Ten

  “What you’ve got to remember—and this has always been hard for you, Winnie—is that you can’t control how other people act. That means you can’t control what Alex does or doesn’t do. You can only control what you do.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Great. Yeah.”

  I controlled what I did by exiting the kitchen. I searched the house for Sandra, but found Ty instead. He was in the long hall just past the dining room, wrapped almost entirely in duct tape. Only his eyes and his nostrils were visible. His arms extended unnaturally from his body, and his legs were stiff, stubby tree trunks.

  “Hi, Ty,” I said. “Are you practicing for Halloween?”

  He nodded emphatically and made some oomphuhly sounds.

  “Are you a mummy?”

  He staggered toward me. He was very realistic.

  “Looking good,” I said, patting him on his duct-taped head. I moved to pass him, but he hop-lurched to block me. He widened his eyes and made more oomphuhly sounds, and it struck me that they weren’t happy oomphs. They were desperately unhappy oomphs. I’d just been too wrapped up in my own problems—“wrapped up,” ha—to notice.

  “Oh, Ty.” I tilted my head, studying him. I went around him, grabbed his torso from beneath his armpits, and lugged him backward up the stairs. His feet bumped along behind.

  “You’re lucky I’m so strong,” I panted.

  I stopped for a break at the halfway point, but when I relaxed my hold on him, he started sliding away. This time his head made the bumping sounds, and his oomphs were more of the owwie sort, I’d say.

  “Whoa!” I cried, chasing after him. “Get back here, you mummy!”

  It took a full hour to unwrap the little guy, and I learned an interesting fact, which was that boys were wimpier than girls when it came to neck hair. Ty was, anyway. Maybe it was because girls put their hair in ponytails, and so we were accustomed to the sensation of tugging?

  I wished I had a video camera so that I could record the whole long process, but since I didn’t, I decided I’d become a movie director when I grew up and make a movie of how one determined ten-year-old managed to free her helpless little brother from yards and yards of duct tape.

  There was squirming, there was whimpering, and there was a tiny bit of actual crying. The crying came from the unexpected discovery of a Dum Dum duct-taped to the base of Ty’s skull, right where those sensitive neck hairs were. Apparently Ty thought a partially sucked butterscotch-flavored one would make an excellent zombie antenna. Apparently, he forgot that zombies didn’t have antennas.

  Ooo! Since my movie would involve zombies, maybe it could be a made-for-TV Halloween special! I’d cast Alex Plotkin as the ugliest, dum-dum-iest zombie leader, and the plot twist would be that Ty wasn’t a zombie, despite all appearances. The plot twist would be that the dum-dum zombie leader tried to steal Ty away and make him a zombie, but the determined girl saved Ty and locked the mean dum-dum zombie in a cage for all of eternity. Sometimes she would throw in a chicken bone. Sometimes just pebbles.

  To play the role of the determined ten-year-old, I’d pick a brown-eyed, brown-haired girl, although with longer hair then I really had, and with pierced ears. For Ty, I’d choose a boy with lung power, since he’d have to scream through layers and layers of duct tape. Also, he’d need to have lots of hair, since big hair ball-y clumps of it would end up being yanked out.

  And ooo, ooo! I could make a hair ball toy to go into McDonald’s Happy Meal bags! It could be called Hair ball-y, the lovable, huggable hair ball. Each hair ball could be made of real hair—maybe from a llama?—with glued-on googly eyes. The girl hair balls could have pink bows, and the boy hair balls could wear tiny ball caps.

  The thought of those cute toy hair balls cheered me up so much that I gave up on finding Sandra and asking for advice concerning Amanda. Instead, as soon as Ty was duct tape–free, I plain and simply called Amanda herself.

  “You’re not considering Alex to have a crush on, are you?” I asked her flat out.

  “What?!” she said. “No. Ew.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Alex Plotkin? Winnie, I am very sure.”

  “Even with the dead eyeball?”

  “Especially with the dead eyeball. Ew. Why would I have a crush on a boy who touched a dead eyeball?”

  Technically, Alex hadn’t touched the dead eyeball, not according to his story. But why nitpick?

  “Well, good,” I said.

  “Did you really think I might?”

