She writes Group Guidance Norms across the top of the chart paper.
“Ideas? Anyone?”
Candace starts. “Don’t talk unless you have the wand. Respect the wand.” I roll my eyes even though I’m trying to be nicer to her. Why does she need to be in Group Guidance anyway? Because she puts her head down on the table sometimes? She’s probably the nice kid they threw in with us so we wouldn’t fail. Teachers always put a good kid in every group. Otherwise crap never gets done.
Ms. Gloria writes down Respect the wand! on the chart paper.
“Respect each other too,” Candace adds. “No laughing at what someone says.”
Ms. Gloria writes that one down. “Anyone else?”
I look at Oscar and realize I don’t think I’ve heard him say one word since Ms. Meg introduced him to our class the day he moved here from Brooklyn. That’s where the Dodgers are from, but when the Dodgers moved they went to Los Angeles, not to Vermont like Oscar. I don’t know why he has to be here either. Maybe every group needs a good kid who raises her hand a lot like Candace and a quiet kid like Oscar who will balance everything out.
Alex is the bully. And I’m the kid who won’t let him get away with it.
“Robinson?” Ms. Gloria asks. “What do you think is important to a group conversation? Can you add to our list?”
I want to tell her that I don’t think group conversations are important at all, but I just sit there.
Ms. Gloria would wait me out forever because that’s what she does, but Candace jumps in. “Eye contact!” Ms. Gloria writes it down.
By the end we have a list. Candace basically created the whole thing, but Ms. Gloria makes us read it over together and sign it on the bottom, which means that we agree to stick to the norms. The list looks like this:
GROUP GUIDANCE NORMS
1. Respect the wand!
2. Respect each other. No laughing at anyone else.
3. Use eye contact when someone is speaking.
4. Be present. Listen to what others are saying even if you’re not sharing.
5. Everything we say stays in the room.
6. Passing is OK.
alex carter
Candace Barnes
Oscar Oates
Robinson Hart
Ms. Gloria
Number six was mine. I mumbled it out when Ms. Gloria was capping the licorice marker. That way I won’t have to say stupid crap.
“Today we’ll just do a group check-in, and next time we’ll be able to have a longer conversation.”
Ms. Gloria explains how we’ll pass the talking wand around and each say how we’re feeling today on a scale of one to ten. If we want, we can say more about why we’re feeling that number.
Candace starts. “I’m a five.”
She’s looking down at the wand. I’m wondering how someone so nice can only be a five. And then I’m wondering why she isn’t saying more about why she feels like a five. She likes to share. But she isn’t.
Then Alex laughs and mumbles something under his breath. I’m pretty sure I hear what he says and I think it’s how Candace is chubby so she could never be a ten, and my fists tighten into balls, but Ms. Gloria speaks up while I take three deep breaths and loosen my hands.
“Are you having trouble with the norms already?” Ms. Gloria asks. “You just laughed at someone else and talked without the talking wand.” She keeps staring right at him with her no-nonsense look. Finally it’s Alex Carter that gets that look instead of me.
Candace passes the wand to Ms. Gloria, who says she’s an eight. “There are a couple of things troubling my mind, but overall I’m really happy to be starting this group today.” Then she passes the wand to Oscar.
“Five,” he says, but it’s almost like a whisper, so I still don’t even really know what his voice sounds like.
“What?” Alex jumps in. “No one can ever hear you.”
And I should be taking three deep breaths and waiting for the talking wand, but I can’t. “Maybe he’d be more than a five if you weren’t such a jerk,” I snap.
Ms. Gloria glares at Alex like she could cut him with her eyes, and I wish she would. Then she glares at me too like I did something wrong, which I didn’t, except talk without the stupid purple glitter wand.
“Robinson—” Ms. Gloria tries, but even her no-nonsense stare won’t stop me, or the fact that I don’t have some talking wand.
“Ms. Gloria, Alex threw those balls of paper in Oscar’s hair in Ms. Meg’s room!”
