Inside Hudson Pickle Read online

  “Wait for me at your locker so we can walk home together,” I said. “You need to fill me in on what I missed.”

  “I don’t need to do anything.” Trev shook his head. “You missed the assignment? That’s your problem. I’m not hanging around.”

  “But —” I started to protest, even though it was obviously a waste of time. Trev was never going to forgive me for the way I’d treated him last year, and I didn’t really blame him. I’d been a chump. A world-class, first-rate chump. And I’d been so blinded by hockey that I hadn’t even noticed.

  Trev sped ahead as I stopped in front of my locker. I spun the lock, trying to remember the combination. I flipped it up in frustration when it refused to open. Twisting the dial back to zero, I tried a couple more times, then finally gave up. Mom would be mad if I didn’t bring home my lunch bag, but I couldn’t stand the thought of people staring at me — the tall, gangly seventh grader who couldn’t even win a battle against his own locker.

  I took off down the hallway, weaving through groups of giggling kids I didn’t recognize, and passed by Trev’s locker without slowing down. He was already gone. I scanned the hall for a glimpse of his fiery red hair — nothing. With a sigh, I headed toward the door, all set to walk home alone. Again.

  But as the hallway cleared in front of me, I caught a glimpse of Trev. He was rushing toward the exit. Walking quickly. Head forward. Back straight.

  And then suddenly he was down, sprawled on the floor. His books, his pens, his lunch bag, his open backpack scattered in every direction, like equipment on the ice after a hockey brawl.

  I hurried up to Trev while Aidan and his friends gathered around him, their laughter echoing off the lockers. I could tell Aidan had tripped Trev — you didn’t need to see the play to know when someone had drawn a penalty.

  Trev scrambled to pick up all the stuff off the floor. I got down on my hands and knees to help.

  When everything was back in his backpack, or stuffed into our pockets, we hurried to our feet and tried to walk away. But Aidan kept dekeing in front of Trev, blocking him in every direction. “Who are you?” he finally demanded, as if they hadn’t sat in the same Career & Tech class for the last month.

  Trev responded in the tiniest voice I’d ever heard, “Trevor Bach.”

  “Elmo and his buddy Big Bird is more like it.” Aidan smirked at his friends before turning back to Trev. “You’re a long way from Sesame Street, dudes. Can you walk down the hall without falling, or do you need help from your mommy?”

  Trev didn’t react — exactly the right thing to do according to the antibullying lecture we’d had in elementary school. But Trev had a black belt in karate. Shouldn’t that have given him the confidence to stand up for himself? To make a statement, so he didn’t end up with a target on his back at the beginning of junior high?

  “Shut up, Aidan,” I hissed in the deepest voice I could muster.

  He narrowed his eyes at me, taking in my height and my skinny, pathetic arms. “Is Big Bird your bodyguard, Trevor Bach?”

  “No, I’m his friend.” I glanced at Aidan’s crew. I knew a couple of them from hockey. “Hey, Matthew,” I said, nodding to the captain of my old peewee team.

  Matthew looked at me, confused. Not because he didn’t recognize me, but because he couldn’t decide what to do.

  I turned to my other old teammate, desperate for some acknowledgment. “Liam, buddy …” The seconds ticked by in slow motion. I silently urged him to bump my fist, which hung between us like a rotten apple on a branch. “It’s been a while —” My voice cracked. I stopped talking and dropped my fist.

  All five of them collapsed into fits of laughter, Matthew and Liam included.

  “We don’t hang around with little kids,” Aidan snickered. “You and Trevor Bach better fly on out of here.” Aidan flapped his arms like a chicken and clucked, “Bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk, ba-WK!”

  The rest of the guys joined in, squawking, strutting and flapping like lunatics.

  Trev tightened the straps of his backpack as he hurried toward the exit. Head hanging. Back slumped.

  I glared at Aidan.

  He took a step forward.

  I backed down. Without another word, I followed Trev.

  I wasn’t a fighter — especially when no one had my back.

