Crooked Lines: Rowdy Times, #1

By R.F. Tyminski

Crooked Lines is about healing. The main character, Griff, gets shocking news before his ninth birthday when he finds out he has a rare disease with painful treatments. Griff's family doesn't know what to do between two working parents, a depressed grandmother, and an obnoxious older brother who can scarcely tolerate him. The family doctor doesn't tell him much either. The story moves in three segments from when he starts fourth grade with a change of class, lost friends, and an unsympathetic teacher. As he's trying hard to settle into his new situation, his steely teacher notices a problem with one of his eyes. He then ends up in the doctor's office where he gets a diagnosis of Bell's palsy. Anything with palsy in it scares kids—everyone knows this. After a month of regular shots that hurt and mark his body, Griff appears to recover. In the third act of his story, Griff's body has reacted unexpectedly to the medication he took: he goes into puberty at age nine when none of his classmates and friends are even near it. He gets even less explanation for this than he did for the Bell's palsy. Frustrated, he begins to hide and keep to his room. A sweltering summer makes things worse because he's so isolated. Then, he finds refuge at an air-conditioned public library. Until he heads for an explosive confrontation with a neighbor who is working there. Will he hold his ground? Or will she manage to stick him into a barrel of shame? And how will his family accept his changing body as a reality that can't be avoided? I was inspired to write this story by working with children dealing with serious illnesses who show strength and toughness when least expected. This book is well suited to middle grade readers as well as young adult readers. Crooked Lines has a psychological dimension that includes how a child dreams, uses humor, and looks for ways to express what feels intolerable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Griffin Flies Books
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218261887

R.F. Tyminski

Rob Tyminski is a writer and psychologist. He grew up in New York. He attended Haverford College before living in Germany for a few years. His non-fiction books include: The Psychology of Theft and Loss, Male Alienation, and The Psychological Effects of Immigrating. He enjoys running, yoga, and travel. He lives in San Francisco with his husband.

Book preview

Faces are strange. Made up of all these parts, each one odd to look at by itself. A single part can turn out wrong and cause trouble: crossed eyes that look comical, buck teeth shooting out a mouth, snouty noses shaped like a pig’s, bushy eyebrows like frozen caterpillars, sunken cheeks making a person look contagious, pencil lips that appear ready to curl lizard-like, missing chins that got sliced away. Our faces tell stories whether we like them to or not. What we’ve been through, what we’ve suffered, what we wished never would’ve happened. Faces always change and, frequently, not to our liking.

Griff O’Neill knew about faces because of what happened when he was almost nine and slogging through fourth grade, wishing he could find a hole to hide in. It was a year that hung on him, and it wouldn’t let him forget, long after it passed, because that year worked its way inside him, changing who he thought he was. At the beginning of the school year, he was eight and the youngest in his class because he had started school when he was four—a decision his parents made and never explained to him—but it was one reason why he attended a Catholic school since you had to be five to be enrolled in public school.

He hadn’t believed he stood out for anything remarkable—certainly not at the beginning of fourth grade. He was thin, gangly, and had blue eyes and mussed black hair. Adults seemed to like the color of his eyes more than anything else about how he looked. He certainly heard his fair share of skinny jokes about beans, poles, and stalks. Griff sometimes worried when one of his aunts took to calling him pretty. He knew pretty was not a word for boys.

The first day of fourth grade began with an unwelcome surprise. Saint Theresa’s School was a drab two-story brick building. There were long rows of vertical windows in each room, polished linoleum floors that shined too brightly, and puke-green cinder block walls lining the hallways. The school was adjacent to a church that was too small for regular services, so it was only used for funerals. Mass took place in the school auditorium, which was cavernous, cold, and doubled as the gym. The school appeared well kept, and it smelled everywhere of cleaning solution.

At the end of third grade, the nuns gave Griff’s entire class a daylong exam most of the children complained about. It was a strange test with a section full of odd shapes—stars, crescents, diamonds, circles—in short and long sequences they had to decipher to figure out what came next. Then, there was a section of random pictures that had to be arranged in correct order to make sense, like with a start, middle, and finish. Next came arithmetic problems, and finally, incomplete sentences requiring a word at the end. The exam went on for several hours with only a lunch break. Most children grew tired, and they simply circled whatever the first choice happened to be to answer the questions. A few fell asleep. Someone pretended to be sick and asked to leave. There was a lot of yawning, and Sister Dolorita scolded them repeatedly, because each section of the test was timed. This meant a lot of blanks on the answer sheets for many students.

Although Griff yawned throughout the exam, he looked at every question and tried to find the best answer. He never found out his score—none of them did. But he scored well, so well in fact, the nuns decided to move him into what was called the A class. Like most parochial schools in the mid-1960s, every grade was divided into groups—A, B, and C, if there happened to be enough children for three—groups that were supposedly sorted by intelligence. Children were assigned to one group in kindergarten, and for most of them, they remained in this group through eighth grade. Usually by the end of first grade, everyone had figured out what A, B, and C meant.

The sisters expected more from children in an A class. They moved through their lessons at a faster pace, they got more homework, and they received small signs of favoritism like awards at assemblies. They also got newer workbooks when the supply was limited, and they were allowed first into the library to choose books.

Since kindergarten Griff and Clifford had belonged to the C class. On the first day of fourth grade, Griff stood looking at the student list outside Ms. Montague’s classroom and saw Clifford’s name, but not his. He thought it had to be a mistake. He went to ask Ms. Montague, who told him, no, he was not in her class, and he must be in another. Clifford was disappointed, and Griff was confused. They’d been best pals for years; they rode the bus together, played after school, and were inseparable over the summers. It didn’t seem possible they’d now be in different classes.

