“Every single Mayan didn’t work on the pyramids,” Spencer protested. “Lots of Mayans did other things. Like . . . well, other things.”
“Other things like lying on the floor?”
“Like designing a calendar,” Spencer said. “That’s right. I’m the guy who invents the calendar. My calendar has twelve months, one for each cycle of the moon. I’m calling this month El Septembero.”
“The Mayans didn’t speak Spanish, you dummy,” Ben said. “America isn’t going to be discovered for another thousand-plus years.”
I grinned as I smoothed my clay onto the cardboard. Despite Spencer’s laziness, it was worth having him in our group because he was so entertaining. Maybe the ancient Mayans had jesters to amuse the pyramid builders, too.
“What did the Mayans eat?” Spencer asked. “I might feel more like building a pyramid if I had some Mayan food to inspire me. Didn’t Mr. Stuart say they ate pepperoni pizza?”
“Corn,” Ben told him. “They ate corn.”
“They had to have had something to go with it,” Spencer said.
“Beans,” I chimed in.
Spencer groaned.
I was softening my next stick of clay when Ben’s mother came into the room. For a mother, she was amazingly pretty, slim and youthful, with chin-length blond hair.
“Are you boys getting hungry?” she asked.
“Yes!” Spencer shouted, rolling up to a sitting position as if to demonstrate his enthusiasm. “Building Mayan pyramids sure works up an appetite.”
Ben glared at him.
“I mean, watching other people build pyramids sure works up an appetite.”
Ben’s mother laughed. “I hope you both can stay for dinner. Do you need to call your parents?”
“I already told my parents I was eating here,” Spencer said.
She laughed again. “Cooper?”
“I’ll call, but I’m sure it’s okay.”
Why wouldn’t it be okay? Carly would be at Jodie’s house, and my mom would be sleeping. Though I thought maybe she seemed a little better. I hadn’t been snooping, exactly, but I had seen a bottle of pills on the nightstand next to her bed, and I had seen “Dr. Leibowitz 1:30” again on the calendar for next week.
No one answered the phone when I called, so I left a message, and that was that.
Dinner at Ben’s house was the opposite of dinner at Spencer’s house. Ben’s family ate in the dining room, not the kitchen, with a tablecloth on the table. The food was delicious: grilled chicken breasts with mango salsa, fancy rice, and a dark green vegetable I didn’t recognize, though it looked something like spinach.
“It’s Swiss chard,” Ben’s mother said, apparently reading the question in my eyes.
Ben’s father—as slim and good-looking as Ben’s mother—said grace, and then everybody began to pass the serving plates along the table. Everyday dinners at Ben’s house felt like Thanksgiving.
I used to think that Spencer’s family and Ben’s family were the two extremes, and my family was in the middle: not as loud, messy, and chaotic as Spencer’s family; not as quiet, neat, and perfect as Ben’s family. My family was the in-between family, the “just right” family, the normal family—well, as normal as a family could be that didn’t have a dad.
That’s what I used to think.
Ben’s mother asked everyone a question in turn. Ben’s father reported on his run; he was training for a marathon. Ben’s older sister, Emma, shared a story from rehearsal; she was a singing and dancing fork in the high school production of Beauty and the Beast.
“Spencer, what’s new at your house these days? Did Nate get his driver’s license?”
“Yeah. But the day after he got it, he backed out of the garage too fast, and one of the side mirrors got knocked off, and now my dad won’t let him drive anymore until he pays for a new one. Nate told him he never looks in the side mirrors anyway, and my dad got even madder, and said that that explained a lot.”
Everyone laughed.
“Cooper, what about you? Tell your mom I haven’t seen her out walking for the longest time. Is she busy getting ready for an art show, or is she just swamped with clients?”
“No.” I tried to think of something to add, to make my answer funny and interesting like Spencer’s.
Before the silence could become uncomfortable, Ben’s mother said smoothly, “Well, tell her I said hi, will you?”
“Okay,” I said.
