Absolutely Almost

by Lisa Graff

  “Maybe I can take the test again,” I said quietly.

  Mom closed her eyes for a long time, not talking, and after a while, I started to worry that maybe she had fallen asleep like that, standing up, and that maybe I should try to shake her or something. But then she opened her eyes and said, “Your father forgot to get coffee. I’m going to run downstairs to get some. I’ll be back in a sec, okay?” And she grabbed her purse and her keys, gave me a peck on the forehead, and left me at the table with my social studies homework.

  The whole time she was gone, I stared at the page and squinted and shifted my head to look at it, but no matter which way I turned—me or the paper—I couldn’t get the letters to look funny. The d was just a d. The p was just a p. And even when I blinked, faster faster faster, bad didn’t come out looking like dab. I shoved the paper in my backpack and gave up trying. I was never going to get a reading disorder.

  • • •

  When Mom came back, she put the coffee in the cupboard but left her mug on the counter and said she needed to lie down for a bit. I didn’t tell her that we already had coffee, that Dad had told her yesterday that he wanted to start keeping it in the freezer for freshness. I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t say anything. Because nothing I thought mattered. And I had a test to prove it.

  The only thing wrong with my brain was my brain.

  things

  i don’t know.

  I don’t know how to spell “mountain.” Or “business.” Or “especially.” I do the flash cards over and over, and I never get those ones right.

  I don’t know how to subtract without a pencil.

  I don’t know Mom’s cell phone number without looking it up, even though I call it all the time.

  I don’t know the name of Dad’s company he works for. I stopped asking because he rolls his eyes every time I ask and says, “Albie, I told you.” But I never remember.

  I don’t know how many nickels in a dollar, or how many dimes. Darren Ackleman says everybody learned that in first grade. Somehow I didn’t.

  I don’t know the capital of Arkansas, and I don’t care. Arkansas should go learn its own capital.

  I don’t know the best way to make a model volcano, or what it feels like to get your Science Fair project picked to go to the gym for Parents’ Night.

  I don’t know how anybody could like Johnny Tremain.

  I don’t know how to make my dad smile when he looks at my report card, instead of clenching his jaw tight.

  I don’t know how to make Mom stop worrying so much about me, even though she says she doesn’t.

  I don’t know why I’m always screwing up at everything, even when I try so hard, all the time, not to. I’d do better if I could, I really would. But I don’t know how.

  There are a lot of things I don’t know.

  donut

  days.

  Thursday night, me and Calista studied and studied with the flash cards.

  Five, that was the most words I could get right at once.

  Five was not perfect.

  After I took a shower and was in my pajamas, I told Calista I was coming down with the flu, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  “You didn’t have the flu thirty minutes ago, when we were eating dinner.”

  “It came on all of a sudden,” I explained.

  “Mmm-hmm.” She crinkled her mouth up and peeled the Johnny Tremain title off the old Captain Underpants I already finished and stuck it to the new one. “This flu wouldn’t have anything to do with your spelling test tomorrow, would it?”

  I shook my head. “I feel really sick,” I said. Which was true. Every time I thought about that spelling test and not getting all ten words 100 percent perfect, I felt sick, right in my stomach. It would be better if I just stayed home.

  She put her hand on my forehead. “You’re not warm,” she said slowly. She studied my face carefully. “Well, I guess we’ll know if you’re really sick if you start to feel sharp pains on the left side in your ribs. That’s usually the first sign of the flu.”

  I was just moving my hand over to see if I had sharp pains there, where Calista said, when I saw the look on her face, and I stopped. “Is that really true?” I asked her.

  She rolled her eyes. “No,” she told me.

  I moved my hand away. “Then my ribs don’t hurt at all.”

  “Albie.” Calista sat down on the bed and patted the bedspread for me to sit down next to her. I sat. She looked at me for a long time, but she didn’t say anything. Which was weird. Then she got up and left the room. I stayed put. I didn’t know what else to do.

  When Calista came back, she was carrying her blue backpack. She sat back down and pulled out a handful of papers, all sorts. Some on thick paper and some that looked like they were ripped out of her sketchbook, because they had crinkled edges on the side. She looked through them and then handed me one.

  I looked at it carefully. It was covered in drawings, all of them done with a pencil. They were all of people—some sitting up, some standing, some lying down. They looked realistic, not like the cartoon people she was helping me draw. Lots of them were just parts, elbows floating next to a pair of crossed legs and, next to that, three pairs of feet. Hands were everywhere—open, holding pencils, scrunched up like a fist. Some of the pictures were scribbled over, like they were started and then given up halfway through.

  “You did these?” I asked Calista.

  She nodded, but she was still flipping through her mess of papers. “For my figure drawing class,” she said. She glanced over at the paper in my hands. “Look,” she told me. “Right there.” She tapped a bright blue sticky note stuck to the top of the paper. “That’s from my teacher, Professor Milton.”

