Don't Feed the Geckos!

by Karen English

Carlos waits for Bernardo to pick it up from the word together. Slowly, Bernardo sounds out the next sentence. He stops on frightened, and as soon as Carlos tells him the word, he says it quickly along with Carlos. “I already knew that word,” he says.

  And that’s how it goes during pair-reading with Bernardo. Carlos practically reads Bernardo’s paragraph for him, with Bernardo telling him over and over that he was just getting ready to say the word on his own. Carlos is relieved when Ms. Shelby-Ortiz says it’s time to finish up and get ready for recess. Today they’re playing basketball.

  Carlos and Bernardo’s table is the last to be dismissed. Gavin and Richard stand at the door, waiting for Carlos. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz finally calls Table Two, and once everyone is out of the classroom, she heads off to the teachers’ lounge. Just as Carlos and Bernardo reach the doors leading out to the yard, Bernardo says, “Wait. I forgot my snack.”

  “You can have some of mine,” Carlos says. He really wants all the graham crackers for himself, but he guesses he can share.

  “No, no . . . I want my own. I’ll be back.”

  Room Ten’s students have moved to the basketball court today, and it’s Bernardo and Rosario’s turn to be that day’s team captains. Carlos knows it’s going to end up boys against girls.

  “So where’s Bernardo?” Gavin asks when he sees that Bernardo hasn’t made it to the court yet.

  Carlos glances at the school building. “I don’t know. He went back to get his snack. He’s coming.”

  “What’s he going to do with a snack? You can’t have a snack on the court while you’re playing basketball,” Gavin says.

  “Knowing Bernardo, he’ll figure out a way.”

  “He’s just going to get in trouble. Let’s choose someone else to be captain.”

  Carlos looks toward the door again just as Bernardo’s exiting. “Here he comes.”

  Somehow, Bernardo manages to eat a whole package of cheese crackers and play basketball at the same time. Just as the bell signaling the end of recess rings, he stuffs the plastic wrapper in his pants pocket. He must have been right about being good at all sports, because he outshines everyone else on the court. He dominates the game so much that some kids just hang back when he’s dribbling the ball. Emilio tries to steal it at one point, and Bernardo elbows him out of the way.

  “Not fair!” Emilio cries. “You can’t do that! That’s a foul. I should get a free throw!”

  Bernardo just carries on as if he doesn’t even hear. He takes his shot. The ball bounces off the backboard and drops through the basket. Emilio stomps off the court.

  One thing Carlos notices about Bernardo: he usually manages to get his way. At the lunch table later as Carlos and Bernardo unpack their sack lunches—that Mami makes at night and puts in the refrigerator—Bernardo pulls out a Toaster Tart, already toasted. Carlos has the usual three cookies for dessert. Bernardo has three cookies as well.

  “Hey,” Carlos says. “Where’d you get that?”

  “What?”

  “That Toaster Tart. My mom never puts those in our lunch. That’s for after school—for a snack.”

  “I got it out of the cabinet and I toasted it and put it in my lunch—last night.”

  Carlos remembers Bernardo getting up from bed to get a drink of water. He didn’t know Bernardo was going to go scavenging for extra food.

  “You have to ask,” Carlos says. “You can’t just take what you want and put it in your lunch.”

  Bernardo barely manages a shrug before he takes a big bite out of the tart.

  Bulldozer. That’s the word that comes to Carlos’s mind. Bernardo is like a bulldozer. Moving people—and rules—out of the way. He just does what he wants. And the bad thing is, he’s going to be there in Carlos’s life for a while.

  Carlos is hurrying through his math classwork so he can get to the puzzle table. He looks around. Mostly everyone is working diligently. Even Bernardo is hunched over his worksheet. Before Carlos can get through the last problem—a word problem for which he must show his work—two hands go up. Nikki’s, then Erik’s. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz calls on Nikki.

  “Ms. Shelby-Ortiz, I’m finished with my math. Can I . . .”

  “May I,” Ms. Shelby-Ortiz corrects her.

  “May I go to the puzzle table?”

  Erik’s hand is waving back and forth.

