Absolutely Almost

by Lisa Graff

  MATH:

  F

  “That’s yours?” I asked, settling down from my tiptoes.

  “Yep,” Mr. Clifton said.

  “Mr. Clifton,” I told him, very seriously, “you should probably take that down. Because otherwise someone might find out that you got an F in math.”

  Mr. Clifton just laughed at that, a real guffaw. “I keep it there on purpose,” he said.

  My eyes went wide. “You do?” That sounded crazy to me. Because why would anyone ever want to hang up an F report card, in a frame and everything? The worst report card I’d ever gotten from Mountford Prep had three U’s for Unsatisfactory, and I threw that one down the garbage chute. I definitely didn’t frame it.

  “You can’t get where you’re going without being where you’ve been.”

  That’s what Mr. Clifton said while I was still staring at his F report card.

  “Huh?” That’s what I said.

  “My grandmother always used to tell me that,” Mr. Clifton explained. “When I was a boy.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I wonder if Mr. Clifton’s grandmother ever saw that F report card.

  “When I was a kid,” Mr. Clifton said, “I hated math. Hated it. Because I was bad at it, and because I thought it didn’t make any sense.”

  I nodded at that, because it was true. Math didn’t make any sense.

  “So that’s why I decided to become a math teacher.”

  I stopped nodding when Mr. Clifton said that last part. Because that was a thing that didn’t make any sense.

  “What?” I said. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I figured if math didn’t make any sense to me, it probably didn’t make sense to lots of other people. So I promised myself that if I ever did figure it out, I’d become a math teacher so I could help other people who’d had trouble, just like me.” He reached up and straightened the report card in its frame so it was exactly even to the ground. “It took a lot of hard work, but I’m glad every day that I made that decision and didn’t end up with some super-easy profession, like neurosurgeon.”

  I just stared at him. Because I knew that Mr. Clifton liked to tell bad jokes, but this time I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Who would actually want to be a math teacher?

  “So I can’t drop out of math club, then?” I asked.

  “Not even a little,” Mr. Clifton told me.

  stacking

  cups.

  Every time we went down to the bodega to get a donut, Calista always ended up talking to Hugo forever. That’s because it turned out that Hugo liked art too. A lot. They would show each other sketches they were working on, and Calista would tell him stories about her art classes, and Hugo would laugh his big, growly old-man laugh.

  At first I thought it was fun to listen to them, because it turns out Hugo is pretty interesting. I never knew that before when I just went there to buy donuts. I guess I never really thought about talking to him about art or anything. But after a while, even art could get kind of boring. Plus I couldn’t eat my donut until I’d paid for it, and so sometimes I was just standing there, staring at the donut in my hand for nine thousand years while I waited for Hugo to take my dollar, and my stomach would get rumbly.

  So on Wednesday when we were there, I started stacking cups. Hugo’s always doing it, taking the long stack of cups out of the plastic wrapper and sorting them into smaller stacks by the coffee pourers. I noticed him doing it all the time when we came in before. So on Wednesday I grabbed the stack that Hugo had set down when he started talking to Calista, and I started counting too.

  Only I realized after I’d been counting for a while that I didn’t know what I was supposed to be counting to.

  “How many do you do?” I asked Hugo over my shoulder. Which I guess was interrupting, because he and Calista were looking at some boring art book he’d brought in to show her, but I didn’t care.

  “Sorry?” Hugo asked me.

  “How many cups?” I asked. “What do I count to?”

  Hugo straightened his back to get a better look at me from the counter. “Well, aren’t you something?” he said, his eyes all smiles. “Thanks, Albie! I appreciate the help.”

  I stood there, waiting for him to tell me the number.

  “I usually do about twenty-five cups in a stack,” he told me.

  When he said that, I had to start counting again, because I forgot what number I’d counted to already. But I finished the whole plastic row, four neat towers next to the sugar and the milk. They looked nice, I thought, all even like that.

  “Thank you very much,” Hugo said when I was done. “You’re a wonderful helper.”

  “Isn’t he great?” Calista said, and she mussed my hair. I didn’t mind too much.

  I put my strawberry glazed with rainbow sprinkles on the counter.

  “On the house,” Hugo told me.

  I squinted at him.

  “No charge,” he said. “You help me stack, I give you donuts.”

  “Really?” I asked, staring at the donut sitting there on the counter. That seemed like a pretty good deal to me. “Can I help stack again tomorrow?”

  Hugo laughed. “Any time, Albie.”

  And that’s how I ended up with my new after-school job.

  (not) johnny

  treeface.

  When Mrs. Rouse was handing back our reading logs on Monday, she stopped at my desk and said she was very glad I was reading again.

  I shrugged. I didn’t want her to find out I was still reading baby books, even though on my reading log it said I was reading a book for a fifth-grader.

  But I guess Mrs. Rouse is hard to trick, because she asked me, “How are you liking Johnny Tremain?”

  It took me a second to remember that that was the real name of Johnny Treeface.

  “It’s, um, okay,” I said slowly.

