Do Bananas Chew Gum?

by Jamie Gilson

  The girls couldn’t ignore her anymore. She was practically standing on top of them. First they glared at her. Then, when they couldn’t take it any longer, they broke out in giggles.

  Mr. B. wasn’t sure what to do. “Girls,” he said, “is it possible you are responsible for this?”

  They tried to hold back their giggles and it sounded as if they were all about to sneeze. “Obviously not,” one of the girls on the aisle managed to say straight-faced. “She must have tripped on her feet.”

  Alicia whirled around, limped over to the upset tray, leaned down, and picked up her green purse with a gold chain.

  Mr. B. hurried off to round up a janitor to clean up the mess.

  “You OK?” I asked Alicia.

  “No!” She narrowed her eyes at the girls, marched back through the cafeteria line, and then headed straight toward us with a new tray of food. For a minute she stopped behind the chair piled with jackets at the girls’ table, but brushed past it and put her tray down between David and Wally.

  “May I sit here?” she asked.

  Wally’s face flushed like he’d fallen asleep in the August sun.

  David looked the other direction. She was biting her lip and I knew doing that kept you from crying.

  “Sure,” I told her. “Be our guest.” I mean, why not? It wasn’t her fault, really.

  “Who’s your girl friend, Wally?” somebody at the next table called. They all giggled.

  “I, um, see, I’ve got a kick-ball game right now …” Wally mumbled, not even looking up at Alicia. He grabbed his tray, dumped it into the compacter, and fled to the playground.

  David ran with him, leaving Alicia and me at the table alone. She sat up very straight and didn’t say a thing. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t leave her all by herself. The girls got bored with teasing and turned away.

  We watched Mr. Westfall, the janitor, push the button that made a big metal plate smoosh all the garbage into a neat cube. He lifted it out, fastened the top of the plastic bag it was in, put it on a cart, and rolled it away.

  And just as he had finished fitting a new bag in place, Wally came flying into the lunchroom.

  “I’ve lost it. My mother’s gonna kill me. She told me I’d lose it if I didn’t take that dumb pink holder. Geez, I bet it cost about a hundred dollars.”

  We stared at him.

  “My retainer’s in there,” he said, pointing at the compacter. “It’s in that machine with all the seaweed malt cups and french fries.”

  “No, it’s not,” Alicia said.

  “Yeah, yeah, it is. I threw it in myself. I remember.” He stared at the big machine and pounded his head with his hand like he wanted to knock out the incredibly stupid thing he’d done.

  “It is not,” Alicia said.

  He looked at her suspiciously.

  “Mr. Westfall compressed it and carted it away,” she went on. “It’s not there.”

  Wally turned green. “He smashed it?” Then he looked at me to tell him it wasn’t true.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding my head. “We watched him smash it.”

  “Well, why didn’t you stop him?” Wally yelled.

  “Look,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Maybe it wasn’t totally smashed. Besides, we didn’t even know it was in there. I’ll help you look for it if you want me to.” I figured the longer it took me to get back to class, the better off I’d be. Even garbage picking would be better than having the Bird bug me about that paper. I’d take it home, hoping that maybe Dad would help while Mom was still at school and didn’t know any different.

  “Yeah, but where is my retainer? It isn’t already in some dump someplace, is it?”

  “Got me,” I said.

  “You might ask Mr. Westfall.” Alicia swept her hand over toward the janitor at the other end of the cafeteria. She was in charge again.

  Wally sprinted away until Mr. B. called, “Walk,” and then he walked very fast. But by the time he got back he wasn’t green anymore. He was ketchup red.

  He sat down next to me and leaned over to talk in my ear. “It’s in the garbage room,” he mouthed. Alicia moved closer. “Mr. Westfall says it happens all the time—people throwing away retainers and stuff. He says the kid who loses it, though, has to scrounge around looking for it. No way, he says, he’s gonna do it.” He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of anybody pawing through the lunch garbage, have you?”

  “It’s probably one of those things people don’t broadcast,” I told him.

