Being Teddy Roosevelt (2 page)

Riley moved closer.

Then Mr. Simpson let the kids crowd around the table to look at the instruments close up.

“First I have to be Gandhi,” Grant groaned. “Now I’m going to have to play a band instrument.”

“Mrs. Eldridge just said we don’t have to play one,” Riley reminded him.

“My parents will make me,” Grant said. “And then they’ll make me practice. Every time I sit down to play a video game, they’ll say, ‘Grant, have you practiced your instrument?’ Then there will be a concert. My dad will videotape the concert. They’ll show the videotape to my relatives when they come to our house. And then the relatives will say, ‘Grant, why don’t you play your instrument for us right now?’ Does that sound like fun to you?”

It did, actually. Of course, Riley didn’t have any relatives who came over. And his mother didn’t own a video camera.

And he wouldn’t have an instrument.

“I want to do the flute,” Sophie said. “I already play violin and piano, violin since I was four, piano since I was five. But it’s not too late to add flute.”

Erika wasn’t looking at any of the instruments.

“Don’t you want to be in band?” Riley asked her.

“Drums,” Erika said. “I want to do drums. And I don’t see any drums.”

Mr. Simpson heard her. “They were too hard to transport today. But you can definitely play drums if you’d like. The percussion section is the heartbeat of the band.”

Riley could picture Erika pounding away on drums.

“What about you?” Erika asked Riley then. He wasn’t looking at the instruments, either. What was the point of falling in love with something you couldn’t have? “Don’t you want to do an instrument?”

“I guess not,” Riley said.

“Did you get your homework done?” Riley’s mom asked him as they drove out of the school parking lot at five-thirty. Because his mom had to work, Riley went to the after-school day care program in the gym.

“Sort of.” He had done his spelling, but not his math homework, since he couldn’t find the math worksheet. It was odd how quickly a math worksheet could disappear into thin air.

He thought of another title for his biography:
Riley O’Rourke: The Boy Who Made Homework Disappear
. It would be a best seller, Riley was sure of it.

Or
Riley O’Rourke: The Boy Who Didn’t Get to Play the Saxophone.

It probably wasn’t even worth asking, but he made himself do it. “Can we rent a saxophone?” he blurted out.

“A saxophone?” She sounded as surprised as if he had asked for a pet elephant.

Riley explained to her about instrumental music. “But you have to rent an instrument. And Mr.

Simpson said it costs twenty-five dollars a month.”

She didn’t answer right away. That gave Riley a ray of hope.

“It’s a lot of money,” she said slowly. “But it isn’t just the money. You’re having a hard enough time with your schoolwork as it is. It takes you forever to get your homework done. I can’t see adding another distraction. And you know how you lose things. What if we paid all that money to rent a saxophone, and you lost it?”

Riley wouldn’t lose it. Some things you didn’t lose. You just didn’t.

They pulled into the parking space in front of their apartment.

“Anyway,” Riley’s mother said, “we really can’t afford it, honey. I wish we had the money for extras, but we don’t. So there’s no point in worrying about it.”

Dinner was macaroni and cheese, the good kind that came in a box. Riley’s mom made him eat some broccoli with it. Once he had asked her if she’d pay him for eating broccoli. She had laughed. So he still had to eat broccoli for free.

After dinner, Riley told his mother, “I have to go to the library.”

“Tonight?”

“Well, sometime. I have to get a biography of Teddy Roosevelt by Friday.” Riley told her about the biography tea.

“That sounds like so much fun!”

Her enthusiasm gave Riley an idea: the teachers and parents could go to the biography tea, while the kids played video games at Grant’s house.

“Let’s go tonight. I’m so proud of you for wanting to get a good start on this!”

What Riley really wanted to get a good start on was playing the saxophone, but he didn’t say anything.

When they got to the library, Grant was there, too. Riley was surprised that Grant’s mother hadn’t taken him to the library the minute after school got out, at 3:01. But then he remembered that Grant had his soccer practice on Wednesdays.

Riley found a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right away. Unfortunately, there was no biography with exactly 100 pages. The best he could do was 127. Poor Grant’s biography of Gandhi had 158 pages.

“Wait till you see the pictures,” Grant warned him as they checked out their books.

The guy
was
bald! And he
was
wearing some kind of strange, white underwear-like thing.

“It’s called a loincloth,” Grant informed Riley. “I think it’s child abuse to make a kid wear a loincloth.”

Some of the pictures showed Gandhi wearing normal clothes, but Grant kept going back to the picture of Gandhi in the loincloth. Riley knew that Grant enjoyed making his project sound as terrible as possible, to upset his mom.

“Do you want me to go talk to Mrs. Harrow?” she asked.

“That’s all right,” Grant said, sounding noble. “Sometime in life everyone has to wear a loin-cloth. In public. To school. In front of the whole class.”

Then Grant’s face changed. “Look at that!”

Riley turned and saw Sophie coming into the library, led by her mother. Sophie was blindfolded.

“What on earth happened to Sophie?” Grant’s mother asked.

Riley knew. “She’s being Helen Keller.” Sophie had known about the biography assignment for all of six hours, and already she was acting the part.

Both mothers chuckled. Then they headed off together to look at magazines.

“Hi, Sophie!” Grant called out in a fake high voice.

“Hi, Grant!” Sophie replied serenely.

“Hi, Sophie!” Riley called out in a low, growly voice.

“Hi, Riley.”

Sophie was amazing.

“Helen Keller was blind
and
deaf,” Grant pointed out, using his normal voice this time.

