Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (21 page)

After thinking about which one of my parents could have possibly given Checkers away, I became convinced that it had been my mother. Checkers wasn’t perfect and had vomited a time or two on one of her favorite wool rugs. The first time this happened, my
mother had yelled, “I’m so mad I could spit!” But she didn’t. She bit her cheek and cleaned it up.

“Hair balls happen,” my father had said.

And I agreed. Even if a cat does toss its cookies, it’s not doing it on purpose. That’s not a good enough reason to give it away. She should have known that! Then, for the umpteenth time, I sighed. I sighed because I knew what my future held.

In addition to being an unlucky cat owner, a cat digger-upper, a science-fair loser, a fish killer, a drowned cat (aka a feline with bad kismet), I also knew that I would have to be a mother confronter. I had to take a stand. For me. For Checkers. And for all the other unfortunate, nameless victims of mix-ups and switcheroos. I picked up my cooler and swung open the door.

Chapter 30
Communication

T
here was no backing down. I had to be brave. To ensure that I would follow through with my confrontation, the first thing I did when I walked through the door was yell, “I’ve got a question!”

To my surprise, the voice that yelled back was not my mother’s.

“Will I need an encyclopedia?” my father asked.

I dropped my cooler on the floor and ran to him.

“Camille McPhee,” he cheered, tossing me up in the air. On the third toss he sneezed.

“You’re covered in cat hair,” he said. “Did you buy a cat while I was gone?”

“No,” I said.

“Why are you covered in cat hair?” he asked, setting me back down on the kitchen floor. His eyes narrowed with suspicion.

Rather than tell my dad the truth about Checkers/Orca, I decided to tell him something else. Because my parents were in a weird space, it didn’t seem fair to rat out my mom to my dad. I was sure he’d be furious with her for giving Checkers away, and I didn’t want to make any more waves between them.

“Have you ever heard of Method acting?” I asked. “Lee Strasberg taught it and that’s the way we’re doing this play. You see, we actually try to become our parts.”

Mrs. Zirklezack had spent ten whole minutes telling us about this guy Lee Strasberg. And she’d encouraged us to try to “become our parts” several times.

“So you cover yourselves in cat hair?” he asked, picking several black and white hairs off my pink shirt. “What do the people who are playing crocodiles do?”

His joke worried me. Was he being funny because he knew I was fibbing, or was he just being himself? I couldn’t tell. To throw him off, I decided to act emotionally wounded. It was a great trick.

“Do you enjoy mocking fourth graders?” I asked. “Does it make you feel big to tear down our little
production?” I flipped my hair over my shoulder and walked away from him.

“I’m not mocking you,” he said. “I just—”

“I feel mocked,” I interrupted, turning back around to face him. “I know we’re not Broadway’s best, Dad. But we’re trying.” Then I crumbled to the floor and began crawling around.

My dad looked very confused. Like he was smelling a certain type of strong cheese, but he didn’t know which one and he didn’t know why he was smelling it.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize.”

I shot him a hard look and hissed at him. Then I raised my right hand and clawed at the air.

“Camille, I brought you something,” he said.

I loved it when my father brought me things.

“Jelly beans?” I asked.

But he shook his head and held out a book. It was about Australia.

“Australia?” I asked.

“It has information about dingoes in it,” he said.

“Oh.”

It was a big book. I flipped it open to the dingo chapter. There was a picture of a long fence.

“It’s to keep the dingoes away from the sheep,” my father said. “It’s led to an increased number of kangaroos.”

“That’s horrible,” I said. Because I didn’t want to think about dingoes eating helpless sheep and interesting kangaroos. “I don’t like it when mammals eat other mammals.”

“But you eat hamburgers,” my dad said.

I frowned. “That’s different. We buy them at the store,” I said.

My dad smiled. “Do you want to grab something to eat? Would it be okay to eat pizza? Do cats like pizza?” he asked.

