dorky,” Olivia declared. “You’re going to embarrass yourself, Jess.”

  “I agree,” Lindsey chimed in. “It’s too long. You ought to just do short and funny. Can I have one of your chips, Olivia?”

  Samantha lifted her chin and scrunched up her nose. “And anyway, who’s Hank Greenberg?”

  *

  After the final bell that day, Kate rushed to the upstairs hallway, where she saw Curtis waiting. Discreetly, she passed him the paper, complete with a separate title page and Curtis’s name, about how Animal Farm was an allegory, using specific examples from the story. It wasn’t a very difficult assignment, because Kate had remembered how the animals’ rebellion against their farmer was supposed to represent the Bolshevik revolution against the Russian czars. The interesting thing that Kate remembered most about the book was how the animals slowly turned into the thing they had rebelled against.

  Curtis took the assignment, rolled it up, and held it in one hand. Would he even read it? She hated what she was doing.

  “I got in trouble today in English,” she said bitterly.

  “For what?” Curtis asked. “Being smarter than everybody else?”

  “Very funny,” Kate responded with a straight face. “I got confused about which book we were reading because of the paper I just wrote for you.”

  “Oh.” Curtis dropped the smart-aleck grin. “Sorry that happened.”

  “Really?” Kate couldn’t help herself. “How sorry are you, Curtis?”

  He lo
oked away. “So I tried to write something about the county fair last night,” he said. “For Creative Writing—”

  “We saw you at the fair,” Kate said quickly. She didn’t want him to have time to even think about giving her another assignment.

  “You did?”

  “My friend Jess and I, we saw you hauling trash behind the food tent.”

  “Oh,” Curtis said, dropping his head and looking a bit embarrassed. Maybe he didn’t want people to know.

  “Seems like you could have gathered a lot of details from your job,” Kate said.

  Curtis gazed skyward. “Use your five senses, right? Okay. Well, about the only thing I heard all day was that guy’s chain saw. The guy making birds and bears out of wood? As for smell? Three smells. When I was inside the tent, it was burgers and grease. When I was outside dumping trash, it was wood chips. There was so much sawdust in the air I was coughing by the end of the afternoon.

  “What did I see? Not much other than that black, smoking grill. I burned myself three times.” He stuck out his arm so she could see the pink, blistered skin.

  “I worked all day without a break,” he went on. “So all I felt was tired. Tired and hungry ’cause I was supposed to get, like, fifteen minutes to eat, but it never happened, so I didn’t taste anything neither. Get this—when a homeless guy showed up at the back and asked if there was anything in the trash he could have, I gave him a burger on a roll and told him to beat it, quick.”

  The words had come in a rush. When he finished, he ran a hand through his hair.

  “Wow. You could write a really good piece, Curtis,” Kate said quietly.

  “What? You think that’s interesting?”

  “Of course it is. Most kids don’t have a clue what it’s like to have to work hard like that.”

  “I have to work. Every weekend I work for that guy at his barbecue place. Got to keep up the truck on my own—gas and everything. Nobody helps me with that. And my truck—that’s my freedom. I can get away from things in my truck.”

  “Maybe you could write about how you felt working when other kids your age were walking around eating funnel cake and corn dogs,” Kate suggested.

  Curtis shoved his free hand into the other pocket of his jeans. He was struggling with something. When she averted her eyes, she saw the pile of books he had set on the floor.

  “Why do you have Huckleberry Finn?” she asked. “I thought you were reading Animal Farm.”

  Curtis straightened up. “We are,” he said. “This is what we’re reading next.”

  Kate had a sinking feeling. She hadn’t read Huck Finn.

  “It’s the first novel to ever be written entirely in dialect,” Curtis said.

  But Kate wasn’t interested in hearing about it. “I need to go.”

  Suddenly, Curtis pulled his hand from a pocket of his jeans and held out a small piece of paper. “Look, I hate doing this.”

  Kate backed away. “Then stop!”

  “I can’t,” Curtis said.

  “Why not?” Kate demanded.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t! Why can’t you just do your own homework—and leave my brother alone?”

  Curtis peered around nervously. Who was he looking for? Hooper?

  “Kate, please. It’s, like, out of my hands.”

  She scowled. “What do you mean, it’s out of your hands?”

  “I can’t explain it right now. I’ll make this assignment the last one, okay? I promise. If you don’t do it, J.T. will get hit hard with some bad stuff.”

  Kate’s arms and hands fell limp at her side. What was going on? She didn’t understand. But did he just say this would be the last time? She let Curtis lift one of her hands and set the folded paper in her palm. In a very odd gesture, his fingers gently made her fingers curl around it.

  They looked at each other, and Kate felt a rush of mixed emotions. Not hatred or anger. Confusion, mostly. Enormous confusion and an incredible yearning to bring the whole thing to a close.

  “Do you promise this is the last one?” Kate asked him.

  He held her gaze and nodded.

  Curtis took his hand away from hers. “Don’t you, like, need to go to field hockey or something?”

