Absolutely Almost(13)

            “That’s pretty good!” he told her, and she smiled big.

            I lifted the lid of the plastic case and grabbed a paper tissue to pick out my donut. I wondered why Calista had never told me she needed bottle caps before. I found bottle caps all over the place.

            Hugo rang up my donut on the register, and I pulled my dollar out of my pocket.

            “You come in here a lot, don’t you?” he asked me. And when I nodded, he stretched his hand across the counter. “I’m Hugo.”

            “I know,” I told him. “It says so on your name tag.”

            “Albie!” Calista nudged me in the side. “He gets shy,” she told Hugo. Which was not true. She stretched her hand out to shake Hugo’s, which is when I realized that’s what I probably should have done. “I’m Calista,” she told him, and they shook.

            “Nice to meet you, Calista,” Hugo told her. “You too, Albie.” But he didn’t try to shake my hand again, which made me mad, because that time I was all ready. I put my dollar on the counter and shrugged at him. “Well, see you two tomorrow!” he said.

            Calista said good-bye, but I didn’t.

            “He’s nice,” she told me as we squeezed into the elevator.

            I pushed the button for floor eight, and the door closed. I stared at the glazed donut in the paper tissue in my hand. I wanted to take a giant bite right there, but donuts always tasted better if you waited till you were home first.

            “How come you never told me you had a boyfriend?” I asked Calista.

            Calista was putting her phone back in her pocket. “Didn’t I?” she asked.

            “No,” I said. And I wasn’t sure why, but that made me madder than not shaking Hugo’s hand.

            I took a bite of the donut.





jokes.




            Every day at the beginning of math club, Mr. Clifton told us a new joke. He’d wait until we were all in our seats, and then he’d raise his white eyebrows, and smile just a little bit, and say the first part of the joke.

            “Why are math books always so sad?”

            That was the one from Thursday. I didn’t know the answer, but no one else did either, so I didn’t feel bad. Pretty much no one ever knew the answer.

            You could always tell when Mr. Clifton was about to say the punch line, because he’d clear his throat and look like he was about to say something super serious.

            “Because,” he said, his head tilted low so that he was looking at us all from over the tops of his glasses, “they have so many problems.”

            That one made us all laugh—well, all except Savannah. She hardly laughed at any of the jokes, only the really really funny ones. I laughed at almost all of them.

            When Mr. Clifton saw that we liked that joke pretty well, he nodded, very serious, and went behind his desk to write something in his notebook. “Use again next year,” he mumbled to himself as he wrote.

            The only thing I didn’t like about Mr. Clifton’s jokes was that they were always about math.





ten words.




            I studied for the spelling test every Thursday. Calista helped me. Every single Thursday. We went over all the words. Calista even made flash cards sometimes, with pictures on them, so I would remember the words and the way to spell them. Growth. G-R-O-W-T-H. That flash card had a flower on it, for grow spelled the normal way, like a flower grows, and then after that, there was a boy smiling with all his teeth, for the th sound that comes at the end of teeth.

            So how come I could remember that when I was doing flash cards with Calista, but when it came to the test on Friday, I wrote groth, because I forgot how to spell grow like a flower because I got nervous? Anyway, sometimes o makes the ow sound even when the w’s not there, like in note. There’s no w in note.