Heaven Is Paved with Oreos (3 page)

I am extremely worried about everything I have just listed plus all the other terrible things I do not even know to list yet. But I'm most worried about Curtis. Because all the things I listed are things Curtis will worry about too. He will worry about them ten times more than me. He will worry 10x
²
(= ten times squared).

 

 

Dad and Mom left for work before I got up, which I appreciate because I do not feel like talking about Rome. It is overwhelming even to think about. Instead I went to Curtis's baseball game. That, I decided, would be my Sarah Zorn adventure for the 14th of June. Red Bend baseball is as far from Rome-thinking as you can get.

Curtis is excellent at baseball. He is a utility player, which means he can play many different positions, including pitcher so long as there is not too much pressure. It is difficult to pitch under pressure, even for professionals, which is why pitchers are so well paid. He also plays third base and sometimes center field.

I like riding my bike to the park and sitting on the bleachers with the parents and the other baseball fans. The problem is that I do not like going to his games for other reasons. For one thing, it is often hot—so hot that some of the grownups use umbrellas, which I cannot do because Emily makes fun of me enough as it is. Instead I wear an old fishing hat from one of Z's ex-boyfriends, which I know looks silly, but if I wear a baseball cap, my ears burn and I end up with hat head. Emily never seems to get hat head.

Emily is the other reason I don't like baseball. Emily attends all the games, with big posters that read
GO RED BEND! GO CURTIS!
She also cheers, which I do not do, because unlike some people, I am not naturally loud.

Sure enough, Emily was there with her friends, who were all cheering loudly. She came right over, even though I specifically sat on another bleacher, and asked if I had made a poster. Which I clearly had not because a poster is exceedingly visible, and also exceedingly difficult to carry on a bike. She asked why I never make posters. “If I was Curtis's girlfriend, I'd make a new poster for every game,” Emily said. “I'd cheer for him a lot. And I'd be very loud so he could hear me.”

I cannot imagine Emily cheering any louder than she already does.

“You know,” Emily said, “I've had boyfriends. I know how to be a girlfriend, if you want some tips.” Then she gave me her
I'm onto you
look and went back to her friends . . .

Okay. This is my personal private journal, so I will tell the truth. The truth about Curtis and me and our Brilliant Outflanking Strategy.

It started back in seventh grade with the hydrogen display that Curtis and I did for science class. The project itself was amazingly fun, but the other kids were awful. They kept teasing us and saying we were working on the project because we were boyfriend and girlfriend, which was especially bad because it was not true! We were only friends. We were good science friends, which is the best kind of friends to be.

We were teased so much that we would not even look at each other or do homework together after school. Last summer I did not see him at all.

Then, at the end of the summer, we both went to his sister's first football game and we talked a little. Then we both went to the Jorgensens' Labor Day picnic because our families go every year. Curtis told me about a possum skull he had just cleaned (Curtis collects skulls), and it felt exactly like old hydrogen times. Several little kids kept hanging around us because little kids love Curtis, and one girl (a future Emily, I think) kept asking if we were going out. I kept saying no, but she kept asking in a pestering way.

Finally I was so fed up that I said, “Yep, we are.”

“I knew it,” she said. And, zip, she ran off.

“Why did you say that?” Curtis looked horrified. He looked as horrified as I felt. We watched the little girl run up to a group of kids and elbow her way into the middle like she had something to say—to say about
us.
But instead she pointed to her T-shirt. She didn't even look back at Curtis and me. She was only talking about her clothes. She acted like she had already forgotten us.

Curtis frowned. “Why would she keep asking us that question if she doesn't care?”

“She did care,” I said, thinking hard. “Until we said yes. Then she stopped thinking about it.” That was when I had my eureka moment.
Eureka
is what you say when you have a massive scientific discovery. “That's it! Curtis, no one cares if we're
really
going out. They just like thinking we are. They don't like it when we say they're wrong. So let's let them think it!”

Curtis looked at me like I was crazy, but in the end he agreed to try because neither of us could think of any better way to keep talking to each other without people teasing us.

