Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus ...

by Kristen Tracy

  While my mom was gone, I tried to call Aunt Stella. But I just got her machine. So I left a message.

  “It’s Camille. I was hoping we could talk about school, because science isn’t going so great for me. Did you ever build anything for a science fair? I had a partner. So I didn’t get to make exactly what I wanted. Hey, Aunt Stella, did you know that it’s possible to freeze a fish and resurrect it? Well, it is. Science is teaching me a lot of new things. Talk later. Hey, I love you.”

  After I left my message, I moved the couch and coffee table so we could watch the movie on the floor. I kept hoping that my dad would call so that I could talk to him again. I had made a promise to myself that I would have a conversation with him this time and that I wouldn’t press the 9 button. But the phone never rang.

  When my mom got back, she hopped through the front door dripping with sweat. Once she was cleaned off, she popped the disc into the DVD player.

  “It’s a reenactment of the ten worst swarms of the century,” my mother said energetically, plopping herself down beside me on the floor.

  I was impressed that my mother had rented this film. Bugs weren’t really her thing. Anytime she came across something buglike in our house, she always squished it with a tissue and flushed it down the toilet. She was also an expert fly and mosquito swatter. A lot of times she struck them down with a magazine in midair.

  My dad always caught bugs with his bare hands and then took them outside and let them go. He said he was liberating them. My mother didn’t see it that way. She said she was helping them rest in peace. I missed my dad.

  “I almost forgot,” she said, hopping back up and running into the kitchen.

  My mother brought out some snacks and set them down on the floor between us.

  “They’re low-sodium soy nuts,” she said, patting me on the back.

  “What about popcorn?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to stuff yourself with carbohydrates and sodium,” she said, pinching my cheek. “Not at this time of night.”

  Then my mother proudly put the soy nuts in front of me.

  “I only got us one ice water. We’ll need more hydration than that,” she said, smacking the heel of her hand to her forehead. She sprang off the floor and dashed to the kitchen.

  Everything inside of me felt bad. I was sure that if a doctor had unzipped my skin, he would have seen all the anger and sadness stuck near my heart. I breathed hard. And thought of the many things I wanted to yell. Let me eat popcorn! I don’t care about stinking carbohydrates. Or sodium. I’m ten! When you’re ten, you eat carbohydrates and sodium. Even when it’s late. And you don’t worry about hydration. EVER! But I didn’t yell any of these things. Instead, I reached out and knocked the bowl of soy nuts over. Then I poured the glass of ice water on them and smeared them around.

  When my mother came back, she stepped right in the mess, soaking both of her socks.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Our new carpet!”

  But before I could answer, she flew down the hall to get a towel. Then, with a lot of enthusiasm, she cleaned up the mess and replaced both the soy nuts and the water.

  Three tears rolled down my cheeks. I counted them. Two tears came from my right eye and one from my left. It was so dark that my mother didn’t notice that I was crying.

  Watching the deadliest swarms didn’t cheer me up at all. It just showed how unfair life was all over the planet. In nine of the cases, everybody lived and was okay, even a boy who fell into a den of rattlesnakes. Even a man who was stung by more than a hundred jellyfish. But a little girl’s mother was killed by a swarm of bees. They weren’t even killer bees. They were regular old honeybees.

  “This is horrifying!” my mother said.

  I watched her lift handful after handful of soy nuts to her mouth. Then I turned back to the television. In the reenactment, the mother wrapped her own body around the girl to keep her from getting stung. The mother held her really close and whispered in her ear. She told her that they were going to be okay. And I believed her. But when the paramedics showed up, they announced that the girl’s mother was dead. I felt horrible. I cried three more tears. How awful and unfair, I thought, to promise someone that there was hope when nobody really knew for sure.

  I hid my tears and told my mom that I thought that was a lousy trick, telling the girl everything was going to be okay. “They were getting stung by a thousand crazy bees!” I said.

