She climbed a small staircase and stepped onto a rope bridge.
“You’re going to have that conversation about a million more times.”
I climbed up after her. I was glad I was at the playground with Gabby and not Zenith. Zenith would have parked herself on a bench, folding her arms around herself, too old to have any fun. If she owned a phone, she would be one of those girls jabbing at it like she had some secret important life elsewhere, but my parents wouldn’t get her one—a big sore spot with her. I didn’t know who she thought she would be keeping in touch with, anyway. Neither of us had made any close friends in Connecticut, and North Carolina felt like forever ago.
Gabby and I danced on the rope bridge, making it swing wildly.
“I don’t get why people have so much trouble with the difference between homeschool and unschool,” I complained, as though I hadn’t just been one of those people. “Home. Un. It’s two different things.”
Gabby nodded her agreement. “It’s true. I mean, you wouldn’t call, like, being homesick being unsick. You wouldn’t call someone homehappy instead of unhappy. It’s two totally different things.”
“You wouldn’t call underwear homederwear,” I said, and we laughed until we had to lie down on the bridge. Then we fell out the sides, so we knew that the laws of gravity were still in working order.
“Come check this out!” Gabby pointed toward a large metal drum.
We picked ourselves up from the ground and ran over to it. Gabby selected two big sticks from the grass and handed one to me.
“Listen!” She banged the drum with her stick, a deep, hollow sound. “Now you!”
I pounded away on the drum for a while before I remembered about Nola and the bus.
This was something I had begun to notice about unschooling. With so many choices, it was easy to forget to finish what you started.
I decided to pretend that I was still homeschooling, and that Mom had assigned me the task of finding out who had vandalized the bus: “Here’s an idea to explore, Azalea,” she would say. “Let me know what you come up with.”
I dropped my stick. Spirit had returned to her picnic bench, too far away to hear.
“I have something to tell you,” I said.
Gabby continued drumming. She couldn’t hear me over the racket. This was not a good start.
“Gabby!” I shouted.
Finally she looked at me and noticed that I wasn’t drumming. She dropped her stick.
I began again. “I want to tell you about something. Yesterday this crazy thing happened. My dad bought this tour bus—”
“From Nola’s uncle,” Gabby broke in. “I know. She told me all about it.”
Aha!
“So we went out to see it, my dad and me,” I continued. “And we got on and there were all these words painted on it!”
Gabby’s mouth dropped open a little. “What kinds of words?”
“Stuff like ‘Go away. Go home.’”
“Oh.” Gabby looked a little disappointed.
“It was really scary,” I explained. “The words were red and very big.” I paused. “Menacing.”
Now Gabby’s face looked properly horrified. “What did you do?”
“What could we do? We got some paint and covered them up. My dad is going out today to do his first test run of his tour route.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“My dad said it was just some kids.” I paused. “You don’t think . . .”
Gabby waited, not helping me out.
“I mean, it’s kind of weird that it said “Go home,’ like it was someone who knows we just moved here. Someone who doesn’t like us. Or me.”
Gabby either pretended not to understand me, or she really didn’t.
“I mean, I’m just wondering who would . . .”
And then the conversation was over, because who should come barreling onto the playground but Nola herself, resplendent in a pink ski jacket and pink leggings.
“Gabbers!” Nola bellowed, speeding toward us.
I saw a woman sitting with Spirit at the picnic bench—Nola’s mother, probably. She was dressed all in white. I wondered if each person in that family had a signature color, or what.
“Hey, Nole,” said Gabby.
When Nola reached us, they hugged.
“Spirit said you might come,” said Gabby.
This was the first I’d heard of it. I wondered why Gabby hadn’t mentioned anything to me. I told myself I wouldn’t have come if I’d known that Nola would be there.
“And here I am!” cried Nola, spreading her pink arms.
“You remember my friend Azalea,” Gabby said.
