“I’m going back to bed,” I announced, leaving the room and making clomping noises on the stairs. The same stair, to be exact. It always worked on Mom and Magda, who thought my clomping on the stairs meant I was out of range.
MOM: “Poor Cassidy. She really wanted to go on a bike ride.”
MAGDA: “You should have seen Jack. He followed Sabrina around like a baby bird.”
MOM: “Do you think he has a crush on her?”
MAGDA: “Well, it’s hard not to. She’s so interested in you…like learning to fall out of buildings and preserving record albums are the most fascinating things she could think of.”
MOM: “Maybe she’s being polite.”
MAGDA: “Maybe. But she asks good questions, too. And she’s coming here in a couple of hours to see my lab and then over to Jack’s to see the setup in his garage.”
MOM: “I guess it’s time…for Jack, I mean. Remember, Janae kept him back in Young Fives. He is a year older. Didn’t you notice the other day…when he wore shorts…how hairy his legs have gotten?”
MAGDA: “But Sabrina’s my age, Mom.”
MOM: “Oh, Magda, you don’t choose your first crush. My first crush was my sixth-grade math teacher. He was brand-spanking-new to teaching, and the way he’d run in from the parking lot with his tie plastered to his face…or use his pencil and his fist to make an exclamation point when you got the right answer—adorable!”
That was enough listening for me. TMI! Of course Jack didn’t have a crush on Sabrina. Jack and I were not at all interested in…that. You had to be totally focused when you were flapping in to the top of a speeding railway car or balancing on a telephone wire. If Jack let his head fill up with thoughts of high school girls in polka-dot headbands, he’d be a pavement tattoo before he was thirteen.
When I got to my room, I threw open the window and crawled under my bed so if Mom and Magda came looking they’d think I’d finally decided to run away. If I really was Calamity Cassidy in a previous lifetime, that would explain my present circumstances. I wasn’t the sort of girl to shoot innocent bystanders, but who knows? In a heated gunfight, with outlaws behind every saloon door, maybe a stray bullet of mine had zinged the town librarian.
That’s when I decided to start improving my karma. With the kind of weird dreams and fears I had—geez, maybe I’d plugged half a dozen charity workers or members of the church choir. So, starting Tuesday morning, I would give out better than I got. When Jack came over to walk with me to school, I wouldn’t ream him out for throwing me over. I’d say, “How was church? Good eats?”
—
“So…how was church? Good eats?”
“Mimi brought potato knishes and babka. My cousin Reggie from Toledo showed us these sweet parkour video clips from the movie District B13. I want to be David Belle when I grow up.” Jack was so excited about the stunts he’d seen on the video clip, he didn’t notice how polite I was being.
We were almost to school before he said, “Hey, Cass. How come you’re so quiet? You still cheesed off that I worked at the Bensons’ instead of going to the gravel pit with you?”
“Me? Nooo. I forgot about that.”
Jack put his hand on my forehead. “You’re not running a fever, are you?”
“No, but thank you for inquiring.”
“C’mon, Cass. Tell me what’s eating you. You know you can’t hold it inside. It’ll pop out sometime today.”
I swallowed. “Fine weather we’re having.”
“Okay, be that way. Two can play that game. Look, there’s Delton. Let’s practice being nice to him.”
Jack!
Being nice to Delton Bean was like going to the karma World Series two days after you got bumped up from the minors. I’d be willing to bet that, at eleven, Delton Bean had a brain even bigger than Magda’s. Every chance he got, he had to show it off, too.
“Good morning, Jack. Good morning, Cassidy.”
“Good morning, Delton. Did you have a nice holiday weekend?”
Delton looked at me all suspicious, like he didn’t know the rules of this extremely boring game we were playing called “chitchat.”
“Yes, I did,” he said, finally. “My dad took me back to the Third Coast Transportation Museum in Marshfield. We have a membership. I was interested in their traveling exhibit of World War II fighter planes. The combustion engines of planes manufactured in the United States during that time were the very first made out of silicone.”
I yawned, but I covered my mouth first, which is the correct order. “You don’t say.”
