Jessi's Secret Language

by Ann M. Martin

  “What kind of snack?” asked Karen.

  “Whatever you want,” Claudia replied. “But if you have the right ingredients, I’ll fix you ghost pâté.”

  Luckily, Claudia found what she needed — crackers and liverwurst. She spread a saltine with liverwurst and handed it to Karen. “There you go,” she said. “Ghost pâté.”

  “Yick,” said Andrew.

  But Karen ate her snack eagerly. “Thank you, Claudia,” she said several times, glad that someone was taking her game seriously.

  When the snacks were eaten and the kitchen was clean, Claudia gave Andrew his medicine, and then took the kids back upstairs. “Time to get ready for bed now,” she said. “Andrew, you first.”

  While she was giving Andrew a hand, she thought she heard Karen on the phone in the hall, but she didn’t think anything of it. Andrew’s room was a mess and he couldn’t find his pajamas. Then he got worried about the ghost party again.

  “Honest. It’s not real,” Claudia told him. “Karen made it all up.”

  “Then why did you make the ghost pâté?” he asked.

  Oops.

  “That was just silly,” said Claudia. “It was pretend.”

  Andrew found his pajamas, put them on, and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. When he returned, he climbed into bed.

  “I won’t be able to fall asleep,” he announced. “I’m scared.”

  “Sure you will,” Claudia told him. “You’ll fall asleep. Count something, like sheep.”

  “I’ll have to count ghosts,” Andrew said.

  “Well, at least count friendly ones. There are friendly ghosts, you know.”

  “There are?”

  “Yup.”

  “How do you tell them from the spooky ones?”

  “The friendly ones are the ones who smile and call, ‘Hi, Andrew!’ The spooky ones just say, ‘BOO!’”

  “Oh.”

  “Call me if you need me.”

  “Okay. Night, Claudia.”

  “Night, Andrew.”

  Click. Light off.

  Creak. Door open a crack.

  Claudia tiptoed down the hall to Karen’s room, where she found her sitting on her bed holding Tickly, her blanket, in one hand, and Moosie, her stuffed cat, in the other.

  “We have time for a story, don’t we, Claudia?” she said. “We have until nine-fifteen. Fifteen more minutes.”

  “Right,” replied Claudia. “What do you want to hear?” And then she went on in a rush, “How about The Cat in the Hat?” She suggested that because Karen always suggests The Witch Next Door or one of her other witch stories, and Claudia had had enough ghost and witch tales for one night.

  “Okay,” agreed Karen.

  So they read the book, lying side by side on Karen’s bed.

  When they were finished, Claudia returned the book to its shelf while Karen snuggled under the covers next to Moosie and Tickly.

  “Good-night,” said Claudia.

  Karen didn’t say anything, but she pulled her arms out from under the covers. She signed something to Claudia.

  “What was that?” asked Claudia.

  “It was good-night! I called Jessi again while you were helping Andrew get ready for bed.”

  Claudia signed good-night back to Karen.

  Then Karen made another sign. “I love you,” she said.

  Claudia smiled and signed back. She switched on Karen’s nightlight and quietly left the room, remembering to crack her door open like Andrew’s.

  Then she tiptoed down the hall to David Michael’s room, thinking that signing was the nicest language she had ever seen.

  I was baby-sitting regularly at the Braddocks’ now. I loved it, but my schedule was tough. On Tuesday and Friday I went to my dance class and sometimes stayed later than usual, trying to keep in shape for rehearsals. Rehearsals were held on the weekends, and often on Thursday as well, which had been my only free afternoon of the week. But every Monday and Wednesday afternoon I went directly from school to Matt and Haley’s house. Then Mrs. Braddock would leave for her part-time job. She was working with deaf adults at the Stoneybrook Community Center.

