Slipping Read online

  “I took that picture with the timer on my camera,” Ewan said.

  “Is that your dad?” Mr. Blum asked.

  Even in the dim light, I could see that Ewan was ducking his head. “Yeah,” he mumbled, and switched off the projector. “It’s an old picture. That was a really long time ago.”

  He sounded embarrassed, which is kind of weird. I know his parents are divorced, because only his mom is listed in the school directory, and that’s what they do at Selden. But I don’t know why that would be embarrassing. Half the kids in our class have parents who are divorced.

  Sam Gershwin went next. All he had to show for himself was his sister’s garnet ring—the melted rock inside the earth’s mantle is made up of the same stuff that’s in garnet. When Mr. Blum asked him if it was okay to pass the ring around the classroom, Sam got really nervous. “Okay,” he said. “But don’t lose it. She doesn’t exactly know it’s here.” Sam’s lame report made me feel better, but then again, everybody knows Sam goes to Study Skills, which means he spends study hall in a small room in the basement where a lady teaches you how to make neat outlines of everything. Study Skills doesn’t help anyone, it just makes it official that you’re dumb. My mom thinks I need to go.

  Every time Mr. Blum asked for a volunteer, I looked down. My only chance of survival was hoping there wasn’t enough time for all the presentations in one day. Everything would be better if I had one more day. The cold feeling was like having to pee—always there, getting a little worse with the passing of time. Maybe, after I warmed up, I could ask Julia what she did in earth science when she was in eighth grade. She probably got an A. I couldn’t help thinking about how warm her room would be right now.

  “Michael?” Mr. Blum was sitting on the corner of his desk, brushing off the spot where Gus’s shoes had left some caked mud. “I think you’re the last one.”

  When I looked under my desk for the poster board, I realized it had unrolled. I had been stepping on it all during class without realizing it, and now, on top of being really sucky, it was covered with black footprints.

  “Um,” I said, standing in front of the whole class, with my half-finished, stepped-on, wrinkled poster stretched between two hands. I wanted to rub my hands together to warm up my fingers, but I was holding the poster. Mr. Blum rolled his palm open, indicating that I should start talking.

  “This is, I guess,” I said, “the earth? These are the layers.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Not another word. I was dumb. I was the stupidest person in the world.

  “Do you want to tell us a little bit about the layers?” Mr. Blum prompted. “Or at least do you want to tell us how your report takes the information you got from the book and goes a little further?”

  “I didn’t know this was going to be an out-loud kind of thing,” I said.

  “You don’t have to say anything extraordinary, Michael. Just tell us a little bit about what you had in mind here.”

  “Um,” I started again. I pointed to the center of the egg-shaped orb that was supposed to be earth. “This is the core.” I pointed to the half-colored pinkish red section. “This is the mantle. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say about them. The mantle is hot. The iron is really, um, iron-y.”

  Mr. Blum sighed. “Try to expand these ideas a little?”

  Expand this, I was thinking. If I brought home another C, my dad was going to throw the Xbox away. Thinking about the Xbox made me start thinking about video games, and thinking about video games reminded me of the idea I’d had while I was coloring that morning in study hall. And even though the cold feeling was really annoying, it was also keeping me awake in a weird way. I think it was making my brain work differently. Was my brain working faster? I don’t know. But it was the cold feeling—I swear—that made me start talking.

  “What this really shows,” I said, “is not just the layers of the earth. But a map for a new video game. The name of the video game is D-double-prime. D-double-prime is here.” I pointed to the green squiggles I’d made outside the circle of iron at the core. “It’s that weird layer you were talking about the other day that no one understands, even actual scientists. But the game starts here.” I pointed to the top of the crust. “You need to get all the way through the crust and the mantle. You have to go down there because there’s a war going on at the surface of the planet, and you’re fighting against the computer machines who are taking over from the humans. The only way to shut them down is to get some kind of special rock that’s inside that layer.”

