“Huh?”
“Your mother is really, really nice.”
Harper smiles one of his rare smiles. “I already know that,” he says.
Nine
Turquoise Bracelet and Necklace to Match
The next morning before school, on the play yard, Calvin tells Carlos and Gavin and Richard all about his experience the day before with Harper. He thinks they might find it funny: Harper’s mother, living in a toolshed. But they just listen with mouths kind of hanging open. Finally Carlos says, “Wow. Harper lived in a toolshed.”
“But it was pretty much fixed up and neat and it looked comfortable,” Calvin explains.
“A toolshed,” Richard repeats, squinting as if he’s trying to imagine it.
Calvin glances around. He’s relieved to see that no one’s laughing. Everyone’s looking kind of surprised—and curious. He’s glad. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” Calvin says.
“How come?” Richard asks.
“Because she was real nice, and how would you like it if you had that situation and someone started blabbing it all over school?”
Richard looks insulted. “I wasn’t even going to say anything.”
Calvin wonders if that is true.
When the bell rings and they file into the classroom, Calvin sees Ms. Shelby-Ortiz’s morning journal topic on the whiteboard: “The Last Thing that Surprised You.”
Calvin sits down and pulls out his journal. He turns to the next clean page and stares at it. He puts the date in the upper right corner. He stares some more. Then he begins:
This boy I know, his mom lives in a tool shed. I’m not going to say where because I don’t want her to get in trouble. Because she has to live in the tool shed and he did too before he had to go to a foster house and have a foster mother who isn’t really his mother but that’s the only person to take care of him. He just said his father is somewhere. I saw this tool shed yesterday and it was cool. There was a cot like the kind you sleep in at camp and a box for her clothes and a radio/CD player and a small refrigerator just big enough for her food, I’m thinking. She’s pretty and nice and I liked her so I’m going to pray that she gets a job and then she can get an apartment for herself and my friend.
Calvin looks at the words my friend. Is Harper his friend? He doesn’t know. He has to admit, he’s still a little afraid of him. But this morning, when they passed each other in the hall, Harper reached out and gave Calvin a soft punch on the arm. Later, when they passed each other again, Harper nodded at Calvin. Surprisingly, Calvin felt kind of . . . proud.
After school, Carlos and Gavin head off to soccer practice, and Richard says, “I want to go to the community garden. I want to see Harper’s mother.”
Calvin’s eyes get big. “Shhh,” he says, looking around. “What if Harper hears you?”
“He can’t,” Richard says. “This old lady picked him up early. I saw her in the office when Ms. Shelby-Ortiz sent me to get copy paper. Maybe he’s got a dentist appointment or something.”
“Don’t say anything, Richard. I wouldn’t have told you if I thought you were going to tell people.”
“Okay, I won’t. Can we go?”
“I guess.”
When they walk through the garden gate, Calvin doesn’t see Harper’s mom right away. Maybe she’s in the shed. There are two other women there. One is down on her knees, weeding, and the other is watering some plants toward the back of the lot.
Calvin and Richard wander around and look at rows of plants. Richard walks ahead toward the toolshed.
“You can’t go in there,” Calvin says, regretting that he even told Richard and the others about Harper’s mother.
“I just want to take a look.”
The woman doing the weeding stands up, brushes her hands on her jeans. “Can I help you?” she asks.
“Um,” says Calvin. “We’re friends of Harper’s, and me and Harper were here yesterday and I met his mother, and we just wanted to say hi.”
“She borrowed my car to go get some mulch from the nursery. She should be back any minute.”
“We can wait,” Richard is quick to say.
The woman shrugs and goes back to her task.
“Come on,” whispers Richard. “I just want to see what it looks like—inside.”
Calvin hesitates. “We’ll look inside for five seconds and then we have to go.” He doesn’t have a good feeling about this.
