Just My Luck

by Cammie McGovern

“Paper flowers?” I said.

  A babysitter showed him how, with pipe cleaners and tissue paper. “They came out really nice,” he said.

  There isn’t much anyone can say to something like that. You can try, “Great.” And “I’d like to see them sometime.” I said both of those things and then we were quiet for the next three hours until his mom showed up.

  After that I decided I should probably stick with Jeremy as a best friend for now. Except for being a bragger, Jeremy isn’t so bad. The only reason I didn’t want to be friends with him in the first place was that I went over to his house once in second grade and had a terrible time. He got mad if I touched any of his already-built Lego things. He kept saying those were for display only, not for play. He said if you play with your Lego after you build it, you can’t eBay sell them later when you’ve outgrown Lego. Or you can, but they’re worth less.

  After we spent an hour in his room not playing with his toys, his mom made us cream cheese on graham crackers, which I’d never had before. I was scared if I tried it, I might get that gagging thing where food gets stuck in my throat and I accidentally throw up. So I said I wasn’t hungry but could I please have a banana?

  Jeremy laughed at me for about an hour after that. He said it proved I was hungry which meant I was lying.

  After I got home, I told my mother no more playdates with Jeremy. She said fine except we had to invite him to our house once since he’d invited me to his. So Jeremy came to my house and spent about fifteen minutes outside George’s door listening to him talk to himself, which is what George does every day after he gets home from school. Usually it’s a mash-up of things he’s heard during the day and lines from his favorite movies. It never makes much sense. Usually we pretty much ignore George talking to himself. Jeremy didn’t, though. After he stood outside George’s door for a while, he came into my room and asked if I thought George was trying to communicate with aliens.

  I said, “I don’t think so. Sometimes people with autism talk to themselves, that’s all.”

  “No,” he said. “There has to be a reason. I think he’s sending messages back to a mother ship or something.”

  “What mother ship?”

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m asking. What mother ship?”

  That night at dinner I asked my mom and dad what he was talking about. “That’s terrible,” Mom said. “I’m not going to make you have Jeremy over again.”

  “But what’s a mother ship?”

  “It’s a horrible, mean thing to say about your brother.”

  Afterward Mom said that Jeremy was probably insecure, which meant that deep down he didn’t feel good about himself, which was why he always had to win at Uno and every other game he plays. Back then, if he didn’t win, his face got really red and sometimes he cried.

  Now that we’re in fourth grade, Jeremy seems like he’s changed a lot. Earlier this year, he saw me talking to George on the playground and he came up to me afterward. “Sorry about that thing I said about your brother when I came over to your house,” he said.

  Even though I pretended to be confused, like I didn’t know what he was talking about, we both knew. “It’s okay,” I said. “He does talk like an alien sometimes.” That was the first day we ate lunch together this year. George was sitting on the other side of the cafeteria with his aide, Amanda. She was trying to get him to talk to other kids while he ate.

  “I think it’s kind of cool, actually,” Jeremy said. “I like the way your brother talks.”

  This is the confusing thing about Jeremy. He can also be sort of nice sometimes. Like the other day I got pulled out of class to go to a special room to work on my reading and writing, which was pretty embarrassing. The notice came from the main office on an orange slip of paper and there were only two—one for me and one for Olga, who is a nice girl, but wears thick glasses and is legally blind. I’m not sure what that means because she’s not blind blind, but her eyeballs shake when she tries to focus on small things (like books) and I think if she ever tried to drive that would definitely be illegal.

  I felt terrible, leaving the room with Olga while everyone else was getting ready for book groups, but afterward Jeremy was really nice about it. He said I was lucky, that all they did was talk about a boring book called The Hundred Dresses. “If you think one dress is boring, try a hundred,” he said. “I wish I could have left.”

  Since then, he’s been pretty nice about not pointing out a lot of things like how he always gets 100 percent on spelling tests, and I’ve never gotten better than 70 percent. Or how he’s already in the eights group for multiplication and I’m still back in the twos and threes.

  I’ve always been bad at spelling, which I would have said was my worst subject, but that was before multiplication came along. It turns out, I’m even worse at multiplication. To me it seems like the multiplication tables are just random numbers that were made up to test kids’ memories. They seem to have no point, even though teachers keep saying there are lots of practical applications for multiplication. Then they give an example like what if six kids bring eight apples each to a Halloween party, how many do they have in all? Hello? If anyone’s at a bad Halloween party like that, they’ve got plenty of apples and not enough candy. (When I whispered that joke to Jeremy, he laughed pretty hard.)

  I don’t know why multiplication is so hard for me. I know most of the other kids learned it in third grade. For me, it’s like the numbers slip around in my brain and get mixed up. I’ll have some answers one week and then forget them the next. Mom got me a computer game where you can shoot a cannon at a bunch of birds every time you get three multiplication facts right in a row. I fly through the twos and scare all the birds and then I get to threes and fours and the birds sit there forever because I can never get three right in a row and I never get the chance to take another shot.

  Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with my brain that no one is saying because we have enough problems to worry about with George and now my dad. Once I asked my mom and she said, it’s okay, everyone learns differently, at their own pace. “There’s no law that says every fourth grader has to know the whole times tables by heart,” she said.

