A Matter of Trust

Chapter 20





At the beginning of second period, Gabe broke out his two peanut butter sandwiches. Mrs. Schmalz was cool and let them eat in class. He had made them after his mom left for work, so she wouldn’t ask why he was bringing sandwiches to school but still needed lunch money. She wouldn’t understand.

This morning she had seemed upset about something, yelling at herself for forgetting to buy fresh bread. But Gabe hadn’t seen anything wrong with the bread they already had. And he needed the 680 calories and 18 grams of protein that he could get from two sandwiches.

Today Mrs. Schmalz showed a boring video about geometry while Gabe doggedly chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. After he finished, it was all he could do not to fall asleep. Even after the lights were turned back on, the talk about postulates and theorems made him prop his head in his hands while trying to keep his eyes open.

In American history they had to pretend they were reporters at a muckraking newspaper and write articles about tenements. In ceramics they made fish out of clay. For lunch Gabe had two vanilla milk shakes and two slices of sausage pizza, for a total of 1550 calories and 42 grams of protein. Then it was on to Spanish I, which was a bunch of verbs he couldn’t remember two minutes after he parroted them back to the teacher.

At least biology was all easy stuff like cell parts, and Tyler was in this class. Tyler wasn’t on the football team—he only cared about basketball—but Gabe and Ty had been tight since elementary school. He had been texting Tyler when his mom made him listen to Colleen’s last minutes. Of course that night, after everything was over and his mom was in bed, he had texted back and forth with Ty, told him what really happened. His mom had said not to tell, but it was too late for that. By then Ty already knew most of it. Gabe had just filled in the blanks.

Before class started, Ty leaned over. “I heard Mr. Washington played basketball at Wake Forest.” His eyes were wide with excitement.

Yeah, but now Mr. Washington was a teacher, not a pro. Maybe that was why he had pinned a quote from Horace Greeley, whoever that was, above his whiteboard: Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wings. Only one endures, and that is character.

While that might be true, Gabe thought as he munched on a protein bar on the way to football practice, he wouldn’t mind fame, popularity, or riches. Even if they didn’t last, still, you would have had them for a little while.

Right now he didn’t have any of those things. The high school was four times as big as his old middle school, and he still felt a little lost. But Coach Harper had picked Gabe for the team, so he must have seen something in him. Gabe wished he knew what. It seemed to have disappeared between being picked for the team and actually playing in a game. Once Coach saw how scrawny Gabe was compared to everyone else, he had probably realized his mistake. If he got bigger, maybe Coach would put him in.

Practice started with warm-up drills: lunges, sprinting, jumping jacks. Then Coach had them running up and back around a backstop. As Gabe huffed and sweated, he hoped the running part would be over soon. It was basically cardio, and everyone said cardio burned calories. Next they did monkey rolls and practiced running into dummies. Gabe was feeling pretty good about things—he might be little, but he was fast and limber—but then Coach had them do punts and punt returns. Eldon hit Gabe so hard he ended up on his back with all the air knocked out of him. Then Coach told them to run pass routes, and Rufus just turned around and threw Gabe down like he was nothing. When practice ended, Gabe’s ego was as sore as his body.

After showering, Gabe stepped on the scale. He was pleasantly surprised. He had already gained three pounds! He had set up a diet plan, and it was working. He was on a roll!

A cuff to the shoulder sent him staggering sideways off the platform.

“Hey,” Gabe yelled, fists balling. Then he turned and saw that it was Zach, one of the guys he had hung out with the night before. Zach was a year older, four inches taller, and seventy-five pounds heavier. The cool thing about high school was that you got to hang out with older kids. The classes weren’t filled with babies, little sixth and seventh graders who didn’t even come up to your armpit, the way it had been last year. Some of the guys on the team were the size of adults—and not regular adults either, but football player adults.

“Beefing up?” Zach asked, grinning. “Drinking that protein shake like I told you to?”

