SURVIVAL
Sometimes people will surprise you.
People get crushed in buildings after an earthquake or stuck in the snow after a plane crash or survive without water longer than anyone thought was humanly possible. One guy even cut his own arm off so the rest of him could live. There are millions of people like that every day. It could be small things like finding food or not getting beaten up or convincing your mom that marshmallows for dinner every once in a while is OK (that is a HUGE accomplishment, by the way).
Some people call it the human spirit. Others call it the will to survive. I call it magic. Unfortunately for me, I don’t think I have that kind of magic when it comes to swimming.
I’m worrying so much about swimming I can’t get to sleep. I even forget about my magic rocks. I try counting stars but it’s really stressful because you can see so many stars in the night sky here that it’s easy to miss one, or think you missed one, so I have to keep going back and starting over because I don’t want to ignore a single star. If I do, the people in that star will feel forgotten and lonely. I can’t let that happen. It’s too sad.
I do finally get to sleep because I keep waking up from my drowning nightmare. It’s REALLY exhausting drowning over and over and over.
Thanks a lot, Mr. X.
I can tell it’s hot because I can feel the sun on my head and the dock is warm on the soles of my feet but in between my head and feet I’m shivering.
Mr. X sighs. “Why don’t you take off the life jacket now?”
“It’s too cold.”
“It’s one of the warmest days we’ve had. If it got any hotter I’d be dead from heatstroke.”
I roll and unroll the straps of my life jacket. “I’m good, thanks.”
Actually, I’m not good. I feel dizzy. It’s not the swimming so much that scares me—I can swing my arms and kick my legs. My arms are strong from stationary rowing and my legs are strong from stationary biking. It’s the getting in the water part that scares me. Like right now, I feel as if that hard plastic mask is covering my face and I can’t breathe and the whole world is going fuzzy and it sounds gurgle-y and my life is about to be over. THAT’S what’s going to happen if I get in this super massive black hole of water. I’ll get sucked in and never come back. I’m just not ready for that. I’d like to at least have a dog before I go up to the Dog Star forever.
I look away and see Mom standing outside the kitchen door on her phone, or pretending to be on her phone. I think she’s really watching me. I wish she wouldn’t. It just makes me more nervous.
Also, I’m missing some pre-learning. I know because I hear Mr. X say, “Are you even listening?”
When I look up to answer him I get dizzy, stumble backward, and almost fall into the water.
“Asciugamano!” I yell and run off the dock to dry land.
“What do you need a towel for?” Mr. X says. “You’re not even wet.”
That snaps me out of my dizziness and I stop. “Wait. How do you know Italian?”
“My family’s Italian. What’s your excuse?”
“I like Italian because I want to go to Italy. And it’s the language of love.”
“Any language is the language of love if you use the right words.”
We both stare at each other because that’s not a very Mr. X–like thing to say.
He makes his grumbly sound. “Why don’t you learn Spanish? It’s more useful.”
“OK.” I start walking to the house.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
“To learn Spanish.”
“I didn’t mean right now! We barely started our lesson.”
“That’s enough for today. I don’t need to be an overachiever.”
“You haven’t achieved anything yet!”
I squint my eyes at him because that was a mean thing to say. “I think I liked you better when you stayed on your patio.”
“Look,” he says, pointing at the dock, “I’m only here because of you.”
Maybe Pookie’s right. Maybe I should work harder at keeping my thoughts inside my own mutant brain and everyone’s life would be easier.
I go to the house because I’m worried that if I go to my tree room Mr. X will follow me and try to get me to go swimming again. Mom runs into the kitchen ahead of me like she really wasn’t watching me all along even though she was.
Inside, everyone is arguing, as usual. It’s definitely not the language of love. Pookie is extra angry now because Mom and Joan decided that even though the plumber fixed the toilet (and Mom got annoyed and Joan took her walk), Pookie should sleep on a cot in the pantry so they can rent out the Jack and Jills. Maybe it’s a test to see if only having the Jack and Jills will bring in enough money without using the addition. I don’t know. I just know that Pookie is madder than usual.
“And anyway,” Pookie is shouting from the pantry, “I’m not going back to that camp ever again!”
“Maybe that little girl will be OK,” Joan says. “Maybe she’ll be back next week.”
“No, she won’t! That’s the whole point! It’s a camp for sick kids who aren’t going to get better, so she’s not coming back! She’s—”
“Pookie!” Mom yells, looking at me.
Pookie slams a cabinet door.
“Hey!” Joan says. “Stop slamming the—”
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” Pookie says, “but I don’t have a bedroom door, remember?” And she slams the cabinet door again. Twice.
Joan heads for the pantry and Mom grabs her arm and they start whisper-arguing, which sounds like hissing. You can’t hear the words but they feel like, “I’m so exasperated with you!” and, “Well, I’m exasperated with you, too!”
It gets my stomach acid rising like a tsunami every time one of them says, “Why can’t you just—” and then you can’t hear the words after that, and the other one says, “BECAUSE—” and then her voice drops to a whisper.
