Hush-a-Bye

by Jody Lee Mott

  “Mom works,” she said.

  I nudged the pile of the green-tinged tater tots around with a plastic spoon. “I know,” I said quietly. “Eat your lunch.”

  “Works hard every day.” Antonia faced me. Her cheeks were colored a blotchy pink. “She don’t know nothing about Mom.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and gritted my teeth. “Please,” I begged her. “Let it go.”

  Antonia scowled. Then she took off her backpack, propped it in her lap, and buried her face in it. I could hear her mumbling something, but I wasn’t going to make a scene about it.

  Of all the different ways I’d played out this day’s lunchtime in my head, I’d never planned for this. Why did I let Madison get to me like that? She didn’t say anything she hadn’t said a hundred times before, and worse. And why couldn’t Antonia keep her big mouth shut? Mom was always going on about how I should be more patient with her because she couldn’t help the way she was. Sometimes I wondered if Antonia didn’t take advantage of her “helplessness” more than Mom realized.

  None of that mattered now. I didn’t look up, but I could feel dozens and dozens of eyes zeroed in on us—the stupid girl who wouldn’t talk to anyone and her crazy, loudmouth sister who was moaning into her baby backpack. A couple of pathetic losers.

  Trash Licker and Trash Licker Junior.

  My eyes started to burn. Please don’t cry please don’t cry, I pleaded silently, even as the sobs rose up my throat.

  Then the table suddenly jerked and banged into my ribs. I swallowed the sob and opened my eyes, ready to glare at Antonia for her clumsiness, which was about all I could do. What I didn’t expect was the sight of the big, goofy grin plastered all over my sister’s face.

  “This is going to be good,” she said.

  Antonia shoved aside her lunch tray, planted her backpack on the table with a thud, and rested her chin on it, all the while still grinning like a cat with a mouse under each paw. Now I was really worried. She must have snapped under the pressure and lost her mind. I couldn’t blame her. It was a miracle the same thing hadn’t happened to me a long time ago.

  “Antonia—” I started, but she held up her hand.

  “Watch,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  You’ll see? A vision of Antonia bolting out of her chair to tackle Mrs. Dudley and shove carrot sticks up the lunch lady’s nose wandered through my brain. Part of me dreaded it. Another part of me wondered how far she could jam them up there before someone pulled her off.

  But Antonia didn’t move. She just sat there grinning her big, dumb grin and drumming her fingers.

  What on earth does she think’s going to happen? I pretended not to care, deciding that lining up my shriveled peas in groups of three was the most useful thing I could do. Let her sit there and grin all she wants. Nothing’s going to happen.

  And for the second time that day, I was dead wrong.

  I heard it before I saw it—like the rumble of a distant train. A strange clattering rang out from the lunch line. I turned to see what the commotion was.

  Mrs. Dudley stood by the large aluminum basket holding the half pints of milk and chocolate milk. Her face was pinched with confusion.

  No wonder. The milk basket was rattling and shaking and bouncing from side to side, the cartons flipping and knocking into each other.

  Nobody was touching it.

  Mrs. Dudley reached out a finger to touch the basket. It clanged loudly. She drew her finger back quickly, like she’d been given a shock.

  “Emma? Something’s wrong with the milk,” Mrs. Dudley said, trying to sound calm and not succeeding very well.

  “I already checked the expiration dates,” the husky voice called out from the back.

  “No, I don’t mean the milk’s gone bad,” Mrs. Dudley said. “It’s—it’s moving.”

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  Bang!

  The aluminum basket jumped up out of its metal slot about a foot, hovered for a second, then slammed back down. Mrs. Dudley shrieked. By this time every head in the lunchroom had turned to watch. No one said a word. No one moved.

  The basket leaped up a second time. Mrs. Dudley grabbed it on both sides and tried to shove it back down. The milk basket didn’t budge from its place in midair.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” she yelled. It slammed down a second time, then started bouncing up and down more rapidly, going a little bit higher each time. Mrs. Dudley’s face changed from pasty fear to tomato-red rage. She kept her hand clamped tight to the basket, even when it leaped so high she was barely standing on her tiptoes, bellowing out words not exactly school appropriate.

