On Thin Ice Read online

  I know they’d disagree. They’d say we just have different friends now. They’d say that things change. And I’d say, By “things,” do you mean my back? But even as I think it, I know that’s not fair. They’re not the ones who stare at me or make fun of me or call me Freak. They’ve never done any of that. But they’ve seen other kids do it. And unlike me, they can opt out.

  WE LIVE IN AN APARTMENT IN TOWN NOW, and it’s close enough to walk. It’s the second floor of a small house, so we have to take off our shoes as soon as we get in. I usually just hang out at home after school. I don’t mind being alone. I’ve still got the Xbox.

  I slow down as I approach my block, even though the wind is still whipping pretty good. By the time I reach the big oak at the edge of our yard, I’m moving like a snail going uphill. I scan the yard and lean forward to see down to the end of the driveway. I’m looking for one red car in particular or a man in a suit.

  We’re behind on the rent again. Dad says summer will be better because he can pick up extra work on the coast. He’s waiting for the tourists the way bears wait for salmon. But that’s still months away. “If you run into Mr. K, tell him I mailed it but forgot the stamp,” Dad told me last week. That’s a dumb excuse, though, and I don’t like to lie to our landlord. I don’t like the way he looks at me when I do.

  But the coast is clear today. No red car, no dark suit. I speed up and cut across the yard toward our door. Once I’m inside, I know I’ll have a few hours to myself. Dad usually gets home between five and six at night. He works the afternoon shift now because, like I said, the factory cut the shifts in half. Any more than that and they’d have to give him benefits. But one benefit he gets is sleeping late. He’s almost always still asleep when I leave for school. If I’m in a bad mood, I slam the door.

  But he’s in charge when he’s awake. I have to get off the Xbox as soon as he gets home. The first thing he does is turn on the TV, and anyway, he hates “the robots.” That’s who he blames for his shift getting cut in half. I used to argue. I was like, “Dad, I’m pretty sure Sonic the Hedgehog doesn’t make leather uppers for shoes.” But you can’t reason with him about job stuff. Plus, I think his definition of “robot” is broad enough to include the Xbox. It’s kind of true too, because it has taken over half his parenting shift.

  He knows it, because he does a good job of picking up used games for cheap. He’s like: “Is this one cool? It was only two bucks.”

  Usually if a game is only two bucks there’s a reason, but I just say “Yeah” and go back to Sonic or Battlefront II or Minecraft, all of which Mom got me for full price before she left. They’re a little old but still good games.

  As soon as Dad gets home I head to my room, like usual.

  “Is your homework done?” he calls from the couch.

  “Doing it now!” I shout through my door.

  I hear the SportsCenter theme and settle back in to a Gordon Korman book I got from the library. I read a lot.

  We have spaghetti for dinner. Dad leaves the jar of store-brand sauce out on the table so we can pour more on if we want. It’s made with “real meat flavoring” and I actually prefer it to the fancier stuff we used to have. I miss having a salad first, though. I used to like the bacon bits.

  We have dinner at the small kitchen table. “Family time,” Dad says. “Nonnegotiable.” Often neither of us has anything to say. Today, though, I have a few things on my mind. I want to talk about Danny ditching me and about sitting alone. But I don’t want Dad to worry about me or think I’m a loser. He’s got enough to worry about.

  “I ran into this girl today,” I say instead. That seems easier. His mouth is full, but he looks up and raises an eyebrow to let me know he’s listening. “Like, literally ran into her—with my head.”

  Dad swallows his spaghetti and says: “Sounds like she should look where she’s going.”

  “Dad,” I say. “I ran into her.”

  He reaches for the sauce. “Well, then she should look where you’re going.”

  I snort and a speck of pasta flies out of my mouth. That’s the thing about my dad. He messes up more than almost anyone I know, but he is always on my side. Sometimes he’s even funny.

  After dinner, I get up to scrape off my plate into the trash. I press the trash can lever with my foot and the lid pops open. There, right on top, is a folded-up string of scratch-off lottery tickets. “Win For Life!” the top one promises.

  “How’d you do?” I say, even though winners don’t go in the trash.

