Ten Rules for Living With My Sister

  “I had an interesting day,” Lexie spoke up. “Valerie decided to have a sleepover on Saturday night and she’s inviting me and four other girls.”

  “Polly and the Emmas and who else?” I asked with interest.

  “Gillian Meyer. You don’t know her.” Lexie turned back to Mom and Dad. “Valerie’s parents are going to take us bowling.”

  “How nice,” said Mom.

  “And then also? After English class this morning?” said Lexie. “Dallas waited for me in the hall, so—”

  “I thought Dallas was in your English class,” I interrupted.

  “He is.”

  “Then why did he have to wait in the hall? Why didn’t he just talk to you in your classroom?”

  “He wanted a little privacy,” said Lexie.

  “In the hall? You said the halls are always crowded.”

  “Pearl. Would you please let me finish speaking?” Lexie turned back to our parents and rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Dallas is going to come over on Saturday. Is that okay? We’re just going to watch a movie or some—”

  “Lexie hung the NO PEARL sign this afternoon,” I announced. “Again.”

  “Pearl! Please! Let me finish.”

  I looked first at Mom, then at Dad, with my saddest expression. “It was because of an underwear visit.”

  “Pearl!” cried my sister.

  “She never put it up for an underwear visit before.”

  “Pearl came in wearing nothing but holey old underwear,” exclaimed Lexie. “It was disgusting. I don’t need that in my room.”

  “Girls,” my father started to say.

  “And anyway, I can put up the NO PEARL sign whenever I want, and for whatever reason.” Lexie paused long enough to take a drink of water. “I was attempting to do my homework. ‘Attempting’ being the operative word,” she added, which I have no idea what that meant except that it didn’t sound good.

  I stuck out my tongue at Lexie.

  “Do you see this? Do you see this?” said Lexie, springing up from her chair and pointing at my tongue. “Look what I have to put up with!”

  “Lexie, please sit down,” said my father. Sometimes he says, “Lexie, resume yourself,” but he knew Lexie wasn’t in a mood for humor.

  Lexie plunked herself back down in her seat. “Dad. Mom. Pearl is such a baby sometimes. She and Justine played a stupid trick on me this afternoon. And Pearl walks around wearing that pirate costume—”

  “At least I was dressed,” I said.

  “And she interrupts me all the time! Like right now!”

  I slumped in my chair and stopped listening to Lexie. There was no point. Instead, I made a little list in my head.

  Five Reasons Lexie Thinks She’s So Great

  1. She almost gets straight A’s.

  2. She has a boyfriend and his name is Dallas, which is not a plain name like Bob or Jim.

  3. She has a best friend who is her own age, plus more friends, including the two Emmas.

  4. She is allowed to go places without a grown-up. Of course, she has to stay in our neighborhood, but she can still go to the movies and to stores and over to her friends’ apartments, where they put on nail polish.

  5. She has her own cell phone and her own computer and her own KEY TO THE APARTMENT.

  It took a long time to think up that list but when I was finished, Lexie was still talking about her day. When you have a lot of friends and a lot of interests, you also have a lot to say.

  Lexie was talking and talking and talking. What I heard was blah, blah, blah-dy, blah, blah.

  I pretended to drop my napkin. I mean, I actually did drop it, but I dropped it on purpose, not by accident. When I leaned down to pick it up, I looked under the table and saw that Lexie had slipped off her shoes, the new purple ones she had bought the day before. She had said they were expensive but that she had been saving and saving her money until she had enough to pay for them without borrowing anything from Mom and Dad. (Good economics.) She added that they were sheek, which I don’t know what that means, and that Valerie and Emma B. were each going to get a pair too. Lexie had worn her new shoes nonstop since she bought them, except for when she was in bed last night. And except for right now.

  I straightened up in my chair and made a great show of refolding my napkin. Then I wiggled my right foot around under the table until I felt Lexie’s shoes, and I slid them under my chair. I watched Lexie’s face and Mom’s face and Dad’s face very carefully. I smiled as if I were really enjoying Lexie’s story about how Dallas was so smart that he had to take a math test 2x, just to prove that he hadn’t cheated the first time, when he got a 100% plus extra credit.

