The Big One-Oh

by Dean Pitchford

  Then, suddenly, everybody seemed to get organized and formed two lines. The kids and parents were closing in on us, cutting off our escape. They formed a single path that led right up to the picnic table, where they knew we’d have to stop, because there was no way the pony could gallop fast enough and leap high enough to clear that picnic table.

  Was there?

  Later, the Pony Man would tell Dad that, in all the time he owned him, he had never seen his pony leap so high before.

  Sadly, it wasn’t high enough.

  It amazes me to this day that the pony and I both walked away from the crash without a scratch. Oh, sure, we were covered with cake and frosting and punch and birthday candles and ribbons and wrapping paper.

  And, yeah, there were hot dogs and presents and potato chips and pickles scattered as far as the eye could see.

  Jamie Wiggerty was crying into his mother’s dress, and when they saw that, a few other kids started sobbing, too.

  So Dad and I left real fast.

  I never pinned a tail on a donkey, I never got to eat ice cream and cake, and I never sang “Happy Birthday, dear Ja—mie!!”

  And after that, I never got invited to another birthday party.

  I shook off that horrible memory and steadied my trembling hand, in which I was still gripping Dad’s birthday card. To ease my panic, I read his message out loud:

  “What are you going to do for your big day?”

  And when I realized what I had just asked, I gasped, “Wait a minute!”

  That made Boing Boing look up.

  “It IS my big day!” Boing Boing tilted his head in drowsy confusion and went back to sleep, but my mind was racing with this startling new understanding:

  I was gonna turn ten. Me. Charley Maplewood. Ten years old. No more single-digit birthdays—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

  NO!

  I would finally move into double digits—and then I’d never go back again.

  How awesome was that? Life-changing, even.

  I began to think that maybe it was time to put the disaster of Jamie Wiggerty’s birthday party behind me.

  Maybe it was time to move on.

  Maybe I should do something for my “big day.”

  But what?

  3

  Later that afternoon when Mom came home from work, I watched her closely and decided to wait a few minutes before starting a conversation.

  See, Mom’s the bookkeeper at Fittipaldi’s Appliances, where they sell stoves and TVs and vacuum cleaners. Even though she gets a whopping twenty percent employee discount on anything in the store, she also has to deal with Mr. Fittipaldi, who can be very . . . loud. Mom never speaks badly about Mr. Fittipaldi’s temper, but I can always tell if she’s had “one of those days.”

  If Mom groans when she pulls off her shoes and shakes her head as she flips through the mail, I know that I should wait before I open my mouth. But if she notices what I’m cooking for dinner and she sniffs at the pots on the stove and goes, “Mmmm, smells good,” as soon as she walks in, then it’s a pretty safe bet that I can ask her anything.

  That day, I decided to wait. And, while I waited, I continued chopping parsley.

  People find it strange that I do the cooking in our house, but I don’t see why. After all, Dad’s a cook. I watched him a lot before he was gone. He left behind lots of great pots and pans and spoons and things, but he took his favorite knives with him.

  Without any help, I can reach the front burners on the stove. For now, I still need to stand on a kitchen chair to reach the back burners, but, if I keep growing on schedule, I should be tall enough to do that by next summer.

  And besides, if I left it up to Mom, we’d have chili dogs 365 days a year, so doing all the cooking is really more out of self-defense.

  After Mom unpinned her hair and shook it out, I sensed that it was finally okay to speak, so I asked her what she had planned for my “big day.”

  “Your ‘big day’?” She blinked.

  “My birthday.”

  “Oh, honey! Your birthday’s not for a month. We’ve got time.”

  Just then Lorena came barging in the front door. My sister’s in tenth grade now, and she’s still a pain.

  At that time, she had a job after school at the Chick-A-Dee Restaurant, selling fried chicken and coleslaw and sodas. I had a feeling she was only working there because of Brad, her supervisor, who is seventeen and has lots of spiky black hair. The way he’d zip around the Chick-A-Dee kitchen shouting orders into his little “talk-to-me-People!” headset had convinced Lorena that Brad was the coolest thing since ice cream.

