by Coco Simon
Today their favorite teams weren’t playing, though, so while everyone was interested, the pressure was off. Which was a good thing, because I’d had kind of a rough day, and I did not want to deal with baseball drama.
After we parked the car and I got inside, I took off my shoes in the entryway and started to run for the kitchen, but Mom stopped me with her voice.
“Tamiko! You must change into clean clothes! You are not getting chocolate sauce all over my house!”
I looked down at my messy clothes. She was right—there was chocolate sauce all over them, and little bits of sprinkles. Usually I always had a retort at the ready, but with this I couldn’t argue, so I darted up the stairs to my room.
We lived in a section of Bayville where the houses were all kind of old. Our house was definitely big enough for four people, but we didn’t have an “open concept” like those people on TV house hunting shows were always talking about. There was just a living room, no family room. And no man cave in the basement, just a laundry room, although Mom kept threatening to build a “she shed” in the back. Yes, apparently that was a thing—but I think only Mom knew about it.
The one good thing about old houses was that they could have odd layouts, and my house definitely did. My room had a smaller room attached to it. It was never meant to be a walk-in closet (another thing people on TV always wanted), because it had windows, so I don’t know what it was originally used for. The windows looked out into the vegetable garden in the backyard and got great light.
I guess most people would call it a craft or sewing room, but Allie had dubbed it my “DIY room” because she said I was always customizing things. And she was right. I didn’t usually create things from scratch, like knitting a sweater out of yarn. But I would take a sweater that I was tired of and take off the sleeves, or change out the buttons, or sew cute flower patches onto it, or dye it fuchsia. That was “Doing It Yourself,” or, as I liked to think of it, improving something.
My parents were okay with me customizing everything, as long as I kept things neat. I did not believe that I was a neat person by nature, but my parents were, and I had to play by their rules at this stage in my life, so there was not much else I could do. Also, when I kept things neat, it was easier to talk Mom into buying me extra glue sticks and glitter.
I was really proud of my DIY room. The storage centerpiece was something I’d customized myself. Mom and Dad had been getting rid of an old hutch they’d had for years—a tall wood cabinet with shelves inside, and doors that swung open. They were going to put it out on the curb, but I convinced them to give it to me. I had seen a hutch like that online, and I remembered how to turn it into a supercute craft closet.
First I painted it. That was during my turquoise phase, so it was turquoise with white trim. Then I bought four white-coated wire racks that were meant for kitchen spices, but were also perfect for paint, glitter jars, and other stuff. Those I attached to the inside of the doors. (Kai “helped” me with the screwdriver and hammer bits. I was really good at using them myself, but Mom insisted that I have supervision. It was kind of funny, because Kai didn’t even know how to use them, but he would sit there and watch, which seemed to make Mom happy.)
Finally, I got some cheap plastic bins to put on the shelves to hold other supplies. I jammed a lot of stuff into the hutch. And when I wasn’t customizing, I just closed the doors, and my DIY room looked super-neat.
The room also had a big, metal folding table that I’d picked up from the curb and snuck into the house, because the idea of me bringing “trash” into the house grossed my parents out. But I’d cleaned it with that spray that kills 99 percent of germs. On top of the table sat a sewing machine that used to be my grandmother’s. It wasn’t one of those fancy computerized ones that they make nowadays, but it was easy to use and allowed me to customize my clothes easily. Plus, it was pink.
Mom had given me an extra chair from the basement, and for my last birthday she got me the magnifying desk lamp that I’d asked for. That allowed me to stay up late working on stuff, but I don’t think she realized that at the time.
Every time I entered my bedroom, I glanced into my customization area, because just looking at it made me happy. Usually I would go pick up the projects I was working on to see if paint had dried, or glue had set, but today was baseball day, and there was no time.
I put on my good-luck jersey and a clean pair of skinny jeans and jogged down into the kitchen. The game had started, and Mom, Dad, and Kai were seated at the table.
“Are they home or away?” I asked.
