“Get it, Kathy? Hank wants Mom and Dad to go to the concert instead of his teacher conference.”
Katherine looked back at Emily and hissed. Emily took that for some kind of answer, because she went on talking to Katherine like I wasn’t even in the room.
“I know, Kathy. Parent-teacher conferences are no big deal for some people. Mom and Dad went to mine last week, and my teacher told them I was getting all As and that I’m highly gifted.”
I may not be highly gifted like my sister, but at least I don’t have long conversations with hissing reptiles.
“Emily, I’m over here,” I said. “Could you maybe talk to me, since I’m the only other human in the room?”
Emily put some hot pink polish on her thumbnail, held it out, and looked at it like she was Pablo Picasso. He was a famous artist who was this really cool guy, because he walked around in shorts and no shirt even when he was eighty years old. Mr. Rock, the music teacher at my school, has told me all about him.
“Mom and Dad wouldn’t miss your parent-teacher conference, Hank,” Emily said in her goody-goody, know-it-all voice.
“They don’t know about it, Smarty-Pants,” I answered. “It’s not on the calendar. I moved the waxed paper and the aluminum foil and guess what? The whole month of May is blank. Plus, I’ve still got the sign-up slip in my backpack. They haven’t seen it yet.”
Emily blew on her fingernails to dry the polish.
“So, great,” she said. “You’ve got a plan. Now can you leave my room?”
“There’s one problem, though. Dad said no to Philadelphia.”
Katherine snapped her sticky gray tongue out at me, just missing my ankle by an inch. She had made it across the room and was lying on some soccer shorts next to the bed, her snout resting on Emily’s pile of lavender vocabulary flash cards. Boy, if that wasn’t a cover shot for Geek World magazine, I didn’t know what was.
“Which color polish should I put on my pinkie—the dark purple or the sparkling orange?” Emily asked me, holding up her hands to admire her manicure work.
“They’re both ugly,” I said.
“It’s too bad you think that,” Emily said, “because if you were nice to me, I was going to tell you my idea for getting Dad interested in going to the concert.”
“The sparkling orange is really cute,” I said without missing a beat. Hey, I told you I was a desperate man.
“Want to help me paint my toenails?” Emily said as she applied the orange polish to her pinkie finger.
“I’d rather eat raw goat,” I answered.
“That’s too bad,” Emily said, “because I think I have the answer to your little problem, but I can only tell you if you help me with my toenails.”
“Exactly how good is this plan of yours?” I growled.
Emily put her foot out and handed me a bottle of lime green nail polish.
“Paint and you’ll find out.” She wiggled her toes at me. I knew she didn’t really want to help me—she just wanted to see me polishing her stupid toenails. Oh, boy, she had me in a corner, and she was loving it.
I grabbed the nail polish, unscrewed the top, and slopped a glob of it on her big toe. I promised myself right then and there that I would get her back for this someday.
“This nail polish looks like lizard skin,” I said. Maybe Emily could make me paint her toenails green, but she couldn’t make me like it.
“Robert and I love lizard skin,” Emily said.
“That’s the difference between you and the rest of the human race,” I pointed out. “Now what’s your idea, Emily? Spill it.”
“Well,” Emily said, a little smile curling around her braces. “The other day, when Mom and I were at the orthodontist, they played a Stone Cold Rock song in the lobby while we were waiting for my appointment.”
Emily seemed really pleased with herself, but as far as I was concerned, this piece of information was not nearly good enough for me to be painting her lizardy toenails green.
“You’d better have more than that,” I said, holding the nail-polish brush up in midair.
“And guess what?” she went on. “Mom knew all the words to the song by heart. It turns out she loves Stone Cold Rock.”
“I’m really happy for her,” I said. “But I still don’t see how this helps me.”
“Hank, you are so thick sometimes,” Emily said. “Don’t you see? If we tell Mom about the concert in Philadelphia, she’ll really want to go. And then Dad will have to go along with it. He won’t say no to something Mom really, really wants to do.”
“He said no when she wanted him to wear those orange flip-flops to Aunt Maxine’s beach party,” I pointed out.
