“The problem,” Dr. Bennington said walking over to a chair and putting his cup and cookies down next to my plaque. “Is that you can’t get an X ray anyway. You’re expecting, right?”
M looked at me with her eyes so puffed out it was hard for her to squeeze her forehead together. “Pregnant,” I told her. Then to Dr. Bennington, I said, “She’s from Brazil.”
“Ah,” he nodded. Then he started talking to her like she was Helen Keller instead of just un-American. “So, unfortunately, all you can do is keep it taped and stay off of it.”
“For how longs?” she asked.
Dr. Bennington tipped his head, “I’d say, ooh, six to eight weeks. Just go by the pain. But a woman in your condition, ah, a pregnant woman, is going to take longer to heal. Your body just cares about the baby now.”
M clenched her teeth when he said that.
Dr. Bennington must have seen her look too, because he started talking to me instead: Could someone come pick us up? Could someone find her crutches? Could someone get her one of those flat wooden shoes?
“I can call my grandmother?”
What I couldn’t do was call my dad. Not in the middle of finals week.
“All right then,” Dr. Bennington nodded, sitting down next to M’s foot. “Nurse, can she use a phone?”
After the school nurse and I walked into the gym teachers’ office and I pretended to laugh at the joke she made about how me and my mom were quite a pair—first I fall flat on my face and then she breaks her toe, ha ha—I dialed Grandma Bramhall’s number.
After three rings, the answering machine picked up.
“Greetings,” her voice said, with no hint of a shake. “I am not home right now. If this is that nice insurance man, I was calling with regards as to whether or not cruises are a part of my plan.” She was probably out shopping for a bikini.
“No luck?” the school nurse asked, looking up from her magazine—tan, happy people all over the place.
I shook my head. “My grandmother’s going on a cruise.”
“Oh. That’s nice,” she said, but we both knew that I didn’t know what to do next.
The nurse went back to reading.
I hesitated for a minute. But it was the only other person I could think of.
“Scent Appeal,” Mike answered.
“Hi,” I said.
“Oh hey, Apron. Listen, I’m just finishing up with a customer. Yes, that’s a Casablanca, ma’am.”
“Mike,” I said, sounding different, because right away he said, “What’s wrong?”
“I broke M’s toe.”
“What?”
I told him the whole story and didn’t even stop when he whispered, “Yes, irises come in white, too,” until I finished telling him how Dr. Bennington said it might or might not be broken.
“I used to think Chad was a klutz,” he said. “But you take the cake.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I can’t call my dad, he’s giving finals right now. You’d have to be dead to interrupt him.”
Mike sighed and I held my breath.
I hadn’t actually come out and asked him to pick us up, so when he said, “All right, give me twenty minutes, I gotta go dig out my old crutches,” I knew with every last drop of blood and every bone in my body that Mike was at least related to Jesus.
“Thanks, Mike,” I said. “You’re saving me.”
“Then we’re even.”
“Do you remember how to get here?”
“What do you mean? Of course I do. I was just there this morning, dropping off the flowers.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I told you. Your teacher got all the graduation flowers from us.”
“No, you didn’t.” I couldn’t believe it. “And you didn’t even ask me to help set up?”
“Oh, we didn’t set anything up. The head of the decorating committee wanted to do that herself, Mrs. Something-or-Rather. I can’t remember now. So I just dropped the flowers off.”
“Wait. This Mrs.? Did she have one big tight curl?”
“Yeah,” Mike chuckled. “She did.”
“That was Mrs. Perry. Rennie’s mom.”
“Oooh.”
“Was Rennie there, too?”
“Nope. Just Mrs. Perry. See you in a bit,” Mike said and hung up.
31
Iuguolo lemma per pietas.
Kill M with kindness.
It took a long time to get M into the Scent Appeal van.
First, Mike had to find us in the gym. M was still sitting with her leg up, sipping the lemonade I had gone out to get for her and I was waiting in the eighth-grade section, as far away from Dr. Bennington and the other leftover parents as I could without seeming rude. I smelled Mike and Chad’s flowers. We would have done a much better job arranging them than Mrs. Perry had. On the soccer field, I had found Mrs. Perry and told her M wouldn’t need a ride back now after all. My friend Mike was going to take her. I waited for her to recognize the name, but she just smiled and said, “Okay, honey,” and, “Congratulations on the award,” then checked on her curl and went back to talking.
When Mike finally walked in with some crutches under his arm, I jumped up and ran over to him.
“Hey, Apron,” he said giving me a tight hug. His hair was back to being all around his face again and he was wearing his same old blue jeans and a white T-shirt, with a swipe of pollen on his left sleeve. I wished Johnny Berman had seen us. He might have thought Mike was my boyfriend. “You must be in big trouble,” he whispered.
“Not yet,” I said. “My dad still doesn’t know.”
“Looks pretty good in here,” he said, glancing around at the flowers. “So where’s the evil M?”
He didn’t need my help finding her, though. We just both started walking toward the chairs and pretty soon the parents moved out of the way and there she was, her face slumped down so low her cheeks practically touched her chin.
Until she saw Mike.
