The Puzzle King Read Online Free Page B

he made up for with his drawings. He drew pictures of the other kids in the class with gaps where their baby teeth used to be, and others with freckles just the right color brown. He drew a picture of Mrs. O’Mara using only rose-colored crayons. Her mouth was the shape of a heart.
    One afternoon, Davey Mullett, a skinny kid with twine-colored hair and yellow teeth, said to Simon: “You draw so good, did you learn it from your father?”
    With uncustomary boldness, Simon answered: “My father is died.”
    “And your mother?” asked Davey. “Is she died, too?”
    “My mother lives in another country,” said Simon. “She and my brothers and sisters live with her. Soon they will come to America.”
    It was the kind of answer that could have gotten Simon intotrouble: a punch to the stomach, cruel taunting.
Sissy boy, misses his mama
. Simon had seen other boys beaten up for lesser crimes. In this neighborhood, someone always seemed to want what you had even when you had even less than nothing.
    As if to authenticate his story, Simon turned to a blank piece of paper in his sketchpad and drew a beautiful woman with long yellow hair and six perfect children standing before a red house high on a green hill. Then he took a black crayon and drew the outline of a seventh child with no features and no color. He held the picture up to Davey. “That’s them,” he said.
    “Who’s that?” asked Davey, pointing to the shadowy outline.
    “That’s me.”
    “Could I have the picture?” asked Davey.
    “Sure,” said Simon, ripping the page from the notebook.
    Davey Mullet wasted no time in telling the other kids. Sometimes, he’d ask Simon for a particular picture he’d drawn and Simon always gave it to him. Davey Mullet never said as much, but it was clear from the way he and the other kids treated Simon that, while they thought a boy with a dead father was a big deal, a boy with a dead father and a mother living in a foreign country was even bigger. The boys thought he was heroic and lucky not to have any parents to boss him around. The girls wanted to mother him. One day, Christina Ryan, a pale, skinny girl with sad, walnut-shaped eyes and long, wavy brown hair, waited for Simon after school. “Can I walk with you?” she asked. Christina was more than a year older than he was and lived down the street from him. Her father owned the milk cart, which he would push around the neighborhood shouting, “Milk here, milk here, fresh from a cow’s teat. Milk here, milk here, fresh from a cow’s teat.” Mrs. Futterman said that the milkman was coarse, but Mr. Seligsaid, “Yeah, but you buy his milk, don’t you?” He’d heard the boys make crude jokes about Christina, who was curvier than the other girls in the class.
    Simon walked down Orchard Street with Christina, aware that she towered over him by at least a head. She stared straight ahead; he had a tight, concentrated smile. It wasn’t often he walked with a girl, particularly a nice-looking one. He walked slowly to make sure everyone in the neighborhood could see him.
    The next day, the same thing happened: Christina waited after school and asked if she could walk with him. Again they walked in silence.
    On the third day, the news of it reached 262 Eldridge Street. “So, I hear you have a sweetheart?” said Mr. Selig, as they sat down to a dinner of roasted chicken. Simon could feel his face get hot. Pissboy looked up from his soup. “She’s got bazooms out to here,” he said, cupping his hands in front of his chest. Mr. Selig slapped his hand and tried to hide his smile. Simon would always remember that gesture, Pissboy holding his hands as if they were weighted down with grapefruits—not because of its coarse nature but because after that Pissboy punched him in the arm and called him a “stinkin’ piece of shitball,” just as he would have any of the other boys.
    The next day in class, Simon drew a picture of a girl with brown wavy hair, big wide eyes, and