Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (13 page)

“You’ve finally got a part.” She beamed. She was carrying a big, bright red and yellow parrot head on a stick. I was surprised by how great some of the animal costumes looked already.

“Yeah,” I mumbled.

“Cats are great! And you get to sing and dance!”

“I guess,” I said, shrugging. “Until I drown.”

When we got back to Mr. Hawk’s class, we didn’t have time to talk about lightbulbs.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Don’t forget your spelling homework. Or your health worksheets. And remember that we’re in the computer lab first thing in the morning. So don’t show up with sticky fingers. We want to leave the keyboards the way we found them.”

Chapter 18
Double-Checking

W
hen I got home, my mom wasn’t there. She’d left a messy note that was hard to read.

I punctured my inflatable ball on a shoe! I went-to buy another ball! Be back soon!

Underneath it she’d scribbled: “I bet I’m back before you read this note!” But she wasn’t.

My mother had recently purchased several pairs of dangerous high-heeled shoes. It didn’t surprise me too
much that she could pop her ball with one of them. One thing I’d learned already in life was that anything was possible. I walked into my bedroom and opened up my jelly bean drawer. (That’s also where I kept my socks.) And I did some double-checking for a runaway bean. But there weren’t any. They were all in the garbage can. So I went to the kitchen and lifted the lid off the garbage can and tried to look all the way to the bottom. But it stank so bad that I had to put the lid back on. Also, I gagged a little.

As I walked back to my bedroom, I heard the answering machine going
beep, beep, beep
. I tried to ignore that sound and got out my spelling homework. This week was a hard list:
void, point, trapezoid, poison, moist, ointment, destroy, royal
, and
oyster
. And our bonus word was
employee
. The reason we were studying these words was because we were learning about diphthongs. That’s when two vowels join together to make one sound.

My mother came home carrying three bags. I looked up, but then I went back to work.

“I thought I’d beat you home,” she said.

“You didn’t,” I said.

“Don’t you want to know what I bought?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Camille, you’ll find this very interesting!” she said.

So I looked back up. She set the three bags on the table and then pointed to each one.

“A ball. A pump. And a spare,” she said.

I blinked. “A spare what?” I asked.

“Ball!” she said. “In case I pop another one.”

I frowned.

“Maybe you should be more careful with the first ball, so you don’t need to buy the second and third balls,” I said.

My mother made a huffing sound and grabbed the bags off the table.

“You sound just like your father. Inflatable balls weren’t meant to last forever. You’re supposed to replace them every now and then,” she said.

While that might have been true, my mom had only had her first ball, the one that popped, for a few weeks. And now she had two more. That seemed like a lot.

“Is that another bag?” I asked. “A fourth one?”

I could see a small plastic bag tucked inside one of the other bags.

“It’s just an empty box,” she said.

But I knew that trick. That was a half-truth.

“But what was inside it before it was empty?” I asked.

My mother smiled. Then she reached in her purse.

“A new cell phone!” she said.

This was terrible. Because my father had once told me that new electronics cost an arm and a leg.

“Wait until you hear my ringtone,” she said.

She hurried to the kitchen phone and dialed her cell phone number. But it didn’t make a ringing sound. It chirped. And made a pounding noise. And chirped again.

“What is it?” I asked. “It sounds like a parakeet. And a hammer.”

“It does not sound like a parakeet and a hammer!” my mother said. “It’s the song of the red-bellied woodpecker. That’s always been my favorite bird.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I didn’t know you had a favorite bird.”

“Well, I do,” she said, folding the phone shut and sliding it back inside her purse. “I love my new ring-tone. And part of the purchase price for my phone is being donated to a red-bellied woodpecker sanctuary.”

“Oh,” I said. I was beginning to think that my mother couldn’t leave the house without buying something. Like maybe she had an illness. I put my head down and focused on spelling.

“What are you working on?” she asked.

“Diphthongs,” I said.

“What?” she asked.

