big whacks at a piñata
in the shape of the boy band Sara loves so much.
So much that they replaced the puppies
on her school folders,
so much that the goody bags
have their picture on them too.
So much that Sara and Fiona are going to see them in
concert for Fiona’s birthday.
So much that Sara made a giant bat out of
jumbo plastic Pixy Stix to use as our only weapon
for breaking up that boy band
piñata.
When no one can even make a dent,
Fiona grabs it and says my turn!
and we all cheer for her
and her power.
Even I cheer as Fiona takes the biggest whack yet
at her beloved band and still
they do not break up
but together
as a band the whole piñata
goes flying off of its licorice string
and into Sara’s face. Hard.
Sara, who loves sweet things,
like puppies and candy
and boy band piñatas,
is suddenly not so sweet
herself,
kicking and hitting that candy-filled,
boy-band-shaped box
(like we even need more candy)
until things go flying,
Sara up the stairs,
lollipops and gum balls
everywhere else.
Candy Land.
Other girls, barely my friends anymore,
go about collecting the candy, and Fiona sulks.
I follow the trail, like the old game,
back up the stairs through the candy-heart path,
past the front door with the gumdrop doorbell,
until there is no path, but I know the way
to Sara’s bedroom.
The bedroom where I had my first sleepover.
There is still a puppy poster above her bed,
still pictures tacked up of us in kindergarten,
at the dance recital,
at last year’s end-of-year picnic.
Too much sugar, I say.
Sara smiles.
Sugar rush! we say at the same time,
remembering the time we got a sugar rush
from eating icing out of the can last year
at Fiona’s birthday party.
It was an accident, I say.
I know, she says.
That’s what happens when you eat too much candy sushi
and try to beat up a boy band piñata
with a jumbo Pixy Stix bat, I say.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you, I say,
shoving her shoulder with mine
till she smiles.
I wish we were still in the same class, she says.
Maybe next year, I say.
And we walk back down together,
roll out our cotton candy sleeping bags,
and fall asleep watching a movie,
the candy-colored stars lighting up the dark.
How was the party? Quinn asks,
and I don’t know if I should say
what party?
or
it was all right.
You can tell me all about it, she says,
unpacking her backpack,
setting up her station nice and neat
the way she does.
I went to Benihana, she says.
Had my own party, she says.
The chef flipped a shrimp into his hat,
she says.
Made a volcano out of a stack of onion slices,
she says.
Did anyone at Sara’s party make a volcano
out of a stack of onion slices? she asks,
lining up her pencils just so.
No, I say.
A volcano out of other things, I think.
What was the occasion, I ask,
sounding like my dad and not like me,
for the onion volcano?
I don’t think you need an occasion
for a sliced-onion volcano, she says.
Anyway, there was a boy band piñata, I say.
I would have loved to take a swing at that, Quinn says.
And I laugh because I did think of her that night
as I swung the jumbo Pixy Stix bat.
I did think that Quinn, who doesn’t love puppies
or candy,
who doesn’t love boy bands either,
who loves Broadway and singer-songwriters,
I think that Quinn would have found a way
to take down that piñata
and it would not have hit Sara in the face
and I would not have had to go into Sara’s bedroom
and see that puppy poster over her bed
and remember my first sleepover.
I would have put my sleeping bag next to Quinn’s
and we would have planned our tenth birthdays
together—
Benihana and sliced-onion volcanoes.
I would have loved to see that, I say.
I make a note in my homework folder:
* buy boy band piñata for Quinn
* fill with onions
Quinn has the type of parents who both show up for
the Thanksgiving feast.
And the Book Fair.
And recess sometimes.
I have asthma, she said one day,
swinging high on the swings,
higher than me,
maybe sorry her mom comes to watch sometimes.
Sorry her mom cares whether she’s breathing well
or not.
I was not sorry.
I’m not sorry my mom doesn’t come for the feast.
This place is full of germs.
She takes care of old people, for God’s sake.
They have a feast too. The old people.
I have to go to theirs.
Maybe you’ll sing something, she says
late on fourth-grade Thanksgiving feast eve.
Too late.
Too late for washing dishes and
checking math homework.
Maybe you’ll sing something at mine, I say back.
Ha ha. Very funny, she says, feeling around for the
low part of her back.
