by Sally Warner
Thank you, Ms. Sanchez.
First, thanks for not telling anyone that Alfie killed Zip, and now, thanks for this.
“No, wait,” Cynthia Harbison says, her eyes getting skinny as she goes back in time inside her head. “Treasure Island can’t be at your house, Ms. Sanchez, because EllRay borrowed it. Don’t you remember? Right before vacation?”
Then Cynthia actually smiles like she expects to be congratulated.
And all my good feelings crash down around my feet—because Ms. Sanchez might be willing to pretend-forget something to keep a kid from being embarrassed in class, but she’s not the type of person who would ever tell a lie. Not once someone else remembered the truth.
“Oh, yes,” Ms. Sanchez says, sighing. “Do you happen to have it with you, EllRay?”
“Nope,” I tell her—and everyone else. “Sorry.”
“Well, that’s okay,” Ms. Sanchez says in her nicest voice. “In fact, it’s perfectly understandable. You had your hands full. Anyway, we’re running too short on time to do the book justice.”
“Yeah. Now we are,” Jared Matthews mumbles, giving me a dirty look.
“Oh, man,” Stanley says, looking like someone just stole his lunch.
Corey and Kevin stare at me, then look away, as if they are trying to remember why we are friends.
“But that means there’s no time for a spelling quiz, either,” Ms. Sanchez tells us, her voice bright. I guess by saying this, she thinks she’s sort of giving everyone an invisible present to keep them from hating me.
“The buzzer’s about to go off,” Annie Pat says, sounding gloomy, and she puts her hands over her ears in advance. Annie Pat has very sensitive ears.
“Any second now,” Ms. Sanchez agrees, aiming her tired-looking smile around the room. “So I want everyone to go home and get a good night’s sleep—because tomorrow is another day. Thank goodness.”
THE NAME YOU GET
“Are you still mad at me, EllWay?” Alfie asks that night at home, a doll in each of her hands. I am supposed to be keeping her company while she picks up her room, but at the same time I am sitting on her rug playing Die, Creature, Die again. I am still trying to top my personal best—which is not very good.
“Only a little mad,” I tell her after pressing PAUSE, and I lean back against her bed. “Mostly I’m mad at me. You didn’t mean to do anything wrong, Alfie. You were trying to help, but you’re just four.”
“But why are you mad at you?” she asks, sinking down next to me.
“Because I should have made sure you fed him right,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says, nodding, and relief spreads across her round face like syrup on a pancake. “It was your fault Swimmy died. You messed up, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I messed up.”
“But I’m the one who got in trouble at day care today,” she says, staring at one of her dolls as she combs its bright yellow hair with her fingers.
“I heard,” I say.
Mom told me that Alfie got sent home with a note—which is the bad thing at her day care. Alfie got mad and told Suzette Monahan that she was going to die some day and maybe be buried in the backyard in a plastic container. Or else flushed.
Alfie didn’t say whose backyard Suzette might be buried in, but it didn’t matter, Mom says. Suzette was already yelling for the day care teacher before Alfie even finished her sentence.
Suzette is sometimes Alfie’s friend and sometimes her enemy, and she is always a pain, in my opinion. She came over to our house once to play, and she even tried bossing my mom around about the snack. Big mistake, Suzette. Our mom is not a pushover.
“I guess I said something bad to Suzette,” Alfie admits, twisting the doll’s yellow hair.
“Why?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Alfie says. “I was thinking about Swimmy, and then Suzette put torn-up pieces of paper in my hair and kids laughed, so the words just jumped out of my mouth. And now Suzette says she gets to be the cutest one in day care.”
“The cutest one?”
“You know,” Alfie says, sounding sad. “Like, there’s a funniest kid in every class, and a smartest kid, and a best jumper, and the one who’s the cutest? It’s just the name you get, EllWay,” she explains.
“Oh. Yeah,” I say. “The name you get. Kind of like with grown-ups, and what jobs they have. ‘The teacher.’ ‘The doctor.’ Stuff like that.”
