Son of a Critch by Mark Critch

Author:Mark Critch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

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On the bus the next morning Fox told me that his oldest brother had stashed the cello near the school and that if I wanted it back I’d have to go see him. Their parents had split and their father had a new house closer to school and he’d been none too happy when the brood he thought he’d escaped showed up at his door with a classical instrument. I’d never heard of anyone’s parents breaking up before. That just didn’t happen at Catholic school. You got pregnant, you got married, and whatever parent outlived the other won. That was how the game was played. I knew divorce was about as high up a sin as you could get, and felt truly bad for him.

“Sorry ’bout that,” I said, and Fox hit me hard in the shoulder.

“Shut up,” he replied, turning his face to the window. I knew what the scratch in his voice meant and I didn’t want to say anything else in case it would make him cry. Besides, his parents were going to burn in hell for all eternity. That was punishment enough as far as I could figure.

I sat in math class more confused than ever. We were covering our times tables. When I was last there, I had loved times tables. This math made sense to me. There was a pattern. One times zero equalled zero. Two times zero equalled zero. Three times zero equalled zero. Okay. One times one equalled one. Two times one equalled two. Three times one equalled three. I was down with that. Two times two was four. Three times two was six. Double the number and you have your answer. There was nothing to it. Three and four went a little rogue but nothing I couldn’t handle. The five times tables all ended in either a zero or a five. I’d missed six and seven and returned to math class in time for eight. Eight times six is forty-eight? What the hell? Shouldn’t it be eighty-six or something? Eight times eight is sixty-four? It should be eighty-eight or at the very least sixteen. This was anarchy. I needed my cello back.

Fox’s older brother skipped school the next couple of days, so I avoided cello lessons. I also avoided math class. When my teacher told me that it was time for cello I’d put away my books and leave the room. Then I’d go down the stairs to the first floor where Sister Elizabeth’s classroom was. Instead of going in to my cello lesson, I’d hide under the staircase until there was movement in the hall above me. I didn’t have a watch, so the only way to know when forty minutes had passed was by listening for the grade sevens. Once I heard a group shuffling their way to the gym or a science lab, I decided the time was right and I went back to class.

Now I wasn’t only missing math. I was missing cello and math. I’d taken a bad situation and doubled down, making it far worse and gaining nothing.

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