It’s weird, but it’s like Brent’s parents have this love of BR or something. His dad is Brad Bruno. His mom is Brenda. The rest of the Brunos are the sisters, Britney, Brook, and Bridget, and then there’s Brent.
Brent and his dad mostly get along by staying out of each other’s way. But sometimes they get into this thing where they bet on stuff. Like whether or not it’s going to rain, or how high is Mt. Wilson, or who will be the first one to spot a dog on some road trip. Anything. They don’t bet money. They bet “services.” Like, I remember a time back in the third grade, I was at their house for dinner. It was pizza night. Bridget asked if we liked our teacher, Mrs. Calahan, the same teacher she’d had two years earlier.
“She’s okay,” Brent said. “Except she likes Eddie better than me.”
Bridget laughed. “I like Eddie better than you. Everyone likes Eddie better than you.”
“Yeah? Well, I like Eddie better than you, too!” Brent said.
I just sat, munching pizza, trying to be likable. Mr. Bruno said, “Mrs. Calahan? Is that the blonde one who plays the piano?”
Bridget nodded her head but Brent said, “Black hair. Mrs. Calahan has black hair.”
“The teacher all of the girls had? In that room where the walls are mostly whiteboards? That Mrs. Calahan? She doesn’t have black hair,” Brent’s dad said.
“Does too,” Brent said, picking bits of tomatoes off of his pizza.
Mr. Bruno looked at Brent like he was crazy. “Mrs. Calahan. Third grade? She does not have black hair!”
“Betcha,” Brent said.
“You’re on, Buddy. What’re the stakes?”
“You take me and Eddie for a day at Disneyland.”
“Whoa. That’s a big bet! What’re you gonna do for me when you lose?”
Brent didn’t know what to say to that, because he didn’t plan on losing. He thought for a long time. “Maybe Eddie and me wash your car every Saturday for a month?”
“How about every Saturday for a year? You and Eddie wash, wipe down, leave no streaks. Clean the inside, too. Inside of the windows, vacuum, leave it looking like it’s right off the showroom floor.”
Mr. Bruno was a fanatic about his car—a little red Lamborghini that he bought with some bridge-building bonus money.
Brent’s mom turned to me. “Don’t let them drag you into this,” she said. I didn’t care, though. I knew Brent would win. I was already thinking about which rides I wanted to go on first. Maybe Space Mountain.
The next morning, I watched as Brent led his dad into the classroom. Mr. Bruno did one of those cartoon double-takes when he saw our teacher.
She said, “Oh, Mr. Bruno. It’s nice to see you. How are those three sweet girls of yours?”
“Mrs. Calahan?” He stared at her, his mouth half open. She laughed.
“Some people don’t even recognize me with this black hair,” she said. “I’m going to be Maria in ‘West Side Story’ at the Community Theatre. I’m too old for the role, and too blonde. I couldn’t get younger, but at least I could get black hair.”
“Is it a wig?” Mr. Bruno asked, looking for some out on a technicality, I guess.
“No! A wig would be too hard to manage—all of that dancing and running around. Hot, too. No, I had it dyed. I may even keep it this way. Like it?”
“I like it!” Brent said, pulling his dad toward the door.
Besides being a stickler for math, Mr. Bruno also prided himself on playing by the rules, and once a bet was made, there was no backing out. So, he kept his end of the bargain and took us to Disneyland. One of the best days ever!
Brent and his dad have probably made hundreds of bets since then, and Brent probably hasn’t won more than two or three. But he’s determined to win this one. High stakes! If Brent beats his dad in cornhole, in what they’re calling a tournament, he doesn’t have to do the summer math camp thing. If he loses, he not only has to go to math camp, he has to work with a math tutor for the whole rest of senior year.
Brent’s dad went to some big, important engineering and science college back east somewhere. Maine, or Montana, or Massachusetts, or Michigan, one of those M states. And cornhole was like their main school sport. I’ve heard of colleges with Frisbee teams, and skateboarding teams, but cornhole? Here’s the thing, though. Brent’s dad was a college cornhole star, and I don’t think Brent’s ever in his life beaten his dad at the game.
