So instead, I told him he was right—Mary Poppins couldn’t possibly be a movie like Pinocchio and Shrek, because they were cartoons and she wasn’t. And the only reason we wouldn’t be able to jump into the chalk picture ourselves is because nobody but Mary Poppins knew how to take us there. Which wasn’t exactly the greatest news Hucky’d ever heard, but at least we were back on the right track.
“You mean we can’t ride on my merry-go-round?” he signed, staring down at his feet glumly.
“Not today,” I blurted, hoping I wasn’t about to lie as bad as I thought I was. “But we can draw a couple of other pictures instead so that she’ll have lots of different places to take us when she gets here.” T.C., you’re like SUCH a low-life! What if he believes you??
He believed me. Before we left, there were eight more chalk drawings on the sidewalk.
On the way back home, I watched Hucky and Nehi play Got You Last up and down Cypress Street, and I remembered the day I taught it to him. It seems like such a long time ago. Was it really just a week? I also noticed how certain things have been adding up a little differently ever since the first time the short little blond kid with frowny eyes told me what pitches to hit.
I don’t worry about things like making up fake girlfriends for Pop so Lori can get jealous or writing obnoxious notes to Alé or people thinking I’m a poser if I get an A instead of a B+. There’s just no time for stuff like that anymore.
Nehi has a new best buddy. If Hucky gets up and walks three feet across the room, Nehi gets up and walks three feet across the room. If Hucky has to go pee, Nehi waits for him outside the bathroom. If Hucky dozes off during Mary Poppins, Nehi falls asleep with him. If Hucky gets too close to a street corner and I’m not holding his hand, Nehi grabs on to him and pulls him back.
I’m not afraid to try things I would have stayed away from before. I can’t believe I’m actually letting myself fall in love with Alé before I even find out if she could ever feel the same way back. It’s like asking for trouble—but the good kind.
I dream about you all the time. Before, the only thing I used to keep in my head was the purple balloon—but now I can remember most of our Christmases and summers, our favorite Red Sox games at Fenway Park, the trip to Nantucket on the boat, sitting in your lap on my first plane trip, and you sleeping on a futon by my bed when I had the flu. Why didn’t I remember any of these things before??
We finally made our way back to the Children’s Residence (with only one detour to peek through the fence around the Fenway Park outfield—how could we not?) and I wasn’t looking forward to it, because dropping off Hucky is always the hardest part of the day. He stalls so much that I learned pretty quickly how to get him home half an hour early so he’ll think he’s putting one over on me.
“Come look at the new rock in our backyard!” “Want to see where Mateo threw up in our room?” But you can tell when he realizes the clock’s run out, because we’re standing in the hallway by the front door and he’s tugging nervously on his favorite piece of hair.
“Are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
How could he think I wouldn’t come back?!
I love you,
T.C.
INSTANT MESSENGER
AlePerez: I can’t believe you told the whole world I was your girlfriend. I didn’t even consider liking you until Hallowe’en!
TCKeller: I was quoted out of context and it was 2 months ago. Who knew you could resist me?
AlePerez: Are you interested in making amends? Or at least restitution? Because I have a problem that’s right up your alley, and I don’t know what else to do.
TCKeller: Shoot.
AlePerez: I got this back from the Manzanar people: “Dear Ms. Perez: Thank you so much for your kind words about our site restoration project. We too are most excited about the way it is shaping up. Please feel free to visit us when we open our gates in 2004. Very truly yours, Fred Hoyt, Assistant Site Superintendent.” Hello? Does anybody pay attention? I could have asked him for a toilet seat and he’d have sent me the same letter.
TCKeller: It’s your own fault. You’re not going to get anywhere yelling $10 words down a tunnel to these people. Sometimes you’ve got to do something.
What about restoring the Manzanar baseball diamond? And maybe having some of the people rebuilding it be the grandchildren of guys who played ball there? Then there could be special games a couple of times a year with white kids and black kids and Asian kids and Latino kids and any other colors they invent along the way. Kind of like a living “I’m sorry.”
AlePerez: How long have you been planning this?
TCKeller: Ever since you mailed your letter to the Assistant Gink in the first place. I figured you’d need some Buck Weaver kind of help, so I got a little bit of a head start. Even before SportsAmerica made me a household word.
By the way, we’re all going skiing in Vermont between Christmas and New Year’s. The Deaf Institute might even let Hucky go with us. Want to come?
AlePerez: Get me my baseball diamond and I’ll think about it.
Dear Mama,
Remember at the end of the first Star Wars when Darth Vader nails Luke’s X-Wing Fighter in his sights and says “I have you now”? Alé doesn’t know it yet, but she’s just been locked into my scope and there’s no way out. This is what I told her we’re going to have to do.
