maybe they only have to tell the truth if you ask them questions. Otherwise, maybe they can tell you any kind of fake shit they want.
I didn’t want to go to swim practice after that, but if I didn’t Coach might call Mom to ask where I’d been. Then she would want to know where I had been, and what was I going to tell her? That I was afraid that Thumper would be waiting for me on the corner? Or in the lobby of the Y? Or (somehow this was the most horrible) in the shower room, unseen by naked boys rinsing off the chlorine?
Was I going to tell her she had fucking cancer?
So I went, and as you might guess, I swam for shit. Coach told me to get my head on straight, and I had to pinch my armpit to keep from bursting into tears. I had to pinch it really hard.
When I got home, Mom was still deep in her manuscript. I hadn’t seen her smoking since Liz left, but I knew she sometimes drank when I wasn’t there—with her authors and various editors—so I sniffed at her when I kissed her, and didn’t smell anything but a little perfume. Or maybe face cream, since it was Saturday. Some kind of lady stuff, anyway.
“Are you coming down with a cold, Jamie? You dried off well after swimming, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Mom, you’re not smoking anymore, are you?”
“So that’s it.” She put aside the manuscript and stretched. “No, I haven’t had one since Liz left.”
Since you kicked her out, I thought.
“Have you been to the doctor lately? To get a checkup?”
She looked at me quizzically. “What’s this about? You’ve got that crease between your brows.”
“Well,” I said, “you’re the only parent I’ve got. If something happened to you, I couldn’t exactly go live with Uncle Harry, could I?”
She made a funny face at that, then laughed and hugged me. “I’m fine, kiddo. Had the old annual checkup two months ago, as a matter of fact. Passed with flying colors.”
And she looked okay. In the pink, as the saying goes. Hadn’t lost any more weight that I could see, and wasn’t coughing her brains out. Although cancer didn’t just have to be in a person’s throat or lungs, I knew that.
“Well…that’s good. I’m glad.”
“That makes two of us. Now make your mom a cup of coffee and let me finish this manuscript.”
“Is it a good one?”
“As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Better than Mr. Thomas’s Roanoke books?”
“Much better, but not as commercial, alas.”
“Can I have a cup of coffee?”
She sighed. “Half a cup. Now let me read.”
32
During my last test in math that year, I looked out the window and saw Kenneth Therriault standing on the basketball court. He did his grinning-and-beckoning thing. I looked back at my paper, then looked up again. Still there, and closer. He turned his head so I could get a good look at the purple-black crater, plus the bone-fangs sticking up all around it. I looked down at my paper again, and when I looked up the third time, he was gone. But I knew he’d be back. He wasn’t like the others. He was nothing like the others.
By the time Mr. Laghari told us to turn in our papers, I still hadn’t solved the last five problems. I got a D- on the test, and there was a note at the top: This is disappointing, Jamie. You must do better. What do I say at least once in every class? What he said was that if you fell behind in math, you could never catch up.
Math wasn’t so special that way, although Mr. Laghari might think so. It was true for most classes. As if to underline the point, I bricked a history test later that day. Not because Therriault was standing at the blackboard or anything, but because I couldn’t stop thinking he might be standing at the blackboard.
I got the idea he wanted me to do badly in my courses. You could laugh at that, but there’s another old saying that goes it’s not paranoid if it’s true. A few lousy tests weren’t going to stop me from passing everything, not that late in the year, and then it would be summer vacation, but what about next year, if he was still hanging around?
Also, what if he was getting stronger? I didn’t want to believe that, but just the fact that he was still there suggested it might be true.