Dexter the Tough (3 page)

Grandma had her head tilted back and her eyes closed. Her glasses were practically falling off the tip of her nose. Her mouth hung open, her chin sagging down toward her chest. She wasn't moving. It didn't even look like she was breathing.

Oh, no. What if Grandma was dead?

“Grandma?” Dexter whispered.

No answer. On the TV screen, the embarrassed girl was replaced by a huge airplane zooming closer and closer. . . .

“Grandma!” Dexter screamed.

Grandma bolted upright.

“Wha . . . Huh?” She swung her head frantically side to side, as if she expected to see the room bursting into flames, or a burglar crawling in the window, or a tiger leaping through the doorway. “Dexter, what on earth—?”

Dexter couldn't exactly tell her he'd thought she was dead.

“I, um, finished my homework,” he said.

“Well, goodness, that's no reason to yell,” Grandma said.

“Were you asleep?” Dexter asked.

“Nonsense. I was just resting my eyes,” Grandma said, blinking drowsily. She shoved her glasses back into place, shook her head a little, then patted the couch cushion beside her. “Want to come sit and watch with me?”

Dexter looked doubtfully at the TV. The regular program was back on—an old man warbling some old-fashioned-sounding song.

“I guess not,” Grandma said. “Want to go play outside until dinner?”

Dexter thought about Grandma's yard, a little rectangle in the front and an even smaller rectangle in the back.

“Play what?” he asked.

“Um . . . ” she began. Then her expression brightened suddenly. “I know! I still have your uncle Ted's bike in the garage. He used to ride it around the neighborhood all the time after school. Him and Charlie Lincoln and
Franklin Jones and Anthony Teeters—what fun those boys had! I can still see the four of them, riding down the street. . . . ”

Grandma had a faraway look on her face now, like she really was back in the past, watching Uncle Ted, a little kid again.

“Land sakes, that must have been thirty years ago,” Grandma said, laughing a little. “Here they are, all grown men now, and three of the four of them bald as posts!”

Dexter tried to imagine his uncle Ted riding a bike. Uncle Ted was not just grown-up and bald. He was also so tall that he had to duck his head to walk through doors. On a little-kid bike, his knees would hit his chin and his long arms would dangle over the handlebars, like a clown act in the circus.

Grandma stopped laughing.

“Oops, sorry, I shouldn't have said that, ‘bald as posts,' ” Grandma said. “I just didn't think.”

Dexter remembered who else was bald now: Daddy. The medicine had made him lose
his hair. But what had always looked normal and natural and right on Uncle Ted looked strange and scary and sad on Dexter's dad.

“The key to the garage is in the kitchen drawer, right by the sink,” Grandma was saying now, quickly. “If you need to put air in any of the tires, the bike pump's beside your grandfather's old tool table.”

“Okay,” Dexter said. He didn't feel like riding a bike anymore—he hadn't felt like it to begin with. But he couldn't stay here with Grandma right now.

D
exter got the key from the kitchen drawer and unlocked the garage. He fought his way past Grandma's car, and an old lawn mower, and a bunch of old clay pots. The bike was behind a stack of wood posts. Dexter kicked at the tires—they were pretty flat. But he'd never operated a bike pump before, so he decided he didn't care. By jerking and pulling and yanking, he got the bike out to the driveway.

Mom and Dad never would have made me do that by myself,
he thought.
They would have unlocked the garage for me and held on to the key so I wouldn't lose it. They would have pumped up
the tires, to make sure they were safe. They would have made me wear a helmet.

Angrily, Dexter straddled the bike and kicked one pedal toward the ground. The bike lurched forward. But Dexter had forgotten about the kickstand, so the tires skidded to a halt as soon as the other pedal slammed against it. Dexter would have gone flying over the handlebars if he hadn't been holding on so tightly. As it was, he had to stretch his toe to the ground to keep from falling. The pedal scraped against his leg.

Don't look,
Dexter told himself.
Don't look and you can forget you got hurt. See? No pain at all. None.

