Strays Like Us Read online

  “It’s funny how certain people come into your life when they do,” Margery said. “Isn’t it?”

  I lowered my eyes again, but I didn’t answer right away. I was thinking about what Delia had said about meeting me. About how she thought maybe we had come into each other’s lives for a reason. Maybe Margery and I had met for a reason, too. And even though it wasn’t something I understood just yet, it made me feel a little hopeful, thinking of it.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “It is.”

  “I get that she wants you to fix it—”

  “Not fix.” I interrupted Delia for the second time the next morning. “Rebuild. She said she wants me to rebuild it. Into something completely my own. Whatever that means.” I clapped my hands. “Come here, Toby. Come here, buddy.” I grinned as he trotted over and curled up in my lap. He looked better than ever. His coat was thick and clean, and his brown eyes shone when he gazed at me.

  Delia plucked a piece of metal out from the middle of the smashed structure and held it up in front of her. “I think it means you can do whatever you want. It sounds like fun.”

  “I think it sounds like a nightmare.” I buried my nose in Toby’s neck, wondering if I’d given in too easily this morning during my conversation with Margery.

  “I can’t force you to do anything with the sculpture,” she’d said, pouring coffee into a long silver thermos, “but you’re not sitting around all day, doing nothing. Especially with Delia here. I have a few more pieces that I can give each of you to sand.”

  “Actually, I thought I might look at the sculpture again.” I kept my eyes on my bagel. I hadn’t known I was going to say such a thing until it came out of my mouth. But maybe I’d try it. After all, my fits and rages weren’t getting me anywhere. And it had worked for Margery. Maybe it would work for me, too.

  “Okay.” Margery screwed the top on the thermos and shoved it in her bag. “But I want to see that something’s actually been done by the time I get home. Don’t tell me you’re going to work on it if you’re not just to get me out of the house. You’re still on suspension from school.” She raised an eyebrow. “Got it?”

  I nodded and rolled my eyes as she headed out the door. Man, she was tough. Fair, but tough.

  “Do you have any idea at all what you might want to make?” Delia asked now. She was still picking at the shattered pieces of metal. “Like a person? Or a piece of furniture, maybe?” Her eyes widened. “Or a tree! How about a tree? You could use all different sorts of crazy things for the leaves. That could be really cool.”

  “I don’t think so.” I grabbed Toby’s leash. “Margery said I could poke through her stuff out back, though. That might give me some ideas. Why don’t we let Toby run while we look?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Delia put the twisted piece of metal down on the table. “Let’s go.”

  We spent the remainder of the morning pawing through Margery’s junk collection. It was hard to know where to start, since there was so much of everything, and harder still to know what to take. And Delia wasn’t helping. Like, at all. She spent the first ten minutes just staring at an old windmill sitting in the middle of all the junk, and shaking her head.

  “This thing is incredible,” she said. “It’s got to be at least a hundred years old.”

  “Maybe.” I was running my fingers over the rusted buttons on a washing machine in the far corner. Was there anything I could make out of them? I had no idea.

  “I mean, where do you even find something like this?” Delia asked.

  “No clue.”

  “Maybe Margery was out driving and saw it on some guy’s farm.” Delia cupped a hand around one of the blades. “You think she just went up to him and said, ‘Hey, dude, can I have the top of your windmill?’”

  “Probably.”

  Delia giggled. “Can you imagine? I wonder how she got it home. She doesn’t have a truck or anything, does she?”

  “I don’t think so.” I tried to push down my irritation. Delia talked sometimes the way people breathed—steadily and without much thought. “It doesn’t really matter, though, Delia. I can’t do anything with that thing anyway. It’s too big. Will you look around for something else?”

  “Oh, I wish you could use it.” Delia moved reluctantly toward a pile of bike chains and picked one up. “It’s just so cool.”

  “You think all this stuff is cool.” I rolled my eyes and picked up an old teakettle. It had an old-fashioned spout, long and curved at the tip. Nice enough to look at, but what were you supposed to do with it?

