The In-Between Page 3

  Giggled.

  No. There was no way Zack could get it.

  Now Zack gently elbowed him in the ribs. “I know why I look rough, but what’s your excuse?”

  “Oh, Jess and I got into a fight.” Cooper said this dismissively, but he had tossed and turned in bed past midnight hearing the echoes of all he’d said, feeling like a jerk (though he knew he’d probably say it all over again if Jess came back at him). When he’d gone to her room to check her blood sugar before bedtime, she wouldn’t even speak to him. This silence wasn’t broken at breakfast, and when they left for the bus, she had run ahead to meet up with her friends. “It’s no biggy, though,” he added.

  “What’d you fight about?”

  “Nothing.”

  A quiet descended between the two of them, making Cooper wiggle in his seat and chew his fingernail. Two years ago, Cooper would have been excited to tell Zack about that train mystery, the unidentified boy and crest and the possible connection to the girl next door. In fact, he probably would have texted Zack the night before, the minute after Jess showed him the articles. But nothing seemed to want to come out of his mouth anymore. Words and thoughts seemed to get lodged in the back of his throat, tangled and stuck like a logjam.

  So Cooper just sat, half paying attention as Zack filled the empty air with what had happened in the video game. He listened, nodding at the appropriate times, and even managed a few “Cool” and “Wow” comments along the way, but his mind wandered. Was it possible that the girl across the alley was connected to that crash somehow? It didn’t make any sense how she could be, but the crests were awfully similar. . . .

  With a squeal and a lurch, the bus came to its next stop. Two seventh-grade girls boarded, discussing something of great seriousness as they took their seats a few rows ahead of Cooper. They were followed by two younger brothers and a new boy in Cooper’s grade who wore the exact same thing every day: a pair of khakis and a baggy sweatshirt that read CALM DOWN! IT’S PE, NOT THE OLYMPICS. Cooper’s mom would describe this kid as “big-boned,” which Cooper always found to be a weird phrase, since he was pretty sure everyone’s bones were the same size.

  As this thought was running through Cooper’s head, the boy looked directly at him, causing Cooper to quickly turn away, feeling like a jerk for musing about his bones one way or another. By the time Cooper glanced back, the boy had sat down in no-man’s-land.

  By official school policy, the first two rows were for the kindergartners, and the rest of the bus was open for all. Everyone knew, however, the unspoken bus rules: the older you were, and the cooler you were, the farther you got to sit to the back. Everyone sorted themselves out accordingly, but since there were more seats on the bus than there were kids, there were always at least two or three empty rows between the kindergartners and everyone else.

  The new kid always sat in row three.

  “Those two are like identical twins attached at the head!” one of Cooper’s classmates joked loudly, nodding toward the chatting girls. “Hey, ladies! Do you need to be surgically detached, or do you share only one brain?”

  There were snickers from the whole back row. One of the girls stared pointedly forward, ignoring the barb. The other gave the entire back of the bus a squinty-eyed glare before swinging her head around with a dramatic whip of her ponytail.

  Cooper looked at his new classmate. It was best he was in the front. Up there, he was out of the splash zone of all the eighth-grade jeers and jokes—any closer and he would almost certainly become a target.

  As Cooper sat there, jostled by a bad patch of road, he couldn’t keep from glancing at the boy, who stared silently out the window at the houses as they rolled by. Cooper had never spoken to this kid, but they didn’t need to talk for Cooper to know they had one thing in common. As he too turned to look out his window to take in the view, the familiar weight of loneliness pressed down on both of them.

  5

  An unusually long line stretched out the door of the lunchroom and down the hallway when Cooper arrived after math, lunch bag in hand. He had tried to sneak into the library to use the computers while he ate, but the librarian was like a hawk when it came to food—she could smell even an apple from a mile away. Further research on the train mystery would have to wait.

  “Cooper!” Zack flagged him over from his place halfway down the line. “Over here.”

  “What’s going on?” Cooper stood on tiptoes and peered toward the kitchen to see what was causing the holdup.

