14

Again, a routine was established. Each morning Billy rose at six-thirty and, after making his bed and straightening his room, went down the long stairway to breakfast. Breakfast was different here than it had been at Melinda's; though everyone met at roughly the same time, there was not the same feeling at the table as there had been at Melinda's house. Everyone here was preoccupied with their own day's beginning. Reverend Beck was still half asleep at this time of the morning (except on Sundays when he’d been up all Saturday night working on his sermon and hadn’t slept at all), and what little wakefulness he was able to muster went toward concentrating on his day’s duties ahead. Mrs. Beck was busier serving breakfast than anything else. She usually sat down to eat when the others were about  to get up and leave.  Only Christine was on the same schedule as Billy, but her initial interest and curiosity in him had cooled. The two of them were at a stalemate. She ignored him unless she had something specific to deal with.

“Christine, did you finish that math homework last night?” Jacob Beck asked, putting down the copy of Time magazine he’d been peering at.

“Yes,” she said, looking at her plate.

“All of it?”

“Most.”

Jacob leveled his gaze at her.

“I finished almost everything,” Christine protested. “There were a couple of problems I couldn’t get.  I’ll do them in homeroom.”

“Billy, did you finish your work last night?” Jacob asked.

“Yes,” the boy answered.

“If Billy could . . . ”  Jacob began but Christine pushed herself away from the table.

“Because I’m not Billy,” she said angrily, getting up and stalking to the front hallway. She threw on her coat, and a moment later stormed out the front door.

From the kitchen, Mary Beck gave her husband the hard, changed look she had been giving him often lately.

When Billy left the house, Christine turned away, facing down the block so that the full back of her jacket was to him. The morning was chilly and crisp. Leaves that had danced in the wind the night before now rested quietly on the sidewalks and in the gutter. They showed the first not-quite bright colors of early autumn; their cousins to follow would be riotous compared to their serenity.

The bus was late. Christine moved the toe of one sneaker nervously back and forth through the leaves. She looked up the block for the bus, and switched her schoolbooks from arm to arm. Finally, she turned to face Billy. "You were staring at me!" she screamed. "What is it with you? Why don't you go away, back to your parents or wherever you came from!"

Billy was silent.

"Why did you have to come here?" she said. "You've got my father eating out of your hand, but don't think that's going to get you anywhere. You're a creep, just like they say you are. Everybody knows it."

At that moment the bus appeared, huffing to a stop at the curb.

"Stay away from me!" Christine said, moving ahead of him onto the bus, threading her way to a back seat and looking behind to make sure he didn't follow.

Billy climbed quietly into the vehicle and sat in the third seat from the front behind the bus driver, near the window. It was always empty for him. The seat next to him would remain unoccupied all the way to school, even if the bus was crowded and some of the others had to stand in the aisle.

Billy's day wore inevitably on, through English and geography, a study period and then math. In math class, Christine sat only two seats in front of him, and she squirmed when Ms. Bates, the teacher, asked them to turn in their written homework.

The lunch bell rang. There was an avalanche of children into the halls, through the cafeteria and out into the school yard.

Billy went to the corner where he always sat, with his lunch bag beside him and his back against an oak tree. Sometimes he faced the school yard, watching the games of tag and stickball. Today, he faced the other way, toward the chain-link fence that separated the school from the rest of the world. He watched the trucks go by, the mothers with strollers, the occasional hooky-playing student sneaking out the front gate to Miller's deli or to have a smoke in an alley across the street. Today there was the slow progress of the knife-sharpener man's truck as it rolled smoothly up the road. Its tinkling bells announced its arrival, and the huge open window on the wooden side of the ancient truck announced that it was open for business. No one stopped it.

From behind, someone said Billy's name. It was a statement, not a question. Billy turned his head. He put his sandwich down carefully on its wax paper next to the other half.

It was John, from Melinda's house. The same John he had seen in Jacob Beck's church, staring up at him from the pew below.

