The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (3 page)

From across the table, Andrew Tanizaki watched with quivering, hamsterish excitement. By now, everyone else who’d been sitting at the Scrabble table had come over, and a few people from other tables came over to see what was going on, too. Someone took out a blindfold and wrapped it around Duncan Dorfman’s head, tying it with a sharp jerk. It was really a pair of gym shorts; Duncan could smell the big, stinking gym beneath the slippery fabric. He smelled a thousand long-ago dodgeball games, and he imagined himself getting smacked in the head and the stomach with ball after ball.

Someone else put a magazine under his hand and said in a nasty voice, “Read, Lunch Meat.”

The table became quiet. If Duncan was ever going to have a chance to rise up from his loneliness and his loserdom and the fact that he was just Lunch Meat—a boy who was forced to sit with the Chinaman, a boy who was stuck here in Drilling Falls in a peculiar-smelling little house with his mother and his great-aunt—then this was the moment.

Though his mother desperately didn’t want him to stand out, he knew what he had to do. No one in this school imagined that Duncan Dorfman had anything special to offer. But maybe they were wrong, Duncan thought, and he felt his fingertips crackle once again with heat. He made his voice get loud as he said, “Road Rage Magazine
. Inside: Hot wheels and hot babes—we’ve got ’em!”

The kids around the table started to laugh; someone clapped. It wasn’t just Duncan’s fingers that burned; his face did, too. He couldn’t help but show off a little as he sat in the
good
kind of spotlight for the first time in his life, and so he added, “Then there’s a picture of a guy driving a sports car. And a woman in a bikini is lying on the hood, drinking . . . a glass of lemonade, I think. At least, there’s a slice of lemon on the side of the glass.”

“He’s seen it before!” someone insisted.

Someone else said, “He’s memorized it! He’s got, like, one of them photogenic memories!”

A third person yelled, “What a big dumb fake! Fakey McFakester!”

A book was angrily shoved at Duncan, so he began to read it aloud, despite having gym shorts on his head. He read,
“Was Christopher Columbus really the hero that people say he was?”

The kids around the table howled; it was like lunchtime at a school for wolves. Duncan Dorfman was handed math books; diagrams of spores; sheet music from the school’s a cappella group, the Drilltones. He quickly went from being unknown to being surrounded.

“I have plans for you, Lunch Meat—I mean, Dorfman,” whispered Carl Slater. “You ever hear of the YST? The Youth Scrabble Tournament?”

“Yeah,” said Duncan.

“Well, it’s coming up on December twelfth.”

“I don’t really play Scrabble.”

“With your skill, you could be in it this year. You get what I’m saying?”

“No,” said Duncan.

“Think about it, Dorfman. You could pick letters from the bag like they were cherries from a tree,” said Carl. “The tiles used in tournaments are called Protiles, and they aren’t engraved with letters; they’re just stamped in ink. There’s no way to tell what letters they are when they’re in the bag. There’s no way for a
normal
person to tell, I mean. But you could do it. You’re not normal. You’re a
freak
, Dorfman. But in a good way,” he added quickly.

“Is it legal?” Duncan asked doubtfully.

“No, Dorfman, you’ll probably be arrested. The cops will put you in handcuffs and you’ll be sent to death row.” Carl paused, sighing. “Is it legal?
Of course it’s legal!
Jeez! The rules of Scrabble don’t say anything about some freaky fingertip power. Think of the glory, Dorfman. Think of the
cash
.” He paused. “I hear that you and your mom have no money, am I right?” Duncan didn’t say anything. “I hear that your dad died of some disease,” said Carl.

“Panosis,” said Duncan.

“Whatever. And that you and your mom live in some cousin’s house for free, because she feels sorry for you—”

“Great-aunt.”

“Fine! Great-aunt! And that your mom works at Thriftee Mike’s, and that your life is a little grim.” Duncan felt his shoulders tense up, and he opened his mouth, but Carl said, “Relax, Dorfman. I’m not mocking you. I’m just saying this doesn’t have to be the case anymore. We’ll talk later at your locker, okay?”

“Okay,” said Duncan, but he felt deeply uncomfortable, and almost about to throw up, or faint and fall down on the floor.

