The sign on my sister’s door says Keep Out, and I am pretty sure she has the exact same sign hanging on her brain, because she acts like she doesn’t want anyone in there. Especially “pesky little brothers.” I am not pesky and I am almost as tall as she is, but she ignores me when I say that. My friend Ethan says that this is unsurprising because fifth grade is the year older sisters turn snotty. But Ali started off the year being kind of nice. It wasn’t until our mom started talking about the nanny thing that she turned into a Super Snot, which is what I decided to call her. But not out loud. I just call her that in the keep-out part of my own brain. Sometimes I just use initials.
I decided that if Ali was going to ignore everything I say, then I could ignore the things she says. Like “keep out.” Anyway, I wasn’t really breaking her privacy, because Ali wasn’t even in her room, plus, it’s a stupid sign. Plus, I was mostly keeping out. I just wanted to set Yeti free.
I cracked her door open. Swoosh. Yeti shot right out of there. He didn’t stop to lick my hand, but I could tell he was glad that I’d taken care of things.
“Arf-arf-arf-arf-arf.” Yeti ran downstairs, straight for the kitchen and probably straight for Nanny X. He always jumps on strangers, and Nanny X was a pretty strange stranger—stranger than Mr. Frank, the mailman. Yeti always barks at Mr. Frank, who shouldn’t even be a stranger by now because he’s been coming to our house almost every day for five years.
Yeti is named after the abominable snowman. He looks kind of like a polar bear, except he’s not as big. I read in Fantastically Freaky Animal Facts that even though polar bears look white, their fur is translucent. Yeti’s fur is white. I wished he could be in charge of us, like that dog in Peter Pan. Then the Super Snot could go back to acting the way she did in the good old days. If the new nanny was unconscious in the kitchen because Yeti jumped on her, maybe he’d get the chance to take over.
But Nanny X was not lying on the floor. When I got to the kitchen, she was standing up. She had taken off her sunglasses, and she was staring right into Yeti’s eyes. I didn’t see laser beams, but Yeti stared back as if Nanny X was controlling him with her mind. If she looks away, I thought, he’ll jump on her for sure. But when she looked at me, Yeti kept looking at her, like she was the best thing since bacon-flavored dog treats.
“Why don’t you get in a few minutes for your reading log before school?” Nanny X said. She didn’t say anything about mind control or about the Honey Berry Bombs on the floor. I thought maybe she was good at ignoring things, too. “Try the sports section,” she added. “It counts.”
I was so happy that reading about the Nationals game counted for my reading log that I didn’t stop to wonder how she knew I had a reading log in the first place. I took the paper and went into the living room. I looked out the window, hoping to see a motorcycle that matched Nanny X’s jacket, maybe with a sidecar and some extra helmets or something. But I just saw a regular, boring minivan. Rats. I looked at the paper. Rats again—the Nats lost. But then my eyes found something that had nothing to do with the Nationals but still had lots to do with me.
LOVETT—Rawlings Park, a favorite among Lovett youth, will close if the mayor has his way. The scenic park, which features a playground, a baseball diamond, and tall oaks, is in what Mayor John Osbourne calls a “prime business location.” Osbourne confirmed that the county is considering selling the land to make way for a factory. “It’s going to be big, big, big,” he said. A public meeting will be held in the park today at 2 p.m., in advance of the Lovett Planning Commission meeting.
“They can’t do that.” I slammed the paper down like my dad does when he doesn’t agree with something.
“What are you even talking about?” I hadn’t heard my sister come into the living room, but there she was, grabbing the newspaper away from me without even asking.
“The mayor closing the park,” I said. In my head I added: Super Snot.
My baseball team practices at that park. Half of our games are there. Plus, the playground has a blue slide that looks like an intestine. According to Fantastically Freaky Facts about the Human Body, the small intestine is about twenty feet long, but the large intestine is only five feet long. It’s wider, which is how it got its name.
“Maybe I could handcuff myself to home plate,” I said.
“There’s no place to attach the handcuffs,” Ali said.
“I could lie down on top of it.” I pictured myself on the news, surrounded by a bunch of construction dudes who couldn’t turn on their bulldozers because of me.
“Two minutes until the bus,” Nanny X called. “Jake, Brush your teeth.”
“I already did,” I called back.
“Yes, but you forgot your tongue,” she said. I went to brush again while Ali finished reading the article.
On the way to the bus, my Super Snot sister walked the length of a small intestine in front of the rest of us. Yeti trotted beside me with half a Honey Berry Bomb on his lip, which meant that he’d helped clean up the kitchen. Actually, “trotted” is not the right word; Nanny X was too slow for trotting. She didn’t look like she could pitch, either, which is something I’d been hoping I would get in a new nanny. But between staying on her feet when Yeti jumped on her and figuring out that the sports section counted on my reading log, which always came back marked “More variety, please,” her batting average seemed okay.
It dropped at lunch.
Dead fish is not the smell you want coming out of your lunch box, but it was coming out of mine. Nanny X had packed me a peanut butter and anchovy sandwich. The smell was so bad I couldn’t get past it to see if she had packed me anything else. The smell was so bad Ethan moved to the peanut-free table to get away from me. I threw the sandwich in the trash, but the smell did not go in the trash with it. It lingered, which is one of my reading connection words. The definition is: when a dead-fermented-fishy smell won’t go away and you have to bury your lunch box.
Nanny X just struck out, I thought. But I found out later that the game hadn’t started yet.