  No one saw what I was doing. I pretended to drop my napkin again, and this time I shoved the shoes in back of the floor-length curtains behind me.

  I waited.

  It wasn’t until dinner was finally over and we were clearing our places that Lexie suddenly leaned down and exclaimed, “They’re gone!”

  “What?” said Mom. “What are gone?”

  “My new shoes!”

  “They’re gone off your feet?” I asked.

  “No! I mean, yes. I mean, I was wearing them and I took them off during dinner, and now they aren’t under the table.”

  My parents got down on their hands and knees and peered around with Lexie.

  “The only thing down here is Bitey,” said my father.

  “Are you sure you were wearing them when dinner began?” asked my mother.

  “Yes!”

  “Maybe you took them off when Bitey barfed,” I suggested. “To keep them clean. Maybe you should go look in your room.”

  Lexie shook her head. “That would be pointless.”

  “Well, go check your room anyway. They couldn’t have just disappeared,” said my father sensibly.

  My lips formed themselves into a tiny smile. “No. That would be impossible,” I said. “They couldn’t have just disappeared.”

  Everyone looked at my small smile.

  “Pearl? Do you know anything about this?” asked Mom, and I heard a tone in her voice. It was the You’re-Walking-on-Thin-Ice tone, which, well, to be honest, sometimes I think it would be exciting to actually fall through the ice and see what’s underneath.

  My smile grew a teensy bit larger.

  “What did you do with my shoes?” Lexie demanded. She thumped her fist on the table, which made the silverware jump, but my parents did not say one word about this.

  “Pearl?” said my father, and now his voice had a tone, only this one was the I’ve-Almost-Reached-the-End-of-My-Rope tone, and so since I knew what would happen if he did reach the end of his rope and I didn’t want my art supplies confiscated again, I paid attention when he continued by saying, “Please give Lexie’s shoes back to her.”

  I pulled the curtains aside. There were the shoes. Lexie pounced on them and jammed them back on her feet. She glared at me. “I am no longer speaking to you,” she announced.

  Then she stomped off down the hall and slammed the door to her room.

  P.S. Confiscated = Taken Away

  3

  I am no stranger to the silent treatment. When Lexie is mad at me she shouts, “I’m not speaking to you!” Sometimes after that she whips her head away from me, or turns her back, or stomps into her room and slams the door.

  And then sometimes one of my parents will mutter, “Teenagers.” (They only mean Lexie, not me, since you don’t qualify as a teenager until you are thirteen.)

  “Will I be like that when I’m Lexie’s age?” I asked Dad once.

  “Probably,” he had replied sadly. “But luckily it will just be a phase.”

  I decided to sit outside Lexie’s room again, under the NO PEARL sign, which she had re-hung five seconds after announcing that she wasn’t speaking to me.

  “Pearl,” said my mother, “I think you’re asking for trouble. Come away from Lexie’s door, please. Why don’t you show me your homework so I can make sure you completed all yo
ur assignments.”

  Uh-oh. My homework. “I have a little to finish up,” I told her. And I rushed into my room, did three worksheets in record time, and then waved them back and forth in front of Mom’s face while she was on the telephone. After that I put on my pajamas and stepped into the hallway. Lexie was just coming out of the bathroom.

  “Hey,” I said, all cool again.

  She didn’t answer.

  “So how long do you think your silent treatment is going to last this time?”

  Still no answer.

  “Couldn’t you just give me a clue?”

  No answer.

  “If you tell me then I won’t have to keep bugging you.”

  No answer. Lexie closed the door to her room.

  I stood in the hall and called, “Lexie! Oh, Lexie! How long is the silent treatment going to last?” I counted to five. “Lexie! Oh, Lexie! I said, how long is the silent treatment going to last?” I waited five more seconds. “Lexie! Oh, Lexie! How long is—”

  Lexie flung her door open so fast that the NO PEARL sign almost blew off. “I DON’T KNOW! UNTIL I’M NOT MAD ANYMORE, OKAY?” she yelled.

  “Boy, you sure aren’t very good at the silent treatment,” I told her, and she slammed the door.

  The next morning at breakfast, I said, “Lexie, is the silent treatment over yet?”

