Write This Down (5 page)

“So who had a good day?” Mom asks.

Tonight I can't think of anything non-snarky to say.

I'm still alive despite having to drive with Hunter.

But I wish I weren't because Hunter might have ruined everything with Cameron forever with his totally hideous meanness.

So Mom answers her own question. “Hunter logged another half hour behind the wheel,” she tells Dad. She didn't have a chance to talk to him at his office because parents wait in the waiting room, even parents who happen to be married to the orthodontist.

“Great!” Dad says. He gives Hunter a big thumbs-up.

“Derrick,” Mom asks Dad then, “do you want to tell them, or should I?”

I can tell Dad has some extra-nice news of his own to share. He gives her a smiling go-ahead nod.

“The
Broomville Banner
readers' poll picked him as Broomville's Best Orthodontist again. This makes seven years in a row!”

Dad grins with pleasure. He works so hard at making braces fun for kids who might otherwise hate them that he totally deserves this.

“Yay!” I say, giving him a happy high five. Hunter has a mouthful of food and so can't offer any congratulations, but he manages a couple of feeble claps.

“Autumn?” Mom prompts, so I have to come up with something.

“I'm going to have a flute solo in the band concert next week,” I finally say. Hunter gets meanest of all when I say anything even mildly braggy, even when it's just a fact I'm reporting about something nice that happened to me.

I was super happy about the flute solo until the car ride with Hunter and his bombshell about Cameron hating my poems. Now I can't be happy about anything.

“Great!” Dad says again. “How are your other classes going?”

Although the question is addressed to me, his eyes dart over to Hunter. But our parents already know how we're doing in our classes because our school district has this totalitarian thing called Infinite Campus, where parents can go online and check their kids' grades 24/7. Even though my grades are mostly A's, except for B's in math, it makes me feel strange to think of Mom and Dad monitoring them every second. And Hunter must absolutely hate it. He was never what you'd call a great student—his grades have always been mainly B's and C's—but since his big changeroo this year, they're slipping toward low C's, bordering on D's, because of all the work he doesn't even bother to finish and turn in.

“They're good,” I say. If I mention I got the only A in the class on the last French test, Hunter will totally loathe and despise me. Still, I kind of want them to know. From Infinite Campus they'd know I got an A on the test; they wouldn't know I got the
only
A.

Maybe Hunter already hates me so much he can't really hate me any more.

“On the last French test? I got the only A in the class.”

“Whoop-de-doo,” Hunter says, as nasty as I knew he'd be.

“Hunter,” Mom warns. Now she has a new word to add to the forbidden list: “Whoop-de-doo.” Or maybe it's not the word that's a problem, but the
tone
, dripping with sarcasm.

Dad beams at me as if he hadn't heard Hunter's whoop-de-doo crack.

“Très bien,”
he says, pronouncing it wrong on purpose to be funny, saying “trehz bean” instead of “tray bee-en.”

“How about you, Hunter?” he asks then. “Classes okay? Is Mrs. Pigusch starting to make Algebra Two any clearer?”

Hunter flushes. A month ago our parents hired a math tutor who comes to our house twice a week, a retired teacher who is hard of hearing and talks in a very loud voice the whole time, so that, upstairs in my room, I can hear practically every word. Hunter is in a fouler mood than ever on Mrs. Pigusch days.

Hunter doesn't answer.

“Well, we're barely into October,” Mom says in her best soothing voice, as if Hunter were the one who had just expressed concern about his grades. “You still have plenty of time to bring things up before the end of the trimester.”

“You know,” Dad says, “when I was in middle school, I was close to failing math. But I decided that it wasn't my math
aptitude
that was the problem; it was my math
attitude
. Let me tell you, it made a world of difference. By the time I got to high school, I was sailing along. I even joined the math team.”

“And now you're Broomville's best orthodontist seven years in a row.” Hunter sneers, as if being an orthodontist is some kind of joke. “Wow, Dad. Talk about coming a long way.”