  The Braddocks and I had a routine. I would reach their house at three o’clock, just a few minutes after Haley got home from Stoneybrook Elementary. Then Mrs. Braddock would leave and I would fix a snack for Haley and me. After we’d eaten, we’d sit on the front stoop and wait for Matt’s bus to drop him off. Then Matt would eat a snack, and when he was finished we’d go outside to play. We’d play with the Pikes, the Barretts, and sometimes even Jenny Prezzioso, who seemed to accept Matt a little more than she had the first time she’d met him. On rainy days we had to stay in, of course, but we invited kids over, or went to somebody else’s house. We were always with other kids, and Matt and Haley were eating it up.

  Plus, the secret language was spreading fast. Learning signs was a game, and the kids, especially Vanessa and Nicky Pike, learned them quickly. This was great, because Vanessa and Haley were getting to be friends, and Nicky, Matt, and Buddy Barrett were getting to be friends, too. They often needed Haley (or me) to translate for them, but the friendship was growing anyway.

  One day, the weather was warmer than usual.

  “Summer!” Matt signed to me excitedly. He crooked his right index finger and imitated somebody wiping a hot forehead.

  I smiled at him. It wasn’t summer, though, so I signed, “It feels like summer.”

  Matt nodded. He had just finished his snack and we were heading outside to play. We opened the front door and found the Pike triplets, Buddy Barrett, and Nicky crossing the Braddocks’ lawn.

  “Hi!” Matt waved eagerly.

  The boys waved back.

  “Where’s Vanessa?” Haley called.

  “She had to go to the dentist,” Nicky answered.

  “Oh.” Haley sounded disappointed.

  The boys began a game of six-person baseball. They didn’t need to talk much to play that.

  Haley and I sat down on the steps and watched them.

  Buddy hit the ball out into the street, ran the bases, and jumped up and down as if he’d scored a home run.

  “No fair!” Nicky shouted angrily.

  “The ball was out!” Matt added.

  I was about to remind the boys to sign when suddenly they remembered on their own. Nicky signed, “No fair!”, Matt signed “The ball was out,” and then Jordan jumped in.

  “No!” he signed. “Safe.”

  Haley and I looked at each other.

  “They’re not bothering to talk at all,” said Haley, awed.

  “Nope,” I replied. “They’ve learned every sign that could possibly have anything to do with football or baseball.”

  Haley grinned. “It’s a good thing Matt plays sports so well. If he didn’t, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s sure helped him make friends here.”

  “I know,” I said, “and that’s great. But what does that have to do with you? You said if he wasn’t good at sports, you didn’t know what you’d do.”

  “I have to help him,” Haley said simply. “I have to watch out for him.”

  “You do? I’m the baby-sitter,” I teased.

  Haley smiled. Then her smile faded and she looked sort of sad. “You’re not Matt’s sister,” she told me.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “That’s true…. What is it like?”

  “You have to stand up for him when kids tease him. But while you’re doing it, you wish you weren’t.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it makes you as weird as Matt. And that makes you hate Matt sometimes.” Haley paused and corrected herself. “Well, not hate him. But … oh, what’s the word?”

  “Resent?” I suggested. “You resent Matt?”

  “Yeah.” Haley looked ashamed.

  “Don’t feel bad about it,” I said.
“I resent my brother and sister sometimes, too. Like when Mama asks me to give Squirt a bath or something and I want to practice my ballet.”

  Haley nodded. “But your brother and sister aren’t deaf.”

  “So? Why should you have to be a perfect person just because your brother is deaf?” I asked Haley. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. Matt’s not special, he’s just different.”

  “He is too special!” cried Haley.

  I smiled. “I’m glad you think so. What I meant was that basically, Matt’s like most other seven-year-old boys. Except that he’s deaf and you have to use sign language to talk to him. But look. Look at Matt right now.”

  Matt, Nicky, and Adam were jumping up and down because their team had earned another run. Matt stuck his fist in the air like a proud athlete. Nicky and Adam imitated him.

  Haley couldn’t help grinning. “I really love him,” she said. “And I’m proud of him. He’s smart, he works hard, and even though he’s different, he tries to make himself as not different as possible. And he’s only seven! But, boy, sometimes I wish … I know this is really, really awful, Jessi, but I guess I can tell you. I’ve never told anyone else, though.”

  “What?” I asked her.

