Help! Somebody Get Me Out of Fourth Grade (7 page)

There it was—Philadelphia. That city where Benjamin Franklin flew his kite. Where the founding fathers wrote the Constitution. Where the Phillies and the Eagles play. And most importantly, where my parent-teacher conference was not.

Only two little, tiny, measly hours from New York. So near, and yet so far.

FRANKIE AND ASHLEY had to go back to their apartments for dinner, and by the time they left, I still had no plan. I was left with no one to help me come up with an idea. No one but my sister Emily, that is, who probably wouldn't want to help me, anyway. Besides, I don't know if you have a younger sister, but even if you don't, I think you'd agree that a person would have to be very desperate to ask his younger sister for help.

Okay, I confess. I was desperate.

While my mom was in the kitchen preparing dinner, I walked into Emily's room and flopped down on her bed like it was something I did every day.

“Get your dirty sneakers off my bedspread,” she said.

That wasn't exactly the Hi-Hank-Welcome-to-My-Room kind of greeting I was hoping for, but I could make it work. Trying to be nice, I gave Katherine a smile as if I really liked her. She was crawling across the room, hissing at a pair of Emily's soccer socks. Then I picked up Emily's pillow and propped it under my head. It was stiff and made a crinkling sound when I put my head on it, not like my pillow, which is soft and fluffy.

“Your pillow feels like it's stuffed with saltine crackers,” I said.

“That shows what you know,” Emily said, looking up.

She was sitting at her desk, painting every fingernail in a different color nail polish. “It's filled with synthetic fibers that keep my allergies from flaring up. It's called hypoallergenic.”

“Well, if you ask me, it's hypo-annoying,” I said.

“Why don't you make like a tree and leaf,” Emily said.

She laughed her little nerd laugh. Ordinarily, I would have pointed out that only kids in first grade think that joke is funny, but since I was about to ask a favor, I decided to laugh as if I hadn't heard that joke a hundred million times. She looked a little surprised when I held my sides and gave out an earsplitting hoot.

“You're funny, Emily,” I said, crossing my fingers and toes and anything else you could possibly cross. That girl is about as funny as a cow with gas, and we all know there's nothing funny about that.

I guess Emily didn't buy my attempt to be charming, because she just stared at me and said, “What do you want, Hank?”

“I want Mom and Dad to miss my parent-teacher conference on Friday.”

Emily didn't even answer me. Instead, she looked at Katherine and talked to her like she was a person and not a lower life-form.

“Get it, Kathy? Hank wants Mom and Dad to go to the concert instead of his teacher conference.”

Katherine looked back at Emily and hissed. Emily took that for some kind of answer, because she went on talking to Katherine like I wasn't even in the room.

“I know, Kathy. Parent-teacher conferences are no big deal for some people. Mom and Dad went to mine last week, and my teacher told them I was getting all As and that I'm highly gifted.”

I may not be highly gifted like my sister, but at least I don't have long conversations with hissing reptiles.

“Emily, I'm over here,” I said. “Could you maybe talk to me, since I'm the only other
human
in the room?”

Emily put some hot pink polish on her thumbnail, held it out, and looked at it like she was Pablo Picasso. He was a famous artist who was this really cool guy, because he walked around in shorts and no shirt even when he was eighty years old. Mr. Rock, the music teacher at my school, has told me all about him.

“Mom and Dad wouldn't miss your parent-teacher conference, Hank,” Emily said in her goody-goody, know-it-all voice.

“They don't know about it, Smarty-Pants,” I answered. “It's not on the calendar. I moved the waxed paper
and
the aluminum foil and guess what? The whole month of May is blank. Plus, I've still got the sign-up slip in my backpack. They haven't seen it yet.”

Emily blew on her fingernails to dry the polish.

“So, great,” she said. “You've got a plan. Now can you leave my room?”

“There's one problem, though. Dad said no to Philadelphia.”

Katherine snapped her sticky gray tongue out at me, just missing my ankle by an inch. She had made it across the room and was lying on some soccer shorts next to the bed, her snout resting on Emily's pile of lavender vocabulary flash cards. Boy, if that wasn't a cover shot for
Geek World
magazine, I didn't know what was.

“Which color polish should I put on my pinkie—the dark purple or the sparkling orange?” Emily asked me, holding up her hands to admire her manicure work.

“They're both ugly,” I said.

“It's too bad you think that,” Emily said, “because if you were nice to me, I was going to tell you my idea for getting Dad interested in going to the concert.”

“The sparkling orange is really cute,” I said without missing a beat. Hey, I told you I was a desperate man.

“Want to help me paint my toenails?” Emily said as she applied the orange polish to her pinkie finger.

“I'd rather eat raw goat,” I answered.

“That's too bad,” Emily said, “because I think I have the answer to your little problem, but I can only tell you if you help me with my toenails.”

“Exactly how good is this plan of yours?” I growled.

Emily put her foot out and handed me a bottle of lime green nail polish.

