Lucy, Chapter Eight

Carlie had dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. Lucas had known her and lived with her for five weeks but he’d never noticed because he’d never seen her smile until now. Of course she made a facial expression that imitated a smile regularly, but this was her first real smile.

She had just laid her letters down on the scrabble board and was smiling at her own joke. She’d written ‘poopoo’ across the triple word score square and a double letter score square.

“I don’t think that’s in the dictionary,” he complained even though he knew he was going to let her get away with it.

“We let you have eek,” she retorted, still smiling.

“Fine.” He held his hands up in surrender.

Carlie giggled with glee as she added her points. “Thirty-nine!” She wrote her score down. “That puts me at one hundred and twelve, Penelope at ninety-eight and Lucas at forty.”

Penelope and Carlie grinned at each other triumphantly.

He really needed to get a different game to play at lunchtime.

He’d started bringing board games to school because Penelope was so painfully shy that conversations with her were like talking to a wall. A pretty wall, but a wall nonetheless. Since Carlie had joined them they’d started using scrabble as a way to gang up on him. They didn’t do it meanly, it was just like they were asserting their supremacy as girls, kind of like the way his mom and Micah’s mom high-fived each other any time one of them made a joke about how dumb men were.

It didn’t really bother him. He was pretty sure of two things; first, he’d just had a string of bad luck for the past two weeks with the scrabble letters he’d picked up, and second, Carlie and Penelope were in cahoots against him.

Despite a dismal losing streak at Scrabble, things had gotten better for him since Carlie had left her old group of friends. She was polite to him now. She had stopped rolling her eyes and she actually made an effort to talk to him every now and then.

Last weekend she had gone with him and her dad to the nursery to look for more bromeliads. He was glad because, to be honest, he was kind of sick of bromeliads. He had no idea how Mr. Weaver kept his enthusiasm for them up. They were just spiky little plants with weird-looking flowers.

He’d clowned around with Carlie at the nursery, making jokes about the Latin names for the plants and making the garden gnomes have stupid conversations with each other in high-pitched voices. After a little prodding from him she’d joined in and had invented a gnome character that hated bromeliads with a passion. It had made him laugh so hard that he’d bought it and they stuck it by the path in the front garden (Mr. Weaver had banished it from the pristine bromeliad museum of the back yard).

Carlie’s bromeliad-hating gnome spoke with biting sarcasm in a high pitched Scottish lilt and was called Dr. McLooty. Before long Dr. McLooty was invading all corners of their lives. When they were at the dinner table he’d make a comment about how he couldn’t wait for math class the next day (Carlie despised math), when they were in drama class Carlie would lean in and Mr. McLooty would comment on what a “pompous old tart” the Queen was and how he had no idea why Colin, the boy in the play they were studying, would want to see her.

Mr. McLooty cracked him up. Just the voice that Carlie used was enough to send him into fits. More than once he’d gotten in trouble for laughing during an otherwise completely serious class at school.

Penelope was tolerant of Dr. McLooty, if not a little bewildered by him.

“You should come over this weekend to meet him Nell,” Carlie said one day when Penelope reminded them that she had no idea what they were laughing about.

“Really?”

“Yeah, of course. Come over to my house and stay the night. You can meet Dr. McLooty and we can swim in the pool and watch movies and eat popcorn.”

Penelope’s face glowed with happiness. “Okay, I’ll ask my mum.”

When she came over that Saturday afternoon Lucas hung out with them for a while. He even went up to Blockbuster to pick out some movies with them and Mrs. Weaver, but they outvoted him on every movie pick.

He wanted to watch horror films. He was still trying to replace the nightmare scenes in his head from Sally’s Baby with something else… anything else. Aliens, predators, axe murderers, they were all preferable to Sally.

Although he would never in a lifetime ask them about it, the girls seemed to be unscarred by Sally’s Baby. They didn’t feel the need to scare themselves silly, they wanted to watch vampire romances. He endured through about fifteen minutes of the first one before it became too much for him and he retreated to his bedroom to play computer games and go to bed.

He was woken multiple times throughout the night by squeals and giggles coming from Carlie’s room and the next morning when Carlie finally rolled into the kitchen for breakfast he had to put his hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t laugh.

