How to Survive Middle School

by Donna Gephart

  “I’m done for the day,” Dad says.

  Atop the stairs, Sophie says, “Is she annoying or what?”

  I shrug, thinking about how Mom used to read Elliott’s aura or talk about his energy field when he came over. Elliott and I would laugh about it later, but it was embarrassing, especially the time Mom told him he was Julius Caesar’s bodyguard in a past life. “Your mom seems okay,” I say.

  I think I’m taking Sophie to my room to show her one of my TalkTime videos, but I detour instead to Lindsay’s door. I know I’m here to show off Sophie. “My sister’s room,” I say, and knock.

  Just as Lindsay yells, “Enter,” I remember that she might have zit-be-gone cream slathered all over her face.

  “Maybe we should go to my room instead.”

  “Come in!” Lindsay yells in a ferocious voice.

  I crack the door open. “Hey, Linds, you busy?”

  She swivels around from her computer. “Of course I’m busy, moron. I’m in high school now.” Her face is zit cream free.

  I sigh and open the door all the way to let Sophie in.

  “Oh, hi,” Lindsay says. “You’re not Elliott.”

  What is it with people?

  “This is Sophie. She came over to work on a project.”

  “Hey, Sophie.”

  When Sophie wanders to Lindsay’s CD rack, I’m afraid my sister’s going to yell at her to get away from her stuff, but she doesn’t. Instead, she gives me two thumbs up.

  My neck gets warm.

  “You like Ben Harper?” Lindsay asks.

  Sophie shrugs. “My mom makes me listen to classical CDs. I wish I had a collection like this.”

  “I can burn anything you like,” Lindsay offers.

  “Really?”

  “Definitely.”

  Thank you, Lindsay Melanie Greenberg, for being nice to Sophie. And for not having zit-be-gone cream on your face.

  I pull my shoulders back. “We’re heading to Bubbe’s now.”

  “Good luck,” Lindsay says, and flops onto her bed.

  When we’re out of the room, Sophie whispers, “I like your sister.”

  “She’s okay. Sometimes.”

  Downstairs, Ms. Meyers is still chatting with Dad, so I grab Sophie’s elbow, and we duck past the kitchen and head to Bubbe’s apartment.

  Sophie’s peppermint whisper on my ear surprises me. “What’s a Bubbe?”

  I lean close. “Yiddish word for ‘grandmother.’”

  “Oh,” Sophie says as Bubbe’s door swings open. Her apartment smells like cinnamon.

  “Bubbe, this is Sophie, one of my friends from school.”

  Bubbe takes Sophie’s cheeks in her wrinkly palms. “I’m so glad to meet one of David’s little friends.”

  “Uh, Bubbe,” I say, pulling Sophie out of her clutches, “we stopped by to say hi, but have to head up to my studio now.”

  “Oh. Your studio.” Bubbe pretends to grab onto lapels and struts around her living room. “Even a big-shot star needs to eat.” Bubbe winks at Sophie, grabs our hands and guides us to the table in her tiny kitchen. “You can go to your studio after you nosh on a little Jewish apple cake. Just baked.”

  Sophie stares at Bubbe with wide eyes, and I can’t tell if she likes Bubbe or is overwhelmed.

  “Eat, bubelahs!” Bubbe says, sliding plates of cake in front of us, along with glasses of soy milk.

  I hope Sophie doesn’t think soy milk is weird.

  Bubbe watches us eat. Every bite. You can’t refuse Bubbe. A Jewish grandmother trying to feed you is more persuasive than the heads of the Mafia, the CIA and the FBI combined.

  “It’s delicious,” Sophie says about twenty-seven times. “May I have the recipe?”

  I know she’s just kissing up, but it makes Bubbe glow. “Of course, sheyn ponem.”

  Sophie tilts her head.

  “Tell you later,” I whisper.

  The minute Sophie enters my room, she zooms to Hammy’s cage, opens the lid and cups Hammy in her hands. “Mom won’t let me have pets,” Sophie says, nuzzling Hammy’s fur. “Too many germs. Too much trouble. Allergies. Shedding. Blah. Blah. Blah.” Sophie kisses Hammy on top of his head. “You are the cutest thing ever,” she coos to him. “You don’t have any bad germs, do you?”

