Just My Luck

by Cammie McGovern

  This isn’t what I expected him to say, but I have to admit, I like the idea. It would be one thing to get a footprint from Mr. Norris after all these days of trying and waiting. It would be something else completely to get one from Ms. Crocker. “What do you mean? What for?”

  “Because she feels sorry for you.” I can tell it makes him mad. “That’s the whole point of footprints, right? It’s about doing nice things for people you feel sorry for.”

  No, I want to say. That’s not the whole idea. Instead I shake my head. “I doubt it. What does my dad’s surgery have to do with getting a footprint?”

  Jeremy turns and looks at me. “Exactly,” he says.

  That afternoon Mr. Norris starts reading a new book because he finished So B. It (which never says the mom is autistic, but she definitely is). This time it’s a book called Zen Shorts, but here’s the weird part—it’s a picture book! In fourth grade!

  “This footprints program has gotten a lot of us thinking about kindness, hasn’t it?” Mr. Norris says. “I know a lot of you are trying to think of ways to show kindness to one another, so I thought maybe it would help if I read some stories about that.”

  Yes! I think. It would help a lot!

  Then he reads one of the stories. It’s about a man who wakes up to find a burglar in his house, stealing all his things. Instead of getting mad at the burglar, the man looks down at the bathrobe he’s wearing. It’s the only thing the burglar hasn’t taken. “Would you like this?” he says, offering the bathrobe. When the robber asks why he’s giving him everything, the man says, “I’m not. I still have the moon.”

  Everyone laughs at that one. Ha! The moon! Yeah right! But I think most of us get the main point—we shouldn’t be too greedy about toys or clothes. The problem is, it’s not like any of us know any burglars to give our bathrobes to. If we did though, it’s a pretty safe bet that all of us would.

  ELEVEN

  THE NEXT DAY, I CAN’T HELP it. I walk straight up the hallway where the line of footprints has stretched almost to the art room and look for my name on the new footprints that have been put up on the wall. All night I kept thinking about what Jeremy said: that Ms. Crocker was going to give me a footprint because she feels sorry for me. I have to admit, it’s raised my hopes. I keep thinking he’s right. Ms. Crocker said, “You let us know if there’s anything your family needs.” Well, one thing she could do for our family would be to write up a bunch of footprints with my name on them!

  I read over all the new footprints slowly, just to make sure I’m not missing any. Olga has one for helping the librarians put chairs away during lunchtime. Peter and James got one for “Finding a peaceful solution to their conflict.” And then there’s this, at the very end: Jeremy Johnson helped Ms. Watusi, a new teacher, find paper for the copy machine.

  Jeremy’s smiling big when I walk into class, like I should find this funny.

  “Can you believe it?” he says. “What did that take me, like two seconds? I was waiting at the water fountain and she looked out of the supply closet and said, ‘Does anyone know where the copy paper is?’ I said, ‘On the shelves underneath, I think.’ Then she came out a minute later and asked me my name. Just as easy as that.”

  He laughs like all of this is a pretty funny joke.

  I guess maybe it is unless the one thing you’ve learned in fourth grade is that you’re bad at everything that comes easily to other people, and then it isn’t so funny.

  That afternoon George has a footprint, too. George B. sat through chorus concert very nicely, it says. I sat through the chorus concert very nicely, too. Afterward I told Hannah I liked her solo even though I couldn’t hear it. No one could. She sang so softly, she looked like she was lip-synching and someone forgot to turn the CD player on. I still told her she was great, but guess how many footprints I got for that? Zero.

  By Wednesday, there are footprints on the wall stretching from the front door around to the art room and first grade classrooms. There are too many footprints to count. Someone gets creative and puts some on the ceiling, which means I get dizzy trying to read those.

  Some people already have two footprints. Four people have three footprints.

  I still have no footprints. Even though I love Ms. Crocker and work hard every day at showing my compassion, empathy, and respect, I have no footprints. None at all.

  “Maybe you should tell Mr. Norris,” Jeremy says on Thursday afternoon. His face is serious. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s supposed to have at least one by now.”