“Did not!” Alex screams like the baby he is.
Oscar shakes his head back and forth and runs his hands through his hair. It’s raining paper balls on the floor beneath him.
“I watched him do it!” I never tattle on people, but I’m so mad at Alex and I’m sick of him getting away with everything.
“I saw it too,” Candace says, quiet and nice and to her hands, and now I’m starting to feel OK because even Candace is breaking the norms.
“See?” I shout.
Ms. Gloria almost never raises her voice, so when she does we all go paralyzed.
“Enough!” she yells. “Alex, if this is true, I think it’s time for a little meeting with your mom.” He tries to whine something back, but she talks right over him. “And I want you all to look at your signatures. You signed this list of norms.” She takes a deep breath and points at where we signed the chart paper. “Unless your word and your name mean nothing, I expect you to follow them.”
And I want to yell back that my name does mean something, which is why people better say it right, but that’s against the norms, and Robinson Hart is written right there near the bottom of the list.
Oscar passes the talking wand to Alex.
“Nine-point-five,” he says with his prissy little mouth, like he’s better than everyone else and his life is so perfect.
Then he passes the wand across to me. I’m about to say that he’d be a ten if his nose didn’t look like a tie-dyed green-and-purple monster bulging out from his face. But I don’t because I think it breaks norm number two, and I don’t want my grandpa coming in here today to shake his head for anything at all. But Alex deserves it.
I’m really feeling like a two, but I say, “Pass.”
It’s nobody’s business how I’m feeling, or that I can’t forget my grandpa’s scared face when he wandered off and that we have to do this stupid family tree project, which is making me feel more like a zero.
And I know what Ms. Gloria is trying to do. She’s trying to push us to all get along and bond and be nice and make friends because she’s like Grandpa and she thinks that there’s sweetness at everyone’s core, like a maple tree. But there’s not. There’s definitely not sweetness at Alex’s core and not at mine either. I don’t know what my core is made of except maybe Grandpa’s one-quarter, but it’s not all syrupy sweet, that’s for sure. It’s not like the center of a perfect sugar maple. It’s tight like a knotted piece of firewood, gnarled and hard to chop through.
chapter 10
Once school is out, I’m close to a ten because I’m at the garage and Grandpa says I’m on my own with the 2012 Dodge Grand Caravan that’s driving in right now. He’s never let me talk to the customers on my own before. That’s always been him or Harold, but Harold’s at the hospital because the baby he’s adopting is due this week and he’s going with the birth mother to her doctor’s appointment.
Grandpa’s already busy working on a Subaru, so he points to the Dodge Grand Caravan and says, “All yours,” and I think he might be giving me a test to see how I do.
“Hear carefully,” Grandpa says, and I know he means listen carefully, but sometimes he changes his words around so they sound wrong, and I wonder if that’s why he’s letting me talk to the customers now instead of him. Because I can keep my words straight. And before I know it, I’m not a ten anymore because I’m thinking of him getting all mixed up and turned around and how it’s probably my fault that I’m making his memory more tired.
As soon as the van parks, the back door slides open and three little kids tumble out and rush past me. They’re all bright, feathery blond and having an imaginary sword fight, dodging between the parked cars in the lot. Their jackets are unzipped and falling off their shoulders, but they don’t even seem to notice.
“Get over here!” their mom screams, and slams her door. First I see her leather high-heeled boots making pockmarks in the old melting snow like a freshly aerated outfield, and before I look up and see her flowy blond hair I know it’s Alex’s mom. She adjusts her scarf, sees me, and says, “Oh Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding.”
That’s exactly what I’m thinking.
Of course the first time Grandpa lets me talk to the customer it has to be her. And I’m not sure I have a good foot to put forward here, but I can’t run in and get Grandpa because then he won’t let me help him fix the car, or worse, he won’t remember Alex’s mom, and he’ll get embarrassed and let his words wander off, so I just have to try.
