by C. C. Payne
I looked away, trying to give her privacy, but Miyoko removed the hand from her mouth and said, “I’m not laughing at her . . . I’m . . . I’m . . .” Then she fell to pieces again—she was laughing!—and had to slap her hand back over her mouth.
Relieved, I smiled and tried to help her out: “So . . . you’re laughing with her? But do you really think she’s laughing?”
“She should be—that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen! Did you see her butt pads? My mom has a really flat butt, so I guess . . .”
After that, we both had to clap our hands over our mouths. By the time we got control of ourselves, both the dog and the shoe were long gone.
I walked over to my backpack, lying in the grass, and then remembered: “Hey, Miyoko.”
She turned.
“My mom said you could spend the night with me on Friday.”
“I have to ask my mom,” Miyoko said. “Later.”
I nodded my understanding, hefted the backpack onto my shoulder, waved, and started for home.
I remembered what Miyoko had said at my mom’s wedding: My parents aren’t normal either. They weren’t. They really weren’t. Does anybody have normal parents? I was beginning to wonder.
I laughed all the way home—every time I’d start to settle down, I’d picture Mrs. Hoshi in her Big Booty Judy Bloomers, screaming at the sky, and start up again.
When I got to my house, I went to the mailbox before I remembered I didn’t have a key. That’s when the laughter officially died. I’m probably lucky to have a key to the house! I thought as I unlocked the front door. I stepped inside and was again struck by the feeling that I’d barged into the wrong house—the one with the pukey recliner.
I kicked off my shoes, dropped my stuff by the front door, and went to the kitchen to call Mom.
I got her voice mail: “You’ve reached Cecily Adams . . .”
I was thrown off balance in a way that was a lot like the wrong-house feeling. I had to think for a second. I thought I’d called Cecily Russo, and that’s who I really wanted . . . but she was gone now and I was stuck with Cecily Adams. My throat tightened with this thought, but at the beep, I rasped, “Hi, Mom. I’m home,” and hung up.
I was sitting at my desk, trying to do my math homework (translation: staring into my math book with a blank sheet of paper in front of me) when I heard Keene come home from work. I didn’t go downstairs to say hello and he didn’t come upstairs to say anything to me either. So what? I asked myself. Whatever.
A few minutes after Mom got home, she came into my room holding up the shoes I’d kicked off at the front door.
I just blinked at her.
“Fizzy, you’ve got to stop leaving your shoes by the door—bring your things up to your room, like I asked you to.”
“Okay,” I said, “but . . . why?”
“Because Keene doesn’t like it,” Mom said. “His pet peeve is floors—he always wants the floors to be clear and clean.”
“Oh, good gravy,” I mumbled.
Mom shot me a warning look.
I went back to my math book.
“How was your day?” Mom asked.
I gulped and touched the pocket that held Mrs. Ludwig’s note. “Um . . . fine.”
“It doesn’t sound like it was fine to me,” Mom said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I insisted.
Mom waited a few seconds and then said, “Elizabeth. Ann. Russo.” This pretty much meant, Spill it.
I took a deep breath and blurted, “My new math teacher sent home a note saying that I created a disturbance in class today.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Would you like to explain?”
I explained.
“All right,” Mom said. “Sounds like it was just a misunderstanding.”
“So . . . um . . . we don’t need to have ‘a family discussion,’ right?”
“Hopefully not . . . unless it happens again.”
My shoulders sagged with relief. “I could make dinner,” I offered.
“No, that’s okay,” Mom said. “I have a certain something planned already.”
“A certain something” is what Mom calls a meal she’s planning as a surprise for Keene. In case I wasn’t perfectly clear before: I hate all the meals that Keene loves.
For a few minutes, Mom moved around my room, putting my shoes in my closet, smoothing the clothes that bubbled up out of drawers, closing the drawers, and straightening. All the while, I continued staring into my math book—and not writing anything.
Before I knew what was happening—and could stop her—Mom was out in the hallway, hollering down the stairs, “Keene, Fizzy needs you to help her with her math homework, okay?”
“Okay,” he hollered back. “Tell her to bring it down.”
I looked at Mom, and with my eyes, I tried to say, Please tell me you did not just do that.
She smiled proudly at me like, Problem solved.
My stomach flipped.
Even so, I brought all my math stuff downstairs to the dining room table—what choice did I have?—where Keene was already seated. The first thing I learned is that it’s hard to learn when your brain is busy worrying about what your teacher thinks of you and what he might think of you if you don’t learn fast enough, or at all.
“Fizzy, are you listening?” Keene asked.
“Yes, sir.”
He shook his head and then repeated some math mumbo jumbo.
I thought about how all math might as well be a foreign language . . . other than French, because I would understand at least some of that.
Keene stared at me.
I stared blankly at the fractions in my math book without moving.
Keene sighed.
