Buddy, Beware!

    Seventh grade brought changes, all right, but the biggest one didn't happen at school - it happened at home. Granddad Duncan came to live with us.

   

    At first it was kind of weird because none of us really knew him. Except for Mom, of course. And even though she's spent the past year and a half trying to convince us he's a great guy. from what I can tell, the thing he likes to do best is stare out the front-room window. There's not much to see out there except the Bakers's front yard. but you can find him there day or night. sitting in the big easy chair they moved in with him, staring out the window.

    Okay, so he also reads Tom Clancy novels and the newspapers and does crossword puzzles and tracks his stocks, but those things are all distractions. Given no one to justify it too, the man would stare out the window until he fell sleep. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just seems so...boring.

    Mon says he stares like that because he misses Grandma, but that's not something Granddad had ever discussed with me. As a matter of fact, he never discussed with me. As a matter of fact, he never discussed much of anything with me until a few months ago when he read about Juli in the newspaper. 

    Now, Juli Baker did not wind up on the front page of the Mayfield Times for being an eighth-grade Einstein, like you might suspect. No, my friend, she got front-page coverage because she refused to climb out of a sycamore tree.

    Not that I could tell a sycamore from a maple or a birch for that matter, but Juli, of course, knew what kind of tree it was and passed that knowledge along to every creature in he wake.

    

    So this tree, this sycamore tree, was up the hill on a vacant lot on Collier Street, and it was massive. Massive and ugly. It was twisted and gnarled and bent, and I kept expecting the thing to blow over in the wind.

    

    One day last year I'd finally had enough of her yakking about that stupid tree. I came right out and told her that it was not a magnificent sycamore, it was, in reality, the ugliest tree known to man. And you know what she said? She said I was visually challenged. Visually challenged! This from the girl who lives in a house that's the scourge of the neighbourhood. They've got bushes growing over windows, weeds sticking out all over the place, and a barnyard's worth of animals running wild. I'm talking dogs, cats, chickens, even snakes. I swear to God, her brothers have a boa constrictor in their room. They dragged me in there when I was about ten and made me watch it eat a rat. A live, beady-eyed rat. They held that rodent up by its tail and gulp, the boa swallowed it whole. That snake gave me nightmares for a month.