“I’m not saying you can’t borrow it.” Pearl was lecturing Tamille. “I’m just saying you have to wait your turn. It’s because—” But before she could say why she deserved the book more, Shady tossed a handful of cracked corn near her feet.
Svenrietta started quacking. She flapped her wings frantically, trying to get the food, and her body lifted off the ground, but only a little. She isn’t much of a flyer.
“Oh my God! Get it away!” Pearl shrieked. She started kicking, but that only made Svenrietta more flustered and flappy. She does not like people getting in the way of her cracked corn. Then Pearl went and made it even worse by dropping her pile of books. One of them landed right on Svenrietta’s back. Thankfully, it was a paperback, but it still freaked her out pretty badly.
WAK! WAK! WAK!
Mrs. Patton came running over, and Pearl didn’t waste a second before going into tattletale mode.
“Mrs. Patton!” she wailed over the quacking. “Shady threw duck food near me, and then his duck started going crazy. We need to report this to Mrs. Mackie.”
Shady picked up Svenrietta. The second he had her in his arms, she settled right down.
“Shady, is that true?” Mrs. Patton asked.
Shady had been doing pretty great with yes and no answers lately, but now he went right back to the way he was before and couldn’t answer. I could tell from the way he looked down at the floor and how his shoulders tightened up that he was upset. Even just the idea of getting in trouble at school upsets Shady.
“Shady would never bring food into the library,” I said. At least, he’d never bring people food into the library.
I pointed to the floor, where the evidence was clearly in our favor. There wasn’t a single piece of cracked corn on the carpet (ducks are food vacuums), but there were graphic novels all over the place.
“She was quacking because Pearl dropped a book on her,” I said.
“Pearl,” Mrs. Patton said. “That could have hurt the duck. Try to be more careful, okay?” Mrs. Patton bent down and started picking up books. She placed them in a stack on the table for Pearl to finish shelving—which Pearl did, with a murderous look in her eye, shoving them in any which way.
Tamille went back to reading aloud to Svenrietta, but she’d only made it through another page or so when the bell rang.
“Hey!” Pearl shouted. She was down to just two books left to shelve. She held them both up. One had fairies on the front, and the other seemed to be about space. “Where’s Champions Club number seven?”
Nobody answered.
“It was here a minute ago. Who stole it?”
“Don’t look at me,” I said.
“Tamille!” Pearl accused. But Tamille held up her empty hands. She didn’t have a backpack with her either. Unless she ate it, she didn’t have the book.
“You probably put it on the shelf by accident,” I said.
Shady handed me the leash that he kept in Svenri’s diaper bag, and I reattached it to her harness while he went to put the sea-otter book in the returns bin.
“You want me to help you get to the sensory room?” I asked when he came back.
We were going to be playing jai alai in gym class that day. It’s a game where you bounce a ball against the wall with a scoop thing. Svenrietta hates the echoey noises of the balls slamming against the walls, and Shady can’t handle it either—so they were going to do a yoga video in the special needs room instead. But wherever Svenri went, Shady had to take all her stuff. Not just the diaper bag, but also her food and water.
Shady nodded, so we both headed to the sensory room with me carrying the food bag.
“All good?” I asked, once we’d set everything down on the foam mats beside the beanbag chairs. It was all stuff that Jackson Eriks’s grandparents fundraised for with an autism-awareness walk last year.
Shady nodded before plopping down into the hammock swing in the corner with Svenri in his lap. He twirled his feet lazily to twist the swing up in a knot. That was when I saw that he was grinning big-time.
“What?” I asked.
He lifted his feet and let the swing start to spin in circles, and as it twirled, he laughed…out loud. It was the funniest sound. Not because he laughed funny or anything—it wasn’t especially low or high or donkey-like. It was your average ha-ha-ha. I’d just never heard him do it before, so it sounded weird.
“What is it?” I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, too, even though I didn’t know what we were laughing about yet.
