Just My Luck

  No, I wasn’t. “I was worried that something is wrong with him, not that he’s a bad teacher.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Same difference. All I can say is he better not be a hard grader after this. I’ll be really mad if he is.”

  That afternoon, it’s raining so hard Mr. Norris tells us we’ll have to stay inside for recess. I go to the book corner, where I see Little House in the Big Woods. I pull it out and start reading. A few minutes later, Mr. Norris comes over and stands next to me. “How do you like that one so far?” he says.

  “It’s good,” I say, even though I’ve been reading the same sentence for a while because I haven’t really been paying attention. Usually I read Garfield books at indoor recess. “I like reading about pioneer life.”

  “Do you?” he says, squinting his eyes.

  “Actually, not really.”

  “So why were you reading it?”

  “I have this friend, Lisa Lowes. She said I should read it.”

  “Hey, I remember that name.”

  Suddenly I feel embarrassed. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, but I’ve been wanting to say her name all year so maybe Mr. Norris will notice me more.

  “How is she doing?”

  “Oh, pretty good.”

  “She was quite the firecracker back when I knew her. Tell her I say hi.” He makes a face standing up, like his knees hurt from crouching.

  “I will,” I say. “She really liked you. You were her favorite teacher of all time.”

  He looks down at me, surprised. “I was?” His eyebrows go up. “I’m not sure about that. I remember Lisa and me going head-to-head a little bit.”

  Sometimes Mr. Norris talks in ways that are hard to understand. Like what does it mean if he calls someone a firecracker? Does that mean she’s full of sparks or does that mean she’s someone who explodes when you don’t want her to? And going head-to-head sounds like fighting, but how could they have fought if she loved him so much?

  “I’ll bet she’s changed a lot,” Mr. Norris says. “Lisa could be a little hard on some of her fellow students back when I knew her. But we talked about it and she worked on it. She got much better by the end of the year.”

  Wait, I think. Is he saying that Lisa was a mean girl? I can hardly believe it.

  He shakes his head and keeps going. “She was particularly hard on a girl in our class who had Down syndrome. Usually I try not to interfere too much with peer dynamics, but I couldn’t sit back in that case. I had to take a pretty strong stand. There were a few times I had to ask Lisa to leave the room.”

  I remember the way she cried when I told her I’d gotten Mr. Norris for my teacher. How she wished she could be in fourth grade again. This makes no sense.

  “I’m sure she’s changed a lot.” He claps his hands. “Everyone grows up, right?”

  NINE

  I KEEP THINKING ABOUT MY LEGO MOVIES the whole time I’m still trying to do nice things and earn stupid footprints. I keep thinking of ideas where my Lego minifigs are in the same kind of contest. Where Batman’s arch-enemies like Penguin and Joker and Riddler are competing to see who can do the most anonymous, nice things for one another. In my story, they spend all day making each other apple pies and cups of cappuccino.

  I wonder if that would be funny. Maybe not so much.

  Recently I got a better idea. After I told my mom Mr. Norris wasn’t doing a lot of the things he’d done with Lisa’s class, like dressing up and reading The Indian in the Cupboard out loud, she checked the book out of the library and brought it home. “You don’t have to wait for Mr. Norris to read this to you,” she said. In the past, she and Dad used to take turns reading books to us, even though we’re all old enough to read books to ourselves. Usually they just read to me and George, but sometimes even Martin listens. Since Dad’s accident though, no one’s read to us at night. I hadn’t even realized that until Mom started reading again and it felt like a sound that I hadn’t heard in a long time.

  I’ll say this. Mom is pretty good at the different accents. The main character is an English boy who gets a plastic Indian for his birthday from his friend. From his older brother, he gets an old cupboard the brother found by the garbage in the alley. When he puts the Indian in the cupboard at night, he wakes up in the morning and the Indian is alive. It turns out he’s not only alive, but he’s a real person from history, an Iroquois who’s fighting battles with the French and English. So Mom has to talk like him, which George loves because he doesn’t talk very well. George keeps laughing until Mom tells him it isn’t really funny. “In fact,” she says, “it perpetuates a lot of negative stereotypes about Native Americans, which is probably why Mr. Norris isn’t reading this book out loud to his class anymore.”

