Meena Meets Her Match

by Karla Manternach

  This lid isn’t the kind of trash I like. It’s litter. Litter is icky and soggy. A lot of it used to be in someone’s mouth—straws and flossers and cigarette butts. Sometimes those things can surprise you, though. Once I saw a Band-Aid that looked like it was holding the sidewalk together at the crack. Another time I saw a wad of gum that looked exactly like a brain.

  If you pick up enough litter, sometimes you find something really great. People are always getting rid of stuff just because it’s no good at doing one thing, even though it’s still great for lots of other uses.

  Some people even do that with their friends.

  Not me. I save everything useful or beautiful. DVDs still reflect like moonbeams when they’re scratched. Christmas lights still look like jewels when they’re burned out. Paper clips still have lots of bend in them when they’re broken in half.

  I fish the lid out of the gutter and keep counting colors. It doesn’t take long to find the whole rainbow. In a few minutes I have a drippy yellow grocery bag, a smashed red paper cup, a blue bottle lid, and there—a purple mitten by the curb! I stick the mitten in my backpack and carry everything else to a nearby trash bin. I lift the lid and stop.

  I have to look again, because I can’t even believe what I see.

  A pink feather scarf is sitting on top of the trash bags inside. I look around, but nobody is coming for it. I drop all the litter to one side and try to pull out the scarf, but it’s caught on something. The bin and I play tug-of-war for a while, but then I give the scarf a good yank, it comes free, and I fly backward and land on the ground.

  I stare at the scarf in my hands. It’s stringy and crunchy, and half the feathers are gone.

  Also, it kind of smells like tuna.

  But it’s beautiful.

  I drape it over my shoulders. This thing makes me feel like a movie star! I just know I’ll use it to make something great, as soon as I get an Inspiration. With awesome stuff like this, I’ll definitely make a better valentine box than Sofía!

  I pick myself up and run down the sidewalk, letting the scarf trail behind me. Then I grab hold of both ends and jump rope with it all the way home.

  3

  Mom!”

  She’s typing at the kitchen table when I run into the house. “Shoes,” Mom says without looking up.

  I kick my sneakers toward the shoe rack and drop my jacket on the floor. I cram the feather scarf into my backpack too, because in my experience, Mom doesn’t appreciate beautiful things that smell like tuna.

  “Jacket,” Mom sings as I head for the fridge.

  I groan and hang it up.

  “Hands,” she calls out when I try for the fridge again.

  “They’re clean!”

  Mom tips her head down and smirks at me over the top of her glasses.

  Okay, so this is not my first time picking up litter.

  I wash up and shovel a few grapes into my mouth, because I’m feeling a little low on purple. It’d be a lot easier to eat the rainbow if Mom would just give in and buy gummy bears, but at least she gets lots of different colors of fruits and vegetables. I bounce on my toes next to her while she clicks for another minute, adding numbers to a chart on her screen.

  Finally, she turns to me, hair springing out of her ponytail. Her hug smells like black-jelly-bean tea. “Okay, let’s have it,” she says with a smile. “Tell me everything.”

  “Did you see the snow is melting?” I say.

  “I sure did.”

  “And something dripped in the driveway that’s making a rainbow splotch where we park the car, and I bet tomorrow we’ll have enough milk jugs to finish our igloo, and Mrs. D said we can make our own valentine boxes!”

  “Oooh, you do like a project.” Mom leans closer. “You want some ideas?”

  I make a snorting sound. “From you?”

  “What? I’m good at projects.”

  “You’re the worst at projects.”

  “But I draw up a mean balance sheet. Would that help?”

  “Mom.”

  “Fine, then. I’ll just be on your snack committee.” She leans back in her chair. “Do you want to have anybody over to work on it with you?”

  I know this is her way of asking why Sofía hasn’t been over lately. But how do you tell your own mom that your best friend doesn’t hang out with you anymore? I scratch the back of my neck. “I think we’re supposed to work alone,” I say.

