Another group of kids showed up. They took turns jumping off the rock ledge. In the water they laughed and yelled and splashed each other. Sid pretended to watch them, but mostly he listened to Ashley and Shane talk about how bad Mr. Ferndale’s science lab sucked and how they both thought the new gym teacher rocked.
Sid had his own opinion about both teachers, opinions at odds with Ash and Shane. He loved Mr. Ferndale, who had given him special projects to work on at home, like making a volcano in a plastic bottle with vinegar, baking soda, and dish soap.
The new gym teacher, Mr. Curry, always smiled and laughed and slapped Sid on the back, encouraging him to run faster, put both hands together to hit the volleyball, or take part in some other way that left Sid panting and red-faced. Sid thought the teacher secretly hated him. He didn’t have any reason for his beliefs, but they plagued him just the same.
He dreaded gym class as much as social studies, a class Ashley wasn’t in, but Travis Barron was.
His favorite class was English with Mr. Wolf. It was Ashley’s favorite class too. Mr. Wolf could make anything they read interesting from Romeo and Juliet to Call of the Wild. Both of which Sid had enjoyed immensely.
The kids in the lake looked like high school kids, though they were likely not old enough to drive.
One girl shrieked as a boy picked her up off the cliff’s edge and jumped, holding her wriggling in his arms. Sid cringed as they fell toward the water.
Shane and Ashley didn’t seem to notice.
Sid’s butt started to tingle and grow numb. He stretched his legs out. They looked pale and soft, almost glowing in the sunlight. Ashley’s legs were dark. Her right knee was skinned where she’d fallen on the sidewalk the previous week when they’d been running home after school.
Shane’s legs were pale, but somehow they looked more like a man’s legs than Sid’s. Fine golden hairs coated his calves. Hair had appeared on Sid’s legs, but it grew in odd little patches, prickly and so white blond it looked the color of cat whiskers.
From his mother’s magazines, Sid had gathered he had an issue with self esteem But for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how he’d ever feel better about his body when guys like Shane Savage existed in the world.
Shane got up to pee in the woods.
Ashley leaned close to Sid.
“Let’s show him the raccoons,” she said.
Sid’s mouth dropped open as if Ashley had kicked him in the gut.
“What?” she asked, her expression so clueless he wanted to cry.
And he knew she really didn’t get it.
The raccoons belonged to them. Sid and Ashley. If they shared them with Shane, well… it would change everything.
“I don’t feel so hot. I think I’m just going to go home. You can show him the raccoons if you want.” Sid stood up and hastily pulled on his t-shirt.
“What? No. I thought we would work on their den some more. I thought-”
“Just call me later. Okay?” He started toward the trees.
Sid felt Ashley’s gaze follow him, but he couldn’t turn back. Tears had begun to well behind his eyes, and the moment he stepped into the woods they poured hot and fierce over his cheeks.
10
Max drove his motorcycle to a ramshackle house on the north end of town. It was the cutoff point for the school district, a desolate stretch of road the bus drivers grumbled about having to cover, especially during February and March when the snow drifts reached chest high levels and billowy days further reduced visibility to mere centimeters beyond the windshield.
In June, the spread of country road was anything but barren. The forest crowded in on either side of the baking concrete. Vines and weeds reached out, leaving their snaky entrails, smashed by pick-up trucks, smeared across the road.
Patches of farmland lay between the forests, the crops reeking of the latest fertilizer dump so potently in some areas, Max’s eyes watered beneath his helmet.
He found Vern Ripley’s house easily enough. It was the lone house on a large, desolate lot. The dilapidated farmhouse leaned heavily to the right where an oak tree, with a trunk roughly the size of a small car, stood as if patiently waiting to catch the falling house.
The yard was choked and littered with the kind of debris that revealed Vern’s stepfather as a tinkerer who rarely finished projects. Cars on blocks, whole engines, and a sprinkling of tools and automotive parts lay strewn along the gravel path.
Max climbed off his bike as the screen door swung out, and a woman stepped onto the porch.
She held her hand up to block the sun. A little girl in a paint streaked t-shirt and ratty cloth shorts followed on her heels.
“Mrs. Ripley?” Max asked, taking a few steps toward the house and holding up his hands as if telling her, ‘please don’t shoot.’
She stood in the half open doorway, blocking her daughter, who rammed herself into her mother’s arm like a rabid animal who’d spotted a weakness in the bars of its cage.
She didn’t respond, instead shifting her gaze to the child. She forced the child, not unkindly, back into the house and pulled the heavier interior door shut.
“Yes, I’m Goldie Ripley,” she said, pausing at top of the porch stairs.
She wore brown overalls with a white tank top. Her feet were bare, and her short curly hair stuck up wildly as if she’d only recently woken up.
“I’m Max Wolfenstein. The kids call me Mr. Wolf. I teach at Winterberry Middle School.”
“Okay,” she said, as if preferring he get on with it.
“Have you heard from Vern?” he asked, abandoning his earlier plan to admit to the woman he didn’t really know Vern.
She raised her eyebrows.
“You seen him?” she asked.
He glanced at the window where the little girl had peeled back the curtain. She didn’t peek coyly at him, but rather stood with her face pressed to the glass. She held up a bag of potato chips and waved it as if it were a distress call. A large gray cat hopped onto the windowsill beside her, and she broke her gaze with Max to pet the cat instead.
“No, I haven’t seen him. I only just heard he was missing. I hoped to ask you a few questions.”
“The police already asked a few questions, and I ain’t got any new answers. Vern run off just after Christmas, likely mad at me and his daddy for not buying him the video player he wanted.”
Max watched the woman rifle in her pockets and pull out a pack of cigarettes. She knocked the box against her thigh and retrieved one, propping it on her lip and lighting it with a pink lighter.
“You believe Vern ran away, then?”
Something flashed across Goldie’s face, and she took a long drag on her cigarette, replacing the look with indifference.
“Vern’s a real independent boy, always has been. He used to take apart radios and car engines with Darwin. He’s real smart. If anyone can make it out there on his own, it’s Vern.”
Max understood Goldie didn’t think Vern had run away, but she needed to convince herself he had. If he’d run away, he might come back.
“Is Darwin Vern’s biological father?”
Goldie glared at him.
“I don’t know what that has to do with nothin. Darwin raised Vern from diapers. Vern’s real daddy, if you can call a man who ain’t ever bought him a single birthday present a real daddy, was in Alaska last I heard, workin’ the pipeline. Course, we ain’t ever seen a dime of all that pipeline money.”
Max wanted to probe Darwin and Vern’s relationship, but sensed he’d stepped on a hornet’s nest bringing it up. Best not to spray the bees too.