Do Bananas Chew Gum?

by Jamie Gilson

  DO BANANAS

  CHEW GUM?

  JAMIE GILSON

  Dedication

  FOR LEONA GRAY

  Acknowledgments

  The author is grateful to Winnetka, Illinois, learning disabilities teacher Jane Herron and Wilmette, Illinois, special education coordinator Sylvia Delker and learning disabilities teacher Mary Beth Higgins for their invaluable advice and encouragement.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1 Tinsel Teeth

  2 Treasure Hunt

  3 Twister

  4 The Great Cafeteria Dig

  5 Viking Stuff

  6 You Dig?

  7 A Little Talk About Sammy

  8 Losers Weepers

  9 Some Butterfly

  10 Do Bananas Chew Gum?

  11 Why Not Sam Mott?

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Jamie Gilson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Tinsel Teeth

  IT WASN’T RAINING all that hard as I ran toward the corner office building. I could see the big letters on the silver canopy as clear as sunshine. But even after two months of glancing up at that sign, I still didn’t know what it said. Not that it mattered much, so I didn’t bother looking hard.

  I knew my orthodontist was on the second floor. And that’s where I was headed. But for all I knew the sign said Maniac Orthodontist Inside. I couldn’t read it or any other long words without a whole lot of wheels burning rubber in my head.

  See, I read like a second grader. And I’m not a second grader. I’m in sixth.

  I ducked under the canopy and started to shake the rain off my leaky tan poncho when the revolving door whirled around a couple of times at about eighty miles an hour. Out flew this red-haired kid from my class at school. Wally Whiteside. He shot into me like a stone from a slingshot.

  It’s a good thing it wasn’t into the old lady in a wheelchair just getting out of the cab at the curb behind us. She’d have been in real trouble. I grinned to let him know it was OK, that I knew he didn’t mean anything by it.

  “Oh, hi, Tinsel Teeth,” he said without cracking a smile.

  If there’s one thing I hate it’s people calling me names. It makes me sick. I don’t know why they can’t call me just plain Sam Mott. I mean, why not? But I found out when I was in third grade that if you make a really big stink about it, kids keep it up, on and on. I lived in New Jersey then and these kids in my Penguin reading group (the slowest one) kept calling me Dumbhead Sam when the teacher wasn’t looking. The other kids in the class started it, too. I kept yelling back at them, but they never let up till we moved. My dad said just forget it, but I didn’t know how to do that.

  By sixth grade, at least I knew enough to laugh most of the time. “Ha, ha. Very funny,” I chuckled, like Wally had really laid down a knee slapper. I’d only had braces a month, but when I moved to Stockton in March, Wally was already flashing his own. “If I’m Tinsel Teeth,” I told him as I drip-dried, “you must be the original Magnet Mouth. I bet you’ve worn them a lot longer than I have.” I reached down to pick up a dime that was stuck between the cracks in the sidewalk. “Hey, good luck,” I said.

  When I straightened up, Wally was beaming, a pure white, metal-free, straight-teeth grin. “Just got ’em off,” he said, “and I’m going straight to the drugstore to buy a huge bag of gunky caramels. A year and eight months I haven’t had any candy that really grabs my teeth, and I’m dying for some.” He leaned toward me and shook his head. “You know what? My mouth feels absolutely naked without traintracks.”

  The rain was falling much harder and it was getting crowded under the canopy. One kid who ran under had on a crazy T-shirt with an arrow on it in metallic green that pointed to the guy with him. I stared at it. It read, I’M … WITH … But I couldn’t figure out the last word. Who cares? T-shirts with words on them are dumb, anyway.

  “Wally!” somebody called out. This short lady with long blonde hair came running through the puddles carrying her shoes, a big red purse swinging from her shoulder. She didn’t seem to care that it was raining. “Wally, you’re just the person I wanted most to see,” she said. But you could tell by his face that he’d have rather seen a bag of caramels than her.

  She nodded to me. I must have been frowning or something because she reached up and shook my shoulder. “Cheer up. May showers bring June something or other.”

  “Floods,” I said, staring out at the streams rushing down the gutters.