  “Sometimes I wish he’d never been born.”

  I was a little surprised at what Haley had said, but when I thought about it, it made sense. I tried to be matter-of-fact. After all, her feelings were her feelings. They didn’t make her a bad or a good person. Still, she had surprised me.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “I can understand that. I really can. I’ve wished the same thing sometimes about Becca and Squirt. More with Becca, maybe, since she’s so close to my age. But I’ve felt it with Squirt, too. Sometimes I think, boy, wouldn’t it be great to be an only child. I’d have Mom and Dad all to myself, and no one would ever interrupt me while I was practicing or trying to do my homework, and no one would ever snoop in my room or take my things without asking. But then I think, if I didn’t have Becca, who could I giggle with late at night? And who could I complain to? Sometimes the kids at school tease me because I’m black, and no one knows how that feels the way Becca does.”

  Haley nodded thoughtfully. “I guess you do understand,” she told me. (She sounded very grateful.) “You know, all I really want is a family who talks with their mouths, not their hands. A little brother who doesn’t make wild-animal noises, who walks to Stoneybrook Elementary instead of riding that dumb van to Stamford everyday.”

  “Who doesn’t embarrass you,” I added.

  “Right. And then sometimes … sometimes I don’t know what I’d do without him. Look at this.” Haley reached under her blouse and pulled out a gold chain. Hanging from it was a wobbly-looking round pendant painted red with an H scratched in it. You could tell the pendant had been made from clay. “Matt made this for me in art class,” she said. “He gave it to me for Christmas last year. I always wear it. This is really weird but, like, I’ll be totally mad at Matt for embarrassing me or something, and then I’ll remember the necklace and I can’t feel mad at him at all. I’ll just want to, you know, protect him and stuff.”

  I did know. “Yup,” I said. “Once I was mad because Becca got sick and Mama made me miss a ballet class to watch Squirt while she took care of Becca. I wanted to kill Becca … and Squirt. Then Squirt put his arms around me and said, ‘Dur-bliss?’ and I started laughing and wasn’t mad at all.”

  Haley giggled. We stopped talking for a while. I felt like I was finally beginning to understand the Braddock kids.

  We watched Matt hit a home run and that was when Haley said to me, “You know, if Matt had to be handicapped, I’m glad he was made deaf. If he was crippled or blind he probably wouldn’t be playing baseball right now. I think he’d be able to do a lot less. Being deaf, well, maybe he can’t talk well or hear, but think what he can do. Almost anything. He can even watch TV. With closed-captioned TV you get this special decoder, and then you can read some shows: The words the people are saying are written on the screen. It’s like watching a movie with subtitles. So really the only thing Matt can’t do is go to a concert or a play or something.”

  I’d been thinking about something I’d read recently. Someone, Helen Keller, I think, had noted that blindness only separates you from things, while deafness separates you from people. So I was about to disagree with Haley, but what she had just said caught my attention.

  “Matt’s never been in a theater?” I asked. “He’s never been to any kind of performance?” How awful.

  “Well, sometimes his school puts on plays in sign language,” said Haley.

  “But imagine,” I murmured. “Never been to a ballet or a musical …”

  “Well, he couldn’t hear the music,” Haley pointed out.

  “I know,” I replied, remembering my conversation with Adele. I was also remembering Mme Noelle’s club. I was thinking about when we do warm-ups and Madame roams around the ballet studio saying, “And one and two and three and four,” banging that club. When she walks by you, you can feel the vibrations of the club hitting the floor. You can also feel the vibrations of the piano music Madame’s assistant sometimes plays. If you stand with your hands resting on top of the piano you can feel soft and strong hums.

  I thought about Coppélia. I thought about how much more there was to a ballet than the music. There was plenty to see — the dancing and the costumes and the scenery. Plus, it was just plain exciting to be in a theater — to look at the rows and rows of red seats and watch the ushers showing people up and down the aisles and hold your breath when the lights go down and the curtain goes up.

  I was getting an idea. It was a really terrific idea, but I didn’t say anything about it to Haley then, just in case I couldn’t pull it off.

