Danny Constantino's First (and Maybe Last?) Date

by Paul Acampora

  “Don’t worry.” Natalie pulls out her cell phone. “I’m calling 911.”

  “For what?”

  Before anybody can answer, there is another scream, plus the sound of a giant POP!

  Now the big rubber ducky I met on the bus is trying to stand on tiptoe to see what’s going on. Pushing into the crowd, he trips and stumbles toward our unicorn. Darius rushes forward to prevent the unsteady duck from a crash. Unfortunately, Darius is a much better soldier than a crossing guard. Rather than prop up the dumb duck, Darius whacks him with his cardboard dagger. Startled, the duck turns and punches Darius in the chest. Now they’re both off balance and waving their arms like geese wrapped up in an electric fence.

  “Look out!” I shout, but it’s too late. The two boys stagger into Cooper like half-cocked battering rams.

  “Danny!” Ajay grabs my arm. “Don’t worry about that! Your grandmother fell down. She’s lying on the floor.” He points across the room. “Let’s go.”

  I tear off my cardboard armor and try to make my way to Gram, but the crowd is too thick. “Let us pass!” shouts Maddie. She begins whacking kids with her own cardboard weapon and shoving them aside with her shield. It’s not the most graceful solution, but it works.

  A moment later, I’m at Gram’s side. Mom’s there too. “Give her some air!” Mom yells at the circle of kids around us. “Give her some air!”

  “I don’t need any more air,” Gram snaps. “That’s what got me into this mess.”

  “What are you talking about?” says Mom.

  Gram moves to a sitting position. She raises a hand to show us a deflated shark costume hanging off her arm. “I overinflated. Then I couldn’t see where I was going. I tripped, and I popped.”

  “Can you stand?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head. “I hurt my ankle.” She closes her eyes. “Actually, I think I broke my ankle.”

  A siren wails in the distance, but it’s getting closer quickly. Mom and Maddie push the crowd of kids back. From there, Mr. Maggio and the rest of our teachers move students toward the door and start marching them back to class. By the time the ambulance arrives, the gym is mostly empty. For just a moment, it’s only me, Mom, Mr. Maggio, and Natalie with Gram, who’s leaning against a wall now.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say to Natalie, who is kneeling beside me.

  She gives a quick nod. “You should be.”

  “You really should be,” Mom adds.

  “I’m not talking to you,” I tell my mother.

  “There’s no need to apologize,” Gram mumbles. She’s still got her eyes closed. “I did this to myself.”

  “That’s not what I’m apologizing for,” I tell my grandmother.

  Gram opens her eyes. “Then what—”

  Before she can finish, paramedics burst into the room with equipment carts, oxygen tanks, and a rolling stretcher. One of them, a stocky, round-faced woman, approaches quickly. She’s got a stethoscope around her neck, a walkie-talkie on her belt, and one arm completely covered in floral tattoos. The tattooed lady moves us out of the way while she assesses the situation. With very little delay, she cuts the shark costume off Gram. “My dad and I go deep-sea fishing,” the woman tells us. “Believe it or not, this is not the weirdest thing I’ve ever found inside a shark.”

  I don’t even want to know.

  The paramedics lift Gram, strap her to a stretcher, and start moving to the door. “Meet me at the hospital,” Gram hollers back.

  “Got it,” says Mom, and races out the door. Mr. Maggio follows. I turn to speak to Natalie, but she must have slipped away during all the commotion. Now I’m standing alone.

  Around me, the gym floor is littered with pieces of Halloween candy and costume parts. I step over a cardboard sword and a few remaining shards from Gram’s plastic shark. Nearby, our Halloween masterpiece lies crumpled on her side. By any measure, Cooper the Trojan Unicorn is dead. She is battered and broken and alone. I know exactly how she feels. If Zoey were here, she’d almost certainly feel compelled to tell me that I have finally reached my dark night of the soul. I am glad that Zoey is not here right now.

  Suddenly, the gymnasium doors swing open. Mom stands in the entryway. “Danny,” she says, “what are you waiting for?”

