Azalea, Unschooled

by Liza Kleinman

  “Look!” said Gabby, pointing.

  The Maine Attractions bus rolled by, stuffed with tourists.

  Gabby waved, and a couple of the passengers waved back. The giant fake lobster grinned crazily from the roof as it passed, and I knew we’d been on the wrong trail: anyone could see that this lobster didn’t have the brains for a life of crime.

  Chapter 7

  Unschool Trip

  “Mom is in shock,” Zenith told me happily a few weeks later.

  She had gotten her way about the summer math class, and she and Mom had just come back from signing her up.

  “I have a real textbook and everything. I’ll be going to school!” she said.

  “It’s just one class,” I reminded her. “And it’s just for the summer. And you might not even like it.”

  “Yes, I will,” Zenith assured me.

  I didn’t pay much attention to her. June had finally arrived after a long, cold spring, and I was feeling good. Dad had a steady trickle of customers riding the tour bus. With no new signs of the vandal, I was focusing on other projects. The school-going world may have been thinking about summer vacation, but Zenith and I were busy.

  We often unschooled at the beach, where I plucked crabs from tide pools and examined them while Zenith read beneath a floppy hat. We signed up for swimming lessons (these were exempt from Mom’s general avoidance of organized education) at a nearby pool. On rainy days, we went to the library or museums. I had started collecting facts about Portland’s history. We kept journals—Mom’s idea, though she quickly pointed out that it was a suggestion, not a direction. In addition to history facts, I also liked to write down what I had found while exploring the ocean’s edge during the day.

  At night, I examined the darkened sky and recorded which stars and constellations I’d seen. Sometimes I made up poems about them. Gabby was with us often, when she wasn’t occupied with art club and her modern dance group.

  The part I was looking forward to most about summer was that Nola wouldn’t be around for a little while. It turned out that every year she went to sleepaway camp for a couple of weeks in June. Gabby told me in a whisper one day that this caused a small yearly rift between Nola’s mother and Spirit. Nola’s mother felt that camp was completely different from school. Spirit declared that whether you called them counselors or teachers, they were adults determining the best way for children to spend their time.

  I didn’t care how Nola spent her time, as long as she wasn’t vandalizing our bus, and I didn’t have to see her.

  Zenith flopped down on the couch and flipped through her math book. She began scribbling problems in a notebook, even though her class hadn’t started yet.

  “Why don’t you put that away in our room?” I suggested. “Gabby and Spirit will be here any minute.”

  Dad’s first few weeks giving tours had gone well, so today he had finally agreed to take Zenith, Gabby, and me along on the bus. This would give Mom time alone with one of her life-coaching clients. She had a few of them now.

  Zenith turned another page in her book, studied it a while, and applied her pencil to her notebook.

  “Zenith? They’ll be here soon.”

  Zenith looked up.

  “Why don’t you admit that you’re scared of what Spirit will say about me going to school?”

  “I’m not scared. It’s just—if you know someone doesn’t like something, why wave it in their face? You don’t like mushrooms on your pizza; I don’t wave my mushroom pizza in your face.”

  “Yes, you do,” Zenith said matter-of-factly.

  It was true. Bad example. I liked watching her squinch up her mouth and pull away from the mushrooms. If it wasn’t for Zenith’s reaction, I probably wouldn’t like mushrooms all that much myself.

  When the doorbell rang, I gave Zenith one last glare before turning to answer it. Luckily, it was just Gabby in the doorway. Spirit waved from her car and pulled away.

  Mom came into the room, herding us toward the door.

  “Okay, girls. We need to leave now if I’m going to make it back here for my three o’clock.”

  “Is it the sweet potato lady?” I asked. “Or the guy who looks like an onion?”

  “Azalea, please,” Mom said.

  She dropped us downtown, right near Dad’s pickup spot. We stood by his sign, waiting. Lots of people walked by, but no one stopped and got in line. I wondered if Dad should have someone to sell tickets on the sidewalk, like the lobster tour bus did. Maybe he couldn’t afford to hire someone for that, though.