  Lucky hamster!

  I walk over and pet Hammy with my fingertip. “Now you’ve met the whole family. This is Hammy the—”

  Sophie lets out a peel-the-wallpaper-off-the-walls shriek.

  Before I can restart my heart and ask what’s wrong, Sophie’s mom bursts through the door.

  How’d she get up here so fast?

  “What?” Ms. Meyers’s eyes are the size of matzo balls.

  She rushes to Sophie and flings her arms around her shoulders. “Oh, thank goodness I hadn’t left yet. What’s—” That’s when Ms. Meyers notices Hammy in Sophie’s hands and leaps backward.

  Sophie cracks up, holding Hammy way out in front of her.

  “What’s going on?” Dad asks, stepping into the room.

  “Yeah, what’s going on?” Lindsay asks, pushing past Dad.

  Sophie offers Hammy up like a gift. “He … he … peed on me.” She bursts out laughing again.

  Lindsay laughs, too, then me, then Dad. It’s contagious, but Ms. Meyers doesn’t catch it. She rummages through her purse with a vengeance and thrusts a container of antibacterial liquid at Sophie. “Here.”

  Sophie takes the bottle.

  I put Hammy back into his cage and lead Sophie to the bathroom to wash her hands. When we return, Dad is scrubbing the carpet with an old washcloth, and Sophie gives the antibacterial stuff back to her mom, who retrieves it with a tissue.

  “Sophie, are you ready to go?”

  “Mom,” she says, “I just got here.”

  “Well …” Ms. Meyers looks at Hammy.

  “She’s welcome to stay for dinner,” Dad says.

  “Yeah,” Lindsay says, secretly winking at me. “Bubbe cooks great dinners.”

  Ms. Meyers looks at each of us as though she’s deciding if we’re serial killers. Then she looks at Sophie, who is nodding like crazy. “I guess that’ll be okay. I do have to run a few errands. How about if I pick you up at”—she looks at her watch—“seven-thirty?”

  “Yes,” Sophie says.

  Her mother comes over and whispers something in her ear.

  “I won’t touch the hamster,” Sophie says.

  After Ms. Meyers leaves, Sophie says, “She probably stayed all that time to make sure I was okay.” Sophie shakes her head. “Maybe she was afraid I’d be mauled to death by your hamster.”

  My treacherous hamster is buried under wood shavings, asleep. “Yeah,” I say, “Hammy’s pretty dangerous. He’s also sort of famous.”

  “What?”

  “He’s on YouTube. I’ll show you.”

  At the computer, I pull up our Hammy Time video on YouTube. “I made this one with my friend Elliott,” I say, that familiar ache in my stomach. “It was right after I got Hammy.”

  In the video, Hammy’s up on his hind legs, and Elliott and I edited it to make it look like he’s holding a microphone and singing while that old song “U Can’t Touch This” plays in the background. We dubbed in Elliott’s voice to make it say “Hammy time” instead of “Hammer time.”

  “Oh my gosh,” Sophie says, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. “That’s so cute. Play it again.”

  Sophie watches the video six more times. “Why don’t you have more views and comments?” she asks. “This is too funny to have only four comments.”

  “We never told too many people.” I think of Tommy Murphy’s words. “Besides, our videos are kind of lame.”

  “Lame!” Sophie says. “You mean hilarious.” She leans next to me and takes over the keyboard.

  “What are you—”

  “I’m sending the link to my e-mail address. Did you make other ones?”

  I’m afraid she’ll think I’m a giant dork, but I hol
d my breath and show her the TalkTime video I made with Magazine Cover Jon Stewart.

  Sophie laughs in all the right places and sends that link to her e-mail address, too.

  “I love your Top Six and a Half list, David. Does your sister know about—”

  “No,” I say. “Or I don’t think I’d be here right now.”

  “Gotcha,” Sophie says. “I can’t believe you don’t have like a million views.”

  I feel heat creep up my neck.

  “I’m going to send the links to my homeschool network.”

  “Your what?”

  Sophie pushes hair out of her face. “You know, a network of other kids who are homeschooled.”

  “How many is that?”

  She leans back. “In the United States or internationally?”

  My eyes widen.

  “It’s pretty big.”

