Absolutely Almost(60)

            I thought about it, long and careful. There were things I liked about Mountford. Erlan was there, and I missed seeing him in class and having lunch with him. I missed having lunch with anyone.

            But my teachers were nicer now. And math made more sense at this school, because I had Mr. Clifton and math club. And I got to read books I liked, like Captain Underpants, and Mrs. Rouse didn’t care so much.

            And P.S. 183 never sent home a letter about me, saying I wasn’t smart enough to go there.

            “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

            “So maybe,” Calista said slowly, “your old school being a bunch of mean jerks was the nicest thing they could have done for you?” She said it like a question.

            I laughed at that, because it was funny, thinking about my old school being a bunch of mean jerks. They sort of were a bunch of mean jerks. I wiped at my nose. “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

            And then I thought of something Mr. Clifton had said.

            “You can’t get where you’re going without being where you’ve been.”

            Calista raised an eyebrow at me when I said that. “Where did you get a saying like that from?” she asked.

            “Mr. Clifton’s grandma.”

            “I like it,” Calista told me.

            “Me too.”

            • • •

            That night when I went to sleep, nothing really had changed. I still wasn’t cool. I still didn’t have a finished A-10 Thunderbolt in a display case in the living room, or a dad who would help me build one. I still didn’t have anyone to sit with at lunch. I still had never got more than seven words right on a spelling test. But things felt a little different. Just a tiny titch of a bit.

            That’s because me and Calista had made a frame out of cardboard, she’d helped me paint it and everything, so it looked just like a fancy one on a museum wall. But hanging inside it wasn’t a piece of art. Hanging inside it, high on the back of my bedroom door where no one could see it but me when I was tucked in bed with the door closed ready for sleep, was my letter from Mountford.

            I looked at the letter from across the room, squeezing Norm the Bear close to my chest, and I noticed that the red letters at the top of the page went from fuzzy to clear to clearer.





what i could

have said.




            When my dad walked into my room when I wasn’t expecting and saw me working on the A-10 Thunderbolt, almost completed except for the stickers I never got to putting on the first one so they were a little tricky, he seemed really impressed.

            “Albie!” he said. He squatted down right there on the carpet to look at the airplane close up. “How did you do this so quickly?”

            What I could have said was “I don’t know. I’m just good at putting airplanes together, I guess.”

            What I could have said was “Why? Do you think it looks cool?”

            What I could have said was nothing, just a shrug.

            I could have said any of those things.

            But I didn’t feel like it. I felt like telling the truth.

            What I said was, “I already put one together before, so this one was easy. I already put together the one that we bought when we went to the Sea, Air, and Space Museum a year and a half ago that you said you’d help me with, but then you forgot. And then when you got me this one for my birthday, I threw that one out the window. And I was going to throw this one out the window too, but I didn’t. I put it together instead.” And then I looked up at him, and I shrugged, and I said, “Why? Do you think it looks cool?”