by Andrea Cheng
“She dropped her mouse,” Ken says. The cat dashes over but Ken grabs it first. “Hey,” he says. “I thought you were asleep.”
Grandma laughs. “Seems there is some kind of contest going on here.”
Fourteen
Camille’s Idea
I wake up, the sun is high and it’s almost ten o’clock. I can’t believe I slept so long. I wash my face with cold water and go downstairs. Everyone is crowded into our kitchen. Mom is making rice-covered meatballs to take to Auntie Linda’s for Thanksgiving. Grandma is cooking baby food for Kaylee with the special herbs. Ken is throwing his newest paper airplane around the kitchen. Kaylee is banging lids together like cymbals. Maow Maow is lurking behind the door.
Ken runs to answer the phone. “It’s Camille,” he calls.
“I’m not in Lucy and Allison’s group anymore.” Camille’s voice is matter-of-fact. “My mom told me to ask you if we could work together, but I know sometimes you like to do things ... I mean, you have your own ideas.” She takes a deep breath. “But can you help me?”
That’s how Camille is, always ready to move forward.
“Do you know what you want to do your experiment on?” I ask.
“That’s the problem. I’m trying to figure out a topic.”
“Me, too.”
“We’re supposed to decide before we go back to school,” Camille says.
Suddenly I want to see Camille’s open face. Maybe together we can come up with something. “Can you come over?”
Camille and I sit on the floor of my room. She looks around. “How do you know how to make so much stuff?”
“I’m not really sure. My grandma taught me how to sew doll clothes when I was little. Next she’s going to show me how to crochet.”
Camille picks up my old cloth lunch bag. “I like this.” Then she sees the family of sock mice.
“Laura and I made them,” I explain.
“Laura didn’t come to the meeting at Allison’s.”
“She was probably at her dad’s. So, did Allison just kick you out of the group?”
Camille arranges the mice into a circle. “Everybody was supposed to do a certain task. Allison and Lucy thought I should make the science fair board because I have nice handwriting. But I don’t want to do just the writing.”
“Did you tell them?”
“I said that first I wanted to understand how flowers get water up from the roots. I mean, water doesn’t usually flow up.” Camille is opening and shutting the drawstring bag. “But Allison said that didn’t matter for our project because it’s about dye, not water. Plus she knows I can’t read very well.”
“So what happened?”
“Allison said that maybe it would be best if I found another group. She was pretty nice about it, really.” Camille swallows. “I guess she’s right. It takes me a long time to read stuff. And the group can’t wait forever.”
“I think that’s mean,” I say. “Is Laura still doing the project with them?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t there, so it seems like Lucy and Allison are doing everything by themselves.” Camille winds the drawstring around her fingers. “Now I don’t know what to do.”
“Me, either.”
“You always think of things,” Camille says.
“Not always.”
“My mom says that ideas usually come when you’re not looking for them. She says it’s like when you’re looking for something, you never find it.” Camille puts her hair behind her ears. “So maybe what we should do is stop trying to think of a science fair idea.”
I take the sewing basket off the shelf. “Want to help me clean it out?”
Camille lines the spools of thread up in a neat row. I fold the fabric scraps. Kaylee is crying downstairs. I tell Camille what the doctor said about Kaylee not gaining weight, and how my grandmother is here now.
“That’s good,” she says.
“My grandmother can’t make her eat.”
“Maybe she can.” Camille takes the safety pins and links them into a chain. “When my parents were worried because I couldn’t learn to read, my grandpa helped.”
“How?”
“Mostly he just read me a lot of stories. And he told my parents to stop bugging me to read signs and menus and stuff every second.”
“Did that help?”
Camille looks down. “I still don’t read very fast. But I can read.”
“The doctor said that Kaylee isn’t thriving.”
“What’s ‘thriving’ mean?”
“I guess it’s like growing and talking and doing all the stuff babies are supposed to do.”
Camille is really listening. “My mom says I didn’t do stuff I was supposed to do either.”
“Like what?”
“Like I never crawled.” Camille smiles. “My mom even got down on all fours to show me how. But I just sat there.”
“So how’d you get around?”
“I scooted. Until I started walking.”
“You walk pretty well now,” I say, thinking of how I have trouble keeping up with Camille’s long strides.
“I might go out for the track team next year, if I pass to middle school, that is.” Camille shuts the lid of the sewing basket with everything neatly organized inside.
I smile at her. “Of course you’ll pass.”
Fifteen
Thanksgiving Dinner
I like the smell of Camille’s house and the sound of Chinese and English mixed together. Everybody is talking and laughing and passing Baby Kaylee around. For a while, she doesn’t seem to mind all the commotion, but then she gets fussy.
“Can Camille and I take her?” I ask.
“She hasn’t eaten yet,” Mom says.
“Please.”
Mom looks at Grandma and hands Kaylee to me.
I carry her downstairs and sit her on the rug. We put lots of toys around her from when Camille was little, like blocks and dolls and rattles. But what she’s really interested in is Camille’s hamster. She stands up, gets her balance, and toddles over. The hamster, named Mister, wiggles its nose, and Kaylee smiles. Camille takes Kaylee’s hand and helps her pet Mister’s thick fur.
