Cheating for the Chicken Man Page 6

  THE CHICKEN MAN RETURNS

  Kate’s mouth went dry. Her heart pounded.

  J.T. stood silent beside her.

  “Who did this?” Kate asked softly, even though she’d suspected right away it was Curtis. It wasn’t like her to make a scene, but shock was quickly turning to anger. “Who did this?” she repeated, her trembling voice a little louder.

  Looking around, Kate saw some of the kids shake their heads and shrug. She also heard some giggling and caught a few smirks. But no one said anything.

  J.T. remained silent and seemed stunned.

  “Somebody saw!” Kate declared, her voice so loud it surprised even herself. “Who was it?”

  “Come on, Kate,” J.T. said, putting his hand on her arm.

  But Kate pulled away and stared at the gawking students. And in that moment, she had a crystallized flashback to middle school, the day all of eighth grade sat in the library during Anti-Bullying Week watching the assistant principal draw a diagram on the board. In the middle, he drew a small circle and called it the Victim. In a semicircle around the Victim, other circles appeared: the Students Who Bullied, the Followers, the Passive Bullies, the Disengaged Onlookers, and the Possible Defenders. They were in that circle right now, weren’t they? Everyone standing there knew it. How could they not care? Did they think it was funny?

  Don’t stand by—stand up.

  But not a single person did.

  “You’re all a bunch of cowards!” Kate blurted out, on the verge of tears.

  “Kate, please.” J.T. grabbed her arm and tried to lead her away, but Kate wriggled out of his grasp.

  “You’re going to make it worse!” he whispered harshly.

  Kate ignored the warning. She dropped her backpack on the floor and marched over to where the banner was attached at one end with adhesive tape to the wall. The crowd parted to let her through, and everyone watched as Kate reached up to rip off the tape. She walked to the other side of the hall, the banner trailing on the floor behind her, and ripped the other end off. Quickly, noisily, she gathered the papers in her arms, squashing them against her chest, and retrieved her backpack. She looked for J.T., but he was gone.

  People started moving. The show was over.

  Or was it? Kate spotted Curtis Jenkins in the crowd. He was partially hidden, but stretching his neck to watch her. There was no question it had been him. Kate recognized the long dirty blond hair brushing his eyes, the ever-present camo shirt, the trademark smirk.

  She walked up to him. “Was it you, Curtis?”

  Kids began stopping to see what would happen next.

  Curtis faked innocence and grinned. He pointed to himself. “Who? Me?”

  Hooper Delaney called out, “Whoa, Curtis! Shame on you!” Then he bent over laughing.

  Curtis threw up his hands. “I didn’t have anything to do with it!”

  “You’re a liar, Curtis!” It was J.T.’s voice from behind Kate.

  Curtis puffed up his chest. “Who’s calling me a liar?”

  “I am,” J.T. said without flinching. He was a little bit taller than Curtis, but he didn’t have the bully’s bulk or his muscular arms.

  Curtis lifted a fist. “Nobody calls me a liar! Especially not you, Chicken Man.”

  J.T. slipped off his backpack and curled his own two hands into fists.

  Kate’s mouth dropped. This was like a scene out of a movie! She had never seen J.T. curl his fists at anyone in his entire life! She didn’t think he even knew how to fight! When Curtis pulled his arm back to throw a punch, Kate dropped the crumpled banner and jumped between the boys.

  “Stop!” she screamed at Curtis before whirling around to face her brother. Lowering her voice, she warned, “J.T., if you fight and get in trouble, they’ll send you back!”

  “Come on, Chicken Man, you gonna let your little sister save you? You a coward, too? A coward and a killer?”

  J.T. lunged forward when he heard that, but Kate blocked him, then spun around and used both hands to knock Curtis back, a feat she accomplished only because she took him by surprise.

  A teacher clapped loudly. “What’s going on here?”

  Curtis ducked and slid away into the crowd. Like a snake, Kate thought.

  “Kate, do not say anything,” J.T. whispered urgently.

  The teacher who had clapped stood watching for a few more seconds, then walked back into her classroom.