  Still, as soon as I got home that evening, I began working on the idea. I decided that the first thing to do was to have a talk with Mme Noelle.

  My plan was working! It really was. I was very excited. I’d spoken to Mme Noelle, to Mrs. Braddock, and even to the head of my whole dance school. Nothing was settled, but everything was “in the works” (as Daddy would say).

  One Friday, I got to Claudia’s house for a club meeting a couple of minutes after five-thirty. I charged up the Kishis’ walk, skidded to a stop, rang their bell, heard Claudia yell, “Come in!” and charged up to her room. As usual, I was the last to arrive. I hadn’t even had time to change completely after ballet class, so I was wearing my leotard and a pair of jeans. My hair was still pulled back tightly, the way Madame says we must wear the hair during closs.

  “Hi,” I said when I entered the headquarters of the Baby-sitters Club. Even though I was only two minutes late and everyone knew I had a tight schedule because of dance class, I felt a little nervous. After all, Kristy could be sort of strict. Besides, Mal and I, as the newest and youngest club members, felt that we better not make any mistakes. We didn’t want to stir up trouble, and we felt we had to prove ourselves.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I apologized.

  I checked out Claudia’s room. People were in their usual places: Kristy was in the director’s chair, Mary Anne, Dawn, and Claudia were sitting on the bed, and Mal was on the floor. She and I always end up down there. The room was a cluttered mess, but I could see that Mal had cleared a space for me next to her.

  Claudia’s room is always a mess — for two reasons. 1. She’s a pack rat. She’s a really good artist and likes to keep all kinds of stuff on hand — bottle caps, interesting pebbles, scraps of fabric, bits of this and bits of that, not to mention her paper and canvases and paints. She never knows what she might need for a sculpture or a collage. 2. Claudia is also a junk-food addict. She likes Ho-Ho’s, Yodels, pretzels, candy, gum, etc., but her parents don’t approve of this habit, so Claudia has to hide the stuff around her room. Then sometimes she forgets where she’s hidden it and has to go rooting through all her stuff to find it.

  Anyway, Kristy accepted my apology with no problems.

 
; I plopped down next to Mal.

  “Ring-Ding?” asked Claudia, holding one out to me.

  I smiled, but shook my head. “No thanks.”

  “Double-Stuf Oreo?” she tried again.

  “I better not. I’d love one, but I think I’ll wait for dinner.” I like junk food as much as Claudia does, but I try not to eat too much of it. Ballerinas have to be strong and agile and in good shape. Junk food doesn’t help you to be any of those things.

  “Okay,” said Kristy, clapping her hands together. She swallowed the last of an Oreo. “Any club business? Anything urgent?”

  “The treasury’s low,” spoke up Dawn.

  “How’d it get low?” asked Kristy.

  “Mostly paying Charlie to drive you to and from the meetings.”

  “Well, dues day is coming up,” said Kristy.

  We all kick in some money from our babysitting jobs to keep our club running. We use the money to pay Charlie, to buy stuff for a slumber party or something every now and then, and to buy things to put in our Kid-Kits. (Kristy thought up Kid-Kits. They’re boxes full of games and books — our old ones — plus new coloring books, activity books, and sticker books which we sometimes take with us when we sit.)

  “One day of dues isn’t going to do it,” said Dawn worriedly.

  “Well,” Kristy went on slowly, “could all of you kick in double next time — just this once?”

  We grumbled but agreed to. Nobody wanted to pay double, but we could afford it, since we earn so much money sitting.

  The phone rang then and Claudia answered it and lined up a job for Dawn.

  “Any other business?” asked Kristy.

  Mallory and I glanced at each other. We had decided that we should talk more at the meetings — at least about business. At first we had wanted to keep a low profile; now we were worried that we weren’t joining in enough.

  I can’t believe what I did next. I actually raised my hand — like some dumb first-grader.

  “Yes?” said Kristy, looking surprised. (About the hand-raising, I guess.)

  “Well, I — I — I mean, I, um … um —”

  Luckily the phone rang again.