“Is Casey the tree?” I asked.
He smiled.
“Casey’s dead,” I said.
He nodded. “Go on,” he said.
But I couldn’t.
Freddie spread a giant sheet of brown paper across the bedroom floor, taped it down and got out a big box of crayons from his desk drawer. He’d already drawn outlines of the picture. There was a sun, river, ocean, cloud, house.
“Now, get going, Fred,” he said. “We have to fill this in by next week.”
The house he’d sketched had lots of detail. He was a good artist. I’d never cared that much about what things looked like. “There’s someone taking a bath here,” I said.
“Sure!” he smiled. “That’s part of the water cycle. Velma is doing an experiment in front of the class to show the water cycle, and I’m doing this picture to explain it.”
“Do you like Velma?” I asked.
“Not that much. She’s mean. She called Mike a minority.”
“Do you jump inside when she looks at you?”
“Huh?”
“Is it like an electric shock? A kind of zing feeling?”
He handed me a light blue crayon. “Get coloring,” he said.
Freddie explained the water cycle to me. He did a good job—better than Miss Pullteeth when our class got to it the next week.
“When you take a bath, you drain the water, right?” he said. “And it runs down the waste pipe to the sewer and then to the lake. And the sun heats it and it evaporates into the sky. And then next time it rains the water comes down to earth again. The city collects rainwater in a reservoir and pipes it through to your house. So that when you have another bath, you’re using the same water as before.”
He showed me the things on his drawing—reservoir, water pipe, clouds.
“What’s this?” I pointed at an animal way under the ground below the house. “Is it a dragon?”
I hadn’t seen any since that one in the park, but I kept checking for them. Wondering about them.
“That’s a dinosaur,” said Freddie. “Do you have those in your world? Like dragons, millions of years ago. No wings on that one—it’s a stegosaurus. I put it in because water has been going around and around and around the world forever.”
“Always the same water?”
“Absolutely. It rained on the dinosaurs and evaporated into the clouds, and rained on the ancient Egyptians and evaporated again, and rained on the Iroquois and the pioneers and your grandparents and you. It’s all the same water. It never goes away. It’s never used up. That’s the water cycle.”
It took a minute for the idea of something lasting forever, not ever disappearing, to sink into my brain.
“My favorite part of the project is the experiment,” he said. “We’re going to take sweat from the class and show how it’s part of the water cycle.”
“Hey, that’s smart. Did Velma think of that?”
“No, it’s my idea. I haven’t told her yet.”
I thought of Velma with her hand on my arm, collecting my sweat. Or on my cheek. Zing.
—
The paper stretched from the bed to the window. Freddie was on his hands and knees, filling in the house details. I started near the other end, coloring a mountain. We had the same box of crayons, but I didn’t look after mine the way he did. All his were in the box, all sharpened. Mine were mostly nubby and quite a few were missing.
I got down on my stomach and worked away with brown crayon until Casey jiggled me.
“Oh no,” I said. “I went outside the lines. Sorry, Freddie. Your mountain has a jaggedy brown bump sticking out of it.”
He came over.
“No problem,” he said. “Watch.”
He took my brown crayon and a green one and a black one, and with three or four strokes, he turned my jaggedy bump into a pine tree.
“There. Mountains have trees at the bottom,” he said.
“Hey, that’s good!” I said. “You’re good.”
“Thanks.”
“How come you can draw and I can’t?” I said.
He shrugged. “How come you can jump ten feet in the air and I can’t?”
“I can’t jump very high back home.”
“Well—I guess I’m different from you, then.”
“Yeah.”
He was too. Back home I couldn’t jump or draw. Or play with my dog.
—
I looked up a few minutes later and found that it wasn’t a few minutes later. It was a lot later.
“I have to go!” I said.
Mom would be getting home from work now. She’d ask where I’d been and why I was late, and I’d have to lie. I should have left a half hour ago. Crap. The same water may go on and on forever, but time is now and then it’s gone.
