The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman (6 page)

There were suburban families there, too, and ones who lived in neighborhoods where it was unsafe to walk to school. There were families who didn’t want their kids learning about evolution. Other families simply thought their homes would be far more interesting environments for their kids than an actual school would be. Some families were very religious. Some were very
un
religious. In one family, the girls all wore bonnets.

“Hello, everyone. My name is Abigail,” said a twelve-year-old girl in a bonnet. “My family and I bring thee good tidings and an offering of homemade jam.” She held out a sticky jar with a slightly swollen lid, and passed it around with a bunch of spoons. Nate didn’t really want to touch the jar when it was handed to him.

Mostly, though, the homeschooled families in the room seemed like anyone you would meet anywhere. When Nate thought about the old days—when his parents were still married, or even when he went to P.S. 585—his throat felt thick and a little choked.

During the week it was just Nate and his father. Larry Saviano would get up every so often during the day, pace around the apartment, and say in a vague voice, “How about history? Did you do any of it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You didn’t give me an assignment, Dad.”

“My bad. Read a few chapters in your history book,” his father would say. “And once you’re done with that—what was the subject, the Native Americans?—when you’re done with the Native Americans, get back to studying.”

“But that
is
studying.”

“You know I mean studying Scrabble words.”

Once, as a joke, Nate made a sign and taped it up facing outward on one of the windows in the apartment. It read, HELP!!! I AM A CHILD BEING FORCED TO PLAY SCRABBLE ALL DAY WHEN I SHOULD BE IN SCHOOL!!!!

A neighbor who’d been out walking his dog came upstairs and knocked on the door. “Everything okay in there?” he asked. He insisted on poking his head inside, as if he’d imagined he might see a kid handcuffed to a Scrabble board. “Wow, this is quite a place,” the neighbor said. He turned to Nate. “You must be like the
opposite
of a prisoner in here!”

“Yes, my son’s just a big, hilarious joker,” said Larry. “He cracks everyone up, especially me! Thanks so much for your concern, but as you can see, everything’s great.”

When the neighbor and his dog left, Larry turned to Nate with a hurt expression. “You know that I give you plenty of freedom, right?”

But Nate didn’t think that was true. He didn’t care about Scrabble—actually, more and more, he
hated
it. It didn’t make him sick the way it made his father sick, but the games he was going to play at the YST would be his last. All he wanted now was to win first prize and be done for good.

Maybe, then, his father would let go of the lifelong pain of having lost his own tournament—his glory stolen away all because of the word ZYGOTES. Maybe his father would finally agree that it was time to let Nate back out into the world.

 

 

On the weekend, Nate Saviano took the subway to his mother and stepfather’s apartment uptown. There was no indoor skate park, no recording studio. It was just an ordinary household centered around the raising of a baby. Ugly plastic toys were scattered around, and kiddie music played.

When Nate walked in now, he could hear a song by some annoying children’s singer called Kazoo Stu. The song went:

“
And if you DON’T take the kangaroo outta my hair/I’m gonna have to dress him up in Daddy’s un-der-weeeeaar . . .”

Which was followed by a lot of kazoo playing.

Nate hesitated in the doorway; he knew what awaited him this weekend. It wasn’t just that his mother’s apartment was so hectic, but also that, whenever he was here, he felt as if he was being watched.

“Just
look
at him,” his mother said now to her husband. Dr. Steve was a nice guy, but he talked to everyone as if they were five years old. He was always on the phone with worried parents. No matter what time of day it was, Nate could hear him say, “Be sure she drinks plenty of fluids.”

“Hey there, Nate,” said Dr. Steve. “Come a little closer so I can get a better look at you. Your mom says you’re run-down.”

Nate dropped his weekend bag and skateboard and reluctantly walked over. Dr. Steve took a good look at him, putting both hands on either side of Nate’s neck, checking for swollen glands.

“I’m
fine
, Steve,” Nate said.

“I’m just going to palpate your glands.”

PALPATE, Nate thought. That was a new word for him; he would have to remember to try and play it sometime.

“You getting enough sleep?” asked Dr. Steve. “That’s very important for tweens.”

