Cassidy's Guide to Everyday Etiquette (and Obfuscation)

by Sue Stauffacher

  “Ouch! Cassidy! Sit down and breathe. Mrs. Dennon says, ‘Return to your body.’ ”

  “I’d rather return to home base.” I let go of Delton’s shoulder and started checking in with my body parts—anything to stop the image of that bug on its back, struggling.

  The screen went blank. “I thought we might need a break after this one,” Delton said. “Do you want some water?”

  Delton handed me a water bottle and I took a couple of swigs.

  “Do you mind if I ask why, Cassidy? Why does that scare you? Pill bugs don’t bite.”

  “I don’t know.” Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I set the bottle down. “Why do audiences scare you? They don’t bite, either.”

  “I don’t know, either. I…I think they upset me because I feel…vulnerable…exposed.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe that’s why I don’t like watching bugs squirm. It feels like it’s me who can’t turn over.”

  “Really? Then you’re not so much afraid of them as you are afraid for them.”

  “I don’t know! Does it make a difference why they give me the creeps?”

  “It does, actually. With me, for example, Mrs. Dennon tells me that it’s okay not to be perfect. When I’m standing in front of the class, I feel like if I’m not perfect, something bad will happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’ll get a bad grade.”

  “I’m living proof you can survive that, Delton.”

  “So what bad thing will happen if you see a squirming bug?”

  I thought about it. “It’s like one of those movies where a man is standing on the sidewalk, minding his own business, and you see…the shadow of something—like an air conditioner—falling. You just…you want to run in and give him a good push so he doesn’t get squashed…but it’s all happening so fast you can’t stop it.”

  I rubbed my eyes to get rid of the image. “Do you always keep your house so cold?” I asked, hugging myself.

  “Your blood rushed from your extremities to your heart when you hit the panic button,” Delton said. “I have a sweater if you want it.”

  “No thanks.”

  Delton sat back, making his office chair squeak. “All this time I thought you were afraid.”

  Honestly, I couldn’t see why it made any difference, but Delton seemed happy about it. “Okay,” I said. “I’m ready. Let’s try again.”

  The next slide was of a girl fishing off a dock. She’d caught something. Her line was tight. I knew the next minute there’d be a fish struggling on the line. Slow breathing is tougher than it sounds. I tried counting one-potato, two-potato.

  “Ugh!” I screamed as Delton switched to a slide of a worm squirming on a hook. “Delton Bean!” Running over to the bed, I jumped on it and covered my eyes. I counted through a whole bag of potatoes before I opened them again, only to see a tall man in a vest standing in front of me.

  “Are you all right, young lady? Sorry to interrupt, Delton; the screams drew me in.”

  “That’s all right, Dad. We’re looking at an escalating slide show of Cassidy’s irrational fears.”

  Dr. Bean pulled up the stool I’d just left empty and sat down on it. The smell of pipe tobacco filled the room. “Is this some new fad I have yet to read about?”

  “No. I’m just showing her what Mrs. Dennon taught me so that she can apply transfer of knowledge to her reaction when she sees bugs.”

  “Hmmm…when I was a kid, we spent summer evenings trading baseball cards and playing hide-and-seek.”

  “Let’s go back to the good old days.” I jumped up and stuck out my hand—anything to get that vision out of my head. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Bean.”

  “And you, Cassidy. Your reputation precedes you.”

  “That’s usually how it works.”

  “So you’re the one who’s been charged with infusing some spirit into Delton.”

  “I guess.”

  Dr. Bean pulled a toothpick out of his pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “But first, bugs.”

  Pipe smoke. Toothpicks. Maybe there was hope for Delton.

  “Well, I don’t want to interrupt. It’s been very nice to meet you, Miss Cassidy. I wish you luck—with both challenges.”

  Dr. Bean closed the door on his way out.

