The Boy Who Lost His Face Page 10

“Ba-ba!” said Elizabeth as she took it from him. She turned it over above her head. The nipple fell off and the apple juice poured all over her face.

  26

  IT WASN’T the curse, David tried to tell himself later as he sat on his bed. I just forgot to screw the nipple on Elizabeth’s bottle. It was because the phone rang. The phone had rung as I was about to screw the nipple on and then I just forgot about it. It could have happened to anyone.

  He wondered who it was that called, then hung up. Maybe it was Mrs. Bayfield. Maybe she called to make him forget to screw the top on the bottle, so that it would pour all over Elizabeth.

  No, it couldn’t be her, he realized. She only knew his first name. There was no way she could know his phone number.

  Of course, if she really was a witch, and if she could somehow know the exact moment he’d be getting Elizabeth apple juice, then she could also know his last name, phone number, and who knows what else about him.

  “Hey, David,” said Ricky.

  He turned and looked at his brother.

  Ricky was standing in the doorway. His middle finger was raised and pointed at David.

  FRIDAY MORNING David put on what he thought were his best and luckiest clothes. He needed all the luck he could get. Not only was he going to ask Tori for her phone number, but also he had to explain to Mo why he hadn’t called Tori last night. Not to mention the fact that the curse was back.

  “No blue jeans?” his mother said when she saw him.

  He shrugged.

  “Well, you look very nice,” she said.

  He wore a baggy pair of gray drawstring pants and a long-sleeved pullover shirt with no collar. The shirt had blue and white horizontal stripes. He kept the shirt on the outside of his baggy pants. He wore his regular dirty sneakers.

  “You look like a stooge,” Ricky said under his breath.

  David ignored him. He didn’t care what Ricky thought. All that mattered was what Tori thought.

  When he got to school, Larry and Mo were waiting by his locker. He took a deep breath, then slowly headed toward them.

  “So what’d she say?” asked Larry.

  He took another breath.

  “You better not say you didn’t call her,” warned Mo.

  “I didn’t call her,” said David.

  “I knew it!” said Mo. She turned to Larry. “I told you he’d wimp out.”

  “I didn’t know her phone number,” David explained. “There were over two pages of Williamses in the phone book. What was I supposed to do, call each one?”

  Mo shook her head in disgust.

  “You should have found out her phone number before you went home yesterday,” said Larry.

  “How? I couldn’t talk to her until four seventeen. Look, I’ll talk to her today. I got it all figured out. I’ll ask her for her phone number. If she gives it to me, then I’ll know she wants me to call her up. If she doesn’t give it to me, then it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  Mo and Larry looked at him, unsure.

  “By the way,” David said, “the curse is back. Of course you don’t care about that.”

  “What happened?” asked Larry.

  He told them about the apple juice pouring onto Elizabeth’s face. They both giggled at the word nipple.

  “Wait,” said Larry when he had stopped giggling. “You said it was apple juice, right?”

  David nodded.

  “Then you got nothing to worry about,” said Larry. “So long as it wasn’t lemonade. You just forgot to screw the nipple.” He and Mo giggled again.

  David also told them about his brother giving him the finger.

  “Look, you said you’re going to ask her for her phone number?” asked Mo.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then quit making excuses!”

  David started to say something, then stopped as Roger and Randy walked past them. He could feel himself tense up as they approached, and then feel the tension leave his body as they passed.

  “They seem to have stopped hassling us,” said Larry. He laughed. “I think they’re afraid of Mo.”

  Mo smiled.

  “Yeah,” David agreed. “She’s our watchdog.”

  He didn’t know why he said that.

  Mo flipped him off, then turned and walked away.

  “I’m sorry,” David said to Larry. “But see, that proves the curse is back.”

  “It proves you’re an asshole,” said Larry.

  “I didn’t do anything,” said David. “She’s just supersensitive.”

  “Well, you just better ask Tori out,” said Larry.

