THE NIGHT BEFORE THE CARNIVAL IT’S hard to sleep because we have no idea what’s going to happen. We’ve put flyers around town and a notice on our school’s website calendar. I told Mr. Norris and Ms. Crocker and on Friday they made a joint announcement over the PA, which really surprised me.
At first I thought that was embarrassing, especially when Jeremy said, “What, like a kiddie carnival? Are you serious? We’re in the fourth grade now, remember?”
Then a bunch of kids came up and said they wanted to come. Our house is on a pretty busy street, so it was easy to tell them where it was. Rayshawn said he’d come after basketball practice, which made me happy and nervous and exaggerate the number of Nerf guns we have for sale. (“There’s like a hundred,” I said. “Seriously. You should get some.” He laughed like I was kidding, the way he always does.) At the end of the day, walking back from our math class, Olga asked if there were any jobs she could help with. I couldn’t picture her helping little kids drop their pennies—I’m not sure if she could see a penny or the place they were aiming—so I said she was welcome to bring any old toys or desserts, or anything else she wouldn’t mind selling.
The next morning we wake up to the first bad surprise of the day: Polly, my mom’s friend, has shingles and can’t take Dad to her house for the day. I think of shingles as the things on the roofs of houses but apparently it’s also a very painful sickness. “It’s fine,” Mom says, blowing out in a way that makes me pretty sure it’s not fine. “We’ll set Dad up upstairs, with the TV on, and we’ll check on him every half hour or so.”
“Right,” Martin says. “I’m sure that’ll work. He won’t wonder at all why there’s a million people in the backyard.”
For a second, Mom gets seriously mad. “I don’t want him to know why we’re doing this. He’ll feel terrible if he knows this is about his medical bills. Promise you’ll help me, boys.”
We promise her and then, a few minutes later, we get the second surprise of the day: Olga shows up an hour early, bringing her own table and a box filled with her comic books. Each one has a cardboard cover and is stapled together with her drawings on the front.
“Are you sure you want to sell these?” I say. “Don’t your parents want to save them or something?”
Because of their homemade covers, they look a little like the books I made back in kindergarten. My parents’ favorite is still on display on our family room bookshelf. It has two pages: one with a picture of a hill with a face on it, the next with a sentence a teacher helped me write: This is me, dressed up as a hill. I remember my dad reading that one and saying, “Books don’t get much better than this, Benny.”
Olga lays her books out in a rainbow shape on her table. “These are all copies. We’ve got originals at home.” She pulls out a coffee can with a sign taped to it: Olga Yashenowitz Comic Series for Sale. All Profits to Benafit Benny’s dad’s Medicle Expenses.
I know some of those words are misspelled, and I feel embarrassed for her and sorry that I said she could bring anything to sell. I should have been clearer. I should have said, You can bring either old toys or desserts. I can’t help worrying that she’ll sit here all day without selling a single book, because why would anyone want to buy a little kid’s book?
Then I pick one of them up and I’m a little surprised. The graphics are great. The pictures are all divided into real panels with great drawings. I start to read the first one and I’m even more surprised. It’s about a blind girl who discovers she has the superpower of going into other people’s minds and changing what they think. At first she plays tricks with her power. She goes into minds of kids she doesn’t like and makes them forget all the words on the spelling test. Then she makes everyone in the class fail a math test just so she’ll look smart. In the end she realizes it’s not that fun to be the smartest person in the class and that day at lunch, she goes into everyone’s mind and makes them all share their lunches with one girl who forgot hers.
Okay, so it’s not The Indian in the Cupboard, but it’s good enough that I pick up the next one to see what happens. This time Blind Girl is trying to get strong enough to change grown-ups’ minds. She works and works to get her parents to pick Disneyland for their next vacation instead of some boring historical site with battlefields and museums, which they always do. She almost does it. She hears her mother humming “It’s a Small World” and then: Tragedy! Blind Girl breaks her arm! Her parents feel so bad about it they tell her she should pick their next vacation spot. Disneyland, here they come!
It’s weird reading these because I remember Olga coming to school in second grade with a cast on her arm. Those were the days when boys really didn’t talk to girls so I don’t think I ever asked how she broke it.
Over the rest of the morning, when I’m not busy running my games arcade (which, I have to be honest, probably makes the least money of all our setups), I go over to Olga’s table and keep reading her books. In one, Blind Girl goes to camp and saves a drowning boy by teaching his mind how to swim. In that one, Blind Girl also helps a friend at camp not be afraid of the dark. I like how Blind Girl controls people’s thoughts. Usually she whispers something like You can do this. It makes me think about Olga with her fingers on her knees teaching me multiplication. I look over her titles and wonder if I’m in one of these books somewhere.
“You could buy one,” she says, after I’ve read four. “But you don’t have to. It’s up to you.”