Richard is already leading the way to the shed in the corner. Calvin looks around. He doesn’t want to follow, but he doesn’t really have a choice. At least the woman who was watering plants toward the back of the garden has moved closer to the street. The woman doing the weeding is on the far side of the garden as well.
Richard peeks in the window of the shed. Calvin waits behind him, not wanting to get too close. He looks around nervously again until Richard steps back. “That’s cool. I could live in there,” Richard says.
“Come on now. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold on.” Richard tries the door. It’s not locked. “Let’s go in.”
“No, Richard. You wouldn’t want anyone to just walk into your house when you weren’t there.”
“This isn’t a house. It’s a toolshed.”
“You know what I mean.”
But Richard opens the door and slips inside.
Calvin checks the street for Harper’s mother. It’s a good thing he does, because just then he sees a blue minivan pull up in front of the garden. He watches until he sees Harper’s mother jump out and go around to the back. She opens the hatch and stares at the contents of the cargo space. Finally she lifts a big plastic bag onto her shoulder. She holds it there with one hand, and with the other she slams the door shut.
Calvin slips around to the part of the shed hidden away from the street. He knocks on the window. He sees Richard’s smiling face—he’s pressing his nose against the windowpane from the inside, probably thinking he’s some kind of comedian. Calvin mouths, Come on, and points toward the street.
Richard steps out of the shed and looks where Calvin’s pointing. He closes the door behind him. They’re making their way down the path between the spinach and peas, cucumbers and chard, when Miss Aileen notices them.
“Hey,” she says, waving. She leans the bag of mulch against one of the raised beds full of soil and plants and comes over to them. “Where’s Harper?” She has a big smile on her face.
Calvin and Richard look at each other.
“I think he went somewhere with Mrs. Jeffers,” Calvin says.
Harper’s mom keeps smiling, but it’s not as big a smile as it was just seconds before. “What are you guys doing here?” she asks, but in a friendly way.
“I just wanted to show Richard the community garden,” Calvin says, feeling a little guilty. Calvin knows that Richard was more curious about the shed than the actual garden.
Harper’s mother nods.
“Well, I guess we’ll go now,” Calvin says.
Harper’s mother nods again, then holds up her palm. “Wait. I have something for you.” She reaches down and picks something green with curly-edged leaves.
“Kale. Fresh and organic,” she says, handing bunches to Calvin and Richard. Richard looks at the leaves in his hand. “Thank you,” he manages, though his smile looks forced.
“Thank you,” Calvin says, and then he notices something. The bracelet on Harper’s mom’s arm looks just like a bracelet his mother has. The one with the matching necklace. It’s silver with turquoise stones. It looks exactly like the bracelet his mother wears.
Suddenly Calvin realizes that it is his mother’s bracelet. It all comes back in a rush: Harper having to use the bathroom, which happens to be right next to Calvin’s parents’ bedroom; the length of time Harper took in there; Harper giving his mother a gift wrapped in Christmas paper and telling her not to open it until later.
Calvin thinks about this all the way to Richard’s. He thinks about it during their game of one-on
-one basketball. He thinks about it as he walks home, as he does his homework, as he goes into his parents’ room and looks in the jewelry box and sees only the turquoise necklace. He’s still thinking about it at the kitchen table as he sits across from his father, eating his father’s version of spaghetti and looking at boiled kale. Maybe he should have put the kale in the very back of the refrigerator. It’s bad enough that his dad’s spaghetti is just pasta and store-bought spaghetti sauce. It isn’t very good.
“Dad,” he says.
“Hmm?”
“I think Harper took Mom’s turquoise bracelet.”
His father looks up from his dinner. “That’s quite an accusation. Do you have a good reason for thinking so?”
“I saw Mom’s bracelet on Harper’s mother’s arm. Today.”
“Where’d you see his mother?”
“At the community garden, after school. On the way to Richard’s,” he adds quickly, because he only had permission to go to Richard’s to do homework. He’d already told his dad yesterday all about Harper’s mom living in a shed at the community garden. His father had lectured him again about how one never knows what another person is going through.
