I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO ANYONE at school. I especially don’t want to talk to Jeremy, who says, first thing when he sees me the next morning, “Did you see I got another footprint?”
“I don’t care about stupid footprints,” I say so loud that the girls at the other table look over. I don’t care. I only came to school this morning because Mom made me. She said I had to come and look after George.
Martin is with her at the hospital, which is where I want to be, too, but she couldn’t deal with George all day at the hospital. He had to come to school, so she asked me to please come to school with him.
On the bus, George laughed like he always does, because he might have been the first one to notice something was happening with Dad, but he doesn’t understand what it means.
I don’t want to tell anyone at school. I don’t want to talk about how an ambulance came last night just like last time, only this time felt different. Mom didn’t look at us at all or worry about what we’d do if she left us alone. This time she looked only at Dad and held his hand the whole time they were putting him on the stretcher and taking him.
She climbed inside the ambulance and told Martin, “I’ll call you when we get there.”
By the time she finally called, we were up in bed. Martin said we could all sleep in George’s room the way we do on Christmas Eve. He brought in the blow-up mattress and lay on it, with all his clothes on, saying it was probably a good thing that Mom hadn’t called. I knew that wasn’t true of course.
When she finally called, she told us that Dad was still alive, which was the good news. The bad news was that he’d had another brain bleed and he was going to need another surgery. The doctors told her he still might die but there was an equal chance that he wouldn’t. We should stay positive, she said. She promised she’d come home and be there in the morning.
All day at school I think about Dad’s scar and the hair that has finally started to grow around it. Every day I’ve been watching his hair get a little bit longer, hoping that if he looks more like his old self maybe he’ll start to be his old self, too. Now when he wakes up from this surgery—if he wakes up from this surgery—we’ll be back at the beginning again. He’ll probably have a new bumpy scar somewhere on his head and he’ll shout things no one understands because brain surgeries make you paranoid and mad.
If he wakes up. Last time, we didn’t worry about him dying. He was fine after the accident on the track, walking around and talking. How do you die if you were fine ten minutes before? After we hung up last night, I got mad that Mom told us how bad this could be. Martin said it was better to know. “She wants us to be ready for whatever happens, that’s all.”
Be ready for Dad dying? How does anyone get ready for that?
Certainly George doesn’t bother trying. On the bus ride here, he did the same thing he always does, which is sit behind Taro, the driver, because he likes watching him work the gearshift and the pedals. When we walked into school, I knew Ms. Bartholomew, the art teacher, didn’t know anything because she smiled big at George and said, “Who’s going to have a good day today?” I hate when teachers treat George like he’s in kindergarten but he obviously doesn’t mind so most of them do. “I am!” he said, giving her a high five and laughing.
I wanted to tell Ms. Bartholomew that George will not have a good day. Neither of us will, maybe for the rest of the year. Or even the rest of our lives.
“You want to know how I got my footprint?” Jeremy whispers. “’Cause it was easy. It was so easy it was stupid.”
“I don’t want to know,” I say. I put my face in my hands. I’m afraid I might start to cry.
“What you do is, you go into the office and you ask Ms. Champoux if she’d like a refill on her coffee. That’s it. A little milk and one sugar and, bam, I got us another footprint.”
He likes pretending he’s doing this for the class, not himself, which is one more irritating thing about Jeremy.
Then it’s strange. It seems like Mr. Norris is having as bad a day as I am. He’s forgotten everything—including our spelling tests—at home. “I even forgot my lunch,” he says, shaking his head when he looks at the empty lunch box he accidentally brought.
I know that Mr. Norris’s bad day doesn’t have to do with me. This morning, Martin asked me what we should tell the school, and I said we should wait until we know what’s going to happen to Dad. I didn’t want everyone looking at me with hopeful expressions on their faces, like they wanted to say, Fingers crossed! Let’s hope he lives! So Mr. Norris can’t be thinking about me when he breaks a pencil during math time, and later when he closes a desk drawer on his finger so badly he asks Amelia to get him a cup of ice from the nurse.
He’s tired and he’s thinking about his own problems. That’s why I haven’t gotten any footprints. I wish I could write him an anonymous note with my mother’s favorite tip: When bad things happen, think about someone else’s problems and try to help them.
By this, I would mean: he should think about me! He should think about how I’ve been a nice kid all year and now that my dad might be dying, he should sit down with a big stack of footprints and write up a bunch with my name on them. Maybe that would help him feel better.
