Absolutely Almost(10)

            “Ew, Albie!” Darren said. “Is Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy your girlfriend?” And then he laughed like that was so funny, and so did all the boys next to him, and practically the whole other side of the lunch table. Then Darren tossed a potato chip toward me, and it stuck to my shirt. And even though it didn’t hurt, because it was just a potato chip, I knew that that definitely wasn’t nice.

            The whole other side of the lunch table laughed again.

            I think maybe a couple other kids might have almost started to toss potato chips at me too, because I could tell they thought it looked like fun, but just then, one of the lunch duty aides came over and got mad at Darren for throwing food. Darren glared at me the whole time, like it was my fault he threw a potato chip at me and got in trouble, and the whole other side of the lunch table glared too.

            That’s when I figured out that at P.S. 183, Darren was the one who wrote the rules.

            So it turned out that Erlan’s sister Ainyr was right. Lunch was the hardest part of the day. But it wasn’t all bad.

            After Darren and his friends finished glaring at me and went to the playground, I looked back at the table, and there, on a napkin next to my puffy green lunch sack, was a gummy bear. A red one. And everyone knows that red gummy bears are the best ones.

            I looked over at the girl next to me. “Thanks,” I told her. And I popped the gummy bear in my mouth.

            She smiled. Somehow she didn’t look so small when she smiled.





stutter.




            I figured out why Darren and those other mean kids called the girl with the gummy bears Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy. It was because she has trouble saying words sometimes, especially beginnings, like b’s and t’s and k’s. I noticed it in class when Mrs. Rouse asked her to read a passage out loud from the textbook. The boys started snickering, and her face turned bright red, and her voice got really quiet, so quiet you could hardly hear her, until finally Mrs. Rouse said, “Thank you, Betsy. That was wonderful.”

            Betsy doesn’t talk too much.

            I asked Calista about it, and Calista said it sounded like Betsy had a stutter, which can make talking hard.

            I decided I liked Betsy. She gave me gummy bears at lunch without me even asking. We even picked each other for library partners. And when I got confused when Mrs. Rouse was explaining about the online card catalog, Betsy didn’t make fun of me. She just pointed to the right place where I was supposed to click. I didn’t mind that Betsy didn’t talk too much. Because it can be hard sometimes, saying what you mean. And I thought maybe I understood her most of the time anyway.





einstein.




            On Saturday afternoon, Mom and I went for hot chocolate at the pastry place on Lexington. I always got hot chocolate, and she got coffee, and we picked one dessert from the case and split it. Sometimes it was crowded there, but it was my favorite place to go because there were giant hunks of stale bread with slits cut in them for the menus to slide into, and I thought that was funny. Also, the food was good.

            After we were finished with our éclair (which is just a fancy donut, really) but still sipping our drinks, a woman came up who I guess Mom knew from work.

            “And this must be Albie!” she said when she was done hugging Mom. The lady was wearing too much eye makeup. But I was polite, so I said hi.

            “Hi.”

            Then she hugged me too, which I didn’t like.

            “It’s so nice to meet you, Albie.”

            I smiled a smile without teeth.

            “I bet you’re a whiz in school,” the lady told me. I guess I looked confused when she said that, because then she said, “Well, when you share a name with one of the smartest men who ever lived, how could you not be?”