Calli Be Gold (16 page)

I opened my heart to Dad and he didn’t get it. This makes me all teary. I start to leave the kitchen; then I turn back. “I’m sorry I skipped out of the improv class, but I’m not going to be an actress, or anything else except a fifth-grade kid right now. And I bet if you asked Noah Zullo, he wouldn’t say I’m ordinary.”

“Who in the world is Noah Zullo?” Becca says as I’m running up the stairs.

“Just another ordinary kid,” I scream, and then slam the door to my room.

I grab the jeans from yesterday that are hanging over my chair, and pull the stone from the pocket. I rub it between my fingers, but as smooth as it may be, the stone isn’t making me feel calm at all.

lex knocks on the door to my room later. “Got any tape?” he asks, leaning lazily against my doorframe.

I tuck a bookmark inside my book. “Why?”

“I need it for a project,” he says. “Mom’s all out. She used the rest of the roll when she was fixing the rip in the Calendar.” He grins at me.

I get up and riffle through my desk drawers. I find a roll and toss it to him.

“Great,” he says, and to my surprise, he spreads out a poster board on my carpet and starts laying out pictures, diagrams, and pieces of paper with typed words. “D’ya mind?”

“It’s okay.… I was just reading.”

“So,” he says, arranging the items on the poster board, “I guess I missed the big scene.”

“Yeah.”

“You and Dad had it out?”

“Sort of,” I say, then look down at the poster board. “What are you doing?”

“Some stupid project for biology. The results of my botany experiment.”

“What was your experiment?”

“Giving plants water or Gatorade.”

“Oh. What happened?”

“I don’t know. The whole thing failed. Nothing grew.”

“Don’t tell Dad,” I say.

“Yeah … I had an A going in that class, too.”

Alex is still shifting things on the poster board when Becca flounces in. “Did you take my black tank top?”

“Me?” I answer.

“No, Alex,” she says. “Yes, you.”

“I’m not talking to you,” I snap.

“Oh, what, you’re mad?”

I glare at her. “Yes, I’m mad.”

“They were going to find out anyway,” she huffs.

“I wanted to tell them myself,” I say.

“Well, I saved you the trouble.”

I desperately want to say something she would say, like “You can leave now,” but all I can come up with is “Why do you think I have your black tank top?”

“Because it’s not in my closet, or the laundry, or my skating bag.”

“I didn’t take it.”

“Well then, where is it?”

“How would we know?” I look down at Alex but he hasn’t even glanced up.

Becca sneers at us, then stamps out.

Alex scratches his head. “Here’s a scary thought,” he says, his voice cracking. “You and I share the same genes with her.”

“Pretty scary.” I perch on the end of my bed. I realize that Alex has on shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. “Aren’t you cold in that?”

“Neh,” he says.

His legs have gotten a lot of hair on them, and I can see some hairs on his upper lip too. For some reason, this makes me sad. He looks different with all that hair. “Hey, Alex,” I say. “Do you remember when you used to pull me in the wagon?”

“Where should I tape this?” he says. “What, Cal?”

“The wagon? Alex? Do you remember?”

He shrugs and holds up a drawing of plant roots. “I don’t know where to put this,” he says. “I’m running out of room. I can’t fit everything.”

I glance down at his poster board. The frustrated look on Alex’s face reminds me of Noah’s when he says he can’t make stuff. I kneel next to Alex and start moving a few items, and pretty soon, I’ve rearranged the entire layout.

“Hey, that’s a lot better,” he says, and reaches for the tape. He tears off a strip and tries to press the two ends
together in a circle, then place it on the back of one of the drawings. The tape becomes crumpled and the drawing doesn’t lay flat on the poster board. “I hate tape,” he groans.

I laugh. “You do the tape; I’ll put it on the poster board, okay?”

The two of us work in silence until all the items are neatly taped down. He stands up and takes a look at it. “What do you think? Not a bad poster for a failed experiment, huh?”

“I think it looks good.”

“You want to know another thing I hate? Botany. Plants are the most boring things on earth,” he admits.

“I love plants. And trees. Didn’t you ever look up at a tree and feel completely amazed?”

He narrows his eyes. “To be honest, no.”

“Well, I guess I can see how studying plants could get kind of boring.”

“Kind of?”

I smile. “We haven’t done plants yet this year. I think we do that in the spring.”

He picks up the poster from the floor. “So you didn’t like the theater class, huh?”

“Not really.”

He raises his eyebrows. “I heard you cut.”

“Yeah.”

“And Becca told on you?”

I nod.

“She was wrong to do that,” he says. “And hey, Cal, with Dad … I think he’s got some, you know, issues.”

