Chapter 1 News Flash: My Parents Aren’t As Lame As I Thought! Okay, well, they’re still pretty goofy. Dad’s still got those Clark Kent-style glasses and Mom could really benefit from some time at one those pink fitness centers they have for women, or at least some Slim-Fast. And they still can’t seem to stop saying just the right thing to embarrass me in front of people. But I think I’ll keep ‘em. I used to want to run away. I knew they’d be sorry when I was gone. I could just see them in my mind, all crying and stuff, and calling the police, but I would be long gone. They’d learn their lesson about grounding me, taking away my computer, calling me Timmy, and making me take my sister on the kiddie coaster. How humiliating! My sister’s Kimmy. She’s ten. Don’t even get me started on her. Timmy and Kimmy. Have you ever heard anything more puke-worthy? Well, I never did run away. Probably would have, except I didn’t know how I’d go about carrying my computer tower and monitor when I went (I think that’s why they never bought me a laptop, because they knew I’d be gone), and anyway I didn’t know where I’d plug it in if I lived in a cardboard box at the beach. Considering all I learned this last year, it’s good I didn’t have the laptop. Most kids who run away don’t get to live in cardboard boxes in warm places and make their own rules anyway. Most of them just end up belonging to other grown-ups than the ones they started with. And when I compare my parents to some of the so-called adults I read about, they might as well be Superman and Wonder Woman. Don’t tell them I said that, though. At least they don’t call me Timmy anymore. Finally finally they call me Tim. It’s a step up from Timmy. You can call me Tim, too. I’m not going to tell you my last name. If I’ve learned anything this last year, it’s that a person can’t be too careful about protecting the private stuff. When I’m old enough, I’m going to give myself a good name. Phoenix or Wolf or something. But for now I’m Tim, and I can live with that. Not on the computer, though. On the computer, I call myself Justifixator. Good name, huh? Except sometimes I have to vary it because it’s too long for some sites’ screen name boxes (can you believe that?) or--even worse--somebody else already took it. And I always sit back and wonder: who, but me, would want that name? And then you check their profiles and they’re like a forty-five-year-old investment banker that’s going bald. Loser! Anyway, I didn’t used to be Justifixator. I used to be DarkWolf. I liked it better. I had a lot of friends then. And I was almost famous, too, because I was known on a lot of gaming sites and stuff. Then I had to start all over. But I won’t tell you why now, since that’s what this story’s all about. Anyway, now I don’t mind saying I’m DarkWolf, but there were a few months there where DarkWolf had to disappear. I guess I’ll keep Justifixator because I’m starting to get a name for myself again. I want to be on G4 TV. I know I’d be a great host. Yeah, I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t tell my last name because I wanted it to be private and then I turn around and say I want to be famous. Well, I want to be private until I can be famous and afford a personal trainer and bodyguards and stuff. I’m average height and average build for my age, but I’m hoping I’ll be big when I’m older. I’m going to go to a gym. I want muscles. They’re good because they look good. Plus they let you kick butt when you have to. Not that I go around wanting to kick butt, but there’s some people in this world that seriously beg for it. I won’t care so much what people know about me once I’m in a place where they can’t get to me. For now, I’m stuck here with my moderately lame parents. My best friend, Jason, always got to do whatever he wanted. I used to be jealous of that. Not so much anymore. Jason was kind of stupid sometimes. Wished he had parents like mine. The guy had no idea what it was like to live with these people. I think if we could have rolled my mom and Jason’s together, and then rolled my dad and Jason’s together, and then separated them all out equally, we could both have ended up with a good set of parents. This past year sucked in a lot of ways for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong. A lot of people had worse years. But this one was the hardest ever for me. I’m hoping being fourteen will be better than thirteen. I would say it couldn’t be worse, but no, that would be jinxing myself. Plus I start high school in two weeks, and okay, I admit it, I’m a little worried about all that. Mom and Dad say I can make the next year a good one for myself. All I have to do is want it enough to make it happen. Of course I want it. What do they think I am, stupid? HaHa! I mean, who sits around thinking, ‘I want to have a miserable year’? Of course I want a good year. Making it happen is the hard part. How, exactly, do you do that? I guess that’s one of those things you have to figure out as you go. Kissing a girl would be a good start. Learning to kiss well would be even better. Most of the kids hang at the mall on the weekends. Not much to do around here, for people our age, but that. My parents said if I stayed out