Brett McCarthy

by Maria Padian

  “Would you mind telling me what you’re doing here?” he demanded.

  “Eating cookies and watching TV,” I replied instantly. True, but smartmouth, nonetheless.

  “Home. Now!” he boomed. My dad never booms. “You have some serious explaining to do!”

  The Spanish Inquisitor, looking somewhat less furious and a whole lot more scared, waited in the kitchen.

  “Are you aware,” she said in a choked voice, “that half the Mescataqua police force is out looking for you?”

  “I’ll call the school and tell them we found her,” said Dad. He disappeared into his study and closed the door. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and braced myself for the Lecture of a Lifetime. When I turned to face my mother, I got just the opposite.

  Her face crumpled. She put her hands over her eyes, and tears slid between her fingers. She sobbed without making a sound. Until you’ve made your own mother cry, you just don’t know misery.

  In Michael’s and Dante’s defining circles of Hell, I had officially slipped from the Seventh Circle, the Violent, to the Ninth Circle: Traitors to Family. I would pencil it into his Fifth Period notebook myself.

  Dad spent a long time on the phone in his study before rejoining us in the kitchen. He wasn’t booming anymore and he seemed a whole lot scarier.

  He had the following Big Bad News: I was suspended again (a full week this time). I was grounded (not that I had anywhere to go). Most importantly, Mr. Hare had decided to bar me from playing soccer for the last few weeks of the season. Not even practices.

  “Wait a minute! Can he do that?” I said, feelings of extreme guilt pushed aside by panic. “I mean, he can keep me from games while I’m suspended, but the rest of the season?”

  “He just did,” Dad said quietly.

  “No way!” I exclaimed. “Kids do worse things than cut school and they still play. He’s wrong.”

  Dad cleared his throat. “Mr. Hare has my full support on this decision,” he said. “I think this might be a good way to get your attention.”

  “Dad…please. You have my attention, okay? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left school. Mom”—I turned to her—“I’m so sorry. I know…this is the last thing you need right now. We’re all upset. But please, don’t make things worse for me. I need this.”

  Dad frowned. “You need soccer?”

  How could he possibly understand? He never played sports in school, never played on a team. He’d been one of those Gifted and Talented sorts himself. Mom had been an art geek. They had no clue what it felt like to stand at the corner of an emerald-green field, wind up, and boot a ball in a perfect crossing arc. Hear the roars and cheers from the crowd. I searched for language my college-English-professor dad could understand.

  “It’s not just a game, Dad. It…defines me.”

  His face resembled a mask. His spoke quietly, without a trace of emotion.

  “Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” he said.

  ig•no•min•i•ous

  Mr. Beady took me that evening to see Nonna. It was her last night in the hospital, and she was anxious to go home. Well, more like demanding to go home. Once they’d got some fluids into her, and finished running all their tests, she claimed she felt like her old self.

  “Beady, you’ve gotta get me out of here,” she chirped the moment we entered her room. She was sitting straight up in bed, on top of the covers. She wore her cozy magenta chenille socks and one of the Happy Bunny nightshirts we’d brought from home. Her half-eaten dinner was pushed aside (“These people cook worse than me!” she’d declared) and her night table was crowded with big vases of flowers and about a zillion crayon colorings from the Kathy kids.

  “We’ll spring you tomorrah, deah,” he chuckled, settling into the vinyl armchair beside the bed. “Cheer up. Miss Brett and I brought you an Italian from Emilio’s.”

  I sat on the edge of her bed and handed her a paper bag containing a twelve-inch submarine sandwich stuffed with ham, pastrami, salami, provolone, shredded lettuce, onions, and peppers. Nonna grinned, reaching inside. “Oil and vinegar, salt and pepper,” I said.

  “I adore you,” she said. “Your mother brought bran muffins today. They’re in the drawer. Take them on your way out.”

  Mr. Beady and I watched silently as Nonna tucked into her Italian. Her McCarthy appetite had returned, although her jaundice remained. It would take some time, the doctors told us, for her color to improve.

  “Did you bring the forms we talked about?” she asked Mr. Beady between bites.

