by Mary Amato
Stay asleep, Mudman.
I step over the man’s hand, the one holding the empty bottle. I have two more steps to go and then I’ll be clear. A door slams down the hall. The man’s arm jumps. The bottle crashes. I run.
Our door is locked. I bang on it and try to get my key out of my backpack at the same time. Behind, I can hear Mudman cursing.
My mom lets me in—Tish balanced on one hip—and I quickly close and lock the door. I made it.
“Where have you been? What’s going on? Why are you out of breath?” She sees the cleats. “Where did you get those?”
Sometimes my mom is as fast with her mouth as I am with my feet. I try to explain everything and catch my breath at the same time and when I describe The Plague, she sets Tish down. “You can’t go out for that kind of team, Trev.”
“Why not? All I needed was these and I got them. The tryouts are tomorrow and—”
“Trev, those teams cost money. There’s fees and stuff. What about the school team?”
“I can earn my own money.”
“Not that kind of money. Tish, let go of my leg.”
“How do you know?”
“Listen to me, how are you getting to the practices and the games?”
“I’ll take the bus. The Ride-On lets you ride free with a school ID.”
“What if the games are far away? The bus doesn’t just go anywhere you want to go.”
Her voice is aimed at me and just keeps hitting like a punch. I don’t want to listen. I am going to try out for the team tomorrow; I don’t care what she says.
“Get back here. Where are you going?”
Maybe Juan has a ball and we can shoot on each other.
“Trev.” She stops me. “Tish, go play with Michael.” She pulls me into the bedroom and whispers, “Listen. I tracked Wayne down.”
Wayne is Michael and Tish’s dad. He moved in when Michael was born, and I liked him all right. Sometimes I would even pretend he was my dad. I never told anybody that. I’d just think it to myself. But after Tish was born, he was always getting headaches and one day he was gone.
“Is he coming back?” I ask.
“No,” she says quickly. “I called him for child support. This time he actually says he has it and he’ll come by. I think Social Services is on his back. I was hoping he’d come already, but he hasn’t.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“I’m going to the Fry Factory about a job because they said that’s when the manager would be there. I don’t want this to fall in your lap, but he might come when I’m gone so I wanted you to know.” She tugs a rubber band off her wrist and pulls her hair back into a ponytail so tight it stretches the skin by her eyes. “I’m not telling Michael and Tish anything. Tish is too little anyway, and I don’t want to get Michael’s hopes up thinking he’s got some daddy coming to rescue him. So if Wayne comes, don’t answer or anything. I told him to just slip the money under the door. If you see it, grab it so Tish doesn’t flush it down the potty or anything.”
She asks about homework, and I snap and ask her how to do my Computer Applications homework without a computer.
She just gets mad at the teacher for assuming that everybody’s got one, which does me no good. She shows me what we should eat for dinner if she’s late and says to make sure to give Tish and Michael baths and then she is out the door.
Michael takes his thumb out of his mouth and says, “Trev, you can’t make me take a bath.”
“Stop being a baby,” I snap. “You’re just afraid you’ll go down the drain.”
Michael glares at me. “I hate you.”
“Well, you stink,” I say. “This whole place stinks.”
Tish waddles over and tugs on my shorts and says, “Bubbie!” which is her word for bubbles, which means that she wants to take a bath. Tish is like a mermaid. She loves the water.
“Leave me alone,” I say. “I’m in a bad mood.” I go into the bedroom, push a load of dirty clothes off the mattress, and sit down. “How come we don’t have any clean clothes?” I say to myself, but Michael answers.
“She said them washing machines down there are busted. We got to go to a laundry place.”
Tish waddles in with her big diaper, puts her face close to mine, and looks at me fiercely. “Me bubbie now!”
In spite of how mad I am and how sorry for myself I feel, I have to laugh. “You think you’re tough, huh, Little Cavewoman?” I ask.
She nods, all seriousness, and I laugh again and tickle her. She’s so little and cute. I don’t understand how anybody could give her up.