of trouble, I could start going when I’m fourteen. I’ve been pretty good lately. Fourteen is next week. Can’t wait. They’ll pick me up and drop me off. I guess I can live with that. There’s lots of pretty girls at the mall. I know I can find at least one from another school that wants to kiss me. Probably more. Wish I could get a piercing, too, like Jason did, but my parents would find out and then they wouldn’t let me go anywhere anymore. A lot of kids I know have gotten to second or even third base. Some even had sex. I feel like an idiot. The only thing saving me from being labeled a total loser is that my friends have seen enough to know it’s all my parents’ fault I never get to do anything. My dad’s a cop and my mom’s a schoolteacher—even worse, at our school! They’re going to have to loosen up a lot or we’re going to tangle. I refuse to be known in high school as a mama’s boy and miss out on all the good stuff. We talked tonight. They’re starting to get it. I’m like, “Look, I’m not a baby. If you keep treating me like one, that’s just forcing me to be sneaky. Do you want me to be sneaky?” Well, they both know I can be sneaky, and they learned this last year that can be a bad thing. Then again, so did I. “No, Son, we don’t want you to be sneaky,” Dad said. “We’re giving you the mall trips, aren’t we?” Mom asked. “Yeah,” I said. “I just want it clear to all of us. That’s only the start.” Dad smiled. He put his hand on my shoulder. I used to jerk away when he did that, but I don’t anymore unless I’m really mad. “Yes, Tim,” he said, looking down into my eyes with that ultra-serious look that only he can give. “That’s only the start.” Hallelujah! High school, here I come! Football games. Parties. Maybe even a concert or two. But first, before I get busy with all that, let me tell you about this past year. If nothing else, it’ll at least help explain why I put up with my parents and their stupid rules. More than anything, though, I hope maybe it can help other people not make the mistakes I did. I have to warn you, though, sometimes I’ll be telling what people said, but I might not get it exactly right. I don’t think anybody ever does, unless they go around with tape recorders all the time. I mean, does that bug you about stories people write about stuff that’s already happened? Whole pages of ‘he said, she said’ stuff… as if anybody really remembers all that. I know I don’t. So I’m telling you, right off, I might not get the words people said exactly right. But I’ll do the best I can. From the time I was a little kid, I knew: you don’t take candy from strangers. Easy rule, huh? I still remember being four. Dressed as Buzz Lightyear. Don’t laugh, you probably liked him, too, back then. Halloween night. Looking down at the piece of candy in my plastic pumpkin and back up at the old, gnarly guy at the door who put it there. Well, I know that couldn’t have been my first Halloween outing because there’s pictures of me as Pluto the Dog, Winnie the Pooh, and a Power Ranger from years before that, but I don’t remember those Halloweens, and I didn’t remember them that night. I took the candy out and held it up to him. “I’m sorry, I can’t take candy from strangers.” He laughed, my mother laughed, and I got mad. “You told me!” I said, stomping my foot and looking up at my mother. I felt genuinely betrayed. I mean, what kid wants his mother laughing at him for following her rules--even when it’s hard, because I seriously wanted that Milky Way. Mom had Kimmy--dressed as a pink poodle--on one arm, but she took the candy with her other hand and then wrapped her fingers around my hand, and led me from the door. We sat on the curb and talked. She did most of the talking. It was all I could do to try to keep up. Kids were allowed to take candy from strangers if the kids’ parents were there and said it was okay, because that was almost like the parents giving it to the kids. That, I could understand. She gave me the Milky Way and I ate it, feeling pretty good about the prospects for the night. While we sat there, other kids went to door after door, getting their candy. I wanted to get back out there before it was all gone--but my mother wasn’t done yet. “The reason for that rule is that sometimes bad people try to use candy to get children to come close to them,” she said. “Parents are better at knowing good people from bad people. So that’s why it’s okay to take candy if your Dad or me or Grandma says you can.” “Okay,” I said, getting to my feet. She patted the curb. “I’m not done yet.” I sat back down. “Now, everything was okay tonight because he was a nice man and I was there,” she said. “But I want you to understand. When you reached up toward him… if he would have been a bad person… that would have given him a chance to take you.” “Take me where?” “Wherever he wanted to.” “Why does he want me?” “Well, he didn’t, because he’s a nice man. But a mean man might want to hurt you. And mean people don’t always look mean. So the rule about not taking candy from strangers is really to keep you from getting close to people that might not look mean, but really are.” “So… I can get close to anybody that doesn’t have candy.” “No,” my mother said, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t