  She smiled at me. “Glad to hear it,” she told me. “I remember it being terribly boring. But I’m glad you’re enjoying it.” That’s when I noticed her eyes darting down to my desk, where my copy of Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, with Calista’s fake cover, was sticking out. My stomach went hot, and I pushed the book in just a centimeter, but when I looked up at Mrs. Rouse, she was still smiling.

  She winked at me.

  “Keep it up, Albie,” she said, and then she continued on down the row.

  only

  a test.

  At dinner Mom told me that Ms. McPhillips, the school counselor, wanted me to take a test.

  “What kind of a test?” I asked, because I hate tests. There is no such thing as a good test, unless maybe it's a test to figure out what is the very best kind of donut. But I’ve never taken that one.

  “Oh, it’s nothing to worry about,” Mom said, which really made me start to worry, because that’s exactly what she said when I had to get my cavity filled. “Ms. McPhillips thinks you might have a reading disorder, that’s all.”

  I guess I must’ve made a face right then, and Mom figured out it was because of what she said, not the carrots I was eating (which were also awful). She put her hand on my arm, which was the arm holding my fork, which meant I couldn’t eat any more carrots, which I was not that upset about.

  “Albie,” she said, “it’s not a big deal. I promise.”

  “I don’t have a disorder,” I told her.

  Then she told me about the thing Ms. McPhillips thought I might have in my brain, which was a long word I couldn’t pronounce, with an x in it. “Lots of people have it, Albie,” she said. “Famous people. Smart people. It just means your eyes mix up letters and numbers sometimes, and it would explain why you sometimes have trouble reading.”

  I put down my fork in my pile of gross carrots. “Lots of people have it?” I said.

  Mom
nodded. “And if you have it, then we need to know. You’d get extra time to take tests, extra help with your homework.” She smiled. “We might finally get those grades of yours up. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  I thought about that. Extra time on tests did sound sort of nice. Maybe I wasn’t so bad at school after all. Maybe I was just one of those smart people like Mom was talking about who mixed up their numbers. “Yeah,” I said.

  • • •

  Mom let me have ice cream even though I didn’t finish all my carrots.

  “Don’t worry about it, okay?” she told me again as she flipped through the channels on the TV. I was curled up next to her on the couch, because Dad was working late, so he couldn’t get mad about ice cream in the living room. “It’s only a test.”

  But I could tell by the way Mom patted my leg with one hand as she watched the channels flick by that she wanted, more than anything, to find out that I had it. That big-word-x reading disorder.

  I let my spoonful of cherry chunk ice cream melt into a tiny circle on my tongue. It was weird, I thought, knowing your mom wanted you to have a disorder. I always thought disorders were bad.

  I scooped out another spoonful of ice cream.

  I sort of hoped I had it too.

  patience.

  Patience is hard to have sometimes. Like with my A-10 Thunderbolt. Sometimes I couldn’t wait for Dad to be home to help me, because I just wanted to work on the plane so bad. I wanted it to be a real whole Thunderbolt that flew, not just pieces in the box. So sometimes, when Dad wasn’t home, I would take the pieces out of the box, out of their little plastic bags, and read the directions over and over and over and over until I could figure out where each tiny piece went. It was hard to tell a lot of times, because the directions were confusing, but if I stared and stared at the pictures, usually I could figure it out in the end. I’d mash the pieces right up next to each other, where they should go, and imagine what the plane would look like with everything finished. It would look exactly like the big A-10 Thunderbolt, the real one the air force pilots flew, that was at the Sea, Air, and Space Museum me and my dad went to one time.

  A couple times I really didn’t have patience, and I couldn’t wait at all. I must’ve had ants in my pants like my mom said or something, but whatever the reason, I’d use the glue in the tiny bottle that came in the kit to glue some of the pieces in place. I was very careful with the bottle, to wipe down the tip with a wet paper towel when I was done and screw the lid on tight so no glue dried up. I always liked when new pieces of the plane were glued on permanently, because then I could start to see what it was going to look like. A real A-10 Thunderbolt. I must’ve been super bad at patience, because I did that a lot—gluing on pieces to see what they’d look like. Only sometimes. Only every now and then. When I got antsy pants waiting for Dad to help me. After I glued both wings on, the plane got too big to stick back in its box, so I had to hide it under a pillowcase on the top shelf in my closet. After that, I tried really hard to have better patience. Every once in a while, I would take the plane down and look at it, but I didn’t add any more pieces, because I knew it would be more fun when Dad could help me. But I would look at it, and make it pretend zoom across my bedspread, and think about how after it was finished, me and Dad could put it on a display stand in the living room like Dad said. I really wanted to finish it. A year and a half was a long time to have patience. But I kept waiting. Because Dad said he wanted to help me build it, and I knew he’d be sad if I went ahead without him.

  I could have patience for Dad.

  friday.

  Where can you find the most math teachers?” Mr. Clifton asked us on Friday, when we were all sitting down at our desks.

  I thought hard, but I couldn’t come up with the answer. No one else could either.

