A Face in the Crowd

out was that he hated Sanford Middle School.
    In Malden he’d had it pretty well whipped. He’d run the computer club like it was his own private kingdom; he’d had friends – nerds, yeah, but they went around in a group and the bad kids didn’t pick on them. At Sanford Middle there
was
no computer club and he’d only made a single friend, Eddie Rayburn. Then in January Eddie moved away, also the victim of a parental breakup. That made Pete a loner, anyone’s game. Worse, a lot of kids laughed at him. He had picked up a nickname which he hated: Pete’s CompuWorld.
    On most of the weekends when she and Pete didn’t go down to Malden to be with their father, their mother took them on outings. She was grimly dedicated to these, and although Trisha wished with all her heart that Mom would stop – it was on the outings that the worst fights happened – she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Quilla Andersen (she had taken back her maiden name and you could bet Pete hated that, too) had the courage of her convictions. Once, while staying at the Malden house with Dad, Trisha had heard their father talking to his own Dad on the phone. ‘If Quilla had been at Little Big Horn, the Indians would have lost,’ he said, and although Trisha didn’t like it when Dad said stuff like that about Mom – it seemed babyish as well as disloyal – she couldn’t deny that there was a nugget of truth in that particular observation.
    Over the last six months, as things grew steadily worse between Mom and Pete, she had taken them to the auto museum in Wiscasset, to the Shaker Village in Gray, to The New England Plant-A-Torium in North Wyndham, to Six-Gun City in Randolph, New Hampshire, on a canoe trip down the Saco River, and on a skiing trip to Sugarloaf (where Trisha had sprained her ankle, an injury over which her mother and father had later had a screaming fight; what fun divorce was, what really good fun).
    Sometimes, if he really liked a place, Pete would give his mouth a rest. He had pronounced Six-Gun City ‘for babies,’ but Mom had allowed him to spend most of the visit in the room where the electronic games were, and Pete had gone home not exactly happy but at least silent. On the other hand, if Pete didn’t like one of the places their Mom picked (his least favorite by far had been the Plant-A-Torium; returning to Sanford that day he had been in an especially boogery frame of mind), he was generous in sharing his opinion. ‘Go along to get along’ wasn’t in his nature. Nor was it in their mother’s, Trisha supposed. She herself thought it was an excellent philosophy, but of course everyone took one look at her and pronounced her her father’s child. Sometimes that bothered her, but mostly she liked it.
    Trisha didn’t care
where
they went on Saturdays, and would have been perfectly happy with a steady diet of amusement parks and mini-golf courses just because they minimized the increasingly horrible arguments. But Mom wanted the trips to be instructive, too – hence the Plant-A-Torium and Shaker Village. On top of his other problems, Pete resented having education rammed down his throat on Saturdays, when he would rather have been up in his room, playing Sanitarium or Riven on his Mac. Once or twice he had shared his opinion (‘This sucks!’ pretty well summed it up) so generously that Mom had sent him back to the car and told him to sit there and ‘compose himself’ until she and Trisha came back.
    Trisha wanted to tell Mom she was wrong to treat him like he was a kindergartener who needed a time-out – that someday they’d come back to the van and find it empty, Pete having decided to hitchhike back to Massachusetts – but of course she said nothing. The Saturday outings themselves were wrong, but Mom would never accept that. By the end of some of them Quilla Andersen looked at least five years older than when they had set out, with deep lines grooved down the sides of her mouth and one hand constantly rubbing her temple, as if she had a headache . . . but she would still never stop. Trisha knew it. Maybe if her mother had been at Little Big Horn the Indians still would have won, but the body-count would have been considerably higher.
    This week’s outing was to an unincorporated township in the western part of the state. The Appalachian Trail wound through the area on its way to New Hampshire. Sitting at the kitchen table the night before, Mom had shown them photos from a brochure. Most of the