A few people have bought some, but there’s still a lot left.
Now that she’s said this I realize I really want to. I want the whole series. I want to figure out how she did this on the computer when she can’t see print very well. I want to talk to her about making an animated movie version of one of these stories using one of my girl Lego minifigures like Poison Ivy or Cat Woman. Maybe she won’t like that idea, but maybe she will.
I borrow money from my game arcade coffee can, which I can pay back with birthday money from the bank, and I go back to Olga’s table. I offer to pay one dollar each for the first six books in the Blind Girl series. She pulls an already-tied-together stack of books out of a box at her feet and says, “Here you go. Put the money in the can.”
After that, I watch her table and it turns out she’s selling a lot more than it looks like—she’s leaving the same ones on the table and pulling other copies out of the boxes under the table. One little kid gets done with my game circuit and asks if he can read the copies lying on my chair. “My sister bought them, but she won’t let me look at them until she’s done.”
By this point we’re getting a little busier, so I say fine. I’ve had about ten kids come through my game arcade, which isn’t a lot but is enough to keep me busy. Overall we’ve had about forty people come, most of them to look over the tag sale and the bake sale. Then I look up the street where more cars are parked and—this freaks me out for a second—I see Mr. Norris and Ms. Crocker get out of his car, then open the back door so Aaron can get out.
I look around the yard and try to decide how this will look to them. A lot of people have come and gone. There’s about twenty people right now, standing around in clusters. A line of parents and toddlers are at Martin’s roller coaster, which is going even better this year because there are three vehicles (cardboard boxes) and two friends to help with the pushing that is everyone’s favorite part. Even his friends have gotten into it, making sweaty faces while the babies laugh in their boxes.
Mom is at the pie table. It’s loaded with things other people have brought, including zucchini breads that no one will buy probably and a huge chocolate chip cookie, frosted and shaped like a football, which I really want to buy with the rest of the money in my can (which I’ll also have to pay back from my bank account).
George is meant to be “helping” Mom at the bake sale table, which means he’s wandering around doing whatever he wants, which makes me even more nervous. I see Mr. Norris and Aaron walking up the street, coming closer. Aaron is wearing another candy necklace. If it wasn’t obvious by his outfit that there’s something wrong with him, he’s holding his dad’s hand, which pretty much makes it clear. George still holds hands with our parents, too, even though he’s in sixth grade. Not all the time though. They try to remind him holding hands is for street crossing, not walking around the grocery store.
The main thing is, I don’t want George to run over and scare Aaron. I also don’t want him to start screeching and making Aaron’s noises back to him, thinking that’s a good way to say hello. I can tell how nervous Mr. Norris is about bringing Aaron to our carnival.
When they first got out of the car, I assumed I was seeing something shocking, like next week he might announce that he and Ms. Crocker are getting married. I know that happens sometimes; teachers marry each other because who else do they meet? Watching them walk closer though, I’m not so sure. Ms. Crocker looks nervous, too, like she doesn’t know Aaron and isn’t sure what to do with him. That happens all the time with George. Nice people get really awkward if they don’t know him. Which makes me think they’re friends but probably not getting married anytime soon. She’s here to help, because he wanted to bring Aaron and maybe he wasn’t sure he could do it alone.
Aaron walks toward us, chewing on the hand that Mr. Norris isn’t holding. It’s hard to tell if he’s hurting himself or not. But he’s scared. I can tell.
All morning I’ve been wishing we had more people and a bigger crowd and now I wish there was no one else here. I bet I could get Aaron to do the Penny Drop if no one else was around. That would probably surprise Mr. Norris and make him happy.
I feel like running over to George and saying he has to go inside the house and not come out for at least half an hour. He’s the one who’s most likely to do weird, unpredictable things that might scare Aaron away. I leave my post and run over to Mom. “Mr. Norris is here! With Aaron! You have to get George inside.” I’m trying to whisper and not seem hysterical, but I do anyway.
“Benny, I can’t make George—” Mom says and then looks up and sees Mr. Norris and Aaron on the edge of the lawn. Aaron’s up on his toes. It looks like he doesn’t want to step on the grass. Mom takes it all in—the two adults trying to reassure Aaron, the big deal this is, just stepping on grass—and she says, “Okay, let me see what I can do.”
She heads toward George, who’s sitting on our old swing set, twirling himself around. Before she gets to him, though, something happens that makes everyone on the lawn turn around in the same direction.
I hear someone say, “Oh my God,” and I look: Dad is standing on the back porch, wearing no hat or bandanna. His bald head shines in the sunlight; his scars look like train tracks across his forehead and over his ear. My stomach tightens. He is wearing a big smile, holding up one hand to wave, like he has no idea at all how scary he looks to all these people.