Annie's Life in Lists
Page 3
2. It’s kind of pretty.
3. It’s kind of purple.
Two reasons Mom and Dad didn’t tell us the house was purple
1. They wanted us to be surprised. (We were.)
2. They thought we might not be happy about it. (I was. Ted wasn’t.)
Four complaints Ted had about the house
1. The color is stupid.
2. The floors are creaky.
3. It smells weird.
4. There are too many stairs.
Six things I remembered Ted saying about houses over my whole life so far
1. Our apartment is too small.
2. I wish we had a house.
3. All my friends have bedrooms that are bigger than mine.
4. There’s no privacy here.
5. I wish we had more than one floor.
6. It’s no fun using a Slinky without stairs. (He probably hadn’t said that one in about five years, but still.)
When I reminded Ted about all these things, he spoke to me for the first time since we’d arrived in Clover Gap: “Annie. STOP. REMEMBERING. THINGS!”
Four ways I tried to cheer him up
1. I pointed out the basketball hoop in the driveway.
2. I told him there was a creek in the backyard.
3. I asked whoever would listen, “Is that an apple tree?” (It wasn’t.)
4. I let him choose his room first.
Three things that make Ted’s room better than mine
1. It’s bigger.
2. It’s on the third floor all by itself.
3. It has a crawl space to the attic.
Three things about my room that are still pretty cool
1. There’s a window seat.
2. There are clouds painted on the ceiling.
3. It’s beside Mom and Dad’s room. (I won’t admit it to Ted, but I’m kind of happy to know that in this big old creaky house, my parents will be sleeping right next door.)
Dad’s favorite things about the new house
1. Big kitchen
Dad likes to cook, so he says he’s super excited about all the drawers and counter space. (In Brooklyn, any time he made a big meal, he wound up spreading out all over the place, and there would be lettuce drying on the radiator covers and roasted vegetables cooling on top of the TV cabinet.)
2. Backyard
3. Front yard
4. Basketball hoop
5. Driveway
Every time Dad comes inside he makes a proclamation about how awesome something outside is, like he’s just noticed it for the first time. (“What a joy not to have to look for a parking spot!” or “I can’t believe all that grass out there is ours!”) I’ve never seen him rave about anything this way. In fact, he’s raving so much that I’m starting to think he’s faking it. (He doesn’t know how many times I’ve seen him reading the New York Times Metro section on his phone. Or that I’ve noticed how whenever he starts his iPod, the first song he chooses is “The Only Living Boy in New York.”) He knows I feel bad about making us leave the city, and he’s trying to keep me from seeing how much he misses it. He’s already homesick.
Mom’s favorite things about the new house
1. Like Dad, she’s crazy excited about the bigger kitchen.
2. The screened-in porch (“This will be our reading spot!” she keeps saying.)
3. It has a room off the kitchen that she can use as her office. (In Brooklyn she just used a corner of the living room for her design work. Here she has her own whole space.)
Six things Mom and Dad want to change about the house
1. Rip up the old funky carpet in the living room.
2. Replace all the wobbly doorknobs.
3. Fix a shattered upstairs window.
4. Repair the porch screens so mosquitoes don’t take over.
5. Paint the whole inside.
6. Patch up the leaky roof.
Ten things for a kid to do when she has just moved and knows no one but her family
1. Moping some more
2. Still steering clear of Ted
3. Climbing the tree in our front yard (Turns out it’s a dogwood.)
4. Looking for caterpillars on the dogwood branches, and letting them crawl on my arms
5. Watching “entirely too much TV” (according to my parents)
6. Hovering around Mom, watching her design at the computer
7. Helping Mom paint my room pale blue when she said I was “hovering her to death” (We left the clouds on the ceiling.)
8. Making Dad a “triage list” of which doorknobs were the most wobbly (Once Dad started his new job, he didn’t have much time for house stuff during the week. So he gave me little home-improvement assignments like that.)
