But I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear my name being called—loud.
“Congrats, Joseph!” Kelly yelled across the crowd of kids talking.
I nodded. What else could I do? Everyone looked at me, probably wondering what I’d done and why a girl like Kelly cared.
The assistant principal gave the hand signal that the fire drill was over, and everyone funneled back into school. Fate had it that my class reached the door just as Kelly’s did.
“I just heard your essay won, and that you wrote about your grandfather, the Olympic star. Wow! Did your Korean family tell you all that?”
I stared at the back of the head in front of me. “Sort of.”
“A gold-medal-winning relative. That is sooo cool,” she said.
“Thanks.” If only you knew, I thought.
“Well, if you feel like celebrating, I’m going miniature golfing next Saturday with a bunch of my friends. You can come if you want.”
Kelly was inviting me to hang out with her? Meanwhile I felt like Chicken Little with the sky falling down.
“Maybe” is all I could manage to squeak in return.
On the way home I kept thinking about ways to get out of this mess. Confess over dinner? No way. Mom and Dad would lose it right between the antipasto and the main course. Worse, I could almost feel the weight of their disappointment already, since dishonesty is a big no-no for us Calderaros. Ask Mrs. Peroutka to withdraw me as the winner? Then she’d want to know why. Do nothing? Nah, I couldn’t live with my sleazy secret forever. I’d be like that eighties rock group Aunt Foxy told me about, Milli Vanilli. She said they made millions of dollars by lip-synching other people’s music, but eventually the truth came out and they had to face their own music.
On top of all that, I was feeling guilty—about forgery, history tampering, or whatever crime it was that I’d committed. Dad always bragged that I was a straight-as-a-ruler kid. It used to be true.
As I walked up the driveway, this random quote popped into my head. It was something our teacher made us memorize last year after we finished reading Shakespeare’s Othello:
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!”
Even Spider-Man couldn’t untangle this web.
Who Cares About Mark Twain?
The house stank like broccoli when I walked in the doorway. Dad was in the kitchen wearing the chef’s apron Mom had given him for Father’s Day. He was home early, he said, because a customer had cancelled at the last minute. Usually that made Dad furious, but today he seemed cheery, like maybe he didn’t want to be up on a ladder with dirty water running down his forearms, washing some doctor’s windows on a Friday afternoon.
He was standing over a pot of boiling water. “Tonight we feast on linguini with creamy broccoli sauce, salad drizzled with balsamic vinegar, and bruschetta. Deliziosa cena!”
Dad doesn’t cook all that often, but when he does, he goes all out. Opera music was playing in the family room. Blasting, actually.
“Want a sample?” he asked as he stirred the sauce.
“Maybe later.” At that moment no meal in the world could get me drooling. My stomach still felt like someone was wringing it out with bare hands.
I knew I had to level about what I’d done.
One on one is easier than two on one when you’re breaking bad news to parents. I decided to tell Dad first and Mom later, when she got home.
I pulled a kitchen stool close to the counter, where Dad was chopping onions and garlic, and sat down.
“I did something you’re not going to be happy about, Dad.” I spoke loudly over the mezzo-soprano.
Dad stopped chopping.
“Remember that essay I had to write about my ancestors?”
He nodded.
“Well, I didn’t know anything about my Korean relatives, so I sort of made up a story about my grandfather…in Korea.”
“What do you mean, ‘made it up’?”
“I wrote about this Korean runner named Sohn Kee Chung who won a gold medal at the Olympics in 1936. That part’s true. Thing is, I said he was my grandfather. And now my essay won a contest.”
The timer went off, and Dad carried the pot over to the sink and drained the pasta. He was shaking his head while the steam rose from the colander.
“You’re an honest kid, Joseph. Why’d you do that? You could have written ten pages about Grandpa Calderaro and his tailor shop.”
“I told you already, it’s supposed to be about my heritage, not yours.”
“You know what Mark Twain said about telling the truth?” Dad asked.
Of course I didn’t give a rat’s poop about what Mark Twain said in whatever classic Dad had read. I said nothing.