Silence stretched between them. Behind them, the knife-sharpener man's truck moved slowly away, the tinkle of its bells dimming.

"Why are you here?" John asked.

"This is where I belong," Billy replied.

"Why?"

Billy's face was blank.

"You'll live with the Becks for a while," John said, "but it won't last. They won't want you. No one will. They'll all be afraid of you."

"Are you?"

There was a sudden tight movement of John's Adam's apple, a nervous movement of his hands at his sides, that said more than his mouth could.

"I saw what you did to Jim Crane in the school yard that day," John said. There was a quiver in his voice. "I saw your eyes." Desperate anger rose in John's voice. "I knew Melinda liked you better than the rest of us. I saw that the day she brought you home. She told me once you needed her more. But I never believed that. I think you used her. I think you fooled her like you fooled everybody else. You fooled Marsh and Rebecca, too." He balled one of his fists and banged it against his side. A tear snaked down one cheek. His face was flushed. "You know where I came from? My father came home from work one day and kicked me out. He'd done the same thing to my mother. But now he had another woman, and he didn't want me around to remind him of my mother. He didn't even give me a chance to take anything with me. I had a baseball-card collection, and  . . ." Hot tears rolled down his face, and he wiped at them with his sleeve. He glanced quickly to see that no one else in the school yard was near them, before the unstoppable flow of his words, of what was in him, forced him to go on. "He didn't even let me get that! I had a glove, and my new sneakers, and . . ." He paused, calming himself before going on. "Most of it my mother had given me. When Melinda found me, I'd been eating out of garbage cans for a month. She took me in and people loved me there. Only my mother had ever loved me." His eyes filled with red anger. "And then you came. Everything they gave to me—Melinda, Marsh, and Rebecca—they gave to you. I thought I'd found a new home, and then you came.

"And now you're here, and you want to steal it all again. You couldn't stand to see that I got everything I ever wanted, so you followed me here. I wouldn't be surprised if you killed Melinda before you came here. I don't care what you are. You're not going to take everything away from me again."

Christine appeared, stopping about ten feet away. "John, you okay?" she asked.

"I'll be right there," John answered. The flush had begun to recede from his face.

Christine walked a few steps away, stopping to wait for him.

John looked down at Billy, whose facial expression had not changed. The same steady gaze met him.

"Just stay away from me," John hissed, pointing a finger down at Billy. "I don't care what you are. Don't bother me, or this time I'll make sure you get taken care of."

He walked away quickly to meet Christine, who took his hand. They talked as they retreated, glancing back once at Billy before joining a group of boys and girls, one of them a tall boy with long blond hair and tight jeans who laughed and shouted "Hey!" as the crowd drifted to the other side of the playground.

Billy picked up his sandwich. It lay on wax paper on top of his lunch bag. He turned toward the chain-link fence again. The knife-sharpener's truck was long gone. Across the street someone came out of the deli, a man in a gray sweatshirt with a tool belt around his waist and a thin cigar in his mouth. He cradled a large paper bag in one hand. He shaded his eyes with his other hand and looked up one side of the street. Then he walked down the block away from the school. Near the end of the block he met two other men sitting on the lowered tail end of a pickup truck. He rested the bag there, and the three of them laughed over something one of them said and began to eat.

Overhead, a bird landed in the tree, announcing its arrival with three sharp notes. Billy glanced up; the bird met his gaze, one eye cocked to the side. It flapped its deep blue wings and went to a neighboring tree, where it perched, regarding him curiously.

Billy looked through the chain-link fence. Then a long, sharp set of clangs, the bell signaling the end of lunch, sounded behind him. Down at the end of the block, the three men and their pickup were gone. A torn paper bag in the gutter was the only evidence that they had ever been there. In the tree next to the one he sat under, the bird had taken flight.

Billy gathered up the remains of his lunch. He put everything into the paper bag, closing the top and folding it neatly over.

He rose, taking the bag with him, and went back to school.