His eyebrows fly up. “Gangrene?”
Oops. Shouldn’t have mentioned gangrene, not if the point is to be fine and not talk about my arm. I take a bite of my sandwich—a big bite—and use my chewing time to try and find something else to talk about.
Oh! Winnie told me a joke a few days ago, and I still remember it. I swallow and say, “Hey, Joseph, did you know that in Africa, a minute passes every sixty seconds?”
“Really?” Joseph says. “Cool.”
Then he frowns.
I wait, fighting back my smile.
A grin splits his face. “Ha-ha. I get it.”
“A minute passes every sixty seconds,” I say, pleased. “Because a minute is sixty seconds.”
“Yeah, I get it,” he repeats. He squeezes out a bite of Go-GURT. “But for real. What happened to your arm?”
“Well . . . um . . .”
“Did you fall?”
“Kind of,” I say, and then some part of me makes me decide to just tell the truth. And the second I decide that, I feel better. Lighter. Plus, it is my arm, after all. I can do what I want, just like Winnie said.
I put down my sandwich and lean in. “I’m going to tell you something, but I need you to promise—promise—not to tell anyone else.”
“Okay.”
“Yesterday, I was out catching a bird for Baby Maggie—”
“Did you catch one?”
“No, but I almost did. But anyway, I might have scratched my arm, and might might mean yes, and that might be the reason, you know, for . . .”
“For your bandage,” Joseph says. He doesn’t seem mad. He just seems interested. “Is it a bad scratch?”
“Well . . . not exactly,” I say.
“Did it bleed?”
I giggle. “Um . . . not exactly?”
He giggles with me. “Did it even break the skin?”
“Um . . . not exactly?”
“What about your bone? Is your bone at least bruised?”
“Well . . .” I say, stretching it out to be silly, and then we finish together:
“Not exactly!”
A bum bum bum noise reaches my ears. It’s the sound of feet marching our way. Too many feet. The feet in the front belong to Lexie, and my stomach clenches.
I talk to Joseph fast and low. “But don’t tell. You promised, remember? And especially don’t tell Lexie.”
Joseph glances at the marchers. They’re getting closer. “Then we need to talk about something else. We need to be talking when they get here.”
“Right. Yes. Um, nose hair?”
“Earwax?”
“No—shoehorns! My dad has a shoehorn, and when you blow it, it goes, ‘Shooooooe!’”
“What goes ‘shoooo’?” Lexie says.
“A shoehorn?” I say.
Joseph and I laugh. Lexie narrows her eyes. Elizabeth is with her, and Hannah and John and Chase and Silas and Taylor. They all squeeze into our table, which is only meant for four people.
Actually, it’s only meant for me and Joseph.
“Don’t believe him, people,” Lexie says. “A shoehorn does not go ‘shoo.’”
“What is a shoehorn?” Elizabeth whispers to Hannah.
Lexie puts her hand up to tell them to hush.
“We want to know how you got hurt,” she says, jabbing my bandaged arm.
“He bruised his bone,” Joseph says.
Lexie rolls her eyes. “Riiiight. And who are all these people who signed their names?”
“Well . . . they’re Chloe and Bob and Serena,” I say.
“Al?” Lexie says. She turns over my arm. “Lola?”
“Lexie, you’re being too rough,” Joseph says. “You need to be gentle.”
“Or what? I’ll bruise his bone more? Unwrap your arm and show us, because I know bruises, believe me.”
My body gets hot on the inside and prickly cold on the outside.
“You can’t see a bruised bone,” Joseph says. “Right, Ty?”
He’s trying hard. But Lexie will try harder. I know she will, and she’ll never give up, and now lunch is ruined. Joseph didn’t ruin it. Lexie did. Or maybe I did by wearing this stupid bandage in the first place.
I leave. I get up and walk away from the picnic table altogether.
“Ty, why are you leaving?” Joseph asks.
“Don’t go after him,” Lexie says.
