My Life as a Joke

by Janet Tashjian

  “This isn’t about learning a lesson! Besides, lying isn’t a CRIME.” After the sentence leaves my mouth, it dawns on me that lying probably CAN be a crime. But not this time. “Come on! Jamie’s going to kill me!”

  “You’re the one with all these schemes. I’m sure you’ll figure out a great way to solve your problem.” She loads the dishwasher as if the conversation’s over.

  “Mom! This isn’t the time to start being hands-off! I need you to be hands-on and help me!”

  She shoves some utensils into the tray. “I am helping you—to pay the consequences of your actions. I have total faith you’ll come up with a good solution.”

  I have one thought and one thought only—to get to my father before Mom does. As I jump over Bodi to head upstairs, my mother calls over her shoulder, “Your father had a ceremony to go to with some work friends. I’ll be sure to fill him in on all this before he gets home.”

  Dad’s always been a softer touch than Mom. Why didn’t I go to him first? I scold myself for not planning this out better and head up to my room.

  What am I going to do NOW?

  A Different Plan

  Because my mother’s using this giant fiasco as a learning experience, it feels like she threw me into the deep end of a pool before teaching me to swim. How am I supposed to come up with that much money in just a few days when I’ve never earned more than a few dollars in my whole life?

  I rack my brain trying to come up with ways to raise money that won’t get me into as much trouble as my last plan did. Robbing a bank is out, as is raiding my own savings, which totals a measly twenty-one dollars. I make a list of the lamest, stupidest ideas on the planet, then do what I always do when I need a bigger brain than my own—call Carly.

  It goes without saying that Carly is NOT pleased when I admit to the Baby Goldmine scheme. (She believed the raffle story too.) But by the end of my confession, she almost feels sorry for me.

  “Too bad you can’t just rewind back to the day you took the doll,” she says.

  Hanging out with us has obviously rubbed off on Carly; this suggestion is something Matt would come up with. “It’s not like I STOLE the doll. Somebody gave her away.”

  “To the shelter—not to you.”

  “Come on, you’re my friend! My friend who always knows what to do.”

  “I’m also the friend who was there when you made your New Year’s resolution. You wanted to be more mature. Well, here’s your chance.”

  Talk about rewinding to a certain moment—I wish I could rewind to New Year’s Day and take back that stupid resolution. I beg and plead but Carly remains as unwavering as my mom.

  So after school I implement the first item on my list of money-making ideas: a car wash. Schools always do car washes to raise funds—it’s a good plan.

  Matt and Umberto help me lure customers into the Home Depot parking lot near our house. (I don’t think the skinny manager who said we could use the corner of the lot was paying attention when he said yes.) Even with Umberto racing around with a giant sign that says CAR WASH on his lap, we get only three customers. The last one complains we don’t do a good job and makes us wash her minivan twice. We end up making twelve dollars, which would usually be good news. Not today.

  “It was too short notice,” Matt says.

  “Oh, NOW you’ve got advice?” I answer.

  “School car washes are always in the newsletters and on the website a few weeks before.”

  “Besides,” Umberto adds, “this isn’t for school. It’s more like a ‘Help Save Our Friend’s Butt’ car wash.”

  I pull the folded list from my pocket and scan my options. “Make Frank wear a little jacket and bow tie, begging for money while I play the accordion?”

  “You don’t play the accordion,” Matt and Umberto say together.

  “I know, but wouldn’t it be great to see Frank in one of those little suits, carrying a tiny cup?”

  “What else have you got?” Umberto snatches away my list. “A golf tournament? You probably need months to plan something like that.”

  Matt looks over Umberto’s shoulder. “Sell frozen cookie dough? What are you, a chef now?”

  “You know how many truckloads of cookie dough you’d have to sell door-to-door to make two hundred thirty-two dollars?” Umberto asks.

  Now it’s my turn to snatch the list away. “You guys are a lot of help.”

  “Hey! We washed cars with frozen hands all afternoon,” Matt says. “You can’t complain.”

  I empty the bucket of dirty water onto the asphalt, turn it over, and take a seat. “Jamie’s going to kill me.”

  Matt asks if I tried asking my dad for the money.

  “My mom’s hiding him. It’s like he’s in the witness protection program. I haven’t seen him in two days.”

  As we wait for our parents to pick us up, we wander the aisles of Home Depot, pretending to hit ourselves in the head with hammers, then fall on the floor like cartoon characters. The skinny manager watches us without yelling but without laughing either.

  “How’d it go?” my mom inquires on the drive home.

  “I’m surprised you care,” I answer. “Since you’re the one who wants me to fail.”

  “No. I’m the one who wants you to learn.” She thankfully focuses on the traffic instead of me.

  She talks about the Siamese cat she’s treating for a skin disease and how Mrs. Mitchell is having second thoughts about moving. I know she hates it when I use my phone while someone else is talking, so I sneak my cell near the door handle to read the new text from Matt.

  Doll here. Jamie home tmrw. U R dead meat.

  The buyer must’ve used an express mail service to get Baby Not-Such-a-Goldmine here so fast. I know Jamie and his girlfriend are in Santa Barbara, which is only two hours away.

