by Lisa Graff
On Saturday when I was at the park with Erlan and his brothers and sisters and two of their nannies, I saw Darren Ackleman throwing a football with his dad. Me and Erlan were playing poker on the bench while the other kids ran around screaming. The cameras were everywhere, but they couldn’t film me because I was “no release!” I think that made Erlan happy, because it meant they mostly stayed away from our card game.
“That’s him,” I whispered to Erlan. “That mean kid from my school. Darren. With the bug.”
Erlan lifted his head and turned to look behind him at Darren with his dad across the grass. He sort of showed me his cards when he did it, but I tried not to look, because that would be cheating.
Next to us on the bench, Calista looked up to see Darren too, but she didn’t say anything about him, just went back to drawing in her sketchbook.
“That kid with the football?” Erlan asked, turning back to look at me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“He looks like he smells.”
I laughed. Darren didn’t smell, not really, but I liked that Erlan thought he might.
“I raise you three acorns,” I said.
• • •
After Erlan and his family had to go home and the whole camera crew left too, Calista and I decided to stay in the park and play cards a little longer, because it was a nice day outside, and also because Dad was home and he had a bad headache and said he didn’t want to be bothered by anything. Calista said the best way not to bother anybody was to stay in the park. So we stayed.
Calista was teaching me a new card game called Spit, where you had to slap your cards down really fast. I was good at it, faster than Calista most times. Only sometimes I’d get too fast and my cards would fall between the slats of the bench onto the ground, and then we had to make the game pause while I picked them up.
I’d just won my third game in a row when all of a sudden I heard, “Hey, Albie.” I looked up, and Darren Ackleman was standing right next to me.
I waited for Darren to say something mean, but he didn’t.
“How’s it going?” That’s what he said.
I looked over at Calista, but she wasn’t paying any attention. She was just shuffling the deck of cards, over and over. I didn’t know you had to shuffle them that much, but I guess so.
“Pretty good,” I told Darren, which was true.
Darren stuck his hands in his pockets. “How come all the cameras were here?” he asked. “Were they making a movie?”
Calista’s shuffling got really loud, and she started cracking the cards on the bench between shuffles. But she still wasn’t paying any attention to us.
I shook my head at Darren, to answer his question about the movie. “It’s for my friend Erlan’s family,” I told him. It was weird because Darren wasn’t being mean to me like he normally was at school. So I decided not to be mean back. “They’re making a reality show.”
Darren’s eyes got all big. “Really?” he said. “Cool! And you’re friends with him?”
Calista’s shuffling got so loud that it made a squirrel jump into a nearby trash can.
“Yeah,” I told Darren. “Erlan’s been my best friend since six years ago. He lives on my floor. He’s really cool. He likes chess.” I don’t know why I said that last part.
“Wow,” Darren said. He seemed impressed. I guess it was sort of impressive, that I had a really cool best friend who likes chess.
Darren took his hands out of his pockets and then stuck them back in. “Hey, you want to play football with me and my dad?” he asked.
I looked at Calista, and she shrugged, still shuffling her cards. “It’s up to you, Albie,” she said. So I went.
It turned out Darren wasn’t mean like I thought. Actually, it turned out he was really friendly. His dad too. Darren’s dad taught me all sorts of useful stuff, like the right way to hold the football and how to throw it so it spiraled just right. I wasn’t very good at that stuff, but Darren’s dad said I had potential.
Calista stayed on the bench with her sketchbook the whole time. I guess she didn’t like football. I noticed she kept watching us, though.
I told Darren’s dad that I thought the bug Darren brought in for Science Friday was super cool, and he laughed and said that if I liked that one, I should come over someday after school with Darren and see his whole collection.
“Really?” I said. I turned to Darren.
“Yeah, totally,” Darren told me. He was smiling. “That would be cool. You should bring your friend too.”
“Betsy?” I said. I didn’t know Darren liked Betsy. But I didn’t know that Darren liked me before that day either, so I guess sometimes you can just be wrong about things. “I’m not sure if she could come.” She liked bugs, but she didn’t like Darren. I was pretty sure about that one.
“No,” Darren said. “Your other friend. Erlan.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“Bugs aren’t for girls,” Darren said. And I don’t know why, but I nodded at that like I thought it was true, even though I didn’t.
I was almost 100 percent sure that Erlan thought bugs were gross.
“Well, champ,” Darren’s dad said, putting a hand on my shoulder. I liked being called “champ.” No one had ever called me that before. “We better get going. It was nice meeting you.”
“You too, Mr. Ackleman,” I said. “Thanks for teaching me about football.”
Darren put out his fist like he wanted to fist-bump me, so I fist-bumped. Darren had pointy knuckles. “Stay cool, Albie,” he said. “See you Monday!”
And when Darren and his dad were walking away, I heard his dad say, “That’s a very nice friend you’ve got there, Darren.”
A friend. Darren Ackleman was my friend, and I didn’t even know it.
“You have fun?” Calista asked me when I got back to the bench. She had all our stuff packed up, ready to go home.
