Louie has power. He controls fire. But he also has skill and craftsmanship. When he is turning a dull blade into a perfectly razor-sharp one, he pauses once in a while to run his calloused fingers along its edge. If he feels even the tiniest nick, he mumbles to himself, fires up the sharpener again, and touches just that little spot to the spinning wheel. He is never satisfied until the blade is perfect.
If I were Louie, I would be a war hero and I would be great at something.
Anyway, Lissa’s professional-level skates are super expensive. They are custom-made to fit only her feet. They are fancier than anything I own. But this year, she doesn’t look very excited as she thanks my parents. I don’t get it, because if I were as good at something as Lissa is at skating, I would love to have the best equipment for it.
Like a big, shiny drum set with lots of flashing cymbals everywhere. That would be amazing.
Next, my dad opens a box from my mom. Inside are three ties. I sometimes have to wear a tie if we go to a wedding or something, and I hate it. Wearing a tie feels like choking to death. Very slowly. My dad looks pleased, though. He even kisses my mom, which causes me and Lissa to make faces at each other.
The only person left is my mom. Lissa gives her a painting she made in middle school art class. It’s pretty good. Lissa is like my mom, because they are both excellent at art. I can tell my mom likes the present because she gives my sister a very long hug.
But then—disaster! My mom turns to my father and me. But we don’t have anything to give her. We have been asking her what she wants for at least the past month, but all she ever says is “I don’t need anything. I appreciate you every day, and I don’t need a present to know you love me.” So, for the first time ever, we haven’t bought her a present.
When she realizes she isn’t getting anything, my mother gives my father a super-mean look and bursts into tears. I try to hug her, but she doesn’t hug me back. It is awful! I say, “Mom, you told us not to get you anything, so we didn’t get you anything.”
She sniffles a few times and then says, “You were supposed to know. At least, your father was supposed to know.” She says father like it is a dirty word.
As Lissa and I are on our way upstairs to our rooms, I ask her what I have done wrong. My mother told me not to do something, and I listened.
“You are so stupid,” Lissa says.
I sit on the carpet floor of my bedroom for the longest time after that, holding my metronome but not knowing how to use it. Through the heat vent that leads from the kitchen into my closet, I can hear my parents arguing. For hours.
It is just another example of how following directions can drown you.
* * *
For the next few days, I just kind of mope around the house. Being the World’s Worst Son isn’t easy. Well, apparently, I have a natural gift for it, but it isn’t fun. My dad and I go out to the Staten Island Mall and buy my mom a box of expensive chocolates and a scarf. The next night, each of us hands her one of the gifts. Again, she bursts into sobs.
I make a mental note that next year I should try to spend Hanukkah in Florida with my grandparents.
* * *
The morning after New Year’s Eve, I wake up late and cross my room to Hecky’s cage to say good morning. But it is not a good morning for Hecky, because both of her babies are curled up in the corner of the aquarium, dead.
I don’t understand it. I have done everything the pet store guy told me to do for them. I have fed them cut-up worms from our backyard every few days. I have turned on the heat lamp in their cage every morning and turned it off before going to bed each night. I have changed the water in the bowl more often than ever before. I have tried to spend some time holding them each day.
It doesn’t matter. I have killed Hecky’s babies.
I rush into Lissa’s room to make sure Stripe is still all right. He is, and I take him out of his aquarium, which is right next to the one where she keeps her hamster, Freddy the Second. I try to do all of this quietly, because she is still asleep, but the clicking of the clips on the cage lid wakes her up. She starts to yell at me for waking her up but stops when she realizes I am crying.
“What’s wrong, Jord?” she asks. But I can’t even get the words out. All that comes from my throat is a horrible squeaking noise. Lissa gets out of bed and puts her arms around me. I sit there for the longest time, just trying to keep Stripe warm and comfortable against my shaking chest.
I thought what I wanted for Hanukkah was a drum, but I was wrong. I shouldn’t have wished for anything that comes in a package. What I really wish is that I could stop ruining everything, and maybe even be particularly good at something.
