7
Pantomime
Saturday, October 25
The weekend started out fine. By eleven thirty on Saturday morning, we had almost thirty kids ready to work. Mr. G. was there. So were my uncle Earl and a friend of his, Mr. Otis. They both had clunker pickups. We needed them to haul away trash after we cleaned garages.
We explained to everyone that Saturday was for garage cleaning only. Sunday was yard work. “I’ve already talked to the homeowners association people for approval. They are expecting us to charge twenty dollars per house because that’s what we agreed to, okay?”
A lot of head nodding. I was standing on top of the base of a statue so I could see everybody. Beau Brattley, Braxton’s little brother, stood near the back with his hands in his pockets. Lauren was nearby; Red, too. Becks and Sara were off to the side somewhere. Apparently, Bakari was among the volunteers and love was in the air.
I worked on forgetting how mad I was at Becks and Sara. Trying to portray the mellow calm of a true leader. Today was a new day.
With the help of Mr. G., Mrs. G., and another sixth-grade teacher we’d recruited, we broke into groups and headed in different directions. We’d passed out the block numbers and streets of the neighborhoods where we expected the most participation.
Our group was led by Mrs. G. We went to three houses before we found an old lady who agreed to let us clean her garage. She said her name was Mrs. Elderberry. “But you can call me Ellie.”
Ellie was small and frail-looking, but her eyes were clear and alert. When she opened her garage door, I about fainted. One side was packed from top to bottom with just about everything you could imagine. The other side looked like it had been hit by a tornado. She wanted us to clean up the tornado side.
She also had nine cats—all named Johnny.
“After my late husband,” she explained.
We were introduced to Johnny Earl, Johnny Ray, Johnny Mae, and Rooster Johnny.
She said, “Rooster Johnny’s got all the girl cats ’round here worked up.”
Johnny Ray, a plump orange thing, took the opportunity to use a hidden litter box near the washer and dryer.
Click snapped a LEGO figure’s head on and off. He made a choking sign with his hands. I giggled. He whispered, “Smells like Johnny Ray’s got some digestive issues!”
We all held our breath and got to work.
I got us organized, broke up tasks, and gave everyone an assignment. It went pretty well. Hendrix, a boy from my language arts class, was hilarious, and I enjoyed working with him. Click, too. I realized I’d spent more time with Click since school began than just about anybody other than my girls.
“I have an idea for our next mini-film,” he said as we held our noses while removing boxes filled with used litter.
“What? Something in a cemetery, because we’ll all be dead from toxic fumes?”
He laughed. “No. I was thinking we could do something funny with a kid fund-raising for his school. You know? Have a character going door-to-door trying to sell candy. Each time someone more and more ridiculous could answer the door.”
We both started cracking up. I said, “Or… what if the kid kept trying to sell candy to the same person? Only each time the person gets madder and madder.”
“Yeah! What if we made his head explode ’cause he was so mad!”
Now we were doubling over laughing. But when this kid from the bus who always stares at me weird came over, Click changed. Acting more like a boy-boy than—I don’t know—Click.
He and the dude gave each other complicated fist bumps.
“Click!” shouted the dude. “You’re my man!”
Click-click.
Bus Dude answered the clicks with a nod. His eyes went from inky dark to a soft brown. A slow smile spread over his lips.
When I looked at Click, he wore an unexpected grin.
“Click?” I said, but he just backed away, whistling.
It was weird. I felt myself blushing.
But Bus Dude just laughed.
“When we finish here, can we go to my granny’s? She’s waiting for us to do her house, too,” he said. She lived around the corner, and when we got to her house, she was waiting for us.
It turned out his name was Romeo James. And his grandmother was the sweetest thing. She gave him a big hug and he grinned like it was his birthday. A kid who loved his grandma that much was okay by me.
“Hey, Grandma. These are my friends,” he said. She gave each of us a hug, then told us what she wanted cleaned up. When we finished, she insisted that we meet her in the backyard for lunch. It was all set up—tuna fish, turkey, and fried bologna sandwiches, along with chips and lemonade. The cold air rushed over us and kicked up some leaves. Still, for Michigan, it was fairly warm and sunny. A good day.
“Why do you stare at me like that on the bus?” I finally asked Romeo between bites of tuna fish.
“Like what?” he asked.
“You know.”
“You know, too.”
I blushed again. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.
He looked down, and it seemed like maybe he was blushing a bit, too. Either that, or the cold breezes were turning his brown cheeks red.
“Don’t worry, girl,” he said, getting all street on me. “I’m messing with you, that’s all. You know you look good, though. But when a brother’s name is Romeo, well…”
Click said, “He’s gotta walk the walk. If my name was Romeo, maybe I’d play with girls instead of LEGO pieces. We all gotta have our thing, right?”
My eyes went wide. Julio Ramon Garcia! They fist-bumped again, and I shook my head.
The two of them talked and it was clear they’d gone to elementary together. Romeo James played football for a city league but was here because they had the week off; Click had played football, too, but got hurt last year and had to have surgery. His mom didn’t want him to play anymore.
“We miss you, man,” Romeo was saying as we cleaned up our lunch trash.
Listening to the two of them, I was having such a good time that I forgot to check on the other groups.
Big mistake.
When I finally remembered to call Mr. G., it was almost the end of our workday. He answered his phone after one ring. He didn’t sound good.
“I just sent a text to my wife,” he said. “Gather your troops and meet back at Oak Woods Park. Quickly.”
Once we’d all assembled, Mr. G., usually so enthusiastic, growled his disappointment with “certain individuals.”
He said some kids had been asked to leave one home because they seemed more interested in goofing around and throwing leaves at one another than doing any real work. I noticed Becks look up quickly, then look at the ground.