BRENT AND I PLAY FIRST, with Cameron as the ref. He’s supposed to be watching to be sure that we don’t step past the platform when we pitch. If that happens, the throw doesn’t count, and Brent will want every throw to count so he’s got to practice staying in the boundary. But Cameron’s so busy texting, we could step ten feet out of the box and he wouldn’t notice.
I take the first throw with a red beanbag, give it an easy lob, and it drops straight into the hole—doesn’t even touch the sides. Brent takes the next toss. It hits the edge of the platform and bounces off. “Shit.”
My next throw lands on the platform and rests inches from the hole.
Brent’s blue bag lands a few inches from mine, slides, and pushes mine into the hole. “Fuck!”
Cameron looks up, sees my two red beanbags on the grass under the hole. “Hey, Blockhead! I know a cute math tutor. If you’re going to be spending all year with a math tutor, might as well be a cute one.”
“Up yours, Quinn!”
Cameron laughs, turns back to his phone.
By mid-afternoon we’re all starving. Out of seven games, I’ve won three, Brent and Cameron each won two. But it was the last two that Brent won, so maybe with enough practice...
“Sonic’s?” Brent asks.
“Nah. That’s crap food. Let’s go to the taqueria,” I say.
“Sonic’s is crap and the taqueria isn’t?” Cameron says.
Brent turns to Cameron. “Let’s do McDonald’s. Salad for Eddie, crap for us?”
I dangle my keys in front of them, letting them know it doesn’t matter where they want to go. I’m driving, and the car goes wherever I take it.
“Goin’ to lunch,” Brent yells in the general direction of the kitchen. The kitchen door opens, and his mom yells back at him, “What about the lawn??”
“After lunch!”
“It better be done by the time your dad gets home!”
THE TAQUERIA’S SO CROWDED we go down a block to the McDonald’s drive thru line. We order at the window, crap for them, salad for me, like Brent said. At the window, I pass the food over to Cameron and drive away.
“No eating in my car!” I say to Cameron as he reaches into the bag for a french fry.
“I’m starving!”
“You’re also a slob.”
Brent laughs. “You’re as bad as my dad is about his car.”
“Yeah, well, I hate when my car smells like McDonald’s.”
At Dodsworth Park, we find a table in the shade and tear into our lunches. For the first few minutes, we’re dedicated to eating, then Brent says, “We’ve got time for another practice tournament before I have to mow the lawn.”
“Not me,” I say. “I’ve got to meet William on the job at 2:00.”
“Thought you had the day off, Dude,” Cameron says.
“Nope. The only reason I got the morning off was because Max and William are over on the east side, registering voters.”
“Can’t people register for themselves?” Brent asks.
“I guess not everyone has a way to get to a place to register, and some people might have trouble filling out the forms.”
“Why the east side?” Cameron says.
I shrug. “Maybe because that’s where a lot of people who might have trouble voting live?”
Brent says, “I hope they’ll be registering voters again next Saturday. All day, next Saturday. I need all of the cornhole practice I can get. Zitter screws around too much for it to seem like a real tournament.”
“I’m a multi-tasker,” Cameron says, grinning. “While you two w
ere in such a serious competition, I got a time to meet Nora at her place, where her parents won’t be, and I arranged to borrow thirty bucks from my dad and another thirty from my grandma, and I got two John Wicks on Fortnite. All that, plus I nearly won the second cornhole!”
“If losing by seven points counts as nearly winning,” Brent says.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Irritable Teacher Day
Usually when I leave for zero period, no one else is up. This morning, though, Max and William are at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Empty greasy popcorn bowls are on the counter.
Max shakes her head. “He won,” she says, pointing to the front page of the morning Times with election results plastered across the headlines.
“Yeah—looked like he was in when I went to bed last night.”
“We kept hoping things would change.”
William stares into his coffee cup.
“At least California didn’t go for him,” Max says.
William looks up. “Doesn’t matter. He’ll still be president in California.”
When I get to school, Miss May’s searching frantically through a pile of papers.
