Word Nerd

by Susin Nielsen

  ‘Is he dead?’ I asked, and Mom gave me the stink-eye, which didn’t seem fair because I knew that the question had been on the tip of her tongue.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs E. ‘He’s in prison.’

  Then Mr E shouted at Mrs E in Greek and he stormed out of the room.

  ‘My husband, he’s mad, I tell you. He thinks you’ll think we’re bad people because of Cosmo.’

  ‘Goodness, of course not,’ my mom said, but in a phony kind of way.

  ‘Why’s he in jail?’ I asked.

  From the look on my mom’s face, you’d think I’d just asked what color underwear Mrs E was wearing. Mrs E started to cry, and Mom gave me the stink-eye again and said, ‘Ambrose, that’s none of our business.’ But give me a break. I knew she was dying to know, too.

  Anyway, everyone calmed down after a while and we all had seconds of dessert. Then we watched The Amazing Race, one of Mr E’s favorite shows. Mom had tried to get us to go to our room before it came on, but I just ate my dessert really, really slowly because I’d heard kids talk about this show but had never seen it (despite the fact that it had been on for years). It was great – I was on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. Even my mom, who won’t let us get cable because she says TV is a mindless waste of time, got sucked into the drama of it all. Mr E spent the whole time shouting at the contestants in Greek.

  Afterward, we went to bed. They gave us Vivian’s old room, which had twin beds. A huge collection of Barbie dolls lined the shelves.

  I asked my mom again, ‘Why do you think their son’s in jail?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  We lay in the dark for a few minutes, then I asked, ‘What if he’s a murderer and he escapes and comes home for some of his mom’s cooking? Which was amazing, by the way.’ I burped and got a taste of moussaka in my mouth, mingled with toothpaste, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

  All I got in response was a gentle snore.

  When we arrived home from the meeting at school, the Economopouloses were out on their porch.

  ‘Hi, Irene; hi, Ambrose.’

  ‘Hi, Mr and Mrs E,’ I said.

  Mom just waved and kept walking to our door. Over the years I’d noticed that she didn’t get too friendly with our landlords. When we entered, she still didn’t say anything. She just opened a bottle of wine and started getting dinner ready, so I went to my room.

  My room faces the garden, so through my high-up window I can see the grass, and if I stand on my bed, I can see Mr E’s tomato plants. I have glow-in-the-dark stars all over my ceiling, which I’m now starting to think might be kind of babyish, but I still like gazing up at them after I’ve turned off my light. Definitely babyish is my bedspread, which is covered in Buzz Lightyear images from Toy Story, but Mom says we can’t afford another one for a while. There’s a small white-painted desk in the corner, loaned to us by the Economopouloses. Two big mason jars sit on the desk. One is filled with bottle caps, which I collect. I’ve managed to find some really unique ones, maybe because I’m always looking at the ground when I walk. The other jar is filled over halfway with quarters. I’ve been saving quarters since I was little, and whenever the jar fills up, my mom and I put the money into a special bank account for my university education.

  I don’t have a door, but Mom and I bought these cool multicolored plastic beads that hang from the frame and make a clickity sound every time I walk in or out.

  I have a big poster of the moon above my bed and one of the human body on the opposite wall. My only other picture sits beside my bed in a frame. It’s one of my dad, taken by my mom only a few months before he died. He’s looking right at me, and his eyes are all crinkled and he has this huge grin on his face. Mom said she’d just told him a joke, but whenever I ask what the joke was, she says she can’t remember.

  He was really handsome, my dad. He had thick brown hair and tanned skin and muscles, and he was so tall – six feet, three inches – a full foot taller than my mom. She told me once that he used to call her Squirt, but when I tried calling her that, she asked me not to.

  Sometimes I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to see if any part of me looks like him. But I just can’t imagine that my dad was ever short or scrawny or bowlegged, or that his hair had a cowlick at the front, or that his nose was too big for his face. Lookswise, I must have got some sort of recessive gene.

