by Galia Oz
After that, we saw Blue Dawn the principal coming, so we hid behind the greenhouse that the nature teacher built because we weren’t in the mood to hear her explain again about our friends’ personal space and how it had to be respected and protected, and I told Brody and Adam that the problem with our new cat was that he liked his personal space too much, and sometimes he lay down in the middle of the hall and didn’t let anyone pass by, and if they did, he put on his warrior expression and hissed like mad.
“See how everyone respects the principal’s personal space?” asked Brody. “Wherever she goes, everyone disappears.”
But not everyone disappeared. Of all the people in the world it was the security guard who stood talking with the principal. It was quiet for a minute and we could hear the principal saying, “They’re dangerous, aren’t they? They climb up and get into everything. They’d better not get into the classrooms.” And after that we couldn’t hear anything.
But that was more than enough for Adam, and he said that now it was all crystal clear. “Blue Dawn wants to know everything about the gang of thieves because now she’s partners with the security guard.”
“Blue Dawn is a diamond thief?” Brody laughed. “No chance.”
But Adam explained that Blue Dawn couldn’t care less about jewels, that was obvious. It was just that she didn’t want dangerous robbers running around the school. All she wanted was for the security guard to look through the walls and tell her what was going on in the classrooms when the doors were closed, who wasn’t paying attention and who was making trouble, because Blue Dawn had to know everything, that was how it was, the whole world was her personal space.
During homeroom with our teacher, Mrs. Brown, I made a tiny braid in my hair like the ones Effie always made, and I tried to tie it with a blue elastic, but Danny stole it from me, so I threw an eraser at him, and then he hid the eraser, and I had to scream at him to get it back. There was no such thing as personal space in this world, I thought. Someone just made that up.
At the next recess I saw all the girls standing in a circle with Donna Silver in the middle, and I saw how she was sick of the whole thing and she pushed them, one by one, as if she was joking around, and then pulled Effie along behind her, and they walked away with their arms around each other. And later I saw her standing in the middle of the yard, stretching her arms out to her sides and spinning around faster and faster, just like Shakshuka used to do when she was a puppy, but without the arms. Shakshuka used to chase her tail, but Donna Silver didn’t have a tail, she just spun round and round until she got dizzy and then she flew off to the side, and she wasn’t afraid of falling because of course someone would catch her, and this time Brody and Adam happened to be standing there and she fell right on top of them. I was standing on the side and I saw how Brody was holding her and how he had this little smile on his face, and how Donna Silver laughed and said, “Wow, I can hardly breathe. Air. Why isn’t there any air here?”
I climbed up to the top of the high monkey bars in the yard, as Effie liked to do, and I stood up there and I ate a cookie that I’d hidden in my sweatshirt pocket, and as I looked at the crumbs falling on the sand, I thought, Oh no, what if Blue Dawn the principal tells me that I have to get down now and find every crumb that fell? How will I find crumbs that got mixed up with the dust and dirt, or that the wind has blown away?
Later Brody passed me in the hallway, and he said, “Where have you been, anyway?” I didn’t even feel like turning around, I just sat on the bench outside the teachers’ room as if I was punished, like the kids who had to sit there and wait to have a talk with the principal. Then for the whole recess I made circles on the floor with my feet, thinking about what the principal said to the security guard. They were dangerous, they climbed, they got everywhere. A ray of sunlight came in through the window and hit the floor exactly where my feet were, and I discovered if I moved my feet in circles, I could really see the dust rise in the sunbeams, and that was how I spent the entire recess, and I learned that if you sit quietly you hear lots of things. For example, I heard Adam telling some kids how scientists managed to raise a silkworm in a laboratory that if you put it in a school book, it would crawl across the pages and erase all the boring parts, and Donna Silver said, “If you give me a worm like that, I’ll bring you whatever you want.”
Adam said, “Wh-wh-whatever I w-w-want?”
And Donna Silver said, “Whatever you want.”
Adam said, “Bring m-m-me the silkworm, that’s wh-what I want.”
And Donna Silver couldn’t stop laughing. Even when she laughed it sounded like she was whispering. That girl, you could hardly hear her, and still the whole school was full of her.
On the way home, Brody said, “Leave Effie alone already. She doesn’t have to stick to you like glue.”
I said, “I’m used to her coming over to eat spaghetti. I’m used to her being Effie, and now she’s not Effie.”
“She doesn’t have to be Effie just because you’re used to it,” Brody said.
“You’re also friends with Donna Silver now,” I said. “I saw her spinning around and then she fell on top of you.”
“What do you want?” said Brody. “It’s not my fault that she fell on me.”
“Air, air!” I said. “I can hardly breathe. Why isn’t there any air here?”
“You don’t know how to talk like her,” said Brody, whispering, “Air, move aside, I need air!”
He started to collapse in a faint but stopped himself before he hit the sidewalk. I laughed, but it didn’t help. Brody had stepped inside Donna Silver’s invisible circle, and even Adam managed to get to her with his stories. Let them all be with her. Who needed them?
