Bringing Me Back Read online

  Rina strained against Mr. Davies’s other outstretched arm. “Is that a—”

  “Yeah!” I yelled, taking two strides closer toward the bear. “It’s a bucket.”

  “That’s not something you see every day,” Rina mused.

  The bear now faced us from the other side of the football field. Or rather, she would’ve faced us. But wedged on her head was a black plastic bucket. Somehow she must’ve scratched out a hole at the end of it, because I caught a glimpse of her snout.

  A strangled, snorting yelp echoed from the bucket. It brought me to a stop, but just for a second. Just as I started to rush toward her again, two things happened. First, she rushed back into the woods. Second, Mr. Davies tackled me.

  The teacher rammed into my back, his arms wrapped around mine, slamming me into the ground and knocking breath from my lungs. I was paralyzed under his weight. His mouth next to my ear, Mr. Davies rasped, “You have to get into the school, now!”

  All elbows and shoulders, I scuttled out from under him. I scanned the woods for a trace of the bear. She was gone. Popping back up to my feet, I turned to face Mr. Davies where he now sat, legs out and breathing deeply on the grass. Funny, you’d think he’d been the one tackled.

  Behind us, the rest of the kids trickled back into the building. A crowd gathered just inside the doors, but teachers were swarming, pulling students from the door and into the classrooms. The door swung shut with a loud click.

  Just Rina stayed, her eyes darting between us and the woods.

  Mr. Davies grunted, pushed up with his hands, and stood. “Noah, what were you thinking? Rushing after a … ” His mouth twisted like Miss Dickson’s as he stifled whatever adjective he wanted to use. “… bear! Do you have a death wish?” He reached for my shoulder.

  I twisted away. “She needs our help! It’s stuck on her head.”

  “What’s stuck on whose head?”

  “The bear! A freaking bucket is stuck on her head!”

  Mr. Davies paused. “Is this a joke to you?”

  He again reached for my shoulder, pulling me closer toward him and the doors to the school. I tried to lunge away from him, and Mr. Davies pulled me back again, so hard I tripped. I hung for a second by his hold on the collar of my T-shirt. “Get up!” he said. “We have to get inside!” I planted my feet, but now our faces were just inches apart. I felt all the blood leave my face even as his flushed tomato red. He yelled, “Who do you think you are? Listen, I’m in charge here, not you. Follow my rules. When I say get into the building, guess what?” He shook my shirt in his fist as he said the next words, “You.” Shake. “Get.” Shake. “In.” Shake. “The building!”

  I jumped back from him, and the collar of my shirt cut into my neck before ripping.

  “I’m glad you’re here to see this, too, Mr. Anderson!” Rina’s voice was an eerie calm after the science teacher’s stormy words. Breathing so hard his nostrils flared, Mr. Davies slowly turned his head toward Rina. She held up her phone, camera facing us. He looked behind him. Mr. Anderson stood there, his face white and mouth open.

  Mr. Davies gritted his teeth. “That’s out of context. Rina, Noah, time to go inside.” He quickly walked toward the building. Mr. Anderson motioned for us to follow, and then locked the door behind us.

  Rina took a small step toward me and stopped, her dark eyes even bigger than normal. “You okay?” she mouthed.

  I nodded, not knowing why I was trembling. I didn’t want her to see me stumble. I swallowed hard and nodded toward her phone. “Good thinking, filming that.”

  She grinned. “Battery died. Total bluff. I got one shot of the bear, then zilch.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I thought I’d be called down to the office. All day, I waited for Miss Dickson’s gloating voice to float over the intercom. But, by lunch, it still hadn’t happened.

  So I went down on my own instead.

  “Mr. Brickle?” Miss Dickson twisted her lips. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “I’d like to see Mr. Anderson.” I plunked down into the chair outside Mr. Anderson’s office.

  “He’s unavailable.” Twisty lips, twisty lips.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Go to class.”

  “I have a free period.” Like I was proving a point, I pulled a book out of my backpack and laid it across my legs. The words swam across the page but I pretended to read them. Miss Dickson sighed and punched buttons on her phone. She cupped her hand over it and whispered into it. Very subtle, that Miss Dickson.