  “Yes, and that you two would get married and forget all about me and never sit with me at lunch again.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “I will always sit with you at lunch, you silly custard.”

  Silly custard?! Did Amanda just call me a silly custard? She did! She just used the nickname I made up for her, and it made me so happy! Now we were silly custards together ! ! !

  “And also, I might be over my crush phase for a while,” she confessed.

  “Really?”

  “Really. Why rush it, right?”

  “Uh, right,” I said, wondering if all mothers gave their daughters the same speeches on the exact same days. Maybe they had calendars for that sort of thing? “Hey, wanna be spy-girls for Halloween?”

  “No. I’m going as a princess. Do you want to be a princess with me?”

  “No. Maybe. Except, no. Like you said, why rush it?”

  “Okay, I’m confused. What do crushes and princesses have to do with each other?”

  I giggled. “Um, they both like pineapples?”

  “Winnie, you truly are weird,” Amanda said.

  “I know,” I said happily.

  Alex may have won the battle of the dangling eyeball, but I won Amanda.

  No, strike that, because I’d never lost Amanda.

  But I wanted to win something. Hmm, what did I win?

  Ah-ha! I knew! I won the Happy-to-Be-Weird Award, and not for the first time. And I hadn’t won by being a helpless princess or a piece of crushed pineapple, either. I’d won just by being me.

  November

  Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays in the world, right up there with Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and National “I Hate Olives” Day.

  Today in school we were doing our annual Thanksgivingbased activity. Every year we did Thanksgiving activities, but every year it was something different. In third grade, we made turkeys out of our handprints, which was preschoolish, but still fun. In fourth grade, we made homemade applesauce, just like the Pilgrims did. We made it for a big Thanksgiving feast for the whole school.

  This year, we’d be churning butter for the feast, but not today. Today we were making acrostics. Ms. Meyers had us write the word Thanksgiving on a piece of paper, with the letters going down the page instead of across. Now we were coming up with things we were thankful for that began with each of twelve letters. They could be single words or whole sentences, whatever we wanted as long as what we wrote was appropriate, Ms. Meyers said. She looked hard at Alex Plotkin when she said that, and when she turned away, I smiled evilly and mouthed, “Yeah, Alex.”

  T was easy. I picked a green pen and neatly wrote “urtles,” because turtles were awesome. If I didn’t grow up to be a movie director, I’d probably be a marine biologist and study sea turtles, because sea turtles could live to be over a hundred years old, and how cool was that? And on weekends, I could work at Sea World and train the dolphins.

  Sea World! Yes! I skipped ahead and wrote that down for the S of Thanksgiving. I had never been to Sea World, but I wanted to, and Ms. Meyers told us that writing things down was an excellent way of “setting your intentions.” She said that when we wrote down a goal or a dream or whatever, it helped to firm it up in your brain so that it would be more likely to actually happen.

  If she was telling the truth, then I should use one of my valuable letters to set my intentions regarding Alex. (But only one, because he didn’t deserve more than that.)

  Hrmm. H wasn’t a
good one, because H made me think of hate, and I didn’t hate Alex. Plus you couldn’t be thankful for hating someone, because that would just be weird. And sad. So H was out of the running as far as Alex went. For H, I decided to go with “aving fun with friends.” I drew a smiley face to go along with it.

  A was next. Oh! Perfect! As the A itself was already there, I bent over my desk and added, “lex Plotkin not living in my basement.” Was I thankful for that? WAS I EVER! Did I want to firm up the reality of that never happening? DID I EVER!

  I struggled for a few minutes with N. N was a tough nut to crack. Then I giggled, because der.

  “uts,” I penned in after the N. “Especially the ones in peanut M&M’s.”

  I wrote and wrote. This was fun. Soon my acrostic was almost done, and it looked this this:

  Things I Am Thankful For

  Turtles

  Having fun with friends

  Alex Plotkin not living in my basement

  Nuts, especially the ones in peanut M&M’s

  Krispy Kreme doughnuts!

  Sea World

  Getting to go to the Staute of Liberty

  Imagination (mine)

  Very best family EVER!!!!!!

