by Thomas Tosi
THOMAS TOSI
illustrated by Meaghan Tosi
Dooney Press
GOFFSTOWN, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Story ©2021 Thomas Tosi
Illustrations ©2021 Meaghan Tosi
Cover design ©2021 Heidi Tosi
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Educators wishing to reproduce part or all of this work should contact Dooney Press.
ISBN 978-0-9989132-9-2
First Dooney Press digital edition 2021
Dooney Press
PO Box 406
Goffstown, NH 03045
www.dooneypress.com
This one is for Heidi, who taught me how to share—by sharing her life with me.
The First Day of School
The whole thing started with a chocolate-frosted doughnut. And really, it wasn’t even a doughnut. It was a third of a doughnut. A third is a fraction. If you don’t understand fractions, don’t feel bad—not everybody does. But I get math. Math wasn’t my problem. No, what I had to learn about was all that other stuff—the touchy‐feely stuff that happened after I discovered how to turn that one‐third of a doughnut into six thousand doughnuts.
See, I’m one of five kids—that’s one‐fifth. Which means I never have anything of my own. Books, bathroom, video games, tighty‐whitey underwear—you name it, we share it. Okay, maybe not the underwear. That would be gross. We do have our own underwear. But you get what I mean.
Me? My name’s Abe Mitchell. I’m in Miss Sorenson’s fifth‐grade class at Green Hill Academy in Green Hill, New Hampshire.
And I’m tired of sharing.
“So, how was the first day of school?” Dad asked my older sister, Faye, as she plopped down on the front passenger seat of the beast. The beast was our decades‐old station wagon with fake wood siding. It was already running and rattling. Dad tried not to shut it off if he didn’t have to. There was only a fifty‐fifty chance it would start again if he did. I hoisted up the pants of my hand‐me‐down school uniform while my little sister, Peg, pushed past me, scrambling up onto the beast’s middle‐row bench.
How was the first day? Geez, we didn’t even have our seatbelts on yet. It was school. How did Dad think the first day was?
“It’s not fair to have the first day of school on a Friday,” Faye said. “It utterly destroys the whole week. Sixth grade is going to be devastating.”
“At least you’re not gonna have to do mega‐writing,” I said. “Miss Sorenson says we’re gonna have to write a ten‐page report—without using giant fonts and pictures to make it seem longer.”
Miss Sorenson was actually staring at me when she said that last part. It was like she could read my mind. I’d already calculated that if I switched the font size from twelve to twenty‐four, the line spacing to triple instead of double, and threw in a few pictures, maybe I could get away with—
“We are so going to do reports this year,” Faye said. “Besides, writing’s not that hard. You wanna know what hard is? We’re going to be working with fractions again. And this time, it’ll be stuff like multiplying and dividing them.”
“Fractions are so easy.”
“For a nerd.”
“I like second grade,” Peg said, looking out the car window. “Can we get doughnuts?”
Peg asked because we were right across from the Sweetly Crisp doughnut shop. Peg has unusual eyes. They bypass her brain and connect directly to her stomach.
Faye and I gave each other a look. Doughnuts in the middle of the afternoon? Yeah, right. There’s no way Dad would—
“Now, that sounds like a great idea, sweetie,” Dad said, turning into the drive‐through.
I opened my mouth to complain that he always gives in to Peg but the words “I want chocolate‐frosted” came out instead.
“Me too,” said Faye.
“Me too,” said Peg.
“Quit copying.”
Dad stopped the car. He let out a frustrated sigh.
“Um, in this case, copying is a good thing,” Dad said. “I forgot my wallet, guys. All I’ve got is change for tolls, and that’s just going to be enough for me to get a coffee and for you all to split one doughnut. So I’m glad that you’re at least in agreement with one another.”
Forgot his wallet?
That was just an excuse for when Dad didn’t want to spend extra money—like how none of us kids except my older twin brothers, Brian and James, had a phone. Supposedly, the rest of us were too young. But even the twins, who were in high school, only got one two‐versions‐too‐old and not‐so‐smart phone to share between them. What was the deal with that?
“No. I’m not gonna split half a doughnut with these two,” I said.
“There’s three of us, ‘Mr. Fractions Are So Easy’ genius,” Faye mocked. “That means you get a third—not a half.”
“Well, I’m not having any ‘cause I’m sick of sharing.”
“So, a half it is.”
“Is a half more than a third?” Peg asked hungrily.
It’s amazing how easily having a big mouth gets me in trouble. This is the thought that came to me as I watched Faye and Peg eat their halves of one chocolate‐frosted doughnut and watched Dad drink his coffee while I sat there with my nothing.
But it’s also amazing how sometimes—if I just quiet down, watch, and listen—bad luck can turn good.
“Hey, Dad, what’s that on your coffee cup?” I asked.
He examined his cup with a glance. “I don’t know; it must be some sort of prize thing.” He tore the small paper game piece from the side of the cup.
“Can I have it?”
Faye said, “Hey—”
“No, no, Abe saw it and asked first,” Dad said.