Eldon and Rufus were listening as they got dressed. They were both sophomores and friends of Zach’s. Eldon didn’t say much, and his eyes were continually at half-mast, but he was always smiling. Rufus was big, over two hundred pounds, not all of it muscle. But that didn’t matter very much when he had just run into you and he weighed nearly a hundred pounds more than you did.

“I made one of those shakes last night.” It had tasted terrible.

“You should have another one as soon as you can after practice. Try mixing it with grape juice. It’s a fast-absorbing carbohydrate, and that means it’ll replace the glycogen in your muscle cells that you lost when we were pushing you up and down the field today.” Zach probably knew more about biology than Mr. Washington.

“Okay.” Gabe pulled on his boxers and jeans.

“So what are you going to do now?” Zach asked.

Gabe looked around to make sure he was still talking to him. He thought last night had been a fluke, just him happening to be next to Zach and his friends when Grandpa called with the word that he was free.

“Just going home.”

Zach’s eyes flashed over to Eldon and Rufus, then looked back at Gabe. “There anybody at your house?”

“Only my little sister. I have to pick her up from preschool on the way home. My mom doesn’t get home from work until kinda late.” He hoped no one would ask about his dad—or worse yet, knew what had happened and would say they were sorry—but nobody did. “And then I’m going to lift. There’s a whole weight setup in my basement.”

Zach took the bait, as Gabe had hoped he might. “Cool. Maybe we can come hang out at your place?”

“Sure.” He tried to hide his grin. “Like I said, all I need to do is go get my sister.”

“We can pick her up in my car.”

Gabe was still impressed that Zach had a car. They had all gone to the mall together in it the night before. Gabe was studying for his learner’s permit, which he wouldn’t be able to get until he turned fifteen in February. Wasn’t there some kind of Washington law about drivers under eighteen not being able to carry more than three passengers under the age of twenty who weren’t members of their immediate family? Once they added Brooke, it would be four. Plus there wouldn’t be any car seat. But it was only four blocks, and she would be sitting between him and Eldon and they would be like cushions. And he could throw his arm across her if they had to come to a sudden stop. As they walked out to the parking lot, Gabe gave Zach directions to the preschool.

His new friends stayed in the car while he went inside to get his sister. It was five forty-five, so there were a lot of parents running in and out. He hoped no one noticed that he wasn’t walking her home.

Brooke gave him a big smile with her tiny white teeth. But when they went outside and he opened the passenger door for her, she hung back. Eldon smiled at her encouragingly and patted the empty seat, but Gabe could feel her back stiffen against his knees. “Come on, Brooke, get in,” he said, nudging her. She wouldn’t budge. The only way he got her inside was to have her sit closest to the door while he squished in next to Eldon. Meanwhile Zach drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and sighed.

“Dude, this is nice,” Eldon said appreciatively after Gabe unlocked the front door and they all trooped inside. He looked around, seeing the wood floors and old oak furniture with new eyes. Maybe it was nice. He didn’t know.

“Hey, Brooke, go on and watch TV for a little while, okay?” She went into the family room without protest.

“Time for you to drink that shake,” Zach said. Gabe ended up following him into his own kitchen. While he was making the shake—with milk, since they didn’t have any grape juice—Zach started rooting around in the fridge. “The only way you are going to get big, dude, is to eat lots and lots of protein. Eggs, cheese, milk, peanut butter. And meat. Get your mom to start buying steaks.” He emerged from the refrigerator with an unopened two-pound orange loaf of Tillamook cheddar cheese. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” He grabbed a knife from the block on the counter and started cutting off hunks and handing them to Eldon and Rufus, in between stuffing bites into his own mouth.

By the time Gabe thought to say anything, the cheese was already half-eaten. His mom had been complaining lately about how much he ate. Zach was opening cupboards now, looking for crackers to go along with the cheese. It seemed like a good time to remind them about what was in the basement.

“So you want to check out the weight set?”

