Tonight, though, I just needed permission to help Mike after school tomorrow.
Finally my dad put down his pen and said, “There,” rubbing his eyes and staring at me in between the Himalayas of papers. Ms. Frane had just taught us about Mt. Everest, and Sherman Howl said his uncle made it to the third step but then went snow-blind and had to turn back. None of us believed him.
“I don’t know,” my dad said. “Why doesn’t Mike go and get some real help?”
“It’s just this once. Remember I told you Chad was in the hospital?” He didn’t answer. He took a stack of papers from one pile and stacked it on top of another. “Mike said he would pick me up and bring me home. So can I?”
My dad started flipping through the papers. “And when is this happening?” he sighed, like it was already on the calendar.
“Tomorrow. After school.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said shaking his head and flipping through more papers. “There’s no name on here.”
Which may or may not have meant yes, so I said thanks and left.
22
Licentia vatum
Poetic license
The next day after school, I biked by Mrs. Perry’s white Cadillac in the pick-up line. She waved to me, but I saw two heads in the back, Rennie’s and Jennie Pratt’s, so I didn’t wave back.
This morning I had made it almost halfway up the big hill before getting off my bike to walk. Mr. Solo noticed how much farther up I was getting these days. He said, “Looking good,” when he passed me, nothing about my head, so I gave him the thumbs-up inside his dentist mirror.
Nobody was home. It was M’s last day of work and some nurses were taking her out for dinner afterward. When my dad told me this at my lobster this morning, I thought he might say, And that’s why you can’t go help Mike later. But he didn’t. So I waited for Mike in my room, reading more of The Long Winter and letting The Boss wander around my room until I heard tires crunching.
I rolled off the bed, dropped The Boss back in his cage in the closet, and grabbed my backpack. I was standing in Mrs. Weller’s driveway by my next blink.
“Hey, Apron,” Mike said, climbing out of the Scent Appeal van. He still looked like Jesus, but a paler, more tired one now. His white T-shirt smelled clean when he hugged me, though, and he was wearing his same old jeans.
“What happened to the ORD UCK?”
“Had to sell it,” he said. “Listen, thanks for helping me out. I’m sure you had some fun kid things to do today.”
I looked up at him. “I don’t do fun kid things,” I said. But it came out as I don’t do fun kid things, which was worse.
A chipmunk whizzed by like a rocket and disappeared up a tree.
“You never told me you knew my mom.”
Mike nodded. “I met her right before …” He looked down, flashing his eyes right and left, remembering. “Before Halloween. She was helping Millie with a broken cupboard. She was nice, Apron. And beautiful.”
A shooting star went off in my stomach.
“I saw her a few times after that in her garden,” Mike looked over at my house. “But you were always at school, or someone’s house, maybe?”
“Rennie’s,” I said. “We used to be best friends. Now we’re not.”
He nodded absently. “Listen. I better go check on Millie for a sec.”
I said okay and walked across her yard and sat down against a tree. An ant crawled over my ankle, but I just let it.
After a whole city of ants had used my ankle as a bridge, Mrs. Weller came out on her doorstep wearing her orange sweat suit with white sneakers and an orange bandana wrapped around her head like George Washington playing Little Orange Riding Hood.
“Hi, Mrs. Weller,” I waved, brushing the ants off me and standing.
“Did you hear about your grandmother’s cruise?” she clucked.
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she could see me this far away, so I said, “Yes.”
“Your grandfather would roll over in his grave if he knew about that. But then again,” she said nodding over to my house. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Mike walked back out wearing orange gardening gloves and holding some clippers. “I’ll be just a minute, Apron,” he said, crossing the lawn to Mrs. Weller’s rose garden. Mrs. Weller walked back inside, so I went over to watch Mike snip off branches of perfectly good orange roses and let them fall to the ground.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Pruning?” he asked, another branch biting the dust.