  “Well, it is!”

  “How about that bike chain?” I nodded at the one she held in her hands. “What’s so cool about that?”

  Delia looked at the chain for a minute. She turned it around and studied the other side. “Okay, so maybe a bike chain isn’t that cool.” She put it down and moved toward the windmill again. “But this thing!” She ran her fingertips along the edge of one of the blades again. “I’m telling you, Fred. You’ve gotta do something with it. Seriously. It could be the—”

  “I don’t want to do anything with it!” I flung the teakettle across the yard. It made a dull clunking sound as it hit a pile of hubcaps and then rolled off to one side. “Geez, Delia, don’t you ever listen?”

  She stared at me with wide, unblinking eyes, as if I’d just slapped her. And then she stood up a little taller and straightened her shoulders. “You don’t have to talk to me like that.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it was as serious as I’d ever heard it. “I’m just trying to help.”

  “I’m sorry.” I stared at the space of grass between my feet. Suddenly, I looked back up. “Delia …” I started.

  But she was already nodding. “I did it, didn’t I?”

  “You totally just did it.”

  “Fred!” She came over and squeezed my arm. “Oh my gosh, I really did it! I totally just stood up for myself!”

  I nodded, forcing myself not to pull away as she squeezed even tighter. “I knew you could.” I patted her hesitantly on the back. “I knew it was in there.”

  By lunchtime, Delia and I had carted a bunch of different sized hubcaps, the teakettle with the long spout (which now had a dent in it), a long wide-mouthed pipe, several mounds of copper coil, a set of bicycle handlebars, a rake with a cracked handle, and, because Delia still wouldn’t take no for an answer, two of the windmill blades into the shed. I wasn’t any closer to figuring out what I wanted to do with any of them, but it was a start.

  “Let’s go eat,” I said, wiping my hands on a rag. “I’m starving.”

  We went inside and rooted around in the refrigerator, pulling out a loaf of sourdough bread and packages of turkey and pastrami. I grabbed bottles of mustard and mayonnaise, and a glass jar of bread-and-butter pickles. Delia got to work making the sandwiches while I set out plates and napkins. We popped open two Cokes and a bag of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips and dug in. Halfway through my sandwich, the phone rang.

  “Ten bucks it’s Margery,” I said, getting up to answer it. “I swear she knows exactly when I come inside to eat.”

  Delia grinned.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey there,” Margery said. “How’s everything going? Is the house still standing?”

  “Funny,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Delia and I just came inside to eat lunch.”

  “Good. And I have some news. I called Mr. Carder this morning at the hospital, just to see how he was doing. He asked if I’d bring you girls in to see him.”

  I stopped chewing. “Mr. Carder?”

  Delia raised her eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” Margery said. “What do you think? If you’re up for it, I’ll ask for permission to leave work a little early today so I can come get you.”

  I didn’t like hospitals. They made me nervous. And the thought of going to see Mr. Carder in one made me even more anxious.

  “How would we get there?” I asked. “We can’t all fit on Luke Jackson.”

&nb
sp; “No,” Margery conceded. “I’m going to have to borrow one of the company trucks.”

  “I don’t know,” I stalled. “I doubt if Delia would want to.”

  “Doubt if I would want to what?” Delia put her sandwich down.

  “Why don’t you ask her?” Margery said.

  I sighed. “Hold on.” I covered the mouthpiece with my hand as I explained the situation to Delia.

  “Yeah!” Delia burst out. “Of course I want to go. That sounds great!”

  I gave her a look that said “Really?” and “Why do you get so excited about everything?” and “Do you seriously want to go to a hospital to see a guy we barely even know whose neck is being held in place with metal bars?” She didn’t seem to notice.

  I pressed the phone back against my ear. “Okay, I guess.”

  “What’s wrong?” Margery said.

