Do Bananas Chew Gum?

by Jamie Gilson

  My house was still standing, but the chimney had fallen off. Bricks littered the yard. I didn’t stop to check inside. Mom and Dad were both at work so nobody was home. I steamed ahead to look for Chuck and Alex.

  I got there just when Mrs. Glass did. It’s a good mile from the newspaper, so she must have done some running, too. She came sailing down Ninth Street over to Euclid, splashing through puddles, her high-heeled shoes in her hand.

  “Sam,” she called to me. “Where are the boys?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just got here.” I took the steps two at a time. The front windows were broken in. I flung open the door. Shattered glass lay scattered on the living room rug and all over the brown velvet sofa where I’d put the marshmallows.

  “Alex!” I yelled. “Chuck! You OK?”

  Nothing. Zip. Silence.

  “Chuckie!” Mrs. Glass screamed. “Alex!” I dashed around the house, searching. Something moved in the top bunk so I scrambled up the ladder, sure I’d found them. But just as I got to the top, Al the cat leaped down.

  “Go find the boys,” I yelled at him. He stared at me for a minute and then settled in the rocket-print chair to watch.

  Mrs. Glass opened the basement door and shouted, “Boys! It’s safe now.” Only Rooster scrambled up the steps. Dashing into the hall, I ran smack into Mrs. Glass, who was dashing someplace else. It almost knocked us both flat.

  “Maybe somebody rescued them,” she said. “I don’t see any blood. The phone’s dead. The electricity’s off. The windows are blown in and the old maple tree in the backyard is roots up.” She started biting her nails.

  “The place is a disaster area.” She looked at me, glanced away, and then looked back again like she just couldn’t believe her eyes. “And you,” she said, “look like you’re going to a costume party. Where were you all this time, anyway?”

  “I was curled up in the hall outside Dr. Reynolds’ office,” I told her. “He was running late. I know I should have …” Then I looked down at my mud-spattered pink bib and put my skinned hands up to feel the curly metal whiskers. I’d forgotten all about them. “Dr. Reynolds had just put in my wires …” I started to explain.

  “Reynolds?” she said. “Was that the weird word you tried to write?” Then she frowned, closed her eyes, and shrieked as loud as all the sirens at full tornado force, “Booooooooyyyyyyyyss!”

  From their bedroom I heard a faint whimper and an almost silent “shhhhhhhh.” I ran in and threw open the closet door, but only shoes fell out.

  So I got down on my belly, lifted the NFL bedspread, and looked under the bed. My old finding powers hadn’t left me. There among the dirty socks and dust balls lay Alex and Chuck, scrunched up small against the wall, looking gray and scared.

  “I found them, Mrs. Glass,” I yelled. “They’re alive!” I stuck my head under the bed again. “It’s all over, you guys,” I told them. “You can come out now.”

  “Alex turned it on!” Chuck yelled from deep under the bed.

  “We didn’t mean to do it,” Alex whispered in a weak, dry voice.

  “Come out here this minute!” their mother boomed.

  Chuck poked his head from his hiding place. His bottom lip was quivering. “Alex did it,” he cried. He slithered out, ran over, and clung to his mother’s knees.

  “Alex did what?” She tried to pry him loose so they could carry on some kind of conversation, but he hugged fast.

  “Alex, come out!” I told the dark form pressed against the wall.

  He inched toward me, peering at my face with interest. “What’s wrong with your mouth?” he asked.

  “It’s a long story,” I said, tearing off the pink bib and tossing it over toward the wastepaper basket.

  “What’s she gonna do to me?” Alex hissed.

  I stuck my head under the bed. “She’s going to be so glad to see you,” I said, trying to grab him by the leg, “that she’ll give you a big hug and a kiss.”

  “Yuck,” he said. “No kidding, what’s she gonna do, you think?”

  “Alex,” Mrs. Glass said in a low threatening voice. “You’re going to die of dust inhalation if you don’t get out of there.” She shuffled toward the bed, Chuck clinging to her knees. Alex sneezed and shifted back toward the wall.

  “What is the matter with that crazy kid?” she asked nobody in particular.