  I was barely through pretending to read a full page when Mr. Anderson stormed into the office, Rina on his heels. The nervousness I had seen earlier—after what happened with Mr. Davies—flickered just a second in his eyes. “Mr. Brickle, I can’t deal with you right now.”

  Rina pushed forward. “Just look!” She waved a paper in the air. “Another A-plus!”

  “Congratulations, Rina.” Mr. Anderson sidestepped by me.

  “Same. Narrative. Essay!”

  “Mr. Anderson,” I broke in, planting my feet in front of the door to his office. “What are you going to do about the bear?”

  He half-turned away from me, only to be inches from Rina.

  “Fourth year in a row, Mr. Anderson,” she continued. “There is a serious dearth of creative thinking in this school!”

  Mr. Anderson sucked in a huge breath, his shoulders pitched with the effort. His eyes darted from Rina back to me. I had never seen my steady principal so close to losing it. Slowly, Rina pulled her phone from her back pocket and oh-so-casually glanced at the screen. She murmured, “I could just upload a video while I wait … ”

  “Come in,” Mr. Anderson growled and leaned past me to open the door.

  Rina pranced into the room and sat in the far chair. I took the one next to her. “You first.” Mr. Anderson nodded toward me. “What’s your issue?”

  “The bear. What are you going to do about the bear?”

  Rina bounced in her seat and pulled the reporter’s notebook from her massive backpack.

  Without looking up from the stack of papers on his desk, Mr. Anderson said, “We’ll be on the lookout for the bear. If it wanders onto the field again, we’ll have a Code Yellow and contact the police.” He jerked his head toward Rina. “You’re up.”

  “Wait!” I didn’t mean for my hand to slam down on his desk. I’m pretty sure my face looked just as surprised as his and Rina’s. “I mean, the bear. What are you going to do about the bear? To, you know, get the bucket off her head.”

  Mr. Anderson cocked his head at me, like a dog that heard the word “treat.” He leaned back in his office chair with a creak and crossed his arms behind his head. “Why are you so concerned?”

  His eyes pinned me in place. I licked my lips, not sure how to answer. Why was I worried about the bear? I glanced over at Rina. Funny, I never noticed her eyes were a dark mix of green and brown. Hazel, I think it’s called. Mr. Anderson cleared his throat, and I realized Rina and I were staring a little too long. Rina turned away and studied her notebook.

  “I—I don’t know.” I ducked my head. “It’s not right. The bear. It just got stuck in that bucket.” I felt my jaw tighten. “It’s not its fault. It can’t get out.”

  No one moved for a long moment. When Mr. Anderson picked up his phone and began pushing buttons, I got up from my seat at the dismissal. But Mr. Anderson pointed back to the chair. He cleared his throat again. “Yes, this is James Anderson, principal of Ashtown Middle School. I had called earlier regarding the bear that came onto school grounds today.” Pause. “Yes, what will you be doing to help the bear’s situation?”

  Mr. Anderson listened for a few minutes, thanked the person, and hung up. He turned to me and Rina. Her pen hovered over the pages of her notebook. Mr. Anderson’s nostrils flared again for a second. “The Department of Natural Resources is looking into the bear. They’ve got a rep searching for tracks.”

  The only sound was Rina’s pen scribbling
on the pad.

  Brick-sized thoughts—apologies, questions, thank-yous—crammed into my skull. But none of them traveled down to my mouth.

  “Now,” Mr. Anderson continued, “back to class.”

  I pushed up to my feet and walked out just as Rina flipped a page and began asking about changes to the writing classes.

  In math, I deduced that the number of shoves in the back is exponentially connected to whether a person stands up for someone opposed to a football fund-raiser.

  In science class, I discovered that Mr. Davies was dumber than I had thought. And that’s saying something, because I had pegged his intelligence somewhere around sloth. Did you know sometimes sloths mistake their own arms for tree branches and fall to their deaths? Well, Mr. Davies fell nearly as far when he ended a lecture about gender roles in animal species by bringing up football. Funny thing is, I actually agreed with Mr. Davies this time. His lecture wasn’t dumb; giving it to this football-loving class was.