  I read what was on the sticky note.

  Lacks perspective

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I could tell by the way Calista had her mouth scrunched up while she looked at it that it wasn’t a good thing.

  “Here’s another one.”

  She handed me another paper of sketches. The sticky note on top of that one said Blocky. Calista gave me another paper, then another after that, and another and another. They all had sticky notes on them.

  Loose lines

  No movement

  Stiff!

  Draw what you SEE

  Are you even trying?

  “I hate Professor Milton,” Calista told me when I was finished reading all the sticky notes.

  I looked up at her. “You do?” That surprised me, I guess, because I couldn’t really imagine Calista hating anything. But I thought I might hate someone, too, if they wrote sticky notes like that to me.

  “Yep,” she said. “But I still go to class, every week, because I have to.”

  I was starting to see where this was going. “And you don’t ever get the flu?” I asked her. I was pretty sure I already knew the answer, though.

  She shook her head. “You know what I do instead?” I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know what she did. “I found a soft-serve place,” she said, “right by the school. Tasti D-Lite, the one you told me about, remember?” I remembered. “And I tell myself that every Tuesday afternoon, after class is over, I get to stop there and have some ice cream.”

  “With sprinkles?” I asked, because I knew that Calista liked sprinkles.

  “Lots of sprinkles,” she said.

  “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “Right? So now, when I wake up on Tuesday mornings, instead of thinking, ‘Ugh, I have to go to Professor Milton’s class today,’ I try to think, ‘Hey, I get ice cream after class today!’”

  I squinted one eye at her. “And that works?” I asked. “You never feel like getting the flu?”

  Calista nodded. “Most of the time I don’t.”

  I thought about that. “Can tomorrow be an ice cre
am day for me?” I asked.

  Calista handed me Johnny-Treeface-not-Captain-Underpants. “I think it needs to be.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But instead of ice cream, can it be donuts? Because I like donuts better.”

  “I’ll make sure we get some when I pick you up,” she said.

  “Can we go to the bakery on Seventy-Eighth Street? They have the best donuts. Even better than the ones at the bodega.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “But it’s all the way on up Seventy-Eighth Street, though. That’s far.”

  “Not too far for Donut Day. Now get some sleep, all right, Albie? Good night.”

  “Night, Calista.”

  Donuts, I thought, after I was done with my reading and turned off my lamp. Donuts. Every once in a while, the spelling test would sneak back into my brain, but mostly Calista was right. It was way better to look forward to a donut day than a spelling test.

  afterward.

  The spelling test went okay. I wouldn’t find out my grade until Monday, but I thought I got more than four. Maybe I even got perfect.

  Calista let me get a chocolate donut and a jelly-filled from the bakery on 78th Street. They were good. Almost worth having a spelling test for.

  Almost.

  monday.

  On Monday Mr. Clifton’s joke was “Who’s the king of the pencil case?” And the answer was “The ruler!”

  No one laughed at that one.

  “You can do better than that, Mr. Clifton,” Savannah told him.

  And that made Mr. Clifton laugh.

  I guess he won’t be using that one again next year.

  six words.

  I got six words right on my spelling test. Six whole words. That was more than I ever got before. I even got especially. E-S-P-E-C-I-A-L-L-Y.

  Language. That was one I missed, because I mixed up the u and the a. “That’s a tough one,” Calista told me after she high-fived me for my six whole words. “I even spell that one wrong sometimes.” Which I knew was probably a lie, but I let her say it anyway.

  Soccer. That was another one I didn’t get. Soccer was supposed to be an easy one, but I forgot about the -er not -re at the end. I got confused and screwed up. “Sometimes it’s the easy ones that get you,” Calista said.

  Calista took me to the bodega and told Hugo about my six words, and he was so impressed with me he gave me a giant bear claw that I didn’t even have to stack cups for. I stacked cups anyway, though. I stacked a whole bunch of cardboard coffee sleeves too.

  Hugo and Calista were talking awhile.

  I couldn’t decide if I was happy about the six words or not. Because for one thing, six words was good. I’d never gotten six whole words before. But for the other thing, six words wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even almost. And Dad said I better get perfect.

  My stomach was tied up like knots on a rope waiting for Dad to get home, to see what he’d say about the six words when I told him. But when he got home, he didn’t ask about my spelling test. So I didn’t tell him. He didn’t ask the whole rest of the week either. I think maybe he forgot.

  I couldn’t decide if I was happy about that or not.

  crying.

  Calista was acting funny when she picked me up from school. Quiet. Sniffly. And she forgot which street I lived on too, and I knew she knew that one.

  “You were crying,” I told her once I figured it out. “Before you picked me up.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” she said. But I knew what crying looked like.

