“Yes, where?” Daisy read, twitching her imaginary whiskers.
“I’m not telling or you’ll talk my ears off,” I read.
“Suit yourself,” read Daisy. “You won’t get far with that attitude!”
“Little Rock Riding Hood rolled on until she came to a tumble-down bridge. There were the Chit Chats!” I read.
“Briana used tumble-down twice,” Tina complained. “‘Tumble-down shack’ and ‘tumble-down bridge.’”
“Thank you, Tina. You have eagle ears,” said Mr. Woodman, “but you’ve missed your cue.”
“Where are you going, Little Rock Riding Hood?” Tina and Reena chorused.
“I’m not telling,” I read, “or you’ll make me wonder if I know anything at all.”
“Nothing to wonder about,” muttered Tina.
“Hey,” shouted Morty. “I don’t see that line!”
“Stick to the text, Tina,” warned Mr. Woodman.
Neil raised his hand. “I’ll be the wolf,” he said.
“Thank you, Neil,” said Mr. Woodman.
“Where are you going, little Rock Girl?” read Neil. He worked his eyebrows up and down.
“Little Rock Riding Hood didn’t trust that Wolf,” I read, “but Mother had said, ‘No Grumps. No Long Nose. No Cat. No Chit Chats.’ Mother hadn’t said, ‘No Wolf.’ So Little Rock Riding Hood stopped to talk.”
“Little Rock Riding Hood!” Neil growled. He rubbed his belly.
“Mother said if I listened to everything she told me, I’d be as safe as a barnacle on a sea stack.”
“How safe is that?” read Neil. He bared his teeth and silver braces.
“And that was the end of Little Rock Riding Hood,” I read, relieved it was over.
There was scattered applause. Neil sat down. Sweat had gathered under the rim of my hat. I was afraid it might trickle down my cheeks. “Thank you, Briana,” said Mr. Woodman. “Bravo. Let’s see, who can state the moral of the tale?”
“A rock is a rock is a rock,” said Morty.
“Who else?” asked Mr. Woodman.
Tina leaned toward Reena. “Don’t leave home if your mother is crazy,” she said in a stage whisper. There was silence in the classroom. Everyone had heard her.
How many kids had Tina told about that day after the funeral when she came to my house? And what would Tina think now if she saw that Mom was still in her bathrobe and blue slippers, still sleeping all day?
“C’mon, folks,” said Mr. Woodman. “We don’t have much time.” No one volunteered. Mr. Woodman sighed. “Do you want to read us the moral as you wrote it, Briana?” I shook my head. I was boiling hot. I pushed Dad’s hat down over my eyes. Crumpling the story in my hand, I sat down.
DAISY
“I don’t think the mom is crazy,” Daisy called out. She had three bottles of ink open on her desk—red, green, and blue. She doodled with the green, a complicated drawing that looked like knotted string in a brain-shaped maze.
“She doesn’t warn Little Rock Riding Hood about the wolf, but that doesn’t make her crazy,” she added.
“And the moral, Daisy?” asked Mr. Woodman.
“I think it’s that . . .” Daisy looked up from her drawing and turned her cat’s gaze on me. “I think . . .” She capped her green ink bottle and wiped her pen nib on a tissue full of blots. “The point is . . . you can’t trust anyone to keep you safe . . .” She returned the green bottle to her backpack. “Not even your mother,” she added.
“If you can’t twust your own mother, who can you twust?” asked Morty, shrugging and turning his palms up in a gesture of bewilderment. Nobody laughed except for Sam and Stan.
“You can trust technology,” said Neil. “If Little Rock Riding Hood had a smartphone, she wouldn’t have stopped to talk to the wolf.”
“Do you think that’s the moral, Neil?” asked Mr. Woodman. “Don’t leave home without your iPhone?”
Daisy had her hand up again.
“She was a good little Rock Girl who listened to her mother, but she should have trusted herself,” she said.
“Aha!” said Mr. Woodman.
Be your own, said my Dad heart.
Daisy caught my eye and held up her drawing, a big green maze. I stared at it. There was an area in blue labeled SEA STACKS: SAFETY ZONE with dangerous-looking waves and a sea serpent poking its head out of the surf. There was another marked BEWARE THE CHIT CHATS. Suddenly, I could see a wolf and a little Rock Girl dressed in red, and three Grumps and the other characters, too. The little Rock Girl showed up more than once, bright red each time like pins on a military map. It was the forest in my story. Daisy had illustrated it on the spot.