“Paint and you'll find out.” She wiggled her toes at me. I knew she didn't really want to help me—she just wanted to see me polishing her stupid toenails. Oh, boy, she had me in a corner, and she was loving it.

I grabbed the nail polish, unscrewed the top, and slopped a glob of it on her big toe. I promised myself right then and there that I would get her back for this someday.

“This nail polish looks like lizard skin,” I said. Maybe Emily could make me paint her toenails green, but she couldn't make me like it.

“Robert and I love lizard skin,” Emily said.

“That's the difference between you and the rest of the human race,” I pointed out. “Now what's your idea, Emily? Spill it.”

“Well,” Emily said, a little smile curling around her braces. “The other day, when Mom and I were at the orthodontist, they played a Stone Cold Rock song in the lobby while we were waiting for my appointment.”

Emily seemed really pleased with herself, but as far as I was concerned, this piece of information was not nearly good enough for me to be painting her lizardy toenails green.

“You'd better have more than that,” I said, holding the nail-polish brush up in midair.

“And guess what?” she went on. “Mom knew all the words to the song by heart. It turns out she
loves
Stone Cold Rock.”

“I'm really happy for her,” I said. “But I still don't see how this helps me.”

“Hank, you are so thick sometimes,” Emily said. “Don't you see? If we tell Mom about the concert in Philadelphia, she'll really want to go. And then Dad will have to go along with it. He won't say no to something Mom really, really wants to do.”

“He said no when she wanted him to wear those orange flip-flops to Aunt Maxine's beach party,” I pointed out.

“That's different,” Emily said. “The rubber thingamajiggy on the flip-flops gives him a blister between his toes. He had no choice but to say no. It's a medical problem.”

“So what's your idea specifically?” I asked. I was in a big hurry to get off the topic of the blister in between my dad's toes. The thought of it was making me a little nauseous.

“Dinner's in a few minutes, right?” said Emily. “I think we should put on some music with the meal.”

“As in Stone Cold Rock music?” I asked.

“Yes, oh, slow one.”

“I think I see your plan,” I said, determined to show her that I wasn't as slow as she thought. “Mom will really like the music, and then I can suggest one more time—in front of Dad—that they go to the concert.”

“You're actually getting it.” Emily smiled at Katherine, who was snuggled up there on her soccer shorts. “Pretty brilliant plan, don't you think, Kathy?”

Katherine shot her disgusting tongue out again. This time it reached me and she actually licked my sock. I think she picked up a piece of sock lint on her tongue, because afterward, she kept flicking her tongue around like she was trying to shake something off it.

“It wouldn't kill you to say thanks for the great idea,” Emily said.

I leaped off the bed and hurried out of Emily's room. I had to get the music all rigged up before dinner. But just as I was heading out the door, Emily called me back.

“Oh, Hank,” she said. “Haven't you forgotten something?”

“No.”

She waved the green nail polish around in the air.

“My toes really look so much better with two coats,” she said.

“No way,” I said. “And that's final.”

“Think about it, Hank. What if you need my help during dinner? I'd hate to have to say no.”

She had me there.

I snatched the nail polish, and as I unscrewed the top, I stuck my tongue out at Emily. Katherine stared at me with her beady eyes. I stuck my tongue out at her too.

Sisters. They'll drive you nuts. Not to mention their pet iguanas.

MY DAD WAS SETTING the table while my mom was putting the finishing touches on dinner. When I walked into the dining room, I noticed that he was putting out soup spoons, and for a minute, I actually got excited. I hoped that maybe my mom had brought home some of Papa Pete's mushroom barley soup that we sell at our deli, the Crunchy Pickle. It is my absolute favorite soup.

No such luck.

“Your mother has created a new soup she's trying out on us tonight,” my dad said.

These are not words you want to hear in my house. My mom is always trying to create new, healthy versions of dishes Papa Pete invented when he started the Crunchy Pickle fifty years ago. But her recipes usually taste something like cow pasture mixed in with a little cardboard.

“Please tell me the soup doesn't have cabbage in it,” I begged.

One thing I've learned in my ten and three-quarter years on Earth is that cooked cabbage not only tastes disgusting on its own, it makes everything else around it taste disgusting too. It doesn't matter what the anything else is. Even if it's old leather shoes, if you boil them with cabbage, they'll taste like old leather cabbage shoes.

“It doesn't have cabbage in it,” my dad smiled.

“She says it's Three B Soup,” my dad said. “A mixture of beets, Brussels sprouts, and bananas all ground up together with some lima beans thrown in for texture.”

My mom came in through the swinging door from the kitchen, carrying a big steaming bowl of the awful-smelling stuff. Her blond hair was all wild looking, like it gets when she's cooking up something new, and she had a couple chunks of lima bean clinging to her pink sweater. Even though she was pretty messy, it was really cute the way she looked so proud of her new invention. It must have been the way that scientist whose name I can't remember felt when he discovered penicillin in moldy old dishes.