  “You’re finished too, Erik?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, you may both go ahead.”

  Their chairs scrape in unison across the linoleum floor as they scramble to get to the puzzle table in the corner of the classroom next to the class library. Carlos finishes the last problem, sighs, and takes out his book and stares at the page where he left off. During “free time” only two students are allowed at the puzzle table. Otherwise it can get too noisy. After a while, he glances up to see Nikki and Erik eagerly searching through the last pieces.

  “This goes here,” Nikki says in a loud whisper. “And this goes here.”

  Soon they are looking at the floor around the table. “Ms. Shelby-Ortiz, there are some pieces missing,” Erik says.

  Everyone looks up. A few frown.

  “Did you look around the table and on the floor?”

  “We looked, Ms. Shelby-Ortiz,” Nikki says. “They’re gone.”

  Rosario makes a sound of alarm. “Oh, no! What if we can’t find them and then our puzzle can’t be finished and then Ms. Shelby-Ortiz can’t put the special glue on and then we can’t hang it up for everyone to see?” She’s gotten the attention of the whole class. People have put down their SSR books. Others have looked up from their math.

  Antonia raises her hand and waits to be recognized. When Ms. Shelby-Ortiz nods at her, she says, “Ms. Shelby-Ortiz, if we never find the pieces, then we can just trace the spaces on cardboard and then color it and then put them in place. We can finish it that way.”

  There’s a chorus of “Yeah, yeah, we can do that!”

  That’s when Carlos notices something. Bernardo, who’d been working on some kind of doodling in the upper corner of his worksheet, now looks up, with pencil poised, at Antonia. His brow furrows a tiny bit. Everyone else seems happy with the solution, but his face is blank. That’s when Carlos knows Bernardo took the pieces—when he supposedly went back for his snack. His mother has explained that when people feel bad about things, they can sometimes act out. Bernardo must want the class to feel bad—like he does. Bernardo took the pieces, and Carlos is going to prove it. It’s not right for Bernardo to try to make the class feel bad.

  Carlos sneaks glances at Bernardo on the way home as he tells Mami how he scored most of the points in the basketball game at morning recess and lunch recess. How his team just creamed the other team. How now everyone wants him on their team—because he’s good in every sport.

  Mami has her mind on something else. Carlos can tell, because she’s doing that Uh-huh . . . Oh, really? . . . Oh, wow . . . thing she does when she’s only pretending to listen. While Bernardo is yapping, Carlos is planning. The puzzle pieces have to be on Bernardo or in his book bag. He can search the book bag when Bernardo leaves it at the bottom of the staircase and goes into the kitchen for his snack.

  But what if the pieces are in his pants pockets? Hmm, Carlos thinks. He won’t be able to check the pants until Bernardo goes to the bathroom to take his fake shower.

  “Wash your hands before you get anything to eat,” Mami says as she runs to answer the ringing telephone in the den. It’s probably Tía Lupe. Carlos and Bernardo both wash their hands at the kitchen sink using dishwashing liquid. Bernardo pours himself a glass of milk, and Carlos gets down the chocolate chip cookies from the cabinet.

  “Be right back,” he says. “I have to do something.”

  Bernardo hardly pays attention. He’s busy opening the package of cookies.

  Carlos hurries up the stairs with both book bags. That way, Bernardo will think Carlos’s mother told him to clear the stairs before someone trips over them.

&nbs
p; He hurries into his room and closes the door behind him, putting his back to it. He checks the zippered outside pocket of Bernardo’s backpack. He rummages around among pencil shavings and markers and bits of papers and a sticky piece of peppermint without the wrapper. No puzzle pieces. Carlos pulls his hand out and wipes it on his jeans to no avail. Yuck.

  He’s unzipped the main compartment and is just beginning to search around among the three-ring binder and loose-leaf paper and something that feels like one of his own action figures when he hears Bernardo’s footsteps on the stairs. He’d know that heavy clomping sound anywhere.

  With his back still to the door, Carlos sticks his head nearly inside the backpack and shakes it. The steps grow closer. Then he sees them—three shiny pieces of the woolly mammoth’s ear. He stuffs them into his pocket, just as Bernardo attempts to open the door.

