Only Emma

by Sally Warner

  See, my mom has an office at home now. Instead of being a librarian for a big company, like before, she corrects books for writers, kind of like an extra-fancy English teacher. Words are her business. That’s probably why she’s so fussy about them.

  “No, what did he do?” I ask her.

  “He got into my hair gel, and he turned himself into a triceratops. Used up the whole tube,” Mom says. She makes a too-bad-but-it-was-worth-it! face. “I should have suspected something was up, he was so quiet.”

  “Did you take a picture of him for me?” I ask her.

  “No film,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

  “Well, next time, take a picture,” I tell her.

  But then we look at each other, because—because we both know that there probably won’t be a next time. Anthony will be going home pretty soon.

  I am surprised that I feel a little bit sad about this.

  Mom sighs. “I always wondered what it would be like if you had a little brother or a little sister, Emma,” she says softly. She has a mushy look on her face. As I said before, my mom and dad got divorced a long time ago, so there weren’t any more babies.

  My father lives in England, so I don’t get to see him very often. But he and his new wife haven’t had any babies. And I haven’t ever met her, but I can’t imagine a person with a fancy name like Annabelle changing anyone’s diaper.

  Of course, I could be wrong.

  “It would be crowded and noisy if I had a little brother or sister,” I say, having now had some experience. “But it would also be kind of fun, at least some of the time,” I add, thinking of splashing, singing, crying, peanut-buttery Anthony.

  “Lots of fun,” Mom says, brightening a little bit. “But tiring,” she adds, her eyes suddenly big and serious. “Very tiring.” She rubs her neck.

  “I know what you mean,” I say. I take a dainty sip of my milk and try to look like a grownup lady who is also tired.

  Mom giggles again. Then she says, “So, what are you going to do about lying to Cynthia?”

  Wham, I am a kid again. “It wasn’t exactly a lie,” I say.

  “Yes, it was,” Mom tells me. “And what are you going to do about it?”

  “Um, hope she forgets it ever happened?” I suggest.

  “She won’t forget. Not Cynthia,” Mom says.

  My mom is right about that, I think.

  I stare at the top of the table. “I guess I’d better say I’m sorry,” I tell Mom at last.

  “That’s my girl,” Mom says, smiling.

  “Okay. I’ll do it tomorrow, at school,” I say.

  “You’ll do it tonight,” Mom informs me. “Poor Cynthia,” she adds, making a sad face that is intended to urge me toward the phone. “How do you think she’s feeling right about now?”

  How am I supposed to know how Cynthia is feeling? What am I, a mind reader? Knowing how Cynthia gets when she is angry, though, I figure that she is probably biting the heads off animal crackers, or blowing bubbles and then popping them, or yelling at her cat, or something like that. I don’t say this to my mom, though.

  But my mother is not waiting for an answer to her question. “Why don’t you use the phone in my bedroom when you call her,” she tells me. “You’ll have more privacy that way.”

  “Okay,” I say, taking the hint. I get up from the table. “Um, are you going to punish me? For telling a fib? I mean a lie. A lie,” I say, correcting myself in a hurry.

  My mom laughs. “I think you’ve already been punished enough, Emma,” she says. “You should have seen the look on your face when Cynthia found out that you hadn’t told her the truth. It was priceless.” And she actually smiles.

  “Huh,” I say.

  “No,” Mom says, half to herself and half to me. “I don’t think you’ll be lying again anytime soon.”

  I don’t think so, either, but she doesn’t have to be so cheerful about it. So I just stalk out of the kitchen like a flamingo, without saying another word.

  Flamingos are pink from eating shrimp, did you know that? Not from blushing, of course.

  Anyway, I am not looking forward to this telephone call.

  Unfortunately, Cynthia is home when I call her. She even answers the phone. “Don’t hang up,” I tell her. “It’s me.”

  “Me, who?” Cynthia says coolly.

  Uh-oh, I think, this is going to be even harder than I thought. She is going to make me crawl. “Me, Emma,” I tell her. “Don’t hang up,” I say again.

