Today was crazy hat day. Last night my mom told me she’d heard me talking in my sleep. She ran into the room.
“Ben? Ben, what’s wrong?”
“Don’t make me wear the butterfly hat!” I’d said. But I don’t remember saying it.
My mom had promised that I didn’t have to, and I went back to sleep.
In the morning I put on my Darters cap because that’s as crazy as I get in the hat department.
Serena Perl wore a red beanie decorated with black dots and antennae to look like a ladybug. After school they were selling Long Pops, and when my mom came to pick me up, she’d brought a dollar bill and told me I could get one for me and one for a friend.
Serena Perl was standing behind me in line. I asked her if I could buy her a Long Pop, and she said sure. We walked out together licking our pops. It made our tongues neon red. I told her that was my favorite color, and she said it was hers, too. My mom was waiting by the front gate with Monkeylad in his Halloween costume.
“I thought he might behave better in his hot-dog bun,” my mom said, “even though it’s not Halloween.”
I bent down to pet him, and he kissed my face like a maniac.
“Oh, wow, he loves you so much!” Serena said. “Does he sleep with you? If I had a dog, I’d always want him to sleep with me.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “My sister and I share him.” This was actually true. Angelina had started letting me have Monkeylad every other night.
My mom had brought some Chix Stix with her, and she asked Serena Perl if she would like to see Monkeylad do a trick.
“Do you want to hold up the treat for him?” my mom asked.
Serena did, and Monkeylad jumped to get it but then settled down onto his haunches and just sat like a little man. After she gave him the Chix Stix, he still sat there. And sat there some more.
“I love dogs,” Serena said. “I want to be a veterinarian.”
I hadn’t known that about her. How could I not have known? Although she had written her Career Day thank-you note to Dr. Knapp, and she did have a lot of shirts with dogs on them.
“He’s still sitting there!” Serena said.
“Would you like to come over and hang out with us sometime?” my mom said.
“Sure. That would be great. See you later, Ben. Thanks for the Long Pop.”
She walked away, and Monkeylad fell onto his front paws. He looked exhausted from sitting up for so long. That couldn’t have been easy, with a hard curly monkey tail like that under your bony butt.
My mom smiled at me. “Monkeylad, you little Chix magnet,” she said. She held up another Chix Stix and gave it to him. “Get it, Ben, a Chix magnet?”
Then she took something out of her purse. Something dreaded that should not appear in public at any time in a kid’s life. “Ben, I think you need to reapply some sunscreen before we go home. Monkeylad licked it all off you!”
“Seriously, Mom? Seriously? There is no way I’m putting that on now.”
She didn’t make me. Even she realized how embarrassing that would be.
* * *
Later that night, while Angelina was at Twinkle Knoll’s, I asked my mom if we could watch a movie together.
“Sure,” she said. “That sounds like fun.” She’d been more relaxed lately. Maybe it was because she hung out with Tree and meditated and got acupuncture.
I picked a DVD of this movie Scaranormal Activity that Thursday had left in my room. It was supposed to be funny but also pretty scary. I showed the cover to my mom.
“No way,” she said.
“Please, Mom.”
She thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know. I don’t want you to have nightmares.”
“If it gets too scary for me, I’ll let you know,” I said. “And we can eat chocolate to comfort us.” Angelina had convinced my mom to buy us real, sugar-sweetened chocolate eggs for Easter, and we had a few left over since, luckily, there is no Easter Fairy who steals chocolate. But we were supposed to have the chocolate eggs only on weekends, which actually just meant Saturday night, and this was a Friday.
My mom laughed. “Okay,” she said. “But you have to tell me the truth. If you get too scared, we’re turning it off.”
So we got the chocolate eggs and sat down to watch the movie with Monkeylad sleeping on my feet. The movie got pretty scary, and at one point, without looking away from the screen, I took my mom’s arm and draped it over my shoulders.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Should we turn it off?”
I bit into another chocolate egg without moving my eyes from the movie. “No,” I said. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen!”
After I finished my chocolate eggs, Monkeylad jumped up and sat in my lap, and that made me feel less scared, too.
When the movie was over, my mom admitted she’d liked it, and we talked about what made it good.
“I cared about Scary Gary,” I said. “He was intrepid in the beginning, which made me like him, but it also got him in trouble, which was good for the story.”
“Good use of the word intrepid, Ben. He changed and grew, just like in a good book,” Mom said. “Maybe we’ll go to the library tomorrow and find you some funny, scary novels.”
I told her that sounded like a cool idea.