  “Hey, let me in,” he says.

  Carlos zips up the main compartment and tosses the backpack onto the lower bunk next to his. He moves away from the door and gets on his hands and knees.

  Bernardo steps into the room and gives Carlos a puzzled look. “What are you up to?”

  “I dropped a marker, and it rolled behind the dresser.” That seems reasonable, since the dresser is right beside the door. Looking behind the dresser would cause the door to be blocked.

  Bernardo looks over at his backpack on the lower bunk. He looks back at Carlos. “Oh.”

  Ten

  Storm Warning

  Why is it that when you’re dreading something, it comes super-quick? That’s the way Carlos feels about soccer these days. He’s been dreading Saturday’s game, and here it is Friday already. Bernardo’s in the bathroom singing some song that Carlos doesn’t recognize at the top of his lungs.

  He thinks about the puzzle pieces he retrieved from Bernardo’s backpack. He’d squirreled them away in his pencil box when Bernardo wasn’t looking. He could show them to Mami and get his cousin in trouble. Yeah . . . Mami—and Papi, too—think Bernardo is so great, with all his athletic prowess. Wouldn’t they like to know that he took the last three puzzle pieces from the thousand-piece puzzle? And just as the class was about to finish, too. Wouldn’t they like to know that Ms. Shelby-Ortiz won’t be able to put the special glue on the puzzle like she’d planned? And wouldn’t they like to know that there nearly went Room Ten’s chance to hang the thousand-piece puzzle by the classroom door so everyone in the whole school could see it when they pass by?

  Yeah, sure, Antonia came up with that idea about making their own puzzle pieces out of cardboard, but what if Antonia hadn’t come up with that idea? All those months of hard work would have just gone to waste.

  For some reason, he knows he won’t tell his parents. He’s not sure why. It just doesn’t feel as good as it should. Will he tell Ms. Shelby-Ortiz? He doesn’t know. Maybe not. It almost feels like he’d be kicking Bernardo while he’s down.

  He realizes when he walks into the classroom that he’s not going to tell Ms. Shelby-Ortiz, either. He’s not even going to tell Richard and Gavin. Because then he’ll be the one who’s embarrassed about having a bozo for a cousin. What would they think, learning that Carlos’s own cousin is not only a thief, but also the kind of person who’d try to ruin stuff for the rest of the class?

  Carlos says nothing. He just spends the morning doing his work, pair-reading with Bernardo, and wondering what he’s going to do with the puzzle pieces. Where can he put them so they can be found?

  The class library. He can slip them among the floor cushions. But how will they have gotten there? Maybe they can be on the floor under the bookcase. Yes, there’s a gap between the bottom shelf and the floor. The pieces could have fallen on the floor and been kicked under the shelf. That’s believable.

  He looks around. Everyone is quietly doing their work. He takes out his pencil box, opens it, and plucks out the puzzle pieces. He slips them into his pocket, raises his other hand and waits to be recognized. He waves it around. It gets Rosario’s attention. She looks over at him. Finally, Ms. Shelby-Ortiz glances up and catches sight of his hand. “Yes, Carlos.”

  “Can I . . . I mean, may I sharpen my pencil?”

  Ms. Shelby-Ortiz nods.

  She gives you three times to sharpen your pencil in one day. If you break the lead after that, you have to do your work with a fat kindergarten pencil—because you’re not yet ready for a regular pencil. No one wants to spend the rest of the afternoon writing with a kindergarten pencil. It’s embarrassing.

  Carlos fingers the puzzle pieces in his pocket. He looks around, sharpens his pencil, then blows on the lead. Everyone is busy. He drops the puzzle pieces, then kicks them under the bookcase. He returns to his seat, wondering who is going to discover them. At one point while he works on his math assignment, he looks over at Bernardo, who is doodling on his workbook page. It looks like he’s completed only the top row of problems. He should be nearly finished. He’s not using his time wisely. That’s what Ms. Shelby-Ortiz always says when she catches someone doing everything but completing their assignments.