I decide I have to go visit Mr. X even if he tries to get me to go swimming again. He’s sitting on his bench, so I sit down on the glider.
“You back for a lesson?”
I shake my head. “I have hormone overload.”
“Aren’t you a little young to be having hormone issues?”
“Not mine.” I look at our house. “Theirs. It’s estrogen poisoning.”
Mr. X pinches his nose and looks around like he doesn’t know what to say.
“Have you ever tried living with three women?” I ask him.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Right then, Mom’s voice rises even louder than the others. Her anxiety can make her do that sometimes.
“Your mom’s a little … tightly wound, isn’t she.”
“You should’ve seen her when she was a doctor. Especially when her patients died.”
“How many of her patients died?”
“Just some. She’s really a good doctor.”
“Right. Remind me never to make an appointment with your mother.”
I feel a bubbly laugh come out of my stomach and through my mouth.
“What’s so funny?”
“She’s an ob-gyn! Do you know what kind of doctor that is?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He waves his hand at me and turns away like I farted. “Titties and hoo-hah.”
“What? Actually, the correct terminology is—”
“I don’t want to hear it. A kid shouldn’t mention female body parts.”
“Then what am I supposed to say? Titties and hoo-hah?”
“Sounds funny when a kid says it.”
“It sounds even funnier when a grown-up person says it.”
He grunts. “Sometimes I don’t act very grown-up.”
“That’s OK. Me either.”
He almost smiles. “What are you going to be when you grow up?”
I shrug. “I never think about that.”
“Every kid thinks about what they want to be when they grow up. How about a
stronaut?”
I shake my head. “Astrophysicist. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson.” I don’t tell him I’ll probably never get that old.
Mom’s voice is still scream-y but now it’s calling my name.
“I’m right here!”
“Well, come in this minute! It’s time to eat! And then we’re having a family meeting.”
I sigh. “Asciugamano.”
“Good luck, kid,” Mr. X says.
Turns out the family meeting is about renting out the Jack and Jill rooms, which I’d already guessed and really doesn’t involve me since I have a tree room so I ignore it and think about the universe. Pookie is having a hard time ignoring it and she’s making the meeting longer with her yelling.
When Mom and Joan argue with each other for a moment I whisper to Pookie, as nicely as I can so she won’t get mad, “Just go to a parallel universe until it’s over.”
She narrows her eyes at me and opens her mouth to yell.
“It really works,” I say, nodding my head fast. “Mom and Joan won’t be there.”
She closes her mouth and even almost smiles. At least she looks happier for the rest of the meeting. And she’s quiet.
After dinner, Mr. X isn’t around so I go look through my telescope. Still no comet.
When I get to my tree room there’s another rock! I wonder again if it’s possible, somehow, that Mr. X is putting them here for me. And if it is, does he want it to be like a Secret Santa thing where I’m not supposed to know it’s him? I take it up to my room and remember to put all three rocks on my chest before I close my eyes. At least I won’t have the drowning nightmare now.
I think about what Mr. X said, and he’s right. Any language can be the language of love. For instance, when he said, Good luck, kid to me tonight that was as good as a grandfather saying, I love you. Really. That’s what Westley means in The Princess Bride when he says, As you wish. Sometimes it’s hard for people to say, I love you so they have to use other words.
Mr. X is also right that it’d be smart to learn Spanish because I can use it more. Plus, I already know some Spanish:
Hola! (Hello!)
Adiós! (Goodbye!)
Si desea continuar en español, elija número dos.
That’s the pharmacy recording, which basically means, If you want to continue in Spanish, press two. I hear it on speakerphone when Mom orders my antibiotics, which is like every other week because all I have to do is cough or sneeze and she panics.
Sometimes I hear that lady’s voice in my sleep … Si desea continuar en español, elija número dos.
ASTRONAUTS
I could never be an astronaut. For one thing, they have to learn to scuba dive. Under. Water. I know! I probably wouldn’t pass the physical, either, because I have heart palpitations just thinking about training underwater.
Plus, there’s the motion sickness. They make you ride on a plane called the Vomit Comet. No, really. If it makes regular people puke, just think what it would do to me! Maybe they have super strong motion sickness medicine but still, the other stuff you can’t fix.
Besides, I’ll be in outer space soon enough. I don’t need to be an astronaut.
Mr. X will not give up on swimming. He says we have to have lessons every single day. Which includes getting wet.
I make a sneer-y Pookie face at him as I hold on to one of the posts on the dock and lower my left foot close to the water.
“Come on, kid,” he mutters.
I actually dip my entire big toe in the water, but it’s so cold I run screaming off the dock to dry land. I hear Mr. X swearing behind me.
Pookie is in a lawn chair in the front of the house. Even though she’s wearing sunglasses I know she’s rolling her eyes at me. “Jeez, squirt, you’re such a wimp!”
“You don’t have to watch me,” I tell her.
“Yes, I do. Mom is making me.”
“But I don’t need you, I have—”
“I know. But it’s MOM, right? I don’t like it any more than you do.”
“So-rry,” I say, all sarcastic, “that I’m wasting your precious time.”