Shady stopped the swing with his feet, then leaned down, still smiling wide. He reached into Svenri’s diaper bag and pulled something out.
Champions Club #7.
“You stole it?”
Shady shook his head vigorously. He took out the due-date slip and pointed to his name on it. Fair point. You can’t steal a library book. They’re for everyone.
“Well, why’d you take it out? You don’t seriously want to read that, do you?”
I don’t have anything against horses, but Champions Club books are all about girls who are obsessed with gossiping about each other and winning trophies.
Shady stuck out his tongue like bleh so I knew he felt the same way. Then he bit his lip, seeming frustrated. There was more he wanted to tell me, but he couldn’t. He looked around the room, then held up one finger, like wait. I watched while he rooted through a bin of school supplies on the table and pulled out a pad of sticky notes. He handed me Svenri, who was getting heavy enough that it took two arms to hold her, then walked over to a big laminated poster on the wall. He started to sticky it up—which took a while—but, thankfully, the teacher supervisor who was supposed to watch him was running late.
STRATEGIES FOR TAKING CHARGE OF MY FEELINGS AND BEHAVIORS
Make a fist and squeeze hard.
Think about a safe place.
Count slowly for 20 breaths.
Squeeze or press down on something.
Give the teacher my “I need a break” card.
Draw a picture and write your feelings underneath.
This integrated education resource is brought to you by K.Y. Autism Awareness.
I stared at it, amazed. Taking charge of makin’ a safe place for the underducks. Not only was it cool that he’d found the words he needed in the poster, but I was pretty sure I understood now, and I liked the idea.
“You’re going to give the book to Tamille, right?”
He nodded.
“Because underducks are like underdogs!” I went on.
I’d learned that word not long ago. It meant someone who was never going to win because the odds were against them. Like Tamille, because she has to catch up to fifth-grade reading level in a whole other language, or me and Aisha, because our families can’t afford to buy forty pairs of socks for homeless people.
Actually, now that I thought of it, there were lots of underducks at Carleton Elementary—from the kids who lived in the big, rent-controlled apartment buildings in Summerside, like my family and Aisha’s; to the special-ed kids, like Shady because of his not-talking thing and Jackson Eriks and Aaron Somers-Thanning, who have autism; to boys like DuShawn Henry, who gets teased because he wears his hair long and likes dresses; to the ones who’ve just moved here from another place and don’t know the rules yet; to the ones whose families are a little different because they’ve got grandparents instead of parents, or two moms, or no mom at all—and we were all overdue for some better odds.
Taking charge of making a safe place for the underducks. Not only did it sound kind of fun—it was exactly the kind of mission that was worthy of our last three weeks on Earth.
“Killer move, Captain!” I held up my hand for a high five. Shady didn’t leave me hanging. Then he passed me the book hopefully.
“I’ll get it to Tamille,” I promised.
CHAPTER 9
The Underducks
Told by Manda
When Pascale and I ran the idea for our duckumentary past Mr. Maloney at F
ilm Fanatics club, he was completely on board. He even called Mrs. Mackie, the principal at Shady’s school, to ask if she’d grant us access to film there, and he got us time off from class to do it. We had two days and a lot of footage to gather, so we tried not to waste time setting up that first morning. Easier said than done though. The kids were all over us.
“Can I be in your movie?” a girl with red braids asked. “I acted once in a commercial for a shoe store.”
“What’s this button do?” Pascale had to swat away the hand of an overeager second grader who couldn’t take his eyes off the camera.
“Are you from Hollywood?” a wide-eyed, gap-toothed kindergartner asked.
“Okay, Zach. Come put your backpack away.” His teacher guided him toward the coat hooks, but the whole time he was watching us over his shoulder with his mouth hanging open.
“Let’s get a few establishing shots,” I suggested as the hallway emptied out. “Maybe some of these little snow boots and a few turkey crafts.” I pointed to a bulletin board that hadn’t been updated since Thanksgiving. “Stuff that screams ‘elementary school.’”
