As the teams got ready he discovered he was playing against Roger’s team. Of course Roger was playing goalie. Roger was too cool to play a position where he might get sweaty or mess up his hair.
David ran up and down the field kicking the ball, getting kicked in the shins, falling down, and getting back up.
Roger leaned on the side of the goal with his hands behind his head and watched. Whenever someone kicked the ball at the goal, Roger would casually block it, then pick it up and boot it all the way to the other end of the field.
Just one shot, hoped David as he wiped the sweat from his face. One clear shot to kick a goal past him. Or maybe just kick it right at him, as hard as he could, right into the middle of Roger Delbrook’s smug face.
The ball bounced free and David ran after it. He stopped it with the side of his foot. Someone charged him. David tried to dribble around, but their legs collided and they both fell to the ground.
The ball rolled harmlessly toward the goal. Roger picked it up and booted it high over David’s head.
David pulled himself back to his feet. He leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and took a deep breath.
There was a blocked kick and the ball was rolling toward the sidelines. He ran after it and managed to save it with the heel of his foot just before it went foul. Then, turning around, he saw there was no one between him and the goal.
Except Roger.
He dribbled down the field trying to go as fast as he could without losing control of the ball. People were closing in from all sides. He just needed to get a little closer.
He tapped the ball too hard, knocking it too far out in front of him, too close to Roger.
Roger came out after the ball. David continued to charge even though he knew Roger would get to it first.
Roger suddenly stopped. David thought he saw a look of panic on Roger’s face as he backed up to defend the goal. Roger was still backing up with arms outstretched as David reached the ball.
He smiled, then kicked it as hard as he could.
He wasn’t even close.
The ball soared high over the goal and rolled all the way to where the girls were playing volleyball.
All traces of panic were now gone from Roger’s face. “Go get the ball, butthead,” he said scornfully.
David chased after it. He was the one who kicked it, and he was closest to it, except for Roger, who obviously wasn’t going to get it. He jogged to the volleyball court.
He stopped. Miss Williams was holding the soccer ball. She had freckles on her arms and legs, too. Up till now he hadn’t even known she was in his P.E. class.
He stared at her with his mouth open and sweat dripping down his face. Besides her blue shorts and white button-down shirt, she wore a green headband and red high-top sneakers.
She underhanded the soccer ball to him.
He exhaled. “Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Ballinger.” Her green eyes sparkled as she smiled at him.
He returned to the soccer game elated.
10
DAVID SPENT too long in the shower, thinking about Miss Williams, what she said to him, and the way she smiled. He could still picture her with her green headband, her blue shorts, and her red high-top sneakers. He felt a sudden pang of remorse as he remembered that Mrs. Bayfield was wearing red high-top sneakers too.
The bell rang while he was still getting dressed. He hurriedly tied his shoes, stuffed his gym clothes into his locker, and headed for Spanish class, his last class of the day.
“Buenos tardes, Dah-veed,” Mrs. Guiterrez greeted him as he walked in late.
“Buenos tardes, señora,” he replied.
He was struck by the fact that in Spanish tardes means afternoon, whereas in English “tardy” means late. Even though Mrs. Guiterrez said good afternoon to him, he had the feeling that in her own way she was also telling him he was late.
“Dah-veed!” Mrs. Guiterrez whispered sharply. She wiggled her finger at him, gesturing for him to come to her.
“What is it?” he asked as he made his way to the front of the room.
“Come here,” she whispered, now gesturing with her whole hand.
He heard several kids snicker, so he smiled. Leslie Gilroy was in his Spanish class. He didn’t look at her.
He approached Mrs. Guiterrez’s desk. “Si, señ,” he said. He had heard rumors that Mrs. Guiterrez had once been a judge in El Salvador or Nicaragua or someplace like that, and that she had to suddenly leave her home in the middle of the night to escape from the Sandinistas or Contras or somebody.
“Dah-veed,” she said. “You are obliged to, ah”—she struggled to find the right English words—“raise your …”
Her bracelets jingled as she moved her hand in a circle, searching for the word.
“What?” he asked. “Qué pasa?”
She smiled at his Spanish and continued moving her hand around in a circle. “Cremallera,” she said. “Comprende?”
He shook his head. He didn’t know what a cremallera was. “I’ll try not to be late again,” he said.
“No, no,” she said. “Cremallera is down. You need to lift up.”
“My grades are bad?” asked David. “I need to raise my grades?”
She looked through him. Suddenly her eyes lit up as she remembered the word. “Zeeper!” she exclaimed.
“Zeeper?” asked David, still not knowing what she was talking about. “I need to lift up my zeeper?”
Suddenly he turned bright red. As inconspicuously as possible, he zipped his fly.
“Gracias,” said Mrs. Guiterrez.
The class was hysterical.
He returned to his seat, trying not to look at anybody.
He wondered who saw. All they would have seen were his Jockey shorts. Big deal! He wondered if Leslie noticed. Of course, it didn’t matter whether she did or didn’t, he realized. She’d say she did.
