Absolutely Almost(69)

            Being famous sounded a whole lot like being cool.





a green

pencil.




            Calista left a pencil at our house. A green one with no eraser, the kind she used for doing sketches in her sketchbook. When I found it, it made me sad in my stomach but happy too. I knew Calista couldn’t take me to the park anymore or pick me up from school. She’d never take me for a donut day again.

            But I had her pencil.

            I found a fresh piece of paper in my drawer, and I smoothed it out against the top of the desk. Then I curled my fingers around that green pencil, and I started to draw.

            Donut Man to the Rescue!

            That’s what I wrote at the top, when I was done with the drawing.

            I was pretty sure Calista would have liked it.





studying

with betsy.




            Studying for spelling tests with Betsy was different from studying with Calista. Usually, we went to her apartment after school, and her mom gave us cookies, the vanilla sandwich kind with chocolate in the middle. I always twisted mine open and ate the chocolate off first, one lick at a time. Betsy nibbled the whole cookie in circles, all the way around slowly, till she got to the final bite in the center.

            We didn’t make flash cards or draw pictures.

            What we did was practice the spelling words, over and over and over. Betsy’s mom read them out, and we took turns trying to spell them. I did mine out loud, and Betsy wrote hers on paper. If we got five or more right, we got another cookie. That’s why I had to eat mine so slowly, with the licking. But I was starting to get more cookies.

            I missed Calista a lot, but it wasn’t so bad, studying with Betsy.





a famous

schaffhauser

grilled cheese.




            How did the elections go this week?” Dad asked me. It was just me and him, since he was working from home after Harriet said she was done watching me and my parents should find a real nanny already. I was pretending to do social studies homework while Dad worked on his laptop. Really, I was doodling superheroes.

            “Um,” I said. Elections were a while ago, but I was surprised Dad remembered at all. “I ran for vice president,” I told him. “But I lost.” I clenched my stomach in a knot, waiting for all the disappointment.

            “Oh,” Dad said. “Well, that’s all right, Albie. You can’t win them all.”

            I unclenched my stomach just the tiniest bit. “Really?” I said.

            “Sure.” Dad clicked at his keyboard. “Only one person gets to be vice president, right? If there are a lot of people running, then you can’t take it too much to heart if you don’t get it.”

            “It was just one other person,” I told him.

            I don’t know why I said that, really. I should’ve just let Dad be not disappointed in me, and not said anything at all. It was nice when Dad was not disappointed in me. But I guess I wanted him to be not disappointed in me, and not some made-up Albie who did really great in school elections.

            Dad looked up from his laptop and frowned. “I bet you got a lot of votes, though,” he said.

            “Nope,” I told him.

            I was feeling like a pretty disappointing person.

            But my dad surprised me. Because he pushed back his laptop on the table and said, “Did you want to be vice president very badly, Albie?” And he looked like he really wanted to know.

            So I thought about it. “Yeah,” I said at last. “At first I didn’t, but”—I twirled my pencil in my fingers—“then it seemed like it would be fun. It would’ve been nice to win something.”