Yosh said, “Question. Does that include kidnapping?”
Mrs. Paradisi shrugged. “Every baby is created with one egg and one sperm cell. What happens between conception and it landing in your doting arms is of no concern to me.”
I raised my hand. “What about cloning? You don’t need sperm for that. You take the DNA from a skin cell and implant it into an egg cell whose DNA has been removed, and—”
Mrs. Paradisi looked at the ceiling, just for a second. “The point is you have a baby. Whether it was conceived by traditional means, IVF, or cloning. Whether you birthed it yourself, adopted it, or stole it. Whether a stork delivered it to your doorstep. You have a baby. Is everyone clear on that?”
She passed out the rules of the assignment. We were supposed to carry the flour baby with us at all times. If we needed to leave it for some reason, we had to arrange for a babysitter. We had to document all baby-related activities in a journal and take photos of the baby around school and home to prove we hadn’t parked it on the kitchen counter all week.
“Besides,” Mrs. Paradisi said, “last time someone did that, Grandma turned Baby into a loaf of raisin bread.”
Each day of the project, starting today, represented one month in the baby’s life. Our journal entries were supposed to reflect the baby’s development, based on a booklet she gave us called Baby’s First Year. Next Friday, we’d celebrate the babies’ first birthday with cupcakes before returning the sacks to Mrs. Paradisi, who’d inspect them for damage.
“Be grateful you won’t lose any sleep over this,” she told us. “Some school districts spend big bucks to get dolls that cry every half hour. Some dolls even wet themselves.”
Grateful wasn’t how I would’ve described my feelings. Consumed by vague, gnawing dread came closer. Something about the assignment felt wrong, though I couldn’t say what.
“That about covers it,” Mrs. Paradisi said. “Pick your partner and line up for your baby.”
Stools clattered across the linoleum as kids hurried up in pairs, most of them boy-girl, boy-girl. It was like being at a dance—or what I imagined a dance would be like. I’d never actually gone to one. Too much loud music and too many people.
“I’ve got one more flour sack on this cart,” Mrs. Paradisi said. “Who doesn’t have one?”
I hesitantly raised my hand. I hadn’t budged from my seat.
“Okay, Hazel, but there should be one more. This class has an even number of students.”
“I could be a single parent,” I said. “That’s a valid parenting option.”
“Good point, but as I said, I’ve only got one more flour sack. You and the other straggler will have to pair up.” Mrs. Paradisi’s eyes scanned the room—and landed right next to me. “Your neighbor, Mr. Fukuzawa.”
“Darn it,” Yosh said. “Are you sure, Mrs. P? I’d be the perfect deadbeat dad for Hazel’s baby.”
I rolled my eyes, but I was more irritated with myself. I should’ve noticed Yosh hadn’t gone up either. I should’ve begged someone else to let me be their partner—someone who’d take the project seriously.
“I could buy my own sack of flour,” I said. “Then we could each be a single parent.”
“Oh, deal with it, Brownlee-Worrywart.” Yosh wheeled across the classroom and grabbed the final flour sack off the cart. “I promise not to tank your grade. I’ll even take the first shift.”
“That’s settled, then,” Mrs. Paradisi said, adding our names to her list.
At dinner, I told my family about the flour babies.
“The what?” Mom asked.
“Oh, you know, Dawn,” Mimi said. “That project where they carry around a sack of flour to teach them about child-rearing. Rowan had to do it.”
“Not until high school,” Rowan said. “Libby Morgenstern was my baby mama. She fell completely in love with it and insisted on doing all the work.”
“I guess Libby wasn’t short for liberated,” Mimi said.
Rowan shrugged. “At least I didn’t have to deal with it. I had a project due in AP bio.”
“I thought we raised you better than that,” Mom said with an exaggerated sigh.
“Anyway,” I said.
“Right,” Mom said. “So they’re doing this project in eighth grade now, huh? Finally caught on that middle schoolers aren’t as cherubic as they’d like to think. Present company excluded, of course.”