I gave Daisy a thumbs-up. She smiled and pointed to her head. The bell rang. “I like your hat,” she mouthed.
Daisy waited for me in the hall outside Mr. Woodman’s room. She fell in beside me as if we always walked to history together. “I really like your hat,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s my dad’s. It’s goofy, but . . .”
“No, it’s cool. Did he wear it a lot?” she asked.
“Just when it was cold out. He didn’t like hats, but when it was windy his ears got cold.” It felt okay to be talking with Daisy about Dad and his cold ears. Daisy asked about Dad so easily, as if having a dead father was the most natural thing in the world. She smiled.
“Do you look like your dad?” she asked.
“Kind of,” I said warily.
“I don’t look like my mom at all,” said Daisy. “After she died, I started drawing her from a photo. In my portrait, her head is like . . . five feet tall! I’m giving it to my dad for Christmas.”
“Oh,” I said. “Nice.”
I imagined Daisy drawing Dad’s head from a photo. It’d be as big as the wizard’s in The Wizard of Oz. Maybe she’d give it to me to hang in my room. Mom would freak out.
“When I’m finished, I could draw your dad,” Daisy said as if she’d read my mind. “I’ll add the hat from memory. Or not. I never know exactly what I’m going to do till I do it. Isn’t that how it is when you write?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, blushing. I had never talked about writing before with anyone my own age, not even Peter.
“Oh God!” said Daisy. “We’re late! Mr. Bergman’ll kill us!”
“Let’s say Mr. Woodman needed to talk to us after class,” I said.
Daisy grinned. “About Inwood Chatter,” she said. “I signed up. Did you?”
“No.”
“But you’re going to?” asked Daisy.
“Not if Tina does,” I said. I didn’t tell her I wanted to join, but Mom would never let me go to meetings of the school literary magazine instead of picking Aaron up on Thursdays.
Daisy laughed. “If you join, there’ll be more us than her,” she said.
Us. I liked the sound of that.
STONESTILTSKIN
A few weeks after Aaron began kindergarten, before Dad died, I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen. I snuck out of my room and crept closer. Mom was reading a letter aloud to Dad and Grandpa Ben. The note was from Didi. “When kids come too near or bump into Aaron, he screams,” she read. “He won’t go on the slides. He stands to one side, tucking his head in like a turtle.”
“‘Like a turtle’?” asked Grandpa Ben. “Does she say ‘like a turtle’?”
“That’s what she says,” said Mom.
“Didn’t she ever hear the story of the tortoise and the hare?” asked Grandpa Ben. “He may start slow, but in the end, he’ll get there first.” No one answered. “Well, maybe not first,” said Grandpa Ben, “but he’ll get there.”
Mom read on: “He doesn’t like to build with blocks. He won’t do puzzles. He forgets where to put things. He has no sense of direction. He gets lost going to the bathroom.”
“I get lost all the time,” said Grandpa Ben.
“He doesn’t draw well with a crayon or a pencil,” Mom continued. “He can’t make his letters stay in
the lines. He throws tantrums when he has to wash his hands.”
“She recommends we get him tested,” interrupted Dad. He was reading over Mom’s shoulder.
“Here we go again,” said Mom. “Same as nursery school.”
“This time we should listen,” said Dad. Mom shot him a look.
“Tested? Tested for what?” asked Grandpa Ben. “He’s a healthy kid. Doesn’t eat enough. That’s about it.”
“That’s not about it,” said Dad. “Not by a long shot.”
“Einstein was a late bloomer,” said Grandpa Ben.
“Not every child with a developmental delay is an Einstein,” said Dad.
The tests showed that Aaron was on the spectrum.
“They say he’s autistic?” shouted Grandpa Ben. “That’s what you’re telling me?”
“On the autistic spectrum,” said Mom. “That’s not the same thing.”
I had googled spectrum. A band of colors as seen in a rainbow. I imagined my brother standing on a rainbow with a rainbow halo hanging over his head. He sure wasn’t wearing any halos today.
