Five Things About Ava Andrews

by Margaret Dilloway

  “Lip service,” Nana Linda mutters. Then, louder, “How are you going to do that when half of the stores are closed?”

  “Ma’am, we’re going to have to ask you to leave,” the man says.

  “I’ll answer that. Those businesses chose to leave rather than renegotiate. Believe me, we tried to work things out.” Brett blinks rapidly. “We are committed to helping local businesses.”

  I wonder if someone wrote that down for her to say over and over.

  Nana Linda stands now. “Can anyone here vouch for that?” She addresses Brett. “Or do you have documentation of how you’re helping the fifty local, family-owned businesses in Navegando Point?”

  I want to stop this whole meeting, but I can’t. They wouldn’t listen to me anyway. My fingers grip the sides of my chair. I’m just praying that it turns out all right.

  The man starts walking toward her. Nana Linda picks up her bag. “Fine, fine.” We walk out. She puts her arm around me.

  I don’t know whether to be mad or proud of her. That took some guts. I’ve never seen anyone interrupt a meeting like that. “Why couldn’t you wait until the end?”

  “Because they weren’t going to let me talk.” Nana Linda pulls me into her, and I put my arm around her. She probably needs a hug right now as much as I do. “Sometimes speaking up means doing things differently.”

  I squeeze her. “What now?”

  “There’s plenty more to do, Ava. An online petition. Letter writing. Calls. All kinds of things.” She sighs. “We just have to get people fired up enough to participate.”

  We didn’t even find out if they read the letters. If I’d asked Brett before the meeting, then she might have been forced to answer me. I’m let down, the way I was when Dad promised us a trip to Disneyland and then Hudson got a sore throat. There has to be something else we can do. This can’t be the end, with Brett Rosselin and the Brancusi Group winning and Navegando Point being torn down without anyone saying another word. That’s not the way stories finish.

  Is it?

  Chapter 19

  On the way home, I send a group text to the improv group telling them what happened. Cecily writes back: That’s awful—anybody wanna meet tomorrow and talk about what to do?

  But what can we do? I tug on Nana Linda’s sleeve. “Hey, Nana Linda, would it be okay if my improv group came to your house tomorrow so we can . . . you know?” I punch the air. “Figure out what to do next.” And I’ll get to hang out with them, I add in my head. Which I like.

  She squeezes my hand. “Of course. The more the merrier.”

  I squeeze her hand back.

  Mr. Sukow gives us class time to work on our group project the next day. Sometimes thinking about it makes my stomach hurt and then I don’t even want to try to do it, so I don’t. Ty’s got his desk pushed against mine, but his head is lowered, his face hidden by the Chromebook cover and the black hoodie. He kind of stinks the way my brothers stink when they don’t shower and don’t open their bedroom window all weekend. I wrinkle my nose.

  Of course that’s when he looks up and sees me. My look of grossed-out-ness. I cringe, feeling my face go hot. “What’s your problem?” he says. “I’m just trying to fix what you lost.”

  “The program lost it. Not me.” The woman who wrote the app had written back to us, apologizing, but hadn’t been able to recover my document. Mr. Sukow said we could have an extra week to make up for it if we wanted. Both of us said no. We don’t want to work on this a second longer than necessary.

  “You should have made a backup in Word. You were the typist.”

  I shake my head. He sounds like Luke. “Are we going to talk about this forever?” Or can you build a time machine to travel into the past to fix it? I add in my head.

  Ty cranks his neck back to look at me, startled by the gush of words. “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  Ty’s words appear on my screen in our shared document.

  This is a napkin. It is absorbent. It helps you clean up spills. Buy me.

  I blink at him. It’s not long enough. It’s boring. It’s never going to convince anyone to buy a napkin. But he’s smirking at me as if he’s written the best thing on the planet. Just like when Luke sets the dining table and doesn’t bother folding the napkins.

  I add, Made from 100% recycled materials, Bliss Napkins are the best on earth.

  “Bliss? What’s that?” Ty wrinkles his nose like I just ate brussels sprouts and had a stinky toot.

  I smile and point at my mouth. “Happy.”

