by Lisa Yee
“That’s very cool, Bobby.” Mrs. Carlson nodded. “But I want to know something about you. For example, what do you like to do when you’re alone?”
Bobby thought so hard his eyebrows almost touched. “Well, sometimes I practice writing my name. I try different lettering so it looks sort of fancy.”
“I can tell that you’re very artistic,” Mrs. Carlson said. “We’ll be painting murals soon. I’ll bet you’re going to be great at that!”
Bobby smiled. Fourth grade was a million times better than third grade.
The first week of school sped by. By Thursday afternoon, besides all their regular work, the students of Room 15 had learned how to say “hello” in five different languages: ciao, shalom, nei hao, hola, jambo. Plus, they found out why elections were important, and that teachers sometimes snorted when they laughed. Bobby liked Mrs. Carlson more every day.
“How’s Rover?” Holly asked as they walked to school on Friday morning. She was munching on a Cinnamon Crunchy Toasty Oatsie cereal bar.
“Fine,” Bobby answered. He gazed longingly at her Toasty Oatsie. He had choked down burnt French toast and runny eggs for breakfast.
“Well, is he doing anything new?”
“Holly, Rover is a fish,” Bobby reminded her. “Not a dog. Fish are fish. They don’t do anything but swim around.”
Holly shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe Rover has hidden talents.” She popped the last of the Toasty Oatsie into her mouth.
“If he does anything special,” Bobby assured her, “I’ll be sure to tell you first.”
The Parting Place was just ahead. This time Holly sped up and Bobby slowed down. They had to be careful. The other day they had almost run into St. James doing wheelies while riding his bike to school. St. James hated girls even more than he hated lima beans — and he really hated lima beans.
That afternoon, when Bobby’s classmate Jackson was at the board adding up whole numbers, he made a strange burping noise. His eyes widened and then he opened his mouth and threw up his lunch — spaghetti. When St. James announced, “It looks like bloody worms,” several students started screaming. Then another boy puked, and Bobby had to hold his nose with one hand and cover his mouth with the other.
“If anyone needs to step outside,” Mrs. Carlson said calmly, “you have my permission.”
All at once the entire class stampeded toward the door. That sort of excitement had never happened in Mrs. Woods’s class.
After school, Bobby had permission to hang out with Chess. They decided to hop all the way to Chess’s house in hopes of breaking the world record for hopping. But their attempt came to a quick end when they ran into Jillian Zarr and Holly hogging the sidewalk.
“Move,” Chess said.
“You move,” Jillian Zarr shot back. “We were here first.”
“We’re breaking a world record,” Bobby said as he hopped up and down. It was getting tiring and they hadn’t even gone one block.
“Really?” said Holly. She looked intrigued.
“Are you going to move or not?” Chess asked. He was out of breath.
“Or not,” Jillian Zarr said. “Holly and I aren’t budging, are we, Holly?”
“I guess not,” she said, sounding uncertain.
Bobby’s backpack was starting to get heavy. “Come on, Holly, move or else.”
“Or else what?” Holly asked.
“Or else this!” Bobby yelled. To be funny, he threw his jacket at her.
“Ouch!” The zipper from the jacket had scratched Holly’s face. “Bobby?!”
Before Bobby could apologize, Jillian Zarr was telling Holly, “See, I told you boys were mean. I don’t know why you even bother to talk to that Bobby person. Let’s get out of here.”
Hopping for the world record didn’t seem nearly as much fun as when they first started. After a while, Chess and Bobby gave up hopping and instead just jumped whenever the mood hit them. At first it bothered Bobby that Holly was mad at him, but he quickly forgot about the fight when Chess’s new dog, Wilbur, ran over to greet them. Bobby’s stomach made such a loud rumbling sound that Wilbur yelped and backed away.
“Sorry,” Bobby apologized to the dog. “I didn’t eat lunch.” His father had packed a big bag of burnt cookies and a sandwich that smelled like butter pickles and old sneakers.
“Saffron can make you a peanut butter sandwich,” Chess offered. Saffron was the college girl who was supposed to watch Chess after school, but instead mostly watched soap operas.