  The crowd cleared out.

  “Stay out of it,” J.T. warned Kate again as he gathered his stuff. “I can handle this myself.” He hoisted his backpack and stalked off.

  But Kate was not going to stay out of it. After scooping up the crumpled banner, she grabbed her things and headed toward the school’s main office.

  *

  When the buzzer sounded for first period, Kate was still standing at the front counter waiting to talk to the school secretary. Again, she would be late for class, this time her first biology class and lab. But what else could she do? Ignore what happened? If she did, it would continue. It would get worse.

  There were at least four others waiting for help in front of her. How long would this take? Nervous, Kate bit her lip. She hoped that J.T. had gone on to class so at least he wouldn’t get into trouble.

  Eager to get the report done and return to class, Kate tapped her sandaled foot nervously. While she waited, the girl beside her begged to see the school nurse; “Come on, I’m dying!” she moaned. Another boy slapped the counter angrily and declared that someone had stolen the hubcaps off his car.

  Still Kate waited, clutching the crumpled banner.

  “Can I help you?” a woman finally asked.

  “I need to talk to the principal,” Kate said bravely.

  “What’s this about?” the secretary asked. She pushed a pencil into her hair, folded her hands on the counter, and tilted her head as she looked at Kate.

  “I need to talk to Mrs. Larkin about a case of bullying,” Kate said. She set the crumpled banner on the counter and started to spread it out.

  The secretary didn’t even look at the banner. “Did someone get injured?” she asked.

  “No,” Kate replied, but then changed her mind because J.T.’s feelings had surely been hurt. “I mean yes! My brother!”

  “Where is he?”

  Kate had no idea of J.T.’s schedule. “In class somewhere.”

  “Does he need medical attention?”

  It was Kate’s turn to frown. “No . . .”

  The secretary considered these answers. Then she walked to her desk, where she pulled out a drawer and returned to hand Kate a piece of paper.

  Kate glanced at it: “Bullying, Cyberbullying, Harassment, or Intimidation Reporting Form.”

  “Fill this out and bring it back to the office,” she said.

  Kate hadn’t realized she would have to fill out a form. She’d thought she could talk to someone. She wanted to talk to someone.

  The form was two pages long and full of little boxes to check.

  Name of Alleged Offender:

  Is he/she a student? Yes / No

  Place an x next to the statement that best describes what happened:

  Any bullying, cyberbullying, harassment, or intimidation that involves physical aggression

  Getting another person to hit or harm the student

  Teasing, name-calling, making critical remarks, or threatening, in person or by other means

  That last one certainly fit, Kate thought. So did the next one.

  Demeaning and making the victim of jokes

  She set her purse on the counter beside the crumpled banner and rummaged in a side pocket of her backpack for a pen so she could fill in the information.

  “Wait a minute,” the secretary said, stopping her. “What’s your name?”

  “Kate Ty
ler.”

  “Kate, listen to me, hon,” the secretary said. “Take the form with you. Fill it out. Then return it to the office.”

  “But you have to do something now!”

  The secretary held up both hands. “Take your time. Fill out the form and bring it back. That is the protocol. We need the form.”

  Protocol. That word again: the rules of appropriate behavior. “But this boy—”

  “Look,” the secretary’s voice was firm when she cut Kate off. “Give us the information we need, and we’ll follow up on it.”

  “What about the banner?” Kate asked, gently lifting the pile of papers.

  But the secretary had moved on down the counter to the next student, who couldn’t get his locker open.

  Kate was a mix of anger, frustration, and now, disappointment. Pressed together, her lips made a tight line. Quickly, she gathered up the banner and left. She would take the form home and fill it out. She would follow the rules, the protocol, and Curtis Jenkins would be punished. Maybe even suspended.

  On her way out of the office, Kate angrily stuffed the banner into the wastebasket, then, three steps into the hall, changed her mind and returned to pull it out, even taking the time to sit for a minute, smoothing out the papers and folding them so they’d fit into her backpack.

  When she finished, she realized she was twenty minutes late for class and, shoulders slumped, returned to the counter to wait for a late pass.