“Home,” Mom said. “First batter struck out already.”
“Yes!” I cheered, and slid into my seat. Then I patiently waited for Mom to put some hiyashi chuka onto my plate.
We didn’t eat Japanese food at every single meal. My dad had been born in Tokyo and had come to America to go to school, where he’d met my mom. My mom had been born here and had grown up just a few hours from Bayville. So she liked to mostly eat and cook American food, but my dad missed the food that he’d grown up with. When he cooked, we usually ate food that he loved.
Sometimes when I thought about my parents, I got really happy. They just worked together. It made me kind of sad to think about Allie’s parents being divorced now. I didn’t know what I would do if my parents got divorced. I’d definitely want to live with Dad, that’s for sure—he’d never shake me out of bed—but if I lived only with Dad, who once wore one black shoe and one brown shoe to work when Mom was away, would I ever get out of bed? Would Kai and I live in the same house, like Allie and Tanner? Would the family ever have game day again?
I guess I was lost in thought, because Dad prodded my elbow.
“How was your shift at the ice cream shop, Tamiko?” he asked, picking up some noodles with his chopsticks.
“She wasn’t happy,” Mom answered for me.
“I was mostly happy,” I countered. “Things just got a little tense with Allie at the end.”
“Then maybe you should forget this idea,” Mom said. “You already have a very busy schedule, Tamiko.”
“Well, I think Tamiko’s having a job at this age is a good way to build character,” Dad said. “But maybe your mom is right. You shouldn’t do too much.”
“I’m not doing too much,” I assured them. “My only other extracurricular right now is cross-country, and that’s only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday mornings. And I’ve been getting good grades. I still have plenty of time to do homework.”
“That is true,” Dad said. “I check your grades every night. They are excellent.”
I smiled at him, and he winked. All of my grades were really good except for gym, which wasn’t bad, but Mom would definitely be mad. But let’s be real. Get sweaty enough to have to shower in the locker room? I did so much exercise during the week, it wasn’t like I was slacking. I just would rather not shower in that gross school water that kind of smelled like the sewer. Of course, I was sure that Allie’s supercool Vista Green locker room was state-of-the-art and birds sang or something when you stepped inside, and the water smelled like delicate lavender. I rolled my eyes at the thought.
Kai chimed in. “You might not have to worry about that ice cream shop being around for long, anyway,” he said. He scrolled through his phone. “The shop is practically invisible on social media. Who do you serve ice cream to? Old people?”
“Kai, no phone at the table, please,” Mom said. She shook her head. “How many times . . .”
“That’s not nice, Kai,” I said. “But then again, you’re kind of right. I have been bugging Mrs. S. to set up a website. Or a SuperSnap. Or anything. I’ve been posting for the shop, but I’m using my account.”
“She needs to do all those things, or she’ll sink,” Kai said. “Not to mention all of the print opportunities in a small town like this. She could be getting free press from the Bayville Gazette.”
“Allie got an article in her school newspaper,” I said.
&
nbsp; “That’s a start,” Kai said. “You know, I should give Mrs. S. a hand with this. I’m going to come up with some ideas for her.”
“Go for it,” I said. “Coming up with ideas is the easy part. Getting her to do them is the hard part.”
“So, why weren’t you happy at work today?” Mom asked. She never let anything go.
I sighed. “Listen,” I said, “Allie and I used to see each other every day at school. Now practically the only day I get to see her is Sunday. It’s just a little weird sometimes. But I like working. When it stops being fun, I’ll quit. I promise.”
My parents looked at each other. Dad nodded.
“Fine,” Mom said.
“And I will keep checking your grades,” Dad added.
“That’s settled,” Mom said. “Now, I want to remind you both that we’ve got the food festival next Saturday. Tamiko, we’re going to have to leave right after your cross-country meet.”
A roar went up from the crowd on the TV.
“Home run!” I cheered, jumping up. “But was it our team or the other? I wasn’t paying attention. That would be awkward if I were just cheering for the other team.”