“Meow,” I said, crawling toward his shoes and rubbing my head against his jeans. For added effect, when he bent down to pet me, I licked his hand. I thought about biting him, but I didn’t want to take things too far.

“Let’s leave a note for your mom,” he said.

Once we got in the car, I dropped the whole cat routine. I explained to my dad that for safety’s sake, I abstained from Method acting while in moving vehicles.

“Abstain
is a pretty impressive word,” he said.

“It was a bonus spelling word last week,” I said. “My teacher is very advanced.”

Eating pizza with my dad was stressful. He wanted to talk about serious stuff. He kept asking about school, and Mom, and my self-esteem, and Mom, and my friends, and Mom, and Mom’s self-esteem, and blah blah blah. Then he’d go on and on about his love for me
and for Mom and how even if he didn’t live at the house, he’d still like to come over and mow the lawn all summer and blah blah blah. Everything always led back to Mom. I wished we’d have been talking on the phone so I could have just pressed the 9 button.

“You’re stressing me out!” I finally said. “I don’t know what Mom thinks. Hello! I’m Camille McPhee, not Maxine McPhee.”

To be honest, when I said this, my mouth was stuffed full of pizza, and no real words came out. I just mumbled in a very angry tone.

“I know, honey. I’m upset too,” my father said, rubbing my shoulder and picking off some more cat hairs.

When we got home, my mother wasn’t there. She had taped two notes on the kitchen chandelier. One for me. One for my dad. My note said that she wouldn’t be home until very late, because she was teaching three aerobics classes in a row. I don’t know what my father’s note said. After he read it, he folded it up and slipped it in his shirt pocket. Then he faked a very fake smile.

That night, it took me a long time to fall asleep because I kept trying to listen for my mother’s car. I planned to eavesdrop on my parents’ conversation so I’d know what in the heck was going on. But all I could hear on the other side of my door was silence. Even though I didn’t have to use the bathroom, I got up and
walked to the bathroom several times. On my last trip, I noticed that my mother still wasn’t home. And that my father was stretched out in a sleeping bag on the couch, snoring softly.

When I got up to go to school the next day, my father was outside whacking the weeds. He’d pulled the lawn mower out of the garage too. Which was good. Because Mom had missed several important patches of grass. My father saw me watching him and he waved. I waved back. It was nice having him around again.

When I walked to the refrigerator, I realized that my mom was already gone. I thought it was pretty convenient for her that I hadn’t seen her since I’d found out she’d given my cat away. A little too convenient.

My mom and dad had each taped a note for me on the kitchen chandelier. They both wished me good luck on the play, and told me that they’d be there. My father said he’d be there with bells on. My mother said that wild horses couldn’t keep her away. Reading those notes, I made an important decision. If my parents ever made it to mediation, I was going to write their mediator a letter and explain how screwed up our ability to communicate was. I may have only been in fourth grade, but I knew that taping notes to a chandelier like this was completely weird. In fact, it was so weird I decided I had to call Aunt Stella.

AUNT STELLA:
Aren’t you supposed to be in school?

ME:
I’m on my way to the bus stop
.

AUNT STELLA:
What’s going on?

ME:
Dad is sleeping on the couch
.

AUNT STELLA:
Sometimes that happens
.

ME:
But sometimes it stops happening, right?

AUNT STELLA:
Yes, sometimes that’s true
.

ME:
My play is today
.

AUNT STELLA:
The one where you’re a cat that dies in a rainstorm?

ME:
Yes
.

AUNT STELLA:
I’m sending you a lot of luck
.

ME:
I think I’ll need it
.

AUNT STELLA:
You’ll be spectacular
.

ME:
What if I fall off my bucket?

AUNT STELLA:
You won’t
.

ME:
(sigh)

AUNT STELLA:
I’m going to call you after the play
.

ME:
I think Mom is taking me out to celebrate
.

AUNT STELLA:
Well, I’ll call her cell phone. I want to know how things went
.