  ~8~

  A WEDGE

  Our knowledge of biology helps us to understand how life on earth is connected,” Mr. Rutkowski was telling his new biology class. Kate was relieved her teacher didn’t question the late pass. He handed her a textbook, then a syllabus, and nodded toward a vacant seat.

  “This knowledge of how life is connected can be used in many ways,” her teacher continued.

  Kate sat and placed the heavy textbook on her desk. A growling tiger stared back at her from the cover. Tigers were beautiful, even when they were angry. But they had a reason to be angry, Kate sympathized. All tigers were endangered. Out of nine subspecies of tigers, only six remained, and it was all because people not only destroyed their habitats but hunted them for pelts, meat, and body parts. She sighed and glanced at the open book on the boy’s desk beside hers to try to figure out where they were. The boy smiled and pointed to the page number.

  “Thanks,” Kate mouthed. She flipped to the right page and shifted uncomfortably. She hoped she’d done the right thing marching into the office and getting that form. It wasn’t like her to be so bold. But she was angry—like that tiger on the book cover! Maybe that’s what anger did to a person. It made them do things they otherwise might never do. She thought of J.T. curling his fists in front of Curtis. And how she had called out “Who did this?”

  “Advances in biology help us fight diseases,” Mr. Rutkowski went on. “Diseases like cystic fibrosis and cancer.”

  Cancer. Kate blinked hard and tried to close a curtain on the hallway incident and endangered tigers and now, hearing the word cancer. She needed to focus on her class.

  “Your diet and the chemicals that you are exposed to can affect whether or not you get a particular form of cancer,” her teacher continued.

  But there it was again. The word for the insidious disease that had taken away her father. Mr. Rutkowski had mentioned it twice already. Kate swallowed hard. She would never hear the word cancer again and not feel a punch to her stomach. From J.T.’s problems, to vanishing tigers, to cancer, to her father’s death. Was she never going to have a normal day again? A normal moment?

  Apparently, Mr. Rutkowski liked to walk while he talked. “For example,” he said, now from the back of the room, “smokers often get lung cancer, which is caused by tobacco. Now they say there is a link between CT scans in children and leukemia, which is a different kind of cancer where white blood cells displace normal blood.”

  Kate stared at a spot beneath the front blackboard and thought back to early summer, just after J.T. had come home. The truck that delivered chicken feed to their farm was pumping it into the two large metal tanks on either side of the chicken houses; and the auger, the long, metal pipelike arm that transferred the feed from the truck to the bin, had not aligned properly, allowing some of the feed to spill out onto the roof and into the air. J.T. stood watching with his hands on his hips and a deep scowl on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate asked him.

  “See all that dust flying around?” he asked.

  Kate looked again. “Yeah. I see it.” She thought he was going to say that all that dust was a waste of money, but wouldn’t that be the chicken company’s loss? After all, they provided and paid for all the feed.

  J.T.’s expression didn’t change. “Could be what made Dad sick.”

  His reply shocked Kate. “What are you talking about? Chicken feed gave Dad kidney disease? And then cancer?”

  J.T. lifted his shoulders and then lowered them. He didn’t look at Kate. “Maybe.”

  Was he kidding? Why would he say that? Sometimes Kate had a really hard time figuring out her brother. “Well, I never saw him eat any of it!”

  J.T. didn’t think her reply was funny. “It’s nothing he ever ate,” he said. “It’s what he breathed in all those years. Before this big truck here, before we were even born, they used to drop off bags of feed that Dad cut open with his jackknife and dumped into feed carts. The carts ran on a steel track into the chicken house, where he’d scoop it out into the feeders for the chickens. There was a lot of dust. Dad said some farmers he knew even wore masks. But he said no one ever thought back then that it was going to make them sick. They never even questioned the stuff the company put in the feed.”

  “What was in the feed that was so bad?”

  “Chemicals.”

  “Chemicals,” Kate repeated, holding her hands palm up. “What kind of chemicals?”

  “You ever heard of arsenic?” J.T. asked her.