Without even glancing down, he used the toe of his shoe to shove the kickstand up and out of the way. Then he began pedaling furiously down the block.

He passed one old house after another. They blurred together, even though Dexter wasn't going very fast.

Mom and Dad never would have let me do
this,
he thought. Back home, he wasn't allowed to cross the street by himself. When he rode his bike, he had to stay on the sidewalk in front of his own house. He couldn't go beyond that without a grown-up.

Grandma doesn't care,
he told himself.

He came to the corner and let his tire bump down into the street. He rode up the wheelchair ramp on the other side, onto the next sidewalk. He'd done it—he'd crossed the street all by himself and nothing had happened.

So there,
he thought.

But it didn't really feel exciting to be out riding a bike all by himself. It felt lonely and scary and sad.

Dexter crossed more streets, and turned a couple corners. He kept telling himself he needed to keep track of where he was going. But he had trouble remembering, especially when he had to work so hard just to push down on the pedals and keep the bike going.

And he was getting a funny idea in his
head that made it hard for him to think about anything else. Maybe, just maybe, it would turn out that Uncle Ted's bike was magic, and Dexter would end up back in Cincinnati if he kept pedaling. And Mom and Dad would be there, and everything would be okay again: Daddy wouldn't be sick and Mommy would have all the time in the world to be a mom. And Dexter never would have had to move in with Grandma or go to a new school or hate everyone or beat up anyone. . . .

“Hey!”

Dexter looked up, half expecting to see his own familiar street in front of him, his own familiar house. But he was in front of a huge park now. The bike hadn't carried Dexter home. Of course it hadn't.

Dexter looked at the little-kid swings and slides in the park. Wait a minute—he remembered this place. Dexter's dad used to bring him here, years ago, those times when they were all visiting Grandma and Dexter would
get squirmy sitting on her stiff furniture and trying to be polite.

“We boys just need some run-around time, don't we, Dex?” Dad would say. And then he'd race Dexter across the park, and they'd fall on the ground in a heap, laughing and squealing.

Daddy wouldn't even be able to walk to the park now,
Dexter thought, kicking harder than ever at the pedals.

“Hey!” someone said again.

Dexter had already forgotten the first yell, because he'd been too busy thinking about how the bike wasn't magic and how Daddy maybe wouldn't be able to run with him ever again. But this time he looked around, past the swings and slides. Someone was waving at him.

Robin Bryce.

Robin came running toward him. A woman carrying a little brown dog was behind him, trying to keep up.

“You've got blood all over your leg!”
Robin shouted as soon as he was close enough that Dexter could hear him well.

“Do I?” Dexter asked.

He looked down, and there was a stream of blood starting where he'd scraped his leg on the pedal. It ran all the way down to his shoe. The blood was bright red, a shocking color soaking into his white sock. He felt dizzy just looking at it.

“Oh, dear,” the woman behind Robin said. “I'm Robin's mom. Can you tell me what happened?”

Dexter shrugged.

“I just hit my leg against the pedal by mistake,” he said. “I'm okay.”

Robin stared, his eyes almost popping out of his head.

“Wow,” he said. “You're really brave.”

Dexter felt his face get hot.

“I better go now,” he said. “You know—before I bleed any more.”

He wasn't sure he could make it back to Grandma's, now that he'd seen what his leg
looked like. Anyhow, the muscles in both his legs ached just from pedaling to the park. And he couldn't quite remember the directions. Had he turned right or left by that house with the yellow awnings?

Still, he was scared that if he stayed here, Robin would say, “See, Mom, this is the boy I was telling you about, the one who beat me up this morning. Aren't you going to call the principal now? Aren't you going to call the police?”

Dexter put his right foot back up on the pedal and started to push off, but Robin's mom dropped the dog and grabbed Dexter's handlebars.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You can't ride home with a wound like that. And look—both your tires have gone completely flat.”

Dexter looked. The tires didn't look any flatter than they had when he'd started out.

“We live right over there,” Robin's mom said, pointing at a small white house at the edge of the park. “Why don't you let me clean up your wound and give you a Band-Aid? And then I could drive you home.”