  Ty deletes the word and types happy. “Too fancy.”

  “It’s not.” Is he really going to do this to me? Bliss, I type back.

  Blis| I watch the backspace get rid of my word.

  Bliss bliss

  Blissbliss

  bliss

  bliss

  I type over and over again.

  HAAPPPPPY, he types. Yelling.

  I’m about to unleash about three hundred blisses when something soft yet rough hits my forehead and bounces down into my lap.

  The napkin.

  “Did you throw this at me?” My heart’s beating fast and my chest burns. I glare at Ty and uncrumple it as best I can. “We need this.”

  “I give up.” Ty gets up and stalks over to Mr. Sukow. “I can’t work with her, Mr. Sukow.”

  I follow. “Mr. Sukow, Ty . . .”

  “Mr. Sukow, Ava . . .” Ty says.

  Mr. Sukow holds up his hand. “You’re both talking at the same time. Ava, you first.”

  “Figures,” Ty grumbles.

  My chest feels like I ate too much hot salsa. “He threw something at me!” Is my heart doing okay? My fingers go up to my neck, looking for my pulse. It’s pounding hard.

  “Just a napkin!” Ty raises his voice. “She’s impossible.”

  The burning sensation goes away and my heart stops pounding. I think I got paced, but I’m not sure. Anyway, I’m okay, I remind myself.

  My head hurts.

  “All right.” Mr. Sukow gets eerily calm, the same way Dad does when he’s about to deliver justice. “I have thirty-five other students who need my attention, and frankly I’m tired of both your attitudes. Why don’t you go down to the office and talk to Ms. Shepherd?”

  My palms go cold. “Ms. Shepherd?” That’s the vice principal. Luke calls her “Bad Cop” because she’s the school disciplinarian.

  Mr. Sukow picks up his school phone. “Go on.”

  Ty and I walk down the hallway, Ty in front of me. The heels of his sneakers are worn down at the corners and there are holes near the rubber. I don’t know why boys always let their shoes get so bad. Last year, Luke didn’t tell Mom he needed new shoes until the sole fell off on the way to Disneyland.

  If Zelia were here, I wouldn’t be in this mess at all because she would be the one who stuck up for me. She would probably be here now. She definitely would have told me what to do. Once, I had to do an assignment with a girl in fourth grade and she took over the whole thing. Zelia told me to just let her. “Who cares?” she’d said. “She can do all the work if she’s going to be like that.” And I’d gone along with it.

  I follow Ty into the office through the maze of desks. The receptionist is an older lady with hair dyed almost egg-yolk yellow, curled closely against her head. She wears a sweatshirt with a wolf howling at the moon on it. Hudson has the same sweatshirt, but he says he wears his ironically. She’s got all kinds of wolf pictures tacked up around her cubicle, though, so I guess she really likes wolves. “Hello again, Tyler.” She squints at me. “And you are?”

  “Ava.” I guess she knows Ty by name even though school only started a few weeks ago.

  Ty flops into a wooden chair. I sit, my stomach switching between feeling like it’s boiling and like there’s a block of ice in it. I’ve never been in trouble in my entire life. I’m like the anti-trouble kid. The only thing teachers have to say about my behavior is that I could speak up more.

  “My mom can�
��t come in,” Ty informs the receptionist. “She’s working.” He twists his mouth. “She just lost one of her jobs, so she can’t leave.”

  His mom had two jobs? “My mom’s working, too,” I say quietly. My dad will be the one who comes in. And he won’t be happy. I swallow.

  “Well, if my mom leaves work early, she doesn’t get paid.” Ty chews on a fingernail. “She might even get fired.”

  “Then I guess you’d better stop getting into trouble, huh?” The receptionist smiles in a teeth-baring kind of way.

  Ty doesn’t react, but her words send a shudder over my skin, as if a bunch of spiders have run across my shoulders. I go as still as possible, as if she won’t be able to see me.

  The phone buzzes and the receptionist picks up. “Okay, Tyler, Ms. Shepherd’s ready for you.”

  I’m sweating so hard my shirt sticks to my back. My pants, too. My breath is kind of fast. I don’t know whether I’m going to pass out or barf.