The next day—the first day of eighth grade—we got to school and immediately started talking in the hall. Within one minute Brett Ortlieb said, “Oooh, you two are going out.”

Normally I would say,
No!
But this time (
Please, Sarah, be right about this!
) I said, “Yep.”

Brett Ortlieb looked confused. “Wait. You two are really going out?”

I nodded. Curtis stared at the floor, but that is not unusual for him.

Brett said, “Oh . . . ,” and walked away. That was it.

That day, Curtis and I ate lunch together and walked home together and even worked on science together. No one said a single teasing thing. They just let us be.

This is why we call it the Brilliant Outflanking Strategy, because that is how brilliant it turned out to be. My parents think Curtis and I are going out—they give me lectures about it, which is how I can tell—and Paul does, and our friends and Curtis's parents and his sister, D.J., who has a boyfriend and gets a kick out of the fact that her little brother and I are boyfriend and girlfriend too, just like Brian and her. Although Curtis is not a quarterback like Brian is. Or eighteen years old. Or going to college.

Emily is the only person who is suspicious. No one else expects us to kiss in public or hug all the time, because they know we are not like that. But not Emily. Whenever Curtis and I are together, she watches us as though she is preparing her own science-fair project. I do not like it at all.

Emily is probably suspicious because around boys she is the exact opposite of me. She is always laughing at boys' dumb stories and giggling when they touch her gluteus maximus, and she makes out in the halls. Even though I tell myself I am not like Emily at all, I worry sometimes that sitting in the bleachers watching Curtis play baseball makes me look like her. I do not want anyone thinking that ever.

I have not talked about this with Curtis. We are not good at talking about anything related to Emily, and also I do not think he would understand, because he is (duh) a boy. Sometimes I get so worried about whether I look like Emily that I leave his games early. But I tell Curtis I have to be somewhere else, or that Mom or Paul is calling me.

Anyway, that was an extremely long description of Curtis and me and the Brilliant Outflanking Strategy. Now we can return to today's baseball game and the fact that I was doing my best not to think about Rome.

I stayed until the end of the game. Curtis's team won—hurray. He was supposed to leave right away for a weekend tournament in Sheboygan, but his mom said he had time to get ice cream. That's something the two of us do. It's nice because it's what boy/girlfriends do, but it's what friend-friends do too.

“Hey,” I said when he came up. “Nice game.” We Palm Saluted and smiled. Every time we Palm Salute, I smile.

“Thanks. Boris says hello, by the way.”

“Will he be okay while you're gone?” I was not completely joking. I do not want anything happening to Boris. Being dead is bad enough.

Curtis said he'd double-checked and that Boris would be fine. We walked toward Jorgensens' Ice Cream. I asked Curtis what he thought about Emily's poster.

Curtis shrugged. “She sure cheers a lot.”

That was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to say posters are stupid and he doesn't like Emily coming to his games and he doesn't like her, period. What did he mean,
she cheers a lot
? “Doesn't she cheer too much?”

“Nah . . . It's kind of crazy, you know, how she does it . . .”

I wanted to ask if Curtis wanted me to cheer, but it's the kind of thing Emily would ask, so I couldn't. I wouldn't ask that even if Curtis and I actually were going out.

We did not say much more after this, and we got our chocolate (Curtis) and vanilla (me) and sat under a tree and ate our cones. Sometimes we discuss trying other flavors, but that didn't seem like a good thing to talk about today. Nothing did.

I wanted to tell Curtis about Rome, but I did not know how to bring it up. It is interesting that Curtis and Z are my two favorite people in the world and yet they are total opposites. Z never thinks about what could go wrong, and Curtis only thinks about what could. Once he told me that he wished he could drive my school bus because then he'd know I'd be safe.

But I would have to tell him eventually, right? “Z wants to take a trip to Rome to be a pilgrim again, and she invited me to go with her.”

Curtis frowned. “Rome,
Italy?
”

I nodded.

“Would you fly there?”

