Trout and Me by Susan Shreve Read Free Book Online

mentioninvisible but he told me about getting the question mark burned on his skin.”
    “Yeah, me too,” I said.
    “It’s not a tattoo,” my mother said.
    “Did he tell you that?” Meg asked.
    “No, he told me it
was
one.”
    “So?” I said, suddenly protective of Trout. I don’t know what happened to me because usually I don’t argue with my mother. But suddenly I wanted to tell her that Trout was my best friend and she better be nice to him, better believe what he told her.
    “It isn’t a tattoo,” my mother said quietly.
    “How do you know?” Meg asked.
    “Because it weeps.”
    “Weeps?” That was me speaking.
    “I was looking at his face as he got out of the car and the red ink from the question mark was dripping down his chin. A tattoo doesn’t do that.”
    I didn’t bother to tell her that I’d seen the same thing, that I’d wondered about a dripping tattoo as well. I wasn’t going to betray my friend, even with my mother, and I didn’t like to hear that my mother, of all people, doubted him. I didn’t like that at all.
    “What if he
wants
you to think it’s a tattoo?” Meg asked. “What if that’s important to him?”
    “I was concerned that he felt the need to lie,” my mother said.
    My mother is like that, worried about right and wrong all the time, which drives me crazy. Because as far as I can tell from eleven years on the planet, what feels like right is sometimes wrong and what feels wrong is sometimes right.
    But that’s another subject we’ll get into later in this story.
    “I lie to you, Mom. I need to lie two or three times a day,” Meg said. “‘Why were you late for dinner tonight?’ you asked me. ‘I was at the dry cleaners picking up your clothes,’ I answered. But that wasn’t true. I was actually at Viv’s house and only picked up the dry cleaning at the last minute. I tell that kind of lie all the time.”
    The telephone rang just as my mom was about to lose her temper at Meg, which she sometimes does and it makes her face go red as cranberries and her top lip quivers. It was Mr. Baker.
    “Oh, hello, Mr. Baker,” Mom said. “I’m so glad you called.”
    So I went into my room and Meg turned on her music quite loud so I couldn’t possibly hear my mother’s end of the conversation, which went on and on and on. All I could do was watch through a crack in my bedroom door as my mom paced the living room, mostly listening to Mr. Baker on the other end of the phone. Finally I checked Meg’s room and she was painting her fingernails purple and didn’t want to talk, so I climbed into my bed and waited.
    That’s when my mother came in.
    “Mr. Baker has been pleased with you recently,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “He says your attitude is better. Not great but better. He says you’re becoming more of a citizen.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Just a good guy.”
    I could tell bad news was coming. Good news first to soften me up, and then slammo, the bad news explodes.
    I sat up against my headboard.
    “What else?” I asked.
    “Well, Mr. Baker is worried about Trout.”
    I shrugged.
    “Why doesn’t he call Trout’s father?” I said. “Not you.”
    “Because he’s worried about the effect Trout could have on
you,”
she said in that way she has, her voice soft enough, almost friendly. But that doesn’t mean she’ll put up with disagreement from me.
    “Like what effect?”
    “Like getting in more trouble instead of less.”
    So there you have it. “The Trout Problem.” Before the end of fifth grade, “The Trout Problem” got so awful I was forced to do something surprising, something I can’t believe I had the courage to do, even now, a year later, with Trout gone.

The next morning Trout called me with a plan. He called very early, even before I went in the kitchen for breakfast, and told me he’d already left his house and was calling from a phone booth. He wanted to meet me outside school at eight o’clock.
    “What’s the plan?” I