“But—”
“Joseph, sit,” Lexie commands. “If Ty wants alone time, let him have alone time.”
Taylor says something about his boogers, and Elizabeth says, “Nasty.”
“But where are you going, Ty?” Joseph calls.
I don’t answer, and pretty soon his voice blends with all the others.
I go to my private spot under the play structure. I scoot on my bottom until I’m all the way in, and then I lean against a metal pole that’s part of the bouncy bridge.
I unwrap the bandage from my arm. I dig through the dry sand on top until I get to the damper sand underneath. I always get to damp sand eventually, and when I do, that’s when I know I’ve gone deep enough.
I scoop and scoop until I’ve got the right size hole. I roll up the bandage and shove it in. I pile the wet sand on top of it, and then I fill in the rest with dry sand. I push my hair out of my eyes and examine my work. Hmm. It looks pretty good, but I sprinkle some small rocks around for good measure.
I rest my head on my arms. I’ll stay here until Mrs. Webber calls us in, I decide. If Lexie wants me to have alone time so much, then I will.
“You have sand in your hair,” someone says.
My head flies up.
“Your hands and knees are sandy, too,” the someone says. It’s Breezie. She’s sitting farther back in a shady spot. There are shadows all over her.
“I know,” I say. “It’s a playground.” My heart is racing. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
We stare at each other. Neither one of us wants to bring up Lexie. Neither of us wants to bring up Joseph.
Breezie looks away first, but she pretends she didn’t lose the staring contest by gesturing at my front pocket.
“What’s that lump?”
I pull out the giant red lollipop. It feels like a month since I got it out of my candy bag. A year.
“Can I have it?” Breezie asks.
Well. I don’t know the rule about this. I brought the lollipop for Joseph, but Joseph isn’t here.
Breezie is.
And she’s a girl.
And her hair is pretty and long.
“I won’t tell,” she says. I know she’s talking about the Ace bandage, not the lollipop.
I make my arm as straight as a stick and hold out the lollipop.
“I was going to give it to you anyway,” I say.
Her eyes are sad, but she halfway smiles. “Thanks.”
CHAPTER SIX
When we’re back inside from lunch, Lexie takes one look at me and says, “Where’d your bandage go?”
“Mmm-MMM-mmm,” I say, shrugging.
I side-eyeball Breezie. She’s pretending to organize her desk, but her face says la-la-la, this time I’m choosing with Ty.
Lexie doesn’t let up about it, and Taylor and Chase say things too, like, “Yeah, Ty, do you have magical healing powers? Is that how your arm got better so fast?”
Breezie doesn’t join in, and neither does Joseph. I’m glad about that, but I feel guilty for abandoning him at lunch. Also, I’m embarrassed about “alone time.” So even though I know that Joseph is on my side, it doesn’t feel like we’re a team.
• • •
I don’t wear the bandage the next day, since duh, I buried it. But I wouldn’t have anyway. My bandage days are over. Lexi
e bugs me about it anyway, copying Chase by asking if I have healing powers and if I’m a wizard and if I can turn people into frogs, stuff like that. To the frog question, I say, “Yep, people like you,” and keep doodling in my notebook.
So ha.
Joseph and I sit together at lunch, but it’s not just us. There are other kids, too. I help Joseph with his fractions worksheet, because he wasn’t here when we started fractions. Everything’s fine, I guess. But I don’t know. We both might be pretending we’re back to being best friends more than we really are.
Breezie’s opinion is that Joseph is everybody’s new best friend. That’s what she says to me by the water fountain. “He thinks he’s so important,” she adds, picking an invisible piece of dust off her dress.
“I don’t think he thinks that,” I say.
“Well, I do. It’s annoying.”
I guess she’s missing Lexie. I guess she wants Lexie to leave Joseph and come back to her.
I guess I wish that, too.
I imagine the universe the way I drew it on Monday, with the planets all in the wrong places and space junk floating randomly. I’m beginning to wonder if the universe is ever going to line up straight again.