I cleared my throat. “When two vowels join together to make one sound, it’s called a diphthong. Like in
poison
or
trapezoid,”
I said.

My mother tilted her head to one side and all of her curls slid in that direction.

“Trapezoid
is on your spelling list?” she asked.

I nodded. My mother slapped the table.

“If your teacher wants to keep assigning advanced material, he should just go back to the sixth grade where he belongs.”

I kept working. Even though my mother’s slap made the table wobble.

“I like Mr. Hawk,” I said.

“Well, he and I might need to have another discussion,” she said.

I quit working and looked up. My eyes grew very huge and I shook my head.

“Camille, it tortures me to watch you struggle like this,” she said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Absolutely. As a parent, I want to do anything I can to help you. It’s a mother’s animal instinct.”

This surprised me very much. Because I had never thought of my mother as being a “mother animal.” I’d only thought of her as being a fighting wolverine.

“Well, if that’s true, why don’t you call Dad,” I said. “Because not having him here makes me struggle a lot.”

She took a deep breath.

“Camille, that’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant I could fix things with Mr. Hawk.”

“But I don’t think there’s anything there that needs to be fixed,” I said.

“That man is treating you like you’re twelve,” she said. “His actions could impact your development.”

I set my pencil down.

“I don’t worry about that,” I said. “But I do worry about how well I’ll develop without Dad around.”

“Camille, your father and I are going through a rough patch. Things are going to have to work themselves out,” she said.

“Maybe a phone call could help that,” I said.

“No,” my mother said.

But then, like magic, the phone started ringing.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” I asked.

My mother walked to the kitchen phone and pulled it out of its cradle.

“I’m doing fine,” she said. “Yes, I have seen the Visa bill for this month.”

I gathered up my homework. I hated to hear them go through the Visa bill. I decided to go downstairs to watch some television and maybe do some looking at our house’s guts. Upstairs, I heard yelling. And the sound of my mother’s feet as she paced through the kitchen.

Downstairs, on CNN, they showed a big crowd of people in Japan. This made me a little bit excited, because they said that it was “live” television. And I thought I could look for Sally and possibly see her live. I stood very close to the TV. But nobody looked like
Sally. The whole crowd appeared to be people I didn’t know. I thought about turning the channel. But I decided to look harder.

Then, in the corner, I spotted somebody who looked familiar. Could it be? Was it her? The person who looked familiar stood next to a tree. Which was exactly where I would expect to find Sally Zook. Because she loved trees. In the summer, she climbed them all the time.

“Turn around!” I said to the television. Because I wanted to know if the person really was Sally.

Whoever it was looked happy. Though I couldn’t see her actual face. But I could see that she was carrying a purple purse. Then she started walking away. Right off the screen. Seeing this made me think of a lot of questions for Sally.
Why aren’t you writing me? Don’t you miss me? And when did you get a purple purse? And what do you keep inside it? I
stared at that crowd in Japan until the screen changed.

CNN switched to a picture of a turtle that had two heads. It was so ugly I turned off the TV, climbed the stairs, and went to my room. I felt so sad. I heard my mother still going over the Visa bill.

“The charge I made at Kmart was for a hot glue gun,” she said. “We needed it.”

I put my pillow over my head. And then I closed my eyes. And waited for dinner.

The next day, when I got to school, I arrived ready for Technology. It was not my favorite class, because it involved following directions
exactly
. And I enjoyed only following directions
somewhat
.

“Please sit at your assigned computer,” Mr. Hawk said.

This meant that I had to sit next to Nina Hosack.

“Today we’re going to be sending e-mails to other students,” Mr. Hawk said. “Go ahead and open up your accounts.”

So I used my mouse to click what I needed to, and got into my account. “Today you’re going to be sending an e-mail to the person on your right,” Mr. Hawk said. I looked at Nina and nodded. But when I looked to my left, which is the direction my e-mail would be coming from, all I saw was a wall. Because I was the last person in the row.

