I never asked her to go biking again.
Sunday night I emailed Bart on our brand-new fixed computer.
............
Dear Bart,
I don’t know if you are in the FBI.
But if it helps, I saw Grant outside again today.
It’s out of his normal routine because he was wearing jogging shorts and no shirt and looked like he was going to try to exercise or something, which he’s never done in his whole entire life. He went on the jogging trail but was back in ten minutes.
Please instruct.
From, Olivia
P.S. Are you really running in a hundred-mile race? Which race?
............
Two minutes later he emailed back.
............
Olivia:
Please focus on his emotional state. Particularly after coming home from events. We are concerned he is unbalanced and a danger to society.
Please don’t use his real name.
From now on, he will go by Gandalf. I am deleting your previous email to erase evidence even though anything you do on your computer is never gone so really you have com-promised this investigation but I will discuss this with my superiors and see if they will let it slide.
Also, my entire room smells like dead fish.
Sincerely,
B.
P.S. I am running in the Wasatch Back. It is on August 20. If you would like to bring me water, I would very much appreciate it.
............
I wrote back.
............
Bart.
I will watch Gandalf very carefully but I would like some spy gear to help.
Also, will there ever be a time I will get more details about this mission?
My whole house also smells like fish. And I’m grounded.
Cordially,
Olivia
P.S. I would like to run in the race. Not give you water.
............
Dear Olivia,
I’ll tell you more when you have proven yourself.
I can’t use email during weekdays sometimes because of FBI policy so we’ll have to just communicate face-to-face at school. Let’s meet at the drinking fountain by the lunchroom.
Also, I just found out that on PBS they are doing shows on the most famous circuses in the world beginning Monday night starting with the New Shanghai Circus, which is clearly the best circus of all of them.
You and Berk should watch to get ideas. I can do any of the acts probably.
Masterfully,
B
............
Dear Bart,
I thought you don’t watch TV.
Regrettably,
Olivia
............
Dear Olivia,
I don’t and you shouldn’t either.
Professionally,
B
............
I laughed.
I looked up Wasatch Back on the computer.
August 20.
I put it on the calendar.
~
Then I emailed Dad.
............
Dear Dad,
It turns out Bart is not a liar. I spent the whole afternoon with him and he can pop wheelies and we went swimming and he told me some top-secret things.
I can’t talk about a lot of it because he’s on some kind of secret military spy mission that is being overseen by the FBI. He said Grant is under surveillance. I told him you might be doing some of that too because you work for the National Park Service and he said that the National Park Service has nothing to do with national security and we got in an argument about that. Do you have anything to do with the FBI?
He said he’d want to meet you. I said he should come to Las Vegas to the Monster Truck show. He said he’d ask his mom.
~
I stopped writing. I thought about saying this: Are you and Mom divorced?
I also thought about writing this: Do you love her anymore?
I also also thought about writing this: Do you love someone else? How does love work?
And then I thought about writing this: I may be in love with someone.
~
Instead I wrote,
That’s all.
Love, Liv
............
On Monday morning, I was excited about school for the first time. I tried on five different outfits. I did my hair in a semi-fishtail, sort of, but then took it out because it looked bad but who cares and got all my homework packed in order of my classes.
I woke Berk up.
I woke Mom up.
I got cereal for everyone.
So excited.
But then
Mom’s cell rang. It was 7:25 in the morning.
We all looked at each other.
“I don’t know the number,” she said.
“Maybe it’s Dad,” Berk said.
Mom and I looked at her. Berk never talked about Dad. I’d almost thought she’d forgotten about him.
“It’s not Dad,” Mom said.
Mom answered it.
Berk and I watched as she listened to the voice on the other end.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
She stood up.
“What? She would never do that.” She walked over to the window. Glanced at Berkeley.
“I have nowhere else to take her. Why didn’t you tell me over the weekend?”
I looked at Berkeley who was not looking at me or Mom. Rather she was shoveling Cheerios in her mouth and maybe, just maybe, trying not to smile.
Finally, Mom got off the phone.
She walked over to Berk. Sat down.
“Berkeley?”
Berk took another bite. Still not looking at Mom.
“Berkeley. Did you take something at day care?”
I looked at Mom. Shocked. “What are you talking about?”
Mom ignored me. Stared at Berk.
“She said you took some money out of one of the worker’s purse.”
Berkeley was chewing. And chewing and chewing. Finally, each word taking forever to get out of her mouth, she said, “I put it back.”