It was another one of those times where she sounded more like an adult than a child. I didn’t mind it, though. It seemed normal for her.
“Yes, I do,” said Nola, not looking at me. “Let’s go on the seesaw!”
The seesaw sat two on each side. The little boy and his mother were taking up one seat on each side, but when they saw Nola flying toward them, they got up and left. Nola plopped herself on one of the seats and pointed across the way for Gabby.
“Sit,” she commanded.
Gabby sat in the back-most seat, sending Nola upward.
“You sit, too,” Gabby told me. “There’s plenty of room.”
“No, thanks,” I said, and started to walk back toward the drum.
“I don’t really feel like doing this, either,” Gabby said. “I’m getting hungry. Aren’t we all going back to my house for lunch?”
So it wasn’t enough that my secret return to homeschooling hadn’t worked out. Now the rest of the afternoon was ruined, too. I wondered if I should say I felt sick, and ask Spirit to take me home. If I did, though, Mom would be full of questions, and Zenith would laugh at me.
Besides, this was the perfect chance to make the transition for real to unschooling. No assignments from Mom, no reports to give. Just me and my natural, child-driven exploration of the world.
First challenge: explore how to get along with my least favorite person, Nola the Pink.
Chapter 5
Unschool Lunch
At Gabby’s house, things just got worse.
Spirit collected some papers from the kitchen counter and announced that she and Nola’s mother had to go into her office and make a chart about water pollutants. So it would be just Gabby, Nola, and me, best buddies, for the entire afternoon.
“I thought you were making us pizza,” Gabby complained as Spirit swept past her.
“I was going to,” Spirit said, “but I forgot to do the dough, and then I remembered about this. You can make lunch for yourself and the other girls, Gabby. It’ll be fun!”
No, it wouldn’t. Except . . . maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe this was my chance to find out more about Nola, to see if she let anything slip about the bus.
“It’s the old bait and switch!” Gabby said. “No fair.”
“The old what?” I asked.
“Bait and switch. Like when you’re lured in by the promise of one thing, but then it gets switched around on you. Like you think you’re going to get pizza, and you end up having to make yourself a peanut butter sandwich. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”
Nola danced around the kitchen like she owned it, singing a high-pitched song and swinging Gabby around square-dance style. My afternoon with Gabby: my life’s most recent bait and switch.
Gabby fixed the sandwiches while Nola squawked and jabbered about a movie she planned to see, not pausing for breath and not acknowledging my presence.
I tried to use the time to plot out how I would uncover her secret, but I couldn’t think of anything. Maybe if she would just stop talking for half a second, I could think better. I almost wished Zenith were there. She was good at problem solving. Except, of course, that she had been no help whatsoever on the subject of the bus.
Gabby plopped a plate with a sandwich in front of each of us, and there was a welcome silence whi
le everyone ate. When we finished, Gabby asked us what we wanted to do. Nola was still chewing, so I had a chance to say something.
“Maybe play in the yard?” I suggested. I remembered it from when we had come to the meeting, and I wanted to get a better look. I thought maybe I had seen a tire swing.
“I thought we could do one of our projects,” Nola told Gabby, her mouth still a little full, as though I had said nothing. She swallowed the rest of her sandwich. “Maybe work on the undersea exploration.”
Gabby explained it to me. “I’ve been really interested in mollusks, and Nola has been studying the effects of water pollution on sea life. Our mothers are part of a group that monitors pollution in the ocean, and we got interested in it, too. So we’ve been sort of putting together what we learn into a big model.”
“It’s not just a model,” corrected Nola. This was the closest she’d come yet to actually talking to me. “It’s a multidimensional exploration. There’s sounds and images and textures.”
“I did something like that once when I was homeschooling,” I said. “It was about outer space. I made this big model.”
Nola giggled. “Like, with foam balls?”
My face burned. What was wrong with foam balls? Besides, I’d also used an inflated balloon for the sun, and lentils for the planets’ moons.
