Here Comes Trouble

by Kate Hattemer

  “Frankly,” I said, “it was the lesser of two evils.”

  She laughed. “Maybe so. But I appreciate your company. You’re fun to be around, Soren.”

  What the heck? Twice in one day, Jéro and Mom, saying nice things out of the blue. I scuffed my toe on the wheel of the cart. “Oh.”

  “It’s nice to have you spending more time around the family.”

  “I am?”

  “You’ve been hanging around the kitchen a lot.”

  “Because half the time I’m grounded.”

  “Well, true.” We moved forward a foot in line. “Even so.”

  “And because I’m taking care of Cah and Croach.” Their fish tank was in the corner of the kitchen, as far from the food as Dad could get it.

  “How’s that going?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re working okay with Flynn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm.” She shoved the cart forward and almost clipped the heels of the old lady just ahead, who turned and glared at her. “Sorry, sorry, ma’am!”

  “That’s all right,” said the old lady in a long-suffering tone.

  Mom grimaced at me. Oops, she mouthed, and then said in her normal voice, “I’ve noticed you and Flynn still aren’t talking.”

  “We’re talking about science fair.”

  “Hmm,” Mom said again.

  “The thing is,” I said, toying with the bars of Coffee Crisp in the basket, “he’s really mad at me. I can’t explain why. It’s too complicated.” I hoped she’d buy that. “And I’m really mad at him, too.” For the mural, sort of, but mostly I was mad at him for being mad at me. I doubted he’d even thought about what a sacrifice it was for me to retire from pranking.

  “Hmm.”

  “You’re going to tell me things would be better if we talked them out, I know, and I’m not supposed to simmer, I know, but he won’t even let me try! He won’t even talk to me unless it’s about stupid graphs!”

  I was glad Mom hit the front of the line just then because my eyes had filled with tears. Angrily, I swatted them away. I hate crying. You look dumb plus your nose gets all stuffy. Mom was loading the belt, and I put my head down and helped.

  It wasn’t until we were in the car, bags loaded, windshield wipers shoving away the snow, that she said anything that wasn’t about being careful with the eggs, darn it, Soren, I mean careful, do you want to stand in that line again, etc. “I know what happened at the spelling bee,” she said.

  “Dad told you?” The man had no loyalty.

  “He didn’t have to tell me.” She rolled her eyes. “Why you two imagined I wouldn’t figure out that one on my own…Anyway. You’re not going to feel good about yourself until you make things right with Flynn.”

  “I tried!”

  “Did you?”

  “I told him I’m retiring from pranking. Which I am. I’m done.”

  Till I saw the look on Mom’s face right then, I’d had trouble visualizing her as a prankster. But her forehead crumpled, and her mouth gaped, and she looked the same as Dad had when I’d made my retirement announcement to him.

  Surprised. And sad.

  Suddenly I could imagine teenage Mom loading two numbered pigs into a pickup truck.

  Come to think of it, she’d come home from work once with a story about how someone had Saran-wrapped her boss’s entire office….

  And that time she’d given us mashed potatoes and gravy in ice cream dishes with cherries on top—maybe that hadn’t been an accident, like she’d claimed….

  And once I’d found five bucks in Ivan’s diaper and she’d said that sometimes babies pooped cash—it was a phenomenon as yet unexplained by science—and for months afterward I’d volunteered to change his diaper in the hopes of finding more money….

  Mom!

  “Soren,” she said, unaware that I was rewriting the story of my life, “retirement aside, you do need to make it up to Flynn.”

  “But—”

  “I know, I know. You can’t apologize, because he’d just cup his hand around his ear and say, ‘Is that the wind?’ ”

  “Right!”

  “So apologies won’t work. The thing is, you can’t control what he does. You can only control what you do.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Act like the person you want to be. Be kind. Think about how it’s hard for him.”

  “It’s hard for me, too.”

  “It is. I know, Soren. It is.” She leaned forward, concentrating on the slushy road. “It’s hard for everyone. That’s kind of the thing about life.”

  It was dark already. The snowflakes zoomed toward us and then caught the wind up and over the car, like mini skateboarders. I must have fallen asleep, because next thing I knew we were at the border, and then Mom was poking at me and Ruth was saying, “Just because he went with you doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to help carry in the groceries.”

  We were home.

  I WOKE UP the next morning to the smell of roasting turkey. Dad was happily pirouetting from sink to oven to countertop. He wore a floral apron, and his forehead was smeared with a large dab of something pinkish brown. “Happy Thanksgiving!” he said. “I am thankful for you, firstborn!”

  “Yeah, same to you,” I said, which was all the holiday spirit I could muster. Three minutes ago I’d been unconscious. I went to the pantry for some cereal.

  “Ah ah ah,” said Dad, waggling his finger. “We’re fasting till the grand meal.”

  “Dad! I’m starving.”

  “Hunger,” he pronounced, “is the best spice.”

  “What time are we eating?”

  “Six.”

  “There’s no way—”

  “Chef makes the rules!” Dad seemed loopy. Probably from low blood sugar.