  I looked over at Delia, who was still grinning from ear to ear. “Nothing. It’s fine.”

  “It’ll probably be a little weird,” Margery said. “But I think he just wants to thank you. You know, in person. And I’ll stay there with you. I won’t leave.”

  “All right.” I felt a bit better.

  “How’s the sculpture going?”

  “I think we found some pieces to work with. Now I just have to figure out what to do with them.”

  “Remember the first step,” Margery said. “Stop looking at it as junk. When you learn to do that, the rest will come. I promise.”

  We took Toby out for a little while after lunch and hooked him up to his leash. It was cold and the wind bit through my jacket, but I forgot about it as I watched him race up and down the yard. The fur along his back rippled and his pink tongue lolled out of his mouth. I could have sworn he was smiling. Maybe even laughing. My heart swelled, thinking of it.

  Afterward, he came back in the shop without any fuss and curled up in the middle of his little blanket bed. After a few minutes, he put his head down and closed his eyes. It wasn’t long before the sound of soft snoring began to fill the room.

  I turned the radio on low and stared at the objects laid out on the table. Margery had said to stop looking at them as junk, but I still didn’t even know what that meant. If they weren’t junk, what were they?

  “Margery said I’d be able to figure this out,” I said finally, “but I don’t have a clue where to start. Seriously, I’ve got nothing.”

  “Well, you don’t have to build it today.” Delia settled herself on a stool. “Let’s do something else until Margery picks us up.”

  “We can’t. She really expects me to get started at least.” I fingered the edge of one of the windmill blades. “She was pretty firm about that this morning.”

  “We did get started.” Delia swept an arm over the objects. “We found all these pieces and brought them in!”

  I shrugged. It didn’t feel like much, but she was right. It was something.

  “I know.” Delia’s eyes gleamed as she reached into her back pocket and took out her cell phone. “Let’s practice some of the Quiz Bowl questions. I’ll ask you science ones. Just to see how many you can get right.”

  I could feel something jump inside, but I pushed it down. “Nah. I’m telling you, Delia, I really don’t—”

  “You scared?” She raised that one eyebrow of hers and grinned. “Huh? Worried you might not actually be Einstein?”

  I cocked my head and gave her a look.

  “Come on!” she said. “Just for the fun of it!” She looked down at her phone and started scrolling. “Here’s the first one from last year’s competition. No one got it, either. I remember. The whole audience gasped after Marissa Maynard, who’s like the smartest kid in the whole school, gave the wrong answer.”

  I stared at her. My nose began to twitch.

  “What is the most common source of energy for human brain cells?”

  I could feel my body relax. I’d learned this just last year, in Mrs. Wright’s science class. “Glucose.”

  Delia studied the screen for a second. “Yes!” She looked back up at me. “That’s right!”

  I tried not to smile, but I couldn’t help it. Knowing an answer that the smartest kid in another school had gotten wrong felt pretty good.

  “Okay, here’s another one,” Delia said. “Which bone is found in the leg between the knee and the hips?”

  “The femur.”

  Delia stared at me again. “Now you’re just showing off.”

  I grinned. “One more.”

  “Okay.” She scrolled through the phone again. “How many times per month does the moon orbit Earth?”

  “That’s too easy,” I said. “Gimme another one.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “One,” I said. “Everyone knows that.”

  Delia blinked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “That’s why we only have one full moon a month.”

  “Huh,” Delia said. “Okay, how about this one? What’s the only bird in the world that can fly backward?”

  “The hummingbird.”

  Delia was shaking her head. “You are an Einstein.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, although I kind of loved her for saying so. “I told you—I just really like science. I think it’s interesting.”

  “You’ve gotta be on the Quiz Bowl team, Fred. I’m telling you. No one will believe how smart you are. They’ll all be screaming to get you on their team.”

  I didn’t want to get into another argument, so I changed the subject. “How about if I ask you some of the math ones?”