“I’m practicing being blind first,” Sophie said. “Then I’ll practice deafness. We stopped at the drugstore on the way here to buy earplugs.”

“How are you going to find your biography if you can’t see the computer catalog?” Grant wanted to know.

“My mother is going to help me. People helped Helen Keller, too, like her teacher, Annie Sullivan.”

“Where did you learn so much about Helen Keller?” Riley asked. “You haven’t even gotten your biography yet.”

Sophie shrugged. “Everybody knows some things.”

Riley felt as if he didn’t know anything.

Riley’s mother and Grant’s mother hadn’t returned yet. Sophie’s mother was typing away at the computer catalog across the room.

“Let’s play a trick on Sophie,” Grant whispered.

“Like what?”

Grant got down on all fours and crawled over to Sophie’s feet and started meowing. Riley set his book down to watch him.

“Very funny, Grant-the-cat.”

Grant tried again. “Oh, Sophie, look! There’s a snake crawling into the library. A long, slithery one.”

“A snake in the library,” Sophie said scornfully. “I suppose it just opened the door and came in all by itself?”

“Wait! There’s a spider! A big black hairy one. It’s coming right toward you!”

It was hard to tell what someone was thinking when you couldn’t see her eyes. But this time Sophie wasn’t so quick with her response.

“I’m not afraid of spiders,” she said uncertainly.

“There really
is
a spider!” Grant told her. “Honest! I wouldn’t lie about something like that. I’ve never seen such a big one!” He reached out a hand and brushed Sophie’s arm.

Sophie gave a muffled scream and tore off her blindfold. “Where is it? Where’s the spider?”

Grant burst out laughing. Sophie glared at him with pure rage.

“If you were really Helen Keller, you wouldn’t be able to take off your blindfold,” Grant said.

“Well, if you were really Mahatma Gandhi, you wouldn’t be playing stupid tricks on people.”

“Guess what? I’m not really Mahatma Gandhi. Lucky me.”

Sophie’s mother came bustling over. “I found three biographies. I know you’ll want the longest one. I’m glad you took off that blindfold, honey. It’s well and good to practice being Helen Keller, but a little bit of pretending goes a long way.”

“I’ve practiced being blind enough for one day.” Sophie swept off with her mother to the nonfiction stacks.

Riley wondered whether Teddy Roosevelt had ever played tricks on people. He didn’t know anything about Teddy Roosevelt, except that he was President and had a mustache and had his head carved on Mount Rushmore.

Back at home, Riley thought he might look at the first page of his biography, to see how hard it was going to be. But where was it?

“I can’t find my library book,” Riley confessed.

“Oh, Riley. It has to be here somewhere.”

Riley looked everywhere. He still couldn’t find it.

“I think I left it at the library.” He had a dim memory of laying it down on a table while Grant was meowing at Sophie.

“Oh, Riley,” his mother said again. “The library’s closed now. We’ll have to go back tomorrow and hope it’s still there. Do you see why I don’t want to rent a saxophone?” She sounded tired and discouraged.

Riley felt tired and discouraged, too. He bet Teddy Roosevelt didn’t forget everything. A person who forgot his own head if it weren’t fastened on wouldn’t get
his
head carved on Mount Rushmore.

During reading time on Fridays, Mrs. Harrow let her students sit anywhere they wanted: on the rug, in the beanbag chairs by the bookcases, even outside on days that were warm and sunny—anywhere but on the couch. Only the two special students who were the “couch potatoes” for the week were allowed to sit on the couch. The couch potato names were drawn from Mrs. Harrow’s big papiermâché potato.

This week Riley was a couch potato.

Unfortunately, Erika was a couch potato, too.

If only Riley and Grant could have been couch potatoes together. But so far this year, Mrs. Harrow’s potato had never picked best friends in the same week. Riley sometimes wondered if it was rigged.

Grant plopped down on the floor next to the couch, like a couch potato that had rolled onto the floor. A floor potato. The couch potatoes and the floor potato started reading.

Riley read slowly. There were a lot of hard words in his biography of Teddy Roosevelt, which he had brought home from the library yesterday. Words like
asthma
. When he was a little boy, Teddy Roosevelt had asthma. Asthma was a sickness that made it hard to breathe. When young Teddy had trouble breathing at night, his father would take him out for rides in his carriage.

Teddy Roosevelt was lucky to have a father, Riley thought.

And to be rich. The Roosevelts had piles and piles of money. If Teddy Roosevelt had wanted a saxophone, his father could have bought him one in a second.

But maybe, since Teddy had asthma, it would have been hard for him to blow into a saxophone.

Still, it was even harder blowing into a saxophone if you didn’t have a saxophone—and were never going to have one.

At the other end of the couch, Erika slammed her book shut. Uh-oh. Grant looked up from his. Riley saw that Grant was already on chapter three.

“How’s empire ruling?” Grant asked pleasantly.

A spot of red burned in each of Erika’s cheeks. “It’s Queen Elizabeth’s father. Guess what he did.”

Riley had no idea.

“He made her sit cross-legged in her underwear?” Grant suggested, even though Erika was clearly in no mood for jokes.

“Queen Elizabeth’s father,” Erika said, “cut off Queen Elizabeth’s mother’s head.”

That was bad, all right. Maybe fathers weren’t such a great thing—at least some of them.

“Why did he do that?” Grant asked.

Erika’s eyes glittered with rage. “He did it because he was mad that Elizabeth wasn’t a
boy
. He wanted a boy.”