“I think a new school will be good for you,” Mom said.
• • •
It’s my job to take the trash to the garbage chute every week, or whenever it’s full. Recycling too. It’s part of my chores. I get five dollars a week allowance.
That day, the letter day, I did my chores. But one tiny piece of recycling never made it down the chute. I smoothed out the letter from Mountford Prep, and folded it back along the creases, and put it in the bottom drawer of my dresser with my swim trunks.
I never read it. I didn’t want to. But I didn’t want to throw it out either. I don’t know why.
Maybe P.S. 183 doesn’t believe in sending home letters.
calista.
Mom waited two weeks for Dad to free up his schedule so he could help her pick the new nanny, but he kept being busy, so finally she picked by herself. The nanny came over on Tuesday to meet me.
“Hey, Albie,” she said from the doorway. She waved one hand. The other was wrapped around a cup of takeout coffee from the bodega downstairs. I knew it was that bodega because I heard the owner, Hugo, say one time that they’re the only ones for fourteen blocks who use the blue cups. “I’m Calista.”
I didn’t want to look up to meet her, but finally I did. It was better than the supplemental reading packets Mom had gotten for me, anyway.
She was short, but not too short for a girl, I guess. She was wearing jeans, even though it was too hot outside for jeans, and sandals, and a pink-and-orange plaid short-sleeve button-down shirt. Her hair was braided in two braids on either side of her head—not the regular kind of braids, but the complicated kind the girls do to each other during assemblies, the kind that start all the way above the ears and take forever. I wondered why she would wear her hair like that, because it made her look like a kid. Maybe that was why.
My mom walked to the kitchen and took a glass out of the cupboard. “Calista, would you like some water?” She started filling it before the new nanny even had a chance to answer. “Albie, don’t be rude,” Mom told me. “Say hello.”
“I’m too old for a nanny,” I said. Which was true, because I was ten.
“Albie!” Mom squawked. The ice tumbled out of the square in the fridge door and into the glass. “He’s not normally like this,” she told the nanny.
“That’s all right,” the girl said. But she didn’t say it to my mom, she said it to me. She sat down in the chair next to me, still holding tight to her coffee, and smiled. “I’m not really a nanny,” she said.
“More like a babysitter,” Mom piped up from the kitchen.
I was too old for a babysitter too.
“We’re just going to hang out together,” the girl told me. “I’ll pick you up from school. Maybe we’ll go to the park a little bit, I’ll help you with your homework.”
“She can help you make flash cards to study,” Mom said as the water poured in around the ice. I scrunched up my nose.
“And when your parents have to work late, we’ll do dinner and play games,” the girl went on. “Do you have Monopoly? I love Monopoly.”
“That sounds like a babysitter,” I told her.
My mom walked over and handed the girl the glass. It had little wet speckles of cold on the outside already. “Albie, you should show Calista your chess set. He has a gorgeous chess set, from Guatemala. Maybe you can practice so you can join the chess club at your new school. What do you think of that, hmm, Albie?”
I squinted at the girl.