By the end of the day, I know that’s a stupid idea. Mom said she’d call the school if there was any big news, which she hasn’t done, so I have to assume that at least there isn’t bad news.
I should feel relieved, but instead I feel mad. What if every day is like this for the rest of the year—where I spend the whole time wondering if I’ll be a half orphan when I go home? It’s not Dad’s fault, I know, but I hate him for not being able to fix it like he used to fix everything around the house.
I hate him for not acting like himself for so long—for sounding like a kid or a strange, angry drunk person sometimes. I hate him for getting all our hopes up and seeming better and then getting a brain bleed again. It’s the one thing I’ve learned in fourth grade so far: there’s nothing I should count on being happy about. I was so happy when I got Mr. Norris, who was fun for a while, until he got so distracted and wasn’t fun anymore. Then I was happy when I found out I hadn’t lost George and we were all home with Dad, laughing about Lisa.
And now this.
I definitely have to get better at not counting on anything, I think.
I can’t help myself—I’m so scared to go home, I start crying a little bit when I get on the bus in the afternoon. I slouch down in my seat so my backpack rides up and no one can see what’s happening with my eyes. That’s when I look up and notice the front seat behind Sue, our afternoon bus driver, is empty. The bus ahead of us is leaving and she’s pulling the door shut.
I grab my backpack and start up to the front of the bus.
“Wait!” I say. Usually, an aide or one of the assistant principals stands with George until he gets on the bus, but they don’t always keep perfect track of him because usually they don’t have to. George loves riding the bus. He knows our bus number and our driver. He’s never made a mistake about this. Usually he’s the first person on.
“I need to get off,” I say.
Sue gives me a tired look in her mirror. She’s not as nice as Taro, our morning driver. “I forgot something,” I say, because I see George on the far side of the playing fields, wearing his backpack. He’s near the bushes where soccer balls get lost sometimes, but George doesn’t care about soccer balls. I have no idea what he’s doing over there. “I can’t wait for you,” Sue says. “All the buses are pulling out.”
“I know,” I say. George is too far away for me to tell what he’s doing, but I have a terrible feeling I know what happened. Mom called the school in the last hours to tell them Dad is dead. They told George but not me because maybe Mr. Norris didn’t answer a page. George knows and ran away to cry in the bushes. Somehow he got away, because suddenly he’s better at sneaking off. I should know. He did it to me yesterday.
“It’s fine if you leave without me,” I tell Sue. I’m scared if she doesn’t open the door and let me off, I’ll start to really cry. “Just let me off,” I say. “Please.”
I catch one break at least. I get off the bus just as a late class of third graders comes out of the building. Mr. Wilder, the principal, is too busy shuffling kids onto their buses to notice me running away from mine. I run as fast as I can across the field to George, but it’s hard, running and crying at the same time. My heart is beating and I’m afraid of what I’ll hear when I get to him: Dad’s dead! No more Dad!
I hate this. I hate Mom for making us come to school today. I hate Dad for getting sick. I hate Martin for being at the hospital, where we should all be right now.
By the time I get to George, I’m a mess and I almost can’t believe it. George isn’t crying, he’s laughing and pointing at a hole in the bushes. He’s rocking back and forth, flapping his hands a little. “It’s Mr. Norris’s path! Mr. Norris says, Bye, George.”
He’s right. It’s the shortcut path to Mr. Norris’s apartment building. The one he used to use every morning until he started driving his beat-up car to work. George remembers weird things like this. Maybe he even notices that it’s been weeks since he’s seen Mr. Norris walk through these bushes, carrying a cookie sheet full of snacks for the class. Maybe this is his way of asking what’s going on. Who knows with George, but for the moment I’m so relieved he’s not telling me Dad is dead that I laugh and look where he’s pointing his stick. Just beyond the bushes is the path that dips down into a drainpipe and comes up again in the back of a parking lot for the apartment complex. Because it’s still the middle of the day, there aren’t too many cars in the lot.
Then I see a real surprise: Mr. Norris’s car pulls into the parking lot. George recognizes it, too. He bounces up and down and squeals a little in excitement. “Shh, George,” I say. “We’re just going to watch.”
In the distance, I see the last three buses close their doors and pull away. Now we’ll have to go to the office and call home for a ride. Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m thinking: the longer we put off going home, the longer we won’t have to hear any bad news about Dad. I push George ahead of me so we’re on the path, hidden by the bushes, and no one will look over here and wonder what we’re doing.