3. While sitting in my box at the Mets game, I will catch more foul balls than any fan ever has.
4. They will offer me a position on the Mets as centre fielder. I will accept the position and become the youngest baseball player in America.
5. For my third wish, I will wish for world peace, because that’s what Papa Pete always wishes for when he blows out his birthday candles.
6. I will become world famous as a peace loving baseball star.
You must have guessed by now that Numbers 1 to 6 didn’t come true.
Instead, what happened was that Mr Gristediano called my parents and said that he had to see them right away about a very serious matter.
So much for my predictions. I guess I don’t have much of a future in the crystal ball business.
The hardest thing in the world is waiting, especially when you’re waiting for bad news. It only took twenty minutes for my parents to get to Mr Gristediano’s, but it seemed like twenty years.
I asked Papa Pete if he would take Ashley, Frankie and Robert home. They got into this mess to help me out. I didn’t see any reason for them to have to be there to take the blame. Papa Pete told me he was proud of that decision, because I was taking responsibility for my own actions. Before he left, he took my face in his hands and whispered, “Remember, Hankie: truth. That’s the magic word.”
Papa Pete took Cheerio home too. Poor Cheerio. After Mr Gristediano’s store managers had left, Cheerio had flopped down next to the fireplace and started to lick the bricks as though they were doggie treats. Don’t ask me why. You just can’t explain a lot of what Cheerio does. Nina wanted to play with him, but Cheerio had lost all interest in her. That’s him. In love one minute, licking bricks the next.
When we were alone, I offered to help Mr Gristediano clean up the mess in his flat.
“I think you’ve done enough damage already,” he said. He was holding the pieces of one of the china ducks that had broken in half.
“I bought these ducks in Italy,” he said. “I paid a pretty penny for them, as I recall.”
“I’m really sorry, Mr Gristediano,” I said. “I didn’t mean to break anything.”
He didn’t answer. I couldn’t blame him. I’d be angry at me too, if I were him.
I bent down and started to pick up the chess pieces that were scattered all across the floor. I had to do something to help. Very carefully, I put them back on the board the way they were supposed to go.
“I see you play chess,” Mr Gristediano said.
“My grandpa taught me.”
He began to sweep up the pieces of the blue-flowered vase. It was quiet.
“Do you play chess?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “My father taught me. He played a lot of chess.”
“My dad does crossword puzzles,” I said.
“Do you do them too?”
“No way. I’m a terrible speller.”
“Me too,” he said. “I was a teenager before I could spell my name correctly.”
“Really?”
“Really. Of course, it’s not that easy when your name is Vincenzo Giovanni Giuseppe Gristediano. My brother got off easy. His name is Mike.”
I laughed. Mr Gristediano smiled for the first time since the disaster. I couldn’t believe he could smile after all the trouble I had caused.
The doorman downstairs rang the buzzer to say my parents had arrived. I sighed. And there it was – the moment I definitely had not been waiting for.
When my mum came in and saw the mess, she shot me one of her mum looks. It was the one that says, “I don’t know what you’ve done, but how could you have done it?” You’ve probably received that look sometime in your life. My dad had a different look on his face. It was the same one he had the time he went to the dentist for a root canal on his back molar.
“Let me just say that we are so sorry,” my mum began.
“Of course, we’ll take care of everything that’s broken,” my dad added.
Mr Gristediano offered them a seat on the sofa. My dad sat down, then reached under his bum and pulled out a piece of salami that had got wedged in between the pillows. When he put the salami into the ashtray on the coffee table, I could see a wad of manila envelope mashed up inside it.
“Hank, I think you need to tell your parents what happened here today,” Mr Gristediano said. “I’m sure they would like an explanation, as would I.”
Listen, I can make up a story at the drop of a hat, right?
Sitting there on the sofa with all of them waiting for me to talk, I was tempted. I could have said that alien worms invaded the salami and planted secret papers in it. I could have said that a superhero named Captain Destructo told me to destroy all lunch meats to save the world from the evils of soy.
Truth, I heard Papa Pete say in my mind’s ear.
And so I told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I started at the very beginning, with the three Ds on my school report. I told them how ashamed I was of those marks. I described everything that happened after that – the meat grinder, the recipe switch, the plan to seize the salami. At the end, I even pointed out the chunk of brown manila folder wadded up in the salami on the coffee table.
My parents could not believe what they were hearing. Their mouths were hanging open so wide that you could have planted trees in there.
There are no words to describe how they reacted. Well, maybe there are. Angry. Embarrassed. Shocked. Disappointed. Hot under the collar. (Sorry, that’s three words. Oops, I mean four.) If I knew how to spell infuriated, I’d put that down too.
I’m out of words now, so let me just say this: imagine confessing to your mum or dad the worst thing you’ve ever done. Imagine what their faces would look like. Imagine how their voices would sound. Imagine steam coming out of the top of their heads. You get the picture? Good, because that’s just how my parents looked when I finished talking.
“Hank, how could you?” my mum asked. She turned to Mr Gristediano. “We don’t know what Hank was thinking.”