I wanted to leave right away, but Izzy was in the hall outside, yelling down to her mom about laundry. I pulled open the bedroom window—it stuck at the bottom, just like mine at home—and peered out.
“What are you doing, Fred?”
“I’m going to jump,” I said.
“Can you?”
“I think so. It’s not much higher than a basketball net.”
I perched for a second on the sill. It looked like a long way down, but the drainpipe was within reach. I wouldn’t dare do it from home, but I was running late and feeling the light-headedness of this place. I grabbed hold of the drainpipe and scrambled down. Freddie leaned out the window to wave.
A guy in a hard hat stared at me as I raced—slowly—across my Sorauren Park, pushing Casey’s ball back into my pocket and adjusting to the heavy right-side-upness of things.
—
Turned out that all of us were late for dinner. I got in the door one minute ahead of Izzy and two ahead of Mom. No one asked where I’d been. Mom had picked up a pasta thing on the way home from work and we had that. Tasted gluey.
The dishwasher made sloshing sounds as it filled up. I thought about the water inside, cleaning off our pasta dishes and draining away into the lake, where it would evaporate and then become rain, the same rain that had fallen on my mom when she was a little girl.
Didn’t matter how awful or disgusting or plain boring something was, Miss Pullteeth would get excited about it. “Way to go, Kleenex!” she would say, when one of us came in with a cold and spent a whole minute blowing our nose. “All right, Team Canada! Way to try!!” she said when they lost a hockey game to the US or the Swedes. Miss Pullteeth wore clothes she’d made herself out of odd bits of fabric—dresses, pants, pullovers. She was tall and thin and the clothes flapped around her body like flags on a pole. She had big hands and she liked to clap them. Today she was clapping for me, because I had volunteered to be South America.
“Way to go, Fred! Come on up here.”
I don’t know why I did it. Ever since…well, for what seemed forever I’d sat in the back of the class with my head down. Hadn’t felt like saying anything. We had Friday spelling bees, last one standing won a candy bar, and I always got my word wrong on purpose so I could sit down. But today Miss Pullteeth had held up a bunch of cardboard cutouts and said, “Who wants to be part of the world?” And I found myself with my hand up.
I took the cardboard map of South America and stood up at the front of the class with Paul, Rider, Lisa, Renee, Mike and Tara.
“Hey, look!” Velma whispered to Carmen next to her. “Mike is Asia!”
From his expression, I couldn’t tell if he’d heard the comment. Lisa Wu heard. “And I’m North America,” she said. “Immigration, eh? Get used to it.”
She glared at Velma. She didn’t like her any more than Freddie did. Velma sneered back at her. Man, she had a cute sneer.
Miss Pullteeth had us stand together to show how the continents used to fit into each other like a jigsaw puzzle, back at the beginning of the world. Then she had us spread apart. Renee went off by herself at the back to be Australia. Tara and Mike and Paul were in a kind of huddle over by the door, since Africa, Asia
and Europe are all together. Lisa and I were holding hands, two continents linked in the middle. She wore dark nail polish.
My first time ever holding hands with a girl who was not my sister. I felt my face getting warmer.
“And then a hundred years ago,” said Miss Pullteeth, “they built the Panama Canal, and the link between North and South America was cut.”
She nodded to us. “You can let go of each other’s hands now,” she whispered.
I could feel the pressure of Lisa’s fingers even after she dropped my hand.
Lunch recess. Mike Lee was losing to Lance Levy at one-on-one. Lance was fist pumping after every basket, as usual. Finally Mike scored.
“That’s it, Asia!” I yelled. “You can do it!”
He stared over at me, startled, then broke into a smile. I held out my hand and he slapped it as he ran past me.
—
“What’s so funny?”
“Huh?”
“Were you laughing at the veal parmigiana?”
“Oh. No, Mom, it’s fine. It’s good.”