  “You’ve got something on your face,” I told him.

  “Ooh,” he said, scraping it off and examining it. “Giblets.”

  * * *

  —

  BY THREE, I was about to pass out. My stomach felt like it was eating itself.

  The turkey was still in the oven. The other preparations were done. Dad’s sister and her husband had arrived from Ely, and once Aunt Karen, Uncle Foster, Mom, Dad, and Flynn were deep in a game of Scrabble, I snatched a bag of pretzels and made a break for it.

  Ruth was already by the pigpen. Her cheeks were as full as a squirrel’s in October. “Sneaking food?” I said.

  “Of course not.” She swallowed. “I was visiting Jim Bob.”

  “Sure. Uh-huh. I got pretzels. What’d you get?”

  “Hummus.” She pulled it from behind her back. “I was desperate. I grabbed the first thing I saw. Thank goodness you got something we can dip. I was licking it off a twig.”

  We brushed the snow from the downed tree and sat. “I haven’t been so hungry since the last time we got sent to bed without dinner,” Ruth said. “Remember? The tinsel and the blowtorch?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said quickly. “No need to get into details.” I stuffed food into my mouth. “Wow,” I said, muffled. “This is amazing.”

  “Hunger is the best spice,” said Ruth.

  We munched. When we were finished, Ruth tried to pick up snow all subtly, but come on, I’m a native. You’re not going to fool me. Before she even started to pack it, I’d sprinted behind the pigpen to scoop my first snowball. It was a free-for-all. We were both panting, moving fast, snatching snow and packing it and flinging it at each other.

  A small figure darted across my vision. I had just packed a giant snowball, and all my instincts told me to hurl it. I nailed the person in the head.

  “Hey!”

  It was an Andrezejczak. A very bundled Andrezejczak. I couldn’t tell which one.

  “Pause!” I yelled to Ruth. �
�Armistice!”

  The Andrezejczak took down her hood. It was Olivia. “It’s clear now!” she called back. Lila and Tabitha came out from behind the garage.

  “Wait,” said Ruth. “They stayed on safe ground while you went out?”

  “That’s me,” said Olivia.

  “You’re like the one poor penguin that the others shove into the water to test for seals,” said Ruth.

  Olivia dumped a load of snow from the hood of her coat. “That’s me.”

  Lila and Tabitha marched up. “Hello, Ruth. Hello, Soren,” said Lila. “Have you guys eaten yet?”

  “Nope,” said Ruth. “Nothing.”

  “So why are you outside?”

  “The adults and Flynn are playing Scrabble.”

  “Same at our house!” said Tabitha.

  “It’s awful,” said Olivia.

  “We aren’t allowed to make any noise,” said Lila.

  “Us neither!” said Ruth.

  “Ethan keeps bluffing,” said Olivia, “but Great-Aunt Ermintrude would have to be the one to challenge, since her turn’s after his, and she never does—”

  “She keeps being like, ‘I declare, this young man’s vocabulary is enormous!’ after he’s played a word like KINJROG, which he claims is an Icelandic knitting needle—” said Lila.

  “Our parents are furious—he’s beating them by like six hundred points—” said Olivia.

  “We had to escape,” said Tabitha.

  “How’d that thing go?” said Ruth.

  “What thing?” I said.

  “Just a thing they were planning,” said Ruth airily. “A secret thing.”

  “It went perfectly,” said Lila.

  “He was so mad,” said Tabitha, biting her bottom lip in a devilish smile.

  “Come on,” I said. “Tell me.”

  Olivia took pity on me. “Let’s just say mayonnaise went in a place mayonnaise should never go.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

  “We put it in Ethan’s shampoo bottle.”

  “Oh. Wow.” I really hoped Ruth wouldn’t take any little-sister inspiration. “That’s bad.”

  “You should try it on your mom.”

  “About that…” I glanced at Ruth. “I’m retiring from pranking.”

  I have to admit, I was hoping the announcement would go like it had with Mom and Dad. Shock, sadness, people telling me I was the talent of a generation, etc. But the triplets just got aha expressions. “So that’s why Alex emailed us,” said Olivia.

  “She emailed you?”

  “Complaining about you,” said Tabitha.

  “And also—” said Olivia, but Lila kicked her and she shut up.

  “And also what?” I said.

  “And also, Soren,” said Tabitha, “on the way over here, I found something you might be interested in.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Come here.”

  “What is it?” I took a couple of steps toward Tabitha—

  And she stuffed a massive snowball into my face.

  I forgot about everything else. It was on.

  Ruth took my side, Skaars versus Andrezejczaks. We ranged over the whole yard, our fort behind the pigpen, theirs in the vegetable garden. We’re better at throwing but they’re more vicious, so it was an even match.

  We’d just called time-out to catch our breaths and stockpile ammo when we heard footsteps. It was Flynn, looking wan and pinched.

  “Soren?” he said. “It’s time to feed Cah and Croach.”

  “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “They need to be fed at four p.m. exactly. That’s how the experiment works.”

