by Susie Salom
“So, that’s why you haven’t been on NAVS chats?”
“That’s why I haven’t been on anything. Or why my mom didn’t get me a phone this year like she said she would before Dad left. We have a landline again.”
“What’s a landline?” I ask.
“It’s a phone you hook into the wall.”
“But how do you carry it out of the house?”
“You don’t,” she says.
“Well, has getting rid of the electronics helped your mom feel better?” Marcy asks.
“I don’t know,” Brooke says. “A little, I guess. I don’t know.”
“Brooke, I’m so sorry,” I say. I can’t believe Brooke’s mom gets sick from the Internet.
“I did read an email from Sheroo at my dad’s,” Brooke says.
“And?”
“She asked if you’re really on NAVS. I told her you’ve been coming to the meetings but that I don’t know if your mom is going to let you compete since technically you’re not allowed to be on the team.”
“You still haven’t told your mom?” Marcy asks me. “You are adventuresome.”
“I’m not adventuresome.” I roll onto my back and lay flat on the ledge, trying to stare past the pinkish night clouds out the window and straight to the stars. “I’m a tropical fruit basket with jicama for brains. Which you’ve already picked. I’m a picama brain.” I turn my head to face them. “You guys have to help me figure a way out of this. It’s been driving me crazy for, like, years.”
“Years, Kyle?” Brooke says.
“You should invite Mrs. A. over for dinner,” Marcy tells me. “Invite her to your house and have her tell your mom all the wonderful things you’ve been up to.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Brooke puts in. “There’s no way the team would have gotten this far with the solution if it wasn’t for you.”
Hmmmm.
“But you’d better do it quick because we have only like, what? Three weeks until the challenge?”
“Two.”
The more I stare at the ceiling and turn it over in my head, the more I think Marcy might be a pure and simple Einstein. I mean, maybe if I did invite Mrs. A. for dinner and she started bragging to my family about how well I’ve done with NAVS, Mom would feel pretty bad forcing me to back out after that.
I could bring it up tomorrow, once Mom gets something nice for herself at the shops and is in a snazzy mood. I imagine myself in one of those old monster movies where the camera starts to close in on the main scientist’s sweating face and he says in this big, shaky voice, ‘It’s got to work. It’s just got to.’
“So, do you really have a crush on Chris Dixey?” Brooke asks me.
Good ol’ Christopher Dixey. Wonder if his freckle’s even flirtier in Helena.
“Not really,” I tell her. “To be honest, I guess I’m kind of over him now.”
“Well, just so you know, I wouldn’t have emailed him if I’d known you were in love with him,” Brooke tells me.
“But I thought you said people aren’t passwords,” I say. “I mean, it’s not like you would have been stealing him from me. After all, you’re the one he gave his address to.”
Fair’s fair.
“I know,” Brooke says after a little bit. “I wouldn’t have technically been doing anything wrong. I guess people just have to work out their own values. And I think, according to mine, I wouldn’t have written him if I’d known all along that you liked him.”
“Values,” I say. “You mean, like a code?”
“I guess.”
I lie perfectly still in the half darkness and pull the blankets up to the bottoms of my eyes. Whenever I come to the cabins, I have this terrible fear that a daddy longlegs will crawl up my nose while I’m sleeping and lay eggs in it.
Values.
Mine are all totally bent up and … oh, who am I kidding? I don’t even have a code. Unless my code is to do what you gotta do in the moment and then worry about the consequences later.
Truth or Dare can be kind of a crud-muffin game sometimes. I’m not even in the mood to tag Roger with mustard anymore.
The shops. Are so. Boring!
I hate the shops! Not even having Brooke and Marcy with me is making them fun because we have to walk like fifty jillion blocks to go into what looks like the same store with the same decorations for the house over and over and over. I’m pretty sure I’m going to melt into a quiet puddle of desperation, right there in front of one of the cash registers, when something catches my eye.
It’s a magic kit. With a picture of a wand and scarves of all different colors and a trick card set with trick dice on the box and everything. I wanna look inside so bad I peel back the top a little—it was already kind of opening—and try to slide a pinky through. I’ve always wanted to be a magician. Well, I mean not always, but maybe I should explore the possibility now.
“Hon, ya gonna pay for they-at?”
The lady behind the register has hair in a pinkish bun with huge, rolling bangs. She’s snapping a piece of gum and has gigantic boobs with a religious necklace kind of squishing between them.
“Cuz if ya ain’t gonna pay fawr it, ya caint be openin’ it.”
I hug the kit to my chest. “I’m thinking about it.”
“Well, think ’bout it with yer head, sugar pie, not with yer hainds.”
I nod and rush off to find Mom. As I turn the corner to get away from the amazing Madam Raspberry, I come face to face with the worst possible nightmare of all imaginings and horror.
Mom is talking to Mrs. A.
Mrs. A.!
Of all the boring shops in all the mountain villages of all the world, my NAVS sponsor had to walk into this one.
I creep up behind a shelf of garden gnomes and peek over the red pointy hat on one of them.
