Absolutely Almost

lunch.

  Erlan’s sister Ainyr told me that the hardest part of going to a new school would be lunch. “If you don’t have anybody to sit with,” she told me, “then everyone will think you’re a loser. If you sit with other loser kids, then everyone will think you’re a loser too. If you sit with kids who are way cooler than you, and they don’t want to sit with you, then they’ll think you’re a loser. You have to find kids to sit with who are just a little bit cooler than you, but not too much. Then everyone will think you’re cool too, but not trying too hard.”

  When she said all that, it made me really scared. Because it sounded super hard to figure all that out, and what if I messed up?

  Lucky for me, at my new school, everybody had to eat lunch with their same class, so I didn’t worry too much once I figured that out. Everybody in Mrs. Rouse’s class sat at one long table in the middle of the cafeteria. Mostly it was boys on one side, and girls on the other, but it was mixed up a little bit.

  I was sitting next to a girl who was tons shorter than me, even sitting down. Her feet didn’t quite reach the floor. I looked at her lunch as she pulled it out of her brown paper lunch bag. Turkey sandwich with no crusts, cut at an angle. A box of apple cranberry juice. Carrot sticks. It looked like a healthy lunch, but loads better than mine. I had leftover kimchi and a cold bagel with cream cheese, which is what Mom gives me when she forgets to make my lunch the day before. I have that lunch a lot. I looked around the table. Nobody else had kimchi. Almost everybody had sandwiches. I zipped the kimchi back inside my puffy green lunch sack.

  While I chewed my bagel, I looked around the table and tried to figure out who Erlan’s sister Ainyr would think was cool, and who she would say was a loser. But I couldn’t really tell. Everybody sort of just looked like a fifth-grader. There was a boy with spiky hair and a kid with a skateboarding shirt. One of the girls had a panda lunch box, which at my old school would be lame, but she seemed like she had a lot of friends, so maybe here panda lunch boxes were okay. I wondered who made up the rules about what was lame and what wasn’t, and who was cool and who was a loser. If somebody told me what the rules were, I’d be fine.

  While I was thinking all that, the girl next to me, the short one with the healthy-but-good lunch, pulled another thing out of her lunch bag.

  “Gummy bears?” I said. “Cool.” I love gummy bears.

  The girl looked up at me and smiled. It was kind of a funny smile, actually, like she was surprised I was talking to her. But before she could say anything, the boy across from me who was wearing the skateboard shirt—I think Mrs. Rouse called him Darren—said, “Ew, Albie, don’t talk to Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy.”

  I don’t know why he said her name like that—Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy. But when I looked at the girl, it seemed like she definitely didn’t like it. Her shoulders were sunk down, and her face was red, and somehow she looked even smaller than before.

  “Don’t call her that,” I said to the skateboard shirt boy. Darren. “That’s mean.” I didn’t know why it was mean, but sometimes you could tell that a person wasn’t being nice, even if you weren’t sure how.

  “Ew, Albie!” Darren said. “Is Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy your girlfriend?” And then he laughed like that was so funny, and so did all the boys next to him, and practically the whole other side of the lunch table. Then Darren tossed a potato chip toward me, and it stuck to my shirt. And even though it didn’t hurt, because it was just a potato chip, I knew that that definitely wasn’t nice.

  The whole other side of the lunch table laughed again.

  I think maybe a couple other kids might have almost started to toss potato chips at me too, because I could tell they thought it looked like fun, but just then, one of the lunch duty aides came over and got mad at Darren for throwing food. Darren glared at me the whole time, like it was my fault he threw a potato chip at me and got in trouble, and the whole other side of the lunch table glared too.

  That’s when I figured out that at P.S. 183, Darren was the one who wrote the rules.

  So it turned out that Erlan’s sister Ainyr was right. Lunch was the hardest part of the day. But it wasn’t all bad.

