Absolutely Almost (14 page)

W
hat the heck is your sister doing in there anyway?” I asked Erlan when I was over at his apartment. We were playing Operation, only we couldn't play it in the quilt fort because Erlan's sister Ainyr was in there crying.

“She broke up with her boyfriend or something,” Erlan told me. “She won't shut up about it either.”

That made me so surprised I dropped the funny bone I was tweezering out and the game buzzed at me. “She has a
boyfriend
?” I asked. “She's only in seventh grade.”

Erlan took the tweezers. “She's in eighth,” he said. He got the funny bone easy. “And she doesn't have a boyfriend anymore. That's what she's so upset about.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, she's being a real baby. They only went out for like a week.” He said that loud enough for Ainyr to hear from inside the fort.

“You shut up, Erlan!” she shouted at him.

Erlan handed me the tweezers, and I looked for the best bone to remove. The Adam's apple or the charley horse or the butterflies in the stomach. “I don't think I'll ever go out with anyone,” I told Erlan. “It sounds awful.”

He rolled his eyes. “You don't even know. Yesterday Ainyr spent two hours deleting all the photos of him off her phone. Two hours! You know how many photos that is? They only went out a week!”

“I'm gonna punch you, Erlan!” Ainyr screamed.

“No you won't!” Erlan shouted back. “Because you'd have to come out here to do it, and then I'd get my fort back!”

Ainyr didn't leave the fort the whole time I was there. Erlan and I played four games of Operation, and she just cried the whole time.

• • •

“Do you still have pictures of Gus on your phone?” I asked Calista the next day after school.

She seemed surprised when I asked her that. But sort of happy too. “Sure!” she said. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “You want to see them?” She started to thumb through to the photos.

I shook my head. “No, thanks,” I said. “Can we go visit Hugo and get my donut now?”

Calista frowned, but she put her phone back in her pocket. “Yeah, okay,” she told me.

That's how I figured out that Calista still had a boyfriend.

N
ow that I was cool, I ate lunch with Darren and the other cool kids and played tetherball with them too. I was all right at tetherball, even if I did flinch once when I thought the ball was going to whack me in the head, and Candace Sims laughed at me. At lunchtime, all us cool kids would eat our lunches super-duper fast so we could go outside to meet Sage Moore at the tetherball courts. Sage was Darren's best friend, but he couldn't eat at our same table because he had to eat at the “egg-free” one with the allergy kids.

I didn't mind not having to eat with Sage Moore so much.

“Do you like Carrot Squash?” Sage asked me on Friday when the two of us were next to each other in line waiting for our turn to play tetherball. The way he asked me about it, I felt like I was taking a test. Like there was only one right answer to the question, and he already knew I was going to get it wrong.

“I don't know,” I said slowly. I didn't want to get the answer wrong, but I didn't want to lie either. “I've never had it.”

Sage laughed so hard when I said that that he started to choke on his own spit. “Oh, my God!” he said between chokes. “You've never
had
it!”

Candace reached around me in line and pounded on Sage's back. To stop the choking, I guess. I hadn't even thought to do that, to pound on Sage's back to help him stop choking.

Then again, I didn't really care if Sage Moore choked so much. (That was not a very nice thing to think, maybe.)

(But it was true.)

“Carrot Squash isn't a food,” Darren told me. Darren was so good at tetherball that he could play and talk at the same time. “It's a video game,” he said, and he whacked the ball.
Whack!
Nasim Johnson whacked it back.
Whack!
“It's really cool.”
Whack!
“You'd like it.”
Whack!
“You're a rabbit”—
whack!
—“and you go around killing talking carrots”—
whack!
—“that commit crimes.”
Whack!
“When they die, all their carrot juice splatters everywhere.” The rope wrapped around the pole too high for Nasim to get it, and Darren beat her. She went to the end of the line. Lizzy was next.

“Oh,” I said. I was sort of embarrassed that I thought that Carrot Squash was a food. But then I figured if the video game people didn't want everyone to think it was a food, then they shouldn't have named it something that
sounded
like a food. So really it was their fault. “Is it rated E?” I asked.

Sage started choking again, and Candace reached around me to pound his back some more. I was pretty sure she rolled her eyes at me when she did it, but I decided not to notice.

“No,” Darren told me. He only had to whack the ball once and it spun spun spun around the pole until it got so high Lizzy couldn't reach it even when she jumped up on her tippy-toes. “It's Teen.”

“Oh,” I said, when Candace stepped up to play. I put my hands in my pockets. “Then I can't play it. I'm only allowed to play games that are rated E.”

Sage was still choking.

“Do you want my juice?” I asked him, since Candace was playing tetherball now and couldn't pound his back anymore. I still had a little juice left over from lunch. “I can go get it from my lunch sack.”

Sage looked at me like I was crazy, but I knew I wasn't.

“To help with the choking,” I explained. But he just shook his head. Which was fine with me, because it was probably a bad idea to share juice with someone who kept choking anyway.