“I used to be the cutest,” Alfie tells me, ignoring what I said about grown-ups’ jobs. “But now, Suzette says I’m the meanest and she’s the cutest.”
“Suzette doesn’t get to decide,” I tell Alfie, trying to make her feel better.
“Yes she does,” Alfie says. “Because the other kids do whatever she wants.”
“That makes Suzette the bossiest, not the cutest,” I say, laughing. “But don’t tell her that, or you’ll get sent home with another note for sure.”
“Okay,” Alfie says. “I won’t tell her that. I’ll think it, though. And I’ll always get to be the cutest one at home, right?” she asks. “And you can be the cutest one’s brother.”
“Okay,” I say, getting back to my game.
But later that night, when I think about what Alfie said, I think she’s kind of right. Everybody is something.
But it’s more than that. Who you are changes depending on where you are. Like here at home Alfie is everybody’s “baby girl,” and Mom is the lady who loves us all, no matter what we do, and Dad is the smart, strong guy who needs peace and quiet when he first gets home. He is also strict, but he loves us, too. A lot. And I’m the fun kid who likes to do stuff, and who only sometimes gets in trouble.
Everyone likes me at our house. I’m very popular here.
But at school, Jared and Stanley don’t like me, at least some of the time, and neither do Cynthia and Heather—most of the time. At least I don’t think they do.
At school, you don’t get to choose the name you get, and you can’t argue about it. It just is.
In the third grade at Oak Glen Primary School, Jared and Cynthia are usually the mean ones, like I said before, and Cynthia is also the bossy one, so she gets to be two things at school—both of them bad, in my opinion. But at home, Jared’s mom and dad probably don’t think he’s mean. Maybe they think he’s the quiet one in the family, or the hardest one to wake up in the morning, or something else. The point is, maybe he has a different name there.
I don’t know what Cynthia’s parents think. I feel sorry for them, that’s all.
And to give you another example, Kry Rodriguez is the smartest kid in both math and spelling at school, but maybe at home she talks back to her parents or forgets to take out the trash. Probably not, but maybe.
At school, Fiona McNulty is the best artist, and she is also the shyest kid in the third grade—but maybe at home she’s the funniest person in her family, or the loudest.
At school, my friend Corey is the kid who’s the most afraid of math, especially mental math and standing-at-the-board math, but at home he’s the champion swimmer who has to be fed exactly the right food to keep him in smooth operating condition. And he’s brave during swim meets. He never cries. Some kids do, he told me once.
Those are just a few examples of what I’m talking about.
But what about me, when I’m at school? I have always wanted to be the funniest kid in my class, the boy who other guys wanted to be friends with, since I can’t be the TALLEST or the STRONGEST—which honestly would be my first choices, if I got to pick. But now, I’m starting to be known as the third-grade kid who messes up.
Like I said before, you don’t get to choose.
Once you’re away from home, stuff chooses you.
OCTOPUS TAG
I don’t remember what April was like last year, it was so long ago. But this April has been very mixed-up in Oak Glen. Rainy, sunny, rainy, cloudy, windy, rainy, rainy.
And that’s just in the past week!
It’s like they put a lit
tle kid like Alfie in charge of the weather.
Today, Thursday, it rained all morning, but now the sun has come out and we get to have our afternoon recess outside.
FINALLY.
It seems like it has been days since we played outside, and our legs are jumpy. Also, the air in our classroom has been almost used up, in my opinion. What’s left smells like floor cleaner, dry erase markers, pencil shavings, and old tuna sandwiches, all mixed up.
“Come on, EllRay,” Corey says, his freckles looking like polka dots on his face, he is so excited. “We gotta grab a kick ball before they’re all gone, for once.”
“Yeah,” Kevin says, with his usual serious look on his face. Kevin and I are alike in many ways. For example, we are the only black kids in our class, not counting two very quiet girls who are friends from church and who pretty much stick together. Kevin is a lot more careful and calm about things than I am, though. He never loses library books or forgets to get permission slips signed, and he has never had to go to the principal’s office in his life. Not once.
