The Boy Who Lost His Face (6 page)

David shook his head.

Larry threw them in a trash bin, all except Carmelita, which he put back in his jacket pocket.

“I
T’S NOT
a heart,” said David. “It’s an apple. It’s a cheese board in the shape of an apple.” He rubbed the sandpaper around the rough edges of his project.

“Well, it looks like a heart,” said Mo. She hammered a nameplate over the entrance to the doghouse.
Wham! Wham! Thud
! “Shit!”

She jumped up and down with her thumb in her mouth.

“Did you hurt yourself?” asked David.

She took her thumb out of her mouth and shook it wildly. “No, it feels good,” she said. “I love hitting myself with a hammer.”

David smiled. “That’s like the guy who kept banging his head against the wall, and somebody asked him why he did it, and he said, ‘Because it feels good when I stop.’ ”

Mo stared at him. “Was that supposed to be a joke?” she asked.

David shrugged.

He looked at the nameplate that Mo had hammered onto her doghouse. It was shaped like a large bone, and on it, in big black letters, it said
KILLER
.

He returned to sanding his heart-shaped apple-cheese board.

“Hey, David, where you been?”

It was Randy. He and Alvin were leaning on the side of David’s worktable.

David looked up at him. “Hi,” he said flatly.

“So where you been, buddy?” asked Randy. “How come you haven’t been hanging around? Everybody’s been wondering what happened to you.”

“Yeah, right,” David muttered.

“Especially Leslie,” said Randy. He winked at David. “I think she likes you.”

“That’s right,” said Alvin. “Today at recess she said, ‘Where’s David? He’s so cute!’ ”

“I think it was when you walked into class with your zipper down,” said Randy. “That’s when she fell in love.”

He and Alvin laughed.

“Leave me alone, all right?” said David.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” asked Randy. “Don’t you like her?”

“It’s your curly hair,” said Alvin. “She goes for guys with curly hair.” He rubbed the top of David’s head with his hand.

David pushed Alvin’s arm away.

Alvin pushed him back.

“Hey, look, he made a heart for her,” said Randy, picking up David’s cheese board. “If you want, I’ll give it to her for you at lunch.”

“Give me that,” said David, reaching for it.

Randy held the heart behind him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll tell her it’s from you. I’ll write on it, ‘To Leslie, with love, from David.’ ”

Mo grabbed the cheese board out of Randy’s hand. “It’s not a heart, assbite!” she said. “It’s an apple.”

Randy took a step toward her but thought better of it when she picked up her hammer.

“What’s the matter, David?” asked Alvin. “You need a girl to protect you?”

“Is she a girl?” asked Alvin.

“I don’t know what
it
is,” said Randy.

They walked away laughing.

Mo handed David his project.

“Thanks, Mo,” he said.

“You just have to stand up to those assholes,” she told him. “You can’t let them push you around.”

David shrugged. It was a lot easier for her to stand up to them than it was for him, he thought. They’re not going to fight a girl.

“You know, it does look like an apple,” said Mo. “I mean, now that I know what it is, it definitely looks like an apple.”

“It was supposed to have a stem,” David explained, “but I accidentally cut if off. It would have looked more like an apple if it had a stem.”

“Oh, yeah, I can see that,” Mo agreed. “But that’s okay. It still looks like an apple. I mean, not all apples have stems.”

David looked at the doghouse with the nameplate
KILLER
nailed above the entrance. “So what kind of dog do you have?” he asked.

“What?” asked Mo. “Oh, this.” She glanced at her project. “I don’t have a dog.”

S
CIENCE MADE SENSE
.

It was logical. It was consistent. If you dropped a rock, gravity would always cause it to fall down. It wouldn’t sometimes fall up. If you combine two parts hydrogen with one part oxygen, you’ll always get water. You won’t sometimes get milk.

Maybe that’s why it was David’s favorite subject. Nothing else in his life seemed to make sense anymore.

“David, will you please assist me,” asked Mr. Lugano, his science teacher.

Mr. Lugano often called on David to help out with experiments. The chemicals could be dangerous and David could be trusted. Some of the other kids instantly turned into mad scientists whenever they were asked to help in an experiment.

“Hey, Ballinger,” Scott whispered as David walked by him on his way to the front of the room. “Your fly’s down.”

