CHAPTER 6

Samir insists that I take his nine dollars, so now I have a grand total of ninety-five dollars.

I am still five hundred and thirty dollars away from my goal. I’m also tired and cranky.

Even more, I’m annoyed with myself for thinking I could make all the money I needed at once.

When Baba gets home from work, he has a good idea for me. “Offer to mow beoble’s lawns.”

“Do you think anyone will hire me?” I ask.

“Why not?” he says. “You’re good at it. You mow our lawn.”

“I don’t know.…”

“It’s summertime,” he adds with a wink. “Everyone’s grass is tall and growing fast.”

“But they’ll hire me? I’m just a kid.”

“Of course,” he says. “Because it means they don’t have to do it themselves.”

• • •

The next day is Sunday. Day Four of summer. Baba wakes up early to help me. He fills our lawnmower with gasoline.

“Good luck!” he says cheerfully.

I sigh. “Thanks, I guess.”

Baba pats my shoulder. “I’m broud of you, by the way. For making a blan, and working for that blan.”

So I set out to work toward my plan: mowing lawns to make money for Camp Crystals.

Except that the people who have lawns live blocks away. We have a kind-of lawn (half is filled in with rocks and pebbles). Mama says our lawn is “the size of a grape leaf.”

So I push the lawnmower toward Allie’s neighborhood, and I start knocking on people’s doors.

“We have a lawn service,” says one lady.

“Oh, thanks, but we own a riding lawnmower,” says another. “We cut our own grass in just fifteen minutes.”

One older woman finally agrees to let me cut her lawn. “Okay, sure,” she says, her voice creaky. “Just let me know when you’ve finished.”

“Great!”

“Want some lemonade or something, hon?” she asks.

“No, ma’am, but thank you,” I say, eager to start.

I push the mower, making neat lines, back and forth, back and forth. It’s just ten in the morning, but the sun is getting hot. I’m glad Mama insisted I wear a hat and sunscreen.

An hour later, just when I feel like the back of my neck is burning, I finish. I push the mower to the sidewalk and look at my work. The lawn looks trim and clean. Proud of its appearance, I knock on the woman’s door.

“Well, thank you,” she says, stepping outside and glancing around. “I guess it really needed a cut, didn’t it?”

“You’re welcome!”

“You want that lemonade now?”

“No, thanks.”

“Okay. Well, have a nice day, sweetie,” she says. “Thanks again.”

Then she waves goodbye and shuts the door.

Holy hummus.

I just stand there for a second, unsure what to do. Did she forget? She is kind of old, I think. But my Teta Maha is old too, and her memory is like a laser.

I knock again.

The lady opens the door.

“Umm… you forgot to pay me, ma’am?” I say politely. It comes out like a question.

“Pay you?”

“Yes.” I frown at her confusion. “It’s fifteen dollars,” I state clearly.

“I thought you were just being neighborly,” she says, looking shocked. “You didn’t mention money.” Her eyebrows jam together at the top of her head. “What kind of racket is this?”

Stunned, I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what she means by racket. I picture myself as a giant tennis racket, slamming balls across a net.

I watch as her confusion changes to something different. Now she just looks annoyed. She peers down at me through her glasses.

“You should have said something first,” she says. She turns her back and then returns a second later. “Here’s ten dollars. That’s all I have. These kids today… the gall…”

My neck is really burning now, and I’m also feeling irritated. Why would she assume it was a free service? And now I’m short by five dollars.

I knock on a few more houses, and I get the same responses. They either have a professional service or they cut their own grass.

One more person allows me to cut his lawn. I clearly tell him it will be fifteen dollars, and he agrees. I spend the next hour making neat lines in the grass until his lawn looks like a sheet of lined paper.

He hands me the money and thanks me. “You can come back in two weeks, if you like,” he says kindly.

“I’ll let you know,” I answer wearily.

I trudge toward the sidewalk, where my lawnmower awaits me. At this point, the machine is out of gas. And so am I.

I push it back home and store it in our small shed. Then I go inside, take a shower, and let Mama put aloe vera gel on my neck. I add the twenty-five dollars I earned in five hours to my stash. That brings my total to one hundred and twenty. I still need five hundred and five dollars.