The muscles tense in Dad's jaw, and Mom lays her hand on his arm, as if to warn him not to say what he might say next. Not that Dad ever says anything terrible to either one of us, but sometimes I can look at him, look at both of our parents, and know what they're thinking. And
thinking
can be even worse than
saying
.

My brother must know this, too, because he lays down his fork and stalks out of the room, leaving most of his healthy-Asian-kitchen meal uneaten on his plate.

 

7

I'm the one who sees the sign on the display board in front of the Broomville Humane Society. We're in the car: Mom is driving Kylee and me to our Thursday-afternoon ballet class.

I'm not very good at ballet, but Dad says I have to do a sport, and I got him to agree that ballet is athletic enough to count. Even though Dad tried to make Hunter do a sport, too, Hunter didn't do
any
extracurricular activities his freshman year, as in none at all. Dad made this big speech last summer about how what you do
after
school is just as important for getting into a good college as how you do
during
school, so this year Hunter signed up for cross-country, which doesn't require competitive tryouts like football (Dad's favorite sport) or soccer or tennis. But Hunter quit after the first week of practice, which started in August the week before school began; in fairness to Hunter, it
was
the hottest August ever recorded in Broomville. Dad, who usually rolls with life's punches pretty well, stalked out of the room when Hunter broke the news to him, just like Hunter stalked out of the room on the healthy-Asian-dinner night.

Kylee isn't very good at ballet either, and her parents don't care about sports, but they said she has to do something besides knit all the time.

So twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, Kylee and I go together to this funky, run-down dance studio on the other side of town from the Dr. Jaws office. We have to pass the Humane Society building on the way there, and they have this sign in front that says things like
ADOPTION SPECIAL THIS WEEK!
or (on the week Hunter quit the cross-country team)
DON'T LEAVE PETS IN A HOT CAR!

“Mom, stop!” I call from the backseat, where Kylee is sitting next to me.

Mom slams on the brakes, which is
not
what I meant for her to do, especially with a huge SUV right behind us.

I guess I should have made myself more clear.

Thankfully, she manages to pull over to the side of the road. Wouldn't it have been ironic if I survived Hunter's driving only to get myself killed in a rear-end collision with my safety-obsessed mother at the wheel?

“Autumn, don't shout things like that while I'm driving!” Mom scolds.

“I'm sorry,” I say in a small voice because I really truly am. “I wanted Kylee to see the sign on the animal shelter.”

Kylee reads it aloud: “
KNIT FOR DOGS! DETAILS INSIDE!
”

I expect Kylee's face to light up with excitement. The only thing Kylee loves as much as knitting is animals. Her parents won't let her get a pet—her mom's allergic—so this could be next best.

But she wrinkles her little button nose. I like Kylee's nose so much better than mine. Hers is cute. Mine is more what you'd call regal, which really means big and pointy-ish.

“Remember that penguin-knitting thing you found for me?” she asks. “Where I was supposed to knit sweaters for penguins who were injured in that oil spill in Australia or somewhere? You showed me pictures of penguins dressed up in sweaters, and so I knitted three whole penguin sweaters, and then we found out that penguins hate wearing sweaters, and being made to wear a sweater stresses already stressed-out, oil-soaked penguins even more?”

Okay, so knitting penguin sweaters had been a bad idea.

Even if the picture of the penguins in their sweaters had been quite possibly the most adorable picture in the history of the world.

“We should go in and get the details at least,” I say. “Mom, can we? You know we're always super early for ballet.”

“Kylee?” Mom asks.

Kylee shrugs. “Okay.” But she crinkles her forehead in a skeptical way.

The lady at the front desk is knitting when we walk in. A good sign!

Margo—that's what it says on her name badge—explains that the warmth and snugness of a sweater is comforting for dogs who have been abandoned to an animal shelter. She says the shelter believes in taking their dogs out on exercise walks in all kinds of weather, and sweaters will be needed with cold weather on the way. She says the dogs can take their sweaters with them to their new homes when they're adopted, and the familiarity of the sweater helps ease the transition.

