by Mary Penney
There was nothing I could do to bring back my nana, but I wasn’t going to stand by and watch the rest of my family fall to pieces. I was Montgomery “Gum” Hollinquest’s daughter, after all. We didn’t give up. We were fighters.
I just had to find him, so I could remind him of that fact.
Dear Mr. Jimenez,
I got your letter welcoming me to your seventh-grade homeroom. I haven’t ever gotten a letter from a teacher in the mail before. And I’ve never had a man teacher before.
You said all your new seventh-grade students should write back and share seven things about ourselves. You said it could be something interesting, unique, or funny. When you shared seven things about yourself in the letter, you said you once fell off a camel in Egypt. And broke your tailbone! I didn’t know if that was supposed to be funny or interesting. Anyway,
The First Thing About Me: my best friend, Twee, is not coming with me to Kit Carson Middle School because she’s only going into sixth grade. She didn’t flunk or anything like that. See, Twee is one year younger than me, so we are in different grades. But we’re not used to being apart. I’m telling you now, so you won’t think I don’t have any friends when you see me sitting alone in the cafeteria sometimes, which, really, let’s be honest, will be all the time.
I have a feeling I am going to have a hard time in seventh grade. I already have nearly forgotten everything I learned in sixth! You shouldn’t feel bad if you want to flunk me—even during the first week of school. I’m not the kind of student that would hold that against you. And if I stayed back a year, Twee could help me with algebra. I am terrible at finding y.
Yours very sincerely,
Macy L. Hollinquest
CHAPTER TWO
“No!” I nearly shouted as Twee came toward me, her eyes glazed. They get like that when she thinks she has the best idea ever.
“‘No’ in every language of the universe. Ni, non, votch’, nem, Nein, N-O!”
“Macy, come on! It’s five hundred dollars! We’ve got a whole week left before school starts. Just think of what we could do with all that money. It’s a fortune!”
I pressed the flyers at her. “Here, you put these up. You told her you would. Keep me out of it.”
“But don’t you want to help her?”
Silent glare from my end.
“But she’s so nice,” she added, trying another tack. “Don’t you think she’s nice, Macy?”
I headed down the street, walking fast. Twee followed, hot on my tracks.
“Sure. Other than nearly killing you on that death mobile of hers, she’s a peach. But I don’t have time.”
“What do you mean you don’t have time? Your mom promised if you babysat Jack all summer, you could have this last week of summer to do what you want to do.”
“I mean I have other plans already, and they don’t include looking for a lost dog. If you want to, go right ahead.”
Behind me, Twee fell silent a long moment—too long. That should have tipped me right off. She yanked the bus ticket from my back pocket. I turned to grab it from her, but she’d always been a little taller, and stronger, than I was. She held me off.
“What is this—a round-trip ticket to Los Robles? One child’s fare?” She looked at me like she’d just found plans in my pocket to hack into the Pentagon’s computers.
I swiped at the ticket again, a hot flush steaming up my neck. She held it over her head, taking full advantage of the 2.75 inches she had on me.
“Who’s this for? You do not ride buses.”
Technically, this was true. Not since kindergarten. After some pretty spectacular projectile vomiting, the PTA encouraged my mother to find me other transportation. At the start of every new school year, though, Mom would pack me up with a good-sized barf bag and have me try it again. It never changes. Buses and me don’t mix.
I dug my fingers into both sides of Twee’s shorts. “Unless you want to moon all the old guys in Hadley’s Barbershop right now, you better give me my ticket!”
Twee grabbed her waistband and held on, still holding the ticket high. “Who’s it for? Just tell me!”
I pulled, and her shorts dipped dangerously low on her nonexistent hips. “Give it, Twee—now—or here comes the great Continental Divide.” My voice was hard as baked clay.
“All right! All right already! If you’re going to have a stroke about it!” She yanked her shorts back up and handed the ticket to me. “Here, take it. Don’t tell me anything. I could give a flip.”
Folding the ticket into quarters, I crammed it back into my pocket. I crossed my arms tight against my chest while I caught up with my breath. I studied my new crop of arm freckles while I considered what I could safely tell her. “Okay. It’s for me. I’m taking the bus to Los Robles to get some school clothes,” I lied.
Twee’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, this gets weirder by the minute. Number one, you would rather swim in stew than ride a bus. And number two. . . .” She paused. “Well, number two, you hate shopping.” She narrowed her eyes. “Give it. What’s going on, Macy?”
My eyes fixed on the gap between her two front teeth, while I calculated the risk. “All right. Look, I’m going to see my dad. But no one can know about it! Especially not my mom. This has got to be completely secret.”
She opened her mouth and then snapped it shut. “Okay, but I’m going with you. You are not taking the bus to Los Robles all by yourself. The ticket’s for August thirtieth, right?” She cocked her head. “Wednesday?”