Griff wandered the hall. He checked the list for the B class, but his name was not there. He sat on the stairs, shoulders slumping, when Father Ahern approached him. Father Ahern was from Ireland. He was young and had thick curly brown hair and a sloping smile that would have meant mischief if he weren’t a priest. He was the friendliest of any of the priests at St. Theresa’s. He squatted down and said, Griff, you look lost. His accent sounded soft and musical because of his funny Irish accent.

Griff sighed, I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.

Father Ahern frowned. He liked Griff, and he knew his classroom had been changed. As an assistant principal, he had attended the meeting when Sister Germaine, the principal, reviewed the exam scores for the third graders. She decided to move four children who were advancing into fourth grade: one went from A to B, one from B to C, one from C to B, and one from C to A—this last one was Griff.

Father Ahern eyed Griff sympathetically, Well, that’s a problem, not knowing where you belong. But you know, I have an idea where you do belong. Let’s go upstairs. The A class was upstairs, in a larger room with better windows.

They stood outside the A classroom looking at the list. Father Ahern pointed down the alphabet, See, there you are, Griffin O’Neill. He said it cheerfully, although Griff didn’t understand why.

Griff scowled, I’d rather be with Clifford. 

I bet you would. You two are good friends. But I think you’ll find other good friends in your new class. Now scoot along! The bell’s about to ring. 

Griff looked at Father Ahern with sorrowful eyes, waved bye, and reluctantly entered his new class. Ms. Kane, along with Ms. Montague, was one of the few lay teachers in the school. Lay meant she wasn’t a nun, although she might as well have been. She was a spinster who had beady mud-colored eyes, sandy hair pulled into a tight bun on the back of her head, and a dour face. She hardly ever smiled. She had a reputation for being grouchy. When Griff introduced himself and shook her knobby hand, he imagined a store shelf packed with Heinz vinegar bottles. He had an uneasy feeling this new class was going to spell trouble for him, all in capitals: TROUBLE.

Trudy Kane was not nearly as old as her students believed her to be. She was thirty-seven, a devout Catholic who had joined a convent at age eighteen fully expecting to become a nun. Sadly for her, she took ill with a mysterious disease that caused her not only to lose more than thirty pounds but also all her hair. Her doctor advised her to quit the convent because her health was so frail and she needed time to recuperate. It was a devastating blow that threw her life off course like a boat run aground on an uncharted island.

As she held onto Griff’s sweaty hand, she regarded him skeptically. Checking a list in her head, she took stock of his untucked shirttail, uncombed hair, and unwashed face. She quickly concluded here was another tiresome boy she had to train, all because he was un-this and un-that. She much preferred girls to boys; they usually had proper manners, and they almost always showed decent habits when it came to washing, combing, and dressing themselves. Finally letting go of his small hand, she directed Griff, her newest student, to his seat at the back. She doubted he would last long there where he’d be harder to watch. She already thought he would be one to keep a closer eye on.

During recess, Griff approached Clifford, suggesting they play tag or dodge ball. He wanted to talk to him, but with each passing day, this contact became more and more awkward. Griff’s move upstairs into the A class had the unwelcome effect of putting up an invisible wall between them. Neither of them wanted this. But Clifford felt a change in his allegiance. He began to keep distant from Griff at recess and on the school bus. Within weeks, Griff’s friends in the C class had turned against him. They called him smarty pants, bookworm, and brainiac. They became Griff’s ex-friends, who now enjoyed teasing and mocking him.

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Mortedale, a murky place, was a town in upstate New York. Small, yet quietly divided into pockets of bleakness and shorter stretches of hope with empty lots in between, like the A, B, and C classes at St Theresa’s. Clifford lived in one of the bleak spots: rusting cars with missing wheels sat for months, sometimes years, on top of crumbling cinderblocks. His family’s front lawn had a couple of them resting like the skeletons of dead animals waiting to be taken away for burial.

Clifford’s house was an unintended picture of decay. It had far too many broken and taped windowpanes and an enormous, tattered canvas tarp covering half of the roof, and the front steps were missing entire planks. Inside, this unhappiness showed itself in the shapes of Clifford’s parents. His mother was a desperate chain-smoker whose skin peeled for reasons no one seemed to know. His father was an angry alcoholic who worked, at most, half a year during the spring and summer. Somehow, cross-eyed Clifford could keep a happy outlook on life, and Griff admired this most about him. Maybe Clifford could be happy living as he did because he literally didn’t see the world the way others did. He wore thick-lensed glasses, the left side with a crack from top to bottom, and he told Griff he liked them broken because it blurred his vision: it’s like opening your eyes underwater. Griff wondered how poor they must have been that Clifford’s parents never seemed to care about replacing his broken glasses.

Three blocks down an intersecting street, Mortedale looked different. Along this stretch, better-off families took pride in their second stories, which reached upward like expectations. Lawns got mowed weekly during spring and summer. Maple, willow, and elm trees shaded the front yards. Griff, his parents, and older brother Doug shared a place there with his grandparents. Their house on Beasley Avenue had three-bedrooms, was painted bright white with green shutters, and sat on a well-kept lot with shrubs, trees, and flowerbeds. Griff understood his grandparents lived with them so they could afford this house, but it was an unfortunate arrangement. His mother and grandmother fought a lot and did so as fiercely as he and Doug. The main difference was they didn’t beat on one another, at least as far as Griff could tell.

After big blow-ups, his mother and grandmother wouldn’t speak for days. Silence and icy tension ran through the house