“Except these projects don’t work,” Mimi said. “Taking care of a fake baby is supposed to scare teens away from early parenthood. But research shows it actually makes them more likely to want a real one.”
“Why’s that?” Rowan asked. “Does it trigger pheromones or something?”
Mimi shrugged. “All I know is the only measurable benefit is empathy.”
“Great,” I said, “so thanks to this project, I’ll be more likely to become a teen mother—”
“And you’ll fall in love with a sack of flour,” Rowan finished. “It’s true. Ours got a tear in the corner and started leaking. By the time we noticed, the bag was sagging. From the way Libby freaked out, you’d have thought something happened to her real kid.”
“Or maybe she was worried about her grade,” I said. “You lose points if your baby gets hurt, right?”
“See, you’re doing it already,” Rowan said. “There is no baby. It can’t get hurt. It’s a sack of flour. It gets damaged. Libby’s first mistake was naming it.”
“What did she name it?”
“Oh, God, you expect me to remember? That was four years ago.”
“But you remember, don’t you?”
He sighed. “Tristan Christopher Morgenstern Brownlee-Wellington.”
Everyone laughed.
“See?” I told my moms. “You should have signed that permission slip. Now I’m going to be wasting valuable school hours developing empathy for a sack of flour.”
“What they should really do, if they want to freak out girls about pregnancy, is strap twenty pounds to their stomachs and pump their feet full of water,” Mimi said, awkwardly leaning over to rub her ankles.
“What about the boys?” I asked.
“Good question. I’m sure I could think of something equally horrible for them.”
Everyone was laughing and joking, even me. But I was furious when I thought of Libby Morgenstern crying over a sack of flour. I knew what it was like when a real baby died. I could never mistake one experience for the other.
Yosh plopped the flour baby on the lunch table the next day. “Say hello to Mama,” he told it.
I stared in horror. “What have you done?”
Across the words WHITE FLOUR UNBLEACHED, he’d drawn two giant scarlet eyes and a gaping, bloody maw with dozens of jagged teeth. They were well drawn, but that was hardly the point.
Yosh shrugged. “I decided it didn’t have enough personality. You’ve got to admit this is a baby who can take care of itself. What do you think we should name her?”
“Her? This is supposed to be a girl?”
“I like the sound of Bernadette. Bernadette Fukuzawa-Brownlee-Wellington.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Well, Bernadette Brownlee-Wellington-Fukuzawa didn’t have the same ring to it.”
“Why are you being awful? You’ve ruined her!”
Yosh leaned back, smiling smugly. “So Mama does care. Would you like to hold her?”
“No!” I said. “It—uh, she—is all yours until health class.”
When Carina arrived at our table, she laughed so hard she almost dropped her lunch tray.
I felt betrayed. “How can you laugh? She looks like a demon.”
“Yeah,” Carina admitted, “but have you ever seen such a cute little demon?”
“I don’t know how to answer that,” I said.
Yosh and Carina laughed even harder. “Where’s your sense of humor?” said Yosh.
“Somewhere else,” I retorted, “laughing at something that’s actually funny.”
“How? A makeover isn’t going to cut it. She needs a face transplant.”
“Here.” Carina scooped up the demon flour baby. She rummaged in her backpack and pulled out a purple zippered pouch. She dumped a bunch of colored pens on the table. “May I?”
“Go for it,” Yosh said. I nodded, sure Carina couldn’t make things worse.
She spun the sack so the demon face was screaming at Yosh and me and went to work on the other side, where the nutrition facts were printed. A couple of minutes later she turned it back around. “Voilà!”
Yosh and I stared. I said, “That’s supposed to be an improvement?”
Carina’s face fell. “It’s not?”
“Well,” Yosh said, “she’s very glamorous.”
Carina had given Bernadette two wide-set purple eyes with spidery black eyelashes, fluorescent pink cheeks, and full magenta lips. She looked nothing like the satanic nightmare on the other side. She looked like a dimwitted Disney princess who’d cleaned out the makeup counter at Walgreens.
