Absolutely Almost (9 page)

M
om said I should be Sherlock Holmes for Halloween again, but Calista had a way better idea.

A zombie.

“With ripped-up clothes and blood and everything?” I asked her when we were walking through the racks of kids' shirts at the Housing Works thrift shop. We'd taken the bus all the way up to 90th Street to get there. Calista said it was the best one, that they had all the best stuff for cheap. She also said that thrift stores were the best places to find Halloween costumes, but so far I didn't see anything that a zombie would wear. “I want it to look like I'm dead and all my guts are hanging out,” I said. Calista nodded and held up a pair of pants to my legs, to see if they would fit, I guess. “And fangs. I want to have fangs.”

“Zombies don't have fangs,” Calista told me.

“Oh,” I said, and I frowned. I'd really wanted to have fangs.

When Calista saw my face, she laughed. “You can be a fanged zombie if you want, Albie.”

That made me smile.

My zombie outfit from the thrift store cost $7.85. Really it was just pants and a shirt—it didn't look like zombie clothes at all. But Calista said we could fix it so it did. After the thrift store, we went to Duane Reade and got a bottle of red hair dye, then we headed home.

“And now,” Calista said while I swung the bags beside her, “we make magic.”

• • •

It turned out that the way to make magic was to rip up my new thrift store clothes with a pair of scissors. Calista did most of the ripping.

“
Brains!
” I shouted while Calista ripped, because all zombies cared about was eating brains, and I needed to practice.

“Louder,” Calista told me.

“
BRAINS!
” I shouted, louder.

“Much better.”

I kept practicing while Calista showed me how to pour the dye over the clothes in the bathtub.

“
Brains! Mmm, brains!
”

Calista laughed.

It turned out zombies didn't just care about brains. One of the other things they
should
care about, according to Harriet, the cleaning lady who came once a week and who was about a million years old, was staining the bathtub. She came to clean while me and Calista were hanging the zombie clothes up in my room to dry, and we didn't realize she was there, actually, because she has her own key so she doesn't use the buzzer or anything, and all of a sudden, we heard all this
screaming
coming from the bathroom. And me and Calista ran-ran-ran down the hall from my bedroom, and when we were right outside the bathroom, Calista put a hand on my chest like she wanted me to stay in the hallway while she figured out what was going on. Only no way was I staying all by myself in the hallway if there was someone being
murdered
in our bathroom, which is what it sounded like, what with all the screaming and everything. So I ignored Calista's hand on my chest and peeked inside too.

It wasn't anybody being murdered. It was Harriet the cleaning lady, which I guess maybe I should've figured out.

Harriet looked up from the bathtub when she saw us—me and Calista in the doorway—and she stopped screaming that terrible scream, only her mouth was still open, so it looked like she might start up again any minute. And then she spent a few seconds looking back and forth between me and Calista and the bathtub, which was smeared with zombie blood. I was still holding the zombified shirt in my hand, and I finally realized that Harriet had been doing all that screaming because she thought
we'd
been murdered. And that was kind of funny, I thought, all of us thinking that someone else had been murdered, when really no one had been murdered at all. It had just been a Halloween zombie in the bathtub. Which was why I started laughing.

Harriet did not start laughing. She did not seem to think that zombies were very funny.

“I'm not cleaning that up,” she told me. And then she stomped out of the bathroom and hollered at Calista if she knew where my parents kept the aspirin, and then she spent the next hour lying on the couch with a cool washcloth over her eyes while Calista and I scrubbed the tub clean.

But anyway, the zombie costume turned out pretty great.

W
hen we finished with my homework on Wednesday, Calista said she wanted to do some drawing.

“What kind of drawing?” I asked.

“How about people?” she said. “Cartoons, maybe, like in
Captain Underpants.
”

“Can we draw superheroes?” I asked. “I want to make my own superhero.” I knew exactly the one I wanted to do.

“Sure,” Calista said, so we got out the markers and paper.

Calista's superhero looked amazing. It was a girl superhero, and Calista named her Art Girl. She had curly hair and a paintbrush in one hand and one of those wooden things artist people put their thumbs through that has all the colors of paint on it. Also, she had a cape.

Calista said superheroes always had capes.

Calista sure was good at drawing. She was using the exact same markers as me, but somehow when she drew with them, her drawings looked a million times better than mine. My superhero was supposed to be Donut Man, the best superhero anybody ever invented. But he just looked like a blobby stick.

“What are you doing?” Calista asked when she looked over at me.