  “Where is the garbage room?” Alicia asked crisply, like she was supposed to be part of the conversation. “We’d best begin or we’ll be late for Social Studies.”

  Wally’s eyes opened wide.

  “You don’t need to help,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to see if the girls were listening. But they had long since gone outside. We were almost the only ones left. “I don’t want you to help.”

  “I don’t mind,” Alicia told him. “Besides, before we moved here my mother told me, ‘Alicia, help out all you can and you’ll make friends.’ Not that it turned out to be very good advice.”

  Wally edged away.

  “Oh, come on,” she said, sounding almost real. “I clearly haven’t got anything else to do. The girls won’t even talk to me. Please.”

  “Oh, I guess OK,” Wally told her. “But listen, don’t go telling anybody. OK?”

  The cooks showed us the garbage room behind the kitchen and told us not to mess it up. We could have used some paper clips for our noses. Boy, did it stink. It was painted tornado-sky green, and it was piled up in back with old globes and workbooks and plastic cans emptied of copying machine gook. In front were three bags of squared-off garbage sitting side by side, each about two by two feet of stuff to search through.

  “All right, then, which one’s it in?” Alicia asked, hands on hips, ready to plow in.

  “He said he couldn’t remember which sack he put in last. We’ll have to look in all of them,” Wally told us, stepping back outside to take a deep breath.

  “Don’t be an infant,” Alicia told him. “Garbage men get used to smells a lot worse than this.”

  “It’s not as bad as sauerkraut,” I said, trying to think of what could be worse. “Or the zoo, sometimes.”

  “We’ll each take one,” Alicia said, carefully untying one of the plastic bags, “unless you prefer to just forget about the whole thing.”

  Wally gulped some kitchen air outside the door and then dashed in and tried to untie his bag fast while he held his breath.

  Alicia started shifting things around in the bag she’d opened. “Eureka!” She held up a quarter and two dimes. “Treasure!”

  Wally’s nose suddenly got less sensitive. He tore open the bag he’d been picking at and started digging.

  “Look at this,” he called, lifting out a purple Roadrunner lunch box, only slightly dented. “How could anybody be so stupid as to throw away something like this?”

  Alicia just looked at him and raised her eyebrows.

  “Well,” he said, turning away, “maybe the kid was in a hurry. Let’s save the good stuff over here.” He put the lunch box next to the door and eyed the forty-five cents. Alicia smiled and put it in her purse with the gold chain.

  “I think I’m earning it,” she said.

  I opened my bag and started looking for clumps of french fries. I remembered that’s what he’d hid the retainer under. And it had to be nearer the top of the pile than the bottom because it wasn’t too long after he’d left that we’d watched the janitor cart it away. The stuff wasn’t really packed tight like those cars that get cubed, so it wasn’t all that hard to shuffle through.

  “Hey, my turn,” I said, flashing a slightly damp blue folder. “Here’s somebody’s report! Doesn’t have a grade on it, so it must not have been handed in yet.” I laughed. “Somebody’s teacher’s not gonna believe it got swallowed by a hungry trash smasher.”

  “What’s it on?” Alicia asked.
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  “Fresh something,” I told her, glancing at it. I put it down behind me. “I’ll turn it in at the office.”

  She reached over and pulled it away. “Fresh nothing,” she said. “It’s on the French Revolution.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “So?” I said. “Who cares?” Unless I want to I don’t even try to read words that look hard. Idiot. Dumbhead! “Geez, these kids waste a lot of food,” I said fast and loud to Wally. “I bet I’ve gone through a thousand french fries. Some of these sandwich bags haven’t even been opened.”

  The bell rang. Everybody outside would be heading in to class.

  “I’ll run and tell the Bird what we’re doing,” Wally said, getting up and easing out the door. “Can I leave you two alone?” He winked at me and fled through the kitchen.

  “You’re all heart, Wally, all heart,” I called. “You go on back to class,” I told Alicia. “I don’t want you to miss anything.”