If Wayne comes, I’ll tell him that Tish has outgrown her crybaby stage and that Michael doesn’t wet himself every night the way he used to. Wayne will see how cute they are and decide to stay. He’ll bring money so Mom won’t have to worry and then I can be on the team. “Let’s order pizza,” Wayne will say, and Mom will come home and see everybody sitting around the table eating and laughing and she’ll be happy.
“Bath time,” I say. “We have to get ready.”
“No,” Michael says.
“Little guys who stink never ever get new backpacks. If you get clean something good might happen.”
I run water in the tub and peel off Tish’s diaper. “You stink worse than Michael!” I say, picking her up.
“Me stinkie!” She laughs and kicks her little legs in the air, and then I slip her into the water and she sits, happy as a duck. I squeeze some dish soap into the tub and turn on some more water until it bubbles and foams.
“Bubbies!” she says, and splashes the water.
Michael comes in and stands there, looking at the water, sucking his thumb, wanting to go in but scared.
“It’s okay, Little Man. Nothing’s going to happen.” I scoop up a handful of bubbles and lay them on his arm. “See. Feels good.”
Michael climbs in carefully, like if he steps in the wrong spot, a trapdoor will open and he’ll get sucked in.
“Here’s a boat.” I set a toothpaste box on the surface of the water in front of Michael. They watch it float. I would like to be a little kid again. Little kids don’t have very big problems.
“Me wan boat,” Tish says, and slaps the water.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be back in one second. No messing around. Okay?”
I go into the kitchen and get an empty Jell-O box out of the trash. My mom’s orange shoe box is on top of the refrigerator, which makes me think about Charlie. I wonder who found him and how that person felt. I imagine that I’m the one walking past the Dumpster and hearing a sound. I imagine lifting the box out, feeling the weight of something living in my hands. I imagine opening it and seeing a perfect little baby inside crying. It’s okay, Charlie. You’re safe now.
I notice silence. There’s no sound coming from the bathroom, no splashing or talking or giggling or arguing or screaming. My blood goes cold. My heart starts pounding. Then Michael screams.
I run into the bathroom, expecting—I don’t even want to say what I’m expecting—but Michael is holding up the soggy pieces of the toothpaste-box boat.
“It sunk!” Michael says.
Relief washes over me like a huge wave.
“It’s okay.” I take the wet box and throw it in the trash. My heart is still pounding.
“Me wan boat,” Tish says.
I set the Jell-O box on a cloud of suds and blow gently. The little box boat drifts toward Tish, and she looks at me as if I’m a hero. “It’s not going to last, okay, Tish? It’s going to get wet and sink. Don’t go crying when that happens.”
“What’s on your hand?” Michael points to the H that I wrote on my hand.
“Oh! H stands for science homework,” I say. My reminder. “Thanks, Little Man.” I bring in the box of paper I picked up from the print shop and my science book so I can do my homework and keep an eye on them at the same time.
“I got homework, too,” Michael says, even though it isn’t true.
“Me wan home ork,” Tish says.<
br />
I laugh. “Trust me. You don’t want home ork.”
In between two pieces of stiff cardboard, I put a stack of the paper with the printed side facedown so it’s not so noticeable. Then I clip the whole thing together with a bulldog clip and write out the title, very cool, Trevor-style.
“What’s that?” Michael asks.
“It’s my official Kingdom of Fungi Identification Notebook,” I say. Ferguson didn’t say it had to be an expensive notebook. At least it’s something. “Listen to this,” I read from my science book. “Mushrooms don’t have seeds because they’re not plants, and they don’t lay eggs or give birth, so what do they do?”
“They die,” Michael guesses.
He and Tish are watching the Jell-O box sink.
I pick it up and throw it out. Miraculously, they don’t throw a fit. “Here’s what mushrooms do,” I say to keep their attention away from the boat. “They shoot out spores. Little round things made of super-hard stuff called chitin. Mushrooms shoot out lots of spores, hoping that they’ll land in the dirt and start new mushrooms. Listen to this.… A scientist measured the force and found that spores can blast off a mushroom with ten thousand times more force than the space shuttle uses to blast out of the Earth’s orbit.”