  “There he is,” called Zenith.

  Dad’s bus pulled up to the curb. I barely recognized it. The last time I’d seen it had been the day we painted it in the garage. Now, with the sun hitting it and the bustle of the summer season all around, it looked bright and clean. It looked successful.

  A line of people filed off the bus, most of them stopping to slip a bill or two into the tip box next to Dad’s seat. My heart beat quickly. This was going to work. Dad was going to hold on to this business.

  Gabby danced in place beside me.

  “It looks great!” she said excitedly. “I can’t wait to take the tour!”

  I elbowed Zenith. “He’s making it work,” I told her.

  The tourists who had been on the bus stood on the sidewalk looking slightly dazed. They all seemed to be wearing white sneakers and very new clothing. Some of them had fanny packs around their waists.

  “I never doubted he would make it work,” Zenith said, much to my glad surprise. Then she finished her sentence: “. . . in the summer. The question is, what’s going to happen the rest of the year?”

  I put my hands on my hips, refusing to let Zenith ruin my good mood.

  “He’ll figure out something. And Mom has her clients. This time we’re going to stay.”

  “If you say so.”

  Our dad raised a palm to us from the empty bus.

  “All aboard!” he shouted.

  We climbed up and sat in the seat behind him. Inside, the bus looked more familiar. I recognized the red paint above the seats and tried not to think about the angry words hidden beneath it. It had been a one-time prank, I told myself. No one was trying to make us leave.

  Other than Zenith, Gabby, Dad, and me, the bus was empty.

  “So where are the other passengers?” Zenith asked.

  Dad checked his watch.

  “I have fifteen minutes before I leave again. They’ll start coming on board soon.”

  We waited in silence for a few minutes, the three of us squished into one seat. Just when it started to seem silly to share a seat on an empty bus, passengers began climbing on. Each one paid Dad, then found a seat. Some of them smiled at the three of us, wondering, probably, why three girls were on the bus without an adult. Gabby and I smiled back.

  Most of the passengers were older people, although there was a young family with three small children all dressed in matching red polo shirts.

  Dad checked his watch again, and then the sidewalk. There was no one else lined up for the tour. The bus was about half full. Dad pulled the bus door closed and cleared his throat. He leaned toward his microphone, which was mounted on the dashboard of the bus. His tour notes were taped down next to it, written out in large type with the names of streets highlighted. I wondered if he knew the notes by heart yet.

  “Welcome to beautiful Portland, Maine,” Dad said.

  The words drifted weakly back to us. Then he turned on the microphone and said it again. This time his voice echoed through the bus. Some of the people said hello back to him.

  “Right now we are in the historic Old Port district of the city, riding along Commercial Street. To your left, notice the US Custom House building, which was completed in 1872.”

  The tourists turned dutifully to their left, and some held up their phones to take pictures out the bus window. Dad maneuvered the vehicle through the heavy downtown traffic.

  “Soon, we’ll head out of the Old Port and up historic
Munjoy Hill, where we’ll get a stunning view of Casco Bay.”

  Dad pulled the bus up to an intersection.

  “Oh, no,” he said into the microphone.

  There appeared to be the remains of a minor crash up ahead. Two cars sat at strange angles in the middle of the intersection, and several people stood around talking into their phones. No one looked particularly panicked, but two police cars were there, lights whirling, giving an air of emergency.

  The road was blocked, so Dad turned left instead of making the right he’d planned.

  “So, we’re just going to take a little detour, here,” he explained to the passengers. He sounded nervous. “Now we’re, uh, passing some stores.”

  There was an expectant silence in the bus.

  Dad cleared his throat again. “That’s a gelato place, over there.”

  I squinted at his notes. He had nothing for this street. Traffic was thick; we were barely moving. I could see Dad’s shoulders hitch upward, a sure sign that he was tense.