Carl Slater left the table just as Duncan was carried off into the sea of kids. Somewhere in that sea, Andrew Tanizaki’s head bobbed up, then went under. It would be a long time before the two of them would sit at the same lunch table again.

A FISH OUT OF WATER IN A FAMILY OF JOCKS

A
ll the way across the country in Portland, Oregon, April Blunt sat in her bedroom making flash cards. Her hand wrote out card after card about photosynthesis, but her mind was focused not on plants, but on a person. She didn’t know his name, his e-mail address, his phone number, where he lived, or anything else. They had met once at a motel pool when she was nine, and had spent a couple of hours together. He was a mystery to her, but still she’d been thinking about him off and on for all this time.

The boy was the first person who had ever been impressed by her Scrabble skills. But it wasn’t just that. He’d also made it clear in their brief time together that he liked hanging around April when she talked about Scrabble. She didn’t bore him. Looking back, she realized that he was the first person who’d let her feel like the best version of herself. Later on, other people did that, too, including Lucy Woolery, who became her closest friend and Scrabble partner. But he was the first one, and she thought about him often.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said to Lucy, who was sitting at the foot of April’s bed, making her own far neater flash cards. “The boy I met back then was a lot more interesting to me than photosynthesis.”

“I like photosynthesis,” said Lucy. “It’s plants
breathing
, basically. How sick is that? But of course he was more interesting. Especially since you don’t know who he is or what happened to him.”

A vague picture of the boy who April had met at the motel pool was vacuum-packed inside her brain forever. She and this boy had had a great time during the couple of hours they had spent together. They had talked a lot, and she’d taught him to play Scrabble, and then it was over,
bam.

“It’s amazing that you still think about him,” said Lucy. “Can’t you find out where he is?”

“You can’t look someone up if you don’t know their name,” said April.

“Yes, you can,” said Lucy. “My parents do it all the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll be at dinner, and my mom will say, ‘Paul, who was that actor? The one with the scar on his lip who was in that movie about the deranged zookeeper?’ Then they’ll send me off to get my laptop, and I’ll type in ‘actor,’ ‘scar,’ ‘lip,’ and ‘zookeeper.’ And up pops the name.”

“But this is different,” said April. “I can’t just search for this kid under ‘Boy Who I Met at a Motel Pool Three Years Ago and Who Liked Listening to Me Drone on About Scrabble and Who I Never, Ever Saw Again.’”

“That’s true,” Lucy said.

“If I don’t know this boy’s name, I can’t get any information. It’s just one of those things.” April paused. “You meet somebody, and then your parents say, ‘Okay, great, I’m glad you’ve been having fun. But now it’s time for us to go.’ And because you’re a minor, you have to leave with them, and you and the other person never see each other again. It’s actually kind of sad the way kids have no control over their own lives. We’re just basically . . . puppets being ordered around by cruel puppeteers.”

“Yeah,” said Lucy. “It’s totally tragic. The tragedy of the tormented, underage puppets.”

April took a pillow and thumped it down on Lucy, who laughed hard as some small, curling feathers swooped through the air.

The house was quiet on this clear October Saturday, though out in the backyard there was shouting as usual. “Hut one, hut two, hut three, HIKE,” someone cried, and everyone in the family moved their solid, sporty bodies across the crunching grass.

The Blunts were a family of jocks. All of them had thick, strong necks, except for April, who had always seemed different. The three other Blunt children had weighed over nine pounds at birth and had had broad shoulders, full heads of hair like carpeting, and mashed faces that already gave them the appearance of being jocks.

April was born weighing four pounds, eleven ounces. She didn’t have a single hair on her head. “You were like a little goldfish,” her father sometimes said. If he hadn’t actually witnessed the moment she popped out into the world, he would have sworn that they had been given the wrong baby.

But April
was
a Blunt. As she got older, she still looked nothing like them (she was small, with red hair and nearly see-through pale skin), and acted nothing like them, either, but she
was
one of them—the one who did not “get with the program,” as she often said to her best friend.

Lucy Woolery always nodded and said, “That must be hard,” though she couldn’t relate. The Woolerys were all alike: three tall, skinny, incredibly organized people who were good at everything and had skin of an identical deep brown
.