Big deal. What did he care what Leslie or anyone else said about him?
When the bell finally rang, he walked quickly out of the room, but not so quick that he’d draw any more attention to himself.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around.
“You and your friends think you’re so cool,” said Larry Clarksdale behind his blue sunglasses. “But at least I don’t walk around with my cremallera down.”
David remembered how Scott and Randy had kept Larry from using the bathroom yesterday so Roger could have a smoke.
“And you call me a pervert,” said Larry.
“I didn’t call you a pervert,” said David.
“Your friends did.”
“They’re not my friends,” said David.
“They’re not?”
“No.”
“Oh,” said Larry. “Well, I think they’re a bunch of assholes.”
David turned and headed toward his locker. As he made his way across the school he noticed that Larry was still walking beside him.
“No one could really see anything,” said Larry. “You had your back to the class the whole time.”
“Mrs. Guiterrez saw,” said David.
“That doesn’t count. She’s from South America,” said Larry.
“So?”
“It’s different in South America. People walk around naked down there all the time.”
“How do you know?”
“I used to live there, in Venezuela, when I was nine years old. I used to see naked people all the time, boys and girls.” He shrugged. “It was no big deal. You get used to it.”
“You saw naked girls?” whispered David.
“Twenty-three,” said Larry. “We lived in an American section where everyone was usually dressed, but we used to go for drives, and you’d see kids walking around naked until they were like thirteen or fourteen.”
“Wow,” David said.
Larry smiled. “I got pictures, too,” he said.
“Really?” said David.
“Not all twenty-three,” s
aid Larry. “Only twelve. I had to pretend to my parents that I was taking pictures of scenery and stuff, but I was really taking pictures of naked girls.”
David laughed.
“I was just a kid then,” said Larry. “It’s no big deal to me now. You know, once you’ve seen twenty-three naked girls it’s no big deal.”
“Yeah,” David agreed as if he had also seen twenty-three naked girls before.
“I can bring the pictures tomorrow,” said Larry, “if you want to see ’em.”
David shrugged. “Sure,” he said as if it were no big deal, like maybe he just wanted to see the pictures because he was interested in photography.
“Okay, I’ll bring them tomorrow.”
“Okay,” said David.
“Well, see ya tomorrow,” said Larry.
“Bye.”
“Bye, David.”
David put his Spanish book into his locker. He didn’t have any books to bring home since he had already done all his homework.
He was halfway home when it struck him. I saw Mrs. Bayfield’s underpants.
“I really am cursed,” he said aloud. “Everything that happened to her keeps happening to me.”
That’s stupid, he thought. Mrs. Bayfield didn’t do anything to him. He just forgot to zip his fly after P.E. because he was in such a hurry.
He didn’t believe in witchcraft. He was, after all, going to be a scientist when he grew up. He knew that everything had a logical and scientific explanation. He didn’t believe in curses or astrology or fortune cookies or any of that stuff.
True, some of the same things that happened to Mrs. Bayfield happened to him, but that was just a coincidence. In a world where so many things are happening to so many people all the time, coincidences are bound to happen now and then.
“Okay, just one more thing!” he said aloud, looking up at the sky and speaking to Mrs. Bayfield or God or the Devil, or to whoever was in charge of curses. “Just do one more bad thing to me and then I’ll believe I’m cursed.”
He waited a few seconds for a lightning bolt to strike him, or maybe a pitcher of lemonade to pour on his head.
Nothing happened.
He took two steps, then stopped. He smelled something.
He checked the bottom of his shoe. Sure enough, he had stepped in it.
He could see it on the sidewalk behind him, with his footprint right in it. He laughed. “That doesn’t count,” he said. “That’s got nothing to do with Mrs. Bayfield. I’ve stepped in that stuff before.” He looked up at the sky and shouted, “I’ve stepped in it lots of times!”
11
Doppelgänger: a ghostly counterpart of a living person.
THAT WAS the definition David found in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. He also looked up regurgitate. It seemed to be a nice way of saying “throw up.”
He could now clearly recall the words Mrs. Bayfield had said to him. Your Doppelgänger will regurgitate on your soul. My ghostly counterpart will puke on my soul?
What is a ghostly counterpart of a living person?
He thought about everything that had happened to him: breaking the window, falling over in his chair, flipping off his mother, his fly.
Nobody else caused any of that to happen. Mrs. Bayfield didn’t do anything to him. He did it all to himself.
Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was his Doppelgänger?
Whatever was going on, it sure felt like someone was throwing up on his soul.
12
MISS WILLIAMS wasn’t paying attention to anything Mr. MacFarland was saying. She was drawing a picture. David couldn’t see what she was drawing, but it must have been funny, because every once in a while she would stop, look at what she’d done, and smirk.
Whenever Mr. MacFarland looked at her, her head would instantly straighten up and she would look directly back at him. But as soon as he turned away she would smirk and go on drawing.