I’d been thinking about my races with Freddie that afternoon. Him inside the house, me outside. One, two, three, go! he shouted and ran up the stairs to his room. Meanwhile, I was climbing up the outside of the house, using the drainpipe as a ladder. There were metal things sticking out of the brick to attach the drainpipe. I could leap to the first one, pull myself up and then shin up the rest of the drainpipe to Freddie’s window. Casey barked and ran around in circles.
Voices, arguing. I looked up from my veal again. Izzy was asking if she could go to her boyfriend’s house and watch TV. Mom was saying sure, but she had to be home by nine. Izzy was saying that was too early. Mom was saying tough.
I thought about Harry and his long chin. Handsome Harry to Freddie. Harry the Horse to me. I didn’t mean to smile, but I guess I did. Izzy saw me and thought I was making fun of her.
“Shut up, brat,” she said to me.
“Isabel!” said my mom.
“You shut up, Izzy!” I said.
Mom opened her mouth and closed it again.
Isabel stood in the doorway with a hurt expression on her face. Hurt? I mean angry. “Aren’t you going to yell at Fred for saying shut up? You yelled at me.”
“I…” said Mom. “I…want to yell at both of you!”
“Yeah, sure.” Isabel glared at her. And me. And left. So it was just two of us at the table. And one of us was crying.
I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. I cleared my throat and tried a there, there to see how it would go.
Mom—this was a surprise—laughed through her tears.
“Your face,” she said. “You’re so concerned and uncomfortable. Did you think I was upset?”
“Aren’t you?”
“No. I’m happy. You yelled at your sister.”
“And that made you happy?”
“You sounded like yourself. Your old self. Dr. Nussbaum was right. You’re making progress.”
She blew her nose.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m still angry at you skipping piano lessons without telling me. Why couldn’t you just say? Anyway, that’s over for now. You’re not hiding anything, and you’re angry at Izzy. Things are normal. Oh, you don’t understand, Fred. I’ve been afraid to leave you, even for an evening, let alone overnight. But the way you’re acting now, I’m hopeful. It’s a big deal, honey. That’s why I’m crying. Sorry to make you uncomfortable.”
Freddie always seemed happy to hang around his mom. Was that because he was cooler than I was, or because she was cooler than Mom?
“What’s for dessert?” I said.
Wet afternoon. Rain dripped off eaves and trees and made little dents in puddles. My hair hung limp. I brushed it out of my eyes. Freddie left a note for me in his shed.
Mom is making me go to the dentist. Teeth, am I right?
Sorry, Fred. See you tomorrow!
His writing looked just like mine.
Shinning up the drainpipe, I had a moment of panic. What if the house wasn’t empty? Mom always made Izzy’s and my appointments on the same day and went with us. What if Freddie’s mom didn’t? What if she was inside right now? What if she caught me? What story could I possibly tell her?
But the house was empty. I squeezed into Freddie’s room, and there was Casey. He’d heard me climbing up. He barked and wagged and wriggled and jumped all over me. And I was glad to be there.
“Hey, boy.” I hugged him hard and put my nose right up against his fur. He smelled like I remembered him when I first got him. Like my dog, Casey.
I found I was crying.
Weird, eh? I’d been playing with Casey for weeks. Why was I suddenly weepy?
I hadn’t cried much when he died. Not even that first night, alone in my quiet room when I’d been used to him breathing beside me. I had stared up into the dark, dry eyed and numb.
Dr. Nussbaum and I talked about this. He told me not to worry. He said I’d cry as much as I had to when I was ready to. So maybe I was ready now, because here I was blowing my nose and then starting again right away, a tap that wouldn’t shut off.
Casey didn’t mind. He panted and licked my face.
I went downstairs and played chase the ball with him in the living room, and kept crying. When it was time to go, I knelt down to give him a big hug.
A police car was parked in the street outside. It made a bleeping sound to get my attention and the officer got out.
“What were you doing in there, kid?” he called.
I sniffed. “I live there.”
“We got a report about someone breaking in,” he said. “Kid in a gray sweatshirt and jeans, climbing up the drainpipe.”