9. Dreading the first day of school
10. Wondering if this place would ever feel like home, for any of us
SEPTEMBER
Four sounds that woke me on the first day of school
1. My alarm clock (which I smacked to turn off)
2. Ted’s alarm clock (which he seemed to be ignoring or sleeping through)
3. A scary metallic grinding sound, like a mechanical dinosaur was eating a car
4. Mom yelling, “Turn it off! Turn it off!”
Five favorite sounds
1. A train on train tracks
2. The ding our computer makes when I get a new email
3. A basketball bouncing on pavement
4. The subway conductor announcing our stop in Brooklyn
5. Acorns falling on our roof in Clover Gap
Two things I saw when I went downstairs
1. Dad scooping mounds of soggy yellow stuff out of the kitchen drain
2. Mom looking super annoyed, tapping something furiously into her phone
Mom’s pet peeves
1. People saying “I could care less” when they really mean “I couldn’t care less”
2. When me, Ted, or Dad forgets to take tissues out of our pockets and they wind up in the laundry
3. Shoes all over the floor when you first walk into the house
4. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT bumper stickers on cars
Six things they yelled at each other next
1. Mom: I’m searching plumbers.
2. Dad: We don’t need a plumber. I can figure this out.
3. Mom: We’ve never had a garbage disposal before. You don’t know anything about them.
4. Dad: What’s to know?
5. Mom: Well, for one thing, apparently, you can’t dump a box of packing peanuts into one!
6. Dad: They were supposed to be biodegradable!
After a pause, four things they said in calmer voices
1. Mom: I’m calling a plumber.
2. Dad: Plumbers are expensive.
3. Mom: So are restaurants, and that’s where we’ll be eating if we don’t have a working sink.
4. Dad (after an even longer pause): Fine. Call a plumber.
Then Mom noticed me standing there. “Oh, honey, it’s your first day of school!” she said with a weak smile. “Can I get you some breakfast?”
Three reasons I said, “It’s okay. I’ll just have an apple.”
1. The sight of Dad pulling gloppy mush out of the garbage disposal didn’t do much for my appetite.
2. I didn’t want to stick around and watch Mom and Dad do battle with the house. The excitement they’d had about this place on our first day here seemed to be wearing a little thin.
3. Seeing as how it was my first day in a new school, I wasn’t very hungry anyway.
Eight things I was dreading
about the first day of school
1. New class
2. New teacher
3. Having to talk more than I want to
4. The teacher calling me Andromeda
5. Everyone thinking my name is weird
6. Lunch
7. Lunch
8. Lunch
One new thing that was bothering me
1. Mom and Dad are not happy about the new house.
Four things I’m better at than other kids
1. Remembering weird details, as we’ve established
2. Knitting (thanks to Aunt Pen)
3. Typing
4. Making eggs over easy
Four things I’m worse at than other kids
1. Blowing bubbles
2. Diving
3. Cartwheels
4. One-handed bike riding
Five ways my new school is different from my school in Brooklyn
1. It’s all on one floor.
2. It’s newer.
3. There’s no fence around it.
4. There’s a big grassy field beside the playground.
5. It goes up to sixth grade (instead of fifth), so I’ll have to wait one more year to be the oldest in the school.
One way my new school is the same as my school in Brooklyn
1. It smells the same. You know, like a combination of paste and construction paper and pencil shavings and bathroom cleaner? I wonder if every school in the country is required to have that smell.
Seven questions asked by Mrs. Silva, the school guidance counselor, in our “new student” meeting
1. So, you used to live in Brooklyn?
2. What brings your family to Clover Gap? (Answer: My dad got a new job. [Also, my parents say that living in a small town will allow Ted and me to have a more “free-range” childhood. That’s what they’ve told us, but I didn’t tell Mrs. Silva this part because I hate when my parents say it. It makes it sound like we’re chickens. And obviously I didn’t tell Mrs. Silva my theory that we actually moved because of my big mouth and my big mistake.])
3. What is your favorite subject in school? (Answer: writing)
4. What is your least favorite subject in school? (Answer: gym, unless we’re playing basketball)
5. Do you have any hobbies? (Answer: stamp collecting. [But not really. I hate when people ask me what my hobbies are because I feel like I’m going to let them down or confuse them by saying “making lists.” So I usually say the first thing that pops into my head when I hear the word “hobby,” and that is “stamp collecting.” I think I have three stamps.])