  “Yes,” he said hesitantly. “But wouldn’t you rather visit with Brett instead of filling out forms?”

  “I don’t mind,” I said quickly. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about my ignominious day. A Mr. Beady word I’d looked up.

  Ignominious: characterized by disgrace or shame; dishonorable.

  “Go on, Beady,” said Nonna. “I’d like to see what she thinks, anyway.”

  Mr. Beady sighed and pulled a sheaf of papers from an inside coat pocket. He placed it on the bed alongside Nonna.

  “‘Taking Charge of Your Health Care,’” she read aloud. “‘Maine Health Care Advance Directive.’”

  “Translate?” I said. Nonna wiped her fingers, flipped a page, and read on.

  “‘When you need medical care, you have the right to make choices about that care. But there may come a time when you are so sick that you can’t make your choices known. You can stay in charge by putting your choices in writing ahead of this time. This is called giving advance directives.’”

  “Oh,” I said. Maybe talking about my ignominious day might be preferable. Even though I had direct orders from my parents not to tell Nonna about the second suspension. An unprecedented move, since I always told Nonna everything. But our redefined lives had new rules, apparently, and Not Upsetting Nonna had become Rule #1.

  “Maybe you should wait until Mom and Dad are around to do this,” I suggested.

  “She tried,” said Mr. Beady. “They fought.”

  “Since when do you fight with Mom and Dad?” I said. So much for Rule #1.

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly a fight,” Nonna explained. “More like a tearful disagreement. For one thing, I want to be an organ donor. That wasn’t a big problem for them. You all know how I’m into recycling. But I also want a Do Not Resuscitate order, and that upset them.”

  “That means if her heart stops beating, or she stops breathing, she doesn’t want the doctors to do CPR and all the rest of it,” Mr. Beady translated.

  “Why not?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible. It was hard not to show how much this conversation was freaking me out.

  “Because when the ol’ ticker stops tocking,” Nonna said, patting her chest, “I’ll assume it’s time to go. And I want that to be peaceful.”

  “‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’” Mr. Beady said in a gravelly voice.

  Nonna frowned. “Not yet, Beady. No Dylan Thomas yet,” she said. Mr. Beady rose from his chair and wandered to the side table packed with vases.

  “‘Wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers,’” he sighed, fingering the petals of a large daisy. I saw him glance slyly at Nonna, waiting for her reaction. She didn’t disappoint.

  Nonna snatched up the empty sub bag, rolled it into a ball, and threw it at him.

  “That’s it! Out, Beady,” she exclaimed. “Go get yourself a cup of coffee from the machine. I warned you: No Philip Larkin, especially that poem. Give me some time alone with my granddaughter.”

  Mr. Beady, beaming and not looking one bit repentant, gave me a little wave and left the room. Just as Michael was to movie lines, Mr. Beady was to poetry. Add a poetry-quoting dad to the mix, and it was enough to drive a person insane.

  “Now, where were we?” Nonna smiled as the door closed.

  “Who’s Philip Larking?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “Larkin. Philip Larkin,” she said. “A British poet, and I can’t sta
nd him. Beady loves his work. The only thing he might enjoy more than reading Larkin is torturing me about Larkin. It’s an ongoing battle.”

  “Are there other families on the planet that fight over poems?” I wondered aloud.

  “I certainly hope so!” she said. “What else is worth fighting over, except perhaps love and politics?”

  I sighed, stretching myself across the foot of her bed. “You want to know what I can’t stand?” I said. “I can’t stand the way Dad says ‘poem.’ Most people just say it like ‘pome.’ Simple. But Dad says it ‘po-ehm.’ Like it’s got two syllables. Drives me nuts.”

  Nonna looked thoughtful. “I think it does have two syllables,” she replied.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yes way,” she persisted. “I really think it does. It’s subtle, but it’s definitely a two-syllable word. Po-ehm. Look it up when you get home.”

  “Oh, god, are we really talking about poems and pronunciations?” I moaned, hands over my eyes. “You people are weird and making me weird too. I’m doomed.”