“Tamiko, settle down, please!” Mom pleaded.
I sat down, and the game went to commercial. Boring. For as much as I liked learning about marketing, I couldn’t stand commercials. Just get me to the good stuff!
Since Mom had told me to settle down, I glanced around at the clock. It was 6:05 p.m., which meant that it was 8:05 a.m. in Tokyo. And if it was 8:05 a.m. in Tokyo—
“Grandpa’s awake!” I yelled, and I jumped up again and made a beeline for my tablet.
Grandpa Sato, my dad’s father, called us almost every morning when he woke up. I swiped the screen, and his face popped up. Right on time!
“Ojiichan!” I said, which meant “grandfather” in Japanese. I had been taking Japanese lessons since I was five years old—until I started cross-country this year, and the meets conflicted with the class times. I could speak Japanese pretty well, but I was lucky that Grandpa Sato liked to practice his English when he called us. It was just easier.
“Ohayo, Tamiko,” he said. (That meant “good morning.”) “Are you watching the game?”
“Yes,” I replied, glancing at the screen. “We’re up two–nothing.”
“Very good,” Grandpa replied. “The Swallows did very well last night. They won.”
Grandpa was a big fan of Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan, or Puro Yakyu ¯ as it was called over there.
“I read online that Brad Cortland is injured,” I told him. Some of the baseball players in Japan were from America.
“Yes, he sprained his knee sliding into second base,” Grandpa said, shaking his head. “He is one of their strongest hitters. But they won the game without him anyway.”
Mom appeared behind me. “We are just finishing dinner,” she said. “Would you like to talk to Toshi now?”
“Yes,” Grandpa said with a nod. “Talk to you tomorrow, Tamiko-chan!”
“Bye, Ojiichan!” I said with a wave, and then my dad got up from the table and started talking to Grandpa in Japanese.
I sat down at the table. “Only ten more months until we go back,” I said with a little bit of a sigh. Every summer we made a trip to Japan to see my grandfather, my aunt and uncle, and my cousins. I absolutely loved it there, especially when we went to Tokyo. Everything in that city was so colorful and bright and inspiring.
As I put another mouthful of noodles into my mouth, Mom glanced at me.
“You’re smiling,” she said. “It looks like you got your sprinkle of happy today after all.”
“Yes, and I’d better enjoy it while I can,” I said. “After all, tomorrow is Monday!”
CHAPTER FIVE
PERSPECTIVE
If Sundays were a sprinkle of happy, then Mondays were definitely a dollop of doom. Mondays meant back to school, back to homework, back to waking up even earlier—and they also meant going to art class with Mr. Rivera.
You might have thought that art would be my favorite subject in school since I loved DIY and all that jazz, but that was not the case. There were several reasons for that, but the main reason was Mr. Rivera.
An art teacher should be a creative warrior with the heart of a dragon and the soul of a unicorn, right? The kind of teacher who played ukulele and always had a paintbrush behind one ear? That’s what you’d think. But Mr. Rivera had the heart of a mouse and the soul of an even more boring mouse—and I didn’t like that at all.
Want to know how boring he was? Mr. Rivera always wore a shirt and a tie to school. A shirt and a tie! Even the male math teachers didn’t wear that. And secondly, he usually wore brown pants, a beige shirt, and a black tie. Blah! No color!
Third of all, he was not a fan of customizing—at all. He just wanted everyone to copy what he did, exactly the way he did it.
Where was the art? The expression? The love for the craft?
Just as an example, the day after the Sprinkle Sundays sisters’ first official shift at the ice cream shop, Mr. Rivera announced that the class was going to learn about perspective, which basically meant that you drew things on a flat piece of paper so that they looked 3-D. There was this genius artist I’d seen online who created these amazing chalk drawings in public spaces, so that it looked like there was a shark coming out of the sidewalk, or a deep pool in the middle of a courtyard, and I was really excited to make something that kind of looked like that.
