Milo and the Restart Button

by Alan Silberberg

  “What do you mean, ‘sick’?” my sister asks, and because she’s older, I think maybe she sees through the haze and can tell something real is happening even while I pretend it isn’t.

  Nobody answers, and suddenly I’m fidgeting too. “I want to go back to my show,” I say, pleading to slink off to the den so I can watch Wheel of Fortune because I’m really good at guessing the words, especially when they are looking for a “phrase” or a “thing” but not a “person” because I never know who people like Liberace or Humphrey Bogart are.

  My mother reaches for my shoulder and her touch makes me stay, and when I look up in her face, I see the hint of tears and then it hits me so hard that I freeze inside because SOMETHING IS WRONG.

  “I need to go into the hospital,” she says all calm. “Just a few tests and then we’ll know more.”

  Know more? More about what? What do they need to know?

  The phone rings, and then I realise I’m back in Hillary’s room and I’m holding the top half of one of her rescue dolls in my hands and I’m squeezing it really hard. Hillary isn’t sitting on her bed anymore. Somehow she’s now on the floor with me and she’s looking at me in a way that I just can’t stand.

  “I gotta go.” And I do. I stand up and I can’t look at her, and she says, “Okay,” and I say, “Thanks for the cookies.” And then I walk next door and go upstairs and sit on my bed and it isn’t until supper that I realise I’m still clutching the broken doll piece in my fist.

  Suddenly, the thing looks like a hand grenade, and the only thing I can do is try to blow up what just happened – so I open my window and twist off the head and throw both pieces into the darkness.

  I lie back on my bed and count to five and then mouth the word that I hope will erase the last two hours.

  “Boom.”

  brain scans

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT SCIENCE-FICTION THINGS happen inside a brain to make the cells go crazy and change and then turn into cancer. I just know that when my head throbs or I get the slightest pain behind my eyes, I don’t get an aspirin.

  I get scared.

  When your mother dies because of a tumour in her brain, it’s pretty hard not to think that every time you get a headache, you’ve got one too. I know that sounds a little kooky, like yelling “Fire!” because someone lit a match, but my mom’s head ache was the first chapter in the story that was the end – so it’s not such a huge leap to make.

  equal signs

  EQUATIONS ARE WHAT I’M HAVING SUCH a hard time with. That’s why I stay after school two days a week. It’s Monday so I have no choice but to drag my butt to Mr Shivnesky’s stupid room. The truth is, Mr Shivnesky is really a pretty nice guy once you get past the whole head thing, and to do this, I picture different styles of haircuts that would make both our lives better:

  I decide he’s a good teacher, which doesn’t mean I’m making much progress, but he doesn’t get mad at me when I keep not getting it and he gives me a five-minute break whenever I need one – except when it’s because I’m being lazy.

  Five minutes isn’t a ton of time, but it is enough to take a walk around the hallways, which is exactly what I decide to do. Walking past the French room, I hear a sound that makes my feet stop.

  “I’m sorry,” the voice says. “I can’t use the past tense because I don’t know the word.” The voice is Summer’s voice, and I instantly forget that I only have two minutes and forty-three seconds left on my break. Dabney St Claire tells me that now’s my chance to swoop in and save the day, but I have to remind him that I don’t know French. I barely know Spanish.

  Come on, Dabney St Claire says. Go say something to her. What’s the worst that can happen?

  In my head I answer him by making this list:

  While I stand there stuck in time, time marches on.

  Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

  It’s my watch alarm reminding me my break is over, and I have to abandon Summer and rush back to Mr Shivnesky, who just opens the maths book and picks up where we left off, which is me not understanding anything and him being patient.

  Mr Shivnesky asks me what I plan to do over the winter break. They can’t call it “Christ mas vacation” anymore, mainly because everyone doesn’t celebrate Christmas and some people got mad, which I guess makes sense, except for the fact that “winter break” sounds lame and not half as much fun. Truth is, I hate December almost as much as I hate September but not nearly as much as June.