  My first thought is that I want to tell Elliott that all these homeschooled kids will be watching our videos, but then I remember. Elliott and I aren’t friends anymore. He made that mean joke about my mom today. And I said something just as mean about his dad. How have things gotten like this between us?

  “You okay?” Sophie asks.

  I nod, even though I’m not.

  She points to one of the comments for the video. “Who’s Matzo Ball Mama?”

  I nod toward downstairs. “Bubbe.”

  Sophie laughs and covers her mouth. “That explains what she wrote: ‘Excellent video, but lose the bit about your sister, mister!’”

  “That’s what I get for showing her how to use YouTube.”

  “Who’s LADM?” Sophie asks, pointing to the screen. “He wrote, ‘Two thumbs up. If you see only one video this year, make it this one.’”

  “No clue,” I say, “but he writes really nice comments on our videos.”

  “Cool. A mystery fan. I’m totally going to let my friends know about this.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You should be on WHMS in the morning, David.” She waves her hand. “You know, reading the school news.”

  I sit taller. “You think?”

  “You’d be great.”

  “I don’t even know where the TV studio is at Harman.” My stupid voice cracks. What if I was on WHMS and my voice cracked with the whole school watching?

  “I think it’s in the media center. When I went today during lunch, I saw a door that said ‘WHMS News’ on it.”

  Sophie is leaning back on my bed, her curly hair swinging loosely.

  I inhale a faint whiff of peppermint.

  “David?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’d better get started.”

  “Oh, right.” I type the Web address for Wikipedia.

  By the time Bubbe calls us for dinner, we have three pages of notes about Albert Einstein.

  “I didn’t know some of this stuff,” I say. “He was pretty amazing.”

  “See?” Sophie says. “Einstein was the perfect choice, right?”

  I look at Sophie hunched over her notebook, curly red hair framing her face.

  “Yeah.” I let out a long, slow breath. “Perfect.”

  Bubbe carries a plate of sweet-smelling blintzes into the dining room. My stomach rumbles. Lindsay follows with a dish of sour cream, and Dad’s got a salad in one hand and dressing in the other. We take our places at the table, but there’s an empty seat. Mom’s old seat.

  “Where’s Sophie?” Lindsay asks.

  “She was right behind me.” Feeling awkward about losing my guest on her first visit, I call from the dining room, “Sophie?”

  From the living room comes a deep, throaty horn blast.

  Dad’s fork slips from his fingers and clatters to the table.

  Bubbe’s hand goes to her mouth.

  And Lindsay looks at me with her jaw dangling. She’s the first to move; then we all rush toward the living room.

  Sophie stands between the TV and the coffee table, holding Mom’s tuba—Mom’s tuba!—with air squirreled in her cheeks for her second blow.

  Don’t!

  She blows with gusto, and a loud blast comes from the bowels of the tuba.

  A tiny noise escapes Dad’s throat.

  The last time we heard that tuba was about two years ago in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the sounds from the tuba that woke me, though. It was my parents’ screaming at each other.

  “Anita, you can’t play the tuba in the middle of the night. You’ll wake the kids.”

  Lindsay and I crouched on the top step, held hands and listened.

  “You don’t let me do anything, Alan,” Mom shrieked. “Anything at all.”

  “If by ‘anything’ you mean stopping you from buying those damn figurines by the armful while we’re going broke, then yeah, Anita, I don’t let you do anything. Or holding séances when Lindsay brings her girlfriends over. Yeah, I kind of frown on that, too.”

  “I’m suffocating here,” Mom shrieked. “Suffocating!”

  Lindsay squeezed my hand so tight it hurt.

  There was silence; then Mom wailed, “Alan, I can’t—”

  “It’ll be okay, Anita,” Dad said softly. “It’ll be okay.”

  A few days later, Mom left.

  Sophie moves the tuba from her lips and bursts out giggling.

  When she’s met with stone silence, she puts the tuba back in the corner, wipes her lips with the back of her hand and says, “Sorry. Mom taught me how to play the trumpet. I just thought …”

  Her voice trails off.

  Bubbe looks at Dad’s fallen face and rushes to Sophie. “That was lovely, Sophie. Just lovely.” Bubbe guides Sophie past us, into the dining room. “But dinner’s getting cold,” she says. “And it’s a shame to eat my blintzes cold. Wait till you taste them. Lots of sweet cheese and blueberries.”