I had my head down on the table, close to her hand so I could watch while she drew, and my right hand was up in the air, gripped tight around the marker. “I'm trying to see if I'm holding it wrong,” I said, but then I sat up, because all of a sudden I felt silly. “How come I can't draw as good as you?”

“Albie.” Calista set down her marker and looked over at my paper. “Yours is good!”

It was not good. “That's what teachers say when they don't want to hurt your feelings,” I told Calista. Then I grumped, crossing my hands over my chest. I was feeling particularly grumpy.

Calista glanced at me sideways. Then she leaned in close to look at my drawing a little harder. “All right,” she said after a while. “It's awful.”

At first that made me mad, because that was not the thing a not-a-babysitter was supposed to say, especially a nice one. But when I saw the look on her face, a scrunched-up half smile, I couldn't help but laugh. Because Calista was telling the truth, and I knew it—my Donut Man drawing
was
awful.

“It's horrible!” I said, still laughing.

“Wretched!” Calista added.

“Gross!”

“Putrid!”

“Terrible!”

“An abomination!”

I shook my head. “I guess I'll never be an artist like you,” I said.

Calista thought about that. “Oh, I don't know that
that's
true,” she said. “I've had a lot more practice that you have. I could teach you a couple tricks, if you want.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

So Calista took out a fresh piece of paper and gave me a new marker, one where the tip wasn't all mushed-up used. “We'll start easy,” she said. And she drew one line, straight down the paper. She told me to draw one just like it, right beside it. So I did. I copied her like that, one little step after another, and when we were done and we pulled our hands from the paper, wouldn't you know it—Calista had shown me how to draw a whole person. Head, legs, feet, everything. It wasn't a superhero yet, just a person. Actually it was a little bit like a stick figure, like in hangman, but with more details. Then Calista showed me how to make changes, whatever I wanted, like giving the man muscles or a fat belly, or bending his arms or making him run, or anything. By dinnertime we had tons of people, all different kinds, crammed all up and down and sideways across the paper. I'd even drawn a better version of Donut Man.

He looked pretty okay.

“See?” Calista said as she got up to put water on for spaghetti. “I told you you could do it.”

I looked down at the paper. You could tell which people were Calista's and which ones were mine, because Calista's were better. But mine weren't
awful.

“Do you think I could ever get good enough to be an artist one day?” I asked Calista as she turned the heat on under the pot on the stove.

“I don't know,” Calista said. “Do you want to be an artist?”

I looked at Donut Man some more. For a long time. “I want to be something I'm good at,” I said.

“Albie.”

Calista walked over and leaned her elbows on the counter by the table. I looked up at her. She looked more serious than normal. “You should do something because you
love
it, not just because you're good at it.”

I wrinkled my nose, thinking. “But you're good at art, and you love it,” I told her.

She nodded. “Did you ever think maybe the love part comes first?” I guess she could tell I was confused, because she kept talking. “Find something you'd want to keep doing forever,” she said, “even if you stink at it. And then if you're lucky, with lots of practice, then one day you won't stink so much.”

That sounded good. But . . .

“But what if I'm not lucky?” I asked her. “What if I
do
find something I love, and then I always just stink at it?”

Calista smiled her thoughtful smile. “Then won't you be glad you found something you love?” she said.

And I didn't really get a chance to answer, because then she said, “I'm too hungry to wait for the spaghetti to boil. What do you say we eat cookies first?”

That was one thing I didn't have to think about too hard. Even if they weren't nearly as good as donuts, I
knew
I loved cookies.

H
ere's what I figured out about the coffee cups at the bodega downstairs that I stacked after school for free donuts while Calista was looking at art books with Hugo.

I always ended up with four stacks of them. Always. Every single time. Twenty-five cups in each stack. One, two, three, four.

I looked on the plastic bag once, and it said
ONE HUNDRED PAPER CUPS
.

That's how I knew that there were four stacks of twenty-five in one hundred. Every time.

Here's another thing I figured out. Once I'd counted out three stacks—one, two, three—then I didn't have to count the last one. Because no matter what, it would be twenty-five in the stack, every single time.

I figured that out by myself. No one told me.

I told that to Mr. Clifton, because he asked me what I liked to do after school, so I told him, and he grinned at me and said, “Albie, I think you accidentally did math.”

“Really?” I asked. I almost didn't believe it.

He nodded. “Did it hurt?” he said.

I thought about that. Usually math hurt my brain, like a tree crashing down inside it over and over. But this time it didn't hurt at all.

“Nope,” I said.

Mr. Clifton gave me a high five.

I hoped I could accidentally do math some more. It turned out that was the best way to do it.