Dessert was baked apples with real whipped cream, not whipped cream from a can or Cool Whip.
“I want to come live at Ben’s house,” Spencer said.
I knew Spencer said it as a compliment for the dinner. He couldn’t really mean it. If Spencer lived at Ben’s house, he’d have to clean his room, and give up junk food, and do his share on any future Mayan pyramids. If I lived at Ben’s house, the meals would be better, but I’d miss seeing the walls covered with my mom’s artwork, and hearing Carly’s chatter.
I didn’t want to live at Ben’s house. I wanted to live at my own house, the way it used to be.
6
It rained the last weekend in September. It so seldom rained in Colorado that I loved a rainy day. Soccer was canceled, and on Saturday morning, I lay in bed listening to the steady rhythm of the rainfall on the roof, watching the rivulets of drops streaming down the window.
“Who wants French toast for breakfast?” I asked Mom and Carly, as I came into the kitchen after talking on the phone to Gran-Dan.
“Uh-oh,” my mom said good-naturedly. “Are you volunteering to serve as chef?”
Her teasing tone made me grin. She was dressed, too, in a denim jumper with a flowery turtleneck underneath.
“Mom, my team got an A on our French toast,” I informed her. It wasn’t strictly true; Mr. Pasta didn’t grade us on the quality of our cooking itself. But it was true that our team’s French toast had been delicious. The question was whether it would be delicious without Ben to supervise.
“Can I help?” Carly asked. “What do we need to make it?”
“Bread and milk and eggs . . .” I tried to remember the rest. “And vanilla and sugar and cinnamon. Syrup to pour on it when it’s done. Oh, and confectioners’ sugar to sprinkle on top, if we have any.”
While Carly hunted on the pantry shelves for the ingredients, I retrieved my morning binder from my backpack and found the handout with the recipe. There was a moment of panic, when Carly couldn’t find any vanilla, but then it turned out to be hidden behind a large container of salt.
At the very last minute, as I was about to transfer the French toast to the plates, I remembered to slice up an orange from the fruit bowl to create a garnish. Mr. Pasta said that presentation was as important as taste. Food should please the eye as well as the mouth and the stomach.
“Oh, my!” Mom marveled when I brought the first plate to her at the kitchen table. “Cooper, this is beautiful!”
I savored every syrupy bite. Carly and Mom gobbled theirs all up, too.
“If I’m the family chef now, does this mean that I don’t have to vacuum the living room?” I asked.
“The short answer is no. But I’ll put on some reggae music, and while you’re vacuuming I’ll dust.” She began humming a peppy tune as she grabbed a dustcloth from the kitchen drawer.
I stared at her. I hadn’t seen her so energetic in months, not since the start of the summer.
Carly carried her dish over to the sink and, equally energetic, danced upstairs to change the sheets on her bed. Then, or so she had told us, she was going to work on her newest story, about a beautiful Hawaiian princess named Lu-ah-la-ah-li-ah.
I lingered at the table, not ready yet for the roar of the vacuum to disturb the coziness of the gray, gloomy morning.
“Carly told me that the princess in her story is all made out of fruit,” I said. “She has a coconut for her head, and bananas for her arms, and a pineapple for her body.”
Dustcloth in hand, Mom laughed and dropped back
into her seat at the table again. “She sounds yummy.”
I laughed, too. Then I said, “You seem different.”
She hesitated. “I feel different. Oh, Coop, it’s been a bad couple of months. It took so long for me to realize what was wrong, that I was depressed. I kept thinking, I have nothing to be depressed about. I have wonderful children and work that I love. But depression is a physical illness. If the chemical balance is wrong in your brain, you can’t be happy, however good everything else is in your life.”
“Are you taking medicine for it?” I asked, thinking of the bottle of pills beside her bed.
“Yes. It took a while for it to work, and I was getting more and more discouraged, but then last week I noticed that I felt . . . just more like my old self. Not so tired, not so hopeless. Cooper, honey, things are going to be different now. I can tell. It’s all going to be better. I promise.”
