Trout and Me by Susan Shreve Page A

our apartment.
    Meg took us to a Japanese restaurant called Mikado, where you sit on the floor and eat with chopsticks, and we sat in the back of the restaurant at a small table on thefloor, just the three of us, and we talked. I was surprised. Trout told Meg all the same stories he had told me and told her that his tattoo was a fake. He drew it on with Magic Marker every morning and washed it off at night. He told her about his learning disabilities and flushing Ritalin down the toilet at night. And then he said he was never going back to Stockton Elementary again. All he did was skip school one day and now they were changing him to the other fifth grade and next year he was being sent to a school for dummies.
    Meg listened quietly. Every once in a while, she got a sad look on her face and she’d touch Trout’s arm or shake her head or say how awful his life sounded. Then she had a plan.
    The plan was simple. Every morning we’d meet at the corner like we already did and walk into school together, promising each other to be quiet and well behaved all day long. For every hour of the school day we were not in trouble, Meg would give us a surprise. And so, if there were eight hours of no trouble, that meant eight surprises.
    “What if one of us is bad and not the other?” I asked.
    “No surprise. That’s the deal,” Meg said. “It’s up to both of you.”
    “It’s a deal,” Trout said.
    And “that was that for this,” as my father would say.

Meg’s plan worked. At least we thought it was working. We didn’t miss tutoring. We didn’t interrupt classes or get sent to Mr. O’Dell or have to sit outside the classroom for rudeness or talking out of turn. We even did all our homework.
    Every afternoon at around five o’clock, we’d meet Meg, sometimes at The Grub and sometimes at home, to tell her about our successful day. And she’d get us our prizes. One day it was eight M&M’s each. Another day, it was eight stickers each. Another, it was eight pencils. And once it was eight cents each. So we thought we were doing really well.
    But as it turned out, we were wrong. I don’t understand how things happened the way they did. But they did.
    We should have caught on. That’s what I said to Trout later.
    I mean, the first week of Meg’s plan, Billy Blister had a birthday party and invited all the boys in the class, at least all the ones I know except for Timbo Wirth, who’s a juvenile delinquent, and Trout and me.
    “So did you get invited?” I asked Trout at recess, when all the boys were talking about Billy’s birthday party.
    “Nope,” he said. “Billy doesn’t like me.”
    “Well, he likes me and I didn’t get invited.”
    Trout shrugged.
    “Maybe he forgot.”
    “Maybe,” I said.
    I didn’t ask Billy how come he didn’t ask us, although I wanted to. But Mary Sue told me on the way home from school one day that she heard Billy was having an all-boys birthday party and I wasn’t invited and neither was Trout because of the parents.
    I shouldn’t have asked Mary Sue anything since she has such a bad character, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know.
    “What about the parents?”
    “Billy’s parents,” Mary Sue said. “They said you couldn’t come because Trout is such a bad influence on you. A lot of parents feel that way.”
    “Wrong,” I said. “Trout isn’t a bad influence on anyone.”
    But later that night, after Meg had given us our prizes for good behavior, I did ask my mom what she thought Ishould do. And she asked my dad and he said he couldn’t stand the way people are like sheep and move around stupidly in herds and never think for themselves.
    “What does that have to do with Billy’s birthday party?” I asked my mom when she came in to kiss me good night.
    “Just that some of the parents of the kids in your class don’t understand Trout, so they don’t want their children to play with him.”
    “Idiots,” I said.
    “I think so too. But what happens is