“As long as it’s not the crunchy kind of peanut butter,” Bobby said, making a face. St. James had once said that the crunchy parts were cockroaches. Bobby didn’t believe him, but still … it was probably best to be safe.
They went into the house and said hello to Saffron, then waited for a commercial so she could fix Bobby his sandwich. As he sat on the porch and devoured it, Bobby watched Chess chase Wilbur. Then Wilbur chased Chess. Then they both ran in circles and started all over again.
Bobby’s heart swelled with longing when he gazed at Wilbur. He had patches of fur missing and one leg seemed considerably shorter than the rest. Still, he could catch a Frisbee and chase squirrels. He came when you called him and stayed put when you told him to. Wilbur was the finest dog Bobby had ever met.
“What kind of dog is he?” Bobby yelled to his friend. He was guessing that Wilbur was a rare breed like an Akbash or even a Tyrolean Hound.
“A mutt,” Chess answered. He slowed down and plucked some brown leaves from Wilbur’s fur. “Mutts are good.”
Bobby nodded. Mutts were good. After all, wasn’t he a mutt? Mrs. Carlson had said that immigrants from all over the world helped create the United States, and America was a melting pot of many races. Bobby had scribbled an equation in his notebook:
“Why’d you name him Wilbur?” Bobby asked.
“Well, I wasn’t about to name him Charlotte. So it was either Wilbur or Templeton, but that’s the name of a rat,” Chess explained. Bobby nodded. Mrs. Woods had read Charlotte’s Web aloud to the class last year. Chess loved the story so much that his mother bought him his own copy of the book.
The boys watched Wilbur scratch behind his ears with his hind leg. It looked easy, but when they tried to scratch their own ears with their feet, they fell over.
“So you named him after a pig instead?” Bobby asked as he sat up.
“Wilbur’s a phenomenal name,” Chess said defensively. Though he was small, Chess loved using big words.
“If I ever got a dog,” Bobby said, “I was going to name him Rover, but that’s my fish’s name. So now I think I’d name my dog Galileo instead.” He pictured himself running on the beach in slow motion with Galileo at his side.
“How is Rover?” Chess asked.
“Okay,” Bobby answered.
“Fish are cool,” Chess said as he threw a tennis ball. It didn’t go far. “Ichthyology can be interesting.”
“Whatever.” Bobby watched Wilbur drop the ball at Chess’s feet. “I’d like to see Rover do that,” he said. “All he does is swim around all day.”
“Poor Rover,” Chess said, shaking his head. “That must be awfully boring for him.”
Bobby paused. He had never thought of that.
“Here,” Chess said as he grabbed Wilbur. “Take him. He doesn’t bite that hard.”
Bobby shook his head. If he touched anything with fur, the wheezing would start, and he’d end up having another asthma attack. “Sorry, Wilbur,” he apologized. “I can’t. I’m allergic to fur.”
Yet, when Wilbur drooled and looked up with his wet brown eyes, Bobby found it impossible to resist. The dog’s tail wagged so fast it looked like a windshield wiper gone crazy. Bobby reached out a hand….
* * *
“Da-Da-Doo, Da-Da-Doo, what about you?”
It was 4:30 P.M., so Princess Becky’s Planet was blasting from the television. A steady mist of asthma medicine filled Bobby’s nebulizer mask as he inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled. Bo
bby imagined that he was an astronaut as he listened to his own breathing.
Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
The machine made a loud, comforting humming sound. Though Bobby hated his nebulizer, he also knew it helped him stop coughing and wheezing, and that if he sat still long enough, the medicine would make his chest stop aching.
Inhale, exhale.
Mr. Ellis-Chan whistled as he wandered into the living room. He had a roll of paper towels tucked under one arm like a football. Casey sat up on the ledge of the couch behind her brother. “Bobby, look! I have curlers. Want to play beauty shop?”
“No,” he said.
Inhale, exhale, inhale.
“Okay! Here we go,” Casey squealed as she began putting pink curlers in Bobby’s hair.
“I said ‘no,’ ” Bobby repeated as he tried to bat her away. But Casey could not be stopped, and he couldn’t just get up and leave since he was still on his nebulizer — and it was plugged into the wall. Finally Bobby gave up and watched Princess Becky as his sister filled his hair with curlers.