  My time is just about up.

  Baby Disaster

  When I try to bum a piece of candy from Carly before class the next morning, she quietly slides a notebook under her math textbook. It’s a small spiral pad, the kind reporters use on TV shows. I ask her why she’s hiding it.

  She says she isn’t, which just makes me swipe it from her desk. “Is it a diary?” I ask. “Notes to a secret crush?”

  But the book is filled with dates and titles of novels borrowed from the library. “Are these all the books you’ve read this year?” The list is longer than the list of books I’ve read in my entire life. “There are so many!”

  She shrugs as if it’s no big deal.

  “Why are you hiding it?” I ask. “It’s an achievement—you should show it off.” It dawns on me why she’s hiding the notebook. “You’re worried I’ll feel bad about being such a crummy reader. That I could never in a million years read a book a week—unless they were baby books.”

  She doesn’t look me in the eye when she answers. “That’s not true.”

  But I know it is.

  I sit at the empty desk beside her. “Or is it because you kept your New Year’s resolution and I didn’t keep mine?”

  Carly steals the notebook back. “I wasn’t hiding this. I was just putting it away.” She looks down, suddenly captivated by the inside cover of her math book.

  I shuffle back to my desk feeling more like a joke than I usually do. There’s no way around the fact that school is getting harder with each month that goes by. Even though I stumbled through elementary school, that was nothing compared to the amount of work I have to do now. Kids like Carly and Maria and Umberto might be able to sail through homework in two seconds, but this year I’ve had to dedicate more time just to keep up. Not to mention the muscles I’ve built up lugging around my four-thousand-pound book bag. What’s going to happen next year and the year after that? Will my every waking moment be spent trying to keep my head above water?

  I look over at Carly, now engrossed in the paperback she keeps tucked in her bag, and feel a stab of envy. I think about New Year’s Day when she made that vow and how she had the discipline to stick w
ith it, not try and find a shortcut like I did. I think about all the people who glued lentils and marigolds onto those Rose Bowl floats—they had goals they achieved too. I’d love to be patient and focused, but as much as I try to be, I never end up with the same results as someone like Carly.

  Of course, it doesn’t help that I fall asleep during history class later that afternoon. It was only for a few minutes but it was enough time to have a dream of Jamie driving a golf cart and chasing me as I race across the course. He was steering the cart with one hand and whacking golf balls at me with the other. I wake up with a start and almost fall out of my chair. Matt laughs but when he gets a look at my panicked face, he realizes it isn’t funny.

  “Are you worried about my brother?” he asks on the way home. “Because you should be. I swear he’ll drive us both up to the canyon and leave us there till we get attacked by mountain lions or scorched in a wildfire.”

  “If you’re going to throw in every natural disaster known to man, don’t forget earthquakes and mudslides,” I say.

  “And monsoons,” Matt adds.

  “And tsunamis.”

  “And tornadoes.”

  Our disaster routine takes my mind off my troubles for a few minutes, but not enough. After going on way too long, Matt checks his phone. “Jamie will be home in a few hours. Are you ready to face the music?”

  “If by music you mean him playing the cymbals on either side of my head, then no.” I tell Matt I have one last idea to try. Seeing Carly’s reading list today motivated me to be as smart as I can be. My last plan is unpredictable but worth trying. If Carly can stick with her resolution, maybe I can too.

  A Last Resort

  I made a list of all the people who could possibly help me: Grammy, Mrs. Mitchell, maybe even Ms. McCoddle. But deep down I knew there was a little bit of truth to Mom’s notion of me fixing this myself. Sure, borrowing money from Grammy would have been a slam dunk, but when I made that vow to try to be more grown up this year, I really meant it. (Besides, a check from Boston probably would not get here in time.) So I ride my bike across town to decide my destiny.

  I salute Mrs. Sweeney on the way into my old elementary school. She salutes back without straying from her huge stack of papers.

  I hurry down the hall and wait outside the cafeteria where the smell of freshly baked brownies makes me hungry.

  “Excuse me, Ms. McManus.” In my eagerness I almost knock over the woman with the high heels and the metallic blue fingernails.

  She has to balance herself not to fall. “Derek, right? How are you doing?” She suddenly looks terrified. “Did I miss a meeting?”

  “No, I called your office and they said you were here today. I was wondering if we could talk.”

  She checks her phone for the time, then hands me a box of flyers. “Let’s talk in here.” She leads me to a table in the back of the cafeteria.

  “Let me guess,” she says. “You had such a good time volunteering, you want to sign up for more? We get that a lot.”

  “Not exactly.” I take a deep breath and launch into the saga of Baby Goldmine.

  At the end of my tale of woe, she tilts her head and looks me over. “I’m wondering why you’re telling me all this.”

  “You seem really busy, and I wanted to see if you needed an assistant, someone to help you carry stuff to your car, hand out flyers, that kind of thing.”

  She buzzes through texts on her phone as she listens to me. “I suppose you want an advance, right? To make your little doll problem go away?”

  I tell her an advance of two hundred thirty-two dollars would be a lifesaver.

