Just My Luck

  “He’s okay,” I said and then I thought about it. “I mean, no, he’s actually not okay, but you don’t have to worry about him.”

  She laughed like I’d made a really funny joke and put her arm around me. It felt a little weird actually. Like she was really nervous about George or something. “Thank you, Benny. Martin’s right. You’re a great little brother.”

  That was all before Dad’s accident. Lisa was away at horseback riding camp when the accident happened, but I still remember the day she came back. Dad was in the hospital and Mom was exhausted and none of us knew what was going to happen, but seeing Lisa again, tan and smiling and hugging us all, it felt like everything was going to be okay.

  Mom gave her an extra big hug and invited her to stay for dinner. Then Mom looked at the stove and realized we were having hot dogs. “Oh well, that’s embarrassing, but stay anyway. It’s nice to have you back, Lisa. You’re like family and we need family around.”

  Lisa loved hearing that, I could tell. She looked at Martin and then at me. “Of course, Mrs. Barrows. I’d love to.”

  I still remember the way Mom laughed that night. Not completely like her old self, but almost. In the old days, Mom and Dad loved having people over for barbecues and last-minute dinners. I could tell Mom wanted to be her old self like that, but I could also tell she wasn’t sure if it was okay with Dad in the hospital. So with Lisa, she tried it and everyone was happy. Martin was, I know. He made Mom laugh a lot that night. Even George surprised us. After dinner was over, he asked Lisa if he could clear her plate for her. No one had ever heard him ask someone that before. Usually we take turns clearing the table and if it’s his turn, he just does it, whether you’re done eating or not, so sometimes you have to scream, “George, I’m not finished!”

  But that night, he asked her, “Lisa, may I clear your plate?”

  He sounded so normal, it made us all stop talking for a minute. Like each of us wondered for a second if George had been playing a joke his whole life, pretending to be autistic. After he took her plate and she thanked him, he walked it over to the sink and put it down. Then he started bouncing around and flapping his hands like his usual crazy self. “There we go,” Mom said, like she’d been holding her breath, wondering what was going on.

  The next time Lisa came over, it didn’t go so well.

  In fact, it went much, much worse. Dad was home from the hospital by then and he’d stopped wearing a bandage around his head because the doctors said his wound would heal faster that way. We’d gotten used to the weird way his head looked, completely shaved with a Frankenstein scar down the front of his forehead. It was scary at first—especially when you looked at it and thought about the word staples—but if you stared at it for long enough, it got a little better. Or at least you got used to it.

  Maybe that’s why we forgot to tell Dad to put on a hat before he came out to say hi to Lisa. We were standing in the living room and Mom came in and asked if it was okay and we all said, “Yeah sure! Come on out, Dad!”

  Maybe we were all thinking: How bad could it be? He’s home now and still his old self, except maybe he sleeps more and moves slower. Then he came into the living room and he got confused. Like he’d been told Lisa was there but he forgot who Lisa was. Because he walked over to her and put his arms around her and wouldn’t let go.

  “It’s so good to see you,” he said, touching her hair, still hugging her with his eyes closed.

  After a long time, Martin said, “Ah . . . Dad?”

  Lisa looked terrified. “Mr. Barrows?”

  “You should stop hugging her now, Dad,” Martin said.

  We’d never seen Dad do anything like this before. We’d never seen him hug any woman except our mom and our grandmas and we’d never seen him hug either of them this long.

  Finally Mom said, “Brian, sweetheart?”

  His eyes stayed closed. He looked like he’d fallen asleep with his head on Lisa’s shoulder, his mouth and nose buried in her long blond hair.

  Then Lisa shocked us all. “Get him off of me!” she screamed and shoved him really hard. Mom had to catch him to make sure he didn’t fall down.

  The whole thing was terrible. Lisa ran into the bathroom, crying. George bounced around in circles, which is what he does when he gets nervous. I stayed in the living room and could tell Dad had no idea what had just happened.