There was no way I could take her with me. I would trust Twee with my life, but with things that fell in the category of Stuff Guaranteed to Send a Parent to an Early Grave, Twee was a lightweight. Not to mention the fact that for some reason, she didn’t like my dad anymore. Which I never could understand or even get her to admit. But it was absolutely true. She’d go into this polite-but-chilly routine when he was around. I definitely didn’t need any of that in the vicinity while I was trying to convince him to come home.
“The ticket says the thirtieth, but that isn’t actually the date I’m going,” I fibbed. “They have this Labor Day special. It starts on the thirtieth, but it’s good for Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. I’m going on Thursday.”
Twee’s face scrunched, trying to follow all this. “They put your real departure date in the computer,” I explained. Lame, but it seemed to work.
She turned my arm to look at my watch. I was the designated timekeeper. Her job was to always carry the Chap Stick. “Maybe we should go by the bus station before the movie and get my ticket, then. I don’t want them to sell out.”
I grabbed her sleeve and hustled her down toward the movie theater. “No time! We’re already late. I’ll get it for you Monday. My treat! I really appreciate you going with me. But bring goggles and a raincoat.”
“Because we are actually taking a submarine to Los Robles?” she asked, looking confused.
“No—because I may be barfing on you the whole trip. Just remember. You wanted to go!”
“Shoot, Macy. What’s a little barf between best friends?”
I tried not to think about how long she would be mad at me after she discovered that I had gone to Los Robles without her. Because if it brought my dad home, it’d be worth every lousy bit of it.
The wood floor under my bed felt cool against my belly as I wiggled my way to the middle. I gently unwrapped the piece of glass I’d saved from Nana’s window, careful not to cut myself again. It was the original window’s glass from when Nana first opened the coffee shop almost forty years ago. That window had never been broken—until today. It was a very bad omen.
Every spring Nana would have the window painter come and redo it. Never change it, just repaint the loopy gold letters. When Chuck stole the café from us, he’d added “caffeine” in front of Nana’s name when the painter came. I think he thought it made the shop seem hipper. I thought it was just dumber.
Thankfully, he’d kept the rest of the window the same. Across the
bottom, it had always read:
GOOD COFFEE, GOOD TIMES, GOOD LORD, COME ON IN
SERVING IT UP BY THE CUPFUL SINCE 1977
The piece of glass I had saved just read “good tim.” The es hadn’t survived the crash.
I rewrapped it in an old undershirt and unhooked the bungee cord that strapped a big, long, thin box to the underside of my mattress frame. When your mom is a snoopy probation officer, you have to be very smart about where you hide your private things. I knew for a fact she couldn’t get under my bed. I’d watched her try a couple of months ago to drag Jack out. It wasn’t because she was fat or anything, but she was kind of stacked.
I was hoping to get my future boobs from my dad’s side of the family, where they came in smaller sets.
Next to my private box, my old Cookie Monster puppet hung from the bed slats. He was my version of a scarecrow. I had to put him up to keep Jack from going under my bed. I didn’t want him ever getting into my box. And to Jack, the Cookie Monster was the devil incarnate.
The familiar smell of my life history greeted me as I pulled the lid off. An old cigarette butt of Nana’s rolled around the bottom. The end still had her lipstick marks on it. She wore one lipstick—an orangey color called Sweet Sunset, and it never changed. Nana loved to smoke, and in the end it killed her.
My grandpa had died before I was born. Whenever I asked about him, everyone got kind of quiet. Especially Dad and his big sister, my aunt Liv. Guess Grandpa hadn’t been the greatest father ever. When I was real little I’d heard Aunt Liv tell one of her friends that he’d drunk himself to death. That worried me, because I’d been trying for some time to see if I could drink up all my bathwater. I liked the taste of it, and it seemed it would be a great accomplishment for a kid. I gave up trying after that. I figured out when I was older that they meant he drank too much booze.
I put Nana’s cigarette butt between my lips and let it hang like she did when she was working on her accounts. She once told me she’d come back and haunt me if I ever started smoking, but since it wasn’t lit, I’m sure it didn’t count.
I poked at Jack’s belly-button stump that I had sealed up in a Ziploc bag. No one knew I’d saved it. When he was older, I was going to sneak in some night while he was sleeping and glue it back on him. Then I’d try to convince him it had grown back. It would completely freak him out. God, I couldn’t wait.
I peeled the cigarette off my lip where it had started to stick and pulled out Dad’s letter. It had come about three weeks ago. I was home babysitting Jack the day it arrived. Mom didn’t know about it.
He had been gone for close to seven months now. When he first got out of the army, I thought he’d finally be home all the time. I’d been dreaming of having a regular family for so, so long. It wasn’t bad when it was just me and Mom at home waiting for him. But after Jack was born, it seemed Mom never gave me a thought unless she needed someone to help her. I didn’t want to be her staff. I missed just being the kid.
Not that I didn’t love my little brother—it just changed everything when he came.
I held Dad’s letter to my nose, trying to find his smell—shaving cream, and the cigars he always tried to hide from my mom. But it just smelled like mail. I had been surprised to get a letter, direct to me, from my dad. But I guess it was the only way to keep Mom from reading it. He probably figured she wouldn’t open a letter that had my name on it. Plus, he had sent me something in the envelope besides the letter.
