Taneesha Never Disparaging (9 page)

“Thanks” wasn't a big enough word for how I felt about Carli right then. Sure, she'd really messed me up with the whole nomination thing, but saving me from whatever know-it-all advice my parents would dump on me if they knew about the older girl almost made up for it. I'd been dumped on enough for one day. I didn't need my parents adding to the pile.

 

By the time Carli and I finished our homework, Mama was home. While she made dinner, we worked on a campaign poster in the living room. I'd had to confess to Carli that when I told her I'd made a poster, I'd really meant, “I have a board that'll work for poster.”

I used a purple marker on a giant, yellow-butused-to-be-white poster board I'd dragged up from the basement. It smelled musty, like dragon breath, and had COLOSSAL YARD SALE in huge, red letters on its bad side and lots of black
mildew dots on its “good” side. But it was all I had, so it went with it.

I magic-markered this on it in big letters:

Carli and I drew a bunch of colorful flowers all around the slogan for decoration. I tried to make the mildew dots look like pollen springing from the flowers but the more I looked at my artwork, the more I had to admit that my idea had tanked.

Whatever.

Once I was done, I propped the poster against the moss-green couch.

“That looks okay,” I said, real dry.

“Want to make buttons or something? I brought the construction paper in case you needed it.”

“Naw. I think the sign's enough. I don't want to overdo it.”

I didn't care about the dumb campaign. It took
every bit of my energy to make that poster.

All I could think about was the older girl, Sasquatch, about how angry she'd looked when she said “M-Y-O-B!” Her booming voice filled every space in my brain like an endless lion's roar. In my mind, I could see that ferocious beast—a big brown lion in a puffy red coat, tearing into me with her fangs. And, when she finished, leaving me on the ground—a heap of brown noodles with blood-red sauce.

 

A while after Mr. Flanagan had come by to drive Carli home, my parents and I sat at the dinner table.

“Taneesha, I spoke to Marsha,” said Mama, all teeth. “My supervisor. She said you and Carli can start coming to the hospital on Friday afternoons to read to the children. How's that sound?”

“Fine.”

I stared at the food on my plate.

“I called Carli's father this afternoon and told him about it. You two can start this Friday.”

I could hardly hear Mama. Only the sound of Sasquatch the Bigfoot's lion's roar: “
M-Y-O-B
!” I knew that was two different creatures mixed
together—Sasquatch/Bigfoot and a lion—but I heard it anyway. I just knew I was fixing to be that ugly creature's meal.

“You remember Shantay, right? The little girl? I told her, too. She's all excited.”

I didn't move, blink, or speak.

I wished Mama would stop talking. Her voice was scratching at my brain like sandpaper. Add that to the big beast howling in my head and it was enough to make a girl go crazy.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, Mama. I'm fine.”

“You sure, honey? You're mighty quiet today. I thought you'd be happy about this news. Last week you were so excited about Carli coming with you to the hospital.”

“I said I'm okay, Mama. All right?”

“Taneesha, watch your tone with your mother,” warned Daddy, mid-chew.

“I'm done now anyway.”

I scooted back, stood, and grabbed my plate off the table. The food looked gross.

“Wait, don't throw that out—” began Mama.

Too late.

My uneaten dinner—a grilled salmon filet,
brown rice and steamed broccoli, carrots and cauliflower—slid into the garbage pail.

“Girl, do you know how much salmon costs?!”

You'd have thought I'd just thrown
her
into the garbage.

I felt a twinge of guilt. I thought of the bony, starving kids that she always told me about when I threw away food. But the guilt passed. I just wanted to get out of there.

“Sorry,” I said, not meaning it. “I got to study.”

I flounced out of the kitchen. I knew I'd flounced because I felt my parents' eyes drilling into my back and looking at me all like “Why are you flouncing out on us?”

I walked through the living room and caught sight of the altar. I stopped. I thought about the practice, about all the times I'd chanted with my parents but hadn't really wanted to. I thought about how I'd only done it because they'd made me.

I'd chanted at meetings but I was always glad when I could escape. The only times I'd practiced on my own were when I wanted something real bad—like not getting nominated for class president. Now
that
had worked out real well, hadn't it?

But sometimes Nam Myoho Renge Kyo came through. Like when I chanted at the hospital Friday. But then again, I could have done the same thing without chanting. All I had to do was read to some little kids. That was nothing when you got right down to it.

But what about my bike? My magenta ten-speed from Summit Cycles? Mama and Daddy were all set to buy me a $35 used bike from Mr. Garrett, the bike man down the street. But I chanted for the ten-speed I'd seen in the window at Summit Cycles. And the bike shop ended up putting the last one, the floor model, on sale for
exactly
$35. I got it for my birthday. No getting around that, I chanted me up a new bike. A nice one, too.