  After Darren and his friends finished glaring at me and went to the playground, I looked back at the table, and there, on a napkin next to my puffy green lunch sack, was a gummy bear. A red one. And everyone knows that red gummy bears are the best ones.

  I looked over at the girl next to me. “Thanks,” I told her. And I popped the gummy bear in my mouth.

  She smiled. Somehow she didn’t look so small when she smiled.

  stutter.

  I figured out why Darren and those other mean kids called the girl with the gummy bears Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy. It was because she has trouble saying words sometimes, especially beginnings, like b’s and t’s and k’s. I noticed it in class when Mrs. Rouse asked her to read a passage out loud from the textbook. The boys started snickering, and her face turned bright red, and her voice got really quiet, so quiet you could hardly hear her, until finally Mrs. Rouse said, “Thank you, Betsy. That was wonderful.”

  Betsy doesn’t talk too much.

  I asked Calista about it, and Calista said it sounded like Betsy had a stutter, which can make talking hard.

  I decided I liked Betsy. She gave me gummy bears at lunch without me even asking. We even picked each other for library partners. And when I got confused when Mrs. Rouse was explaining about the online card catalog, Betsy didn’t make fun of me. She just pointed to the right place where I was supposed to click. I didn’t mind that Betsy didn’t talk too much. Because it can be hard sometimes, saying what you mean. And I thought maybe I understood her most of the time anyway.

  einstein.

  On Saturday afternoon, Mom and I went for hot chocolate at the pastry place on Lexington. I always got hot chocolate, and she got coffee, and we picked one dessert from the case and split it. Sometimes it was crowded there, but it was my favorite place to go because there were giant hunks of stale bread with slits cut in them for the menus to slide into, and I thought that was funny. Also, the food was good.

  After we were finished with our éclair (which is just a fancy donut, really) but still sipping our drinks, a woman came up who I guess Mom knew from work.

  “And this must be Albie!” she said when she was done hugging Mom. The lady was wearing too much eye makeup. But I was polite, so I said hi.

  “Hi.”

  Then she hugged me too, which I didn’t like.

  “It’s so nice to meet you, Albie.”

  I smiled a smile without teeth.

  “I bet you’re a whiz in school,” the lady told me. I guess I looked confused when she said that, because then she said, “Well, when you share a name with one of the smartest men who ever lived, how could you not be?”

  I tilted my head to the side and probably looked more confused.

  “Albert Einstein,” she explained. And when she said it, she looked like I really should’ve known that. Like maybe I wasn’t so smart after all.

  I waited for Mom to say something about that, but when I looked up at her, she was smiling a smile without teeth. “It was lovely running into you, Theresa,” she said, and then she hugged the lady again, and I had to hug her too, but after that the lady went away, which was good.

  “My name’s not Albert,” I said when I was sitting down again, back to sipping my hot chocolate. “It’s Albin.”

  “I know that, Albie,” Mom said. “I named you, remember?” She finished the rest of her coffee. “You about ready?”

  “Yeah, almost.”

  I let the last sip of hot chocolate sit on my tongue for a little bit before I swallowed it down, and then Mom and I headed home.

  almost, albie.

  My whole life, I’ve always been an almost.

  “Almost, Albie.”

  “Almost.”

  I was an almost in kindergarten when
I asked if I could use markers at art time, instead of just crayons.

  “Almost, Albie,” the art teacher said. “Let’s wait until your grip is a little stronger.”

  I was an almost in first grade when I wanted to walk our dog, Biscuit.

  “Almost, Albie,” my mom said. “He still tugs too hard for you.”

  I was an almost in second grade after I spent a whole weekend practicing my sounding-out words so I could move up to the red reading group.

  “Almost, Albie,” Miss Langhoff told me. “You have a tiny ways to go.”

  I was an almost in third grade too, when my poem wasn’t picked for the wall for Parents’ Night.

  “Almost, Albie,” Mr. Vidal said. “I almost put yours up. But there were so many to choose from.”

  By fourth grade, I was an almost every day.

  “Almost, Albie.”

