He winked. “Bye, then!” he said.
“Shee-shee!” I answered, and I closed the door.
Dad snapped shut his laptop and got up from the couch as I handed Mom the change.
“Oh, Albie,” Mom said, looking at the four dollars. “I said don’t tip more than five.”
I didn’t, I started to say. I just rounded up the change. But before I could tell her that, Dad put a hand on my shoulder. “He was just being friendly. Weren’t you, Albie?” He looked at Mom, still staring at the four ones. “It’s just a few dollars.”
That’s when I started to get the feeling in my brain I sometimes got, when something that was clear before all of a sudden turned fuzzy. I sat down and Mom scooped some rice onto my plate, with kung pao and an egg roll.
Twenty-seven sixty. I put the number in my brain and tried to keep it there while I chewed my egg roll. Twenty-seven sixty. I’d started with forty dollars, and I gave Mom four. Over and over I tried to subtract the numbers, but I didn’t want to do it on paper because I didn’t want Mom and Dad to know I was subtracting, so it was hard. Every time I did it, I got a different number.
Fuzzy.
Fuzzier.
I gulped down the last of my egg roll.
“Everything okay, Albie?” Dad said, looking at me carefully.
“Yep,” I told him. I picked up my fork and mixed the kung pao up with my rice, and decided that maybe I was being friendly after all.
letters
from school.
E-mails from school are never about good stuff. The teacher never writes to your parents to say things like “Albie’s so wonderful to have in class! Just wanted to let you know!”
Or
“Albie always lets Rick Darby borrow his pencils, even though Rick barely ever gives them back!”
Or
“Today Albie picked Jessa Kwan first for his team in basketball, because Jessa usually gets picked last, and he felt bad!”
(My team lost in basketball that day.)
E-mails from school are always bad, but they try to hide it with big words that are hard to understand.
Potential.
Struggling.
Achievement gap.
Words that make my dad slam his fist on the table and call my teacher to shout about setting up a parent-teacher conference, and my mom to go out and buy fruit. When Mom comes back with strawberries, her face is always crystal clear. Not an almost-crying face at all.
I used to really like strawberries.
E-mails from school are always bad, and they’re always about me. But letters from school—the kind that are written on real paper and sent in a real envelope, with a stamp and everything—those are even worse.
When the last letter came from Mountford Prep, my old school, Dad didn’t yell at my teacher. Mom didn’t go out and buy strawberries. They just sat at the table, blinking at me, their shoulders slumped like when our dog, Biscuit, ran away.
“What does it say?” I asked. It was open, in front of my dad across the table, but I couldn’t see any of the words. Only the big red letters at the top of the page, spelling out the name of the school.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dad said. He looked mad, like his eyes were hurting him. He crunched up the letter and tossed it in the recycling.