I was beginning to wonder if all this goodness was worth it. I mean, I was already a girl.
In class, Mrs. Parsons was handing back our final paper. “I know the weather feels like summer vacation, but we still have important work to do here. Your writing portfolios will be forwarded to your middle-school language-arts teachers. Some of them are ready to go, but some of you”—she paused at our table and dropped my portfolio folder in front of me—“seem to have intentionally misunderstood the assignment. As you recall, you were supposed to research a field of interest, some occupation you could see yourself holding in the future. I’d like those of you whose portfolios are finished to work on peer evaluations with those whose papers still need polishing. So, Hayley, you will work with Mary; Jack, you pair up with Graham; and, Delton, I think you will be very helpful to…Calamity here.”
“Calamity?” Graham piped up. “When I read your rough draft, it was Catastrophe.”
It doesn’t take much for our class to go on a laughing jag. Magda warned me not to use my road name, but Mrs. Parsons said she wanted colorful language. And I spent a lot of time picking out that name. Catastrophe Cassidy was my first runner-up.
I told myself that the laughing didn’t matter. I’d been nice to Delton before school. Now Delton would be nice to me so I could finish my paper. And more importantly, fifth grade.
Delton read the title of my paper. “Your occupation of interest is…hobo?”
“She told us to pick something interesting.” I crossed out the word “hobo” and replaced it with “Knight of the Road.” If I changed every “hobo” to “Knight of the Road,” I might meet the minimum word count. “What’d you pick?”
“Aeronautical engineer, of course. Like my dad.” Delton scanned the first page of my paper before reaching into his backpack for his red pen.
“Cassidy, we were supposed to cover contemporary issues in the field—job security, earning potential, regional—”
“I did. Look here.”
Delton made clicking noises with his tongue as he read. “Sooo…hobos live off the goodwill of others, they have each other’s backs, and your dad says with rising gas prices more people than ever are riding the Amtrak, making you confident that we’ll add more train lines? You used your dad as your main source?”
“Well, it’s hard to pin down a real hobo.”
“Possibly because they are extinct? You know very well there are no classified ads for hobos.” Delton uncapped his pen and put it in hover mode over my paper. “Where to begin…?”
Then he stopped talking to me and started talking to my paper. “Setting aside the logical fallacy that hobos exist…I would argue with this transition between ‘hobo hash’ and barter arrangements…. Can you really be a hobo and not know when the steam engine was invented?”
As his pen scooted over the pages, I concentrated on scraping a blob of one hundred percent fruit preserves off my shirt.
“Maybe you should change your stage name to Rambling Rose,” he muttered, handing back my paper.
“It’s my road name, thank you very much.” I scanned all the pen marks. “That’s it?” Delton had messed up my paper so bad I’d have to retype the whole thing. “I thought you were supposed to fix it.”
“The purpose of peer evaluation, Cassidy, is to give feedback to the author of the paper, not to fix it. You and I both know you are perfectly capable of doing it yourself—if you choose to. I�
��ve seen your standardized test scores. You were almost as high as me in expository writing.”
I grabbed the sheets of paper and started to fold them. Whenever I didn’t like something, I tried to make it disappear. In second grade, I’d taught myself to fold papers with bad grades into packages so small I could slip them into my shoe. But papers get longer in fifth grade, and no matter how I folded, I couldn’t conceal this mess.
“Thanks for nothing, Delton. You’ve got a lot of nerve saying those things about my honest efforts.”
Delton pinched the tip of his nose, which was just one of his many nervous habits. “Was I too forthcoming? My mother says I need to work on my social cues. She says being blunt isn’t a leading-edge technique in the workplace and that the reason my father doesn’t advance is his lack of understanding in the area of social cues.” He moved from the tip of his nose to his earlobe. “How should I have handled it, Cassidy? Should I have said it was a good paper even if it wasn’t?”
“I guess not.” I managed to make my paper small enough to sit on it with no corners showing. “Then you’d just be a phony.”
“Like you were to me this morning when you asked about my weekend?”