  Mom raises an eyebrow at me. “Since when do you pay attention to the rules?”

  I shrug.

  She sighs. “Suit yourself.”

  “Hey,” I ask, trying to change the subject, “do you think there are any other dads in my class with size fourteen feet?”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “That means I’ll have the biggest box in the class!” I pop the last grape into my mouth, grab my backpack, and run for the stairs.

  I stop short when I get to the living room. My little sister only has kindergarten in the morning, so she’s been home with Mom all afternoon. She’s watching her show about the alphabet or cooperation or whatever. I’ll have to sneak past her if I want a chance to work by myself. I drop down on my hands and knees and crawl behind the couch, all the way to the stairs. I sneak halfway up, super quiet, then race the rest of the way to my workshop.

  I’m the only kid I know who has my own workshop. It was supposed to be Rosie’s room, but she didn’t like sleeping alone, so a few weeks ago they moved her bed back into my room, and we made this my project space instead. That way the mess stays all in one place.

  Everything in my workshop is just the way I like it. The floor is covered in paper scraps. Flattened cereal boxes that say things like “Now with more fiber!” are piled in the corner. Beautiful trash is spilling out of crates: bottle caps, keys that don’t open anything, a syrup bottle shaped like a lady, Popsicle sticks stained orange or cherry or grape.

  They’re all just waiting to be used.

  I drop my backpack, peel off my wet socks, and kick some stuff out of the way to make space on the floor, because it’s hard to work around all those bottles of You-Must-Be-Crazy Glue stuck to my table. I dump the candy wrappers I’ve been saving out of my biggest shoe box, all over the floor.

  Time to get to work.

  I pull the feather scarf out of my backpack and wind it around my neck. I flip on my walkie-talkie in case it picks up trucker voices. I pop the Banana Burst gum into my mouth and imagine the gooey explosion of fruit flavor filling me with sunshine yellow.

  Now I’m ready. I lie on my back, hold the empty box up over my head, and stare into it, waiting for Inspiration.

  I wish I’d gotten to show Sofía this place. I made it just like the Craft Center from when we were in kindergarten. There were lots of great things to do back then. You could build with blocks or bang on drums or shovel dry corn in a bin, but I almost always picked the Craft Center. I loved pounding clay and squirting glue and tearing up bits of paper then taping them back together. Sometimes I’d spend my whole snack time daydreaming about what I might make later.

  That’s where I met Sofía. She’d hardly said a word during class, and from the way Pedro talked to her, I wasn’t sure she knew English. Then one morning she came to the Craft Center and sat bent over her paper, drawing pictures in pencil.

  Pencil! All those crayons and markers and chalk, and she picked a plain old pencil!

  I was squeezing globs of paint onto a huge sheet of paper from the roll. When Sofía looked up at me, I smeared my hands through the paint and gave her a big wave—orange with one hand and yellow with the other. Then I pushed the paper over to her. I didn’t know how to say “You want a turn?” in Spanish, so I raised my eyebrows and pointed.

  Sofía looked at the paper, then at me. I nodded. She touched the paint with the tip of her finger and traced a little line. I wiped a big streak across the page to show her how. Finally, Sofía gave me a shy smile and pressed her whole hand into the glob of paint. I smacked mine down ne
xt to hers and splattered us both with orange. The next thing you know, we were smearing and giggling and splattering.

  It turns out you don’t have to use any words at all to make something beautiful together.

  We spent every day at the Craft Center after that. She knew plenty of English, once you got her talking. We drew pictures of each other. We raced to see who could color a page the fastest. We cut paper into confetti and threw it in the air. We even learned how to vacuum! And outside at recess, we ran races together and climbed the monkey bars and hurled playground balls at each other.

  But it seems like every year one of my favorite parts of school disappears. In first grade they took away the Craft Center and gave us spelling tests. In second grade they took away show-and-tell and gave us multiplication. This year they took away snack time and gave us cursive. Sofía doesn’t mind. She’s the world’s leading expert on third grade.