  “Sports like football, they serve no purpose in today’s society. They’re as archaic as gladiator games. With any luck, our society will evolve to the point where men can showcase power with intelligence, rather than their ability to hold on to a ball.”

  For a few seconds, complete silence blanketed the room. I looked up and saw Rina’s hands float upward like she was about to start a slow clap. I shook my head quickly at her, and she sat on them instead. Then, the silence crumbled and the booing began.

  “Oh, come on!” Mr. Davies burst in. “How does it help kids like you when whole stadiums cheer you for touchdowns but ignore you when you ace a test or treat others with kindness? How awful it must be when the bleachers are quiet.”

  I kept my eyes locked onto my desktop, trying to push away the noise in my head. The noise of packed bleachers chanting for the Bruins. Mom and Jeff’s roars louder than anyone’s. The slosh of ice and Gatorade as the coolers were lifted and emptied over my head. My neck suddenly felt heavy, heavier than when I was weighed down with all that gear.

  “It’s all just posturing,” Mr. Davies said over the hissing in the room. “It’s setting us up to fall from grace, making boys feel like they belong, only to snatch it away the minute the timer runs out or the team loses.”

  “So don’t lose,” Landon called.

  “Are you following me?” I felt, rather than saw, Rina standing just behind me at the end of the day.

  “Paranoid much? I have the locker next to you.”

  “Since when?” I blurted.

  Rina sighed, deep and heavy. “Since always, oh Master of Observation.” She twirled through the combo on her lock and popped open the door next to mine. Photos of Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, and—strangely—the two grumpy Muppet men were taped to the inside of her door.

  “What?” she snapped when she caught me looking. “I like to accessorize.”

  “That’s such a girl thing to say.”

  Rina cocked an eyebrow at me. “Did you know that I am a girl?” She waved a hand down herself, and my eyes followed across her black T-shirt and dark skinny jeans.

  “Well, obviously.” And then I felt like an idiot because it really made it sound like I had been checking her out. Which I guess I had been. She was cute, in an annoying, always-smarter-than-you sort of way.

  Both of us turned back to our lockers without looking at each other again. The walls on mine were bare.

  “You should get a lock, you know.” Rina pointed to the heap of trash, none of it mine, in the locker. It had taken me a few days after school started to realize that no one was mistakenly using my locker. They were doing it on purpose. Real clever, right? Kids pointing out that I’m nothing by using my locker as a trash can. I swiped the balled-up copies of Rina’s newspaper, a hamburger wrapper, chewed-up gum, broken pencils, and more onto the ground.

  “Or you could just create tripping hazards,” Rina continued in a superior you’re-so-dumb voice. “That’ll work, too.”

  “Who asked you?”

  But just as Rina was about to slam shut her locker door, I saw it. A snapshot from last year of her with her arm around Micah. Even though he’s twice her size, she was somehow looking down at him. He was smiling hugely into the camera, holding up a Butterfinger candy bar.

  Man, he loved those things. It started when Landon gave him one at practice for a laugh. You know, like calling him “Butterfingers” since he could never hold the ball long. But, of course, Micah, who never seemed to learn much past third grade, didn’t get the joke. He loved the candy bar, though. Before long, someone always had one for him. It wasn’t to be nasty, either; it was because when Micah was happy, you couldn’t help but be happy, too. Too quickly the memory switched to the last I had with Micah, with him sprawled on the field. My heart hammered in my chest.

  “He’s okay, you know?” Rina whispered. “The whole leaving school thing—that was his mom’s idea. She was planning it for a long time before … Well, it’s not your fault. Not really.”

  I tore my eyes away from the picture.

  “You know,” she said softly, “Mr. Davies is a complete dunce. But even dunces have a point once in a while.”

  “What’s yours?” I kept my eyes down, knowing I was being a jerk but not being able to stop. Not wanting to hear her next words, but not able to walk away, either.