Good guy one—evil troll sister nil.
Dad handed me the game piece. I used my fingernail to peel away the Sweetly Crisp game logo so I could see the prize.
“Yes!” I said. “Dad, turn this crate around.”
“Excuse me?”
I waved the small ticket in front of both Faye and Peg. “Read it and weep, girls. One free doughnut. And I do believe that means one free whole doughnut.”
“That’s not fair,” Faye said. “It’s like rewarding him for refusing to share.”
“Abe saw the game piece, and I gave it to him,” Dad said. “It’s his. That’s just how it worked out.”
“Yes!” I said again.
“But we’re not cashing it in today.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe it.
“We’re almost home, Abe,” Dad said in his calm don’t‐argue‐with‐me dad voice. “I’m not turning around and going all the way back there now. You can get the doughnut on another trip.”
“Unbelievable.” I sank down in the corner of the seat. What was the point of winning a free doughnut if I couldn’t flaunt it in front of Faye and Peg while they ate their half doughnuts?
Since I didn’t really have anything else to do but watch my sisters eat, I decided to examine my winnings instead. In the fine print on the back of the game piece, I read a very interesting word—cash. Maybe I’d won something even better than a doughnut.
“What’s it mean, ‘cash equivalent’?” I said.
“Cash equivalent?” Dad said.
“Yeah, it says, ‘cash equivalent one‐twentieth of a cent.’”
“Oh, I think they put something like that on just about every contest. It’s probably so that someone who won a prize—like a doughnut—couldn’t come in and say they’d rather have money instead. Because all they’d get would
be one‐twentieth of a penny.”
“Like a penny cut into twenty pieces? But that wouldn’t really be worth anything.”
“I think that’s the point. If you try to turn that in for cash, you’re not going to get anything.”
“Yeah, but what’s it mean, ‘equivalent’?”
“Equivalent,” Faye said. “That’s like—equal to.”
Peg laughed. “A doughnut is worth a little piece of a penny.”
“Or…like a penny is worth twenty doughnuts?” I said.
“Well, I guess you could say that, Abe,” Dad said, “though I hardly think that’s what they mean.”
“But they’re saying it….” My mind began to work.
Cousin Celia Crowds In
I was reeling with doughnut math. If I could get twenty doughnuts for a penny and there are ten pennies in a dime—ten times twenty equals two hundred. Two hundred doughnuts for a dime! No way was I going to stop there. Two hundred doughnuts for a dime, and there are ten dimes in a dollar—two hundred times ten equals two thousand. Two thousand doughnuts for a dollar!
Now, I do realize that Sweetly Crisp doughnuts get pretty stale after a couple of days. I also know, of course, that it would take me at least a week to eat two thousand doughnuts. But that wasn’t worrying me.
What was worrying me was the fact that I didn’t have a dollar with which to buy two thousand doughnuts. I needed a plan. I decided that, as soon as we got home, I would head to the one place where I could think—my room.
Only, as I bet you already guessed, it wasn’t really my room. The third floor of our house was sort of like an attic, except it was all fixed up like a big open room so you could live in it. I shared this space with Brian and James.
If you really had to share a room, I guess this is the one you’d want. Because of the roof, the walls were all at crazy angles, and, in some places, they stuck out and made way for windows. The planks on the stairs and floor were creaky—our own alarm system to warn us when somebody was coming. The air smelled woody and old, but I liked that. When you looked out one of the windows toward the side of the house, you could see straight into the high branches of an old tree. It was an oak, I think. Those are the ones that make acorns, right? When the windows were open, you couldn’t really tell where the oak ended and the house began unless you leaned out to get a better look. We could pretend that our whole room was a tree fort.
The only bad things were that it got pretty hot up there in the summer and that Brian and James were a pain. But it absolutely could’ve been worse. And, as I was about to find out, it soon would be.
I was still multiplying doughnuts by dollars when Dad pulled into our driveway and parked beside a little orange car I didn’t recognize. Peg swung her door open and dinged it.
“Oopsie,” Peg said.
“Peg,” Dad said. “Be careful.”
“Why? It’s as crappy as the beast,” Faye said. “Whose car is it?”
I didn’t care to stop and find out. I had doughnut plans to make in my room. I burst into the house and leaped up the first staircase two steps at a time. At the top step, I grabbed the railing post thingy and swung around for a U‐turn, spinning myself down the hall toward—
“Abe, I need to talk to you.” My mom was carrying a stack of blankets out of her bedroom.
“Not now, Mom. I have some thinking to do up in my room.”
“Yeah, that’s what I want to talk to you about.”
Wait a second, what was Mom doing home in the middle of the day? Don’t know, don’t care, I decided as I hit the second staircase, the narrow wooden one leading up to the attic. There was no railing, but I didn’t need one. My elbows practically brushed the plaster of the walls on both sides. Partway up, the stairs took a sharp bend. I was just making that corner when—
“Dude! Gangway!” James yelled.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
My twin brothers were riding a folded‐over lemon‐yellow futon mattress like a toboggan down the steps. James wore his BMX bike helmet and pads. Brian had on his old Darth Vader mask and cape, which I had supposedly inherited but never seemed to get to wear.
