Absolutely Almost

by Lisa Graff

  Then again, maybe it was good she didn’t call on me. I don’t think Betsy likes things that are cool.

  • • •

  It happened at recess. Darren stole Betsy’s bug, right out of her hands. I saw it from where I was sitting, at the bench, showing the new girl Darissa my Captain Underpants book (which was what I normally read during recess, because of not having any friends). Well, first I heard Betsy shouting, and then I saw that Darren had the bug in the pickle jar, and then I figured out that he’d taken it.

  “G-g-g-give m-me that!” Betsy shouted.

  Darren was holding it high over his head, and Betsy was reaching for it, but she couldn’t get it. Sage and Candace and them were laughing.

  “M-m-make me!” Darren said.

  Betsy was trying not to cry, I could tell. Her hands were balled up into fists.

  I closed my book.

  I stood up.

  I left my Captain Underpants book on the bench with Darissa, and I went over.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do—try to make Darren give the bug back, I guess. I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to help Betsy so bad, because we weren’t friends anymore. She wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t even look at me. But Darren was being mean, and that wasn’t right. So I closed my book and I stood up and I went over there.

  I was too late.

  Before I even got there, Darren unscrewed the lid on the pickle jar, and the bug hopped right out. Betsy scrambled to catch it, but it was too fast. It was zoom, zoom, gone. Lost in the bushes.

  “Oops!” Darren said. But even I could tell it hadn’t been an accident.

  What was I supposed to do then?

  Darren and Sage and Candace and them walked away, laughing, and I picked the jar up off the grass and handed it to Betsy. It still had the twigs and grass in it.

  “Here,” I said.

  Betsy took it, but she didn’t look at me.

  She left the lid in the grass.

  • • •

  When we got back to class after recess, Darren’s desk was on the ground, toppled over. The papers were falling out everywhere, ripped and torn. His pencils were broken in half. Everyone stopped in the doorway and gasped.

  “Who did this?” Mrs. Rouse hollered at us. “Who would do such a thing? This is unacceptable.”

  We filed into the classroom slowly, one at a time, all staring at Darren and his desk. He was seething angry. Everyone was staring at Darren, shouting by his desk. “What the heck? What the heck?”

  I wasn’t staring at Darren, though. I looked over at Betsy. Her eyes were on the wall, not on Darren and his desk. She bit her bottom lip, the way she did when she was nervous, and she just blinked. Blink. Blink. Over and over.

  “Who did this?” Mrs. Rouse said again.

  “I did.”

  It was me who said it, even though it was a lie. I didn’t topple over anything.

  But I knew who did. And I didn’t really think that person should get in trouble when they weren’t the person who was mean in the first place.

  “Albie!” Mrs. Rouse shouted. She seemed shocked. “What got into you?”

  I glanced at Betsy. She seemed shocked too. “I, um . . .” I shrugged. “I was just angry, I guess.”

  Mrs. Rouse made me help Darren clean up his desk, and then she told me she’d let me know when she’d decided on an appropriate punishment for me. Detention, probably, or worse.

  I didn’t care. If I couldn’t help Betsy get her bug back, I figured making sure she didn’t get detention was the best I could do.

  I guess Betsy thought so too. When we were leaving for lunch, she said, “Albie?” really quiet.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Th-thanks,” she told me.

  I smiled, and Betsy smiled back. She held out her hand. Inside was a whole bag of gummy bears.

  I’m not totally sure, but I think maybe me and Betsy are friends again.

  lucky.

  That night we all ate dinner at home, at the table, because Grandpa Park was visiting. It was real dinner too—steak and potatoes and even a salad with homemade dressing, not from a bottle or anything. Mom made it, and Dad set the table, which was usually my job. When I told Dad that, he said I could be in charge of loading the dishwasher instead, and that made me grouchy, because I hate loading the dishwasher. But I tried not to look grouchy in front of Grandpa Park. Grandpa Park doesn’t like it when you’re grouchy.

  “So,” Grandpa Park said after he bit into his steak. “Albie.” He was talking with his mouth full, which I thought was something that was rude. But I guess when you’re a grandpa, you can do whatever you want. I cut my own steak and tried not to look at the chewed-up food in his mouth. “How’s Mountford?”

  My eyeballs shot up from my plate. But Mom answered before I could say anything.

  “Albie doesn’t go to Mountford anymore, Appa,” she told him. “You know that.” Appa is what she calls Grandpa Park, because that’s Korean for “Dad.” I asked him once if I should call him harabuji, because that’s what I thought Mom said the Korean word was for “grandfather.” But Grandpa Park just swirled his glass with a clink of ice and said, “Not with that accent.” So I stick to “grandpa.”

  “I most certainly did not know that,” Grandpa Park said, stabbing at a piece of steak with his knife. He didn’t even bother with the fork, just lifted the piece to his mouth and ate it right off the tip of the knife. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have asked about it. So.” He turned to look straight at me, and I shifted my stare down to my salad, which suddenly I didn’t want at all. “You’re no longer going to the fancy private school your parents have been struggling so hard to pay for for the last six years. Why the hell not?”

  Mom’s eyes went big. “Appa!” she said.

