Mr. Maddox reached over and pushed my chin up. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” he asked. “I thought we were just talking about growing up. Look, if you’re mad, you should say something. If you think I did you wrong, you can do me wrong. You can call me a name. Any name you want.” He paused. “Or you can hit me. Go ahead, hit me.” He spread out his arms. “Right here in the stomach. Hard as you can.” He waited a moment. Then he pointed at his jaw. “Or right here in the face if you want.”
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t want to hit me? Why not?” He paused again. “I know you’re not scared of me, so I guess you’re not mad at me. Good.” He took out his roll of bills and pulled off a twenty. “Here’s for your day’s work,” he said, and headed back up the stairs.
Twenty dollars was way more than Mr. Maddox usually paid me for a day’s work. The whole thing had been creepy, and by taking the money, I felt I was letting him buy me off. But twenty dollars was a lot of money. Mr. Maddox knew I needed it, and he knew I’d take it. I put the money in my pocket, finished matching the socks, and left without saying goodbye to anyone.
“I don’t like Mr. Maddox,” I told Liz that night.
“You don’t have to like him,” she said. “You just have to know how to handle him.”
I had been planning to tell Liz what had happened, but it was sort of embarrassing. Also, when I played it through in my head, Mr. Maddox hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and if he had, he’d more or less apologized. I kept telling myself that I didn’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it was. From now on, I just had to figure out how to handle him. Like Liz did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Usually Mom called once a week, but every now and then she called a few days late or skipped a week. When that happened, she’d apologize, saying she meant to call, but you know how crazy the music world can get.
The time wasn’t quite right yet for Liz and me to come up to New York, Mom told us, but we weren’t going to be stuck at Mayfield forever. Besides, it was good for us to be exposed to life in Byler. It would help us understand her, what she had to put up with and why she made the decision to leave. It would make us grateful that she’d taken pains to raise us among open-minded nonconformists instead of people who treated you like a pariah if you didn’t do everything exactly the way they did.
When I told Mom I joined the pep squad, she sighed. “Why would you want to do that?” she asked. She’d been a cheerleader herself, she said, and she shuddered to remember it. Football was barbaric. And cheerleading was a way of brainwashing women into thinking that the men were the stars and the most women could expect out of life was to stand on the sidelines and cheer them on.
“Don’t be someone else’s little cheerleader,” Mom said. “Be the star of your own show. Even if there’s no audience.”
I knew Mom had a point. Still, I liked being on the pep squad. It was fun, and I’d made some friends. What was wrong with that? Also, I’d figured out that school spirit was important in Byler, and if you didn’t show any, you wouldn’t get very far.
Liz, however, took Mom’s advice to heart. She’d been leaning in that direction anyway and was glad to have Mom’s perspective to support her own views. I’d been trying my best to make things work out at Byler, but you couldn’t say the same about Liz. She was constantly making comments about quaint local customs, dropping Latin phrases, correcting other kids’ grammar, and grimacing at the sound of country music. After the first day of school, Liz and I had worn blue jeans, but after a couple of weeks, she’d gone back to outfits that made her stand out, including the orange-and-purple skirt, a beret, and recently, even some of Mom’s old clothes—the very ones Uncle Tinsley had wanted us to wear—like a tweed hunting jacket and riding breeches. It had been years since I’d been in the same school with Liz, and while I was in the habit of thinking of her as brilliant and beautiful and all-around perfect, it was clear the other kids at Byler thought she acted peculiar and put on airs.
In California, we’d never paid much attention to school sports. The only people who really cared were the kids on the teams. But in Byler, the entire town was obsessed with the Bulldogs. Signs cheering on the team appeared in the storefronts along Holladay Avenue. People painted Bulldog slogans on the windows of their cars and houses and planted red and white flowers in their gardens. Grown-ups standing on street corners discussed the team’s prospects and debated the strengths and weaknesses of individual players. Teachers interrupted class to talk about the upcoming game. And everyone treated the members of the team like gods.