  That’s what they tell me.

  “Almost.”

  “Almost.”

  Always, always almost.

  a real a-10

  thunderbolt.

  Me and my dad went to the Sea, Air, and Space Museum together once, when I was nine. We spent the whole day together, me and him. It was the best day. Dad even had fun too, I think. He said he did. Afterward he said he wasn’t so sorry the subway broke down and got us stuck there, all the way over on the west side of Manhattan, where no cabdriver would ever dream of picking us up.

  Dad bought me a model airplane from the gift shop, a real A-10 Thunderbolt. He said he’d help me put it together. He hasn’t had a lot of time lately, but one of these days, he will. It will be a lot of fun.

  math club.

  Mrs. Rouse signed me up for math club. She did it without even asking me, which I thought wasn’t very fair. I told her I didn’t want to be in any math club, because math is the worst subject out of any subject in the school. Only I didn’t exactly say the part about math being awful, because she taught math, so that might make her sad. Even if she did deserve it, because of signing me up for math club without even asking me.

  “I think you’ll like it, Albie, really,” Mrs. Rouse told me, which was what grown-ups said right before they made you do something that stunk. I wrinkled my nose. “Just give it a shot, all right?”

  I guess I didn’t have much choice, now, did I?

  The one good thing about math club was that it took place during my regular math time, so I only had to do math once a day instead of twice, like I was worried about. The club leader’s name was Mr. Clifton, and there were five other kids in fourth-period math club, from all different grades.

  The first thing I noticed about Mr. Clifton was that he smiled a lot. There were basketball posters all over the walls, that was the next thing I noticed. Which I thought was good, because I was worried that a teacher who was in charge of math club might only like math and nothing else, and that would be terrible. I didn’t know a whole lot about basketball, but it seemed way better than math anyway, so I figured Mr. Clifton was probably all right.

  What happened in math club the first day was that Mr. Clifton gave us all one goldfish cracker and then asked us how many we had altogether. Which was easy. Even I knew that one. It was six. That wasn’t math, it was counting. Then Mr. Clifton gave us all another goldfish cracker, and asked us again. He kept giving us more and more goldfish crackers, and then we all put our piles together in the middle of the table and helped each other count them. Savannah was the fastest counter, and this boy Jacob was the slowest. I was second-slowest, but no one seemed to care.

  All the kids were nice.

  When math club was over, Mr. Clifton let us eat the crackers.

  “You guys eat like sharks!” Mr. Clifton said as we gobbled up the last of the crackers. “You sure you all got enough breakfast?”

  I got back to Mrs. Rouse’s room just in time for recess, and she said that as long as I went to math club every single day, I didn’t have to do math homework with the rest of the class. That’s when I told Mrs. Rouse that math club maybe wasn’t so bad after all and I wasn’t mad at her for signing me up for it.

  “Thanks, Albie,” she said. “I appreciate you telling me that.”

  “They should change the name, though,” I said.

  “Oh?” Mrs. Rouse asked.

  “Yeah. Instead of ‘math club’ they should call it ‘cracker club,’ because we didn’t do any math at all.”

  Mrs. Rouse just smiled.

  an empty

  tin can.

  Calista could make friends with an empty tin can—that’s what she told me her boyfriend said about her. I don’t know why her boyfriend thought Calista would want to be friends with an empty tin can, but anyway, he was probably right. I figured that out after we stopped at the bodega downstairs on our way home from school one day and she started talking to Hugo, the old man who owns the store.

  Also, I didn’t know Calista had a boyfriend. Why hadn’t she ever told me before that she had a boyfriend?

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any bottle caps, would you?” Calista asked Hugo while I studied the donut case on the counter to decide which one I wanted most. Mom said my limit was one donut per week, but I think she forgot to tell Calista that, because Calista let me have one almost every day, as long as I spent my own allowance on it.