Well, Hanukkah might have been depressing, but Presidents’ Day does its best to cheer me up by dumping more than a foot of snow and canceling a day of school. I need the break, too, for two reasons. Ever since Christmas, everybody’s baby snakes have been dying off. Steven’s went at the very beginning of January, followed by one of B.J.’s, both of Peter’s, one of Robert’s, the second one of B.J.’s, and then the second of Robert’s. Now the only two left aside from Stripe are the ones at Jonah Carp’s house.
Also, Mrs. Fisher has gone completely off the rails.
As usual, it all started because of something that wasn’t my fault. There is a big group of kids in my class who are having a lot of trouble with reading, so every day, Mrs. Fisher takes them to a table in the back and works with them on phonics. She gives the rest of us work to do, but the work is way too easy. We are supposed to get cards out of the SRA reading kit if we finish early during these times, but those are easy, too. It only takes me maybe five minutes to read a card and answer all the questions in my head. After that, because I am trying really hard to be good, I have been reading silently. Every day, I bring in something interesting, because I know I am going to be spending a lot of time with it.
And that’s where the trouble starts: Mrs. Fisher and I have different ideas of what makes an interesting book. She says science fiction is “trash.” Fantasy is “junk.” My all-time favorite book, Bad Luck Stars of Sports, is “all right, if you like that kind of thing.”
All right if you like that kind of thing? It’s only the most important book I have ever read. Without it, I wouldn’t have learned about my hero and role model, Ron Hunt—the coolest baseball player ever. He holds the all-time record for getting hit by the pitch. He once got hit fifty times in a single season! Sure, Babe Ruth was the first and biggest baseball star. Hank Aaron has the most homers in history. There are guys with more stolen bases, more runs batted in, and more runs scored. There are a million better fielders, and we haven’t even mentioned pitchers yet. Ron Guidry, the Yankees’ best pitcher, went twenty-five and three this year, and is the best fielder I have ever seen in my life.
But nobody has more guts than Ron Hunt. He’s the toughest. And that is why he is my role model. I am a terrible hitter, because my parents always take me to the eye doctor in September, so by April my glasses prescription isn’t strong enough. It is hard to hit the ball if you can’t see it. Still, thanks to Ron Hunt, I have a new plan for the 1979 Little League season: I am going to get hit by the pitch as much as possible.
It is totally foolproof. I don’t have to have any talent to get beaned. I just need the courage of Ron Hunt.
I did my last book report on Bad Luck Stars of Sports so Mrs. Fisher could learn what a great book it is, but she didn’t give me an Excellent, like William Feranek got. On the front cover of the report, right over the picture of Ron Hunt that I had spent hours drawing, she wrote GOOD in gigantic letters.
GOOD is bad.
When I opened up the report and saw Mrs. Fisher’s comments, I saw that all she had written—in huge red letters across my words—was, Sloppy work. You were supposed to skip lines. In the future, you must follow directions! This was the dumbest thing ever! I made the report three pages long without skipping lines, and it was supposed to be three pages long with skipping lines. So
I wrote twice as much as everybody else about a completely life-changing book and got yelled at in red for it.
That was when I decided something. If Mrs. Fisher was just going to hate me and whatever I read, I might as well not care anymore. So I started to bring comic books to school. I knew she would hate them, but I also knew she would be wrong. Comic books have excellent lessons. Along with Spider-Man’s motto, “With great power comes great responsibility,” I have learned tons of other things from other comics. I mean, just last summer, in DC Comics Limited Collector’s Edition #55: The Millennium Massacre, Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes taught me love is more important than war. The X-Men have always taught me that you can’t judge people just for being different from you. Then there are the Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. They have taught me that you have to stick up for your friends, no matter what.
Meanwhile, two seats away, Britt Stone is reading a million books about snotty girls and their horses. What is she going to learn from them? She is already exceptionally good at being a snotty girl who rides horses.