  “You’ve told him a billion times not to play with Daddy’s stereo,” Chuck said, sniffling, “but he did and …”

  “I’m going to get you, Chuckie,” Alex shouted from his cave. “Next time you beg me not to, I’m going to rat on you. You’ll see.” And he started to sob.

  But Chuck kept going. “And he turned it up so loud the house started shaking, and it shook so much it exploded, and my ears hurt and the lights went out and there were noises outside …” He started to wail.

  By then it was Tear City. Mrs. Glass was doing it, too. She burrowed under the bed, dragged Alex out by his foot, and they all three of them sat there and bawled. It was catching. I almost started in with them. I mean, really it was my fault because I wasn’t with the kids. Maybe if I’d come home with them or at least called them the storm wouldn’t have happened that way. It was my fault as much as anybody’s.

  “You didn’t do it, you funny nuts,” Mrs. Glass said. “It was a tornado from the sky. You know, like that funnel cloud that picked Dorothy up in The Wizard of Oz.”

  Geez, what a dumb thing to say, I thought. Next time they’ll run out and try to catch a ride to the Emerald City.

  “Well,” she laughed, smoothing the dust balls out of Alex’s hair, “I’ll bet it’s a couple of light years before you fool with Daddy’s sound system again.”

  She bounced up, fluffed her hair, and smiled down at the two kids, who looked like they’d been personally responsible for losing the World Series. “Let me fix some popcorn to cheer you up. Sam, read to them, will you? That’s the best soother I know.” She handed me a book with a duck on the cover.

  I opened it to the first page. I could feel my brain frost over. Mrs. Glass was waiting.

  “Oh, Mother Goose, good,” Chuck said. “Do this one,” and he flipped the pages to a picture of a little girl talking to a hunched-up old man.

  “Mother Goose, yuck,” Alex groaned.

  “One … one …” I said, then looked again at the picture. It didn’t give me any hints at all. I don’t know why, but it’s hardest for me to read out loud with people watching and listening. My thinking stops like a faucet turning off. “Once upon a time,” I said, faking it.

  “Dummy, that’s not a ‘Once upon a time.’” And Chuck rattled off by heart,

  “One misty moisty morning when cloudy was the weather,

  There I met an old man clothed all in leather.

  He began to compliment and I began to grin,

  ‘How do you do,’ and ‘How do you do,’ and ‘How do you do again.’”

  I laughed like I was Bozo. “Can’t fool you, can I?” I said, like it was some classy joke I’d pulled on him. “Probably it’s my metal whiskers.” I curled them up, stuck out my tongue, and crossed my eyes—Sammo, the clown.

  “You’re crazy,” Chuck said, laughing. “Sam’s crazy.”

  Mrs. Glass gave me a long funny look. “I want to talk to you later, Sam,” she said, like she had important things to say. The frost that had hit my brain moved to my stomach.

  “Sure,” I told her. “Anytime. But listen, is it OK if I go home now? I want to see if my house is still there and everything.”

  It was getting lighter out. From the boys’ window we could see that a porch had been completely sheared off the house next door. A whole batch of people had gathered round, waving their arms to show how the tornado had totaled the place. And out in back we could see the Glasses’ huge tree, uprooted, like some giant had thought it was a weed and pulled it right out of the ground.

  “Can we wait and talk tomorrow, Mrs. Glass?” I said, figuring if I worked one
more day I could earn at least two dollars more before she fired me. She couldn’t very well pay me for today. All I had done was flap around.

  What I wanted the money for was to buy a tape recorder to take to school. Just a little one so I could hide it. Mrs. Bird was lecturing to us, trying, she said, to teach us to take notes. But when I tried to write things down I missed half of what she said. My paper would be all crossed out and scribbled over and smudged. And I wouldn’t even have heard half of what was going on. It was a big mess.

  The teacher in California told me I should take a tape recorder to school. Mom said absolutely no I couldn’t have a tape recorder because then I’d never learn to read hard stuff or write so “normal people” could read it. But I wasn’t learning anyhow. Dad said why not, but I’d have to earn the money myself. Being dumb is no fun.

  “I’ll stay longer if you really want me to,” I told her, looking down at the holes in the toes of my gym shoes.