  And Lexie said, “Mom, I need a new library card.”

  So the silent treatment was definitely not over.

  After breakfast, Justine and I rode the elevator down to the lobby with Dad and Lexie.

  “Hi, Lexie,” said Justine in a friendly manner.

  “Hey.” Lexie sounded grumpy so she was probably still mad about being boo-ed by us the day before.

  In the lobby, Lexie said, “Dad, Dallas is going to meet me here and walk me to school.”

  “Okay,” replied Dad, and he kissed the top of her head. “Have a good day.”

  “Bye, Lexie!” I called as John held the door open.

  Lexie just stood there in her purple shoes, staring at a wall.

  “Silent treatment,” I whispered to John, and pointed to Lexie with my thumb.

  “It won’t last,” John whispered back.

  “I know.”

  Dad and Justine and I turned right and began the walk to Emily Dickinson Elementary. Dad walked in the middle and Justine and I held his hands. We passed Quik-Mart, which is a delicatessen, and Universal, which is a dry cleaner, and The Bagel Place, which you can figure out, and New World, which is a coffee shop, and Steve-Dan’s, which sells art supplies, and Happy-Go-Lucky, which is something of a mystery. Also, we passed Alice, who is a woman who sits out on her stoop with her little white dog and spends all morning saying, “Snowball, don’t bite. Snowball, come back here. Snowball, don’t eat that. Oh, Snowball, how did you get to be so naughty?” You would think she would be annoyed by Snowball’s behavior, but she always smiles at him quite fondly, just like mothers and fathers smile at their children and think they’re cute even when they’re clearly not.

  When we reached school, we said good-bye to my father, and Justine ran to room 1B, which is a first-grade class, which is right by the front door. I ambled along the hall to room 4C. My teacher’s name is Mr. Potter. Sometimes this one boy in my class calls him Mr. Potty behind his back, but most of us like him. He’s okay as teachers go.

  “Hi, Pearl,” he said as I slid into my seat. I sit directly in front of Mr. Potter’s desk. This is not so he can keep an eye on me, but because no one else wanted to sit that close to the teacher. Also, the other kids wanted to sit near their friends, so on the first day of school there was a great scrambling around in order for Jill and Rachel and Katie to flock together in the back row, and Evan and Ryan to sit together by the windows, and Kenny and Greg to sit directly behind Evan and Ryan, and Katrina and Tracy to sit anywhere as long as they’re together, and blah, blah, blah-dy, blah, blah. Only four of the strays—Leslie, James Brubaker the Third, Elyse, and I—wound up in the first row. And I wound up right under Mr. Potter’s nose. The front of my desk touches the back of his desk. When we’re both sitting there, I look straight into his eyes, which is embarrassing, and not at all like staring into Bitey’s eyes, which if you do it long enough he’ll turn away and lick his paw.

  If the Three Bad Things hadn’t happened last year I might have scrambled around on the first day of school in order to sit next to someone special too. Jill maybe. But they had happened, and everyone remembered them, even kids who were in the other third-grade classes, which is why I wished I could be in third grade now with kids who had never heard of the Three Bad Things.

  “Hi,” I answered Mr. Potter. And this was when I remembered that the three worksheets I had done the night before were at home on my bed. Or maybe under it. But definitely not in my backpack.

  “Pearl, how would you like to collect everyone’s homework today?” asked Mr. Potter.

  I would not like to do that at all, but I knew that the only possible answer to this question was, “Okay. Thank you.” So I said, “Okay. Thank you,” and stood up.

  Being the homework collector was slightly good but mostly bad. It was good, at least for me, because if I was the one collecting the homework then Mr. Potter might not notice if I didn’t hand in my own assignments. But it was bad because no one likes the homework collector. Everyone, Mr. Potter included, could watch and see if someone (apart from the actual collector) didn’t hand over his worksheets, and then Mr. Potter would write that person’s name on the upper left hand corner of the blackboard. In my case, being the homework collector was especially bad, though, because as I walked up and down the aisles everyone watched me and remembered the Three Bad Things and silently called me various names.