We were crossing the street on the way to school. Aaron stopped in the middle. He made one of his rock faces. “Take me home!” he yelled. I squeezed his hand hard and tugged on it. He stared into the gutter, refusing to move.
“Take me home! Take me home!” he screamed. He broke loose from my grip on his hand and sat down in the middle of the street. Slapping himself, he pulled his own hair and hit his fist into his chest over and over again. His eyes went dull, his mouth got hard, his chin jutted forward.
Stonestiltskin, said my Dad heart . . .
I smell the sea and something gross. Seaweed? Dad is on our front porch in Cape Cod. He’s talking with Mom. I sit on the dune by our door. Aaron sits there, too.
I sink into hot sand. I show Aaron how to make fairytale characters out of rocks and splinters of driftwood. Aaron crawls into the shadows under the porch and drags out a half-burned corncob and some broken shells. He makes a monster. Corncob Man.
I choose an angry red rock. I make a mouth out of a twig. It turns down in a terrible frown. Stonestiltskin, I tell Aaron, holding it up. He has tantrums like you.
I don’t like him, scowls Aaron. Throw him in the ocean.
He’s just like you, I say. Do you want me to throw you in the ocean, Stonestiltskin?
I look over at Mom and Dad. Their heads are close together. They haven’t heard me. Mom is smiling at Dad. They aren’t thinking about me at all.
Don’t call me that! You’re mean, shouts Aaron. He throws himself facedown in the sand. He wails and kicks his legs. The wails get louder. I let him cry.
It’s true. I’m mean. He doesn’t know how mean. I wish he had never been born.
Dad looks over at Aaron. I hear him say, He’s killing me with those tantrums. He says it to Mom so quietly I’m not sure I heard it right.
Calm down, Mom says. She puts a hand on Dad’s arm as if he’s the one having the tantrum. She isn’t smiling anymore.
It’s true, says Dad, and now I’m sure I heard him right. He’s killing me.
A car slowed but didn’t stop, its radio blaring. The driver wore shades and bopped his head in time to the music.
I yanked Aaron’s jacket, trying to lift him. He wouldn’t budge.
“We’ll get run over!” I shouted. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Get us killed?”
Aaron curled into a ball. The light turned red. The car was so close now that its fender cast a winglike shadow over my brother’s neck. Why didn’t it stop? Did the driver even see Aaron lying there? My brother looked like a rabbit or a mouse. In a moment, he’d look like roadkill.
Move! said my Dad heart, beating hard and slamming me into a crouch. No riddles this time. No songs.
I gathered Aaron in my arms and hoisted him up. He was deadweight, like lugging a boulder uphill. I half carried, half dragged him to the curb. “I scraped my knee,” he complained.
“It’s your own fault,” I said.
“It’s bleeding,” he cried.
“It is not,” I said. “Don’t you ever do that again!” I dumped him on the sidewalk.
“I don’t want to go to school!” Aaron yelled, all sprawled out. He clenched his fists and beat his feet on the ground. “Take me home!”
I glared at Aaron. I hated him. I hadn’t remembered my dad saying that about Aaron’s tantrums. He’s killing me . . . My Dad heart had remembered.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll just wake Mom and tell her you don’t want to go to school today.”
Eyes wide, he said nothing. He stared at me. I stared back at him like I meant business. He stood up. Shuddering a little, he took my hand. We walked toward the schoolyard.
We passed the blood bank. It used to be a bowling alley. I spent too many hours on family nights there wishing I were somewhere else. Now I wished I were back there, wearing bowling shoes a size too small, eating bad pizza, and watching Dad try to interest Aaron in the score.
PETER
“Rebecca isn’t here,” Aaron complained as soon as we got to school.
“Go play!” I said, pushing him away. He didn’t budge. I sat down on one of the schoolyard ledges. Aaron climbed up and put his arm around my waist.
“Don’t try to make up,” I said. “I’m mad at you.” I pointed to my frown so he’d understand I was still angry. He ducked his curly head into my lap. His hair was soft like dandelion fuzz.
“Tell me a story till Rebecca comes,” he begged.
“Did you hear what I said? I’m mad at you.” I frowned again, a cartoon frown.