At home I tried to be like Dad, who somehow managed to win over the cat by stroking him. I patted him, and at first it was fine, but then something annoyed him and he scratched me and I didn’t care. I kept on playing with him and he kept on scratching me and he also bit me, and in the end it hurt too much and I lay on the floor and hugged Shakshuka so no one would see that I had tears in my eyes, and Shakshuka licked my cheek and I hid my face in her fur, and Monty came and saw us and he started to clap his hands, he thought it was funny, the way we were all tangled up together, and maybe he was a little worried about me, and then he started to shout “Peekaboo, Julie,” and in the end I had to lift my head and say “Peekaboo, Monty,” and then I hid my head again, and Monty laughed his head off, and that was how I finished with my crying before it even started.
Later, when I helped Mom put the Munchkins to sleep, I asked her if there was an insult so bad that it never ended, a disappointment that kept hurting. A sadness that never ever ever ever went away.
Mom said she had to think about it because this was a very serious topic. “Toffee!” said Monty, who was listening to us with a sweet, sleepy expression on his face.
“I said, ‘topic,’ not ‘toffee.’ Go to sleep!” said Mom.
And Max said, “I don’t want toffee. Yuck.”
After that Monty managed to pull down the curtain and tried to cover Max because Max liked blankets, but Max didn’t want to snuggle under a curtain because a curtain wasn’t a blanket, and it took Mom about an hour to hang it again, and after that she had to read them eight bedtime stories because otherwise Max wouldn’t fall asleep, and that was the end of my conversation with Mom.
In the morning Danny brought me a thick glove, an oven mitt really, so that I would be able to stroke the cat without getting scratched. I didn’t want to ask where it came from or whether he had sneaked it out of his house. I felt it all over and I examined it from all sides.
“What are you worried about?” Danny asked. “I didn’t put a mouse inside. Try it on.”
I turned it open-side down and shook it, and it was true that there wasn’t a mouse inside. Just a beetle.
“You are so dumb,” I said to Danny, “that you should win a prize.” But I walked around all day wearing that oven mitt, and I didn’t take it o
ff even when Adam announced that it reminded him of his uncle, who couldn’t stand Chinese green tea.
“That’s really sad to hear, Adam,” I remarked.
But when Adam got going on a story there was no stopping him, and he kept talking about how his uncle really hated green tea more than anything in the world, but his aunt thought it was healthy and every morning she made him a cup of piping hot Chinese green tea, and when she wasn’t looking, he poured it out the window, and that was how it went every day, until once they looked outside and discovered a strange Chinese vegetable growing there that no one recognized, and there was no need to cook it because it grew precooked because of the boiling hot tea, and when they tried to peel it they found it was hot inside as if it had just that minute come out of the oven, and they put it in the fridge but even three days later it was still boiling hot.
Brody came up while Adam was talking and we walked in circles around the water fountain, and we passed underneath the monkey bars in the little kids’ yard and stepped in the squishy mud, and suddenly I felt happy. We didn’t see Donna Silver and maybe everything would go back to the way it was before. We kept on walking and we went around the soccer field, but Danny wasn’t there, and we found ourselves next to the security guard’s wooden booth. She was sitting reading a book and chewing gum and playing with her bunch of keys, and Adam said she kept tabs on us wherever we went and she had no problem at all seeing us right through her book.
“But why does she care what we do?” I asked.
Listening to one of Adam’s stories was like staring at the last remaining crumbs in a chip bag. Some things you simply couldn’t leave unfinished.
Adam explained that the security guard checked out everyone who came near her booth because that was where she hid her diamonds. And some kids told him that yesterday, after everyone went home, they saw her dragging a big sack out of the booth, and they heard weird sounds.
Brody and I said that it didn’t make sense to hide diamonds in a place like that, anybody could steal from there, no problem, but Adam said the security guard was smart, she knew that it was the one place where no one would ever think to look.
“And what about Blue Dawn?” I asked.
“B-B-Blue Dawn knows everything,” Adam said. “B-but she’ll never give her away. That’s what you call the p-p-perfect crime.”
“That’s what you call perfect nonsense,” said Brody, who was trying to annoy Adam, but as he said it, he looked hard at the booth, as if there was a chance he might really see the diamonds there. And I think I may also have checked if I could catch a glimpse of them, even though I was definitely not the kind of person who could see through walls.
During the long recess, I went outside and I saw a big group of kids standing in the middle of the yard, and in the center of the center of the center of the group was Adam, and he was talking to Donna Silver, who stood there with Effie, and Donna and Effie had their arms around each other.
Donna completely forgot that just yesterday we tricked her about Adam, and she forgot that he was one of those weird kids you had to feel sorry for, and now she thought he was the cutest kid in the whole grade, and Adam told her that he wasn’t so cute, there were much cuter kids, and of course right away that reminded him of a story.