  “My assistant is on maternity leave and I’m very behind, so here’s the deal.” She puts down her phone. “First, we call your mother to make sure it’s okay. If it is, you can be my assistant for the next month. I’ve got several fund-raisers planned—you’ll have to get a ride to the meetings.”

  Even though my mom wouldn’t lend me the money, she’s never complained about chauffeuring me around town for appointments. I tell Ms. McManus transportation won’t be a problem.

  Ms. McManus grabs her wallet and counts out a pile of twenties. I’m not sure, but I don’t think either of my parents carries around this much money on a normal day. Just as she’s about to hand it to me, she pulls back and tells me to get my mother on the phone. As she talks to Mom on my cell, I can’t help but stare at the money that’s in Ms. McManus’s hand. Really, who carries around all that cash?

  “Your mom says it’s okay if you work for me, so here you go.” She hands me the money that will repay my debt. “I’ll see you tomorrow at six at the Hammer Museum. Do you know where that is?”

  I tell her yes but don’t tell her it’s because I got dragged there on a field trip last year.

  “You’re earning the money fair and square; your parents should be proud.”

  Proud isn’t a word that comes to mind when I think about this whole Baby Goldmine disaster. I can’t help asking Ms. McManus why she trusts me. “How do you know I won’t just take off with this money and never pay you back?”

  She looks at me as if she never even considered the possibility. “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “I just assume you’re a man of your word.”

  There’s that word again—man.

  “Besides,” she says, “I have all your info—I know where you live.” She stands up and stares at the giant box on the table.

  I realize my assistant duties begin immediately and carry the box to her car.

  “By the way,” she says as she closes the trunk, “call me Debbie.”

  As I ride home on my bike, I think about how funny things turn out sometimes. How a stranger you didn’t like is the person who ends up helping you when you need it. Like one of those stories where a random person donates a kidney to some guy in need of a transplant, THAT’S how much Ms. McManus—I mean, Debbie—helped me out today.

  I tried to be a cool money-making superhero but wound up as someone’s sidekick instead. There are worse things—namely, being at the other end of Jamie’s fist.

  I Am Now a Worker Bee

  I give the money to Jamie, who immediately sends the refund to the buyer in order to save his precious rating. He doesn’t smile or act happy that I got the money back; instead he’s all business. As soon as we’re done, I can tell he wants me to leave, so I do.

  My mom drives me to my first day of work at my new job. She comes inside the Hammer Museum to meet Debbie, whom she’s only spoken to on the phone. Mom apologizes for the whole Baby Karen thing—even though it’s my fault, not hers—but Debbie says she’s happy to have the help.

  “It may take a while for you to earn that money back,” my mom tells me before she leaves. “But you used your resources and solved your own problem. Plus you’re learning new skills and working in the community—all good things.”

  And it WAS good, at least that first day. The second day was okay too. And the third. But by the end of the first week of helping out after school, I have to admit I was exhausted. I couldn’t believe how many different jobs were involved in putting an event together. Compiling lists of donors, printing name badges, doing seating charts, making phone calls, looking up stuff on the computer—my afternoons and weekends were full of … what’s the word? Oh yeah, WORK.

  The jobs weren’t the only things that were different—so were the locations. During the next several weeks, I met Debbie and her volunteers at the women’s shelter downtown, the YMCA in Santa Monica, the Wildlife Rescue Center in Culver City, and the Observatory at Griffith Park. I thought I’d been to most places in L.A. but it turns out I’d never seen lots of cool features of the city. As much as it was a month of labor, parts of it were fun too.

  Today we’re setting up a fund-raiser for Big Brother/Big Sister and Debbie asks me to organize a giant pile of name tags into alphabetical order on the table by the door. Like most afternoons of working with her, I’m too busy to check the clock once. Filling gift bags, rearranging chair
s, putting out literature—I can barely take a bathroom break before it’s time to go home.

  Debbie looks around the room approvingly. “We’re going to have a nice event here tonight, Derek. You and the other volunteers have done a great job.”

  I glance at the others helping get the room ready for tonight’s event. “Is everyone working for free?”

  “Of course they are,” Debbie answers. “This is a fund-raiser—everyone’s volunteering.”

  “But … you paid me.”

  She takes a stack of pamphlets and fans them out in a different pattern than I had them. “You needed a break and I’m in the business of helping people. It wasn’t a tough decision.”

  I stare at her slack-jawed until she bursts out laughing.

  “I needed help, you needed to make money—it’s not brain surgery.” She reaches into her giant bag as if she just remembered something. “Speaking of brain surgery, can you meet me at the Central Library downtown Friday afternoon? There’s a brain-injury awareness program and I need some escort help.”

  Dragging a bunch of old fogies around a library on a Friday afternoon sounds like the worst event EVER, but Debbie’s given me a new perspective on helping people out. I tell her no problem.

  She hands me a brochure from her bag. “There’ll be a Q-and-A panel with some press afterward. It’ll just be a few hours.”

  I stare at the brochure in my hand. “Tony Hawk’s going to be there?”

  “You know him? He’s doing a demonstration on helmets and brain injury. He’s the person you’ll escort. You skateboard, right?”