“That’s different,” Emily said. “The rubber thingamajiggy on the flip-flops gives him a blister between his toes. He had no choice but to say no. It’s a medical problem.”
“So what’s your idea specifically?” I asked. I was in a big hurry to get off the topic of the blister in between my dad’s toes. The thought of it was making me a little nauseous.
“Dinner’s in a few minutes, right?” said Emily. “I think we should put on some music with the meal.”
“As in Stone Cold Rock music?” I asked.
“Yes, oh, slow one.”
“I think I see your plan,” I said, determined to show her that I wasn’t as slow as she thought. “Mom will really like the music, and then I can suggest one more time—in front of Dad—that they go to the concert.”
“You’re actually getting it.” Emily smiled at Katherine, who was snuggled up there on her soccer shorts. “Pretty brilliant plan, don’t you think, Kathy?”
Katherine shot her disgusting tongue out again. This time it reached me and she actually licked my sock. I think she picked up a piece of sock lint on her tongue, because afterward, she kept flicking her tongue around like she was trying to shake something off it.
Too bad, Kathy old girl. You should keep your tongue in your snout where it belongs.
“It wouldn’t kill you to say thanks for the great idea,” Emily said.
That’s what she thinks. I think it just might kill me.
I leaped off the bed and hurried out of Emily’s room. I had to get the music all rigged up before dinner. But just as I was heading out the door, Emily called me back.
“Oh, Hank,” she said. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”
“No.”
She waved the green nail polish around in the air.
“My toes really look so much better with two coats,” she said.
“No way,” I said. “And that’s final.”
“Think about it, Hank. What if you need my help during dinner? I’d hate to have to say no.”
She had me there.
I snatched the nail polish, and as I unscrewed the top, I stuck my tongue out at Emily. Katherine stared at me with her beady eyes. I stuck my tongue out at her too.
Sisters. They’ll drive you nuts. Not to mention their pet iguanas.
CHAPTER 13
MY DAD WAS SETTING the table while my mom was putting the finishing touches on dinner. When I walked into the dining room, I noticed that he was putting out soup spoons, and for a minute, I actually got excited. I hoped that maybe my mom had brought home some of Papa Pete’s mushroom barley soup that we sell at our deli, the Crunchy Pickle. It is my absolute favorite soup.
No such luck.
“Your mother has created a new soup she’s trying out on us tonight,” my dad said.
These are not words you want to hear in my house. My mom is always trying to create new, healthy versions of dishes Papa Pete invented when he started the Crunchy Pickle fifty years ago. But her recipes usually taste something like cow pasture mixed in with a little cardboard.
“Please tell me the soup doesn’t have cabbage in it,” I begged.
One thing I’ve learned in my ten and three-quarter years on Earth is that cooked cabbage not only tastes disgusting on its own, it makes everything else around it taste disgusting
too. It doesn’t matter what the anything else is. Even if it’s old leather shoes, if you boil them with cabbage, they’ll taste like old leather cabbage shoes.
“It doesn’t have cabbage in it,” my dad smiled.
Oh, yes!
“She says it’s Three B Soup,” my dad said. “A mixture of beets, Brussels sprouts, and bananas all ground up together with some lima beans thrown in for texture.”
Oh, no! Cement soup. You could probably hold bricks together with it.
My mom came in through the swinging door from the kitchen, carrying a big steaming bowl of the awful-smelling stuff. Her blond hair was all wild looking, like it gets when she’s cooking up something new, and she had a couple chunks of lima bean clinging to her pink sweater. Even though she was pretty messy, it was really cute the way she looked so proud of her new invention. It must have been the way that scientist whose name I can’t remember felt when he discovered penicillin in moldy old dishes.
“Soup’s on,” my mom called out. “Everyone come and get it.”
Emily came galloping out of her room, carrying Katherine on her back like she was taking the lizard on some kind of crazed piggyback ride. Katherine must have smelled the soup, because as she got closer to the table, her nostrils got really big, and she started to hiss.
“Oh, look, Kathy seems upset,” Emily said. “Maybe some nice music would calm her down.”