  “Well, you brought it up,” Nonna said brightly. “Since you don’t seem to want to talk about my advance directive.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “What is it about discussing these forms that bothers you?” Nonna asked.

  “Nonna…duh!” I exclaimed. She looked startled.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  “I don’t want to talk about you dying!” I said. “I think that should be a no-brainer, okay?” I rolled onto my stomach and hung my head over the edge of the bed. The blood rushed to my ears. Nonna and I stayed like that for a while.

  “Brett, look at me,” she finally said. I rolled over.

  “I owe you an apology,” she said carefully. “In so many ways you seem so wise and mature to me that I talk to you as if you’re an adult. That’s not fair, and I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I don’t want to talk about dying either,” she declared. “I want to talk about living. I have a lot of living left to do, and I’ll need your help in getting it all done. But Brett…living is not the absence of dying. Dying is part of the deal. We all do it—some better than others, if you want my opinion. And I want to die the way I’ve lived.” We let that sit for a while before either of us spoke again.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I finally said.

  “Give it some thought,” she said. “In the meantime, I have a proposal for you.”

  Then Mr. Beady, with his knack for interruptions, returned.

  “What’d I miss?” he asked, resettling into his vinyl resting place.

  “We’re planning a party,” Nonna told him.

  My eyes widened in surprise. Nonna never spoke sarcastically to Mr. Beady, no matter how annoying he was. But then I realized: She wasn’t being sarcastic.

  dire

  The actual substance of junior high is so mind-numbingly dull that people yearn for little scandals to think about. Even a falling-out between once-obscure, Pluto-circling BFFs was enough to set e-mails flying.

  So when I finally returned to school after my second suspension, Diane and I provided plenty of material for the rumor mill simply by ignoring each other. Anytime we took up space in the same room, eyes focused on us, everyone waiting for a fight or a snarly comment.

  But week after week: nothing. We passed in the hallways, handed test papers to each other in language arts, changed for gym at adjacent lockers: nothing. Our worlds had come crashing down—Kit told me Diane’s parents were having fights in public places, like the grocery store parking lot; she told Diane my Nonna had cancer—and we said nothing. “You’re both being idiots!” she complained, but I simply shrugged.

  What Kit didn’t get was that Diane and I now existed on different planets. Coupledom with Bob, plus cheerleading, had launched her into stratospheric levels of popularity. You could practically hear the cameras clicking when she walked down the halls, the eager paparazzi of Mescataqua Junior High watching—and imitating—her every move. If her home life was in shambles, if she was crying herself to sleep every night, you’d never have guessed it. She seemed more beautiful, more perfectly positioned smack-dab in the middle of The Junior, than ever before.

  Meanwhile, her former BFF, former Best Eighth-Grade Corner Kicker in Maine, was…bored silly. Climbing the walls every gorgeous, crisp fall day after school as my soccer team practiced without me and boarded the yellow bus on game days and headed off together in a chanting, riotous pack. Okay, so it was probably unreasonable of me to expect them to wear black armbands and go into mourning because Brett McCarthy got kicked off the team. But my girls didn’t seem to miss a beat. They even won games without me. The nerve.

  To make matters worse, I had a date with the principal every day. A lunch date, that is. While Diane munched lettuce leaves at the Impossibly-Thin-Way-Popular-Girls’ table, I got treated to a daily gag fest with No-Hare. Lunch detention required that every day I drag my sorry self and my sandwich to his office, where he would sit behind his desk, eat cafeteria fried chicken, and lick his fingers.

  Luckily, he didn’t talk much. I had feared a mini Lecture of a Lifetime each day, but No-Hare seemed perfectly comfortable with our companionable silence, broken only by his swallowing, chewing sounds. Usually he read while he ate. I’d wolf down my PB&J, then knock out some homework until the bell rang.

  One day we had company. Walking into his office at lunchtime, I discovered Mrs. Augmentino, the school’s Gifted and Talented coordinator.

  “Ah, here she is! Come in, Brett,” No-Hare said jovially, in his Company Voice, that hearty, fake voice adults always use when “company” is around. Something’s up, I thought, settling into my usual chair and unwrapping my sandwich.