  “Okay!” Delia’s face had a way of lighting up when she was happy about something. It almost gave me the same feeling I got when I saw Toby running.

  “Okay,” I started. “What is seven to the third power?”

  “Three hundred and forty-three,” Delia answered promptly.

  “Nice! Okay, how about one to the eightieth power?”

  “One.”

  I shook my head. “Didn’t know that one at all.”

  “That’s pre-algebra,” Delia said. “Have you taken that yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe next year. Okay, two more.”

  “What is one-half minus one-third?”

  “That’s easy.” Delia grinned. “One-sixth.”

  “Easy for you, maybe. I hate fractions.”

  “I hate them, too,” Delia said. “But I’m still good at them. You just have to find the problem’s common denominator. The trick is to look for what you do have, not what you don’t.”

  It occurred to me that while Delia was talking about numbers, she could have been just as easily talking about people. Would it make things any easier if I tried to focus on the things I did have right now—Margery, Toby, Delia—instead of all the things I didn’t? It sounded easy, but I knew it wouldn’t be. Still, it was worth a shot. Because while I sort of hated to admit it, Delia’s law of subtraction actually made a lot of sense.

  I nodded my head. “Okay, last question. This is a long one. A fifty-pound boy is sitting four feet from the center of a seesaw. How far from the center will a forty-pound boy have to sit to achieve balance?”

  Delia’s forehead wrinkled. Her eyes raced back and forth across the tabletop, as if searching for the answer. “Four feet?”

  I shook my head. “Five feet.”

  She smacked the side of the table. “Darn it! I was going to say five feet, too!”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “My math teacher, Mr. Dennis, says I have to learn to go with my gut, but I never do. I always second-guess myself.”

  “What do you mean, go with your gut?”

  “You know. That little voice inside that pops up first before all the rest of them get in the way and make it so confusing? Mr. Dennis says that’s the one that already knows the answer. And it’s the one I never listen to for some reason. I always, always think it’s wrong.”

  “I think we all do that,” I said. “It
’s just habit, I guess.”

  “Yeah.” Delia looked a little crestfallen. “I gotta stop, though. It’s killing my math average.”

  I was sure that not listening to my gut was killing some part of me, too, but I didn’t want to find out what.

  Listening to the other voices was easy.

  Delia was right: It was the first one—the one in the gut—that was the hardest to hear.

  I guess I thought that Mr. Carder would be a little out of it. I mean, his neck was broken. I’d kind of pictured him just lying there in his hospital room, glassy-eyed and mumbling. Maybe even drooling a little.

  But I was wrong.

  Not only was Mr. Carder awake and alert, but he knew exactly what he wanted to say to me. And he said it loudly.

  “Bring ’em over!” Mr. Carder boomed when Margery announced our arrival. He flicked his fingers, motioning us closer. Margery nudged me forward, encouraging me to get near the bed. I took a few steps, but then I stopped again. Man, she wasn’t kidding when she’d said that Mr. Carder’s head was fastened by metal rods. What she hadn’t mentioned was that the bases of the rods were stuck into his skull. Mr. Carder couldn’t move his top half at all. Instead, he stared straight up at the ceiling as he spoke.

  “Hi, Mr. Carder.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Which one are you?”

  “I’m Fred.” Delia was close behind me, her fingers grabbing at the back of my sweater. I didn’t push her away.

  “Are you the one who stayed with me?” Mr. Carder blinked. “By the window?”

  “Yeah. And Delia’s here, too. She called the ambulance.”

  “Hi, Mr. Carder,” Delia said behind me. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “I’m not okay,” Mr. Carder said to the ceiling. “My neck is broken. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to walk again.”

  Delia and I exchanged a helpless glance. What were we supposed to say? Especially to someone like Mr. Carder who’d just said something like that?

  “You’re alive,” Margery said. “And that’s all that matters.” She leaned over and patted Mr. Carder’s foot, which stuck up from under the blanket like a little mountain. “There’s no reason to start getting bleak about things.”