  Except there is, sort of.

  Maybe that’s why I want to get a footprint so much. It’s like ever since I started fourth grade, I spend every day learning new things I’m bad at. I think about what my mom said, that I understand kindness better than my brothers. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’d sure like to find something I’m good at.

  FIVE

  “I WOULDN’T WORRY ABOUT FOOTPRINTS,” Rayshawn says over lunch. “I don’t think Mr. Norris is giving them out to anybody.”

  Jeremy and I both look at each other. We’re probably trying harder than anyone else and we both know this isn’t true. There are about forty footprints up in the hallway now, at least three of which are in Mr. Norris’s handwriting, all for the kids I would consider the worst behaved in our class. Like Samuel, who is so fidgety he gets a bumpy plastic cushion to sit on at his desk. And Emma T., who has a little problem with taking things from other children and pretending she has no idea how stuff got into her backpack. Once she stole a dollar fifty from the milk money envelope. When Mr. Norris asked if anyone knew anything about the missing money, she cried and said it was accidentally in her pocket. She might have jail waiting for her in the future, but for now she has a footprint thanking her for cleaning up some paint that spilled in art class.

  When I point this out, Jeremy has an explanation. “He has to do it for those kids. They get nothing but threes and fours on their report cards.”

  At our school we don’t get grades on our report cards, we get numbers between one and five. Jeremy gets all ones on his report card except for a few twos in subjects he doesn’t care about like cooperation and PE. I get numbers that are so far in the middle it’s hard for my parents to remember which end we’re aiming for. “Wait, is five the best or one?” my mom always asks because looking a
t my report cards, it’s hard to tell.

  “Those kids have nothing else,” Jeremy says. “I mean seriously. Look at them.”

  I don’t know if Jeremy has forgotten who he’s talking to. Or if he’s forgotten that this morning another orange notice came from the main office and now I’m getting pulled out of class to work on math, too. This means Olga and I might as well get married we’ve walked down so many hallways together at this point.

  When that notice came, people were busy. It’s possible Jeremy didn’t even see me leave. I keep hoping he didn’t. I’m not sure how many embarrassing things I could expect him to be nice about.

  I want to be great at something. That’s all.

  Martin used to be like me—not such a great athlete, not such a great student—then he got tall enough to make the basketball team. When I tell Mom this, she reminds me that Martin used to be terrible at basketball. “He had to work hard just to make it on the team. Don’t you remember the summer before seventh grade when he was out there every day for three months, practicing free throws? You have to choose something and work at it. Look around. Find something you’re passionate about.”

  Mom is a big one for saying we need to find our passion. “I don’t care what it is, just as long as it’s not video games.” The thing is, I do have a passion but it’s sort of screen related, so Mom rolls her eyes and acts like it doesn’t count. I like making short videos with my Lego minifigs. I started doing it with Kenneth two years ago. At first they were terrible. The stories didn’t make sense and you could see our fingers moving the minifigs around. Then we worked on it and learned there’s a lot of great special effects you can get using stop-motion photography.

  Now that Kenneth is gone, I make the movies on my own and I have about three really good ones so far. I’ll have two minifigs walk toward each other, holding their light sabers. Then I have them get in a fight. Sometimes heads will roll or arms will come off. My best one has a great joke. Just before a battle starts, Senator Palpatine goes to the bathroom right next to Count Dooku’s fort. Dooku turns his head and looks right into the camera like Can you believe this guy? And when Palpatine walks away, the Lego base plate is all yellow.

  I’ve showed a few people and they can’t believe how well it works. Martin thinks I should post it on YouTube, but I’m not ready for that yet. I don’t want strangers making comments on my movies. I can just picture Jeremy saying something like, “This is pretty good, but you can tell a fourth grader made it.”

  I don’t need that.

  Plus, I haven’t made a new Lego movie since Dad’s accident this summer. Not that anyone has said I shouldn’t, it just seems wrong to have Dad sleeping in the next room while I make movies about Lego minifigs knocking each other’s heads off.

  SIX

  AFTER DAD WENT TO THE HOSPITAL in an ambulance, it took a long time to figure out what had happened. Mom stayed at the hospital with him all day and called us every hour to say they were still doing tests and didn’t know what was going on. That night she finally came home to tell us in person because she didn’t want to tell us over the phone. The first thing she said was, “This isn’t Benny’s fault.”

  Then she explained: Dad had an aneurysm, which meant a blood vessel started leaking in his brain. It could have ruptured with even less of a bump, the doctor said. “Some people live for years with these things and then walk through a doorway that’s too low and suddenly they’ve got a brain bleed.”

  It would have happened sooner or later, the doctor said, and in a way we were lucky, because we were all there and Mom called an ambulance right away.

  So it wasn’t my fault that an ambulance came and it wasn’t my fault that Dad went in for surgery right away to stop the bleeding. Even Dad said it wasn’t my fault the first time he saw me in the hospital.