“I'm not supposed to go with strangers,” Dexter said.

Robin looked like he thought Dexter was being too picky, for someone who was practically bleeding to death. But Robin's mother nodded and said, “That's a smart boy—you don't know me at all. Here, let's use my cell phone and call to have someone pick you up. What's the number?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a phone. She flipped open the top and held her finger over the buttons, waiting.

“Um,” Dexter said. “It's five-five-five, uh—” What if he forgot the rest of the number? What if he said it wrong? “Six-three-eight-one,” he finished in a rush, praying it was right.

Robin's mom began speaking into the phone.

“Hello, this is Myrna Bryce. I'm here in the park with, uh—”

“Dexter,” Dexter told her.

“With Dexter,” she said. “And he's hurt his leg and it's bleeding quite a bit, and . . . ”

Mrs. Bryce seemed to be listening now.

“Oh, no, it's not that bad,” she said. “He doesn't need to go to the hospital. It's just, I don't think he could ride his bike with such a bad scrape, and it does need to be cleaned, and I just thought you might want to come and get him. . . . ”

She started nodding, like she approved of whatever Dexter's grandmother was saying.

“All right,” she said finally. “My son and I will stay here with Dexter until you arrive.”

She shut off the phone and put it back into her pocket. Dexter was glad that the dog she'd been carrying began barking just then, because Robin and his mother started looking at the dog instead of him.

“No, Petunia,” Robin said. “Be quiet.”

The dog kept barking.

“Petunia!” Mrs. Bryce said in a stern voice.

The dog whimpered a little and lay down on its paws.

“He never listens to me,” Robin complained. “I bet he'd listen to Dexter.”

“Do you have a dog, Dexter?” Mrs. Bryce asked.

Dexter thought about how his parents always used to say that he could get a dog when he was eight. But by the time he turned eight, Daddy was sick. And the one time Dexter had just kind of slightly hinted that maybe, just maybe he should have a dog to make up for Mom and Dad leaving him at Grandma's, Mom had snapped, “Dexter,
really!
Think about it! With everything else that's going on, do you honestly think that anyone has the time or energy for a dog?”

Dexter had wanted to say, “I do.” But Mom had already left the room, gone to pack to leave.

“I don't have a dog,” he told Mrs. Bryce now in a flat, hopeless voice.

“Well, if it's okay with your parents, you're welcome to come over and play with Petunia sometime. Robin would like that,
wouldn't you, Robin?” Mrs. Bryce said.

Dexter knew he should tell her that he lived with his grandmother, not his parents. But he just shrugged and stared at the ground. He felt so tired all of a sudden—so tired he didn't even bother listening to how Robin answered his mother.

Grandma got there quickly, with a hot washcloth in a plastic bag and a whole first-aid kit ready on the front seat of her car. She had Dexter's cut washed, disinfected and bandaged before he knew it.

“You're . . . good at this,” Dexter mumbled, leaning his head back against the seat of the car while Grandma knelt at the curb beside him.

Grandma laughed.

“Well, you know, Dexter, I was a mother for many, many years before I became a grandmother.”

Grandma went around to the back of the car with Mrs. Bryce. They had the trunk open and were turning Uncle Ted's bike this
way and that, trying to figure out the best way to put it in. Dexter could hear them talking, but he couldn't quite hear what they were saying. Robin stayed right by Dexter's side.

“I would have fainted, bleeding like that,” he said. “Didn't it hurt? Didn't you want to cry?”

Dexter shrugged.

“I didn't notice,” he said.

He could have said, “My dad's really, really sick, and my mom left me with my grandma, and I can't have a dog, and I had to go to a horrible new school today, and I hated everyone there, and I'm just lucky the police didn't arrest me for fighting, and maybe they still will. . . . And you think I should cry over a stupid little scrape?”

Except, saying that probably would make him cry.

“I wish I was like you,” Robin said, biting his lip.

Grandma and Mrs. Bryce came back around to the front of the car.