“Well, yeah. If I go.”

“What if the plane crashes?”

See? He always worries. Why couldn't he say,
That sounds like fun
? I am also worried about crashing, but that is not reason enough not to go. “Flying isn't that dangerous.”

“Rome is really far away,” Curtis said.

“I know. But my grandmother would say that that's why you go.”

Curtis ripped up a handful of grass. “That seems like a really bad reason to go somewhere.”

“Well, I don't even know if I'm going yet.” I was the one who should be nervous about traveling, not Curtis. Curtis goes everywhere. He goes to Sheboygan.

We ate our ice cream in silence. Then his mom pulled up and he left.

 

 

My weekend was not productive. I spent the whole time thinking about Curtis and Rome but I got nowhere with my thoughts.

This morning, D.J. drove Paul and me to Prophetstown.

Mom stayed home from work until D.J. got there to make sure we knew what we were doing et cetera. As soon as D.J. pulled up in front of our house, Paul took his guitar and headphones and climbed into the back seat of her car so he wouldn't have to sit next to her. Sitting next to her was obviously going to be my job.

We rode awhile without saying anything. I wondered if I should ask about Curtis and what he's thinking, which D.J. might know given that she's his sister. I didn't want to be the one to bring it up, though.

“So,” D.J. asked, “you doing anything fun this summer besides walking dogs?” Oh: Curtis had not talked to her—but he had been in Sheboygan all weekend.

“My grandmother wants to take me to Rome. Rome,
Italy
.”

“Cool . . . That is really, really cool. What are you going to do there?”

I said we were going to visit churches, and then D.J. asked about Z, and so I spent the rest of the car ride describing her. Describing Z could take a whole car ride and then some.

Z is not a normal grandmother. Normal grandmothers don't wear four earrings in one ear and two in the other, or dress in loose, dangling clothes that make you look like a hippie, which is what Z used to be. She is the only grandmother I know who goes on water slides, and when she slides down she makes a noise like a cowboy. The other kids on the water slide were extremely impressed.

Z was born in Two Geese, Wisconsin, but then she moved to California and Oregon and New York City. She did not come back to Wisconsin until my great-grandmother Ann got sick—which I remember because I was five when Grandma Ann died—and then Z decided to stay. Now she lives in Prophetstown in an apartment in an old painted house with a dog named Jack Russell George.

I am in Z's apartment now, eating Oreos with milk and writing this down. It is important to eat Oreos the right way. Z and I are in agreement on this, and Paul, too. We are dunkers, not scrapers. Eating the filling first is a violation of everything that is the Oreo Way and also leaves you with two dry cookie halves. Not good. Luckily we live in the dairy state of Wisconsin, so milk is readily available. Z used to tease me that
milk
was
Oreo
spelled backwards. She jokes that that's how I learned to read so early—from reading all those Oreos. She says Oreos + yoga keep her young.

Now I am going to walk Jack Russell George.

 

 

Training a dog is a lot harder than it looks.

Jack Russell George is extremely smart, even for a Jack Russell terrier. This is how smart he is: when Z is at work and he has no one to play with, he drops a tennis ball down the stairs and runs down and catches it at the bottom and does it again. This is hilarious to watch and I am sure it is excellent exercise, but it is also noisy. The sculptor who lives upstairs from Z does not find it hilarious at all. That is where I come in. I am supposed to walk Jack Russell George to the park and throw him a tennis ball so he can release all his stair-bouncing kilowatts of energy.

The problem is that while Jack Russell George is tremendously good at fetching the ball, he is not so interested in returning it.

I think I need a book on dogs.

I am back home in Red Bend now. On the ride back, Paul listened to music in the back seat and ignored us. I asked D.J. about her basketball practice. She said it went really well and she really likes playing with girls on this level. But she was far more interested in Z than in basketball, which I appreciated because then I could contribute to the conversation. D.J. wanted to know, for example, why we call her Z, which is a tremendously long story and it makes some people uncomfortable, so I have to be careful how I tell it.