Dodger Boy Read online

  “Human being?” asked Mom.

  James rolled his eyes. “Bunch of dope-smoking hippie loser long-hairs.”

  “Now, James, no need to be narrow-minded. Are you having breakfast before you go?”

  James flinched, shook his head, and carried his coffee out the door.

  “I guess budding businessmen don’t eat breakfast,” said Mom.

  “So we need some plastic buckets that it doesn’t matter if they get wrecked.”

  “Problem is,” said Mom, “that I can’t see pasta-making and tie-dyeing going on in the same kitchen at once.”

  The kitchen door opened and Dawn appeared, backing in with her arms full of bags.

  “Hi, everybody. Claude! You’re back. What’s that stuff hanging on the chairs?”

  “Maybe tie-dye could happen outside? Under the deck?” said Claude.

  “But we need hot water.”

  “Coffee urn do you? I can get it from the garage. And there’s some buckets there, too.”

  “Don’t dye the urn, okay? We need it tomorrow for Meeting and I don’t want to give them blue coffee,” said Mom.

  * * *

  Under the deck was crowded with stuff.

  Charlotte sighed, “This family is hopeless. Your parents would never keep a rusty barbecue ‘just in case.’”

  “But I love all your stuff.” Dawn put down an armful of bags and edged a faded pink plastic box from under the chaos.

  “Look! L’il Kitchen. I remember this.” She opened up the L’il Oven and pulled out a stuffed animal. “Pandabear! Oh. He’s not looking too good.”

  “Ick! He’s not only moldy. He’s suppurating.”

  Dawn rolled her eyes. “Suppurating! Word Power, right?”

  Charlotte was a loyal reader of “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” in Reader’s Digest.

  “Yup, good one, eh? Sounds like it means. Okay. Let’s get things set up. Here’s the rubber gloves. The plug for the urn is behind that piece of plywood.”

  By piling, rearranging and hucking they were able to clear a space. They set up the buckets on some garden chairs and balanced the coffee urn on a plastic milk crate. Groovy Tie-Dye Fun was propped on a pile of plant pots.

  Dawn tore open the packets of dye. “Red, yellow, blue. We should be able to make all the colors. Is the water hot yet?”

  “Use lots of dye. Groovy says we want intense color.”

  “Okay. Step one. Twist your garment into a spiral.”

  The girls squinched up the wet skirt and dress and tied them into lumps.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Charlotte noticed the chair holding the bucket of blue beginning to rock on the uneven ground.

  “Hey! Puff! Get off there!”

  Charlotte lunged as the cat sprang into the air and the chair tipped and a waterfall of blue dye cascaded out of the bucket and puddled on the dirt.

  As she grabbed for the cat, her foot caught in the cord of the coffee urn. Puff yowled and went into attack mode, scratching Charlotte right through her rubber glove. Time stopped as the urn began to tip.

  Charlotte imagined a tidal wave of water scalding the cat but seemed frozen into inaction.

  Dawn did her own lunge and grabbed the urn just before it fell off the crate. Puff made her escape right through the lake of blue dye and Charlotte ripped off her glove. Three deep scratches were beading blood.

  There was a moment of silence with only the sound of blue dye dripping.

  “So. That was groovy fun,” said Dawn, which somehow struck Charlotte as the funniest thing ever and they both fell into laughing.

  “Okay. Stop. Stop!” said Charlotte with a final nose-dripping snort.

  Still giggling, they bandaided Charlotte’s hand and got reorganized.

  “So,” said Charlotte. “No blue. No green.”

  “It’s okay. We’ve got red, yellow and orange. It’ll still be good.”

  “Remember when we had our colors done that time at the mall? We’ll both be autumn for the be-in.”

  They tied and dyed and dried. Blue-pawed Puff snuck back. The rubber gloves leaked. Charlotte wiggled her orange fingers at Dawn.

  “What’s this color? It’s just like … oh, come on, it’s on the tip of my brain.”

  “Kwik-Tan! Remember Mandy North and the Summer Bronze Kwik-Tan and how her legs went orange?”

