Borrowed Boy Read online

  Mom gave me a crooked smile. “See what you miss when you text while you walk?”

  I headed for the basketball court. There was a worn and smudged ball behind one of the goalposts. I scooped it up and bounced it a few times. A bit underinflated, the ball still had enough life left for a little play. I casually dribbled my way toward the opposite goal.

  Mom stepped right in my path. She held up her hands, a move that confused me. Was there dirt on her palms or something? Did she want me to wipe it off? Then she turned her hands and flexed her fingers in a feed-me-the-ball motion.

  My eyes bugged again. In all my life, I’d never seen Mom so much as look at a basketball. I didn’t even think she knew what a basketball was. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Do I look as if I’m kidding?” She narrowed her eyes at me, putting on an actual game face. “I was a Lady Vol at the University of Tennessee four years running, and my team took the SEC basketball championship in my senior year. I may not be as fast on my feet as I was then, but I still have a move or two. Believe that, youngster.”

  I laughed. “Mom, you’re… a mom. Moms don’t play basketball. I’d kill you.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at me. “H-O-R-S-E. Best three out of five. I’ll let you have the first play.”

  H-O-R-S-E was my game. Even as short as I was, I killed at it. I grinned as I squared off against Mom.

  She kicked my butt in three games straight.

  EXERCISE IS good for the body and the mind.

  My PE teacher repeated that several times during the past school year, but it didn’t mean much of anything to me until now. After walking to the woods and losing three games of H-O-R-S-E to Mom, I felt energetic, hungry, and halfway happy. On the walk back to our neighborhood, we stopped at the gas station’s convenience store and Mom bought a Snickers ice cream bar for me. Munching that thing on the way home was like being two steps from heaven.

  When we reached our house, Mom pulled out her key as she stepped onto the porch. I grabbed her arm, stopping her. “Mom, I’m gonna hang out with Cole for a while.”

  “Will you be back for lunch, or do you plan on eating at his house?”

  “I’ll get lunch at his place.”

  “That’s fine. I suppose you’ll want this back.” She took my cell phone from her pocket and handed it to me. “Have fun.”

  I stood there holding my phone as she turned to go inside. “Hey, Mom, I feel a lot better now.”

  “Well, honey, I’m so glad.”

  “Thanks for the ice cream and for taking me to the park.”

  She gave me a big smile before letting herself into the house.

  I turned and headed for Cole’s house, thinking about Mom. She was always there for me. She understood my moods and how to deal with them. Whether I was sick, sad, angry, hurt, scared, or confused, she knew exactly what to do to make things better for me.

  What would I do without her?

  Chapter Six

  COLE LOOKED as if a zombie had just walked up in front of him and made a snack out of his nose. He blinked at me. “Say what?”

  I had to tell the whole story again, about the FBI agent, the kidnapping, the fake adoption papers, and the parents in Chicago who wanted their stolen son back. When I finished he blinked at me again.

  “But… but….” He started gasping.

  I whacked him between the shoulder blades a few times. “Breathe, Cole. Breathe.”

  He took a deep breath and sort of choked on it. He coughed like he was trying to heave up a lung. I hit him on the back again. “I don’t get it, man,” he finally managed. “I just don’t get it.”

  “It’s pretty simple, Cole, really.”

  He was home alone when I arrived. His parents were at work, and Lolo was at the mall catching a movie with her boyfriend. Cole was lying face up on the front porch, tossing a football at the ceiling and bored out of his mind. He practically cussed me for not answering his texts. I wanted him to understand that I hadn’t just ignored him or anything, so I dumped all the details of my new crazy situation on him.

  “No, something’s not right here,” Cole replied. “The FBI must’ve mixed up their records. They came to the wrong house, knocked on the wrong door.”

  “My mom and dad are pretty sure the agent came to the right house.”

  “Come on, Zay. I’ve known you my whole life. You can’t be these other people’s kid.”