  “Alicia said something went wrong with the plumbing this morning, so they’re way behind getting lunch ready. Wanna jump in line with us?” He grinned. “You’ll basically get a free late pass to science.”

  “Nah.” Cooper shook his head. “I’m good.” He held up his lunch bag and turned away. Not only did he have the sandwich he’d packed, but he’d also stopped at the vending machine to supplement his meal with a few non-diabetic-approved snacks.

  The smell of sanitizer and the ever-lingering odor of a thousand lunches past greeted Cooper as he made his way between the cafeteria tables. They were sparsely populated at the moment, basically just the other brown baggers. He sat at their usual table and pulled out his lunch, his journal, and his favorite pencil, now just a stub, one sharpening away from death.

  Only one sentence in, however, there came a voice from across the table.

  “Is it okay if I sit here?”

  The kid from the bus stood before him. Cooper hastily covered what he was writing before glancing side to side at the open chairs.

  “It’s okay if you’re saving seats for someone else,” the boy said, and started to turn away.

  “No. I mean, no, I’m not saving seats.”

  The boy smiled slightly. “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  The boy pulled out a chair. “I’m Gus.”

  Cooper closed his journal and moved his lunch bag to the side. “I’m Cooper.” He’d never had a good look at the boy’s face before, mostly just the back of his head on the bus. Gus had acne that looked painful, and also braces, which Cooper guessed were new because his lips didn’t seem used to them yet.

  “So, how’s it going?” Gus asked a bit awkwardly.

  “Good . . . pretty good,” Cooper said reflexively. When the ensuing silence became uncomfortable, Cooper added, “You’re new this year, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “It’s been . . . somethin’,” Gus said with a shrug and a small grimace.

  Cooper nodded, because he knew what Gus really meant: It’s awful and I don’t really want to talk about it. He changed the subject. “Where’d you go to school last year?”

  “Westminster.” When Cooper gave him a quick head shake, Gus added, “Oh, sorry. It’s in Oklahoma City. That’s where I really live. I came to Chicago to stay with my grandma for a bit until my parents can get some things worked out.”

  Cooper knew all about parents getting “things worked out.” He hoped Gus’s parents were better at it than his own had been.

  That’s when he remembered where Gus got on the bus. “Wait,” he asked cautiously. “Who’s your grandma?”

  “Virginia Dreffel,” Gus answered.

  Cooper groaned. He couldn’t help it. The neighborhood kids called her Ms. Dreadful. The first time he’d walked by her house, he had mistakenly touched a blade of her grass and she’d waved her cane in the air and shouted, “Get off my lawn!” Cooper had assumed she was joking. Did anyone actually say that?

  Apparently Ms. Dreadful did. She had a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging on the handrail leading to her front door, and each Halloween, she strung a line of yellow tape across the end of her driveway with the word CAUTION repeated in big black lettering—not in a decorative haunted-house kind of way, but more in an I’ll-call-the-cops kind of way. It was like she didn’t know that if you didn’t want trick-or-treaters, all you had to do was turn off your lights and ignore the doorbell.

  Cooper
immediately felt bad for groaning, but Gus just laughed. Cooper’s reaction clearly wasn’t much of a surprise.

  “I didn’t know Ms. Dreffel even had kids,” said Cooper, “let alone grandkids.”

  “Yeah, my grandpa died right after my mom was born. My mom’s tried to convince me that my grandma has a good heart, but she moved out the minute she turned eighteen, so . . .” He made a face even more dour than Cooper’s had been. “They don’t talk all that much.”

  “But they still sent you to live there?” Cooper said.

  “No other choice, apparently. You could come over sometime, if you want.”

  Cooper froze at the thought. He didn’t know how to answer; he just opened and closed his mouth a few times. Gus started laughing again, this time loud and warm. “I’m kidding! Oh, man. I wish you could see your face. You’re all like,” and he made a face like someone in a Halloween scare house.