  He’s still eating, but he looks over and sees where I’m looking. “Pretty good,” he says. “Almost won a hundred thousand.”

  “Almost won” is how Dad says “lost.” The one good thing about us being broke is that it keeps him from gambling as much. He still blows through a lot of scratch-off tickets, though. He says they don’t count, but I don’t see why not. I’ve seen him win $2 and $5 more times than I can count, and then just blow it on more tickets. If he starts thinking about anything bigger than the lottery, he’s supposed to go to a meeting over at the Catholic church. “Our Lady of the Horse Track,” he calls it. He never goes, though. He says he doesn’t need to—and anyway, Mom’s not here to make him.

  I scrape the rest of my dinner onto his loser tickets. That’s the thing about gambling: There are always more losers than winners. Sometimes it feels like my dad is the last person in the world to figure that out. And he was always the worst kind of gambler: superstitious. Lucky numbers, birthdays … a million dumb ways to lose.

  I finish reading my book after dinner and look out my window to check the weather. It looks clear. A gust of wind rattles the windowpane, but I don’t mind the cold much.

  I sit on the edge of my bed and put on my boots. Then I grab my big green heavy-duty parka and my old backpack and head out into the living room.

  “I’m going out,” I say to Dad.

  He peels his eyes off the TV just long enough to check the time on his phone. It’s just a little after nine. He nods. “Don’t turn left,” he says, as usual. “And stay on the sidewalk.” There’s a pause as he mentally runs through his parenting checklist. “And don’t be gone too long, or I’ll come get you,” he adds. I’m pretty sure he’s bluffing.

  “Okay,” I say, pocketing the keys and zipping up my parka.

  Our apartment has its own stairway. I throw open the door at the bottom and the cold wind slaps me in the face. It’s a lot colder than it was during the day. My eyes water as I flip up my hood. It has a fake fur lining, so now I am looking out at the world through a little tunnel of fuzz.

  I check our mailbox alongside the door because sometimes Dad forgets. It’s empty, but it’s not like I was expecting anything special. The Jibrils’ mailbox is right next to ours. The Jibrils are from Somalia. Mr. Jibril came here for a factory job like five years ago, just like Nephi’s dad—and then his shift got cut in half just like everyone else’s. It was a pretty cruel trick, if you ask me.

  He works the morning shift now, so he gets home right after my dad leaves. They must pass each other on the road sometimes, two men splitting one house and one job.

  I head down the walkway, but halfway to the sidewalk I veer off. There’s still some snow on the yard, and I want to feel it crunch under my boots. It’s been extra crunchy lately because it melts a little more in the sun each day and then refreezes at night. Soon all this snow will be gone.

  Nothing nice sticks around for too long around here.

  DAD ALWAYS TELLS ME TO TURN RIGHT. Left takes you to the edge of town. It takes you to boarded-up houses that are maybe abandoned but maybe not. To rusted-out cars and broken snowmobiles and junkyard dogs, outside in the cold with their ribs showing and ragged worn-out barks. To the left there are people with worse addictions than gambling.

  To the right is downtown; to the right is the river. Our downtown isn’t much compared to most towns’, I guess, but our river is just as wet as anyone’s.

  I turn right and start walki
ng. A few minutes later I pass our car. Dad’s been parking it down the street so our landlord won’t know when he’s home. He’s got a lot of tricks like that.

  The sky is clear and there’s lots of moonlight. The houses are closer together once I get downtown. A lot of old-timers live around here. Dad grew up in this town, and he knows most of their names. I can see a few windows glowing gold up and down the street, perfect boxes of light in the darkness. There’s a life behind each one, I think, an old person inside remembering stuff.

  I hear a car. A battered Subaru is coming my way. Its headlights hit me full on and light me up. I duck my head so the top of my hood shields my eyes. The car passes, and whoever’s in there has no idea who I am. Everyone leans forward into the wind. Everyone looks lumpy and awkward in a parka.

  Norton’s downtown doesn’t fit it anymore. It hangs loose like a too-big suit. I pass an empty lot with just the outline of a building left. I think it used to be a bank. The next building is still standing but half-empty. The lights on the second floor never come on anymore.