  Since then, we’ve never really talked about that day. How Lisa left a few minutes later without staying for dinner and Mom made us all sit down and eat anyway, even though she was crying, too, by then. I think we were all so embarrassed we didn’t know what to say, even after Lisa was gone and it was just us.

  In the old days, our dad was one of the reasons friends liked coming over to our house. He followed which sports Martin’s friends played and always asked them about it. He also didn’t mind spending ten minutes trying a new video game. Then Mom would walk by, roll her eyes, and he’d pass the game console to one of Martin’s friends. “Just changing the batteries!” he’d say to Mom, which was one of their inside jokes.

  They used to have a lot of jokes like that.

  Now it’s hard to tell if he remembers their old jokes. He’ll start to say something that sounds like one and then he’ll forget the word he was looking for. Or he’ll fall asleep in his chair, which happens a lot. At first we tried to wake him when it happened, especially if we were all in the room and it wasn’t close to bedtime. Now Mom closes her eyes and shakes her head. “Let him sleep,” she’ll say.

  Lisa hasn’t been back to the house since that terrible dinner, even though she and Martin are still going out. I don’t blame her exactly, because none of us have invited anyone over. Even when Rayshawn mentioned coming over to my house and said that he wouldn’t mind making toast again sometime, I had to say, “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  I don’t think I could risk having Rayshawn come over. Dad might come out and shake his hand, but he also might follow him around patting his Afro. Every day Dad surprises us by seeming like his old self for a little while and then, just as quickly, he’ll seem like a child again or else someone we’ve never met.

  “Give him time,” Mom keeps saying. “It takes a long time for a brain to heal. He’ll come around, though. I know he will.”

  Even though she says this, I notice she never invites her old friends inside either. These days more of them stop by to see how we’re doing or bring us a dinner, but Mom always talks to them out on the porch. She tells them Dad is napping, otherwise she’d invite them in.

  I know for a fact that she’s said this when Dad is inside, not napping at all, but watching TV. Which he does a lot. Usually he watches cooking shows and whatever comes on afterward. Sometimes we’ll get home from school and find him sitting on the sofa, watching nothing. It’s scary and it’s the main reason I never invite my friends over here. Not Rayshawn, who is cooler than I’ll ever be, and definitely not Jeremy, who I’m pretty sure is starting to have some doubts about being friends with me at all.

  SEVEN

  I KNOW I’M PROBABLY THINKING TOO MUCH about who my friends should be. Maybe it’s easier than thinking about Dad or remembering how he sometimes felt like my best friend, especially after Kenneth moved away last spring. Dad used to like coming in my room at the end of the day to sit on the floor and look at my Lego setups. Because I combine a lot of different sets into bunkers and fortresses, it changes all the time. Some of my designs can be very complicated but also very cool—with elevators and weapon storage units and sleeping quarters for twenty people. Some nights Dad would study everything I’d done and then say, “Do you mind?” and change one little thing.

  He’d usually be right, whatever he did. He’d say, “I’d like the guards on patrol to have easier access to the watchtower,” and he’d move a little staircase. Mom can come in and say, “Oh, Benny, it’s beautiful!” but she could never do something like that.

  Before the accident, it felt like having a best friend didn’t matter so much. N
ow it’s different. If Dad isn’t Dad anymore, I kind of need someone who can look at my Lego setups and know what needs adjusting. I just do.

  I may not be the only one having friendship problems. I used to think all the girls at school were friends and got along well enough to have big sleepovers with six or seven girls, where they all stayed up all night, scaring each other and laughing. Now I’ve found out they have separate sleepovers, where they make up mean lists ranking the other girls by how much they hate them. It seems like they’ve divided into two groups that aren’t allowed to be friends with each other anymore. One group is the sporty girls, who talk about soccer practices and swim teams, and the other group is the girls who care about their clothes and matching their socks with their headbands. They’re also the ones who’ve started wearing fingernail decals and rubber-band bracelets. And even though we’re all trying to be nice and earn footprints these days, it hasn’t changed how they’ve been acting toward one another.