  “I thought you left without me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Mom. “I brought the car around. Let’s go.”

  I have to jog to catch up. Outside, I find Mom sitting behind the wheel of Gram’s car. I open the passenger door and drop into my seat. Before I can speak, Mom punches the gas and peels out of the parking lot. “Are you allowed to drive Gram’s Camaro?” I ask.

  Out in the street, she blasts through a yellow light and then points us toward the hospital. “I learned how to drive in this car. One day, you will too.”

  “Not if you kill us both before I turn sixteen.”

  “Sorry.” Mom lets up on the gas just a little. “I’m running on adrenaline right now.”

  “How is this different from every other day?”

  “My angel wings aren’t usually this visible.” She shoots me a quick look. “What happened back there between you and Natalie?”

  I shake my head. “I said something stupid.”

  “Like mother like son, huh?”

  Mom passes a slow-moving minivan on a long straightaway, then cuts the wheel to take a tight turn. She drifts a little too close to the shoulder of the road and clips several sidewalk scarecrows holding MISSY FOR MAYOR signs. This particular group is dressed up like characters from The Wizard of Oz. I’m happy to see Dorothy, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion all explode in a cloud of straw.

  “I hate that movie,” Mom mutters.

  Finally, Mom downshifts, makes a couple more turns, and then brings us onto the Cuper Cove Hospital driveway. Approaching the entrance, Mom slows to a crawl in search of a parking spot. Seeing none, she makes the sign of the cross. “Mother Cabrini, Mother Cabrini, please find a spot for my little machiney.”

  She really does have a prayer for everything. “You realize that’s ridiculous, right?”

  “And yet,” she says, “it never fails.”

  A moment later, a space opens up. Mom parks, and I open the door to get out. My mother puts a hand on my arm and stops me. “Danny, I want to talk to you.”

  “Gram is waiting,” I remind her. “We can talk later.”

  She grips my arm tighter. “She just hurt her ankle.”

  “And got bitten by a shark.”

  “She’s not going to die,” Mom says.

  “Thanks to one of your dumb prayers?”

  “They’re not dumb to me,” Mom snaps. “And if you must know, I started praying the minute I saw your grandmother on the floor. It wouldn’t hurt if you said a few prayers yourself.”

  I turn to face Mom. “I’ve been praying you won’t be mayor, but I don’t think that prayer’s going to be answered.”

  “Just because you don’t get what you ask for doesn’t mean your prayer doesn’t get answered,” Mom tells me.

  I cross my arms. “Why did you have to do a big complicated campaign anyway?”

  “A campaign is how you tell people what you want and how you want it,” she tells me.

  “Oh,” I say. “In that case, you’re always in a campaign.”

  She laughs like she just figured something out. “Danny, everybody’s always in a campaign.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “What are you talking about?” I say.

  “Danny,” says Mom. “You’re in a campaign to make your mother want to kill you. You’re in a campaign to fill my house with weird drawings of mutant super weirdos. You’re in a campaign to make Natalie Flores Griffin like you. And by the way, I hear that last one seems to be going pretty well.”
r />   “No thanks to you,” I tell my mother.

  “Because I made her behave like a movie star? News flash, Danny. Natalie Flores Griffin is an actual movie star.”

  “News flash,” I tell my mom. “Nobody comes to Cuper Cove to be a movie star.”

  Mom glances in the Camaro’s rearview mirror and fixes her tiara. “Tell me about it.”

  “Natalie came to Cuper Cove so she could be normal for a change, and you ruined it. She wanted to go to a school dance and then go trick-or-treating and then eat too much candy and then go home. That’s it. Why couldn’t you let her have that?”

  “Danny,” says Mom, “you just listed all the things that you want.”

  “And because of all the things that you want, none of it is going to come true for me either.”

  “Do you know why I get the things I want?” Mom asks me now.

  “Because you’re bossy and loud and you always think you’re right?”

  “Because I go for it,” Mom says.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  Mom looks me in the eye. “Figure it out.”