get close to strangers without your parents’ permission ever.” “Then what about the candy?” “Candy’s just one way people try to catch children.” I sighed and put my head on my knees. “So I’m just s’posed to stay away from grown-ups if you’re not there.” “Yes.” “Okay,” I said. That was an easy rule. I could get my head around it. “Can we go now?” We finished the trick-or-treating without incident, but I was soon to discover that rules were never simple. Half of what my parents said to me seemed to contradict the other half. I got lost from my mom one day at the mall. Not wanting to ask any strangers for help, I stood where I was and screamed for her. I very quickly found myself surrounded by strangers, which was not at all what I wanted. At least Mom was one of the people crowding around me. She gave me a new rule. If I ever got separated from her or my dad, she said, I should look for an employee of the place where we were or somebody in a police-looking uniform. “But they’re strangers,” I said. “Still,” she said, “they’re usually safe. See, if you scream, then that draws attention. So someone who wanted to steal you would know you were lost.” “So don’t scream?” “No,” she said. “Not unless somebody touches you. Then scream, because you don’t want them to take you away where I can’t find you. Then you scream, “Help! A stranger’s got me!” New rules. They made sense. Sort of. Then I went to kindergarten. My mom didn’t work back then, so I was used to being home with her and Kimmy. Here she was, turning me over to strangers. Telling me to do what they said. In my five-year-old mind, the woman was making no kind of sense. But I went along because I was five. What else was I going to do? Okay, so I could trust people in police uniforms and teachers and the preacher and my Cub Scout Troop Leader. Not necessarily, I learned later, when I got old enough to read newspapers and the internet for myself. Lucky for me, I just never encountered any mean ones. If I had, there’s no telling what might have happened. By the time I was twelve, I thought I was pretty smart. Now I know. I was an idiot then. Not because I was twelve, though. Just because I was an idiot. The truth is, I’m lucky to be here. In a way, I guess we all are. There’s a lot of kids who aren’t. I think about them a lot, the kids who lived and died. They deserve to be remembered. We need to know their stories. There’s a lot they can teach us. There’s one that really haunts me. He won’t ever get his fourteenth birthday, like me. And there’s times I think… maybe he’d still be here if I wasn’t such a wuss. That’s a hard feeling to wear. I think most people, when we’re little, we want to grow up to be heroes. I hate knowing I maybe could’ve made a difference, and didn’t. The stuff I was thinking about then—not wanting to make my parents mad, not wanting to be grounded—it all seems so stupid now, compared to the trouble he ended up in. I would’ve done a lot of things different, if I’d only known then what I know now. I wish I could go back in time and knock myself upside the head, and make me do it all the right way. It might not have changed anything for him. But what if it could? I’ve learned a lot of stuff I wish I would have learned earlier. One of the scariest things of all is, even really smart people can be hurt, even if they haven’t made a mistake at all. That’s what this past year taught me. I can never go from one day to the next, knowing I can be a-hundred-percent safe. But I also know this: the more I know, the smarter somebody else is going to have to be, and the harder he’s going to have to work, to take advantage of me. I’m nobody’s fool. A lot of them aren’t ‘strangers’ and ‘candy’ is just a symbol for anything a potential victim might want. I asked my mom tonight why she didn’t level with me a long time ago, tell me what the deal really was. Why did she tell me stories that made ‘the bad guys’ as mysterious as the boogeyman, and every bit as unreal to me? Why didn’t she give me the cold, hard facts? She looked all embarrassed and finally answered, “It’s hard to talk to your kids about some things.” She could tell, from the way I looked at her, how dumb that answer was, and she tried again. She said sometimes parents fall back on generalities and platitudes because some things are really hard to warn your kids about because, just in thinking that way at all, the thoughts and images are too horrible for the parent. Mothers and fathers don’t want to subject their kids to that. Especially since some of what a kid needs to know is way beyond what’s age-appropriate. That is so stupid. I mean, if a kid needs to know it, why is it not age-appropriate? Duh! But I kind of get where she’s coming from. The world’s a lot uglier than Mom and Dad ever wanted me to know it was. I kind of wish they’d focused less on painting pretty pictures for me and more on letting me gain some real-life experiences. But I think they know that now. I think they’ve learned their lesson, and maybe they’ll handle things a little better from here on out--both for me and for Kimmy. I found out, for myself, what Mom was afraid to tell me. I know all about strangers with candy.
An
Ivey Banks
Excerpt