“Hey,” I say, grabbing a stack of paper towels and the vinegar/water spray bottle for the tables. Between cleaning the yoga mats in the afternoon and the tables in the morning, I’m beginning to think the job high school is preparing me for is to be a school custodian. Which, if I didn’t already know I was going to be a painting contractor, might not be a bad thing. Mr. Manchester seems like a pretty happy guy. Happier than most of the teachers, if you ask me.
Papers are flying around May’s desk.
“Looking for something?” I ask, expecting a laugh.
“No, Eddie,” she says, all sarcastic, “I’m working on putting together a band with the sounds of flying paper providing major harmonies.”
“Sorr—eeee.”
She stops long enough to look at me. Lets out a long, deep sigh.
“Help me find that Appleman poem. You know, we read it last year. It was one of your favorites...oh...something something puddin’ and pie?”
“The Karma poem?”
“Yeah. That one.”
I pull Good Poems off the shelf, check the index, turn to page 132, and show Miss May.
“Oh, good! Take this to the choir room and make twenty copies.”
In the choir room Taggerty sits at the desk in his office, tapping out a one-fingered text.
“Okay to use the copier?” I ask.
He pauses, looks over his little half glasses, nods his head. “She owes me paper,” he says, then goes back to texting.
I wonder if this is Irritable Teacher Day? Like there are teacher conference days, and department meeting days, and now they’ve got Irritable Teacher Day? I’ll have to wait until 2nd period to see. It’s always an irritable day for Crandall, my first period teacher. But 2nd period? If Ms. Cortez is irritable in Life Skills, I’ll know it’s an official irritable day.
Between clearing a paper jam and reloading the machine, it’s almost class time when I finish copying the poem, and a few kids are straggling into the choir room. I leave slowly, hoping Rosie will be the next one through the door. She’s not, but at least I’ll get to see her after school. I like that I always take her home now.
Miss May is on her phone when I get back to the classroom.
“I can’t believe it, either,” she says. “After eight years of such an intelligent, well-spoken leader and then we get this racist...”
She notices me putting the copies on her desk and stops abruptly.
“I’ve got to go now,” she says, and stashes her phone in one of her giant pockets.
By the time the tardy bell rings, kids are loading up on stuff from the snack table, getting coffee or tea or hot chocolate, and taking it to their table. Unlike most of the other classes with individual student desks arranged in rows, we sit facing each other at big, oblong tables that are arranged in a horseshoe. I mark attendance in Miss May’s roll book, then take my seat next to Phong. Usually Consuelo’s on my other side, but she’s not here today. Neither are Maryam and Sarah, the two quiet girls who wear those head scarves.
We always start class with a “read-around” of a poem or some other short bit of writing. Today it’s the poem May had me copy. “‘O Karma, Dharma, Pudding and Pie’ by Philip Appleman,” she reads.
We go around the table, each of us reading a line. I like this poem because it rhymes and because it’s funny. I don’t care much about the poems that are all like the beauty of the sky and the sea, with big words like “rhapsody” and “confluence” and no rhymes.
When we finish the read-around, Miss May reads the poem through. I’d like to show you the whole poem, but that’s against some kind of copyright law, so I’ll try to explain. The poet is asking for strength and wisdom, and to be a good person, and then it shifts to the poet wanting to give the gods advice on how to make the world a better place. Turn the bad people into good people, and have the good people be nice. It ends with “and before our world goes over the brink/teach the believers how to think.”
May pauses, then reads the last lines again. “Wouldn't that be nice? Or, better yet, teach the voters how to think...Never mind, I didn’t say that...Write whatever comes to mind. Whatever you want.”
I write about Buddy, who is trustworthy, loyal, helpful and kind, but doesn’t have great abs. Even though I write for laughs, it’s all true about Buddy. When it’s my turn to read, everyone laughs at my last two lines, “It’s true Buddy’s not got great abs/ but they’re better than those on most other labs.”
It’s all about positive feedback in here, and what kids say is that they saw the dog’s personality. They liked the thump, thump sound of his tail.
Phong wrote about his cowardly vampire—nothing to do with the poem we read. He usually writes about vampires. He says he’s working on a trilogy.
