Fitz - By Mick Cochrane Page 0,41

There is his cereal bowl and spoon in the sink. A jar of peanut butter on the counter where his mom made her morning toast, a knife balanced across the top. On the table is the multivitamin she laid out for him and he forgot to take. It looks sort of forlorn and sad sitting there, a little still life reminding him how much his mom loves him and what a rotten person he is.

There’s one message on the answering machine, just as Fitz expected, received a little after nine o’clock that morning, about the time he was introducing himself to his father. It’s from the attendance office at school, reporting Fitzgerald’s absence, with a reminder that he’ll need a note of excuse when he returns. Fitz has been planning all along to forge a note. He doesn’t have the skills or guts to pull off a fake phone call. But he has discovered that with very little practice, he can reproduce his mom’s signature reasonably well. She hardly signs her name the same way twice, but there’s always a big Eiffel Tower A and an equally tall double-peaked M—the rest is squiggles.

Fitz deletes the message. For the first time today, maybe, he really feels that he’s being dishonest with his mom. He doesn’t feel good about lying to her. He’s done just what Dominic and the rest of the detention crowd do every day—pull the wool over their parents’ eyes. Turns out, he’s pretty good at it, being sneaky. It’s not that hard to do, Fitz is learning—except for the queasy feel of betrayal in his stomach.

Just then there’s a noise from near the front door—a click and a soft scraping. Fitz turns, startled and frightened, his hands rising slowly, a man apprehended in the act. But it’s not his mom, not the attendance police, it’s just Caleb’s cord snaking its way from the mail slot across the tile floor of the entryway. It seems alive, curious. He walks over to it slowly, grabs it by the pronged head, and plugs it in. He remembers what he came for and heads up the stairs and into his bedroom.

The guitar is poking out from under his bed, half-buried in dirty clothes. It supposedly belongs to Uncle Dunc, who bought it a year ago and conveniently left it in Fitz’s custody. It’s a dark mahogany, and he loves everything about it, even the smell. He strums a G chord. It has such a rich and beautiful tone, Fitz sometimes feels unworthy of it.

Before he heads back out, he takes a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. His hair may not look frightened, but it doesn’t look good either. He scratches at it a little, moves it around his forehead. It doesn’t seem to make much difference one way or the other. He holds his guitar up and makes an album-cover face, his best approximation of the Beatles’ stare on Rubber Soul. He wants to look profound, he wants to look deep, but really he just looks worried—he looks constipated. He wonders whatever led him to hope that Nora might find this kid attractive, that his father might find him interesting.

35

When Fitz comes out of the house, guitar in hand, Caleb is sitting in one of the lawn chairs, playing scales, his father standing back a little, leaning on the porch railing, arms crossed, looking on approvingly. So often Caleb looks awkward and out of place, hunched and squinting, always at the edge of something, the perpetual square peg, but when he’s cradling his guitar like this, bent over it, coaxing something out of it, speaking some special language to it, like a mother to her baby almost, he seems perfectly at ease, when he is most himself.

That’s when Fitz notices her. It’s as if his stomach knows who it is before his brain does: it does one of those little elevator drops. She is walking a black cruiser bike up the sidewalk, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, a cascade of beautiful red hair spilling out from beneath her helmet. Nora Flynn!

She drops her bike, unbuckles her helmet, and comes up the porch steps, just as casually as if she did this every day. “Hey, guys,” she says generally, taking in Caleb, Fitz, and his father, too.

Caleb, never really famous for his social skills, looks up and makes some rudimentary introductions. It’s Fitz’s house, but he’s grateful that Caleb is willing to play the role of official greeter. He’s not