  “Fine,” I say. “I will.” I step out of the Camaro and slam the door behind me.

  Chapter 20

  a visual and terrible revelation of truth

  Thanks to Mother Cabrini and the miracle of the perfect parking space, the hospital entrance is just a few feet away. I march inside, where I find a white-haired nurse seated at a reception desk. “I’m looking for my grandmother,” I say. “I think she broke her ankle.”

  “Broken ankles go to the Emergency Room,” the nurse tells me. “That’s on the other side of the building.”

  “How do I get there from here?”

  She points at a set of double doors directly behind her. “Up. Up. Down. Down. Left. Right. Left. Right. Then take the B elevator to the A level. Got it?”

  “Up. Up. Down. Down. Left. Right. Left. Right. B. A,” I repeat.

  “Got it,” she says. “You’ll be there in no time.”

  I rush into a zigzag maze of long hospital corridors. Somehow, I follow the directions and find myself at the Emergency Room waiting area. I stop to let a team of paramedics roll a patient from an ambulance into the building. I peek at the stretcher and see a guy with an arrow sticking out of his shoulder. “What are you looking at?” he asks me.

  “You’re not my grandmother,” I tell him.

  “Good thing for her,” the man says.

  “Danny!” calls a familiar voice.

  I turn and see Mr. Beamon entering the hospital. He’s easy to pick out because he’s still wearing most of his spunky space pilot costume. Plus he’s a lot taller when he’s not seated behind a school bus steering wheel. A moment later, Ajay and Zoey along with Darius, Billy, and Maddie rush inside too. Maddie’s still got a winged helmet on her head. It’s battered and torn, which makes her look even tougher than usual. “How did you get here?” I say.

  “We know a man who drives a bus,” says Maddie.

  “Your mom texted me,” Mr. Beamon explains. “She told me to pick up this crew and get over here right away. You might not know this,” he adds, “but your mother is very good at giving orders.”

  Tell me about it. “Can we please find my grandmother?” I say.

  With Mr. Beamon’s help, we learn that Gram has been moved to something called the Acute Medical Unit on the hospital’s sixth floor. According to a nurse at the Emergency Room desk, only two people at a time can visit Acute Medical Unit patients. Not only that, all Acute Medical Unit visitors must be adults. “Thank you,” Mr. Beamon says to the nurse. “We understand.”

  “We do?” I say.

  He nods, takes us a few steps away from the nurse’s station, and then whispers, “Listen, smile, agree, and then do whatever you were gonna do anyway.”

  “That’s a line from Iron Man,” I tell him.

  “It is,” Mr. Beamon confirms.

  “But Iron Man’s got a super high-tech exoskeleton with sentient armor, onboard proton beams, guided missiles, and supersonic flight capability,” says Ajay. “What have we got?”

  Mr. Beamon holds out both arms to show off his tinfoil suit. “A spunky space pilot from the future and his ragtag group of rule-breaking rebels.”

  We seriously have the best school bus driver in the world.

  Mr. Beamon leads my friends and me out of the busy Emergency Room. Together, we head toward the yellow school bus parked at the curb.

  “How were you able to find a parking spot so close to the hospital?” I ask Mr. Beamon.

  “Mother Cabrini, Mother Cabrini, please find a spot for my little machiney,” he tells me.

  I should have known.

  We sneak behind the bus, then follow Ajay, who leads us down a sidewalk to another entrance. “Where are we going?” Darius asks.

  “Don’t worry,” Zoey says. “Ajay’s parents work here. He knows what he’s doing.” She reaches out, takes Ajay’s hand, and gives it a quick squeeze. The gesture is so easy and natural that I barely give it a thought. But then something strikes me.

  “Hey,” I say, “are you two—”

  Zoey holds up her free hand. “Let’s focus on your grandmother.”

  We reenter the hospital building. Ajay brings us to a single tiny elevator at the end of a long, empty corridor. All seven of us cram inside. Somebody punches a button, and we’re on our way to the sixth floor. “Can anybody spell claustrophobia?” asks Mr. Beamon.