I take a long, long nap. Just before I fall asleep, my last thought is: I have to find another way.

• • •

That night, after dinner, I sit at the kitchen table with Samir. We are practicing his sight words. I help him write the whole list of words on index cards with a marker.

“Thank you for helping your brother, Farah,” Baba says as he washes the dishes carefully.

“Why are you doing dishes?” I ask, thinking of how Baba breaks them all the time.

“Your mother is going to the library for her book club,” he says, smiling. “Don’t worry—I will be bery, bery careful.”

“So you fixed the car?” I ask.

“For now, yes. I still don’t know what the real problem is. But your baba does have some skills with cars. Back in the old country, I used to—”

Just then, a coffee mug slips out of his hand and crashes to the tiled floor. It shatters into approximately a bajillion pieces.

Baba blinks and looks at us helplessly.

Samir and I giggle wildly and, after a second, Baba joins in.

“Tell Mama to buy plastic stuff,” Samir suggests, while I fetch the broom.

Baba won’t let me sweep up the shards. He’s afraid I’ll get hurt. I sit down again and watch Samir practice his words. I stack the cards into two piles: words he knows and words he needs to study more.

Samir gets frustrated sometimes by sight words. They’re words like and and the that you see most often when you are reading. Those ones are easy. Some of the harder ones are words like about, should, and around.

He moves quickly through the first pile, reading each one out loud to me. He gets some of the words in the second pile, but he doesn’t recognize most of them.

“Good job,” I tell him.

“Not weally,” he mumbles.

“You’re reading, Samir! You’ve got this.”

“I’m not weally weading yet.”

“Sure you are!” I insist.

“No, I’m not. A lot of kids in my class wead awesome but not me.” He sighs and goes to the counter, sticking his hand in the bowl of M&Ms that Mama leaves for him sometimes. That’s his favorite candy of all time.

I watch Samir shuffle through the cards. I can see the frustration growing in his big brown eyes. How can I help him feel better about reading?

He’s so smart, but his learning challenges mean he sometimes has to work harder than other kids. Just writing the words on the card in neat letters is a big deal for Samir. At one point, he had to learn and practice how to hold a pencil. It’s more challenging for him than for other kids because he has smaller muscles in his hands. They weren’t strong enough for a long time.

I hate that he feels like he’s not doing as well as he should. That’s when an idea pops into my mind, like the goddess Athena springing from Zeus’s brain.

I get yesterday’s newspaper from the living room, then find a yellow highlighter in the kitchen “everything drawer.” I hand him both.

“Here—let’s play a game,” I say. “If you find a word you can read, highlight it.”

He grabs the marker.

I open to the sports page, where there is an article about the Harbortown Hurricanes, our soccer team.

Samir excitedly scans the article. “Here’s one! And here’s another one, Faw-wah!” He slides the neon yellow marker across words he recognizes. Before I know it, almost half the page is highlighted in bright yellow.

“Look, Baba!” I say. I hold up the newspaper page to my father. “Samir read so many words on this page.”

“Excellent, habibi!” Baba says.

“Pretty soon, he will be able to read the whole newspaper,” I say to Baba. Samir seems to glow with pride.

“Your sister is a good teacher, I think,” Baba says.

Samir nods. He starts to stack his cards up and secure them with a rubber band. “You should help Ana,” he says. “She has to learn these wouds too. It’s our summeh homewowk.”

Ana has been Samir’s friend since they were preschoolers. Like Samir, she gets pulled out of class for special speech therapy. She also gets occupational therapy because she has cerebral palsy.

“I can help Ana anytime,” I tell him.

“Hew mom got hew a tutah.”

“A what?”

“I think a tutor?” Baba pronounces it like TOOT-OOR. “Mrs. Bergman was telling Mama about that at the yard sale. They pay her by the hour.”

“She helps Ana with her wouds and with math and stuff like that,” says Samir. “Like how you help me.”

“How much do they pay the tutor?” I wonder.

Baba shrugs. “I think she told Mama about fifty dollars an hour.”

I wish I could do that, I think. I could pay for Camp Crystals in no time at all.