It smelled like the best perfume in the mall right there. Another chipmunk zoomed by, but stopped in the middle of nowhere to look around when it heard the snap of the clippers. It took off again when Mike said, “It takes a lot of energy for a plant to keep the old buds alive, when it could be used to help the new buds grow.”
Mike kept clipping while he spoke, moving in and around the bushes, flipping his hair back off his shoulders once in a while. “Out with the old, in with the new kind of thing,” he said after another bush had been knocked off. Last year, Mr. Burke told us in Science Lab that if you hooked trees up to tiny microphones and then chopped them down, you could hear them scream. “Our ears can’t hear it, though,” he said pulling on his black moustache. “Their screams are that high-pitched.” Everyone thought he was making it up. Except me. Because unless you were a tree, how would you know?
I picked up an orange rose. “Collige virgo Rosas,” I said quietly.
“Did you just say something in another language or am I hearing things?” Mike smiled.
“Latin. Pick, girl, the Roses. It means stop and smell the roses.”
“I like that,” Mike said.
“My mom did, too,” I told him. It was the only sentence she liked in Latin.
When we got to Scent Appeal, Mike opened the back door of the van and filled my arms with flowers. “I’ll get the rest,” he said. “If Chad’s awake, go sit with him. He’s been waiting to tell you something.”
The window was still covered with garbage bags and tape, and inside it didn’t smell as good as it used to. Some of the flowers were sagged over or dried up.
Upstairs there was a long lump under a white blanket on the couch. It was so hot in the living room you didn’t even need your skin on. But Chad’s blanket covered his whole body all the way up to his chin.
“Hi, Chad,” I whispered.
His eyes popped open and he pulled himself up. “Apron.” He groaned a little, like he was getting a Band-Aid ripped off. “Come here.”
I put the flowers on the floor and walked over to him, feeling guilty for ever being mad at my freckles. At least they were normal ugly. Chad’s face had two new black spots on it that were so big and uneven it was hard to stop looking at them. One was next to his ear and one was on his chin. His face looked like the skull that Mr. Solo kept in his classroom, but with a little skin on it.
I tried to smile.
“Listen,” Chad said, letting his blanket fall off. He was wearing a dark blue sweater. “What goes ninety-nine clunk, ninety-nine clunk, ninety-nine clunk?” He grinned at me. You could tell he had no idea how much worse he looked in just a few days. That’s what a hospital could do to you.
“I don’t know,” I said, wishing I hadn’t come up here without Mike. “A pirate with a lot of friends?”
“Close! A centipede with a wooden leg! Hah!” He pointed at me and laughed, and really did look a little better.
I tried to laugh back. “Good one. Where did you get that?”
“Hey, man, I have my sources.”
He waved me over to sit on the floor next to him. The coffee table was gone. The TV was too.
“Where’s your TV?”
“Sold it,” Chad shrugged. “Drug money. You know.”
I said oh.
“So what’s been going on around the school yard?” Chad asked, snapping his fingers. “What’s the word. What’s the haps. Everyone talking smack about Back to t
he Future? Think they’re going to go out and get themselves one of those fancy time-warp cars?”
“You’re a freak, Chad,” Mike said walking in with more flowers. “You’re the one who wants that kid’s car.”
“Ooh,” Chad said wiggling his eyebrows. “Me, Michael J. Fox, suddenly back in homeroom class, dissecting things.”
Mike tried not to laugh, but you could see the corners of his mouth begging him to let them go. Chad blew him a kiss and Mike finally gave in, both sides of his smile, and most of his eyes, turning up.
“Okay,” Mike said putting the flowers on the floor. “We’re going to do these up here today so Chad doesn’t have to move.” He headed back down the stairs again.
“I must really be close to the end then, huh?” Chad winked at me.