Then all of a sudden, her face slid back up. She didn’t exactly smile, but you could tell she was thinking about it.
“Well, hello,” Mike said taking her hand and kissing the back of it. “You must be Marguerite.”
“Yes,” M said, shifting herself straighter. She smiled like the lady on Dynasty, but the bad one, with the black hair. Even though Mike had been standing next to me in church when she walked by and hissed, clearly M didn’t remember him.
Mike brought the crutches out from behind his back with his other hand and said, “Your chariot awaits, Madame,” then bowed to her.
M smiled. Even though her toe was purple and her bump was huge and I was about to get grounded forever, I smiled too. If you didn’t know the whole story, you might think that Mike was asking M to marry him and giving her a set of crutches for a promise.
Dr. Bennington poked his head down in between them and said, “Hi there, are you Margie’s husband.”
“No,” Mike said shaking his head low. “Alas, we all can’t be.”
M must have understood that Shakespeare, because she laughed quickly, throwing her head back.
“Okay,” Dr. Bennington said. “I told her she needs to keep the toes taped together. She should be looked at by a doctor at some point, but for now, she needs to keep it up and iced.”
“Thanks, doctor, can she come to your office tomorrow?”
“Oh no,” Dr. Bennington chuckled. “I’m an oncologist, not a podiatrist.”
My skin unzipped. Those were the worst kinds of doctors. They never saved anyone.
I tugged on Mike’s shoulder and said, “Come on.” The last thing I needed was for Rennie to walk in and start batting her eyelashes at him.
When M saw me do that, she lost her smile, but it came right back on as soon as Mike leaned down to help her up, hooking his hands under each of her arms. M kept her foot lifted and Mike reached back for the crutches and slid them into her underarms. “Perfect,” Mike said. “Gorgeous and tall. Are you a supermodel?”
&n
bsp; M giggled. Turns out she knew that word, too.
Mike said, “Apron, can you get Marguerite’s shoe?” Then they both ignored me and started hobbling out the door, so I stashed my award for Best Attitude under my arm and hooked my finger under the smelly black strap.
I heard M say, “Are you one of Apron’s teachers?” when I came around the corner with my bike.
“No,” Mike answered. “Just a friend.”
That put a skip in my step, until I saw Rennie and her family walking the same way as us toward the parking lot.
At first Rennie didn’t see Mike, or M, or me walking my bike. But when she turned to say something to her mother, her face lit up. “Hey!” she said waving to Mike. “Mike! Mike Weller!” and came running over.
Mike stopped and smiled, keeping a hand on M so she wouldn’t fall over. “Hey, Rennie,” he said.
Her face turned neon pink, you could tell she was flattered he remembered her name.
When Mr. and Mrs. Perry saw the three of us standing there, they started toward us too, dragging Eeebs along.
“Mom and Dad, this is the Jesus, remember?”
Mr. Perry said, “Oh, of course. Pleased to meet you,” and held out his hand. Then he nudged Eeebs to do the same. “This is my son, Ebert.”
“Nice to meet you,” Eeebs grumbled, shaking Mike’s hand.
But Mrs. Perry crossed her arms. “Weren’t you the one who delivered the flowers this morning?”
“Yes,” Mike answered. “That was me.”
“So how do you know Margie and Apron?” she asked through her tight mouth, looking over to me, standing on the other side of M.
“From Scent Appeal,” I answered, staring at Rennie. “That’s how we first became friends.”
“You’re Mike of the gays?” M asked, pulling her shoulder away from him. Her top lip was touching her pointy nose now.
Mr. Perry looked down, but Mrs. Perry kept staring at him with her arms crossed, and Eeebs looked horrified. I started to say something, but Mike’s glance told me not to. Then he turned to M and lifted up a smile like it was the heaviest thing in the world. “The very same,” he nodded.
M just stared, but Mrs. Perry uncrossed her arms and raised her eyebrows and said, “Well, I will say, you people certainly know your flowers.” And with that, she steered Eeebs away.
“And you have a great voice,” Rennie added, before following her mother.
“Yes,” Mr. Perry agreed. “We enjoyed the play.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. “Glad you could come.”
Mr. Perry lifted his hand in a wave and when he turned away with the rest of his family, we all saw it: Mrs. Perry leaning into Eeebs’s ear to whisper something, and Eeebs quickly wiping his hand on his pants. The one he had used to shake Mike’s hand.
I looked at Mike, still hanging on to that smile, but barely. “I hate those people,” I said through my teeth.
Mike dipped his head at me and said as sad as the bluebird sings, “Then the cycle continues, doesn’t it?”
Shame knocked the wind out of me. Not just for how much I hated the Perrys now, but for how much Mike didn’t.
M broke the moment with a cluck. “Such the waste,” she said, starting on her crutches again, oblivious to what Eeebs and Mrs. Perry had just done. “You are too handsome for the boys.”
Mike grinned for real this time and started walking with her. “Well, if I had met you a little earlier things might have turned out differently.”
M looked at him with a big smile as a blush broke out on her face. And for the first time ever, I wanted to hug her.
At the Scent Appeal van, I put my kickstand down and held the crutches while Mike helped M into the front seat, angling her so that she could still keep her foot up.