I dig my fist into it for her. The small of her back.
I learned that from my dance teacher.
The dance teacher I don’t see anymore,
who Fiona and Sara see three times a week still.
Thanks, babe, she says, stretching her hands out to
lean on the counter.
Formica, damn Formica, she always says,
mad at our countertops for not being marble.
We were always going to do a gorgeous kitchen, she says.
The we is her and my dad,
who won’t be at the feast either,
who isn’t the kind of dad
who comes to a classroom feast.
The faucet runs and my fist digs deeper.
Quinn’s mom includes me in their family at the feast,
plopping a turkey made out of marshmallows and
Swedish Fish onto my paper dessert plate.
Cutest thing ever, she says
while she leans in between Quinn and me,
and her husband takes a picture of us smiling.
I don’t eat the marshmallow turkey.
I want to show Mom.
I want to show her that I didn’t eat that germy thing.
I want to sing for her old people.
It is getting very hard
to do all this.
To concentrate so hard.
These tests.
I haven’t done well on many of them.
I am not fast.
One was so long it almost killed me.
And now
my arms shake from all the w
ork of holding
this pose.
A plank.
One minute
and counting.
Yoga is good for the core, says Mrs. Regan,
who is probably a yoga teacher in her spare time,
since she can talk
and plank
and be a gym teacher
all at the same time.
Good for Quinn for being so good
at every single one of these gym tests.
Good for physical education, my dad will say tonight,
for finally doing something to shape this country up.
I’m not giving up this time,
till I’m the last one planking.
Jackson Allen’s pajamas look the exact same
as his clothes.
Sporty pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, I think,
looking down at my fuzzy bottoms and
red hoodie sweatshirt.
Rolled out of bed this way,
slept in pigtail French braids
just so I wouldn’t have to do my hair.
James, looking at me funny in the kitchen—
Polar Express day, I explained.
Polar Express! he said, smiling more than he’s smiled
in such a long time.
I believe! he said, remembering that the book is about
still believing in things that were hard to believe
in the first place.
You do? I asked.
Yeah, right, he said.
Why do I ask? I thought.
Not that we would believe in Santa,
not that we believe in Judah and the Maccabees
either.
I definitely believe in wearing pajamas
to school.
Quinn’s in red footies—FOOTIES!
And everyone is jealous because she looks so cozy
and because everything Quinn does makes everything
everyone else does look
less interesting.
The boys don’t make fun of Quinn because Quinn
wouldn’t care if they did.
So she wears footies and they wear sport pants and
long-sleeve T-shirts that look
less interesting
than ever.
A few days ago, Quinn and I got to spray fake snow
all over the windows of our classroom.
After that, we got to walk the halls with our
spray cans,
spraying snow on any window we could find.
It was very festive.
Fake snow smells like winter and Christmastime
the way fake butter smells like the movies.
We ran into Fiona and Sara on our way.
I was cheerful,
festive.
I was thinking we could be a group.
Hi! I said.
Let’s all wear red pajamas for Polar Express, I said.
Okay, Quinn said.
I have red pajamas, Sara said.
Not me, Fiona said. You guys do red,
she said. We’re going to do something else.
It is overly hot on the day we walk through the halls,
making believe we are on a train
bound for the North Pole
on the last day before Christmas break.
Hot in the winter,
hot in the summer.
Schools only have one temperature.
Unless you’re on the
Polar Express!
And you walk past two girls who are not in red,
not in footies
but in sweatpants and
boy band sweatshirts they got together
at a concert
probably.
Then you might find a cool breeze,
arctic even,
I believe.
In second grade I had a leaf project to do over a school
break,
and I was happy to do it, scooping up all the leaves in all
their different colors and sorting them and labeling them.
Biggest, smallest, best-smelling—hint: none of them
smell in the fall—brightest, strangest shape.
And I made a leaf creature out of maple leaves because
they look like they have arms and legs anyway.
I collected those leaves with my dad and on our walk
he said he was leaving,
that he was getting his own place.
But you have a place, I said, knowing that his place
was not here,
knowing that this place was a place that made him
quiet and angry
and always leaving and
not settled on the sofa and tickling and cheerful the way
having a place was supposed to make a dad feel.