“You put it back?”
“I put it back.”
Mom looked at me. I was just as surprised as her.
“She says you can’t come back.”
“Oh,” Berk said.
“And she said that she might call the police.”
“Okay,” Berkeley said. She reached for more milk.
“Did you hear me, miss? You could go to jail.”
Berkeley nodded. She was so calm.
She wasn’t going to jail. We all knew that.
Mom stood there. I thought she might yell at Berk. Or at me. Or at someone.
But then she just sat down. She was too tired to yell, I guess. “What am I going to do now?”
“Can’t you find another place?” I asked.
She looked at her hands.
“Mom. There are a lot of day cares.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t even afford that place. I have to be at work in fifteen minutes. I don’t have time for this.”
We all sat quiet.
“Why can’t I just stay home?” she said. “Livy can take care of me.”
I looked at her. She smiled at me and I realized, she planned this. She planned it. She thought she could stay home if she got kicked out of day care. She probably thought I would get to stay home, too.
She was smart.
Mom looked at her. “Livy can’t stay home. She has to go to school.”
“What about Delilah?” I asked.
“She has work,” Mom said.
“Maybe she could stay home.”
Mom looked irritated. “I’m not going to ask someone to miss work for us, Olivia.”
I nodded.
Then I said, “Melody doesn’t have a job.”
Mom’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
“Why not? She’s really nice.”
“No,” Mom said again.
I didn’t understand why Melody made Mom so mad. All she did was make cookies and sit on her dumb step and tell me she’d reverse perm my hair. Had they had a fight or something? Had Melody done something wrong?
Mom rubbed her forehead. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
She glanced at Berkeley. “Do you think you could take care of yourself?” Mom said.
Was she serious?
Berk perked up.
“Mom. She’s five,” I said.
Mom shot me a look.
She knew I was right. You can’t leave a five-year-old home alone, especially not where we lived.
But I’d made her mad. I could feel that I’d made her mad.
“I can’t take her to work. Dennis would go through the roof,” Mom said.
I thought about my mom’s boss going through the roof and he was bald with round cheeks and I thought it would probably hurt and he’d bleed a lot.
“There’s that one free preschool,” I said.
Some lady had brought over a flyer for a head start place that was free for people who didn’t have very much money.
She’d knocked on the door and Mom had stood on the stoop. “What makes you think we can’t afford a regular preschool?” Mom asked, holding the pamphlet up to shade her eyes from the sun.
The lady was really nice. You could tell because she was wearing Bermuda shorts with white socks and she had frizzy hair and when Mom got after her, she turned red and got all fidgety. She probably was just out of college and trying to save people like me and Mom and Berk. Trying to make our lives better. I wished Mom would let her alone. Sometimes she doesn’t let people alone.
“I’m sure you could afford it,” the woman said.
“Oh really? You think we have enough money?” Mom said back.
The lady looked at me and I tried to give her a nice smile. A smile like, “It’s okay. We probably don’t have enough money.” She looked back at Mom who said, “If you think we have enough money, why did you bring this here? Who sent you?”
“Oh,” the lady said, smoothing her hair. “No one sent me. I mean, I’m taking the flyers everywhere.”
“Everywhere?”
“Everywhere.”
“Are you taking them to the houses on the hill?”
“Absolutely.”
Mom stared at her and then the lady said, “I actually have to keep going. I hope you fine women have a fine day,” and Mom said, “Fine women? Fine day? Who talks like that?”
But the lady was already walking away.
I looked at Mom.
“Why’d you have to do that?” I’d asked her.
“Do what?”
“You know what.”
“I have no idea,” Mom said. “Plus we don’t need some stupid government preschool.”
“We don’t?” I asked.
“We don’t,” she said.
And that was that.
Until now.
Now we needed some stupid government preschool. We needed something.
She looked at me. “Do you think you could take her to school with you?”
I stared at her.
She stared back at me.
Not laughing.
Not saying, “Just kidding.”
Just sitting there with her Diet Coke and her makeup.
She wanted me to take my baby sister to school with me. To my classes. To lunch. To fifteen-minute break.
“I’ll just stay home,” I said.
She closed her eyes and blew out a big burst of air. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.
She got up, grabbed her mug, and walked over and slammed it in the sink.
She stood there, her shoulders slumped and then, this really happened, she started to tremble. Like a leaf.
Just watching her made the whole room shrink.
I had to do something.
I had to fix this.
I said, “I guess I can take her to school with me.”