Anyway, the last day before Presidents’ Day weekend, Mrs. Fisher comes storming over to my desk and interrupts my reading of the excellent Avengers #182: The Many Faces of Evil. I’m thinking, Do you mind? I’m about to learn the secret origins of the Scarlet Witch and her brother, Quicksilver. But I am smart enough not to say that.
“JORR-dan!” she says. “You are supposed to be reading!”
I bite my lip to stop myself from saying, “Then it’s a good thing I am reading!” Instead, I just sit there with the comic in my hands.
“But instead, you are wasting valuable class time with these … comic books!”
Now I have to say something. “I’m not wasting time. I learn a lot from comic books!”
She snorts at me. What kind of teacher snorts at her students?
“What could you possibly learn from … that?”
I tell myself to stay calm, because I don’t want my mom to get a call reminding her about how doomed my future is. Plus, now the whole class is staring at me.
“Well,” I say serenely, “for one thing, there is excellent vocabulary in comic books. Look, just on the first page of this one, there’s, umm, united. And withstand. And degenerative. And ceased. And thy.”
“I bet you don’t even know what those words mean!” Mrs. Fisher snarls.
I am dying to say, “If this class united, we could withstand the degenerative effects of having you for a teacher, and band together until thy reign of terror ceased!” Instead, I just say, “Yes, I do. United means—”
“I know what united means, JORR-dan! Now, put that thing away and find something else to read. If I see you with another comic book, I will confiscate it!”
Hey, I know what confiscate means. Thanks to comic books.
“Do you understand me?” she barks.
“Yes,” I say, staring directly into her beady witch eyes.
“Good. Because comic books will rot your brain!”
In that case, I’m thinking Mrs. Fisher must have read a whole lot of comic books.
* * *
So you can see why I needed this longer-than-usual Presidents’ Day break. It doesn’t turn out the way I would have hoped, though. Friday is our first day off, and I am all excited to sleep late. Unfortunately, my mother wakes me up frantically before it is even eight o’clock.
“Get up, Jord!” she shouts. “Your snake is missing!”
I jump out of bed, grab my glasses, and rush over to Hecky’s cage, where she is happily curled around the fresh new tree branch I just put in there last week.
“What are you talking about, Mom?” I say. “Hectoria is right here.”
“Not that snake. Your other one!”
Stripe.
I dash across the hall to Lissa’s room and peer into his cage. She is right: He is gone. This doesn’t make any sense at all. Over the years, Lissa and I have dealt with a lot of pet escapes. The original Freddy the Hamster was a breakout expert, and the snake I had before Hecky once got out of his cage by crawling up the side and then pushing the lid up with his head. But the new aquarium tanks we have come with snap clips on the lids so you can’t open them just by pushing up. Plus, Stripe is still only something like seven inches long, and he lives in a cage with twelve-inch-tall walls and no climbing stick.
But Lissa, who is standing there, says, “You know what this means, Jord? A pet hunt!” She smiles at me, because we both secretly love pet hunts. My mother freaks out the whole time there is a pet on the loose, but for us, it is a great adventure every time. When we are on a pet-finding mission, we don’t even fight.
If my parents were smart, they would let Hecky or Freddy the Second out once a day.
Anyway, we know the routine. First, we go through the junk drawer downstairs to get the most important piece of pet-tracking equipment: flashlights! These are necessary because snakes and hamsters always go right for the darkest places in the house. Usually, we find the missing animal under a radiator, smushed into the back of a closet, or way in the corner of a room, under somebody’s bed.
Once, we even found the original Freddy asleep in one of my mom’s high-heeled shoes. Now my mom has a special rack in her closet to keep all her footwear off the ground.