David didn’t look.

It was Friday, three days since he’d walked into Spanish class with his
cremallera
down. Every time Scott or his friends saw him, they told him to zip his fly. If he looked down, they’d laugh. If he didn’t look
down, they’d call him a pervert who liked to walk around with his pants unzipped, until at last he’d look. Then they’d all laugh.

David had the feeling that they would leave him alone if it wasn’t for Scott. It was like Scott was using him as a way to become popular. The more Scott picked on David, the more the other kids liked Scott.

Mr. Lugano handed David a beaker full of some kind of foul-smelling chemical and asked him to fill six test tubes halfway.

He heard several kids snicker.

Maybe his fly was down, he worried. No, he wouldn’t look. What if he was standing in front of the room, this time facing the class, with his zipper down? Still he didn’t look. If it was down, it was down. The damage was already done.

He heard more laughter as he continued to pour the chemical into the test tubes.

“What’s that smell?” asked a girl from the front row.

“It smells like rotten eggs!” said someone else.

Maybe that was it. Maybe they were just laughing at the smell.

He tried to think about Carmelita. He thought about her whenever he was feeling depressed. His problems were so trivial compared to hers. And still, she was laughing her head off.

The image of Carmelita disappeared and instead he saw Mrs. Bayfield lying on her back in the rocking chair, her face covered with lemonade.

The beaker slipped out of David’s hand, fell on top
of the test tubes, and the whole experiment crashed to the floor.

The smell of rotten eggs exploded across the room like tear gas. “Everyone outside!” ordered Mr. Lugano. “Now!”

The students hurried outside, gagging, coughing, but mostly laughing.

“Try not to breathe!” said Mr. Lugano.

David looked down. His pants were zipped. He ran out of the room with one hand over his nose and mouth.

Out on the blacktop Mr. Lugano explained what happened. He discussed the chemical reaction that had taken place and how the molecules had been dispersed through the air to cause the resulting odor. It all made sense, logically and scientifically.

But there was one thing that didn’t make sense. Roger had broken Mrs. Bayfield’s pitcher of lemonade. And now David had broken a pitcher. How do you explain that, Mr. Lugano?

“Y
OU KNOW
, if someone else did it,” said David a little later while eating lunch with Larry, “everyone would have thought it was funny. Like if Roger Delbrook had done it, everybody would think it was real cool. He’d be bragging about it—‘You hear about how I made a stink bomb in Lugano’s class?’ But because I did it, then it’s not cool. It’s, ‘Did you hear what that stinkpot Ballinger did now?’ ”

“I know,” Larry agreed. “It’s just who you are. Roger or Scott could do anything they want, and it
would be cool. But if you or I do the same thing, we’re stinkpots.”

They were sitting across from each other at the end of a long table. No one else was sitting at the table. That was partly because almost everyone else had finished their lunch, but it was also because Roger had walked past holding his nose and said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Puke, you stink!”

“You don’t stink,” said Larry. “I don’t smell it on you.”

“You sure?” asked David.

“I can’t smell it at all,” Larry assured him.

David looked at his ham and cheese sandwich, but he couldn’t eat. The smell of rotten eggs was stuck in his throat. “I wonder what Carmelita is doing right now,” he said.

“Yeah,” Larry muttered, leaning on his elbows. “I bet she’s doing okay,” he said hopefully.

“Too bad she’s not here,” said David.

“Yeah,” Larry agreed. “I wonder if she’d be my girlfriend or your girlfriend.”

“Mine,” said David with a laugh. Then more seriously he said, “She wouldn’t have to be the girlfriend of either of us. She could just be our friend. Besides, there’s this other girl I kind of like.”

“Really?” asked Larry. He sounded surprised, but then he said, “There’s a girl I kind of like, too.”

“Really?” asked David. He bit into his sandwich. He had to concentrate very hard to keep it from tasting like rotten eggs.

“What if Carmelita didn’t like either of us?” asked Larry.

David looked at him, surprised, as he swallowed his food. He had never thought of that.

“What if she thought we were nerds?” asked Larry. “What if she came here and just turned into another Leslie Gilroy or Ginger Rice?”

“Carmelita’s not like that,” said David.

“How do you know?”

“She just doesn’t seem that way.”