  “No, Sam, I guess you do want to go home and check,” she said. “Call me if you need help. You know our number?” She wrote it on a scrap of the old Snoopy notepaper and handed it to me.

  “824-1276,” I read off. “And they add up to 30. Right?” I knew it was right. Numbers are no problem to me. (Ha-ha, Mrs. Glass. Ha-ha.)

  “See you tomorrow,” she said, without a smile. “And don’t be late.”

  4

  The Great Cafeteria Dig

  “I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU for a while after school today, Sammy,” Mrs. Bird said, lowering her voice as she stopped at my desk. She’d been sailing up and down the aisles snooping over our shoulders as we wrote. I snapped the tip off my pencil, then lifted the desk top so I could search through the mess inside for one that still had lead. Marching across the room to sharpen it would be a pain. A short yellow tooth-marked one was stuck inside the math book. I took it out, shifted around in my seat, and covered my paper with my arm so nobody could look. My stomach growled. I felt like growling, too.

  We were supposed to be doing creative (ha) writing about the big twister of the day before. I had a whole lot of stuff in my head about it and a whole lot of wild words my dad had used when he got home and saw the mess, but all I’d gotten down was:

  It took me half an hour to do that much creating (ha). I stared out at the sky, which was bright blue with cotton candy puffs of clouds floating in it. The tops of the trees on the lawn across the street almost touched the clouds. I thought about the huge tree lying flat in the Glasses’ backyard and how the boys and me could climb it after school and how great it would be to jump around in the high limbs of a tree and know you couldn’t even fall and break a leg. I wondered what lunch would be. Tacos maybe.

  Across from me Wally was filling pages up with paragraphs. Once he held up his paper to show me. He’d drawn a picture in the margin of me and my metal whiskers.

  Just so anybody who looked would think I was writing, I added at the bottom of my page, “DUM DUM DUM ME DUM ME.”

  Mrs. Bird probably wants me to finish this after school and it’ll take a year, I thought, and Chuck and Alex will really have blown the house apart by the time I get there.

  “I’ve completed mine, Mrs. Bird,” Alicia Bliss said brightly, raising her paper in the air like it was the Statue of Liberty’s torch. “Is there anything I can do for you?” A girl in the next row hissed, “Priss is at it again.”

  The hands of the clock snapped shut to twelve and the lunch bell rang.

  “Pass your papers up to the captains, people,” Mrs. Bird called from the front of the room. Our class was made up of People, Captains, and the Bird, who’d elected herself General. The kid first in every row was a captain. Alicia was mine. She turned around and smiled at me, sweet as Sugar Pops.

  The last thing I wanted to do was let a brain like that know I was some kind of idiot, so I stuck the paper in my pocket and raced out the door.

  “Don’t leave until you hand in your papers, people,” Mrs. Bird commanded.

  Wally was at my heels. “Hey, what happened to your steel whiskers? Lightning strike them on the way home?”

  “No,” I told him as we got our stuff from our lockers, “Mom unthreaded them while Dad swore at the chimney. The whole top part of the crazy chimney flew off and some of the bricks crashed through our neighbor’s window and broke the screen of his TV set. My dad says it was an act of God. But our neighbor says our chimney needed tuckpointing and if it had been in better shape it wouldn’t have happened. My dad says they’re crummy neighbors and maybe we should move.”

  “Nothing happened to our house,” Wally said with a sigh.

  We ran, skipping steps on the way down because there was nobody to stop us.

  The grades eat in shifts, the little kids first, and most of them were still there, poking at their sandwiches. Outside the sun was shining, but inside it was even brighter. Our cafeteria is caution-yellow with pictures of street signs stenciled all over it—One Way, Stop, Merge, Yield.

  “Walk!” a teacher yelled at us. “Walk! There’s food aplenty.”

  The cafeteria smelled like sack lunches and bananas. And french fries. No tacos today. It sounded like somebody’d stuck a microphone into a beehive and turned the volume all the way up. But I was starved so it didn’t matter. The line shuffled along slow.

  Some third-grade girls just finishing their desserts were trying to get the gym teacher, Mr. Bromfield, to notice them. Mr. B. cruises the cafeteria every lunch hour to keep order.

  “Mr. Bromfield, Mr. Bromfield, my mother made some ginger snaps. You want one?” a kid in a Girl Scout uniform called.