  Antonia punched me lightly on the arm. “Here we go,” she said.

  Before I could ask what she meant, the basket dropped down and the banging stopped. The room went completely quiet except for Mrs. Dudley’s heavy breathing. She hunched over the basket with her hands gripping the sides. Thick veins stuck out in her neck, and a satisfied look of victory spread across her red, sweaty face.

  “Got you,” she wheezed.

  And that’s when the milk exploded.

  Every carton burst open at the top and shot its contents straight into Mrs. Dudley’s startled face like wet fireworks. The volley of milk hit her so hard she was thrown a foot in the air. She rode the brown-and-white wave for a moment until gravity took over, and she fell back on her bottom with a huge, damp plop.

  Even after she landed, a downpour of white and chocolate milk continued to rain on her. She didn’t move or try to get out of the way. She just sat there blinking with her mouth open, adrift in a huge, swirly lake of milk. Finally, the last of it sputtered out of the ruined cartons.

  For about five seconds, there was complete silence, except for the drip drip of milk from her hairnet and the click of the minute hand on the wall clock.

  Then Mrs. Dudley screamed.

  After that, it was chaos. Kids doubled up with laughter while adults burst into the lunchroom and ran in every direction, shouting and pointing fingers and sometimes slipping in the milky puddles pooled up and down the lunch line.

  It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. But what was even stranger was how Antonia sat there the whole time clutching her backpack to her stomach, rocking back and forth, smiling like she’d never stop smiling the rest of her life.

  5

  WATCH, YOU’LL SEE. That’s what Antonia had said right before the milk exploded. And then there was that big grin she’d had stuck on her face after the whole show. At first I wondered if she’d had something to do with it. But that made no sense. I mean, how could a girl who wore a baby-duck barrette pull off such a stunt?

  The answer came easily—she hadn’t done anything. It was only a coincidence.

  It was just like Antonia to take credit for a coincidence. Once, when she was seven, she dreamed it would rain. Later that day, despite the weatherman’s predictions, it drizzled a little. For a long time after, she insisted she’d made it happen and she was a dream wizard, even though she could never make any of her other dreams come true since.

  This was the same thing. A coincidence—a very weird coincidence, sure, but still a coincidence.

  The cafeteria incident was all anyone in the school talked about the rest of the afternoon. The “Atomic Milk Bomb” and “Revenge of the Cows” were a few of the names I overheard. The teachers were the worst. After shushing the kids and scolding them for gossiping, they’d whisper to each other and hide their smirks behind closed fists like they were coughing.

  No one bothered with me. The Milk Bomb made me invisible. Even Madison didn’t evil-eye me when she walked into Ms. Crozzetti’s social studies class—the only class we shared, thankfully. She was too busy chattering with the twins. As first days went, this one hadn’t turned out half bad. And heading to Mr. Capp’s art class at the end of it was the whipp
ed-cream frosting on the stale and just-barely-edible first-day-of-school cupcake.

  I’d knew I’d be okay once I got to Mr. Capp’s class. He was the best, and I loved knowing he was going to be my art teacher again.

  He never asked me any embarrassing questions, and he always had little tasks for me to do, like cleaning brushes or sorting colored beads. And about once a week he had me draw a dog.

  The dog thing started the year before in November, just before the Thanksgiving break. We were supposed to be constructing a color wheel. Usually I do what I’m told, but that day I was copying the little beagle from the cover of Shiloh onto the back of my notebook. I’d borrowed the book that morning from the library, mostly because of the cover. I love any book about animals, and I’d read Black Beauty about a thousand times, but something about that dog’s face just warmed my heart.

