Absolutely Almost (12 page)

T
he spelling test went okay. I wouldn't find out my grade until Monday, but I thought I got more than four. Maybe I even got perfect.

Calista let me get a chocolate donut
and
a jelly-filled from the bakery on 78th Street. They were good. Almost worth having a spelling test for.

Almost.

O
n Monday Mr. Clifton's joke was “Who's the king of the pencil case?” And the answer was “The ruler!”

No one laughed at that one.

“You can do better than that, Mr. Clifton,” Savannah told him.

And that made
Mr. Clifton
laugh.

I guess he won't be using that one again next year.

I
got six words right on my spelling test. Six whole words. That was more than I ever got before. I even got
especially. E-S-P-E-C-I-A-L-L-Y.

Language.
That was one I missed, because I mixed up the
u
and the
a.
“That's a tough one,” Calista told me after she high-fived me for my six whole words. “I even spell that one wrong sometimes.” Which I knew was probably a lie, but I let her say it anyway.

Soccer.
That was another one I didn't get.
Soccer
was supposed to be an easy one, but I forgot about the
-er
not
-re
at the end. I got confused and screwed up. “Sometimes it's the easy ones that get you,” Calista said.

Calista took me to the bodega and told Hugo about my six words, and he was so impressed with me he gave me a giant bear claw that I didn't even have to stack cups for. I stacked cups anyway, though. I stacked a whole bunch of cardboard coffee sleeves too.

Hugo and Calista were talking awhile.

I couldn't decide if I was happy about the six words or not. Because for one thing, six words was good. I'd never gotten six whole words before. But for the other thing, six words wasn't perfect. It wasn't even almost. And Dad said I better get perfect.

My stomach was tied up like knots on a rope waiting for Dad to get home, to see what he'd say about the six words when I told him. But when he got home, he didn't ask about my spelling test. So I didn't tell him. He didn't ask the whole rest of the week either. I think maybe he forgot.

I couldn't decide if I was happy about that or not.

C
alista was acting funny when she picked me up from school. Quiet. Sniffly. And she forgot which street I lived on too, and I knew she knew that one.

“You were crying,” I told her once I figured it out. “Before you picked me up.”

“No, I wasn't,” she said. But I knew what crying looked like.

I knew what it sounded like too. I heard her when she went into the bathroom when we got home. She said she had to pee, but that was a lie too, because I heard her on the phone. She was trying to whisper, I think, but if that was true, then she wasn't doing a very good job. I couldn't hear any words, just angry talking, but then all of a sudden, I did hear some words. Five of them.

“Gus, just
listen
all right?”

So that's how I figured out she was talking to Gus.

“You're being a real idiot.”

That was five more words I heard.

It sounded like it got angrier after that, the talking, but I didn't try to hear any more of the words. I went and sat on the couch in the living room.

I didn't know anything about that Gus, but I did know that if Calista was yelling-whispering at him in the bathroom when she said she had to pee, then he probably wasn't very nice. Nice people didn't make other people yell-whisper instead of pee.

Anyway, I didn't like him. I decided Calista was right. Gus
was
an idiot. Then I started to wonder how come someone so smart like Calista would have a boyfriend who was a real idiot. But I must not be very good at figuring, because that one just didn't make sense to me.

S
o what's Donut Man's superpower, anyway?” Calista asked when she was showing me some more art tricks on Thursday, after we both got sick of studying spelling flash cards. “Eating donuts?” She scratched her nose with the end of her marker. “Making donuts?”

I shook my head. “He doesn't have a superpower. He just really likes donuts.”

“But he's a
superhero,
” Calista said. “That means he
has
to have a superpower.”

“Nope,” I said, because I was pretty sure she was wrong. “Some people aren't good at anything. Some people just really like donuts.”

Calista looked at me for a long time, her marker raised in the air, and she didn't say anything. She didn't really even move. She sat there like that for so long that I started to worry that maybe her marker was going to dry out, because the cap was off. But finally she blinked and looked down at her paper and said, “Okay, Albie. Here, I'll show you how to do feet.”

“Thanks,” I told her.

M
om likes to go through the papers in my take-home folder every night if she doesn't get home too late. I try to keep them neat, but sometimes I forget and smush them.

“Albie!” she said when she was looking through the folder. It was a really excited “Albie!” so for a second, I thought she was going to say how proud she was of me doing such good reading with
Johnny Treeface
(even though it wasn't really
Johnny Treeface,
it was really three different
Captain Underpants
books, but she didn't know that). But anyway, that's not what she was “Albie!”-ing about.

“What?” I asked, trying to sneak a peek around her arm. “What is it?”

She put my take-home folder on the table. “You never told me you were having class elections,” she said. I knew she was smiling even before I looked at her face, that's how excited she sounded. “What are you going to run for?”

I pressed the two twenty-dollar bills for the Chinese food on the table into a neat stack so they were one right on top of the other.

“I'm not running for anything,” I told Mom. “Mrs. Rouse said we didn't have to. It's only if we want.”

“You know,” Mom said, pulling the page out of the folder and settling into a chair, “I was treasurer of my tenth-grade class. I beat out five other students.” She seemed very happy about that.

I put the top twenty on the bottom and re-neatened the stack. I wondered when the doorbell would ring already, because Mom had called at least twenty minutes ago and I was getting pretty hungry. Usually the delivery people were super quick.

“Well, it's not real elections,” I said. “Just fifth grade. It's stupid anyway. The president takes attendance, and the vice president turns the lights on and off. Stupid stuff like that.” The hall manager was in charge of the bathroom pass. Being in charge of the bathroom pass sounded like the grossest job in the whole world.

“You have to start somewhere, right?” Mom said. “This could be good practice for when you want to run in high school. When do you have to decide by?”

“Two weeks. But I already decided I don't want to.”

Mom shook her head and stuck the paper back in my folder without even looking at all the good reading in my reading log. “Don't be such a party pooper, Albie. Who knows? Maybe you'll end up being treasurer just like me, huh?”

• • •

When the food came, Wei frowned at me when I asked for the change, and he didn't say
shee-shee
either. He stood in the door for a long time and didn't leave until I said good-bye. Which I thought was weird, because usually Wei was so friendly. But then while we were eating, I started to get a sour feeling in my stomach, and when Mom got up for more water, I did math with a pencil on my napkin, and I realized I only tipped Wei sixty cents.

I was pretty sure I would never end up treasurer of anything.

O
n Thursday Mr. Clifton raised his eyebrows at all of us and said, “If you had two tennis balls in your left pocket and seven tennis balls in your right pocket, what would you have?”

We all sort of shuffled around in our seats and didn't say anything. I didn't know what everyone else was thinking, but
I
was thinking that this was supposed to be joke time, so why was Mr. Clifton trying to make us do math? I wasn't too happy about it either.

But then Mr. Clifton lowered his head and looked at us over the top of his glasses and said, “You'd have . . .
really big pockets
!” And just like that, the room pretty much exploded with laughing. I was giggling so hard I almost fell out of my chair. Even Savannah was laughing, so I knew it was a good one.