Camille shows me her reading corner. “This is where my grandpa read to me for hours.” She takes a book off the shelf. “I loved this one,” she says. “Chinese Folk Tales and Nursery songs” Camille starts reading them in English and in Chinese.
“Wow, you’re really good at Chinese,” I say.
“I just memorized these songs and poems,” she says. “My grandpa read them to me so many times that they got stuck in my head.”
Kaylee comes over and sits between us.
Camille sings a nursery rhyme in Chinese about fruit: “shui guo shui guo zhen hao chi.”
Kaylee listens.
“She likes it,” I say. “I wonder if she understands some Chinese.”
Camille puts her face close to Kaylee’s. “Ni hao, xiao mei mei” she says. Hello, little sister.
“In the orphanage, they called her Bao Bao.”
“Ni hao, Bao Bao,” Camille says.
Kaylee stares blankly and reaches for the book.
Camille is smoothing Kaylee’s hair. “How about at meals, you sing her the Chinese poems. To help her forget about eating.” She looks at the armchair where she read with her Grandpa. “I forgot that I couldn’t read when Grandpa read to me.”
Kaylee bangs on the book. Camille reads her another poem. Kaylee lies down on the carpet and closes her eyes.
“She looks so peaceful,” Camille says.
I play with the carpet fuzz and think about how Camille is always trying to help other people. But then other people don’t always try to help her. “Allison isn’t very nice.”
Camille is quiet for a minute. “When I am with her by herself, she’s different.”
“What do you mean?”
“The other day she was sitting alone in the locker room, and she told me that her mom’s always naggin
g her.”
“About what?”
“About her clothes and her hair. Her mom wants her to go to modeling school so she can learn how to carry herself.”
“What does that mean, ‘carry herself’?”
Camille shrugs, then pats Kaylee’s hair. “Sometimes I think we’re lucky we’re Chinese. I mean, if Allison weren’t blond and skinny, I don’t think her mom would be ... I don’t know how to explain it.”
“What about when David and Robert pull their eyes and say ‘Ching chang chung’?”
Camille sighs. “I hate that.”
“Or when Laura names the little sock mice Ming, Ping, and Ling.”
Camille raises her eyebrows. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It just sounds so ... Chinese. I mean, she could have said they were Ashley, Jason, and Max.”
Camille considers this. “My cousin in China is named Kai Ming and we call him Ming Ming. Anyway, Laura’s nice.”
The smell of food is making me hungry. “Dinner must be ready,” I say.
Camille takes a deep sniff. “I hope so.”
I pick Kaylee up carefully, trying not to wake her up, but she opens her eyes. I kiss her warm cheek and we go upstairs.
Auntie Linda’s duck is juicy and tender. But Kaylee won’t even put a little piece into her mouth. She fusses and mashes her food around with her hands.
“Let me try,” Grandma says, shoving a spoonful of rice with meat into Kaylee’s mouth.
Kaylee spits it out.
Camille gets up, stands by Kaylee’s highchair, and starts singing one of the Chinese songs from the book. Her voice is strong and clear. Kaylee sits very still and listens. Everyone else gets quiet too. Slowly the corners of her mouth turn up. Camille puts a small piece of duck into Kaylee’s mouth and keeps singing. Kaylee chews it and swallows. She eats three small pieces of duck before she starts batting it away.
On the way home, Kaylee falls asleep in her car seat. Ken says she’s drooling on him and he wants to switch seats with me.
“Just move your arm over,” I say.
“She’s still drooling,” he says.
“It won’t kill you,” I say.
“Stop bickering,” Mom says. “Maybe since it’s Thanksgiving, we should think about what we’re thankful for.”
“I am not thankful for baby spit,” Ken says.
“Ken,” Mom says sharply.
We are quiet after that. I remember last year Ms. Sylvester asked us to write what we were thankful for, and I said the mini cereal boxes that I like so much. This year if she asks us, maybe I’ll write that I am thankful for my two best friends. I’ll draw a picture of three buckeyes in one shell and label them Camille, Laura, and Anna.
Kaylee stretches, opens her eyes for a minute, and then closes them again. Or maybe I’ll draw a map of China and an airplane. Underneath it I’ll write that I’m thankful we adopted Kaylee. But thinking that makes me feel strange, because even though we’ve only had her for three months, I can’t imagine our family without her. We have a picture from last Christmas with Mom and Dad in front of our house, and me and Ken sitting in a pile of leaves. It looks wrong to me now. I want to take a new picture with Kaylee in it. And Maow Maow, too, if we can get her to sit still long enough to snap a picture.
Before her bath, Mom weighs Kaylee and she hasn’t gained at all.
“At least she didn’t lose,” Dad says.
“She ate some duck,” I say.
Mom seems like she doesn’t hear us.
“I bet the scale’s wrong,” Ken says. “It could be broken.”
Mom takes off Kaylee’s clothes and puts her into the bath water.
“Look, the wrinkles on her thighs are deeper,” I say, rubbing soap on her legs.
