One Square Inch Read online

  4

  “Today,” said Mr. Pasta one morning early in September, “we will learn how to make the single most versatile and enticing of all breakfast foods.”

  “Pop-Tarts?” Spencer asked.

  “No!” Mr. Pasta waved his spatula threateningly in Spencer’s direction, but it was obvious he wasn’t really angry. “Pop-Tarts are not food. They are two pieces of cardboard fastened together with overly sweet, artificially colored, fake fruity glue.”

  “I don’t think he likes Pop-Tarts,” Spencer whispered to Ben and me. One of the many good things about Food Fun was that Mr. Pasta let friends sit together and be on the same cooking team. It was a small class—eighteen students—and each team of three sat in one of the six cooking units, complete with our own table, stove, and sink.

  “Would anyone care to make an educated guess?” Mr. Pasta asked.

  Ben raised his hand. I knew Ben couldn’t help himself. It was just about impossible for Ben to know the correct answer and not volunteer it.

  “Omelets?” Ben asked.

  “Of course! Omelets with artichoke hearts, goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, smoked salmon, wild mushrooms . . .”

  Mr. Pasta had a dreamy expression on his face, as if he could already taste each delicacy he was naming. All of them sounded terrible to me, especially the goat cheese. Not that I had ever eaten any, but there had to be a reason why most cheese came from cows.

  “What about normal fillings?” Spencer asked.

  “Such as?”

  “Ham and cheese?”

  “We will begin with ham and cheese,” Mr. Pasta said regretfully. “Plain cheese for those of you who are vegetarians. I’m afraid the Western Hills school budget does not permit me to purchase artichokes and goat cheese. But I encourage all of you to try more exotic fillings at home.”

  Mr. Pasta began to demonstrate his omelet-making technique at the stove in the front of the class. “Now, the secret to a delectable omelet is to have just the right balance between eggs and filling.”

  I loved watching Mr. Pasta cook. He made everything look so easy, but so far, when Spencer, Ben, and I tried imitating him afterward, nothing turned out the way it should, even with Ben directing. And today we’d each be making our own omelet, as one omelet wasn’t enough to feed three people.

  Mr. Pasta flipped his omelet over in the pan with one deft flick of his wrist. I knew my own omelet would stick to the pan, or fall apart into scrambled eggs. I tried to pay attention to Mr. Pasta’s quick, practiced motions. It would be great if I could surprise Mom and Carly with omelets for supper.

  As it happened, when each team member took his turn, my omelet did disintegrate into scrambled eggs, as did Spencer’s. But Ben’s omelet was almost as impressive as if it had been produced by Mr. Pasta himself.

  “Great job, Ben,” Mr. Pasta said as he stopped by our station to inspect our progress.

  We carried our plates to the table and began shoveling in big, eggy mouthfuls to beat the closing bell of class. Third period was definitely the best thing about sixth grade at Western Hills Middle School.

  After school Ben had practice for the Western Hills cross-country team. I got off the bus with Spencer at the stop for his house, just one stop before mine, preparing myself mentally for the amount of cheerful chaos that I would find there.

  For starters, Spencer’s house was extremely messy. In the front hallway alone, I had to make my way around a gym bag, two bicycle tires, a half-full glass of Coke that someone had set on the floor, and a heap of every kind of shoe imaginable, no two matching shoes visible anywhere.

  Then there was the noise level. At Spencer’s house at least one TV would be blaring, usually two or three, all tuned to different channels, and a dog would be barking somewhere (Spencer’s family had three). Louder than all the rest put together, Spencer’s mom would be shouting at Spencer or his three older brothers.

  I found it all oddly restful and reassuring.

  Spencer’s mother came to greet us. She was hardly any taller than Spencer, and weighed twice or three times as much.

  “Did you leave this Coke glass by the front door?” she yelled at Spencer.

  “No!” he yelled back.

  “Who in his right mind would leave a Coke glass by the door where anybody could knock it over?” she shouted.

  I couldn’t help thinking: who in his right mind would leave two bicycle tires by the front door, and a couple hundred shoes?