  Interesting and highly informative shows on the Discovery Channel

  Not having to eat giblets, and also not being a giblet

  G

  I pooched out my lips. I was almost done. Lots of kids were only halfway done, or not even that close, but all I had left was that second G. What to put for that second G???

  The answer was handed to me out of thin air, because just then, Ms. Meyers said, “Okay, kids, finish up. We’ve got ten minutes before the bus gets here.”

  And my brain went wheee! Because of course—how could I have forgotten? The bus Ms. Meyers was talking about was coming to take all of us kids—both fifth grade classes—on a field trip! A field trip to the World of Coca-Cola, because Karen’s mom worked for Coke, and she got special permission for us to go.

  I laughed and slapped my desk when Ms. Meyers told us about it. When I showed Sandra the permission slip, I laughed some more. I didn’t have my desk to slap, so I slapped Sandra’s back.

  “Ouch,” Sandra said, lunging forward dramatically and pretending my slap had hurt.

  “But look!” I said, pointing out the World of Coca-Cola part on the permission slip.

  She closed her eyes, pressing her fingertips to her forehead. “Oh, good Lord.”

  “Yep!” I crowed. “The day has come: I’m going to get to be a tourist in my very own city! So who goes to the World of Coke? I do! I do!”

  Now, twining my feet around the legs of my desk, I grinned at that lonely G and filled in “oing to the World of Coke ! Yahoo-eee-hoo-eee-hoo-eeeeeee!”

  “Winnie?” Ms. Meyers said, standing above me. I jumped, and my knee bonked the underside of my desk, knocking my pencil and paper to the floor.

  “Smooth,” Alex said, but his voice sounded oddly far away. I lifted my head and saw that he was all the way across the room, lined up at the door with the rest of the class. When in the world had that happened?

  “Just leave her,” Alex suggested.

  “Oh, pooey on you,” I shot back.

  “Pooey on you both,” Ms. Meyers said, which shocked me, and then made me grin. Secretly, and without letting Alex see, she smiled a small smile just for me. “Come on, Winnie. It’s time to go.”

  The World of Coca-Cola was, in a word, Coketastic. We entered through the lobby, which was filled with statues of Coke bottles taller than me. The walls were decorated with photos of happy, smiling people, and though they weren’t drinking Coke in the pictures, I was pretty sure we supposed to think they had Cokes in their hands and their hands just happened to be out of sight, or that they had just finished swigging a delicious Coke, or that they were about to swig a delicious Coke and that’s why they were so happy.

  In addition to the photos and the statues, the lobby was also filled with REAL LIVE TOURISTS. I whispered to Amanda and Chantelle that we should be extra friendly and polite, so that we’d make a good impression.

  “How do you know they’re tourists?” Chantelle asked after I complimented an old man on his walking cane.

  “Because of their shirts,” I said, doing an arm sweep to draw their attention to the vast display. Some shirts had the Coke logo, some were Braves baseball jerseys, and one lady had on a lime green T-shirt that said Hotlanta in pink letters.

  “Wow,” Chantelle said.

  “Omigosh, I have never seen so many Atlanta shirts in my life,” Amanda said.

  “Yup,” I said. My point exactly.

  One boy—he was maybe seven or eight—had on a shirt that made me grouchy, however. His shirt said, I’m kind of a BIG DEAL in ATLANTA, but guess what? He wasn’t. He wasn’t a big deal at all, because if he was, then I would know him, or at least know of him, and I didn’t.

  He was clearly a tourist, I concluded, and that just added to his irksomeness. Because if he was a tourist, that meant he lived somewhere else. If he lived somewhere else, that meant that he was an outsider when it came to Atlanta, just like I’d been an outsider in New York. And in New York, had I gone around bragging that I was a big deal?

  No. In fact, I’d done the opposite. I’d behaved just like Aunt Lucy told me to, in order to fit in with the real New Yorkers.

  Whoa. If there were rules for New Yorkers—like don’t be spazzy if you see a famous person, fold your pizza before eating it, know how to hail a taxi with confidence—were there rules for people who lived in Atlanta? If so, did I follow them?