The return address might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. My dad had extremely messy handwriting. Like if you gave a whole pot of coffee to a monkey and then handed him a leaky pen. But I had gotten pretty good at decoding Dad’s scribble. I was even better at it than my mom. When he’d first gone overseas, we sent him with a supply of envelopes that were already made out to us. Just in case email was down, which he said happened a lot over in Iraq.
Dear Short Stack,
Just a quick note so I can return this money I borrowed from you last time I was home. Not a bad interest rate, huh? Doubled your money! Remember our deal not to tell Mom, okay? If she knew I’d lost my wallet again, she’d be really sore at me.
I miss you and Jack like the dickens. My new assignment is great—wish I could tell you more about it, but that’s the Department of Defense for you—their special projects are very hush-hush. I have to stay with it to the end. So, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get home for your birthday like we planned. I can’t believe my baby girl is going to be twelve! But I promise you we’ll celebrate as soon as I can get finished here.
Until then, mind your mom, kiss Jack, and leave the porch light on for me. I see your face everywhere, Macy—even in the stars.
All my love,
Dad
This was just so wrong. I had to find him. I had to convince him to come home for my birthday. Sometimes he called my birthday our anniversary. He said it was the “anniversary of us,” since it marked how many years we’d been a father and daughter.
How was I supposed to turn twelve without him here? Twelve was a huge deal. It was the last official year of being a kid. I might even get my period! And boobs! And sweat glands!
In all the years my dad had been in the army, he’d only missed one birthday, and that was because he was fighting in Iraq. I tried to celebrate it without him, but it wasn’t the same. I crashed the new bike Mom had gotten me, broke my arm, and chipped my tooth. And our freezer died, and all my birthday dessert melted into a big, rainbow sherbet puddle. Which is not as pretty as it sounds. After that, Dad promised me he’d never miss another one so long as he lived. And now . . . well, now what?
It wasn’t just me that needed him home either. The longer he was gone, the smaller the empty space next to my mom got. Ever since the café got sold and Dad took off, it seemed like the only thing that mattered to her was Little Lord Jack, and her job. Even worse, Chuck had been calling her a lot lately, supposedly asking her questions about the business. If that were true, I don’t know why my mom always giggled so much. There’s nothing funny about coffee.
I wasn’t about to take any of this sitting down. I was Gum’s daughter after all, and Nana’s “best girl.” I owed it to both of them to get this family back on track, back to the way it used to be. Back to the way it was supposed to be.
Even if I had to do it all by myself.
Twee pounded up the stairs behind me and dropped her overnight bag on the floor of my bedroom with a thud. She kicked off her shoes and flung herself down on the bed next to mine. We spent nights together so often my mom bought Twee her own permanent guest bed for my room. I didn’t spend the night as often at Twee’s because there were already so many kids over there, it was like a kid zoo.
“I am so full! Your mom is such a good cook. I’d weigh a ton and a half if I lived here.” She sucked at the ends of her fingers like a Hoover, in case she’d missed any pizza sauce. “My dad cooked tonight because Mom is about to explode with babies. Her doctor told her to stay in bed for the next few days. It looks like a mountain has fallen on her and pinned her to the bed. Anyway, he was making tofu and kale tacos,” she said, with a disgusted look. She rolled over onto her stomach and rummaged through her bag on the floor. “I brought you something!” She pulled out a squashed paper bag with a ribbon tied around the top. “Here! Open it!”
“What’s this for? It’s not my birthday yet,” I asked, suspicious. I didn’t want any birthday presents or any celebrating until Dad was back. It would be a big, fat jinx if I did.
“Well, it nearly is. But this isn’t for your birthday. It’s for starting middle school. Open it!” she said, pushing it into my lap.
I pulled off the ribbon and looked inside. I poked through the contents with one finger. Like it might detonate.
Twee squirmed next to me and then apparently couldn’t take the wait anymore. She grabbed the bag and dumped it over the bed. “Ta-da!”
I surveyed the pile. “Makeup? You bought me makeup?”
She came at me with the hot-pink metal instrument. I ducked away. “I like my eyebrows! And I don’t want my eyes to pop—”
“But your brows are furry.”
I smoothed the right one in place. “They look just like my dad’s.”
“My point exactly. Nobody wants dad eyebrows, Macy.”
“Maybe I do—”
“Let me just get a few of the big, long ones,” she said, lunging for me with Hello Kitty’s pointy end.
I swatted her away. “Cut it out!”
She stopped midattack and glared at me. Then dropped the tweezers. “Fine! But you’re doing lip gloss. I spent all my allowance on this stuff. It is not going to waste.” She peeled off its protective covering and then pulled out a long, sticky-looking wand. It smelled extremely raspberry. “Now, close your mouth.”
I shrugged in surrender and pressed my lips closed.
“Well, now your lips have completely disappeared. Not so tight, Mace—poof ’em back up.”
“For Pete’s sake!” I grumbled, and grabbed the wand from her. I swiped it around my mouth a few times.