  •••

  I caught up with Trev in the back alley. It wasn’t like I was trying to follow him. It’s just that the alley was empty (of people, not garbage), and my legs were about twice as long as his.

  I fell into step with him, and we walked home in silence. I don’t know what was going through Trev’s mind, but here’s what I was thinking: jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, JERK. It ran through my head to the rhythm of Aidan’s chicken chant. Two jerks for Aidan, one for Matthew, one for Liam and a big one for me. For deserting Trev last year.

  The story with him is kind of like the story with Willow, but instead of drifting apart we’d been ripped and torn.

  Trev and I had been tight in a way that only next-door neighbors six months apart in age can be. Our friendship took a hit when I started school ahead of him — the curse of being born in December. But that hadn’t lasted long, thanks to my repeat run through second grade.

  Things were cool between us until last year when I started ditching Trev for hockey more and more. Then I’d made a choice that blew it all to smithereens.

  Trev had been competing in the New York State Martial Arts Tournament being held right here in Bluster. Instead of going to watch, which I knew he wanted me to, I’d bowed out because of hockey. Not just for one of his bouts but for all of them. And not for an important game, just the regular set of early-season weekend practices. But here’s the clincher: instead of coming clean, I’d lied and told him my grandma was sick — a lie that had popped like a blister when his gran had asked my mom about Grandma’s recovery.

  I didn’t blame him for hating me. Even I hated me.

  “This doesn’t change anything, Hudson,” Trev said when we’d finally reached the cul-de-sac where our houses stood, side by side, like mirror images of each other.

  “What do you mean?”

  Trev pulled the brim of his cap down over his almost-nonexistent orange eyebrows. “I don’t need your protection.”

  “I don’t want to protect you. I just —”

  “You just need someone to eat lunch with?”

  “Well —”

  “Sorry there wasn’t a welcome sign waiting for you at the jock table, but …” Trev’s voice trailed off as he lifted his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “It’s not my problem.”

  “Well …” I repeated slowly, embarrassed by my string of lonely library lunches. Trev was right on that score. I’d been shunned by my eighth- and ninth-grade teammates — make that ex-teammates — on the very first day of school. Partly because none of them would be caught dead eating lunch with a lowly seventh grader, but also because I was no longer part of the team.

  All of the other seventh graders had balled together like wads of old hockey tape — everyone but me. After all the time I’d spent on the ice with the older kids, missing birthday parties and after-school activities, I wasn’t tight enough with any of them to stick. I guess for Trev, it was payback. He’d refused to offer me a spot at his table of gamers.

  “Can you just give me the lowdown on Career and Tech?” I asked.

  “What’s the deal with firefighting anyway?” Trev scoffed. “I thought you gave that up years ago.”

  “And I thought you’d given up on …” I couldn’t think of a comeback. Trev had picked video-game developer for the Career & Tech project. It was what he’d wanted to be for as long as I could remember, and I knew it would never change.

  As we stood there staring at each other, my first-grade trip to the fire station flashed through my mind. I’d really wanted to be
a firefighter back then. Not in that cute little-kid way where everyone wants to be a superhero or a princess. No, becoming a firefighter had been my long-term plan, and Mom had totally encouraged it — easiest Halloween costume ever, she’d said. For years I’d dressed up in my oversize hard hat, rubber boots and reflective jacket (and not just for Halloween). And Trev had always been my ninja sidekick.

  “There was a fire at my uncle’s last night,” I said to break the awkward silence.

  “Really?” Trev said.

  And, to my surprise, he stood there at the end of his driveway while I told him how Uncle Vic’s house had been burned to smithereens. I exaggerated the damage and hammed up the image of Uncle Vic in his tighty-whities until Trev started to smile.

  “Now I have a bunkmate,” I said, exaggerating the word so I sounded more like a gangster sharing a jail cell than a kid sharing his room with his uncle.

  Trev laughed.

  “So, anyway, that’s how I ended up choosing firefighting as my career. It was a total accident.”

  We laughed together, and before I knew it, Trev was filling me in on what I’d missed in class — which was a lot. We had to do a report and interviews for class and a presentation board for our community career day. And we only had till the end of the month to do it.