“Let’s go,” Zach said, grabbing his pack and another hunk of cheese.

“Yeah, bro,” Rufus said.

The basement smelled musty, a smell that must have always been there but that Gabe had never noticed before. Some people had basements with carpets and TVs and gaming systems, but in this part of Seattle during the rainy season most basements were, at a minimum, damp. The weight bench was in a dry corner, along with a rack of dumbbells that ranged from ten pounds all the way up to fifty.

Zach sat on the bench, hooked his legs behind the pads, and started doing leg extensions. Eldon picked up the twenty-pound weights and began doing bicep curls. Rufus did the same thing, only with thirty-pound dumbbells that he handled with ease. That left the ten, fifteen, forty, and fifty-pound dumbbells for Gabe to choose from. He grabbed the fifteens, glad he hadn’t been the first to pick up weights. Nobody could blame him for not taking the forties. Even still, if the other guys ended up doing more than twenty-five reps, it was going to be hard to keep up.

Zach already seemed bored. He stopped lifting, got off the bench, and started walking around the basement, touching things while Gabe bit back the urge to ask him not to.

“I saw you hanging out with that Tyler McCabe at lunch today.” Zach picked up a bottle of paint thinner, undid the cap, and took an experimental sniff. “Are you friends with him? Because he’s queer. You can tell.”

Gabe smiled uneasily. “Tyler’s not gay.” He had known Tyler since kindergarten. “He’s just a little different, that’s all.”

“Different as in gay,” Zach pronounced. He put the cap back on the paint thinner and set it down.

“Different as in he’s just a little intense. He’s got some specialized interests.” One of them was Legos. Ty still played with Legos, only now he incorporated little motors inside so the things he made actually moved. Over the summer he had made a spider that skittered across the floor. Gabe hadn’t known it would move, or even that it could move, so when Ty had shown it to him, he had screamed like a girl.

“Specialized interests like other boys, you mean.”

Gabe realized it was futile to argue.

“We did something fun over the summer.” Zach grinned.

“What?” Gabe was just thankful that he had changed the topic.

“All I can tell you is that we were on the news.”

Gabe tried to think of what it could be. He imagined a party with hot girls, a keg of beer, and a swimming pool. “Come on—what?”

Rufus said, “Dude, if we told you, we’d have to kill you.”

Zach added, “But maybe we’ll let you join in sometime.” He was still fidgeting, picking things up and putting them down.

Eldon gave Gabe a look he couldn’t read.

Zach walked over to the door and opened the lock. Three stairs led up to the backyard, which was empty except for their old wooden play structure. The nearest neighbors were behind a tall hedge.

Rummaging in his pack, Zach came up with a small brown pipe, a lighter, and a baggie half full of gray-green crumbles. Rufus put down his weights.

Zach filled his pipe and fired it up. He took a long drag, held it, and then exhaled. He offered the pipe and lighter to Gabe. “Here you go.”

Gabe waved it off. “That’s okay.”

“Come on, take a hit. It won’t hurt you. All it will do is make you hungry, and that will help you put more weight on. And they don’t ever drug test at our school.”

Gabe tried to think of a reason to say no. “My mom’s always hugging me. If she smelled that on me, she’d ground me for sure.”

“Trust me,” Zach said, “moms are clueless.” He passed the pipe and lighter to Rufus, who lit up and sucked on it eagerly, while Eldon lay back on the weight bench and started doing chest presses.

Zach was taking his third hit on the pipe when there was the sound of a car stopping outside their house.

“My mom’s home!” Gabe’s heart felt like it would burst out of his chest. The basement reeked. He began to frantically fan the door open and closed, open and closed.

Eldon dropped the weights he was holding and they crashed to the floor. Rufus swore.

“We’ve got to get upstairs and pretend like we’ve been there the whole time. If my mom smells this, she’s going to kill me!”

Zach calmly picked up a can of WD-40 from the workbench, shook it twice, and pressed the button. The metallic scent filled the air.