  On Friday I ask Mr. Norris if I’m doing something wrong to go so long without getting any footprints at all. He says no, it doesn’t work that way. “They’re meant to be a surprise for doing nice things when you think no one is looking.” He whispers the last part.

  “But no one is ever looking at me. Some people get looked at and some people don’t!”

  Mr. Norris puts a hand on my back. I feel happy for the hand and sorry that I’m sitting here, almost crying in front of him. “The footprints shouldn’t make anyone feel bad. I’ll tell you a little secret, Benny. I think some teachers give footprints to the kids who have the hardest time figuring out what doing nice things for other people feels like. It doesn’t come naturally to some kids. It comes so naturally to you that people forget to tell you because you’re doing little nice things all the time.”

  I peek up at him. “I am?”

  “Oh sure. I see it. You’re a very nice friend to Jeremy. You don’t complain when Gabriel kicks your feet in music class. You gave Rachel some of your lunch when she left hers at home.”

  I can hardly believe it! He’s right! I’ve done lots of nice things! My footprints could get us all the way to the cafetorium if someone would just write them down!

  “Here’s the thing though, Benny. You know in your heart that you’re one of the nicest kids I can think of. You shouldn’t need footprints on a hall wall to prove that to yourself.”

  But I do! I want to scream. Why shouldn’t I need that! Plus the pizza party, too! “It’s not fair, Mr. Norris,” I want to scream and then I feel embarrassed because I realize that I have screamed it.

  At home that afternoon, I lie down with Lucky. I think maybe I’ll cry into her side for a little bit and then just lying there makes me feel so much better, I don’t need to. That’s the nice thing about Lucky. She doesn’t know what happened to me today, she’s just happy to have me on the dog bed with her. That’s what’s great about dogs.

  TWELVE

  FOR THREE DAYS I KEEP CHECKING the hall wall. Even though Mr. Norris never said he would write up the nice things he said about me, I keep expecting to see my name with the good deeds he mentioned. Maybe there will be three footprints, I think. But two will be fine, or even one. Then I can’t believe it. There’s nothing the next day. Or the day after that.

  Four days later: still nothing.

  Didn’t he almost promise he’d write one? Wasn’t the whole point of our talk that he saw me doing three nice things and felt bad because he hadn’t written them down? Then I remember the last thing he said: You shouldn’t need footprints to prove that to yourself.

  Why would he say something like that?

  On Friday, Jeremy gets another one hundred on the spelling test. I miss five words out of ten and get See me written on the bottom of my page.

  When I go to talk to Mr. Norris, he doesn’t even look up when he asks me if everything is all right at home. He’s shuffling papers and looking in his drawers. Maybe he’s going to give me a lemon drop, I think and then I remember that nothing else Lisa told me to expect has turned out to be true so why should that one be any different?

  I’m right. He doesn’t give me a lemon drop.

  He shuts the drawer and looks at me. “I wanted to ask about your dad and how he’s doing, Benny. I’m sorry I haven’t done that yet. I’m still getting to know all of you and I wasn’t sure if you wanted to talk about it or not.”

  “No,” I say, though it’s hard to t
ell what I’m answering because he hasn’t asked a question. “I mean, it’s okay. He’s better now.”

  I try to imagine the teacher meeting where my name must have come up. I picture all the teachers hearing brain surgery and shaking their heads. Part of me wants everyone to feel sorry for us and part of me really doesn’t want that. “The doctors say he’s going to be totally fine. It’ll just take some time.”

  No doctor has said this—at least not that I’ve heard—but Mom says it. I try to believe it. Maybe that’s enough for Mr. Norris to believe it, too. “Maybe the question I should ask is, are you okay?”

  “I guess so,” I say softly. Mr. Norris has to lean closer to hear me.

  “I know when parents get busy with other problems, sometimes the kid with the fewest problems might feel a little forgotten.”