“I have you now,” Brian said in a deep, breathy voice.
He grabbed me as I was falling over backward and yanked me onto the futon. We tumbled the rest of the way back down to the landing, where we ended up in a heap.
“Honestly,” Mom said, shaking her head.
I shoved James’s dirty gym‐sock‐covered foot off my chest and tried to get my face out from underneath Brian’s sweaty, sour‐smelling, hairy, high school armpit.
“Don’t you three ever quit?” Mom asked.
“What did I do?” I said, “I was just trying to get to my room when these two Neanderthals ran me over with—wait, where are you going with that?” Brian and James were trying to push past me into the hall with the futon.
Before my brothers could answer, as if they even would, Dad, Faye, and Peg made their way upstairs.
“No. No. No. No,” Faye said to Dad as she reached the top of the staircase.
We were all crowded in the hallway. Not that there was anything unusual about that—crowded was my natural habitat.
“She’s a college student now,” Dad was saying to Faye. “She’s going to have a ton of work, be staying up late, and needing quiet—her own space.”
“Who?” I asked.
Faye complaining and Dad talking about someone needing their own space? It’s crazy but, if I didn’t know any better, it almost sounds like Dad is talking about cramming someone else into the house. But who could possibly—
“Celia!” Peg bolted out from behind Faye and dashed straight into Mom and Dad’s bedroom.
“Peg‐ster! Shoot, look at you,” said a voice from inside the bedroom.
My cousin Celia stepped out into the hallway, carrying Peg on top of two pillows.
Celia’s mom and my mom are sisters. Most everybody in my family is normal and lives in New England, but Celia’s mom married a guy from South Carolina, and that’s where they lived and where Celia grew up.
I always thought Celia was okay because she was nice enough and smart enough—not in math like me, but smart anyway. I liked the way she said y’all all the time. I saw her as a visitor from some exotic far‐off land. Also, whenever her family came to visit, they stayed in a hotel, which was good. Unlike my brothers and sisters, Celia didn’t take up any space in our little—
“Celia’s college messed up her housing,” Dad said. “We’re going to make room here and adjust.”
“Just until they get the discombobulated, combobulated again,” Celia said. “I appreciate y’all takin’ me in. Hey, Abe.”
“How?” I asked, trying to play catch‐up in this conversation.
“Her schedule’s probably going to be crazy,” Mom said. “That’s why Celia’s getting the little bedroom to herself with the futon. We’ll move Faye and Peg and their bunk bed out.”
“To where?”
Dad raised his hands like he was trying to calm me down. But I wasn’t mad—yet. “You boys have had the whole attic to yourselves for a long time,” he said.
“To ourselves? There’s three of us up there.”
Dad sighed. “It’s the biggest open space in the house. Faye and Peg…well, there’s plenty of room for all—”
“We’ll hang up some blankets as dividers between the boys and the girls,” Mom said.
“Whoopee!” Peg said. “Faye and I get to go up to the attic with you guys?”
“It’s not a good thing, Peg,” Faye said.
“Yeah, whoopee,” I muttered.
We finished the move after dinner. On what was now supposed to be the girls’ side of the attic, Mom told Brian and James to finish putting the bunk bed together. She hung up the blankets that divided Faye and Peg from the three of us.
She did this by pounding some nails into the walls, bending them, and tying off a rope she stretched across the attic. I didn’t know if it was becau
se Mom was strong or the attic walls were weak but, on one of Mom’s swings, she went a little wide. The hammer went right through the plaster.
“What’s with all that pounding?” Dad shouted from downstairs.
“Nothing,” Mom replied, wiggling the hammerhead out of the hole, sending little white chalky chunks of the wall to the floor. “You just worry about getting Celia settled down there.”
“What did you break?” Dad hollered up.
“Nothing,” Mom said, trying to see if some of the bigger plaster pieces would fit back in the hole. “Brian and James are putting the bed back together.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Brian said.
“You are so bad,” James said, ruffling Mom’s hair with his hand.
“Look, all this needs to get done tonight,” Mom groaned as she pulled the rope tight. “I’m not bad. I’m…creative.”
“Dude, that’s where we get it from,” Brian said to James with a laugh.
I wasn’t laughing.
“Peg’s asleep in my bed,” I said as Mom was finishing draping the blankets over the rope.
“Well, it is ten o’clock,” Faye said.
Mom put her hands on her hips and assessed the situation. She turned to Faye. “Grab your sister’s shoulders under her arms. I’ll get her feet. Help me get Peg over to her own bed.”
“And out of mine,” I said.
A Deal with Peg
I was without doughnuts. I was without dollars. I was crammed into three-fifths of an attic with my two brothers on one side of a blanket wall and my two sisters on the other.
And then, of course, there came the final insult. On my side of the attic, there was a pile of Faye and Peg’s stuff and their dresser. On top of the dresser was Peg’s “Peggy” bank.