She reached out and gave me a long, enfolding hug. I fought tears as I hugged her back.
After a rousing, reggae-accompanied turn around the living room with the vacuum, I let Carly talk me into joining her at her small table to work on the maps and drawings for Inchland.
“This is the school the Inchie children go to,” she told me. “It’s a one-room school house like in Little House on the Prairie.”
I studied Carly’s picture. She had drawn the front of the school with a door, two windows, a chimney, and a bell.
“What kinds of things do they learn in school?” I asked, to play along.
“Well, reading and spelling, like we do here. But instead of geography they have inchography, where they study all about Inchland, how tall its mountains are, what its weather is like.”
“What is its weather like?”
Carly thought for a minute. “They have four seasons, like we do, and it snows in winter, but not too much, because even an inch of snow would bury everything. It rains sometimes, but a drop of rain is enough for them to take their baths and water their plants.”
“Do they have math in school?”
“Yes. It’s mainly like our math, except that when they measure things, they don’t have feet or yards or miles. They don’t have anything bigger than an inch.”
Carly selected a red crayon and began coloring in the shape of the schoolhouse. She poked the tip of her tongue out the way she did whenever she concentrated hard on doing something.
“In social studies, I bet they learn the history of Inchland,” I suggested. “When it was discovered, how the Inchies came to live there.”
Carly looked up from her coloring and shook her head emphatically. “Cooper, Inchland has never been discovered. The Inchies have always lived there. That’s the most important thing for the Inchies, to keep it from being discovered. The Inchies are so little, and their country is so small. If big people found it, they could do something terrible—they could step on it, or treat the Inchies like toys and give them to careless big children to play with. Cooper, you have to promise you’ll never tell anyone about Inchland.”
“Sure,” I agreed. Planning out a made-up country with a seven-year-old wasn’t something I was going to talk about with my friends, that was for sure. “Does Jodie know about it?”
“No. Nobody knows but you and me. Don’t tell anybody. Not Ben, not Spencer, nobody.”
“Okay,” I promised.
When I came home from school on Monday, all over the living room, the family room, the dining room, and spread out on the kitchen table were heaps of scarlet fabric, ropes of gold braid, and boxes of shiny gold buttons. Carly’s ballet school was working on a program called “The March of the Toy Soldiers,” and Mom had signed up to make toy soldier outfits for forty-five little ballerinas.
“Just the vests,” she explained. “They can wear plain black pants with them. Two other moms are making the hats, out of cardboard spray-painted red, each with a large white feather on top—they’re going to be darling. I’m the only mom who likes to sew, so I said I’d make the vests.”
“Forty-five vests?”
“They’ll go fast on the sewing machine, now that I have most of them cut out. Just a few seams, and then the trim—I guess that will take some time, and sewing on all the buttons. You and Carly can help.”
“I don’t know how to sew on buttons,” I protested.
“Then it’s high time you learned.” She gave me a quick kiss. “We have plenty of time. The show isn’t until a week from this coming Saturday. I have so many months of lost time to make up for. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all I want to do.”
By the end of the week, I decided red and gold were the most hideous colors I had ever seen. I closed my eyes to go to sleep and saw patches of red and gold everywhere. Each vest had eight gold buttons. Eight times forty-five was three hundred sixty. Three hundred sixty buttons to sew! I tried to pretend I had homework to do, but Mom would find me in the basement rec room playing video games, and I’d be back at the dining room table with needle in hand.
“At least for the rest of your life you’ll be able to sew on a button if you need to,” she told me.
She enlisted Ben and Spencer in the effort as well. As the three of us were trying to sneak down the stairs to the basement one afternoon, she called out to us, “Boys!”
“Pretend you don’t hear her,” I whispered to them.
Fatally polite, Ben turned back.
“If each of you do three vests, that will be nine more done,” she said with a smile.
The next thing I knew, all three of us were sewing on buttons, together with Carly, Jodie, and another of Carly’s friends.
Ben sewed on two buttons in the time it took me to do one. Maybe it was a good idea to have Ben’s help after all.