  I feel like saying, Are you kidding? You think I have no problems? Haven’t you noticed all the orange slips with my name on them? Whatever happens, though, I don’t want to start crying right here in front of Mr. Norris and everyone else. I used to have a little problem with crying in school, especially in first grade, when everyone was obsessed with playing Uno and I always lost. Once I lost eight games in a row and no matter how much I told myself not to cry, I still did. I couldn’t help it. In second grade, I learned a few different tricks to cover it up. I’d say I have allergies and sneeze a lot into a paper towel. Or I’d go to the nurse who, no matter what your problem is, always says, “Why don’t you lie down for a few minutes and see if you don’t feel better?”

  Now that I’ve remembered this trick, I really need to use it. I tell Mr. Norris I have a bad stomachache and he gives me a pass to the nurse’s office. Usually it’s a relief to go to the nurse’s office, where she keeps the lie-down room dark, so it’s fine to cry in there without too many people figuring out what you’re doing, but today I walk in and find someone is already there. Even worse: it’s George, lying in the dark, flicking a pencil over his face back and forth, and singing the “Garden Song.” He doesn’t look in the least bit sick. I have no idea what he’s doing in here.

  He doesn’t look at me when I walk in. He just keeps singing: “‘Inch by inch, row by row. Gonna make my garden grow . . .’”

  “You can’t sing in here, George,” I say. “You have to be quiet. This room is supposed to be for sick people.”

  He ignores me the way he always ignores people when he feels like it and keeps singing.

  “We don’t mind,” the nurse calls from the other room. “George likes the echo in there. He comes here to sing when he’s finished his work.”

  George gets weird rewards for doing things that other kids are just expected to do, like finishing his work. Usually his reward is visiting the custodian’s office to look at the floor waxer. George has never seen the floor waxer plugged in because it only gets used at night when no kids are here, but still it’s his favorite machine of all time. At the end of my first day of kindergarten, George was allowed to take me from class and walk me down the hall to see the floor waxer. I’d heard about it for years, and I had to admit, it was very big and pretty cool.

  “So if you’re done with your work, why aren’t you visiting the floor waxer?” I ask now.

  “Don’t know!” he says and laughs. Maybe he doesn’t love it so much anymore. Maybe he’s changing, like Mr. Norris, only I didn’t even realize it.

  I lie down on the cot next to him. Instead of asking what I’m doing there, he looks over at me and starts singing the song he always sings around me, “Benny and the Jets.” It’s by a guy named Elton John, who used to dress crazy but doesn’t anymore. “‘He’s got electric boots! A mohair suit! You know I read it in a maga-zine! Benny and the Jets!’”

  George doesn’t know what the song is about. Mom says no one does, probably.

  It’s George’s way of saying hello. He doesn’t do anything like other people. He doesn’t say Hi or Are you sick? or What are you doing in the nurse’s office? He just switches the song that he’s singing way too loud.

  George can be a really good singer sometimes. Other times, his singing sounds awful.

  Mom says it’s because George likes playing games with his voice. That sometimes “disconsonant singing” is more interesting to his ears than singing a song perfectly in tune. I don’t know what “disconsonant” means but I assume it means “bad sounding.”

  I came here because I wanted to cry for a few minutes about my test and now I have to sit in the lie-down room with George singing too loud. “Could you stop singing, George? Please?”

  He doesn’t stop. He never does unless someone threatens to take away his screen time if he doesn’t stop. For the rest of us, it means losing TV and video games. For George, it means he can’t watch the stupid YouTube videos he loves of people falling down and cats doing crazy things like climbing curtains. The rest of us wouldn’t care, but George cares a lot about dumb cat videos.

  Finally I wait for a pause in the song and say, “If you don’t stop, I’ll tell Mom to take away your screen.”

  He stops and I cry for a little bit. I know I’m too old to care as much as I do about spelling tests or footprints. I also know that I’m not really crying about these. I’m crying because this morning Mom told me she’s taking Dad in for a doctor’s appointment where they’ll do tests to measure how well his brain is recovering. According to Mom, the tests are full of strange questions and it’s hard to predict how he’ll do. A question on one of the other tests was: If I were a fire, what color would I be? Dad looked at the woman, confused, like he wanted to say, You’re not a fire.