  “How are you, Brett?” asked Mrs. Augmentino, sounding very sincere.

  I shrugged. “Okay, I guess,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Well, actually, I’m very excited,” she replied. “Someone special paid me a visit this morning. Can you guess who it was?”

  Oh gosh golly! I wanted to exclaim. Can you say, “Special Visit,” boys and girls?

  Mrs. Augmentino has this really annoying habit of talking like a female version of Mr. Rogers. It sends Michael into major Mr.-Rogers-imitation mode after every Fifth Period.

  “Uh, I have no idea,” I replied instead.

  “Really?” she persisted. She seemed truly surprised that I didn’t know.

  “Really,” I said, taking a big bite of my sandwich.

  “Your grandmother, of course.” She smiled. I almost choked.

  “And her friend,” Mrs. Augmentino continued, unaware of the dire effect of her words. “An elderly gentleman named Mr. Beady.”

  Dire: desperately urgent; warning of disaster.

  “Why?” I sputtered, mouth full.

  “Your grandmother has come to us with a marvelous Special Challenges project proposal,” Mrs. Augmentino explained. Special Challenges, a.k.a. Fifth Period. That’s what the teachers call it. I enjoy telling Michael he’s challenged.

  I imagine I looked pretty challenged as Mrs. Augmentino filled me in. I think my mouth dropped open and my bag lunch fell unnoticed to the floor when I learned that Nonna and Mr. Beady had come up with the idea to set the Nerd Herd loose on the lighthouse problem. Their question: How would you illuminate a lighthouse without electricity, solar panels, lead acid batteries, a Fresnel lens…in other words, how did they do it back in Thomas Jefferson’s day, when Spruce Island light was built?

  This was exactly the sort of stuff that got the Fifth Period’s mental machinery humming. It was Odyssey of the Mind, Destination Imagination, and Math Counts all rolled into one. With Michael and company on the case, I reckoned we’d see that lighthouse ablaze come summer. Take that, Maine Maritime Academy.

  “Brett, you haven’t answered Mrs. Augmentino’s question,” No-Hare said, dragging me back into the conversation.

  “I’m sorry…what?” I sta
mmered.

  “I said, how would you like to participate in this project?” she repeated.

  “I’m not in Fifth Period,” I replied automatically. I am Brett McCarthy, I thought. Former Soccer Star, Violent, Practically Friendless Nongenius.

  “Yes,” replied Mrs. Augmentino, reading my thoughts. “But we thought since this involves your family, you might like to join us. And you know, Brett, you’re quite a capable student. One of your former L.A. teachers—Mrs. LaVoie—has spoken very highly of you. I think you’d enjoy a Special Challenge.”

  “I’ve already consulted the guidance counselor, who says we can easily accommodate this schedule change for you,” No-Hare said. “You’d have to switch lunchtimes. Eat with the Special Challenges class…I know, you’ll miss me. You’ll also lose your study hall.”

  No more giggling Diane and Jeanne Anne passing notes in study hall? No more dining with No-Hare?

  “Where do I sign up?” I almost shouted.

  “Excellent!” No-Hare looked satisfied.

  “Marvelous!” Mrs. Augmentino enthused. I realized it had been a long time since one of my decisions had pleased an adult, let alone two.

  The bell rang, signaling my release, and as I hurried through the halls to my next class, I could feel the grin stretched across my face. Because there was no way, no way, he’d know I’d been invited to join their group. I laughed to myself as I sprinted toward my locker, imagining Michael’s expression when Brett McCarthy, Special Challenges Scholar, strolled into Fifth Period.

  prow•ess

  I wasn’t the only one who’d had no clue what Nonna and Mr. Beady were up to. My parents shared my cluelessness. But I didn’t fully appreciate how clueless until dinner that night.

  Even though my new membership in the Fifth Period club had nothing to do with my mind (Mrs. Augmentino had carefully chosen “capable,” not “gifted,” to describe my intellectual prowess) and everything to do with Nonna’s involvement, I couldn’t wait to tell Mom and Dad.