Johnny’s text:
Meatless Mondays (strong support, as long as one of the options is veggie pizza)
Squishy-chair corner in some classrooms (mostly favorable but doubts u can get $$)
Ping-pong table in cafeteria (big win and staff likes it too)
New student mentor program (SOLID YES, 90%!)
So the student body loves my ideas, but I can’t stop thinking about how voters said they worry about electing someone who might move. And Cassie Jacobs has made me maybe moving one of her campaign issues. (Plus, polls show voters admire her smooth hair, which I cannot compete with.) Worrying about letting down voters puts even more pressure on the All-Pros Play working.
And what if the All-Pros Play should have been a solo operation? Like, why am I so nervous to tell my friends that I’ve drafted Peter to help? I know part of it is that after telling them all that Peter’s a total nuisance, I can’t throw them a curve and announce we’re a sibling team. But I’m worried it’s something else.
Like, what if the play goes awful and he backs out, or tattles on me? There was a moment this morning that made me wonder if he would. I couldn’t find my favorite pen and it turned up next to his homework. “Can you not take my stuff?” I snapped. Then, when I grabbed two of Dad’s chocolate chip cookies for my lunch, Peter said, “You’ve had more than me, no fair. And everyone knows the youngest gets the last cookies.”
“That doesn’t even make sense. Also, I called the last pack of fruit snacks and I know they didn’t just disappear,” I reminded him. “So these are mine.”
“Your cast smells like rotten eggs.”
“Your face looks like rotten eggs.”
We were in each other’s faces and I was so close to saying, “Forget the All-Pros Play,” but I took a deep breath and saw Peter’s expression. He looked angry. But as we stared each other down, his face changed. Even though he’s as tall as me, he looked small . . . and worried. Worried like Nolan had been when he thought he was getting kicked off the team. Peter and I had a small case of the yips. Or one yip.
So as we left the house for our different schools, I said, even though I didn’t want to, “Sorry for this morning.” And he said, “Me too.” I think it was the first real apology we’d ever made to each other.
“Meeting tonight?” I asked and he said, “Sounds great!” with relief. I felt relief, too.
We said it quietly, because we were still in COVERT OPS mode and we couldn’t say anything to terrify Dad and Louie.
But I’m still nervous (and now sneakily writing this in geometry). We’ve never gotten along, and if he gets even a LITTLE annoyed with me, what if he turns on me, or worse, suddenly WANTS to go to Seattle?
He wouldn’t though, right? Peter understood better than anyone else what I was going through, and he believed in the plan. (Unlike Katy when I said at lunch that a for-sure Peach Tree Sweet Spot for Louie and Dad was the church where they got married. She said, “But won’t your dad and Louie like finding new sweet spots in Seattle?” Which I’d thought of, but it was like a baseball bat: just because you could find a sweet spot on a new one didn’t mean it was a good replacement for the bat you’d hit with for years.)
Anyway, I hope Peter believes in the plan more than that.
(Later, post–Peter meeting)
I was wrong to worry. Peter and I are DEFINITELY ON THE SAME PAGE. Here’s the highlight reel:
As Dad made dinner, Peter and I both said we had homework to do in our rooms. (We did: we were working on staying in our HOMEtown of Peach Tree.) Peter had written his ideas out on a small pad of paper. I had mine in a school folder. (I’d have written them here, Playbook, but I’m not ready to show Peter ALL my secrets.)
“I hereby call the first meeting of the All-Pros Stay-in-Peach-Tree Play,” I said, to make things official.
“Operation Sweet Spot is in effect,” Peter said.
“That’s a good name for this phase,” I said.
“You came up with it . . . when you were muttering to yourself.”
I wanted to correct him, but I stopped myself.
Some ideas were no-go:
Peter’s idea to get a stray dog to follow us home and make it impossible to leave had holes in it. “Even if we kept the dog, we could technically bring it to Seattle,” I said.
My idea to have us win the lottery so that Dad and Louie wouldn’t have to work anymore had a lot of flaws. They both liked working, and millions of dollars meant they might decide to move somewhere even weirder. Like a dusty castle. Or an ocean liner. I couldn’t really imagine them wanting that, but money changes people. Or so I’ve heard.
It was equally unlikely we could convince our parents that all of Seattle was haunted (Peter’s idea), or to realistically fake a rain allergy (my idea, unworkable because we have rain here, too), or even to buy time by attempting to say our school years wouldn’t translate over to the Seattle school system (I thought of this because it sounded official and parent-y but I really didn’t know how to go about it and the paperwork would have probably been awful).
Peter also brought up an idea inspired by one of his favorite books, where two kids run away and live overnight in the Met, an art museum in New York City. I definitely liked the idea for its weirdness and surprised myself by asking him if I could borrow the book. For a plan, it seemed unrealistic, though. “First off, our parents would definitely look for us,” I said.
“And find us,” Peter added.
Second, it was one thing to convince Dad and Louie that Seattle was a bad idea, and it was another thing to run away. “I don’t think it’s fair to make them feel like bad parents,” I said.
