Falling Over Sideways

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  First, I considered doing Explorer Death Charades. Unfortunately, when I tried the game out with Roshni, it turned out to be impossible to tell the difference between Magellan and Cook, because getting slaughtered in hand-to-hand combat in Hawaii looks a lot like getting slaughtered in hand-to-hand combat on any other island. Also, the Verrazano part was tricky, because by the time I got around to him, I was an expert at getting killed by natives, but “eaten while his crew watched helplessly” was beyond my technical miming abilities.

  On the bright side, if I ever need to pretend I am getting shot with a poisoned arrow, jumping from a height and mangling myself, or freezing to death in slow motion while rowing a boat, I have those down.

  I chucked the mime idea and switched over to a poster project, which was much easier. I drew each explorer’s death scene on one side of the paper, with the explorers’ names listed out of order on the other. Whoever looked at the poster could try to match up each death with the right explorer.

  That took me two entire evenings, which, combined with my scheduled dance nights, meant I got to avoid a whole week of family dinner ordeals. When it was done, I was pretty pleased with myself. I couldn’t imagine anybody else had spent this much effort on their project.

  During the coloring phase, I used a lot of red marker.

  When I was completely finished with the poster, my mother asked me whether I wanted to go with her, Dad, and Matthew to some kind of special therapy store to buy “mealtime adaptive items” for the house. I was like, I’d rather just stay here and get Verrazano’d by enraged, hungry islanders. Which gave me an idea: What if I also recorded a song to go with the poster? I asked Mom if I could stay home to work on my history project, and of course she had to say yes.

  We had done a whole unit on song recording in seventh-grade music class, so I knew how to set up a background with instruments and stuff in a recording-software program on my laptop. It took only a few minutes to create a basic Caribbean-sounding tune. The words took me several hours, but at the end, I thought it came out pretty well:

  I am having an awful day

  (Henry Hudson! Henry Hudson!)

  ’Cause I’m freezing my butt to death on the bay!

  (Henry Hudson! Henry Hudson!)

  I thought Hawaii was pretty fab

  (Captain James Cook! Captain James Cook!)

  ’Til I started gettin’ clubbed and stabbed!

  (Captain James Cook! Captain James Cook!)

  Sometimes I just want to cry and beg

  (Juan Cabrillo! Juan Cabrillo!)

  ’Cause I fell and died of a broken leg!

  (Juan Cabrillo! Juan Cabrillo!)

  You get the point. (So did Ponce de León.)

  I saved the song to a flash drive, rolled up my poster, and headed off happily to school the next morning for the first time in weeks. I was totally right that nobody else had put nearly as much flair into the assignment as I had. Other people had boring charts like “Nutrition at the First Thanksgiving” or unoriginal essays or—in the most pathetic case—a macaroni sculpture of George Washington crossing the Delaware.

  I was like, Now, if he had been boiled while crossing the Delaware until he was al dente, that would be interesting.

  Ryder performed a “patriotic saxophone tribute to America,” which was (A) completely off topic because there was nothing to be patriotic about until after the Revolution, and (B) the lamest example of a history project ever, because it didn’t display any knowledge of history. As far as I could tell from Mr. Evans’s reaction, Ryder’s grade was a raised eyebrow.

  Roshni’s project was as morbid as mine. She had a whole PowerPoint on how European settlers had spread fatal diseases to the indigenous people. She spent the last few slides illustrating the dangers of smallpox-infected blankets. Then she turned off the projector, but before Mr. Evans could turn the lights on, she threw a blanket over the three kids in the middle of the front row: Christopher, Ryder, and Leigh. Ryder laughed, Christopher yelled, “Help! Smallpox!” and Leigh screeched, “My haaaiiiiirrrr!”

  Regina’s project was a bunch of pencil drawings of famous Latino Americans, done on regular old loose-leaf paper. Some of the papers were crumpled, and there appeared to be stains on one or two pages. I had to admit the art was kind of amazing, though. At the beginning of the second day of presentations, we had time to walk around and look at all the silent projects. I spent a long time looking at one particular picture Regina had done. It was supposed to be some guy I had never heard of named Cesar Chavez. There was a quote from him under the drawing: “We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure.”