  Alicia stopped digging. “Oh, I can afford to miss. I’m already doing next week’s work. That’s what makes the girls so mad. They’re jealous. I guess geniuses are always lonely.” She sighed, closed up her garbage bag, and leaned against the concrete block wall. “I don’t care, of course. I understand them. I’m going to be a psychiatrist when I grow up. Like my Aunt Sophie is.”

  “Look, Alicia,” I said, partly to keep the talk away from me, and partly because it seemed to me she needed some good advice. “I don’t think the girls treat you like that because you’re so smart. It’s just that you’re always talking about being so smart and acting like you think you’re so smart. I mean …” She narrowed her eyes at me, and I was sorry I’d said it. I didn’t know for sure what I’d said wrong, though. I mean, it was true. I wasn’t lying or anything.

  She stuck her chin out. “What are you suggesting?” she asked, cold as ice.

  “Well, I mean, like telling everybody what grades you get on your tests and sort of expecting people to tell you what they got when you know they didn’t do as good as you. And stuff like yesterday telling those girls who sit behind me how your parents think you ought to skip a grade or maybe it was two grades. I don’t know. I mean …” and I started digging around in the bag again, without looking at her. “Stuff like that makes people think you think you’re better than they are.”

  “Maybe I am,” she said.

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. Maybe she was, for all I knew. “But I don’t think people like people much who are different.”

  “Are you different?” she asked me. She sounded almost kind. Or maybe she was pretending to be a psychiatrist.

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  “OK, then, if you’re so smart, what should I talk to them about?”

  “How do I know? I think they talk a lot about boys—and whatever kind of stuff girls do after school. I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t know what they do after school because they don’t ask me to do it with them.” She stared at me like it was my fault. “You want me to talk about you?”

  “Geez, no. Look, forget I said it.” I turned my back to her. My face got as hot as if somebody had plugged it in. Sometimes I talk too much.

  “Sammy,” Alicia said, like Mrs. Bird does, “you really couldn’t read that report title, could you?”

  “Me? Oh, sure,” I lied. “I was just making a little joke there. Fresh-French. Very funny, no?”

  “No,” Alicia answered. “I looked closely at the Viking test you passed up to me yesterday, and some of your spelling …”

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything for Old Retard to say. Besides, it wasn’t any of her business. So we kept searching, without saying anything and without finding much—some pennies, a plastic orange barrette, and a yellow coin purse with a smiley face on it.

  Wally burst into the garbage room, still trying to hold his breath and talk at the same time. “She says OK, but hurry up or we’ll miss all the Social Studies movie.”

  Then, just as he grabbed his nose and tried to open his bag again, I found the retainer, mashed over to the side of my bag. And here I’d been all the time plowing through the middle.

  “Found it!” I yelled, digging it out and flipping it over to him in a high pop-up. “At least it’s somebody’s retainer, though for all I know it’s some fourth-grade girl’s.”

  His face fell. “Do you think so?” he asked. But when I grinned he shook his head and looked at it close. “Can’t be two lost or we’d have had some help in here.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?” Alicia called after him as he waved the retainer in the air and disappeared, yelling, “I’ll wash it off and try it on!”

  While I tied up the garbage bags, Alicia gathered up the money, the yellow purse, the report, and some other junk from the floor. I fled from the green room and Alicia ran after me.

  The class was already looking at this movie on the crossing of the Mayflower. When we walked in, the huge mast was cracking below deck and all the Pilgrims were panicking because they thought they were all going under. For school movies it wasn’t half bad.

  Mrs. Bird nodded to us.

  “Where do you suppose Priss Bliss and the new kid have been?” the girl behind me asked somebody.

  Wally came in just after we did, smiling, the retainer snug in his mouth. As he sat down, Alicia said, loud enough for the girl in back of me to hear, “We just found Wally’s retainer in the lunch trash.”

  Wally groaned. “Geez, Alicia.” The class broke up laughing just as some sailor in the movie was shouting, “Land Ho!” A couple of girls leaned over in the dark and giggled with Alicia.

  “Were you with Wally and the new kid all that time?” one of them asked her. She smiled and tossed her hair.

