DEDICATION
To best friends everywhere,
and the magic they bring to our lives.
And to my magical friend Julia.
Contents
Dedication
A Perfect Day with Danny
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
A Perfect Day with Danny
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
A Perfect Day with Danny
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
A Perfect Day Without Danny
Acknowledgments
Back Ad
About the Author
Books by Corey Ann Haydu
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
A PERFECT DAY WITH DANNY
I am twisted up like a pretzel with my eyes closed in Danny’s backyard. It’s so sticky hot that I’m desperate to untwist, but that’s not how you play the statue game. It is two summers ago, and we have been playing the statue game every single afternoon, so I’m an expert on the rules.
“One. Two. Three!” Danny yells at the top of his lungs, like the whole neighborhood needs to hear.
I open my eyes and he does too, and there he is, twisted up like a pretzel, just like me.
“Another!” I say.
“That’s three in a row,” Danny says, grinning and unpretzeling.
“Let’s see if we can do four.”
We stand straight up. I brush a strand of sweaty hair off my forehead, and Danny wipes the back of his neck.
“One. Two. Three,” I say, and we close our eyes at the same time. With our eyes closed, we each find a shape for our bodies to make. This is how the statue game works. The goal is to make the same shape, without seeing each other. The goal is to wonder at how our best friendship is the world’s closest best friendship. The most special. The most beautiful. The most magical.
I raise my arms to the sky and split them into a V. I can feel the part in my hair getting burned, but I don’t care.
“You ready?” Danny asks. We have never failed at the statue game. I wait, breathe, think about the grass tickling between my toes, and concentrate on now-invisible Danny. I always know what shape he’s making, and he always knows what shape I’m making. I lift one knee, certain that he is doing the same.
“Ready!”
“One. Two. Three!” Danny yells, so loud I’m sure his father, Ross, who is working inside at the kitchen table, can hear.
We open our eyes. We both start laughing. We both are reaching up to the hot Florida sun. We each are balanced on one leg. Danny’s having trouble balancing. The leg holding him up is wobbly and he’s sticking his tongue far out, like that will help him stay upright. He looks goofy but happy, which is the number one best combination possible.
“Having some trouble?” I ask. I am always better at balancing. Danny gets too distracted. The key is to look at one spot, a little ways in the distance, but Danny likes to look everywhere, all around, taking in every single thing. I am focused on seeing one thing perfectly, and Danny likes to try to see everything all at once. I like watching him try to stay still.
“I’m doing great,” Danny says, even though we both know he’s not.
“I could hold this pose forever,” I say. “Should we stay like this for a while?” I lift my knee even closer to my chest and focus on one yellowing blade of grass.
“Yep. I’m very comfortable,” Danny says. His standing knee wobbles. His body sways. He topples to the ground and we laugh so hard our eyes water, even though it’s hardly the funniest thing that’s ever happened to us.
It doesn’t matter. “You two will laugh at anything,” my mother’s always saying when we’re sputtering and doubled over in the kitchen or the pool or one of our neighboring backyards.
And she’s right, we will.
“Another!” I say, knowing we will once again find the same shape in the darkness.
Because Danny and I are always a perfect match.
1
In fifth-grade science, we’re learning about the way the world works.
Danny thinks we’re learning about fish and flowers, but that’s because he’s only listening to every other sentence as usual. It’s only the third week of fifth grade, and he’s already having trouble focusing.
He passes me a sheet of paper ripped out of his notebook. Notes from math class are on one side, and he’ll be kicking himself later for losing them, but when I take a closer look, they’re not quite right anyway. I’m better at math and science and Danny’s better at English and social studies, and together we manage to do pretty well at everything.
The other side of the paper he hands me is set up for a game of Snowman. There are dashes across the bottom, each dash representing a letter in a word I’m supposed to guess. Whenever I guess a letter wrong, Danny draws a part of a snowman—its round head or carrot nose or branch arms.
Danny never completes the snowman.
Sometimes it takes me a few guesses to get my first letter right, so he’ll make a headless figure or a snowman with no face and a missing arm. But that’s it. Because after I have one letter figured out, I know the whole word.
It is one of the many things I can rely on in my friendship with Danny, like the statue game. I glance at his paper even though I’m eager to listen to Ms. Mendez, who has a glint in her eye like she’s going to reveal all the wackiest bits of the world to us, and I don’t want to miss that.
There are six dashes on the paper. I guess a c, and Danny draws a large circle, a sturdy bottom for a snowman. I guess an o, and Danny smiles and writes an o in the second slot. He grins. I stare at the dashes. If I can find the word quickly, he’ll let me focus on the rest of class without bothering me. He knows it’s my favorite part of every day.
Danny’s words are always related to something going on around him, so I know the clues are in how he’s currently feeling or objects directly in his line of sight. This one’s easy, though—he’s used the same word a million times before. I fill in the rest of the dashes.
Boring.
