On Friday I found Mom straightening up the kitchen. When she saw me, she held out a pair of scissors.
“Eliza, honey. Can you please put these away?”
“Sure.” I told her.
I pulled open the junk drawer. There was a deck of cards near the front.
“Hey, Mom. How about a game of War?”
Mom finished wiping some crumbs off the table and grinned. “Okay! Why not?”
It’d been a long time since Mom and I had played War. We used to do it all the time before she had to go back to work. It was kind of our thing, and we’d always end up laughing and talking. Mom called it our “kitchen sink” time cause we discussed everything but the kitchen sink.
Mom shuffled and dealt. Right away I lost a king when we had a war of threes and she pulled an ace.
“So,” Mom said after a couple of rounds. “Are you looking forward to taekwondo tomorrow?”
I considered her question. “Yeah. I guess,” I told her. “I liked The Karate Kid.”
Mom laughed. “Things are never like they are in the movies!”
I figured she was probably right, but it still kind of annoyed me that she laughed.
After I won back my king and took the rest of the cards, Mom suggested we make popcorn.
I wrinkled my nose.
“Since when do you not like popcorn?” Mom asked.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like popcorn. But for the last few months, we’d given up the pop-in-the-bag microwave kind and had been making it in brown paper bags instead. Which still, technically, was microwave popcorn since we put it in the microwave to cook. But it wasn’t the same. It was too plain. And weird: No other families I knew made popcorn that way. Mom said it was cheaper, though.
“I think we’re out of paper bags,” I said. (It could’ve been true.)
“Then I’ll show you how to make it the old-fashioned way,” Mom said. “I need the popcorn and vegetable oil.”
It turned out that the old-fashioned way meant putting oil and popcorn in a lidded pot and shaking it over a lit hot-stove burner.
I was skeptical, but sure enough a few minutes into shaking the pot, I heard the ping ping ping of kernels popping. It smelled heavenly! After Mom dumped the fluffy white popcorn into a bowl, she melted some margarine in the hot pan.
“This is how me and my friends used to make popcorn when we had sleepovers,” Mom said.
I tried to imagine what it was like to have a sleepover.
I had a few friends. Or at least people who were nice to me. But I didn’t have any sleepover friends. There was this one girl when I was in third grade. Naomi. She was in my Jitter Lunch Bunch. She had ADHD, too. The rest of the kids called us the Double Trouble Twins to our faces, but we didn’t care. She gave me half of a best-friends heart necklace. But Naomi’s family moved the following the year, and that was that. Adios muchachos.
After Tony and I did our Tasty Pastry project, people started talking to me more. Some of the girls even asked me to sit with them at lunch. But I had no idea what was going to happen once I started middle school.
What if no one liked me? A bigger school could just mean more people who thought I was weird. The teachers could be mean or not give me more time for tests or not let me take a break when I needed to get up and walk around. And the middle school was huge. We had a field trip there once to see a play. It was two stories and had tons of rooms.
I swallowed hard. “Um,” I said, “so do you think I’ll be invited to sleepovers next year?” I tried to sound like it was no big deal if I was or wasn’t.
Mom smiled. “Sure! And I’ll make my famous stove-top popcorn,” she said, waving the bowl of warm, buttery popcorn under my nose.
“I don’t know. . . .”
“You’ll see,” Mom said, sounding like a chirpy mother on one of those Hallmark Channel shows where everything works out. “Middle school will be great.”
Mom said movies weren’t like real life. I wondered if she knew real life wasn’t like the movies, either.