  “Wally, I don’t think I’ve met your friend,” she said, smiling.

  “Uh, Mrs. Glass, this is, uh, Sam, uh …” and Wally looked at me, blinking, trying to remember my last name.

  “I’m Sam Mott,” I told her. “We just moved here two months ago.” I looked down to see which hand my dragon-head ring was on. I never could remember the hand to shake with so Mom bought me this ring from a kind of gum-ball machine at the grocery store to remind me. Now all I’ve got to do is look. I stuck out my right hand.

  “Oh,” she said, shaking it. “You’ve got good manners. I try to get my boys to shake hands, but Alex holds out his left hand and Chuckie puts his hands behind his back.” She turned to Wally. “I got a job,” she said. “I just now got a job. Be sure to tell your mother.” She beamed at us both. “And guess what! I’ve got a job for you, too.” She touched Wally on his nose.

  “What kind of job?” Wally asked suspiciously, shifting away from her into the splash of the rain.

  “I answered a ‘Help Wanted’ ad and got a job at the Stockton News Advertiser,” she said, lighting up like a kid who’d just won a big panda pitching pennies. She lowered her voice. “I’m not a reporter or anything. I’ll just be taking ads from one to five o’clock Tuesday through Friday. But don’t you think that sounds like fun?” she asked him. “Look, I know it’s a dinky suburban paper that only comes out once a week and there won’t be any big deadlines or scoops or anything, but it’s a real job. I’ll get to talk to people all day long.”

  Wally was staring through the rain toward the drugstore, so she looked at me very seriously. “My husband thinks I’m crazy, but everybody I know is working. Virtually. People are always asking me, ‘What do you do?’ And now I’ll say, ‘Well, I work at the newspaper and raise two fabulous boys,’ and they’ll say, ‘Wow! However do you manage?’ and I’ll say, ‘It’s nothing!’” She leaned down and put on her shoes. They must have made her at least four inches taller.

  “I meant,” Wally said, looking back at her and sighing, “what job do you have for me?”

  “Oh,” she said, smiling hugely. “I want you to baby-sit with Alex and Chuckie after school when I’m working. Tuesday through Friday, three to five. Chuckie will be in kindergarten all afternoon and Alex is in school all day, of course.” She opened her huge red purse and took out a small calendar. “Since this is Friday, you won’t need to start until next Tuesday, May tenth. I’ll pay you two dollars an afternoon. Is that OK? You just meet the kids after …”

  “Listen, Mrs. Glass,” Wally said patiently, like he was talking to a little kid, “I can only come to baby-sit sometimes on Friday or Saturday nights like I’ve been doing. Because, see, after school I’ve almost always got something going.” He started edging away toward the street, where the rain had almost stopped. “No kidding, like on Tuesdays I’ve got Boy Scouts and the rest of the week it’s either swimming at the Y or, you know, stuff. Thanks a lot though. Really. I’ll tell Mom about your job. See you,” he said to me. And he splashed off toward the drugstore for some gluey caramel for his braceless teeth.

  “Oh,
” Mrs. Glass said to me sadly. “I was counting on him. I really was. The boys like him because he wrestles with them and lets them win.” Then she squinched up her eyes and looked at me closely. I imagined my mom saying, “Stop slouching, Sam!” so I stood up straight and smiled.

  “Sam,” she said slowly, like she was trying out some word she didn’t know. “Sam, how old are you?”

  “Twelve,” I told her. “Thirteen in August.” I put my hand in my pocket and rubbed the dime for luck.

  “Can you baby-sit?” she asked, flinging the purse back over her shoulder. “Or do you have stuff going every day after school, too?” She was offering me a job. Me, Dumbhead Sam, a job.

  I grabbed it, too. I grabbed that job so fast. I didn’t have anything going after school any day and I really wanted some money. I had this thing I needed to buy.

  “It would be regular work, though,” she went on. “You’d have to come every day and be loyal and trustworthy and all, because I’ve got to work every day. I expect there are lots of mothers who’d like to get my job.”

  “No problem,” I told her, shaking her hand again to make it legal. “No problem. Every day. Tuesday through Friday, three to five.” It was like I’d discovered a cave of pirate’s gold. Maybe it happened because I’d found that lucky dime.