  Mr. Clifton lowered his head to look at us above his glasses and then he told us the answer.

  “Math-achusetts!”

  We told him to use that one next year too.

  the zombie

  in the bathtub.

  Mom said I should be Sherlock Holmes for Halloween again, but Calista had a way better idea.

  A zombie.

  “With ripped-up clothes and blood and everything?” I asked her when we were walking through the racks of kids’ shirts at the Housing Works thrift shop. We’d taken the bus all the way up to 90th Street to get there. Calista said it was the best one, that they had all the best stuff for cheap. She also said that thrift stores were the best places to find Halloween costumes, but so far I didn’t see anything that a zombie would wear. “I want it to look like I’m dead and all my guts are hanging out,” I said. Calista nodded and held up a pair of pants to my legs, to see if they would fit, I guess. “And fangs. I want to have fangs.”

  “Zombies don’t have fangs,” Calista told me.

  “Oh,” I said, and I frowned. I’d really wanted to have fangs.

  When Calista saw my face, she laughed. “You can be a fanged zombie if you want, Albie.”

  That made me smile.

  My zombie outfit from the thrift store cost $7.85. Really it was just pants and a shirt—it didn’t look like zombie clothes at all. But Calista said we could fix it so it did. After the thrift store, we went to Duane Reade and got a bottle of red hair dye, then we headed home.

  “And now,” Calista said while I swung the bags beside her, “we make magic.”

  • • •

  It turned out that the way to make magic was to rip up my new thrift store clothes with a pair of scissors. Calista did most of the ripping.

  “Brains!” I shouted while Calista ripped, because all zombies cared about was eating brains, and I needed to practice.

  “Louder,” Calista told me.

  “BRAINS!” I shouted, louder.

  “Much better.”

  I kept practicing while Calista showed me how to pour the dye over the clothes in the bathtub.

  “Brains! Mmm, brains!”

  Calista laughed.

  It turned out zombies didn’t just care about brains. One of the other things they should care about, according to Harriet, the cleaning lady who came once a week and who was about a million years old, was staining the bathtub. She came to clean while me and Calista were hanging the zombie clothes up in my room to dry, and we didn’t realize she was there, actually, because she has her own key so she doesn’t use the buzzer or anything, and all of a sudden, we heard all this screaming coming from the bathroom. And me and Calista ran-ran-ran down the hall from my bedroom, and when we were right outside the bathroom, Calista put a hand on my chest like she wanted me to stay in the hallway while she figured out what was going on. Only no way was I staying all by myself in the hallway if there was someone being murdered in our bathroom, which is what it sounded like, what with all the screaming and everything. So I ignored Calista’s hand on my chest and peeked inside too.

  It wasn’t anybody being murdered. It was Harriet the cleaning lady, which I guess maybe I should’ve figured out.

  Harriet looked up from the bathtub when she saw us—me and Calista in the doorway—and she stopped screaming that terrible scream, only her mouth was still open, so it looked like she might start up again any minute. And then she spent a few seconds looking back and forth between me and Calista and the bathtub, which was smeared with zombie blood. I was still holding the zombified shirt in my hand, and I finally realized that Harriet had been doing all that screaming because she thought we’d been murdered. And that was kind of funny, I thought, all of us thinking that someone else had been murdered, when really no one had been murdered at all. It had just been a Halloween zombie in the bathtub. Which was why I started laughing.

  Harriet did not start laughing. She did not seem to think that zombies were very funny.

  “I’m not cleaning that up,” she told me. And then she stomped out of the bathroom and hollered
at Calista if she knew where my parents kept the aspirin, and then she spent the next hour lying on the couch with a cool washcloth over her eyes while Calista and I scrubbed the tub clean.

  But anyway, the zombie costume turned out pretty great.

  a fresh piece

  of paper.

  When we finished with my homework on Wednesday, Calista said she wanted to do some drawing.

  “What kind of drawing?” I asked.

  “How about people?” she said. “Cartoons, maybe, like in Captain Underpants.”

  “Can we draw superheroes?” I asked. “I want to make my own superhero.” I knew exactly the one I wanted to do.

  “Sure,” Calista said, so we got out the markers and paper.

  Calista’s superhero looked amazing. It was a girl superhero, and Calista named her Art Girl. She had curly hair and a paintbrush in one hand and one of those wooden things artist people put their thumbs through that has all the colors of paint on it. Also, she had a cape.

  Calista said superheroes always had capes.

  Calista sure was good at drawing. She was using the exact same markers as me, but somehow when she drew with them, her drawings looked a million times better than mine. My superhero was supposed to be Donut Man, the best superhero anybody ever invented. But he just looked like a blobby stick.

  “What are you doing?” Calista asked when she looked over at me.

  I had my head down on the table, close to her hand so I could watch while she drew, and my right hand was up in the air, gripped tight around the marker. “I’m trying to see if I’m holding it wrong,” I said, but then I sat up, because all of a sudden I felt silly. “How come I can’t draw as good as you?”

  “Albie.” Calista set down her marker and looked over at my paper. “Yours is good!”