  “I don’t know, Cole. Have you really looked at my mom and dad? They’re both tall and dark-skinned. And here I am this light-skinned shrimp. I never thought about it before, but I look so different from my parents. My mom showed me a picture of this other family, and the husband and the son… I have their faces. I have the same big dark brown eyes, the same poufy mouth, the same pointy chin. I look like them.”

  Cole snorted so hard it made his glasses slip down his nose. “And I probably look like some boy monk in Tibet. Everybody has a twin somewhere. That’s what Lolo says. She swore there was this history teacher at her school who looks exactly like our Uncle Raj. I didn’t believe her, so she took a picture of him on her phone and showed it to me. Guess what? That teacher really did look exactly like Uncle Raj. And there’s no way that teacher is related to us. He moved here from Senegal, and my family’s straight out of Mississippi.”

  “I don’t know about the teacher from Senegal, Cole. I just know what I saw in the picture my mom showed me.” Seated on the wrought iron rail bordering the porch, I swung my feet, feeling like a very little boy.

  “Anybody can look like anybody,” Cole said stubbornly, pushing his glasses up on his nose again. “That doesn’t make them blood related. Right?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “You’re smart, Zay. Think!” Cole jabbed his finger against my forehead hard enough to leave an impression on my skull. He could get pretty excited about things. Just last week he got so worked up arguing with Lolo over which of them had the prettier feet that he bit his tongue. “How easy would it be for the FBI to pick somebody’s adoption records and say they’re fake, just so they can take the kid and give him to a rich family? And I’ll bet that family’s rich. They’re rich, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know them at all. They were wearing fancy clothes in that picture I saw, but maybe that was just for the photographer. Everybody dresses up to take a picture, right?”

  Cole rubbed his fingertips together like a gangster in a movie. “Money talks and money walks. You have enough money and even the FBI will dance to your tune.”

  “I don’t think these people have that kind of money, Cole.”

  “You just said you don’t know anything about ’em. This has got to be one big hoax. The only kidnapping around here is the one that’ll happen when these Chicago creeps get their hands on you. And who knows what’ll happen then. They could pump you full of knockout drugs and sell you into slavery or something. You’ll wake up in a dark factory in some dark foreign country and get forced to make cheap flip-flops for the rest of your life.”

  “Thanks, Cole. Now I’m scared all over again.”

  “You should be scared, Zay. This is some crazy serious stuff. No way would I let anybody take me away from—”

  “Okay, okay. I get the point. You can shut up now.”

  Cole looked at me like I was about to stick my head in a shark’s wide-open mouth. “No, I can’t shut up!” he shouted, throwing up his hands. “I don’t have a lot of friends, and you’re the best one I got. I don’t want anything happening to you.”

  It felt good to know how much Cole liked me. I wanted to tell him how much I liked him too. But that vague fear was still there, hovering over me like a vampire waiting to tap me on the shoulder, and now I could feel tears rising to the surface. I swallowed them back fast as anything and put on a big smile. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Everything’s gonna be cool.”

  “You promise?”

  “Sure.” I blew out a breath and stood up. “Come on. Let’s grab o
ur boards and go to the skate park.”

  “Nah. Let’s go inside so I can beat your butt at Zombie Mania again.”

  “I’d rather do the skate park.”

  Cole scratched his head, a skeptical squint on his face. “You sure about that? It’s hot as fire out here. We’ll get heatstroke or something.”

  The whole get-physical thing worked once before to calm the worries in my head. I figured it would do the trick again. “No we won’t. We’ll be okay. Let’s go.”

  IT WAS hot as fire at the skate park.

  Thanks to my talk with Cole, I was already in a lousy mood. It didn’t help that, when we got to the park, I could see heat shimmering up from the white concrete vert ramps, funboxes, and launchers like microwaves ready to nuke a bag of popcorn. Cole kept complaining that he was either going to pass out or burst into flames, which didn’t exactly improve my attitude. The relentless sun had chased most kids inside, however, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves except for a skinny guy doing slow, idle turns around the center of the park. At least we wouldn’t have to wait.

