Goodbye Stranger Read online

  “Yeah?” Sherm hesitated. “Want to go? To Dollar-Eight?”

  “When?”

  “What about next Friday? After school?”

  Bridge nodded. “I think we have to. I mean, you can’t say ‘cinnamon toast’ and not want cinnamon toast. It’s like an automatic response, right?”

  He smiled. “Sure.”

  The PA speaker came back to life with a loud static pop that made everyone jump.

  —

  “He likes you, you know,” Em said after school. “That kid Sherm.”

  “Don’t be nuts.”

  “I’m not being nuts.”

  They’d gathered outside for Em’s “emergency meeting.” Bridge was still in a bad mood from French, where all the words bounced off her, where she waited with a growing sense of doom for Madame Lawrence to point with that look on her face, like she was waiting for Bridge to stop being so stubborn and speak French already.

  “So? The suspense is killing me!” Tab said to Emily. “What are you showing us?”

  “This.” Em held out her phone. “Look at this.”

  Tab and Bridge leaned over it.

  It was a picture of a—

  “What the heck is that?” Tab snatched the phone and held it close to her face.

  “Do you need glasses?” Em said. “It’s a belly button.”

  “That is NOT your belly button,” Tab said. “No offense, but we all know you have an outie.”

  Emily grabbed for her phone, but Tab held on to it. “Let Bridge see it!” Em said. “And of course it isn’t my belly button. Would I call an emergency meeting to show you a picture of my belly button?” She got the phone from Tab and handed it to Bridge. “And just for the record, Tab, I happen to like my belly button. It’s awesome. You idiot.”

  “So—this is Patrick’s belly button?” Bridge asked.

  “Shhh! Yes!” Em shrieked. Then in a lower voice, “It’s Patrick’s.”

  Tab made a face. “Ugh. I really wish you hadn’t shown me that. Celeste is waiting for me. I have to go to the stupid orthodontist.”

  “Wait!” Em said. “You guys haven’t helped me at all.”

  “Helped with what?”

  “With the whole picture thing.”

  “You want help erasing that ugly picture?” Tab said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  HOW TO MAKE A FIST

  On her way home from school, Bridge stopped at the Bean Bar. Adrienne was behind the doughnut counter, wearing a T-shirt that said THROW LIKE A GIRL.

  “Is my dad around?” Bridge asked.

  “He’s at an event.” Adrienne started jumping from side to side, fast little hops with her feet together. “One of those office-party gigs.”

  “Oh.” Bridge watched Adrienne jump. Her blond hair was in a lot of messy braids that bounced, but the rest of her was small and compact. She had what Bridge’s mom called a heart-shaped face, and a chin with a tiny dimple in it.

  “Have a seat,” Adrienne said, gesturing at the mostly empty tables.

  Bridge sat.

  “You want a doughnut, Finnegan?”

  Bridge glanced around. “Um, my name’s Bridge.”

  Still jumping, Adrienne nodded. “I knew a kid named Finnegan who always sat like that, on the edge of his chair, with his backpack on and everything. Like he was ready to bolt. Sometimes he’d be sitting on our couch in a winter coat all afternoon, playing video games.” She laughed. “So do you want a doughnut?” Bouncing, she pointed one hand like a gun at the doughnut tray.

  “Nah.”

  “Cookie? Muffin?”

  “No thanks.” Bridge had never turned down a cookie from Mark, but Adrienne made her nervous.

  “I have a brother too,” Adrienne said.

  “What?”

  “Like you. A brother. In Canada. Finnegan was his friend, actually. Not mine.”

  “You grew up in Canada?”

  Still jumping, Adrienne nodded and pointed at herself with both thumbs. “French Canadian.” She smiled.

  “You speak French?”

  “In school it was mostly English. But my dad was always making me speak French at home. I hated it.”

  “You’re lucky, though. I mean, now you speak two languages, right?”

  “Yeah. Three, if you count body language.” She laughed, moved her hands to her hips, and started jumping an invisible jump rope.

