sorry, Miss McKinney. If you want your son to believe that people are basically selfish and unresponsive, you’ll have to tell him so yourself. He smiled tightly and shook his head, saying nothing.
She fixed him with a look that burned in silence, but he was not afraid of her anger, or so he intended to prove to them both; so he noted instead that her eyes were almost the same color of brown as her short, baby-fine hair.
“Well, Trevor,” she said. “I think it’s a good project. Tell us some more about it.”
So Trevor explained, with the help of his calculator, how big this thing could become. Somewhere around the sixteenth level, at which he’d involved 43,046,721 people, the calculator proved smaller than Trevor’s optimism. But he was convinced that in just a few more levels the numbers would be larger than the population of the world. “Then you know what happens?”
Arlene looked to Reuben but he didn’t care to guess, wanting to hear it straight from Trevor’s obviously active brain.
“No, honey. What?”
“Then everybody gets helped more than once. And then it gets bigger even faster.”
“What do you think, Mr. St. Clair?” Arlene clearly wanted something from him, but he wasn’t sure from minute to minute what that something might be.
“I think it’s a noble idea, Trevor. A big effort. Big efforts lead to good grades. How do you feel about the fact that Jerry got arrested?”
Trevor sighed. From the look on Arlene’s face, Reuben had done his job correctly for a change.
“It’s okay, I guess. Except I just have to start all over, is all. It’s okay, though. I already got other ideas.”
“Like what, honey?” Arlene asked in that sugary voice she slipped into when questioning her own son.
“It’s a secret. Can I be excused?”
Arlene caught Reuben’s eye again, begging for something. As if she could not just say, No, young man, we are not done here. Reuben only shrugged.
“Okay, run along, then, honey.”
Trevor charged in the direction of his bedroom, but as he barreled by Reuben’s seat, Reuben took him gently by the sleeve and pulled him over close enough that Arlene, on the other side of the table, hopefully would not hear.
“You can’t orchestrate love, Trevor.”
“What’s ‘orchestrate’?”
“You can’t make it happen for somebody else.”
“Doesn’t that have something to do with music?”
“Not always.”
“Oh. You can’t, huh? I mean. Oh. Okay. That wasn’t my idea, though. Anyway.”
“Just checking.”
Reuben loosed his sleeve and he disappeared.
Reuben looked up to see Arlene glaring across the table with that mixture of stress and anger and rocket fuel to which he was becoming nicely accustomed.
“What’d you say to him?”
“It’s a secret. May I be excused?”
From The Diary of Trevor
M om and Mr. St. Clair like each other. I just know it. What I can’t figure out is, why don’t they know it? It’s right there, and I just feel like shaking them and saying, Oh, just admit it. Mr. St. Clair would be nice to her, I think. I think he’d give his entire heart to somebody who would say, You know, that’s a nice half a face you got there. You know, like the glass is half full instead of, well, you know. He’s sad about his face. I think if he wasn’t, he could admit it better when he liked somebody. But then my mom has a great face and she’s doing it too. Go figure.
What if the world really changed because of my project? Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing? Then everybody would say, Who cares about his face, he’s the best teacher in the world, that’s what matters. That would be so cool.
I think the best shot I got now for my project is Mrs. Greenberg. Jerry got arrested and Mr. St. Clair says you can’t orchestrate love, which made it sound like I was trying to wave a baton around or something. But so far it looks like he’s right.
But a garden. A garden holds still for all that orchestra stuff.
Chapter Seven
M RS
David LaRochelle
Walter Wangerin Jr.
James Axler
Yann Martel
Ian Irvine
Cory Putman Oakes
Ted Krever
Marcus Johnson
T.A. Foster
Lee Goldberg