essay for Mr. Fiedler about Hamlet’s revenge. But all I could think about was Becky. Finally I wrote at the top of the page: “Where is she? Who took her?” I tried to imagine Shawn Olney and his father as suspects, but they just didn’t seem to fit. Then I thought about the man in my dream, the one who was vaguely familiar and yet a stranger to me. I wondered if he was someone else in the neighborhood, someone I didn’t know as well.
As I sat there, I started to draw a map of my neighborhood, marking the houses of the people I knew and the people I didn’t really know that well but whose names I knew. The neighborhood I live in is small enough so that I at least know who lives in every house.
After I finished my map, I sat there, looking at all thehouses, all the names; the possibilities of where to start, what to do next, rambled around in my brain, like prematurely exploded fireworks, popping so loudly that none of the colors even made any sense.
Chapter 11
A FEW DAYS after I had met Hal for the first time, he brought my father thick manila folders filled with all sorts of information about the people of Pinesboro, mostly my neighbors. Some of it didn’t surprise me: Shawn Olney did drugs, and the hard-core stuff, not just marijuana. Mrs. Olney had been married before, and Mr. Olney was not Shawn’s biological father. Mrs. Ramirez had signed up to become an Avon lady (but had never sold a drop of makeup). But other things I found shocking: Mr. Peterson was cheating on his wife, his lovely, perfect wife, with the beautiful red hair and lovely heels. Detective Kinney had been arrested as a teenager driving in a stolen car (a crime deleted from his record after he had performed 150 hours of community service).Harry Baker’s real first name was Edward.
I watched my father pore over the information with Hal and then throw up his hands in disgust. “It all means nothing,” he said.
“Nothing means nothing,” Hal told him.
But I agreed with my father; everything that Hal had brought him seemed useless.
Tommy and I began playing Uno after school and on Saturdays, when my father took my mother to her therapy sessions. Tommy had brought the game with him from Florida, but I already knew how to play. Becky and I had played it sometimes on snowy days and Saturdays when there was nothing else to do. It’s a pretty simple game actually, where you match colors and numbers and so on, but we played it enough that we began to take it seriously, and we each developed our own strategy.
The odd thing about the game is that it doesn’t really require you to talk. Once you have one card left, you have to say “uno,” but other than that you don’t have to say anything. Tommy and I didn’t. We’d just sit there for a few hours, throwing cards into a pile, back and forth. Sometimes, if one of us spaced out or was too slow, the other onewould say, “Your turn.” Otherwise we were quiet.
It’s not that we were hostile to each other. It was more that I found a sort of comfort in playing cards with him and not having to say anything at all. For a few hours I would concentrate on strategy, on winning a game. It was an odd sort of friendship—if you could even call it a friendship—very different from what I’d had with Jocelyn, where all we would do is talk. But there was something nice about it, I had to admit.
One Saturday, a few weeks after my mother had started seeing a therapist, Mrs. Ramirez came in and interrupted our game. Usually she left us alone. She’d stopped bugging us about being friends, but she’d get this sort of smug, satisfied look on her face when she’d walk by and see the two of us playing cards, so I knew she thought we were friends. When she came in, she told Tommy that she was on the phone with his mother, and his mother wanted to say hello to him before they hung up.
Tommy put his cards facedown on the table and started swinging his hair a little to move it out of his eyes. I’d
As I sat there, I started to draw a map of my neighborhood, marking the houses of the people I knew and the people I didn’t really know that well but whose names I knew. The neighborhood I live in is small enough so that I at least know who lives in every house.
After I finished my map, I sat there, looking at all thehouses, all the names; the possibilities of where to start, what to do next, rambled around in my brain, like prematurely exploded fireworks, popping so loudly that none of the colors even made any sense.
Chapter 11
A FEW DAYS after I had met Hal for the first time, he brought my father thick manila folders filled with all sorts of information about the people of Pinesboro, mostly my neighbors. Some of it didn’t surprise me: Shawn Olney did drugs, and the hard-core stuff, not just marijuana. Mrs. Olney had been married before, and Mr. Olney was not Shawn’s biological father. Mrs. Ramirez had signed up to become an Avon lady (but had never sold a drop of makeup). But other things I found shocking: Mr. Peterson was cheating on his wife, his lovely, perfect wife, with the beautiful red hair and lovely heels. Detective Kinney had been arrested as a teenager driving in a stolen car (a crime deleted from his record after he had performed 150 hours of community service).Harry Baker’s real first name was Edward.
I watched my father pore over the information with Hal and then throw up his hands in disgust. “It all means nothing,” he said.
“Nothing means nothing,” Hal told him.
But I agreed with my father; everything that Hal had brought him seemed useless.
Tommy and I began playing Uno after school and on Saturdays, when my father took my mother to her therapy sessions. Tommy had brought the game with him from Florida, but I already knew how to play. Becky and I had played it sometimes on snowy days and Saturdays when there was nothing else to do. It’s a pretty simple game actually, where you match colors and numbers and so on, but we played it enough that we began to take it seriously, and we each developed our own strategy.
The odd thing about the game is that it doesn’t really require you to talk. Once you have one card left, you have to say “uno,” but other than that you don’t have to say anything. Tommy and I didn’t. We’d just sit there for a few hours, throwing cards into a pile, back and forth. Sometimes, if one of us spaced out or was too slow, the other onewould say, “Your turn.” Otherwise we were quiet.
It’s not that we were hostile to each other. It was more that I found a sort of comfort in playing cards with him and not having to say anything at all. For a few hours I would concentrate on strategy, on winning a game. It was an odd sort of friendship—if you could even call it a friendship—very different from what I’d had with Jocelyn, where all we would do is talk. But there was something nice about it, I had to admit.
One Saturday, a few weeks after my mother had started seeing a therapist, Mrs. Ramirez came in and interrupted our game. Usually she left us alone. She’d stopped bugging us about being friends, but she’d get this sort of smug, satisfied look on her face when she’d walk by and see the two of us playing cards, so I knew she thought we were friends. When she came in, she told Tommy that she was on the phone with his mother, and his mother wanted to say hello to him before they hung up.
Tommy put his cards facedown on the table and started swinging his hair a little to move it out of his eyes. I’d
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