  Anyway, I gave the picture of my dad a quick wave, which I always do when I enter my room. It may sound dorky, but I know deep down in my gut that he sees me waving and that he wishes he could be here to watch me grow up, play ball with me, and talk to me about girls and puberty and embarrassing erections (entices, esoteric, notices, cistern, corniest), of which I have now had at least a dozen. Thank God for textbooks that a guy can put in front of his pants if he needs to walk across a room. And I’m not even going to start about wet dreams.

  But even if Dad can’t be here physically, I think he’s watching over us.

  And I know he loves Mom. And I know he loves me.

  After supper, I washed the dishes while Mom drank her third glass of wine and paid some bills. I could hear her talking to herself and swearing a little. Bills always make her do that.

  She still hadn’t said anything about the meeting at school. When we were both done, she pulled out the Scrabble board, which was a good sign because she was sticking to our routine.

  There’s not a lot I’m good at. I’m good at school, but not exceptional. I’m lousy at sports. My mom once scrimped and saved so I could take trombone lessons. I was so hopeless, we gave it up after three months.

  But I’m good at Scrabble. In fact, my mom calls me a Scrabble genius because I beat her all the time. She finds this mostly amusing, but also a little irritating. ‘And to think I’m the one with the Ph.D. in English lit,’ she’ll say.

  Tonight was no exception. I laid down the words ‘LEGUME’, ‘ZIP’ (on a triple word score), and ‘MEMENTO’, in front of an ‘S,’ which got me a bonus of fifty points for using all my letters. But my favorite part in the game was at the very beginning. I had to go first, and I had a terrible rack of letters: ‘HPYKIOT’. I stared at them for a long time, moving the tiles around, and just as my mom was starting to get restless and drum her fingertips on the table (which was really annoying and actually against our family rules), suddenly I saw it: ‘PITHY’. I laid it down on the double word star in the middle for twenty-six points.

  Later, when we were putting away the board, Mom said, ‘What did you do with the book?’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘The book we bought for Troy’s birthday party. The Thief Lord.’

  Oh. That book. ‘I left it at Planet Lazer.’

  She nodded. ‘And what did you do there for three hours?’

  ‘I read the book in the bathroom. It was very good.’

  She put the Scrabble game back on the shelf and poured the last of the wine into her glass.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t know why I lied. It’s just … starting at another new school, it’s not easy, and I thought if I made it seem like I was someone … someone, I don’t know—’

  ‘Someone else?’

  I didn’t answer.

  Mom picked up her wineglass. ‘I think I’ll go to bed and read,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ I replied. But I knew this conversation wasn’t over.

  And I was right.

  7

  EHODBEAN

  honed, bane, done, heed, debone, need, dean, hen

  BONEHEAD

  ON SUNDAY, WE walked all the way to Granville Island along the waterfront. It was overcast, but it wasn’t raining.

  I like Granville Island, even though technically it isn’t an island at all since a road runs right to it. It’s a happy place. Mom and I bought apples fresh from the Okanagan at the market and some pizza buns from our favorite bakery. We ate them by the water’s edge while we watched the aquabuses – funny-looking little boats that take foot passengers across False Cre
ek to downtown.

  That’s when the conversation started up again.

  ‘You don’t seem to have much luck in the regular school system,’ Mom said.

  ‘Gee, thanks.’

  ‘It’s not a criticism. Just an observation. A lot of famous people didn’t do well in the regular school system.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Like who?’

  ‘Like the Brontë sisters.’ I rolled my eyes. Only my mom would call the Brontë sisters famous.

  ‘And Einstein,’ she continued. ‘He had to stand in the corner with a dunce cap on his head.’

  ‘You’re making that up.’

  She smiled. ‘And Nelson Mandela got the strap every week. And Gandhi got lots of detentions.’

  Now, I was laughing. I fed a bit of my bun to a bunch of squawking seagulls.

  ‘I met with Principal Acheson yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘You did? When?’