ME:
She has a new cell phone. Her ringtone sounds like a parakeet and a hammer. But really it’s the song of the red-bellied woodpecker
.

AUNT STELLA:
Well, that was always her favorite bird
.

ME:
She buys a lot of things
.

AUNT STELLA:
I know
.

ME:
I wish she didn’t. I also wish we didn’t have a mortgage. Do you have a mortgage?

AUNT STELLA:
Yes. Most people who have homes do
.

ME:
That’s too bad. Hey, Aunt Stella, Mom’s taping notes to the chandelier
.

AUNT STELLA:
For who?

ME:
Me and Dad
.

AUNT STELLA:
Oh, Camille. Sooner or later, things will improve. They’re in a rut
.

ME:
The rut makes me sad
.

AUNT STELLA:
I’m sorry, sweetheart
.

ME:
Me too. I think I better go
.

AUNT STELLA:
Break a leg!

ME:
That’s exactly what I’m worried about
.

I wanted to talk longer, but I knew I couldn’t miss the bus. When I looked out my window, I could see Polly shuffling down to the end of my driveway I wasn’t in the mood to see her. I was in the mood to avoid her. Instead of waiting in line, I decided to run out of my house right as the bus was stopping. I downed a banana for extra energy. Then I cracked
open my front door and assumed the position that I’d seen runners take in Olympic races.

When the bus brakes gasped, I acted like somebody had shot the starting pistol. You should have seen me fly. I may not have been good at running long distances, but for a fourth grader, I was a very good sprinter.

Chapter 31
Knee-Locking

A
ll morning long, I avoided Polly Clausen like she was infected with the superbug. In my mind, I imagined that Polly knew she had the superbug, and that she was purposely trying to track me down so that she could give it to me. But I outsmarted her by peeking around corners before I walked around them.

To be honest, avoiding Polly was pretty easy—she being a parrot, me being a cat. I never really had to look around too many corners, because she was getting ready at the opposite end of the school.

Butterflies zipped through my stomach as the cats prepared to enter the stage for our first performance. All seven of us stood in a line outside the gymnasium. Clearly, I had one of the best tails. It was long and velvet and my mother had sewed it herself with material she had bought several years ago, intending to make throw pillows. Gracie had better ears. She said they were mink, and I believed her, because when I touched them they felt like real fur. Mine were just black construction paper held in place with bobby pins. We all had the same black Lycra bodysuits and tights, although they looked best on Penny, by far the tallest cat. And everyone else had better faces. I couldn’t help myself. All morning long—after Mrs. Zirklezack had decorated our skin with face paint—I kept touching my made-up face, smearing my whiskers and rubbing off the tip of my black nose.

I held my big white bucket by its metal handle and stood in my assigned place in line.

You won’t fall off
, I told myself.

When Mrs. Zirklezack opened the back door, that was the cue for the cats to race into the gymnasium and take their places. When we stood on top of our plastic buckets and sang, “We Can’t Go, We Won’t Go,” Mrs. Zirklezack insisted that we do it with snotty faces and taunting body actions. I wasn’t totally sure
what a taunting body action was, so I just copied what Penny did.

We were supposed to belt our song right at Nora and her bus of animals as they drove off. We were supposed to sing until the third thunderclap. Then we were supposed to step off of our buckets and curl up and be silent.

I don’t know why construction-paper ears made a head itch so much, but mine sure did. With my free hand, I scratched around my ears again and again. I kept knocking them crooked. But Penny was nice. She kept setting her bucket down and straightening them for me.

“You have really nice hair,” she said. “It’s very silky.”

I smiled. And scratched my head again.

“Stop it,” Penny said, “or you’ll look stupid.”

I nodded. I didn’t want that.

“I think I’m going to yowl,” Penny said, twirling her tail with her hand.

I was surprised to hear Penny say this.

“Mrs. Zirklezack said no noise,” Gracie said, flipping around to face Penny.