  Charlotte nodded. “That’s it.”

  Who else in the world would know about Mandy’s leg disaster? Well, presumably Mandy, but her family moved to the States the next year.

  “Where did they move to? Idaho?”

  “Maybe. Or Iowa or Ohio. One of those ones.”

  “Somewhere where nobody knew about the shame of her orange legs and she could be a different person.”

  Charlotte stirred the dye. “If you moved away and you could be a different kind of person who would you be?”

  “A person with straight hair. Folksinger-straight hair. So nobody would say, ‘Hey, Dawn, what did you do to your hair?’ You?”

  “I’d be sophisticated, like a reporter on TV. They get to be really smart.”

  “You’re already really smart.”

  Good old Dawn. She knew the right thing to say. Charlotte held up her bandaided Kwik-Tan hands.

  “But not exactly sophisticated.”

  Dawn fished a bright red lump of bound-up fabric out of the bucket. “Is this done?”

  “I think so. Moment of truth.”

  They snapped off the elastic bands and shook the fabric out into the air.

  “Beautiful!”

  “Beautiful-weird!”

  “Like a sunset!”

  “Like a sunset in a kaleidoscope!”

  “So human,” said Dawn.

  “So be-in,” said Charlotte.

  Three

  Charlotte was doodling. Martian flowers bloomed in the margins of her notebook.

  Would school be cooler if classes were called learn-ins?

  In the last year of elementary school on the last class of the last day before spring break, adding “in” didn’t work. It was Charlotte’s favorite subject, English, with her favorite teacher of all time, Miss O. O. McGough, but today the hour was dragging. In fact, the whole week had felt stretched out, just delaying holidays and especially the be-in.

  Straight-A Sylvia was standing at the front of the class talking about The Lord of the Rings, Volume Three: The Return of the King. The Lord of the Rings was not on the curriculum, of course, but O.O. had thrown the curriculum out the window. Students got to read whatever they wanted. It was O.O.’s last year of teaching before retirement, and she had decided to “go rogue.”

  First thing in September she told the class that everyone was going to get a B in English.

  “All you have to do is read. You are required to keep a list and once in a while you have to tell the class what you’re reading and one interesting thing about it, but no book reports are required or indeed permitted. No book reports, no exams, no projects. Just reading and a bit of talking. We’ll devote the last hour of every day to this plan. I do not have permission to do this but I’ve wanted to try it for my whole teaching career and what can they do to me now? Fire me? I am invincible.”

  At this point in the speech O.O. had assumed a superhero pose, which looked especially goofy as she was less than five feet tall and skinny as a kid.

  “You still have to have marks so everyone is getting a B and we can stop thinking about that from this moment to the last syllable of recorded time.”

  This plan did not go over well with Sylvia Lane, Straight-A Queen. “Can we do extra work and get an A?”

  O.O. shook her head and smiled. “No. Bs all around.”

  Sylvia may have objected but the guys in the back row liked it. They punched and nudged Larry into aski
ng questions.

  “What do we gotta read?”

  “Absolutely anything,” said O.O. “I’m going to bring in my entire book collection. You can borrow anything and if you want to keep the book you can. I’m clearing out. Or you can bring in a book from the library or from home.”

  Punch, punch, kick, kick. “Can it be like a comic or a magazine?”

  “Magazine” was obviously code for Playboy but O.O. just nodded.

  “Print of any sort. Follow your passions. Snicker away, Neil Cameron. Unlikely as this seems now when you are an unappetizing lump of unevolved dough, you are going to grow up to be a perfectly splendid human being and when you do, you will look back on grade seven and remember me and find that I am right.”

  The other person who seemed uneasy about the plan was Dorcas Radger. She asked O.O. if she could read the Bible. O.O. said of course she could and that the Bible was a rich work of literature.

  Dorcas made Charlotte uncomfortable. She knew she should feel sorry for her because of her awful mother. Mrs. Radger was a member of city council and her thing was cleaning up the city. Not litter, but “moral filth.” The summer before grade seven she had walked up and down the nude beach out near the university with a sign saying Clothe Thy Nakedness. There were pictures in the paper.