  “Is that, like, exercise?”

  “I like to move around. That’s why I’m a pretty decent boxer.”

  Bridge laughed.

  “What’s funny, Finnegan? I box. This place is more like a day job. You know what a day job is?”

  “A job you do during the day?”

  “No. A day job is a meaningless job that pays. No offense to your dad.”

  Bridge didn’t know what to say to that. “I’m terrible at languages,” she blurted. “The worst.”

  Adrienne smiled, still jumping. “But do you know how to throw a punch?”

  “What?”

  “A punch.” Adrienne punched the air, two quick jabs.

  “I guess so.” Bridge’s hands clenched at her sides.

  “You a righty?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Make a fist. Can’t throw a punch if you don’t know how to make a fist.”

  Bridge made a fist and raised it in front of her. It made her think about that year of rehab after the accident: “Pick up the pen. Put it down. Walk to the door. Now come back.” She looked at her fist. She was still surprised by the lack of pain sometimes.

  “What’s that?” Adrienne said. “That’s your fist?” She stopped jumping. “Come here.”

  Bridge went up to the counter, and Adrienne came out from behind it to stand in front of her. “A good fist has no air in it,” Adrienne told her. “First, fold your fingers down, tips to base. Yeah. Now fold them again, toward that meat below your thumb. Right. Now tuck your thumb up to hold it all together. Much better.”

  Bridge had never in her life thought about the right way or wrong way to make a fist, but standing there in the Bean Bar, she felt strong. She thought about the nonexistent intruder at school. She smiled and threw an air punch toward Adrienne.

  “All wrong,” Adrienne said flatly. “Don’t square your body like that—put one leg back, and when you throw the punch, your weight should be shifting. Body in motion, body always in motion. Your other hand should be up by your face, not hanging dead at your side like that. And you want to lead with your knuckles, not the thumb. If you lead with your thumb, you’re going to do damage to no one but yourself. Let’s see it again. Yeah, better. There’s hope for you.”

  Bridge dropped her arms. “Thanks.”

  “You sure you don’t want a cookie, Finnegan? Or how about some of this sticky stuff over here?” She pointed.

  Bridge smiled. “That’s halvah. My dad loves it.”

  Adrienne looked up. “Armenian thing?”

  Bridge laughed. “Yeah. Armenians like it. But so do other people.”

  “I tried it the other day—it’s kind of like fudge without the chocolate.”

  “It’s sesame,” Bridge said.

  “Sesame! Full of protein.” Adrienne reached for the tray. “Come on, one for me and one for you.”

  SHERM

  October 14

  Dear Nonno Gio,

  I got a 102 on my math test. Mr. Fisher had me do the extra-credit problem on the board.

  Nonna made the Marsala chicken tonight. Sometimes when she brings the food to the table I know we’re all thinking about you but nobody says anything. Dad gets this look on his face. Sometimes I get so mad at you I almost wish you were dead. I don’t wish that, though.

  She’s still wearing those cat ears.

  Sherm

  P.S. Four months until your birthday.

  DOLLAR-EIGHT

  The waitress at the diner seemed genuinely happy to see Bridge. “Hey there, Cinnamon Toast. Little while no see!” She grabbed two menus from a stack and
handed them to Sherm, winking at him. “Sit anywhere, guys. I’ll be right with you.”

  Sherm was impressed. “You weren’t kidding—she really does call you Cinnamon Toast.”

  Bridge smiled and slid into a booth. “Are you opposed to splitting a vanilla shake?”

  Sherm said he wasn’t at all opposed to a vanilla shake.

  “Good. Because a vanilla shake goes really well with cinnamon toast.”

  Sherm grinned.

  She kept waiting for the strangeness to arrive—being at the diner with Sherm Russo. This is strange, she told herself. They’d met in front of school and walked here together, pretending it was perfectly normal, which it wasn’t. Only it didn’t exactly feel strange, either.