  This was confusing, because I pretty much only approved of rules when it came to board games and red lights. Like Sandra, I didn’t believe in rules for how to be a fifth grader or how to be a ninth grader, and as I’d taught Ty, I didn’t believe there were rules for how to be a boy versus how to be a girl.

  But I did like Coke. That was an unofficial Atlanta rule. And I loved Krispy Kreme doughnuts, although like most people in Atlanta, I’d only eat them when they were fresh off the doughnut conveyor belt. A cold Krispy Kreme doughnut wasn’t a real Krispy Kreme doughnut. A Krispy Kreme doughnut sold at the grocery store as a fund-raiser definitely wasn’t a real Krispy Kreme doughtnut.

  On the other hand, I preferred to be barefoot than to wear fancy shoes. I hate purses and other “proper Southern lady” things like lipstick (blech!) and pantyhose (double blech!).

  Maybe what it boiled down to was this: I was proud to be an Atlanta girl, but I had no desire to be just like every other girl in Atlanta. I didn’t want to fit inside a cookie cutter—or rather a Coke bottle! Ha! I just wanted to be me. And since I was me, and since I was doing a pretty good job of it (in my opinion), then who should be wearing the I’m kind of a BIG DEAL in ATLANTA shirt?

  That’s right: ME, a true Atlanta insider, who nonetheless wasn’t afraid to be an outsider when the mood struck.

  I got so wrapped up in my insider-outsider thoughts—and with wanting that boy’s shirt—that I almost got left behind when the other fifth graders exited the lobby. Amanda had to grab my elbow and say, “Winnie, snap out of it. It’s time to go in search of the secret formula!”

  “Huh?”

  She dragged me up the stairs to the second level, where the whole grade was filing into a theater. A sign at the door said, “Embark on a quest to uncover the mysterious secret formula for Coca-Cola! But beware: You’re in for a bumpy ride!”

  Chantelle and Maxine were ahead of us, accepting 3-D glasses from a man with wild hair who was dressed in a white lab coat. We fell in behind them and got our own pairs. They had the Coke logo on them. I immediately put mine on.

  “I am a ma-a-a-ad scientist!” I said in a mad scientist voice. I waved my hands around madly. “I will find the secret formula or die trying!”

  A girl named Mindy looked at me not as if I was a mad scientist, but as if I was a nutcase who deserved to be locked up. I didn’t know Mindy very well, because she was new t
o Trinity this year, and plus she was in the other fifth grade class. Still, I dropped my mad scientist act and grinned at her. She didn’t grin back.

  The theater went dark once everyone was inside, and the movie started. It was about this weird guy named Professor Rigsby who was trying to figure out why Coke was so good, and maybe it was kind of dumb, but I loved it anyway. There was a ferret that leaped out at us, and floating fruits, and when Professor Rigsby went to visit the Coke factory, he traveled there in a giant rumbling Coke can. And when the can on the screen rumbled, our seats rumbled!

  I was not expecting that, and I squealed and grabbed my armrests. Amanda squealed and grabbed me. Our seats moved other times, too, lurching us forward and shaking us up and tilting us from side to side. I guess that’s what the sign meant by telling us we were in for a bumpy ride.

  At one point, Professor Rigsby took us to see the water filtration system, and real water misted up from under our seats. We squealed again. I leaned over to see if there were hoses down there, but it was too dark for me to see. We got misted again when the movie showed a giant water fountain, but that time we were more prepared. We also got wind blown in our faces and jostled a lot more. It was awesome.

  After the movie, we were allowed to wander around on our own. Amanda, Chantelle, and I stuck together, and we learned lots of freaky facts about Coke. Like, in Japan, they sell soup in Coke cans, and that when Coke first came out, it cost five cents a glass.

  “Oh, oh!” I said, spotting the part of the museum I’d been looking for since we got there. “The tasting room! Come on!”

  We rushed inside and saw most of our class already in there. The whole room was one big soda fountain, pretty much, only instead of six drinks to choose from, we had sixty. Sixty different soft drinks, from all over the world! Sugar sugar sugar! And caffeine!

  “Oh my God,” I overheard Ms. Meyers say to Mrs. Tompkins after Alex Plotkin burped so loudly that a security guard had to tell him to quiet down. “Whose idea was this?”