Life of Me, The #14

I tried calling Zoe the minute I got home, but her mom said she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come to the phone.

I tried calling her the next day when I got home, but I just got their voice mail. It was her voice saying, “Leave your name, message, and favorite song after the beep.”

“Name: Hank Improvement Zipzer,” I said. “Message: I’d like to talk to Zoe. Favorite Song:

I waited for her in our booth at McKelty’s Roll ’N’ Bowl on Thursday after school.

But Nick the Tick did. With Joelle “The Phone Fanatic” Atkins by his side.

“If you’re waiting for Zoe, you’re going to be waiting a long time,” McKelty said. “Like forever.”

“Well, she told us she thinks you acted like a bad sport and a poor loser,” Joelle said.

“And then she told me she doesn’t like you anymore, not even a little bit,” McKelty added.

“She didn’t really say that part, did she?” I asked, trying to stop my voice from quivering.

“Text her yourself,” Joelle said, offering me her cell phone. “Ask her.”

I think you know by now that I’m not a big spelling guy, which also means I’m not a big texting guy. I see all those letters on that little keypad, and my eyes just start to spin in their sockets.

“That’s okay,” I said to Joelle. “I’ll text her later.”

“He probably doesn’t know how,” McKelty said, which may have been the first true thing he’s ever said.

That was the last thing I wanted, to have Joelle in the middle of my private conversation with Zoe. She’d be announcing what we said from the top of the Empire State Building.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not really in the mood to text right now. I’m an after-dinner texting kind of guy, not an afternoon texting kind of guy.”

“Wow,” said Joelle. “You have special times of the day when you text?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” I answered. “I instant message in the morning, e-mail in the afternoon, text after dinner. If I don’t keep them separate, I’m just communicating nonstop all day long, and you know what that does.”

“Rots the brain,” I whispered to her. “Next thing you know, you’re wearing a bracelet with penguins on it and thinking that’s okay.”

I saw Joelle gasp, then fold up her phone and put it in her pocket.

At dinner that night, I was so sad I could hardly eat. Cheerio could tell something was wrong. He sprawled out on top of my feet and nuzzled my ankles. It’s his little dachshund way of showing support.

“What’s wrong, honey?” my mom asked. “You look like you lost your best friend.”

“It must be in the air,” Emily said. “Robert and I had a fight, too. We’re not speaking.”

“Robert said that chickens can’t fly, and I told him that’s not entirely true because the longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds. Then he said that’s not really flying, and I said, tell that to the chicken who stayed in the air for thirteen seconds.”

“Wow,” I said. “You guys get pretty upset over poultry.”

“It wasn’t about the chickens. He was acting like a know-it-all,” my know-it-all sister said. “What did you and Zoe fight about?”

I didn’t want to go into it with Emily. I mean, there are some things a fourth-grader can’t understand. They’re still fighting about flying chickens and stuff. Not like us fifth-graders who fight about real human-type things.

“We fought about ducks,” I said. “I said that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and she said it does.”

“Well, she’s right,” my dad piped up, putting his glasses on top of his head and taking a break from our beet and mushroom casserole. “Many people believe that a duck’s quack does not echo. In reality, the quack has a particular sound quality that makes it difficult to hear the echo, but it actually does echo.”

“All knowledge is interesting, Hank. That’s what I keep trying to tell you. You should call Zoe and apologize.”

Like the way I should apologize to you for not telling the truth, I thought to myself.

Ever since Frankie had that talk with me, I had tried to find the right moment to tell my dad the truth about the Reading Gym. But trust me, that is not an easy thing to do, and I was still working on getting up the courage.

Fortunately, the doorbell rang, taking my mind off everything. I got up to answer it. It was Robert, standing at the door holding a bunch of half-wilted flowers.

“I came to apologize,” Robert said, handing Emily the bunch of flowers. “I wasn’t being a good listener. You know a great deal about chicken flight, and I respect that about you.”

“Here, you better take these fast,” Robert said, offering Emily the flowers. “The pollen makes my allergies flare up. I can feel my nose starting to drip already.”

Robert sneezed a big wet sneeze. Any normal person would have slammed the door in his face. But not our Emily. She opened the door wider, grabbed the flowers, and smiled a dopey little smile.

“Do you want to come in?” she asked Robert. “I have some reptile drawings we can color. And a new box of fruit-scented markers.”

I watched them skip off to the kitchen table, take the caps off Emily’s new markers, and start sniffing them.

Boy, oh boy, did I ever wish Zoe and I were back in the fourth grade, when a couple of pineapple- and grape-scented markers and some reptile drawings could solve everything.