  Bridge had once read a story about a girl who goes on a date to a restaurant where she’s too shy to order anything but the cheapest thing on the menu, which is a cream cheese and olive sandwich.

  “Have you ever had a cream cheese and olive sandwich?” she asked Sherm. Not that this was a date.

  “No,” Sherm said. “Have you?”

  “No.” They looked at their menus. “You can order anything you want,” Bridge said. “I have money.”

  “Thanks. But we came for cinnamon toast, right?”

  The waitress came back with two glasses of water. “You guys know what you want?”

  “Two orders of cinnamon toast, please,” Bridge said. “And a vanilla shake in two glasses.”

  The waitress smiled. “You sure you need two glasses? I could bring one glass and two straws.” She winked again.

  “Two glasses,” Bridge said. “Please.”

  Suddenly she worried that when the waitress walked away and she and Sherm were sitting across the table from each other with no menus between them, they would have nothing to say to each other. There would be what Jamie called awkward silence.

  That was what Jamie said whenever the conversation died down at dinner: “Awkward silence.” And when their mother said, “It’s comfortable silence, Jamie. There’s nothing awkward about it,” Jamie would wait a beat and then say, very doubtfully, “If you say so.” Once, this routine had made Emily laugh so hard she practically snorted her dinner through her nose and had to leave the table to pull herself together in the bathroom.

  “You know that riddle?” Bridge said to Sherm. “With the two brothers guarding the two doors, and one door leads to heaven and the other one leads to hell?”

  Sherm shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

  “Really?” Bridge leaned forward. “So there are two brothers. One brother always lies, and one brother always tells the truth. You want the door to heaven, obviously, but you’re only allowed to ask one question.”

  “One question each?”

  “No. One question.”

  “Do I know which brother is which?”

  Bridge thought. “No. You don’t know which is which.”

  The waitress brought their food, and Sherm picked up two toast halves together, like a sandwich.

  “Stop!” Bridge said. “What are you doing?”

  Sherm’s hand froze. “Eating my cinnamon toast?”

  “You can’t eat it like that! You have to eat one piece at a time, faceup, so that the cinnamon and the sugar hit the roof of your mouth.”

  Separating the two sides of his toast, Sherm muttered, “You’re lucky I’m used to living with bossy women.”

  “Very funny.” Bridge felt herself go red. “I’m just trying to give you the real experience here.”

  Sherm took a bite of the cinnamon toast.

  “Well?” Bridge said.

  “It’s delicious,” Sherm said. He bowed his head. “Thank you for showing me your planet.”

  “You’re hilarious.”

  “I especially enjoy the way the cinnamon and sugar feel against the roof of my mouth.”

  “Double hilarious. Just go ahead and pretend this isn’t the best thing ever.”

  “It is, actually,” Sherm said, looking her straight in the eyes, the way he had during the intruder drill. “Best thing ever.”

  Bridge pushed his glass toward him. “And you haven’t even tried it with the shake!”

  There were no awkward silences. When the check came, they each paid four dollars. Bridge never left less than a twenty percent tip. Her mom said that was the definition of a good New Yorker.

  “Nice wallet,” Bridge told Sherm. “Looks about a hundred years old!” She grabbed it. “Check out all the secret pockets!” She turned it upside down, and something fell to the table.

  It was a worn square of paper with a date written on it in big letters.

  “What’s February fourteenth?” Bridge asked, reading upside down. She felt bad all of a sudden, about grabbing the wallet and shaking it like that. She closed it and held it out to Sherm.

  He took the wallet and then picked up the slip of paper from the table.

  “It’s Valentine’s Day, dummy.”

  “And you just like to carry that piece of information around so you don’t forget?”

  “Actually, this was my grandfather’s wallet. And this”—he held up the paper—“is his birthday.”

  “Oh God, sorry,” Bridge said. “I didn’t—”

  “He’s not dead,” Sherm said quickly. “He moved out over the summer. My grandparents always lived with us, but now it’s just my grandmother. He left her, after fifty years.”