She smelled awful, like rotting fruits and vegetables or something. She had goopy dried greenish-grey stuff all over her face and her hair was tangled with plastic wrap and a lumpy white mixture that looked a bit like cottage cheese. She lifted her hand to cover a yawn and he noticed that she was wearing black nail polish. The whole effect was not flattering.

“What on earth have you done to yourself?” Mrs. Weaver asked.

“Huh?”

“What is all of this on your face and in your hair?”

“Oh!” She patted over her face and head and her eyes went wide. “We were doing a beauty treatment… we read about it in Dolly…”

Her mom walked over to her and picked at Carlie’s crusty hair. “A beauty treatment? What is this?” She sniffed at her head and her nose wrinkled in disgust.

Carlie’s forehead creased and the greenish-grey face mask she had on crinkled. She turned quickly and ran out of the room.

Mrs. Weaver turned to him and Mr. Weaver. “What…? I mean, what was she thinking?”

Lucas just shook his head and went back to his breakfast. He had no idea what went through girls’ heads, if anything at all.

A yelp of distress echoed through the house a few moments later and then Carlie and Penelope boarded themselves up inside the bathroom for the rest of the morning.

After all of that fussing, when they finally emerged from the bathroom they both looked exactly they same as they had before their ‘beauty treatments.’

That was the way it went the Carlie, Penelope and Lucas. All three of them were friends, but sometimes they were better off without his input, and he knew it. When they got caught up in their ‘girl stuff,’ he’d just go and find something else to do.

Sometimes he’d bike over to Ben’s house and hang out for a while. Ben was a nice guy and his family was into sports the same way Lucas and Micah’s families were. Ben and his sister Natalie always had some swim meet or cross country race or kayaking regatta to go to and sometimes Lucas went with them. Any time he could enter the events he would, just as something to do.

When they went to swim meets he only entered the events he wasn’t good at. Lucas had always been good at swimming and it had always been a source of great distress for him. He’d raced Micah since they were so young he didn’t even remember and he always beat him. Sometimes he wanted to swim slowly just to let Micah win, but he knew that was unfair.

He was contemplating quitting swimming for the thousandth time when he got to school that Monday morning and headed for his locker. There was a sea of dark blue skirts and white blouses crowded around the stand of lockers that his was a part of and he pushed to the front to see what was going on.

Mrs. Hoskins was wearing a super-sized pink woolen skirt suit and fanning her fat, sweaty face with a lace frilled handkerchief as she watched the large, burly groundskeeper cut through the lock on one of the lockers with a large set of bolt-cutters.

The locker looked eerily familiar and it only took a quick count from the end of the row for Lucas to realize it was his that they were trying to break into.

“Ah… I could just open that for you if you like?” He said.

The man with the bolt cutters turned and said, “Oh, great…” before Mrs. Hoskins cut him off.

“That wont be necessary,” she trilled. “Stand back Mr. Gray. George, you get back to work on that lock.”

Mr. Gray? Since when did anyone call him Mr. Gray?

Poor George’s shoulders slumped as he turned back and struggled with the bolt cutters and lock. After a great deal of exertion he managed to cut through Lucas’ lock. He took it from the locker and offered it to Mrs. Hoskins, who waved him away as if he were an irritating insect. George sighed and put the lock in his pocket as he walked away.

Mrs. Hoskins stepped up to his locker and started rooting through it, pulling out folders and notebooks and his spare swimsuit until she held a plastic bag full of what looked like dried herbs triumphantly in the air.

“Ah-ha! My sources were correct!” She shouted exuberantly. “Marijuana!” She pronounced it marry-you-wana.

“Wh.. What?” He stuttered. “That’s not mine.”

“I beg to differ Mr. Gray. It seems you’ve been caught red-handed!”

He didn’t know what to think or to do. He’d been set up. He didn’t own any marijuana, well at least not since that unfortunate incident last summer.

“I think you had best come with me young man.” Mrs. Hoskins grabbed him by the ear and marched him through the crowd of girls. It hurt like hell but he was too afraid to make her stop.

This was really serious. He didn’t know what it was like in Australia, but in America you could get arrested for owning marijuana and go to prison. He didn’t like the idea of prison. Images of shackles and forced labor ran through his head. They probably had some medieval form of physical punishment here, like that episode of The Simpsons when Bart was indicted for fraud and got the boot.

All of these fears ran through his head as Mrs. Hoskins paraded him past groups of whispering girls on the way to her office. He had a sinking feeling that this was the first of many miserable days ahead.