  When nobody says anything while we eat, Sophie nudges me with her foot under the table.

  “So,” I say. “We found out one very interesting fact about Einstein.”

  “That he was way smarter than you?” Lindsay says.

  Bubbe shoots Lindsay a look.

  “No,” I say. “Well, yes, but … he was an Ashkenazi Jew.”

  “We’re Ashkenazi Jews,” Bubbe says. “Your zeyde—God rest his soul—and I were both from eastern Russia.”

  “Wait a second.” I run to the kitchen to get paper and a pencil.

  “Where were you from again?”

  “Eastern Russia,” Bubbe says, her cheeks stuffed with blintze. “Why?”

  “School assignment.”

  “Oh,” Sophie says. “I had to do that, too. But ours was due today.”

  My blintze goes down hard. “Yeah, we, um … So, Dad, where were Mom’s parents from?”

  Dad parks his fork midway between plate and mouth. “Hmmm. I think her mother was from Austria.”

  “Like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Sophie says.

  “Yes, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I can’t remember where her father’s from.” Dad shakes his head. “It’s sad they died so young.”

  “David,” Lindsay says, stabbing her blintze with her fork, “why don’t you call and ask Mom? Oh, that’s right. You can’t. She doesn’t have a—”

  “That’s enough!” Dad says.

  I glare at Lindsay but go back to eating.

  No one says another word the rest of the meal.

  “Your family’s quiet when they eat,” Sophie says as we stand by the door, waiting for her mom to arrive.

  I can’t tell her the truth—that remembering Mom has a way of doing that to us. It’s been two years now, and sometimes I wonder if it’ll ever get easier.

  “Yeah.” I shrug. “They’re kind of weird about that.” Shut up, David. “Afraid of choking or something.” Really, shut up. “I choked on a nickel when I was little.” Oh my gosh! Shut up!

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I saved it in a jar in my closet.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s sort of green now.” Please strike me
dead. SHUT UP!

  Sophie’s mom runs up our steps at exactly 7:29, holding a plastic bag out to Sophie. “Look what I found.”

  Sophie pulls out a paperback book with Einstein on the cover.

  “Ta-dah!” Ms. Meyers says. “For your project.”

  “The New Quotable Einstein?” Sophie says. “You bought us a book about Einstein? We can do our project by ourselves, Mom.”

  Ms. Meyers looks down. “I just thought …”

  I take the book from Sophie. “This is great, Ms. Meyers,” I say quietly. “It will be real helpful for our project.”

  But Sophie still looks upset. “Let’s go,” she says, storming down the steps.

  Ms. Meyers looks at me awkwardly. “Thanks for having Sophie for dinner.”

  “No problem,” I say.

  “I can thank him myself,” Sophie yells. She gives me a quick salute, gets in the car and slams the door.

  After they leave, I head to my room and glance through the book Sophie’s mom bought us. Even though it seemed to make Sophie mad, there are some great quotes. I mark off the ones I think would work well in our video, then go to my closet and pull out the box of letters from Mom. Sophie, you have no idea how lucky you are.

  I pull a piece of paper and a pen from a drawer in my desk.

  Dear Mom,

  I want to write to Mom about Sophie and our project, maybe even mention how Sophie’s not so nice to her mom.

  But all I end up writing is

  Where was your father born? It’s for a school assignment.

  Love you,

  David

  I know if she answers, it will be too late for the assignment, but I want to know anyway. It feels like I lost so much after Mom left. I don’t want to lose my history, too. A person should be able to find out where he came from.

  I address and stamp the letter, then say good night to Hammy. Before getting into bed, I switch off the ringer on the phone in case Elliott or Tommy gets any more brilliant early-morning ideas.

  I need a good night’s sleep tonight.

  In the morning, Dad is in the living room, sitting near Mom’s tuba.

  “Hey,” I say.

  When he turns toward me, I see that his eyes are red-rimmed. “How ya doing, champ?”

  I know he was sitting here thinking about Mom. I wonder if he’s thinking about the last time she played that tuba, and I wonder if it makes him as sad as it made me. Probably.