  Then she looks at my face and she knows what I’m thinking: I understand what you’re saying, but I still like the part about toys coming to life and I want to hear the rest of it.

  She smiles at me and squeezes my hand. She keeps reading.

  We’re only halfway through the story, but the interesting part to me is how busy the boy gets taking care of his toys that have come to life. He has to keep them fed and warm and make places for them to sleep, along with the horses they were both riding that have also come alive. As if that’s not hard enough, as the story goes along, he also has to worry about their feelings and helping them get along with each other.

  Little Bear, the Indian, wants a wife and more tribesmen to help him fight the battle he was in the middle of back home, so Omri (that’s the kid’s name. I know—I don’t get it either) has to worry about that, too. I don’t know yet how it turns out, but all day at school, as I’m holding open doors and complimenting the cafeteria ladies on their tacos (which is the only food anyone can honestly compliment them on), I keep thinking I’d give anything for a magic cupboard that would bring my Lego minifigs to life. Then I could be really kind to them and earn a zillion footprints for that.

  I have four favorite minifigs that I’ve carried around in my pocket and played with so much their faces are almost worn off. Two are from Star Wars sets—Senator Palpatine and Count Dooku—and two from Batman—the Riddler and Penguin. Mom once asked me why all my favorite minifigs are the bad guys, and I explained it’s because they’re strong and they’re also the people who need friends the most. If my Batman minifig came to life the same size he is now—that’s what happens in the book, the plastic people stay small—would he need a big kid to help him out? My guess is, honestly, probably not.

  Also, if Batman came to life, he wouldn’t want me to make him food or build him a house—he’d want Alfred, his butler, to do all that stuff. I’d bring Alfred to life and while I was at it, Robin, too, and then my work would pretty much be done.

  With the Riddler and Penguin it wouldn’t be that way. We’d have to work together since they have no other friends and no one else likes them. Maybe this is how Omri feels in the book when he brings Little Bear to life. In every movie Omri’s seen, the Indian is the bad guy (I’m pretty sure he lived before the Batman and Star Wars movies), but even if the guy is shooting arrows and swinging a hatchet, how bad could he be if he’s small enough to stand in the palm of your hand? The answer is: not that bad.

  That’s how I feel about my guys. I get to know them better and I like them more. I always think bad guys make better movies. Look at Pirates of the Caribbean.

  Ever since that conversation with Olga about spending lunch periods working on her comic books in the library, I’ve been thinking about asking Mr. Norris if I could do the same thing, only I’d go to the computer lab, where they have movie-editing software that I learned how to use once, but I’ve never been able to try it again because my class always has an assignment during computer lab time.

  “You’re thinking about doing what?” Jeremy says at lunchtime. Rayshawn is eating at another table today. He goes back and forth between two tables and, I can’t help it, I always feel a little sad when he doesn’t sit with Jeremy and me. Maybe because I l
ike the way he laughs and shakes his head and says “sheesh” at the things Jeremy sometimes says.

  “Going to the computer lab. To ask if I could edit something there.”

  “Edit what?” Jeremy stares at me.

  “Just something I’m working on.”

  “Like what? Tell me.”

  I’m not sure why I started all this. “Just these little movies I make. It’s not that big a deal. I don’t play anything at recess anyway.”

  It’s true—the last few days Rayshawn has asked me to play basketball with two of his friends who are fifth graders. I’m pretty sure he’s kidding because the other guys are really good and so is he, so I haven’t played with them but I’ve stood on the sidelines and watched. They were so good, I wondered if Rayshawn asked me out of pity as a way to get a footprint.

