Ten Rules for Living With My Sister

  I was trying hard to keep up with whatever was going on in Daddy Bo’s mind. “The key?” I asked.

  “Of course the key.”

  “But, Daddy Bo, if the house has been sold maybe the new owner doesn’t keep the key here anymore. And maybe the key wouldn’t fit the door now anyway.”

  “Why wouldn’t the key fit the door?”

  “Well, after Justine moved away, the super changed the locks on their door. So maybe—”

  Daddy Bo wasn’t listening to me. He was walking around to the garage. Both doors were down. He tried to pull them up, first one, then the other. They wouldn’t budge.

  He continued around to the front yard and walked right up to the door, and I realized that in the light from the streetlamp anybody could see us standing on the porch.

  “Daddy Bo,” I said in a loud whisper, “I really don’t think we should be doing this. We have to go home.” I was trying not to cry. “How are we going to do that, anyway? How are we going to get back home? Where do we buy bus tickets at night?”

  “I am home, Pearl,” said Daddy Bo.

  “No. You’re not. This isn’t your house anymore. You live with Mom and Dad and Lexie and me now.” I was going to add that sometime soon he would have yet another home, but it didn’t seem like the right time to remind him about that, and anyway my teeth were chattering and it was hard to talk.

  Daddy Bo and I sat on the top step of the porch. I was trying not to pay too much attention to the darkness, since I didn’t know what might be in it, like murderers or snakes, but mostly I felt bad for Daddy Bo. I put my arm across his shoulders. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then slowly he turned to me, and I could see that his face was crumpling like Justine’s used to do when she was about to burst into tears.

  “I can’t even look inside,” he said. “I don’t have my keys or—” He paused. “I wonder where my car is.”

  I was pretty sure it had been sold.

  Daddy Bo began to gaze around the yard and the driveway. “How did this happen?” he asked at last.

  I sighed. It was such a long story.

  I sat with my arm around Daddy Bo for a while longer, my nose growing colder and colder, and then I noticed the lights in the house next door, and all of a sudden I remembered that Daddy Bo’s friend, Will Henderson, lived there. I got an idea.

  “Hey, Daddy Bo,” I said. “As long as we’re here, why don’t we visit Mr. Henderson?”

  “Will?” he replied, and he brightened.

  I got to my feet and held out my hand. “Yeah. Come on. You haven’t seen him in a long time. I bet he’d like a visit.”

  So Daddy Bo stood up stiffly and took my hand. He let me lead him across the lawn to Will Henderson’s porch. I rang the bell. A few moments later I heard footsteps, and then the curtain by the door parted and a face peered out at us. First the face was frowning, then the mouth opened into a surprised O, and then Will Henderson started to smile.

  He unlocked the door and threw it open.

  “Well, if you two aren’t a sight for sore eyes!” he exclaimed, but he was looking at me with a question mark. Still, he said, “Come in, come in!”

  Daddy Bo and I walked through the door and sat on a couch in the living room. “Um, Mr. Henderson,” I said. “I’m really thirsty. Could I have a glass of water? I mean, if it isn’t too rude to ask.”

  “Not at all, Pearl. Come with me.”

  We left Daddy Bo sitting slumped on the couch. Mr. Henderson closed the kitchen door behind us and right away I started talking. “Daddy Bo and I were home alone,” I began, trying to think how to explain my problem in a clear way that Mr. Potter would approve of. “And he said ‘Let’s go to New Jersey,’ and it’s really hard to say no to a grown-up, so we got in a cab, and everything sort of seemed okay, except I remembered that we hadn’t left a note for Mom, and then we took the bus here and it was dark, and Daddy Bo didn’t know his house had been sold—”

  Mr. Henderson put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Pearl. I think I understand what happened. Let’s call your parents.”

  “That’s another thing. If I had a cell phone, I could have called them already. But I’m not allowed to have one.”