  “Delton, there’s something I need to show you.” Before I’d decided to bring Livvy’s letter to Delton’s house, I thought over the oath I’d taken. She might not keep her promises, but I did. I decided since I was not revealing the Chipmunk Code or anything written in the Chipmunk Code, it didn’t matter that Delton was a boy.

  “I met this girl and then she went to camp and now she wants to write letters…in code.”

  “That sounds intriguing.”

  “Crazy-making is more like it. She gave me a code to memorize and then she sent me this.” I pulled the letter out of my pocket and smoothed the paper on his desk. “This is not the code she had me memorize. Why would she do something like that, Delton?”

  Delton put his face close to the paper, studying it. “There are several possible explanations for this, Cassidy, but first a question. How well does she know you?”

  I thought for a minute. “She knows I have a sister who’s addicted to mold; she knows I like hobos; she knows—”

  “Does she know you like pranks? Because that’s the most likely explanation. She’s pulling a prank on you.”

  “On me? Nobody pulls pranks on me!”

  “Well, you could call it by some other name, but I’m betting she’s sitting on her bunk bed at camp right now busting a gut—as you say—thinking about you trying to read this letter.”

  “Are you serious? Because if it’s true, that stinks! In fact, it stinks so bad…”

  What was it Bree said when Magda let her smell the bottle of sulfur?

  “That stinks bad enough to knock a dog off a meat wagon! I spent time on my free Saturday memorizing that stupid code.”

  The whole idea of being pranked made me so annoyed I had to get some air time on Delton’s bed just to release the tension.

  “Cassidy, it’s not a good—”

  “I’m just helping you rebel, Delton, by…making wrinkles.” After a full sixty seconds of bouncing the way Livvy taught me, I landed in a sitting position to catch my breath.

  “You know what, Delton?” I said, still huffing. “What Livvy doesn’t realize is that I have a secret weapon.”

  “A secret weapon?”

  “Yes, right here in this room. My secret weapon is your giant head.”

  “Me? My…” Delton started to get that look he gets when we’re putting on our choir robes for the Christmas concert.

  “Yes! I need your brains, Einstein. Is this gibberish? Or is it a code?” I jumped up from the bed, took his head in my hands and turned it back to the page. “Study.”

  “It does seem to conform to a certain pattern…clearly some sort of mono-alphabetic substitution…” Delton scanned the letter, talking to himself like he does when solving ninth-grade algebra problems while the rest of us work on graphing and tables.

  Finally, he looked up at me. “It will take me a while to crack it.”

  “That Livvy has a lot of nerve. Do you know Donna Parker said I reminded her of Livvy?”

  “I can’t think why…”

  “It’s probably because we’re both mercurial,” I told him.

  “I’m not familiar with that. Mercurial?”

  “Really? I use it all the time. It means we change our mind.”

  “Mercurial…” Delton typed the word into his computer. “According to the Internet, ‘mercurial’ means ‘volatile, temperamental, unpredictable, erratic, moody, impulsive, excitable…’ With all that volatility, I’m not sure you and your new friend should be in the same room, Cassidy.”

  “Those aren’t good words, Delton. Are you saying…?” I wondered. “Was my dad saying…? Do I annoy people as much as Livvy is annoying me right now?”

 
“Well, I haven’t met Livvy yet, but from the evidence you’ve presented…and what I know about you after five years in elementary school, it is a workable hypothesis.”

  “It seems appropriate that we conclude our last class before our luncheon by covering how we signal to the waiter that we are finished with our meal. Now…” Miss Melton-Mowry paused, waiting for our attention.

  “It’s important to note that different countries have different approaches; so that you don’t get confused, we’ll confine ourselves to the American way. When you have finished eating, you simply put the handles of your fork and knife at the four o’clock position. The utensils lie across your plate with their tops near the ten o’clock position. Oh, and the knife blade should be pointing in. Let’s all try that, shall we?”

  It didn’t take long to master putting our knife and fork across our plate—geez! Some of this stuff was so dumb. After about a million more reminders about what to wear, how to greet Mrs. Glennon and everything else we’d already covered in exhausting detail, our last etiquette-suspension class was over.

