Here in the Real World

by Sara Pennypacker

  “Then why?”

  “Because it needs to be made, and you’re the one to do it.”

  Ware lay in his bed that night, staring at the ceiling. Tonight, the plaster swirls didn’t look like infinity signs. They looked like question marks. Question marks inside question marks on top of question marks.

  Fifty-Five

  Two days later, Uncle Cy left and a tropical storm arrived. It planted itself a hundred miles west in the Gulf, like a toddler throwing a weather tantrum.

  “It’s supposed to be like this through Wednesday,” Ware said at breakfast on Monday when it began. “They won’t let us outside at Rec. You know how unhealthy the air is in there. I should stay home.” He added a subtle cough.

  It was a long-shot argument he hadn’t expected to win, but his parents, weakened from two sleep-deprived months, didn’t even put up a fight.

  “Fine, whatever, could you run the vacuum?” his mother had said as she staggered off to work.

  “And maybe a load of laundry,” his father added, scooping up his keys.

  And so Ware had three whole days to work on his film. Which, if he had to title it the way it was, would definitely be called Jolene’s Hands.

  Jolene’s Hands would have been a pretty good movie. But it wasn’t the movie he was meant to make. That was what had come to him as he was drifting off under the question-mark ceiling plaster.

  He was meant to make the story of the lot. Because it needed to be made, and he was the one to do it.

  But for another reason too.

  Uncle Cy had said that it didn’t often happen that your film made people do what you wanted. That meant that sometimes it did happen. And this, he decided, was one of those times. People would see this film and cry and empty their wallets. He’d bring it to school in September. Other schools, too.

  This film would save the lot.

  Ware cut most of the footage of Jolene’s hands. Most, but not all. Then he went to work.

  At the end of those three days, his back ached, his fingers were cramped, and his eyes were red and dry, but he felt better than he had ever felt in his entire life. And he had managed to trim nearly sixteen hours of footage to four minutes and forty-two seconds.

  Those four minutes and forty-two seconds began with the photo of the church being built and ran all the way up to a family of ducks floating in the brimming moat. In between, a wrecking ball smashed down the roof, papayas grew in time-lapse frenzy, and castle walls were mudded. He patched in Jolene’s dandelion bed and her compost pile, his sundial and the church floor emerging as he swept off the debris, and a new stained-glass window spilling its rainbow rays.

  Even Wink got a close-up—winking, of course.

  He stood and stretched wide. He cracked his knuckles and shook his neck loose. He poured a ginger ale, dropped in a slice of orange, and took a long drink. Then he popped an extra-strength honey-lemon cough drop into his mouth.

  He was ready for the final layer.

  “Everything was something else before,” he began to voice-over his film. “And everything will be something else after. Sometimes, if you look hard enough, you can see it—the whole story of a thing.”

  Fifty-Six

  “So? Plan B?”

  Ware shifted away from Jolene on the bus seat. It was Thursday, and he hadn’t seen her since Sunday, and he’d missed her—which had come as a very big surprise to him—so he’d been glad when she decided to come along to see Big Deal. But now he was reconsidering. “Uh-huh,” he agreed. “Plan B.”

  “Well, what is it?” Jolene pressed.

  “So . . .” Plan B was a little unformed. Plan B had some holes. But the fall was a long way off. “Just trust me. It’s going to work. But I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I say.”

  Hearing her own words seemed to take Jolene aback for a second. Ware changed the subject while he was ahead. “Why are you even coming? I thought that Franklin guy told you what you wanted to know.”

  “He did. The parts that don’t get recycled into other people are ‘disposed of in a most respectful manner.’”

  “Well, don’t you believe him?”

  “I believe him.” Jolene licked her thumb and rubbed at a scuff mark on the back of the bus seat in front of her. “This used to be a cow,” she said, as if that explained anything.

  She peered at the seat more closely. “Or maybe some detergent bottles. It’s too dirty to tell.”