“Hi, Mrs. Carter,” I say. “What seems to be the problem with your car?”
“You can’t work here,” she huffs. “Aren’t you ten?”
“Eleven.” But what I want to say is what the crap does it matter how old I am if you can’t fix your car and I can? “I’ve been fixing cars since I was six.”
Now her kids are jumping up on the bumper of the van and launching themselves as far as they can into the parking lot’s melting slush. She tells them to stop, but they don’t listen. Guess no kid in that family knows how to listen. And I’m wondering where Alex is and why he isn’t with them, not that I’m complaining. He probably went home to ice his busted nose.
“The last time I brought my car here I worked with a nice man named Harold.”
“He’s not here today. But I am, and I’d like to get started diagnosing the problem with your car, if that’s all right with you.” I put my fists on my hips and start counting to ten so that only nice things come out of my mouth.
She crosses her arms, huffs again, and juts her chin toward the Caravan. “The check engine light is on.”
I think about what Harold would say next. “I’d be happy to take a look at that for you. Do you mind moving it into the garage so I can begin working?” Even though I know how to drive all kinds of cars, even standard shift, no eleven-year-old has a license, so I can’t let Mrs. Carter know that Grandpa sometimes lets me. Then she’ll think he’s even more unfit to raise me, which is bull because I’m a better driver than half the adults on the road.
She sighs and mumbles, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” again, then shoves her kids back in through the sliding door of the van and backs out of the parking space. I push the automatic door opener, and she drives in through the big garage doors to the first bay, where I have everything I need to figure out what’s wrong with her car.
The kids tumble back out and I tell Mrs. Carter she can wait inside in our lounge. “It should only take a minute.”
“I want someone else to check your work,” Mrs. Carter tells me. “I’m not relying on some eleven-year-old.” I clamp down hard on my back teeth as she pushes her monster children through the doors to the lounge inside, where I know they will bounce off the couches. Two of the kids are identical twins. The third one is smaller. All boys. All blond and flowy and not listening.
I want to yell after her and say that her car is in good hands, even if they are eleven-year-old hands, that my hands can fix anything, including her stupid son’s stupid attitude, and if she wants me to readjust another one of her kids to just send him on out. Instead I take a deep breath and turn toward the van.
Grandpa’s installing new windshield wipers on the Subaru Outback across the garage, and he walks over when Mrs. Carter takes her kids inside. “Good job, Robbie,” he says. “What’d she say was the program?”
I know he means problem, not program. Since he wandered off into the sugar maples, his memory’s been more tired than usual, even during the day, and I wish he would just rest so everything could come back to him.
“Check engine light is on.”
“Know what to do?” he asks.
“I got it, Grandpa.”
The scan tool is black and yellow and looks like a big cell phone with a long wire attached. When I plug it into Mrs. Carter’s van, it will give me a code and tell me exactly what’s wrong.
I open the driver’s door of the van and slide into Mrs. Carter’s seat. It feels weird to be in Alex Carter’s car. It’s sort of like when I see Ms. Meg or Mr. Danny or Ms. Gloria at Dean and Walt’s country store and it feels all wrong, like I’m peeping in on a part of their life that I’m not supposed to see.
White towels line the backseat, and they’re covered with muddy paw prints and black hair, and that makes me hate Alex Carter even more because he has a dog and I’ve always wanted one, but Grandpa says no, he doesn’t need one more thing to take care of. Alex will probably put his dog on his family tree.
When I turn back around to plug in the scan tool, I knock a plastic bag from the console and it spills all over the passenger floor, and I’m thinking this is exactly when Mrs. Carter is going to come out and check to see how the eleven-year-old is doing with her car, so I shove everything back in the bag fast. A huge pack of M&Ms, some kind of makeup with a big black brush, and lots of bottles of pills that rattle when I pick them up and look like the kind of bottle I got when I had strep throat. I want to look closer and figure out what’s in the bottles and why there are so many but I know I’ll get caught peeping where I don’t belong, so I put the bag back on the front seat and try to forget about it.