His dad raises an eyebrow. “Just because she has the same bracelet your mom has doesn’t mean Harper stole it. You can’t think that Harper stole it just on a hunch.”
“But I looked in Mom’s jewelry box, and the matching necklace was there but not the bracelet.”
“Maybe she took the bracelet with her.”
“But she always wears them together. Can you call her?”
“I’m not going to disturb your mother about this when she’s probably tired and stressed-out from taking care of your grandmother. We’ll find out when she gets home.”
“But—”
“You shouldn’t accuse someone of stealing unless you have proof. That’s no proof, Calvin. Subject closed.”
It is proof—to Calvin. He hates when his father bends over backwards to be Mr. Fair. In his gut Calvin knows that the bracelet on Miss Aileen’s arm is his own mother’s. But he has to wait for proof, just to be fair. Calvin scrunches up his mouth at the thought of it.
Okay. He’ll wait. And when his mother gets back and complains about her missing bracelet—when she tells his father that she always keeps it in her jewelry box when she isn’t wearing it—then he’ll have his proof.
Ten
Science Fair
The march of the science projects: That’s what it looks like on the yard and in the hall leading to the gymnasium Thursday morning before school. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz told them that the class could start bringing in their projects the day before the fair, and Calvin almost decided to wait. His plan was to just check out the parade of display boards and science paraphernalia and then, on the day of the actual science fair, he’d unmask his own.
But he changed his mind. He decided he might as well bring his project in a day early too. That way, while he was setting up his display, he could get an even closer look at his competition. Now as he glances around the gym to see if his project really is the most original, he’s happy to decide that yes—his is, absolutely, the most original and the most interesting.
There go the blue carnations, he thinks, catching sight one of the second-graders with a vase of blue carnations in blue water. And there go not one but two clay volcanoes being carried on plywood boards. Wait until Richard gets a load of that.
Carlos, with his big white display board that’s nearly empty, has begun to set up behind him. Calvin looks over his shoulder. The board has a few index cards posted on it and some kind of graph. He watches Carlos pull two small jars with holes in the lids out of a small box. He dumps the contents of one jar into a little glass dish and the contents of the other into another glass dish, probably to see what his whole setup will look like. He stands back and checks it, then returns both dishes’ contents to the jars.
Curious, Calvin moves over to Carlos’s table and is immediately grossed out. The jars are full of wiggly brown mealworms and fat, cream-colored wax worms. “Ugh, what are those for?”
“Remember, my project is about seeing which worms my geckos prefer—wax worms or mealworms. I want people to see the real live food.”
“Couldn’t you just draw a picture?”
“I can’t draw that good. Anyway, I want people to be grossed out. The judges will probably give me a better score that way.”
Carlos has a point, Calvin thinks. He frowns at the writhing worms. He looks up at Carlos hurriedly writing Wax Worms and Mealworms on index cards and placing the cards next to the empty dishes.
Okay. So he’s got a bit more competition than he’d thought.
He wanders over to Richard and his volcano. Someone—he’s sure it wasn’t Richard—has painted an island scene on Richard’s display board and made palm trees with twisted brown wrapping paper and yarn. That 3D effect might catch a lot of the judges’ attention. It’s kind of creative, and adults love creativity. He realizes he’s losing some of his confidence.
Then in comes Harper with his mom. Calvin is surprised to see Harper’s mom at school. She’s carrying the display board, and Harper is carrying two trays of radishes.
Even from Calvin’s position, he can see a huge difference in the trays of radishes. A huge difference. And everybody’s looking at Harper’s pretty mom. The other kids are all fascinated by her.
On Harper’s display board, red construction-paper letters form the questions With or Without Music? (Do Sound Waves Nourish Plants?). Immediately Calvin has a sinking feeling. A bunch of people will want to know the answer to that, he’s sure. He looks around. He bets more people have plants than have, say, geckos. Plenty of folks have gardens, and they’re going to want to know the answer to that question. Harper might get lots of points.