  She doesn’t hang up, but she doesn’t say anything to me, either.

  I clear my throat. “Okay, listen,” I say. “I’m sorry I lied to you—I’m really sorry, I mean. My mom said I could make up my own mind about Friday, but I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. And then when I knew, I was afraid to tell you.”

  “How come you didn’t want me to come over to your house?” Cynthia asks. “Because you didn’t want to share that little boy with me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Sharing that little kid,” Cynthia says, explaining. “Like we were real babysitters,” she adds. “You know, teenagers.”

  That’s what Cynthia wants to be when she grows up: a teenager. She told me.

  “I don’t think you would like Anthony, once you got to know him,” I tell Cynthia. “I mean sure, he’s cute and everything, and he can make a pretty good fireman’s hat out of construction paper, but he also wrecks toys. And he hogs the VCR, too, and he drools when he sleeps.”

  “We could train him not to drool,” Cynthia informs me.

  Now, this is a weird thing for her to say. Train him? Like a seal in the zoo, or something? “I don’t think Anthony would be that easy to train, Cynthia. And anyway, he’s just staying with us for a week. We wouldn’t get very far.”

  “Then Friday night is our only chance to try. We’ll pretend we’re teenagers, and we’ll babysit, and we’ll teach him how to do stuff,” Cynthia says.

  “You—you mean you really want to come over on Friday?” I ask her.

  “Well, yeah, if it’s okay with your mom. And with you,” she says, suddenly shy.

  “It’s okay with both of us,” I tell her, only half telling the truth.

  Cynthia gets all excited. I can hear it even over the phone. “Oh, Emma,” she says, “we can play school with him, and pick out clothes for him to wear, and dress him up, and everything.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” I say, going along with all of Cynthia’s goofy plans. Over the phone, anyway.

  She will find out the truth about Anthony soon enough.

  But at least we are friends again—until we attempt to babysit Anthony Scarpetto on Friday night, anyway.

  8

  Scissors Skills

  “Can you watch Anthony for about forty-five minutes?” my mom asks me that night, right after dinner. “I’ve got to catch up on some work—uninterrupted, for a change. I’ve gotten a little behind.”

  “I’ve got a little behind, too,” Anthony says, shaking his bootie and dancing around the kitchen.

  I think he actually made a joke, but I decide to ignore it. My mom starts to giggle, though.

  “Watch him?” I ask my mom. “All by myself?”

  This would be Cynthia’s dream come true, I guess.

  “I’ll still be here, Emma. I’ll just be busy working,” my mom reassures me. “All you have to do is to play with Anthony for a little while.”

  “O-o-o-kay,” I say reluctantly.

  “Now, stay out of trouble, you two,” my mom says playfully, preparing to make her getaway. “Don’t squabble, and don’t try to cook anything.”

  “What about the chain saw?” I call after her as she disappears down the hall. “Can we use the chain saw, Mom?”

  “What’s a chain saw?” Anthony asks.

  “I don’t know. Something loud and scary,” I tell him, looking at my watch.

  Not even one minute has gone by. That means we have more than forty-four minutes to go until my mom stops working an
d starts taking care of Anthony again.

  “What do you want to do?” Anthony asks, looking sort of lost. He is no longer shaking his little behind, I notice.

  “I don’t know. Something safe,” I tell him.

  That eliminates doing puzzles, for one thing.

  “I could take a bath,” Anthony says.

  “Nope. Too dangerous. But I could read you a story,” I tell him, quickly trying to figure out which of the old picture books in my room would make him sit still the longest.

  “Nope. Too dangerous,” Anthony says, grinning at me.

  I grin back, and then I look at my watch again. I sigh. “Well, what about drawing some pictures?” I ask, mentally crossing my fingers—because drawing is something that might keep Anthony quiet the whole time Mom is working.

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “Anything! Pictures for your mom and dad,” I say, inspired. “And one for your grandmother in Tucson.”

  “Okay,” Anthony says, brightening. “But you draw, too.”