  Holidays are really hard in my house, and the whole Christmas – Hanukkah – New Year’s stretch just lies there all flat and empty.

  My sister caught on last year, and this year made her own plans to go away with Cynthia Boyd’s family over “the holidays”, which is fine by my dad, but the bad part is, then it’s just me and him and way too much nothing to do.

  I don’t say any of this to Mr Shivnesky. I lie and tell him that we like to go to the Bahamas over the holidays, which is something I heard Rachel Grenier tell Donna Rubin in the cafeteria.

  Mr Shivnesky says that sounds nice, and suddenly an equation pops into my head and it looks like this: ME = x – y (x = US, y = HER).

  a purple p.s.

  sleepover

  THE ONLY PROBLEM WITH CALLING A vacation a “break” is that it reminds me that everything in my house actually does feel broken. Don’t get me wrong. Ten days of not going to school makes me happier than Patches when he gets to scratch himself against the side of the couch (when even more fur falls off). It’s just that hanging around with nothing much to do makes the house get quieter, and it just makes me remember how loud everything used to be.

  But none of that really matters because I’m at Marshall’s house and not just to hang out after school, and not to use his computer to Google the traffic to see if my dad’s going to have a safe ride home – I’m there for a sleepover, and I feel like I’m on the greatest vacation ever.

  I’m lucky for the reason that Marshall’s grandmother is a wild woman, which means he and his family didn’t have to drive to Arizona over the “winter break” on account that she (his grandma) decided at the last minute to go on a singles cruise, where she plans to find a new boyfriend.

  Now, I’m no relationship expert, but to me, once you’re older than a certain age, I don’t think you should still call people “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” anymore. I think that age is probably seventeen or maybe twenty. In my head it just feels spooky to picture old people talking like teenagers, and if it were up to me, I’d put a quick stop to it.

  I mention this at dinner my first night at Marshall’s house, and you know what? They all laugh, and it’s so weird to hear people laughing at the dinner table that I feel really bad and stare into my plate, but Mrs Hickler says, “No, Milo – that’s really funny. My mother does act a little like she’s still in high school. You should see her yoga clothes.” And it’s so shocking that laughing even co-exists with eating, and it’s while I’m having broiled chicken (which I love) and green beans (which I hate but eat anyway) that I want to go home and pack up all my stuff and move right into Marshall’s house forever.

  If I squint, I can pretend that I’m in a different kitchen with a different family – my family – and there’s always laughing and sometimes yelling going on, but it’s the kind of yells that end usually with hugs and sometimes pudding. Pudding with canned whipped cream, which I can spray straight into my mouth until the one time I nearly choke and then it’s not allowed anymore and my mom never buys it again.

  It’s cool that my dad’s agreed to let me sleep over at Marshall’s house for two nights, which is something I normally would hate to do because I’m a one-night-only kind of sleepover guy, but three things make this a great decision:

  1) It’s the week between Christmas and New Years.

  2) My sister is gone at my house.

  3) Marshall’s house feels normal.

  Normal houses are the houses you see on TV where people talk more than they don’t tal
k and they eat together and play games like Uno or Crazy Eights even when they don’t want to. These houses smell like brownies or chocolate chip cookies, and if you find a mouldy half-eaten tuna sandwich in the cushion of the couch, it’s an exception and not a rule.

  Marshall’s house is all that and more, and his mom is super-nice to me, and his dad might be strange but he likes when I’m around and, after the first incident with the exploding pen, only asks if I want to try something he’s working on if it doesn’t involve electricity.

  Last week when the phone rang and it was Marshall and he said, “Hi” and I said, “Hi” and then he said, “Can my mom talk to your dad?” I thought I was in trouble or something. But after my dad hung up and he looked at me not like I just broke his car window with a hammer (which was a total accident) but like he was glad about something, I thought that maybe I was being adopted.