  “It wasn’t a trick,” my mother said, rubbing my back. “I bet the mother wanted everything to be okay so badly that she really believed it would be. That’s not lying. It’s how our brains work.”

  When I started thinking about how my own brain might be playing tricks on me, I got so upset that I decided to go straight to bed.

  Later that night, I heard my mother answer the phone. By the tone of her voice, I could tell it was my father. I now knew that I could no longer believe everything my father said. When he told me that everything was going to be okay, what he really meant was that his brain hoped that everything was going to be okay. There’s a huge difference.

  “Her play is next week. I think you should come,” she said. “No, this doesn’t mean that anything has changed. You can sleep on the couch.”

  Shortly after she told my father that nothing had changed and he could sleep on the couch, she hung up the phone. She didn’t slam it down. She just hung it up. When I heard the click of the phone being placed back in the handset, something clicked inside me too. Somewhere deep inside I heard a voice say, Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.

  But I couldn’t trust my own brain anymore. I turned my face into my pillow and let out deep sobs. When it got hard to breathe, I turned my head to the side and gasped and coughed and sucked in fresh air. I was shaking and my hair was sticking in clumps to my wet face. I cried as quietly as I could for a long time.

  I bet after her father died, Polly cried like this all of the time. I bet when her brain told her that everything was going to be okay, she was smart enough to know that her brain might be a liar.

  That night it was hard to stop crying. I missed my father. I missed Sally. I missed my three cats. I missed the resurrected fish, even though I’d barely gotten to know it. I missed the twenty-two minutes I’d lost on my international calling card, too.

  I missed so many things that I started running out of stuff to miss and I had to get out an old photo album to jog my memory. I’m glad I did that, because it reminded me of a lot of things I didn’t have anymore.

  Chapter 27

  Personal Growth

  My weekend wasn’t good. I missed Aunt Stella’s first phone call because I was outside with my mother helping her fertilize flowers that hadn’t even bloomed yet. And I missed Aunt Stella’s second phone call because I was in the bathtub removing mud from myself. But I listened to her message after I got dry.

  “Camille, I did enter a science fair once. But science was never my favorite subject. My project involved magnets, and I can’t remember it exactly. By the way, I’m very curious to know what’s going on with that play of yours.”

  But by the time I got her message, my skin was shriveled up like a raisin and I didn’t have the energy to call her back. I just pretended like something was in my eye a lot, so my mom wouldn’t notice I was crying.

  By Monday, I was very ready to get on my school bus and forget about my problems and start acting like a dingo again. I didn’t realize that all that thinking and crying and bathing had changed me a little bit. But that day, at the bus stop, something very important happened. And I didn’t even mean for it to happen. In fact, until it did happen, I thought I was having a regular day.

  Manny and Danny skipped small stones across the road. Polly no longer stood in line with us. She stood on the other side of my mailbox. I think she liked having a barrier between her and Manny and Danny.

  Manny and Danny tossed some rocks at the ground by Polly’s feet, hitting her shoes.

  “Dance for us
, Polly,” Danny said. He and Manny were nudging each other with their elbows and laughing. They were laughing so hard they were snorting.

  I don’t know if I had extra anger inside of me because my parents were still on a break. Or maybe I felt this way because I’d watched that DVD about deadly swarms. All I know is that when I saw tears in Polly’s eyes, it reminded me that her father was gone—forever. And Manny and Danny didn’t seem to understand what this meant. It’s like they didn’t even care. Some one had to do something. Enough was enough.

  “No more pushing Polly around,” I said, stomping my foot on the ground. “I’ve talked to my dad about this situation, and he’s not happy.”

  “But your dad’s not here, is he?” Danny asked in a snotty voice.

  “No, not at the moment,” I said, standing my ground. “But I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him every awful thing you two are doing and when he gets back he’ll come and talk to you.”

  Manny put his rocks down. But Danny didn’t.