  We were all scared to see him that visit, but I was surprised. He didn’t look that much different. Just thinner and pale and dressed in one of those hospital nightgowns. It was hard to know what to do the first time we visited him because he was attached to wires and machines that we weren’t supposed to touch. Of course George touched everything because he can’t help himself, so Mom got mad and told him to sit in a chair in the corner. Instead he went into the bathroom and opened all the cupboards in there.

  “Maybe it’s best to keep this short,” Dad said in his soft, croaky voice.

  I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. On the way there, Mom said whatever we did, crying would be the worst thing because it would make Dad feel worried about how we were all holding up. She said it as a warning to George because he cries so easily sometimes.

  On the drive home from that visit, Mom said it was fine to cry now, but only she did. I didn’t feel like it anymore. I was too scared that if I started to cry, I’d never stop. George pressed his cheek to the window so he could see his breath and Martin sat in the front seat next to our mother and stared ahead, like he was trying to be the father of the family now.

  By the time Dad came home from the hospital, Mom had stopped saying it wasn’t my fault and had started saying how lucky we were. Lucky that Dad opened his eyes after surgery and squeezed her hand. Lucky that he walked for the first time three days after surgery. Lucky that he could talk even if he didn’t always make sense.

  Every time she said it, our dog, Lucky, looked up like maybe she was going to get a treat because we were talking about her so much.

  “It just could have been so much worse,” Mom said. She’d seen terrible things at the hospital, like people who had been there for months and were still learning how to swallow food again. People who would never walk. People who would drool for the rest of their lives. “Some of the other families couldn’t believe your dad was talking the same week he had surgery.” She looked over at Lucky, who was back asleep. We got Lucky the year I was born, which means I’m still a kid but she’s very old. “We are very lucky,” she whispered, so she wouldn’t wake poor Lucky. This might have been true, but the more Mom said it, the more I wondered how unlucky she felt.

  First with George, then with Dad.

  Because Dad’s accident happened at the end of August, a lot of our friends weren’t around. After Dad came home from the hospital and school started, a few people found out, but Mom didn’t call anyone and tell them what was going on. She kept saying she wanted to wait until we had a better idea of how Dad was doing.

  The only friend our age who has been over to the house since the accident is Lisa, Martin’s girlfriend, who he started dating last spring. The thing about Lisa is that she’s so pretty it’s confusing to stand next to her. It’s like standing next to the sun. You get all hot and sweaty. No one—including Martin, I’m pretty sure—understands why she chose him to be her boyfriend.

  The first time they went out, he brought me along because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to think of enough things to talk about. He told her our mom had made him babysit at the last minute, which made me mad (because she hadn’t) but I could also see why he was so nervous: Lisa is beautiful. Her hair is long and blond and almost down to her waist. Her eyes are super blue, like someone colored them in with a cerulean crayon.

  Then it surprised me. Right from the beginning, she was really nice and asked me lots of questions. She told me I had to get Mr. Norris for fourth grade. “He was my favorite teacher ever!” she said, putting her hand over her heart like it might break just thinking about him. “He’s so nice and fun and really inspiring. He keeps these lemon drops in his desk and if you do something special, he calls you up to his desk and gives you one.” She made him sound magical. “Some days he doesn’t follow a schedule at all. He’ll say ‘Let’s go for a hike, kids, and see what we can find.’ Then everyone brings their nature journals outside and hikes in the woods between the apartments and the school.”

  By the time we walked into Barnes & Noble that day, it felt like she was talking to me more than Martin. She asked what I was reading “these days,” like we were old friends who talked
about books all the time. She said she knew it sounded childish but her favorite books were still the Little House on the Prairie series that she read when she was in Mr. Norris’s class. “I just love them,” she said.

  “Oh I know. I love those, too,” I said, even though I’d never read them. I knew the stories because our mother used to make us watch the old TV show if she thought we were ruining our minds with too many cartoons.

  “I love how they’re all so happy at Christmas even though they only get a candy cane and an orange.”

  “Yeah,” Martin said, trying to get in on the conversation. “I love that, too.”

  Suddenly it was like Martin and I were in a competition. I wanted to tell her that Martin’s Christmas lists were twenty items long, everything electronic. I wanted to tell her that he had to work hard to keep those lists under three hundred dollars. I didn’t though. I looked at Lisa and knew that if I was on a date with her, I’d probably say anything, too.

  Martin never held her hand that day but he took every chance he could to touch her elbow. At the end of the date, I watched from Mom’s car as he touched both her elbows and kissed her on the cheek.

  Two weeks later, Martin invited Lisa over for dinner. I was all set for her to forget everything we’d talked about and then she came in the family room where I was pretending to read Little House in the Big Woods and said, “Oh my gosh, that’s my favorite one, Benny! What part are you on?” She leaned over and looked even though I tried not to let her see. “Oh, the first page! That’s great—that means you have all the best parts to go.”

  She told me a few of the good parts and then she really surprised me. She whispered, “I’m a little nervous about this dinner. Maybe you can tell me what I should talk about.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Had Martin not told her how weird our family was? “You can talk about anything,” I said. “That’s what George does.”

  “I haven’t met George,” she said. Then I could tell: that’s why she was nervous.