I roll my eyes at him. Science class is anything but boring. Danny wiggles his eyebrows in response, and I can’t help laughing. Danny’s eyebrows always make me giggle.
“Something funny, Clover?” Ms. Mendez asks. Her glasses have fallen from the top of her nose to the bottom, and they look like they could crash to the floor at any minute.
“No, Ms. Mendez,” I say.
“Why don’t you repeat to the class what I just said about symbiosis?” Ms. Mendez says.
It’s not a word I’ve heard before, so I can’t even guess. I let my foot find Danny’s shin and give it a tiny but serious kick.
Ms. Mendez lets me sit in silent embarrassment for exactly ten seconds. Then she clicks her tongue and writes the word on the board.
Symbiosis.
I love science words. I love how when I hear them they don’t mean anything at all, and moments later they mean more than any other word.
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nbsp; “Symbiosis,” Ms. Mendez says, and I think from the way she says it that she likes the word too. She can be strict, but I don’t mind because she is the world’s best teacher. Danny may think it’s all boring, but I think everything out of her mouth is magnificent. I straighten my back, waiting to hear what sort of treasure this new word holds. “It refers to a relationship where two organisms or creatures are benefiting from each other and surviving together. Because of each other. In symbiosis, each organism does something the other one can’t do for itself, and they live off each other. They’re dependent on each other.”
Danny’s kicking his chair with the heels of his beat-up sneakers, and behind me Elsa is humming something very quietly under her breath. Across the room, Brandy is looking out the window and squinting at the sun.
But for me, the world stops.
I’ve loved a lot of science—from gravity to evolution to the organization of the planets around the sun. It’s all pretty amazing as far as I’m concerned. But I think I will find symbiosis the most beautiful of all.
“One of the more familiar symbiotic relationships is between flowers and bees,” Ms. Mendez says. “Bees survive by eating the nectar and pollen from flowers, and flowers survive when those same bees drop some of the pollen on other flowers, which makes seeds, so that more flowers can grow. Each being has what the other one needs. That’s one example of symbiosis. We’ll be talking about more examples over the next few weeks. Symbiotic relationships can be found all over nature. Especially under the sea.”
I am gripping my desk so hard my fingers start to hurt, that’s how excited I am. I am finger-hurting excited to learn more.
I look to Danny, because sometimes my excitement is contagious and he’ll stop calling something boring and start thinking it’s awesome. I expect to see his pouty-lipped, squinty-eyed concentrating face, or maybe just another sheet of notebook paper covered in bored-Danny scribbles. But instead his eyes are watery and unfocused, and there’s a hunch in his shoulders that is making his body into the wrong shape. It is not a Danny-shape.
I raise my hand, but I should have shouted out because before my hand is all the way up in the air, Danny has slumped over and hit the ground.
Danny always tells me I’m too polite and that it’s okay to be a little brazen sometimes. Danny likes fancy words like brazen, instead of bold or rude or obnoxious. This one time, he’s right; I should have been more brazen.
Everything is wrong. Danny is meant to be upright and smirking and fidgeting and leaning back in his chair so it wobbles a little. It’s frightening, to see him on the ground instead.
I leap out of my chair and hold my breath.
“Everyone give him some room. Elsa, go get the nurse. Paloma, get some water from the fountain. Brandy, please step away from him.” Ms. Mendez puts her hands under Danny’s head and her ear to his chest, and I sink onto the floor next to them both. She doesn’t ask me to move away and give them space; I think she knows I wouldn’t be able to. “He fainted, Clover,” she says, looking at me very closely. “Has he ever done this before?”
I shake my head and try to remember every time Danny’s ever been sick. There was a long night of him puking in my downstairs bathroom after eating Mom’s terrible microwaved salmon, and the time he broke his ankle jumping off the swings. And the last few months he’s had a stuffy nose and a sometimes cough that his mom says are probably allergies.
“Did he eat enough at lunch?” Ms. Mendez asks. She is relying on science even now. I decide I want to see the world the way she does—filled with facts and explanations and scientific experiments that answer all the questions that seem impossible to answer.
I scrunch up my brain to make it remember everything.
“He had two cheese sandwiches and a cookie. He mixed all the juices together and drank them really fast. Could that be it?” Danny called it rainbow juice, and some of it came out of his nose, he drank it so recklessly.
Paloma comes back with a cup of water and Elsa drags the nurse in by his hand and everyone else settles back to talk about whether or not this means the rest of science class is canceled. Danny’s eyes start to open, and I take a hurricane-strength breath.
The nurse comes down to Danny’s level and pushes me and Ms. Mendez aside.
“Clover?” Danny says, when the nurse asks him how he feels.
“Clover?” he says, when the nurse asks if Danny knows where he is.
“Clover?” Danny says, when the nurse asks if Danny can stand up.
“I’m here,” I say. I step in front of Danny, and at last he smiles.
“What happened?” he asks me, even though I don’t have those kinds of answers. I promise myself that the next time he asks, I’ll know for sure.