“All you saw was a naked picture of her when she was nine years old.”

“The way she was laughing,” said David. “I bet Leslie Gilroy never laughed like that.”

“Yeah,” Larry agreed.

“Besides, she’d have to like us,” said David, “if we’re the ones who go down there and find her and rescue her and everything.”

“I guess. But what if we weren’t the ones who rescued her? Suppose she was born here, and never lived in Venezuela, and her parents had plenty of money. She might be Randy or Scott’s girlfriend.”

David shook his head. “No way!”

“Maybe if Carmelita were born here,” said Larry, “she wouldn’t be able to laugh like that. Maybe it’s not Leslie Gilroy’s fault. It’s just that all pretty girls in America automatically turn snotty. There’s nothing they can do about it.”

“Maybe,” David agreed, “except the girl I like is pretty, and she’s not a snot.”

“Yeah, the girl I like isn’t a snot either,” said Larry. “She’s pretty, but not like Leslie or Ginger. I mean, I think a lot of kids think she’s kind of strange.”

“The kids think the girl I like is kind of weird, too,” said David.

They looked at each other and the same thought struck them simultaneously. “I hope we don’t like the same girl,” said Larry.

David laughed. “So what, even if we do?” he asked. “It’s not like she’ll really want either of us to be her boyfriend!”

Larry smiled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine a girl like her ever liking a guy like me.” He laughed. “It’s hard to imagine any girl ever liking me.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe she would. Sometimes I think she does.”

David thought about the way Miss Williams always said “Hello, Mr. Ballinger” or “Good morning, Mr. Ballinger” or “Good afternoon, Mr. Ballinger” whenever she saw him. If she didn’t like him she wouldn’t say that. Still, that didn’t mean she wanted to be his girlfriend.

“So what’s her name?” asked Larry.

“You tell me your girl’s name.”

“I asked you first.”

David bit his lip. “I don’t know her name,” he admitted.

Larry laughed.

“I know her last name,” said David. “Williams. There’s this sort of game we play. Whenever we see each other we act very proper and formal. I say,
‘Hello, Miss Williams,’ and she says, ‘Hello, Mr. Ballinger.’ ”

David waited for Larry’s opinion on whether the game was stupid, or if it meant she liked him, but Larry obviously was thinking only about the girl he liked. “I don’t know my girl’s last name,” he said.

“What does she look like?” asked David.

“Well, she’s kind of little,” Larry said, “petite. She has big brown eyes and real short brown hair.”

“The girl I like has long red hair,” said David.

Larry smiled. “Well, that’s good anyway,” he said.

“Does she know you like her?” asked David.

“No, I’m cool,” said Larry. “She’s in my math class. I stare at her all the time, but she can’t tell where I’m looking ‘cause of my shades.” Suddenly his cheeks reddened. “That’s her!”

David turned around. “Where?”

“Don’t stare. She’s heading toward the door to the library. She just walked past it. Don’t let her know you’re looking at her.”

David tried to hide his eyes as he looked at the girl. He had to look twice to make sure he wasn’t mistaken.

“Mo?” he asked. “She’s in my shop class. I share a table with her.”

“God, you’re lucky!” said Larry. “Don’t you think she’s pretty? And she’s really funny, too.”

“Um, sure,” said David. “I never really thought of her like that. I mean, being in shop, I guess because she’s always hammering and stuff like that.”

Larry sighed.

“Maybe if her hair wasn’t so short—” David started to say.

“I like her hair like that,” said Larry. “That’s how girls wear their hair in France.”

“How do you know?”

“I used to live there.”

“I thought you lived in Venezuela.”

“We moved to France after we left Venezuela,” said Larry. “Mo reminds me of a girl I used to see every morning in a café in Paris.”

D
AVID WAS
feeling pretty crummy as he headed home after school—until Miss Williams popped up. He was walking by the bike racks and she was bent down fiddling with her bicycle lock, hidden by her bicycle. He didn’t notice her until she suddenly popped up right next to him, as if out of a jack-in-the-box, and said, “Good day, Mr. Ballinger.”

It caught him completely off guard and he didn’t know what to do or say.

She smiled, glad to be the cause of his befuddlement.

“Good day, Miss Williams,” he said at last.

She hopped on her bicycle and rode off.