  “If you insist,” I say, and I get the crayons and paper out of the kitchen cupboard where Mom keeps our art supplies.

  This could actually be fun! It’s been a long time since I used crayons.

  Anthony flashes me a sunny smile, and we set to work.

  Forty-three minutes later, my mother comes into the dining area and plops a plastic bag on one end of the table.

  Anthony throws his crayon down, jumps off his chair, flings himself against my mother’s legs, rubbing his pink and white face into her skirt. He is acting as if he thought she would never walk back into the room.

  She doesn’t topple over, for once. I think she is getting used to Anthony.

  “Hey,” I tell him. “Don’t make such a big deal out of everything. It’s not like you’ve been locked in a closet. We were having fun, remember? Coloring?” I wave my hand toward the table. Its surface is almost covered with ten or eleven of Anthony’s spidery drawings.

  He works fast.

  “Yeah,” Anthony says, his voice muffled. “But don’t go away again, okay?” he begs my mom, looking up at her face. Right on schedule, tears trickle down his cheeks.

  “Oh, honey. Of course I won’t,” my mother says, her voice breaking with emotion as she sinks to her knees. She gathers him into her arms. “I didn’t know it would upset you.”

  “It didn’t upset him, not until now,” I tell my mom. “He was perfectly fine.”

  “Well, never mind,” my mother says in a soothing voice as she attempts to unstick Velcro Boy from her legs. “I just remembered that I bought you guys some brand-new construction paper when I went to Office Depot this afternoon. Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner, Emma. But I was hoping that you and I could help Anthony cut some up.”

  “Cut some up?” I echo. Buying colored paper and then cutting it up sounds like a waste of money to me.

  And my mom is usually so careful about every penny she spends.

  “Miss Becky says my scissors skills are weak,” Anthony says, looking tragic.

  Mom and I both bite our lips and try not to smile, hearing such an unusual sentence come out of little Anthony’s mouth. But I guess that bad scissors skills are nothing to laugh about if you’re four years old. And I don’t want Anthony to flunk out of preschool!

  “Well, let’s get cutting,” I say, starting to stack up Anthony’s drawings.

  “Wait—I haven’t signed my art yet,” Anthony says, reaching for an orange crayon.

  Now, first of all, his drawings are not exactly masterpieces. No one is going to mix them up with the art I did tonight, for instance: pictures of perfectly shaded birds. And for another thing, all of Anthony’s drawings look exactly the same. He could sign one, and everyone would get the general idea. And third, since it takes Anthony about ten minutes and a tongue sticking out of his mouth to print even his first name one time, it is clear that there are not enough hours in the day for him to sign every piece of art he dashes off.

  I try to think of some quick way to distract him, but my mom beats me to it. “Careful! Very sharp scissors,” she says, popping a brand-new pair of blunt-nosed scissors out of their snug plastic covering and handing them to Anthony.

  She bought those for him, too!

  But because of the look on Anthony’s face, I’m not even a little bit jealous or mad. I whisk his drawings into the living room and put them on a high shelf while he is still staring greedily at the scissors.

  He is exactly like a magpie! They are interested in bright, shiny objects, too.

  A magpie is a bird that is similar to a crow, but even noisier. In fact, magpies are the chatterboxes of the bird family, so that’s like Anthony, too. But the funniest thing about magpies is that they are famous for stealing glittering things-watches, keys, little pieces of metallic paper—and hiding them in their nests. They don’t need the things they take, obviously, but they want them.

  I can totally understand that. Not that I’m about to start stealing things. But sometimes you see something, and you find yourself thinking, If I only had that, everything would be okay.

  I feel that way when I see other people’s families. They seem so—so solid.

  I could never tell my mom that, though, because it’s been just her and me for the last six years, and she makes this big deal out of us being a family.

  And I completely agree! I mean, if two people is all there are, then that’s your family.

  But when I was coloring with Anthony tonight, it felt almost like a real family. The living room clock was ticking, and Anthony was humming Christmas carols under his breath, and I heard Mom’s printer whirring, and the crayons smelled good, and I could still smell the tacos my mom cooked us for dinner, and for one floaty moment, I was completely happy.

