I considered the problem all afternoon. When my father came home, I didn’t rush downstairs to greet him. He stopped at my bedroom door to check in with me. “Hey, son, everything okay?”
“Just reading.”
My dad picked up the copy of Tom Sawyer from my nightstand. “Mark Twain,” he said. “My favorite American author. Did you know his real name was Samuel? Samuel Clemens.”
Under other circumstances I might have been interested, but I was preoccupied. “Dad, can I ask you something?”
He set the book down on my bed. “You know you can.”
I couldn’t very well tell my dad I had been spying on my mom and Mrs. Cantwell, so I decided to keep things anonymous. “What if you had this friend and he wasn’t doing so good . . . like in school. And you wanted to help him, but you didn’t want him to know you were helping him.”
“Would this friend be anyone I know?”
“No,” I said. “I’m just supposing it.”
“Well, just supposing, why wouldn’t this friend want help?”
I recalled how Ernie had always stuffed his tests in his desk when our teachers returned them and never told me his scores. “Maybe because he’s embarrassed about it, you know, maybe because he doesn’t want people to think he’s stupid or something.”
My dad put his hands to his chin as if in prayer, rubbing the palms together. “I can see why you wouldn’t want him to feel stupid.” He pondered the question a bit longer, then smiled and picked up Tom Sawyer, flipping the pages. “You’ve read the part in the story where Tom has to whitewash the fence?”
“You mean the part where he tricks Ben Rogers into doing it for him?”
“Exactly. You see, what Tom did was take advantage of Ben Rogers’s disposition.”
“His what?”
“Tom knew what type of boy Ben was. He knew Ben would tease him because he had to work while Ben was going swimming. Before Ben could tease him, Tom made his work look like more fun than swimming. And that made Ben want to paint the fence. Do you follow?”
“Not really.”
“What you need to do is find out this friend’s disposition. Do you know him pretty well?”
“Pretty well,” I said.
“Then you need to figure out how to get this friend to accept your help without him knowing you’re doing it.”
“You mean trick him like Tom Sawyer tricked Ben Rogers.”
“As long as this trick isn’t mean-spirited, yes.”
I thought about that a bit longer. “Thanks, Dad.” My father started for the door. “And Dad, can we not tell Mom about this friend?”
My father looked at me. “You know your mother and I don’t keep secrets from each other, Sam. But maybe I just won’t bring it up.” He winked and left.
I lay on my bed, considering Ernie’s disposition. The one thing I knew about Ernie was that he hated to lose, at anything. His parents had had to rush him to the emergency room one time after he bet his cousin he could stuff more peanuts up his nose. I had to be like Tom Sawyer. I had to get Ernie to want to whitewash the fence.
7
The following Monday I set my plan in motion. During our scheduled free time in school, I met Ernie at the reading shelf. Most of my classmates were one packet behind me, reading from the red section, but Ernie had still not completed the yellow packet.
“I’ll bet you can’t finish the yellow packet before I finish the purple packet,” I said.
Ernie’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not fair. You’re a better reader than me.”