  “The Hicklers have invited you to stay at their house this week.” And because he knows how I feel about sleepovers, he quickly added, “For two nights. What do you say?”

  Inside I was saying, Yes, get me out of here because it’s just you and me and a lot of silence and frozen food. But I looked in his face, and even though he was smiling, I thought his eyes were saying that he wanted me to stay behind and be with him. As much as I wanted to escape the house, I felt bad about leaving him behind.

  But then I figured it’s like in a movie when one prisoner gets a chance to escape and the other prisoner guy is wounded and insists that he won’t make it and it’s all up to you and you have to do it. You just have to!

  And so I did. I escaped!

  After dinner it’s like the greatest night ever. First Marshall and I don’t have to help clear the table and can go straight to his room and play video games. He has two controllers, so it works out great.

  After that his mom and dad light a real fire in the fireplace (not one of those fake wrapped-in-paper logs) and then we get to roast marshmallows and make s’mores, which are these things I never heard of but most kids know about. Here’s how they work:

  The last thing that makes the night super-special is that it starts to snow – and not just a little bit. You can tell just by looking out at the streetlights where the snowflakes are thick and falling hard and fast that this is going to be a snowstorm!

  The only bummer part is that this is the exact kind of snow where you can start getting excited that they’re cancelling school tomorrow and you stay up listening to the little radio by your bed waiting for the announcement and you keep listening for the sound of the heavy ploughs on your street and you doze off a little at the end and when you wake up . . . it’s your dad and there is school and you get really mad.

  But it’s vacation, so there won’t be school tomorrow, no matter what. And I’m at Marshall’s and not at my house, where the snow will pile up higher than here and the rooms will feel colder even with the thermostat turned way up.

  “Hey,” Marshall says across the darkness of his room.

  “Hey,” I say back from the air mattress on the floor, which is actually way more comfortable than it looks and blows up by plugging it into the wall.

  “This is great. You sleeping over.”

  “Yup. Way great.” And I mean it. It’s just the best.

  “Milo,” Marshall says, and I can tell he’s getting sleepy because the o in my name kind of falls off the edge of his bed and rolls around on the floor. “You think maybe Summer Goodman is . . .”

  And I wait because I know how Marshall will finish that sentence, and in my mind I write the words for him in HUGE BOLD letters like this:

  “. . . IS TOTALLY GORGEOUS!”

  But he doesn’t speak, and then finally I have to clear my throat in that obvious throat-clearing-snot way, and Marshall starts again. But his words aren’t what I’d pictured at all. He says, “Don’t you think she’s kind of . . . you know, a stuck-up snob?” And for a second his sentence gets all lit up in my head and it kicks and stomps on my sentence and his words make me mad.

  How could he say something so bad about the girl I am in love with, who still doesn’t know the real me . . . or the fake me . . . or any me at all?

  We don’t talk, and just the heavy metal sound of a snowplough outside pushing away the storm fills the space, and then it’s like the plough pushes the words and feelings away too because suddenly I don’t care what he just asked me.

  And I close my eyes and picture Summer Goodman making snow angels with me, and even though I know she’d be the one to stomp through them with her boots, I still think she’s the best thing ever.

  snowed in

  THE FIRST THING IS, I AM ASLEEP AND I am dreaming of being in the ocean and my dad is throwing me up in the air and then I splash down below the surface of the cold water, except it doesn’t feel cold – it’s real cosy. Underneath, the colours are different and with my eyes open, I see his legs standing solid against the waves and the light swirls the sand like small tornados.

  Seaweed, coral, even the hairs on my dad’s legs seem to individually wave at me, and it feels like I’m underwater forever, but then I pop above the surface and Mom’s there too and together they grab my arms and twirl me around in circles and I don’t get dizzy. I just look up past their smiles and the blue sky stares down at me, and suddenly I know it’s a dream because someone else’s voice is there too:

  “Milo. Get up. You gotta see this.”