“Why don’t I put on a CD?” I suggested, like I just had the best idea my brain had ever come up with.
“That’s a very good idea, honey,” my mom said.
Emily took her place at the table, with Katherine the Ugly still draped across her back. Then she looked over at me and winked—Emily, that is. Katherine isn’t what you’d call a winker. I flashed Emily a little smile. I have to admit, the girl may be the oddball of the western world, but for once, she was really taking my side in a very cool, sisterly way.
As my mom dished the soup into four bowls and put one at each of our places, I raced into my room to get the Stone Cold Rock CD. I held it behind my back as I came into the dining room and casually strolled over to the CD player we keep on the bookshelf near the table.
“I hope you didn’t pick anything too loud,” my dad said. “Dinner music should be easy on the nerves.”
“No problem, Dad,” I answered as I slipped the disc in and cranked up the volume. I could hear the disc start to whir, gaining speed.
I slid into my chair and took a whiff of the soup. I nearly passed out.
“Smells really interesting, Mom,” I said as I crumbled up a handful of crackers into the brownish-greenish-pinkish liquid. My dad was just putting the first spoonful of soup into his mouth when the music started to play Stone Cold Rock’s classic hit, “Whacked Out Crazy for You.”
Wang . . . dang . . . wang-a-danga . . . . . . whoop-wop . . . . . .
The bass guitar belted out a thumping beat that exploded into our dining room like a bomber diving into the soup bowl. I thought my dad was going to jump out of his skin. His spoon went flying out of his hands and sailed across the table.
Ladies and gentlemen, the soup has left the spoon.
Wang . . . dang . . . wang-a-danga . . . . . . whoop-wop . . . . . .
As the spoon flew over the table, the soup that had once been in it splattered in all directions—little clumps of it landing on the table, the walls, and my mom’s pink sweater. It looked like it was raining brownish-greenish-pinkish mud.
Thunk! The spoon landed with a thud, right on the end of Katherine’s hissing snout.
“Careful, Dad, Kathy has a very sensitive face!” Emily shouted.
“What about my ears?” my dad yelled back over the blasting music. “They’re sensitive too.”
The beat was great. Our whole dining area was thumping with the bass. Then the lead singer let out a wild shriek and launched into the first lines of the song that are so catchy you just have to sing along. Cheerio, who had been sleeping under my dad’s feet, suddenly jumped out from under the table and started to spin in a circle, howling in a high, screechy voice that made him sound like a girl dog with hot feet.
I looked at my dad, and his eyes were really big like he had just seen a ghost. But he wasn’t looking at Cheerio or even at the soup on the walls. He was staring at my mom.
She had jumped up out of her seat and had started to sing. And I don’t mean the tra-la-la kind of singing, either. She was rocking out in a major kind of way.
And she was dancing too. And I don’t mean the hold-your-partner-and-twirl slow dance, either. All the parts of her body were shaking, and at different times, too.
Because I love my mom and don’t want to embarrass her totally in case she ever reads this, I think I’ll just describe the way she looked this way: Imagine your favorite rock song, then imagine your mom singing it at the top of her lungs. Then imagine her dancing to it with all her heart and soul. You have that picture in your mind? Good. Now multiply that times twenty. Better yet, times fifty. No, times one hundred. Okay, that’s close to the way my mom was singing and dancing to “Whacked Out Crazy for You.”
Let’s just say it was loud and nuts and very un-mom-like.
“Come on, Stan,” my mom giggled. “Get up and dance with me.”
My dad didn’t move. He just sat there with his mouth open so wide, I could see the silver fillings in his back teeth. My mom grabbed Emily and started to dance with her. To my surprise, Emily got into it, shaking her bony butt in a really scary kind of way.
Good old Katherine freaked out. I guess in iguana land where she comes from, they don’t boogie down. When Emily started to shake her butt, Katherine hung onto her back for dear life. Finally, the shaking got too much for her lizardy self, and she dove headfirst down the back of Emily’s shirt. Her back claws clutched onto Emily’s shoulders, and her tail stuck straight up above Emily’s head like a feather. The two of them together looked like a whacked-out version of Pocahontas doing a twenty-first century rain dance.