  “We haven’t been fed yet today.”

  “That’s irrelevant. Do you know anything about science?”

  And everything Mom told me about Being Kind and Acting Like the Person I Want to Be, all that stuff disappeared the way snow disappears in hard rain. It didn’t even have a chance. Here I was, making the ultimate sacrifice, retiring from pranking, infuriating my best friend—and there he was, acting like a jerk.

  I was holding a giant snowball I’d been working on, hard-packed with crunches of ice, and I threw it at him.

  Not that hard.

  Not that soft, either.

  It hit him in the face. He wasn’t wearing a coat. It exploded all over him. His hair was covered with drifts of snow. His mouth was a small, perfect O.

  Everyone gaped, shocked. A few seconds passed. I guess they were seconds. It felt like a month.

  In a very small voice, Olivia said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I know.” I kicked the snowball pyramid I’d built, and then I kicked its ruins. They were staring like I was an exhibit at the zoo. “Stop looking at me,” I said.

  “You’re destroying all our ammo,” said Ruth.

  “I don’t care. I’m done with this stupid game. I’m going to go feed my real friends.”

  I stomped toward the house. When I was almost in, I heard Tabitha say, “His real friends are cockroaches?”

  “They have names,” said Flynn. “And personalities.”

  They all laughed. I slammed the door.

  ON MONDAY, Ms. Hutchins’s skin had the delicately crumpled look of an undershirt that’s been in the corner of your room for a week. I guess I wasn’t the only one who’d had a rough Thanksgiving. “Today,” she said, “you’ll be writing a reflection on how your science-fair experiment is going. And yes, it will be graded.”

  Jéro scooched his desk toward Lila’s, but Ms. Hutchins lifted her hand. “Nope. This is an individual assignment.”

  “But what if our reflections don’t match?” said Jéro, eyeing Lila.

  “What if one of us has a much better reflection than the other?” said Lila, eyeing Jéro.

  “What if one of us makes unfair accusations about the other’s quality of work?”

  “What if—”

  “Class, you have the rest of the period to write,” said Ms. Hutchins. “If you have a question, save it for tomorrow. If you have an urgent question, consider whether it’s actually urgent.”

  She returned to her desk.

  “If you need me, and you shouldn’t, I’ll be over here. Just me, my coffee, and my frayed sense of self, trying to forget that my in-laws…”

  We couldn’t hear her anymore, but her mouth was still moving. Nobody in their right mind would have asked her a question. Nobody would have even asked to go to the bathroom. Sometimes it’s better to hold it.

  I read the first prompt from the board.

  1. What have you learned so far from your research?

  For his individual report, Flynn was researching the chemistry of nitrogen fertilizers. I was writing a paper called Indestructible: The Life and Times of the Modern American Cockroach.

  I have learned many fun facts about cockroaches. For example, did you know a cockroach can live for a week without its head? Plus, they can run three miles an hour. And if you’re thinking, “Hey, I’m faster,” well, your legs are also a hundred times longer.

  I have also learned that cockroaches cannot twerk.

  I read the next question.

  2. What have you learned about working with a partner?

  I untwirled the spiral of my notebook.

  I didn’t want to answer that.

  Everyone else was working. Soup wore the constipated look he always gets when he has to think. Freddy kept digging around in his ear with his pencil, so it kind of looked like he was writing with a quill dipped in earwax. Jéro and Lila were each hunched over, scribbling fast and furious, trying to outdo—a.k.a. out-tattle—each other.

  Flynn was rotating his pencil inside the Statue of Liberty–shaped sharpener he kept in a
n Altoids tin. A curl of shaving dropped onto his desk. He glanced at me. I jerked my eyes away, but I knew he’d seen me looking.

  “Ten minutes, class,” said Ms. Hutchins. “When you’re finished, stack your notebooks on my desk.”

  I have learned many things about working with a partner.

  I always start by repeating the question. It makes your answer look longer.

  Sometimes you have to compromise

  I tried to erase, since we hadn’t done much compromising. But my pencil had the worst eraser ever. All it did was smear pencil guck around my paper.

  I scratched out compromise and wrote split up the work.

  Evenly dividing the work is important. That way, you can do your thing and your partner can do theirs and you don’t have to talk.

  “Five minutes.” People had started to file past me to turn in their notebooks.

  Though it’d probably be way more fun if we actually worked together, so it’s kind of sad the way it’s ended up

  Where did that come from? I tried to erase. But no, not with this cruddy pencil.

  “Two minutes.”

  and that’s why you should let us choose our own partners next time.

  I looked hurriedly up at the board.

  3. If you could start over, what would you do differently?

  I scrawled:

  What I would do differently would be

  “One minute.”

  Rats. I scribbled as fast as I could.

  to not get in fights with everyone. I actually hate fighting. And if Flynn and my sister hadn’t already been mad at me, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal when Jim Bob

  I scratched out that last part so hard I made a hole in the paper.

  when something unfortunate happened, but now Flynn will never forgive me. (Ruth has mostly forgotten.)