Nest (17 page)

Joey tips backward and I tip with him until we’re lying on our backs on the blanket. Cold blue sky. Cold white sun.

“We need the blanket on top,” I say, so we squirm around and pull the blanket out from under us. Joey stands up and shakes the sand off, and then he lies down and covers us from our knees to our necks. Joey’s arm is against my arm, and I move my leg so it’s touching him, too. If I keep my eyes closed, maybe nothing will change. Cold sand. Cold air. Joey’s arm and leg against me, warm.

“Okay?” he whispers.

“Okay.”

The water sounds like someone slurping soup.

Joey whistles really soft, and I think he’s trying to copy the wind. I start whistling, too, but I’m not so good at it and can’t help being loud and drowning out Joey, so I stop. Joey stops, and then I feel his breath in my ear.

“You know,” he says, “Thanksgiving wasn’t all fun and games.”

I nod, but my eyes are still closed, so I don’t know if Joey’s looking at me.

“Open your eyes and look at me,” he says in an angry voice. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

When I open my eyes and turn my head to look at him, his face is so close to mine, our noses are almost touching.

“You know, I really hate germs.” His voice isn’t mad anymore.

“You do?”

“Snot keeps germs from getting in your body. That’s one of the reasons noses are important.”

I have to work hard to keep his two eyes separate instead of one gigantic gray-blue eye right above his nose.

“You have sand on your face,” Joey says, and he reaches out like he’s going to brush it off, but then he just puts his cold hand on my cheek.

I look at his pink mark.

“Don’t touch it,” he says.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Well, just don’t.”

I put my hand on his cheek right below the pink mark. We stay put, our hands on each other’s cheeks.

“Hear that?” I ask Joey.

“A frog?”

“It’s a great blue heron. It croaks like a big fat bullfrog.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“I like your name,” Joey says.

“Naomi?”

“Chirp.”

I want to give something nice back to Joey. “Thanksgiving sucked.” Now he’ll know he wasn’t the only one who had a lousy Turkey Day.

“Not a grand ol’ time,” he says.

“Not a barrel of monkeys,” I say.

“Not a run for your money.”

“Not a fine how-d’ya-do.”

“Not a bowl of cherries.”

I can’t think of any more, so I sit up, take off my mitten, and reach into my pocket.

“What are you doing?” Joey asks, sitting up, too.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” When I hand him some clam strip, he doesn’t say anything, even though it looks gross. Even though it’s gray and rubbery and probably has tons of germs swimming around on it, he just smiles and puts it in his pocket. While I watch the water just in case a loon decides to
surprise me, Joey shakes the sand out of my blanket and folds it into a perfect neat square. He puts the perfect square over one leg, smoothes the wrinkles out, and hands it to me. I put it in my knapsack. Then we walk home.

When us kids complain that the classroom is too hot, Miss Gallagher says it’s
toasty
and
cozy
and we should be grateful that the school has a good furnace now that Thanksgiving is over and winter is upon us. I guess she’s forgotten that President Nixon has asked us all to do our part during this oil crisis and turn our thermostats down. My family hates Nixon, but saving energy seems like a smart idea, just like paying attention to the owl in the commercials who says
Give a hoot, don’t pollute!

How am I supposed to put my very best effort into writing my book report when my head hurts and my yellow blouse is sticking to my skin? I roll my long sleeves up. I roll my brown kneesocks down.

No one in
The Secret Garden
is happy when they’re all cooped up inside, not Mary and not Colin and especially not Dickon, who’s my favorite, because he believes in fresh air and everything that’s wick, which means alive and green and growing. The book says he smells like “heather and grass and leaves … as if he were made of them,” and animals follow him
around, and I bet anything that he wouldn’t just sit here sweating at his desk in this stuffy classroom because Miss Gallagher has decided that it’s cozy. He’d open the windows and sniff the air and play his wooden pipe and lead us all outside, where we’d run around and play tag with the squirrels. He’d know the names of all the birds, just like I do.