  I wasn’t wishing for something more.

  The strange thing is, nothing about tonight was different from any ordinary night—except that Anthony Scarpetto was here.

  Maybe that’s the difference. When I’m alone with Mom, it’s just us hanging out, and it’s always her taking care of me. But with Anthony here, I get to have someone to take care of, too.

  He’s only four, and he’s lonely, and he needs me.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Mom asks me, snipping construction paper into little pieces.

  This is something she says when I am being unusually quiet.

  I smile. “Nope. Tonight, a magpie has my tongue,” I tell her, and I select a piece of paper to cut up and then throw away.

  “Magpie, magpie, magpie,” Anthony whispers, concentrating so hard on his own piece of paper that he doesn’t even ask what the unfamiliar word means.

  Which is highly unusual, and not very educational for him.

  But that’s okay. At least his scissors skills are improving.

  9

  A Teensy Little Fight

  “Where is he?” Cynthia asks on Friday night. She is standing at the front door. Her shiny hair is pulled back tight by a red plastic headband, the kind with little teeth in it. And she is holding onto a suitcase with a picture of a ballerina on the side. The suitcase is round, and it is shiny, too.

  Everything Cynthia owns always looks brand new.

  “He, who?” I ask, but I already know the answer. She is talking about Anthony.

  “You know,” she says, excited, “that little kid. The one we’re babysitting.” She pats the side of her suitcase. “I brought some stuff we can use,” she says. “We can play school with him. We’ll be the teachers.”

  “He’s watching a video right now,” I tell Cynthia. “And I’m not so sure about playing school. He had a tough week. I think he needs a rest from school.”

  “Well, that’s just too bad for him,” Cynthia informs me. We go into my room, and she puts her red suitcase down on my bed. She and I are going to sleep on the living room floor tonight, though, in sleeping bags. Anthony will be the only one staying in my room.

  Cynthia walks over to my guest bed and looks at a
ll of Anthony’s stuff: his inside-out sweatshirt, his giant Legos, his new blunt-nosed scissors, his stuffed bunny rabbit.

  I don’t like her spying on his private things.

  “Let’s play dolls,” I say to her. That’s what we usually play when she comes over, even though we don’t talk about it at school, since we don’t want to sound babyish. “Which one do you want to be?” I hold up my newest doll. She is wearing short shorts and tiny Rollerblades, and her hair is almost as shiny as Cynthia’s.

  Last time, we fought over this doll. But not today.

  “Let’s go get Anthony,” Cynthia says.

  “Well, maybe we should wait until after dinner,” I say. I was hoping she would forget her crazy plan about playing school with Anthony. “Come on, let’s play dolls,” I say again, tempting her with the short shorts, Rollerblade doll with shiny hair.

  But Cynthia just walks right out of my bedroom as if I haven’t said a word.

  This is a whole new Cynthia, I think, following her.

  We walk past the kitchen, where Mom is fixing dinner. “Hello, Cynthia,” she calls out. Her voice is all smiley, as if she thinks this is going to be a really fun night.

  “Hi, Mrs. McGraw,” Cynthia says, barely looking at my mother. She just keeps right on walking—like a Bengal tiger stalking its prey.

  Anthony is sitting in the most comfortable chair in the living room. A little blanket is spread across his lap, as if he is about to have a picnic. I can tell that he would like to be sucking his thumb. I have noticed that he does that sometimes, when he is really, really tired.

  I can also tell he is a little sad, only no one else but me would know that. But he’s not even singing along with the video this afternoon, and he knows it by heart, naturally.

  “Hi, Anthony,” I say. “This is Cynthia, remember?”

  Anthony’s eyes shift sideways for a second, then he nods his head. “I remember,” he says.

  I cross my fingers, hoping he does not add the part about how he does not think that she is very polite. Because she is polite. Oh sure, she gets mad fast, but already I have learned that her anger goes away fast, too. And after it goes, Cynthia is ready to have fun again.