I didn’t answer. Chad lay back down on the couch and closed his eyes. I tried to unwrap the newspaper as quietly as I could. I knew the names of all the flowers, but I made up new names for them anyway as I rolled them out of their newspapers. Names that matched their smells like: “No More Jenny Pratt” and “Sea Glass Cave.” All of them, especially “Gone Back to Brazil Forever,” made the room start smelling better. After his last delivery, Mike walked into their kitchen and got himself a glass of water. Chad still hadn’t moved yet, but Mike wasn’t looking too worried about it. Mike put his glass down and started telling me how many of each flower went into the arrangements.
“And Lisianthus,” Mike said walking over and pointing to the last pile. “Wait, what did we say, Chaddie? Five or six of each?”
Chad lifted his head like he had been awake the whole time and looked over at us. “Three,” he said. “Makes a statement,” then flopped his head back onto the pillow.
“It’s all a big blur to me now, what we learned in school. Like, I think we learned verbs in fourth grade, is that right?” Chad mumbled while Mike and I started grabbing from this pile and taking from that, saying, “Oops, sorry,” once in a while when we bumped wrists. Being this close to Mike made the cramp in my heart loosen up a bit, like little shingles were falling off of it.
I told Chad no, that happened in first grade, even though you really learn your verbs from Schoolhouse Rock! before that. Chad and Mike said, “Oh yeah!” at the same time, and then Chad started singing “Conjunction junction what’s your function?” And Mike and I started singing it, too. You could hear what a good voice Mike had when he started harmonizing. They had both forgotten the noun song, but when I said, “A noun is a person, place, or thing,” they caught on again.
“Cool. We’re all nouns. Wait a minute, have you had to write a thesis yet?” Chad asked.
Mike chuckled. “Where’d you go to seventh grade, Harvard? Didn’t know that was your alma mater.”
I looked at him. “That’s Latin, you know. It translates as ‘nurturing mother.’”
Chad whistled. “Kid’s a scholar.”
I shrugged. “My dad teaches it.”
“So it’s not dead after all,” Mike said.
“It teaches you the English language. That helps with spelling and stuff.”
“You’re scary,” Chad said.
“You’re speaking it all the time. You just don’t know it,” I argued.
“I’d know it,” Chad chuckled.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “So you and me and Mike, we’re all—?”
“Present?” Chad guessed.
I shook my head. “No. We’re all homo—?”
Chad and Mike looked at me, surprised.
“Sapiens,” I finished quickly, my cheeks heating up. “Men. I mean man.” I looked down at the flowers. No wonder Rennie and Jenny Pratt hated me.
Chad propped himself up on his elbows and said, “Or just plain homos, in Mike’s and my case.”
“Chad,” Mike warned him.
“Oh come on, that was funny,” Chad said while I untangled some stems.
My cheeks were still rug burned, so I leaned into a bunch of babies’ breath and pretended to smell them, hoping they wouldn’t remember that babies’ breath doesn’t even have a smell.
“Anyway, tell us some more things we used to do in seventh grade, Apron.”
“Geometry and social studies,” I said happy to change the subject. “And we have to write a free verse poem. By Monday.”
“A free verse poem,” Chad said dreamily. “Now those I remember. Don’t I, Mikey?”
Mike shrugged. “Probably not,” he said counting out some irises. “What’s your poem about?”
“Love,” I groaned, like it was the worst news in the world. “What it means to you.”
“Love!” Chad clapped. “So what does love mean to you, Apron?”
I told him I thought it was a dumb question.
No one said anything for a second, but I could tell they were eyeballing each other. Then Chad said, “Yeah. My mom’s dead, too.”
“She is?” I stopped untangling stems to look at him.
“Will you knock it off, Chad,” Mike warned him meanly this time.
“What?” he said throwing his hands up. “She is, to me. Haven’t spoken to the woman in twelve years. That’s pretty dead.”
“Nice,” Mike mumbled, shaking his head.
I focused on figuring out the tallest daisy, then snipping it.
“Tell you what, Apron,” Chad said. “I’ll write the poem for you.” He lifted himself up on his elbows again. “I’m a hopeless romantic-type, right Mikey?”