  ‘When you were helping Mr Economopoulos clean out his garage.’ I helped Mr E on the weekends sometimes, cutting his grass with a push mower or doing other odd jobs for a bit of pocket money. ‘We talked through the options, and he suggested correspondence schooling.’

  ‘Correspondence schooling? What’s that?’

  ‘Basically, you get all of your work from the district correspondence school and you do the work at home.’

  ‘With no one to teach me?’

  ‘Well, I would supervise you. And you’d have a teacher you could access on-line.’

  ‘But we don’t have a computer.’ Mom doesn’t believe in computers, especially in the Internet. She says it’s a haven for pornographers and paedophiles. But that’s a bit hypocritical if you ask me, because she has access to a computer at the university any time she wants.

  ‘Mr Acheson says that he can arrange to get you some computer time since Cypress is a community access school. I’ll have to be with you because if you’re not a student at the school, they can’t let you be on your own. Liability issues, apparently.’

  ‘How can you do that? You teach during the day.’

  ‘The department needs a sessional to teach in the evenings, too. Five nights a week, from six to ten. I talked to the dean, and he says I can make the switch.’

  ‘And you’ll leave me home alone?’

  ‘I’m not thrilled about that part. We’ll have to have some rules, and I’m going to ask Mrs Economopoulos to keep an eye on you.’ Her voice cracked a little, and I looked at her and saw that she was trying not to cry.

  ‘Mom, don’t … I’ll go back to Cypress, seriously. I don’t want to mess things up for you.’

  ‘Oh, Ambrose,’ she said, and pulled me close. ‘You don’t mess things up for me. Don’t ever think that.’ She blew her nose on an old Kleenex she’d found in the pocket of her jeans. ‘So what do you say? Shall we give correspondence school a try?’

  ‘I guess,’ I said. And as we sat there watching the boats on the water, I started to make a mental list of the pros and cons:

  THE PROS

  a) no more Three Stooges

  b) no more fag jokes

  c) no more impatient teachers who get annoyed when I ask too many questions, or when I squeal because the Three Stooges have flushed my lunch down the toilet

  d) no more schedules

  e) no more gym class, where they make you change into dorky shorts in front of all the other guys (one day I forgot to wear underwear and it was the worst day of my life, even worse than the day I almost died)

  THE CONS

  a) no more sneaking peeks at Ms Martin’s boobs in music class when she props them up on top of her guitar and they’re big and they move a little and you can see the edge of her bra (but this one is also a pro because I once got a boner watching those boobs and had to sit with my sheet music over my lap for the rest of the lesson).

  That was the only con I could come up with. I felt a little flutter of excitement in my stomach.

  Correspondence school was going to be great.

  8

  EIUPSRRS

  super, purse, press, spur, pure, ruse, user, uprise

  SURPRISE

  AS NOVEMBER BEGAN, so did the rain. The days were shorter too, and because we were in a basement it sometimes felt like we were living in a cave, even in the middle of the day. I didn’t mind so much, but it bothered my mom. At first, as a treat, we’d put on all the lights when we woke up in the morning and keep them on, but it wasn’t environmentally friendly and it made Mom choke when she got the Hydro bill, so we had to stop.

  By the middle of the month, we’d settled into our new routine. Because Mom now worked till ten and didn’t get home till almost eleven, our days started later than they used to. We’d both sleep till eight-thirty, then, without bothering to get out of our pajamas, we’d eat our breakfast of no-name cereal and fruit, and Mom would have two mugs of coffee and read the Economopouloses’ Vancouver Sun newspaper from the day before (they always left it by our door when they were through with it). Around ten o’clock, we’d review the work that I needed to do that day (which was sent by the district correspondence school), then Mom would make me shower and get dressed and I’d get started on my work by ten-thirty.

  I could get through my work surprisingly quickly. Take away the classroom setting and a teacher who had thirty other kids to manage, and suddenly stuff that filled a six-hour school day took me two to three hours. While I did my work, Mom would mark papers, grumbling at the students’ poor spelling or lack of critical thinking.