Write a one-page argument on why they have to let us build our diamond
Start a website with our contact info
Post the one-page argument on our website
Turn the one-page argument into a letter
Find out the names and addresses of all 100 senators
Send the letter to all 100 senators and CC each one of them to Fred Hoyt, the Gink of Manzanar
Turn the one-page argument into a press release
Get the names and e-mail addresses of 500 political reporters and sports columnists from Mom’s P.C. at the Globe
Send the press release to all 500 political reporters and sports columnists and CC each one to Fred Hoyt
Kiss Anthony
(Since Buck Weaver taught me how to make Major League Baseball nervous in just a couple of months, I figure the U.S. government ought to be a no-brainer.)
Except for crossing out #10, Alé agreed with everything else, so I started a website called www.manzanarbaseball.com and showed her how to use it. Now she calls me at least four times a day with questions. Seeing as she’s a rookie and I’m indispensable, how could she not know that wearing my sweatshirts comes next??
Q:
Why are we copying the senator letters to Fred Hoyt? Won’t it make him angry?
A:
No, it’ll give him the runs. That’s what we want. They always move faster with stomach cramps.
Q:
Didn’t all ten internment camps have baseball teams?
A:
Yeah, but Manzanar started it, so that’s where the diamond should be. Unless we want to make them build nine more, which come to think of it isn’t a bad idea for down the road.
Q:
I just got off the phone with Wei at the Globe. She can get us a thousand reporters’ names instead of five hundred. Is that too many?
A:
No. A thousand names is a good thing. Especially if we put Fred Hoyt’s telephone number on all of the press releases.
But you know what? She doesn’t really have to wear my sweatshirts if she doesn’t want to, and the only reason I put in “Kiss Anthony” is because I love watching the way she shakes her head whenever she deletes me. Now I think I know what Pop meant when he said I had to figure it out for myself: I trust her. I’ve even started telling her things that I never breathed to anybody else except Augie. So who really cares if she winds up falling for me or not?? The friend thing can last forever. Pop says this is called “rationalizing.” And it got you to marry him when he figured out how to twea
k it the right way.
ME:
Pop, you need to teach me how to tweak it the right way. Like now.
POP:
Where are you calling from?
ME:
The boys’ lav. I finished my geography quiz early. Alé was wearing the flower dress again and wouldn’t look at me once. I think I wrote down that Greece was in Spain. Pop, I can’t take much more of this.
POP:
You’re too young to try the “just friends” routine. Because if it backfires—
ME:
It won’t. Just tell me what the ground rules are.
POP:
All right. But listen to me carefully, because there’s no margin for error here. Remember when Luke Skywalker only had one shot at the Death Star?
ME:
Duh. “It’s just like shooting womp-rats in Beggar’s Canyon back home.”
POP:
But first you have to wait for the right moment.
ME:
Sweet. I was thinking that maybe at lunch I could—
POP:
Hey! I said wait for the right moment. That could be tomorrow or in two months. You’ll know when it happens. Then you say, “Alé, would it be okay with you if we could rewind to the first day and just be friends? Without all of my secret plans to make you fall for me? Because I think I’m getting in a little too deep here, and it’s more important to know that we can always count on each other no matter what.”
ME:
Oh, that’s good.
POP:
Yeah, well you’d better be ready to live up to it, because girls like to take their time when it’s their move. And if she ever smells that the “just friends” fix is bogus—
ME:
She won’t.
Today Hucky came over to our house with somebody named Alice Trumbo from Social Services. Mrs. Jordan already said he could spend a weekend with us and go on our Xmas ski trip to Vermont, but first we had to be vetted by Ms. Trumbo. It sounded to me like something they do to pets so they don’t get pregnant, but Pop says it just means that Massachusetts needs to check us out to make sure we don’t belong to the Mafia or sell stolen cars and children. The only problem with Ms. Trumbo is that she looks pretty much like Miss Gulch before she morphed into the Wicked Witch of the West, and the minute she came through the front door into our living room, Pop and I had to turn away from each other. This was a life-saving routine that we invented when I was eight and we went to Cousin Bobo’s wedding in Peabody. The lady minister was a dead-ringer for George Washington on the dollar bill—and even though Pop and I both noticed it at the same time, we behaved ourselves. Then we made the mistake of looking at each other while we were both biting our bottom lips so we wouldn’t laugh, and it was all over. After whispering back and forth things like “The Mother of Our Country” and “I do, Mrs. President,” we had to go out and listen to the wedding from the lobby. Otherwise we would have ruined the whole ceremony.
We’re so not a good influence on each other.
I love you,
T.C.
P.S. Hucky taught me how to say “I have you now” in sign language the same way Darth Vader would say it if he was deaf. At least we think so.
INSTANT MESSENGER
AugieHwong: Is she going to let him go on the ski trip with us?
TCKeller: Yeah, as long as Toto doesn’t bite her leg again. I invited Alé, but she found a creative way to say no. The “just friends” thing is my last resort. Does Pop really mean it when he says I’ll recognize the right moment when it happens? Or is he just saying that so I won’t notice that he’s just as clueless as I am? Again.
AugieHwong: Andy can’t come either. They’re going to Cleveland to visit his grandparents. Why do they always keep grandparents in places like Cleveland?? I won’t even be able to see him until January.
