As Boogie tried out his signs, Sally tapped him on the shoulder after the last one. When he turned to look at her, she made the sign for Good! three times, moving her hand forward from her chin in a sort of bow.
Boogie didn’t think his feelings signs had been good, good, good. Well, maybe he had done better with feelings than Vera, Nolan, and Nixie, but he was still the worst of anyone at remembering the letters of the alphabet.
Sally tapped Boogie on the shoulder again and made a sign that seemed to mean she wanted him to go to the front of the room. Peg saw her and translated.
“Campers, watch Boogie! He’s doing a great job of signing feelings in a natural, believable way.”
Boogie came to the front of the room. What other choice did he have? But now he felt like someone acting in a not-very-good play called How to Show Your Feelings. Not like a real kid feeling happy, sad, or scared. Well, sort of like a real kid feeling scared. What if the other campers laughed? What if James started laughing, and then the others laughed along with him?
But to his surprise, the other campers clapped when he finished, after adding in the sign for worried, as well. He could hear Nixie bragging to the kids sitting behind her. “Boogie has a huge dog, too, and I walked him once!”
Peg demonstrated the Deaf way of applauding, by raising your hands, spreading your fingers, and twisting them silently in the air. Then the campers twisted their raised hands for Boogie, too.
As he headed back to his seat, he passed James. “Nice job, Boogie,” James mocked, making the scared sign in an extra-exaggerated way. James hadn’t joined in the hearing or the Deaf clapping.
Boogie thought about walking past James as if he hadn’t noticed. But he laughed and made the happy sign in reply, with an extra-happy grin.
He was happy right now, James or no James.
If he couldn’t buy a new Doggie-Dog head, Boogie would have to buy a whole new Doggie-Dog, the way his dad had suggested. Not so Bear could chew off this Doggie-Dog’s body. Boogie couldn’t bring himself to treat an innocent stuffed animal in that way. Besides, Bear didn’t need any encouragement for his chewing habits.
Boogie would make up some story about how a headless, dirty, worn-out dog had turned into a brand-new one, complete with unchewed head and clean, fresh fur. But first he had to get the brand-new one. How was he supposed to do that?
He couldn’t ask his mom to help him. She had already said she didn’t want to start that all over again.
He couldn’t ask his dad to help him. His dad was always at work. Not that his dad had taken Doggie-Dog’s tragedy very seriously, anyway.
So the only person he could ask was Nolan.
On Saturday morning he rode his bike to Nolan’s house. Instead of three younger brothers, Nolan had two older sisters. To them, Nolan was the baby of the family. Boogie bet that even as a baby Nolan had been brilliant. He grinned, imagining baby Nolan sucking on his ten fingers and ten toes and then saying, in an itty-bitty voice, Ten plus ten equals twenty.
Nolan’s house was neat and tidy, like the house of the Deaf family in the video. Boogie was sure if he lifted up the couch cushions he would find no empty potato chip bags or lost sets of car keys. But it was still cozy and homey.
The best thing in it was an orange elephant taller than Bing, made of fabric with dozens of tiny mirrors sewed into it, sparkling in the light from the living room fireplace. In Boogie’s house that elephant would have been ridden to death by T.J. and Gib, and Bear would have chewed off its trunk.
“I have a problem,” Boogie said, once he and Nolan were settled on the couch by the elephant with a plate of cookies baked by one of Nolan’s sisters who was taking a Food Fun class at her middle school. Boogie bit into the first one. “A-plus!” he mumbled over a mouthful of chocolate chips and walnuts. Even the cookies were better at Nolan’s house.
“I want to get Bing a new Doggie-Dog,” Boogie told Nolan after swallowing. “But I don’t know where to find one.”
“Let’s look online,” Nolan said.
Sure enough, after a few clicks by Nolan on his laptop—Nolan had his very own computer—there on the screen was a stuffed dog that looked exactly like Doggie-Dog, complete with head.
“Kids can’t buy things online,” Boogie pointed out. “We don’t have the right kind of cards to pay for them.”
“I’ll ask my mom to order one for us, and we can pay her back,” Nolan said. He checked the price. “It’s eighteen dollars, plus four dollars for shipping. No problem!”
No problem?
It might as well be a million dollars plus a hundred thousand dollars for shipping.
“I only have sixty-seven cents,” Boogie confessed.
“Well, I can pay her back now, and then you can pay me back later.”
Nolan made it sound so simple. Boogie thought about how much Bing missed Doggie-Dog. If he said, Thanks, Nolan, that would be great, Bing could be hugging a brand-new Doggie-Dog in a few days.
But then he imagined his mother saying to Nolan, Do you spend every penny of your allowance on junk food and even junkier toys, or do you save yours so you have money to buy nice things for other people? Never mind, I already know the answer to that one.
“That’s okay,” Boogie said. “I’ll save up the money, and then you can ask your mom to buy it for me.”
But with two dollars allowance a week, it would take the rest of Boogie’s life, practically, for him to buy Bing a new Doggie-Dog. Nolan would know how to do the math to figure out exactly how long, but Boogie wasn’t going to ask him. He couldn’t ask Nolan everything.