  If you must know, the Three Bad Things happened at the beginning, the middle, and the end of third grade. Each thing was worse than the one before, so that the last one, which took place on our end-of-the-year class trip to the Museum of Natural History, was the worst of all—and the one everyone remembers the best. Also, when you find out what the Three Bad Things are you can sort of see how I wound up with my reputation as a baby.

  The first bad thing happened on Day #1 of third grade when I showed up with my Mickey Mouse ears, the ones with my name written in fancy script like Pearl across the front. We had been to Disney World over the summer and I couldn’t wait to show off the hat. As it turned out, that wasn’t such a good idea. The problem wasn’t the hat, which the other kids liked okay. The problem was that I planned to present it during Show and Tell. When we reached the end of the day and Mrs. Van Horn, our teacher, hadn’t said anything about Show and Tell, I raised my hand and I was like, “Excuse me, Mrs. Van Horn, we only have six minutes until the bell. Are we going to have enough time?”

  “Enough time for what, Pearl?”

  “For Show and Tell.” I almost added, “Duh.”

  Mrs. Van Horn looked surprised, but no one said anything until finally Katie exploded with laughter and exclaimed, “We don’t have Show and Tell in third grade!”

  Well, I didn’t know that. (How come everyone else did?)

  Soon the whole class was laughing except Mrs. Van Horn, because teachers aren’t allowed to laugh at their students, including when they want to.

  Eventually the laughing died down, but the memory stuck and everyone talked about Show and Tell until December 3rd, which was the day I wet my pants while I was giving a book report. This incident was entirely Mrs. Van Horn’s fault, since I had already asked her 2x that morning if I could go to the girls’ room and she had asked me back if I couldn’t please wait and go at lunchtime. Then when I wet my pants, she said in front of the whole class, “Oh, I’m sorry, Pearl. I should have let you tinkle when you asked.”

  So then for the next six months everyone including the kids in the other third-grade classes talked about my tinkle. And they hadn’t forgotten about it by the day of our trip to the museum. In fact, I heard both Show and Tell and tinkle mentioned on
our bus ride uptown. (I was sitting by myself in a two-person seat and pretending that I liked having all that space to spread out in.)

  The trip went okay until the very end when I was standing in front of a dinosaur and all of a sudden I realized that no one else in my class was with me. I looked around the room, which was the size of an airport, and it was just me and the dinosaur. So then I ran into another room and there were a lot of people in it, but no one from my class. I ran into another room and another and another, but all I saw were groups of kids from the wrong schools, and adults who were strangers.

  Finally I shouted, “Help, police!” and in a few minutes an officer was at my side asking what was wrong, and I said that Jill’s mother, who was named Mrs. DiNunzio and who was one of the class parents on our trip, was supposed to be keeping an eye on me and that obviously she hadn’t done her job. It took a lot of sorting out, but eventually the officer found my class and Mrs. Van Horn and Mrs. DiNunzio and the other parent helpers. I think all the adults got in a little trouble, especially Jill’s mother, and on the way home not only did I have a whole seat to myself on the bus again, but a couple of rows in front and back of me were empty too, even though it meant that some of the kids had to sit three to a seat.

  So, Three Bad Things. Show and Tell, tinkle, and Help, police. I know that’s what my fourth-grade classmates think about whenever they see me.

  I walked around our room now, going up and down the aisles in an orderly fashion, from the wall side of the room to the windows side of the room. At each desk, I held out my hand and waited for three papers to be placed in it. I always checked them, and it was a good thing because William had only done one worksheet, but he tried to trick me by slipping two sheets of notebook paper underneath it. I caught him right away, and handed back the blank pages.

  “Tinkle,” he whispered, which caused quite a bit of giggling even though Mr. Potter was already writing William in the corner of the board.

  In the back row, Jill handed me her three perfect papers with a smirk. She didn’t mention Help, police, but she did say, “I saw you walking to school this morning.” And I knew what she meant was that she had seen me and Justine walking to school holding hands with my father. Everyone in fourth grade walks to school with a grown-up or an older brother or sister. But no one else in fourth grade has a first-grade best friend. (For some reason, no one cares that Justine is nearly eight.) Plus, maybe it was time to stop holding my father’s hand.