“Never mind,” I tried. “I’ll just—”
“No,” Keene interrupted. “Wait. Let me think of another way to explain it.”
I waited—in a squirmy, uncomfortable way.
“Fizzy, how many slices can you get out of a pie?”
I snapped to attention. “What kind of pie?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Keene said.
I gawped at him. Of course it mattered! “So, then, if I promise to make apple pie for dessert next week, you won’t mind if I make mincemeat pie instead?”
“Apple. It’s an apple pie,” Keene said, catching on quickly. “How many slices?”
“I’d say six good-size slices.”
Keene nodded and quickly drew a pie with six slices. He colored in one slice, and said, “One slice is . . .”
“One-sixth!” I said, the concept of fractions making some sense when applied to food.
“Good, Fizz,” Keene said. “I’ll be right back.”
Keene was gone long enough that I began to wonder if he’d forgotten about me.
But he came back, carrying a tray with a plate of sliced apple, a glass of water, a measuring cup, and a box of graham crackers. Keene picked up all the apple slices and put the apple back together. “This is one whole apple,” he said.
I nodded.
He opened his hands a little so that I could see he’d cut it into eight slices. “If you eat a piece, that’s—”
“One-eighth!” I said.
Keene used the water and the measuring cup to show me that I’d been working with fractions successfully for a long time—in my cooking. Then he used the graham crackers to make a number line, showing me another way to look at fractions.
I finished my math homework in twenty minutes flat and Keene checked it for me—perfect.
“Thanks,” I said, when he handed back my paper.
Keene nodded in a tired way.
“And . . . I’m sorry. About my shoes.”
“I know you are,” Keene said quietl
y, getting up from the table.
As I set the table for dinner, I couldn’t help wishing that Keene had responded, “It’s okay,” instead of “I know you are.” Because what did that even mean? Yes, I know, you are sorry—you are a sorry human being if I ever saw one?
• • •
Keene was washing his hands in the kitchen while Mom bent to pull a pan of sweet potatoes out of the oven. She made a whimpering sound.
Both Keene and I turned at the sound.
Mom set the pan down and stuck a finger in her mouth.
“Did you burn it?” Keene asked.
Mom nodded.
“Let me see,” he said. Keene carefully rinsed Mom’s burn in cool water, wrapped it ever so gently in gauze, and dosed her with aspirin. When he was done playing doctor, he bent his head and kissed her wounded hand in a way that struck me as . . . tender. He loved her, I realized then, not in words, but in actions.
When we were all seated at the dining room table, I said, “What is that smell?”
“Brussels sprouts,” Mom said cheerfully, passing me a big bowl filled with stinky-ness and what looked like tiny heads of lettuce.
“No, thank you,” I said, pushing the bowl away and coughing a little.
Mom raised her eyebrows at me. “Fizzy, I’ve worked hard on this dinner. The least you can do is taste it—you can’t know that you don’t like something unless you taste it.”
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I was going to have to put something that smelled so awful on my plate, right next to my food! But Mom and Keene were waiting, so I spooned one of the little green things onto my plate and coughed some more.
Neither Mom nor Keene seemed to notice my cough. But I noticed, as we passed food around, that Mom only took a few of the stinky little green things, too.
The sweet potatoes were the good news. The bad news was that there wasn’t anything else on the table that I liked even a little. So I ate my sweet potato and then just mushed and pushed everything else around on my plate.
Mom and Keene talked, mostly about work.
When there was a pause in conversation, I said, “May I please be excused?”
Mom inspected my plate and said, “Not until you try the brussels sprouts.”
I looked right back at Mom’s plate and said, “You haven’t tried yours.”
Mom looked like she wanted to say something but instead she speared the green thing with her fork and put it in her mouth.
I watched her chew, and I have to say, it didn’t look like Mom enjoyed brussels sprouts.
Even so, she swallowed, touched the corners of her mouth with her napkin, forced a smile, and said, “Your turn, Fizzy.”
Okay, now I’m not going to describe the gagging and coughing I did in detail, because . . . gross. No, let’s just say that in my opinion, brussels sprouts not only smell like feet; they taste like feet, too!
“You may be excused, Fizzy,” was all Mom said.
• • •
When I was back in my room, I added to Keene’s Dislike List:
10)Likes brussels sprouts.
11)Took my mail key!
12)Has a weird thing about clean floors—eye roll.
13)Brought the ugliest chair in chair-history into our living room!
Then I added to Keene’s Like List:
5)Is good at math.
6)Loves my mom.
Chapter 25
I smiled a little secret smile when I saw Zach waiting for me in the distance, on Wednesday morning, as usual.
The first thing I said to him as he headed down his front walk to meet me was, “Do you like brussels sprouts?”
“I don’t know,” Zach said. Then he grinned his crooked grin. “Why? Were you thinking of cooking some for me?”
I felt myself blush. “No.”
Zach smiled some more.
I took off walking and he scrambled after me.