I raise my hand. There’s a wet spot under my arm, like I’m a teenager who forgot to put on her Ban Roll-On.

It takes a while, but finally Miss Gallagher looks up from her desk and raises her eyebrows at me.

“Please, Miss Gallagher, could we open the windows just a crack, since it’s really hot in here?”

“Hot?” she says. “Open the windows?” She looks at me like I’m Oliver, asking for more gruel.

I nod.

“What you need to do, Naomi, is focus on your work, not on the temperature.”

“That’s
not
what I need,” I say, before I’ve even realized that I’ve said it.

“Oooohh,” Sean says. “Naomi is in trouble.”

Now my face is even hotter.

“Sean, you stay out of this,” Miss Gallagher says.

“Oooohh,” Joey says. “Sean is in trouble.”

“Oooohh,” Lori says. “Joey is—”

“That’s enough out of all of you!” Miss Gallagher is getting up from her desk. She’s trying to stomp over to me in her red high heels, but it isn’t easy. She has
to bend her knees so she doesn’t lose her balance and fall down and crack her head open on the speckled linoleum floor.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Naomi Orenstein,” Miss Gallagher says from in front of Lisa B.’s desk, because she’s given up on making it all the way over to me, “I expect much better from you. If I have to speak to you again, you’re going to the office.”

“I’m really sorry.” My forehead is wet, and my neck has the prickles.

Miss Gallagher shakes her head and gives me a what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you fake smile, but I can tell that she’s mad, because her eyes are squinty. She has pink lipstick on two of her front teeth. It looks a lot like Bazooka bubble gum.

Sean’s wagging his finger at me, but I pretend I don’t see. A little square of my blouse is stuck to my upper arm, like the wrinkly paper on a temporary tattoo before you lift it off and leave a splotchy red heart or a yellow smiley face behind. I look at my book report. Not even one word yet. I haven’t written one word. I want to scribble like a baby, I’m so cranky hot. In
The Secret Garden
, Mary’s cranky all the time, because her parents abandoned her and died, but then she discovers a secret garden and starts working in it and her mood gets much better, especially after she meets Dickon, who teaches her all about “friendly wild things.”

Maybe at McLean, Mom looks for frogs in the frog pond. Maybe she walks into the courtyard and stares up through the branches of the maple tree and watches the birds and wonders what they’re thinking about. Maybe there’s a male cardinal that’s so perfectly red she says
oy
out loud. Maybe when it gets stuffy in her room, she opens her window and leans out and sniffs the air and feels better, because she remembers all the stuff we do outside together—for example, clip armfuls of purple lilacs in May that smell so sweet we pretend to get dizzy and fall down laughing in the grass and just lie there until Dad opens the screen door and says
Oh, my crazy ladies
, and even then we keep laughing and just stay put, with the lilacs on top of us and the damp grass underneath us. I hope the employees at McLean let Mom open the windows whenever she wants to because they know that it makes her happy. Or maybe they at least understand that getting overheated is bad for her multiple sclerosis, so they have a special rule that she can open the windows if she really needs to.

But what if they don’t? What if she’s stuck inside with no fresh air, day after day after day until I don’t know when?

Suddenly I’m just too hot. Miss Gallagher is wrong. I don’t need to focus on my book report. I stand up from my desk without raising my hand and asking permission. I walk right past Sean and Debbie and Lori and don’t care that everyone’s looking at me.

“Naomi,” Miss Gallagher says, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m getting some fresh air.”

It takes all of my strength, but I lift the window open.

“Go for it, Chirp!” someone says.

I stick my head out.

“Naomi!” Miss Gallagher says.

Cold, cold, cold in my nose and in my ears and down my yellow blouse.

“Shut the window right now,” Miss Gallagher says.

“What if she doesn’t?” Sean whispers.

My eyes are closed. I can’t stop giggling.