The Blunts had put April through a series of secret tests over time, as if to reassure themselves that she was one of them. She had failed every test. They gave her the first one when she was eighteen months old, handing her a soccer ball and saying, “Here you go! A ball! A ball for April!”

She held it in her hands, stuck out her tongue and licked it, and put it down. Then she waddled over to the refrigerator door and moved the magnetic alphabet letters around in a big swirl until they spelled the word BALL.

“Oh my God,” said her mother.

“Unbelievable,” said her father.

They turned to each other and whispered in frantic voices. Her parents had both been shocked at her verbal skills, but disappointed that she hadn’t given the ball a good hard kick or, better yet, a slamming head-butt.

There were other tests later on that involved memorizing the names of team cheers. At this she was also hopeless. “Go . . . Rainers?” she would chant with doubt in her voice.

“It’s Raiders, not Rainers,” her parents said. “Try it again.”

When April was six years old she started playing Scrabble, and right away it was obvious that she was good at it. She read word lists, and taught herself the two-letter words that were acceptable in Scrabble—words like XI and PE and HM, and also a few new ones, including QI and ZA.

April still didn’t know what many of these words meant, but she knew that ZA was short for
PIZZA
, even though no one ever said, “Mmm, I’m starving! I wish I had a nice, piping hot slice of pepperoni
za.
”

Whoever came up with the words that were acceptable in the Scrabble dictionary seemed to have a warped view of life, April thought. Why was ZA good, but, say, GA wasn’t? More babies probably said GA than all the people combined who called pizza ZA, but those were the rules.

April had first gotten to know Lucy Woolery a year earlier, in sixth grade, after the Woolerys had moved here from another town in Oregon. She soon learned that Lucy was a talkative and interesting girl who played Scrabble, too. Other kids would say, “Oh, I like Scrabble a lot,” but when April actually sat down to play them, they did something like try to make words on a diagonal, or insisted that something like FLINK was a word.

“Are you thinking of FLUNK?” April had politely asked a boy.

“Nope. FLINK,” he’d said, and then she’d challenged him, and the word had had to be removed from the board.

A few days later, a girl played CURNISH, and April kindly said, “Are you thinking of FURNISH? Because CURNISH isn’t a word.” She offered the girl a chance to take back her word without a penalty.

But the girl said, “It is too a word. It’s a kind of tree.” So April had challenged her, and that word had had to be taken off, too.

April didn’t need other players to be really good, but it was more entertaining when they knew the basics. Lucy did, and they became great friends and opponents. There were never hard feelings when one of them crushed the other. They always shook hands across the board at the end, and went to do something else. Occasionally April and Lucy referred to each other by the names Flink and Curnish. Someday, Lucy said, they would become lawyers and open a practice together called Flink & Curnish, Limited.

“Why do they always say ‘Limited’?” April asked, but Lucy had no idea.

The two of them talked about everything. “Have you ever noticed,” Lucy asked recently as they sat in her room with her dog, Bear, sleeping on the floor between them, “that dogs smell like corn chips?”

“No,” April said. But Lucy was right. Dogs—their paws in particular—did smell like corn chips: slightly salty, with a good, tangy, fried odor. Lucy was always right.

Another time, when they were walking home from school in the fall and kept stopping to step on particularly crunchy-looking leaves, Lucy asked, “How come humans love the sound of leaves crunching? We go out of our way to hear it, to feel it. Why is it so insanely satisfying?”

April said she had no idea. But of course it was a good question.

The girls played Scrabble all the time in their middle school. Lucy was good at everything: sports, English, math, science, drawing, and Scrabble. On December twelfth, they would be playing as a team at the Youth Scrabble Tournament in Yakamee, Florida. Though April’s parents had agreed that she could go, they had no interest in anything as unsporty as Scrabble.

Lately, April had had a persistent fantasy: if she and Lucy made it to the final round of the YST, her family would finally respect her. She had read online that the finals would be broadcast live on the cable sports channel
Thwap!
TV. If she and Lucy appeared on that channel, her family would realize that Scrabble
was
a sport. It was a sport of the brain.