He’d just have to earn extra money somehow.
But how?
He wasn’t going to ask Nolan that, either.
* * *
By the middle of the second week of sign-language camp, Boogie loved every single thing about sign language except for the alphabet. Why did alphabets need twenty-six letters? It took forever for little kids to learn the plain old ABCs, even with a special catchy song made up to help them remember the letters in order. When he was little, Boogie had thought L-M-N-O-P was some weird letter with an extra-long name.
Now in camp they were signing the alphabet while chanting the ABC song very, very slowly, to give everyone enough time to get their hands in position for each letter. But it still wasn’t slow enough for Boogie to keep up.
If Boogie had been inventing sign language, he would have written each letter in the air with his pointer finger. Well, maybe that wouldn’t work, because the letters would look backward to the person reading them, like mirror writing.
If Boogie were teaching a sign-language camp, he would skip over the ABCs and go straight to the signs for actual words. But some of the word signs used the alphabet letters: for example, to sign the days of the week, you had to make M for Monday, T for Tuesday, W for Wednesday, and move each letter sign around in a small circle.
Anyway, Boogie wasn’t in charge of any of this.
On Wednesday, Sally made the sign for sad when Boogie still got stuck on most of the letters. And the sign for sad—those fake tears running down Sally’s cheeks—was sadder than spelling out sad would have been.
“Campers,” Peg said to the whole roomful of kids, “believe me, it will make a big difference if you practice the alphabet at home just ten minutes a day.”
But it was clear the only person who hadn’t learned his ABCs yet was Boogie. Even James, who acted like he didn’t care about sign language at all, had apparently managed to learn the letters just from the time spent on them in class. Boogie doubted that Nixie was practicing very hard, either. Everyone else just seemed better at memorizing alphabet letters than he was.
James caught Boogie’s eye and signed the letter L, one of the letters Boogie did know because it looked like the L kids made to call each other a loser. He knew that was how James meant it, too.
But loser did seem like a pretty good description of someone whose fingers still couldn’t remember the ABCs little Deaf kids learned when they were babies.
After the disastrous ABC practice that day, Peg and Sally showed a video of the Deaf family taking a walk in the park and signing the words for the things they saw on their way. For tree, they held their left arm flat as if it was the ground; they held their right arm with the elbow touching the back of the left hand, straight up like the trunk of a tree, and twisted their fingers like tree branches blowing in the wind. For bicycle, they moved their fists like feet pedaling.
Then Peg made an announcement. On Friday, they were going to have a camp field trip to an after-school program at a school across town. The students at Laurent Clerc School were all Deaf or hard-of-hearing.
“They will put on a special program for us,” Peg said as Sally signed. “But there will also be a chance for you to meet the students there and chat with them, showing how much ASL you have already learned in our camp’s first two weeks. So we will spend today and tomorrow learning some basic questions and answers for making conversation.”
Sally showed the campers how to sign What is your name? and What is your favorite food?, plus a few other things, and then it was time for the campers to practice with one another. At least the sign for Hi was an easy one: moving your hand out from your forehead in a sort of salute. Maybe Boogie could just say hi over and over again to lots of different people.
“What if we mess up?” Vera asked Boogie, Nolan, and Nixie. “What if none of those kids can understand a single thing we try to say? Or what if we try to make the sign for one thing, but it’s the sign for another thing, and the other thing is something really embarrassing?”
“We won’t,” Nixie promised her.
Nixie was always sure everything was going to be great.
“Or if we do, it’ll just be funny,” Nixie went on. “And they’ll laugh, and we’ll laugh. And maybe one of them will have a dog that just had puppies, and she’ll ask if we know anyone who has a good home for a puppy, and I’ll sign, YES! What do you think the signs would be for My dog just had puppies?”
“Oh, Nixie,” Vera said. “We could never understand the signs for a complicated thing like that. You know we couldn’t. Even Nolan couldn’t.”
Boogie certainly couldn’t. But at least it was unlikely any of the Deaf kids would quiz him on his ABCs.
* * *
“We could practice the alphabet together,” Nolan offered as he and Boogie sat side by side at the end of camp the next day waiting for their parents to come pick them up. Sally hadn’t made the sad sign after Boogie messed up the alphabet yet again. She had given Peg a look that might as well have been the sign for annoyed. “I’ve been having trouble remembering some of the letters, too,” Nolan added.
Liar! You never forget anything!
But Boogie didn’t say that out loud. He knew Nolan was just trying to be a good friend.
“I’m okay,” Boogie said cheerfully. “Maybe there will be a camp booby prize for worst at ABCs, and I’ll get it, and it’ll turn out to be something really cool. Remember that one birthday party we went to where the mom gave a prize to the kid who hadn’t won any of the other prizes, and it was this really great game, and the kids who won real prizes were mad because theirs were just candy and stickers?”
“We could even practice a little bit right now,” Nolan said, ignoring Boogie’s reply. “How about we start with M?”
“How about we don’t?” Boogie said, less cheerfully this time, and Nolan dropped the subject.