6. Do you have any special talents? (Answer: I’m a good writer.)
What I didn’t say: Is having a crazy memory for random information considered a talent? What about blending in so well that people forget you’re there? Is that a talent? If so, then those are mine. I guess those skills could make me a good spy someday. But right now I don’t want to be a spy. Which brings me to Mrs. Silva’s next question…
7. What is something you want this year? (Answer: I’d like to be faster at solving math problems.)
Three things I didn’t tell Mrs. Silva that I really want this year
1. To be a regular kid who blends in and doesn’t notice or remember too much, or say the wrong things
2. For my family to be happy in Clover Gap so they’ll stop caring that I made us leave Brooklyn
3. At least two new friends in my new school (I’ll never meet anyone as great as Millie, but I feel like I need to try for safety in numbers. Backup friends seem like a good idea in case something goes wrong.)
I know there’s a challenge here. How am I supposed to make new friends if I’m also invisible? But I don’t want to get myself—or anyone else—in trouble, the way I did in Brooklyn.
Ways to be a regular kid, blend in, and make new friends all at the same time
1.
Okay, so I have no idea. If I could think of even one thing to put on this list, I probably would have done it in Brooklyn…and I wouldn’t have been so nervous for the first day of school here.
Three things that could have gone better on the first day
1. My teacher, Mr. Allbright, could have introduced me as Annie, instead of saying Andromeda.
2. Everyone could have stayed quiet, instead of saying, “Huh? What’d he say? What’s her name?”
3. When I spoke up to say, “Just call me Annie,” my voice could have been louder instead of coming out in a whisper.
If I got to pick my own name, I would choose…
1. Mia
2. Lulu
3. Vanessa
4. Honeybee
Four things that could have gone worse on the first day
1. Mr. Allbright could have made us choose our own desks. But he gave us assigned seats (so I didn’t have to worry about someone telling me they were saving a seat for somebody else).
2. Mr. Allbright could have insisted on calling me Andromeda like some grown-ups do. But he listened when I whispered that he should call me Annie.
3. Mom could have put an embarrassing mushy note in my backpack the way she sometimes did when I was younger. But instead she just slipped in a little Reese’s cup, with a tiny smiley face drawn on the wrapper.
4. I could have sat all alone at lunch. But I met Zora.
Eleven things I learned about Zora
1. She writes funny notes, like the one she passed me across the aisle in class this morning: “Did the teacher say his name is Mr. Allbright or Mr. Allright?”
After I read it, I looked around a little nervously. (Passing a note about the teacher on the first day of school is a pretty gutsy move.) I quickly drew a lightbulb and wrote, “Allbright, all right?” then passed it back to her.
2. She thinks I’m funny too. (She giggled after she read my answer.)
3. She’s smart. Mr. Allbright made us get into pairs to brainstorm suggestions for classroom rules, and she had some good ideas (like raising our hands with different signs to mean different things—one finger up for “I have something to say,” two fingers up for “I have a question,” etc.).
4. She didn’t try to make me talk too much. When I told her I didn’t want to tell our rules to the class, she said, “That’s okay. You can be the note taker.”
5. She isn’t shy. When I walked into the lunchroom, she saw me looking around for a seat, and she waved her arms like crazy and yelled, “Annie! Come sit over here!”
6. She is a pescatarian. That means the only kind of animal she’ll eat is fish.
7. She has a cat with no tail. No one knows how it got that way.
8. She has an older brother who’s in the same grade as Ted and a younger brother who’s six.
9. Her mom grew up in Clover Gap.
10. Her dad is from Jamaica.
11. She goes to Jamaica during every winter and summer break to visit her grandparents, who still live there.
Three other kids at Zora’s lunch table
1. Charlie (likes to draw Star Wars characters, was wearing a fedora and sunglasses before school this morning)
2. Zachary (talks about Legos a lot)
3. Amelia (laughs at everything Zora says, carries a heart-shaped lunch box)
Four things Amelia did that made me feel weird
1. Changed the subject when Zora introduced me.
2. Looked at everyone but me every time she talked.
3. Rolled her eyes when I said I thought Mr. Allbright seemed nice.
4. Offered cookies to the other kids, then looked at me and said, “Sorry, I don’t have enough. I didn’t know there’d be another person at our table
.”
Four more not-so-great things about the first day
1. I made a wrong turn on my way to the bathroom and a third grader had to point me in the right direction.
2. Three more people called me Andromeda (the PE teacher, the school secretary, and the nurse when I dropped off a medical form my parents forgot).
3. I didn’t know there was an afternoon snack time, so I hadn’t brought anything to eat after lunch.
4. I kept thinking about Millie and wondering what she was doing in Brooklyn.
Three more sort-of-good things about the first day