All About Sam (9 page)

So Leah sat up very straight in her wheelchair and gave burping lessons. Fake burping wasn't easy. Skipper finally managed a pretty good one, but most of the children simply giggled and sputtered, and Nicky got the hiccups.

Mrs. Bennett was the most successful at it. She did a huge loud fake burp on her second try, and everybody clapped.

"Okay," Mrs. Bennett said, laughing. "Time for just one more person before we go out to the playground." She looked around the circle.

"Sam," she announced. "Your turn."

Sam stood up. He knew his was better than the palm tree postcard. But the fake burps—well, it would be tough to be more interesting than fake burps.

He took his father's pipe out of his pocket and put the stem of it into his mouth. Then he took the lighter out of his other pocket and tried to push hard on the little ridged wheel that would make the flame appear. All of the children were watching in amazement.

"HOLD IT!" said Mrs. Bennett in a loud voice. "Stop right there, Sam Krupnik. What on earth are you doing?"

That was a strange question, Sam thought. Anybody could
see
he was lighting a pipe. But he took the pipe out of his mouth and explained to his teacher.

"I'm lighting my pipe. I'm showing how I smoke my pipe."

"Not in this nursery school, you're not. I'm ashamed of you, Sam. Does your father know that you took his pipe?"

Sam hadn't even thought about that. When he took the pipe, he'd been thinking about being interesting at Show-and-Tell. He hadn't thought of it as taking. As
stealing.

He wished he had been the one to do fake burps instead of Leah. He wished Mrs. Bennett's angry face would go away.

"It's not my daddy's pipe," Sam said. "It's
my
pipe. My daddy has a different pipe. We sit around and smoke our pipes together at home."

"Oh?" Mrs. Bennett said. He could tell that she didn't believe him.

"And my mom and my sister, they both smoke big cigars," Sam added. His voice was a little quavery. It was quavery because he was lying. But he couldn't seem to stop.

Mrs. Bennett took the pipe and the lighter from Sam. She knelt beside him and put her arm around his waist. Sam felt terrible. All the kids were staring.

"I'm
very
glad Sam decided to give us all a lesson about health and safety," Mrs. Bennett said. "You taught us all an important thing, Sam."

"I did?"

"You certainly did. We all need to be reminded about how dangerous fire can be, right?"

"Right," said Sam.

"And we should never,
ever
play with lighters or matches?"

"No," Sam said in a loud voice. "Don't anybody
ever
play with lighters or matches!"

"And what do we think about smoking?"

"YUCK!" Sam shouted. The kids in the circle all clapped their hands and yelled "YUCK!"

Sam looked around and grinned. He was being a bigger hit than Leah.

Mrs. Bennett kept the pipe and the lighter. She said she would send them back to Sam's father with the carpool driver.

Sam decided, as he was putting on his jacket for the playground, that when he got home he would have a serious talk with his mom and daddy and Anastasia, too, about safety and health. He would also teach them how to do fake burps.

Sam sat on Anastasia's bed and watched his sister brush her hair. Anastasia had long hair and every night she tried to brush it, she had told Sam, one hundred strokes.

"Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four," Anastasia was saying softly as she brushed.

"A hundred and forty-nine," Sam said loudly.

Anastasia stopped brushing and glared at him. "Don't, Sam," she said. "You'll get me all mixed up."

He waited quietly until she got to one hundred and put the brush down.

"Now do me," he said.

"Your hair looks fine," Anastasia said. "You don't have oily hair like I do."

"I just have dumb curls," Sam muttered.

"You have
great
curls, Sam. I'd give anything to have curls like yours. In fact, you know what? I'll tell you a secret."

"What?" Sam asked. He loved secrets.

"Well," his sister confided, "when I was younger, I used to be jealous of you. Sometimes when people would come to visit Mom and Dad, they would all start talking about what pretty curls the baby had."

"What baby?" Sam asked.

"You, when you were little. When people started talking about how cute you were and what pretty curls you had, I would get so jealous and mad that I would leave the room. I would go sulk."

"Did you cry?"

"No, of course not," Anastasia said. Then she added, "Well, sometimes I did. Once or twice."

Sam sighed. "I was such a cute baby," he said with satisfaction. "Very, very, very cute."

He raised himself to his knees so that he could look across the room into Anastasia's mirror. He frowned at himself. "Now I hate my curls," he said. "I wish I had punk hair."

"
Punk hair?
"

"Yeah. My friend Adam has punk hair. His hair all sucks up like a porkypine."

"Porcupine," Anastasia corrected him automatically. "Is it dyed orange or green or anything?"

"No, it's just a plain brown porkypine. And he has a little tail at the back." Sam felt the back of his own head. "I wish I had a little tail like Adam."

"Well," Anastasia said, "I think it's very weird for a three-year-old kid to have a punk haircut. When you're
big,
you can get one if you want to. Although to be honest with you, I think it would freak Mom and Dad out if you did."

Sam grinned. He pictured his mom and dad freaking out. They would probably scream and faint. Maybe ambulances would have to come, with their sirens going. He would stand there with his punk haircut and direct the ambulance people and tell them what to do.

"Sam, would you go downstairs, please? I have to do my homework now," Anastasia said. "I can't concentrate when you're fooling around in my room."

"I'll go if you give me five brushes. You don't have to do a hundred."