But even for stuff I'd really wanted, like my bike, I'd never chanted more than a few minutes. Thirty minutes max to be exact. That was for Disney World. Before the trip, Mama had told me I had to chant a half hour every day for a whole month in order to go and, as usual, Daddy backed her up.

I had hated being forced like that. I just knew that making your kid chant had to be against some kind of Buddhist rule or something, or
should have been.

I paid my parents back by chanting in a tiny whisper for the whole month. I said my throat hurt.

But I'd gotten to go to Disney World last summer. That was pretty cool. Only talk about
hot
!

CHAPTER 12

S
tanding in the living room, I started thinking about Florida. Before we went to Disney World, we spent four days at this Buddhist retreat in the Everglades—the Florida Wildlife Buddhist Center, the FWBC. That hadn't been half bad.

We'd had our own rooms in one of these one-floor buildings called dormitories. They were covered with stucco like a lot of the houses and buildings down there were. My room was connected to Mama and Daddy's, but I closed my door whenever I wanted to.

The food was great. We ate in this big cafeteria.
I had lobster for the first time, on pizza at that.

At night, we heard alligators croaking in the lake. They were going “Croak! Croak!” It was really spooky. But cool, too. The people that ran the FWBC said the bank on the edges of the lake was too high for the alligators to climb out. I didn't care, though—I wasn't taking chances. I stayed away from that lake like those people told us to.

I stayed out of the grass, too—with its big, fat, green blades—so fire ants wouldn't get me. The name of those ants alone told you what they were all about.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Florida was downright dangerous. But it hadn't seemed like it at the time. What had seemed more dangerous was the possibility that I'd make an all-out fool of myself in front of a bunch of people I'd just met. And, thanks to my mother, I got my chance.

Still, there was no getting around it, Florida was beautiful. In the daytime, you saw sky so blue it looked like a painting, not the real thing. And, just like on postcards, palm trees danced in the breeze everywhere.

Now, I'd realized this before, I wasn't a natural mingler. But something about Florida made me mingle. I made friends with kids from all over the country—from California, Atlanta, Minnesota, Texas, New York. You name it. Jocelyn and Dennis, a sister and brother, even came from England with their mother. And this other girl, Akiko, her parents brought her there from Australia.

And there were these bikes that we got to ride around the campus. That's what they called the place where the FWBC was, “the campus,” just like at a college. But, of course, none of those bikes compared to my magenta ten-speed. Now, seriously, how could they?

They had ESG meetings there, too. I should have known they would. But I didn't mind them so much. To tell the truth, they were kind of fun.

In ESG, we got to choose different activities. I had a hard time deciding between two of them: circus stuff and Kung Fu. In the end, I went with the clown.

She taught everybody tricks. She said clowns use Buddhism all the time, or something like that. All I knew was I learned how to juggle four oranges. I could still do it.

On our last day at the FWBC, we had a big talent show in the cafeteria, kids and grown-ups together. I read one of Daisaku Ikeda's poems. I knew the poem already because I'd read it in a book Gail, the ESG leader here in Cleveland, had given me a while back.

In the living room, I walked over to the altar and sat in the middle chair in front of it. In the row of books inside the altar's cubby, I saw my book—
Fighting for Peace: Poems by Daisaku Ikeda
. I pulled it out, started flipping through it, and remembered the day I stood on stage in the FWBC cafeteria, in purple shorts, sandals, and ashy legs, and read in front of all those people.

At first, I hadn't known what to do for the FWBC talent show and I hadn't planned on being in it anyway. And, of course, Evella wouldn't have been her self if she didn't have a bunch of really good reasons why being in the show was a bad idea.

What if you stutter? What if people laugh at you? What if a hurricane blows through while you're standing up there on that stage, Taneesha? You should be checking out places to run for cover, not humiliating yourself in front of
strangers
!

But a lot of kids were doing it, being in the show. Even ones who were way more shy than me. So I'd started thinking maybe I might be in it, too. Only, when I got that brilliant idea, I didn't have a talent.

Then, in the FWBC bookstore, I saw Daisaku Ikeda's book and I remembered this poem I'd read in it once. The bookstore people let me photocopy it.

I didn't read the whole thing for the show. I skipped some parts at the beginning and lots of the middle. Daddy had said that might be a good idea since it was real long. I used one of the computers at the FWBC to type up just the parts I was going to read.

In the living room now, sitting in front of the altar, I found, tucked inside my book, the crinkly white sheet of paper with my poem typed on it. I was still irritated with my parents and I didn't want to give them a reason to celebrate—“Taneesha's reading Sensei's poem!” I could just hear them. And I didn't want to. So I read the poem very quietly:

Holding the book and crinkly sheet of paper on my lap in the living room, I remembered how, at the FWBC, as soon as I'd finished reading onstage, everybody had started hooting and hollering. They even got out of their seats, clapping for me, giving me a standing O. It had been amazing. My stomach had done all these flip-flops, but in a good way.