When it’s Miss May’s turn to read, she does what she almost never does: she skips her turn. “Revision time,” she says, handing back typed copies of papers we’ve chosen that we might want to have published in this year’s WriteLight book. “Use your revision guidelines.”
Phong passes one of his vampire pieces to me, and I pass a Simba story to him. Vernon the Cowardly Vampire, who faints at the sight of blood, always makes me laugh. I mark a place where he’s used the same word, “cowardly”, only two sentences apart.
“This Simba is one bad-ass cat,” he says to me. He’s bracketed a paragraph and written “More details.”
“Yeah, Vampire Vernon is a total wuss,” I say. “But, hey! What if they met each other?”
Phong gets this big smile. “Yeah! Maybe Vernon could hire Simba as a bodyguard. That’d show that bully Viceroy Vampire!”
We’re going on about the Vernon/Simba partnership, laughing about the possibilities, when Miss May tells us we’re disturbing our fellow writers.
“We’re being creative,” Phong says.
“Well, create more quietly,” she says.
It’s hard, though, to stop laughing once you get started, and now everything is funnier and funnier. Luckily, the bell rings before we’ve totally pissed May off.
It for sure is Irritable Teacher Day. Second period, Life Skills. Ms. Cortez is not, as usual, standing at the door, smiling, greeting everyone by name as they come into class. Today she’s sitting at her desk, not looking at anyone. The first thing I notice after I sit down is “No Talking!” written on the whiteboard in big red letters. Below that is, “Chapter Six, Banking and Credit Costs, read and answer odd numbered questions. Even numbers for extra credit.”
Whenever we start a new chapter, Ms. Cortez always has a personal story to tell us to “show relevance.” “Relevance” is like her favorite word. With the “Taxes and Insurance” chapter she told about how she realized she was paying way too much insurance for full coverage on her old car. It wouldn’t be worth it to pay for any body repair if it got messed up in a car c
rash. Then she told a story about someone who lost his business because he got sued for an accident that was his fault and he didn’t have any liability insurance.
“The moral of this story is to be sure you’ve got enough liability insurance and not too much collision,” she’d said. Really, I guess that was relevant because after that chapter I took a closer look at my car insurance and changed a few things, which ended up saving me about $600 a year.
Before today, she always started us with a story. I flip to Chapter Six and skim through it. Really? She expects us to read twenty-one pages and answer fifteen questions in 50 minutes?
Danny, the guy who has to be told everything at least ten times before it sinks in, has his hand up. Ms. Cortez glances his way and points to the board.
“But Miss, I don’t get...”
She gets up, underlines “No Talking” twice, adds an exclamation mark, sits back down, opens her roll book, and starts silently taking roll.
The guy who sits next to me, Nick, says a little too loud, “What’s with her today? She on the rag or something?”
“Well, duh!” Jane leans across me to whisper to Nick. “Remember that story she told us about how her parents never learned English even though they’d been here a long time? It was that personal finance unit. Remember? How that car salesman took advantage of them because they couldn’t read the contract? How if we can’t understand a contract, don’t sign it until someone you trust looks it over?”
“What’s that got to do with ‘No Talking’?” Nick says.
“Her parents. They didn’t learn English. What if they never became citizens?”
I push my desk back to get out of the middle.
Nick gives her a blank look. I know what she’s talking about. I don’t pay a lot of attention to politics, but I know the guy who just won the election has been spouting off for months about sending all of the criminals back to Mexico, and by “criminals” he means anyone who doesn’t have papers.
I’ve heard stories about how scary it was for Tia Josie and Tio Hector until they got papers. They came on some kind of temporary work permit back in the 70s. I think it was the 70s. Then, because life was so much better here than what they’d left behind in Mexico, they stayed. They had Victor, bought a small farm. Tio Hector had a good job with one of the growers, but it took them a few years to get the papers they needed to stay here legally. They could have lost everything if they’d been deported before they could get legal. Now, with all the talk about deportation that was thrown around during the campaign, I bet there are plenty of people like Tia Josie and Tio Hector used to be—scared. Maybe Ms. Cortez is scared for her parents.
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