“Good idea.” Pascale loosened her scarf like she was ready to get down to business.
She held the portable LED light as I panned the handheld, high-definition camera slowly down the hallway. It was undeniable: we made a great team. Right from the concept, “a day in the life of a service duck,” to the execution, “strictly observational with narration, no interviews,” to the style, “dramatic but with a goofy, educational edge—like film noir meets Sesame Street,” we saw eye to eye.
It also helped that, right from the start, Shady was comfortable around Pascale. She never teased him or made a thing of it when he didn’t answer her questions or only answered them in his own way. The star of the show thought Pascale was pretty awesome too. Although that might have been because she started carrying a bag of peas in her pocket.
“Just keep panning until you get to the classroom door.” Pascale walked a few steps ahead while staying just out of the shot. She peered in the door of Room 9. “Then you can come in tight for a shot of Svenri sitting on Shady’s desk wearing…a tiny elf hat? For some reason?” Pascale said those last two parts like questions, but not in a weirded-out way. She seemed to take everything in stride—no matter what kind of odd things Shady and Pouya did—and they were definitely doing something odd that day. In fact, I might not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes and filmed it with my own camera.
I got the shot, then handed the camera to Pascale so she could review the footage on the display.
“Oh,” I said as I watched Mrs. Okah pick up a wrapper a kid had dropped on the carpet. “Svenri’s wearing the elf hat because it’s CandyGrams day.”
It had been almost five years since I’d been a student at Carleton Elementary. You’d think I would have overcome the trauma, but the sight of Pearl Summers and a bunch of other high-ponytailed popular girls walking up and down the aisles with big stockings full of little folded cards (each with a small candy cane stapled inside) still gave me the shivers.
“What’s CandyGrams?” Pascale asked with her eyes still on the camera display.
“It’s basically a Christmas popularity contest,” I explained. “Friends buy little candy canes for each other for twenty-five cents each. Then when they get delivered the next day, all the loners get to feel like nobodies because they don’t get any.”
I’d been there, done that. Especially after my best friend, Meghan, moved away halfway through fifth grade. Only—something was different this year. All the CandyGrams had been passed out, and Mrs. Okah was already partway into a lesson about words with silent letters before I figured out what it was: every single kid in the room was either sucking on a mini candy cane or had one on their desk. Some of them were different though. They looked like the cherry-flavored ones (the good kind), and nobody seemed to be on the verge of tears.
Then, as we were packing up our equipment to follow Svenrietta and the rest of the class to the music room, I overheard a boy named Jackson, who was sucking on a cherry candy cane, ask a girl named Aisha: “What’s your card say?”
“‘What do you call a duck that steals?’” she read slowly and carefully from her CandyGram.
“What?” he asked.
“‘A robber duck.’” She smiled, then read the rest. “‘Happy holidays from Svenrietta.’ How about yours?”
“‘What do you see when a duck bends over?’” He was already grinning from ear to ear. “Its butt quack.”
I heard a familiar burst of laughter from across the room. So familiar that it made my breath catch in my throat. It couldn’t be. But when I looked up, it definitely was…
Shady was sitting at his desk, doubled over—snort-laughing like the time our dad walked into the screen door with a plate of hamburgers. Meanwhile, Pouya was yukking it up beside him.
“What?” Pouya said when he caught me staring. “It’s funny!”
Shady managed to catch his breath, only to crack up again.
Was this honestly the same kid who’d been too anxious to even smile when class photos had been taken a few months before?
After music—where Svenrietta joined in by pecking at the triangle Shady was playing—the bell rang for recess, and things got weirder. Most of the kids rushed out, but Pascale and I stayed behind with Shady and Pouya to get shots of my brother putting on Svenrietta’s duck boots (another thing my mom read about on a message board and ordered online, since now, besides selective mutism message boards, she was also a lurker on duck-care forums). After that, Shady had to get Svenri settled into her sling. By the time we got out, recess was almost half over.