“You’ll have to sit in the back, Apron,” Mike said after he shut M’s door.
I sat on my knees, my bike on one side of me and twelve bunches of yellow lilies on the other. And then we drove out the school driveway, M and Mike looking straight ahead, and me staring out the back window, watching my school get smaller and smaller, seventh grade gone forever.
32
Modus operandi
My new m.o.
Things went back to bad after Mike left. I begged him to take me to Scent Appeal with him. But he said, no—that I couldn’t leave M all alone up there on my dad’s bed watching TV with a bag of peas on her toe. And he had a lot of work to do. Chad was having a hard day and so far he hadn’t even gotten off the couch. They had one retirement party and two bat mitzvahs to decorate this weekend.
“What about Toby, can he help?” I asked, the two of us walking down the porch stairs together, my feet finally free. I had small red dents across both ankles where my straps had been strangling me.
“He went back to cutting hair,” Mike said jumping off the last stair and turning around to me, still a few steps up. The two of us were the same height now. In the bright afternoon sun you could see tiny wrinkles on his cheeks. “Toby was just helping us out for a while. Money’s kind of tight, with Chad’s medicine costing so much and all. Anyway, you’ll be all right.”
But I must have looked like the inside of my stomach, because Mike said, “Do you really think your dad is going to be that mad?”
I looked into his blueberry eyes and nodded.
“Jeepers,” he said turning away and kicking a pebble under the van. “What does he expect? You’re a kid. Goes with the territory, know what I mean?”
But all I knew was that I was a kid whose territory was about to get a whole lot smaller.
“Look, Apron, I really have to go check on Chad,” he said turning back to me.
“Thanks for coming to get us, Mike.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Then he leaned into me so close that his hair brushed up against my cheek. “She’s a would-be beauty queen contestant, Apron. If she gets on your case, just tell her she’s never looked better. Kill her with kindness.”
But even Mike didn’t know the M that I knew.
After he climbed into the front seat of the van and closed his door, I jumped off the last stair and stepped up to his window to give him the high-five he was waiting for. But instead of slapping me back, he wrapped his fingers around my hand and held it.
“Was it awful, at the end, with your mom?”
“Yes.”
Mike’s blue eyes started melting. “Thanks,” he said. Then he squeezed my hand and let go.
He started the engine and I stepped back and watched him back out. After the van turned around, he rolled down the passenger window and said, “Hey, I keep forgetting to bring you your report card. We signed for it at the conference. Ms. Frane says you’re a killer writer, you know. She’s entering your poem in some contest, did she tell you? That’s why you didn’t get it back.”
I had noticed my free verse poem wasn’t in my last homework pack, but figured Ms. Frane probably didn’t have time to read them anyway. That’s something only kids with parents who teach know; half the time your homework doesn’t even get read, just graded.
Mike waved one last time and drove off. I waited until every single piece of dirt in our road had settled back down again before I turned and climbed the porch stairs.
I spent the whole afternoon tiptoeing around and cleaning things up. My plan was ruined now. M couldn’t look lazy with a broken toe.
Twice, I brought up frozen peas, lemonade, and Chips Ahoy! and left them all on her bed. Both times when I carried them in, she was on the phone talking all wrong in English with a very bad look on her face. The only word I could figure out was horrivel because it was the same in Latin. She never said thank you or no thank you, she only ignored me or rolled her eyes.
But one time, she screamed my name so loudly that even The Boss stopped twitching. Lately, I had been making an obstacle course for him around my room. I liked to figure out where he was going to go before he did, but most of the time he went straight under my bed and pooped. My room had sta
rted smelling really bad now, and I knew it was only a matter of time before my dad came in and figured things out.
When M screamed, though, he ran under my dresser. I cornered him, dropped him back inside his cage, and went to go see what M wanted, me twitching as much as The Boss.
“I have to use the bathroom,” she said. “Get those things.” She pointed to her crutches, lying up against the bed, close enough for her to reach.
“Crutches,” I said, trying to do her a favor but getting sneered at instead. After she got herself up on one foot, I held my breath and tried to slide my hands under her arms like Mike had. But as soon as my hands hit her big boobs, she whacked them away. “I can do this,” she said sliding the crutches under there herself and then clunking down the hall into the bathroom.
I looked at my mom’s closet. The door was shut tight. If I had broken M’s toe last week, my dad would never have saved her closet for me.
“Aprons!”
“What?”
“Come in to here.”
I told myself not to be scared. But it turned out, I should have been. Because when I got into the bathroom, M was standing in front of the toilet with her pants down, and her big white underpants stretched across her bump.
“Hold these things,” she said handing me the crutches. I must have looked as afraid as I felt because then she added, “Please.”
After I took them from her, she started wiggling down those underpants. I turned around and found my freckled self staring back at me in the mirror. I didn’t even know that kids with freckles could have circles under their eyes, but there they were, sort of greasy, in a deep shade of red.
M’s pee shot out so hard it sounded like a water gun spraying into the toilet. I tried not to breathe. After it went to drip, she sighed and said, “I know that you hates that I am here, Aprons.”
My heart ground to a stop and those eyes of mine bugged back at me.