Cheating for the Chicken Man Read online

  “Hi!” she greeted them.

  Kate pulled out the chair and sat down. But before she even put her lunch bag on the table, the girls peppered her with questions.

  “So what was the deal with your brother this morning?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah. What did the sign say?” Lindsey chimed in. “That J.T. is a jerk?”

  “Or a dumb ass. I heard it called your brother a dumb ass,” Sam added as she peeled the wrapper around an ice-cream sandwich.

  Surprised, Kate stopped scooting the chair up to the table and held the lunch bag on her lap. “The sign didn’t have any cusswords in it,” she said.

  “The sign said Chicken Man. ‘The Chicken Man Returns,’” Olivia noted matter-of-factly.

  Jess met Kate’s eyes. “It’s so awful,” she said. “Is J.T. okay?”

  But there was no time to respond to Jess, because Lindsey had leaned toward Kate from across the table and asked, “Is it true you yanked it off the wall and threw it at Curtis?”

  “I heard you slapped him,” Sam added with a chuckle.

  “No!” Kate told them. “I didn’t throw it! I didn’t slap anybody!”

  “He is such a jerk, though,” Lindsey said. “He deserved it! J.T. should have punched him out.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “It’s just drama, you guys. That’s all it is. There was a lot of drama like that in my old middle school.”

  “No. It’s more than drama,” Kate disagreed. “Curtis isn’t going to leave my brother alone until someone stops him. I feel like the school needs to step in.”

  Lindsey smiled like she was truly amused. “You know what my dad would say? It’s life, and you got to get tough. If someone’s picking on you, let ’em have it. That’s what he told my brother. Last year—my brother, who’s a junior this year—he beat up this kid who was bugging him.”

  Sam was nodding. “Yeah, my dad says all that anti-bully stuff is crap—”

  “No!” Kate shook her head.

  “It’s not crap, Lindsey!” Jess interjected, backing up Kate.

  Lindsey just shrugged. “Whatever.” She pulled open a bag of chips and started eating them.

  “So do you think there’s going to be a fight?” Sam asked around a mouthful of ice-cream sandwich. “Like after school or something?”

  “Probably,” Lindsey said as she offered her chips to the group.

  “A fight?” Kate’s mouth fell open. She turned from Sam and Lindsey to Jess with a painful look.

  “Guys, maybe Kate doesn’t want to talk about this right now,” Jess said.

  “It’s just drama,” Olivia repeated as she dipped into the chip bag Lindsey offered.

  But now Kate was worried that something terrible would happen to J.T. after school. He was planning to stay for a science club meeting. If he did, then he would be waiting on the bench outside school for their grandmother to pick them up. He would be a sitting duck for someone like Curtis. If he got into any kind of trouble, he’d be sent back to juvenile detention.

  For a moment no one said anything. Lindsey munched her chips. Olivia sipped her strawberry milk. Sam redid her long ponytail. And Jess watched Kate. None of them really cared about what happened to J.T., did they? Maybe Jess did, Kate thought, but not the others. They just wanted the gossip, the inside scoop to fuel “the drama.” That’s all it was.

  The paper bag with Kate’s peanut butter sandwich suddenly felt heavy in her hand. Slowly, she nestled it down inside the backpack.

  “I just realized I left my lunch in my locker,” Kate said.

  Jess looked alarmed. “But—”

  “It’s okay. I’ll be right back,” Kate said.

  But she wouldn’t return. She was on a mission now. She picked up her things and left.

  ~9~

  A MATTER OF TIME

  Kate rushed straight to the girls’ room, where she entered a stall and closed the door. Two girls standing near a sink looked startled when she burst in. The smell of cigarette smoke lingered in the air. After latching the door, Kate pulled out the bullying report form and a book to write on, tucked in her skirt and sat on the toilet. She coughed a little so the girls might think she was sick, then focused on the questions and began filling in the answers with a pen.

  What did the alleged offender do or say?

  Easy enough. Kate described the banner strung across the hallway.

  Did a physical injury result from this incident?

  If there was a physical injury, do you think there will be permanent effects?

  Was the student victim absent from school as a result of the incident?

  No. No. And no.

  If none of these things had happened, maybe the report wouldn’t be taken seriously. Kate frowned and pressed a hand to her forehead. But wasn’t the whole point of the form to stop those things from happening?

  Did a psychological injury result from this incident?

  Maybe. It was possible! But how would Kate know? She tapped the pen on the palm of her hand as she read the next question.

  Is there any additional information you would like to provide?

  Yes, there was. Kate wrote about how Curtis had bullied J.T. in middle school and how her brother had just returned from nearly a year in juvenile detention. He served time for what he did, Kate wrote. He wants to start over, but how can he with Curtis picking on him all the time?

  When she finished, Kate started to read everything over again, but the buzzer sounded and lunch was over. She clicked her pen and put it away.

  Walking fast, she went directly to the office to hand in the form. The secretary she had spoken with earlier took the paperwork. “That was fast,” she said. “I’ll be sure this goes to the right person.”

  Kate heaved a sigh of relief.

  It was just a matter of time, then.

