Boogie Bass, Sign Language Star

by Claudia Mills

  “What?” Nolan said. “I just thought…I knew how much you wanted Bing to have it. I just wanted to help.”

  “You always help!” Boogie burst out. “You help everybody with everything all the time! I’m the reason Doggie-Dog got ruined, and you’re the reason Bing got a new one. You do everything right, and I do everything wrong!”

  “That’s not true,” Nolan said. “I didn’t do this right. And you do lots of things right.”

  “Like what?” Boogie demanded. “Name one thing I’ve ever done right.”

  But before Nolan could answer, there was Boogie’s mother coming toward them, with T.J., Gib, and Bing trailing behind her. Quickly Boogie shoved the new Doggie-Dog back into its package.

  “Ready?” Boogie’s mother asked.

  Without another word to Nolan, Boogie followed her, so he didn’t have to watch Nolan struggling to answer his question.

  * * *

  “Look what Nolan got for you!” Boogie said to Bing that evening when he and Bing were finally alone in the family room.

  T.J. and Gib were both having a time-out for trying to turn Bear into a polar bear by emptying a canister of flour all over him. Their mother was busy brushing off Bear, as well as vacuuming up the flour that lay thick like new-fallen snow on the kitchen floor.

  From behind his back Boogie produced the brand-new Doggie-Dog.

  Bing stared at it, his face squinched up in puzzlement. Boogie had to admit the new Doggie-Dog looked and felt very different from the old Doggie-Dog. One was bright white with black spots; the other had become dirty gray with faded spots. One was firm and solid; the other had been soft and limp.

  “It’s Doggie-Dog!” Boogie said.

  His little brother didn’t reach out to cuddle it, so Boogie waggled the new dog and made it talk in a high, squeaky voice. “I’m your new Doggie-Dog! I’m here to be your friend!”

  Bing looked up at Boogie and made the sign Boogie had taught him for sad. But Boogie didn’t even need the sign; he could see real tears starting to trickle down Bing’s cheeks.

  Over the last few days Boogie had taught Bing some other signs, too. Now Bing made the tap-and-snap sign for dog and pointed emphatically to himself, and then made the sign for dog a second time and pointed to himself again.

  Bing didn’t want this Doggie-Dog. He wanted his Doggie-Dog.

  Wonderful.

  Maybe Bing had already started to forget about Doggie-Dog. Maybe Boogie’s mom had been right, after all, when she said that stuffed animals were more trouble than they were worth.

  This was your idea, Nolan had told him, trying to make Boogie feel better.

  Now Boogie felt even worse.

  Friday’s camp was so busy with practice for the Signing Showcase that a full hour passed before Colleen whispered something to Peg, and then Sally switched the lights off and on to get everyone’s attention.

  “We almost forgot the most important thing we have to do today,” Peg said, while Sally signed.

  Boogie loved watching Sally’s busy hands as he tried to figure out exactly which sign meant forgot and which sign meant important.

  If only he was better at sign language.

  If only he was better at being a brother, too.

  If only he was better at everything.

  “We have to vote for our showcase emcee,” Peg and Sally continued. “We teachers could have picked someone ourselves, but this is your camp, your showcase, your chance to shine, so everyone gets to do the choosing here, campers and teachers, all of us.”

  Colleen passed out a pencil and a small square of paper to each camper. Boogie was glad it was the kind of vote where people didn’t have to raise their hands in front of everyone. He didn’t want to be mad at anyone who didn’t vote for Nolan.

  Boogie covered his paper with his hand as he wrote Nolan, even though he knew everyone would be writing the same thing.

  Colleen collected the ballots. It took only a minute for Peg and Sally to count them.

  “We have a winner,” Peg said with a smile. “In fact, it was almost unanimous. The emcee for our show will be…”

  Nolan Nanda!

  “Boogie Bass,” Peg finished.

  Was this a joke? A joke that was James’s idea, so the worst signer in the camp would stand up onstage in front of everyone looking completely ridiculous?