  I lean forward and wrap my arms around my thighs. “I feel sick,” I say truthfully.

  The receptionist comes over and feels my forehead because obviously she thinks I’m making it up. “Clammy. Let’s get you to the nurse.”

  The nurse, Mrs. Romero, knows who I am—she knows all the kids with medical plans. She takes one look at me and decides I don’t have to see Ms. Shepherd in her office. “You’re having a little anxiety attack,” she tells me. Instead she has me lie on the cot, lined with paper, in the dark and cool room. “Just relax and you’ll be fine.”

  Ty’s not going to be happy. He’ll say I’m getting special treatment again. And he might be kind of right. Who else gets sent to the office and ends up lying down?

  I’m having an anxiety attack, which means I need to calm myself somehow. If I don’t, my heart won’t like the stress.

  Oh no.

  I try to notice my surroundings. White walls. Weird disinfectant smell that reminds me of the hospital. Which reminds me of being sick. Which reminds me that my heart could be going nuts.

  I turn over on my side to face the wall, paper crinkling under me. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I had been born into another body, a healthy one that could dance and play soccer without thinking about what might happen.

  I take a shaky breath. I need to think about something else. Five things about improv.

  Laughing. One.

  Miss Gwen. Two.

  Cecily. Three.

  Happy. Four.

  IKEA. Five.

  Okay, IKEA has nothing to do with improv but that’s what popped into my head, and there are no wrong answers. “These are five things,” I say out loud, and then my stomach growls as I remember Swedish meatballs.

  In a little while, a woman comes in. Ms. Shepherd, the vice principal. She’s tall, with an Afro that frames her face like a halo. She sits on a chair next to me. “You feeling any better, Ava?”

  I nod. I didn’t know she knew who I was.

  “I had a talk with Ty and Mr. Sukow,” she says. “I know you want to switch partners but I really think this is a good chance for you and Ty to work it out.”

  That’s what Mr. Sukow says. That’s probably what everyone who’s over the age of fourteen would say. My parents included. I sit up. “Did you call my parents?”

  “You don’t have a temperature, and you didn’t throw up, so no,” Ms. Shepherd says. “Did you want me to?”

  I’d meant because of the other thing. The in-trouble thing. I sure don’t want my parents to know about that. It’s just totally embarrassing. “No.”

  “Okay, then.” Ms. Shepherd pats my arm. “Well, you and Ty just have to do some give-and-take. Communicate instead of argue. If you have another problem, go to Mr. Sukow. Okay?”

  I nod, my neck hot. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are. You’re a good student.” Ms. Shepherd stands. “I’m glad it’s all worked out.” She walks away, shutting the door behind her. I wonder what adults consider “worked out” because nothing feels worked out to me at all, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. So I just lie on the cot, waiting for someone to tell me what to do.

  Chapter 20

  It’s less than a half mile to my grandparents’ house from school. Usually that feels like a somewhat longish walk, but today it doesn’t. Chad and Ryan and Cecily and I are like a jumble of puppies milling around on the sidewalk, jumping on lawns, zooming around.

  “I think it was really rude of Ty to ask to be switched, right in front of you,” Cecily tells me. “It’s like, dude, just deal.” She takes my arm.

  “Right?” I lean into her. Just her saying that makes me feel a thousand times better. At least for now, until I have to deal with Ty again.

  Ryan walks backward. “I don’t know what he’s complaining about. I’d be your project partner anytime.” He trips on a crack and catches himself.

  “Me too.” Chad’s galloping sideways in the street gutter.

  We pass by a cute little blue house with a FOR SALE sign in front of it. Cecily grabs a flyer, looks at the price, and shrieks. She shoves it at me. “Two bedrooms and it’s seven hundred thousand dollars!”

  My heart drops. I knew houses were expensive here, but I never looked at how much. “I’m not going to be able to afford to live here when I grow up.”

  “My plan is to marry a rich old lady.” Chad flaps his arm like a chicken. “Then I’ll never have to get a job.”

  “That’s a terrible plan,” Ryan says.

  Chad rolls his eyes. “Dude, I’m not being serious. Obviously. My plan A is to be a bank robber.”