“Yeah,” I said. “Darren and his dad are pretty nice.”
Calista raised her eyebrows at me like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. She just hoisted the backpack onto her shoulder.
“What?” I asked. Because I was wondering what it was she didn’t want to tell me.
“Just . . .” Calista was staring off across the grass. Finally she looked back at me. “Just be careful, all right?”
“Be careful of what?” I said. I didn’t see anything to be careful of, like a dog that wanted to bite me or a mud puddle to slip in or anything.
Calista handed me the trash from our snack and we headed off down the path back to my building.
“Sometimes,” Calista said slowly, and then she stopped to point to the garbage can, and I threw the trash inside. “Sometimes people aren’t always nice for good reasons.”
That made me confused. Because how could being nice not be good? And then I got even more confused, because I figured out that she was probably talking about Darren.
“But he’s my friend,” I told her. His dad had even said so. “And he said I was cool.”
Calista sighed. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt, Albie, that’s all. Promise me you’ll be careful around that kid.”
“I promise,” I told Calista, because I could tell she was upset, and I didn’t like when she was upset. But I wasn’t really sure what I was promising, because what did she mean about being careful? And anyway, she was just being silly. No way Darren would ever hurt me.
That wasn’t the kind of thing friends did.
isn’t.
Dad remembered about the spelling. Three weeks after the parent-teacher conference, he asked me how I’d been doing with my grades. So I showed him the last one.
Seven. Seven words. The best I’d ever done. Calista gave me two whole chocolate donuts after I showed her.
But I knew by the look on Dad’s face wh
en he saw that C grade at the top that I wasn’t getting any donuts from him.
“I only missed three words,” I told him. My voice was a squeak. “That’s seven right. Which is almost all of them.”
“Almost, Albie,” Dad said slowly, putting the test down on the table, “isn’t nearly good enough.”
being cool.
Here’s what it’s like to be cool:
Cool kids play Pokémon by the drinking fountains before school starts. I found that out on Monday when I got to school. Darren saw me walking up the steps and pulled me over. I never knew that the cool kids did that before. No one told me. I always thought drinking fountains were just for drinking.
Cool kids don’t raise their hands to answer questions in class. That’s what Darren told me. I liked that rule, because I hardly ever know the answer to Mrs. Rouse’s questions anyway. Maybe I was cool all along, and I never realized it.
At recess the cool kids play tetherball, which it turns out I’m sort of okay at.
The only thing I didn’t like about being cool was that I couldn’t sit next to Betsy at lunch because Darren said cool kids didn’t sit next to kids who weren’t cool, and Darren said Betsy definitely wasn’t cool.
“Maybe she is cool,” I said when we were all grabbing our lunches from our cubbies. Betsy was frowning at me talking to Darren, and I didn’t like it. “She never raises her hand in class either.”
Darren snorted. “Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy,” he said, “is not cool.”
I was starting to think I didn’t get what was cool and what wasn’t.
I told Darren I needed to talk to Mrs. Rouse about something, and I’d meet him in the lunchroom. But I didn’t really have to talk to the teacher. That was a lie. After Darren left, I made sure no one was looking, and I snuck over to Betsy’s cubby, where she was busy unstuffing her coat.
“Hi,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, which was pretty normal, but usually she looked at me while she didn’t say anything, and this time she wasn’t looking at me, so that didn’t seem normal at all. I didn’t like it.
“Hey, um, Betsy, do you know how to play Pokémon?” I asked her.
Betsy did look up at me then, and she looked confused-mad. Which was not a look that made me happy. I did my best to try to explain to her.
“Because all the cool kids play Pokémon,” I said, “and I’m cool now, so I’m learning it, and I thought if you knew too, then you could be cool with me and then we could still sit next to each other at lunch. Wouldn’t that be good?” I thought it sounded good. “Anyway, if you don’t know Pokémon, I could teach it to you. When I get better, I mean. I’m still not very good.”
I must not’ve been doing a very good job explaining about Pokémon and being cool and lunch and everything, because Betsy went from looking confused-mad to just mad-mad. Which was even worse.
But I didn’t get a chance to explain any better, because Betsy started talking then, and even though it took her a long time to get the words out—longer than normal—I waited for her to say what she wanted and didn’t interrupt because Betsy hated when you interrupted her before she was done, and I was nice. And cool.
“N-n-n-n-no.” That’s what she told me. “Y-y-you are n-not c-c-cool.”
I couldn’t believe I waited for that.
Then she stormed off to the lunchroom. She forgot her lunch bag in her cubby, and I thought about bringing it to her, but then I decided not to. I wasn’t feeling very nice right then.
Just cool.
That afternoon was the first lunch of the whole school year where I didn’t get any gummy bears.
still.
What the heck is your sister doing in there anyway?” I asked Erlan when I was over at his apartment. We were playing Operation, only we couldn’t play it in the quilt fort because Erlan’s sister Ainyr was in there crying.
“She broke up with her boyfriend or something,” Erlan told me. “She won’t shut up about it either.”
