The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman Read Online Free PDF Page A

the cable sports channel Thwap! TV. If she and Lucy appeared on that channel, her family would realize that Scrabble was a sport. It was a sport of the brain.
    Sometimes April dreamed about sports. Occasionally in the dreams she was actually playing, wedged in the middle of a family scrimmage in a football stadium. Yet at the very last minute, when everyone was counting on her to make the winning field goal, she would freeze.
    “You can do it!” one of her sisters would shout.
    “Come on, April, you’re one of us!” cried her brother. “Do it for the Blunts!”
    “Do it for me,” someone else said quietly, and in the dream she always turned sharply toward the voice in the stands.
    “ It’s you,” she would say in amazement . “The boy from the motel pool. Where are you ?” she would whisper.
    But right before she was about to find out, April always woke up.

Chapter Four
    ROAST MULES
    T he dreams had started three years earlier, the night after April met the boy. The Blunt family had been on the road; her siblings were playing in travel baseball and softball games that weekend, and so her parents had decided that the family would spend the night at some motel. The one they chose wasn’t very busy, and had a swimming pool. The Blunts went to sleep not too long after dinner, for they were planning to get up early in the morning. April had gotten permission to spend the next day at the motel by herself.
    It was ten A.M. by the time she woke up, and everyone was already gone. April got dressed and went outside onto the second-floor landing. She could see into the fencedin pool area, where a boy about her age was standing in bathing trunks and a T-shirt, looking down into the water. April changed into a bathing suit, too, and soon she was at the pool, sitting on a lounge chair with her travel Scrabble set open in her lap. She often played against herself, drawing two separate racks of tiles. When she traveled with her family, there was no other choice.
    The boy paced the edge of the pool. If he’d been in April’s family, he would have already been in the water, doing cannonballs and shouting, “Look at me, everybody!” But he seemed reluctant. April got up and dipped in a foot.
    “It’s warm,” she announced.
    “I figured,” said the boy. He was thin, with a nice face, and a blue T-shirt that had some words printed on it in white.
    “Don’t you swim?” she asked him.
    “I used to. But then I found out I have serious food allergies.”
    “You can’t swim because of allergies?” April asked.
    “Well, I got kind of skinny when they were trying to figure out what I was allowed to eat. So I don’t like to take my shirt off. I look too scrawny.”
    “You could leave it on,” April suggested.
    “Everyone would say, ‘Why is he swimming with his shirt on’.”
    “No one would say that. No one is here.” In the distance, cars and trucks rumbled by on the Interstate. Then April added, “Well, I’m going to swim,” and she jumped in.
    In a few seconds he was in the pool, too, wearing his T-shirt, which ballooned with water and rose up around him. He smoothed the shirt down and swam. They played tag, darting back and forth, though after a short while they got out and sat by the edge with motel towels draped around their shoulders. April saw him notice her travel Scrabble, so she asked, “Do you play?”
    But he shook his head. “No, sorry,” he said.
    “It’s the greatest game,” she said. “I basically live and breathe it.”
    “Show me how. I don’t know anything.”
    For the next hour or so, April Blunt taught the boy how to play Scrabble. “Okay, here are the basics. There are one hundred tiles,” she explained. “You pick seven and line them up on a rack. But I have a feeling that maybe you already know that.”
    “No,” he said. “I actually don’t.”
    She held out the bag, and he pulled out seven tiles and placed them on the rack she’d handed him.
    “Now,” April said,