  “It would have to be iron,” Mr. Blum said. “The core is made of iron. Didn’t you just explain that?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Some special iron. And you start off fighting the machines, until you can find the hole into the deep parts of the crust.”

  “Like an abandoned mine?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And then you get into the mantle from there. You have to get on a special kind of wet suit that would allow you to swim through the melted rock.”

  “That would be some wet suit,” said Mr. Blum. But he was giving me a look he usually saves for students who do the homework.

  “Or you can go in a special submarine kind of thing, with blasters to fight off all the scary dinosaur slug things that you find in the mine or the mantle or whatever. Things would be catching fire, like, constantly.”

  “That’s actually a really cool idea,” I heard Ewan say.

  “I’d play it,” said Sam.

  “The first geology-based video game,” Mr. Blum said.

  “The last level would be D-double-prime,” I went on, feeling my own idea growing as I thought about it. “And down there it would be, like, totally black, except you’d see pieces of the earth that had sunk down there, like on the news when there’s a flood somewhere and you see people’s roofs and cars and trees floating down a river. Except a lot of it would be on fire. You’d see water lit up only by the flames.”

  “You realize, of course, that by the time pieces of the earth’s crust reached D-double-prime, all traces of human life would have been completely obliterated?” said Mr. Blum.

  “But this is a video game,” I protested. “It has to be cool.”

  “Okay,” said Mr. Blum, putting a hand in the air. “I stand corrected.”

  Just then the bell rang. Everyone started piling up their books and shuffling their papers together. I felt kind of excited by my idea, and I was thinking about asking Mr. Blum right then and there if he could promise I wasn’t going to get a C. But before I could even ask the question, he said, “Michael, can you see me for a second?”

  Mr. Blum gestured for me to take a seat at an empty desk in the front row. “Your video game idea was great,” he said. “It showed a good understanding of the material and I think even helped the class find the magic in what we know about the interior of our planet. But when I look at your work on the page, I have to wonder why we don’t see any of your good ideas coming through.”

  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to try to answer that question.

  “You can do better,” Mr. Blum said. That’s what teachers are always saying to me. “But there’s nothing I can do to help you if you don’t start to pay attention. Leave yourself more time. And here, I’ll give you a chance now. If you want to bring this home and turn it into a real map of a video game, I’ll let you turn it in by Friday. How’s that?”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling all the excitement of people actually liking my idea flow out of my body. I didn’t want another chance with that poster board. I was too cold to work on anything. All I wanted was to get warm. Playing video games would warm me up, not coloring in maps of them. I didn’t care that I was crushing my poster as I rolled it back up and stuck it in the top of my book bag. The second bell rang, and Mr. Blum said, “Better hurry, Michael. You’re not supposed to be late for assembly. Good luck.”

  I ran, but still, I got to assembly when everyone else was sitting down, and I had to stand looking for a place to sit for fa
r too long. It’s been weeks since I would expect Gus to be saving me a seat, but I always kind of check anyway, like one day things will go back to normal. I noticed Julia was all comfy in her seat already. She was sitting next to the exchange student from Germany, Inge. Because she’s so busy with ballet, Julia always makes friends with the exchange students. Every time they go back to wherever they’ve come from—and some of these places, I’ve never even heard of—Julia boo-hoos to my mom about how she has no friends at school, until my parents pay for the plane ticket to go visit them. It’s so unfair. They give me a hard time about each and every Xbox game, and in the meantime, Julia’s spending thousands of dollars on international flights. Last summer alone, she flew to Japan and Buenos Aires. The other day, I heard her tell Mom that London was getting boring.

  I must have been looking around for a long time, because eventually Ms. Rosoff beckoned me to her. Ms. Rosoff’s the art teacher who isn’t really a teacher at all—or even an artist. She did an assembly once where she told us she was some kind of handwriting expert who used to work for the FBI. No one believed her—last time I checked, FBI agents don’t wear big purple dresses and talk so softly into the microphone that you can’t hear half of what they say. Near the end of her assembly, everyone at Selden started clapping as if she were finished, and we had to write her personal letters of apology that were signed by our parents.