• • •
After school, Mom picks me up and tells me we have one errand to run.
“Blah,” I say, feeling sorry for myself. I just want to go home and watch cartoons, but I don’t get to, so I roll the car window up and down. I lock and unlock my door. I do both of these over and over.
“Ty? Stop,” Mom says.
I slump. Next to me, Baby Maggie wiggles in her car seat, kicking her chubby feet to make her socks come off. It’s cute, because she doesn’t even need socks. She’s a baby. But how come she’s allowed to be squirmy and I’m not?
Mom glances at me in the rearview mirror. She says, “What’s going on, bud?”
I press my lips together. How do my mom and my sisters always know when to ask that question?
“Well, it’s just . . . Joseph,” I say. “He thinks he’s so important, just because he’s finally back from the hospital.”
“Ty,” Mom says. I know she’s disappointed in me. I’m disappointed in me, too.
“It was Breezie who said that,” I say in a small voice. “I know it’s not true. I even told Breezie it’s not.”
“Hmm,” Mom says.
“For real. Mom, that really is the truth.”
Mom exhales. “Oh, baby. It’s hard, isn’t it?”
I blink. I was waiting for a scolding. Cautiously, I say, “What’s hard?”
“Life,” she says. She reaches back and squeezes my knee. “But you’ll get through it, and that is also the truth. For real.”
She pulls into the parking lot of Collindale Care Center, and my heart sinks. Collindale Care Center is a nursing home. Every month, Mom visits an old lady named Eloise who lives here. I guess today is Eloise Day. I guess that’s the errand.
Mom parks the car and turns to face me. “I know that visiting Eloise isn’t your favorite thing to do,” she says, and I pick invisible dust off me like Breezie did at the water fountain. “But doing something nice for someone might make you feel better, if you let it. You might be surprised.”
I don’t think so, because when we go inside, it smells the way it always does. The paint on the walls is the same yucky yellow, and the lightbulbs they use make my eyes hurt. Also, I know Eloise won’t let me make her bed go up and down, so I don’t even ask.
Joseph, when I used to visit him at the hospital, let me make his bed go up and down as much as I wanted.
Eloise makes “ooh-ooh” noises when she sees Teensy Baby Maggie. She reaches out a shaky hand, and Mom steps closer with Maggie in her arms. Eloise pats Maggie’s leg. She and Mom start talking about baby stuff, and I push down a groan.
I leave Eloise’s room and wander into the hall. I’m allowed, and Mom sees me go out the door and nods to say it’s okay, so it’s not like I’m secretly escaping or anything.
But—aha! Outside in the hall, in his motorized wheelchair, is Mr. Marconi, who is scary and strange and interesting. Mr. Marconi doesn’t like it at the Collindale Care Center, and he’s always trying to secretly escape. Really!
I press my back against the wall. I don’t want Mr. Marconi to see me, because he has the bushiest eyebrows in the world. Eyebrows that could kill a small animal, Winnie says.
I don’t know how his eyebrows would do that, but I believe her. If I were a small animal and I saw those eyebrows coming, I would run like the wind.
“Hey, kid,” Mr. Marconi says.
I pretend not to hear him.
“Hey!” he says. “Kid!”
I point at my chest. “Me?”
He gestures for me to come over. His chin sinks into his chest, making him look like a human version of quicksand. First his chin will sink all the way in, then his face, then his bushy eyebrows.
“Come on, come on,” he says. “Speed it up before one of those old biddies comes and makes me play bingo.”
I walk toward him, dragging my feet. He uses the joystick on his wheelchair to meet me halfway.
“What’s your name, kid?” he says. He asks me this every time he sees me.
“Ty,” I tell him.
“What kind of name is that?” he grouches. “Your mother named you after a tie? What’s she going to do, tie you around your father’s neck?”
He says this every time, too.
“It’s short for Tyler,” I say.
He waves his hand to say, yeah yeah, not interested. I can see the bones in his fingers, especially his knuckles.
