But Lori hadn’t deserved Mom’s glares last night or the cruel way she’d snapped, “You stay out of Chuck’s suitcase. You hear?” And she didn’t deserve Mom’s anger now. Lori had been trying to help Chuck, showing Mom his drawings. She’d been, well, almost proud of him, wanting someone else to see what he could do. It wasn’t even like she’d been snooping in his suitcase to begin with. She’d just seen his drawing pad hidden under his bed back in Philadelphia, and she’d picked it up, thinking some other guest had left it behind.
But had Mom given her a chance to explain that?
And this morning, she was just trying to get Mom to understand what it was like for Chuck at school. And for Lori. It wasn’t Lori’s fault other kids were mean.
Or was it?
Lori thought about all the times she’d heard other kids call to Chuck, “Hey, Lardson,” all the times she’d heard them taunt, “Do you even have a brain?”
Could she have stopped them?
She thought about the postcard she’d almost sent from Atlanta, making fun of Chuck for sneaking out to art museums. Did that count as joining in?
“Mom,” Lori pleaded again, but it was no use. She sounded guilty now. She was guilty.
Chuck came out of the bathroom just then, and Mom and Lori sprang apart instantly, like they were doing something wrong. Like they had to hide the fact that they’d been talking about him. Chuck looked dazedly from Mom to Lori.
Lori stared back at Chuck like he was some stranger she’d never seen before. Like he was an exhibit in a museum.
He was fat. But he wasn’t really any fatter than lots of other kids back home—Robert Hayes, for example, who was some big star on the football team. Nobody teased Robert.
Chuck had his mouth open slightly, and that made him look dumb. But he had to breathe through his mouth sometimes because he had bad allergies. It wasn’t his fault.
Chuck was wearing stiff new blue jeans and a polo shirt Mom had gotten him, with vertical red-and-blue stripes. (Had Mom thought that would be slimming?) The shirt was a little too big on him, and maybe too grown-up. It looked like he’d borrowed it from some businessman at a conference Mom had spoken at—like one of them had said, I brought this because I thought I was going to have time to play golf, but I didn’t. Want it for your son? Chuck just didn’t look comfortable wearing that shirt.
Did Chuck ever look comfortable?
Chuck still had comb marks in his wet hair, and that made him look younger. For just a second, Lori saw past the fat and the dumb expression and the ill-fitting shirt. She saw the little boy who had been her best friend and constant companion. The one she would have walked barefoot across a field of burrs and thistles for. The one she worried about when he got carsick. (“Chuckie okay now? Chuckie okay now?” she used to ask, again and again, because her whole world depended on hearing the right answer.)
The one she’d been mad at for the past eight years, without even knowing why.
Lori waited for the familiar fury to hit her again, but it didn’t come right away.
“Chuck,” she said weakly. “When we get home and you start taking art lessons, if anyone makes fun of you for it, I’ll make them stop.”
At the same time, Mom was saying, “Chuck, we need to figure out how to deal with those kids who are making fun of you. Who are they? I bet I went to school with the parents of pretty much everyone in your class. If you tell me who’s teasing you, I could make some calls, talk to their parents—”
Lori had wanted Mom to notice what Lori was saying. She turned on Mom.
“Mom, that’s crazy. You can’t call people’s parents. That will just make everyone tease him more,” she said.
“Well, we’ve got to do something. What those kids are doing—that’s harassment. No one should have to put up with that.” She glared at Lori. “Do you have any better ideas? Anything you could do that won’t hurt your image?”
Lori looked back at Chuck. His eyes were darting back and forth—toward Lori, toward Mom, toward Lori, toward Mom. He reminded Lori of a caged animal looking for an escape.
Chuck had had a nightmare.
It started out happy. He dreamed that he and Mom and Dad were having a conference with Miss Prentiss, his first-grade teacher, and she had said, “Oh, forget about reading and math. They don’t really matter, not when he’s so talented otherwise. Have you seen how Chuck can draw?”
Daddy had clapped him on the back and said, “Way to go, son.” They’d gone out for ice cream to celebrate, not to make up for everything Chuck couldn’t do.
But while Chuck was sitting there digging into mounds of Dairy Queen soft serve, Daddy had disappeared. Poof. Now you see him, now you don’t. Chuck got up from his little stone table and walked all around the Dairy Queen parking lot yelling, “Daddy! Daddy! Where are you?” And people were laughing at him. All the kids he knew were high school students, pointing and snickering and calling out, “Dummy! Fatso!” But Chuck was still a little boy who couldn’t see over the pick-up truck beds. The cars and trucks were parked like a maze, and Chuck couldn’t find his way out.