“I can’t believe I’m supposed to take selfies with this thing,” I said.
“It’s glorious.” Yosh snatched Bernadette and toddled the pretty side across the table toward me. “I loooove you, Mommy!”
He flipped it around and snarled, “Mommy, I want to rip out your heart and eat it for dinner!”
Back around again, Yosh smacking his lips: “Mommy, give me a goodnight kiss! Mwa! Mwa! Mwa!”
I didn’t want to laugh. It would give Yosh too much satisfaction. But the corners of my mouth twitched all the same. The whole thing was ridiculous. Yosh didn’t gloat, thankfully, but as he tucked Bernadette back on the corner of the table, he wore a grin of triumph.
At home, I opened the journal where Yosh and I were supposed to track our baby’s development. He’d written pages—literally pages, with cutesy doodles in the margins—about his hopes and dreams for the baby. Little Bits has a viselike grip. Our princess may just have a future in the WWE. And don’t get me started on that scream of hers. So deafening! So pure!
I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream in aggravation.
One thing was certain: I needed to cover Bernadette’s faces or I’d be too busy having nightmares to do the assignment. After dinner, I found Mom on the computer, typing out shipping labels for the latest batch of soap orders. “Mom? Are there any baby clothes I could use for my project?”
Right away, I realized my mistake. Of course there were baby clothes in the house. Lena had died before a baby shower could be held, and my moms hadn’t wanted one for Miles because it seemed like a jinx. But somehow they’d still ended up with a stockpile of onesies.
I added, “Some of my old baby clothes, I mean. Maybe in a box in the basement?”
Mom shook her head. “I’m pretty sure all of Rowan’s and your clothes went to Heidi. She had the twins a couple of years after you arrived.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Mom hesitated. “You could use something from the baby’s room. Those clothes were meant for Lena and Miles originally. But at the end of the day, they’re just pieces of cloth, waiting to be worn by whoever needs them. Even a flour baby.”
I didn’t know how she could say Lena’s and Miles’s names so easily. Every time I had to, my throat tickled, and my eyes started to sting. I wondered if she practiced—if their names were one of her mantras that she repeated until she could say them as easily as breathing.
She led me upstairs. “Get your baby. Let’s see if we can find something that fits.”
“Bernadette,” I said. “Yosh named it Bernadette.”
Mom’s eyebrows went up. “Nice name.”
I got Bernadette from my room—I’d already broken Mrs. Paradisi’s rules by leaving her unattended on my desk—and brought her back down to the second floor. Mom had opened the door to the baby’s room. Delicate blue light spilled into the hallway.
I stepped inside, feeling like I was stepping into a time capsule. Everything looked as it had three years ago. The only sign that the room hadn’t been left completely undisturbed was how clean it was. It wasn’t dusty, as I’d imagined. The faint scent of lemon oil hung in the air. My bunny sat in the rocking chair, bright black eyes gazing out the window.
I plopped Bernadette on the dresser. Mom’s eyes bugged a little. “Carina drew that,” I said. “The other side’s even worse.” I spun Bernadette to show Mom what Yosh had drawn.
“Oh my.” Mom’s hand fluttered to her mouth.
“I know.” I sighed. “You can laugh if you need to. I know it’s horrendous.”
“Thank you,” Mom said, and giggled. “I can see why you want to dress her up. Why don’t you look through the dresser and find something you like? You won’t need booties, obviously, but a hat might help. And it’s getting chilly outside, and babies should be kept nice and warm. Maybe you could swaddle her in a soft blanket.”
By the time Mom and I finished dressing Bernadette in a yellow onesie, green knit cap, and receiving blanket printed with frogs and lily pads, all that was left peeking out were her huge purple eyes. I could live with that.
“Thanks, Mom.” I reached out to give her a hug.