  The thought made me think about my father. Was he going to draw strength from having his brain suddenly ruined for no reason? How could he draw strength when he couldn’t even think?

  Regina caught me looking at her work, and said, “What?”

  I asked, “Is this a relative of yours?”

  She said, “Are you kidding me? Just because we have the same last name, you mean? There are probably a million people in the world named Chavez. Cesar wasn’t my relative. He was only the greatest labor leader this country has ever had. But of course you haven’t learned about him in school, because he’s not important enough.”

  I said, “God, Regina. I was just thinking—”

  “What, that I used ghetto paper? Well, excuse me if there aren’t any really fine craft stores within walking distance of my house, and my mom works late every night. I don’t want to hear it, Starbuck.”

  “Uh, I was going to say I think you’re a great artist.”

  Regina looked at me for the longest time without saying a word, like she wasn’t sure whether I was serious.

  When I played the recording of my song for the class, everybody seemed to like it. Some people laughed, and others were tapping along or bobbing their heads to the beat by the end. Even Mr. Evans chuckled.

  Before I knew it, miserable explorer deaths became kind of a thing in my class.

  Some kid slipped and fell down, like, half a flight of stairs, and one of the boys behind him said, “Whoa! Cabrillo alert!” At lunch, on meat loaf day, Regina bit into the mystery meat, and said, “Holy Verrazano, what am I eating? Quick, pass me some Skittles!” In flag football, when a whole bunch of kids attacked one person, that was the “Captain Cook play.”

  Then it was time for our once-a-year swimming rotation in gym. Everyone freaking hates swim-gym days, for about a million reasons. For one thing, the custodians are not professional pool maintenance people, so the pool is always either vaguely coated with a thin, green slime or so incredibly overtreated with chlorine that, after you swim in it, your hair has the consistency of straw for a month. For another thing, uh … it’s eighth grade. You’ve got these obnoxious popular girls like Leigh Monahan with their perfect bodies, who probably schedule three weeks of tanning sessions when they know swimming is coming up, just so the boys will drool over them even more. But you’ve also got a few unlucky, teensy-weensy girls who look like they belong in my dance classes, some overweight girls who mostly come unprepared every day, stand around hunching over, with their arms crossed to cover every bit of themselves they possibly can, and then the main mass of basically-normal-but-self-conscious girls like me. I usually wear a tankini with boy-short bottoms that scream, Hide my legs! Meanwhile, Roshni sports some kind of ridiculous skirted suit in an attempt to conceal the fact that she has a butt. Jennifer’s suit has weird poofy fringes that are supposed to camouflage … well, I’m not sure what they’re supposed to do. They mostly just make it look like she’s wearing some kind of inflatable child flotation vest.

  Not a flattering look, BTW.

  So the girls are all wishing invisibility cloaks were a real thing. The boys are huddled in their own little groups, and it’s the same ugly situation over there. You’ve got maybe three male Leigh types with actual six-packs and such, but the rest of the boys are either generally tiny, gener
ally chubby, or sporting the made-from-mismatched-parts look.

  So yeah, the first day of gym was a tense and horrifying scene. And then some friend of Ryder’s walked by on the other side of the pool, and Ryder yelled, “HELP! I’m getting Verrazano’d!” Which was hilarious because, you know, they were across the water from each other and all.

  Unfortunately, as soon as “Help!” left Ryder’s mouth, the high school girl who was our official lifeguard jumped up, knocked over the table she was sitting at, which sent her books, her backpack, and the school’s official swimming time clock skittering across the tiles into the pool, and shouted, “WHERE?”

  She was a little jumpy. I guess it was probably her first day, too.

  The gym teacher, Mr. Banyon, went nuts. First, he got right into Ryder’s face and screamed, “Why are you shouting ‘Help!’ in a crowded pool?”

  Ryder said, “Um, I wasn’t in the pool, sir. I was next to the pool.”

  “But when you shout ‘Help!’ it creates a dangerous situation. The lifeguard thought you were actually in the water.”