  Cole and I went straight for the big vert ramp at the back of the park. As we passed through the center, the skinny kid churned my way, gliding so neatly on his board it was as though he were floating on air. He had his head down, and you could tell from his empty expression that his mind was a million miles away. He plowed past so close his arm bumped me in the side.

  It was such a glancing blow that it didn’t even slow my stride. I stopped and turned to stare after the guy, who raised his head as if he’d just been snapped awake. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “Oh, hey. My bad. Sorry about that.”

  I’m usually pretty easygoing. Any other time, I would’ve accepted the apology with a shrug, tossed off a “No problem,” and gone on to have my fun.

  This wasn’t any other time.

  “Yeah, you’re sorry, all right! Next time, pull your head out your butt so you don’t go around bumping people! Ya narrow-as-an-arrow dumbhead!”

  Honestly, I don’t know where that came from. It just spilled out, and I felt as surprised as Cole looked. The skinny guy didn’t look surprised, however. His whole face seemed to downshift into this deadpan expression that showed exactly how insulted he felt. In midcruise, he slid off his board like magic and came walking up to me.

  Cole always had my back. But Cole is no dummy, and in that skate park he eased himself about thirty feet away from me. Once skinny guy was in my face, I realized something that my brain hadn’t quite registered through all that testiness boiling in my skull. The fella was maybe three years older and around eight feet tall and had hands that could curl into some pretty big fists. This was definitely not the kind of person a short stuff like me would want to piss off. And I’d just done a royal job of pissing the guy off.

  Take it back. Apologize. Plead temporary insanity.

  My mind screamed for me to do those things, and I would’ve done all of them if my mouth hadn’t gone dry as powder. Skinny guy grabbed me, the world spun like a Tilt-A-Whirl ride, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground, stunned speechless. Also, I had a rather airy feeling below the waist. I watched the guy walk away holding something in his hand. He mounted his skateboard and pushed off. As he glided out of the park, he tossed the something he carried way up into the air. The something caught the top of the flagpole and hung there where Old Glory fluttered in the hot, dry breezes.

  The something was my pants.

  I got to my feet and brushed myself off. Then I walked over to the flagpole and looked up. My pants were trapped something like twenty feet above me. Climbing up to get them wasn’t even an option. The metal pole didn’t have anything to use as handholds, and anyway it had gotten hot enough in the summer sun to blister a person’s skin on contact.

  All I could do was stand there and look.

  Cole walked over casually and stood beside me. He was looking up too. After about a minute, he said slowly, “Uh, Zay.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The next time you decide to piss off a giant teenager, make sure you’re not wearing holey underwear.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. “Thanks, Cole. You’re really helpful.”

  “I try, man. I try.”

  IT WAS almost four when I got back home. Dad was in the living room reading something on his cell phone. He looked up when I walked through the door and gave me this sad little smile. “Hi, son.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He seemed kind of tuned out as he looked back at his phone. Usually he’d joke around with me and Mom when he was home. I went and sat next to him on the sofa.

  “Your mom told me you went over to spend some time with Cole,” he said, still reading. “What were you fellas up to all day?”

  “The usual. Playing games.”

  He didn’t ask me anything else about my day with Cole. I leaned over and sneaked a peek at his phone. The screen displayed an email. The “From” line showed that it had been sent by the Tyler and Taylor Law Firm.

  “So you talked to a lawyer today, Dad,” I said.

  “Yes I did.”

  “What did the lawyer say?”

  Dad turned his phone away from me, slipping it into his pocket. He started to say something and then hesitated. “It’s complicated.”

  “What’s complicated? I’m gonna get to stay with you and Mom, right? The lawyer will be able to work that out, won’t he? Or she?”

  Dad again flicked that little smile my way. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay, Zavier.”

  His expression said otherwise. A good lie-face would make an audience take even the most bare-bald fib as gospel truth. Dad had one of the worst lie-faces in the world. He felt stuff too deeply to hide anything, and what he felt now after conferring with the lawyer was obviously very painful to him. I suddenly got that bone-deep chill all over again.