  Thursday afternoon, I ask Olga what she thinks about all this. I suppose I’m interested because I’m trying to figure out what the boy groups are and where I fit in. If there are any groups, I’m pretty sure I don’t belong to one. I don’t know if boys have group sleepovers. I’ve never been to one, if they do.

  Recently, walking down the hall with Olga has gotten to be a little more fun, which is lucky because I do a lot of it. When we’re alone, she sometimes laughs so hard her glasses slip down her nose and fall off. Then she always screams at them, “Argh! You glasses!” which makes me laugh. Today when it happens, she picks her glasses up off the floor, leaves her hair in front of her face, and puts her glasses on over her hair. One great thing about Olga is she doesn’t care about looking silly or weird. She also doesn’t care about getting paint on her clothes in art class or dirt on them at recess. In third grade, when boys and girls still played tag and hide-and-seek together, she was always the girl who found the best hiding spots. Mostly because she didn’t mind getting muddy and the other girls did.

  Now she says she doesn’t understand what’s going on with the other girls either. “They make up these stories about each other. I think it’s pretty dumb.”

  That’s when I realize, I don’t know which group Olga is part of. Sometimes she eats with the sporty girls but mostly she doesn’t. When I ask who she eats lunch with, she says, “No one, usually. Mr. Norris lets me eat lunch in the classroom and then I go to the library.” She says this like it’s nothing. “I told him the lunchroom has gotten a little too cliquey for me—recess too, sometimes.”

  Clique is a new word we all learned last year. Now even though everyone pretends to hate the cliques, I’ve never heard of a girl not trying to be in one. “What do you do in the library?”

  She looks at me sideways. “Read mostly. Sometimes I talk to the librarians. It’s not that weird. I’ll go back to the cafetorium when all these girl fights die down. I just don’t like watching all that. Mr. Norris says he doesn’t blame me.”

  I can hardly believe it. Here I am, worrying every day about who I should eat lunch with, and it’s never occurred to me: I could just skip it altogether.

  Then I remember there’s something a little unbelievable about this. “You go to the library to read?” I say.

  She laughs and stops walking because her glasses have slipped again. “You’re right, I don’t read. I’m working on a comic book series. The library has this computer program where you can do graphic design that’s partly your own art and partly the software. It comes out looking pretty good. The librarian says when I’m done with the whole series, we can make copies and put them on the shelf so anyone who wants to can check them out.”

  “That’s great,” I say, even though I’m thinking: Can a legally blind person really make a comic book?

  Then I think, So what if she can’t?

  Hearing all this makes me admire Olga. I’ve never had the guts to tell Jeremy about my Lego movies mostly because I care about them too much to have him make fun of them, which is what he’d probably do. Not definitely, but probably.

  When we get back to the classroom, everyone is supposed to be working on math, but Mr. Norris isn’t even there, so most people are drawing pictures or doing other things. “Where is Mr. Norris?” I whisper to Jeremy.

  “Who knows?” He shrugs. Jeremy is working ahead in the math book. He says he wants to be able to start algebra before he gets to middle school. I don’t even know what algebra is. “He just disappeared. I think he got a phone call or something. One more example of Mr. Norris being a freak case.”

  EIGHT

  WHEN THE LETTER CAME IN THE mail over the summer saying I got Mr. Norris for fourth grade, Lisa was the first person I told. It was before the accident, so Mom and Dad were both at work. Lisa was in the family room, reading a magazine while Martin took a shower upstairs. “I did it! I got him!” I said, holding my letter.

  Then I couldn’t believe it: Lisa started to cry.

  “That’s so great, Benny. I’m so happy for you.” She wiped away a tear moving down her cheek. “Don’t mind me. I’m just jealous. I wish I was starting fourth grade again. With a whole year of Mr. Norris to look forward to.”

  Jealous? I thought. I didn’t understand. Why would someone who was in high school and was pretty and really popular want to go back to fourth grade?

  “I just remember being really happy in fourth grade,” she said. “That’s all. It’s great being a kid. You shouldn’t try to hurry through it.”

