The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (7 page)

He glanced down the list of twos, which was partly made up of words that he had never seen or heard before. But all of these words were acceptable in a game of Scrabble:

AA

AB

AD

AE

AG

AH

AI

AL

AM

AN

AR

AS

AT

AW

AX

AY

BA

BE

BI

BO

BY

DE

DO

ED

EF

EH

EL

EM

EN

ER

ES

ET

EX

FA

FE

GO

HA

HE

HI

HM

HO

ID

IF

IN

IS

IT

JO

KA

KI

LA

LI

LO

MA

ME

MI

MM

MO

MU

MY

NA

NE

NO

NU

OD

OE

OF

OH

OI

OM

ON

OP

OR

OS

OW

OX

 

OY

PA

PE

PI

QI

RE

SH

SI

SO

TA

TI

TO

UH

UM

UN

UP

US

UT

WE

WO

XI

XU

YA

YE

YO

ZA

 

“Whoa!”
Duncan said when he got all the way to ZA. “I have to
memorize
all of these? That’s insane, Carl. I’m not good at that.”

“Then what are you good at?” Carl asked.

Duncan was silent. He knew, actually, that he was not particularly good at anything. Nothing had come together inside him and grabbed him by the throat. He had no burning interest yet; he still had no incredible ability in any subject at school or in any sport. Suddenly he felt babyish and ashamed.

“I don’t know yet,” said Duncan.

“Well,” said Carl, “just memorize these twos. Become good at it. I swear,” he went on, “it’s no harder than some of the things you have to memorize for school. Like last year in science we had to learn all these unfamous parts of the human body. Did you know that we’ve got things inside us called the islets of Langerhans?”

“No,” said Duncan. You could never tell, with Carl Slater, whether he was being serious or trying to jerk you around.

Duncan folded the list back up and put it into his own pocket. Sitting here across the table from Carl, he thought about what a long way he had come since the earliest days of school, when he was simply Lunch Meat, lumped together with the Chinaman. His ordinariness and dullness now seemed increasingly far away. As far away as the islets of Langerhans.

LANGERHANS, Duncan thought as he sat in Slice’s. He moved the letters around slowly in his mind, as Carl had told him to do. He saw that you could make HANGERS from LANGERHANS. Or, he saw, you could make LASAGNE. You’d still have leftover letters, of course, but hey, Duncan joked to himself, you
always
have leftovers when you make lasagne.

“The thing is, dude,” said Carl, “it’s one thing for you to be able to
feel
the tiles and know what they are. I mean, it’s a great skill, because as I said, you can pull all the best tiles out of the bag. And your opponent will basically be left with a rack made up of EEEIIOA.” He snickered softly. “Or VWULNUG. But once you’ve
got
the tiles, you still need to keep up your side of the game. I can’t do everything by myself,” he added. “I’m good, but there are kids out there across the country who are a lot better. And we’re all going to meet up in Yakamee. Last year Drilling Falls got humiliated—it was
pathetic
—but this year, with my secret weapon by my side, we will cream everyone.”

“What’s your secret weapon?” Duncan asked, and as soon as he spoke, he thought: DUH. (A word, he had recently found out, that was good in Scrabble.)

“
You
are, dude,” said Carl Slater cheerfully. “You’re my secret weapon. And I forgot to mention this, but when we win that money, I will be happy to split it with you seventy-thirty. That would net you
three thousand dollars.
Pretty nice pay for doing something you do anyway—feeling things on flat surfaces, right? I know your mom could really, really use that money,” he added. Carl stood, shrugging into his denim jacket. “Speaking of moms,” he said, “I see that mine has just pulled up outside. I’ve got to run.”

Duncan looked through the pizza-place window and saw a gleaming black sports car with an ornament of a leaping gazelle on its hood. Inside was a woman who had an older, female version of Carl Slater’s face, with slightly puffy-looking lips. She was smoking a cigarette, which clouded the inside of the car. She pressed a button to lower the window, and some of the smoke escaped. “CARL!” she called in a hoarse voice. “ORTHODONTIST’S! NOW!”

“See you,” Carl said to Duncan. “Work on those twos. And think about the cash, my friend.”

Duncan Dorfman understood that Carl Slater wasn’t really his friend. Anyone could see that a seventy-thirty split was unfair. Anyone could hear the casual unpleasantness in Carl’s line about how Duncan’s mother could really, really use that money.

“Sounds good to me,” Duncan said.

I am a doormat, he thought. I am Duncan Doormat. And I am also an old piece of lunch meat that’s lying on the doormat, and someone is stepping on it and squashing it forever.

“So it’s a deal,” said Carl. “Seventy-thirty. Seventy me, thirty you. Obviously.”

“It’s a deal,” Duncan heard himself reply. Though he hated himself for saying it, the words were already out of his mouth.

And words, he realized, mattered.

THE SEARCH FOR THE BOY FROM NOWHERE

O
n a Friday night in November, April Blunt and Lucy Woolery babysat together for an extremely hyper four-year-old named Jasper Kroger, who lived across the street from the Woolerys. After insisting that April and Lucy cook him some packaged clown-head-shaped macaroni and cheese, then create a scavenger hunt for him throughout the house, and finally call his father’s cell phone to ask how old he would have to be to get a tattoo (“Thirty-five,” Mr. Kroger calmly replied), little Jasper finally collapsed while listening to a CD of some annoying kiddie singer who played the kazoo, and April and Lucy had a chance to talk. The school week had been very busy, but now that the weekend had come, they wanted to discuss the upcoming Scrabble tournament, and also, once again, the boy from the motel pool.

“Any brainstorms about finding him?” Lucy asked.

“Nope,” April said.