  “Bottle caps?” Hugo asked. He had a thick accent, but I couldn’t tell from where. He had lots of curly gray hair and a big wide nose, and he was very friendly. I was glad he was our bodega owner and not the guy who worked at the one on 62nd Street. Erlan and I went in there once to see if they had Smarties, and that guy yelled at us, “No parents? Get out!” Even though Erlan’s mom was right outside on her cell phone.

  “Yeah,” Calista told Hugo. “I’m collecting bottle caps for an art project.”

  I pressed my nose close to the plastic case and studied the jelly donut and the twist with chocolate frosting. I was feeling more like a jelly donut, but the twist looked fresher. While I was thinking, Calista tried to explain to Hugo about her art project. By the time I settled on a plain glazed, Calista was behind the counter, showing him pictures of her “work in progress” on her phone.

  “That’s pretty good!” he told her, and she smiled big.

  I lifted the lid of the plastic case and grabbed a paper tissue to pick out my donut. I wondered why Calista had never told me she needed bottle caps before. I found bottle caps all over the place.

  Hugo rang up my donut on the register, and I pulled my dollar out of my pocket.

  “You come in here a lot, don’t you?” he asked me. And when I nodded, he stretched his hand across the counter. “I’m Hugo.”

  “I know,” I told him. “It says so on your name tag.”

  “Albie!” Calista nudged me in the side. “He gets shy,” she told Hugo. Which was not true. She stretched her hand out to shake Hugo’s, which is when I realized that’s what I probably should have done. “I’m Calista,” she told him, and they shook.

  “Nice to meet you, Calista,” Hugo told her. “You too, Albie.” But he didn’t try to shake my hand again, which made me mad, because that time I was all ready. I put my dollar on the counter and shrugged at him. “Well, see you two tomorrow!” he said.

  Calista said good-bye, but I didn’t.

  “He’s nice,” she told me as we squeezed into the elevator.

  I pushed the button for floor eight, and the door closed. I stared at the glazed donut in the paper tissue in my hand. I wanted to take a giant bite right there, but donuts always tasted better if you waited till you were home first.

  “How come you never told me you had a boyfriend?” I asked Calista.

  Calista was putting her phone back in her pocket. “Didn’t I?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. And I wasn’t sure why, but that made me madder than not shaking Hugo’s hand.

  I took a b
ite of the donut.

  jokes.

  Every day at the beginning of math club, Mr. Clifton told us a new joke. He’d wait until we were all in our seats, and then he’d raise his white eyebrows, and smile just a little bit, and say the first part of the joke.

  “Why are math books always so sad?”

  That was the one from Thursday. I didn’t know the answer, but no one else did either, so I didn’t feel bad. Pretty much no one ever knew the answer.

  You could always tell when Mr. Clifton was about to say the punch line, because he’d clear his throat and look like he was about to say something super serious.

  “Because,” he said, his head tilted low so that he was looking at us all from over the tops of his glasses, “they have so many problems.”

  That one made us all laugh—well, all except Savannah. She hardly laughed at any of the jokes, only the really really funny ones. I laughed at almost all of them.

  When Mr. Clifton saw that we liked that joke pretty well, he nodded, very serious, and went behind his desk to write something in his notebook. “Use again next year,” he mumbled to himself as he wrote.

  The only thing I didn’t like about Mr. Clifton’s jokes was that they were always about math.

  ten words.

  I studied for the spelling test every Thursday. Calista helped me. Every single Thursday. We went over all the words. Calista even made flash cards sometimes, with pictures on them, so I would remember the words and the way to spell them. Growth. G-R-O-W-T-H. That flash card had a flower on it, for grow spelled the normal way, like a flower grows, and then after that, there was a boy smiling with all his teeth, for the th sound that comes at the end of teeth.

  So how come I could remember that when I was doing flash cards with Calista, but when it came to the test on Friday, I wrote groth, because I forgot how to spell grow like a flower because I got nervous? Anyway, sometimes o makes the ow sound even when the w’s not there, like in note. There’s no w in note.