  Mr. Henderson wasn’t listening. He was already punching in numbers on his phone. “Paul?” I heard him say. “It’s Will Henderson. Pearl and your father are here.” This was followed by a long silence. I wondered if my father was crying with relief, and whether, when he cried, his face crumpled like Justine’s.

  Mr. Henderson spoke to Dad for a few minutes, then to Mom, and then he handed the phone to me.

  My mother was on the other end and she was crying. I said, “Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine,” over and over again. Then I told her, “We took the bus … . Well, he had enough money for one-way tick— … No, really, I’m fine. Well, actually, I’m hungry. Can we get a pizza for dinner?”

  An hour and a half later our green Subaru pulled up at Mr. Henderson’s. If I may say so, it was traveling kind of fast for just being on a driveway. It stopped a few inches from the back of Mr. Henderson’s Toyota and I heard the brakes screech, which my father has always said is a sign of unnecessary speed. In a flash, both of the front doors and one of the back doors of the Subaru opened, and Mom and Dad and Lexie scrambled out and all ran along Mr. Henderson’s walk. I opened the door before they could ring the bell, and for a moment no one said anything. Then Mom hugged me and cried, and Dad stepped inside and hugged Daddy Bo and cried, and Lexie looked at me and I think maybe she wanted to cry, but she didn’t, and I didn’t either, because I was still thinking about pizza.

  By the time we got home that night it was after nine o’clock. I had never eaten dinner so late, not even on New Year’s Eve. “Do I have to go to school tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mom answered.

  A few minutes later, when Dad had taken Daddy Bo back to his room, Mom added, “Pearl, what you did today was …” She paused. “Well, you did everything right.”

  If I had really done everything right we probably wouldn’t have wound up in New Jersey, but I didn’t feel I should interrupt my mother.

  “You kept your head,” Mom continued. “You didn’t panic. You got help from an adult you could trust. And you did it all without embarrassing Daddy Bo or hurting his feelings.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I looked at the clock on the cable box and chewed a piece of pepperoni. “I know it’s almost my bedtime, but could I do one of my homework assignments now?” I asked.

  My mother looked startled, which was not surprising. “What? Right now? Well, of course. But just one assignment. I’ll write a note to your teacher about the others.”

  A few minutes later Lexie was lying in the top bunk and I was sitting at the desk, my blank journal open in front of me. I had read other journals and knew that you don’t always have to put journal thoughts in complete sentences, so I wrote:

  Big adventure today. Took bus to state of New Jersey! Was with Daddy Bo and on way to bus station crazy person yelled at our cab driver, “Who taught you to drive? Your grandma?” My grandmother was very good driver when alive, but whatever.

  On bus everyone had cell phones, which they didn’t work in tunnel though.

  Certain parts of NJ smell bad, others are nice.

  By the time I stopped writing Lexie was already asleep. I closed the journal, picked up Bitey, and pulled him into bed with me.

  21

  “Lexie?” I said softly.

  “Yeah?”

  Lexie was lying in the top bunk, and I was lying in the bottom bunk with Bitey, and the lights were out. It was almost Valentine’s Day. That was how much time had passed since my adventure with Daddy Bo. And during those weeks, neither Daddy Bo nor I had been allowed to stay home alone, or home alone together. I had kind of hoped maybe I could become Daddy Bo’s babysitter, but no one else thought much of that idea.

  “Do you still make valentines for your friends?” I asked my sister.


  “Well … no.”

  “You mean you grew out of it?”

  “I guess. But I’m going to make a valentine for Dallas.”

  “Is he going to make one for you?”

  “I hope so.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask, “Are you and Dallas in love?” but I had learned that some of my questions should not get out in the open. Instead I said, “Lexie? Do you think Daddy Bo will like his new home?”

  “I don’t know. Mom and Dad said he will.”

  “Yeah. But do you think he’ll like it?”

  “I haven’t seen it yet, Pearl.”