  Spencer’s mother looked furious, but even as she kept on shouting that whoever had left the glass there had better be ready to get out the mop and clean up a big, sticky mess, she gave Spencer a hug and for good measure gave one to me, too.

  “Well, don’t just stand there! Come to the kitchen and get something to eat!” she ordered us.

  I picked up the offending Coke glass and carried it into the kitchen, emptied it, and put it in the dishwasher. I knew everyone in Spencer’s family would rather blame everyone else for leaving it there than pick it up and put it away.

  “What do you want to eat?” Spencer asked. He threw open the pantry cupboard door, and we surveyed the jumbled contents of the bulging-full shelves. Every form of junk food known to man was available there.

  “I’m sort of in the mood for Pop-Tarts,” Spencer said. “How about you? Some nice tasty cardboard spread with fake fruity glue?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I agreed.

  We each took two Pop-Tarts—no need for a plate at Spencer’s house—and headed up to his room. I sprawled out on Spencer’s unmade bed, and Spencer settled himself in a heap of pillows on the floor. A TV somewhere in the house blared out the cheers of the crowd at a baseball game; another TV was tuned to a war movie, with plenty of gunfire. I could hear Spencer’s mother shouting, “Andrew, did you leave a Coke glass by the front door?”

  “What Coke glass?” Andrew shouted back. “What are you talking about?”

  I took the first bite of a chocolate fudge Pop-Tart. Mr. Pasta was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts were delicious.

  My mom was sleeping when I came in the front door. Carly was next door at Jodie’s house.

  Welcome home, I thought.

  I finished my L.A. homework quickly, making sure to put my name and class period in the upper left corner of the page. Miss Bellamy had given us time to finish our math homework in class. I didn’t have anything for science or social studies. Practicing trombone was out of the question; I couldn’t imagine breaking the silence with a B-flat major or F major scale.

  At least Mom made a real dinner that night: spaghetti with sauce from a jar. I knew Mr. Pasta wouldn’t have liked it. He didn’t approve of pasta with store-bought sauce.

  “So how was school?” she asked.

  “We made omelets in Food Fun,” I offered.

  “How did they turn out?”

  “Like scrambled eggs.”

  Mom laughed. “What about you, Carly Bug?”

  “Jodie and I are making a book together,” Carly said. “I’m writing the story, and she’s drawing the pictures.”

  “What’s it about?” Mom asked.

  “It’s called The Magic Eraser.”

  “What’s magic about an eraser?” I asked.

  “It can erase anything. Anything you don’t want for there to be in the world, the eraser can erase it.”

  “Sounds good,” Mom said, but I didn’t think she was really listening.

  “But what’s the plot?” I pressed on. “The eraser erases all the bad things in the world, like war and poverty and cancer—the end? I mean, what happens after it all gets erased? Does the book just end with a bunch of empty pages?”

  “We haven’t finished it yet.” Carly sounded defensive. “We think it’s going to end with a picture of a flower. Just one little flower, with yellow petals.”

  “Everything in the world gets erased, and all that’s left is one flower?”

  “What’s wrong, Cooper?” my mom aske
d, reaching over to pat Carly’s hand. “What do you have against flowers?”

  “Nothing.”

  Carly could never stay discouraged for more than half a minute. “Maybe Jodie and I will write a sequel: The Magic Pencil. The magic pencil can come along and write in all the new, good things. Do you think that’s better, Cooper?”

  “Sure,” I said, ashamed of how I had responded before. “Keep working on it.”

  After Carly and I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, I hunted through my backpack for the notice I was supposed to bring home about the back-to-school night for parents on Wednesday, not that I thought my mother would have the energy to go this year. At least I could give her the notice and mark the date on the big calendar she had hanging on the kitchen wall, where all three of us were supposed to write down our activities.

  I found a pen, but as I wrote “Cooper back-to-school night 6:30” on the calendar on Wednesday’s square, I saw that Mom had already written “Dr. Leibowitz 1:30.” I didn’t know if I felt more relieved that she was seeing a doctor or worried about what kind of a doctor she was seeing.