  Kate suddenly remembered the meeting with Mrs. Langley. “Oh, my gosh, yes!” she exclaimed, a hand to her forehead. “But you need to explain this to me, Curtis!”

  “I will. I promise.”

  Kate whirled around. Already late for her meeting with Mrs. Langley, she half ran the rest of the way, her hands on her backpack straps to steady her, her mind spinning. What did Curtis mean when he said she wouldn’t understand? So strange, how Curtis’s large, rough fingers had closed around her hand. . . .

  *

  The session with Mrs. Langley was not as painful as Kate feared. She told her teacher she’d been up late doing homework, and had read Animal Farm to help her brother. She figured Mrs. Langley wouldn’t know enough about her brother’s schedule to question what English class he had. Yet another lie thrown on the heap. She topped it all off by saying, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Langley. It was almost a year ago today my father died. I guess I was distracted.”

  It worked. Mrs. Langley didn’t give Kate a detention, just a warning.

  Outside the classroom, Kate closed her eyes for a two-second silent prayer to her father asking him to forgive her for using him as an excuse, then glanced at her watch and took off toward the gym. She was twenty-five minutes late for practice.

  “Kate!” a boy’s voice called out on the stairwell.

  Kate stopped and turned to see her lab partner, Marc.

  “Wait up, Kate. There’s something I want to ask you!”

  “Marc, I can’t! I’m late to field hockey!” She resumed her rush down the stairs. At the bottom, she paused briefly to call back, “Send me a text, okay?”

  The locker room was empty by the time Kate arrived to change. Quickly, she pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, threw her things into the locker, and pulled a hair elastic over her wrist. She’d make a ponytail out on the field, since there wasn’t time to braid her hair. A mad dash out the back door—and abruptly, Kate stopped. The field was empty. The team wasn’t out there, because they had an away game today. The bus had already left.

  Kate sank down on the cement steps leading to the athletic fields and held the field hockey stick across her lap. She hadn’t even packed her uniform.

  Missing the game without an excuse meant she was automatically off the team.

  ~19~

  LIKE A TURTLE

  It took nearly an hour and a half for Kate to walk home from the high school. She’d never had to walk home before, and the main highway was nerve-racking, especially when tractor trailers barreled by blowing sand in her eyes. When she was finally off the busy road, the route became quieter—and a lot safer as it wound through the countryside past farms and fields. Along the way, she saw a fox and two deer, and almost stepped on a tiny lizard.

  By the time Kate turned up the long driveway to her home, she had thought a lot about her situation. It would be embarrassing to be off the team, and it would hurt, for sure. She could only hope it didn’t further damage her friendship with Jess. But there was so much else on her mind that she was almost relieved.

  Field hockey wasn’t the only thing to go. Because she hadn’t written the piece on Mr. Ellison for the school newspaper, she had stopped attending newspaper staff meetings. And poor Marc, her lab partner. What did he want? She’d probably never know now. He hadn’t sent a text and probably never would, because she’d been so rude by not stopping to talk. Probably just as well, she thought. She didn’t have time for a boyfriend or a social life.

  Getting good grades and protecting J.T. were the two most important things, she decided. There was always next year for the newspaper and field
hockey. In the spring, she could try out for lacrosse—or maybe softball. Things would be settled down by then. Now if she could just come home after school every day, she’d have more time for homework and chores—and that one last assignment for Curtis. She felt the piece of paper in her pocket: Compare and contrast hieroglyphics and cuneiform. She’d have to do some research for that one.

  As she neared the house, Kate could see her brother walking off toward the tractor sheds. And then, as she got closer, she noticed the family van parked in a different spot—off to the left under the maple tree near the old swing set, instead of to the right where it usually sat in front of the garage. Soon she was able to see that someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. Not J.T., but her mother?

  What was that all about? Kate crouched behind the tangle of forsythia that lined the driveway and crept closer. Had her mother driven the van from one side of the yard to the other? She was trying, wasn’t she? She was doing battle with her demons, whatever they were. Not wanting to interfere, Kate stayed low behind the bushes and circled the yard, sneaking in the back door of the house.

  After changing into jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, Kate set aside her cell phone, picked up her personal journal and a pen, and quietly slipped back outside. She planned to take care of her chickens next door and then sit outside their coop and write. But first she wanted to check in with her brother.

  “What happened?” Kate asked, finding J.T. in the tractor shed standing with one hand on his hip and the other drumming his fingers with annoyance on the tractor’s fender.

  “That darn choke. I flooded the engine, so now I’ve got to wait for some of the gas to evaporate before I can try again. A complete waste of time.”

  “No,” Kate said. “I mean with Mom? Why is she sitting in the van?”

  J.T. shifted his attention to Kate. “She’s still there?”

  “Yeah. Just sitting.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, she drove the van down the driveway and met me at the bus and let me drive back. I thought she got out after I did.”

  “She drove the van?”

  “Wonders never cease, huh? She was just letting me practice so I can go for my learner’s permit in a couple months.”