“Admit it,” Zach said, coming up alongside me. “You missed me.”
I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “When?”
“I knew it,” he said, nodding and smiling to himself. “You missed me. Bad.”
I laughed.
“I missed you, too, Fizzy,” Zach said. “But I had to be in court yesterday.”
“Because you really are a violent maniac?” I teased.
Zach laughed. “Nah, because my grandmother wanted to legally adopt me.”
“Oh. Where’s your mom?”
The smile faded as Zach shrugged. “Who knows? Haven’t seen her in a few years and I don’t remember my dad at all.”
“I’m sorry, Zach,” I said.
“S’okay,” Zach said easily.
I didn’t know what else to say, so I just gave him a sympathetic look.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Zach said.
“Like what?”
“Like you feel sorry for me—I hate that—I’m fine.”
“Oh yeah, I know that,” I said quickly, because I understood: He just wanted to be a normal kid, like everybody else. I wanted that, too—for myself and for Zach.
“And Gran’s fine, too,” he said. “She’s tough, but fair.”
“So . . . then it’s good that your grandma wants to adopt you?”
“Very good,” Zach said. “It means I’ll never have to go back to living with some other family or in a group home for foster kids—because I have my own family, my own home.”
My heart ached for Zach. It must’ve been awful not having anyone who wanted him, even temporarily. And I knew how hard it was to live with one stranger, let alone a house full of strangers.
“Fizzy?”
“Yeah, sorry—so how’d it go in court?”
Zach smiled, remembering. “Gran stood up in front of the judge and the lawyers and everybody and said that she’s capable of caring for me, that she wants me, and . . .”
Silence. I risked a quick glance at Zach out of the corner of my eye; he lowered his head.
We kept walking.
Finally, he lifted his chin and continued in a hoarse voice, “She said that I’m a good boy and she loves me. In front of everybody.”
I didn’t know why tears gathered behind my eyes, but I blinked them back, sniffed, and said, “So you’ll live with your grandma from now on?”
“Yeah,” Zach said. “I’ve been here, with her, almost a year now.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I’ve been in the valley for almost a year now, too—hey, do you feel sick when your alarm clock goes off in the mornings?”
“No. Why? Do you?”
“No,” I said defensively, and then I admitted, “Sometimes . . . only sometimes.”
“Maybe you’re not a morning person.”
“Maybe,” I agreed.
“Or maybe you need a new alarm clock,” Zach said. “But me? I wake up feeling all right. Living here with Gran’s been the best—it’s better than foster care for sure.”
A big dog barked ferociously from a fenced backyard as we approached. “He kinda reminds me of our new math teacher,” I warned.
Zach grinned. “Can’t wait.”
• • •
In math class that afternoon, when Buffy entered the room, she smiled and trilled her fingers at Zach.
Zach smiled back.
Then, as soon as Brian sat down at his desk, he turned around in his seat and said, “Man! I gotta tell you about the omelet I had for breakfast this morning—diced tomatoes, feta cheese, fresh parsley! Man! I think it was the best omelet I’ve ever eaten.”
I leaned over my desk, and said, “Let me ask you something.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you like brussels sprouts?”
Brian looked at me like he was having serious doubts about m
y taste. He shook his head and said, “Aw, man . . . brussels sprouts? For breakfast? Disgusting.”
I was about to say that brussels sprouts are disgusting for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but before I could, Brian—who was clearly deeply upset by the revolting turn in our conversation—turned back around.
I was still thinking about brussels sprouts when Mrs. Ludwig started our math lesson. Which is how I missed the exact page number we were supposed to turn to in our books. I looked around and tried to catch someone’s eye so I could ask.
Zach’s eyes were already on me, from the desk beside mine, across the aisle.
“What page?” I whispered.
“Two thirty-one,” Zach said.
“Thanks.”
“Who’s talking?” Mrs. Ludwig boomed, looking around the room.
I sat up in my chair and stared straight ahead without blinking.
Finally, Mrs. Ludwig gave up, turned around, and started writing on the board.
I peered over at Zach.
He grinned, mouthed the words Who’s talking? and made a funny face.
A giggle escaped me.
Mrs. Ludwig spun around. “Fizzy Russo, was that you?”
My face and ears went hot.
Just as I opened my mouth to apologize, Zach’s math book slammed to the floor.
Mrs. Ludwig turned her evil eye on Zach. “Now that you have our attention, Zach Mabry, is there something you’d like to say?”
Zach shrugged his shoulders and gave Mrs. Ludwig a bored look.
What’s wrong with you? I thought at him. Say what she wants you to say!
“Get your things, Zachary, and move to the table at the back of the room, please,” Mrs. Ludwig said.
Zach looked around, then pointed to himself, and said, “You talking to me?”
Mrs. Ludwig stared him down.
“Because my name’s not Zachary,” Zach informed her. “It’s Zachariah.”