“Can’t a girl be nice without raising suspicions?”
“Well…no. Not you, anyway.”
“Say, Delton, you’re a smart guy. What do you know about karma?”
“Karma?”
“Yeah, you know. The old ‘what goes around comes around’ thing.”
“Are you asking me for the definition?” Delton slipped his cell phone from his pocket and consulted the Internet.
“I guess. It’s just that, lately, I feel like maybe I have…I don’t know…rotten karma. And I’m wondering if I can turn it around before…hmmm, let’s just say before June fourteenth.”
“What’s special about June fourteenth?”
“None of your beeswax.”
“I don’t know, Cassidy. It says here that karma is built up over lifetimes. I’m not sure being nice to me this morning is enough to turn that around.”
“Delton, I hope you are using your handheld device for academic purposes…otherwise, I’ll have to confiscate it.”
The sudden appearance of our teacher made Delton switch from pinching his earlobe to folding a pleat in his lower lip. “We were talking about karma, Mrs. Parsons, and I was looking up the definition.”
“What does karma have to do with—where is your paper, Cassidy?”
“Um…” I shuffled my hands around in my backpack and looked on either side of the table as if I’d dropped it.
“She’s sitting on it, Mrs. Parsons. Isn’t it time to transition to social studies? I can’t really count the last twenty minutes as instructional time. In fact, I’ve noticed that student time-on-task has taken a huge dive since Field Games Day.”
As Mrs. Parsons walked away, I whispered, “I may have rotten karma, but you have snitch karma, Delton, and that is much worse.”
“All I did was tell the truth.”
“She didn’t even ask you. You should have kept quiet. You would make a lousy hobo.”
—
There’s a big difference between a catastrophe and a calamity. Getting hit by a train is a catastrophe. Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel is a calamity. The way I figure it, you get a fighting chance with a calamity. Things don’t look too pretty, but people have survived a barrel ride over the falls. Get hit by a train and you’ve got a one-way ticket to that great cattle car in the sky. It takes brains, ingenuity and nerves of steel to survive a calamity.
I knew that, according to my own definition, etiquette lessons were only a calamity, something to survive and do my best to forget. Then why did they feel like such a catastrophe? Was it because every Monday and Wednesday from June 14 through July 14 (aka the best part of summer vacation), I would be imprisoned in a stuffy classroom?
If the other great Calamity in history—Calamity Jane—was telling this story, she’d skip the boring junk about how I revised my paper to focus on being part of the transportation industry, and how I finished up my social-studies poster about the Incas. (For Family Night, Mrs. Parsons made me cover the part where they sacrificed their babies.)
I might tell the story of how in retaliation for being forced to wear a dress and curl my hair for the fifth-grade graduation ceremony, I wore my sister’s tap shoes to cross the stage and palmed Principal Janescko a note that read “See you later, alligator” when he shook my hand.
But no, I think Calamity Jane would skip ahead—straight to the moment when, on a beautiful summer morning only three days out of fifth grade, I stood in front of Miss Starr Melton-Mowry’s School of Poise and Purpose.
The sign was painted on a glass door, wedged between Bliss in a Glass Juice Bar and Olde Worlde Tailors Alteration Shop.
“Scoot, Miss Cassidy,” Mom said, rolling up the car window so I couldn’t complain. I looked up at the perfectly blue sky and wondered what Jack and I might do on a morning like this. Ride our bikes to Riverside Park and go fishing? Maybe play Frisbee golf or mess with the squirrels by feeding them the clay peanuts I made in art class?
I started to curse Great-Grandma Reed again but remembered my karma and yanked open the door, making the bells jingle—multiple times. I have a little palsy in my right arm every time I open a door with bells.
“Miss…?”
“Cassidy.”
“Corcoran. Miss Corcoran.”
I gave Miss Melton-Mowry the once-over. She kind of figured to be an etiquette teacher, with hair as stiff as cotton candy that moved exactly when her head did and lines around her mouth and eyes that seemed to keep them in marching order.
“We’ll cover promptness in Wednesday’s class. For now, see if you can find a seat…quietly, please.”
