“Camille! Are you sick?” Mrs. Bratberg called to me.
“Not really,” I said. “Are you stuck on your house?”
“No, I’m teaching a lesson about gravity.”
I watched her drop something off the roof. It looked like a wad of tinfoil. All the Bratbergs stared at it.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Leftovers,” Mrs. Bratberg said.
It was clear to me that learning science in school was nothing like learning science at home.
“Is your father in town?” she asked.
I shook my head. I did not think it was smart to yell the answer, because a robber might have heard me.
“Can you come over and be a mother’s helper tomorrow?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Mrs. Bratberg ran a business in her house, and sometimes she needed an extra set of hands to watch her kids. She sold things on eBay. Mostly it was stuff from her basement and garage that looked old. For a while, I thought they were antiques. But Mrs. Bratberg called them retro bargains. She said they were things from her childhood, like records and lamps and hot pants, that had become valuable again. I could only be a mother’s helper when my father was out of town. He didn’t want me to watch the Bratberg kids even if their mom was in the next room. Because he thought I was too young to handle dangerous situations. And he thought the Bratbergs were very dangerous.
Mrs. Bratberg waved to me.
“I only need you for an hour,” she said.
I waved back. That was a relief. The Bratbergs sucked a lot of my energy. I watched her throw something else off their roof. It looked like a loaf of bread. Then I turned to go inside. When I climbed the front steps to my house, my legs wobbled like pudding.
I kicked off my snow boots at the front door and stumbled down the hall in my socks. I felt very dizzy. I didn’t peek back in at my mother. I wasn’t ready to talk about my day yet. When I got to my room, I collapsed on my squeaky bed. I crawled under the covers and tried to pretend like none of this had happened. Like fourth grade was still going pretty good.
Did you just fall underneath Mrs. Spittle’s bus? Did you just miss chocolate-milk day? Did Pinky just eat all your food and is your blood sugar so low that you could slip into a coma? I groaned and reached for some jelly beans that I kept in my dresser drawer. Because I didn’t have a single friend who would stick up for me, I was sure everybody at school was laughing about what had happened. I was sure that nobody cared about how I was doing, or if I’d suffered a contusion.
I’d suffered one of those before. The summer before second grade, I fell off the diving board at the public swimming pool the wrong way. Instead of falling forward, into the water, I fell sideways, onto the cement. It’s actually very easy to do. Because those boards are quite wet and bouncy. And the swimming instructors make you jump off them in your bare, slippery feet.
Sally was in my swim class, and after I fell that day she came and found me in the locker room and told me, “Diving is very dangerous. They should put pillows around the pool edges.” I held a bag of frozen peas to my head and agreed with her. But nobody in my school was as nice as Sally. They were all a bunch of laughers. I hoped Japan understood how lucky it was to have her.
I wiped some hot tears off my cheeks and tried not to think so much about Sally Zook. But it was hard. Sally was very important to me. I’d wanted to be her friend from the moment I met her in her purple swim-suit. Because Sally looked a lot like Snow White, and I thought that was neat. She had pale skin, dark hair, and blue eyes, and even though she was allergic to coconut, that’s exactly what she smelled like. After we became friends in swim class, all through second and third grades she saved me a seat on the bus. Sometimes our mothers took us to the mall.
We did all the things very good friends do. Except we didn’t e-mail each other. Because her parents were afraid of computers. They had one. But Sally wasn’t allowed to use it. Except for playing video games about math and spelling. And neither one of us liked those games. We liked playing real games together. Like who could run the fastest with an egg on a spoon. Or who could hold an ice cube the longest. Or who could throw my mother’s couch cushions the farthest. But then everything changed. Sally’s dad took a job in Japan.
At first, I wasn’t worried, because Manny and Danny told Sally that it was against the law to move to a country that we’d fought against in a war. But they were wrong. When the Zooks moved in September, I sat on my front steps with my mom and we watched Sally leave. Sally waved to me from the back window of her car as her family drove to the airport, and even though I tried not to, I cried. Before she left, she promised to write and send me a bathrobe. (She called it a kimono, but the way she described it made it sound exactly like a bathrobe.) I never heard from her again.
Because, like my mother said, I was hopeful, I thought that when I made a friend I would have that friend in my life forever. But Sally only lasted two years. For the rest of September, I moped around the house. I moped so much that my parents took me to the zoo. There was a touring exhibit of a pack of dingoes. As I stood watching all these dingoes, I noticed one dingo off by itself in the corner. It looked shinier than the other dingoes. Maybe that was because it was the only dingo in the sun.
As I watched that shiny dingo, I realized that it didn’t care about the rest of the pack. It looked totally content. It looked proud. And happy. I also noticed that it had a stubby tail, one only half as long as the other dingoes’ tails. If I were a dingo, that would have really bugged me, and I probably would have tried to lie on my tail so no one else could see how wimpy it looked. But this dingo didn’t care a fig about the other feisty, nipping, bushy-tailed dingoes.
That was when some guy in the crowd said, “Look at that smart dingo in the corner, flying under the radar.”