Nate hated the word TWEENS, even though it was a good Scrabble word. “Yeah,” Nate lied. He had actually only slept for five hours the night before. He would have liked to go lie down right that minute, but it wasn’t possible. He had to share a bedroom here with Eloise, and she was screaming in her crib.

“I don’t believe you, Nate,” said his mother. “I think your dad is making you stay up late at night. Nate, tell me the truth.”

“Dad is being fine,” Nate said.

But soon she was on the phone, saying, “No, you listen to
me
, Larry—he is
twelve.
He has to just be a kid. He can’t make you feel better. Oh, he
can
? Well, he shouldn’t
have
to make you feel better. You’re a grown-up now. You know what?” she said. “Steve and Eloise and I are going to come along to that tournament on December twelfth, so we can stay on top of everything.”

“What?”
said Nate, but his mother waved him away from the phone.

He didn’t want them coming to the YST! Dr. Steve would go up to random players and palpate the glands in their necks. Eloise would explode foul-smelling stuff into her diaper during a tense moment in a Scrabble game. His mother would get into an argument with his father in front of everyone. They didn’t belong down there. But Nate’s mother still felt uncomfortable leaving him with his Scrabble-obsessed father all the time, and she wanted to show that she was a very involved parent, too. Which she was.

When she got off the phone, she said, “Okay, so it’s all settled.”

“No,” said Nate. “It’s not. It’s not settled!”

“Inside voice, Nate, inside voice,” said Dr. Steve.

“It’s just that I don’t need you guys going down there with Dad and me. Really, I’ll be fine.”

“We want to come,” said his mother. “Besides, it’ll make for a nice family vacation. Isn’t Yakamee, Florida, where that weird amusement park is?”

“That’s right,” said Dr. Steve. “Funswamp.”

“Funswamp?” said Nate. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s an amusement park built completely on swampland,” said Dr. Steve. “They’ve got a gator coaster.”

Nate shook his head, defeated. He knew he would have to let them come.

“Who’s your partner going to be, Nate?” asked his mother.

“Maxie Roth,” he answered without thinking; her name had just jumped out of him. Maxie Roth, the ultracool skater girl with the magenta hair and multipierced earlobe. The girl who liked to ride fast and do mental math. As far as he knew, she had no interest in Scrabble. But suddenly, he thought, if I have to go to the YST, then maybe she can go, too. He would text her later and ask her to be his partner.

All Nate wanted—and all that he thought about, many times each day—was that he had to get by until the YST, win first prize, then shout at his father, “Are you finally
happy
?” At which point he would add, “And can I please go back to school already?”

But now, an awful thought occurred to Nate. For some reason, it had almost never occurred to him before.

THE LESSONS BEGIN

D
id you know that SPORK is no good?” Carl Slater asked Duncan Dorfman on a cold afternoon in late October. School was out for the day, and the two boys sat at Slice’s, the pizza place in downtown Drilling Falls.

“No. I did not know that,” said Duncan.

“You might have assumed that SPORK is perfectly fine, right? After all, you’ve used a
spork
before—one of those plastic spoon-forks. But the Scrabble people say nope, sorry, it ain’t good, at least not yet.”

“Huh,” said Duncan. “What do you know.”

“And then there are plenty of words that you
wouldn’t
think were good, but they are,” said Carl. “Your job is to move letters around until you make real words out of them.” Carl took a bite of pizza, which dripped about a quart of orange oil onto his plate. “Words are like clay, Dorfman,” he went on. “They can be shaped and messed with not only by your hands, but also by your
head
. So if you want to win at Scrabble, you have to learn how to move words around and totally reshape them. Do you get what I’m saying?”

Duncan nodded. Once in a while the front door of the pizza place would swing open and the little bell would ring, and one of Carl Slater’s friends would see Carl and start to say, “Hey, dude, what are you—” Then he would notice who Carl was sitting with, and understand that a lesson was taking place. “Catch you later,” the friend would say, backing out. Most of Carl’s friends were annoyed by Duncan, because he hogged all of Carl’s attention these days.

