Catboy - Eric Walters [1]
I was one of the few “white” kids, but that didn’t matter. At my old school everybody was white, and we didn’t even have an ESL—English as a second language—teacher because everyone spoke English.
My new friend Simon was Korean. Simon Park. He said Park was as common a last name in Korea as Smith was here. I didn’t know anybody named Smith. He told me his parents gave him the name Simon so he’d fit in. He was born in Toronto, but he had a Korean name that he said I wouldn’t be able to pronounce. He said it actually sounded like a swear word in English. That had only made me more curious, but so far he hadn’t told me what it was, and he said he never would.
Simon spoke perfect English, which I guess makes sense since he was born here. He also told me he spoke perfect Korean. What did I know? He said some things to me in Korean, but he could have been counting to twelve, reciting his favorite Korean foods or just making interesting sounds.
I did know that he did really well in school. He told me that there were two things you had to know about Korean kids. First, their parents expected them to do really well in school. Second, no matter how well they did, it was never good enough. He told me if he ever brought home all A’s, his parents would have wanted to know why they weren’t all A+’s. I knew he was incredible in math. It was like the guy had swallowed a calculator.
“How about we play some basketball when we get home?” Simon asked.
“Sounds good,” I said.
“You know, Taylor, you’re a pretty good player,” he said.
“I used to play for a rep team…you know…before.”
Before. That was shorthand for “prior to our move,” when we lived in a house with a basketball hoop on the driveway that had a key and a three-point line my grandfather had painted on the pavement. That was before I had to compete with other people—older kids—to play on the court behind our apartment building. The hoop had no netting, the rim was crooked and the backboard was cracked.
“Come on, this way,” Simon said.
He turned down an alley that cut between some houses. Alleys made me a little nervous. There were no alleys where I came from. The only ones I knew were on shows like CSI and Law and Order. That was where the detectives usually found the body—in an alley, sort of like the one we were walking down.
I looked around. An alley really did seem like a good place to dump a body. There were no people but a lot of bushes, garages and the backs of stores where somebody could hide. At least it was daylight, so it wasn’t that scary, just unnerving.
“This is a shortcut, Taylor. Through here,” Simon said as he stopped in front of a chain-link fence. At the top was a sign that said NO TREPASSING. Simon pried part of the fence back.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Like I said, it’s a shortcut, through the junkyard.”
I hesitated.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s only three forty-five. They don’t let out the attack dogs until four.”
My eyes popped open, and Simon burst into laughter. “No dogs, no worries. Everybody goes this way.”
I didn’t see everybody, just him and me. Although, him and me was a big chunk of everybody I knew.
I could see through the fence into a junkyard filled with cars and pieces of scrap metal.
“It’s safe. I come here all the time,” he said.
He hadn’t come this way the other times we had walked home. I knew two weeks wasn’t a lifetime, but still.
“Look, if you want, we can go the long way,” Simon said. “It’s no problem. We can walk on the street. That’s the way the little kids go.”
He had given me a choice, but really, he hadn’t. He pulled the fence back even more