Absolutely Almost (4 page)

I
figured out why Darren and those other mean kids called the girl with the gummy bears Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy. It was because she has trouble saying words sometimes, especially beginnings, like
b
's and
t
's and
k
's. I noticed it in class when Mrs. Rouse asked her to read a passage out loud from the textbook. The boys started snickering, and her face turned bright red, and her voice got really quiet, so quiet you could hardly hear her, until finally Mrs. Rouse said, “Thank you, Betsy. That was wonderful.”

Betsy doesn't talk too much.

I asked Calista about it, and Calista said it sounded like Betsy had a stutter, which can make talking hard.

I decided I liked Betsy. She gave me gummy bears at lunch without me even asking. We even picked each other for library partners. And when I got confused when Mrs. Rouse was explaining about the online card catalog, Betsy didn't make fun of me. She just pointed to the right place where I was supposed to click. I didn't mind that Betsy didn't talk too much. Because it can be hard sometimes, saying what you mean. And I thought maybe I understood her most of the time anyway.

O
n Saturday afternoon, Mom and I went for hot chocolate at the pastry place on Lexington. I always got hot chocolate, and she got coffee, and we picked one dessert from the case and split it. Sometimes it was crowded there, but it was my favorite place to go because there were giant hunks of stale bread with slits cut in them for the menus to slide into, and I thought that was funny. Also, the food was good.

After we were finished with our éclair (which is just a fancy donut, really) but still sipping our drinks, a woman came up who I guess Mom knew from work.

“And this must be Albie!” she said when she was done hugging Mom. The lady was wearing too much eye makeup. But I was polite, so I said hi.

“Hi.”

Then she hugged me too, which I didn't like.

“It's so nice to meet you, Albie.”

I smiled a smile without teeth.

“I bet you're a whiz in school,” the lady told me. I guess I looked confused when she said that, because then she said, “Well, when you share a name with one of the smartest men who ever lived, how could you not be?”

I tilted my head to the side and probably looked more confused.

“Albert Einstein,” she explained. And when she said it, she looked like I really should've known that. Like maybe I wasn't so smart after all.

I waited for Mom to say something about that, but when I looked up at her, she was smiling a smile without teeth. “It was lovely running into you, Theresa,” she said, and then she hugged the lady again, and I had to hug her too, but after that the lady went away, which was good.

“My name's not Albert,” I said when I was sitting down again, back to sipping my hot chocolate. “It's Albin.”

“I know that, Albie,” Mom said. “I named you, remember?” She finished the rest of her coffee. “You about ready?”

“Yeah, almost.”

I let the last sip of hot chocolate sit on my tongue for a little bit before I swallowed it down, and then Mom and I headed home.

M
y whole life, I've always been an almost.

“Almost, Albie.”

“Almost.”

I was an almost in kindergarten when I asked if I could use markers at art time, instead of just crayons.

“Almost, Albie,” the art teacher said. “Let's wait until your grip is a little stronger.”

I was an almost in first grade when I wanted to walk our dog, Biscuit.

“Almost, Albie,” my mom said. “He still tugs too hard for you.”

I was an almost in second grade after I spent a whole weekend practicing my sounding-out words so I could move up to the red reading group.

“Almost, Albie,” Miss Langhoff told me. “You have a tiny ways to go.”

I was an almost in third grade too, when my poem wasn't picked for the wall for Parents' Night.

“Almost, Albie,” Mr. Vidal said. “I almost put yours up. But there were so many to choose from.”

By fourth grade, I was an almost every day.

“Almost, Albie.”

That's what they tell me.

“Almost.”

“Almost.”

Always,
always
almost.

M
e and my dad went to the Sea, Air, and Space Museum together once, when I was nine. We spent the whole day together, me and him. It was the best day. Dad even had fun too, I think. He said he did. Afterward he said he wasn't so sorry the subway broke down and got us stuck there, all the way over on the west side of Manhattan, where no cabdriver would ever dream of picking us up.

Dad bought me a model airplane from the gift shop, a real A-10 Thunderbolt. He said he'd help me put it together. He hasn't had a lot of time lately, but one of these days, he will. It will be a lot of fun.

M
rs. Rouse signed me up for math club. She did it without even asking me, which I thought wasn't very fair. I told her I didn't want to be in any math club, because math is the worst subject out of any subject in the school. Only I didn't exactly say the part about math being awful, because she taught math, so that might make her sad. Even if she did deserve it, because of signing me up for math club without even asking me.

“I think you'll like it, Albie, really,” Mrs. Rouse told me, which was what grown-ups said right before they made you do something that stunk. I wrinkled my nose. “Just give it a shot, all right?”

I guess I didn't have much choice, now, did I?