  The Glasses, it turned out, lived just down the street from me on Euclid. And my mom had wanted to get me an old-lady-type baby-sitter, somebody, she’d said, who could tutor me so I wouldn’t have to go to any special classes like I did in California. I’d really screamed, though, and Dad had talked her out of it. “He’s a big kid now,” Dad had said. “He can take care of himself until we get home from work.” Now me baby-sitting just down the street would really knock her out. (Ha-ha, Mom.)

  I told Mrs. Glass I’d drop over Saturday to meet the boys and look around and everything and then I just whizzed through the revolving door as fast as Wally had and up the steps to Dr. Reynolds’ office. Stormy day or not, it was like rainbows.

  The waiting room was packed, so I was going to have to sit it out. This wire on my braces had popped loose the day before, during Social Studies. I’d tried to push it back with my pencil eraser, but that hadn’t worked. The thing was drilling a hole in my cheek. That morning my mom had called and they’d said just come on over after school and Dr. Reynolds would fit me in.

  I threw my raincoat on a hook and eased myself into a space on the red plastic sofa, right across from the big mirror. So there I was, looking at me. I raised my bushy black eyebrows, smiled at my reflection, and thought, You look like some lucky kid who just got a job.

  It’s a little weird to smile at yourself in the mirror, so I started making faces, jutting out my jaw and crossing my eyes, lapping my front teeth over my bottom lip, and pressing my finger on the tip of my nose, turning it up like a pig’s snout. My hair was like a big black bird’s nest, all wet and matted from the rain.

  Actually, I knew this office as good as any place in Stockton. It was easy to find, right in the middle of the little business district a few blocks from home. We hadn’t lived here a week before my dad brought me in to get my bite fixed. “We’re going to stay in the Chicago area,” he’d told me. “And this suburb will do as good as any other. This is home forever. I mean it. I’m going to take you to the best orthodontist in town and sign you up for two years of appointments for a thousand-dollar mouth of absolutely straight teeth.” He’d banged me on the shoulder and said, “This time, kid, we’ll stay so you can get straight teeth and really learn how to read.”

  Maybe we’ll stay. But I doubt it. My dad always thinks that some other job is better than the one he’s got. And then when he gets it he’s not so sure and he starts looking around for another one. My mom calls it the Greener Job Syndrome. She doesn’t like it much. Me neither. I’ve been to five schools since kindergarten, in five states—Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, California, and now Illinois. That’s why Dad thinks it’s his fault I read like a dumbhead. “I keep uprooting him,” he tells people, like I’m a dandelion or something.

  I crossed my eyes again and looked at the two of me in the mirror. There wasn’t anything else to do. What I wanted to do was go out and run around the block—or at least look at some good pictures in Sports Illustrated. But a little kid with long skinny braids had already grabbed it from the magazine rack and was sitting on the floor tearing its pages out.

  “Can you read that, Pussycat?” her mother asked, talking too loud and looking around, smug, like she was inviting everybody to look at her kid and think, Wow! “What’s that word after ‘big,’ Pussycat?” she practically shouted. “I bet you know that one.” I looked down at the word she was pointing at. I couldn’t read it. Zero. Zip. Nothing. Blank.

  “League,” the little kid said, bored out of her skull, like it was the easiest thing going. (Zap! Samhead, I thought, Pussycat gottcha.)

  When I was in first and second grades they said I was a “slow starter.” My mom and dad argued about that a lot. They didn’t like the way it sounded. My teacher in Jersey, Mr. Spears, said that I was lazy and didn’t try. That really bugged my folks and they tried teaching me themselves and that bombed. In the middle of fourth grade we moved west. Then last year in California the teachers started asking if they could give me these tests. Geez, that was some battle royal. Finally my folks said OK, but they didn’t like the test results. See, they said I had this learning disability thing. And twice a week I got special lessons from this learning disability teacher. She was helping me some, I guess. But I was still dumb. And then we moved again.