  I might’ve pressed Dad to tell me what the lawyer had said, even though I was afraid to hear it, if his gaze hadn’t shifted to my legs. He frowned. “Are those new jeans you’re wearing?”

  The jeans I wore belonged to Cole. After getting depantsed, I’d hidden in the bushes behind the skate park while he went home to fetch a replacement for me. Cole was just about a size smaller than me, so getting into his jeans had been a real struggle. I’d had to suck in my gut like crazy just to get them fastened. If I breathed out completely now, the metal button would pop off like a bullet and put a hole in the ceiling. I nodded at Dad and answered right off, “Yeah, I got these today.”

  “Aren’t they just a little… snug?”

  “Hey, that’s the new style, Dad. All the guys are wearing ’em like this.”

  There was nothing wrong with my lie-face.

  Chapter Seven

  THE NEXT day at 12:27, I was wedged between the wall and the desk in my room, chewing the heck out of my thumbnail. My birth family, as Mom referred to the three strangers from Chicago, was due to arrive at 12:30.

  Mom had bought me new khakis and a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt for the occasion. “You want to look presentable, don’t you?” she’d said when she handed the clothes to me earlier. What I wanted most was for this whole lunch thing to be canceled and my life to get back to normal. Since none of that was about to happen, I at least wanted to be comfortable in my favorite T-shirt and basketball shorts. The khakis were so stiff they practically crackled with every step I took. The new shirt smelled like plastic or something, and the collar made my neck itch.

  After another mostly sleepless night tossing from one end of my bed to the other, my brain seemed to spark and buzz like the bug zapper Mom and Dad kept over the patio. My anxiety kicked up a notch when I heard the sound of two cars turning into our driveway. I shot up from my little safety zone and then froze in place as my heartbeat went into overdrive. Oh boy, here we go.

  Mom called from the living room, “Zavier, they’re here.”

  I thought seriously about opening my window and jumping out.

&
nbsp; Instead, I sucked in a breath, exhaled, and walked up the hall to the living room. I got there just as Mom—dressed in one of the crisp, professional-looking outfits she wore when teaching school—opened the door and shook hands with Agent Henley.

  “Hello, Mrs. Beckham. So nice to see you again.” Despite the heat, Agent Henley wore another blazer over her blouse and slacks. She stepped into the room and moved to the side, clearing the way for the people behind her. As those people came in, Agent Henley spotted me and nodded in my direction. “Hi, Zavier.”

  I mumbled “Hi” back at her, moving to stand next to Mom. The three people who’d come in after her were looking at me as though I were a weird alien growth some NASA space probe had plucked off the surface of Mars and brought back to earth. Or at least, that was what I felt like now that they were here. Even though it was rude, I stared right back at them.

  Agent Henley made the introductions. “Mrs. Beckham, Zavier, this is Mr. and Mrs. Copeland and their son, Blake Jr.”

  Mom had told me their names yesterday, and I already knew what they looked like from the picture she showed me, but facing them in person was sort of unreal, like seeing actors in a play. Smiling like the president greeting a foreign head of state, Mom stepped up to shake hands with Mr. and Mrs. Copeland. “Welcome to Memphis. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Thank you for having us, Mrs. Beckham,” Mr. Copeland said, taking his eyes off me just long enough to smile at Mom. He was a couple of inches shorter than Mom, which was really strange. I’d never seen a full-grown man that short.

  Agent Henley said she had other business to take care of. As she headed back to her car, Mom ushered everyone else into the living room. “Please, have a seat,” she said. “I’m sure you and Zavier have a lot to talk about. I’ll just pop into the kitchen and let you get to it.”

  I grabbed her wrist as she turned away and looked up at her about as desperately as a person hanging by one hand over a very steep cliff. Please don’t leave me alone with these creepy people! I made that silent plea with my eyes, hoping Mom would get it.