  I tried looking up Leibowitz in the phone book, and there was a listing for Leibowitz, Nancy, M.D., but that was all it said: it didn’t give any other information.

  On the computer upstairs in my bedroom, I typed in “Leibowitz Nancy MD,” and then it came right up:

  Nancy J. Leibowitz, M.D., Psychiatry

  And then I knew.

  My mother didn’t have cancer.

  My mother was crazy.

  5

  Gran-Dan always called Saturday morning at eight. There was something about the way he called on the same day at the same time that made it seem like a chore he was crossing off his list: 8:00, call Emily and the kids—done! He and I never had much to say to each other. He’d ask me about the weather and about school, and I’d say whether it was sunny or windy or snowy, and then I’d say that school was okay, and he would ask to talk to Carly or Mom.

  That Saturday, I heard the phone ring while I was still in bed. I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head. Carly or Mom could talk to him first. But suddenly I wasn’t sleepy anymore.

  What if . . . what if I told Gran-Dan what I’d found out about Mom? That she was seeing a psychiatrist? I mean, if my mom was crazy, shouldn’t some grownup family member know? Gran-Dan was the only other family member we had.

  I got out of bed and scuffed my feet into my slippers. After a week of still-summery September days, it had turned cold and the first frost was predicted. I found Carly on the couch in the living room, yakking away on the phone. She hardly paused for breath as she told Gran-Dan everything that had happened that week.

  “We have an assembly every Monday, and at the assemblies different people in different classes get awards, you know, if they’ve done something special the week before, and I got an award for ‘excellence in writing stories,’ and Mrs. Brattle is going to let me publish one of my stories at the school publishing center, so I’ll have a real book with my name on the cover, and a dedication page. I’m going to dedicate it to Jodie’s cat, Skittles, because it’s a story about a cat, a pirate cat, and Skittles gave me the idea for it, because she has kind of a black pirate patch around one eye, and at the end of the book there will be a page called ‘About the Author’ and it will say, ‘Carly Harris lives in Colorado. She is seven years old. She has written many books, but this is the first one that got published.’ ”

  There was a pause as Gran-Dan must have asked a question.

  “No, she couldn’t come to the assembly. But she likes the award and said she’s going to get a frame for it and I can hang it up in my bedroom.”

  I waited as Carly proceeded to tell him the entire plot of Priscilla the Pirate Cat.

  There was another pause on Carly’s end of the phone. Then she said, “Sure. He’s right here,” and she handed the phone to me.

  “Hey there, Coop,” said Gran-Dan.

  “Hi,” I said. I walked into my room and shut the door behind me as I tried to think of what to say next. I climbed back into my bed, not realizing until now that I was shivering.

  “So how’s everything?” Gran-Dan asked.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I heard it’s turning cold out there,” Gran-Dan continued.

  “Yeah. It’s pretty cold this morning.”

  “What’s new at school? What’s your favorite subject so far?”

  “Not much. Food Fun, I guess. The teacher, Mr. Pasta, I mean Mr. Costa, is pretty funny.”

  There was a pause. We had already gone through our two standard topics.

  “One of my friends,” I blurted out, then stopped.

  “One of your friends what?”

  “One of my friends broke his foot, playing soccer.”

  That was actually true, but it wasn’t what I had meant to say.

  “It’ll heal,” Gran-Dan said.

  “There’s another kid on my team? He’s worried because his dad is seeing a psychiatrist.” I purposely didn’t say “his mom,” so Gran-Dan wouldn’t think I was talking about me. I wanted to see how he reacted before I said anything else.

  “Everybody sees a psychiatrist nowadays,” Gran-Dan said. “I guess people have to have something to throw their money away on. And somebody to boohoo to about their problems.”

  My mother knocked and then came into my room. I was glad I hadn’t told Gran-Dan anything about her.

  “Here’s my mom,” I said quickly. I handed her the phone and buried myself under the covers; I still had an hour before I had to get dressed to carpool to my soccer game with Ben.