Mom shook her head. “No, you can’t.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
Mom looked at me. “I don’t think it’s allowed, is it?”
She was asking me like I knew the answer to that question and she didn’t, even though I was pretty sure we both knew that no way was it okay for me to take my five-year-old sister with me to middle school. No way.
But I said, “It’s fine. People do it all the time.”
It was stupid.
It didn’t even make sense.
There was no way.
No way.
But then she nodded. She nodded. And said, “Just for today.”
Just for today.
Just for today.
“You can try it out and see how it goes,” she said.
Then I was nodding, too, hard to find any words.
She smiled. “Thank you, Olivia. I can always count on you.”
Steve Fossett climbed almost all of the world’s tallest mountains.
He climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, which is where the world’s oldest skull was found.
He swam the English Channel and was in a dog sled race and an all-day and all-night car race.
He also never had kids.
You can do a lot of things if you don’t have kids.
I didn’t know very much about Dixon.
I didn’t know where the good closets were.
I didn’t know if there was a basement where they stored old desks and textbooks.
I didn’t know if there were offices that had mice or something bad so they kept them empty.
Basically, because I’d missed so much school I knew nothing useful about middle school.
When Mom dropped us off, this time me holding Berkeley’s hand, she said, “I’ll take you guys to the pool this week, okay?”
Berkeley said, “Yay!”
And I said, “Okay.”
Then she said, “Walk home.”
I nodded.
She winked at me. “Love you, Bumblebee,” she said, like I was four years old again.
Love you.
Then she looked at Berkeley, “Love you too, Missy. Be good to your sister.”
I started to tear up. Please don’t go, I wanted to say. Even more than before. Please.
Then she drove away.
Just like that.
Just drove away.
I took a deep breath.
The thing was, it wasn’t her fault.
I said I’d do it. Me.
This was my problem.
I’d said it.
She agreed to it.
Berkeley was bouncing. She’d never been to school before. Would there be tests?
“No.”
“Will they do art?”
“No.”
“Story time?”
I shook my head. How was I going to make this work? We could just go home but what if Mom found out? What if she really had to go to court and to jail?
We stood there, alone, with hundreds of kids my age getting out of cars and unloading off buses and locking up bikes. Talking in groups and throwing things.
I saw Carlene and dumb-bum Bonnie and I didn’t want them to see Berkeley even though they knew her and maybe they would feel bad for me and help?
No. No. They wouldn’t.
I scanned the crowds for Bart.
I thought he would help. He would. But then, what if he really was FBI? If he was, and if he saw us, he’d have to turn us in. Me in. Mom in. Dad in. Berk.
The voice in my gut started rumbling again. Rumbling and rumbling and it said: Take care of your sister.
Take care of your sister.
Take care of your sister.
Take care of your sister.
So I did.
I forgot about Bart. I forgot about Carlene and dumb-bum Bonnie. I even forgot about Mom and Dad and I took care of my sister.
I said, “Do what I say, Berk. And don’t let go of my hand.”
Then I took a deep breath, shook my hair out, which I wished was already reverse permed, and walked with my little sister right into Dixon Middle School.
I once found out about a fish that if you rubbed it on your skin, you would fall down on the ground and die but you really wouldn’t be dead.
You would appear dead.
Your pulse would be nothing.
Your heart would be nothing.
Your breathing would be nothing.
But you’d be alive.
Everything slowed down so much that they’d all bawl for you and they’d have to prepare a funeral for you.
And your body would lie on the bed and people would talk about the nice things you did. And how you saved their lives.
And how you won more contests than any other living person in the world.
And how you became an explorer.
And how you and your father were reunited and how he was held as a hostage for a time and that’s why he couldn’t communicate with you but you figured it out and you were able to find him when he was in a cave surrounded by deadly scorpions that were unusually large because of a genetic mutation and you battled them and you set him free.
And how he wasn’t trashy at all.
And how he didn’t have a girlfriend.
And how he’d been waiting for you, waiting and waiting.
They’d talk about all these things and your little sister would be sad and she would be hugging her doll that has no hair and Carlene and Lala and even Bonnie would be sobbing all over the place.
And Bart.
Bart would be there. And he’d be holding a tuna fish sandwich with Doritos and his eyes would be wet but he wouldn’t cry. Not then. He had to be strong.
But most of all, your mom. Your mom would say, “I could always count on her. My Olivia. I could always count on her.”
You May Already Be a Winner Page 10