As I watched my mom and Emily dancing around the room, singing the words to Stone Cold Rock’s “Whacked Out Crazy for You,” I knew I had my dad in the palm of my hand. There was absolutely no way he could say that he wasn’t going to take my mom to Philadelphia to see their concert. She was just having too much fun.
But parents are full of surprises, aren’t they?
I was wrong about my dad. Totally, completely, absolutely, entirely wrong.
Even after I told my mom all about how I won the concert. Even after I played another Stone Cold Rock song. Even after I gagged down all my soup and told my mom how delicious it was. Even after all that, my dad still said he didn’t want to go to Philadelphia.
“It’s silly to go all the way to another city on a weekday just to see some young men who need haircuts play instruments,” he said.
“But, Dad, they’re Mom’s favorite band,” I argued.
“And here they are,” he said, holding up the CD. “All packed up inside this nice, shiny disc. She can listen to them right here in the comfort of her own home.”
“Mom!” I said, turning to her. “Aren’t you going to tell him how much you want to go?”
“Marriage is all about give-and-take,” my mom said. “If it makes your dad uncomfortable to go, then how much fun would it be for me?”
“How much? It would be totally fun!”
“Hank,” my mom said. “I’m fine not going to the concert. Why is it so important to you, anyway?”
Why? For once, the words were right there, ready.
Because I want you to miss the parent-teacher conference. Because I don’t want you to know how bad I’m doing in school. Because I want to go on to the fifth grade. Because I don’t want to be the only one left behind.
But I didn’t say any of that.
Instead, I just shrugged my shoulders and sighed and said, “No reason.”
CHAPTER 14
THE NEXT MORNING on the walk to school, I told Ashley and Frankie that the trip to P
hiladelphia was absolutely, definitely off. We were waiting outside King Pin Donuts on Columbus Avenue while Frankie’s dad went in to buy us each a glazed chocolate twist. I had told Dr. Townsend that I hadn’t slept much the night before because I had some worries on my mind.
“I find that a glazed chocolate twist can be a balm for the despairing soul,” he said, giving me one of his extra-hard shoulder squeezes.
Dr. Townsend teaches African-American history at Columbia University, and he uses more big words in one sentence than I’ve used in my whole lifetime. He’s really nice, though, and he has great taste in donuts.
“You mean your dad just said no, I won’t go?” Ashley asked as we continued down Columbus Avenue munching on our donuts. Ashley can untwist the braided part of the donut with her tongue without using any hands at all. She’s amazing.
“Yep,” I said, licking the chocolate frosting off the top of my donut, which is my preferred way to eat it.
“It’s too bad there isn’t a crossword-puzzle tournament there,” Frankie said. “Silent Stan wouldn’t be able to resist that.”
Dr. Townsend dropped us off on the corner of 78th Street where our school is, and we headed down to the middle of the block where Mr. Baker, the crossing guard, was waiting for us.
“You kids are getting so big, pretty soon you’ll be helping me cross the street,” he said as he held up his red stop sign. “Couple more weeks, and you’ll be in fifth grade. Fifth grade, Hank, I don’t believe it.”
Hey, you and me both, Mr. Baker.
Ms. Adolf started the day by collecting the pink sign-up slips from our parents. Luke Whitman and I were the only ones who didn’t return the slip.
“I forgot,” I said when Ms. Adolf asked me where mine was.
“Today is Wednesday, Henry,” Ms. Adolf said, making some kind of note in her roll book. “There is only one more day before conference day.”
“I’ll try to remember it tomorrow,” I told her, which wasn’t really a lie. I would try to remember. And then I’d forget.
I couldn’t concentrate at all that morning in class. Not that I’m the king of concentration, but this was even worse than usual. Katie Sperling was giving a report on careers and which one she was going to choose when she grew up. She said she was either going to be a makeup artist for the movies or an astronomer. Either way, she’d get to be around stars.
Help! Somebody Get Me Out of Fourth Grade Page 5