The man was talking about my dingo. That was when I realized that without Sally, the rest of fourth grade was going to be really rough. Because I didn’t need friends who would leave me or forget important promises. I needed to find myself a corner where I could sit and admire myself. So I hatched a plan. From that point on, at school, I was going to try to fly under the radar too. Other than falling underneath my own bus, I thought I was doing a decent job so far.
I ate some more jelly beans and waited for my mother to finish practicing her routine. I knew she wouldn’t be mad at me. My mother was very sympathetic to people who fell down. Once, when she was my age, she had fallen down an escalator. She called it her only near-death experience. At department stores, she still took her time getting on escalators.
The jelly beans helped. I felt much less fuzzy. I was about to drift into a wonderful sleep. But I didn’t. I never realized how loud our phone was until it started to ring. My mother didn’t answer it. From my bedroom I heard the machine pick up. And it was a voice I recognized. It was Jimmy! The guy who worked at the paint counter at Home Depot. Jimmy was also a contractor. My mother had hired him to do some construction work for us—without my father’s permission. Which meant, of course, big trouble.
Chapter 3
Lies
“Maxine,” Jimmy said. “I can knock that wall out today!”
When I heard this, my stomach began feeling awful, like I’d just eaten eggplant. (Eggplant is a risky vegetable for me.) Jimmy’s news was terrible. Why? Knocking down walls was all part of the crisis.
The crisis started when my mother stopped watching soap operas and became a certified aerobics instructor. Her specialty was kickboxing. This meant that she chopped and kicked the air in front of her on a pretty regular basis. Mostly, this happened in the den or the kitchen. She’d plant her feet and yell, “Hook! Uppercut! Hook! Uppercut!” She liked to throw her punches in the direction of the refrigerator.
When she agreed to teach an early-morning class at a nearby gym, she told me that she might not be able to spend as much “quality time” with me as she normally did before school. But she’d pack my cooler for me at night. And no
thing else would change. That’s when my father explained what was really happening here. My mother had turned forty and she was having a midlife crisis. He said that I shouldn’t take anything she did personally. He said that was how he was going to handle it.
But her midlife crisis was not a small thing. Even though my father said that we couldn’t afford it because we’d just gotten out of the hole, my mother wanted to change everything: the color of the walls, the carpet, the furniture, the roof, the kitchen appliances. She even wanted to replace the toilet seat.
“Imagine how much better it would feel with a little cushion on it,” she told my father.
“I don’t want to imagine it with a little cushion, Maxine. We don’t need it. We need to stay out of the hole.”
These were the last words my father spoke before he left on a business trip to Seattle.
I heard my mother turn off her music. My coat made me sweat, but I didn’t feel like taking it off. Underneath my hood, my hair felt like somebody had warmed it in an oven. I cocked my head so I could see out my bedroom door. A bright pink blur flew down the hall. Then the bright pink blur zoomed back in the other direction. She replayed Jimmy’s message.
“Mother,” I groaned.
She didn’t come.
“Mother,” I groaned again.
She popped her head in my bedroom.
“Did you miss the bus?” she asked.
When she said the word bus, I couldn’t help myself. I started to cry.
“Are you sick?” she asked, taking a few steps into my room.
When she asked me this, it made me realize that I’d eaten way too many jelly beans. I felt like I could throw up. But I held it back.
“I think I am,” I said, lifting my head up off the pillow. I had decided not to tell my mother about the bus. It was too embarrassing. Being hit by a bus was one thing, but falling underneath it was a totally different story.
“How come you’re wearing your coat?” she asked.
That was a good question.
“I tried to go to school, but it didn’t work,” I said.
My mother came and sat at the foot of my bed. She pressed her hand against my forehead.
“You’re burning up,” she said. She unzipped my coat and peeled me out of it. “Wow. These mud spots are huge.”
I nodded. “Yes. They are.”
“Did you drop your coat in a puddle?” she asked.
“No,” I said. And this wasn’t a lie. Because when I was underneath the bus, I wasn’t anywhere near a puddle. I landed on top of ice and snow and the road and maybe one of my mozzarella sticks.
She turned my coat over.
“They’re everywhere!” she said. “I’m going to have to wash it at least twice. Maybe three times. Plus, I’ll have to soak it.”
“The world is a dirty place,” I said. Then I changed the subject. “I still feel hot.”
She touched my forehead again.
“You’re very warm,” she said, frowning. “Schools are little plague factories. You might have caught something. Don’t worry. I’ll call the attendance office and square away your absence.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I probably don’t need my homework. Today was mostly math and PE and social studies and science and other things that I don’t mind missing until Monday.”
My mother frowned. “I’m going to get your homework, Camille.”
Before I could argue against this idea, she looked at her watch and jumped to her feet.
“I need to get a substitute for my class,” she said.
“Really?” I asked.
This was the first time this had ever happened. It felt very dramatic.
“What choice do I have?” She kissed my forehead. “You smell like an orange, Camille.” She tilted her head and smiled. Then the bright pink blur ran from my room.