  Daddy used to talk about getting a dog, but talk was all he ever did about it, which was pretty typical for him. The trailer park we lived in now didn’t allow pets, but that didn’t keep me from daydreaming about a cute pup to cuddle. So that day, without thinking, I picked up my pencil and started drawing.

  My face burned once I realized Mr. Capp was watching me. Last year I hadn’t known him very well, or how nice he could be. I was so scared I didn’t even try to hide what I was doing.

  I waited for the red-faced screaming and the detention slip I probably had coming. After a minute of silence, I braved a quick glance up. His forehead was all knotted like he was thinking hard. He didn’t look mad, but I could never tell with adults.

  “Not bad.” He crooked his finger and directed me to sit at the table by the window. I did as I was told, even though my legs felt like cement. He disappeared in his art closet for a few seconds, then came out with a huge book the size of a mailbox. He slammed the book on the table, opened it up, and pointed to a picture of a beagle.

  “Try and draw that for me,” he said, and walked away.

  For five minutes, I sat there trembling, my pencil frozen in my fingers, not moving a muscle. Was this a trick? Some kind of weird adult game to trap me? My daddy used to be like that. Smiling one minute like he was everybody’s best friend and then, without warning, throwing out angry words like knives, not caring much who he cut.

  After a very long and very painful five minutes, I finally lifted my eyes. Mr. Capp was leaning back in his chair with his feet propped on his desk. He was gazing out the window and tapping a pencil on his chin. And then he stopped, turned to me, and smiled.

  He smiled at me for all of two seconds, then went back to tapping his chin. And that was it. But something in me kind of unwound a little. I can’t explain why. And I started drawing.

  Since that time I’d said maybe six words to him. He still talked to me every class, though, like we were having a regular conversation. I must have drawn at least a couple dozen different dogs for him. Once in a while one of them would show up somewhere on a wall or a bulletin board. And for a little while that day I’d float a couple of inches above the ground.

  So for forty-two minutes, twice a week, I could unclench my stomach and relax. I was safe with Mr. Capp. That was a pretty big deal.

  Some kids made fun of Mr. Capp behind his back. He’d married the guy he’d lived with for twenty years once it became legal in New York. Their picture was in the paper, smiling and holding hands. I thought they looked sweet together. Happy. I hoped I could feel happy like that when I was an adult.

  But I did feel almost happy when I entered his class that afternoon after all the lunchtime craziness. And almost happy was good enough.

  “There you are, Lucy,” Mr. Capp said as I walked in. Like always, he wore a pale blue painter’s smock, and the ends of his big black mustache were twisted so they pointed up like a bug’s antennae. He held a large cardboard box in both hands.

  “Come here and give me a hand,” he said. “I need you to sort through these colored pencils and pull out all the broken ones.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m making you table partners with a girl who’s new to the school. Her name is May Darasavath. Her family moved here from the city about a week ago, so she’s probably feeling a little out of sorts. You don’t have to do anything special with her but be your usual wonderful self. That work for you, Lucy?”

  I looked at the girl sitting at the front table. She had a long waterfall of black hair and friendly brown eyes. “Sure,” I said, and I brought the tub of pencils over to the table.

  I found out pretty quickly that for a girl who, according to Mr. Capp, was “feeling a little out of sorts,” she sure didn’t hold back. While we both sorted the pencils, she talked to me about her little brother, who had a head like a pumpkin and who ate his boogers; about her left pinkie toe, which was abnormally larger than all her other toes but was still her favorite; about the best television show ever, called Demon Donnie, about a half-human, half-demon teenage boy who had a good heart and awesome hair and couldn’t help it if everything he touched blew up; and about a thousand other things all jumbled up together in words that spilled constantly out of her mouth.

  Once in a while she’d turn to me and say, “What do you think?” And I’d nod or mumble, “Uh, yeah . . . great,” or something just as meaningless. Sometimes I even smiled. But she didn’t seem to mind keeping up the conversation for both of us. And the funny thing is, neither did I. I liked May right away, and strangely enough, I think she may have liked me. Or at least she didn’t hate me, which was okay too. Whipped-cream frosting with a cherry on top, I thought.