  “I thought Career and Tech was supposed to be easy,” I groaned. “That’s why I chose it as my option.”

  “It’s a split class of seventh and eighth graders. You should’ve known it would be tough.”

  I winced. Trev was right — as usual. He may be younger than me, but that didn’t stop him from being a whole lot smarter. “So why did you take it?” I asked. “Not getting enough of a challenge in the dojo?”

  Trev’s freckles blended together as he scrunched up his face. “Like you care,” he grumbled.

  My reference to martial arts, an attempt to bridge the gap between us, had obviously backfired. I tried to change the subject. “Do you want to work on —”

  Trev cut me off with a shake of his head. “Later, Hudson.”

  “Fine.” I ran the toe of my high-top across the leaf-clogged gutter as Trev disappeared into his house without looking back. I knew his gran would be waiting inside with some yummy homemade snack — ice cream and applesauce or jam-filled sandwich cookies (or both) — while his parents stayed out, working late into the night at the hardware store they owned in town.

  Trev was still pissed off at me, and I still didn’t know how to fix it.

  It was true that I’d been a jerk. But I’d already apologized a million times — even before the start of junior high.

  Trev hadn’t just sent me to the penalty box; he’d thrown me out of the league.

  Chapter Three

  I spent the rest of the afternoon shooting hoops, hoping Trev might be tempted to come out for some one-on-one. But no. With each basket, I got madder and madder, until I finally gave up and went inside.

  When Mom came home, I stayed in my room. I was still fuming over Aidan, Matthew, Liam … and Trev. As I doodled on the corner of my homework book, I could hear her talking to Uncle Vic in the kitchen.

  After a while, curiosity and hunger (my afternoon snack, three fluffernutter sandwiches and a glass of chocolate milk, was a distant memory) got the better of me. I went prowling downstairs.

  “Hey, Mom, what’s for dinner?” I sat on my stool at the kitchen counter, hoping for some takeout. Chinese would be good. Then I noticed Uncle Vic was wearing an apron. Great.

  Mom nudged me off the stool.

  “We’re in the dining room tonight, Hudson.”

  “Why?” I asked, ignoring the fact that there were only two stools at the counter.

  She ignored me right back.

  I watched Uncle Vic carry a big wooden bowl from the kitchen to the dining room, which was less than four feet away and about the size of a goalie crease. “Hey, kid. Ready to chow down?”

  “Hey, Uncle Vic.” I followed him to the table and dropped heavily into the spot that had obviously been set for me — with a plastic cup instead of glass. I surveyed the meal, laid out in serving dishes in the center of the small, round table. No meat. No potatoes. Just salads. “Is this all we’re having? Rabbit food?”

  “Don’t be rude.” Mom ruffled my hair and then sat down beside me. “As long as Uncle Vic makes dinner, we’ll eat what he eats.”

  I ran my hand through the thick brown hair that had grown out of my brush cut. It was finally long enough that it didn’t stand on end, adding more unwanted inches to my height. “But athletes need protein.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry, kid.” Uncle Vic dumped salad and half a jar of dressing onto his plate. “Looks to me like you grew another foot while I was on tour.”

  I slouched down low in my chair, wondering whether his milk run through Pennsylvania qualified as a tour. “I’m not worried about getting taller,” I said through clenched teeth. “I’m worried about muscle mass.”

  Mom smiled sympathetically. “Just be glad your uncle is no longer a freegan.”

  Uncle Vic laughed. “Those were some crazy times.”

  “Crazy?” Mom made a face like she’d just caught a whiff of my sweaty hockey gloves. “Try disgusting.”

  I nodded in agreement. I couldn’t imagine eating food from a garbage bin. But Uncle Vic had insisted that grocery stores and restaurants threw away tons of perfectly good food every day. For months, he’d saved the world — and money — with what he called his anticonsumerism lifestyle. Then he’d ended up in the hospital with stomach problems.