“Okay . . . well, we could just make them feel really bad about the move,” Peter offered. “By not hiding how incredibly sad we are about even the idea of moving.” He had a point, but I’d dismissed the Excessive Mope tactic from the get-go.
“If we do that, we’ll feel bad that they stayed just because of us,” I said. “If we KNOW it’s better here, then we just need to make them see it.”
Peter sat in my desk chair, which normally would have been an OFF-LIMITS situation, but I was surprisingly okay with it. He spun around and I gritted my teeth so I wouldn’t yell, “No spinning!” I took some deep breaths instead.
“Our ideas are bad, aren’t they?” he said. His face had all the signs of someone who wanted to give up. I’d seen it on teammates before, when we were down a few runs and, every time we tried to rally, we just couldn’t make it on the scoreboard.
Often, in those games, players wanted to make a big thing happen, and when it didn’t, it was a huge letdown. If Peter was let down, he might quit on me.
I slumped on the bed with my busted arm on my stomach. Even though I didn’t need my arm to come up with a way to stay in Peach Tree, the cast even made my brain feel out of commission. We’d barely gotten started on the All-Pros Play and we were already losing!
That was it! We’d barely gotten started.
“Our ideas aren’t bad, they’re WARM-UPS,” I said, suddenly inspired and sitting up. Before any game, warm-ups didn’t just get your muscles working, they cleared out all the gunk that might screw you up when it was time to play.
“Like we had to stretch our brains before the real stuff?” I was impressed that Peter really seemed to get my athletic line of thinking. Had we had this much in common all along?
“Yep,” I said. “And we’re way off base. Remember, we have to think of things in Peach Tree that make it better than Seattle. What are some things that happen here and make it HOME? That’s our edge.”
It took us only two minutes of drumming our fingers (Peter) and aggressive doodling (me) to land on an idea: “We use GRANDMA,” Peter said, with a glint in his eye.
“I was thinking the same thing!”
THE GRANNY NEVER LET YOU GO
Goal: Show Dad that there’s nothing like a mother’s love (or a mother’s guilt trip) and no way you can move thousands of miles away!
Action: Leverage Grandma Garcia’s total sure-to-be shock about the possible move
Post-Day Analysis:
September 15
All the elements of the play were in my and Peter’s favor:
We had home-field advantage. Grandma was coming into town for the Peach Tree Fall Festival, hands down her favorite event of the year. So we’d be operating IN PERSON.
We had a size advantage, meaning we’d each grown a few inches (okay, Peter more than me), guaranteeing a Grandma-heartstrings win (“You’re getting too big!”), meaning we couldn’t move away and GROW MORE without her around.
We had a surprise advantage—Dad hadn’t told Grandma yet. He didn’t know we knew this. He was talking to Louie in the kitchen last night and Peter had gone downstairs to get his math textbook and overheard them. “Dad’s worried,” he told me. “Because he hasn’t said anything about maybe moving to Grandma yet. So that’s the whole point of her visit, kind of. That’s good, right?”
“Yeah, it means we can act like she knows and she’ll totally freak out and tell him he can’t go!”
Then, things got even better this morning, when Grandma arrived.
“Look at these kids! So big! I need to take them out and about with me before they’re embarrassed to be seen with an old lady,” she said, even though no one thinks my grandma looks old. She calls herself a “snazzy senior,” and she wears high-tops, like me.
Salma Garcia, aka Grandma or Abuelita
Age: Whatever she says it is
Height: 5ʹ1″ but looks taller due to wisdom
Build: Petite, but with surprising hug strength
Sport: She’s the Dade County Senior Club’s leading billiards player
Excels at: Being your number one fan. Also, tough corner shots at the pool table.
Motto: “How are you going to know if you can’t until you see if you CAN?” —said by HER
So, there we were on a perfect Peach Tree day, at the Fall Festival. Grandma was humming a tune as she browsed each stall. She liked to look at all the crafty handmade things and ask the vendors about their techniques and inspiration and even though she never bought anything—“I have seventy-four years of stuff! I can’t fit any more!”—she always made the people she talked to happy because she was so interested, plus she had the Grandma Effect. It seemed like every time she was deep in conversation with a crafter, customers were drawn to the booth.
“And then you paint each little expression onto the doll’s face?” Grandma was asking a man about his dolls with turning heads that each displayed a different emotion. Incredibly creepy heads and horrifying emotions, if you ask me.
He launched into the details, and Peter nudged me. “When are we gonna do it?”
“Give it time,” I whispered. “We’re building a comfortable lead.”
We put in guesses for the contests the festival held each year: weight-guessing contests for the Bennington Farm Pumpkin Patch’s biggest pumpkin and the High Peach Farm’s biggest peach. Then, we got lunch at Fuzzy Fusion, where every dish featured a peach in the ingredients.
I have to say, in all the years Grandma had taken us to the Fall Festival, Peter and I had never been on better behavior. We even posed for silly photos at the petting zoo and the Peachy Keen photo display (where you stick your face in a hole so you look like a peach with legs) and no two kids had ever looked so angelic as we did, except for maybe some sleeping babies.
There was no way Grandma was going to let us move so far away. She’d let someone borrow her pool cue first (and she has a very superstitious rule that no one can touch her pool cue).