  I didn’t want to say it, but she sounded a little like one of my grandparents.

  After that, she made it her special project to get me ready for Mr. Norris. “Oh, Benny, I forgot about this,” she said in late July, before she went away to camp. “He also does this thing called Crazy Hair Backward Day where everyone wears their clothes backward and their hair forward or just really weird. He put his in a million little ponytails. It was so funny!” She laughed at the memory.

  After Lisa told me all her happy memories from fourth grade, I think maybe my expectations got raised too high. The first few days of school, I kept waiting for something magical to happen, like she had described. For Mr. Norris to come to school dressed as Paul Revere or some other historical figure we were studying. Lisa’s year, apparently he came as Benjamin Franklin and spent the whole morning asking children to explain what all the modern inventions around the classroom were. Lisa said it was hard work pretending he was really Ben Franklin and not Mr. Norris, but after he explained all his inventions to them, they got the point—that a lot of things we still use today are based on ideas Ben Franklin thought of. “He’s a great actor,” Lisa said. “He loves reading aloud and he’s super good at it. Our year, he read The Indian in the Cupboard and he used different voices for all the toy people that came to life. It was hilarious!”

  Even in the beginning of this year when he seemed less distracted, I kept expecting him to do the things Lisa talked about. He’d bring in a tray of beet brownies and I’d wonder about the lemon drops. Or he’d start reading So B. It, a book about a normal girl with a mother who seems autistic, and I’d think, Why is he reading this? Why not something fun with plastic Indians coming to life?

  That’s why it’s been hard for me to tell if there is something really wrong with Mr. Norris or if I just expected too much. This week, though, I’m paying closer attention and I notice a few more unusual things about Mr. Norris.

  His fingernails seem longer than they should be. Maybe he plays guitar like my uncle Hank, but Mr. Norris has never mentioned this and usually with guitar players, they have only one hand with long fingernails.

  He hasn’t shaved in a while, which makes him look a little like my dad after a week in the hospital.

  Today, during reading time, his voice got very hoarse. At first I thought he was acting the voice of some new character, the way Lisa described, but that wasn’t it. The story was making him hoarse, like he was almost going to cry.

  At lunch I ask Jeremy i
f he noticed this and he says no. “Why would Mr. Norris cry because of a book?”

  I tell him I don’t know but it seemed like he was about to.

  “You’re crazy,” Jeremy says. “Mr. Norris is a guy. Guys don’t cry at books.”

  Jeremy has a lot of rules like this. Like not playing with girls at recess. Like not wearing pink socks, even if they’re an accident. “Something must have run in the wash,” I said so he knew I didn’t buy them that way.

  “Then you throw them away,” he whispered.

  I know he doesn’t say these things to be mean. Jeremy is my best friend this year, I’m lucky to have him, I remind myself all the time. Still I sometimes wish he’d keep his helpful suggestions to himself.

  I figured this out: Jeremy is nice to me about 75 percent of the time; 25 percent of the time he says things to remind me that he’s better than me at everything. The other day he told me he was happy to be in this class, because he’d heard Mr. Norris was such an easy grader. “I got mostly ones last year so I shouldn’t worry, but still, it’s nice to know.”

  Jeremy isn’t like Lisa. He doesn’t care if Mr. Norris is fun or inspiring. He cares about getting good grades.

  “I’m glad I got him because I want to see him dress up like someone from Colonial times,” I said.

  Jeremy looked at me funny. “What are you talking about?”

  “Haven’t you heard about that? He picks a day and comes in dressed up like Benjamin Franklin or someone like that.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. I heard it from someone who had him five years ago.”

  “Well that was five years ago then. He hasn’t done that since. That’s what happens, Benny. Teachers have a lot of energy when they first start out and then they get tired. They can’t keep it up and they burn out.”

  I thought about Mr. Norris falling asleep in class. Maybe Jeremy was right.

  “Yeah, I’d say his best days are definitely behind him,” Jeremy said. “You were the one who figured that out first.”