“Oh, yeah. That was me. I was locked out.”
“What’s your name?”
“Fred Berdit.”
“Your mom or dad around, Fred?” he asked.
“My what?”
“Your parents?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, no. Not around. Not here. My dad is—I mean my mom’s at the dentist with my sister,” I said.
My throat felt tight. I don’t know if it was the policeman’s suspicion or a reaction from the crying. I took rapid breaths to fill my lungs and—and—and took off down the street. I don’t know what I was thinking. No. Yeah. No, I had to get away. That’s what I was thinking. Had to get away. Had to.
I looked back from Sorauren Avenue. The cop was staring after me like I was a ghost or a superhero. How had I got so far so fast? I turned into the park, found the drain, jumped.
The trip between worlds was time-out. Like sitting on the sidelines, watching your big sister play soccer. Like standing on the subway platform, waiting for the future to arrive.
Falling, I thought about the day I picked Casey out. It was last year about this time. Not summer, but summer was coming. Sunshiny weather, T-shirts and shorts. Mom and I took the streetcar along Queen Street to the other side of the city. We sat at the back, with the sun on our necks and our shadows stretching in front of us on the floor of the streetcar. She was wearing her green jeans again—she seemed to have the same clothes on forever, last summer. She sighed and yawned and pushed her hair out of her eyes while the streetcar shrieked and clanged and swayed across the city.
At the Humane Society shelter we walked down a hallway lined with cages. I was quiet and Mom was tired. Come on, she kept saying. We looked at wiggly dogs and growly dogs and mournful dogs. They all came up to me and barked, and I didn’t want any of them. “Come on,” said Mom. “How about this one. Her name is Lucky. Isn’t she sweet? Look at her big eyes. How about Lucky?”
I shook my head.
Lots of barking and whining. Pain, anger, dog poop. I hated it. And then I saw a ball of black and brown, curled up at the back of a cage near the door. I bent closer, and he opened an eye and smiled at me.
He didn’t come over. A careful dog. And because he didn’t come over, I stayed and watched him. He breathed quietly, his whole body
rising and falling on each breath.
The lady from the shelter said something to Mom.
The big dog in the cage next door was baying at me. Loud, angry, repetitive. Like a stupid toy making its one noise over and over.
Casey smiled a secret little smile. I got down on my knees. Put out my hand.
There were tags on the front of the cages, with the names on them.
“Casey.” I read the tag aloud.
The dog perked up. Still cautious.
“Casey,” I said again. Quieter. Just him and me. He came over slowly, taking hesitant little steps. He knew his name.
He smiled at me, showing his chipped tooth.
I carried Casey out of the shelter and put him on the seat next to me on the streetcar ride home. Mom sat behind us. I whispered in his ear on the way home. Casey, I said, over and over. Casey.
We got off the streetcar a stop early, opposite the pet store, and bought food and bowls and another leash. When we got home, Izzy said he was stupid and smelly and a pain, and that she was not going to walk him. I didn’t mind. He was my dog.
He slept in my room from the start. His blanket was by my bed. When Mom came in to check on me, Casey got up and stood with his head on one side. It looked like the two of them were saying goodnight to me together. Mom cried. I guess she was relieved I finally found a dog I liked.
I guess.
I landed with a heavy thump. Back to reality. I climbed the ladder, heavy in heart and body, and banged my head on the grating.
I didn’t see the seriousness of the situation right away. What the heck, I thought. And lifted my hand. Of course the grating didn’t move. I pushed again, using all my strength. Nothing. The grating fit tight on the drain, as it was supposed to. I remembered how hard it had been to lever it off with the hockey stick. Okay, this was serious now. I clung to the ladder and raised my voice.
“Hey!”
It was getting harder to make out the blackness of the bars against the purple twilight sky. I felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I wasn’t scared. I was—something else. I pushed upward as hard as I could. Banged my hands on the bars.
Downside Up Page 5