  “Jolene. Why are you coming?”

  She looked up, wide-eyed. “You said your grandmother asked me to,” she answered, as if catering to the whims of the elderly were a natural result of her thoughtful personality. “Also, you were gone this week. I got kind of bored.”

  Ware felt a little buzzy. As if he might be glowing. Jolene had missed him, too.

  Just then the bus rocked a hard turn. A can of ChipNutz rolled out of the Winn-Dixie bag at Jolene’s feet.

  Ware caught it and held it up.

  Jolene shrugged. “Your grandmother wants bacon. They taste like bacon.”

  Ware handed her the can. “I didn’t tell you she wanted bacon. How did you know?”

  “I heard last time.”

  “You heard her?”

  “Oh, everybody heard her,” Jolene assured him. “The whole place.”

  Ware cringed, his hand to his face.

  “Let me tell you, if I had a grandmother,” Jolene muttered, rubbing the scuff mark again, “I’d want someone with a voice that everyone could hear.”

  Ware sat back. He hadn’t known Jolene didn’t have a grandmother. It wasn’t fair. He really hated unfairness.

  Which reminded him. “That thing you say. About me living in Magic Fairness Land. You’re wrong.” The insight had come to him the night before. He had lain awake practicing the announcement. “I mean, you’re right that I don’t think you should just take it when bad things happen. But I don’t want things to be magically what they’re not. I want them to be what they could be. And somebody has to want that, or nothing bad will ever get better.”

  Jolene blew her bangs out with an unimpressed sputter.

  “Besides, you do it too.”

  Jolene lifted her shades and arrow-slitted her eyes. “I do not. I’m a realist.”

  “Nope. That papaya you got from the Greek Market. Everybody saw a rotten piece of fruit. You saw a plantation.”

  Jolene crossed her arms and turned to the window. The whole way to the Bright Horizons Rehabilitation Center, she didn’t turn back once.

  Fifty-Seven

  Inside, the same woman sat at the desk eating an egg salad sandwich, wearing the same stained scarf. She squinted up at them from her spider-nest eyes and said the same words—“Isn’t that the nicest thing”—when Ware told her why they were there. She didn’t seem to mean it any more this time around.

  Ware signed them in, wondering if he had somehow traveled backward in time.

  But just then, something new and surprising happened. A woman in a yellow pantsuit marched out of the elevator and through the lobby. She moved as if she led an extremely purpose-driven life, and that purpose was to get the heck out of the New Horizons Rehabilitation Center.

  “You go ahead,” Ware told Jolene. “I’ll see you up there.”

  He caught up with the woman at the doors. “Mrs. Sauer. Wait.”

  Mrs. Sauer turned. She frowned.

  Ware drew a deep breath and plunged in. “Why don’t you like me? My grandmother said I should ask.”

  “I don’t not like you, young man.” She crossed her arms over her chest. Because of her thinness, and the yellowness of her pantsuit, it made Ware think of two pencils crossed over a slightly thicker pencil. Somehow, the pencils felt sharpened.

  “I think you’re mad at me because I wasn’t watching her. I should have been. But I didn’t know. About her condition. If I’d known, I would have—”

  Mrs. Sauer looked disbelieving. “How could you not know about
her condition? She’s your grandmother.”

  “Well, I knew. I just didn’t know I was supposed to watch her because she’s old.”

  “Because she’s old?”

  Ware nodded. “Her condition. Being old.”

  “Being old? Your grandmother has diabetes, young man.”

  “Diabetes? My grandmother?”

  Mrs. Sauer drew herself up and pursed her already pursed lips. She seemed to be asking the question, How could he not know? and then answering it herself: Off in his own world.

  But that wasn’t it.

  “What a bunch of nonsense! No one told you?” she asked with an indignant huff.

  Ware shook his head.