“You can’t do that, Chad. Apron could get in trouble. Teachers have a way of knowing stuff like that. You’re not actually a seventh grader, remember?”
Chad pouted. “Well, then, can I help write it? Please? I’ll take you to Dairy Queen?” He blinked at me, then Mike. “Fine. Mike will take us to Dairy Queen.”
Mike gave a quick nod.
“Great!” Chad smiled, even though I still hadn’t agreed to anything. He stood and shuffled over to the kitchen for a pen and some paper, then shuffled back to the couch. “What Love Means to Me,” Chad said, writing. “By Apron Bramhall, the loveliest noun I know. Get over here, noun.”
So I did. And while Mike drove off to deliver the flowers, Chad and I wrote my free verse poem together.
And later, when Chad slid the poem into my backpack he said, “You’re gonna get an A. You wait.”
23
Draco dormiens nunquam titillandu.
A sleeping dragon is never to be tickled.
If you thought M looked bad before, you had to see her now. She had black circles under her eyes the size of a football player’s and her mouth hung so low she probably couldn’t lift it up into a smile if she tried. Even though she didn’t look as bad as Chad did, she looked like she could check into the hospital for a nap at least. And if she looked this bad, you could only imagine what that little whatever in there looked like. Which is why, when I saw her carrying a load of laundry up the stairs, I heard myself say, “I’ll do it.”
She looked up at me like she was too tired to play games.
So I stepped down and took the pile out of her hands just to prove it.
“What do you want?” she scowled.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that you seem kind of tired this morning.”
Turns out I did want something, though.
In the bathroom, I pulled the green curtain back. The other side was the laundry room, and the hamper against the wall already had a few arms and legs hanging out of it. I dropped M’s pile, dumped the hamper out on top of it, and started sorting. When I was done, I plucked my dad’s bright red shirt, which always bleeds, out of the darks and dropped it in with the whites, which had his favorite summer pants and white button-down shirt. Sadly, I was going to have to sacrifice my white Portland Pottery T-shirt to make things look real.
I was putting in the load when I noticed M through the space between the curtain studying herself in the mirror. She pulled both cheeks back with her palms and opened her mouth as wide as she could. Then she dropped her ey
es to her bump and turned sideways, smoothing my dad’s plaid shirt over it. She tried to suck in her stomach, but it wasn’t going anywhere. That little whatever was going to have to come out one way or the other now. M let the bump go and put her hands over her face and started crying; silent and quick with shaking shoulders.
Even though she wasn’t hitting her bump this time, that same tidal wave of sadness crashed into me. When Mrs. Christianson was pregnant, she rubbed her stomach so nicely you practically wanted to climb in there yourself. But M just hated it, you could tell.
Maybe I needed to cut back on the messes I was making. At least for a few days. My dad had started clenching his jaw again, what he always did when he had a low-grade problem, and M had started stepping away from him. I pulled my dad’s red shirt out of the load and threw it back down with the darks. Then I opened the curtain. But when M saw my face, her eyes hardened. “This laundry should be your job anyway, Aprons. You American girls are all so spoiled,” she hissed, walking out.
So I picked up the red shirt again, dropped it back in with the white load, and started the laundry machine.
By the time I got downstairs, M was standing in front of the stove cooking runny eggs. “Morning, Apron,” my dad said sitting at his lobster. Last night after Mike dropped me off, he had yelled out from his office, “Is that you, Margie?” I had made it home before M, who was still out with her nurse friends. I poked my head in through his doorway. “Oh. Apron. How’d the flowers go?” he asked. So I told him. And he told me to make sure the front door was unlocked and to go on up to bed, it was late.
Now, I got down my cereal, but something was too thick around here and it turned out to be their moods. M put some eggs in front of my dad and asked me if I wanted any. My dad was watching so I looked her straight in the eye and smiled when I said, “No, thank you.” She looked away and sat down. My dad took a few bites of the glop, but M stared at hers, not eating a thing.