“Very school,” Nola told Gabby, who looked down at the floor.
Then Gabby said, “I don’t feel like working on the exploration right now. I feel like playing on the tire swing.”
I smiled at Gabby as she led the way to the backyard, grateful that she’d read my mind.
Nola followed, her hands on her hips. She stood like that while Gabby told me to climb onto the swing and gave me a push. Gabby and I took turns swinging for a while, and then the back door opened and two boys came into the yard. One of them was Gibran, Gabby’s brother. The other boy looked the same age as Gibran, but skinnier, with darker hair.
“Azalea, you met my brother, Gibran. And that’s Nola’s brother, Charlie.”
I gave a shy wave, and the boys nodded and grunted as they walked over to a tarp in front of a large shed in the corner of the yard. I noticed that Nola’s brother wore blue jeans and a green shirt, so maybe the one-color thing was just for the women in the family.
“Oh, God, not the boat,” said Nola. She did me a great favor by addressing me. “They’ve been working on that boat for, like, ever.”
“I know,” I said coolly, so she wouldn’t think I cared that she was talking to me. I remembered Gabby telling me that her brother was building a boat.
“It’s never going to float,” complained Nola. “And besides, they won’t let us help.”
“Which is too bad,” Gabby said loudly, so the boys could hear. “Because we would make excellent helpers.”
“And if we were making a boat,” Nola added, even louder, “we would let them help.”
The boys ignored them.
Nola’s brother yanked the tarp off. Several long wooden planks lay on another tarp beneath. I tried to imagine what they would look like as a boat. All I could see was separate pieces. I couldn’t imagine how they would fit together to make something whole and solid.
My life felt like that, sometimes.
I thought about how it would be to move yet again. We would pack up everything we owned, I would take a last look at our apartment, and a neighbor would hand us a cake or a houseplant as a going-away gift. This time, though, it wouldn’t just be a neighbor I had to leave behind. It would be Gabby, my friend.
Then we would start over. There would be a new town, a new apartment. Dad would start out with high hopes for his latest idea. Then, the early optimism would give way. There would be some problem that could not have been foreseen: a bad economy; an ill-timed frost; a city that refused to accessorize its gerbils.
No. I wasn’t leaving this time. I had a friend here—I was happy. I was not moving again.
A thought struck me: what if I could get Nola to like me?
Suppose I couldn’t prove that she was the bus vandal. Suppose she was too sneaky for that. What if I took away her motive to drive my family out of town? Would she—assuming she was the culprit—keep harming the bus if she liked me?
There was no way I was backing off my friendship with Gabby. That was for sure. If she was jealous of Gabby’s and my friendship, well, I couldn’t help that. And the truth was, I would probably never like Nola all that much.
I didn’t have to, though. I just had to get her to like me. Enough, at least, so she wouldn’t want to expel me from the state.
I could do this.
“I have an idea,” I told Gabby and Nola. My mind raced. I glanced toward the boys and then back at Nola and Gabby. “Let’s make them something to drink.”
Gabby looked surprised. “Like lemonade?”
“Kind of like lemonade,” I said. “But not.”
Nola looked at me with a flicker of interest. “What did you have in mind?”
“Switchel,” I announced. “It’s a beverage that field hands in New England drank in the olden days. Because they thought drinking plain cold water was harmful, they made a drink called switchel. The lady of the house would bring big jugs of it out to the fields and the workers would drink it.”
“You like history!” Gabby cried. “Me, too!”
“We homeschoolers—former homeschoolers—have been known to read a book or two,” I replied. “Not to mention the ten million museums, historic houses, and old-time reenactment villages I’ve been to.”
“So, just what’s in this switchel?” asked Nola.
I could tell she was sizing me up, trying to figure out my angle. Was I hatching a scheme to get back at the boys, or was I just suggesting we make old-timey refreshments?
I raised my eyebrows slyly.