Michael blasts water out of the tub.
“Don’t make a mess, Little Man, or you’ll have to clean it up. Listen to this.… Spores are so small they blow away in the wind. Some scientists think maybe spores can fly through space without getting crushed or blown up or fried because they’re made of that hard chitin stuff, which means that it might be possible that mushrooms from Earth can travel to other planets.”
Michael and Tish laugh even though they have no idea what I’m talking about. After they’re done with their baths they run around without any clothes until I make them get dressed. I put Tish in her good dress so that Wayne will see how cute she is.
I stick my head way out the window to see if Wayne is coming. He might have changed a little, but I’ll recognize him because he’s tall with the longest neck and the smallest head I’ve ever seen. My nickname for him was Giraffe, which used to always make Mom laugh.
A grandma is walking home with a baby tied to her back. A group of high school girls are waiting at the bus stop. No Giraffe.
Michael comes over and makes me move so he can see if Charlie is still written in the windowsill. He gets me the blue chalk and makes me write all our names over. “Make ’em fresh,” he says. Not bad vocabulary for a little man. When he’s not looking I write another name. Wayne. I focus all my energy into thinking about Wayne and send it out the window, like I’m calling his butt here. Wayne. Wayne. Wayne. You never know. Maybe it could work. When I was Michael’s age, I used to call for my dad like that. Dad. Dad. Dad. Only that was stupid because even if my dad could hear it, he couldn’t just walk out of prison.
I look out the window. In the parking lot, Juan is juggling, Markus is riding around and around on that bike he stole, and Microphone Mouth is out sitting on the fence singing like she’s got an audience. Diamond’s mom comes out and yells at her and Diamond gets up and follows her back to their building.
The bus comes and no Giraffe gets off.
Sometimes I imagine there was some big mistake and my dad got framed and really didn’t steal the stuff they said he did. I imagine him getting out and finding me.
Three cars go by. None of them pull in.
Everywhere you look there’s another apartment building. Window. Window. Window. Window. Windows stacked on top of windows. People stacked on top of people. Once when I was little, we had a basement apartment and the windows had bars on them. Mom said it was to keep people from breaking in, but I didn’t like those bars. That place felt like a jail.
On the bus ride to school, as soon as you cross Branch Road, there aren’t any more apartments. And once you get to Buckingham Heights, the houses get big and have nice green grass. I bet Xander and Langley live in those kind of houses. I’d like a house with grass.
Five times there are footsteps in the hallway, but nobody knocks on our door.
Michael and Tish get hungry, so I give them cereal, and Tish spills milk all over her dress. “Momma’s gonna be mad,” Michael says, which makes Tish cry.
After a while, they go to sleep.
I go back to the window and concentrate as hard as I can. Wayne. Wayne. Wayne.
The bus comes and goes three times, and Wayne doesn’t get off.
The fourth time the bus comes, my mom gets off.
I watch her walk all the way across the parking lot and past Diamond’s building. She doesn’t look up once.
I rub the Wayne off the windowsill, and then curl up on my mattress in the living room, pretending to be asleep. I don’t want her to ask me if Wayne came. I don’t want to see the look on her face when I say no. I picture her walking up to our building and opening the front door. What if Mudman is in the stairwell with the empty bottle in his hand? Even though I’m still mad at my mom, I don’t want anything to happen to her. Shut up, I say to my heart because it’s pounding way too loud. I hold my breath.
I wonder how loud a baby’s heart beats. Could Charlie hear his own heart beating in the Dumpster? Did it echo?
Babies should be made out of chitin—that hard stuff that mushroom spores are made of—so no matter what happens they’ll be okay.
She must be walking up the stairs real slow because it takes forever before I hear footsteps in the hallway.