  *

  Throughout her first geometry class (mostly review), then Chinese (ni hao—“hello”) then field hockey practice, Kate tried to focus, but she was distracted with worry.

  “Why didn’t you come back to lunch?” Jess asked, looking anxious as the two girls changed up for practice.

  “I guess I lost my appetite,” Kate said.

  Jess leaned in and whispered, “Sorry about Sam and Lindsey. That was mean.”

  Kate shrugged. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, closing up her locker. She walked away to stand in front of a mirror where she made two short pigtails to keep the hair out of her face. There were larger concerns on Kate’s mind. She didn’t want J.T. to be involved in a fight after school.

  Throughout practice, Kate kept glancing at her watch. When the drills ran longer than J.T.’s meeting, she ran to the sideline.

  “You have to leave? What for?” Coach Dietrich asked.

  Kate knew this wouldn’t be easy. Her coach was really nice. Just last week she’d had the entire team over to her town house to cook hot dogs on her grill. She had made all kinds of salads and even bought ice cream for the girls. But she was totally serious on the field and incredibly strict about practice.

  “You didn’t bring me a note,” Coach Dietrich said before Kate had a chance to say anything more.

  Nervous, Kate pulled on one of her pigtails. Should she say she had a dentist appointment? No. Kate didn’t want to lie. “It’s a family thing,” she said, forcing herself to maintain eye contact.

  The coach studied Kate. “All right,” she said. “Just this once, Kate. Go ahead.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much!”

  Kate whirled around and started running back to the gym when the coach called out, “Tomorrow let’s try you out in a halfback position, okay?”

  Turning, Kate smiled broadly. “Oh, my gosh, yes! Thank you so much!”

  Back in the locker room, Kate skipped the shower and just grabbed her stuff and a bottle of cold wa
ter from the cooler by the coach’s door. Rushing out to the front of the school, she saw J.T. sitting alone on a bench near the flagpole. Their grandmother was picking them up that day, since Jess had to go straight from practice to an orthodontist appointment.

  “Hey, how was science club?” she asked, still breathless, but relieved she’d arrived before anything bad could happen.

  J.T. was bent over his homework. “Okay.”

  Kate dropped her stuff on the ground and collapsed beside her brother on the bench. “Are there some nice kids?” She took a swig of water.

  “Don’t know, Kate. Not really there for friends. I’ve got a project I really want to get done.”

  “Oh.” Kate took another long drink and then held the cold plastic bottle against her face. She wondered what project he was talking about, but he had his graphing calculator out and seemed pretty engrossed in his homework, so she didn’t ask. Instead, she took out her American history textbook and a yellow highlighter.

  The blare of a horn interrupted them. Kate and J.T. looked up to see Curtis Jenkins slow down in front of them in a green pickup truck. Hooper Delaney sat beside him. If he was old enough to drive, then Curtis was at least sixteen and a half, Kate thought. He must’ve had to stay back a year, which didn’t surprise her at all.

  “Yo!” he called out while his truck rolled to a stop. He actually stuck his hand out the window and held it up as though in greeting.

  Kate stood up defiantly. Was he going to pick a fight?

  Just then, the front doors of the school opened. A kid and what appeared to be a parent walked out. The doors closed heavily behind them.

  “Let’s go inside,” Kate urged J.T. “We can watch for Grandma from the window.”

  But J.T. didn’t move. Calmly, he turned his attention to homework again.

  As the other people came down the sidewalk, Curtis pulled his arm back in. “Later!” he called before slowly moving on.

  Relief. But only for the moment, because what did “later” mean?

  J.T. was doing a great job of ignoring the situation, Kate thought, a little annoyed. Maybe he had escaped this time, but Kate knew Curtis wouldn’t quit. She was glad—very glad—she had turned in that form.

  Suddenly, Kate noticed that J.T. was not only staring at something behind her, he was slowly standing up, the calculator still in his hand.

  The kid who had come out of school was Brady. Brady Parks and his mom stood a few feet away.

  Kate stopped breathing. The boys hadn’t seen each other since that day in court over a year ago. She watched Brady’s eyes flick from Curtis’s departing pickup truck to J.T. Had he heard Curtis call out? Did Brady catch who it was?

  Time seemed to stand still. It was Mrs. Parks who spoke first. “J.T., it’s good to see you,” she said with a gentle smile. “Welcome home.”

  God bless Brady’s Mom, Kate thought. She let out her breath.

  Brady was wearing the Corsica High soccer uniform, green shorts and a gold and green top. He must have made the team and just come in from practice. His face was sweaty—his hair, too, and some of it was stuck to the side of his face. He took an uncertain step forward. “Yeah, welcome back,” he said to J.T. “And hey, thanks for that letter.”

  “You’re welcome,” J.T. replied. “Thanks for writing back. It meant a lot.”

  The two boys looked at each other. Kate wondered what they had written to each other and what they were thinking. There didn’t seem to be any anger. Were they glad to see each other? Or were they just being polite?

  The tense moment became almost unbearable when Brady glanced at Kate. Already flushed, she felt even more blood rush to her face. When Brady actually smiled a little and the corners of his mouth turned upward, she was so overcome with emotion she had to look away.