“Camille, you’ll be getting an e-mail from Polly,” Mr. Hawk said. “Go ahead and send the person on your right one question. Don’t forget to spell-check before you send.”

The whole class started clicking keys.

This was my question to Nina:

Do you have a dog?

This was my question from Polly:

What’s inside your cooler?

When everybody stopped pecking at the keys, Mr. Hawk gave us more instructions. “Go ahead and answer the question. And then send one question back to the person who asked you a question.”

I took many deep breaths. Then I wrote Polly back.

Lots of things are in my cooler. Cheese. Fruit. Ham. My blood is the kind that spikes. And crashes
.

Question to Polly:

Have you ever been on a plane?

Answer from Nina:

I don’t have a dog. I am allergic to all fur. And when I take baths, I have to use a special bar of soap
.

Wow. I wanted to write back to Nina that she’d given me too much information. But I didn’t. I just looked at her and said, “Too bad about the special soap.”

Polly’s answer made me laugh.

I have been on a plane. I have been to Florida. And Texas. And New York. And Italy. I liked it. Because you get to fly above the clouds. Did you know that on planes they have a barf bag for every seat? It’s true!

I peeked my head over my computer and looked at Polly.

“I didn’t know they had a barf bag for every seat,” I said. “Is there that much barfing on planes?”

“There wasn’t on mine,” Polly said. “But I took my barf bag with me as a souvenir. They’re free.”

“Cool!” I said.

“You could come and see it,” she said. “I still have it.”

And so I nodded. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. Because spending time together meant we would be friends. But sending e-mails in Technology didn’t mean anything, because it was an assignment.

“What kind of cheese do you eat?” Polly asked me.

“String,” I said. “Hey, you type really fast.”

“I send a lot of e-mails,” she said.

And this made me feel a little bad. Because I didn’t send very many e-mails. At home, I didn’t have an account. I only had one at school. But I guess that was okay. Because typing was hard. But talking on the phone was easy. And who would I send an e-mail to anyway?

Chapter 19
Opportunity Knocks

I
think Mr. Hawk forgot that he told us to count all our lightbulbs. Because a few days after he told us to do that, he never asked how many lightbulbs we had. But that was okay. Because I kept forgetting to count them anyway. So if he asked, I was going to have to make up a number and say that my house had one thousand three hundred seventy-six lightbulbs. Be cause I didn’t want to look poor.

“Time for science,” Mr. Hawk said.

He stood up and licked his thumb. Then he peeled papers off a thick pile and sent them down our rows.

“I’m very excited to share something today,” Mr. Hawk said.

“Is this about our lightbulbs?” Penny asked.

“No. This is about an opportunity. For the first time ever, the Rocky Mountain Middle School Science Fair has offered a special category for young scientists.”

I had no idea what this had to do with us. Because we weren’t middle school students. Also, we weren’t young scientists.

“Normally, I end the month of April by having each student pair up with another student and give a presentation about groundwater and pollution and the hydrologic cycle.”

I was very surprised to hear Mr. Hawk say this. Because that sounded like the most advanced project ever. And I thought he and my mom had come to an understanding.

“But this year, for a change of pace, I think it would be a good idea to let you take part in the Rocky Mountain Middle School Science Fair. The grand-prize winner of the fair receives fifty dollars and is eligible to enter the District Ninety-three Science Fair. And the District 93 Science Fair winner is eligible for the Idaho
State Science Fair. And the Idaho State Science Fair winner is eligible for the national science fair, which has a five-thousand-dollar grand prize.”

As Mr. Hawk spoke, he raised his winglike arms to his sides. My mother had told me that raising your arms like that was an excellent way to work out your medial deltoids.

“But we’re not in middle school,” Lilly said.

“This year, there is a new category. Young scientists from fourth to sixth grades can enter. I’ve made copies of the rules. Your projects will be due in two weeks,” Mr. Hawk said.