A simple farmer receives a horse from the gods, a man sells ice creams named after missing schoolkids, the demolition of a hotel brings an old horror to light, a wounded soldier finds the real enemy is in his own camp, a family inherits a peculiar r...
"I think," said Miss Radcliffe, "this is an excellent opportunity for you to master long multiplication. Wouldn't you agree?"
No I didn't agree. But I was hardly going to tell her that.
Then something weird happened to me. I felt something hot rise up in my throat, and I was horrified to find that I was on the verge of tears. "I can't do it," I wailed. "I've tried and tried."
"You HAVEN'T tried," she said, pouncing on me like a snake. "If you had, you would have made at least some progress. But this - " She picked up my exercise book then let it flop back down onto her desk like a dead seagull "- this is not progress. This is RUBBISH."
It wasn't fair. I wasn't the only one in the class who sucked at maths. There were even more retarded kids than me. I was good at reading and writing, but she never mentioned that – all she did was write "satisfactory" on my work, even when I aced it. I never got a gold star like Amelia Jenkins, and Miss Radcliffe never read my work out in front of the class – not unless it was bad enough to get a laugh from everyone.
End of the year's only a month away.
This is what I kept telling myself. One more month and I'd be shot of Miss Radcliffe forever. In grade four I'd have a brand new teacher. But a month seems like a long time when you're nine years old. It seems like forever. Right then it felt like the only thing in my life I had to look forward to was ice cream every Friday.
Every Friday except this one, that was.
How much of the line would be left now? A third? A quarter?
They'd be lined up straight and neat and quiet. The only sound would be the wind through the leaves of the big oak. No clowning around, no shoving, no pushing in. Nobody would dare. Not after what happened to Ricky Beaufort.
I wasn't there when it happened. I was home sick with the flu. Jay told me about it when I went over to his house after school the following Monday.
Jay was crazy about dinosaurs. His bedroom was full of them: Pterodactyl skeletons swooped down from the ceiling, Velociraptors stalked through jungles of dirty clothes - if you tripped over you'd probably be gored to death by a Triceratops.He held a Brontosaurus in his lap as he told his story.
"So Ricky says: gimme a single Ebony and don't be stingy about it, okay?"
I whistled through my teeth. Nobody had ever told the Ice Cream Man not to be stingy. Just forgetting to say "please" and "thank you" was unheard of.
Ricky was the biggest boy in school. He was the only one not afraid to push and shove in the ice cream van line. Fact is, people like Ricky can't be in a line without pushing and shoving. They wouldn't know how. He had mean piggy eyes set too close together, and freckles all over his face and hands, and little red hairs on his upper lip, and he smelled of a mixture of sweat and the Brut deodorant he liked to spray in his hairy armpits. I figured he must have been held back a year or two before he'd come to our school, because he was just too large and hairy and smelly to be true. He'd once held me down and rubbed big handfuls of sand into my face until I was bleeding and crying and couldn't breathe or see. All I'd done was laugh when he'd slipped over on the wet grass and landed on his butt. But people like Ricky don't like being laughed at.
"What'd he do?" I asked Jay.
"The Ice Cream Man? Nothing. Just made up a Single Ebony. No bigger than usual, far as I could tell. And when it was done Ricky goes hmmph, like that. Hmmph."
"Wow," I said.
"So Ricky puts ten bucks on the counter and the Ice Cream Man gives him his change, but it's only two fifty. He's charged Ricky for a double. 'Hey!' says Ricky. 'That should be five bucks.' But the Ice Cream Man just stands there with his arms crossed. Then Ricky says: 'Gimme my money back then, I don't want your dumb ice cream.'"
I gasped.
Jay nodded and went on. "Then Theo puts his hand on Ricky's shoulder and says 'hey Ricky, let it go.'"
Theo Papadakis was the only person in school who wasn't afraid of Ricky – and that included the teachers. Theo was almost as wide as he was tall, he was always smiling, and never raised his voice – actually, he was the most reasonable person I'd ever met. He was the one who'd helped me up and taken me to the office to get cleaned up after Ricky had rubbed sand into my face. I don't know why he hung around with a wildcat like Ricky. Opposites attract I guess.
"Then what happened?" I whispered.
"Ricky pushes Theo's hand off his shoulder. And for a while nothing happens. Ricky stares at the Ice Cream Man, and the Ice Cream Man stares back – I mean, I guess he was staring back, but you can't tell right?"
I shook my head. No, you couldn't tell.
"Then Ricky says: 'Keep your dumb ice cream then.'And he – get this – he turns it upside down and mashes it down on the counter. You know how people stub out a cigarette?" Jay demonstrated with the Brontosaurus, turning it upside down and twisting its head into the floor.
"Then what happened?" I whispered.
Jay shrugged. "Ricky just walks off. Doesn't even take his change. Doesn't look back. The Ice Cream Man, he sweeps the coins off the counter and wipes the ice cream up with a rag." Jay demonstrated by sweeping the Brontosaurus through the air. "Then after a moment Theo steps up and orders his ice cream."
"Nothing happened?"
"Nothing."
"But Ricky wasn't at school today."
"So what?" Jay said. He seemed suddenly angry at me, as if I'd forced the story out of him or something. As if he was already regretting telling it to me.
"It's just – weird," I said.
Jay frowned and got up and left the room, but he didn't stay mad at me for long. I don't think he was really mad anyway. Just scared.
Whether Ricky Beaufort decided not to come back to school, or moved away, or something else, I never found out, but he wasn't there the next day, or the day after that. I never heard anything about him again. I mean, people like Ricky tend to come and go, and nobody really misses them. And when a brand new ice cream flavour appeared on the board outside the ice cream van the following Friday afternoon, nobody said anything, though Richard proved to be an unpopular flavour, and I never tried it.
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If you were ice cream you'd just be an empty cone.