Carl Slater was seen as the king of the Drilling Falls Scrabble Club. If someone had a question about whether a word was good or not, they went to Carl. Brian Kalb was particularly unfriendly toward Duncan now, since Duncan had replaced him as Carl’s partner at the upcoming tournament in Florida. Because Brian had gone with Carl last year, he had assumed they would go together again this year. It wasn’t fair that Brian had been elbowed aside by Duncan, a total beginner, but this was the way Carl wanted it.

Carl Slater had become Duncan’s Scrabble tutor. “I can take a total word dummy like yourself—no offense, man—and turn you into a major player,” he’d said.

Ever since the day in the cafeteria when Duncan had revealed his so-called power, Carl had taken it upon himself to show Duncan “the ropes,” as he called it. “I could also say, ‘show you the PROSE,’” he added.

“What?” said Duncan.

“PROSE is an anagram of ROPES. Oh, and SPORE is too. And POSER.”

In the hall closet of Aunt Djuna’s house, among the boxes that Duncan and his mother had brought with them on the bus from Michigan, was a Scrabble set. It was the old-fashioned kind, in a rectangular maroon box, and it had once belonged to his mother, though she never played it anymore. The day that Duncan started playing with Carl, he’d gone into the closet and taken out the box. Inside was the board, folded in half. Also in the box was an old piece of lined paper with oily spots on it, on which a game had been scored a long time ago.

Duncan had recognized his mother’s handwriting. One of the players had been written down as “Caroline.” That was his mother. The other one, Duncan saw from the faded ink, had been written down as “Ms.”

“Who’s ‘Ms’?” Duncan had asked his mother.

“Ms? What do you mean?” she said.

He showed her the name written on the score sheet, and his mother stood looking at it. “Oh,” she said quietly, taking the sheet from him. She paused.
“‘Ms.’
That was my teacher, Ms. Thorp. We played sometimes.”

“Ms. Thorp beat you,” said Duncan, noticing that the final scores were 382 to 261.

“So she did. I remember that she was a good player,” Caroline Dorfman said. She walked into the kitchen, crumpled up the score sheet, and threw it into the garbage under the sink.

So now, as October in Drilling Falls neared its end, Duncan was becoming a good player, too.

Carl didn’t really care whether or not Duncan actually
liked
Scrabble. Carl simply wanted to bring him to the tournament. And it was only because of the sensitivity of Duncan’s fingertips. Duncan was going to be Carl’s partner so that during the games Duncan could pick both blanks, all four S’s, and all the power tiles from the bag. Not to mention the four-point H’s and W’s, and the five-point K. Or even just so Duncan could pick combinations of letters that could make bingos and earn his team a ton of points.

“Also, Dorfman,” Carl reminded Duncan as they sat in the pizza place with their slices in front of them, the oil making the paper plates look almost see-through, “don’t forget that Scrabble is not just about picking good letters, or finding anagrams. You also have to know how to look at your rack.”

“What do you mean?”

“For instance, when you have an E and a D, you should automatically put them at the end of your rack, hoping that you can make a word that ends in ED. The same is true of ING. And, of course, if you have an S, you should see if it can make a plural. And if you have EST, well, that could be an ending, too. But then again so could TCH, like in the word CATCH. Got it?”

“Sort of,” said Duncan.

“This is true of the beginnings of words, too. You should try to cluster consonants together on your rack, if you have them. Like TH, or CH, or SH. And there are plenty of others. You still with me?” Duncan nodded. “Okay, good. But the most important thing—like basically knowing how to tie your own
shoes
—is knowing your twos.”

“My what?” said Duncan, his mouth full of pizza.

“Your two-letter words. Every serious Scrabble player learns them, and I have decided that today you are ready. You have to memorize the list,” Carl said. “I guarantee that if you learn these words, your game will improve a million percent.” Carl reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He smoothed it down on a clean part of the table. “Here you go,” he said. “Read it. Learn it. Or, hey, just rub it with the fingertips of your left hand, in your case.”

But Duncan didn’t want to use his fingertips to study the list. He wanted to memorize it the way everyone else did. Since that day in the cafeteria, he had almost never used his fingertips again. He sensed that they were meant for big occasions only. Now that he knew his skill was something of value, he didn’t take it lightly.