  And I have no choice because the ocean is gone and I know I’m in a bed, and then I remember I’m not in my own house and I let my eyes open and I’m looking up at Marshall’s face.

  His grin says it all, but his words confirm it: “It’s a blizzard!”

  I’m dressed in, like, two seconds, and we both tear down the stairs to the living room so we can look outside at the street. “Oh, man,” I say.

  And Marshall bounces up and down on the couch saying, “Double that!”

  Outside the snow is piled up three and a half feet and it’s still coming down.

  We think up different things to do in snow like this:

  • We want to build a fort – and not just an igloo kind of barrier to hide behind, but one with a real roof that we can stand inside and maybe sleep in if we wear enough layers.

  • We plan to spend one full hour assembling a stockpile of snowballs for a snowball fight that will take forever to be finished. (We agree on no slush balls or iron rockets, which is when you put a rock in the middle of the snowball and it can take your eye out.)

  • Sledding down Chamberlain Street is on the list because it’s really steep and even the salt trucks have a hard time getting to it.

  Dressed in layers that make moving nearly impossible, we wave goodbye and enter the snow, which reaches all the way up to my waist.

  Our first paying job is Marshall’s house, and it takes half an hour to clear the walkway from the street to the front door. We each get five bucks, which may not sound like a lot but when your Freezie fund is down to two dollars and fifty cents and your Summer Goodman secret ring fund is wavering around one seventy-five, five bucks each feels pretty sweet.

  “Okay,” I announce. “My house next!”

  We march off with shovels on our shoulders and end up on my street, and the biggest surprise of all is that my house is already done. My dad has paid someone with a plough and a snowblower, and there’s nothing we can do but sit on my front steps and wish we’d skipped thinking anything at my house would work out okay.

  My dad asks if we want to come in, but I know there’ll be no hot chocolate or good snacks and I don’t want to let go of the feeling I am on a vacation at Marshall’s house, so I say no.

  “Hey,” Marshall says, pointing at something across the street. “That house isn’t shovelled.”

  I look up and see that Marshall is talking about my weird old lady neighbour, who buys pumpkins too early and stands by her window waiting to wave at me all day.

  I say, “Forget it. She’s nuts.” But Marshall won’t forget it,
so I have to follow him as he rushes across the street really fast because he’s afraid some guy in a plough truck will swoop in and get the job first.

  Once we finally climb the impossible snow-covered stairs, I kind of on purpose stand a bit back from Marshall as he rings the bell. I’m half hoping no one is home or that if she is home, she’s too busy to come to the door, but those two half hopes disappear as soon as the door opens and there she is smiling and holding a cup of something steamy, which she tells us is mint tea.

  Two things I notice right away: The weird old lady isn’t old. Well, not in the “old lady” way I thought she was. Up close she’s “teacher old,” not “grand ma old.”

  And the second thing is: She sees me right away, and even though we’ve never met, she says, “Hello, Milo.” And then, “So, what can I do for you boys?”

  Marshall does the negotiating, and by the time he’s done laying out our expertise and skill level, we’ve got the go-ahead. “However, I think ten dollars isn’t a fair price for so much work,” the old lady who isn’t so old says. “Let’s make it fifteen, and I’ll throw in some snacks.”

  The door closes, and Marshall kicks snow at me. “You said she was crazy.”

  We work double hard mainly because it’s later in the day and the snow, which started off light and powdery, is now heavy and wet and takes way more effort to actually lift. “If she tries to feed us, just say no. I don’t trust her ingredients,” I yell to Marshall, who answers back with a snowball that smacks my parka with a dull thud. Wearing so many layers, I don’t even feel it. But I like the sound it makes.

  The very last thing to do is the steps to her door, and I say that I’ll do them even though I know once I finish, we’ll have to go inside her house, which is starting to make me feel like I want to just go home.