So Anastasia picked up her hairbrush again, brushed Sam's curls carefully five times, and patted him on his behind fondly. "You're still cute, Sam," she told him.

"Yeah, but I have these dumb curls," Sam said glumly. He left his sister's room.

Sam could hear his parents talking quietly downstairs. He could hear the television news in the background. If he went down to where they were, they would make him be quiet while they watched the news and talked.

He wandered into the bathroom instead. If he stood on the closed toilet seat, he could open the medicine cabinet, and there was interesting stuff in there.

First he took out his dad's shaving cream and pushed the button on top so that it foamed out into his hand.

He smeared it on the bottom of his face so that he had a beard. Then he closed the medicine cabinet and leaned over so that he could see his white-bearded face in the mirror.

Sam giggled.

Still wearing his foam beard, he opened the cabinet again. This time he noticed his mother's perfume. He sprayed it across his chest and sniffed.

Next, he thought he would try the hairspray. But as he reached for it, he noticed the small pair of scissors that his father used to trim his beard.

Sam wondered if you could trim a
foam
beard. He fitted his fingers into the scissors handles and tried.

But it didn't work very well. Part of his beard fell into the sink.

He closed the mirrored door again and looked at himself to see if his beard was still okay, even if a piece of it had fallen off.

But when he looked, he found himself looking more at his hair than at his beard. He found himself looking at his curls. His dumb curls.

Very carefully he reached up with the scissors and snipped at a curl. It fell into the sink on top of the foam. Where the curl had been, there was now just a small tuft of hair. It was sticking up. Straight up.

He stared at it. It was the beginning, he realized, of a punk haircut.

He snipped another curl and watched it drop into the sink.

And another.

He began to wonder whether, when he finished the top, he would be able to figure out how to make the little tail in the back.

He snipped again.

***

Twenty minutes later, through the closed bathroom door, Sam could hear his mother's footsteps coming up the stairs. He could hear her voice.

"Anastasia?" she was saying. "Sam? It's awfully quiet up here. What are you guys doing?"

"Homework," Sam could hear his sister call.

Sam put his scissors down. He looked around the bathroom. The beard foam had dissolved and was mostly gone. But there was hair everywhere.

"Is Sam in your room?" he heard his mother ask.

"No, he went downstairs a long time ago," Anastasia replied.

"Sam?" his mother called.

Sam leaned over the sink and looked once more into the mirror. Foam had dried on his chin and cheeks, and snippets of hair had dried in it, so he had a fuzzy beard. His curls were mostly gone. Here and there a curl remained, but most of his head was—well, it wasn't what he had hoped.

He had hoped for little tufts and spikes, like Adam's hair, and a small tail in the back.

But something had gone wrong. It was chunks. And there was a bald spot right in front. He hadn't wanted a bald spot at all.

"Are you in the bathroom, Sam?" His mother's voice was louder.

He looked at himself again. The head looking back at him didn't look like Sam Krupnik at all.

"No," he called. "Someone else is in the bathroom."

His mother knocked on the door. "I beg your pardon?" she said.

"Are you looking for your cute little boy, Sam?" Sam called nervously.

His mother chuckled. "Yes, I am," she called through the door. "It's his cute little bedtime."

"Well," Sam replied very slowly, "Sam has disappeared. He turned into someone else, I think."

His mother opened the door. She opened her mouth, as if she were going to say something, but no words came out. She stared.

"I'm not Sam anymore," Sam whispered miserably.

His mother's mouth remained open, but she didn't speak.

"I'm a porkypine," Sam wailed. "An
ugly
one!"

For a very, very long moment his mother still said nothing. They stared at each other in absolute silence.

"Sam," she said at last, "I have never
ever
wished to have a porcupine instead of a son."

"I know," Sam said, sniffling.

"And for the very first time, I feel a terrible desire to spank you," his mother said. "An urge—an almost uncontrollable urge—to spank you. A
need
to spank you."

Sam poked out his tongue to catch a tear that was coming down his sticky cheek. He tasted hair and dried foam.

"I don't think," his mother continued, "that I am actually
going
to spank you. But I want you to know that I would
like
to."

Sam nodded. "Me too," he said miserably. "I want to spank myself."

"Do you think," his mother asked, "that we could try to laugh, instead?"

"I don't feel like laughing," Sam said, spitting out some stray bits of hair.

"Neither do I," said his mom. "But here are the choices. You could cry. I could spank you. If I spank you, then I will cry, too. Or we could both laugh."

"Let's try to laugh," Sam said sadly.

"Ha ha," they both said, and turned the corners of their mouths up very slightly.

Sam's lower lip was still quavering. He laughed again. So did his mom. At first it wasn't easy. But after a moment, the laughter was real. It got louder and louder. Anastasia came running in to see what was going on. Sam's father came upstairs with the newspaper in his hand.

For a very long time, all four Krupniks stayed in the small bathroom together. Sam's father was sitting on the edge of the tub. Sam was still standing on the closed toilet seat. His mother and sister leaned against the wall where the towels hung.

They howled with laughter. They laughed until they were exhausted.

The next morning, bright and early, Sam went with his mother to the barber for repairs. For four weeks, until his curls grew back, he had the most interesting punk hairdo in town. It was even better than his friend Adam's.