But even though we hurry as fast as we can, Jared and Stanley reach the big net of kick balls first. Jared has rounded up all five of the balls like they’re a bunch of red rubber eggs and he is the rooster in charge of guarding them.
“Sorry, losers,” he shouts at us. “But we’re practicing our kicking today, and we need all the balls.” And his friend Stanley grins and gives us the thumbs-down sign with one of his hands, and the loser sign on his forehead with the other—which you’re not allowed to do at our school, but he does it anyway. And of course no one catches him. The playground monitor is way over at the other end of the playground. She is busy trying to talk on her cellphone and show a bunch of confused-looking first-graders how to play Capture the Flag at the same time, so she can’t help us.
“Well, who even cares about kick balls?” Kevin shouts back, even though I know he does care, because he wanted to practice his kicking, too. I’m not sure why. Probably to improve his soccer skills.
“Yeah,” I yell. “And anyway, we’re gonna play Octopus Tag, and you can’t!”
“Don’t even want to.” Jared’s voice floats back over the heads of the jumping-rope girls, who are chanting “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack” as they bounce up and down. Boys would get strangled if they tried that. But Jared sounds a little less sure of himself than before, because OCTOPUS TAG is our class’s newest fun discovery.
I guess different people play it different ways, but here’s how we play.
1. One person is the octopus, and the other kids stand far away in a line, and then they try to run past whoever the octopus is without getting tagged.
2. Whoever does get tagged has to sit or stand where they were tagged, and not move. Then they try to tag someone else when the kids run by the next time.
3. Pretty soon there are a whole bunch of kids helping the octopus–they are his or her extra “arms”—and they try to tag the kids who are left as they run by.
4. And the kid who doesn’t get tagged is the winner!
It’s really fun, only the more kids the better.
“Who wants to be the octopus?” Kevin asks, looking around.
“I do,” Corey says, grinning. And so a bunch of kids—including me—run to the other side of the playground. Even some of the jumping-rope girls join us, because this is a perfect day for Octopus Tag. It’s the kind of day when you could just keep on running forever! The clouds are puffy and white, like in cartoons, and the wind is blowing them around. I think the wind is just as happy as we are.
Jared and Stanley watch us get ready to start the game. I guess they’re not having as much fun hogging the kick balls as they thought they would, since nobody else wants them.
“Okay, go!” Corey says, and we run toward him screaming our heads off as we try to get past without getting tagged. But Corey is a very good athlete—he’s the champion swimmer, remember—and he tags two kids, Kevin and one of the church friends.
By now, Stanley looks like he wishes he could play Octopus Tag, too, but I think he’s scared to leave Jared-the-rooster standing there all alone.
The second time we run screaming across the playground, Kevin almost tags me. He just barely misses my arm, in fact. But Emma, Fiona, and another kid I don’t know very well get tagged, so now the octopus has lots of arms. Twelve, I think.
And I do get caught the next time we run across the playground—by Fiona, of all people, who blushes when she touches me and says, “Sorry, EllRay.”
Like I said before, she’s shy.
“That’s okay,” I say, panting a little as I freeze in place.
By now, there are only a few kids left who haven’t been tagged, including Cynthia, Heather, and Kry. But all of a sudden Jared and Stanley are standing with them, getting ready to run.
Oh. Now they want to play.
TUG-OF-WAR
“No fair,” Kevin shouts to Jared and Stanley. He is still mad about them hogging the kick balls, I guess. “You can’t start playing now, you guys. It’s too late.”
“That’s right, you can’t,” I say, backing Kevin up. “Kids have already been tagged. You have to wait for the next game.”
“Try and stop us, losers,” Jared yells back. “We can play if we want to!”
“Yeah,” Cynthia calls out, kissing up to Jared for no reason—except to be mean to me, maybe. “You’re not the boss of the world, EllRay Jakes.”
Like I want to be!