  I think Ryder would have shut up then, but unfortunately, Christopher involved himself. “Mr. Banyon,” he said, “Ryder said he was being Verrazano’d. Verrazano died on land, so Ryder could not have been in the water.”

  “What in the world are you talking about, Marsh?” barked the gym teacher. Because, you know … gym teacher.

  “Verrazano didn’t drown, he was eaten by cannibals while his crew watched from across a body of water. That is the analogy I believe Ryder was making. Now, if he had said, ‘Help! I am being Henry Hudsoned!’ that might have made more sense, because Henry Hudson was last seen alive on a small rowboat in dangerous, freezing waters, and may very well have drowned. But even then, we don’t really know exactly how—”

  “Are you people insane?” asked Mr. Banyon as the lifeguard girl grabbed the rescue pole-and-net thing off the wall and attempted to fish her binder and calculator out of the pool with it.

  The yelling continued for so long that we never did get into the pool. So, hey, thanks, Juan Cabrillo.

  But at the end of the day, Ryder cornered me at the lockers. “Thanks for getting me in trouble today in gym, Claire!” he barked.

  “Me? What did I do?”

  “You’re the one who started all the stupid Cabrillo jokes!”

  “Are you kidding me? You’re the idiot who yelled ‘Help!’ at a crowded pool, genius. All I did was sit back with some popcorn and watch the show.”

  “I’m an idiot? I’m an idiot?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I think you should say it with more of a sentence-like inflection, but you’re definitely starting to get the idea.”

  Ryder and I were about three inches apart, shouting in each other’s faces, when Regina walked by and said, “Dang, y’all have to work on your flirting skills. Because this is just pathetic.”

  At that moment, I was like, Please Cabrillo me.

  Life at home was pretty weird. Dad basically just sat in the family room all day and watched TV, which didn’t seem like it would be that much fun if you couldn’t follow what people were saying. He had therapists and a visiting nurse, plus exercises to do on his own, but it still seemed like an amazingly dull existence. A few times, some of my parents’ closest friends asked whether they could visit, but my mom kept putting them off. I heard her tell Grandma she didn’t think my father would want anyone to see him so helpless. I kind of agreed with her.

  Some of my friends complained that their dads were boring, but my dad had always been a fun person, you know? I hated seeing him plopped there on the couch with his remote control in one hand, and his stupid little finger-exercise squeezy balls in the other. He was supposed to be singing the wiping-cloth song, dancing around the kitchen, making everybody laugh.

  It wasn’t right. Neither was my response, which was to avoid being around him. I know it’s stupid, but for a while in October and November, I almost pretended the guy on that couch was a stranger instead of my father. It was less painful that way. I wasn’t sure how much he was aware of it, but clearly my mother and Matthew were. It took me a while longer to find out how much my absence was bothering my brother—partly because I was doing such a great job of avoiding everyone, and partly because Matthew and I hadn’t been big on talking to each other, anyway—but Mom got on me immediately. She kept saying things like “While you’re making excuses, everybody else is making time for Daddy. I mean, look at what Matthew has been doing. He—”

  But I didn’t want to hear about perfect Matthew. Plus, I really did have a lot to do. There was homework, or I had to go to the basement and practice dance, or I had yet another poster project, each one more elaborate than the one before. Everyone else’s family tree for French class was just a plain old diagram on tagboard; mine was a three-dimensional Eiffel Tower made of toothpicks, with photos and descriptions of all my relatives hanging from it. For my father, I wrote “Calme.” That means “quiet,” which had been the furthest thing from the truth until his stroke. But none of the words that had described him before were true anymore.

  One day, Grandpa picked me up before school to take me for a regularly scheduled orthodontist appointment. I had been going to these three times a year since the sixth grade. Every time, it was the same. The doctor would look at my latest X-rays, glance into my mouth, and say, “Not yet. Still waiting on a few more teeth to drop into place.” Then he’d send me off to school.