David anxiously looked at the clock. He knew exactly what he wanted to say to her. He just hoped he had the nerve to say it.
The bell rang. David remained in his seat while Miss Williams put her drawing in her folder. He waited for her to stand, then he stood up and started walking so that they both reached the door at the same time.
“Good morning, Miss Williams,” he said without looking at her.
“And good morning to you, Mr. Ballinger,” she replied.
LARRY WAS waiting at David’s locker. “I got ’em,” he said, tapping his jacket pocket. He looked like a drug dealer with his blue sunglasses and long uncombed hair.
David looked around to make sure no one was watching. They walked around to the side of the building.
Larry had eleven photographs of naked girls. “I thought I had twelve,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to the other one.”
“That’s okay,” said David. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was around, then took the pictures from Larry.
The pictures were a little out of focus, since they were taken by a nine-year-old kid in a moving automobile, but he could definitely tell they were pictures of naked girls. Most of the girls were pretty young, probably under seven years old, but there were a couple of girls who were at least fourteen or fifteen.
Besides the naked girls David could also see the conditions around them: the dirt and garbage and broken-down tar-paper houses. He felt disgusted with himself. These poor people couldn’t afford clothes, and here he was getting his kicks by looking at them.
Still, he kept looking.
There was one picture of a girl about nine years old playing with a little black-and-white dog. The girl had long stringy hair and was dirty from head to toe, but she had the happiest face he had ever seen. She looked like she was just laughing her head off.
“I guess she’s about our age now, huh?” David asked.
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Larry.
“I wonder what her name is,” said David.
“Carmelita,” said Larry.
“You know her?”
“No. That’s just the name I made up for her. She looks like a Carmelita.”
David nodded. “I wonder what she’s doing now,” he said. “Do they go to school?”
“I don’t know,” said Larry. “Some do, some don’t.”
They both stared at the picture.
“I hope she’s still happy,” said Larry.
“Yeah, me too,” said David, although it hardly seemed possible. How could she still be happy, living in all that poverty? “They don’t eat dogs, do they?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Larry. “She probably still has the dog.”
“Then maybe she’s still happy,” said David.
All of his own problems suddenly seemed petty and insignificant to him, especially his so-called curse.
“Sometimes I wish I could go back to Venezuela and find her,” said Larry. “And maybe give her some money.”
“Wouldn’t that be great!” said David. “Or maybe even bring her back here to America. She could live at one of our houses and go to school with us. I wonder if she’d be allowed to keep her dog.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to find her,” said Larry. He took the stack of pictures from David. “You want these?” he asked abruptly.
David shook his head.
Larry threw them in a trash bin, all except Carmelita, which he put back in his jacket pocket.
13
“IT’S NOT a heart,” said David. “It’s an apple. It’s a cheese board in the shape of an apple.” He rubbed the sandpaper around the rough edges of his project.
“Well, it looks like a heart,” said Mo. She hammered a nameplate over the entrance to the doghouse. Wham! Wham! Thud! “Shit!”
She jumped up and down with her thumb in her mouth.
“Did you hurt yourself?” asked David.
She took her thumb out of her mouth and shook it wildly. “No, it feels good,” she said. “I love hitting myself with a hammer.”
David smiled. “That’s like the guy who kept banging his head against the wall, and somebody asked him why he did it, and he said, ‘Because it feels good when I stop.’ ”
Mo stared at him. “Was that supposed to be a joke?” she asked.
David shrugged.
He looked at the nameplate that Mo had hammered onto her doghouse. It was shaped like a large bone, and on it, in big black letters, it said KILLER.
He returned to sanding his heart-shaped apple-cheese board.
“Hey, David, where you been?”
It was Randy. He and Alvin were leaning on the side of David’s worktable.
David looked up at him. “Hi,” he said flatly.
“So where you been, buddy?” asked Randy. “How come you haven’t been hanging around? Everybody’s been wondering what happened to you.”
“Yeah, right,” David muttered.
“Especially Leslie,” said Randy. He winked at David. “I think she likes you.”
“That’s right,” said Alvin. “Today at recess she said, ‘Where’s David? He’s so cute!’ ”
“I think it was when you walked into class with your zipper down,” said Randy. “That’s when she fell in love.”
He and Alvin laughed.
“Leave me alone, all right?” said David.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” asked Randy. “Don’t you like her?”
“It’s your curly hair,” said Alvin. “She goes for guys with curly hair.” He rubbed the top of David’s head with his hand.
David pushed Alvin’s arm away.
Alvin pushed him back.
“Hey, look, he made a heart for her,” said Randy, picking up David’s cheese board. “If you want, I’ll give it to her for you at lunch.”
“Give me that,” said David, reaching for it.
Randy held the heart behind him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll tell her it’s from you. I’ll write on it, ‘To Leslie, with love, from David.’ ”
Mo grabbed the cheese board out of Randy’s hand. “It’s not a heart, assbite!” she said. “It’s an apple.”
Randy took a step toward her but thought better of it when she picked up her hammer.