They were sitting in the Krogers’ playroom, on child-sized chairs at a child-sized table, beneath a big painting of a dinosaur on a unicycle, eating Jasper’s leftover clown-head macaroni and cheese, which was an orange color so bright and unnatural that it almost hurt to look at it.
Now with even more disgusting neon flavor!
April thought the package should have read. A few days earlier, they had gone online and tried to locate the summer camp for allergic kids that the boy at the pool had told her he’d gone to, but apparently it no longer existed.

“If we’re seriously ever going to make any progress locating him,” said Lucy, “then we’re going to have to come up with a new plan.” Of course, neither of them had a plan in mind, so they sat eating the rubbery macaroni for a minute or two, thinking hard.

When their plates were empty, April said, “I’ve got nothing. You?”

“Nothing,” said Lucy.

They stopped thinking about the boy for now. Instead they took out the Scrabble set that Lucy had brought with her, set it up on the tiny table, then bent over it and began to play.

 

 

The next morning, when April Blunt awoke and went downstairs in her house, the place was in full swing. This was always the case; her family woke up earlier than she did. They woke up earlier than
anyone
, except maybe farmers. A ball was hitting a wall somewhere deep in the distance, with a rhythm that made the whole house shudder. Her brother, Gregory, came skating in on his Rollerblades, dressed in full hockey gear, knocking a little puck along the floorboards.

“You’ll leave wheel marks, Gregory,” April said. She was often in a cranky mood when she woke up and had to face the sports world of her family.

“Just because you don’t know how to Rollerblade doesn’t mean you have to take it out on me,” Gregory said, and he pivoted and glided away, leaving a wheel mark in the place where the hallway opened into the living room.

“Maybe I don’t want to Rollerblade!” she called out to him. “Maybe I have other things to do!” But Gregory was already in an entirely different part of the house, probably leaving wheel marks there, too.

Jenna, the older of April’s two sisters, was sitting on the living room couch studying a notebook in which were written plays for her touch football game that weekend. April’s other sister, Liz, was doing stretches on the floor, hoping that a charley horse in her left leg would heal before lacrosse tomorrow.

“Scrabble’s a sport, too,” April said to the room in general. It was something she had said many times before, but it never made a dent.

Jenna looked up from the sheet of diagrams so complicated they seemed like something a mad scientist would write on a blackboard. “What?” she asked through her haze of concentration.

“I said that Scrabble’s a sport,” said April.

“So you’ve told us,” said Liz with a little half smile, before returning to her stretching.

April headed down the hall, passing her mother, who was on her hands and knees, her head in a closet, searching for something.

“Hi, Mom,” April said.

“Oh hi, babe, you’re up,” said her mother, backing out of the closet. “Good. Breakfast’s in a minute. Everyone’s starving. Have you seen Gregory’s mouth guard?”

“What? No,” April answered.

“Well, if you do—”

“Okay, fine, got it,” said April, and she went into the dining room and sat down at the big wooden table, not wanting to think about a little lost black piece of rubber with her brother’s tooth marks and germs all over it. In the quiet room before her family arrived, she thought instead about Scrabble words. Yawning, April put her head down on the table and let her mind get loose and dreamy. Soon, different words appeared before her. A couple of random, strange Scrabble words drifted past. She saw:

GARDYLOO

and . . .

I LEX

and . . .

SILEX

April must have fallen back asleep, she realized, because the next thing she knew, everyone was all around her, and her dad was bringing a mess of pancakes to the table, and her brother was saying, “I want a ton of syrup, Dad. Like, an entire reservoir.” All the Blunts did seem to be starving, and why not? Most of them had been up since dawn, running laps or lifting weights or doing sit-ups. As usual in this family, everyone talked at once.

When there was a brief quiet moment, April said, “Lucy and I practiced for the tournament last night.”

“Which tournament?” asked Liz.

“Scrabble,” said April. There was no reply.

“Well, that’s nice,” her father finally said. “You girls work hard at that word game.”

April’s face got warm again, but it was from frustration instead of embarrassment. She knocked back a glass of OJ to cool herself down. Too bad OJ wasn’t good in Scrabble. Why couldn’t her family understand the thrill of Scrabble, the excitement when you won a game, or even when you made an amazingly interesting word?

She flashed back once again to the boy in the blue T-shirt at the motel pool. Somehow, she knew that he would have understood how she felt. Maybe, April thought, he had even gone on to become really good at Scrabble. And maybe every time he played it now, he remembered the redheaded girl who had taught him.

“Here’s a good thing to know in Scrabble,” April told her family. She looked around the table and saw that all of them except her mother had resumed eating, their heads bent down. She could see the parts in her sisters’ and her brother’s hair, and half of the bald circle on the very top of her father’s head.

“Go on, sweetie,” said her mother. “We’re listening. What did you want to say?”

“Nothing,” said April.

“Come on,” said her father, looking up. Most likely, April thought, her mother had given him a kick under the table. “Tell us.”

“It’s a trick for knowing what letters can go after the letters K-A,” she said. “Just remember BETSY’S FEET.” Everyone looked at her blankly. “The letters in the words BETSY’S FEET are the only ones that can go after the letters K-A in a game of Scrabble,” April said. “That means you could make every word that I’m about to say.”

She took a breath, then rattled off:

“KAB

KAE

KAF

KAS

KAT

KAY.”

Her family continued to look as blank as a set of blank tiles. “Those are actual words?” her mother asked, and April nodded. “Have you ever heard of KAB or KAF?” she asked her husband.

“Nope,” he said. “Never have.”

“Neither have I.”

“Neither have we,” said Liz and Jenna, and a second later Gregory chimed in, too. Then, satisfied that they had given April enough time to talk about what interested her, they all began a discussion about the pros and cons of different brands of cleats.