“Oh, water, vinegar, hot ginger powder, some other delicious stuff.”
Nola smiled. “Perfect.”
“Then we’re agreed,” I said. “Switchel for the boys it is.”
We trooped back into the kitchen and Gabby peered into a cabinet.
“Tell me again what we need?”
I couldn’t tell if Gabby cared about seeking revenge against the boys, or if she was just going along with Nola and me. From what I had seen of Gabby’s kindheartedness, she might not even understand that switchel was a revenge plan. She might think it was just a nice treat for them.
Spirit swirled into the kitchen and reached past Gabby to find a box of crackers.
“What are you girls up to?” she asked.
“Oh, we’re doing a sort of history project,” Nola told her.
Spirit nodded and left with her crackers.
“First, we’ll need a jug,” Nola announced.
Gabby shut the cabinet and checked around the kitchen, finally pulling an empty plastic milk jug from the recycling bin.
“Now fill it partway with water,” Nola dictated.
She seemed to have taken command of the project. I didn’t care, even though it was all my idea. The important thing was that she was enjoying herself. If she was going to be that easy to figure out, she and I could get along just fine. In fact, maybe I could do more than just get along with her. Maybe I could get her to say something about the bus.
Gabby turned the cold-water tap on, rinsed the jug, and then filled it three-quarters of the way.
“Now the ingredients,” Nola said, turning to me. “What goes in first?”
“Molasses,” I said with authority.
Gabby pulled a chair over to a cabinet and climbed up.
“I think there’s some sugar and stuff way back here. Spirit likes to use sweeteners sparingly.” She started rummaging. “Aha! I found the sugar. I knew that was in there somewhere. Will that work?”
“Keep looking,” Nola said. “We need molasses for this recipe.”
She turned to me with a wicked smile. I gave her one back.
“Are you sure?” Gabby asked. “Have you ever had mola
sses?”
I could tell by her voice that she had, and she didn’t like it. She seemed to have momentarily forgotten—if she’d ever understood—the point of the plan.
Nola smiled knowingly. “Yes. And yes.”
If I was going to say something about the bus, I had to just do it. I couldn’t wait around for the conversation to shift spontaneously to the subject of tourist attractions.
“So, Nola,” I said, while Gabby looked through the cabinet, “your uncle used to give bus tours?”
My voice sounded too loud. Nola’s lids lowered slightly, signaling her lack of interest in the topic.
“That’s right,” she said.
“Got it!” Gabby said, handing down a small bottle filled with dark brown syrup, and then climbing off the chair.
“Let me see it,” I said, taking the bottle. I twisted the top off and sniffed. It was sweet and bitter at the same time, like a medicine that’s supposed to taste good to kids, but doesn’t.
“Ick,” I said, and handed it back to Nola.
She dipped a finger into the bottle and tasted it. She grimaced. “Perfect. The boys will love it.”
“About a quarter cup,” I announced, like I made switchel every day.
Gabby measured the molasses into a metal cup. I watched the thick syrup fold on itself in layers as it poured.
“Do you have a funnel?” Nola asked Gabby.
Gabby pointed to a drawer near me. I opened it, found a funnel, and handed it to Nola. I tried to think of something else to say about the bus, something incredibly clever that would trap her into a confession.
“So, tours, huh?”
Nola held the funnel to the top of the jug and tipped the molasses in.
“This could take a while,” she said. “Meantime, Gabby, find the vinegar.”
“Are you sure about that?” Gabby asked, wincing a little. “It doesn’t have to be completely authentic, you know.”
“Oh, yes it does!” Nola assured her. “Besides, the boys deserve something special, and what could be more delicious and refreshing than vinegar?”
“Vinegar it is!” said Gabby.
The vinegar was on a lower shelf than the molasses, so she didn’t need a chair to get it out. She set it on the counter and unscrewed the cap. I got a whiff of it without trying. It was a sour, awful smell.
Azalea, Unschooled Page 4