  “Sports being full of posturing. Leading to falls from grace. The rest of the world isn’t like it is here. I met all of these kids at camp this summer, kids from all over the place. When you get out of this town, you’ll see. Football isn’t—”

  I threw one of my books into the locker. “Get out of this town?”

  “Yeah, when you go to the college or—”

  Both of us stopped talking and turned back toward our lockers as Mike and Landon passed. They were throwing a soft, Nerf-style football back and forth. Just pass by. Just pass by. But, of course, they didn’t. Mike’s shoulder rammed me just under my shoulder blade, shoving me into my open locker, my forearms slamming into the sides.

  “Watch it!” Rina snarled, but Landon only laughed and threw the ball. Mike scrambled ahead, knocking into a couple of sixth graders to get the ball.

  “You might not have to wait that long. For me to leave I mean,” I said. “My mom gets out in six weeks.”

  Rina stilled, her hand on the locker door. “Are you moving when she comes home?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “What makes you think you would be?”

  “We only moved in with Jeff so I wouldn’t go to foster care,” I muttered. I wanted to look around and make sure no one was listening in, but if I looked up I’d see Rina’s face. So I just stared at the trash heap in front of my locker. “He and Mom were fighting—that night, I mean. A big fight.”

  “You think they were going to break up?”

  I shrugged again. “Jeff’s too good a guy to dump her after what happened. He’d feel too guilty. Already feels like it’s his fault I was in the car. But when she’s out … ”

  She shut her locker door and turned toward me, crossing her arms. “I don’t know, Noah. He seems like he really likes being your dad.”

  “He’s not my dad.” Jeff was stuck with me, but the countdown was on. Soon he’d be free. It was even written on the calendar, circled in red.

  I slammed shut my locker door, so hard that it whipped back open. I slammed it again. And again.

  Rina’s fingers, light as butterfly feet, landed briefly on my shoulder. I jerked aside. I didn’t mean to. I mean, I know she was just being nice. But I guess I’m not used to someone touching me. Jeff isn’t the touchy-feely type. Rina started to say, “In a few years, no one will—”

  I pushed shut the locker door before she could finish.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I didn’t even like football.

  That’s the thing. I used to be a soccer player.

  I had never even touched a football before Mom took me to Jeff’s place for the first time. I was eleven
then. He was the first boyfriend Mom had introduced to me in years.

  Jeff had cooked this big spaghetti dinner and was slipping frozen garlic bread in the oven when we walked in. Watching Mom just open the front door and stroll to the kitchen in the back of the house reminded me that, while it might be my first time there, that wasn’t the case for her.

  Jeff offered Mom some wine, and I sucked in my breath until she said no thanks. She grabbed a glass from the cabinet and got herself water from the tap instead, winking at me over the top of her glass. She was keeping her promise not to drink again.

  “What’s with the jersey, kid?” Jeff had asked me.

  I shrugged.

  “He’s obsessed with Leonardo Messi,” Mom piped in.

  “Lionel,” Jeff and I corrected at the same time. Jeff smiled at me, eyes crinkling. I wanted to smile back, but I didn’t. It was like I wasn’t ready to be on his team against Mom, if that makes any sense. Mom opened the kitchen door to the backyard and gave me the go-ahead to head out. The sun had set, making it too dark to really run around. Someone—Jeff, I guess—flipped on the porch light.

  I heard them talking inside, voices low, the smell of garlic and sound of Mom’s laugh filtering through the screen door.

  An old football lay on the grass. The skin was worn off in places, showing white patches of thread. I picked it up and rolled it in my hands a little.

  When the screen door creaked open, I turned to see Jeff standing there in the glow of porch light. He held up his hands and jerked his chin toward the ball.

  I threw it, but it was more like a fling, the ball landing with a thud by his feet.

  “Come on, Messi.” He laughed and picked up the ball. Stepping closer to me, he showed me how to hold the ball. “Let it kind of roll off your fingers.” Jeff reared back and threw. The football sliced through the air, landing across the yard.

  I trotted across the grass and picked it up. Holding it like he had shown me, I threw it back to him. The ball landed in Jeff’s hands with soft, satisfying thud. “Not bad, kid.” Jeff nodded and smiled. This time I smiled back at him.