  ‘I teach the ones who don’t want to be there,’ she’d tell me, even though she’d told me this a million times before, in every place we’d lived. ‘Like the engineering students who have to pass one English course, or the E.S.L. students. The tenured professors get to teach the ones who’ve actually chosen to be there. They dole out the crappy courses to sessionals, like me.’

  After my schoolwork and her marking were done, we’d go out for some exercise. Usually this meant a long walk along the beach. Once in a while, we’d go ice-skating at the Kitsilano Community Centre, but I didn’t like that so much because Mom insisted that I wear one of their rental helmets, and since she was also worried I’d get head lice from the last person to rent the helmet, I had to wear a toque and then the helmet and it was uncomfortable, not to mention dorky.

  On Thursday afternoons at two o’clock, we’d walk over to Cypress Elementary together so I could use a terminal in the computer lab. The first time, I had butterflies in my stomach – more like elephants, really, because I did not want to run into the Three Stooges. But it was good timing. All the kids were in class, and the lab was empty. Two weeks in a row, Mr Acheson dropped by to see how I was doing.

  ‘Your mom sure works hard on your behalf,’ he said to me one day, with my mom standing right there. I found this kind of annoying. It was like he thought I had special needs or something and needed an advocate. But my mom didn’t seem to mind, even when he put one of his beefy paws on her tiny shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  Every weekday at five, Mom had to leave for work. Her new schedule meant we couldn’t have our nightly Scrabble games, but sometimes we’d squeeze one in before she left.

  She had a list of rules that I was supposed to follow, and she even gave me a cell phone so I could call her no matter where I was (which, according to the rules, could be no further than our local library, four blocks from our house).

  At first I enjoyed these evenings to myself. I was my own boss. Mom said I was limited to an hour of TV a night, but she wasn’t there to monitor me so I watched as much as I wanted. But since our TV got only one channel, that thrill didn’t last too long.

  For a while I found other things to do, like eating what I wanted, when I wanted; but Mom didn’t buy junk food, or any food that said MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF NUTS, and, to be honest, eating half a loaf of spelt bread in one sitting didn’t exactly make my heart race.

  One night I wandered eight blocks from our house, a full four blocks farther than I was a
llowed. Another night I tried some of my mom’s wine from an open bottle in the fridge, but it tasted gross.

  I was supposed to go to bed at nine-thirty and read, with lights-out by ten, but that was hard because I wasn’t used to falling asleep without my mom there. And I guess you could say that I also needed to know she was safe. So most nights I’d wait till I heard her come up the walk, then I’d flip off my light and pretend to be asleep.

  By Thursday night of the third week, the novelty was wearing off and I was pretty bored. I’d already snooped through my mom’s drawers, which didn’t provide any interesting discoveries and left me feeling kind of yucky. It was pouring rain outside and the wind had picked up, and once in a while the window frames rattled, making me think that someone was trying to break in. I turned on the TV for company and watched David Suzuki’s ‘The Nature of Things’, while eating a rubbery piece of my mom’s ‘famous breaded chicken’. I was trying to convince myself that there was no escaped psycho killer on the loose, when there was a knock on the door. I almost leapt out of my skin. For a moment I sat silent because Mom had made me promise not to open the door, in case a paedophile was waiting on the other side. But since I could clearly see Mrs Economopoulos’s stout figure through the gauze curtain that hung on the window right beside the door, I decided to live life on the edge. I got up and opened it.

  Mrs E held out a plate of baklava. ‘No peanuts,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks!’ I said, and I meant it. Her baklava was like biting into a crisp yet moist piece of heaven.

  ‘Your mama’s at work?’

  I nodded. She gazed at my plate of food. ‘You make that? It looks terrible.’

  I figured I shouldn’t rat out my mom, so I just said, ‘It tastes terrible, too.’

  Mrs E took the plate out of my hand and set it on the table beside the baklava. ‘You’re eating with us. I made moussaka.’

  Who was I to argue? I dumped the rest of my chicken into the garbage, being careful to cover it with other, older garbage so Mom wouldn’t see it. Then I followed Mrs E upstairs.