  “Oh. Wow. Where did he go?”

  Sherm made a face. “He moved to New Jersey.”

  Watching Sherm tuck the slip of paper into his wallet so carefully, Bridge felt even worse. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That really sucks.”

  “I write to him sometimes,” Sherm said. “Letters. Do you think that’s weird?”

  “It’s not weird. It’s nice. Does he write you back?”

  Sherm looked up. “I haven’t actually mailed any of them.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “He doesn’t deserve letters. He just left. My dad says he’s moving in with some woman he met. Which feels kind of crazy, to tell you the truth, because he’s a great person. I mean, he was. We don’t really talk about it much. That’s another crazy thing, not talking about it. But my parents are really busy and my grandmother only likes to talk about happy things. Happy things, or books.”

  Bridge nodded. “I get that.”

  Sherm rubbed the worn leather of the wallet with his thumbs. “I remember when you got hit by that car,” he said.

  There was a funny feeling that traveled down Bridge’s legs sometimes—a zinging rush to her feet. “You do?”

  “Yeah. It was right at the end of my block.”

  “Your block? That’s so random. I didn’t realize you even knew about that.” She laughed. “Even I forget about it sometimes.”

  “Everybody knows about it.” Sherm raised his head and the light hit his eyes. Now they looked greenish-blue mixed with light brown. Bridge thought they looked like tiny planet Earths. “What was it like?” he asked.

  “The accident? I don’t remember it. All I remember is the hospital—the nurses, and stupid stuff like these paper menus they had with pictures of animals all over them that you were supposed to color in with these broken crayons. I remember that.”

  “You almost died, my dad said.”

  “Yeah, everyone says that. But I don’t remember it.”

  Now Sherm stacked sugar packets on the tabletop, carefully shaking each one first to make it lie flat. “My grandparents went to the hospital,” he said. “That first night. They sat in the lobby.”

  “Really?” That was strange to think about.

  Sherm looked at her. “A bunch of people were there, my dad said.”

  “Who?”

  “Just people. From the neighborhood, I guess. The next day my grandmother wanted me to pray with her, but I ran out of her room.” His eyes flicked to Bridge’s, then back to his sugar tower. “I feel weirdly bad about that.”

  “That’s okay.” Br
idge got an achy feeling at the bottom of her throat and took a sip of her water. “You were just a little kid. It wouldn’t have made a difference. I mean, I’m fine!” She reached her arms up over her head and wiggled her fingers as if this were universal proof of being fine.

  Sherm smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I lied before. I don’t ever forget about the accident.”

  He nodded, unsurprised.

  Bridge hesitated. “After the accident, this nurse at the hospital told me that I’m here for a reason.”

  “Here?”

  Bridge nodded. “She said that’s why I didn’t die. It kind of weirds me out, actually.”

  He was the first person she’d ever told. She hadn’t planned to tell him—she hardly knew him. It had something to do with how he had tucked that little piece of paper back into that cruddy wallet. The way he seemed to meet her thoughts wherever they went. The look on his face.

  Sherm said, “My grandfather used to say that everyone alive has already beaten the craziest odds, just being born. Like one in a trillion. Your parents could have had a million different kids, but they had you. And before that could happen, your parents had to be born themselves, and their parents had to be born.” He picked up his shake and used the straw to vacuum the bottom of the glass. “I mean, think about it. It goes all the way back.”

  Bridge laughed. “I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.”

  “Maybe it should just make you feel lucky. Yeah, you were really lucky you didn’t die after the accident. But you were a lot luckier to be born in the first place. So if you’re here for a reason, maybe we all are.”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “You never told me the answer to that riddle.”

  “Oh,” Bridge said. Then she laughed again. “You know what? I can’t remember.”

  SHERM

  October 24

  Dear Nonno Gio,

  Nonna made lasagna and you’re pretty sad you missed it, even if you don’t know it.

  I tried cinnamon toast today and it was great. Do you think people are born for a special purpose? I don’t. I think it’s just something that happens.