  “To your right, notice the T-shirt shop, where you can get, umm, T-shirts. Maybe sweatshirts.”

  Ahead of us, the light turned red. The bus sat.

  “Almost certainly sweatshirts.”

  “Dad,” I said in a low voice. “Don’t you know anything about this street?”

  Dad switched off the microphone.

  “I only know what’s in the notes that came with the bus. Somehow I failed to anticipate fender benders.”

  “What?”

  “Minor car accidents.”

  Fender benders. Was that going to be this year’s late frost?

  Not on my watch.

  “Dad, turn that thing on,” I said, pointing to the microphone. After all, I had been collecting historical facts about the city since we’d moved here. I tapped Gabby and Zenith each on the knee. They had spent as much time in libraries and museums as I had.

  “Between the three of us,” I whispered, “we can do this.”

  “Totally,” said Gabby.

  Zenith shrugged.

  I stood up and cleared my throat. With one hand on the driver’s seat for balance, I leaned toward the microphone. I knew exactly what to say first.

  “On your left, please take a look at these beautiful buildings.”

  My voice traveled fuzzily through the bus. I bent closer to the dashboard.

  “Before 1866, the city was built mostly of wood, but it was destroyed by a fire. All of these brick buildings date back to when the city was rebuilt after the fire.”

  There. A fine, solid historical fact to kick things off. Pleased with myself, I looked at the passengers. They looked back at me, waiting to hear more. One fact wasn’t enough for them. That was okay; I had plenty.

  There was just one problem: I couldn’t remember any of them.

  My mind had gone blank. Where was my fact-collecting journal when I needed it? Home, that was where. I tried to picture it, to flip through the pages, but all I could conjure up was a poem I’d written about how life was like the Big Dipper. I widened my eyes at Gabby and Zenith: help me out here!

  Gabby stood up and moved toward the microphone. I sat back down to give her room.

  “Here’s an interesting fact,” she said.

  Her voice sounded smooth and confident, like she gave tours every day.

  “Did you know that chewing gum was invented right here in the city of Portland? In the Curtis and Son building, which is right around here, somewhere.”

  The tourists looked out the windows helpfully, as though they were trying to locate it.

  “It was made from the sap of spruce trees. The gum, not the building.”

  She sat back down. The three of us had read about this together one day at the library, and then spent an afternoon trying to locate a dripping spruce tree.

  The traffic light up ahead turned green and we inched toward it in a line of cars. Dad’s shoulders relaxed a little. Before we could get through the light, it went red again. The bus sat. Gabby, Zenith, and I exchanged a panicked look.

  This time Zenith came to the rescue, squeezing in front of me so that she could talk into the microphone.

  “The Curtis and Son Company,” she announced, “started out making all of their gum by hand.”

  Several of the tourists nodded like they were listening, but a few of them were busy tapping away on their phones. The children in the matching shirts craned their necks to get a look at the tiny screen in their father’s hand. Pay attention, I wanted to snap. My sister is speaking.

  “Then,” Zenith continued, “the son invented a gum-making machine.”

  Now that she said this, I remembered reading it. I was glad her memory was so good. We needed to fill as much time as we could.

  “In the time it took a worker to make forty boxes of gum the old way,” Zenith went on, “he could make eighteen hundred boxes with the machine.”

  A warning thought flashed through me.

  “Zenith, no!” I hissed.

  There was no stopping her.

  “The question is,” Zenith asked the tourists, “how many times faster was the machine than the workers? No calculators! Put those phones down!”

  She smiled serenely at the baffled tourists.

  “It’s summer vacation,” the father of the matching kids said. They must have been visiting from out of town. I knew that there were some places where the school year had already ended. “No math for anyone until fall.”

  Gabby opened her mouth to start explaining about unschooling, but Zenith interrupted.

  “Forty-five,” she announced. “You just divide.”

  She sat back down, looking satisfied.