I close my eyes and try to quiet down my heart. First come the sounds—the lock turning, shoes being kicked off, the backpack plopping on the kitchen table, bare footsteps on the floor. Then the air around me shifts and she’s there, bending down. She smells like sweat and French fries, and those smells make me sadder than I already am. I want to open my eyes and tell her about Langley and Xander and the team and how I need to go to tryouts tomorrow. I want to tell her about my Kingdom of Fungi Identification Notebook and how I want to do good in that class. I want to ask her if my dad has ever asked about me. I want to ask her if she thinks Wayne will come later tonight and slip the money under the door while we’re asleep. But my throat is closed like my eyes.
I feel her move away.
When she leaves, the air over me gets heavy, like there is a cement slab coming down on me and there’s no way I can push through it. I lay perfectly still. When there aren’t any more sounds coming from the bedroom, I get up. It’s just hard to sleep sometimes.
13.
DECISIONS
“Did he come?” It’s the first thing out of my mouth when I wake up. Mom is in the bathroom, and she knows right away what I’m talking about.
“No,” she calls out.
I lay back down and let it sink in. No Wayne. No money.
Michael runs in and hits me.
“Ow. What’s that for?”
“You said if I got clean, something good might happen. But I went to sleep and there’s no new backpack. All we got is a new baby.”
My mom walks in with a huge baby in her arms, a fat baby boy with yellow snot coming out of his nose.
“Don’t tell me he was the free prize that came in the cereal box.”
She laughs and wipes his nose. “I got me my first day-care business. He just got dropped off.”
Michael takes his thumb out of his mouth. “His name is Rex like a T. rex.”
Tish bangs Mom on the leg. “Me up. Me up.”
“Ow!” Mom squats down so Tish can see. More snot comes out of the baby’s nose.
“Honey, it’s just snot,” Mom says, wiping it away again. “Why do you have to be so interested in snot?”
“That’s what happens when you don’t have a TV,” I say. “Your children want to watch snot coming out of a T. rex nose.”
Mom laughs. “I’m babysitting him until four thirty every day of the week. And his mom says maybe she knows another woman with twins who needs a sitter. And last night I got a part-time job at the Fry Factory.
It’s from five to ten.… You’re going to have to watch your brother and sister, so make sure you come home by four forty-five. You don’t have to watch Rex, but you do have to watch—”
My slave radar alarm goes off. “No. No. No. No. No.”
“What do you mean no?”
“I mean I can’t babysit today.” Today is tryout day.
“Trev, I don’t think you realize how serious this is. It’s called rent.”
“Why can’t you just get one good job? Why do you need two?”
“If I get a job during the day, I have to pay for day care for Tish. That’s what happened with that job at the store. Day care ate my whole paycheck. That’s why I’m trying to put together my own day-care business.” She hoists T. rex over her shoulder and he thanks her by shooting a stream of perfectly white vomit right down her back.
Tish and Michael squeal.
“What happened?” Mom asks, and then she feels it sink in.
“Great,” I say. “We got us a Super Soaker.”
When she takes Rex into the bathroom, I have a moment to consider what this new night job means to me. School gets out at three. She said that I need to be back at four forty-five, which means that if I hurry, I think I could try out and be back in time.
Now, if I tell her what I’m doing, she’s just going to worry that I’ll be late, so I figure I’ll save her the stress. If there’s one thing I know, my mom doesn’t need any more stress right now.
When she’s not looking, I slip the shin guards and cleats into my backpack. I want to wear a nice jersey and new shorts, but I don’t have anything nice. I don’t even have anything clean.
The minute I leave the apartment my stomach gets all nervous. What if I mess up? What if I don’t make a single goal, or worse, a single decent pass? Or what if Xander’s still mad?
In between first- and second-period classes, Matt Salani asks for a shoe creation with his name. I want to keep my business going to cover whatever fees the soccer team might charge, so I say yes, but I’m so worried about tryouts I almost turn his last name into Salami.
I’m dreading lunch because I’m not sure how things are going to be between me and Xander, but Langley sees me as I’m walking in and says, “Hey, Musgrove!” He’s obviously glad to see me, and Xander seems okay, too, although he calls me Mushroom again. Today he’s wearing a T-shirt with a soccer ball on it and a slogan: IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, IT’S BECAUSE OF ME.