  “Well, that is just plain wrong. It’s diabetes, for Pete’s sake, not the Black Plague. I’ve had it for twenty years. Half the people I know have it. You should have been told.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest again. This time, though, her thinness and the yellowness of her pantsuit reminded Ware of sunbeams. Sunbeams of justice.

  “That simply wasn’t fair to you,” she went on. “You are not a child, and you needed to know. I just hate unfairness, don’t you?”

  And Big Deal was right: it helped a lot not to be alone.

  Fifty-Eight

  Ware stood at the door and looked in through its window.

  Unbelievable. Jolene was perched on the bed beside Big Deal, directly below a sign on the wall that read, “Visitors: Please Do Not Sit on the Bed.” Both of them were digging into the ChipNutz can between them as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  He opened the door.

  “Tastes like bacon!” Big Deal crowed, holding up a nugget between freshly fuchsia’d nails. She winked and patted the bed.

  Ware came in and sat, as pointedly as he could, on the chair.

  “You just missed Rita, Ware.” Big Deal licked a crumb off her lips. “You could have cleared things up with her.”

  Ware looked down at his lap. “I talked to her,” he said carefully.

  “Oh, good. And?”

  Ware pressed his lips together. He glanced at Jolene and then at the door.

  Big Deal patted Jolene’s hand. “Do me a favor, would you, dear? Go find Franklin, tell him I could use another blanket.”

  Jolene hurried off on her mission.

  Big Deal turned to Ware. “And?”

  He gripped the chair arms so hard his fingers whitened. “And she was mad at me. And I don’t blame her. You didn’t feel great, and I left you alone and went out to the pool. I’m really sorry about that. But why didn’t you tell me you had diabetes?”

  Big Deal looked down at her nails.

  “She’s not mad at me anymore. She’s mad at you.”

  “I expect she would be.”

  “It’s just diabetes, for Pete’s sake. It’s not the Black Plague.”

  Big Deal nodded her agreement.

  And then he understood. “My mother didn’t let you tell me, did she?”

  “She didn’t want you to worry while you were at Sunset Palms. She felt bad enough about you having to spend the summer there.”

  “I liked it there! And my mother treats me like a little kid.”

  Big Deal lifted her hands helplessly. “She’s certainly protective.”

  Ware looked up at the patient monitor, blank and silent now. It was good news that his grandmother didn’t need to prove she was alive anymore, but he still felt terrible. “If I had known, I would have done something, Big Deal. I would have protected you.”

  “I know you would have, Ware. I know. But your mother . . .” Big Deal fell back against her pillow. “Anyway, look. I’m fine and I have two brand-new hips, and I’ll be dancing soon. So it doesn’t matter.”

  But it did.

  Fifty-Nine

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Ware’s mother closed her file folder. She looked up, her face puzzled. “Tell you what?”

  Ware stood across the table from her. His stomach hurt. “That Big Deal has diabetes.”

  “Oh. That. There are things a child doesn’t need to be bothered with, is all.”

  “I’m not a child! And I did need to know that. I was staying with her.”

  She opened her folder again. “Well, I don’t see what all the fuss is about, since you’re back home.”

  Ware leaned down and pressed a palm over her papers. “I’m home, but Big Deal isn’t. She fell because of her blood sugar. If you’d told me, I could actually have watched her.”

  Something terrible struck him. “That’s what you wished, wasn’t it? That first morning I was home, I came down the stairs and heard you and Dad talking. You said you wished something, but Dad said it wasn’t what you wanted. You wished you had told me, didn’t you?”

  His mother looked away. “Of course not. No. Although, in hindsight . . . But it doesn’t matter.” She pressed a finger to a single tear in the corner of her eye.

  That single tear pierced him—not a hundred-arrow volley, maybe only twenty or thirty arrows, it was hard to calculate when you were bleeding—but Ware had to finish. “It matters to me, because it feels like my fault. And it matters to Big Deal. If you had told me, maybe she’d be at home now. Maybe she wouldn’t have needed an operation.”