  “All alone in a very small room,” she told them. “Wally’s shy, but Sammy’s cute,” she said.

  The girl behind me leaned forward. “Have a good time?” she asked, poking me in the shoulder. I could have died.

  The movie was over just at three and when the bell rang I dashed out the door before anybody else got their eyes adjusted to the light. I had to escape from both Bird and Bliss.

  As I ran I patted my jeans pocket to check that my tornado story was there, but the pocket was flat. I stopped a minute to dig around inside, but there wasn’t any paper to find. I’d lost it. A half hour’s work and I’d lost it.

  “Sammy Mott!” I heard Mrs. Bird shout and I darted away to meet the boys.

  “Oh, Sam-my,” Alicia called.

  I escaped, but with the Bird chirping down my back. And Priss Bliss right behind her.

  5

  Viking Stuff

  ALEX STOOD THERE like a normal kid waiting at the kindergarten door. Spiderman crouched on the windowsill, ready to leap.

  “Aieeeee!” he yelled, and threw himself straight at my neck. I cleverly stepped to the side like a proper supervillain would and Spidey fell flat on the dandelions. He was up in a minute.

  “The Magnet Men are after us,” I told them. “Run like crazy or they’ll yank us back in school.” So we ran like crazy all the way to their house. All the time I tried to remember putting the twister paper somewhere else. Sometimes I forget where I put stuff, but this time my pocket was the only place it could have been. I knew I hadn’t left it in my desk. Oh, well, I thought, who cares?

  “Today,” I said, as the boys started stuffing bananas into their mouths, “today we’re going to the jungle. And we’ll climb a jungle tree—ta daaah—starting at the top.”

  “Don’t you mean the ‘pot’?” Alex asked, grinning at me.

  I bopped him on the head. “That was just a joke,” I said, bopping him again, harder.

  “Don’t hit my brother,” Chuck shouted, slugging me.

  “You told us it was a mistake,” Alex said, punching me harder than I’d bopped him. “My mom said that was a funny mistake—funny strange not funny ha-ha.”

  “You told her?”

  “Sure, why not?” Alex asked.

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nbsp; Why did they have to go and do that? She wouldn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out all those clues. Pretty soon, I thought, they’re all going to know and I’ll be Dumbhead Sam again. Being stupid is like having a birthmark. You can hide it, but you’ve still got it. I ate three bananas.

  “We’re gonna climb our tree, aren’t we?” Chuck asked, shaking my shoulder. “Before they come and saw it up and take it away?”

  I didn’t answer him. I just banged out of the kitchen and let the screen door slam.

  The backyard was filled with tree. Its branches reached all the way to the neighbor’s fence and there were huge hills of leaves. The trunk had been pulled clear out of the ground. It made you feel sad like a big dog had died or some wild thing, like a raccoon or a squirrel, had been hit by a car.

  We started at the top (pot) where Chuck found an empty bird’s nest, empty except for some blue-green eggshells caught in the twigs. He dug around underneath as far as he could for baby birds, but we decided they’d flown away weeks ago. Two squirrels playing tag in the lower branches ran away when they saw us coming.

  Chuck hopped down the branches like a lumberjack riding logs on a river. “Hey, you guys,” he yelled. “You’re not gonna believe this. I found a truck.”

  “A truck? That was some tornado.” I started crawling through the brush to take a look. A Jeep? I wondered. A branch flew back and hit me in the face.

  It was a truck. Chuck was holding it up. A toy yellow earth mover, its scoop filled with a cupful of dirt. “I bet that tornado sucked it over. It was in the garden last week. That’s cool,” Chuck sighed.

  The tree had pulled up a whole batch of dirt, and now that the rain had stopped, the earth was fine and soft, clinging to all the tiny roots. They were just beginning to droop. The trunk was so big I couldn’t reach around it. It must have been very old. It wasn’t fair it should fall and die.

  Chuck slithered into the hole where the roots had been, tearing a path with his sneakers. It was almost three feet deep.