Spencer couldn’t get the knack of threading a needle, so he used ridiculously long pieces of thread that got tangled on everything. He kept stabbing himself with the needle, and each puncture wound called for an elaborate performance to demonstrate the extent of his injury.
“Ow! Ouch! Mrs. Harris, I’m bleeding! I think I hit a vein! The blood is spurting!”
Then, a minute later, “Ow! I need a tetanus shot! I can tell I’m getting lockjaw!”
After half an hour, Spencer had sewed on exactly one button.
“Come see my button!” he crowed. “Mrs. Harris, tell me my button is the best!”
My mom came over to admire it. Her face fell. “Oh, Spencer—”
“What? I can take it.”
“It’s in the wrong place. See where the buttonhole is? The button has to line up with the buttonhole. You’ll have to move it.”
“Move it? How can I move it? It’s sewed on!”
“You’ll have to cut it off and sew it on again.”
Spencer’s anguished howls sent Carly and her second-grade friends into spasms of giggles.
“Instead of sewing on buttons, do you want to cut lengths of braid? Just measure out the braid, using this piece as a pattern, give one snip, and you’re done. It’s easy. Anybody can do it.” Mom hesitated, giving a worried look at Spencer. “Well, maybe it isn’t so easy.”
“You mean, anybody can do it, except for Spencer,” Spencer said.
The three little girls were giggling so much they could hardly keep sewing. My mom, Ben, and I were laughing, too. Ben laid another finished vest on the growing pile.
In Food Fun, our class was baking cookies to sell at a bake sale during the intermission of the Western Hills fall music extravaganza. The bake sale was a fund-raiser for all the Western Hills music programs: band, orchestra, and choir.
I had never realized there were so many different ways to make cookies. You could slice the dough from long rolled tubes; you could drop the dough onto the cookie tray by spoonfuls; you could shape the dough into little balls; you could roll the dough with a rolling pin and cut it into shapes with cookie cutters.
The only thing you couldn’t do was eat the dough. That was Mr. Pasta’s strictest rule.
“First, raw doug
h has raw eggs in it, and you can get salmonella poisoning from eating raw eggs. I don’t want any phone calls from parents upset that their children have contracted salmonella poisoning in my cooking class. Second, raw dough is delicious, and if you start eating it, you won’t be able to stop, and we won’t have enough cookies to sell at the bake sale. Third, raw dough is very fattening.” He patted his own round stomach.
That day we were making peanut butter cookies. For peanut butter cookies, we made dough balls and then flattened them with the tines of a fork, twice, to get a crisscross effect. I was our team’s fork man. Ben made the balls, I flattened them, and Spencer placed them on the lightly greased cookie pan.
Criss! Cross! It was pleasant and satisfying work.
One flattened cookie disappeared en route to the pan.
“Spencer!” I hissed at him.
“I won’t do it again. I couldn’t resist just one. I know it was wrong. Ben, Cooper, I’m very, very, very sorry.”
Spencer did look miserable. “If I die of salmonella poisoning, I deserve it. Don’t even come to my funeral, okay?”
Ben whacked Spencer with the spatula.
The team at the next cooking station was all girls, including one of the girls I had helped on the first day of school with her combination lock, Lindsay.
“What did Spencer do?” Lindsay called over to us.
“Don’t tell her,” Spencer begged.
“Tell us!” Lindsay’s best friend, Tamara, chimed in.
“No,” Ben said. “He’s been punished enough already by his own guilty conscience.”
“Cooper will tell us, won’t you, Cooper?” Lindsay asked.
I felt myself weakening. Once you had opened a combination lock for somebody, it gave the two of you a special bond, even though Lindsay and I had hardly spoken since. But I would never betray Spencer.
Mr. Pasta made his way over to our cooking station. “How are the peanut butter cookies coming along?” he asked. I knew he meant: is all this talking necessary?
“Fine,” Ben said, gesturing to three filled pans ready to go into the preheated oven.
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