I keep my eye on Grandpa in the next bay while I plug in the scan tool and wait for its code. The new windshield wipers are on the Subaru, and now Grandpa’s head is under the hood. I know I shouldn’t be worried because his brain is hardwired for cars. Just like mine. But I keep thinking that he might just drift off again.
The tool beeps and I read the code. It’s something with her gas cap, which is the best-case scenario and should be an easy fix. I pull the lever down by my feet and the gas tank door pops open. I’m sliding out of the driver’s seat to go check out the tank when I hear Harold’s voice.
“What’re you working on, Robbie?” He’s got on regular clothes, not his navy blue jumpsuit with Harold stitched over his heart.
“What are you wearing?”
He hits the brim of my hat, laughs, and tells me he didn’t want to dress like a schlub when he was going to see his baby’s birth mom in the hospital. “I don’t want her to think her baby’s going to some greaseball.”
“But you are a greaseball,” I kid him.
He looks at me like I have a point and says, “She doesn’t have to know that.” Then we laugh together.
“When is the baby coming?”
“Any day!” He beams, and he’s crossing his fingers.
“Cool,” I say, but I’m already sick of talking about baby stuff. “I have to check out this gas tank.”
Grandpa makes his way over and shakes Harold’s hand as I open the gas tank door.
“Easy!” I shout because I love when I’ve solved the problem, when I figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it. It’s that snap-into-place feeling. “The gas cap is missing.”
Harold gives me a fist bump and Grandpa nods his head. “A-plus, Robbie.”
Harold comes with me when I go inside, where Mrs. Carter is waiting with her kids, but he lets me tell her what I found out about her van. The twins are doing a cartwheel contest across the lounge, and the littlest one is wrapped around Mrs. Carter’s ankle and crying.
It’s kind of hard to talk, or think, because they’re so annoying, but I focus on the de
ep grooves that run across her forehead, the grooves like Grandpa’s, and I tell her, “It’s an easy fix. Your gas cap is missing.” I’m trying to tell her how important something so small as a gas cap is because it helps maintain pressure within the fuel tank and how she’s probably not getting her best gas mileage because she’s losing fuel through evaporation, but she doesn’t even care. She cuts me off.
“Oh, good God. I bet I left it on top of the car last time I filled up.”
Harold goes to find a replacement cap and says it’s on the house.
“Thank you,” she says to him. “I don’t think I could have handled one more bit of bad news.” And I see those lines on her forehead cut deeper.
Then she walks out, lugging her youngest kid with each right step while the twins run past her and push through the doors to the lot, where Grandpa is parking her car.
We’re watching Mrs. Carter shove her kids in the sliding door and scream at them to buckle up. One of the twins keeps popping out of the door and dancing wild in the parking lot. When she finally gets everyone in and buckled and drives away, I remember the bag of pill bottles rattling across the floor of her car and I wonder again what they’re for.
“You sure you want kids?” I ask Harold.
He puts his arm around me and says, “Yeah. I’m sure.” And if he still wants a baby after seeing those crazy monsters, then he must really want a baby.
We’re looking out the window and watching Grandpa walk back from the parking lot, and I want to tell Harold about how Grandpa wandered away Friday night and almost got lost up in the woods. And how I think Grandpa’s check engine light is on and I don’t know how to figure out what’s wrong. But I hope it’s something as easy as a missing gas cap. And that we can get a new one, on the house, and drive off all fixed.
But I don’t tell Harold because what if it’s something more serious? Not just a missing gas cap, but he’s got too many miles on him, or tough terrain has worn down his struts. So I just stay quiet and let Harold put his arm around me and keep thinking about how Grandpa’s the only branch on my family tree and how we don’t even look like we belong in the same orchard, and how Harold will be getting a kid soon. One he asked for.
Just Like Jackie Page 5