TCKeller: This is going to be some vacation. You’ll be obsessing about Andy for 5 days and I’ll be on the phone with Alé.
AugieHwong: What are you complaining about? First Alé wouldn’t even admit you existed, and now she’s got this thing about building a baseball diamond with you in a California desert. I need to borrow your routine, preferably without a cactus in it.
TCKeller: That’s easy. But you need to find a political issue that means a lot to him.
AugieHwong: I tried that, and all I can come up with is changing the color of the Patriots uniforms. Somehow it doesn’t have the same bite. Even in sign language. And he gets antsy whenever I say things like that anyway.
Mrs. Packer staged three of my numbers already. “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” “We Open in Venice,” and “Bianca.” Since Andy’s in two of them, he thinks we should rehearse privately whenever we can. Does this sound like he’s waiting for me to make the second move?
TCKeller: No, dude—it sounds like he just made it.
STUDENT/ADVISER CONFERENCE
Lori Mahoney/Anthony C. Keller
LORI:
Show me again.
T.C.:
Both hands parallel to the floor, pinkies down and palms facing you, one hand in front of the other. Then tap the hand closest to the body against the other hand. That means “near.”
LORI:
I thought that was “live.”
T.C.:
No. No. Remember we said—Wait. What’s “re-member”? That one gave you a hard time too.
LORI:
Thumb on the forehead, then both thumbs together.
T.C.:
Good. Remember we said that “live” was like zipping up a pair of zippers on each side of your chest at the same time?
LORI:
So if I want to say “I live near the river,” I’d do it like this?
T.C.:
Um, actually you just said “I live in a parking lot.” You didn’t mean to do that.
LORI:
You’ve never seen traffic on Concord Street at eight o’clock in the morning.
Dear Mama,
I wish somebody could have told me how many invisible land mines there are when you make friends with a little kid. Because if I knew that up front, maybe I wouldn’t be doing such a ginky job.
Hucky spent the weekend at our house. Since it was his first sleepover ever, Pop and I decided we were going to make it a special one, but when we saw him waiting for us on the Institute porch—carrying his stuffed dog Shut-the-Door and a suitcase so small you wouldn’t figure anything could fit inside—it sort of hit me like a punch in the stomach that he looked really little and really scared. That’s me when I was six. I remember how afraid I was to spend a weekend with Aunt Babe once it was just me and Pop. What was that all about? The good news is that Hucky is a whole lot braver than I was, and if he really had cold feet, he didn’t show them for long. As a matter of fact, he got a handle on the whole sleepover routine in about a minute and a half.
Before we’d gone even a block, he discovered the Mazda’s navigational system, and he never took his eyes off of it. Pop offered to show him Mars, but Hucky didn’t believe him until it popped onto the screen. It’s a good thing he’s never been to Nashua, New Hampshire, or else we’d have been busted.
When Pop unlocked the front door of the house, Nehi was already waiting for us. He ignored me and Pop completely (like we aren’t the ones who’ve been feeding him for six years) so he could grab Hucky by the left sleeve and drag him up the stairs to my room. Hucky knew right away which bed was his because (a) Nehi was bouncing up and down on it and (b) there was a Mary Poppins poster on the wall above it, covering up most of Augie’s Bette Davis pictures.
We all went to the grocery store so Hucky could pick out our menu. French fries, melon, pasta, potato chips, and chocolate milk. (I smuggled in some chicken strips while Hucky was debating about Tater Tots.) Pop was in charge of dinner, but he let Hucky help. Together they invented Cantaloupe Linguini. It wasn’t as gross as the hot-dogs-and-maple-syrup that Augie and I lived on for a whole summer, but it was definitely i
n the same ballpark.
Pop built a fire after we cleaned up the kitchen and Hucky had his first s’more. Almost. He was a little suspicious when he got a good look at it all glopped together like that, so he insisted on eating each of the ingredients separately—which kind of defeated the whole purpose.
“Let me just melt it for you,” I insisted.
“No!” he signed back. “I don’t like it!”
“Do you like graham crackers and marshmallows and Hershey’s bars?” I demanded.
“Yes.”
“Then that’s impossible!”
Pop showed Hucky how much sign language I’d taught him, but he somehow wound up saying “I am a horse.” Hucky thought that was about the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. So Hucky showed Pop how well he can finger-spell. He did okay with the preliminaries, but then “hamburger” came out “hangabur”—which Pop thought was about the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. He even got a mad face as a reward.
Pop tucked Hucky into bed and then we both read him part of The Enormous Egg. (Pop’s actually a lot better at sign language than he thinks. Somebody must be coaching him. Gee, I wonder who? Am I really not supposed to know that he’s dating Lori??) But before the baby Triceratops could even hatch, Hucky was already yawning. He grabbed on to Shut-the-Door and turned over onto his side so he could see Mary Poppins on his wall. Then Nehi snuggled up against him, and he was out like a light.
Pop turned off the lamp, kissed me good night, and I wasn’t too far behind.