Read The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman for Free Online Page B

sound studio with a little glassed-in room, some serious recording equipment, and a bunch of electric guitars that had once been owned by elderly rock stars Nate had never heard of. Larry had gone to such great lengths to make everything special that it was hard for Nate to let him know that he would have traded it all in if only he was allowed to go back to P.S. 585.
    “Yeah, it’s me, Dad,” said Nate now, and he dropped into the ramp, then roared along the floor.
    “Whoa, nice,” said his father, who watched from the open kitchen, where he stood in his rumpled pajamas, making coffee. “I thought you were still asleep, kid.”
    “I got up early. Just wanted to get some air.” Nate swung himself out of the skate park section of the apartment and flopped onto one of the low white couches that floated like islands in the middle of the room.
    “Shoes off, please! Why do you have your backpack?” his father asked.
    “I don’t know,” Nate said, working his sneakers off his feet and tossing them aside. He was too embarrassed to say that he had wanted to seem like a normal kid on his way to school.
    “So let’s pick up the lesson where we left off,” said Larry. “What were we doing yesterday?”
    “You mean, last night at midnight?” Nate asked, for his father had encouraged him to stay up late playing an online Scrabble game with a player from New Zealand called kiwiguy22. All evening Nate had been playing games online with anonymous people around the world.
    Both of them knew the reason that Larry Saviano wanted his son to succeed. For twenty-six years, Larry had carried around the pain of having lost the Youth Scrabble Tournament when he was twelve. Larry and his partner, Wendell Bruno, had gone to Yakamee, Florida, together, and had made it all the way to the final round, which, to everyone’s shock, they then lost. Their opponents had been a team of girls who had made the bingo ZYGOTES for their final move, leaving the two boys stunned and defeated.
    The next time they sat down to play Scrabble, at Wendell’s kitchen table back in Arizona, the game had literally made Larry sick. He had run to Wendell’s bathroom and thrown up into the toilet and all over the little round blue bath mat on the floor. Larry vowed never to play again, and over all these years, he never did. Just the idea of sitting in front of a board made him want to throw up. His moment had come and gone.
    But now his son’s moment had arrived.
    Of course it was immature that all these years later Nate’s father had never gotten over it. But all Nate wanted now was to get him off his back, and the only way to do that was to go to the YST on December twelfth in Yakamee and avenge his father’s loss. If he won the whole tournament, then Nate could be done with Scrabble forever. He would never have to look at another stupid tile. He would never have to think about bingos, or bingo-bangos, or bingo-bango-bongos.
    One thing he needed was a partner. Nate didn’t care who it was, since he’d only be going to the tournament to please his father. As far as he was concerned, he could have taken his skateboard with him, propped it on a chair, drawn a face on it, and called it his partner. But he would have to come up with a real person pretty soon, and it didn’t even need to be someone who really played Scrabble.
    Nate was planning on doing all the heavy lifting. His partner just had to sit there next to him. And then at the end, the two of them could split the ten-thousand-dollar first prize. Second prize was five thousand, and third prize was twenty-five hundred. Nate didn’t need the money, and if his team won—which he knew they had to, and first place, not second or third—he planned to hand his winnings to one of the lowest-ranked teams. Then Nate Saviano would turn and head out the doors of the hotel ballroom where the tournament was held. His father would finally get over the past, and would allow Nate to return to P.S. 585.
    But