It was not fun being in bed. I wasn’t really sick. I didn’t have a good book to read. I was tired of eating jelly beans. I wanted chocolate milk. And having a cat with me would have been nice. Cats are great company. They lick. They purr. I loved cats. Sadly, my last three—Checkers, Fluff, and Muffin—were no longer with me. I was a very unlucky cat owner. After Checkers vanished, Fluff used up his ninth life falling out of a very tall tree, and Muffin was hit by a mail truck, both of my parents banned cats.
When we buried Muffin in the field behind our house, my father made a cross out of two Popsicle sticks. He wrote Muffin’s name on it and stuck it in the ground.
“You’re the kind of person who should own fish,” he said.
My mother walked back into my room. She looked sad.
“I couldn’t find a substitute. The gym canceled my class,” she said.
“Forever?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Just today.”
“I could stay by myself,” I said.
“No,” my mother said. “I’m not leaving my sick child home alone.”
I thought that was probably the right decision. Even though I didn’t enjoy hearing her call me a child. Because in a year, I would turn eleven. So I basically considered myself a “young person.” I watched my mother mope out of my room. Then I closed my eyes. I guess I must have snoozed. Because the next time I saw her, she was showered and dressed and looked pretty fantastic. She was even smiling! This made me happy, because it meant canceling her kickboxing class wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
“I have some great news,” she said. Tiny silver dolphins attached to her charm bracelet swam in the air around her wrist.
“I don’t have any homework?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, that I’m picking up this afternoon.” She sat down next to me and stroked my hair. “Camille, here’s something I’ve been thinking about concerning the idea of telling the whole truth.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. Because I knew that sometimes my mother was a fibber.
“Camille, sometimes telling the whole truth can hurt people we love. Sometimes the whole truth can be so alarming that if we told the people we loved the whole truth, they wouldn’t love us anymore.”
After saying this, my mother frowned. So did I. Because it seemed like the polite thing to do. But then her frown somehow snapped into a smile.
“I’ve decided to move forward with some essential home repairs.” Her eyes began to sparkle. “Your father would not be happy about this. Let’s face it. We both love him, but he isn’t always reasonable.”
I nodded. I thought she would talk about all the ways we didn’t find my father reasonable. He watched too much football. He had a difficult time being nice to our mail carrier. He used too much ketchup on his hash browns. He wouldn’t let me be a mother’s helper for the Bratbergs. And he refused to eat brownies if they didn’t have walnuts in them.
“Your father doesn’t understand how important it is to make essential home repairs. Therefore, because we both love your father, we’re not going to tell him.” She brushed a curl from her face and smiled at me.
I pulled my hand out from under the covers and pointed my finger at her. “I don’t want to lie.”
My mother sat down next to me and wrapped her hand around my finger. The tiny dolphins bounced against me, poking my skin with their sharp little snouts.
“Just because you’re not telling the whole truth to someone doesn’t mean that you’re lying.” She blinked at me several times, trying to look innocent.
“That’s exactly what it means to tell a lie!” I said. I pulled my finger out of her hand and reaimed it at her.
The doorbell rang. It was Jimmy. Before leaving my room, my mother looked back at me over her shoulder. “You don’t have to lie. But you don’t have to tell him either.” She blew me a kiss, but her aim was off. I think it landed on the floor.
Chapter 4
Saving the Wall
I was really surprised in first grade when I heard the story about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree. After he chopped it down, his father asked him, �
�Who cut down this cherry tree?” And George Washington didn’t lie. George Washington told his father, “I cut down that cherry tree.”
But I was even more surprised in second grade, when I learned that this story was made up. George Washington never said those words. Also, he didn’t have fake wooden teeth. His dentures were made of cows’ teeth, human teeth, and elephant tusks.
Anyway, because my mother had a habit of not telling the truth, and because she’d taught me this same habit, and because George Washington’s story wasn’t even true, I thought everybody told some lies. I didn’t understand that lying was such a bad thing. As long as I wasn’t lying to a police officer or a 911 operator, as long as I told lies that didn’t really matter (like being a mother’s helper for the Bratbergs), I thought it was okay.
“Camille, I thought you’d be in school,” Jimmy said. He set down a big saw on the living room carpet. “Look at your hair. It’s so fluffy.” As he talked, he reached toward my head, and I ducked.
When your hair has a lot of volume, this happens quite a bit. Either people love it and want to put their hands all over it. Or they make fun of you and try to shoot spit wads in it. Reactions differ depending on how they feel about big hair.
“Camille is sick today,” my mother said.
Actually, due to the day’s events, that lie was becoming more and more true.
I followed Jimmy and my mother to the kitchen table. Masking tape, paintbrushes, and sheets of plastic were crowded on one corner. That’s when I noticed the pencil marks. The wall that separated the kitchen from the living room had big squares, almost the size of windows, penciled all over it. My mouth dropped open.
“You can’t saw down that wall,” I said.
“I didn’t want to saw it down,” my mother said. “I wanted to cut a big hole in it to open up the space. But it turns out, after consulting with Jimmy, that it’s easier to just get rid of it.”
Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus ... Page 2