  Of course, I was itching to get outside. Where was my mother? Can you call Child Protective Services if your mother is continually late to pick you up?

  As I stood there with my nose pressed to the door, Miss Melton-Mowry leaned over my shoulder and said in a quiet voice, “I asked your mother if she would delay her arrival so that you and I could talk.”

  “You mean, more than normal?” What new form of torture could she have possibly dreamed up?

  “I just want to go over a few things with you regarding the luncheon, Cassidy. In private.”

  I froze. Did Miss Melton-Mowry just call me by my first name?

  “Class is over. We don’t have to use formal address.”

  I double-froze. It would have been an Oscar-winning performance in freeze tag.

  Miss Melton-Mowry sighed. “Let’s take a little walk, shall we? Get some fresh air and sunshine?”

  If you’d asked me, I would have said our teacher was allergic to fresh air; I was curious to see what she looked like in the sunshine. Could her skin get any whiter?

  As we stepped out the door, the wind blew a coupon for the juice bar right up into Miss Melton-Mowry’s face. She swiped it away, rearranged her shoulders into dining posture and tugged at the bottom of her blazer to make it all straight. We walked past the tailor, the dry cleaner and the dollar store. I would have peeked in to see what the candy selection was, but Miss Melton-Mowry seemed like she was on a mission.

  “Watch out for gum at twelve o’clock,” I said, pointing to a pink blob in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Thank you.”

  The wind blew harder. I had to grab my ponytail to keep it from whipping my face. Miss Melton-Mowry’s hair didn’t seem to be affected; when it moved at all, it went in one big piece. I would swear it was a wig, but I’d seen her part, with the strip of gray hair ladies get when they wait as long as they can before coloring it.

  “Tell me, Cassidy, do you think you’ll live in Grand River forever?”

  First we were outside. Now she was asking me a personal question, the kind we never touched in polite conversation.

  I decided to roll with it. “Me? Nah. I’m going out…on the open road. You know, sleep rough, gaze up at the stars…”

  “There’s not much use for etiquette around the campfire, is there?”

  “Not that I know of, but if there is, I’ll have a heap of it.”

  We came to the edge of the parking lot. The sidewalk kept going, and I could see that it connected to an apartment complex behind the strip mall. Between the two sat a deserted playground with just a swing set and a slide.

  There’s something sad about empty playgrounds.

  “We can sit here.” Miss Melton-Mowry pointed to a bench across from the swing set.

  As we sat there in the hot sun, I wondered what was wrong with her plumbing that she wasn’t sweating buckets.

  “Well.” She began by folding her hands in her lap. “It’s not just campfires where people have no use for etiquette, Cassidy. It seems the polite rules of society are no longer required in the days of…reality TV and Internet chat rooms. I…I have a favor to ask of you. The truth of the matter is, my enrollment is down. Parents think if their children watch my etiquette videos, they’re covered. But practice is so important. And the nuances…”

  She stopped talking and looked at me. In the bright light, I could see where her lipstick line went just a hair south of her lips.

  “I need this job, Cassidy. I am too old to be doing so much traveling. It’s not the open road, exactly, but the climate of the Middle East and the change in time zones…Working at the Private Reserve Academy would be a way for me to—” She broke off and examined her polished nails. “Well, in addition to being easier for us, it would be an honor, of course.”

  “Us?” I knew I was in personal-question territory, but if there was a Mr. Melton-Mowry confined to a wheelchair due to war injuries who relied on his wife working just to get his pain medication, I wanted to know about it.

  “Me and my cat, Mr. Jeeves. And Miss Information, of course.”

  “Oh. Can I ask—may I ask you another question, Miss Melton-Mowry?”

  She nodded. “Very nice, Cassidy. Yes, you may.”

  “Who’s in that photograph in your office? The one you keep in your desk drawer?”

