6

Edison still howled when his mother left every afternoon and then, three hours later, he howled when Julius left. This might have shown how attached he was to his mother and Julius, or it might have shown how attached he was to howling.

That Monday afternoon, Edison howled as usual while he watched his mother’s station wagon back out of the driveway. Julius had learned that it was best to ignore Edison’s tantrums. He picked up a few toys from the family room floor, but Edison, still shrieking, snatched them out of the toy box and repositioned each one exactly where it had been before.

Finally, Edison’s tantrum subsided. His thumb went into his mouth like a little round plug.

“Hey, buddy,” Julius said, “want to go in your stroller to the library?” He needed to get A Tale of Two Cities if he was ever going to read it.

“Edison’s stroller!” Edison shouted happily. He scrambled up off the floor and ran over cheerfully to stand in front of Julius.

But then his face changed. He pressed his lips together. He shut his eyes. He gave a little grunt. His cheeks turned red.

“No, Edison, no!”

It was too late. An unmistakable odor filled the room. Edison’s face looked normal again, or, rather, normal for when he wasn’t howling. But Julius could feel all the color draining out of his own. He couldn’t believe that little kids could just … go … like that, standing up, in front of other people, their faces giving away the terrible secret of what was going on in their pants.

Julius checked his watch. It was only one-fifteen. Could he really leave Edison like that for two hours and forty-five minutes and then pretend it had just happened? Wouldn’t the contents of Edison’s diaper be squished in a telltale way by then? Besides, Julius wasn’t looking forward to two hours and forty-five minutes spent in the company of someone who smelled the way Edison smelled.

“Edison’s stroller!” Edison sang out again, as if nothing had happened. He headed toward the back door, where his stroller stood waiting.

“Wait a minute, buddy! You can’t go like that.”

Storm clouds gathered over Edison’s face. Was it time for tantrum number two already?

“You have … you know … you can’t sit in that stuff. I have to—we’re going to have to change your diaper.”

At least Edison didn’t launch into another round of howling. Apparently he didn’t mind having his diaper changed. Little kids were strange: they minded stupid, unimportant things, such as having their shirts changed, but they didn’t mind catastrophic, cataclysmic disasters, such as having their diapers changed.

Julius followed Edison up to his room. He was going to have to change a diaper. He was just going to have to do it. Every day millions of people in America changed diapers. They survived. Julius would survive, too.

No. He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t like millions of other people. That millions of people in France spoke French didn’t mean Julius could speak French. People were different. Some spoke French, and some didn’t. Some changed diapers, and some didn’t.

He’d have to call someone to come over and change it for him.

His mother? She had gotten him into this mess in the first place. And she had to know how to change a diaper, because once upon a time she had changed Julius’s own diapers—a sickening thought. So he could call his mother. But, according to his mom, the job was supposed to be teaching him about responsibility. Would she think he was learning about responsibility if he called her for every single catastrophe?

Octavia lived right next door. But she had already said that life was too short for babysitting. And life was definitely too short to deal with the contents of diapers. Maybe Octavia could pretend she was a character in a play and that changing a diaper was part of the script? Julius suspected that there wasn’t a single diaper-changing scene anywhere in the complete works of Shakespeare.

His only hope was Ethan. Julius could almost imagine his friend briskly and efficiently changing a diaper, the way he had briskly and efficiently fried the bacon.

Almost, but not quite. But there wasn’t anyone else he could call.

“Edison, stay right here. I have to make a phone call. Stay right here and don’t sit down.”

Luckily, Ethan was home and not at the pool.

“What’s up?” Ethan asked.

“I’m at Edison Blue’s house. There’s a problem. A big problem. Can you come over?”

“Sure. What kind of problem?”

Julius had to tell him. Ethan would never forgive him if he didn’t. But it was all he could do to say it out loud. “He … went in his diaper,” Julius whispered into the phone. “I have to change it.”

There was a long pause on Ethan’s end of the line. Then Ethan said, “Number one?”