  But everyone was clapping, including Nolan, Nixie, and Vera, and they wouldn’t be cheering for him if this was a prank. Peg and Sally were clapping in the Deaf finger-twirling way.

  “Boogie,” Peg said, “this means you’ll have to do a lot of work this coming week to learn your lines. Are you ready to show how hard you can work?”

  Boogie was too stunned to do anything but nod.

  “All right, campers, time for a break!”

  It was all wrong.

  It was totally unfair.

  Nolan was ten thousand times better at signing than anybody in the room except for Peg and Sally.

  “I’m sorry,” Boogie choked out, finally finding his voice. “Nolan, you’re the one who deserves this, not me. I voted for you. I told other kids to vote for you, too.”

  “Are you crazy?” Nixie demanded. “Nolan wanted you to be it. He wanted you to be it even more than you wanted him to be it! If you ever run for president of the United States, Nolan will get millions of people to vote for you!”

  Boogie suddenly understood.

  The others had voted for him because Nolan told them to, so Boogie would stop feeling so bad about himself.

  “Oh,” Boogie said in a small voice. “I get it now.”

  For one teensy-weensy moment he had almost let himself think maybe he had miraculously become a good signer.

  “Nolan talked to everybody, but it was actually Vera’s idea for you to be the emcee,” Nixie said.

  Vera’s idea?

  “Remember when we went to Laurent Clerc School?” Vera asked. “You were the one who went up to the Deaf dancers and started signing, and then all of sudden everyone was talking to everyone else, and it wasn’t weird and awkward anymore. You were the one who made everyone feel happy and welcome, and that’s what the emcee is supposed to do, right?”

  “And remember how you were the best at doing the feelings signs?” Nixie asked. “Peg and Sally even made you show how well you did them to the whole camp.”

  “And when James made fun of you, you just laughed it off, because you’re so nice to everybody,” Nolan added. “Guess what? James voted for you, too. When I told him we thought you should be the emcee, he looked embarrassed and said he didn’t know why he keeps on teasing you.”

  They all sounded like they meant it.

  “But I still get M and N mixed up in the ABCs,” Boogie protested. “I still might trip on the stage and fall flat on my face.”

  Nolan, Nixie, and Vera gave the same shrug, as if to say, So?

  Maybe the point of learning a new language wasn’t to be perfect about every word and every letter. Maybe the point was to share what you thought and felt so other people would understand, and to be able to understand them when they shared their thoughts and feelings with you.

  “Everyone voted for you,” Nixie said.

  “Even the teachers,” Vera said.

  “You’re the only one who didn’t vote for you,” Nolan said.

  All Boogie could do was make the sign for wow, waving his spread-out hand sideways near his chest, over and over again.

  * * *

  At home that night Boogie found the new Doggie-Dog lying ignored on the floor by Bing’s bed. If the door to Bing’s room hadn’t been shut, Bear would have chewed up a second Doggie-Dog head. But this one was probably too new to taste very good. It didn’t have Bing’s smell all over it, Bing’s love all over it, the way the old Doggie-Dog had.

  Boogie went to
get the headless body of the old Doggie-Dog out of the bottom of his bureau drawer.

  It looked as sad as you’d expect an old worn-out stuffed toy without a head to look. But this was still the real Doggie-Dog, the Doggie-Dog Bing loved. The Doggie-Dog Bing needed.

  Boogie had another idea.

  This might be a terrible idea, but maybe it wasn’t.

  If the whole sign-language camp had voted for him to be emcee for the Signing Showcase, he might be able to do something right.

  But if this idea turned out to be terrible, it was going to be very terrible.

  Boogie found his mother’s sewing box on the top shelf in her closet. One time, T.J. and Gib had taken her special sewing scissors and used them to cut open the beanbag chair in the family room because they wanted to see if the beans inside were the kind people could eat. Ever since then there was a rule against any boy touching the sewing box for any reason whatsoever.

  Boogie took the box and carried it back to his bedroom.

  “Bing!” he called.

  Please let this work. Please let this work.