  At the game, Ben’s whole family—his mom, his dad, his older sister—was there cheering from the sidelines. My mom and Carly weren’t there, although they used to come all the time last year. Occasionally Ben’s dad would shout some encouragement to me. “Good job, Coop!” I heard, when I made an especially good pass.

  We won 3–2. Ben scored two of our three goals, of course. I didn’t mind that Ben was the star of the team. He was so much better than the rest of us that there was no point in being jealous. Even though Ben did his best not to hog the ball, we wanted to pass to him all the time, because that was the way to win.

  But I was jealous that Ben had a father. And a mother who wasn’t crazy.

  After lunch Mom disappeared into her bedroom with the door closed. I was going to do some homework—Miss Bellamy had assigned her favorite kind of word problems—but Carly dragged me into her room.

  “I never gave you your deeds,” she said.

  “My deeds?” At first I thought she was talking about Monopoly, but then she said, “To the Yukon. Remember? We each have four square inches. I brought yours home from Gran-Dan’s. Here.”

  I took the four yellowed sheets of paper Carly handed to me. I had forgotten all about them.

  “What are you going to do with yours?” she asked.

  Do with them? “Save them, I guess.”

  “I was thinking we could put them together, your four inches and my four inches, and we could make a little country. We could call it Inchland. The people who live there are the Inchies. They’re very tiny, so tiny that to them a square inch is as big as . . . Colorado?”

  “That’s too big. Maybe a square mile. For them, a square inch is like a square mile.”

  “Do you want to help me make a map? We can pick where the castle is, and the town—maybe one big town? It can be the capital of Inchland.”

  “Inchopolis,” I suggested. I was getting interested in Carly’s make-believe in spite of myself.

  “I want it to have little, crooked streets,” Carly said. “There are no cars in Inchland. In Inchland, it’s still long ago. They haven’t invented cars yet, or television, or electricity. The streets are lit with candles, so when the Inchies go for walks, everything is twinkling. Or maybe they use fireflies for the lights.”

  “The fireflies would be bigger than they are.”

  “Cooper! If t
he Inchies are tiny people, then their fireflies are tiny fireflies. Everything is tiny in Inchland.”

  Carly sat down at the table by her window. I sat in the small chair facing her, feeling like a gigantic second grader. I was probably acting like a gigantic second grader, too.

  “Do you want to make the map? Or do you want to draw the castle?” Carly asked.

  “I’ll do the map.” I’ve always loved maps. I reached for Carly’s wooden ruler.

  “Remember, the streets are all crooked,” Carly told me. “You’re never sure exactly where you’re going in Inchland. Even the Inchies get lost all the time. Only they don’t call it getting lost. They call it getting surprised. And if they get too surprised, they can always look up and see the castle.”

  For the next hour, Carly and I sat at her table, drawing.

  A week later, Spencer and I were at Ben’s house on Sunday afternoon working together on a group project for social studies. We had to build an ancient Mayan pyramid. Spencer lay on the floor in Ben’s family room, watching Ben and me cover the sturdy cardboard structure with a layer of clay. The next step, according to Ben’s master plan, was to carve the clay into a steep staircase leading up to the cardboard temple perched on the pyramid’s flat top.

  “You could help, you know,” Ben said to Spencer. He smoothed another thin slab of clay onto one side of the pyramid.

  “Would you rather have me help and get a B, or do it all by yourselves and get an A?” Spencer asked.

  “You can’t mess this part up,” Ben said. “I mean, we’ll do the steps, but you could at least do some of the clay. It’s taking longer than I thought to get this covered.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to make a big pyramid,” Spencer reminded him. “It’s not taking you as long as it took the Mayans.”

  “The Mayans didn’t have two guys doing all the work while the other guy did nothing but still got the same grade,” Ben pointed out.

  While I listened to them squabble, I picked up a stick of brown clay and kneaded it for a minute or two until it was soft enough to mold. Then I flattened it to a quarter-inch thickness.