  I was better at kindergarten.

  My workshop is the one place I can still do everything I love. It doesn’t matter if your clip is always going the wrong way and your letters don’t look like the handwriting chart and you keep forgetting to use your inside voice.

  And even though it was supposed to be more like a clubhouse, even though Sofía and I were supposed to use it together, I am not letting this place go to waste.

  “Meena?”

  I hear the door to my workshop creaking open.

  That didn’t take long. “You’re supposed to knock,” I say.

  Rosie pulls the door closed again and gives a little tap.

  I grin. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Rosie,” she says.

  “You can come in, but I’m working.”

  Rosie pushes the door open. She’s carrying her pink plastic pony by the tail, and the hair Dad put up in a little blond sprout this morning is off to the side. She must have had a nap after school.

  I turn back to stare into my box some more.

  “What’s in there?” she asks.

  “Nothing yet.”

  Rosie lies down on her back next to me and looks up into the box. After a while she sits up and starts fiddling with the candy wrappers on the floor all around us. She scoops them up and lets them fall. Some of them are clear red from cinnamon candies. Others are shiny gold from butter toffees. There are even silver ones that still smell like chocolate. How could anybody ever throw those away?

  “Watch this,” I say. I set down the shoe box, lie on my back, and swish my arms and legs over the floor. The wrappers make a crinkly sound all around me. I stand up again. “See,” I say. “It’s an angel.”

  Rosie’s face lights up. “Me too!”

  I mess up the wrappers again. Rosie plops down in the middle and swishes. I grab her hand and help her up. She giggles at the Rosie-size angel on the floor.

  That’s when I get my Inspiration.

  I sit back down, grab my last not-stuck bottle of You-Must-Be-Crazy Glue, and stick a gold wrapper to the outside of my box. I stick on a silver one. Then a red one. Rosie sits and watches while I start covering the whole box with wrappers.

  “What are you making?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. Because I don’t. Not yet. All I know is that I’m going to need all the candy wrappers I can get.

  It turns out this is why I was saving them.

  4

  I think about my valentine box as soon as I wake up on Saturday. Before I even open my eyes, I remember how pretty it looked all covered with candy wrappers.

  I can’t wait to see what I’ll do next!

  I get up and pull on my tie-dyed hoodie. It’s stretchy and comfy and covers me in a rainbow right away so the gray haze can’t even think about seeping in. My hoodie’s also great for making art, because no one can tell if I smear markers or paint on it. I creep across the room. Rosie makes a snuffling sound, so I wait until she starts sleep-breathing again and then slip out the door.

  Pale yellow light is shining through the window in my workshop. There’s a circle of fog in the middle of the glass. I call that my Magic Mist. It only appears on cold mornings, and only until the house gets warm, so it’s a perfect spot to make secret little wishes or ask questions, like you do with those Magic 8-Balls. This one time I thought I might have a crush on Pedro, so I wrote “I ♥ Pedro” on the Magic Mist, and just seeing it there freaked me out so much that I had to smear it away before anybody saw it and thought I actually meant it. It turned out I was just excited about Pedro’s new backpack that had a million pockets and even a real compass attached to the zipper. So that was a close one.

  But see? The Magic Mist worked just like a crystal ball!

  Today I draw a big sun in the Magic Mist. I make a wish that the snow keeps melting and all the colors come flooding back and they drown out all the gray that’s everywhere, inside and out, even if it is too early for spring. I smear out the inside of the sun to make a clear spot where there isn’t any mist at all.

  Now I’m ready to work on my box. I plop down on my knees and start rifling through my supplies, looking for Inspiration. I peek into every container and reach all the way down to the bottom of my bins.

  That’s when I feel something cold and smooth. I jerk my hand away.

  I’d forgotten about this jar. But that’s why I stuck it way down in the bottom of the bin, isn’t it? So I’d forget?