  She wiped her eye and smiled a tiny smile. “I highly doubt that. She’d been needing those hip replacements for a while.”

  “Oh. Well, okay. But I’m eleven and a half. If you keep overprotecting me, I’m not going to survive.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m going to get flattened. If I don’t start living in the real world, life’s going to crush me.”

  At that, his mother looked so worried about him that Ware grew worried about her.

  The checkout lady at the Greek Market had said that things grow into what’s needed of them. Ware felt that exact thing happening now. He sat down across from his mother. “I’m not a child, Mom,” he said. “You did a good job protecting me, but now I’m strong.”

  Suddenly, for the first time in his life, Ware knew exactly where he stood. He didn’t feel as if he might be wafting, or the slightest bit drifty. He sat up straight in his chair. “I am a person leading a purpose-driven life.”

  “A purpose-driven life?”

  “A purpose-driven life. And the purpose driving it is unfairness.” Thou shalt do battle against unfairness whenever faced with it—number nine. Thou shalt be always the champion of the Right and the Good, against Injustice—number seven. “Unfairness. Injustice. I want to fix it. And I got that from you.”

  “From me?”

  “From you. All day long, you work to fix the worst things that happen, and you love your job.”

  “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “Bad stuff happens. I hate that. But I do like fixing it.”

  “So stop trying to keep bad stuff from me and start teaching me how to fix it.”

  His mother slid forward on her elbows and rested her chin on her fists. She looked him straight in the eye.

  “All right. The first thing is to identify the piece of the problem that you can do something about.”

  “The piece?”

  “You can’t fix everything. But . . .” She patted her folder. “Take this morning. A woman came in, desperate because her husband took off, left her with three kids. Her English isn’t good and all she has is a part-time housekeeper job. It won’t feed three kids. Now, I can’t make her husband come back. I can’t get her a better job. But I walked her out to the crisis center’s food bank, and I signed her up for our night lessons in English. After a while, she’ll be okay.”

  “What if you’re just a person, though? What if you don’t run a crisis center?”

  “Same thing. You identify the piece of the problem you can do something about. Look around the edges—there’s always something you can do.”

  Ware and his mother studied each other across the table for a full minute then, as if they were meeting each other for the first time.
r />   “And Ware,” she said at last. “I’m really sorry.”

  Sixty

  “Just one more thing before you go up,” his mother called from the living room.

  Ware paused, one hand on the banister. Since talking with her in the afternoon, he’d been dying to escape into his room so he could think about it all in private.

  Ware stepped back into the living room.

  “One small thing,” she said. “Your grandmother’s being released in two weeks.”

  “Big Deal can go home? Oh, that’s great! Why do you and Dad look so worried?”

  “She’s not quite going home yet,” said his father. “First she’ll come here for a while. Until she gets adjusted.”

  “That’s really great. I liked living with her. She’s funny and—” Ware stopped. He looked from one parent to the other. “Here? In this house?”

  “Yes, Ware,” his mother said. “That’s what here means.”

  Ware looked around. “But . . . where here?”

  His father fumbled with his collar. His mother studied her shoes.

  And the answer struck him, like a punch to the windpipe. He gulped some air. “You’re giving her my room?”

  “No, of course not!” his father said. “Never.”

  And Ware breathed again. Of course not. His parents wouldn’t do that to him. They understood.

  “She’s just had two hip replacements, for heaven’s sake,” his mother agreed. “She can’t be doing stairs. We’re giving her our room.”

  “Oh, good.” Ware felt relieved, but a little guilty now, too. He glanced at the couch. It pulled out into a bed, but it was hard and lumpy. “So . . . where will you sleep?”

  His father tugged his collar out farther. “We’ll be upstairs,” he said. “In your room.”

  “In my . . .” Ware’s windpipe closed again. He felt a kick in his gut, too. “The sofa? I’m supposed to sleep here? Out in the open?”

  “No. You’ll have a room.” His mother walked over to the wall of windows and opened the blinds.