  Anyway, Ms. Rosoff is my advisor, and it’s her job to make sure everyone in her group shows up for assembly and checks in with her. Usually she doesn’t even do this—she’s the kind of teacher who never knows when the girls are passing notes and can’t remember which period we have lunch. But this morning, she pointed out a free seat in the front row, right next to Ewan Greer.

  Ewan carries a giant duffel instead of a backpack, and he slid it over on the floor to make room. Ewan always keeps that duffel bag with him, as if he’s afraid someone will take it. Which they probably would, because he’s Ewan, the kid who breaks every curve. “Hi,” Ewan said. I lifted my hand in a half wave and he flinched, like he was afraid that I was going to hit him. “I liked your video game idea.”

  “Un-huh,” I said. With kids like Ewan, it’s scary to say hi to them. You don’t want to be the only person in the world to be their friend.

  But then I made the mistake of looking Ewan straight in the eye. The cold that I’d been feeling all morning suddenly got much worse. Looking at Ewan, I felt how cold he was, and I felt as cold as that. I felt like I was Ewan. Inside his small gray eyes, I was standing on a blacktop mountain road. I recognized the road, because in art, it is the only thing Ewan ever draws. I’d seen it in charcoal, and papier-mâché. I’d seen it wrapping around the outside of a coil pot, the tall pine trees etched with a paper clip, the rock cliff that drops off to one side imprinted with old toothbrush bristles.

  I was so cold, I couldn’t think of the word “cold.” Instead, I was thinking that I was locked. I couldn’t move.

  As I continued to stare at Ewan, I think he was starting to get a little freaked out. He attempted a smile, but all I could see were his eyes, and behind them that lonely, curving road. I saw Ewan walking alongside it. Snow fell down the collar of his jacket—I felt how it would be on his neck. The sky was gray. Just as I could feel the cold wind along the side of the road, I could feel Ewan’s wishing, wishing for something he knew he couldn’t have. And I was wishing very hard too.

  I heard these words come out of my mouth: “Your dad was watching you,” I said. “That day when you stood by the road. He knew what you wanted. He wanted it too. But all he could do was watch. He’s watching you now.”

  I swear I had no idea why I said that to him. I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  Ewan’s smile sagged, without disappearing entirely, as if he was so surprised by what I’d said he’d forgotten about his own face entirely.

  “What did you say?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said, and I found I could move my eyes again. “Forget it.”

  “Forget it?” he kind of choked out. His eyes were wet, and his voice was cracking. Was he crying?

  “Shh,” I said, because you don’t want to have people see you crying in assembly. You don’t want to be noticed in assembly at all.

  Ewan stood up, threaded his way through the legs of everyone in our row, and walked up the aisle to the doors in the back as if he didn’t care that everyone was staring at him, and that you couldn’t just walk out of assembly without getting a detention.

  I turned to see if anyone else had noticed, and my eyes bumped right into Ms. Rosoff’s watery blue ones, which always remind me of a fish’s. She must have heard the whole thing.

  “What did you say to him?” she whispered. “You made him cry.”

  “Me?” I whispered back. “Nothing. I don’t know. Isn’t he going to get in trouble? He’s leaving assembly.”

  “You said something about his father,” Ms. Rosoff hissed. Her face was so close to mine now, I could smell toothpaste on her breath—she smokes, but no one is supposed to know—and I suddenly remembered how during her handwriting assembly there was this one cool moment when she took anonymous handwriting samples from kids and could tell all sorts of things about them based on the size of their letters, or the way they cross their t’s. Because my writing goes downhill, she told me I was shy. She said she suspected Gus had divorced parents because he didn’t close his o’s at the top. Everyone who was being rude in the audience suddenly got quiet, and for a few minutes, it was like, “Wow, maybe this isn’t the same person who gets lost on the way to the teachers’ lounge.”