  That would definitely be the worst way to get my name on a footprint—where I’m someone else’s good deed. No thanks, I decided last week, and stayed away from basketball. Now I have to admit Olga’s idea of skipping recess completely sounds pretty good. The problem is Mr. Norris already said no. “She’s got a medical excuse, Benny. Even so, all kids need to get exercise and Olga gets hers walking a lap around the building before school starts.”

  Couldn’t I do that? I wanted to say, but part of me feels like I already walk down enough hallways with Olga and I don’t need any more reasons for people to think we’re best friends.

  As I walked away from Mr. Norris’s desk, he must have felt sorry for me, because he said, “We couldn’t make it a regular thing, Benny, but if you’d like me to write you the occasional pass to go to the computer lab for recess, I will.”

  I smiled. He smiled back.

  “But let’s wait for the days when you really need it, okay?” he said.

  That reminded me of something my (old) dad would have said. In fact, he did say it a few times when he was coaching soccer and I was pretending to have a hurt ankle. “I’ll let you sit out a quarter, Benny, but how about if we wait for the games when you really need that?”

  He meant the games where the kids on the other side were really big and scary good. We played a few games like that, where the other team seemed like they’d gotten lost on the way to a high school game. We’d sit on our side and watch them warm up: one kid would head butt the ball to another kid, who’d catch it with his ankle. Sometimes even then, I’d feel bad about asking my dad to sit out—like maybe next week the other team would be even scarier.

  That’s what’s happened with the recess pass. I haven’t asked for one because I haven’t thought I really needed it.

  Jeremy stops asking about my movies pretty quickly. That’s one good thing about Jeremy. If you don’t want to talk about something, he’s not so curious that he’ll keep asking questions.

  That day at recess I spend most of the time sitting near the basketball court, planning the new movie I’ve gotten an idea for. It’s partly based on The Indian in the Cupboard only it’ll be the reverse. We’ll see the characters first as real people in their real movies and then they’ll wake up as plastic minifigs. If I download scenes from their original movies, it could be really great. Like we could see Count Dooku in the middle of a laser sword fight and then suddenly he wakes up, little and plastic. Then he runs into some other minifigs from other movies and the same thing has happened to them.

  They’ll all start asking one another, “How did this happen? How did we get so small and so plastic?”

  Then they’ll go to Lego Yoda, who’ll explain, “Popularity and success, this means. Plastic, it makes you. Fight back your way to your old story.”

  I have to stop there because the recess bell rings and Rayshawn is standing next to me, looking down at my pages. “Whatcha got there?” he says, wiping his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  “A plot outline for a Lego movie,” I tell him. I have no idea why I can say this so easily to Rayshawn when I have never told Jeremy.

  “For real?” Rayshawn says, crouching to study my quick drawings.

  “It’s just something I play around with. It’s not a big deal,” I say.

  “But you know how to make a movie? You have a movie camera and all that?”

  I want to say, Everyone does, Rayshawn, just open your parents’ phone. But the truth is I do have a decent camera. Last year, when Dad saw that I was serious about making movies, he brought out an old movie camera he used when we were little and showed me how to set it up on a tripod.

  “And you can make it look like those guys are moving around? Like having fights and stuff?”

  “Oh yeah, the fights are easy. Dialogue is a little harder. You have to dub that in afterward.”

  He tells me he likes my drawings and lifts the corner of one page so he can look at the next one. I’m not a bad artist.

  As we’re walking inside, he asks me more questions: How do I get the guys to move without showing my fingers? Doesn’t it take forever, one frame at a time? After I’ve explained everything, I almost ask him if he wants to come over and help me make a movie this weekend, but then I remember what happened when Lisa came over. I picture my dad hugging Rayshawn. I would die, I think. I would really die.

