It’s dinnertime, with the whole family sitting at the table: me, Dad, Mom, and Hunter. We don’t have dinner together every night in my family, because a lot of the time this year Hunter is hanging out with the band, and I have ballet or a flute lesson, or I’m at Kylee’s house. But it means a lot to Mom that we try to sit down for dinner a few times a week.
My mother is taking a cooking class called Secrets of a Healthy Asian Kitchen, so she’s made some kind of stir-fry with hormone-free chicken, lots of organic veggies, and brown rice, which is healthier than white rice. She’s always reading up on nutrition and deciding that everything in our lives would go better if we were gluten free, or had less dairy, or ate more nuts and olive oil. The stir-fry smells yummy, but I never feel like eating anything after I’ve gotten my braces tightened.
“So who had a good day?” Mom asks.
Tonight I can’t think of anything non-snarky to say.
I’m still alive despite having to drive with Hunter.
But I wish I weren’t because Hunter might have ruined everything with Cameron forever with his totally hideous meanness.
So Mom answers her own question. “Hunter logged another half hour behind the wheel,” she tells Dad. She didn’t have a chance to talk to him at his office because parents wait in the waiting room, even parents who happen to be married to the orthodontist.
“Great!” Dad says. He gives Hunter a big thumbs-up.
“Derrick,” Mom asks Dad then, “do you want to tell them, or should I?”
I can tell Dad has some extra-nice news of his own to share. He gives her a smiling go-ahead nod.
“The Broomville Banner readers’ poll picked him as Broomville’s Best Orthodontist again. This makes seven years in a row!”
Dad grins with pleasure. He works so hard at making braces fun for kids who might otherwise hate them that he totally deserves this.
“Yay!” I say, giving him a happy high five. Hunter has a mouthful of food and so can’t offer any congratulations, but he manages a couple of feeble claps.
“Autumn?” Mom prompts, so I have to come up with something.
“I’m going to have a flute solo in the band concert next week,” I finally say. Hunter gets meanest of all when I say anything even mildly braggy, even when it’s just a fact I’m reporting about something nice that happened to me.
I was super happy about the flute solo until the car ride with Hunter and his bombshell about Cameron hating my poems. Now I can’t be happy about anything.
“Great!” Dad says again. “How are your other classes going?”
Although the question is addressed to me, his eyes dart over to Hunter. But our parents already know how we’re doing in our classes because our school district has this totalitarian thing called Infinite Campus, where parents can go online and check their kids’ grades 24/7. Even though my grades are mostly A’s, except for B’s in math, it makes me feel strange to think of Mom and Dad monitoring them every second. And Hunter must absolutely hate it. He was never what you’d call a great student—his grades have always been mainly B’s and C’s—but since his big changeroo this year, they’re slipping toward low C’s, bordering on D’s, because of all the work he doesn’t even bother to finish and turn in.
“They’re good,” I say. If I mention I got the only A in the class on the last French test, Hunter will totally loathe and despise me. Still, I kind of want them to know. From Infinite Campus they’d know I got an A on the test; they wouldn’t know I got the only A.
Maybe Hunter already hates me so much he can’t really hate me any more.
“On the last French test? I got the only A in the class.”
“Whoop-de-doo,” Hunter says, as nasty as I knew he’d be.
“Hunter,” Mom warns. Now she has a new word to add to the forbidden list: “Whoop-de-doo.” Or maybe it’s not the word that’s a problem, but the tone, dripping with sarcasm.
Dad beams at me as if he hadn’t heard Hunter’s whoop-de-doo crack.
“Très bien,” he says, pronouncing it wrong on purpose to be funny, saying “trehz bean” instead of “tray bee-en.”
“How about you, Hunter?” he asks then. “Classes okay? Is Mrs. Pigusch starting to make Algebra Two any clearer?”
Hunter flushes. A month ago our parents hired a math tutor who comes to our house twice a week, a retired teacher who is hard of hearing and talks in a very loud voice the whole time, so that, upstairs in my room, I can hear practically every word. Hunter is in a fouler mood than ever on Mrs. Pigusch days.
Hunter doesn’t answer.
“Well, we’re barely into October,” Mom says in her best soothing voice, as if Hunter were the one who had just expressed concern about his grades. “You still have plenty of time to bring things up before the end of the trimester.”
“You know,” Dad says, “when I was in middle school, I was close to failing math. But I decided that it wasn’t my math aptitude that was the problem; it was my math attitude. Let me tell you, it made a world of difference. By the time I got to high school, I was sailing along. I even joined the math team.”
“And now you’re Broomville’s best orthodontist seven years in a row.” Hunter sneers, as if being an orthodontist is some kind of joke. “Wow, Dad. Talk about coming a long way.”
The muscles tense in Dad’s jaw, and Mom lays her hand on his arm, as if to warn him not to say what he might say next. Not that Dad ever says anything terrible to either one of us, but sometimes I can look at him, look at both of our parents, and know what they’re thinking. And thinking can be even worse than saying.
My brother must know this, too, because he lays down his fork and stalks out of the room, leaving most of his healthy-Asian-kitchen meal uneaten on his plate.