  “Why? Just so you can go out on your pretend date with Mo? That’s bullshit and you know it. You’re just afraid to ask Mo out on a real date, so you’re trying to get a free ride from me.”

  Larry flipped him off.

  TORI WILLIAMS was already sitting at her desk when David entered Mr. MacFarland’s class. She was having a very lively discussion with the girl who sat next to her, Lori Knapp. Tori was gesturing wildly about something and they were both laughing.

  David planned the route to his desk so that he walked in front of her. He wanted to see how she’d react to him.

  She didn’t react at all. She just kept talking to Lori. As near as David could figure, they were talking about nose jobs.

  He sat down at his desk and leaned back in his chair. It didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t have to ask her out anymore. She’d probably just flip him off too.

  Is that it? he wondered. Is the whole world going to give me the finger? Is that my punishment?

  He imagined that for the rest of his life wherever he went, to the store, to the park, everyone who saw him would say, “Oh, you’re David Ballinger,” then flip him off. He’d get on a bus, and all the passengers plus the driver would point their middle fingers at him. He’d go to a baseball game and suddenly the whole crowd would stand and shout, “Hey David Ballinger!” with their middle fingers raised high in the air.

  His chair toppled over. He fell on his back with his legs in the air.

  “Mr. Ballinger,” said Mr. MacFarland.

  He scrambled to his feet and quickly reset the chair. “Excuse me,” he said.

  After class he remained seated as he watched Tori walk out of the room. She never looked at him. He gathered his things and headed out. He was halfway to his math class when he stopped and hurried back the other way.

  He slowed down when he saw Tori. He walked behind her for a while, watching her red hair bounce and flow across the back of her yellow shirt. He stepped up alongside her.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Her green eyes flashed as she turned and looked at him. “Hi,” she answered.

  They slowed their pace.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” she asked.

  “What? No.” He shrugged. “It was just sort of embarrassing.” He looked at the underside of his elbow, where it had hit when he toppled over in his chair. There was a grayish mark on the shirt.

  “That’s a pretty shirt,” she said.

  “Thanks. It’s my lucky shirt.”

  “It’s nice. You look like a Greek poet.”

  He smiled. “You want to know why I wore my lucky shirt?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  They stopped walking. “Well, there was something I was going to ask you,” he said. “Except it doesn’t matter because now I don’t have to ask you anymore.”

  “I wanted to ask you something, too,” said Tori.

  The bell rang. All around them kids scurried into classrooms.

  “What’d you want to ask me?” asked David.

  Tori smiled. “You tell me what you were going to ask me.”

  David folded his arms in front of him. “It doesn’t really matter now,” he said, “but, um, I was going to ask you if you had a phone.”

  “No!” she said instantly. She blushed. “I mean yes, of course we have a phone, but, uh, I hardly ever use it. Why’d you want to know that?”

  David shrugged
. He was taken aback by her sudden defensiveness. “What’d you want to ask me?” he asked.

  “Is Maureen your girlfriend?”

  “Maureen?” he asked. “Mo? No. She’s just a friend.”

  Tori pushed out one side of her mouth with her tongue. She looked toward a classroom, as if she needed to be going.

  David uncrossed his arms, nervously put his hands behind his head, and stretched. “The reason I was wondering if you had a phone,” he said, “was because I was just sort of wondering what your phone number was. I mean, I might want to call you up sometime to find out about homework or, you know, ask you out or something, and there’s probably a lot of Williamses in the phone book.”

  Her green eyes were looking right at him. “You want my phone number?”

  “I guess,” he said. He stretched again. As he raised his arms the drawstring on his pants became untied, and his pants fell down.

  In one motion he turned, pulled up his pants, and ran.

  He didn’t stop until he reached the rusty iron gate in front of Mrs. Bayfield’s mansion.

  27

  THE GATE creaked as David pushed it open. He walked slowly up the path to the house. The garden which had been trampled by Roger and Randy had been replanted with yellow and white chrysanthemums. The broken window next to the door had been fixed.