  At that, Cooper couldn’t help laughing as well, Gus’s face was so funny and his laughter so infectious. Gus made a few more frightened faces, each more ridiculous than the last, cracking them both up. Cooper felt a lightness in his chest that was foreign and familiar at the same time. It had been a long time since he’d laughed like this.

  Eventually their laughter died down, and Gus started to eat again. He nodded at Cooper’s journal. “What’re you writing? Is that for school?”

  Cooper flicked a glance down at his notebook before pulling it onto his lap. “Um, no. It’s just . . . stuff.” He found an intense new interest in his lunch, rearranging the PB&J, granola bar, and Snickers before taking a big bite of sandwich.

  Gus seemed to take the hint. “Man, I wish my grandma packed me lunches like that!”

  When it came to picking his meal selections, Cooper regularly took a wrecking ball to the food pyramid. “Yeah, I guess there are some benefits to packing my own lunch.”

  “I want to live with your parents.”

  Cooper snorted. “Nah. You just need to know where the vending machines are. And it’s ‘parent.’ Singular.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper said with a quick shake of his head. “It’s tough with my dad overseas, but someone has to fight for our country, right?” The lie fell out of his mouth before he could stop it.

  “Your dad’s in the army?”

  “Marines.”

  “Wow! Where is he?”

  Cooper looked past Gus to the back wall of the lunchroom and said, “Afghanistan.”

  “Oh, man. How often do you get to see him?”

  “I don’t.” At least that part was true. “He and my mom are divorced, and I don’t really get to talk to him that much.”

  Cooper knew he should stop right there, say something like “Nah, just kidding,” before telling Gus that his dad was a cardiologist who hadn’t spent a second in the military. But the whole reason he’d lied in the first place was because marines have a good reason to not be around. Cooper imagined marines were too busy saving the world to send birthday cards or gifts. Marines could entirely disappear from your life admirably, right?

  “My dad’s not around much either,” Gus said. “Both of my parents travel a ton; only one of them’s ever really home at a time. They’ve always told me that being away makes them love me even more, but since it seems to have made them love each other less. . . .”

  Cooper stayed quiet. His lie seemed to have hardened into something he couldn’t take back; meanwhile, Gus had told him something honest and personal. His stomach suddenly felt as wriggly as a bag of worms.

  “Do you wanna trade?” Gus asked with a wry grin, offering a bag of tired-looking baby carrots while eyeing Cooper’s Snickers bar.

  Cooper wasn’t even hungry anymore. “No, thanks. But you can have it, if you want.”

  Gus’s face lit up, like it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him. “Really?”

  “Sure.” Cooper tossed the Snickers bar across the table.

  “I’m the same, by the way,” Gus said, opening the wrapper.

  “The kid of a marine?” Cooper’s throat tightened. What would he say if Gus asked any questions that required actual knowledge of the military?

  “No, a journaler. I mean I like to write too.”

  Cooper exhaled. “Oh! For real? You mean, like, stories?”

  “Sometimes. But usually, you know, random things. Ideas. Drawings. You?”

  “Yeah, the same, I—”

  “Cooper!” Zack’s voice sailed across the cafeteria. “We’re coming, man!” Cooper turned around to see him waving his arms in the air; he’d finally gotten to the front of the checkout line. “We got our food! Just in time for graduation!” Zack, Remi, and a bunch of the soccer team laughed from behind him.

  Cooper turned back around and took a quick count of the number of seats left at the table. With Gus taking a spot, there wasn’t enough room for everyone he normally sat with.

  Gus must have sensed what was happening, because the easy smile on his face dimmed. The warmth that had buoyed the hot-air balloon of their conversation was gone. “It’s okay,” he said before Cooper even opened his mouth. He packed the remains of his lunch into a crumpled brown bag that had been used so many times it looked as soft as fabric and pushed his chair away from the table with a screech. “I’m done anyway.”

  “You don’t, I mean—” Cooper began.

  “I’ll see you later.” Gus walked away.