Just as Da-Da-Doo was about to blow magical bubbles to stop the Terrible Teeny Tiny Trolls, the doorbell rang. Bobby didn’t bother to take his eyes off of the television. It was probably Annie. She was always forgetting her key.
“Bobby?” Holly stood in the doorway, holding his jacket. “I think this belongs to you.” Bobby couldn’t tell if she was yelling to be heard over the nebulizer or if she was still mad at him. Holly had a Band-Aid on her face where the zipper had hit her.
Guilt tugged at him. Bobby said thank you, but he tripped over his tongue and it came out sounding like “sank woooo.”
Holly giggled. “See you later, Bobby. I like your hair!”
Bobby tore off his nebulizer mask. Several curlers flew through the air. “Holly! I can explain!” he yelled, his voice rising. But it was too late. She was gone.
The next morning, Holly was waiting in front of her house for Bobby as usual. Much to his relief, she didn’t look mad anymore, and she didn’t mention the curlers.
“Another new dress?” Bobby asked. This one was lemon-colored and sported a flower that almost looked real.
“Thanks for noticing,” Holly said. “Hey, did you bring that picture?”
Bobby pulled a photo out of his backpack. It was from Grammy and Gramps. They had finally gotten around to developing the film from their trip. In the photo, Bobby and his grandparents were all doing jumping jacks on a pier at Moro Bay. Bobby’s eyes lingered on the picture.
“You miss them, don’t you?” Holly asked.
“Yeah,” Bobby admitted. He kicked a pebble into the street. There were some things he could tell Holly and not Chess, like how much Grammy and Gramps meant to him. Chess hardly ever saw his grandparents, and when he did, he tried to get away from them. “They act like zombies and smell like them too,” he insisted.
As Holly handed the photo back, Bobby noticed something odd. “Hey, Holly, what’s with your hands?”
“Pink Bubblegum nail polish.” Holly wiggled her fingers in his face.
Bobby shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no!” He wondered if she had been zombified. “What’s happening to you?”
Holly stopped walking. “Bobby, why are you getting all weird? It’s just nail polish. Sheesh!”
“Dresses? Nail polish? Your hair?” he protested. “If you’re not careful, you’ll turn into a girl!”
Instead of thanking him for the warning, Holly balled up her fist and brought it inches away from Bobby’s face. He couldn’t see her nail polish anymore. Her eyes narrowed and her nose scrunched. “For your information, Robert, I am a girl!”
They walked to the Parting Place in silence as Bobby tried to figure out what had just happened. All he had done was try to be helpful.
The next day, Bobby complimented Holly by telling her that her dress looked like an upside-down mushroom. Yet this only seemed to get her mad again. It didn’t help that later St. James said it was “the color of poo” and Bobby laughed.
Later, in class, Mrs. Carlson put a poster of the solar system up on the wall. “Who can name all of the planets?” she asked as she pushed in the last thumbtack.
Bobby knew his planets backward, forward, and sideways, but as much as he wanted to answer, he couldn’t bring himself to raise his hand. He hoped Mrs. Carlson would call on him. He tried to look smart and eager to answer the question.
St. James yelled, “Girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider!”
Half the class broke out laughing. The other half shot alien death stares at St. James.
Mrs. Carlson lowered her voice. “St. James, perhaps you’d like to apologize to the girls.”
“Girls, girls, girls,” St. James said. “I am so totally truly absolutely sorry.” He covered his mouth in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his smirk.
Mrs. Carlson announced that the class would split up into groups to create murals of the solar system. A short time later the classroom was bustling. Colorful bottles of tempera paints came out of the supply closet and butcher paper unfurled across the floor. Bobby was in the Blue Group. He was in charge of Mars. It was his favorite planet. He imagined friendly Martians frolicking with their two-headed dogs.
Bobby poured a big glob of red paint into a paper cup and plunged his brush into it. It looked like a twister as he swirled it around. Swirling, swirling, swirling, faster, faster, faster. He looked around to see who else was having as much fun as he was, when —
“Look at my dress!” Holly cried. “You’ve ruined it!” Sure enough, red paint was splattered across the front of Holly’s dress. Several girls crowded around her and started clucking like chickens. Before Bobby could say anything, Holly huffed away.