“We’ll figure it out.” My heart is still beating fast, and Danny looks small and unusually timid on the floor. I keep expecting him to jump up and grab my shoulders and tell me it was all a Danny prank.
He doesn’t jump up. He doesn’t even sit up.
I sit on the ground next to him and hold his hand. It’s cold and wet. It doesn’t feel like Danny’s hand.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I say.
“What happened?” Danny asks again.
I would do anything to have the answer.
2
Dad’s hot dogs are always a little burnt and his hamburgers are always a little bit raw, but I never care. The food isn’t as good when Dad’s around, but everything else is better. Dad is a truck driver, so he misses a lot of Sunday dinners when he’s on the road. Last Sunday, Danny’s dad, Ross, made bacon cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries, but all I could think about was how much better it would be if Dad were wrapped in an apron, flipping the burgers too early and opening a bag of greasy chips.
I was right. It’s better when Dad’s here.
“Burger, sweet pea?” Dad asks. Danny, Jake, and I are playing a complicated game of tag on the lawn, and I’m scared to stop for even a moment, so I call out “Both!” and forget to say please or thank you or anything else.
“Me too!” Danny echoes. He’s running just as fast as he always does, so I know for sure he’s fine.
“What about you, Jakey?” Dad calls to my six-year-old brother. Jake yips a nothing answer. I don’t know what Dad takes that to mean, but he doesn’t make Jake repeat himself. He knows—we all know—how important the game of tag is to Jake. Making up complicated tag games is one of the things Jake likes to do best. And when Jake is happy, we’re all happy. His moods are big and buzzy and contagious.
Danny and I aren’t supposed to let Jake win—Mom says it’s important for Jake to get used to both winning and losing—but we always do anyway. When Jake wins, he jumps up and down and hugs everyone, even Danny’s parents, Helen and Ross, who he’s never been a hundred percent comfortable with.
Today’s game—Dizzy Tag—involves spinning around in circles before chasing each other. It’s the clumsiest tag, but not the messiest one. The messiest tag is Ketchup Tag, which involves each of us being armed with a squeezy bottle of Heinz and aiming for different body parts every round.
Jake tackles me and it hurts to fall in the grass, but in the good way.
I’m It.
“One! Two! Three!” Danny and Jake count in unison while I spread my arms and start spinning. I have to spin until they count to twenty. It used to be ten, but we all got too good for a count of ten.
When they get to twenty, I try to run but I keep tripping over myself—my body won’t listen to me to stay upright. I bet there’s a scientific reason for why turning in circles makes your limbs all sloppy and silly.
Danny and Jake are cracking up and the air smells like charcoal and the sky before it rains and melting cheese on burgers. All delicious and familiar. Getting dizzy makes me forget all about Danny’s fainting the other day. Being dizzy clears my head right up, and I’m laughing too and reaching my arms out for either Jake or Danny. I hope my dad’s watching through the smoke.
“Gotch
a!” I yell when I finally tag Danny. He stumbles against the big palm tree that started growing in my yard but leans over so far that its top is in Danny’s yard. We love that tree, and the way it isn’t Danny’s or mine, but ours.
We both lean against it for a moment. It’s a good tree to lean against, to meet under, to try to climb even though palm trees aren’t very good for climbing.
When we play tag or hide-and-seek or kick the can, the tree is safety and home base. If you are touching the tree, nothing bad can happen to you. That’s what we decided.
I keep my hand pressed against the tree, and Danny does too.
Just in case we need a little extra luck.
Jake always knows the second dinner’s ready, and he takes our free hands and pulls us off the tree. We’re all three breathless, walking across the lawn to sit with our parents under the big blue umbrella. The parents stop talking as soon as we get to them, and we’re supposed to pretend not to notice. Usually it means they’re talking about something like putting Jake in a new special school or how to help Danny do better in math class or why I don’t have enough confidence. They think we don’t hear these snippets of conversation, but Danny and I hear enough to make sense of the secrets they think they have.
Today they’ve been talking about Danny’s fainting, I’m sure. They look worried, even though my parents specifically told me not to worry.
“One hamburger and one hot dog for each of you,” Dad says, handing out shiny red plastic plates and burgers that are too big for their buns.
“I need mayo and mustard and ketchup and pickles and onions and one tomato slice,” Jake says. “No lettuce.”
“We know, honey,” Mom says.
“How long did it take for the doctors to figure out what was going on with Jake?” Danny’s mom asks. She and Danny’s dad started letting me call them Helen and Ross almost two years ago, on my ninth birthday. Mom thinks I’m too young to call adults by their first names, but I love it.
Mom and Dad look at each other. The serious conversation is always supposed to stop when the kids come back to the table. I grab an extra handful of chips and Danny stuffs almost the entire hot dog into his mouth at once. Jake organizes his toppings like he’s an architect perfecting a burger building. There’s a long silence where Mom and Dad look to us and back to Helen and back to us again.
The Someday Suitcase Page 1