That made me so surprised I dropped the funny bone I was tweezering out and the game buzzed at me. “She has a boyfriend?” I asked. “She’s only in seventh grade.”
Erlan took the tweezers. “She’s in eighth,” he said. He got the funny bone easy. “And she doesn’t have a boyfriend anymore. That’s what she’s so upset about.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, she’s being a real baby. They only went out for like a week.” He said that loud enough for Ainyr to hear from inside the fort.
“You shut up, Erlan!” she shouted at him.
Erlan handed me the tweezers, and I looked for the best bone to remove. The Adam’s apple or the charley horse or the butterflies in the stomach. “I don’t think I’ll ever go out with anyone,” I told Erlan. “It sounds awful.”
He rolled his eyes. “You don’t even know. Yesterday Ainyr spent two hours deleting all the photos of him off her phone. Two hours! You know how many photos that is? They only went out a week!”
“I’m gonna punch you, Erlan!” Ainyr screamed.
“No you won’t!” Erlan shouted back. “Because you’d have to come out here to do it, and then I’d get my fort back!”
Ainyr didn’t leave the fort the whole time I was there. Erlan and I played four games of Operation, and she just cried the whole time.
• • •
“Do you still have pictures of Gus on your phone?” I asked Calista the next day after school.
She seemed surprised when I asked her that. But sort of happy too. “Sure!” she said. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “You want to see them?” She started to thumb through to the photos.
I shook my head. “No, thanks,” I said. “Can we go visit Hugo and get my donut now?”
Calista frowned, but she put her phone back in her pocket. “Yeah, okay,” she told me.
That’s how I figured out that Calista still had a boyfriend.
tetherball.
Now that I was cool, I ate lunch with Darren and the other cool kids and played tetherball with them too. I was all right at tetherball, even if I did flinch once when I thought the ball was going to whack me in the head, and Candace Sims laughed at me. At lunchtime, all us cool kids would eat our lunches super-duper fast so we could go outside to meet Sage Moore at the tetherball courts. Sage was Darren’s best friend, but he couldn’t eat at our same table because he had to eat at the “egg-free” one with the allergy kids.
I didn’t mind not having to eat with Sage Moore so much.
“Do you like Carrot Squash?” Sage asked me on Friday when the two of us were next to each other in line waiting for our turn to play tetherball. The way he asked me about it, I felt like I was taking a test. Like there was only one right answer to the question, and he already knew I was going to get it wrong.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I didn’t want to get the answer wrong, but I didn’t want to lie either. “I’ve never had it.”
Sage laughed so hard when I said that that he started to choke on his own spit. “Oh, my God!” he said between chokes. “You’ve never had it!”
Candace reached around me in line and pounded on Sage’s back. To stop the choking, I guess. I hadn’t even thought to do that, to pound on Sage’s back to help him stop choking.
Then again, I didn’t really care if Sage Moore choked so much. (That was not a very nice thing to think, maybe.)
(But it was true.)
“Carrot Squash isn’t a food,” Darren told me. Darren was so good at tetherball that he could play and talk at the same time. “It’s a video game,” he said, and he whacked the ball. Whack! Nasim Johnson whacked it back. Whack! “It’s really cool.” Whack! “You’d like it.” Whack! “You’re a rabbit”—whack!—“and you go around killing talking carrots”—whack!—“that commit crimes.” Whack! “When they die, all their carrot juice splatters everywhere.” T
he rope wrapped around the pole too high for Nasim to get it, and Darren beat her. She went to the end of the line. Lizzy was next.
“Oh,” I said. I was sort of embarrassed that I thought that Carrot Squash was a food. But then I figured if the video game people didn’t want everyone to think it was a food, then they shouldn’t have named it something that sounded like a food. So really it was their fault. “Is it rated E?” I asked.
Sage started choking again, and Candace reached around me to pound his back some more. I was pretty sure she rolled her eyes at me when she did it, but I decided not to notice.
“No,” Darren told me. He only had to whack the ball once and it spun spun spun around the pole until it got so high Lizzy couldn’t reach it even when she jumped up on her tippy-toes. “It’s Teen.”
“Oh,” I said, when Candace stepped up to play. I put my hands in my pockets. “Then I can’t play it. I’m only allowed to play games that are rated E.”
Sage was still choking.
“Do you want my juice?” I asked him, since Candace was playing tetherball now and couldn’t pound his back anymore. I still had a little juice left over from lunch. “I can go get it from my lunch sack.”
Sage looked at me like I was crazy, but I knew I wasn’t.
“To help with the choking,” I explained. But he just shook his head. Which was fine with me, because it was probably a bad idea to share juice with someone who kept choking anyway.
• • •
Betsy stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria. Four straight days, and she wasn’t there. She never came out to the blacktop either. Once I remembered to watch her when we were on our way to the lunchroom, so I could figure out where she went, and I found out it was the library. She went to the library every day.
Why would someone go to the library during lunch? You’re not allowed to eat in the library. Didn’t Betsy get hungry?
I wondered what she did with all those gummy bears if she wasn’t allowed to eat them.