The one good thing about math club was that it took place during my regular math time, so I only had to do math once a day instead of twice, like I was worried about. The club leader's name was Mr. Clifton, and there were five other kids in fourth-period math club, from all different grades.

The first thing I noticed about Mr. Clifton was that he smiled a lot. There were basketball posters all over the walls, that was the next thing I noticed. Which I thought was good, because I was worried that a teacher who was in charge of math club might only like math and nothing else, and that would be terrible. I didn't know a whole lot about basketball, but it seemed way better than math anyway, so I figured Mr. Clifton was probably all right.

What happened in math club the first day was that Mr. Clifton gave us all one goldfish cracker and then asked us how many we had altogether. Which was easy. Even I knew that one. It was six. That wasn't math, it was counting. Then Mr. Clifton gave us all another goldfish cracker, and asked us again. He kept giving us more and more goldfish crackers, and then we all put our piles together in the middle of the table and helped each other count them. Savannah was the fastest counter, and this boy Jacob was the slowest. I was second-slowest, but no one seemed to care.

All the kids were nice.

When math club was over, Mr. Clifton let us eat the crackers.

“You guys eat like sharks!” Mr. Clifton said as we gobbled up the last of the crackers. “You sure you all got enough breakfast?”

I got back to Mrs. Rouse's room just in time for recess, and she said that as long as I went to math club every single day, I didn't have to do math homework with the rest of the class. That's when I told Mrs. Rouse that math club maybe wasn't so bad after all and I wasn't mad at her for signing me up for it.

“Thanks, Albie,” she said. “I appreciate you telling me that.”

“They should change the name, though,” I said.

“Oh?” Mrs. Rouse asked.

“Yeah. Instead of ‘math club' they should call it ‘cracker club,' because we didn't do any math at all.”

Mrs. Rouse just smiled.

C
alista could make friends with an empty tin can—that's what she told me her boyfriend said about her. I don't know why her boyfriend thought Calista would want to be friends with an empty tin can, but anyway, he was probably right. I figured that out after we stopped at the bodega downstairs on our way home from school one day and she started talking to Hugo, the old man who owns the store.

Also, I didn't know Calista had a boyfriend. Why hadn't she ever told me before that she had a boyfriend?

“You wouldn't happen to have any bottle caps, would you?” Calista asked Hugo while I studied the donut case on the counter to decide which one I wanted most. Mom said my limit was one donut per week, but I think she forgot to tell Calista that, because Calista let me have one almost every day, as long as I spent my own allowance on it.

“Bottle caps?” Hugo asked. He had a thick accent, but I couldn't tell from where. He had lots of curly gray hair and a big wide nose, and he was very friendly. I was glad he was our bodega owner and not the guy who worked at the one on 62nd Street. Erlan and I went in there once to see if they had Smarties, and that guy yelled at us, “No parents? Get out!” Even though Erlan's mom was right outside on her cell phone.

“Yeah,” Calista told Hugo. “I'm collecting bottle caps for an art project.”

I pressed my nose close to the plastic case and studied the jelly donut and the twist with chocolate frosting. I was feeling more like a jelly donut, but the twist looked fresher. While I was thinking, Calista tried to explain to Hugo about her art project. By the time I settled on a plain glazed, Calista was behind the counter, showing him pictures of her “work in progress” on her phone.

“That's pretty good!” he told her, and she smiled big.

I lifted the lid of the plastic case and grabbed a paper tissue to pick out my donut. I wondered why Calista had never told
me
she needed bottle caps before. I found bottle caps all over the place.

Hugo rang up my donut on the register, and I pulled my dollar out of my pocket.

“You come in here a lot, don't you?” he asked me. And when I nodded, he stretched his hand across the counter. “I'm Hugo.”

“I know,” I told him. “It says so on your name tag.”

“Albie!” Calista nudged me in the side. “He gets shy,” she told Hugo. Which was not true. She stretched her hand out to shake Hugo's, which is when I realized that's what I probably should have done. “I'm Calista,” she told him, and they shook.

“Nice to meet you, Calista,” Hugo told her. “You too, Albie.” But he didn't try to shake my hand again, which made me mad, because that time I was all ready. I put my dollar on the counter and shrugged at him. “Well, see you two tomorrow!” he said.

Calista said good-bye, but I didn't.

“He's nice,” she told me as we squeezed into the elevator.

I pushed the button for floor eight, and the door closed. I stared at the glazed donut in the paper tissue in my hand. I wanted to take a giant bite right there, but donuts always tasted better if you waited till you were home first.

“How come you never told me you had a boyfriend?” I asked Calista.

Calista was putting her phone back in her pocket. “Didn't I?” she asked.

“No,” I said. And I wasn't sure why, but that made me madder than not shaking Hugo's hand.

I took a bite of the donut.