  I move aside the fluffy ends I cut off some pom-poms, reach back into the bin, and pull out the jar. I turn it over in my hands and watch the little metal bits inside clinking against the glass. Just the sight of all the aluminum can tabs makes my heart crack a little. Sofía used to pull them off her juice cans every day at lunch for me. She was the only person I ever knew who brought juice in little cans instead of boxes, and I loved how every one of those tiny metal rings was like a souvenir of our day. Even though they were just ordinary can tabs. Even though they were just ordinary days.

  There are hundreds of them.

  For the first few days after winter break, we still ate lunch together. She’d been gone a couple of extra days visiting family, so when she stayed in for recess, I just figured she needed to catch up on work. Sofía is one of those kids who worry how they did on a test right before they get the highest score in the class, so I knew she wouldn’t relax until she had a chance to practice spelling flash cards or brush up on science vocabulary or whatever.

  But she stayed inside the next day, too, and the one after that. Every recess, I missed her more. The following day, when she started to duck into the classroom on the way to recess again, I stopped her. “What are you even doing in there?” I asked, pinching the can tab she’d given me from her lunch. “You must be caught up by now.”

  Sofía looked away. “I just have some things to do.”

  “Well, can you come out tomorrow?”

  She shrugged.

  “Next week?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Hang on,” I said slowly, stepping in front of the doorway. “How much longer are you planning to stay in?”

  “I don’t know.” Sofía shifted between her feet. “It might be a while.”

  My mouth dropped open. “You’d rather stay inside than play with me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But I never see you anymore! Come on.” I tugged on her sleeve, my heart starting to beat faster. “Let’s go outside.”

  She pulled away.

  I dropped my hand, stunned. “Don’t you even want to?” I said.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” she said, brightening. “Mrs. D will let anyone stay in. You could work on your handwriting.”

  My jaw got tight. “What’s wrong with my handwriting?”

  Sofía bit her lip. “You could use a little more practice, right?”

  Hot lava started to bubble in my stomach. “Maybe I like my letters the way they are,” I said. “Just because I don’t write perfect cursive like you doesn’t mean I need to miss recess.”

  “I’m just saying
—”

  “No,” I huffed. “I’m not going in there. But if you have better things to do than play with me, see if I care.”

  She sucked in a breath and took a step back.

  I crossed my arms. “Well, go ahead.”

  Sofía’s face hardened. Her lips pressed together into a thin line. She bumped against my shoulder as she stormed into the room.

  I stood there, feeling the sting all the way down to my fingers, still pinching the can tab. I turned, hurled it into the wastebasket, and stalked off down the hall.

  Now, sitting on the floor of my workshop, staring at the jar of tabs, the hot-lava feeling has dulled to a warm ache. I guess Sofía plans to stay in for recess until she’s the best at everything. I guess she doesn’t have time anymore for people who clip down and write crooked letters and scribble on their papers without meaning to.

  Well, maybe they don’t have time for her, either. I shove the jar back into the bin.

  I’m just sitting back on my heels when a wave of nausea swooshes through my stomach.

  I gasp. An even bigger wave crashes over me.

  Huh. This is different from the lava. It’s different from the sad feeling in my chest, too. Maybe I’m hungry. I guess I’ll have some cereal before I start working on my box.

  I tiptoe down the stairs. I’m the only one up, so I pour an extra-big bowl of Rainbow Pops, and nobody even asks if I checked the serving size! I fill it all the way to the rim. But right when I’m pouring the milk, my arm jerks, and I make a big sploosh on the table. I set down the jug and give my arms a shake. They’ve been herky and jerky in the mornings lately. Last week I karate-chopped Rosie’s orange juice right off the table somehow. And yesterday I flung the toothpaste right off my brush, and I didn’t even mean to!

  I throw a towel over the milk spot and start scooping out all the red Pops. They don’t make my stomach feel any better, so I move on to the orange ones. I’ve only made it to yellow when Dad comes down in his running clothes. “What’s the story, morning glory?” he asks. He’s wearing the sneakers that came out of my valentine box, and his pants are super tight. They make his feet look even bigger, which is saying something.