  “Not now,” he said, and bounded over to stop two first-grade boys from stomping on upside-down paper cups.

  We looked at the trays as the kids filed past. Hot dogs with pickles on the side, french fries, and chocolate milkshakes in paper cups.

  “Looks good,” I said, my stomach growling because I’d only had a piece of toast with peanut butter on it for breakfast.

  “Good?” Wally sneered. “You gotta be kidding. You know what’s in those milkshakes? My mother’s in the PTA and she says they’ve got ground-up brown kelp in them for vitamins. Seaweed! I’m not gonna drink any seaweed milkshakes.”

  “They taste all right, though. I remember they taste like chocolate.”

  “Maybe, but it’s like eating rattlesnake. Doesn’t matter if it tastes good. I wouldn’t touch it. Not even with chocolate.”

  A bunch of girls in line behind us were trying to top each other with storm stories. It sounded like everybody had been almost drowned or electrocuted or smashed by a falling tree or speared by glass missiles.

  When we got our lunches, I took a malt and Wally took a milk. He rolled his eyes at me and gagged.

  The only free table was a four-seater across from the trash smasher—a table with a view. But it was all there was, so we grabbed it.

  A big white plastic garbage can yawned out in front of the trash compacter. The little kids, just finishing their lunches, were emptying stuff into it, sloshing leftover milk and milkshakes into the garbage can and tossing the rest into the compacter. Then they plunked their mostly empty trays on top of the tray pile.

  “Hi, Sam!” Alex came up behind me and pushed his tray under my nose. “Hi, Wally, wanna wrestle?”

  “How you doing, kid?” I asked him, pretending not to notice that his tray swam with malt, hot dog, and dead french fries.

  He smiled. His mouth was ringed with chocolate malt. “My dad found an exploded basketball in our backyard,” he said proudly. “My dad says the volcano must have busted it.”

  “Tornado,” I told him, grinning at Wally. “Meet you and Spiderman at the kindergarten entrance at three o’clock sharp. Same as Tuesday.”

  As he walked away Alex said proudly, “When the electricity came on, the stereo was so loud it nearly knocked our ears off.” He wiped his malty moustache on his sleeve. “My dad wasn’t home yet, though, so it was OK.”

  “Sitting them is a t
otal riot,” Wally said. “My mother thinks their mother is a total flake, though. They bowl together.” Then he shifted his eyes back and forth to see that nobody was looking but me, reached in his mouth, and lifted out his new retainer. It was all pink and wirey. He looked for a place to put it.

  “It’s gross. I know it. I’ve got a pink plastic box I’m supposed to stick it in. I left it home, though. It’d be such a pain to carry it around all the time. But I found out you can’t taste a thing when the retainer’s in your mouth,” he whispered. “You’ve got to take it out.” He tucked the retainer under some french fries just as this other kid from our class, David somebody, sat down with us.

  A pack of girls from our class grabbed the big round eight-chair table that had just emptied out next to ours. “Here comes Miss Priss,” one of them hissed. “Why doesn’t she just sit with the rest of the teachers? Quick, throw your coats on the empty seat.”

  There was a rustle of jackets and then suddenly a crash and a shriek as this girl came sliding across the floor, her tray skidding out ahead of her.

  “OK, now, who’s the wise guy?” Mr. Bromfield hurried over to see who’d tripped her. The girls at the other table stared away as though this kid hadn’t flopped on the floor right under their noses and flung her french fries halfway across the cafeteria.

  He eyed us. “We didn’t do it,” David said.

  It was Alicia on the floor, all right. She rose up to her knees and pointed at the girls sitting at one side of the big table. “Mr. Bromfield,” she said in a high, shrill voice, “one of those girls is obviously guilty.”

  I didn’t know if she was going to cry or what. She was pretty upset, especially because the girls went on talking, pretending they hadn’t seen or heard a thing. I guess Alicia could see nobody was going to confess, so she got up, put her hands on her hips, and said, “Mr. Bromfield, it is imperative that you punish them!” Her voice quivered. She walked over and stood next to the girls who might have done it. “I will not be made a fool of,” she said, like she was an actress or something.