“I think we all figured it out pretty quickly,” Mom says. “With a few missteps.” She is half whispering. Not enough for us not to hear, but enough for us to know we’re not supposed to hear.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” Helen says.
“It’s nothing!” I say, even though I’m not supposed to join the conversation.
I know not to worry—if anything were wrong with Danny, I’d know, the way I know what shape to make when our eyes are closed and what word to guess during Snowman. But Helen has a strained look on her face and hasn’t touched her food. It’s not like her. She usually finishes hers first, and we all joke that she should enter a hot-dog-eating contest.
I don’t like that today is different. I don’t like that she’s breaking the rules.
I know how everyone at this table likes their cookout food. I know the sounds they make when they take an extra-delicious bite and whether they open their mouths when they chew. I know what toppings they like and how many chips they eat per burger and whether they burp openly (Jake) or behind a napkin thinking no one can hear (Mom). I know who is the messiest (Ross) and who eats the most (Helen and Dad). So I know when something’s off.
Something’s off.
Ms. Mendez says good scientists are observers first.
“Remember that time Clover fell asleep at Disney World?” Dad says. He has a big smile and a burger in each hand. His brow is sweaty because he’s the only one not completely under the umbrella. Tomorrow he’ll have a burn, and Mom will shake her head and tell him he looks like a tomato. She’ll tell us not to follow Dad’s example, and she’ll make him take an extra-large bottle of aloe lotion on his next drive. “She took a snooze on a roller coaster. We took her to the doctor, since it was so odd. They said maybe she was just tired.” Dad laughs, and when he laughs, it’s really more of a bellow.
Sometimes I miss him even when he’s right in front of me. I want to record his rough laugh and the way he can make any conversation feel lighter, easier.
“So not to worry,” he says, when he’s laughed himself out. “Stranger things have happened!”
“I feel great, Mom, I told you,” Danny says, and I know he’s not lying because when Danny lies he leans to the left, and he’s sitting up nice and straight now. “I was just bored. Clover will tell you. We’re learning about flowers in science. I couldn’t take it.”
“I don’t like how flowers smell,” Jake says.
“Flowers are one of Jake’s things,” Mom says. Jake has a lot of what Mom calls things. Things that bother him or things that he has particular opinions on. Things that cause tantrums or things that have to be done a certain way. Things he needs.
I don’t have very many things, except for Danny. Danny is a thing I need.
“They’re one of my things too, I guess,” Danny says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have to go to science class anymore! Just to be safe!” Danny’s fingers are covered in ketchup, and he scoots closer to his mom and wiggles them in her face. She laughs. Like my dad, Danny can make any situation lighter, sillier, simpler. It is one of my top ten favorite things about him. A lot of the things I love about Danny are things I love about my dad, and that works out pretty well, since Danny’s always around and Dad’s in his truck a lot. Danny helps fill in some of the empty spaces.
Danny turns his ketchup fingers on Jake, getting a drop on Jake’s nose. Jake squeals and dips his own hands in mustard and wiggles right back. Danny is great at riling Jake up and I’m good at calming him down, so whatever Jake needs, Danny and I have it covered.
Danny coughs and Helen shudders like it’s coming from her own body.
“Take it easy, honey,” she says. She doesn’t like when Danny gets too rowdy. Sometimes I think it would be hard to be Helen, and not much fun. “Maybe we should head home soon. What do you think?”
“What I really want to do is learn how to use the grill,” Danny says to my dad. He grabs a spatula. “Will you show me?”
“Oh, honey, is that safe?” Helen asks. She has always been a worrier, but she’s even more of one today. Danny wrinkles his nose and ignores her again. It’s not very nice, so I smile at Helen and ask her if she wants more lemonade.
Helen says thank you but doesn’t drink much of it. Jake guzzles his down. A few minutes later, Danny turns around, grinning, holding a plate with a single hot dog on it.