  Lorena walked in on my discussion with Mom just as I said, “But Dad sent me a birthday card, and he wants to know what I’m doing for my ‘big day,’ and I don’t know what to tell him.”

  Lorena made a little snorting laugh. “Why’s Dad sending you a birthday card this early? Man, he sucks with dates.”

  I think Lorena is still really angry with Dad for leaving. She sneers whenever she says his name in public, but sometimes I hear her and Mom whispering behind her bedroom door late at night. And when they do, Lorena’s usually crying, so I know better than to stick my head in and ask, “Hey, what’s up?”

  Lorena scrunched up her nose as she passed by me and glanced at what I was cooking. “Sloppy Joes?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Lamb curry with spinach.”

  She groaned. “There’s never anything to eat in this house.”

  It was then that Mom first noticed I had a stove full of bubbling pans and pots. She whirled around to my sister. “Lorena!”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you give your brother my message?”

  “I’m not your secretary,” Lorena muttered.

  That steamed Mom. “I gave you a cell phone for emergencies, so when I call and ask you to tell your brother that I won’t be here for dinner . . .”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” huffed Lorena, “but Brad called me to do an extra shift at the Chick-A-Dee, so I had other things on my mind, okay?”

  Mom opened her mouth to answer, but then she thought better of it, so she just took a deep breath and turned to me.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I have a date tonight.”

  “Oh?” I asked. As if I didn’t know what was coming.

  “Yeah. Vince is taking me for Szechuan.”

  Lorena rolled her eyes and groaned.

  And, although I didn’t say anything, that was pretty much how I felt, too.

  Mom met Vince Champagne a couple months ago at some fancy-dancy market he manages called The Paradise Pantry. Mom went there to get a deli platter for a party at work, and Vince was pricing cheeses in the dairy cabinet when Mom walked by. They started talking about imported cheddar and California Swiss and the next thing you know, they were going out.

  Now, I realize that Mom is probably lonely. Actually, I know she is. More than once I’ve come downstairs after midnight to find her still up, doing her crossword puzzle or blowing on a hot cup of tea and staring across the living room. She always assures me, “No, nothing’s wrong,” but I’ll bet she’d like someone else to talk to besides me and Lorena and Mr. Fittipaldi.

  But why Vince? He’s got a thick neck, like he must’ve played football at one time . . . until he decided that he’d rather stack vegetables in pyramid-shaped piles. He’s the kind of guy who slaps people on the back when he meets them and then laughs too close to their face. He’d always grab my hand, squeeze it and shout, “C’mon, Charley! Gimme a man’s handshake!”

  It made me nuts.

  Mom wanted to change the subject from Vince, so she suddenly came up with, “You know what, Charley? I just remembered: your sister had a party . . .” She turned to Lorena. “Didn’t you? When you turned ten?”

  Lorena was chewing on an ice cube. “You mean at our old house? The time when the sprinklers went off, and me and my girlfriends all got covered in mud and grass, and so you hosed us down in our party dresses? That time?�
�

  Mom decided not to relive that memory.

  “Well,” she bubbled, “your brother might want a party.”

  Lorena screwed up her face. “Why? Who would he invite?”

  “It’s up to him,” said Mom.

  “But he doesn’t have any friends,” Lorena insisted.

  “Don’t say that!” Mom hissed, as she left the kitchen.

  Lorena followed her, protesting, “Well, he doesn’t.” She didn’t even care that I could hear her.

  Then Mom popped her head back in the kitchen door.

  “Honey? You’ve got friends, right?”

  The way that she asked it, biting on her lower lip with just a hint of worry in her eyes, made me realize that it must be important to her.

  “Sure do,” I smiled. And I went back to stirring my lamb curry.

  She exhaled, winked at me, and went upstairs to get ready for Vince.

  The question that she raised, though, was an interesting one. I decided that it was worth further study.

  4

  For the next few days, I started to look at people at school, really look at them as if for the first time, and ask myself, Charley? Can you call this person a friend?