  I looked hard at myself in the mirror. I decided I even looked dumb. Across from me on a long bench under the mirror, this girl was sitting with her mother. I knew her. Alicia Bliss. She was in Mrs. Bird’s sixth grade room, too. She was new like me. Only from Arizona. And she was a real brain. At least she used big words in class and acted like she was the teacher or something every time one of her papers got posted, which was almost every day.

  Alicia was really skinny. Her hair was dark, perfect, never sticking out funny or anything. It hung down to just below her ears, and when she swung her head around you could see the same little gold ball earrings she wore every day. She would have been cute, even, except she had this superior look like she knew all the answers and she knew you didn’t. Some of the girls called her Miss Priss Bliss.

  Mostly she didn’t look at me, but when I made faces she stared. She may have been thinking how dumb I looked, too, but I think she was staring at my braces. I watched her from the corner of my eye and every time I bared my metal bands at the mirror she would run her finger across her teeth. The front ones had a space between them.

  “I bet you’ve got a severe malocclusion of the upper mandibular palate like I do,” I said, to let her know I knew a thing or two. When Dr. Reynolds had told me that was what was wrong with my teeth, I’d memorized it. Severe malocclusion of the upper mandibular palate. It sounded fatal. Everybody in the room stared at me.

  Alicia raised her eyebrows and then smiled like I’d made a mildly funny joke. “Frankly, I doubt it,” she said, and whispered to her mother who I was. Her mother looked up like she was about to start some kind of conversation with me, so I got up and walked over to the magazine rack again. All I could find was Time and Seventeen. Time is too boring and Seventeen is too soppy.

  “Look, I’m in a real hurry,” I told the receptionist. She looked at me like I was a mosquito who’d just flown into her ear.

  “So,” she said, “is everybody else. We’ll just have to fit you in where we can.”

  The dental assistant leaned into the waiting room. “Mrs. Bliss, you and Alicia can come in now.” I groaned out loud and the people on the sofas stared at me. They were gaping like I was some kind of freak. But I knew from experience when parents go in with you it means talk, talk, talk. Dr. Reynolds would give them the whole “Straight Teeth Are Healthy Teeth” lecture and follow that one with “What Is Orthodontia?” and “Is It Worth
Big Bucks?” That meant at least another fifteen minutes.

  Alicia breezed by me without saying anything.

  On the wall is a poster I always look at. It’s gross, really, but I can’t help looking. There are these two sets of teeth. The top set is gorgeous. They look like a TV commercial for Cleaner Brighter Whiter Teeth with Dazzle fortified by New Formula Cloribrill. Then there is this other set. They are purplish gray and scaly and they look like they are about to break off at the gums. “Doesn’t do any good to straighten teeth if you don’t brush them,” Dr. Reynolds always says.

  When I can’t sleep at night, sometimes I think about those scaly teeth and know that’s how mine look hidden underneath my braces. When Dr. Reynolds strips my teeth somebody will probably come in with a camera and lights and take a picture to scare little kids into brushing their teeth. It might happen. You never know what’s going on inside your head where it’s dark and you can’t see.

  “Sam Mott,” the dental assistant finally called from the office door.

  I jumped up and followed her into the clean white office, bright with fluorescent light. Mobiles hang down above the shiny green plastic dentist’s chair. The toothy smiles going around on strings and the cute bobbing kittens are supposed to make you forget all about your agony. It doesn’t work.

  In the next room Dr. Reynolds was telling Alicia’s mother, “First, she’ll need a full-head X-ray, and then an appointment for …” The dental assistant flipped open one of those quilted pink paper bibs and fastened it around my neck with a little chain clamp.

  I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes, feeling good about my new job, glad to be feeling good about something. Dr. Reynolds came strolling in, smelling like soap. His instruments were set up on a small round table—a mirror with a handle and a lot of little pliers.

  “Got a problem here, you say?” he asked me. I opened my mouth and pointed to the raw place on the inside of my cheek. “Ah,” he said, and he picked up a pair of tiny pointed pliers, reached in, and tucked the wire back in place, zip-zap. “Sometimes happens,” he said, “even when you’re careful.” Then he handed me a thin rope of wax coiled into a small package. “If it pokes out again, just cover the end with a dab of this wax and make a quick appointment. When do I see you again, young man?”