“Look, Clover!” he says. “I’m the new grill master!” Dad and Ross are always fighting over who is the “ultimate grill master.” “You want to be the lucky one to eat it?”
“I think I’ll wait and have your fifth or sixth try,” I say.
“The boy’s a natural,” Ross says, and I think they’re both trying to make Helen relax, smile, enjoy the day. “Takes after his old man.”
“You want to do some grilling too, Clover?” Dad says.
I’m not dying to learn how to grill, but I want to be near Danny and all the joking around, and I sort of want to get away from Helen and her nervous fingers and sad eyes.
Danny coughs again. It’s a rocky sound, like something’s stuck inside him. He smiles and opens his mouth to say something, but more coughing comes out instead. He bends at the waist and coughs into his hands, and I pat his back but I’m not sure it helps.
Helen rushes to his side and Jake starts asking a million questions that no one can answer, but when we don’t answer, he just asks them more loudly.
Eventually, Jake covers his ears. He doesn’t like the sound of the cough. Neither do I.
“It’s no big deal,” Danny says. “It’s allergies, like you said.”
“That’s not what allergies sound like,” Helen says.
“I’ve heard something’s going around,” Mom says.
“Stop!” Jake yells, and I’m sure Danny would like to, but he doesn’t. He takes a big breath, like that might calm it down, but it only makes the cough louder.
I can’t stop looking at the way his shoulders shake from the force of it.
“We’re going home,” Helen says, finally getting her way.
“Too much tag,” Ross says, and I know if Ross is joking, it’s probably okay.
“Never too much tag!” Danny says with a big Danny smile. The cough slows down a little and he looks to Helen, hoping she’ll let him stay. She shakes her head and pulls on his arm, leading him from our lawn to his without another word.
Danny’s first hot dog ends up on the side of the grill, abandoned.
Usually hot dogs and burgers and lemonade and the rules for tag are the most important parts of our Sunday.
But today is different.
3
There is a big life-size outline of Danny in front of me, but no Danny.
In art class last week we paired up and traced each other, and today we’re meant to start working on filling in the big empty space. Ms. Fitch says we can go straightforward and draw dresses or pants or little bow ties and capture our subjects’ faces. But she encourages us to be more creative and paint souls or feelings or personalities.
I don’t really know what that means, which is why Danny is good at art and I’m good at science, and I need him here to balance me out.
But Danny is spending the day with different doctors, so I’m here without him.
“All he had was a cough,” I said this morning, and Mom nodded and Dad said something about how Helen would take Danny to the doctor for a bug bite.
“It didn’t sound good,” Mom said, but she said it under her breath, so I think I wasn’t supposed to hear.
I don’t feel right without Danny. I get quiet and there’s no one around to make me talk; I get tired and there’s no one around to wake me up. At lunch there was pepperoni pizza, and I didn’t have Danny there to eat the toppings so that I could just have the bread and sauce, the way we always do it. It looks gross to slide pepperoni and cheese off your pizza and keep it on your plate, so I ate the pizza, toppings and all, and now my stomach hurts.
“This unit is about how we see others
and how we see ourselves,” Ms. Fitch says. She has very short brown hair and a kind smile. If I could be anyone in the world, I think I’d be Ms. Fitch. She is the best artist I’ve ever seen, and she always finds something nice to say about my usually sloppy projects. “So we’ll work on your portraits of each other, and then we’ll transition into self-portraits. It’s one of my favorite units.”
Elsa and Levi are next to me, excitedly talking about what they’re going to do to fill each other in.
“Give me mermaid hair!” Elsa says. “And I want glasses. Give me glasses.”
“Draw me in a baseball uniform,” Levi says. “Or make my insides all green and gross.”
“Draw me a huge heart!”
“Give me robot feet!”
“I don’t want to be wearing a dress, okay?”
“I want purple hair.”
I miss Danny.
The outline of me lies next to the one of Danny, but there’s no one here to fill mine in. I get a little nervous at the idea that it will stay empty.