  There’s a lot of that down here: a lot of empty space, a lot of “For Rent” signs. I look across Main Street. One three-story building is nothing but a hair place now. They don’t really need three floors for that, but there’s nothing else to put inside. Dad says it used to be a store that sold everything—clothes, sporting goods, toys—like our own little department store. Now there’s just one department: hair.

  Another car whooshes past, going about seventy in a twenty-five zone. People around here are always in a huge hurry to go nowhere.

  This all probably sounds pretty sad, but there are things I love about this town too. Like the way it’s mostly quiet but there’s just enough noise to let you know people are still doing their thing. If you hear a door slam and then the sound of heavy boots running, you know someone’s late and it might snow later. And if you hear a car horn honk, it’s usually just once, because there’s never much traffic around here.

  I duck down the alleyway behind Royston’s Good Food Emporium, which is kind of like our supermarket, and a few other stores. I swing my old pack off my back and start going through the trash barrels for bottles and cans. Sometimes there aren’t any because someone else beat me to it. But tonight I’m in luck: almost a buck. I do this at night because I would die a hundred deaths if anyone from school saw me. Once I have enough, I return the bottles and cans to the machines in front of the store. It’s nice to have some spending money, even if it’s just a little. And anyway, it’s not so bad. I almost never dig down all the way to the bottom, where it can get kind of juicy.

  The bottles and cans clink as I swing my pack back on and bend down to rub my hands clean on a patch of snow. And then I’m back out on the sidewalk. Just past the library there’s a little snow-covered park. I see the river sliding by in the moonlight beyond the park and hear the water rustle and clink.

  I turn into the park and head toward the pond at the far end. The concrete path glows gray in the moonlight, and black cracks slither in every direction. I imagine all the cracks are snakes and the river’s noise is their hissing.

  The pond is about as big as a hockey rink, and in midwinter, people use it for one. It’s still frozen solid. There’s no churning current to break up the ice here.

  Smack-dab in the middle of the iced-over pond is a wooden tower. It’s about twelve feet tall, and I’m pretty sure it used to be a lifeguard chair at the lake. It’s painted blue and white now and there’s a sign on top that says “Thin Ice Days, March 18–19! VFD Fund-raiser! Get Your Tickets!” Ticket sales are over now, but they messed up and made it all part of one sign, so that phantom sales pitch for the volunteer fire department will be up until the tower falls. That kind of thing is pretty typical around here.

  A thick white rope runs from the tower to what looks like an old-fashioned gas streetlight on shore, but instead of a flickering flame on top, there’s a big, round clock. The rope is stretched tight to a metal ring on the side of the clock.

  Spring is coming, and it’s almost time for Thin Ice Days. A lot of towns in Maine have these festivals. They’re about lobsters or blueberries or things like that. Ours is about thin ice. I don’t think they meant it that way, but it’s pretty perfect. Thin Ice Days is one weekend a year, but this town is on thin ice the other 363 days too.

  There’s a parade, a concert, and other stuff like that. There’s also the VFD fund-raiser. You pay three bucks and put down the date and time when you think the tower will fall. Someday soon, when the ice on this pond breaks up, the tower will fall into the water, and the rope will pull that ring right out. The clock will stop. Whoever comes closest to the right day and time will win five hundred bucks. The rest goes to the fire department.

  I size up the scene, estimating how thin the ice has gotten. How much longer will the tower be standing? I purse my lips and push a plume of frosty breath out in front of me. It’s a sucker’s bet, but I had to buy one ticket. Everybody talks about it. When’s the ice gonna break? When’s the tower gonna fall? Plus, five hundred bucks—can you even imagine? I could finally get some new games and a better controller. Maybe some less junky clothes and some decent sneakers too.

  My ticket’s for St. Patrick’s Day: Friday, March 17, at nine p.m. The time slots are every fifteen minutes during prime ice-melting time, but you can’t go over. If it’s after nine, I lose. Today’s the sixth, so that’s almost two weeks away. I got the date from The Farmer’s Year Booke. It’s this old-timey book with long-range weather forecasts and planting charts and gardening stories that Mom used to buy every year. I figured they must know something if they’ve been around so long.