“Listen,” he says. He thinks he’s whispering, but he’s not. “I need to get out of here. They put me in here by mistake, see?”
He checks for old biddies. Then he points at the emergency exit door at the far end of the hall. “Open that door for me, kid. The bar’s too heavy for me to press. But just open that door, and I’ll take it from there.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Marconi. I can’t.”
“Aw, you.” He makes a raspberry sound, like when Dad blows on Baby Maggie’s tummy. I bet he makes a thousand raspberry sounds a day, or at least a hundred, because he’s always asking people to open the exit for him, and no one ever does. Everyone knows he’s supposed to stay in the building. It’s one of the nursing home rules.
“So . . . bye, Mr. Marconi,” I say.
His bushy eyebrows push lower and his chin sinks deeper. “Bah,” he says, making his wheelchair turn in the other direction. He rolls away.
I wonder if I should go check on Mom and Eloise, because Mr. Marconi reminded me about bingo, and if there’s a bingo game going on, I want to know. Mr. Marconi might not like bingo, but for me, bingo is the one fun thing at the nursing home. I get to play for the people who can’t play on their own, and I get to use a big fat bingo marker to make blue dots on B-11 or G-58 or whatever. When the prize cart comes around, I get to help whoever I’m with decide between a piece of costume jewelry or a banana.
As I’m walking back to Eloise’s room, I see a lady come out of another room.
“Bye for now, Mom,” the lady says. She sniffles and dabs a Kleenex to the corner of her eye. “But I’ll be back tomorrow. By then, I bet the nurses will have you completely settled in.”
Whoever’s in the room must be new, that’s my guess. And her daughter—because that’s who the lady must be—is worried about her because it’s her first day here.
I cross the hall, thinking I’ll tell the lady about bingo and crafts and all the other stuff they do here. It’s actually not that bad. I just don’t want to live here myself.
But she hurries off before I reach her. And then—uh-oh.
Mr. Marconi. He spots her, and his wrinkled hand goes to his joystick. With a zoom and a fast stop, he plants himself in front o
f her.
“Hey, you,” I hear him say. He beckons her closer and speaks to her in his raspy voice.
The lady tucks away her Kleenex and says, “Of course, of course.” She walks in her high heels toward the emergency exit.
I chase after her. “Um . . . ma’am? Lady?” I don’t know what to call her!
Anyway, it’s too late. She pushes the “emergency only” bar, and there’s a buzz, and the metal door that says “emergencies only” swings open! And this is an emergency, but only because the lady turned it into one! She didn’t know, but still!
“Mr. Marconi, wait!” I cry. “You can’t go out there!”
He hunches his shoulders and jams his joystick forward. I break into a run.
“Stop him! He’s not allowed!” I call.
Mr. Marconi is five feet away from the door. The lady who opened it for him looks confused.
He’s four feet away. A nurse pops into the hall and calls to Mr. Marconi in a panicked voice.
He’s three feet away, and there is traffic outside, and a real live road with sidewalks and yellow lines and cars.
The lady draws her hand to her mouth.
He’s two feet away. One foot away. He’s going out the door.
The nurse’s hands flutter in the air. “Mr. Marconi! Mr. Marconi!”
She reaches the exit, but the doorway is too narrow to fit both a nurse and a man in a wheelchair.
The traffic-y road is right there, just outside the door.
I high-jump over Mr. Marconi’s wheelchair. It takes the highest jump ever to get over the armrest and his knees and his feet, and I stumble when I land.
“Out of the way!” Mr. Marconi yells. “Out of the way, out of the way!”
Owwee, I think. But I turn toward him and brace myself. I do not get out of the way.
Bam! goes his wheelchair, ramming into my shins.
He backs up and does it again. Bam! It HURTS, and I know I’m going to have bruises.
Inside the building, people speak loudly and do frantic things with their hands. I spot Mom, who says, “Ty?”
Mr. Marconi rams me again. Ow!
I grab the armrests of his wheelchair. “Mr. Marconi, no.”