  But there was also something kind of scary about Dorcas. Snobby and scary, like she was just getting ready to be mean.

  Usually the hour was pretty fun. Somebody would say what they’d been reading and maybe read a few sentences aloud and then the class would talk about it. If it was a story or a poem O.O. would say something about the words or the characters. If it was a book about something or someone, the class talked about that something or someone. Over the year they’d discussed how people are manipulated by advertising and are ghosts real and who really killed President Kennedy.

  Two people had read the same book all year. Larry read The Guinness Book of World Records and Dorcas read the Bible. None of the back-row snickerers had actually turned up with Playboy.

  O.O. had lots of books about teenagers and Charlotte had gulped down most of them. The kids in those books all had big problems like mental illness, handicaps, pregnancy and being in gangs. But then Charlotte discovered Pride and Prejudice and she got stuck on it, starting again at the beginning as soon as she finished it. She’d reported on it three times because there was so much to say.

  Usually the last hour was a good hour but The Lord of the Rings wasn’t holding Charlotte’s attention that Thursday. The back-row boys were restless, too.

  Sylvia was bragging about how many pages there were in all three volumes of the trilogy (she had not given up on her hopes of inflating a B) when the door burst open, banging against the wall.

  Sylvia dropped The Return of the King. An arm appeared. Attached to the arm was Mrs. Radger. She was holding a copy of Catcher in the Rye at arm’s length, like you would hold a used diaper.

  Catcher in the Rye had gone around the room like wildfire earlier in the year after Peter Lindos read a sexy bit out loud, probably on a dare from Larry. Charlotte had given it a try but she just didn’t like that boy, Holden. He seemed like a spoiled rich kid. And the sexy bits were actually kind of upsetting.

  Stump, stump, stump. Mrs. Radger walked across the front of the room to stand by O.O.’s desk. Sylvia stepped back against the blackboard.

  “Is this filth your book?” Mrs. Radger had a booming voice.

  Charlotte glanced over at Dorcas, who went from pale to paler.

  “I don’t know if it’s my copy,” said O.O. “Look at the flyleaf and see if my name is in it. And, by the way, have you signed in at the office? Parents are always welcome in the class but all visitors need to sign in.”

  “Sign in. Pah!”

  Pah. It was like air released from a balloon.

  “Have you actually read this book?” Mrs. Radger was getting pinker and pinker.

  O.O. nodded. “Yes, I try to keep up with what my students are reading. Have you read it, Mrs. Radger?”

  “Read it? This smut? I have no need to read it, thank you very much. I have read all I need to know about this so-called novel.” Mrs. Radger made the words “smut” and “novel” sound worse than the worst words in Catcher in the Rye.

  O.O. pushed her chair back and started to stand but Mrs. Radger stepped farther into the room and O.O. froze.

  She approached O.O.’s desk and held up the open book with both hands.

  “There’s only one thing to do with this muck.”

  With a grunt, she tried to rip the book in half. But it wasn’t that easy to tear a hardcover book in half. She tried a couple of times and the back row started to giggle. Her pink face darkened and she gave a magenta glare in their general direction and then heaved the book into the metal wastepaper basket.

  Clang!

  “You will be hearing more about this,” she said and turned to go. Then she stuck out her hand and commanded, “Dorcas. Come.”

  Nobody giggled then. Charlotte glanced sideways and caught Dawn’s eye. There was a whole conversation in her raised eyebrows.

  The door slammed behind the whirlwind.

  O.O. pulled the book out of the garbage can. She riffled through the pages. They were blacked out, big chunks of black. She seemed kind of stunned.

  “Yes. My copy. I wish Dorcas had spoken to me about this.”

  Sylvia picked up the 512 pages of Return of the King and slid back to her desk.

  Then the bell rang.

  The usual rumble started and O.O.’s vagueness disappeared.

  “Sit!” She sounded like a fierce dog-training lady.