  But Grandpa Park kept staring at me. I could tell he was staring at me, even though I was still looking at my salad, not at him. I could feel his eyeballs boring into my brain.

  “Well?” Grandpa Park said.

  “Mom, next time can you put tomatoes in the salad?” I asked. “I really like tomatoes.”

  Mom put a hand on my arm. “Of course, honey,” she said. “I’ll be sure to remember.”

  Across the table, Dad set down his glass of wine. “We thought Albie would benefit more from going to a new school,” he told Grandpa Park. “Mountford wasn’t meeting his needs.”

  Grandpa Park snorted. “He got kicked out,” he said. And the way he said it, it was like he knew it was a fact, like he knew it would happen all along, and he wasn’t surprised at all. He maybe even thought it was sort of funny.

  “I don’t want to go to that stupid school anyway!” I said. Because I didn’t. But then I slapped my hand over my mouth, because I was pretty sure I’d just yelled at Grandpa Park. And that was definitely something I was not supposed to do.

  “Albie, sweetie,” Mom said, her hand still on my arm, “why don’t you go do your reading for your reading log?”

  “I’m still eating,” I told her.

  “For your information,” Dad told Grandpa Park—and he was glaring now, the kind of glaring I’d only seen him do when he was on the phone yelling at the cable guy—“P.S. 183 is an excellent school with a progressive philosophy on student—”

  Grandpa Park snorted again. “A public school?” he said. “You’re sending my grandson to a public school?”

  “Albie,” Mom said, squeezing my arm a little harder. Too hard. “Go do your reading.” Her eyes were focused on my grandpa.

  “Why bother?” Grandpa Park said. He pushed his plate aside and reached for his glass. He wasn’t having wine like Mom and Dad. His glass was filled with the red-brown drink he always had when he visited, the one Mom kept up high in the cupboard just for him. “Why not just throw him in a ditch now and be done with it? That’s where
he’ll end up at this rate.”

  “Appa!” Mom stood up then, her eyes angry-on-fire, and she practically pulled me out of my chair. “Come on, Albie. I think dinner’s over.”

  “But . . . ,” I said, because I’d only had two bites, and I was still hungry. But I didn’t really want to stay either, so I followed her down the hall.

  “Frankly,” I heard my dad say as Mom dragged me away, “I don’t appreciate the way you’ve been speaking to my son, Shin.”

  “Oh, really?” I heard Grandpa Park reply. “Because I don’t appreciate the way you’ve been misraising my grandson.”

  That’s when Mom slammed shut my bedroom door. She plopped herself down next to me on the bed and put her head in her hands.

  I pulled the Hatchet book Mom gave me for my birthday off the table next to my bed, and I held it out to her because I thought she wanted to help me with my reading, and that was why she came into my room. But she didn’t take it. Instead she sighed.

  I sighed too.

  “I’m sorry about that, Albie,” she said. She was looking at the closed door. The way she narrowed her eyes at it, you would’ve thought it was the door she was mad at.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I didn’t want her to feel bad. Anyway, it wasn’t like I was upset or anything. I was pretty sure Grandpa Park was wrong about me ending up in a ditch.

  “No,” she said, still glaring at the door. “It’s not.”

  I nodded. And I waited for her to tell me the stuff she usually told me when Grandpa Park came over, about him not really meaning all the stuff he said sometimes. And about him loving me so much, and that was why he could be so hard on me. And about him having a hard life growing up and so that was why he was gruff. Mom said the word gruff a lot when she was talking about Grandpa Park.

  “Your grandfather . . .” She let out another long breath of air. “Your grandfather is not a very nice man.”

  I sort of laughed when she said that, because at first I thought she was joking. That definitely wasn’t something you were supposed to say about your own dad. But when I looked at her face, I could tell she wasn’t joking.

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “God, sometimes I could just. . .” She balled her hands up into little fists in her lap.

  I hugged her then, around the side. I wasn’t sure why I did it. Usually it was moms who hugged their kids, not the other way around. But I thought right then maybe she needed a hug more than I did.

  She buried her nose deep in my hair. “I love you so much, Albie,” she said softly.

  Maybe my mom didn’t always know how to be the best mother, like she said. But at least she was trying.

  Maybe that was the important thing.

  “I love you too,” I told her. “You are caring and thoughtful and good.”

  Mom pulled away to look at me. Her eyes were wet. She smiled at me as she pushed the hair off my forehead, just gazing at my face. When she spoke, her voice was soft.

  “Sometimes I wonder how I ever got so lucky to get a son like you, Albie.”

  Lucky.

  That’s what she said.

  I hugged her again, around the side.

  Maybe it was silly to not be upset at all when I could still hear my dad and Grandpa Park shouting at each other in the dining room. Maybe I should’ve been. But I wasn’t.

  Right then, I felt pretty lucky too.

  being famous.

  I wish I was famous,” I told Erlan. We were sitting in his new bedroom, which was smaller than his bedroom at his old apartment, but at least it was only his bedroom, no brothers. Plus, Erlan had put the quilt up in front of his door, so he said the entire room was a quilt fort now, which meant no cameras ever.

