Read The Local News for Free Online Page A

just sit here,” Chuck said. He said that a lot. “I’m not here to do the work for you.”
    “What work?”
    “What work do you think we have to do?” He nudged his glasses up his nose.
    It was disconcerting, really, the way he had of looking at my face. It made me want to blow my nose or check for sleep in the corners of my eyes.
    “I have something,” I said after a while, reaching into my pocket, figuring he’d like this. “I have a note from Danny. Well, from a friend of Danny’s, originally written by Danny. She gave it to me today.”
    “What’s it say?”
    “Haven’t read it yet.”
    Chuck looked surprised—only for a second, but I saw it, his faceflexing, then relaxing back to neutral. He leaned slightly forward. “Maybe you want to talk about why you haven’t read it yet.”
    I sighed. “Can I just read it?” I said. “I thought you’d be excited.”
    “Are
you
excited?”
    I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “No,” I said, the word drawn out and plaintive. Chuck’s questions brought out an achy weariness that, once elicited, felt ever-present, as if it’d been trailing me all along.
    “Okay, why don’t you just read it?” he said, sounding a little resigned. I was, I knew, a source of ongoing or at least regular disappointment to Chuck.
    I unfolded the paper, already regretting this, trying to tamp down a nervous feeling that rose in me. “ ‘Min,’ ” I began, and then stopped to clear my throat. “ ‘This is so boring. Madame Guignan looks like a penguin. What are you doing this weekend? We’re going to Haber’s after the game. You should come with us. Bring Penny. Chemanski thinks she’s hot. Write me back. I’m bored as shit.’ ”
    That was it.
    Chuck watched me, waiting for a reaction. I watched him, doing the same.
    “There you go,” I said, “my deep and introspective brother.” But that wasn’t what I was really thinking. I didn’t tell Chuck that
Mme.
was abbreviated incorrectly to
Mdm.
and
penguin
was spelled
pain
.
g
‘
-wim
and that Danny had dropped the apostrophes
from Haber’s
and
I’m,
and that he’d used a homonym for
write me back
so it came out
right me back.
And that there was barely a period in the whole thing, most of the words running one right into the next. I didn’t tell Chuck that all of that gave me a bad feeling, the way Danny came across as little and stupid.
    Chuck didn’t know anything about Abernathy, about how before we moved to Fairfield, Danny had been scrawnier than David Nelson.He used to get teased all the time, and not just because of his size, but because he was dumb. All through middle school he’d been terrible at reading out loud, his words coming in a slow, unintelligible sputter. He brought home papers scrawled in red, with notes from teachers about needing to talk to my parents. He had to go get a bunch of tests and was given a constellation of diagnoses from dyslexia to dysgraphia to ADD. By ninth grade he spent parts of his days in what they called a resource room, which was basically special ed. He came home one time with a crusty shine at the back of his head, leftovers from an egg someone had thrown at him.
    Throughout, he had a joking sort of vulnerability, a self-deprecating humor that made him the magnet of our household. At the dinner table he would go on long riffs about how they made kids do math with colored felt squares in the resource room
(like they’re going to hurt themselves with a regular multiplication table),
or about how Jerry who sat next to him had a hole in the back of his skull that he would let people stick a finger into for a quarter, or how it wasn’t Danny’s fault that he got confused about prepositions when he was writing
(If those words are so important, why are they so little and annoying?).
“Mississippi,” he’d say, “that’s an important word.” He’d sing: “M-I-S-S, I-S-S, I-P-P-I.” My parents were quick to laugh at his silliness, even when it wasn’t