“Kyle has been doing very well this term,” I hear Mrs. A. telling Mom. “She’s bright and engaging and consistently warm with the other students in the class.”
“Well, that’s certainly good to hear,” Mom says. “After our bumpy beginning.”
Pleasedon’tmentionNAVSpleasedon’tmentionNAVSpleasedon’tmentionNAVS.
“Well, a lot of good has come out of that rough start,” Mrs. A. says. “She’s really impressed us with her engineering ingenuity.”
Ingenuity? What’s ingenuity? Since when am I an engineer?
“I think a lot of the work done by the NAVS members has developed because of a seminal idea Kyle contributed early on. Together, they’ve made wonderful progress with the mechanism she and the other students have since refined to guide one of their own through the maze.”
There’s this terrible, horrible, terrible quiet right after Mrs. A. stops talking. I squeeze my eyes shut and wish I had paid attention that one time Mrs. Ockfatrea tried to teach me how to pray the rosary.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says in a funny voice, “but did you say—”
I know it’s desperate.
I know it’s crazy and that I can kiss my magic kit buh-bye if I go through with what I’m thinking, but I really don’t have a choice. As fast as I can, I scramble to the top of the tallest gnome on the ground and balance on his blue shoulders. Then I open my mouth to shout the one thing that will stop the conversation between Mrs. A. and my mom from growing one. More. Word.
“BEAR!”
I’ve never been kicked out of a store before.
But what’s worse is that Mom was asked to leave, too. I’ve never seen a face so red in my entire days on this earth. I would rather have been in the path of a mutant tomato waiting to roll over me than to be staring down Mom.
Marcy says what I did was bonkers but Brooke thinks it was kick. All Dad said when he found out what happened at the shop was, “The jig is up.”
All that night and the whole ride back home the next day, Mom barely speaks to me. She hardly even looks at me. Roger lets Brooke borrow one of his mp3 players so she’s listening to music almost the entire way, while Marcy teac
hes Meowsie sign language as they play everlasting Uno over the seat. I have a lot of time to think things through and here is what I come up with.
Number one, I shouldn’t have pretended to see a bear and scared all the customers. (Even though watching Madam Raspberry choke on her gum was classic.) Number two, I really should have told Mom like a billion years ago that I was still doing NAVS. Even if it was only at school and technically, I am free to roam anywhere I want between classes on campus.
Which leads me to number three: I’m sick of being grounded and I don’t want to spend the month of October the way I spent September.
Number four, that’s probably not up to me. What is up to me is what I do from now on.
It’s time for a code.
Obviously, I can’t keep ghosting the meetings. I’m gonna have to choose. If Mom ever talks to me again I either stand up to her and tell her I’m going to keep helping the team—even if she won’t let me officially participate—or I stop. But I’m not going to keep things the way they’ve been. I once heard someone on a talk show say that you have to own your choices and I had no idea what the schneck they meant then but I think maybe I do now.
It’s not that I all of a sudden think it’s fair that Mom grounded me from something I’m good at just because I biffed it a couple times at the beginning of the school year. But, looking back, I guess I also don’t think it was the best idea in the entire kingdom of ideas to play Powerball with the facts.
I look out the window and watch the trees morph back into grumpy green dwarfs.
Even though I’m determined to come up with a code and really stick to it, an eensy part of me still wishes I could pull a Freaky Friday and trade spots with Brooke right about now. It’d be so much easier.
I’d even wear her old stripy pants.
When we get home, Mom is still acting like I’m mold. The boarder staying with Marcy and Brooke’s dad come to pick them up and Mom is all teeth and politeness, but as soon as she shuts the door on everyone, it’s like I’m not alive. I almost wish she’d tell me what my punishment is going to be and just get it over with. This calm before the storm is making me want to run around the den with my hands over my head yelling, ‘The British are coming!’
I go into my room and see that a whole NAVS chat happened over the weekend while I was gone. It’s still up on my screen. I drop my bag of dirty clothes on the floor and pull out the chair in front of my computer.
Donzie: last two weeks before competition. anyone have anything they want to bring up at the meeting on monday?
MasterOfCeremonies: I definitely do. First order of business is to finalize what we’re going to strike the cables with.
Donzie: cameron’s right we can’t hold off on that any longer.
Logan: I wanna hear what fedora has to say
MasterOfCeremonies: Kyle?
I stare at the bag of laundry with my fedora tossed on top and think about the hats worn by the good guys in the Wild West. What does Fedora have to say, anyway?
Do I keep helping them? Do I stop? If I keep helping them, I’m going to have to sit down and have a talk with Mom and Dad about how I haven’t gone to anyone’s house but that I have been going to meetings before first bell and at recess.
I wish Mom would listen.
I wish I could actually show her all the work that I’ve done. It’s funny because here I am working on a communication system and I haven’t communicated with her at all.
There’s gotta be a word for when stuff like that happens.
I start to write a message to Meowsie on Instant.
the_amazing_kyle: hey what’s it called when say for example you own a coffee shop and you’re allergic to coff
“Kyle, your father and I need to speak with you.”
Mom knocks softly and I scratch my neck. I cross my room and open the door.
