CHAPTER 6

I moved on to my next potential mayoral candidate: Dad. He was out in the garden, as usual.

“You think you can take over my garden,” I heard Dad muttering at a plant as I approached. “‘Oh, I’m a tree of heaven,’ you think to yourself. ‘I’m a big shot. I can grow wherever I want!’ Well, tree of heaven, looks like you have finally met your match!”

I stood nearby for a couple of minutes and waited for Dad to notice me, but he was too engrossed in his battle of wits with the weed. “Dad,” I said at last.

“Oh, hey, Maddie! You were so quiet I didn’t even see you there, sweetheart. You’ve come out here just in time to see your old man triumph over this ingrown ingrate.” He snapped his shears at the plant with all the focus of an executioner. “Did you know that these leaves are poisonous?” he said, glaring at it.

Here is the important thing to know about my dad: He is wrong basically all of the time. Sometimes I think he’s purposefully lying in order to make life sound more exciting. Most of the time, though, I think he genuinely doesn’t remember details and just assumes everything is a bigger deal than it actually is.

So for this plant, for example, when he said that the leaves were poisonous, what I understood that to mean was that some leaves of some plants are definitely poisonous. Just possibly not this one.

“Hey, Daddy,” I said, “I have a question. Would you run for mayor of Lawrenceville?”

Dad seemed to take this question much more seriously than Mom had. He looked thoughtful. “My old childhood friend became mayor of a major city. Miami, I think it was. He made some big changes there. Had a huge impact. Good man. Ever since we were kids, I knew he was cut out for that sort of work.”

Translation: My dad once knew a guy who got elected to do something somewhere. They may not have been friends. The job may not have been mayor. It definitely wasn’t in Miami.

“What about you, though?” I pressed. “Would you want to be mayor?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “I usually don’t even vote, to be honest.”

“Why not?” I asked. If I could vote, I definitely would. Why would I purposely sit on my hands and let other people make decisions about my life? I got enough of that just by being twelve.

“I’m not that interested in politics,” Dad said, bending down to pull up a weed. “And all politicians are pretty much the same. It doesn’t really make a difference which one you vote for, or if you vote at all. It works out fine in the long run.”

This seemed like one of the wrongest things my dad had said in a lifetime of saying wrong things. As usual, I didn’t know for sure that he was wrong. But just based on what I’d seen at yesterday’s town hall and what I’d read in the Lawrenceville Gazette, what he said didn’t make much sense. Lucinda literally wanted different things from the current mayor. She was planning to change our city. Maybe that would work out fine for some people, like my dad. He didn’t have to go to school, after all. But it wouldn’t work out fine for everybody. And I knew that, because it wouldn’t work out fine for me.

“So what do you do,” I said, “if an elected official is trying to pass a law that you don’t like? If you don’t vote, then how do you stop them?”

“You can protest!” Dad replied with a flash of excitement. “March, give speeches, write them letters. Civil disobedience—that’s how you show them that they don’t have any power over you. Have I ever told you about the time I handcuffed myself to a tree near my college that developers were going to cut down?”

“Wow,” I said. “Did that work?”

“No.” Dad sighed. “They cut it down anyway. But I’m sure my protest made them feel guilty about it.”

“Oh.”

“It was a good tree,” Dad recalled, looking a little teary-eyed.

“Do you still march or give speeches or whatever?” I asked.

He stopped looked teary and shook his head. “Like I said, I don’t really follow politics.”

He even sounded a little bit proud of it.

It was time to face the facts: Not only did neither of my parents want to run for mayor, they’d also both be terrible at it. What I really needed was an adult who wasn’t crazy, who had a lot of time, and who actually cared.

Now, where was I going to find one of those?