But that evening Boogie looked for his alphabet handout. He finally found it crumpled in the bottom of his backpack. He made himself practice for ten minutes. Then he figured he might as well practice for ten minutes more.
* * *
When Boogie got off the bus with the other campers on Friday and filed into the Deaf school, Laurent Clerc Elementary looked just like Longwood Elementary: office by the front door, student artwork hanging in the halls, gym with basketball hoops. But it didn’t sound like Longwood Elementary. To Boogie’s surprise it was much noisier! Footsteps pounded down the hallway; lockers slammed; he could hear kids laughing so loudly Boogie’s classroom teacher would have shushed them.
A group of the Deaf students were clustered by the stage at one end of the gym talking together in sign language. Even though Boogie knew he should have expected this, he was amazed by how fast the kids—some his age, some even younger—were moving their hands. The Deaf kids in the videos could sign fast, too, of course, but this wasn’t a video, it was real life.
Boogie couldn’t recognize any of their signs; they all went by so quickly. But the Deaf kids seemed to understand each other perfectly. One of them must have said something funny, because the others burst out laughing.
Boogie was glad he had practiced the alphabet last night. If the Deaf kids could do such amazing things with their hands and faces, he could at least try to learn the difference between M and N.
“Wow,” he heard Nixie say under her breath as she watched the Deaf students, too.
It was like the Olympics on TV, with the ice skaters leaping into the air and twirling three times before landing, only these were regular kids talking the way they did every day.
“Can you understand anything they’re saying?” Vera whispered to Nolan.
Nolan shook his head.
Boogie couldn’t tell if Vera was relieved or even more worried. If Nolan couldn’t figure out the Deaf kids’ signs, how could the rest of them have a conversation with anybody about anything?
At that moment, one of the Deaf teachers turned the gym lights off and on the way Peg and Sally did at camp, but he had to flash the lights at least ten times before the Deaf kids stopped moving their hands and looked instead at their teachers. It was clearly time for the program to begin.
The first number on the program was four kids dancing to music played super loud from large speakers on either side of the stage. They danced to the rhythm exactly as if they could hear every beat. One of the Deaf teachers, who spoke while he signed, explained that the students felt the rhythm from the vibrations of the pounding bass in the music. Also, deafness was a matter of degree; not all Deaf people were completely unable to hear any sounds at all.
Boogie had gotten his nickname because he used to boogie to music when he was Bing’s age. But whenever he danced, he ended up tripping over his shoes or bumping into somebody. These kids were as quick and graceful with their feet as they were with their hands.
Then the Deaf students took turns telling a bunch of very short stories, using the letters of the alphabet. It took Boogie a few moments to catch on, because they weren’t using the letters to stand for words that started with the letter, such as A for apple or B for bear, like in all the other ABC storybooks he had ever seen. Instead, they used the shapes of the letters, in order from A to Z, in all kinds of clever, funny ways. So, the closed fist for A knocked at a door; the four raised fingers for B moved to show the door opening, the cupped shape for C searched around to find something. Boogie could never have come up with something that creative in a million billion years.
For the final number on the program, all the kids in the Deaf after-school program sang along to “America the Beautiful” in ASL. It was easier for Boogie to pick out some of the signs this time because he already knew the words.
At the end of the program, the Longwood campers started whistling and cheering before Peg and Sally signaled to them to clap in the finger-waving Deaf way. Boogie saw that even James was clapping. He should be clapping. James couldn’t dance like that or tell stories like that or sign along to
a song.
Then it was time for refreshments and trying to sign with the Deaf kids. Boogie wished he knew the signs for amazing and fabulous and awesome. But he didn’t.
Were they just supposed to go up to somebody and start asking one of the questions they had learned? Boogie could tell the others felt shy, too, because Nixie, Nolan, and Vera hung back with him. Nixie didn’t look eager to ask if anybody had a dog with newborn puppies. Nolan didn’t look ready to demonstrate all the signs he had mastered. Vera looked as if she wanted to flee to a corner of the room and curl up with her art notebook. The other Longwood campers were standing fixed in place, too.
Somebody had to do something.
“Let’s go up to the dancer kids,” Boogie made himself say. “Come on.” He led the way to the food table.
Hi, Boogie signed. He pointed to himself and finger-spelled his name. Nolan and Nixie followed his example, but Vera stood frozen, her face looking like the expression for signing scared.
The four dancers finger-spelled their names. Luckily, Nolan recognized all the letters they signed and said each name aloud: Ben (Boogie had recognized the B and E, at least), Sam, Amy, and Lily.
Now what?
Boogie jumped in first again. He pointed to himself for I, crossed his arms in front of his chest for love, pointed to the dancers, and then made up his own sign for dance, by doing a crazy little jig.
The other kids laughed, but not in a mean James kind of way. The girl named Amy showed Boogie the real sign for dance, made with two fingers of one hand twirling upside down over the other hand, like two dancing legs on a dance floor.
Nixie jumped into the conversation next. She signed, as Boogie had known she would, I want a dog.
Boogie Bass, Sign Language Star Page 3