  The rocking chair was stuck in the back corner of the porch. It seemed almost ghostlike, teetering slightly as David stepped up the old wooden stairs onto the splintered porch.

  The poor old woman is probably afraid to sit and rock anymore in her own front yard, he thought.

  Poor old woman? He wondered how he could still think such things. She was a witch. Pants don’t just fall down.

  He approached the door and smiled uncertainly at the word WELCOME printed across the old straw mat.

  He tried the doorbell, although he could tell by looking at it that it probably wouldn’t work. It didn’t. It practically fell off the wall when he pushed it.

  He had to pull open a torn screen door so he could knock on the heavy wood door behind it. There was an odd-shaped door knocker. He knocked a couple of times with his fist, but that didn’t seem to make much of a noise, so he lifted the heavy metal door knocker. He then realized it was in the shape of a shrunken head. He knocked it twice against the door, then quickly stepped back.

  The screen door banged shut in front of him.

  He didn’t know what he would say when Mrs. Bayfield opened the door—if she opened the door. All he could do was tell her he was sorry and beg her forgiveness.

  He heard movement inside the house, then the doorknob turned and the door opened a few inches. Mrs. Bayfield peered out at him from under a safety chain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I know I should have said I was sorry earlier, instead of pouring lemonade on my head, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I guess I just didn’t believe you put a curse on me, but that doesn’t matter. I should have said I was sorry anyway, whether or not you put a curse on me. The curse shouldn’t have anything to do with it. Even if my pants didn’t fall down. I shouldn’t have even been here in the first place. I never should have pointed my finger at you, whether you know what it means or not, although I guess you probably do. I thought it would make me popular. But I never wanted to hurt you. You have to believe that. It’s because I have no face.”

  He didn’t know if anything he said made sense. Mrs. Bayfield didn’t say a word.

  “What else can I say?” he asked. “I’m sorry. What do you want me to say?”

  The door closed.

  There was a clicking sound and then the door opened wide. Mrs. Bayfield was wearing a plain brown-knit dress and she leaned on a plain wooden cane. She looked older than he remembered. For some reason it made him glad when he noticed that she had on the same red high-top sneakers.

  “Come in,” she said.

  He stepped inside.

  Although the outside of the house was old and rundown, the inside was beautifully and lavishly decorated. The floor to the entryway was covered with green and white marble tile, and the walls were covered with a rich red and black cloth. A large oval mirror encased in an ornate gold frame hung on the wall in front of him.

  He smiled mockingly at his “lucky” clothes as he saw himself in the mirror.

  “You look like a Greek poet,” said Mrs. Bayfield.

  The smile left his face. He turned and looked at her in awe. He shouldn’t have been surprised. He already knew she was a witch. At least he thought he knew that, but those last words erased any doubts he still might have had.

  It was exactly what Tori had said to him—before his pants fell down.

  Felicia Bayfield obviously had seen and heard everything that had happened to him. She’d seen his pants fall down. Of course she probably saw him put on his pants every morning, too.

  He got even more proof, not that he needed it, as he passed a small table with a telephone. Next to the phone was a pad of paper with DAVID BALLINGER written on it. Under his name was his phone number.

  He nodded as he looked at it. So she was the one who called him last night.

  She led him into the living room. He felt his eyes widen as he looked at all the strange and beautiful masks hanging on the walls.

  He sat down on the edge of the couch and stared at them. Some of the masks were very odd; faces with three eyes or faces that were half black and half white. There was one that looked like it was part lion and part human, although it was impossible to tell where the lion stopped and the human started.

  But the eeriest ones looked like real faces. He couldn’t tell what they were made of. They seemed to have too much texture to be paper or plastic. There was a woman with a double chin, a man with a deep scar, and one mask in particular that he couldn’t stop looking at. It was the face of a very ordinary man with wire-rimmed glasses and a tiny birthmark on his cheek. The mask extended just below the man’s chin, so that there was the very top of a tie, and just above his head to the very bottom of a hat. David had the feeling that if you removed the hat and tie, the face would just dissolve away.