  A couple of the tourists clapped politely, as though she had done a trick, and Zenith took a tiny bow from her seat. I shot her a look. Was she trying to ruin this tour? But no—she thought she’d contributed quite nicely. Judging by the pleased look on Gabby’s face, she thought so, too.

  By now, Dad had gotten through the intersection and was steering the bus around a corner. In another minute he was back to the intersection where we had departed from the route. Surely by now the accident would be cleared up and Dad could take over the tour.

  Except that the street was still blocked off. Once again, Dad turned the bus the other way. His notes were useless.

  And we were fresh out of ideas. The only sounds in the bus were from the traffic outside, and from a game the kids were now playing on their father’s phone. An electronic chicken squawk echoed through the bus.

  This was a disaster. Dad’s business, once again, was a disaster.

  “There’s got to be more we can say,” I whispered fiercely to Gabby and Zenith. “Think! We know so much stuff!”

  “I could talk about modern dance,” Gabby suggested.

  “I could do more math problems,” Zenith volunteered.

  I put my hands over my eyes and shook my head.

  They didn’t get it, either of them. Or maybe Zenith did, and she just didn’t care. This wasn’t just one bad tour. This was everything starting to crumble. This was how it went with Dad. One misstep led to another. The stream of customers would thin. Dad’s enthusiasm would wane. He would start casting around for new ideas.

  The passengers were beginning to look a little annoyed, and I couldn’t blame them. They had paid for a tour of the city, and here we were, sitting in traffic, in total silence. I pushed my way to the microphone again. I took a breath.

  “Here we have . . .” I struggled to gather a thought together. Then I remembered some pictures I’d seen, a passage I’d read.

  “There’s this island right near the city that used to have an amusement park on it. A long time ago. People would go during the summer. It was famous. Back then.”

  The tourists looked out their windows, searching in vain for the island and the long-ago amusement park.

  This was no good. I needed facts about where we were right now, about places people could see out the bus window. Only I couldn’t think o
f anything like that. I would just have to make something up.

  “Here we have the site of the former New England Switchel Factory, founded in 1868.”

  Gabby looked at me with bright-eyed interest: something new to learn! Zenith, on the other hand, knew immediately what I was up to.

  Dad kept the bus moving.

  “At the time,” I went on desperately, “it was one of the country’s leading producers of switchel. Which is a kind of drink. Or was. No one drinks it anymore.”

  Zenith pushed me aside with one hand. I saw a glint in her eye that I didn’t like.

  “The reason no one drinks it anymore,” she explained cheerfully, “is that in the year 1872, the Curtis and Son Company decided to introduce a line of switchel-flavored gum.”

  “No,” I mumbled, burying my face in my hands.

  “The new flavor was an instant success. Everyone loved the taste of—”

  “Vinegar, molasses, and ginger,” Gabby supplied.

  “Vinegar, molasses, and ginger,” Zenith repeated into the microphone. “Sadly, demand for the gum was so great, the company used up the city’s entire supply of switchel!”

  I unburied my face to assess the damage.

  Gabby looked confused. Zenith looked triumphant. The tourists looked mildly entertained. Dad’s shoulders looked two inches higher than they had been at the start of the tour.

  “Which is why,” Zenith continued, “the New England Switchel Factory eventually sold the building to the Intrepid Society of Unschool Adventurers, which is proud to bring you today’s tour.”

  As though she’d planned it—had she?—she ended just as Dad looped again to the street with the accident. The street was clear, finally, and Dad headed the bus toward his planned route.

  He cleared his throat and announced, “I think I can take it from here. Over on your right, you’ll see Casco Bay.”

  “What was that?” I whispered to Zenith. “Are you trying to get us in trouble?”

  “You started it,” she pointed out. “It was just for fun, anyway. We were just having a little unschool on the bus.”

  “An unschool bus!” Gabby and I said together, and as we laughed I tried not to notice Dad’s shoulders, up around his ears, as he conducted the rest of the tour.