“
Now
, Naomi,” Miss Gallagher says.

I open my mouth and the cold rushes in. It tastes like ice.

“Are you listening, Naomi? Do you understand?”

What I understand is my hands on the windowsill and my eyes squeezed shut and my mouth wide open and my body leaning way far out into the winter’s-coming, wick-fresh air.

Miss Gallagher said to march myself right down to Mrs. Mitchell’s office. I don’t think I’m really supposed to march, but I’m not sure, since I’ve never been sent to the principal’s office before. I figure walking fast and swinging my arms is a good compromise. It’s nice and cool out here but a little strange being in
the empty hall with all the classroom doors closed. It’s a perfect place for practicing my leaps, but I’m already in enough trouble without adding inappropriate leaping to the list. Miss Gallagher said I’m to explain to Mrs. Mitchell exactly what I did wrong in my own words, and that I can rest assured that she’ll be checking with her to make sure I got it right.

“What do you need, sweetie pie?” Mrs. Angoff leans down and talks in a high voice, like I’m still a little kid. She smells like peppermint.

“I’m supposed to see Mrs. Mitchell. Miss Gallagher sent me.”

“Oh, really?” She’s surprised, since she’s known me as a good girl since kindergarten. “I see,” she says, straightening up and talking normal. She knocks on Mrs. Mitchell’s door and then pushes it open. “Naomi Orenstein,” she says in a serious voice.

The first thing I notice is that Mrs. Mitchell’s window is cracked open. A good sign.

“Hello, Naomi,” Mrs. Mitchell says. She’s sitting at a desk with stacks of papers in messy piles. Her hair is gray and pulled back in a ponytail. “What brings you here?”

“Miss Gallagher.”

She smiles, like I’ve said something funny.

“Why did Miss Gallagher send you to see me?” she asks. “I assume this isn’t just a friendly visit.”

I look over at the window. I’m really hoping that she’ll understand.

“Well,” I say, “I like air, too.”

Mrs. Mitchell puts her hand over her mouth to hide her smile, but I can still see it in her eyes.

“It wasn’t cozy or toasty, like Miss Gallagher said. It was …” I kind of want to tell Mrs. Mitchell everything, but I don’t think I’m supposed to.

“Naomi,” she says, staring right at me, “I need you to explain to me why you were sent to the principal’s office.”

“I opened the window. It was really hot in the classroom. I didn’t have permission.”

“So you opened the window without permission?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand that your job as a student is to follow the rules of the classroom and be respectful to your teacher?”

“Yes.”

“Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone just did whatever they wanted to all the time?”

This is one of those trick questions where yes and no are both the right answer. I don’t say anything.

“Naomi?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to be bad. It was just so hot, and I was supposed to be writing about
The Secret Garden
, which is all about fresh air and being wick, which means alive, and I couldn’t breathe.” She’s looking at me. Her brown eyes are gentle.

“Anything else?” she says.

Yes
, I want to say.
Yes. My mom is stuck at McLean Hospital with all of the nutbars, and I don’t think she gets enough air
.

I shake my head.

“Listen,” Mrs. Mitchell says, “I’m going to have to call your parents. I’m going to have to tell them that you were disrespectful to your teacher. Can I tell them that you’ll promise to do better in the future? Will you give me your word?”

“My mom is away, but you can tell my dad,” I say.

“Away?” she says. “Is everything all right? I heard from Miss Gallagher that your mother was having some health issues at back-to-school night. But I haven’t heard an update.”

If I tell Mrs. Mitchell about Mom, maybe she’ll let me stay in her office for a little while and sit by her window and sniff her fresh air. Maybe she’ll say
It’s okay to cry
, and so I will, and she’ll hand me a Kleenex and pat my head.

“Naomi?” Mrs. Mitchell says.

“Just fine,” I whisper, which is how Dad says everything will be after they figure out how best to treat Mom’s depression.

“You’re sure?” Mrs. Mitchell asks.