Pretty much all kids were cute when they were in first grade. But a few years ago, there was this kid at our school who started out in first grade as cute as anyone, but in second and third grade he was still like that. He was so incredibly cute that when kids saw him coming they would chase him and kiss him, and at recess there was no chance he would get to play because everyone jumped on him to hug him and he was so miserable that the only day he looked forward to was Halloween so he could wear a costume and no one would recognize him, and on Halloween he came to school in the ugliest, scariest mask, and he wore it everywhere he went and no one knew it was him and no one hugged him, and he was so glad and happy, and he even started wishing that that mask would somehow melt into his face and then everyone would finally leave him alone, but then they had a competition and his costume won second prize and they told him to go up on the stage, and the principal leaned down to shake his hand and knocked off his mask by mistake, and there was perfect silence and everyone was staring at him, and he realized that it had worked—finally he had become an ugly, scary boy—and he smiled….
“And then what happened?” cried some of the kids because Adam had stopped talking.
“Wh-wh-what do you w-want?” Adam asked, looking all wide-eyed and innocent.
“Tell us already. What happened? Did he become as ugly as his mask?”
Adam said that at first, when he saw the expressions on the faces of the people staring at him, he thought that he must look absolutely horrible because everyone looked so shocked, but then he realized that they were astonished to see how totally adorable he seemed because compared to that mask he looked even cuter. It was a disaster, and now he was thirty-seven and people were still following him wherever he went, kissing his cheeks. No one had ever seen such an unhappy guy.
It was quiet. Everyone was thinking about the thirty-seven-year-old cutie pie who had to run away from people in the street.
And then Donna Silver said, “I don’t feel sorry for him. I hope I’m cute when I get old.” And she looked around to see if anyone would argue with her.
Brody said, “Forget it, no chance. You’ll be an ugly old lady,” and he bent over and started hobbling around as if he had a backache.
“Oh, you’re right. That’s how I’ll be,” whispered Donna Silver, and everyone laughed. Effie laughed too, even though sometimes she was so spacey she didn’t notice funny things, and it was only then that I noticed how far away from everyone else the bench I was leaning on was, and how far away I was, and from the side, I almost managed to see, like in a cartoon, that invisible circle, which suddenly looked more like Donna Silver’s invisible castle.
And then a terrible noise started and I couldn’t hear what everyone was talking about in the invisible castle anymore. The security guard was working with a drill in her booth behind the closed door. I didn’t need Adam to guess what was going on in there—I realized that she was digging a tunnel that would lead her right into the coffee shop across the street, and once there she would drill a hole in the cash register and take all the money and no one would notice.
What do I need friends for? I thought. I’d wait until everyone went home, and I’d hide somewhere until the security guard brought out her sack full of diamonds, and that way I’d catch her by myself. So long as her dangerous friends didn’t decide to come visit her. But after the last bell rang, after gym, when I ran to my classroom to get my schoolbag, something happened that made me forget all about the security guard. Effie was sitting alone on the highest school step. When she saw me, she asked if she could come over to have spaghetti because Tuesday was always spaghetti day at my house.
I said, “How come you want to come over all of a sudden? Did Donna Silver run out of spaghetti?” And even as I was saying the words, I felt sorry because Effie looked really sad, and when Effie was sad she didn’t cry, but sometimes that was even worse, and I walked away fast so I wouldn’t see her like that.
Once, a long time ago, Effie came to sleep over and we were playing and we lost track of time and in the end we stayed up all night. At some point Mom walked into the room and told us to go to sleep right away, and we told her that we would, soon, and after that Dad came and he brought us tea and cookies and we ate and talked and played, and somehow the night passed. There was a moment when I realized that it was almost morning, and that no matter what we did, the night was over, gone, and there was no way we were going to get any sleep, and we were awfully tired. Birds were chirping. We stood by the window and saw that the light was starting to push away the darkness—just like Donna Silver pushed the girls at school in her so-called sweet harmless way.
I leaned my head on Effie’s shoulder and I felt as if something big was happenin
g, something frightening yet amazing, and I was sure that by sunrise I would understand things and become a grown-up. But then we both fell asleep on the sofa.
I remembered the sleepover as I walked away. I thought, What a shame I didn’t invite Effie to come over to eat spaghetti. We had that chocolate with nuts that was her favorite, and I hid it high up so the Munchkins wouldn’t find it. I could have given her chocolate and we could have made up. I dragged one foot behind the other down the corridor, and I pretended that I wasn’t allowed to lift my feet off the floor, and I thought about how I could still manage to move from place to place, and I tried to move as if someone was pulling me along, as if each of my knees weighed a ton, and I was glad that no one could see me. The building was almost empty. The cleaners hadn’t arrived yet. One kid ran fast to his classroom; he must have forgotten something. From the yard I could hear the sounds of kids going home. The corridor was long and seemed never-ending. I peeked into the classrooms and saw orange peels, empty bottles, a shirt thrown over a chair, and every class looked like a different country.
And I saw Donna Silver. She came toward me down the hallway half running and half dancing, thrusting out her long arms, one in front of her and one behind. I stood stock-still, but Donna Silver kept on dancing and stopped only after she’d moved a few steps beyond me.
“I know who you are,” she said almost in a whisper. “You’re Effie’s cousin. Here!” And she threw me a huge apple, as big as a grapefruit. I barely caught it. It was red and it smelled fantastic, like pink bubble gum, like leaves and earth and rain, as though it had just that minute been picked from the tree.