  He turned his eyes away from the masks to the wrinkled face of Mrs. Bayfield. She was sitting in a large overstuffed armchair across from him.

  “What happened to your friends?” she asked.

  “Oh, you mean Roger, Scott, and Randy? They’re not my friends. Scott used to be my best friend but not anymore. Roger and Randy were never my friends, not even then. They’re the ones you should have cursed. Not me. I mean, I’m not saying I wasn’t partly to blame, but they’re the ones who knocked you over and poured lemonade on your head and stole your cane. Why’d you pick me? I just sort of went along with them.”

  “I wonder …” said Mrs. Bayfield. “Who is more to blame? The leaders or the followers?”

  “Isn’t there anything I can do?” David pleaded. “I still have my whole life ahead of me! Just tell me what I have to do, and I’ll do it!” He threw up his hands. “Or am I just going to be cursed for the rest of my life? Can you tell me that? Do I have to spend my whole life wondering when my pants are going to fall down?”

  Mrs. Bayfield’s green eyes sparkled as she smiled. “Isn’t that what life is all about?” she asked. “We all pretend we’re such important, dignified people. We become doctors or lawyers or artists. Hello. How are you? Let’s have a barbecue on the Fourth of July. But really we all know that at any moment our pants might fall down.”

  “There was this girl,” said David.

  “Of course.”

  “I know you know,” said David. “It’s just that I think she might have liked me. Did she? Do you know that? Can you tell me? I know it doesn’t matter anymore, but can you tell me what she would have said if my pants didn’t fall down?”

  Mrs. Bayfield pushed out one side of her face with her tongue.

  David shook his head. “Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I can never face her again. How can I even g
o back to school? Everyone will know about it. And then my brother will hear about it at his school. He already thinks I’m the biggest stooge on earth.”

  “Bring me back my cane,” said Mrs. Bayfield.

  David looked up. “And then you’ll remove the curse?”

  “Bring me my cane,” she repeated.

  28

  HE HEADED in no particular direction as he walked away from Mrs. Bayfield’s house. He couldn’t go back to school and it was too early to go home.

  He thought about running away. He could hitchhike to San Francisco, then stow away on a boat to China. By the time anyone found him it would be too late. They’d have to give him a job mopping the deck, or was it called swabbing the deck?

  Of course he knew he would never do that. Besides, he couldn’t run away from the curse. It would follow him wherever he went, dumping lemonade on his head and pulling down his pants. Somehow he’d have to get the cane from Roger Delbrook.

  Maybe he could buy it from him? He had more than five hundred dollars in the bank. He figured he could probably get the cane for no more than fifty.

  He imagined their conversation. Hey, Roger, I got a deal for you, he’d say.

  What do you want, Ballinger? asks Roger.

  You know that cane you took from old Buttfield? I’ll give you ten bucks for it.

  Go to hell, Ballinger.

  I’m not kidding. I’ll give you ten dollars for it. Make it fifteen.

  I wouldn’t give you the cane for a hundred dollars, asshole!

  All right, twenty dollars, but that’s my final offer.

  You really want it? You can have it for fifty!

  Twenty-five.

  Forty.

  Thirty.

  Thirty-five.

  Okay, thirty-five.

  He’d give Roger the money and Roger would give him the cane.

  Here’s the cane. Take it and stick it up your ass!

  Thanks.

  It seemed like a good plan. It was certainly worth thirty-five dollars to get rid of the curse.

  Or he could steal it.

  He had thought he was walking in no particular direction, but looking up, he discovered he was at the corner of Commonwealth Circle. Roger lived at the end of the street. David had never been inside Roger’s house, but he knew where he lived. His house was at the cul-de-sac at the end of the block.