As soon as we have the flashlights in hand, we split up. Because I am smaller and better at getting my head way down low, I am on Radiator Duty. Because she is bigger and lazier, Lissa is the Closet Inspector. I check in my room first, but there is nothing under either of my heaters. Lissa’s room is harder, because there are piles of clothing and junk blocking one radiator, and the other is behind her desk. When I squeeze my way under the desk, I can’t quite get my head down far enough to see because there is a wooden foot rail in the way. I have to twist my arm almost upside down and then feel around with the back of my hand. I find a bunch of dust and twenty-eight cents, but no baby snake.
Meanwhile, Lissa has already checked out both our bedrooms and the upstairs bathroom, which is past Lissa’s door and around the corner between our house’s two extremely creepy attics. I hand her the twenty-eight cents, and we head downstairs. Our mom follows us around making alarmed noises, which get louder and louder the closer we get to her bedroom closet. We don’t find Stripe anywhere. All that is left to check is the basement.
And the attics, which are definitely the last place anybody would want to check. First of all, there is stuff piled up everywhere in them. They make Lissa’s room look like a model of clean living. Second of all, it is freezing and scary in those attics. Besides, I don’t think any sane snake would hide in either of them in the winter, because snakes are cold-blooded, which means they need to stay warm to survive.
We go downstairs first. When Lissa opens the basement door, Spicy is waiting there on the top step. He sleeps in the basement, where we keep his litter box, but he is almost always ready on the steps to pounce on whichever person comes to let him out of there and feed him in the morning. I expect him to rush past Lissa to his food bowl, which is on a floor mat in front of the kitchen sink. But he doesn’t. He follows us down.
That’s when I start to panic. Why isn’t Spicy hungry? He’s always hungry when we come downstairs. What if he has already eaten?
While Lissa goes around the basement checking closets, I crouch down in front of Spicy and check out his paws. I don’t see any blood on them, which might be a good sign. But maybe it just means he is a neat eater. I am almost shivering with fear as I hold Spicy still with one hand and push his lips back from his teeth with the other. Usually, Spicy goes nuts and starts scratching if you try to touch his face. Oh, who am I kidding? Usually, Spicy goes nuts and starts scratching if you get anywhere near him. But he drapes himself calmly over my arm as I put my face right up to his and look at his mouth.
No blood there, either.
The basement looks like a dead end. Lissa looks at me. “Attic?” she asks.
A shudder runs through me. “Attic,” I
reply.
But on our way up there, Lissa stops in her room to put socks on. I follow her and decide to check Stripe’s cage more closely. I basically shove my whole head inside and look everywhere. I even lift up the two miniature bowls we have in there: one for Stripe’s drinking water and one for the chunks of earthworm I have been feeding him. I don’t find any hint of anything.
It’s almost like the snake has disappeared.
I am just about to get up when I hear a strange sound. It’s kind of like somebody is crumpling up paper into balls. Or breaking very small twigs.
Or munching. I look into Freddy the Second’s cage and almost throw up. The hamster is standing up on his back paws, holding his front ones up to his face. I peer around the enclosure, and there are half-inch black-and-red sections of what looks like a strangely colored pencil everywhere. I take an even closer look at Freddy the Second’s hands, and see that he is holding something in them.
Something with eyeballs.
“Lissa!” I yell.
“What?” she says in her smart-big-sister voice. “And why are you shouting? I’m right here.”
In a weird voice that doesn’t even sound like mine, I mumble, “I found Stripe.”
* * *
So my sister is a murderer. The only thing we can figure out is that she “accidentally” put Stripe in the wrong cage after she played with him last night. At least, she swears she did it “accidentally.” I tell her I am going to accidentally punch her, but my mom stops me. In our family, the only punishment for killing your little brother’s pet in cold blood is that your father says he is “disappointed” because you “have been an irresponsible pet owner.”
Ooh, that ought to teach her!
I don’t talk to Lissa the whole rest of the weekend, even after my mom points out that I once forgot to feed Freddie the Second for a whole week while Lissa was at skating camp. I don’t care. Forgetting to feed a pet is totally different from feeding one pet to your other pet!
The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell Page 7