We went on collecting leaves anyway and building
that leaf creature and I didn’t cry
until the nighttime, when he wasn’t there because his last
day living in our house was on the leaf-collecting day.
And now I have this map project to do and it is harder
than the leaf project and it is due
after the Christmas break,
and now I’m afraid of projects
because of what someone might tell you right
in the middle of one.
That’s why I hold up my hand when James comes in
just as I’m tracing over all my pencil marks
with a Sharpie.
Don’t tell me anything bad, I say, not looking up.
Mom’s working late, he says. I’m ordering in Chinese.
Good news, I say, and I cry
right on the fresh Sharpie-inked state capital star.
For extra credit, I will add a weather pattern to my map.
A rain shower in Albany.
It is hard to pin down Quinn Mitchell.
She has a lot to do.
My mom and her mom have tried to get something
on the calendar,
but we both do a lot.
Singing and acting and homework;
semicolon,
and Quinn does tae kwon do a lot,
like every day.
She is a red belt.
“The overscheduled child,” my mom always says,
miming actual quotation marks in the air.
When I finally go to Quinn’s house, I see her belt rack
up on her wall of her room and a poster of her
high-kicking a board.
Her room looks like a page from a teenage-bedroom
catalog. Turquoise, with little white lights strung
around as if it were an outside garden party.
And pictures of one million people and places
tacked up on the walls
with colorful pushpins.
Belts and medals and certificates—
one from St. Jude’s.
St. Jude’s.
I can’t believe it.
St. Jude’s?! I say with a question mark and an
exclamation point in my voice.
The asthma. Quinn says it with a period in her voice.
Hmmm, I say. But I don’t ask anything else because of
that period, and I get back to looking around—
dolls and Barbies and Kens and shoes and boots and
high heels, even.
My sister’s, she says. Try them! she says.
I do and I almost break my ankle before I take one step,
wobbling over to the mirror to see my big feet,
almost filling them up, the strap around the heel
hanging just a little loose.
Bigfoot! Quinn says, but I can’t look away.
I admire myself in the mirror.
I admire the room in the mirror too.
It is a collage of her interesting life.
Quinn puts on the radio and we try on her sister’s old
dresses and pretend to go to a school d
ance together.
We have pretend dates, and we dance,
jumping on the bed to a fast song, then dancing
cheek to cheek for a slow one, and Quinn leads, and
then we collapse in our dresses and heels
and laugh so hard I wonder if it will ever stop.
We are a run-on sentence.
Quinn’s mom knocks on the door—a hyphen—
and calls us for a snack.
We sit at counter stools and Quinn’s dad calls from
work and we put him on speakerphone and he tells us
jokes and says
I love you, girls,
to his wife and his daughter before he hangs up.
I picture him sitting at a desk somewhere,
looking at pictures of his family,
and maybe he has a secretary.
Maybe…he will be home in time for dinner.
We eat crackers and cheese and grapes, and drink
fizzy cranberry sodas from old-fashioned-looking
bottles
all before
Quinn’s sister, who does not yell at us for wearing her
party dresses and her shoes,
comes home.
She does not have a gloomy face or a pierced tongue
either.
She does not grunt at us and close her door.
She smiles and asks Quinn about her day
and winks at me when she says she likes my name
and my hair
and my freckles.
The doorbell rings after a while and we are
still laughing about dancing and school
and the bump in my hair on picture day
when my dad walks in.
Let’s go, kiddo, he says.
And I straighten up right away.
It would have been nice to have Quinn Mitchell meet
dog Mitchell,
but I’m glad it worked out this way.
I’d move in there in a heartbeat,
comma,
if I could bring James and Mom and Mitchell with me.
Period. End of sentence.
Outside Quinn’s house is a brand-new sports car,
with James scrunched into the backseat.
Check it, he says,
rolling down the window.
I feel my face get hot because the car is so cool and
my brother is smiling
and the air isn’t as frozen all of a sudden.
What’s happening? I say, confused because it
isn’t a dad night.
Wanted to take you all for a spin, Dad says,
hopping behind the steering wheel.
He drives James and me home—
shifting gears hard and fast, the way he does
even when he isn’t driving—
to Mom’s house, where she is already in pajamas,
cooking something—tacos—
in the kitchen.
Put on a coat, Dad says to her.