  “Yeah. Later.”

  Cooper sagged in his seat. How had he screwed that up so badly? He could have pulled up another chair, or made room, or at least not acted like sitting with Gus was only an option if no one else was available.

  Zack and the rest of the crew descended on the table, midconversation, laughing, bringing with them the smell of meat loaf, gravy, and cooked carrots. “Finally!” Zack said. “Sorry to leave you alone like that.”

  Cooper watched Gus in case he turned around before disappearing out the cafeteria door, but he didn’t. It had actually been the least alone Cooper had felt in a long time.

  6

  The cafeteria was back to normal the next day, so any lingering hope Cooper had of some easy time with Gus again was dashed. Cooper saw him in the hallways a few times and caught his eye with a smile and a small wave, but Gus simply nodded and kept walking.

  On the bus home, Cooper watched the back of Gus’s head, bobbing up and down with each bump in the road, alone up there in no-man’s-land. When they reached the bus stop in front of Ms. Dreffel’s darkened house, Gus was the last one to walk down the stairs. He stalled on the sidewalk, looking up at his grandmother’s home, seeming to gird himself before weaving through unkept bushes and climbing the front steps.

  A few minutes later, Jess, Cooper, and Zack got off at their own stop. Jess hadn’t said more than a few words to Cooper since Monday evening, and she crossed the street to their home without so much as a glance Cooper’s way.

  “You want to come over?” Zack asked. “We could play Xbox or watch a movie or something?”

  “Nah,” Cooper said as the school bus pulled away. “I’ve got a ton of homework.”

  “You sure? My dad could make us his famous popcorn.”

  Not going to happen. “Maybe tomorrow,” Cooper offered.

  “Sure,” Zack said.

  Cooper, Jess, and Mom went through their normal Wednesday evening routine: homework, eggs, a promise to text Jess’s blood sugar to their mom, and then Mom biking off to her pottery class. Cooper found the whole thing both boring and comforting.

  He settled into his room with his mother’s laptop again, with every intention of watching a video, but he found his fingers frozen in midair above the keyboard. The sketch of the crest with the bird and swords was still knocking at a little door in his mind. Was it really the same insignia on the girl’s jacket next door? Every school crest kind of looked the same. And even if they were identical, it didn’t mean he or Jess could figure out who that kid in the train crash was ninety years ago.
>
  Right?

  An idea crossed his mind. He batted it away, given it was accompanied by a queasy feeling in his stomach, but it refused to be ignored.

  Just one good look across the alley. He wasn’t a creep or a stalker or whatever if he was simply seeking information. It was only to get a clear look at that crest, for comparison’s sake, that’s all. Just to rule it out, so he wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. Besides, she stared at him all the time, right? It wasn’t that different.

  Cooper scrambled off the bed and dragged a water-stained end table that used to hold his fish tank over to the windowsill. Then he pulled a huge telescope from the top shelf of his closet, its weight threatening to crush him. Grandma Stewart had dropped nearly a thousand dollars a few years ago on the thing, with hopes Cooper would be the next Carl Sagan after he watched one old episode of Cosmos. But the only thing the telescope had discovered so far was the billions and billions of dust bunnies that lived in his closet.

  Grandma Stewart would never know that, of course, because she didn’t come around any more often than his dad did. She’d only come to the house once anyway, and wouldn’t stop talking about a man she had passed at the corner who was asking for spare change. From then on, Cooper and Jess only saw her when they visited her at her gated community, where she often wondered aloud at how interesting it was that her son had married someone from such a different background as their mother.

  What Grandma Stewart was really saying was poor.

  Cooper grunted as he set the telescope down on the end table and aimed it toward the girl’s house. As he peered into the eyepiece and fiddled with a truly excessive number of knobs, a blurry smear of yellow morphed into crisp focus, and the texture of the siding on the house across the alley became clearly detailed. Cooper looked out the window with his naked eye and angled the viewer toward the girl’s upstairs bedroom.