  “You can get lots of protein from a healthy, vegetarian diet,” Uncle Vic said, holding up a forkful of chickpeas and sunflower seeds to demonstrate.

  “Maybe enough for musicians,” I said as I buttered another thick piece of multigrain bread, “but not enough for athletes.”

  “What about Georges Laraque from the Montreal Canadiens? He’s vegan.”

  “He’s also retired,” I muttered, even though I’d heard rumors that he was making a comeback in Norway or something.

  “There’s Mike Zigomanis.” Uncle Vic shoveled lettuce into his mouth. “He played a few games for the Penguins,” he added, as if it were possible there was an NHL player I didn’t know.

  “I don’t play hockey anymore.”

  “What?” Uncle Vic raised his eyebrows, wrinkling his otherwise smooth and shiny forehead. “Since when?”

  “Since summer.”

  “Isn’t hockey a winter sport?”

  “You try out for the next season as soon as playoffs are over in the spring,” Mom said quietly, “so you can make a decision about summer training.”

  Uncle Vic’s fingers drummed the table next to his empty plate. “How come no one told me?”

  “Hudson doesn’t like to talk about it,” Mom said.

  I stood up so fast that I banged my knee against the table. Grabbing my plate, I hobbled into the kitchen and scraped the rest of my salad into the garburator. Over the running water, I could hear Mom tell Uncle Vic how I’d been cut from my AAA team. That I’d hung up my skates because I didn’t want to drop down a level.

  The sharp pain in my knee was overpowered by a familiar ache — the feeling of being battered and bruised on the inside — as I thought about what my coach had said: “You grew too quickly, Hudson. I thought some bulk would help you, but it’s slowed you down. And your height has really affected your stick handling. I’m sorry, sport, but it happens.”

  His words had crushed me. Hockey had been my life. It was still my favorite sport in the world, but now I was a spectator instead of a star. Mom had encouraged me to keep going, convinced that I’d get the coordination back, and then my height would be an advantage. But I didn’t want to.

  Here’s what I knew: Mom had lied. She’d always told me that I could have whatever I wanted if I tried
hard enough. That I could be whatever I wanted to be.

  But that wasn’t true. I’d tried and failed. There was nothing I could do. No one could control how much they grew. Or when.

  Not even Mom.

  •••

  When the dishes were done (to my standards, not Mom’s), I went back to the dining room to ask Uncle Vic for the firefighter’s business card.

  “It’s all that time you spend in bars and restaurants,” Mom was saying. “Those places are full of smoke and —”

  Uncle Vic cut her off. “When’s the last time you were in a bar, Martha? There’s been a smoking ban in New York State for over ten years. None of the big cities allow you to light up anywhere near —”

  “You don’t have a healthy lifestyle.” Mom leaned forward and pointed her finger at him. “You refuse to grow up, and now you’re suffering the consequences.”

  “Don’t get all high-and-mighty on me, sis.” Uncle Vic’s voice was getting louder. “It’s just some smoke from last night. Don’t make such a big deal about it.”

  I could see the cracks in Mom’s usual mask of calm and control: red eyes that matched her face, a twitch at the side of her mouth. She didn’t lose it often, but when she did, look out. “Don’t make a big deal of it? How does someone sleep through a kettle whistle, a smoke alarm and a frantic neighbor trying to bust down the door?”

  “Dunno, sis.” Uncle Vic looked tired and defeated. Even his hair hung limp and straight, instead of messy and fun like it usually was. “Being on the road must’ve really worn me out …”

  “That feeble excuse is not going to cut it. Do you know how long I spent on the phone with the fire department?” Mom’s hands were flying, her pointed finger stabbing the air as she spoke. “When are you going to grow up? No insurance. A suspicious fire. Arson investigators calling me at work —”

  “The fire’s suspicious?” I interrupted.

  Mom and Uncle Vic looked up, surprise showing on each of their faces in totally opposite ways: Mom’s lips pursed together tighter than the stitching on a goalie pad, Uncle Vic’s mouth hanging open. They’d been so deep in conversation that neither of them had noticed me standing there.