“You’d better get used to your room,” my dad said to me, “because you’ll be spending all your time there.”
“I don’t want to butt in to your family business,” Mr Gristediano said, “but may I make a suggestion?”
I was sure he was going to suggest that I go to jail and just eat bread and water.
“This sounds like a situation I had in my own family,” Mr Gristediano said. “With my middle daughter, Angela.”
“She ground her school report up into lunch meat too?” I asked.
“I’m sure she would have liked to,” Mr Gristediano said. “Angela was a very bright child who did very poorly at school. We were always so frustrated with her, and even worse, she was always frustrated with herself. She grew to believe she just wasn’t clever.”
Boy, do I know how she felt, I thought.
“When she got to junior high school, one of Angela’s teachers suggested that we get her tested to see if she had any learning difficulties. It turned out she did. Angela was clever, don’t get me wrong. She just learned differently to how a lot of other kids do. Do you know that one out of every five kids has learning difficulties? I’m sure I had them too, but when I was growing up, no one even knew there was such a thing.”
Mr Gristediano had trouble learning? No way. He owned the biggest supermarket chain in all of New York.
“Where is Angela now?” my mum asked.
“She’s a senior at Columbia University,” said Mr Gristediano. “Once we figured out how she learned best, we got her help and her marks improved dramatically. In fact, everything changed for her.”
“I assume you’re telling us this for a reason,” my dad said.
“As I listened to Hank just now, he reminded me so much of my Angela, and of myself too,” Mr Gristediano said. “His frustration. His shame in failing. It’s all so unnecessary. I’m no expert, but if Hank were my son, I’d see about getting him tested.”
/>
I looked over at my mum and dad. We all said the same thing at the same time: “Mr Rock.”
That’s exactly what Mr Rock had said after I’d spent that week in detention with him. He said he thought I should be tested to see if I have learning difficulties. He even came over to our house to tell my parents that. He said exactly what Mr Gristediano had just said, but without the Angela part.
When Mr Rock suggested it, my mum thought it was a good idea to get me tested, but my dad refused. Instead, he gave me a lecture about his Stanley Zipzer theory of success in school. According to his theory, all you have to do is “put your butt in your chair and study” and you’ll do fine. End of story.
I’ve never been able to convince my dad that I really do study. I study; I just don’t learn.
That’s not exactly true. I learn some things. In fact, a lot of things are really easy for me – like memorizing poems or remembering facts from history. My brain just gobbles up that stuff like Hershey’s Kisses. But other subjects, like spelling or maths or drawing – those are really hard. I feel as though when I try to learn those things, my brain says, “Sorry, I’m closed.”
Before we left, my parents again offered to pay Mr Gristediano for everything that Cheerio had destroyed.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You can pay me back by looking into the testing.”
My dad didn’t say anything, but my mum said she would make arrangements right away.
As we left, I apologized to Mr Gristediano for causing so much trouble.
“I hope you learned something from everything that happened today,” he said. “Growing up is tough, Hank. It’s not all smooth sailing.” Boy, was he nice.
We were pretty quiet the whole walk home. When we got back to our apartment, my mum went right into her bedroom.
I could hear her dialling on the phone.
The testing place looked just like an office at school, which isn’t surprising because it was an office at school. The walls were covered with lots of posters that kids had drawn. One showed a colourful butterfly. Another showed a family of puppies in a basket telling whoever was looking at them to read a lot. Those puppies were cute enough to play with.
The tester was Dr Lynn Berger. She smiled when she talked and kept telling me to take deep breaths and relax. She must have been hanging out with Frankie.
We sat at a round table facing each other. Dr Berger had a little table right next to her with all her equipment on it: blocks, Lego, pictures, pencils and lots of paper. I mean lots of it. Some pages were blank, some had shapes and some were divided into four squares.
I was nervous. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because I hate taking tests or maybe because I was worried the tests would tell everyone that I was stupid for real.
“Well, shall we begin?” Dr Berger asked.
“Sure,” I answered, not really meaning it.
“OK. First, I’m going to put a piece of paper in front of you and ask you to draw your family – pets and all.”
“Does neatness count?” I asked.
“No, Hank. This is not about you being an artist,” Dr Berger assured me.
I picked up the pencil and stared at the blank piece of white paper for a while. I didn’t know how to draw people without making them look like sticks.
“Can I go and get a drink of water?” I asked.
Dr Berger went to the corner of the room, where there was a water cooler. She pushed the blue button and water rushed out into a paper cup. She handed me the cup. I took a small sip. I wasn’t really thirsty; I had just wanted to get out of there.
“Try to relax, Hank. You’re fine,” she said.
I drew a little squiggle on the paper. It looked like a hair.
“Do you understand what I asked for?” Dr Berger asked. “I want you to draw any kind of picture of your family.”
“I understand. I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t exactly positive why I was apologizing, but it sounded right.
I started with Stan the crossword-puzzle man. I tried drawing him sitting at the dining room table doing a crossword puzzle. The table got so big that it took up almost the whole page, so I put the rest of the family there too. Everyone in the family was on one side of the table, facing me. Mum, Dad and Emily, with Katherine on her shoulder. I even put a little piece of iguana poo on Emily’s sweater. Cheerio was under the table. He came out looking like one of those really long bubbles that I used to blow when I was little.