  Miss Melton-Mowry shaded her eyes, then smiled, remembering. “He was my…beau…the one who had picnics with me. By the water.”

  “Were you all stars and hearts for him? Like in the cartoons?”

  “Stars and hearts and…maybe even smiley faces.”

  “Then why…why isn’t he with you now?”

  “It’s…complicated.”

  There was that word again! The one grown-ups used when even they hadn’t figured out the answer.

  “We were in different stations in life. My parents didn’t approve…it seems so silly now, but back then…I do wonder sometimes what would have happened if I hadn’t been, well, such a dutiful child. More like you, perhaps, Cassidy. But my mother owned an etiquette school. We had visiting dignitaries all the time. I was her star pupil.”

  I nodded. Things were beginning to make more sense around here.

  “She loved to tell the story of the time we had lunch at the Polo Club. We were out on the terrace. They had just cleared the palate cleanser—I think it was a melon sorbet—when a spooked horse stampeded onto the patio, foaming at the mouth.

  “Ladies screamed, men tripped over their chairs. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept my eyes on my mother.”

  “You didn’t…run?”

  “Of course not. I hadn’t been dismissed. It’s important to stay calm in an emergency. Some of the diners were cut by the glassware, but I”—Miss Melton-Mowry stared into the distance, remembering—“I…wasn’t harmed.”

  “So is that what you wanted to have this little chat about? If there’s a stampeding horse, then all eyes on you?”

  Miss Melton-Mowry looked as if she was about to say something else, but instead, she reached over and patted my knee. “Not in so many words, but I think…yes, that is the import.”

  —

  The following night—the night before the big luncheon—I did everything right. I turned off my e-reader an hour before bedtime; I dimmed the lights. I put on my cricket noises. I tried to read a very dull story about nucleo-pepper-something in one of Magda’s Scientific American magazines. Nothing made me sleepy—I couldn’t even scare up a yawn.

  So when I heard Dad in the hallway around eleven, I called out to him.

  “Cass, have I ever told you the human species is diurnal, not nocturnal?” he asked, sticking his head into my room.

  I tossed the magazine on the floor. “About a million times…”

  “Flip over,” he said, sitting on my bed and rubbing my back. “Are you thinking about your big day?”

  I nodded, my face in the pillow.

>   “Well, I can’t see the future, but I do know one thing, Miss Cassidy. You’re going to try your best.”

  “ ’Course I will,” I said, lifting my head so Dad could hear. “You don’t think I like going to extra-quette class, do you? Because if you do, Dad, I know some scientists who’d want to examine your head.”

  “No, I don’t think you do.”

  “It’s just…well, I set a good intention, but then I…I don’t know. Something always goes wrong.”

  “Does something go wrong or does something get stirred up? By someone who is, hmmm…unengaged?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, it is deadly boring in there. And there’s no AC. Can you die of hot boredom?”

  “I don’t think so. My wish for you, Miss Cassidy, is that you learn how to be yourself and help others be themselves, too. You’re not the only one trying to get through the day. Today, for example, someone broke a jar of molasses in the baking aisle and six carts rolled through it before my team was alerted. Do you know about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 in Boston?”

  No, I had to admit I didn’t.

  “Well, picture a scaled-down grocery-store version of a sticky federal-disaster site. In the break room, they were calling it the Grand River Molassacre.”

  “That’s rough. Sorry, Dad. Want me to rub your back?”

  “No, honey. It’s all in a day’s work. I calmed down by reminding myself that you would mostly likely have been one of the cart drivers. Be honest. Would you have been able to resist it?”

  Why deny it? We both knew I’d be there, front and center. And sticky.

  “Dad? I think I know how you feel.” To cheer him up, I told him about Livvy’s letter and how frustrated it made me when I tried to read it.

  “I wondered when this day would come,” Dad said. “I’m not trying to rub it in, sweetie, but it’s called a dose of your own medicine.”

  “Well, it stinks, especially since I memorized the other one.”