  Ms. Shelby-Ortiz is busy posting student work on the Good Job! bulletin board. They’d had to write a letter to a classmate about a place they’ve been to—interesting or boring. They had to remember to include supporting details after each topic sentence.

  They’d pulled one another’s names out of a box without looking. Carlos had gotten Ralph’s name, and Rosario had gotten his. He wrote about Zooland. There were so many interesting things to write about, he almost couldn’t stop. He never knew giraffes can use their necks as a weapon in combat bouts or that the closest relative to a hippopotamus is a whale. Rosario wrote about visiting her great-aunt at a senior living facility. The only thing she’d liked were the free doughnuts in the lobby.

  Antonia raises her hand.

  “Yes, Antonia?” Ms. Shelby-Ortiz says.

  “May I get a new book to read? I’ve finished this one.”

  Most of the class will choose the puzzle table when they finish their work early and have free time. Antonia usually chooses reading for pleasure.

  “Yes, go ahead,” Ms. Shelby-Ortiz says.

  Carlos can’t help checking Antonia every few moments as she looks for her next book. When she squats to search the bottom shelf, he holds his breath. Carlos’s view of her is blocked by the bookcase. She’s out of sight for what seems like minutes as she squats behind the shelf. He looks at his next problem. It’s a multiplication problem with a three-digit multiplier. He begins to tackle it. But then he finally hears what he’s been waiting for. “Ms. Shelby-Ortiz . . . Look what I found!”

  Everyone looks up as Antonia makes her way over to the teacher with her hand extended.

  “Oh, great!” Ms. Shelby-Ortiz exclaims. “Class, Antonia found the missing puzzle pieces!”

  Bernardo jerks his head up from his math work. His mouth drops open a little, and he looks around the classroom, as if he’s searching for an explanation.

  “Can I put them in the puzzle?” Antonia asks.

  Nikki throws her hand up and waves it around. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz nods at her. “But we were the ones—me and Erik were the ones who were going to finish the puzzle yesterday! We were just about to do it!”

  Of course their smart teacher comes up with the perfect solution. Since there are three pieces, she hands one each to Erik, Nikki, and Antonia. “Antonia, you may put your piece in the puzzle now. Erik and Nikki, when you finish your math, you may put yours in.”

  A few minutes later, Nikki is the person to place the final piece in the thousand-piece puzzle. Carlos thinks she slowed down on purpose just so she could be the one to complete it. It would be like her to do something like that. She brushes her palms together and looks around as the whole class cheers. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz raises her hand to quiet them and Carlos checks Bernardo. He has his mouth poked out. He doesn’t look happy. Not at all.

  There are dark clouds in the sky by the time school is over. They look heavy with rain. There mi
ght be a storm coming. A big storm. As he and Bernardo walk to Mami’s car, Carlos looks up and his heart races with excitement. A big storm with lots of thunder and lightning—a storm that lasts through the night and into the morning and maybe a little bit into the afternoon—could mean a canceled soccer game! He smiles as he climbs into the back seat of the car, next to Issy in her tiara.

  “What’s so funny?” Issy asks.

  “Oh . . . nothing.”

  A storm with plenty of thunder and lightning would definitely mean a cancellation of the game. Everyone knows the worst place you can be during a thunderstorm is in the middle of an open field. He checks the low-lying clouds through the car’s front window. They look very promising.

  Of course, there’s also the possibility he might not get into the game for long. With Bernardo on the team, they’ll have more than eleven players. Someone will have to sit out at least part of the game and then rotate in just for a show of allowing every player a chance to play. Carlos suspects Coach Willis will do that—make sure everyone gets a chance.

  Carlos looks over at Bernardo. He wonders what he’s thinking. He must know that Carlos went into his backpack and found the puzzle pieces. He wonders if Bernardo is even going to say anything about it. He wonders if Big Bernardo, who knows how to punch a person for no good reason, will be mad.

  If Bernardo’s mad, he doesn’t show it. At dinner, he and Papi talk about soccer. Then they switch to basketball and whether this one famous player is going to be traded to this other team. Issy whines about having to eat all of her empanadas because they’re not the fruit kind, and Mami talks about snacks for the next day’s soccer game.