  As soon as Bing came into the room and saw the old headless Doggie-Dog, he grabbed it and hugged it as if he would never let it go.

  “Watch this,” Boogie said, as if he was about to perform a magic trick.

  With his mother’s extra-sharp sewing scissors, he carefully snipped the threads of the seam on the back of the new Doggie-Dog and scooped out the stuffing. Bits of fluff fell onto the floor like the flour from T.J. and Gib’s polar bear project.

  As Bing watched, wide-eyed, Boogie gently pried the old Doggie-Dog away from his hands. Without its head, the old Doggie-Dog was smaller now. Plus, its stuffing had lost a lot of its stuffiness. So the old Doggie-Dog fit inside the empty body of the new Doggie-Dog. Grown-ups were always saying that the most important thing about you wasn’t what you looked like on the outside, but who you were on the inside. Boogie hoped Bing would agree.

  He found a needle, already threaded, stuck into his mom’s pincushion, and did his best to sew up the open seam at the back. Maybe the next Longwood Elementary After-School Superstars program would be a sewing camp so big brothers could learn how to do a perfect job stitching up their little brothers’ stuffed animals. But when he was done, he thought it looked good enough.

  “What do you think, Bing?” he asked, holding out the new-and-old Doggie-Dog to him.

  Would Bing start crying again? Would he push this Doggie-Dog away, too?

  A slow smile spread across Bing’s face. “My Doggie-Dog!” Bing said, cradling it close to his chest. “My Doggie-Dog!”

  Boogie felt a huge smile spreading across his own face.

  He made the sign for happy to Bing.

  And Bing made it back to Boogie.

  Boogie stood straight and tall in a black suit that was a size too small, a hand-me-down from an older cousin. His mop of curls was as neatly combed as a mop of curls could be. After practicing for the whole week one-on-one with Sally, and at home with Bing and Doggie-Dog, he was ready. Or as ready as he would ever be.

  The Longwood auditorium wasn’t a real auditorium. It was just a semicircular space in the middle of the school, where the audience sat on low carpeted risers, while the performers stood on a small raised platform in front that served as the stage. For the Signing Showcase the space was packed. From his spot at the side of the stage, Boogie could see the Laurent Clerc kids talking away with their hands. He hoped they wouldn’t think it was pathetic to watch kids who were the same age as them but who were just now learning their ABCs. But everyone had to start somewhere.

  Lots of parents, siblings, and friends were there. He saw Nolan’s mom and dad and his two older sisters. Would they think Nolan should have been the emcee, not him? But they were as kind as Nolan. Vera’s mom was there in a purple business suit, looking fancier than most of the other parents. Nixie’s dad and mom had both taken time off from work to come. Boogie hoped that one of these days Nixie would be able to wear them down and finally get a dog of her own. A girl named Lucy, who had been at coding camp with them last month, was there with her big sister.

  But all these people together didn’t make as much noise as T.J. and Gib, who were running up and down the risers as if riser racing was an Olympic event and they were sprinting toward a medal.

  “T.J.! Gib!” he heard his mother saying. “Boys, I’m not going to tell you this again. Boys!”

  Only Bing sat quietly, clutching Doggie-Dog. When his mom had tucked Bing into bed a week ago, Boogie had lingered at the door to see if she noticed the return of Doggie-Dog. At first she had given Doggie-Dog a kiss the same way she had always done after first kissing Bing. Then she did a double take.

  “Where did this come from?” she asked Boogie.

  Thank goodness Boogie had remembered to return her sewing box to the closet! He could feel his proud grin giving him away.

  “But I thought we had agreed not to keep on bothering with this,” she said.

  Then, at the sight of Bing and Doggie-Dog cuddled together, her face had softened.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked Boogie.

  Should he have told her Nolan had gotten it for him? But he was the one who had turned the new Doggie-Dog into a Doggie-Dog Bing would still love the same old way. So all he had said was, “Nolan and I got it together,” which was totally the truth.