  So far only Mom and Dad had seen it. A week ago the phone had rung and it was this man saying that Daddy Bo’s name had come up on the waiting list for a retirement community called The Towers. It was the one on the Upper West Side that Mom and Dad had liked so much.

  “You’ll have your own suite of rooms, Dad,” Mom had told Daddy Bo at dinner that night. “Three rooms all to yourself.”

  “And we’ll be just a subway ride away,” my father had added.

  “You can eat in the dining room at The Towers so you’ll never have to cook,” said Mom. “And there’s a barber shop and a gift shop and a library and a lecture room. All in one building. You can watch movies or take classes. You can even go on field trips.”

  This kind of reminded me of the talk my parents had had with me when I was afraid to go to kindergarten.

  Now I said to Lexie, “I hope Daddy Bo likes The Towers.”

  “Me too. Hey, Pearl, guess what I found out today. The Towers is only four blocks from Justine’s new building.”

  “Really? Maybe Justine and I will get to see each other more often after Daddy Bo moves.” Despite what all the parents had said, Justine and I had seen each other exactly 3x since January. (Also, the Lebarros had not gotten a dog, smelly or otherwise.)

  “And you know what else? You’ll get your room back,” added Lexie.

  “So will you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  For a few moments, neither of us said anything. Bitey pawed at my covers, so I lifted them up and he crawled underneath and curled up on top of my legs, which I have to tell you made me get sweaty almost immediately, but I was afraid to move him. Finally I said, “Lexie? What if Daddy Bo forgets he’s going to move to the new place?”

  It turned out that this was why Daddy Bo and I had taken our trip to New Jersey. Mom and Dad had told him about his house. They’d told him that he needed to live in a retirement community, and that they were going to sell his house and car, and that his furniture had been put into storage until they could decide how much of it he would need in his new home. They had told him these things slowly, bit by bit, with lots of time in between each new piece of information to give him a chance to adjust. But just like I’d thought, he had forgotten anyway. Or else he hadn’t wanted to believe what he was hearing.

  It also turned out that my parents had not yet told Daddy Bo that his house had actually been sold. But they were getting ready to tell him. I don’t think it would have made much difference, though. The other day I saw him studying the map of the building that I had made him, so I knew his memory could use a little help.

  “What if he forgets?” Lexie repeated.

  “Yeah. Like he forgot all the other things Mom and Dad told him.”

  “Well, I don’t think he forgets things completely. He has good days when he remembers, and bad days when he forgets, and then good days when he remembers again. So I think we should just keep talking about his new place. That will help him remember.”

  I threw my covers back and tried to air out my legs. Bitey growled softly.

  “What’s going on down there?” asked Lexie.

  “Bitey’s making me sweat.”

  Lexie laughed.

  She seemed to be in a good mood, so I said, “Hey, what’s happening with Valerie and Lindsey?” I actually already had a very good idea what was happening since I had discovered that if I stood on the toilet in our bathroom and put my ear up to the heating duct I could hear every word Lexie said on the phone during her alone hour in the bedroom. (I did this with the bathroom door closed, of course, and twice in the last week Mom had almost made me take Pepto-Bismol.)

  “Well,” said my sister, “first I asked Valerie and Lindsey if they wanted to go to the movies with me one Saturday, and they both said no, they were busy. I knew they were busy doing something together without me, so then I said, ‘Okay, when aren’t you busy?’ They could have been really mean and said, ‘Never.’ But they didn’t. So we went to the movies the next weekend. But after that, things went back to the way they’d been before.”

  This was a very long answer to my question.

  “So then,” Lexie continued, “one day I said, ‘Do you want to eat lunch with me tomorrow?’ And Valerie said …”

  At this point, I kind of lost track of my sister’s answer. Partly because I had already heard all this stuff in the bathroom when she would call Dallas to report on her life, and partly because, if you must know, it was a teensy bit boring.