“Number two.” There was another, longer pause. “Listen, if you can’t, forget it.”

“What’s the address?”

Julius told him. Then, weak with gratitude, he hung up.

Upstairs, Julius found Edison sitting on the floor playing with his wooden train tracks. How could he sit in it? And the smell—couldn’t he smell himself? Maybe Julius needed to start a list of lifetime goals in the back of his journal.

Goals for the Rest of My Life

1. Don’t have kids.

Though maybe he could adopt one who had already been toilet-trained.

A few minutes later, he heard the doorbell. Ethan hadn’t wasted any time biking to the rescue. Julius let him in, and the two of them hurried upstairs.

“Edison, this is my friend Ethan. He’s going to help me change your diaper.”

“No!”

Edison hadn’t objected to the prospect of the diaper change before. What was his problem now? Not that Edison was famous for consistency.

“Hi, Edison,” Ethan said. “My mom is Mrs. Winfield, your teacher at school.”

“My teacher is Patty!” Edison contradicted him.

“That’s her! That’s my mom!” Ethan said.

“Not Mrs. Winfield.”

“Patty Winfield. Patty is her first name, Winfield is her last name.”

“Not Mrs. Winfield!”

Julius decided to cut the conversation short, fascinating as it was. “Okay, buddy, let’s get that diaper changed.”

“No! You don’t change Edison’s diaper. Edison change Edison’s diaper!”

Julius thought for a minute. Could Edison really change his own diaper? If he could, Julius’s problems were over. Still, he really ought to stick around and supervise, in case anything … fell out.

“Okay, Edison, you change your diaper. Ethan and I, we’re only here to help.”

Edison looked suspiciously at Ethan.

“That’s right,” Ethan confirmed. “We’re just your helpers, your diaper-changing helpers.”

“Don’t look,” Edison commanded them.

Julius pretended to shut his eyes, keeping them open just enough to squint through his eyelashes.

Edison pulled down his shorts. Then he tugged at the little sticky tabs on the sides of the diaper.

“Hey,” Julius interrupted, “maybe we should do this in the bathroom.” Someplace where there wasn’t light-colored wall-to-wall carpet.

A brilliant idea he should have had fifteen seconds ago. Off came the diaper, and down onto the middle of the wall-to-wall carpet covering Edison’s bedroom floor. Fortunately, it looked as if it fell clean side down.

“Edison need wipes!”

Ethan was able to unroot himself first. He grabbed the box of wipes from the diaper table and placed it on a chair next to Julius.

“Come on, buddy.” Julius recovered his voice. “Let’s go do this in the bathroom.”

“Mommy changes me here!”

“Yeah, but Mommy’s not changing you now. Julius and Ethan are changing you now—well, helping to change you—and we think we should be doing this in the bathroom.”

“No! Here!”

For answer, Julius took Edison by the arm and began to lead him down the hall to the bathroom.

“No!” Edison yanked himself away and tried to run back to his bedroom, his shorts still bunched around his ankles. “Edison do it here! Like Mommy!”

Just as he got back to the bedroom, he tripped and fell, unwiped-bottom side down, and began to howl. But not as loud as Julius and Ethan were howling.

*   *   *

By the end of the afternoon, Julius was pretty certain that there was one thing worse than changing a diaper: scraping and scrubbing the contents of that diaper off a light-colored carpet. He would owe Ethan for this one for the rest of his life.

Luckily, once they managed to open the childproofed cupboard of cleaning products, they found one bottle for removing “pet stains.” Apparently, pets stained carpets in much the same way that three-year-olds did. By the time they were done, only a suspicious antiseptic-smelling wet spot on the carpet remained.

When Mrs. Blue came home, Ethan was gone and Edison was getting ready for his closing tantrum. Everything was back to normal. But, not surprisingly, Julius hadn’t gotten to the library to check out A Tale of Two Cities. He wouldn’t have had the strength to start reading it that night, anyway.