  Danny stared at me hard, and I stared right back at him. He had a lot more freckles than I realized. Especially on his nose. We stared and we stared. After a while, my eyeballs felt dry and I had to blink. This bugged me, because I knew that blinking was a sign of weakness. And I didn’t feel weak. My eyeballs just got dry. Then I started talking, and I was surprised by how tough I sounded.

  “Do you feel lucky, Danny?” I asked, walking toward him. I drew a line in the dirt with the toe of my sneaker. “From now on, you stay there and we stay here. And no chucking rocks or hocking loogies over it. This is our area. Got it?” I said firmly.

  “What if I don’t?” Danny said with a smirk.

  I walked up to the line so both of my toes were right on the edge. “Go ahead, Danny,” I said, setting my cooler down in the dirt. “Make my day.”

  Danny tossed his rocks into the road and shot me a dirty look. Polly walked over and stood behind me.

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone has done for me in a long time,” she said, looking at the ground. “I like Clint Eastwood too.”

  “Get used to it,” I said, picking my cooler back up. “This is the brand-new Camille McPhee.” I wasn’t sure what she meant about Clint Eastwood. I didn’t know who the heck he was. But that day, when crossing the road to get on the bus, I slapped the bumper with my hand and stuck my tongue out at it and said, “Meet the brand-new Camille McPhee!”

  Polly laughed. Mrs. Spittle said I wasn’t allowed to touch the bus ever again. She said it was school policy. Especially for me. She was firm on that.

  On the bus, Polly told me all about Clint Eastwood. She said that he was a pretty famous actor who, when he was younger, liked to play cowboys and police officers. Polly said that he also starred in a movie with an orangutan named Clyde. But that was a while ago. She also thought the orangutan might have been mistreated on the movie set, and that didn’t surprise me, because I already knew that monkeys’ lives were pretty unfair. Then, because Polly knew so much about Clint Eastwood, I asked her if she knew anything about dingoes. She did.

  She said that in Australia, dingoes weren’t popular because they ate helpless sheep. She’d also heard of cases where dingoes had eaten helpless babies. Not sheep babies. Human babies!

  “They’re a real nuisance, and if they’re not on a reserve or a national park, people are allowed to shoot them,” she said.

  This really bummed me out. I was under the impression that dingoes were proud, lovely animals. Polly made them sound almost as bad as brown tree snakes. After learning this, I wondered if it was time to part ways with my dingo side. Because what did I really have in common with a dingo?

  Other than learning about Clint Eastwood and dingoes, the bus ride was uneventful. When I got to school, it turned out that Tony was sick. That made me happy. And Nina smiled at me. I liked that. And the science contest winner couldn’t be announced until tomorrow, because the judge had to pass a kidney stone first. And Polly slipped me a note.

  You have the prettiest hair in the school.

  I folded the note up and stuffed it in my cooler next to my turkey sandwich. Then Mr. Hawk said something that caught my attention and ruined my day.

  “I have a surprise. Sally Zook sent me a letter from Japan,” he said. “She wanted me to read it to the class.”

  For a second, I didn’t believe that he had a letter from Sally Zook. But then he pulled it out and I saw it with my own two eyes. Then I thought maybe there were two Sally Zooks in the world. But I didn’t think that for very long. Because Sally was so special, I knew there could only be one of her.

  And so Mr. Hawk read Sally’s letter about how great Japan was and all the monkeys she’d seen. I was very angry that my very good friend would send Mr. Hawk a letter, our whole class a letter, before she wrote to me. And where was my bathrobe? I bet she made up kimonos. I was so upset that when school was over, I walked to the paper map of the world at the back of the classroom. I searched until I found Japan. It looked like a lousy, lime green pinto bean. I took out the piece of gum I’d been chewing all afternoon and stuck it to Japan. That’s what I thought of Japan. That’s what I thought of Sally Zook.

  Sadly, my gum had too much spit on it, and it slid off the map and landed on the floor. Japan! Sally! I hoped I never heard anything about either one of them again.