“In the kitchen,” she says. I stare at a bloop of mascara on one of her eyelashes and swallow. “Now.”
I follow her down the hall to the stairs. Her footsteps are all soft on the carpet. I keep my eyes on the ground and just feel really, really sad. I’m not going to be able to compete in the challenge. Will everyone else be forced to give up my ideas since I’m not an official member? Will they be mad at me? Brooke and Reed knew all along I was doing everything behind my parents’ back but will Cam and Donzie ever forgive me?
As Mom and I enter the warm, goldy light of the kitchen, I see Dad. He’s sitting at the dining room table with a cup of hot tea. I can see the steam coming off the top in little curlicues that get all relaxed before they disappear.
Circular power.
I glance up at Mom. She looks tired from all the driving and probably all the thinking. I never wanted to use my circular power to mess with her center of gravity. I’m just sorry, is all.
“Kyle, I think you know the basic issue that’s at stake here,” she says.
I nod but, really, I have no idea what the basic issue at steak is. What does that mean, anyway? I look at Dad’s tea, feeling hungry.
“I think what Mom’s getting at,” Dad says, “is that the main thing we’re dealing with here”—he tips his head a little then lifts a few fingers from his mug—“is trust.”
I scratch the tip of my nose. Why in the world does everything itch all of a sudden?
“When we send you on the bus to school,” Dad says, “we trust you’ll come back on the same one.”
“Dad, that was just—”
“Let your father finish, Kyle.”
“When we send you to your classes,” he says, “we trust that you’re not going to hit people.”
I take a breath and shake my head. Have I ridden the wrong bus home or punched one single bully since the first week of school?
“When you say you’re going to a meeting for a club,” Mom adds, “we trust that you’re not sneaking off to a swimming party when you’re supposed to be grounded.”
“Mom.” I feel like I’m gonna cry. This is so unfair.
“Kyle, the entire month of September, you were participating in something that I told you was off-limits.”
“But, Mom—”
“Just listen, Kyle,” Dad says. “Right now, silence is your strongest ally.”
Silence? Are they serious?? Are they still not going to listen to me?
“Mrs. Arceneau had a lot of complimentary things to say about you but you seem to look for ways to cancel out the good,” Mom says.
Forget Exploded Daughter Control. If I have to sit here at this table and listen to all of this without being allowed to say anything back, we’re gonna need state-of-emergency money from the government to put this kitchen back together.
“Kyle.”
I look at my dad’s face. He’s pretty handsome for an old guy. And he doesn’t even really look that old. My brain starts running fast. Dad said silence is my best ally but maybe my real best ally is sitting right in front of me.
“Your mom and I aren’t trying to make your life miserable.”
“I know,” I say, even though I only half believe it. “But Dad, it’s just like the salt.”
“The salt?” Mom and Dad say it at the same time.
“Yeah, the salt,” I say. “Mom thinks it’s super bad for you but without it at all, the food tastes grotesque.”
Mom cringes and I wince.
“What I mean is”—I swallow—“it’s not like salt’s the enemy. It’s the way everything comes together.”
Mom and Dad look at each other but don’t say anything so I grab my chance and run with it. Hard.
“Mom doesn’t want to put salt on the food because she cares about her family. But there’s more to health than just doing all the right things separately. It’s the big picture. Why live forever if you’re going to be eating food that makes you wanna blow chunks?” I take a quick breath. “You have to look at every side. It’s important to be healthy but part of being healthy is being happy. Which is why you’re learning to cook, right, Dad?”
“It’s important for you to be able to trust me,” I say, “but it’s also important for you to actually trust me.”
“Kyle, you repeatedly violated that trust.” Mom raises her voice.
“I know, I know,” I say, and feel so many different emotions, tears start to form a line in my throat. “The problem is two things. I didn’t tell the whole truth.”
“That’s a pretty big problem,” Dad says calmly.
“But you wouldn’t listen,” I tell them. “Afterward, I couldn’t explain to you that we were going to work on echolocation like with dolphins in Donna’s pool. I didn’t bring a towel because I was afraid you’d think it was a swimming party but it wasn’t. I’m sorry about that. But the truth is Mom got there right at the moment when we’d gotten in the water. It was a NAVS meeting.”
“Without a sponsor?” Dad raises both eyebrows.
My head falls back. “Why do parents think that kids can’t get together to work without having someone telling them what to do?” I ask the ceiling.
“Well, you weren’t working,” Mom says, still kind of loud. “You were having a water fight and you were grounded!”
“We started out with a water fight.” I look at her. “Don’t you guys have bagels before business meetings? I mean, can’t people warm up to work?”
“Kyle—” Mom lifts a palm. “You have been going behind our backs for a month.”
“I know.”
“That’s not trust!”
“I know! But can’t you see it works both ways?”
Mom wipes her face and gets up to grab a mug from the cabinet.
“Kettle still has water,” Dad tells her.
I like that Dad knows how to get mad without getting mad. I love him for it. I wish I was more like him in that way, actually. Then I wouldn’t even be in this stupid situation. I could kick Ino for having started this whole mess by being such a jerkswirl.