Who’s going to care if boys can see an optical illusion faster than girls? Calvin wonders. And they can’t. At least not the boys he chose. Maybe Ralph or Carlos’s cousin Bernardo would have done better. But it’s too late.
Harper’s mom is setting up a question card in the middle of the display board. Guess! it says. Then lift the card to see the answer. So his project is interactive. That’s sure to get him even more points.
Calvin shakes his head and continues to fool with his own display. He angles the data sheets on his table, then repositions the sample tests on his board. Next he busies himself centering the letters of his title across the top of the middle panel of his display: Whose Brain Is Faster? Boys’ or Girls’? Was that a good question? He wonders.
Finally the bell rings. Time to go to class.
“Calvin, let’s go,” his father calls up the stairs the next afternoon, when it’s time for them to leave for the science fair. Calvin had arranged with his father to go home after school so he could change into fresh clothes. He figured a crisply-ironed shirt and pants might impress the judges, somehow. And it was a good thing he did. He was there when his mother called to wish him luck.
“When are you coming home?” he’d asked her for the zillionth time.
“Won’t be long now,” she’d told him. “Be patient.”
Now Calvin is tying his shoelaces and feeling sorry for himself. He’s been counting on getting the new Wuju Legend video game. He’s imagined playing it and other people wanting to play with it, and him deciding who gets to play with it. But now he doesn’t think it’s going to happen.
In the car his dad looks over at him and says, “I’m going to drop you off, then run to take care of something at work. I’ll only be gone thirty minutes, tops. Are you okay with that?”
Calvin nods. “Yeah. That’s fine.”
The gymnasium is packed with parents, kids, and teachers—and there’s a long table against one wall with paper cups of punch and plates of cookies and chips. Mrs. Broadie, the cafeteria lady, stands guard over it, making sure kids take one cup and one plate and that they don’t go through the line again.
Antonia’s display
is the biggest in the auditorium. He’d noticed it yesterday. It’s as tall as she is. How did she find a display board that tall? She needs it. The panels are packed with stuff. There’s a topic in big blue letters (Which Brand Pops the Best?), papers and graphs (what are the graphs for?), and five different brands of popcorn stuck to the board—using two-sided tape, probably. On the table in front of the display board are five small bowls of popcorn.
It seems to Calvin to be a lot of blah, blah, blah showing nothing. Fancy and spectacular nothing. Yeah—like where’s the hypothesis? Where’s the prediction? He sees the panel of parents with their pens and clipboards, appearing dazzled by the display. He wants to rush over to them and point out that there is no real hypothesis. And the pictures of Antonia and her friends tasting each brand and ranking them and then counting the unpopped kernels and posting them beside each brand—what’s all that but filler? He thinks, She’s obviously trying to fill up her display board. She must feel she can get more points on just the size of her board and all the stuff on it . . .
He wishes his dad would hurry up and get there. He paces a bit, stops, checks his own display board again, and is dismayed to still see a lot of blank space.
Just then the parent judges turn and head his way with their clipboards at the ready. His throat feels like it’s closing. There will be questions. Is he ready?
“Ahhh,” one of the fathers says, looking at the question below the title at the top of Calvin’s display: Do Boys See Optical Illusions Faster than Girls? It’s Antonia’s dad. Calvin has seen him dropping off Antonia in front of the school. Calvin also recognizes Gregory Johnson’s mother in the group. He met her at Gregory’s skateboard party. Now she squints at his hypothesis and marks the paper on her clipboard. She smiles at him. “Interesting question,” she says. “And prediction,” she adds, looking at the sentences he’d written in big, red letters: Boys are faster at everything. So, yes. She peers at Calvin’s posted samples of optical illusions. Then she checks his conclusion. She smiles at him again.
Trouble Next Door Page 6