  I didn’t like the answer I kept coming up with.

  For instance, during math class on Tuesday, when Mr. Jordan sent me and three other kids to the blackboard to solve square root problems, I looked out, and I saw Donna Pointer, who is too beautiful to describe.

  Donna looked up from her math paper, and her straight brown hair bouncing off her shoulders made her teeth seem unbelievably . . . white. I guess I stopped to look, because, when she she saw me, she smiled a little smile.

  I’m not making this up.

  Now, sometimes Donna would nod to me in the hallway if we passed each other and our eyes met.

  And there was this one day last year when she asked to borrow a pencil from me before a spelling quiz, and when she returned it at the end of class she said, “Thanks a bunch, Charley.” So I knew she knew my name.

  Wow. For the first time, I wondered, Is Donna Pointer maybe my friend?

  Donna pals around with two other girls, Dina Andrews and Dana McGuire. They’re nice enough, I guess, but if you think of Donna as the sun, then Dina and Dana are more like moons, orbiting around her.

  When I caught Donna’s eye, I shrugged, sort of like, “Square roots? Hey. No problem.” And I gave a little wink.

  I guess Dina and Dana saw the wink, because they started to giggle. I could feel my face redden as I turned back to the blackboard, determined to solve my square roots with the speed and style that would earn Donna’s admiration. But, in my hurry, I scraped the chalk across the board, and it made that horrible squeaky noise that makes everyone who hears it inhale sharply.

  Then, even worse, my chalk broke, my hand slipped, and I made a long slash that wasn’t part of my square root solution. By this time, there were more snickers.

  So I picked up the eraser to neaten my work, but when I swiped it across the blackboard, the eraser took a skittering skip, flipped out of my hand and flew over my head onto Mr. Jordan’s desk, where it landed with a poof! of chalk dust on his lesson plan.

  That got everybody laughing—everybody except Mr. Jordan.

  Now, I’m used to being embarrassed—just skateboarding off school property is bad enough—so I squeezed my lips together real tight and retrieved the eraser. But before I turned back to the board, I looked once more at Donna; by now she had joined Dina and Dana in laughing and covering their mouths like they had chewed food that they didn’t want anybody to see.

  I wasn’t sure if that’s what a friend would do.

  In the elementary school, the boys’ room on the ground floor is where most guys go, but it gets so crowded that sometimes, in the crush, I end up getting shoved into the paper towel dispenser or having the water faucet stream directed at me. So I tend to visit the boys’ room on the second floor; it’s way smaller, but it’s not as risky.

  I usually run into Darryl Egbert there. Darryl’s the smartest guy in fourth grade, but he can be unpredictable.

  Darryl sweats a lot and worries about his grades a lot, and his mother takes him to see a psychology doctor once a week because he gets stomach cramps and sometimes he can’t sleep at night. But he knows all the answers in every subject. Whenever he’s called on, Darryl pushes his glasses back against his nose and sticks his hands under his armpits before he speaks. Then he almost shouts, and the veins on his neck bulge. So people tend to treat Darryl in that careful way you see in movies about people defusing a bomb.

  But when we see each other in the upstairs boys’ room, we usually say, “Hey.” And whenever I put my tray down next to his in the cafeteria, he never tells me to beat it; sometimes he’ll even look up from the book he’s reading and say something like, “Do you realize that cow flatulence is responsible for twenty-five percent of the methane gas in our atmosphere?”

  So later that week in the boys’ room I didn’t think it was out of place for me to ask him, “Darryl? Would you say that you and me are friends?”

  He looked up from the sink, where he was splashing water on his face. He does that when he gets overheated, and he gets overheated when he’s nervous about something.

  “ ‘You and I,’ ” he corrected me.

  “Huh?” I blinked.

  “ ‘Me’ is objective, ‘I’ is nominative. The question is ‘Would you say that you and I are friends?’ ”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Would you?”