And BOOM. The kids who are left—and Jared and Stanley and his freckles—are running across the playground, trying to escape the octopus arms reaching out to tag them.
Stanley is the first one tagged, but Jared is zigzagging back and forth like a champion football player. He’s pretty far away from me, though.
It will be so not fair if he wins this game of Octopus Tag! I was the one who thought of it, and he cheated by not starting to play until it was almost over.
But here comes Cynthia, and she’s heading straight toward me.
Cynthia, who said Zip was “only a goldfish.”
Cynthia, who said she would never ask me to take care of anything.
Cynthia, who told everyone that I was the one who took home Treasure Island.
Cynthia, who just said, “You’re not the boss of the world, EllRay Jakes.”
And so I decide to stop Cynthia Harbison, no matter what.
I have to, to make things come out even.
All this thinking happens in about two seconds, and—perfect. Cynthia’s not even looking at me, she’s so worried about getting tagged by Emma McGraw. So I reach toward Cynthia as if my arm has sudden elastic super-powers, and—grab.
“Gotcha,” I shout, but Cynthia’s not giving in without a fight, even though she’s been tagged. She tries to pull away.
“You didn’t get me,” she says.
Doesn’t she know the rules? I’m still touching her!
“GOTCHA,” I say again, not letting go of her pink sweater sleeve, but she starts spinning around and around me. She is still not giving up.
“Grrr,” she growls, baring her teeth and everything.
What is her problem?
“I won!” I hear Jared shout in the distance, and that just makes me angrier.
“You’re got,” I yell at Cynthia, still not letting go, because she really is the kind of person who might tell everyone that I didn’t tag her at all. And that is not going to happen no matter who says he has already won.
There can’t be two cheaters in one game, or what is the point of playing the game at all? Even one cheater ruins things!
By now, though, it’s a tug-of-war between Cynthia and me over her sweater sleeve, which is stretching out with elastic super-powers of its own as we whirl around and around in a circle. “Let go,” Cynthia says, gasping out the words. “You never tagged me, EllRay. I was winning!”
“I’m tagging you right now,” I argue, dizzy and panting. “Hold still!”
“Let go!”
And all of a sudden I do let go, by accident, and she goes crashing onto the playground pavement.
“Owww,” Cynthia cries, curling up into a ball, and everyone comes running, including the playground monitor, of course—because Cynthia has become an instant sympathy magnet.
“Oh, you poor thing,” some other girl says.
“Are you okay?”
“What happened?” kids are asking as the playground monitor quickly checks Cynthia over—for any cuts needing stitches, or broken bones, I guess.
But there is only a tiny bit of blood on one of Cynthia’s knees. Just a speck or two, really. Not even specks. Dots is more like it.
“Aaack!” Cynthia screams, seeing the blood on her barely skinned knee. “EllRay wrecked me!”
“I did not,” I say, trying to defend myself. “It was an accident! We were playing a game. And you were trying to CHEAT.”
“You did so wreck her,” Heather Patton says, trying to show Cynthia how loyal she is. “Now she’ll probably have a scab, and then a scar. And she was perfect before. Just perfect! And now she’ll never be perfect again!”
“Waaah,” Cynthia cries, hearing this.
I personally think that this is going a little far, saying that Cynthia Harbison used to be perfect, ever. But the kids standing around us seem so excited by this drama, and so grossed out by the microscopic blood on Cynthia’s knee, that no one says anything to defend me.
Including Kevin, Corey, Emma, or Annie Pat.
And including me.
Because—what is there to say?
I messed up again.
YOU OWE ME!
“You two sit there,” the playground monitor says to Cynthia and me, sounding both angry and worried as she points to two chairs outside the principal’s office. The principal’s door is open, but he’s probably in the hallway, jumping out and saying “Hi!” to unsuspecting kids coming in from lunch. “Mrs. Tollefsen can slap a bandage on that knee for you when she gets back from the ladies room,” the monitor tells Cynthia, talking about our school secretary. “The nurse isn’t here on Thursdays.”