  By the time I stepped onto the bus after the last bell, I’d half convinced myself this year might not be as horrible as I’d imagined. After all, the honors for having the worst first day ever had to go to the lunch lady. And to be honest, I didn’t feel too bad about what happened to Mrs. Dudley. Antonia was right. That woman shouldn’t have talked about Mom that way.

  I worried about Antonia, though. She didn’t say much sitting next to me on the bus and kept her head buried in her backpack like she’d done at lunchtime. I wondered if her cafeteria grin was only an act, her way of pretending she wasn’t bothered by Mrs. Dudley’s nastiness. Or maybe she’d really convinced herself she’d made the Milk Bomb happen, and now she was feeling guilty about hurting someone.

  I touched the back of her hand. She turned it over and wrapped her fingers in mine. We stayed like that the whole way home.

  I thought about raiding my coffee-can bank for the Christmas half-dollars I’d been saving. A couple of fat chocolate bars from the convenience store would be just the thing to perk up my sister. Especially if they had almonds.

  The bus slowed and let us off. As it pulled away, I tapped Antonia on the shoulder to share my candy bar idea. Before I could get out a word, she grabbed hold of my sleeve.

  “Come on!” she said, yanking me behind her as she rushed on ahead. She was smaller than me, but her grip was a steel vise, and I stumbled along as best as I could. When we got to the ginkgo tree, she pushed me hard onto the stony ground.

  “Ouch,” I said, rubbing my bottom. “Watch what you’re doing.”

  Antonia didn’t hear a word I said. She danced around the tree, flailing her arms, kicking up her feet, and letting loose with several earsplitting howler-monkey screams.

  “What’s gotten into you?” I yelled.

  Antonia ignored me. She stopped to watch the bus as it turned the corner. When it disappeared completely, she stuck out her tongue and blew a wet raspberry. Then she plopped herself right next to me.

  “So . . . what did you think?” Antonia was grinning like she had at the lunch table. It was starting to get on my nerves.

  “About what?” I asked. “Like how you almost broke my butt bone?”

  Antonia groaned and rolled her eyes. “Not that! You know. Spoosh!” She puckered her lips and wiggled her fingers in the air.

&
nbsp; “Oh, the milk,” I said, still rubbing. “Yeah, I guess that was kind of weird.”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “The lunch lady? Sure. She was pretty upset.”

  Antonia snorted. “Serves her right.” She pulled her backpack to her lap, zipped it open, and stuck her face deep inside. At first I thought she was searching for something. But then I heard her whispering.

  “Antonia?” I said.

  She laughed and lifted her head. “It was all her idea, you know. About the milk. Wasn’t that a good idea?”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Whose idea?”

  “Whose? Hers.” Her hand dove into her backpack. Sheets of paper, notebooks, and gnawed pencils were flung carelessly over her shoulder. Then she jammed her tongue in the corner of her mouth and strained at whatever was stuck in the bottom of her bag.

  Finally, with a loud grunt, her arm jerked free. More paper and pencils shot in all directions, followed by a huge yellow cloud that swallowed both her hands. Antonia kicked the backpack aside and smoothed the cloud in her lap until it settled into loose blond curls. Then she spun it around to face me.

  The doll’s head. She was holding the doll’s head.

  6

  MY STOMACH FLUTTERED like it did on stormy nights, when the tree branches rattled like dead bones. Maybe it was the dark space in the eye socket where Antonia had cleaned out the mud, or the tiny smirk on the doll’s thin lips I hadn’t noticed before. Or it might have been the thought of Antonia with a battered doll’s head buried in her backpack at school all day long. Ugh.

  I frowned. “Why did you bring that to school?”

  “I told her what that lunch lady said,” Antonia said, ignoring my question. “She thought it was mean. She said mean people like that need to know what it feels like to be treated like garbage.” Her bottom lip trembled a little. “Mom’s not garbage.”