  Now Peg switched the lights off and on. The room fell silent. Even T.J. and Gib plopped down in place. It was time for the showcase to begin.

  Boogie walked to the microphone. He was going to speak into it for the people in the audience who didn’t know sign language, which was just about everybody except for the kids from Laurent Clerc. As he spoke, he’d sign.

  “Good afternoon!” he said and signed, smiling his biggest smile because it was a good afternoon. It was a great afternoon! “My name is Boogie Bass. Welcome to our program! We are going to show you all we have learned!”

  He spoke and signed slowly. The Deaf kids, the real signers, would have moved their hands so much faster. But he knew he was doing a good job.

  When he introduced the ABC song, he invited the audience to sign along. Would the Deaf kids do it, or would they think it was too babyish? But they did, and in fact, they ended up showing people in the audience how to hold their fingers in the correct positions. If only they had been at camp when Boogie and his friends had been learning! By the time the song had been sung half a dozen times, lots of people were laughing at how much fun it had been to sing the alphabet in this completely new way.

  The other songs went well, too. Boogie saw that James was not rolling his eyes and giving his usual sullen scowl. His fingers twirling for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” were twinkling as happily as everybody else’s.

  Over the last few days Sally and Peg had added a couple of short skits to the program, including a signing solo for Nolan. For his act, he did math problems by using number signs, his fingers moving almost as fast as if he was Deaf himself. Boogie didn’t know if the emcee was supposed to clap, but when Nolan took his bow, Boogie couldn’t help proudly twisting his hands high in the air. It was perfect that one best friend was the emcee and the other one had a special part in the program, too.

  The program ended with the Parade of Animals. Even though Boogie, as emcee, hadn’t taken part in any of the other demonstrations, he joined in this one. Since real-life penguins looked as if they were wearing black suits with shiny white shirts, Boogie felt especially penguin-like dressed up in his emcee outfit. The audience laughed for him appreciatively. He did stumble over his untied shoelace as he left the stage, but Nolan, Nixie, and Vera had been right: it didn’t matter.

  Once the program was over, it was time for refreshments. Boogie led the way to the group of Deaf kids, with his friends following. After a moment of hesitation, James came with them.

  Gre
at job! one kid signed, not just for Boogie, but for all of them.

  Another kid, with a puzzled look on his face, finger-spelled Boogie’s name. Then the kid moved his fingers down from his nose in a way that had to be the sign for booger.

  James cracked up totally, and then the Deaf kid cracked up, too. It was impossible for Boogie to keep from laughing along with them.

  When he was finally able to stop laughing, he tried to explain.

  No, he signed. He spelled his name again, and he did the sign the Deaf kids had taught him last time for dance. Then he boogied in place, and before he knew it, all the kids, Deaf and hearing, were laughing harder than ever.

  After that, everyone was talking and signing like old friends. James signed that he liked to play basketball, holding his hands up as if he was making a basket. Finally even Vera signed that she liked art, drawing a zigzag line with her pinkie finger across the palm of her other hand.

  The dancer girl they had met last time, Amy, had a notebook with her. She opened it to a blank page and held it out to Vera, along with a pencil.

  Flushing, Vera shook her head.

  “Vera!” Nixie said. “Come on, draw something!”

  “I can’t,” Vera whispered frantically.

  “You totally can!” Nixie replied.

  Shyly, Vera took the notebook and pencil and sat down in a corner of the room. Five minutes later she returned and handed the notebook to Amy. Boogie could see Vera had drawn a girl who looked exactly like Amy, with two pigtails, a freckled nose, and a short twirly skirt.

  Amy signed wow.

  Drawing was a kind of language, too.

  Boogie felt someone tugging on his legs.

  It was Bing, still holding on to Doggie-Dog, with his mother close behind. T.J. and Gib were back at their Olympic riser race. It was clear his mother had given up trying to make them stop. At least Bear wasn’t there to be barking at their heels as they ran.

  “You were wonderful!” Boogie’s mother said, crushing him into a hug. “I took a video on my phone to show your dad.”