• • •

Betsy stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria. Four straight days, and she wasn't there. She never came out to the blacktop either. Once I remembered to watch her when we were on our way to the lunchroom, so I could figure out where she went, and I found out it was the library. She went to the library every day.

Why would someone go to the library during lunch? You're not allowed to eat in the library. Didn't Betsy get hungry?

I wondered what she did with all those gummy bears if she wasn't allowed to eat them.

I
still wanted to be friends with Betsy, even if that was hard now. Because of me being cool and her not. I decided the best thing I could do was to do a lot of noticing about exactly what the cool kids did, and then tell Betsy to do those things so she could learn how to be cool too.

Helpful hints, that was what she needed.

It was going to be really helpful, actually, because by the end, Betsy would know all the rules for being cool—the ones the cool kids never told you themselves—and who wouldn't want to know that?

The only problem was that Betsy didn't seem to want to talk to me too much anymore. Probably because she was so embarrassed about not being cool. Which made it hard for me to tell her all my helpful hints. But I finally figured out a way to do it. I left a note in Betsy's desk every morning before school started. A new helpful hint every day.

Don't ever be last in the line to go to lunch.

That was one of my helpful hints. I noticed that was one of the things about being cool, that you always had to get to the lunchroom near the front of the class.

Sing fake words to the songs during chorus.

That was another helpful hint. I noticed that one too. Whenever Mrs. Chilcoat came in to do chorus with us, all the cool kids stood in the back and didn't sing the real words we were supposed to. Some of them were just quiet, no noise at all. But some of the coolest kids, like Sage, made up their own words. Like when Mrs. Chilcoat was teaching us the song “Waltzing Matilda,” Sage kept singing “farting fat Hilda” instead. Which, as far as I could tell, didn't make any sense, but it must've been pretty funny because all the cool kids in the back near us were laughing so hard with their hands over their mouths that they almost got in trouble. So I figured that was a pretty cool thing to do.

All my notes to Betsy were really helpful hints, I thought. And I left them right where Betsy would be sure to find them, at the very front of her desk, every morning. And I knew Betsy could read them. Betsy was a really good reader.

Only, for some reason, Betsy never did any of the things that the helpful hints said to do. She kept leaving for lunch at the back of the line, way behind me and all the other cool kids. She kept standing exactly where she always did when Mrs. Chilcoat came in for chorus, and she never sang any fake words.

I kept leaving the helpful hints, though. A new one in Betsy's desk every morning. Because if Betsy didn't figure out how to be cool, then we couldn't hang out anymore. And I sure did miss hanging out with Betsy.

Y
ou should run for vice president of the class, Albie,” Darren told me while we were in line for tetherball. It was Candace and Sage playing. Candace was winning.

“Really?” I said. My stomach was grumbling from only eating my bagel at lunch, not my kimchi. The week before, Nasim said kimchi smelled, and even though Darren told her to shut up, I didn't want to eat something that smelled anymore. “How come?”

“Duh, 'cause it's only the second-best job you can have in the class,” Darren said.

“What's the best one?” I asked.

“President, dummy.” Darren still called me “dummy” sometimes, even though he was my friend now, only he said it while he was laughing and not laughing
at
me I didn't think, so I figured maybe it was okay. Even if I didn't actually like it a whole lot.

“What does vice president get to do again?” Lizzy asked. Lizzy and Nasim were making bead bracelets while they waited for tetherball. “Is that the calendar one?”

“No, secretary makes the birthday calendar,” Sage told her. He jumped up to hit the tetherball but missed and Candace got it instead.
Whack!
“Vice president switches off the computers at the end of class and makes sure all the lights are turned off when we leave the room. Treasurer takes the hot lunch count to the office, and safety officer carries the first aid kit in fire drills.”

“The president is the one who takes attendance,” Darren said, stepping up next to play tetherball after Candace whacked Sage out. “That's the one I'm going to be.”

That made me confused. “How do you know you're going to be president if nobody's voted yet?”

“
Duh,
” Darren said as he held up the ball to serve, and Sage snorted as he passed me to go to the back of the line. “Who else do you think would win it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I think Aleef would be pretty good at taking attendance, or Grace, or—” I stopped talking because I realized no one was playing tetherball. Instead, Darren and Sage and Candace and Nasim and Lizzy were all looking at me funny. That's when I realized that Darren hadn't really been asking me a question. “You'd be a good president,” I said to Darren. That seemed like the right thing to say.

Darren nodded when I said that, so I knew it was right. He held the tetherball up again to serve. “Thanks. And you'd be an awesome VP.” I smiled at that. “I'll make sure no one else runs so you'll win for sure. Then we can be in charge together.” And that time he whacked the tetherball good and hard.

That made me feel good, and while I waited in line for my turn at tetherball, I started to wonder why I'd been thinking before that turning off the lights was a stupid job. It was going to be a great job. I was going to be
awesome
at it.