  I guess weird phrasing is the point of these questions. Mom says they’re testing his abstract thinking, which is different from concrete thinking. He has to be able to imagine certain things and then answer questions based on what he’s imagining. “For example, George can’t do much abstract thinking,” she said this morning to explain. All that did was make me more nervous—like at the end of all this, Dad is going to come out like George.

  This morning when Mom reminded Dad that he had his big test today, he started to groan like George does when he has to turn off the TV. He acted like a child, which was terrible to see. I know everyone says what happened to Dad wasn’t my fault, but if it wasn’t my fault, then whose fault was it? It was my helmet hitting his head, my stupid clumsiness making us crash in the first place. If I was a different person—or a better bike rider, at least—I wouldn’t have flown off my bike into Dad. He wouldn’t have bumped his head hard enough for it to bleed into itself. I wouldn’t be lying here crying and wondering how his test is going today when mine went so badly.

  THIRTEEN

  AT HOME THAT AFTERNOON, I CAN’T concentrate enough to do my homework so I go up to my room and lie down on my bed. Mom and Dad still aren’t back from the doctor and I can’t help it. I feel like crying again. Martin comes into my room with an old carton of ice cream. It’s a boring flavor—vanilla—so no one has eaten it for a while and there’s an icy crust on top. I know because I looked at it earlier and decided not to eat it.

  “Heard you had a tough day,” he says, handing me the carton and an extra spoon. He’s eaten through the worst parts. It’s not too bad. I’m surprised he knows about my day, but I guess George’s ramblings say more than I think. Martin must have listened for a while and figured out that I was crying in the nurse’s office. “So what happened?”

  I shrug. I don’t feel like going into all the details. “I just feel so stupid. Why can’t I be a better bike rider?”

  He sits down on my bed next to my feet. “I’ll tell you something. I know it seems like a big deal now, but by the time you get to middle school no one cares much about bike riding.”

  He’s probably right. I can’t remember the last time I saw Martin riding his bike.

  “There’s a lot of things that seem super important when you’re a kid and then it turns out, guess what, they don’t really matter when you’re grown-up.”

  Is he s
aying he’s a grown-up now? I can’t tell. “Most grown-ups can ride a bike,” I say.

  “Yeah, but you know what? If they can’t, who’s gonna know? Don’t get on one and don’t advertise the fact, right? Get good at other things. No one’s standing there with a checklist at middle school.”

  I have to admit, it’s nice to hear him say this. We eat for a while, passing the carton back and forth, until it’s empty.

  “So what’s happening with Lisa?” I finally ask.

  I know they’re still going out, but she hasn’t been over to the house since that day when Dad hugged her too long, and Martin hasn’t talked about her too much. “I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s weird. I’m not sure if I really like Lisa that much anymore.”

  I’m surprised. “But isn’t she still your girlfriend?”

  “Right. I mean that’s the problem. I know everyone says I’m so lucky, she’s so great and all that, but—”

  I stare at him. “But what?”

  He throws away the carton. “Okay, here’s the problem. Do you remember that girl, Mary Margaret, who I was partners with for sixth grade science fair?”

  I do, but barely. I was in first grade and visited their booth with the rest of my class. I didn’t understand how she could have two names. I still don’t, actually.

  “So we’ve always been friends since then. Real friends. Like, she was the first girl I could laugh with. We’ve always had these inside jokes and she makes fun of me and whatever. We text a lot over the weekend, even though we don’t really do anything or hang out, right?”

  I didn’t know any of this.

  “So this whole thing with Lisa—we’ve been going out for, what? Six months?”

  “Seven,” I correct him. “You started last March.”

  “Right. Seven. So it’s been a while. We should know each other pretty well by now, but we still have these times where we’ll be sitting at lunch and she’ll be telling some story and I’ll think—oh my God, I stopped listening to her like twenty minutes ago. I can’t help it. Most of the time I have no idea what she’s talking about. It usually has to do with all her friends and who’s in a fight with who and I just don’t care. And the thing is, she does the exact same thing to me. I’ll be talking about something that happened with my friends and I can tell she’s not listening even though it’s a hilarious story, and I’ll get to the end and she’ll say, ‘Are you really still friends with those guys, ’cause you should think about that.’”