My Homework Ate My Homework

For Lauren and Lex,
my homework buddies

“Can I talk to you a minute, Mr. O.?” I say to the mirror. “You’d better sit down.”

I make a face that shows how sorry I would be if what I was saying were true. The sunglasses holding my hair back aren’t working. They make me look too glamorous, and that’s not the look I’m after. I pull them off and my strawberry blonde hair tumbles down over my shoulders. This is worse. I make a mental note to stop washing my hair a few days before returning to school.

“It’s about Bandito,” I say and pause …… dramatically. I love dramatic pauses. They’re very …… dramatic.

“You see …… I can’t seem to find him. I’m sorry.”

I cast my eyes downward. Casting your eyes downward is very effective, especially if you want somebody to think you feel bad about something you did. Even if you don’t.

Casting them upward, by the way, is good if you want to pretend to be thinking, or trying to remember something. For example, I look up when I say, “I’m pretty sure I turned that in, Mr. O.,” even though I know I didn’t do the assignment. Casting your eyes sideways makes you look like you’re making up an excuse, or just plain fibbing. Only do this on purpose and onstage. It’s important to control sideways looks in real life. They can give you away.

Practicing eye-casting is difficult to do in a mirror, so I’m video-recording myself on my mother’s cell phone.

“How did Bandito get out of his cage?” I ask rhetorically. “I don’t know, Mr. O.,” and shrug my shoulders up to my ears. I really look like I don’t know that I left the ferret’s cage door open after I fed him. Which is what happened.

Now I shift from faux-clueless to faux-suspicious.
(
Faux
is French for
fake
and is pronounced
foe
, like friend or foe, and makes
fake
sound fancier.)

“I’m pretty positive my baby sister, Abalina, opened the cage door,” I say, and tighten my lips, like I’m holding back anger. “That girl is always getting into my stuff.”

No. I don’t want to come across as blaming, especially of a baby. A baby isn’t responsible for her actions. Or so my mother keeps telling me. But that’s another story.

I reach up and make an erasing motion with my hand. I’m starting over.

“My baby sister, Abalina, probably opened the cage door, but she’s just a baby and isn’t responsible for her actions, so I’m not angry at her.”

That’s good. I’ll keep that.

“But then something awful happened.”

No, not quite right. I “erase” it.

“But then something
terrible
happened.”

Better, but still no. Erase.

“But then something HORRIBLE happened!”

Yes, that’s it. Now I swallow loud enough for
him to hear, flash a faux-horrified-bordering-on-sick-to-my-stomach face, pause dramatically …… then deliver my well-rehearsed punch line: “My homework ate my dog.”

Bandito is my homework and he is hideous. Sure, he has a shiny brown-and-white fur coat, kind of like a cat’s, but instead of covering an adorable purring kitty, it covers a creepy, wheezy, slithery ferret. Bandito has ratlike toes and ratlike ears, a twitching ratlike nose, and a white face with a raccoonlike black mask. He’s a mustelid, which means he’s cousins with stinky skunks and weasels.