  I start the movie by myself over the weekend. I shoot the first scene, where each character wakes up and realizes their stubby plastic arms only bend at the shoulder and their legs have no knees. I have to say it’s pretty good. Since I don’t have a friend to help me, I get George, who turns out to be fine at pressing the shutter release when I say “Go!” which is great. It means I don’t have to get up every two seconds. When I made movies with Kenneth, I gave him this job, but he always thought I was moving the guys too much between each shot, so we had to waste a lot of time arguing about that. George doesn’t even look at the shot. He just likes the sound the camera makes when he presses the button, so he stays with it for a surprisingly long time and it goes faster than I’ve ever shot a scene before. In the last scene we shoot, I have all my main characters stand in a square (no circles in Lego world!) and try to decide what to do.

  “What do you think should happen now?” I ask George over lunch.

  He rocks a little. “Don’t know!” he says into his hand.

  “Is George really helping you?” Mom asks, surprised.

  “Yeah. He’s a good cameraman actually. Better than Kenneth was.”

  Mom puts some more mac and cheese on my plate and kisses the top of my head. “That’s because you’re a great teacher, Benny. You’re probably the best teacher George has. Don’t tell Martin I said that.”

  I think Mom says things like this because it’s not always easy hanging out with George and being his teacher. Like in the afternoon when we go back to shoot some more, he doesn’t want to listen to me. He just wants to keep pressing the shutter and hearing the sound until finally I have to get so mad at him Mom comes into the room and says we’re both going to lose all of our screen time if we don’t stop fighting.

  So that’s what a great teacher for George I am. Earlier, when Mom said that, I thought, Maybe she’ll tell Mr. Norris and he’ll write that on a footprint. It’s like even though I’m pretending to care less these days, it’s still this big stupid thing I keep thinking about.

  TEN

  ON MONDAY SOMETHING REALLY SURPRISING happens. At lunch, Ms. Crocker comes over to the table where Jeremy and I are sitting and sits down next to us. “Oh, Benny, I just heard about what happened to your dad this summer. I’m so sorry. Is he doing better now?”

  At first I’m so embarrassed I don’t know what to say. I haven’t told Jeremy anything about what happened to my dad. Every time I think about it, I picture Lisa screaming “Get him off of me!” Or I remember Jeremy asking if George was an alien contacting his mother ship, like he seriously thought that was a possibility. What will he say if I tell him my dad has no hair, a scary scar, and forgets almost everything you tell him these days?

  I feel my face burn red, but I know I have to say something. “He’s okay,
” I say. “It takes a while I guess, but he’s a lot better than he was.”

  “Good.”

  I’m blushing like this is a lie, even though it’s not. These days, he does seem better about half the time. Like in the morning he’ll come down while we’re eating breakfast and say hi to everyone. Sometimes he’ll look a little surprised, like he forgot how many kids he had, or how big we’ve gotten, but he usually he seems happy. The afternoons are harder. A lot of times he’s asleep when we get home. If he gets woken up, he’s usually in a terrible mood. He’ll tell us we have to go outside even if we’re not making that much noise. Sometimes it’s only George humming, but even that is too much. He’ll say his head is about to explode if someone doesn’t turn off whatever’s making that noise.

  “You let us know if there’s anything your family needs,” Ms. Crocker says. “That’s what we’re here for, Benny.”

  I try to think of something I could ask her for. Should I tell her, My mom seems pretty worried about money? If the school wanted to give us some, that would be great.

  Obviously I’m not going to say that. I have enough things to be embarrassed about.

  Jeremy waits until after Ms. Crocker walks away to ask, “What happened to your dad?”

  “He had an operation this summer on his brain.”

  “Oh.” Jeremy nods. “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah. I mean, sort of. It takes a while for the brain to get completely back to normal, I guess. So he still can’t do certain things.” I feel like I can’t lie to him completely. But I’m also not going to tell him that this morning my dad couldn’t remember the word for oatmeal. “Mostly he’s okay.”

  He narrows his eyes in a way that makes me nervous. Like he’s trying to decide if all this is too much and he shouldn’t be my friend: first my brother, now my dad.

  I wait forever until he finally says, “I think Ms. Crocker’s going to give you a footprint.”