“Why am I going to need gifted?”
Mrs. Milner looked astonished. “Friends,” she said. “These will be your friends. Do you think those regular kids out there have any idea how to be friends with someone like you?”
“I’ve never seen a lot of point to friendship,” Shelby told her. “Starts as an interview, ends as a job.”
Mrs. Milner turned sad, a woman crumbling under the weight of her unheeded wisdom. She rested her hand on Shelby’s forearm and Shelby gently peeled it off and whispered the word “No.” Shelby stood above Mrs. Milner like a holy person over a disciple, the icemaker humming like a distant choir.
Shelby and Toby followed the main trail to the public library. They walked quickly, outpacing the mosquitoes. They heard the robotic xylophone music of an ice cream truck. The music grew distant, then close, then trailed away altogether.
In the library, Toby went into the computer lab with Shelby and they shared a chair. She saw him reading along as she relayed bits of light gossip from school. Aunt Dale liked middle school gossip. Shelby wrote that she wondered if Icelanders used ketchup, if they went skiing a lot, what the drinking age was. After sitting stumped for a moment, staring at a poster of Mel Gibson reading a book, she pecked in:
I’m dating a boy named Toby. I think about him all day. He’s got a little boy belly but his arms are as hard as a steering wheel. He smells like wet logs and doesn’t have one freckle. He’s not like anyone else. I’m waiting for him to work up the nerve to put some earnest moves on me. I would like one adult in the world I can speak openly to and who will speak openly to me, and I choose you.
That would get Aunt Dale’s attention. Aunt Dale had been sharing plenty about herself, answering all Shelby’s questions. It was time Shelby shared.
She hit send. She let her eyes drift around until she was looking at Toby. He’d read her message and was making such an effort to be blank-faced, he appeared grave. Nobody else could unnerve Toby, but Shelby did it every other day.
“You look insane,” she told him. “You look like the person that wrote the ice cream truck music.”
“I’m insane?” Toby asked.
Shelby logged out of the computer and slipped her library card in her pocket.
“Don’t tell your Aunt Dale anything about me,” Toby said. “I don’t want to be included in this experiment. Being honest with adults?”
“Aunt Dale isn’t a normal adult.”
“And I’m not a normal kid. Hard as I try.”
Toby picked up a basket on his way into the grocery store. He put some ground beef and a tomato in the basket, to seem normal. He stood in the medicine aisle. There was a section for upset stomach, and he grabbed something from there. There were pills especially for nausea, and he grabbed those. There were a bunch of boxes with coughing children on them. Toby hadn’t been to the bunker in three days. The sun was going to keep setting and rising. Toby wondered what Kaley was thinking. Toby had skipped a day before, but never two and certainly not three. She would run out of food today or maybe tomorrow. After that, Toby had no idea how long it would take. She was sleeping in her own filth, trying to become as much of a mess as she could, knowing Toby would have to clean her up. Her wounds were getting infected — her elbows and knees. The water and the jug of iced tea and the juice packets wouldn’t last. Toby wondered at what point she would stop expecting him, at what point she would know in the pit of her stomach that she was absolutely alone in the world. She had no allies and was losing her only enemy.
Toby had glimpsed it. While walking alongside Shelby, he’d seen how things could be, how they would be, when Toby had nothing to hold him back, nothing squeezing his soul like a terrible vine. He could do it. He could leave Kaley down there. Toby didn’t have to answer to his evil. He could do what was right for himself and for Shelby. The sun kept going down and it kept coming up, and if Toby could keep clear of the bunker then one of these days when it came up it would find Toby unfettered.
Toby told himself he wasn’t in the grocery store to get medicine for Kaley. He was getting medicine in order to restock Uncle Neal’s cabinet, before Uncle Neal noticed and went nuts. Uncle Neal wouldn’t notice, though — not at this point. Toby looked at the ground beef and the tomato in his basket. He got more medicines, not any of the boxes with children on them. There was something meant to boost your immune system. Regular old multi-vitamins — couldn’t hurt. Toby got lip balm and antibiotic ointment. He kept looking at the coughing children on the boxes of kids’ medicine. They were trying to look sad, trying to trick Toby. They weren’t real children.
Springstead’s coach, the rival of the coach who was starting the lawn service, had beady eyes and neck muscles. Mr. Hibma did not go over and speak to him before the game, as was the custom among coaches, and the guy seemed not to notice, wrapped up as he was in the fact that his point guard had a bad ankle. He kept making her try it out, hoping she could play.
The first time Springstead had the ball, Mr. Hibma put on Earl Ray, a half-court press, throwing Springstead’s shaky backup point guard into a profound fluster that remained with her the rest of the game. The poor thing dribbled off her shin, threw the ball in the stands. Meanwhile, Mr. Hibma’s point guard got into the paint whenever she felt like it. She was a magical sprite who’d cast a spell on the ball. She’d also, Mr. Hibma noticed, cast a spell over a spindly boy with long hair who now sat in the second row at each game. Since Mr. Hibma’s regime of beauty had begun, the team had gained four boyfriends, which, added to the three it’d already had — the pretty benchwarmers’—gave the Citrus Middle girls’ basketball team a not-too-shabby following. If Mr. Hibma wasn’t mistaken, he was doing a serviceable job coaching. Maybe he could be a teacher. Of course it couldn’t be that hard; look at all the people who managed it. Mr. Hibma had just been lazy. He’d been daunted by the idea of selflessness, of commitment.
His team won, 29 to 5. Mr. Hibma wanted to criticize them, to prevent them from growing complacent, so he raised his voice and informed them that they’d made a liar out of him. He’d made a promise. He’d given his word that they would shut Springstead out.
Mr. Hibma set himself up on his couch and began filling in a fresh grade book. He had a list of all the assignments he’d given and printouts of his class registers. He had to start from scratch. He’d turned his classroom upside-down, but the grade book was nowhere to be found. It had made its way into the wide world and Mr. Hibma would never hear from it again. He could handle it. Every job had difficulties. Everyone’s time got wasted.
Mr. Hibma listed the kids’ names, then the assignments and dates. He had this grade book crisis under control. He could estimate, by this point in the year, what each student would score on each assignment. Once in a while, though, an A student bombed something or a D student cobbled together some lucky guesses. The safe way was to make sure each kid ended up with a higher average than expected. Mr. Hibma plugged away at the grades for over an hour, until his eyes began to feel strange. Very strange. He set his grade book work aside. He felt like he was stoned, except he wasn’t hungry, didn’t feel lazy. It was like being stoned in way that sharpened one’s mind rather than dulling it. Mr. Hibma could smell the garbage in his kitchen trashcan. He could see magnified details from the Springstead game — the mole on the opposing center’s shoulder, the scuffs on the players’ shoes. Mr. Hibma’s identity felt shifty. The vocab words he’d assigned that week ran through his head. Reductionism: the theory that every complex phenomenon can be explained by analyzing its simplest physical mechanisms. Reechy: smoky or sooty. Mr. Hibma wanted the television on. He dug the remote out from under the couch cushions and hit the power button. Professional wrestling. The wrestlers preened around the ring. One of them luxuriated in the upper hand, tossing his hair.