I spotted Peter across the schoolyard. He wore his work boots, a lumberjack shirt, and a beat-up red cap pulled down over his eyes. Above the brim was a picture of a happy organic turnip. The hat was a gift from the vegetable garden project in Harlem where Peter volunteered on weekends. He made it a point of honor not to record his hours of community service in Mr. Bergman’s logbook. He thought being a good neighbor for extra credit in social studies was being a jerk.
“Rebecca!” Aaron shouted, rising. Rebecca dropped Peter’s hand and opened her arms to him. He scurried to her side.
“We have to rehearse,” she said, getting straight down to business.
Aaron and Rebecca were partners in their class play for Parents’ Day. Rebecca was Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Aaron was Pygmalion. “Pygmalion is shy,” Rebecca had coached him, “but when he’s alone with his statues, he’s happy, so he sings.”
“Hey,” said Peter. I settled in next to him, fitting comfortably into the shape his shadow made as he leaned against the wall. It was good to have a friend big enough to make shade. “Rebecca’s got your brother singing that song of hers again. Poor Aaron.”
“Poor me. Poor you,” I said.
Rebecca had insisted that Aaron make up a love song to his statues. Aaron had taken it to a higher court. “I can’t,” he had complained to Grandpa Ben.
“Of course you can,” Grandpa Ben had ruled.
To please Rebecca and Grandpa Ben, Aaron had tried but he couldn’t come up with a song. He threatened to quit the play. Rebecca made up the song for him. He was singing it now, belting it out like a home run across the yard. “He sounds like an old man,” said Peter. “Like a baby Tom Waits.”
“Maybe it’s just that he’s an old soul. That’s what my dad said once.” Sitting close to Peter in the sun, the memory of Dad saying that lost some of its sting.
Rebecca was showing Aaron how to wave to his statues one by one. She lined up a few girls to stand at attention pretending to be statues. Aaron edged along, step-by-step, like a politician running for office, stopping in front of each kid with a smile and a wave. The last was the P girl.
“Is that Sarah M.’s sister?” I asked. “Petra?”
“Yeah,” said Peter.
“She’s stuck-up like her big sister,” I said.
“Sarah’s okay,” said Peter. “She asked me to team up with her on Bergm
an’s immigrant project.”
Sarah M. was perfect. In gym class, she never got sweaty and her sneakers were never smelly. She wore a bra. She had wavy blond hair and green eyes and a henna tattoo on her ankle. It wasn’t Petra’s fault she had snubbed Aaron in the park. She had learned how to be snobby from an expert. Sarah had never snubbed me, but that was only because she never noticed I was alive.
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
“What are you doing for Bergman?” asked Peter.
“I don’t know, maybe something about Grandpa Ben,” I said. “I could interview him about what it was like growing up on the Lower East Side.”
“Yeah, Bergman might go for that,” said Peter. He hesitated. “Maybe we should work on your grandfather’s story together?”
“What about Sarah M.?”
Peter looked at me. His eyes were bluer than Grandpa Ben’s. He squared his shoulders. He was so tall! Standing there in the schoolyard, my best friend looked handsome.
Peter watched me take him in. The kids would be shepherded inside any minute. It was time to tell Aaron goodbye.
“I told her . . .” he said. He grinned. “I told her you asked me first.”
I blushed.
Didi chose that moment to come over. Today her hair was braided and clamped like giant black snails on either side of her head. A bright red ribbon hung from each snail. She drew me aside, away from Peter.
“I need to ask you something,” she whispered. “Parent conferences are coming up . . .” Lightly, she touched the left snail and the right. “Will your mother be coming? I’ve left several messages on her voicemail.”
“My mother . . . doesn’t always listen to her messages,” I said.
“I understand. It’s a hard time for all of you right now,” said Didi.
“Is it okay if I come to the conference?” I asked.
Didi raised an eyebrow. “Of course you can come if Aaron would like that,” she said.
“I mean . . . if my mother can’t come . . . ?”
Didi shook her head, making both red ribbons flutter like flags. “An adult needs to be there,” she said. “If your mother can’t come, your grandpa will have to stand in for her.” She stepped a little closer. “You know, Briana, kids like your brother need special attention. Sometimes, they need special schools.” I stared at her. Was she going to throw Aaron out of school if Mom didn’t show up? “I’m disappointed your mother hasn’t returned my calls,” she said.
The Girl with More Than One Heart Page 4