“What’s your plan here, Clover?” Ms. Fitch says. She’s wandering the room, looking at the first steps everyone’s taking, but I haven’t taken any.
“I don’t know what Danny would want,” I say.
“That’s okay, he’ll figure out what he wants when he draws his self-portrait. You can draw what you want today.” Ms. Fitch has a singsongy way of talking that I like. When I reply, I singsong right back by accident.
“Danny might be out all week,” I say. Mom told me this on the ride to school this morning, after she got off the phone with Danny’s mom. She said it in a scared voice like she knew I wouldn’t like hearing it. When I asked what was wrong, and if a cough was really that big a deal, and if the fainting had to do with the cough, Mom shook her head and said sometimes we have lots of questions but not a lot of answers, and this was one of those times. I almost tell Ms. Fitch about that whole conversation, but I’m still working it through in my head. I’m not ready to talk about it out loud yet.
“Well, you’ll be able to get a lot of work done while he’s out this week! He’ll have something wonderful to come back to,” Ms. Fitch says.
“What about me?” I ask, trying not to get upset. “If Danny is out all week, who will color me in?”
Ms. Fitch tilts her head. She looks sad.
“Well. That’s a very good question, Clover. Let me think on it, okay?”
“Sure,” I say. I want to move away from my outline so I don’t have to keep looking at how empty it is. “I just think I deserve to be colored in too.”
Ms. Fitch brings her hand to the place where I’m pretty sure her heart is beating under her skin. “Of course you do.”
She pats my shoulder before moving on to talk to Elsa and Levi. They make her laugh right away, and her laughter and their laughter make me feel lonelier. I miss Danny so much my fingers tingle and my ears ache and my toes curl.
I wonder which doctor he’s with and what they’re telling him and why Helen was so scared.
I take a red crayon. It’s Danny’s favorite color, so I should give him a red shirt or something. I hover over his outline and can’t think of a single thing to draw. I want to write get better get better get better and I miss you I miss you I miss you all over his face.
I put down the red crayon and find a purple crayon and a yellow crayon and a light blue crayon.
And because it’s what’s on my mind and because it’s something to do and because Ms. Fitch says sometimes art is about the things that are beautiful and sometimes it’s about the things that scare you, I draw this little bruise he got when he fainted the other day. I noticed it when we were playing tag—it was small and bluish and on his elbow, which he must have hit on the way down. It was a regular Danny bruise in every way, except the way he got it.
Next I draw Danny’s eyes, but I draw them closed like they were when he fainted. I make the lashes long, which his are, and his lids pale, which they are.
I can’t draw a cough, but I can draw an open mouth, and I do just that.
It’s a weird combination—the little bruise, the open mouth, the closed eyes, but it’s everything I am scared of right now.
“Danny sleeping?” Elsa asks, leaning over to take a look at what I’ve done. Her hands are covered in glitter, and she has patches of glue on her arms.
“Not really,” I say. I sit next to the outline of Danny, and there’s still a half hour left of class, but I can’t find any energy. When I get tired during the school day, Danny sneaks me a Hershey’s Kiss or tells me a joke and I wake up a little. When I’m mopey, Danny distracts me with games of Snowman or buys me a special snack at lunch. We get each other through every day. Danny always forgets pencils and I always have a full pack of twelve; Danny gets in trouble and I talk him out of it; Danny’s always late and I always save us seats because I’m early.
“You okay?” Elsa says. She wipes her glitter hands on her jeans, and streaks of shiny gold and shinier purple are now all over her pants. Instead of looking messy, it looks great. I bet by tomorrow it will be a whole new trend, taking over the school.
She sits next to me, near Danny’s feet.
“Oh yeah, just trying to figure out what to do next.”
“What’s this?” Elsa says, touching the bruise on Danny’s elbow. I don’t know how to answer because I don’t know what it is or why it matters so much, but it does. It also matters that I don’t have a bruise on my elbow. We used to get bruises in tandem. It always made our parents laugh. Danny would have a bruise on his right elbow and I’d get one on my left. Danny would scrape his left knee and I’d manage to cut my right.