  “Maybe things will change by the time we’re grown-ups,” Cecily offers.

  “We’ll probably all have to move out of state if we want to afford to, like, live,” Ryan says.

  San Diego’s so expensive, especially compared to someplace like Maine. Zelia says that she and her mom will be able to buy a house there in a couple years, something they’d never be able to do here.

  The air goes out of me as I realize something. Like, deep-down realize it.

  Zelia’s probably not going to come back here. Ever. For real.

  It all hits me between the ribs. Zelia’s being gone, and how she’s cutting herself off from me. The house prices and Navegando Point. Suddenly all these battles feel like too much to deal with. They crush me as if they’re real boulders on top of my shoulders.

  “Who the heck is going to live here?” I stop moving so suddenly that Cecily bumps me. “What are all the non-rich people supposed to do in this town? Why do only the rich people get to enjoy the ocean?”

  “What are you talking about?” Ryan swings around to look at me. “This neighborhood’s nowhere near the ocean.”

  “Navegando Point is what I’m talking about.”

  Ryan crumples the flyer and sticks it in his pocket. “I have never needed ice cream more in my life.” He takes off at a slow jog for the last half block, the rest of us following.

  I think about the letter Nana Linda made me write. I don’t know if all of us writing letters would be enough. But maybe this group could come up with some way that would really get people’s attention. Or maybe Nana Linda has a new idea.

  My grandfather’s chilling on a lawn chair in the front yard, a glass of ice water in his hand. “Hey, Ava. Good to see you.” He looks at my friends with mild curiosity in his deep brown eyes, as if I’m carrying a few extra books with me. “These are your reinforcements?” He takes a big, loud slurp.

  Chad goes uncharacteristically quiet, looking down at his shoes.

  Is he actually kind of shy with new people, or maybe new adults? Dad has always forced me to say hello even if it was the last thing I wanted to do. Even if all I could manage was a whispered hi. Maybe Chad’s insides feel like mine do when I have to do this, too.

  I introduce them all, and they say hello.

  “Good to meet you.” Jīchan shakes each of their hands in a formal way.

  “Your grass is the most evenly cu
t grass I’ve ever seen in my life.” Ryan gets on his hands and knees to peer at it. “Is it fake?”

  “Of course not,” Jīchan says, squatting near Ryan and pulling out a blade. He chews it. “It’s real.”

  “It’s his baby,” I say. “He cuts it with manicure scissors.”

  Ryan lets out a delighted gasp-giggle. “No way!”

  Cecily and Chad bend to look at it, too. “Amazing!” Cecily says.

  I’d always been afraid if I brought new people over, they’d think my grandparents were embarrassingly weird. But these kids think weird people are more interesting. I smile. I have a feeling that someone cutting grass with manicure scissors will end up in an improv scene soon.

  Jīchan’s a character. He does a lot of unique things. So is Nana Linda, for that matter. I tilt my head, considering my grandfather in a new light. Mom says I pay so much attention to detail because I’m a writer—maybe that will help me in improv as well.

  Jīchan gets back up to a standing position—for an old man he can get up and down pretty well. He says sitting on the floor helps with mobility. “I admire people who can do improv. It looks so hard.”

  Everyone says that.

  Ryan launches into a really detailed example of how the games work, and Jīchan’s eyes start glazing over like mine do when Luke describes soccer plays.

  “Let’s do Improv 101 another time,” I tell him. I open the screen door and we shuffle inside the house. “Take off your shoes.” They kick off their shoes without question, leaving them in the neat rows next to my grandparents’ sensible loafers and Mary Jane sneakers.

  “Hello?” I call into the house.

  “Nana will be home in a few minutes.” Jīchan startles me by coming in behind us. “Now eat some ice cream. It’s been on sale and we’ve been stockpiling.” He hits his gut. “I can only take care of so much.” He gestures at the kitchen. “Help yourselves.”

  “Oh boy!” Totally not caring that he’s in a stranger’s house, Chad runs toward the treats. A second later we hear the freezer door open. “It’s like Baskin-Robbins in here!” he bellows. “Come check this out!”