Jillian Zarr sidled up to him and wagged her finger in Bobby’s face. “We’re going to keep an eye on you,” she threatened. “You’re bad news!”
St. James slapped him on the back. “Bad News Bobby — I like that!”
At recess, St. James and Jackson joined Bobby and Chess as they ran in circles and tried to make themselves dizzy. After everyone had fallen down at least twice, Jackson suggested, “Let’s play Arctic ice robots!”
“What’s that?” Chess asked.
“You know,” Jackson explained. “It’s where we’re frozen robots and can’t move. We have to be as still as possible.”
Bobby relished the challenge. The only time he was still on purpose was when he slept. But even then, every morning his sheets were tangled around him like he had been in battle — and lost. He noticed that Holly was nearby with Jillian Zarr and her friends. Last year in Mrs. Woods’s class, Bobby did a report on wolves. He had learned that wolves were social creatures that traveled in packs and were rarely seen alone. The girls reminded Bobby of a wolf pack.
As the boys tried to be as still as statues, the girls circled, getting dangerously closer with each pass. Bobby was holding his left foot high in the air and his arms out to the side. He wanted to shout at them to stay away, but he was frozen, just like the rest of the guys.
Bobby saw Holly approaching him. She brushed past his foot, knocking him down accidentally-on-purpose. “Oops, sorry,” she said, giggling. Jillian Zarr gave Holly a nod of approval.
“You are not sorry,” Bobby grumbled as he got up. He would have won the Arctic ice robot contest; he was sure of that. “You did that on purpose!”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”
Bobby rubbed his elbow. Was he bleeding? “You should apologize,” he said, scowling. His elbow really hurt.
“NO!” Holly yelled. Her intensity surprised him. “YOU should apologize!”
“For what?”
“For ruining my dress!” Holly looked like she was about to cry. “My grandma made this.”
Her dress did look pretty bad, all splotched with red. Bobby started to say something, but St. James stepped in. “He doesn’t owe you an apology. You owe him one for knocking him over on purpose!”
Ho
lly straightened up. When had she gotten taller than Bobby? “Bobby’s the one who owes me an apology. Or is he too dumb to say, ‘I’m sorry’?”
“Yeah,” Jillian Zarr jumped in. “Bobby, you’re a wimp for not apologizing. You wimp, you big wimpy wimp! Why can’t you be stronger like your dad, or even your sisters?”
This was just too much. “Jillian Zarr, you’re nothing but a GIRL,” Bobby shouted. “And you too, Holly! You’re both dumb girls!”
Jillian Zarr shouted back so half the playground could hear, “Bobby, you’re the girl! YOU WEAR PINK CURLERS!”
Bobby felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. He was so stunned he couldn’t even speak.
Chess rushed to his defense. “Jillian Zarr, you’re a dunderhead!”
“Yeah,” St. James added, “whatever he said. Plus, you’re a big liar. Bobby doesn’t wear curlers. Liar, liar, liar! You’re worse than a liar. You’re … You’re a … You’re a booger-eating gorilla liar!”
That was all the boys needed to hear. They instantly switched from Arctic ice robots to gorillas. As they hopped around and pretended to eat their boogers, the girls fled, screaming.
“That showed them,” St. James said as he tried to make his knuckles drag on the ground.
“Indubitably,” Chess agreed.
While the guys congratulated one another, Bobby was silent. There was only one person who could have told Jillian Zarr about the curlers.
The next morning, Bobby skateboarded quickly past Holly’s house. When he got to the Parting Place, he kept going as if it never existed. As if Holly never existed.
“We’ve got a couple of big events coming up,” Mrs. Carlson announced as she shuffled through the papers on her desk. “Today we have a special assembly sponsored by the PTA, featuring Professor Science! And don’t forget the student council rep election in a few weeks, and before that we have our field trip to Huntington Gardens.” A cheer went up from both the boys and the girls. Mrs. Carlson smiled and passed out the yellow permission forms. “Your parents will need to fill this out….”