  I knew what it sounded like too. I heard her when she went into the bathroom when we got home. She said she had to pee, but that was a lie too, because I heard her on the phone. She was trying to whisper, I think, but if that was true, then she wasn’t doing a very good job. I couldn’t hear any words, just angry talking, but then all of a sudden, I did hear some words. Five of them.

  “Gus, just listen all right?”

  So that’s how I figured out she was talking to Gus.

  “You’re being a real idiot.”

  That was five more words I heard.

  It sounded like it got angrier after that, the talking, but I didn’t try to hear any more of the words. I went and sat on the couch in the living room.

  I didn’t know anything about that Gus, but I did know that if Calista was yelling-whispering at him in the bathroom when she said she had to pee, then he probably wasn’t very nice. Nice people didn’t make other people yell-whisper instead of pee.

  Anyway, I didn’t like him. I decided Calista was right. Gus was an idiot. Then I started to wonder how come someone so smart like Calista would have a boyfriend who was a real idiot. But I must not be very good at figuring, because that one just didn’t make sense to me.

  superheroes.

  So what’s Donut Man’s superpower, anyway?” Calista asked when she was showing me some more art tricks on Thursday, after we both got sick of studying spelling flash cards. “Eating donuts?” She scratched her nose with the end of her marker. “Making donuts?”

  I shook my head. “He doesn’t have a superpower. He just really likes donuts.”

  “But he’s a superhero,” Calista said. “That means he has to have a superpower.”

  “Nope,” I said, because I was pretty sure she was wrong. “Some people aren’t good at anything. Some people just really like donuts.”

  Calista looked at me for a long time, her marker raised in the air, and she didn’t say anything. She didn’t really even move. She sat there like that for so long that I started to worry that maybe her marker was going to dry out, because the cap was off. But finally she blinked and looked down at her paper and said, “Okay, Albie. Here, I’ll show you how to do feet.”

  “Thanks,” I told her.

  just like me.

  Mom likes to go through the papers in my take-home folder every night if she doesn’t get home too late. I try to keep them neat, but sometimes I forget and smush them.

  “Albie!” she said when she was looking through the folder. It was a really excited “Albie!” so for a second, I thought she was going to say how proud she was of me doing such good reading with Johnny Treeface (even though it wasn’t really Johnny Treeface, it was really three different Captain Underpants books, but she didn’t know that). But anyway, that’s not what she was “Albie!”-ing about.

  “What?” I asked, trying to sneak a peek around her arm. “What is it?”

  She put my take-home folder on the table. “You never told me you were having class elections,” she said. I knew she was smiling even before I looked at her face, that’s how excited she sounded. “What are you going to run for?”

  I pressed the two twenty-dollar bills for the Chinese food on the table into a neat stack so they were one right on top of the other.

  “I’m not running for anything,” I told Mom. “Mrs. Rouse said we didn’t have to. It’s only if we want.”

  “You know,” Mom said, pulling the page out of the folder and settling into a chair, “I was treasurer of my tenth-grade class. I beat out five other students.” She seemed very happy about that.

  I put the top twenty on the bottom and re-neatened the stack. I wondered when the doorbell would ring already, because Mom had called at least twenty minutes ago and I was getting pretty hungry. Usually the delivery people were super quick.

  “Well, it’s not real elections,” I said. “Just fifth grade. It’s stupid anyway. The president takes attendance, and the vice president turns the lights on and off. Stupid stuff like that.” The hall manager was in charge of the bathroom pass. Being in charge of the bathroom pass sounded like the grossest job in the whole world.

  “You have to start somewhere, right?” Mom said. “This could be good practice for when you want to run in high school. When do you have to decide by?”

  “Two weeks. But I already decided I do
n’t want to.”

  Mom shook her head and stuck the paper back in my folder without even looking at all the good reading in my reading log. “Don’t be such a party pooper, Albie. Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up being treasurer just like me, huh?”

  • • •

  When the food came, Wei frowned at me when I asked for the change, and he didn’t say shee-shee either. He stood in the door for a long time and didn’t leave until I said good-bye. Which I thought was weird, because usually Wei was so friendly. But then while we were eating, I started to get a sour feeling in my stomach, and when Mom got up for more water, I did math with a pencil on my napkin, and I realized I only tipped Wei sixty cents.

  I was pretty sure I would never end up treasurer of anything.

  thursday.

  On Thursday Mr. Clifton raised his eyebrows at all of us and said, “If you had two tennis balls in your left pocket and seven tennis balls in your right pocket, what would you have?”

  We all sort of shuffled around in our seats and didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what everyone else was thinking, but I was thinking that this was supposed to be joke time, so why was Mr. Clifton trying to make us do math? I wasn’t too happy about it either.

  But then Mr. Clifton lowered his head and looked at us over the top of his glasses and said, “You’d have . . . really big pockets!” And just like that, the room pretty much exploded with laughing. I was giggling so hard I almost fell out of my chair. Even Savannah was laughing, so I knew it was a good one.

  friends.