  But all of a sudden at this appointment, right after he looked at my teeth, the orthodontist snapped a big lamp thingy onto his forehead and turned on the light. I was like, Is this guy planning to go mining for diamonds in my throat or what?

  “Today’s the day, princess,” he said.

  An hour and a half later, I had a very sore jaw, several holes in my cheek where a wire had stabbed me, and my very own set of shiny braces. The joy was nearly overwhelming.

  In a “Cabrillo me” kind of way.

  I had been allowed to choose the colors for the little rubber brackets that went around the brace part on each tooth, and had gone with an alternating scheme of two blue teeth, two purple teeth. I thought the blue and purple would look nice with my blue eyes. My mom, Matthew, and I all have blue eyes. Dad always said that Mom’s blue eyes were the first thing he noticed about her.

  Anyway, when the dental assistant lady showed me my teeth in her handheld mirror, I thought the colors looked really good. I even texted Roshni, Jennifer, and Desi to tell them I had gotten braces and that I liked the way they looked. But when I got to school, Roshni was absent, and Jennifer and Desi apparently didn’t agree with my assessment.

  Jennifer said, “Ooh, let me see the new hardware!”

  I smiled widely, thinking she would say something kind. You know, like any semi-decent human being might. Instead, she said, “Huh. So those are the colors you went with?”

  Then Desi put her hands on my shoulders, physically turned me, stared into my mouth as though she was studying for a quiz on tonsil anatomy, and finally said, “Oh. Interesting choice.”

  I asked, “What do you mean, interesting choice? You can’t just say ‘interesting choice.’ What’s that?”

  Desi let out an insincere little chuckle and said, “Well, don’t you think blue is kind of, um, a boy color?”

  Before I could respond, Jennifer said, “And purple is just kind of dark. We really think you should have minimized all that metal with something lighter. Like maybe white?”

  “Or yellow?”

  “Or even pink? You know? Because at least pink is feminine?”

  I said, “I can’t believe this. I got blue because my eyes are blue. And purple because I wear a lot of purple. Plus, why are you guys being so mean?”

  Desi started tapping one foot, turned to Jennifer, and said, “See? I told you we shouldn’t tell her our real opinions. I knew she was going to be like this.”

  Jennifer made a point of staring down at her nails and said, “Whatever. S
he asked us what we thought. It’s not our fault if she picked weird colors.”

  I couldn’t stand it. I turned to storm away and crashed right into Leigh Monahan. Leigh said, “HEY! Watch where you’re—Oh, look! You got braces … blue braces.”

  I had already missed two classes, but the remainder of the morning was just like that. I felt like a freak show. Everybody kept coming up to me and checking out my teeth. Most people didn’t say anything about the braces, but they didn’t have to. Once Leigh Monahan had spoken, the grade had spoken. Unfortunately, unlike boots, braces were not an item that could be left at home.

  Lunch was the worst. Without Roshni, I had no protection. Ryder and Regina didn’t say anything about the braces, though. Instead, Ryder just went through the snack line and ordered a pile of things he knew I wouldn’t be able to eat. Then he combined that with his usual hoard of junk food and offered me each item, gleefully.

  The worst part was that I hadn’t known I was going to get braces when I’d packed my lunch, so I had a brown bag full of stuff I couldn’t chew: hard cheese with crackers, carrots, an apple, crunchy peanut brittle, and Skittles. Essentially, I had packed myself a lunch of rocks, diamonds, sticks, and bullets. And I was hungry. I popped half of a cracker in my mouth, hoping that if I just sucked on it long enough, it would sort of fall apart.

  Meanwhile, I had to deal with Ryder waving Snickers bars, popcorn, baked Doritos, three kinds of gum, and hard candies under my nose.

  Regina grinned at me and said, “You know you might as well just give me those Skittles, right?”

  I pushed them across the table and ran out of the cafeteria, trying not to cry in front of everybody. I headed for the band room and got to sit there alone for a few minutes and calm down … until three sixth-grade alto saxes came in together for a group lesson with Mrs. Jones. I tried to smile at them, and one of them, an awkwardly tall, red-haired girl whose name I could never remember, said, “Hey, I like your braces!”