I was so excited for this assignment, I raised my hand.
“Have you seen the work of the guy who does the amazing chalk drawings?” I asked, without waiting for Mr. Rivera to call on me.
“That does not sound familiar, Tamiko,” Mr. Rivera said.
“But it’s all over social media,” I informed him.
“Well, I am not all over social media,” he replied.
I took my phone out of my backpack. “Here, let me show you!”
“I’m afraid that if you take that phone out of your book bag again, I will have to confiscate it,” Mr. Rivera said. “It’s against school rules. Right now we’re going to begin our lesson.”
He walked to the front of the room, to one of those big easels. He turned over a piece of poster board to reveal a large photo of a kitchen. (Side note: according to Allie, every classroom in her school had a wireless projector connected to the teacher’s laptop, so all of the lessons were projected onto a screen in front of the class. No more chalkboards, whiteboards, or old-school paper easels. Another reason why it wasn’t fair that she got upset when we talked about MLK. Her school was way better!)
“Let’s begin by discussing one-point perspective,” he said. “The surfaces in the photo facing you, the viewer, show their true shape. They are drawn using mostly horizontal and vertical lines. Like this rectangular refrigerator.”
He traced a refrigerator with a marker. I’m not joking. A refrigerator. By this time I was yawning. He went on to talk about the vanishing point, which was the point right in front of your eyes when you looked at something, and the horizon line, which was at eye level, and then he started drawing a bunch more lines over the photo of the kitchen that, frankly, just left me bored and confused.
He turned over another page on the big easel.
“For our first lesson in perspective, we’re going to draw a cube,” he said.
“I can hardly stand the excitement,” I muttered under my breath. Mr. Rivera didn’t hear me, but Ewan Kim was sitting next to me, and he laughed.
So that was what we did in art class. We learned how to draw cubes. I drew several cubes, and then I started customizing them with lightning bolt designs, because I needed something interesting in my life.
“Tamiko, please don’t add any new lines to your drawing,” Mr. Rivera said as he examined my cubes over my shoulder. “This exercise is all about lines.”
“Exercise? I thought exercise was for gym class, not art class, and I hate gym class anyway,” I
wanted to say. But I didn’t, because Mr. Rivera would have heard me this time. On my progress report the year before, several teachers had made comments about me “talking out of turn,” and Mom and Dad had not been happy.
So, I sadly erased my lightning bolts, but I made sure not to erase them all the way, so that you could still see their little outlines, and when the bell rang, I had created nothing but boring, plain old cubes with sad, shadowy erased lightning bolts underneath.
My next class was English, which I had with my new friend MacKenzie. She was staring at the open book in her hand, making a squinty, frowny face.
“Hey, Kenz!” I greeted her.
She put down the book in frustration. “Oh, hi, Tamiko.”
She said it like she was upset about something.
“You okay?” I asked.
“This book is so hard,” she complained, nodding toward the novel on her desk, the one we were reading for class. She lowered her voice. “I’ve got an appointment for testing after school today.”
I nodded, because she had explained that things were tricky for her at school. MacKenzie had always had trouble reading, but somehow she’d never been tested for dyslexia when she was younger. I guessed that it must be pretty hard to get through the day if reading was a struggle.
“I can help you with the book at lunch,” I said. “Go over all the juicy parts.”
She smiled. “Thanks. That would be great. And I need to hear all about what happened at the ice cream shop yesterday.”
I realized that I hadn’t told MacKenzie how successful the unicorn sundaes had been!
“Definitely,” I promised. I decided to keep the news a surprise until lunch, because the bell rang.
“Good morning, class,” said Ms. Johnson, our English teacher.
Ms. Johnson was, IMHO, a better teacher than Mr. Rivera. For one thing, she dressed way cooler, accenting her clothing with print scarves and bangles and funky necklaces. She wore her dark hair in, like, a hundred skinny braids and usually kept them tied back, away from her face.