“So what’s new with you kids?” she asked, picking up a triangle of her peach-and-pepper-jack quesadilla when we finally sat down to eat.
I chewed my peach-and-honey pizza slice and then said, trying to make it seem like something she already knew, “Well, Dad’s news, of course.”
“It’s family news, really,” Peter said in a stroke of brilliance, as he ate his plain grilled cheese. No peaches for him. He’s a picky eater, but today I stopped myself from teasing him about his completely unadventurous palate.
Grandma tilted her head at us. “What news? Oh, you mean the book project he helped on. Turned that one in in the nick of time. Your father has always been a procrastinator.”
“Oh, no, it’s related to the book, though the writer he edited for, his friend LaKesha, put him up for a job . . . ,” I started, sounding extremely innocent, like we weren’t spilling my dad’s secret news.
“. . . A job in Seattle, for the paper,” Peter added. “So we’d move. Didn’t he tell you?” If I’d been a runner on third, he’d have driven me in with a home run.
Grandma put down her nibbled-on quesadilla with her mouth wide open in shock. “What? What kind of job?”
“Sports reporter,” I said, and the way Grandma’s eyes widened, I felt certain we had staying in Peach Tree in the bag. No one could look that STUNNED and not be ready to give her son a talking-to.
BINGO.
She pulled her phone from her purse and pressed a button. I looked at Peter, who looked as amazed as I felt. She was calling Dad already! We wouldn’t even have to wait until dinner.
“Juan, is that you? . . . I know I called your phone, I’m just making sure this is MY SON.”
We couldn’t hear what Dad was saying, but the way Grandma said “my son,” there was no way Dad wasn’t going to be in trouble. I felt a little bad for him.
People at the festival were slowing down because Grandma, on the phone, was gesturing wildly and saying, “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me right away!” And, “I know it’s not definite, but how long were you going to wait?”
Peter and I were sitting completely still, like if we moved, everything that was going right might suddenly go wrong. It was almost too easy, I thought. For a split second, all the little Gabbys were in my stomach doing the wave. Was it fair that Peter and I had changed things so quickly?
But of course it was. Not choosing Seattle wasn’t about us; it was about our family.
Then Grandma put an arm around me and squeezed as she said into the phone, “Because my son would have shared his good news with me immediately!”
She was smiling so big there wasn’t the slightest chance she was suddenly going to tell Dad he couldn’t leave his only mother so far away.
Wha . . . ? I thought. Good news? Wonderful? Peter looked at me wide-eyed.
“I’m so proud of you! We have to celebrate . . .” She glanced up and smiled at us but didn’t notice how weak our return smiles were. “I know it’s not for sure, but I have faith they’re going to pick you. Why wouldn’t they? You’re my TALENTED, AMAZING BABY BOY.” Then she said a whole bunch of stuff in Spanish that sounded very loving but was so fast it was better than my skills could follow.
She shook her head as she hung up and wriggled her patented Grandma Finger at us.
“You kids learn a lesson: don’t keep big things from your parents, especially these good things! Your father thought he could surprise me, but how could I be surprised? That boy is so smart. Such a hard worker. Even when he does save things for the last minute.”
I pushed away my paper plate of pizza. I was in no mood for peaches and honey.
“But even if they pick him, he still has to decide if he’s going to take it,” I said. “And move us all the way to Seattle.”
Did she know how far it was to Seattle?
“I know,” she said. “But he’s been dreaming of this his whole life! And can you imagine how much he’ll love being so close to that beautiful fish market???”
Peter and I exchanged a look. I knew the look and what it meant: the play was a bust. Big-time.
“Let’s go, kids,” Grandma said. “I think I should make your dad a cake.”
So not only had the play failed; we’d also lost our best player to the other side.
Peach Tree: 1
Seattle: 2 (to the power of Grandma)
> Random Haikus
Don’t tell my best friend:
Wish I had binoculars
For the bird I saw.
Is my cat busy
Or is he avoiding me?
Pets are hard to read.
Since there’s a cast on
My broke arm, my hair should be
Cooperative.
Also, shoelaces.
I need my shoes well-fastened
So I don’t trip again
And, ugh, my pillow.
I like to put my left arm
Underneath. I can’t.
Haikus are easy
enough, as long as there’s not
a whole lot to say.
Complaints of more than
Seventeen syllables need
A longer poem.
Writing poetry
Makes me hungry. Sure hope there’s
Something good in fridge.
Score. A cookie was
Waiting for me. They are the
grand slam of all snacks.
THE FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Goal: Use one of Dad’s favorite things—food—to remind him there’s no place like home
Action: Give Dad and Louie a literal taste of what they’ll be missing with the perfect family outing to their favorite Peach Tree restaurant
Post-Day Analysis:
September 16
Even though the Grandma offensive hadn’t worked, it ended up leading to the next move in the All-Pros Play.
Two minutes ago, I heard Peter’s feet pounding up the stairs, and Koufax jumped off his spot on the bed and darted into my closet. He hates company.
Gabby Garcia's Ultimate Playbook #3 Page 8