She looked surprised. I didn’t usually initiate. A smile spread across her face as she pulled me close. “Anything for you,” she murmured into my hair. Then she drew back. “One more thing—babies get heavy. Let’s dig out the sling for you to carry her.”
Before bed, I sat at my bedroom window with Bernadette, holding her against my chest, wondering how it would feel if she were really a baby and I were really her mother, or at least her big sister. Even with the blanket wrapped around her, she was heavy and cold, her paper corners poking through. A lump started growing in my throat. I didn’t know why. She—it—was just a sack of flour. And this was just a stupid school assignment.
I swallowed, and the lump dissolved.
I checked Baby’s First Year to see what happened in the average baby’s second month. I got out the journal and started writing, trying to imagine Bernadette was real.
Bernadette sleeps a lot. And wakes up a lot. And cries a lot. And eats a lot. And needs to be changed a lot. The whole system is very inefficient. She can almost hold her head up by herself. I’m showing her the view out my window, which happens to be a very nice view, but since she can’t really see anything more than 18 inches away, it’s wasted on her. She keeps putting her fist in her mouth. I think she might turn out to be a thumb sucker, which is a gross habit. If she were real, I’d get her a pacifier.
I put the assignment away. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Besides, even Mrs. Paradisi would have to admit that two-month-olds were tedious. I didn’t know how Mom had gone through this with Rowan and me in real life, twice, all by herself. Voluntarily. I wondered if we were the reason she started meditating.
I set Bernadette aside, and Arby picked her way onto my lap. I stroked her ears and breathed in her warm, sourdough scent. Faint music seeped through my bedroom door—not Rowan’s angry Russians, but scratchy old jazz from Mimi’s turntable.
In the moonlight, Sweet Melissa waddled with her nose to the ground, sniffing out grubs. I wondered if she remembered her lost kits, and if she felt sad. It was impossible to know. From my lookout high in the attic, she seemed to carry on the same as always, but maybe she was faking it.
Chapter 17
The next day, Yosh noted Bernadette’s new outfit with a flicker of surprise. I waited for him to mock it, but he said only, “Hey, Bernie,” chucking her under her chin—or where her chin would have been if she’d had one. “Hey, Hazel.”
I relaxed. “Hey.”
“I’ve been thinking about the weekend,” Yosh said. “It’s basically three straight days of solo parenting. An undue burden on who
ever has to take Bernie home Friday afternoon. Which, if we keep up the current pattern, happens to be me.”
Of course it did. He wouldn’t be concerned otherwise, would he?
“I have a proposal. I’ll take Bernadette the rest of this week, if you take her for the weekend. Next week we can go back to every other day. That way custody stays fifty-fifty.”
During the week, Bernadette spent most of the day on the corner of my desk. I didn’t have to do anything with her, and in fact, my other teachers didn’t want me to do anything with her. Mrs. Paradisi was the only teacher excited about the project. The rest were constantly telling kids to stop messing around with their babies—singing and cooing to them, passing them like footballs. But on the weekend, I’d have to tote Bernadette everywhere I went—inside and outside, upstairs and downstairs, to the pasture and the barn and the farmers’ market. It would be much more work.
Yosh said, “Or we can split the weekend. Whatever. I’ll take her home Friday, and you can pick her up halfway through.”
That was fair. Still, I couldn’t see asking my moms to drive me all the way into town so Yosh and I could hand off a sack of flour. I sighed. “No, your original plan is fine.”
“Wait,” said Carina. “I have a better idea.” She leaned forward. “We stick to the schedule.”
Before I could point out that she was not, strictly speaking, part of we, she said, “Friday: Yosh takes Bernie home. They have a whole day of daddy-daughter time. But who should show up at Yosh’s door Saturday afternoon? Tía Carina!”
“You want to babysit?” I asked.
“No! Even better. Next, I go to your house, Hazel. Except instead of hanging out for only a couple of hours, we could . . .” She trailed off. “Um. Maybe we could have a sleepover? If you want to, I mean. If you’re not too busy.”
Hazel's Theory of Evolution Page 13