  “Well, see you around, both you guys,” Brady said.

  J.T. nodded. “Yeah, see you around.”

  Both you guys. Brady’s words echoed in Kate’s head.

  And that was it. Brady and his mom left.

  *

  “Let me see: soup, bread, salad, iced tea. That’s it.” Kate’s grandmother surveyed the tray she had placed in Kate’s hands that evening. Somehow, it had become Kate’s job to deliver dinner to her mother whenever she had a headache.

  Kate accepted the tray with a glum expression, but only because she was still distracted by events at school.

  Her grandmother misread Kate’s thoughts. “I know, I know. We’re enabling her, aren’t we?” she said. “We should stop and force your mother to come downstairs if she wants to eat.”

  Kate wasn’t sure what enabling meant, but she had a pretty good idea it had something to do with making it easy for her mother to avoid facing her problems.

  “I tell you what. We’re going to stop this right now.” She took the tray out of Kate’s hands and placed it on the counter. “Run up and tell your mother dinner’s ready. If she’s hungry, she can come down and eat.”

  Kate did as she was told, and everyone except for her mother ate. Afterward, Kate helped with the dishes and then launched into homework. She finished assignments for English and American history, then texted Jess about some math problems. She gathered her outfit for the game, putting a clean uniform in her field hockey bag and plucking some green and gold hair ribbons from a basket on her bureau. Finally, she sat cross-legged on her bed, her school journal open to an empty page on the pillow in front of her. The assignment for creative writing was to “describe a special place.”

  Whenever I need to get away, I follow the dirt path between corn and soybean fields all the way down to the river to sit on the fallen locust tree. The trunk that juts over the water is my special place. Straddling it, I love to dangle my bare feet and daydream. . . .

  Kate paused and thought back to once when J.T. came with her and they shared their dreams. It must have been more than a year ago, because it was before J.T. got into trouble.

  “For sure I want to go to college,” Kate had told him. “Then I want to be a linguist.”

  “A linguist, what’s that? Someone who makes linguine?” J.T. had asked.

  “Ha, ha. Very funny,” Kate replied. Her smile faltered. “Are you kidding? You don’t know what a linguist is?” It wasn’t often Kate knew something that J.T. didn’t.

  Her brother grinned. “Someone who studies language.”

  “Okay, but did you know that elephants have a language?”

  J.T. dropped his chin and looked at her over his glasses.

  “Seriously,” Kate said. “Elephants make these rumbling sounds that are so low humans can’t even hear them. They talk to one another!”

  “And what are they saying, Kate?”

  “Maybe they’re saying, ‘Watch out for that man with a rifle. I think he wants to kill me so somebody can carve an ivory statue out of my tusk.’”

  “Sad,” J.T. acknowledged.

  “It is! I really want to help them. I’m not afraid to go live in the jungle! For a while anyway. If I had to. If there was, like, a house or something. But do you think I’d need to be a linguist or a scientist to study elephant language?”

  “I don’t know,” he told her, “but for sure you’d have to be crazy.”

  Kate had laughed. But she knew J.T. took all of her “animal passions” (his term) seriously. He had helped her make an impressive graph for her fifth-grade report that demonstrated the speed with which the ice caps were melting and the polar bears vanishing. And he was the one who came up with the idea of a trip to the National Zoo to see the baby panda when Kate turned eight.

  “So what do you want to do?” Kate had asked her brother.

  After handing Kate his glasses so he could hang upside down from their tree, J.T. confided to her how he wanted to be a professional hacker, one of those cyber experts at the National Security Agency who helped pr
otect the country.

  “You got to keep that a secret, though,” he told her, pulling himself back upright on the branch, his face flushed red with the blood that had run to his head. “Promise me? Because you know Dad wants me to take over the farm. I hate to let him down, but, man, I do not want to raise chickens.”

  No! Kate shook her head vehemently. Neither did she! She had handed him his glasses back . . .

  What would become of their dreams now? Kate wondered, still holding the pen over the single paragraph she’d written in her school journal. Would their precious hopes be swallowed up by all the larger worries?

  Frustrated because she didn’t have the answer, Kate paused to look out the window at the foot of her bed. While it was dark out, there was moonlight, too, and she thought she saw someone running across the yard. On her stomach, she scooted closer to the window. Was it her brother? It looked like him. Why would J.T. be running at night? Where had he been?

  Down the hall, Kate’s mother was silent behind her closed door and Kate’s grandmother was reading a story to Kerry. Kate stepped into her flip-flops and rushed downstairs.

  Outside, the early September evening was still warm. Crickets chirped in the soybean fields, and the chicken smell was faint. She spotted her brother, a dark profile, sitting on the gas tank down by the tractor sheds. When she got closer, she could see Tucker curled up on the ground and noticed that J.T. was facing in the direction of Brady’s house next door. It used to be you could see a dirt path made by the two boys going back and forth through the field, but not anymore.

  Had J.T. run over there? To Brady’s house? Was he running to get in shape? To fight Curtis? All kinds of crazy thoughts ran through her mind. She stooped to pick up a tiny stone and threw it, making it ping off the tank.