  Chapter 28

  Hope

  I went home extremely ticked off at the world. But one good thing about being me was that Camille McPhee was the kind of mammal who was born with the power to bounce back.

  Once, my neighbor’s ferret, Denise II, jumped on my back and sank her teeth into me. My father had to grab Denise II by the scruff of her neck and pull her off me. For some reason, that ferret went totally nuts for two minutes. Nobody knew why. Both my dad and I got pretty scratched up. But I didn’t go around the rest of my life hating ferrets named Denise. I forgave her and moved on.

  I didn’t even have to be conscious for my ability to bounce back to work. I could go to sleep feeling sour and upset, and I could wake up feeling sweet and okay. For me, bouncing back didn’t seem to take much effort. When I woke the next day, the world was still an unfair bomb of stink, but I felt a little bit better about this. I hoped that by Friday, the day of our first performance, I would still feel this way. In front of my mom and dad, I wanted to be the best and most energetic cat that I could possibly be. And I wanted to stay upright on my bucket, even if I did drown. I cared about the other performances, too. The one for the first through third graders. And the one for the general public. But out of the three, the parents’ performance was the one that worried me the most.

  The next morning, my laser-beam mind had a new focus. I wanted to know if Polly’s cat ate tuna fish and licked up her tears. Because all three of my cats had been tuna-fish eaters and tear lickers. And I wondered if all cats were like that. Or just my cats. But I didn’t know how to bring it up naturally. A lot of times, when I was stuck like this, I just went ahead and brought it up anyway, even if it was unnatural.

  Polly was waiting for me on my front steps again. When I opened my door, I was surprised to see her hair. It was still blond, but it was a lot shorter. And it looked thick. All its stringiness had vanished.

  “I like your hair,” I said. “It looks completely different.”

  “Thanks,” she said. She reached up and touched it.

  “It really looks fantastic,” I said. I mean, I was surprised by such a drastic change. Polly had never been drastic before.

  “I hadn’t cut it in three years,” she said.

  I slapped my knee. “Wow! Were you going for a record?”

  Once, I went for a record. I kicked my legs back and forth in the air like superpowered scissors for as long as I could. My record was one minute. Then I lost my form.

  “No,” Polly said. “Not a record. After my dad died I didn’t want to cut my hair.”

  I sat down next to Polly. I didn’t know what to say. Luckily, she kept talking.


  “After I understood that he was gone, I wanted to keep everything he’d touched: his clothes, cans of soup, even my hair.”

  This seemed very sad. I didn’t ask her any questions about it. But it did make me realize that I shouldn’t go around judging people who have stringy hair, because maybe they have a very good reason for having hair like that.

  “I think your hair looks super,” I said.

  “My mom says that change is good.” She ran her fingers through her bob.

  “My mom says that too,” I said. “But it usually means that she wants to buy something new.”

  Polly smiled at me like she was able to read my mind, like she understood the deeper meaning of what I’d said. We walked to the bus stop and stood by ourselves. Both Manny and Danny had come down with mono. I wasn’t too surprised. They were always drinking out of other people’s soda cans and milk cartons. And a couple of times, accepting a stupid dare, they’d licked the monkey bars. I’d seen them do it. Twice, they’d wiped their tongues over the shiny metal bars and then stuck them out for everybody to see. I thought if you were dumb enough to do that, catching mono was the least of your problems.

  I looked at Polly, and her new bob. I looked at the sky. I looked at my shoes. I looked back at the sky. I looked at Polly’s shoes. I adjusted my socks. I suggested that Polly adjust her socks too. Then I blurted it out. “What’s your cat’s name?”

  I thought the question would roll off my tongue like an ordinary question. But for some reason, I didn’t use my regular voice. I used a loud voice. And for some other reason, I aimed my hand at her like my finger was a gun.

  Polly didn’t notice.

  “Orca,” she said. “My dad named her Orca because she’s a mix of black and white. Orcinus orea is the scientific name for killer whales. They’re black and white too.”