“I hope this is right,” I said to Dr Berger.
“There are no right or wrong answers on this test,” she said.
“I wish all my tests were like that,” I said to her.
Dr Berger laughed, and I started to relax a little bit.
I sat back and looked at my picture. I noticed that we all looked exactly alike – even the iguana. Now I started laughing, because it struck me as funny that Mum had three twins and one of them was a green reptile with a mile-long tongue.
Dr Berger asked me what was so amusing.
“It’s just that my sister’s pet iguana looks like her twin,” I said.
“Do you all have dinner together?”
“Yes. Every night.”
“My, such a lovely family you have.”
“That’s easy for you to say, because you haven’t seen my dad in his boxer shorts.”
Wherever that thought came from, please let it go back there right away!
Dr Berger laughed again. What a great audience.
The next part of the test involved putting a set of odd-shaped blocks into exactly the same pattern as the one drawn on a sheet of paper. Dr Berger put the blocks in front of me.
I pushed them around until I lined them up perfectly to look just like the pattern on the test paper.
“Wow! You accomplished that task in record time!” Dr Berger said.
“No kidding. Was I the fastest person ever?”
“I’m sure you are one of them,” she said.
That felt good. I began to think that maybe this testing thing was going to work out just fine.
There was reading and vocabulary and listening to numbers and having to repeat them back. I worked on puzzles, looked at splattered paintings and arranged pictures in order. Some of the activities were fun, which made the time really speed by.
When we were all done, Dr Berger walked me out to the hall, where my parents were waiting. She told us she would go over the results and we would hear back in about a week. Hear what? Hear that I had to change schools? Be left behind? That I’m not clever enough to go to school in the first place?
Boy, seven days can be an awfully long time.
When I’m nervous, my body turns into a fountain. If I’m a little bit nervous, my forehead gets damp. If I’m medium nervous, my palms start to sweat. If I’m really nervous, the armpits get involved. And when I’m scared, my back actually sweats. That may be too much information for you, but there it is, I’ve said it.
As I sat outside Head Teacher Love’s office, all of the above were happening at once. Sweat was trickling out of every part of me that could trickle.
They had been inside there for half an hour – Mr Love, Dr Berger, and my mum and dad. They’d said that they wanted to review my test results in private before they called me in. I knew if my tests had turned out normal, my parents would have been out of there in two minutes. I mean, how long does it take to say, “Great kid you got there”? Not half an hour, I can tell you that.
Mr Rock had seen me waiting in the hall. He said he was really glad my parents had agreed to get me tested and he thought life at PS 87 was going to be much better for me now. Before he left, he handed me a packet of tissues and said I could keep them to mop myself up. It was nice of him not to mention that I was sweating like a hog. After I used the tissues to dry my face, I screwed each one up into a ball and shot them into the bin with my foot. I made seven out of seven, so sitting in the hallway wasn’t a total loss.
Frankie came running down the stairs, tw
o at a time.
“How’d you get out of class?” I asked him.
“I volunteered to take the register to the office,” he said. “Any news from Mole Man?”
“Not yet. I’m pretty nervous.”
“Release the tension, Zip,” he suggested. “Let it flow up your spine and out of your third eye.” The third eye is a yoga term for some place on your body. I have no idea where, but I keep looking for it.
“What kind of freak has three eyes?” asked a big, nasty voice from behind us. That could only be one person. It was Nick McKelty, the last person you want to see when you’re waiting to find out if you’re normal or not.
“How’s the boy genius?” Nick the Tick asked, pointing towards me. “They figure out what’s wrong with you yet?”
Frankie waved his hands in the air. “Zengawii!” he said. “That means disappear, McKelty.”
“Ms Adolf sent me to find you,” Nick said to Frankie. “She thought you’d got lost.”
“Why would she send you?” answered Frankie. “You couldn’t find your way out of a paper bag.”
“Oh yeah?” asked McKelty. He scratched his huge blond head, trying to think of a comeback. “Oh yeah?” he asked again. Then he turned and left. He’s a quick one, that McKelty.
The door opened and Dr Berger stepped out.
“Hank, we’re ready for you now,” she said.
“They’re going to tell me I’m stupid,” I whispered to Frankie.
“Right, and my name is Bernice,” he whispered back.
I took a deep breath and walked into the office.
My mum was holding a yellow pad with her notes on it. My dad had a report in a blue cover. My name was printed on the outside. It was thick – probably twenty pages long. Wow, someone had a lot to say about me.
“We’ve had a nice chat with your parents,” Dr Berger began. “I want to begin by telling you how much I appreciated your co-operation during the testing process, Hank. You gave it your best effort, and I’m proud of you for that.”
This wasn’t sounding good. I’ve played enough football to know that when the coach talks about a good effort, he’s usually talking to the losing team.
The World's Greatest Underachiever and the Crunchy Pickle Disaster Page 8