A friend. Darren Ackleman was my friend, and I didn’t even know it.
“You have fun?” Calista asked me when I got back to the bench. She had all our stuff packed up, ready to go home.
“Yeah,” I said. “Darren and his dad are pretty nice.”
Calista raised her eyebrows at me like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. She just hoisted the backpack onto her shoulder.
“What?” I asked. Because I was wondering what it was she didn’t want to tell me.
“Just . . .” Calista was staring off across the grass. Finally she looked back at me. “Just be careful, all right?”
“Be careful of what?” I said. I didn’t see anything to be careful of, like a dog that wanted to bite me or a mud puddle to slip in or anything.
Calista handed me the trash from our snack and we headed off down the path back to my building.
“Sometimes,” Calista said slowly, and then she stopped to point to the garbage can, and I threw the trash inside. “Sometimes people aren’t always nice for good reasons.”
That made me confused. Because how could being nice not be good? And then I got even more confused, because I figured out that she was probably talking about Darren.
“But he’s my friend,” I told her. His dad had even said so. “And he said I was cool.”
Calista sighed. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt, Albie, that’s all. Promise me you’ll be careful around that kid.”
“I promise,” I told Calista, because I could tell she was upset, and I didn’t like when she was upset. But I wasn’t really sure what I was promising, because what did she mean about being careful? And anyway, she was just being silly. No way Darren would ever hurt me.
That wasn’t the kind of thing friends did.
isn’t.
Dad remembered about the spelling. Three weeks after the parent-teacher conference, he asked me how I’d been doing with my grades. So I showed him the last one.
Seven. Seven words. The best I’d ever done. Calista gave me two whole chocolate donuts after I showed her.
But I knew by the look on Dad’s face when he saw that C grade at the top that I wasn’t getting any donuts from him.
“I only missed three words,” I told him. My voice was a squeak. “That’s seven right. Which is almost all of them.”
“Almost, Albie,” Dad said slowly, putting the test down on the table, “isn’t nearly good enough.”
being cool.
Here’s what it’s like to be cool:
Cool kids play Pokémon by the drinking fountains before school starts. I found that out on Monday when I got to school. Darren saw me walking up the steps and pulled me over. I never knew that the cool kids did that before. No one told me. I always thought drinking fountains were just for drinking.
Cool kids don’t raise their hands to answer questions in class. That’s what Darren told me. I liked that rule, because I hardly ever know the answer to Mrs. Rouse’s questions anyway. Maybe I was cool all along, and I never realized it.
At recess the cool kids play tetherball, which it turns out I’m sort of okay at.
The only thing I didn’t like about being cool was that I couldn’t sit next to Betsy at lunch because Darren said cool kids didn’t sit next to kids who weren’t cool, and Darren said Betsy definitely wasn’t cool.