  “No, you don’t,” Erlan said. He was setting up the cards for our card game. The one called Spit, which Calista taught me. I was pretty good at that one, better than Erlan even, because you didn’t have to count or anything, it was all about being fast. But it took forever to set it up every time, that was the only problem. Erlan was better at that part than I was.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. If I was famous, maybe I could have a bigger apartment too, like Erlan’s family did. Maybe my family could have a billboard even, like the Kasteevs, with our faces on it, smiling happy. Maybe I could have all the toys I wanted, and everyone would like me and be friendly and nice to me, and my dad could quit his job, like Erlan’s did, and just be home all the time with the family.

  “No,” Erlan said again. “You don’t. Oh, man, I lost track. Now I have to start again.” He scooped up all the cards.

  Erlan was a smart kid, I knew that. You didn’t get all Excellents on your report card every year, and win the chess championships too, without being really smart. I knew that. But sometimes he could be dumb. “You don’t even know what’s good,” I told him. And for some reason, I wasn’t sure why, I said it really angry.

  I felt angry.

  Erlan’s head shot up at me.

  “You complain all the time,” I told him, the angry still in my voice. “But what’s so bad about being famous? You’re on TV. That’s so great!”

  If I was on TV, instead of “no release!” Darren wouldn’t make fun of me whispering behind his hand all the time. He wouldn’t smash his finger into all my birthday cupcakes.

  Erlan rolled his eyes. “You want to know what’s so great about being on TV?” he said to me. He wasn’t setting up the game. He stopped. I wanted to tell him that he should start again, but I didn’t. I waited. “Nothing. That’s what. No one at school will even talk to me anymore. Everything that happens on that stupid show, they laugh about it all week. Even if Erik was the one who screamed like a girl when he saw that mouse, and everyone at school made fun of me for it. Erik pretends to be sick like every day so he doesn’t have to go to school, and Karim just acts like a jerk, like he’s so important. And Roza and Ainyr and Alma, they . . . It doesn’t matter. I don’t even care.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I never even knew all that.” I stared at the piles of cards. “How come you never told me before?”

  Erlan shrugged. He scooped the piles together and started over setting them up. One, one. Five, five. Seven, seven. He counted out thirteen for the big piles. “You’re the only one who treats me normal.”

  When the piles were all set up and it was time to start playing again, I picked up my pile of five, and at the same exact time, Erlan and I flipped over the one piles. And we were off.

  Being famous maybe sounded like it would be fun, I thought, before you knew what it was really like. But it turned out it really wasn’t at all.

  Being famous sounded a whole lot like being cool.

  a green

  pencil.

  Calista left a pencil at our house. A green one with no eraser, the kind she used for doing sketches in her sketchbook. When I found it, it made me sad in my stomach but happy too. I knew Calista couldn’t take me to the park anymore or pick me up from school. She’d never take me for a donut day again.

  But I had her pencil.

  I found a fresh piece of paper in my drawer, and I smoothed it out against the top of the desk. Then I curled my fingers around that green pencil, and I started to draw.

  Donut Man to the Rescue!

  That’s what I wrote at the top, when I was done with the drawing.

  I was pretty sure Calista would have liked it.

  studying

  with betsy.

  Studying for spelling tests with Betsy was different from studying with Calista. Usually, we went to her apartment after school, and her mom gave us cookies, the vanilla sandwich kind with chocolate in the middle. I always twisted mine open and ate the chocolate off first, one lick at a time. Betsy nibbled the whole cookie in circles, all the way around slowly, till she got to the final bite in the center.

  We didn’t make flash cards or draw pictures.
>
  What we did was practice the spelling words, over and over and over. Betsy’s mom read them out, and we took turns trying to spell them. I did mine out loud, and Betsy wrote hers on paper. If we got five or more right, we got another cookie. That’s why I had to eat mine so slowly, with the licking. But I was starting to get more cookies.

  I missed Calista a lot, but it wasn’t so bad, studying with Betsy.

  a famous

  schaffhauser

  grilled cheese.

  How did the elections go this week?” Dad asked me. It was just me and him, since he was working from home after Harriet said she was done watching me and my parents should find a real nanny already. I was pretending to do social studies homework while Dad worked on his laptop. Really, I was doodling superheroes.

  “Um,” I said. Elections were a while ago, but I was surprised Dad remembered at all. “I ran for vice president,” I told him. “But I lost.” I clenched my stomach in a knot, waiting for all the disappointment.

  “Oh,” Dad said. “Well, that’s all right, Albie. You can’t win them all.”

  I unclenched my stomach just the tiniest bit. “Really?” I said.

  “Sure.” Dad clicked at his keyboard. “Only one person gets to be vice president, right? If there are a lot of people running, then you can’t take it too much to heart if you don’t get it.”

  “It was just one other person,” I told him.

  I don’t know why I said that, really. I should’ve just let Dad be not disappointed in me, and not said anything at all. It was nice when Dad was not disappointed in me. But I guess I wanted him to be not disappointed in me, and not some made-up Albie who did really great in school elections.

  Dad looked up from his laptop and frowned. “I bet you got a lot of votes, though,” he said.

  “Nope,” I told him.