It makes perfect sense to me.

“Are all of you knitters?” Margo asks.

“Just Kylee,” I say. “But Kylee is a totally amazing knitter.”

“So what do you think, Kylee?” Margo asks. “We have a variety of patterns I can give you, sized for small, medium, and large dogs. And we have yarn donated by local merchants.”

At that very moment, a shelter volunteer comes through the front door with three small dogs on leashes. The dogs are wearing hand-knit sweaters.

Kylee gives a big, deep, rapturous sigh. I sigh with relief at hearing her sigh.

Three minutes later she is clutching a folder of photocopied dog sweater patterns in one hand and a shopping bag filled with skeins of brightly colored yarn in the other.

“Girls, we're going to be late for ballet,” Mom says, but she, too, seems dazzled by the adorableness of the dogs in their sweaters. Knowing my mother, now she'll try to teach herself to knit from some YouTube video—maybe we'd be a happy family if we all had matching hand-knit sweaters—only to give up on it a couple of weeks later. During which time, my best friend will have knitted sweaters for every dog in the Broomville animal shelter.

“See?” I say to Kylee after we've dashed back to the car. (Madame Fidelio's nostrils flare in this awful angry way if anyone isn't standing at the barre at exactly four o'clock on the dot.) “Do I have good ideas or what?”

Seat belt buckled, Kylee reaches over and squeezes my hand. Already she's studying the first pattern in the folder. The photograph shows a poodle wearing a sweater with blue and yellow zigzag stripes.

“Some of your ideas are better than others,” Kylee says. “But
this
idea is going to be great.”

 

8

Cameron didn't notice my existence in class on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. I felt so horrible after Hunter said that Cameron thinks my poetry sucks that I pretended he didn't exist, too. But now it's Friday, and one way or another I have to find out where I stand with him, both as a poet and as a girl who is in love with him.

I still haven't heard from
The New Yorker
, even though I check my phone constantly just in case. I wonder if Ms. Archer ever sent any of her poems there. I'd love to ask her, but it's hard to find time to talk to her before or after class given that we have a four-minute passing period. While we sometimes get an opportunity to conference with her during class, that hasn't happened this week. Besides, I hate the thought that Olivia might overhear my talking to her about trying to get my poems published. If Olivia heard me ask that, she'd probably rush hers off to
The New Yorker
, too. And the last thing I'd want is for Cameron to know that I'm trying to publish my poems about him. I don't want him to know anything until I have the poem there, in print, proof that my poems aren't sucky, and are in fact the total opposite of sucky.

Before class, I say “Hey” to Cameron, who as usual is there in his seat before I get to the room; he comes from first-period language arts, right next door.

To say that one word I have to screw my courage to the sticking place, as Shakespeare said. We did a couple of scenes from Shakespeare plays in the drama camp Kylee and I signed up for this past summer, which is where I learned how bad an actress she is. I may be a better actress than Kylee is, but not good enough to say “Hey” to Cameron without feeling my cheeks flame.

“Hey,” he says back, though maybe it's more of a cross between a word and a grunt.

“What are you going to write your personal essay about?” I blurt out.

He shrugs. It doesn't seem to be a rude shrug, more of an I-don't-know-yet shrug.

“You?” he asks then.

Now this is turning into an actual conversation, the kind where both people talk.

“I don't know either,” I say. “I think I might write something about my br—”

How could I be such a babbling idiot? I
had
planned to take my Mrs. Whistlepuff freewrite and turn it into a full-fledged essay. But the last thing I want to talk about with Cameron is brothers, especially brothers who tease younger sisters about certain poems written about certain boys.

“Your brother.” Cameron finishes the word for me, not that it's hard to figure out what word starts with “br.”

I feel my ears reddening to match my already red cheeks.

“Hunter,” Cameron says, as if to confirm which brother I'm talking about. “You have my condolences.”