When we got pinkeye, we had opposite infected eyes.
But my elbow isn’t bruised one bit.
And I’m not coughing or sneezing. Or fainting.
I don’t think Danny’s ever had a cold without me. I don’t think I’ve ever had a fever or a cough or a sniffle without him having one too.
“Something’s wrong with Danny,” I say. I don’t know why I say it to Elsa. She’s nice but not my good friend or anything. I guess she asked like she really wanted to know, and it feels good to say something to someone after a whole day on my own.
“Yeah, he’s out today, huh? I hate when Levi’s out sick.” Elsa looks back at Levi. It’s hard to imagine them as best friends. Elsa has long, curly red hair and big blue eyes and is amazing at art class, which is one of the coolest things anyone can be as far as I’m concerned. Levi is quiet, with glasses and short hair and a mumbly voice. He is coloring in the Elsa outline with gray marker right now, and even I know how wrong that it is. Nothing about Elsa is gray.
“I don’t know how to be me without Danny,” I say. “I’m not as me-ish without Danny.”
Elsa looks at me hard. I thought maybe she felt the same way about Levi, but I guess not, because she doesn’t nod or say yes totally me too or anything. Instead she walks over to my outline, the one that’s not colored in and might never get colored in if Danny doesn’t get back soon, the one that looks a little like how I feel right now anyway: empty.
She grabs the glue and the silver glitter and draws a heart on the outline where my real heart would be.
And like that, I have a glittery silver heart.
“That’s better,” Elsa says, grinning before returning to Levi.
It’s not what Danny would have done, but I like it anyway.
4
The concrete pool on the edge of town is depressing, but Danny loves it, and when Danny loves something, it turns magical. Danny is good at making things seem different than they are.
On Saturday at the pool, I don’t tell him how much I missed him all week at school. I don’t tell him that I messed up our vocab test and that I almost fell asleep during social studies and that I kept bumping my shoulder on door frames because I forgot he wasn’t walking through doors with me.
“Get in!” he calls from the water, but he knows I won’t. Instead I sit on the
edge of the pool and watch him swim. He looks like a fish. He looks happy.
Today’s a good day. I have a new bathing suit and it’s yellow, a color I love and Danny hates. He wrinkled his nose when he saw it, and even that made me feel good. There aren’t very many people at the pool, and the ones who are here aren’t paying any attention to us.
“So everything was fine with the doctors?” I ask. Mom told me not to talk to Danny about the doctors; she said it was rude and we should just be kids and have fun. Dad’s on the road for a while longer, so I don’t know what he thinks, but I bet he’d tell me that Danny and I can talk about anything at all because that’s what best friends do. Mom and Dad don’t agree on lots of things, but I think they like it that way. They have this goofy look they both get on their faces when one of them says something the other disagrees with. Like it’s all an inside joke.
Danny’s parents don’t get that look when they disagree. Ross mostly shrugs and Helen scrunches her face and the house turns quiet. Danny says it’s weird that I notice that kind of thing, but I know that everyone in the world has something they’re really great at, and noticing stuff is what I’m really good at. I’d rather be good at gymnastics or painting or singing, but you don’t get to choose what you’re good at.
Danny hasn’t answered me yet. I notice that, too.
“Hey! The doctors! You being gone all week! You’re coming back to school, right?”
“Come in the water and maybe I’ll tell you,” Danny says. He splashes me and I kick water back in his direction, but I don’t go in. “I’m fine, Clo. This is the best I’ve felt all week.”
He didn’t tell me how badly he’d been feeling all week. I have a bunch of questions that I don’t really know how to ask.
“So what’d they tell you?” I say, since I can’t figure out the other words I want to say. I’d like more details, so that I know why a cough and his fainting is such a big deal. I had a cough for a week last year, and I only spent half an hour at the doctor.
The Someday Suitcase Page 2