  “Arsenic?” Kate’s eyebrows shot up. “Sure! Arsenic is poison! But why would a chicken company put arsenic in the feed?”

  J.T. smiled a little. A funny smile, though, like she couldn’t possibly understand. “It’s complicated,” he said.

  Kate was put out by his attitude. It made her feel dumb or like a little kid. Plus she still found the whole conversation weird. It was something else her brother probably wouldn’t talk about again. Another subject off limits and unspoken, another brick in the wall he was building between them.

  But now Mr. Rutkowski had mentioned the word cancer, and Kate couldn’t help but think of her father’s diagnosis of kidney disease, then kidney cancer and his last days struggling to breathe. Could there actually be something to J.T.’s puzzling comment? See all that dust flying around?

  She would never forget. Never. For nearly two years, Kate’s father had gone to the clinic three times a week for kidney dialysis. During the summer, Kate often went with him to keep him company and help him in and out of the county van. Sometimes, when he was on the machine that cleaned his blood, she read to him from the newspaper because he liked to keep up with the news. If he’d already seen the paper, then she’d get an old National Geographic from the basket at the clinic to read to him. She always went for the animal stories first: saving koala bears from the modern-day threats of highways and dogs, a beauty pageant for camels in Abu Dhabi, the zebras’ epic migration as they followed the rains.

  The dialysis took nearly four hours, so they also spent a chunk of time just sitting together. Kate always brought her journal. Writing in her journal that summer was when Kate discovered how suffering taught her to see the details . . .

  I know it hurts, but Dad leans his head back and repeats Kerry’s corny joke to Lisa, the nurse. “Why do we keep the refrigerator door closed?” he asks as Lisa sticks a needle into the gigantic, ropy vein called a fistula on my dad’s arm. �
�I give up,” Lisa says. Dad tells her, “Because the salad is dressing!” Lisa smiles and then slips another needle into Dad’s arm. The needles are attached to long tubes that carry Dad’s blood to the machine and then return it without the bad stuff that has been building up because Dad’s kidneys don’t work right.

  My dad never complains. He never gets impatient the way I do. In my head, I can be somewhere else when I’m writing. But after I put the pen away, I keep an eye on the clock and get up to walk the clinic hallways, avoiding the lines bordering the squares of tile just for something to do.

  After the van brings us home, my dad stretches back in his La-Z-Boy, and I pull the afghan up over his knees. “Thanks, Katie Bug,” he says, and tries to squeeze my hand. No one except for my dad ever calls me Katie Bug, and I feel like crying, but not in front of him. I wish he could have a banana, because he loves bananas. But he can’t eat them anymore. They contain a lot of potassium, and that’s bad for people with kidney problems. Still, I wonder how much harm one single banana would do. When my eyes mist up, I turn the TV on to CNN and rush to the kitchen to measure out a small glass of orange juice instead.

  “We don’t have all the answers,” a doctor had once told Kate while he tried to explain the kidney cancer and why her father had only a couple months to live. “I’m so sorry. There’s nothing more we can do.”

  So unfair, people said.

  Bad luck, others concluded as the illness took its toll.

  After her father passed away, some people from church said, It was his time. Others tried to comfort Kate’s family by saying it was all part of God’s plan. But Kate could not accept that explanation. Despite the kindness and all the meals and prayers, the cancer had driven a wedge into her beliefs.

  *

  “Kate! Over here!” Jess called out in the noisy cafeteria.

  When Kate finally made it through the lunchtime crowd, she saw that Jess had saved her a seat next to Olivia and across from two other girls Kate knew from middle school. Samantha and Lindsey were on the junior varsity field hockey team, too. Both were on the forward line. Lindsey had an especially powerful drive. Everyone hoped she was going to score a lot of points this season. Sam and Lindsey hadn’t been good friends with Jess and Kate back in eighth grade. They’d always been what Kate and Jess called “the popular girls.” But it was the second day of high school, and maybe everyone was just trying to find a place to fit in. They had field hockey in common. Maybe they’d be the field hockey group. Kate kind of liked the idea.