At breakfast, Magda and I decided I wouldn’t know anyone in my etiquette class because one, it was on the posh side of town, and two, what normal kid would be caught dead in a place like this? Now, as I rolled up on my tiptoes to get a look over her shoulder, I saw a dozen students sitting at fancy tables set up with enough glasses and plates and silverware for dinner with the queen of England. Either a lot of great-grandmas had a twisted dying wish or there was something funny in the drinking water here on the east side. Who in their right mind would waste their precious summer vacation on this?
“Hello, Cassidy. I saved you a seat.”
“Delton? What are you doing here?”
“Freeze.”
The other kids, who’d been whispering to one another, froze instantly. Even I did. Maybe we were playing statues.
The tables were set up in the shape of a U just like small-group time back at Stocking Elementary. Miss Melton-Mowry walked into the middle of the U and said, “Good morning, Mr. Bean. What a pleasure to see you.”
Those magic words broke the spell and all the kids could move again. “When I want to insert the preferred way of behaving,” she explained to me, “I ask the class to freeze…. Well done, class.”
“What’s with the stiff?” I pointed to the table at the front of the room. There were only two seats and one was occupied by a dummy like you see in department stores, only she was dressed in the exact same suit as Miss Melton-Mowry. Same cotton-candy hair combed to her shoulders. Even the same scarf.
“Freeze.” One more time, the whole class froze. I contorted my face like I was frozen under ice—it’s a look I’m famous for in freeze tag.
Miss Melton-Mowry pinched my pointer finger. “I’d be delighted if you would introduce me to your companion, Miss Melton-Mowry.”
I stayed frozen, but I squeaked out, “Wait a minute. I thought you were Miss Melton-Mowry.”
“I am. And she is my assistant. Be seated, Miss Corcoran, and I will explain.”
I took the only seat available to a girl with rotten karma—next to Delton and some girl wearing a headband just like Sabrina Benson’s.
“Now that we are all assembled, we will begin. Again. Welcome
, students. I am Miss Starr Melton-Mowry, international poise, etiquette and communication consultant. Every summer, I return here to teach my renowned finishing classes for genteel young men and women. Over the winter, you will find me in Dubai or Tokyo. During polite conversation, I will share my hobbies and other details about my life.”
I couldn’t figure out why she talked so slow, but even I knew it wasn’t polite to ask if she was a recovering stutter-holic or something.
“Allow me to introduce you to my assistant, Miss Information.” Miss Melton-Mowry waved her hand in the direction of the dummy. “That is a gesture, Miss Corcoran. In polite society, a slight gesture can indicate positioning. It is the preferred method to pointing.”
Even though Miss Melton-Mowry hadn’t told us to, I froze as I watched six of the twelve kids write down what she said on their notepads.
“Miss Information is a gift from Sheikh Jaaved of the Dubai High Council. In some cultures, it is considered humiliating to be singled out as a bad example, so the sheikh had this replica made of me. While she purports to be full of information, she demonstrates the incorrect way to do things, thus the double meaning of her name.”
More scribbling by the brownnosers. Could there really be a test on all this malarkey?
“Now.” Miss Melton-Mowry smoothed her skirt, which was already straight as a ruler. “I’d like you all to stand behind your chairs.”
We did. Miss Melton-Mowry unbent Miss Information and stood her up so that they faced each other. “Note her excellent posture. The head is in line with her shoulders, her back is straight, her arms are not crossed but hanging loosely at her sides. Her torso…”
Miss Melton-Mowry went on. We learned there was even a right way to point your feet—straight ahead.
“This is the posture we will take when standing to greet someone. So, first I’ll demonstrate and then you’ll have a chance to practice with one another. We want to make sure we’re at the correct distance from a person when we introduce ourselves. This automatically puts everyone at ease. The distance varies from culture to culture. Here in the United States, we’re most comfortable about an arm’s length away.” Touching Miss Information on the shoulder, Miss Melton-Mowry got in position.
Cassidy's Guide to Everyday Etiquette (and Obfuscation) Page 4