  “What? Friends?” That seemed to totally confuse him. “I . . . what? Why are you asking me that now?! We’ve got an American history quiz in seven minutes, and this is neither the time nor the . . . urp . . . !”

  The “urp!” was because he was about to throw up, but he didn’t do that in the sink; he rushed into one of the stalls and slammed the door and heaved.

  So I couldn’t really count that as a “yes.”

  The next day, on my way to geography, I saw Leo Jacobi down the hall. Leo’s a good guy. Everybody thinks so.

  Earlier this year, when Leo was running for Class President, I got into line behind him one day after recess, and I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’ve got my vote.”

  And you know what he did? He turned around and shook my hand and patted me on the shoulder. But he didn’t say anything because we’re not supposed to talk after the recess bell.

  Of course, he won; he always does. Nobody’s ever dumb enough to run against him.

  So that afternoon in the hallway, when Leo looked up and saw me, he raised a hand and waved, “Hey.”

  I froze, not sure whether to return the gesture. Is Leo really waving to me? I wondered. But then I answered myself, Well, why wouldn’t he? Leo’s a friendly guy. Which of course led to the big question, Does that make him a friend?

  Just in case it did, I lifted my hand to wave back at the same moment that a bunch of guys came from behind me and raced over to surround Leo and clap him on the back.

  That’s who Leo was waving to.

  I stood there stupidly, with my hand in midair. Rather than waste the wave, I made a swoop and brought my hand down on the button of the drinking fountain.

  Yeah, I thought. Perfect timing. I need a drink.

  Except that just as I took my first sip—WHAM!—I got smacked on the side of the head, and as I stumbled back, I heard, “Leave some for me!”

  It could only be one person.

  “OW! Leland!” I sputtered, and the water spurted out of my mouth and onto the hallway tiles.

  Leland Plunk has been on my case ever since I tranferred to this school. Leland has wild hair, messy clothes, and crooked teeth; he looks like somebody put him into a clothes dryer once, tumbled him around for a while, and then shoved him out the door. He’s about my height, which makes him too short to pick on the bigger guys, so he decided a long time ago that I was just the right size to torture.

  Leland stuck his face into mine a
nd hollered, “Hey! What’d I tell you?! It’s no longer ‘Leland.’ Don’t call me ‘Leland’ anymore.”

  “Oh, right. What’s the new name? I keep forgetting,” I said.

  Leland snarled over his shoulder, “What’s my name, Scottie?”

  Scottie Heep is so thick and squat that when he puts his fists on his hips you could mistake him for a fire hydrant. I think Scottie would really like to get into more trouble than he does, but he can’t figure out how, so he hangs around with Leland, who is really full of rotten, mean ideas.

  “ ‘Cougar’!” Scottie announced. “It’s ‘Cougar’ now.”

  Leland backed me up against the wall. “Can you say that? ‘Cougar.’ Say it. ‘Cooooo-ger.’ ”

  In that moment, I actually stopped to think: What if I did? What if I called Leland “Cougar”? Would he stop smacking me around? Would he like me, even a little bit?

  And would that mean we were friends? Me and Cougar?

  And, of course, Scottie would be included as part of the deal.

  Wow. TWO friends. Just by saying one word. It was worth a shot.

  But before I could speak, someone behind Leland . . . I mean, Cougar . . . asked: “Do you even know how to spell ‘cougar’?”

  I recognized that voice. Unfortunately.

  Leland turned very slowly.

  Jennifer Mobley’s braces glinted under the fluorescent bulbs overhead.

  Now, if anybody ever gave Jennifer a nickname, it would have to be “Red,” because she’s so . . . red. She’s got red freckles all over her pinkish face, she’s got red eyelashes, and she’s got curly red hair that looks like it exploded out of her skull one day and she never managed to pull it back in.

  But people don’t give nicknames to people like Jennifer and me, unless they’re the kinds of nicknames that you’d really rather not have.

  “Your name is ‘Leland,’ ” Jennifer explained to him, as if she were talking to a puppy. “ ‘Cougar’ is just plain dumb.”