“It’s so pretty,” Pascale remarked.
It really was. The snow was coming down in big, fat flakes and had already completely covered the cracked concrete of the playground. Seen from a distance, anyway, there was something sweet and innocent about the scene—all those kids in their bright scarves and hats, laughing and running around. But it only took a second for the illusion to shatter.
One big kid in a gray coat and another wearing an orange hat came charging across the yard toward a snowman that a couple of little kids were building.
“Hiiiyah!” Gray Coat kicked the snowman in the head, then Orange Hat finished it off with a mitten-clad karate chop.
“Seriously, guys?!” Pascale yelled at them.
I shook my head, but I wasn’t surprised. Grade school hadn’t changed much after all.
That was when I felt Shady push past me. He marched straight toward the snowman.
“Yup. That’s what I was thinking too,” Pouya said as he followed. “Those kids are definite underducks.”
“Definite whats?” I asked, but Pouya was too far ahead to answer. Pascale and I had to run to catch up.
When we reached the snowman, one of the little girls was sitting on the ground with tears in her eyes. “Teacher!” she said plaintively to me. “They broke Mr. Snowy.”
“I’m not a teacher,” I said, but I was kind of flattered. Most people tell me I look young for my age.
“It’s okay.” Pouya offered a hand to help her up. “Look!” He packed some snow into his mitten. “It’s perfect snowman snow today. We’ll rebuild him. Even better than before. Right, Shady?”
My brother nodded, then took Svenri out of her sling and showed the girl how to gently stroke the duck’s head. She pulled off her mitten, and as she petted Svenri, she blinked her tears away. Her friend came over to see too.
It was amazing footage of a service duck in action, and Pascale and I got every second of it.
Meanwhile, Pouya was working in the background with a little boy to pat the snowman’s head back together. They were just finishing up when the big kid with the orange hat walked past. “Want to film us smashing it again?” he asked.
“Get lost!” I shouted, and I automatically stepped in front of my brother.
But Shady walked around me and st
ood in front. Then he set Svenrietta down in the snow and crossed his arms defiantly.
“Good idea,” Pouya said, coming to stand beside him. “We’ll guard it with our lives. Go pick on a snowperson your own size!” he shouted to the big kids.
Shady clapped twice, telling Svenrietta to stay close, then he began to lead her in a big circle around the snowman on her leash. Once the kids were a safe distance away, Pouya joined the march, defending the perimeter.
The kid with the gray coat pointed and laughed, but he didn’t come any closer, and when the class went out later to do a science unit on snowflakes as part of the water cycle, Mr. Snowy was still standing.
Then—and this was maybe the biggest deal of all—Shady raised his hand and pointed toward the hallway to ask to use the bathroom during final-period gym class. It meant we didn’t have to rush home right after school. Instead we took the long way, wandering down the main street through Summerside, filming as we went.
A family on their way home from school stopped to fuss over Svenrietta. Next, she sat for a while with a homeless man on the corner of Bloor and Sunnydale, letting him stroke her feathers. He told Shady and Pouya how he used to raise ducks and chickens on a farm when he was a kid. The memory made him smile widely, showing a broken front tooth. “You’re a good girl, aren’t ya?” he said to Svenri.
We went into a café and bought him a doughnut, and he clapped his hands when Svenri came toward him, carrying the bag in her bill. “Now that’s service!”
It was a good day. A really good day. One of the best I’d seen Shady have in, well, ages. Maybe ever.
Which made what happened next all the worse.
CHAPTER 10
Stealing the Show
Told by Pearl Summers
Elfina is the most important role in Santa’s Tree Trouble, this year’s holiday musical. Without her, Santa (played by Connor) would never realize the havoc being caused by Elves 1, 2, and 3 or learn to see the true beauty in the scraggly old pine tree (unfortunately, played by Pouya). Christmas would basically be ruined.
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