  I lay in bed, trying not to sweat, and thought about how Mr. Potter was finally over the flu, and how Jill had caught a different kind of flu and had barfed on her desk in front of everybody in our class (I heard the word “barf” a lot more often these days than I heard about Show and Tell or tinkle or Help, police). And I thought about the fact that no one was coming to my birthday party. Then in my head I started to think about the valentines I wanted to make for my family and Justine, and I was wondering if Mom or Dad could take me to the crafts store soon for supplies, when I realized Lexie was saying, “Pearl? Are you still awake?”

  I didn’t want my sister to know that I hadn’t been listening to her, so I said, “Mmphh, um, yeah,” like I had drifted off for a few seconds.

  “Well, don’t you?” said Lexie.

  “Don’t I what?”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you had a new best friend?”

  “A new best friend?” I pretended to wake up completely. “No! Justine is my best friend. She always will be!”

  “Calm down,” said Lexie. “All right then, don’t you think you should find another friend? One who lives nearby, who you can see every day?”

  “Well, it isn’t like going to the store. You can’t just point to somebody and say, ‘I want that one.’”

  “Of course not. But you do know you can have more than one friend, don’t you? Take me, for instance. Valerie is my best friend. Just like Justine is yours,” Lexie added quickly. “And then I’m also friends with the Emmas and Lindsey and Chloe and everyone.”

  What I wanted to say to Lexie was, “You don’t have to brag.” But I didn’t.

  “So,” Lexie continued, “who in your class do you have the most fun with?”

  I was about to say something mean about Katie and Rachel and Barfy Jill, but to my own surprise, I replied, “James Brubaker the Third.” I was thinking of the pictures we had drawn of Jill and Katie and Rachel with their hair on fire.

  “The kid across the street?” said Lexie.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, then he should be your friend.”

  “But he’s a boy.”

  “So? Justine’s your best friend and she’s, well, younger. A friend can be a boy or a girl or any age. It doesn’t matter if James is a boy.”

  “James Brubaker the Third,” I said. “That’s his whole name.”

  “Well?” said Lexie. “Why don’t you invite him over or something?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  So I thought about it and two days later I asked James Brubaker the Third if he wanted to come to my house, and he said he had to ask his parents, so he did, and his mother called my mother and they got things all arranged. On Wednesday, he walked home with Lexie and me, and the very first thing he did was stand in our family room and point acros
s the street to his own building.

  “There’s my living room window,” he announced.

  “Cool,” I said. “We should write giant notes and hold them up for each other to read.”

  “We should invent a secret code.”

  Daddy Bo wandered into the family room then and James Brubaker the Third said, “Hello, Mr. Bo. Where’s your tail?”

  Daddy Bo smiled and left the room. A few minutes later he came back with the squirrel tail hanging out the back of his pants and asked about James Brubaker the Third’s molar costume. I was a little surprised that Daddy Bo remembered the molar costume, which just went to show that Lexie was right about his memory.

  “It had a little accident,” my new friend admitted. “My dad sucked part of it up the vacuum cleaner, and that was the end of it.”

  James Brubaker the Third and I got out my art supplies and sat at the table in the family room. I drew a portrait of Bitey, and JBIII told me he thought I was the best artist in our class. He stayed for two hours and he never once mentioned Show and Tell or tinkle or Help, police. When he was leaving, he said, “Go wait at your window, okay?”

  I stood at the window in our family room and a few minutes later I saw a light come on in JBIII’s window. He waved to me.

  I waved back.

  That night I got out my comparison chart. I studied the “Friends” line. I thought for a while, and then under Justine’s name I added: James Brubaker the Third (boy).

  22

  I stood in our front hallway and looked at the boxes stacked there, and at Daddy Bo’s suitcases. Bitey had jumped up on one of the suitcases, and was sitting straight and tall, licking his paw.

  We had had a busy morning. Mom and Dad had helped Daddy Bo pack up the last of his belongings, and then we had all walked through the apartment to see if he’d missed anything.

  “If you did, we’ll bring it by very soon,” Dad said now. “We’ll be visiting you often.”