“It’s not that, dork—well, it’s that—but also it’s not letting you step out of the house without one of us having to watch you. How does she ever expect you to be normal if we treat you like a freak? And what’s the big deal with swimming, anyway?”
“I don’t want to swim because I’ll die.”
“That’s stupid.”
“People die all the time. Like that girl at therapy camp,” I say, because now I know why Pookie’s not going back. She’s mad that one of the kids died.
“Shut up about her!” Pookie yells, but I can feel the hurt screaming in her voice.
“She’s still here, Pookie. She’s up in the stars and you can talk to her. The universe is incredible.”
“The word incredible means not credible which means not believable.”
“But that’s just it, it’s incredible but it happens anyway! It’s magic! Actually, it’s science. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson says, the good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
“To be honest, I don’t care so just shut up.”
“To be completely honest,” I say back to her, “I wish you were still at therapy camp.”
Pookie’s lips start wobbling and now I really, really wish I hadn’t said that about therapy camp because that was mean. “You’re either honest or not, dork. There’s no such thing as completely honest.”
Actually, there is but I don’t want to argue with her. For instance, to be honest, I’m looking forward to being part of the Dog Star because it’s the brightest star in our universe (and it has dog in it). To be completely honest, I’m not looking forward to the dying part that has to happen first.
I try to make my voice nicer and say, “You must feel really bad. And I’m sorry.”
Even with wobbly lips she manages to yell, “Just get in the water, wimp!”
WIMPs
I’m not upset that Pookie calls me a wimp. And not because I feel bad for her. It’s because WIMPs are magical.
No, really. I looked it up.
WIMPs are “weakly interacting massive particles,” which are particles smaller than atoms and aren’t made up of ordinary stuff like protons and neutrons and electrons. They’re called “weakly interacting” because they can actually pass through ordinary stuff without any effect, like a ghost. They’re “massive” because they have mass, which means they can be light or heavy although not really heavy because they’re so tiny. And they’re “particles” because, well, they’re particles. I guess physicists can’t think of a better word to describe really teeny bits.
WIMPs are like superheroes invisibly passing through other objects.
Also, WIMPs are miraculous because physicists call it a WIMP miracle that they exist at all and behave the way they do. I don’t understand the science behind it but I think it’s pretty cool that WIMPs are miracles. Like magic!
Here’s another cool thing about WIMPs: They’re winning the battle against dark energy.
See? WIMPs are magic.
Mr. X calls me back to the dock, but I can only make myself go as far as the edge.
“OK.” He sighs. “How about you sit in the water?”
“What!”
“At the edge,” he says, walking off the dock and stepping over the rocks to the water lapping at the shore. “Right here.”
How we do it is that I sit on the very edge of the lake so just the bottom-est part of my butt gets wet.
Pookie shakes her head at me. “I’m going in after you so don’t even THINK of peeing in there!”
I ignore her even though I’m sitting facing her so I don’t have to see the lake that’s the size of a SUPER MASSIVE BLACK HOLE. But I still know it’s there and I can feel its waves trying to drag me in so I quickly stand up to get out but I trip on the slippery rocks and somehow I get water up my nose and I almost drown! I land on the shore, exhausted. br />
“Wimp!” Pookie yells again.
Mr. X lets me stop swimming after that horrifying experience but only for today because he says otherwise I’ll be too scared to ever get back in. I’m already too scared! I’ve always been too scared! I’m not stupid! I didn’t have to almost drown to learn that! Asciugamano!
Pookie marches past me to the shore and even though I want to go to my tree room and recuperate I notice the tears on her face and I make myself walk to the edge.
“I’m really, really sorry about that little girl, Pookie. What was her name?”
She grits her teeth. “Cassie.”
“Cassie?” I smile. “I can show you the constellation she’s in.”
Pookie turns to stare at me. “Shut up!”
“No, really. She’s probably in Cassiopeia.”
“Stop it!” she yells. “Mom! Make him stop!”
But I keep talking. “We’re all made of star-stuff, Pookie, and we all go somewhere.”
“Mom, come here NOW!” Pookie screams.
“Cassie’s got to be up there in—”
“She’s dead, Julian! Just dead!”
“No one’s just dead! It doesn’t happen like that!”
“That’s exactly how it happens! It’s over.”
“No! We stay around! We stay around because people need us! And maybe we need them a little bit, too!”
She looks at me like she’s just thought of something big. “OK,” she says softly, still staring at me. “OK.”
Mom is walking toward us now, giving an exasperated sigh. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” we mutter, even though we both know it’s not nothing at all.
* * *
I can’t eat much dinner because my stomach is still too scared about almost drowning. Pookie refuses to eat anything. Mom looks at Joan and grumbles, “I don’t know why I even bother.”
I feel a lot better after dinner because I find another rock at the bottom of my tree. Mr. X is just going in for the night and I yell over, “Thanks for the rocks, Mr. X!” and I hold up the new one and grin. He squints and says, “Yeah. Nice. I don’t get it.”
I feel as confused as he looks. But I still love the rocks. Especially this one. It reminds me of the Dog Star because it has a super bright crystal in the middle of the gray.