  “Right. Here’s what’s going to happen now. Nobody from this class is going to talk about this. Nobody is going to tease Dorcas when she comes back to school. We’re not going to turn it into a joke. If someone starts doing this, it’s your responsibility to shut them up. That must have been horribly embarrassing for Dorcas. We’re not our parents and we’re not responsible for them. We’ve talked a lot about censorship this year. The freedom to read what you want is important. Kindness is even more important. When you get back after holidays we’ll have a new copy of Salinger in our class library. And nobody will have been humiliated. Is that clear?”

  Mumble. Mumble. Shrug. Shrug. There was the roar of students passing in the hall.

  “I need an answer. Is. That. Clear?” O.O. looked like she was facing down an attack dog.

  There were nods all over the room.

  “Right. You’re good people. Off you go. Happy holidays. Read up a storm.”

  Charlotte glanced back at O.O. as she left. The teacher was sitting at her desk, looking out the window. The back of her head and her shoulders looked old.

  Four

  Friday and Saturday were delicious. Sleeping in, eating breakfast at noon, watching People in Conflict on TV, hanging out while Claude made cinnamon buns, taking said buns down to Green Thumb and lounging around with Miss Biscuit who did the Saturday shift at the shop, playing the radio loud when everyone was out of the house, reliving the Mrs. Radger drama with Dawn on the phone (“Did you notice that little bits of spit came out of her mouth?”) until Dad came by and tapped his watch.

  But Sunday, Be-In Day, Dawn phoned early to report a crisis.

  “Charlotte! Phone!” Claude’s voice broke into her dreams. She stumbled down to the front hall.

  “They’ve been reading the paper and now they’re all worried about marijuana and a ‘police presence.’”

  Mr. and Mrs. Novak were hard to figure out. In some ways they were way cooler than the Quintans, with their interior decoration and all that. But they were also stricter. More “old country,” as Dawn put it. Dawn had been born in the old country but she was only interested in being one hundred percent Canadian.

  She was furious. “They’re going to drive u
s!”

  “Is that so bad?” Charlotte stretched around the corner of the hall to look out the window. “It looks kind of rainy.”

  “Charlotte! It’s going to be SO embarrassing to be dropped off, like our first day at kindergarten. They just treat me like a child. Can you come over?”

  “Uhh, sure. I’ll bring all the stuff.”

  By the time Charlotte arrived at the Novaks’, Dawn had bounced back from furious. Mrs. Novak was wandering around in elegant loungewear with a cup of coffee, and Mr. Novak was nowhere to be seen.

  There was an ironing board set up in the living room and the tie-dyes were festooned across the furniture.

  The skirt looked great on the armchair.

  “Try it on,” said Mrs. Novak. “I want to see this hippies look.”

  Charlotte pulled on the skirt. Then she went into the hall to look in the full-length mirror.

  She wanted to cry. She looked ridiculous. Like one of the younger, rounder children in The Sound of Music.

  She couldn’t go out in the world looking like this. Maybe she could just stay in her jeans. Maybe she wouldn’t go to the be-in after all. What had made her agree to this whole thing?

  Mrs. Novak walked by and turned Charlotte to face her.

  “Oh, no, no, no. Take it off. Daliborka! Get the sewing machine!”

  “Mo-om. Dawn.”

  Dawn had turned up at kindergarten and announced her name as Dawn. Her parents sometimes forgot.

  With much tsk-ing over the poor quality of the original workmanship, Mrs. Novak measured and pinned, cut and sewed, added elastic and darts, all at top speed and accompanied by the tinkling of small bells.

  A final snip of threads and the skirt was ready. Held up in the air it looked basically the same, and Charlotte didn’t hold out much hope. But Mrs. Novak had performed magic. Once on, it looked folky, not lumpy at all. And perfect with Dawn’s peasant blouse.

  Mrs. Novak gave an approving nod. “Good now.”

  “Leave up the ironing board,” said Dawn. “I want you to iron my hair.”

  “Why would you do that? Your hair is fabulous.”