The rest of Karl’s sandwich disappeared into his mouth. “I heard he’s going to fail, like, mathematically,” he said. “Maybe academic probation. Right?”
“I didn’t hear that,” Jenny said.
I put my hands on the table and spread out my fingers. “Okay,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It means that he’s either not going to class or failing his tests. Maybe both.” He nodded his head. “I don’t think he got busted for dealing, so it’s probably not that. Anyway, if you end up talking to him, can you get him to give me a call? It’s Karl. He’s got my number.”
* * *
When I got home I was very angry and decided to take action. I had gone all the way to the college to bring him the calculator. If Karl was correct, Gert was in big trouble.
He is very serious about me not going into his room when he is not home. I have always respected his wishes. But I had to find out who was telling the truth and who was lying. If Gert had lied about going to his test, that was one lie. But if he had stopped going to classes and was failing, he should have told me.
I knew Gert had books and papers on his desk that he said were from school. I put down my bag in my room and went to Gert’s room. I knocked on the door and said it was me, to open up.
If he was not at school, he should have been home.
Everything was quiet.
Gert’s door has a lock on it, but I knew that if you took a pen apart and used the plastic tube inside, you could stick it into the round hole of the lock and press around and the lock would sometimes open.
AK47 showed me how to do it.
So I found the pen and opened the door.
Gert was not hiding in there from his test.
His room was not very clean and smelled like his underarm deodorant and also cologne, and dirty laundry and his armpits. The poster of Al Pacino from Scarface stared at me and said SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND.
Gert likes to keep everything clean and orderly. His messy room was weird. I did not know where to look, so I started at his desk and looked at the papers there. It looked like homework and things from college. They would not help very much.
I checked under his bed and also in his desk, and in the table beside his bed, where he kept his condoms for having sex and also bundles of socks.
His room has a bigger closet than my room. I went into it and moved all of the shirts that were hanging up out of the way. It was like being in a jungle and being attacked by all the plants. At Uncle Richard’s he kept his important things in our closet, behind a lot of clothes.
I saw the gym bag that Toucan gave him.
I put it on Gert’s bed and pulled open the zipper. There were two envelopes and one of them was empty and the other one had money in it. All of the bills were for twenty dollars and I counted them twice and there were twelve bills. The envelope also had a piece of paper inside, folded up, from a notebook. Gert had written names on the paper and a number beside the name. Some of the names were crossed out.
I put the money and the paper back in the envelope. Then I put the gym bag back into his closet. There was another box hidden behind the gym bag that I had not seen before. It was metal and had a key inside the lock.
I turned the key and the box opened.
There was a gun inside.
chapter eight
“Shit-heel!” I shouted at the gun, even though it was made of metal and couldn’t hear me. I also shouted, “Níðingr!” a word from Kepple that means “scoundrel or person who can’t be trusted.”
The problem with guns is you can make them go off by accident, and the television always shows people getting shot and dying. Sometimes even children and babies get shot. Before AK47 allowed me to call her the name of a gun, she made sure I knew that guns were dangerous and that people who used them to hurt others were cowards. I did not like the idea of Gert being a coward who used guns like a villain and stopped touching the gun.
“Shit-heel,” I said, because if Gert had a gun it could go off by accident and kill a baby. “Shit-heel, níðingr, shit-heel, níðingr!”
Vikings did not use guns. They stopped being powerful and vanished in 1050 AD. The first cannon used in battle was in 1250 AD. So they were late to inventing guns.
During high school, when Gert was still playing football, one of his friends on the football team got shot on the street. Gert was not there, but everyone in the school had to go to a meeting in the gymnasium to talk about how the friend got shot and how guns were very dangerous.
There was a picture of the student from the yearbook on the wall and people were crying. I also cried, even though I did not know the football player who had died. Crying is like yawning. If one person cries, then everyone starts crying. Gert did not cry in the gymnasium but he did cry when we were back home at Uncle Richard’s. After the shooting there were metal detectors and police officers in the school, which made everyone angry and nervous at the same time.
I thought of the THINGS LEGENDS NEED list. A sword needs skill to use and is a powerful weapon in the hands of a master. Many cowards and villains use guns. As a hero, Gert should not have a gun.
While I was in Gert’s room, cursing the gun, I heard the door of the apartment open.
“Zelda?” Gert called, and I started to panic.
Before I knew what I was doing, I had the gun in my hand, which I did not mean to do. I meant to leave the gun in his room and never think about it again. But now it was in my hands, and I did not want to be holding it anymore.
Gert called my name again.
The panic continued inside me and I put the gun back into the box and locked it, and as fast as I could put it behind the gym bag in the closet. I just made it out of his room by the time he came down the hallway.
“What were you doing in my room?” he asked.
“Why were you lying to me?” I said.
He stomped past me and looked in his room and asked why his clothes were all over the place, if I wasn’t in his room. He looked in his closet where I had found the box with the gun. He rooted around in there and came out and said, “What is the rule about our bedrooms?”
“What is the rule about lying to me about writing your Midterm Exam?” I said back.
“What are you talking about?”
I went into my room, got the calculator and held it up, and said, “You forgot your calculator.”
“Oh.” Gert took the calculator. “This test isn’t one that needed the calculator. Stats needs the calculator. Not Macro. But I was looking for it.”
“But you use it for your studying,” I said.
“This was all word problems. You don’t need a calculator for that, do you?”
“No,” I said.
“And can we agree, once and for all, that you stay out of my room and I stay out of yours? Isn’t that about respect?”
I nodded. It was a RULE OF THE HOUSE we had come up with together.
He asked if I was hungry. Before I could answer he walked to the kitchen, went to the fridge, and took out ingredients to make a sandwich.
He started cutting some tomato. “What? You’re looking at me weirdly.”
“You did not do your test today,” I said.
The knife he was holding went through the tomato, over and over and going clunk on the cutting board. “Is that right? Then where was I for the last two hours?”