  “What did you say to Ewan?” Ms. Rosoff asked again, and she didn’t seem lost at all. She seemed angry. “About his father.”

  “I didn’t say it,” I insisted. I thought for a second about telling her how cold I was, how the cold feeling was getting worse. “I don’t know anything about his father.”

  “You don’t know,” she spat out, in that I-have-a-hard-time-believing-this voice, “that Ewan’s father died in a car crash a month before he moved here?”

  “Oh,” I said. Before I even remembered what I’d said to Ewan, I thought, Oh, man. Poor Ewan. And then I made the connection: Ewan’s dad. Ewan’s gray eyes. Ewan’s road.

  “Ms. Rosoff,” I said, “I think I need to go to the nurse.”

  Chapter 4

  “You do sound a little hoarse,” said Mrs. Meade, the school nurse, when I told her about the chills.

  She leaned back in her worn desk chair, which had a child’s block taped onto one of the legs where a wheel was missing. Her office was in the basement, and she had filled it with fake plants and the lace doilies she crocheted when there weren’t any sick kids around. I used to love to go see Mrs. Mead. She treats the little kids like they’re puppies, rubbing their foreheads and stuffing them with lemon drops that are supposedly some kind of medicine. She always has Kool-Aid in her mini-fridge, and she doles it out in Dixie cups decorated with stupid knock-knock jokes, like, “Eileen who? Ei-leen-over to tie my shoe.” But after you’re in fourth grade, she treats you like an ex-con—to get any kind of sympathy from her at all, you have to throw up or have a fever.

  Until last year, when a kid in Julia’s class had hallucinations in the lunchroom and his parents sued the school. Apparently, he had been writing about the voices in his head for months in the journal he was keeping in his English class and going to Mrs. Meade twice a week to complain of headaches. She’d thought he was faking. Ever since then, Mrs. Meade sends kids home at the first hint of sickness.

  “There’s a chance you’re coming down with a cold,” she mused again, “and if you’re coming down with a cold, then you’re most certainly contagious. I’m going to call your mother. I think you should see your family doctor right away. In fact, I’m going to type you up a little note that I’ll keep a copy of right here in my file.”

  Since my mother was in a meeting, her secretary told Mrs. Meade it was okay for me to go home in a
car service by myself, which is something you can do only if your parents sign about twenty-five forms in the first week of school. In the car, I decided that as soon as I got home, I would fix myself a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich, and go back to playing Midtown Madness. Definitely not Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction. Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction is new, and I was already feeling a little light-headed, and kind of lost in the way you feel in the beginning of a video game, when you keep falling off the same cliff.

  I was still really cold. I’d zipped my jacket up to my chin and crossed my arms in front of my chest, but it wasn’t helping. Maybe peanut butter and Fluff would help. But as soon as I got home and took a bite of my sandwich, I spat it back into the sink and tossed the rest of the sandwich into the trash. It was the sugar. Somehow, mixed with the cold, it hurt my teeth. My mom can’t drink cold water first thing in the morning—she says it makes her fillings hurt, and that’s how I felt now, like there was a shooting pain from the outside of my teeth traveling into my gums and then straight into the bones of my jaw. Was it my fillings? I don’t have fillings. What was going on with me?

  Inside the fridge, I found leftover creamed spinach. Creamed spinach usually makes me retch. But now I took the container of it over to the microwave. As soon as it started to cook and I could smell the rich, creamy bitterness, I knew it was exactly what I was in the mood for.

  When it was hot, I put as much in my mouth as I could. It was slippery and slimy and I could taste the part of it that always made me gag, the part that tastes the way the grass smells in the spring in the park. But at the same time, it melted on my tongue almost like chocolate, and the gritty parts of it didn’t bother me.

  After I’d finished the spinach and licked the bowl—licked it!—I felt good, but only for just a second. I sighed, and as soon as I inhaled that big sigh back in, I was cold again.