  Anyway, this year the theme of Thin Ice Days is “Building a Better Norton.” So in addition to the tower and concert and stuff, which we have every year, there’s also a model-building competition for kids, a volunteer day to pick up trash in the park, and things like that.

  My face feels warm and damp from my breath inside my hood. I lower the hood and let the chilly wind cool me down. I’ve been on my feet for a while now, and I can feel a dull ache deepening in my back. If I stand for a long time, it starts to throb back there like a second heartbeat. I take one more look at the tower, praying it will hang on for eleven more days. Then I flip up my hood and head home.

  Dad’s waiting for me when I get in. “Where’d you go?” he asks.

  At first I smile. It’s kind of cool that he was worried about me. “Don’t worry,” I say. “I turned right.”

  He nods. “Did you go to the pond? How’s that ice?” he says. “Think that tower will last awhile?” The smile falls off my face. He’s worried all right—about five hundred bucks in prize money.

  Lying in bed later, on my side like always, I stare at the alarm clock: angry red numbers that won’t stop changing. It gets later and later. School gets closer and closer.

  I DECIDE TO VOLUNTEER in the library during lunch on Tuesday. I know it’s not a long-term solution, I can’t alphabetize books forever, but for now it’s somewhere to go. I’m not allowed to eat in the library, so I eat a gluey tuna fish sandwich in the librarian’s office before I start shelving. Then I go to the library to get to work. Ms. Verdi is out there trying to maintain order, but the fourth graders have collaborative time, and that’s always close to chaos.

  When the fourth graders see me heading over, with my shirt riding up and my forward lean, the volume drops. One of the boys leans over and says something to his friends. I can’t quite hear it, but everyone starts laughing.

  Ms. Verdi tells them to quiet down.

  I stare at the boy who said something. He smiles up at me, invulnerable. He’s already more popular than I’ll ever be.

  There’s nothing left to do but get to work. I start pushing the cart around and shelving books. I’m always really interested in what books people are reading here. A lot of the books I’m putting back are ones that I’ve read too: Harry Potter, I Survived, Timmy Failure, The Lord of the Rings.<
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  I think about that for a while. Most of these kids ignore me, and some do worse than that—but we still like the same books. We’ve imagined fighting the same epic battles and laughed at the same jokes.

  Shelving takes concentration. You need to remember what books you’ve got and match them with the right section, the right letter. You can kind of get lost in it. But as I push the cart toward the other end of the library, I hear a loud metal clank, followed by laughter.

  It’s coming from the maker space. It’s in a room just like Ms. Verdi’s office but on the opposite end of the library. There’s a window looking out, just like in hers. The blinds are down but the slats are open. There are a bunch of kids in there. At the head of the table, I see the beanpole body and enormous black-framed glasses of our science teacher, Mr. Feig.

  Our maker space is kind of a volunteer effort. Mostly Mr. Feig runs it during his free period, and sometimes other teachers will pinch-hit. No one can be in there alone because of all the sharp edges and the imminent threat of, like, gluing your hands together.

  I push my cart closer and lean in for a better look through the blinds. Heads are down and hands are busy. I see a wrench, a screwdriver: actual tools. I see Landrover wrestling with something large and metallic, but fortunately he doesn’t see me. Nephi is sitting on the far side of the long table, bent over something that looks like a fish tank and working with a pair of wire cutters. He’s super focused, like usual, but suddenly he looks up. I’m caught spying, cold busted. I lift my chin weakly, a reverse nod, and before he has a chance to react, I get back to shelving.

  Toward the end of the period, the boy who made the joke walks up to me. His face is really serious, so I get serious too. He’s holding an old, thick book that looks huge in his hands. He’s got two friends trailing behind him. “Sorry about before,” says the boy. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  I size him up, trying to figure out his angle. He’s just a kid, with a little boy’s haircut and a shirt that says “Live Every Week Like It’s Shark Week.” I like sharks too, I think. “That’s cool, man,” I say. “No big deal.”