  “C,” says Billy. “L . . .”

  Mr. Beamon closes his eyes. “I was kidding.”

  Billy stops, and we ride the rest of the way in silence. The quiet is kind of shocking after the morning I’ve had so far. In the last few hours, I’ve pretended to be a Greek warrior, witnessed the death of a cardboard unicorn, insulted a Hollywood movie starlet, run over Dorothy and her friends from Oz, and watched my grandmother get cut out of a shark. And it’s not even lunchtime yet.

  The elevator finally slows to a stop. After a long moment, the doors slide open. Mr. Beamon releases an extended sigh. “Were you holding your breath?” Maddie asks him.

  “All I’m going to say is this.” Mr. Beamon massages the sides of his head with both hands. “If we can’t find a stairway leading out, then I have to live here now.”

  Ajay brings us down one more long hallway. “We’re almost there,” he promises.

  Rounding a final corner, we see a small sign pointing toward the Acute Medical Unit. Together, we follow an arrow, head through a swinging door, and then nearly crash right into my mother. She’s standing in the middle of a wide-open corridor lined with doorways covered by blue-and-white privacy curtains. Mom’s angel wings are crumpled. Her tiara is gone, and she’s speaking with Ajay’s parents.

  “The ankle will heal quickly,” Dr. Kalli tells Mom. “And if Ms. Constantino can control her blood pressure, manage her cholesterol levels, avoid fried foods, and limit her salt intake, it is likely that she will not die for many years.”

  “What he means,” says Mrs. Kalli, “is that Danny’s grandmother is going to be fine.”

  “My dad is a surgeon,” Ajay whispers. “Mom says he doesn’t communicate well with people who are actually awake.”

  Our parents turn and see us standing in the hallway. “Is Gram okay?” I ask.

  Dr. Kalli approaches and offers me an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Danny,” he says. “A full recovery is very probable.”

  “She’s going to be fine,” Mrs. Kalli promises.

  I look at my mother. Her cheeks are covered with black mascara lines. “Have you been crying?”

  She nods. “I got lost in the hospital.” She pats her head. “And I lost my tiara.”

  This is usually the part where Mom would say “Dear Saint Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and cannot be found
.” But she must really be upset, because she just keeps talking.

  “And I was worried about you. And of course your grandmother. But mostly you. I didn’t want to get in a fight today, Danny.”

  “You started it,” I mutter.

  She takes a step back. “Do you really want to do this here?” she asks.

  As a matter of fact, I do.

  “Why do you have to be the mayor?” I say to my mother. “Isn’t being queen of everything enough?”

  Before Mom can respond, Madeline MacSweeney steps up from behind and pokes me with her cardboard sword. “What’s wrong with you?” she says. “Your mother is going to be a great mayor.”

  “I’d like her to be a great mom.”

  “Guess what,” Mom says to me. “I’d like that too.” She straightens her wings and adjusts her dress so that it hangs properly on her shoulders. “I’d also like to be a great mayor and a great real estate agent, and I’d like to lead a great Halloween parade. I’m sorry if I’m not living up to your standards, Danny. But last time I checked, I am allowed to be more than one thing at a time.”

  I glance at Mr. Beamon for help, but he raises his hands and takes a step back. “I fought and died on this hill a long time ago.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom says to him.

  “Does Danny know?” he asks.

  “Know what?” I say.

  “Excuse me,” a nurse calls to us from behind a nearby desk. “This is not the family counseling department. You’re all going to have to move to a waiting room.”

  “I asked your mother to marry me once,” Mr. Beamon shares.

  The nurse’s eyes go wide. “But first,” she says, “I’d like to hear how this all works out.” She points at Mr. Beamon. “Go on.”

  “You know we dated in high school,” he tells me. “After your dad died, I used to come over to check on you and your mom. We became close. I even got you a dog.”

  Mom shakes her head. “Our house is going to smell like that dog forever.”

  “Jacko?” I say.

  Mr. Beamon nods. “I got you a dog, and I asked your mom to marry me.”