That wasn’t the worst of it, however. Middle school’s poorest sport—that would be Braxton Brattley—managed to surpass even his own low-down dirty dirtiness.
Despite being in seventh grade and having no reason to be here, he’d hooked up with his brother and a few others to mess things up even more!
At one house, they asked for fifty dollars and the guy actually paid it. When another group of kids showed up and asked to clean the same man’s garage, he was shocked to learn that the rate was twenty dollars. He got so angry that when Mr. G. arrived to try to straighten everything out, he had to refund the dude’s cash entirely and apologize.
Brattley and his Band of Boneheads didn’t stop there, though. They also offered to do yard work, even though we weren’t supposed to be doing yards. So, of course, someone from the homeowners association stopped by and asked what they were doing.
Those little trolls had the nerve to get smart with the lady and told her to mind her own business. Then they BURNED THE LEAVES.
Uh, hello! Leaf burning is not cool. And IT’S AGAINST THE LAW.
The homeowners association lady was not happy. She called the police.
The police were not happy. They tracked down Mr. G.
Now Mr. G. was even more unhappy.
He was yelling at all of us, but some kids weren’t listening. It reminded me of something he said in class about pantomime and how it worked in ancient Rome. How actors would do them in these open-air theaters. And how Roman audiences were notorious for talking during the show, kinda like what happens if you go see a scary movie out at Northland Mall.
He said the actors had to gesture a lot so the audience would understand.
Lauren must have been thinking the same thing. She leaned over to me, whispering, “If Mr. G. waves his hands around any wilder he’s going to fly back in time.”
All I could say was, “Guuuuuuurl!”
We tallied up our earnings and left the park in silence. Having Mr. G. look so disappointed was a big letdown.
By the end of the weekend, I smelled like grass, dirt, and despair. Our combined total for three days’ worth of fund-raising opportunities:
$155 for cupcake sales
$200 for garage cleaning
$80 for yard work
$435 total
Not terrible, but… math don’t lie. We were going to have to come up with something a lot better or we’d never earn enough by our deadline.
When Katy’s one-eyed cat hopped onto my bed, I didn’t even bother shooing it away. And don’t tell anybody, but when a few tears of frustration slid down my cheeks, the mangy little thing licked my face, and I didn’t even mind. I buried my fingers in its fur and drifted to sleep wondering what I could do to make our trip a reality.
Monday, October 27
Gossip tickled the hallways and dangled in the air like moss on cemetery trees. (That’s both a metaphor and a simile. When you spend four hours on a sofa with your dad watching horror flicks over the weekend, you get these kinds of thoughts.)
A lot of the gossip had to do with me and how it didn’t look like I could raise enough money for our trip.
My life had gone from everybody telling me I was awesome on Friday (after all the attention about the newspaper article), to being the latest victim of the Mumble Mafia—kids who talk about you right in front of your face, only they mumble it. The Mumble Mafia are the worst kind of bullies. I didn’t have time for that.
So when two girls and two boys in sixth grade started that nonsense, I shut it down.
They were, like, “Mmm-hmm, she need to go somewhere and get some better ideas before nobody makes it to D.C.”
I was standing right there. RIGHT. THERE. But they couldn’t be bothered to just turn and look at me. No, they had to start mumbling to one another. Let me tell you, middle schoolers and future middle schoolers. You let kids like that bring you down and you don’t even have a name anymore.
So I was, like, “Um, first of all, none of you are even on the list to go to D.C., so what’re you even talking about?”
And one of the girls was, like, “Um, excuse you, but nobody was talking to you.”
I got right in her face. Not yelling. Not cursing. Just standing my ground.
I said, “All of y’all need to be way more worried about your own business rather than trying to talk about me or anybody else. Oh, and by the way, you really need to do something positive with that breath!”
Then I walked away. When you drop a bomb on the Mumble Mafia, just walk away.
Despite that negativity, I still had sixth graders coming up to me with elaborate schemes to make money—ideas that had no chance of working.
One boy suggested a hip-hop car wash. He said we could ask famous rappers to come down and help us raise money. He said he saw it once on his favorite TV show. I told him I’d get right on that.
A girl told me she thought it would be great if we held a dog wash. Like a car wash, but for dogs. Not a completely lame idea, I thought. Until she informed me that she wouldn’t volunteer because she didn’t like washing dogs, but she would bring her dog if we did it.
At least one good thing happened. Becks and Sara both sent texts first thing Monday morning.
From Becks:
And Sara’s text was a photo of the four of us from third grade. Back then, Sara wore her hair in pigtails. Her eyes were a little red. This one kid in class, Todd Hampton, I called Toady Todd because when he was pushing kids around, his voice croaked like a frog’s. Anyway, he was teasing her, calling her “black Japanese.” Because her mother is African American and her father, Korean. Anyway, when kids made fun of her, slanting their eyes, she’d cry. And that day, boy was she crying. But Becks and I told her she was beautiful. We squeezed our cheeks together and made goofy faces at the camera. We were sisters.
In the photo, all four of us stood with our cheeks pressed together. United. Like we were one person.
I thought about the three friends at the hospital. Their photo in the paper, how they shared a look of complete oneness. It reminded me of this photo of the four of us. Only… looking at the old photo on my phone’s screen, I realized how different we all were now. It was like looking at four girls I used to know. Weird, right?
At least we weren’t fighting anymore. We even made plans to go to the movies on Saturday. And when I was moping about the trip, Becks said, “Don’t get all worried like you always do, Brianna. We’re going to make it. I just know it. I can’t wait ’til we get to D.C. It’s gonna be sick!”
Her enthusiasm made me feel better—and worse. Better because it showed she still cared about the trip. But what if the trip didn’t happen at all?