“That’s hard to measure,” Mom says.
I’m tired of worrying about Kaylee’s weight. I stand up and dry my hands on the towel. Mom can give Kaylee a bath by herself.
I go downstairs and sit down at the computer. I know Camille said we should stop trying to think of a science fair project, but we really do have to come up with something. I put “science fair fifth grade” into Google, and there are lots of sites full of projects. I click on one about growing beans, but even the pictures are boring. I click on another about food groups and a third about music and memory. Nothing gives me any ideas.
Then I put “baby not thriving” into Google. Wikipedia has a long entry about it with charts that show how babies are supposed to grow. I scan the article. Near the end it says that sometimes babies who are not thriving have to be hospitalized. They may need IV hydration and a feeding tube.
I click off the site and stare at the blue screen with lots of small icons. The Internet can be great, but I don’t ever want to look at that site again.
Sixteen
Groups of Girls
Thanksgiving break is over and Ms. Sylvester is absent again. This time we have the building sub, Ms. Lamar. She puts the agenda for the day on the board and tells us to work quietly at our desks.
Spelling word sentences
Math problems
Sustained silent reading
Science fair
I don’t even try to make a story with the spelling words. I just want to hurry up and finish. The math problems are pretty easy, and I have everything done in forty-five minutes. Now what?
I was in such a rush this morning that I left my book at home. But Camille passes me a book with a note.
My grandfather sent me this book and I really liked it.
The cover is red and it has a picture of a girl’s hair on the cover. I read the flap and I can’t believe there’s actually a whole book about two Asian girls. One is ABC, American-born Chinese, like me, and the other one just came from China. I’ve read fifty pages when the bell rings for lunch.
The weather is warm for December, so Ms. Lamar gives us extra recess. Laura and Camille and I go behind the building to our mound.
“Why’d you guys think there was someone buried under here?” Camille asks.
“See the cracks in the dirt?” Laura says. “They keep getting bigger. And when you stand on the mound and shut your eyes, you feel yourself going up and down.”
Allison and Lucy are coming toward us. “Ms. Sylvester’s not coming back until after Christmas,” Lucy says.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I heard Ms. Robinson talking to the sub,” Allison says.
“Is she sick?” I ask.
“I don’t know. She just asked the sub to stay until January. By the way,” Allison says, looking at Laura, “we started our experiment. We put the bulbs into different colored water. Our next meeting is Tuesday after school.”
“I can’t come Tuesday,” Laura says quickly.
“Why not?” Allison asks. “I mean, the plants can’t wait forever.”
“I’m at my dad’s on Tuesdays,” Laura says. “Remember?”
The wind is strong. Allison’s skirt blows up and we can see her pink underwear. She grabs her skirt and pulls it down. “I hope nobody saw that,” she says, rolling her eyes and giggling. Then she looks over at Robert and David, who are watching her. She grabs Lucy’s arm and they head toward the boys.
“They’re mean,” I say.
“Allison called me last night,” Camille says. “She said she was sorry for asking me to find another group.”
“Did she ask you if you wanted to come back?”
Camille nods. “But I said I couldn’t because I was doing something with you.” Camille looks at me.
“I think I want to leave their group too,” Laura whispers. “Can I join yours?”
“We don’t have a project yet, but maybe between the three of us, we’ll come up with an idea!” Camille says.
Then Laura says she has a stomachache.
Camille takes her hand. “I get stomachaches when I’m too hungry. I have an apple in my desk.”
I follow behind. Camille is talking to Laura, telling her how much
she likes the little sock mice we made. Laura is smiling. Camille really is good at helping people with their problems, even if sometimes it just means getting them to think of something else.
By the end of the day, I finish the book Camille lent me. The two girls in the story don’t even want to be friends at first because everyone thinks they’re supposed to like each other just because they’re both Chinese. But it ends up that they really do like each other. I want to reread this book. It seems as if it was written just for me.
Seventeen
Finally
When I get home, Mom is at work and Dad is in class. Ken went over to David’s after school. Grandma is there with Kaylee, trying to spoon a mashed-up banana into her mouth. As soon as the spoon gets close to her lips, Kaylee squeezes them shut and gets her stubborn look.
Grandma sets the spoon down. Her face seems older, with deep lines around her eyes.
“Maybe she’s not hungry,” I say.
“She’s hardly had anything to eat all day,” Grandma replies.
Kaylee looks like she’s about ready to cry. I start singing the gumdrops song, and she listens. When I get to the Ah aha ah part, she tries to join in.
Grandma starts singing it too.
I cut a slice of banana and put it into Kaylee’s hand. Slowly she moves it to her mouth. We keep singing the song over and over again without stopping. Kaylee eats three slices of banana.
“Thank you, Anna,” Grandma whispers.
“It was Camille’s idea,” I say, remembering how Camille sang to Kaylee at Thanksgiving.
Grandma wipes Kaylee’s face with a washcloth, takes her out of the highchair, and stands her on her feet. She wobbles for a minute, and then toddles toward her sock mouse, which is on the counter. Maow Maow is glaring from the corner.