I sigh. “He just doesn’t get me.”

“Well, number three with a ‘C’ ”—Alex grins—“I think you’re challenging him, and he doesn’t know what to make of that.”

“Me?” Quiet little me, challenging Dad? “I just didn’t want to go to the improv class.”

“Things will work out,” Alex says. “Eventually. Okay, so, I gotta get to my algebra now. Thanks for helping me.”

I find my place in my book. Alex walks to the door, then stops and turns. “Cal.” He smiles at me. “I was just teasing you. I do remember the wagon.”

or the next few days, Dad works late and doesn’t make it home for dinner. Mom says he’s starting a big project at work, but I wonder if he’s avoiding me. The good thing: no ABC game. The bad thing: is he so mad that he doesn’t want to face me?

Becca has extra practices before the competition, so she isn’t around much either, and Alex is busy too.

One night, it’s just Mom and me for dinner, and she makes us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

“This is kind of fun, isn’t it?” she asks. “A change of pace.”

“Yeah.” I take a bite.

“I’m not used to all this quiet.” She looks around the
kitchen. “So, here we are, just the two of us. You have me all to yourself. What should we talk about?”

I can’t think of one thing. “I don’t know.”

“Polar bears?”

I shrug.

“Tell me about your fair.”

“I don’t feel like it right now.”

She sighs. “Do you want to talk about what happened the other night?”

“Maybe.”

She nods.

I stare at my sandwich. “Are you still mad I didn’t go to the class?”

“I’m not really mad anymore, no,” she says. “Disappointed, perhaps.” She looks at me. “Not in you, I think, but more in the way the whole situation unraveled.”

“Is Dad mad?”

She scratches her head. “He is, but to tell you the truth, more at himself than you. You touched a nerve. I knew he had some buried feelings about Joel and Marjorie and his childhood, but I didn’t know how strong they were.”

I shuffle the potato chips around on my plate. “Does he still want me to be an actress?”

She smiles. “I think he understands that’s not in the cards right now.” She shakes her head. “Families. We all know how to get under each other’s skin, don’t we?”

We finish our sandwiches. She takes our dishes to the
sink and rinses them. “Don’t worry too much. Things will work out.” At that moment, I realize how much she sounds like Alex.

When the Friendship Fair is two days away, we head to Mrs. Bezner’s room for the final meeting. “This is it,” Mrs. Lamont tells us. “Tie up all those loose ends, and put on your final touches. It’s going to be completely wonderful!” She twirls and her long skirt billows out from her legs. I wonder which pair of insect socks she’ll choose for the fair.

Claire is in a panic, because she doesn’t think that she and her peer will have enough time to finish. “Why did we choose something so complicated?” she moans to me as we’re walking. Wanda is in the back of the line next to Jason, of all people, and she’s actually laughing at one of his obnoxious jokes.

“I’m sure it will be fine, Claire. You always worry, and then it always turns out okay.”

She shakes her head. “We still have so much to put together.”

I’m thrilled to see Noah at his desk. I practically push Tanya Timley out of the way and rush up to him.

“Where were you?” I demand.

He gives me that stare, the one he used to do when we first met.

“Is something wrong?” I sit down next to him on an extra chair.

“Yes, something’s wrong.”

“Well, what?”

He casts his eyes toward the floor. “I need to talk to you.” He points under his desk. When we are underneath, Noah whispers, “I went back to the first doctor.”

“Is that why you were absent?” I say.

He nods.

“So, do they know what’s wrong?”

He wiggles his nose, then rubs at it. “They think it’s something with my brain. It doesn’t work exactly right.”

“Your brain seems fine to me.”

Noah sniffs. “This doctor, he kept showing me pictures and asking me what they were. They all looked like scribbles, so I said that. He wrote a lot of stuff down and I think it was bad.”

“How do you know?” I interrupt.

Noah shrugs and continues. “Then he asked me to draw a picture of myself. You know I can’t draw! So I made some lines and circles. He wrote more stuff down.”

“What else did he say?”

“Like maybe I do have that syndrome. I can’t remember the name. It might start with an ‘A.’ They think I need a helper in school.”

“Oh.” I nod.

“But you know what I told them? I said, ‘I already have a helper and her name is Calli Gold.’ ”

“Noah,” I say sadly, “I’m just a kid like you. I’m not the kind of helper they mean.”

“I don’t want a different helper,” he says, and frowns.

I don’t know what to say.

“The whole time, my mom, she just kept saying she wants me to fit in. What does that mean, anyway? A person’s not … a puzzle piece.”

I pat his knee.