Death by Eggplant (11 page)

Gee, that sounded convincing. And if I couldn't believe in myself, how were other people supposed to take me seriously?

I needed to be older. Then when I explained my dreams—no, my
goals
—people would listen. They wouldn't stroke their beards and say,
“Pfffft!”

A beard
.

I squirted foam from my father's can of shaving cream and made myself a full white beard. It looked pretty good. In fact, it made me look like a recent competitor on
Iron Chef
, my favorite program. I loved everything about the Japanese TV show, down to the bad dubbing that made the episodes seem like a cross between
Godzilla
, the WWF, and Julia Child. But the Japanese understood. It was all about mastering the food.

I growled at my bearded reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“Arrrh! Iron Chef French—you are going
down
! Aarrrrh, arrrrrh!”

Plain white toques weren't dramatic enough for TV, so many of the competitors wore colorful costumes. I wrapped a long red bath towel around my shoulders as a cape and a smaller red hand towel straight up around my head like a chef's hat. That was better.

I pointed to my chest. “Iron Chef Italian takes no prisoners!”

I didn't really have enough specialties to claim a country. But I had already made puttanesca sauce this week and planned risotto for dinner. So today I would be Italian. Maybe I should add being Iron Chef to my list of goals. “Arrrh!” Now when I spoke to my reflection, I believed it. “Just today and tomorrow left. You can do it!
Aarrrh!!”

“Do what, Bert?” My father stopped at the open door.

I yanked the hand towel off my head and wiped my face, all in one movement.

“Survive the week,” I said, knocked back to being plain old Bertie Hooks.

“Survive? What do you mean, champ?” Dad asked, punching a number into his phone.

Maybe I had finally been brain damaged by secondhand cell-phone radiation. Or maybe I was just embarrassed,
having been caught growling at myself while wearing a red cape and a shaving-cream beard.

“I'm not your champ!” I snapped at my father's reflection.

“Hi, no, wait a minute,” he said into the phone. He held it down at his side. “Are you okay?”

“What if I said no?”

Without another word, he ended the call.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

Where should I begin? Last week, when he let Mom become mother to a flour-sack baby? Years ago, when he let the office become more important than his family? Or how about when I was first born and he let me be named “Beorhthramm” instead of “John?”

His cell phone rang, probably the person he had just called calling him back. This was my chance, my maybe once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spill everything.

“Bert?”

But would he really listen to me? And what would he say?

The repeated chirp of the phone made me twitch.

“Answer it!” I yelled.

He switched the phone off entirely.

“Not until you answer me. What's wrong?”

Quickly I rinsed my face.

“It's okay,” I told him.

He said nothing.

“Really,” I insisted, then added, “For now anyway.”

“And then what?”

“I'll explain things,” I said. “Just not now.”

“You promise?”

I nodded.

“You know,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb, “all this talk about your running away to be a spy . . . it's brought back such memories.”

“Memories?
You
were a spy?”

“Oh, no no no, there's not much of a retirement package for spies, now is there? I mean, memories of when you were a baby, all the plans I had for you.” My dad smiled, and his eyes got a misty far-off look. “I remember every minute of the day you were born. Your mother phoned my office at 11:37 in the morning, and I said I'd race right over. By 12:03 I got her to the hospital, and at 7:14 that night you were born. When I saw you, the first thing I said was, ‘That boy has the hands of an actuary.' So you can see, this spy business has caught us all by surprise.”

I looked down at my hands. The streaks of shaving foam looked like whipped cream.

“Well, I guess accounting could come in handy,” I admitted, “say, if I were . . . doing the books of a restaurant.”

“A restaurant?” my father said. “Oh, we'll have much bigger clients than that to insure. Mega-multi corporations with branches around the world. You and me, champ.”

Hints were not going to work with my parents. Maybe if I went on a cooking strike and forced them to eat canned soup every night, they would finally notice what I had been doing all these years.

Canned soup?

During my last cold, my mother had tucked me into bed, put a box of tissues near me, and said, “I'll make you some nice hot chicken soup, Bertie.” Smiling, I settled in for a long nap. But she was back just five minutes later, carrying a bowl of thin yellow liquid. Canned soup. Microwaved. I hadn't even known the stuff was in the house.

Coughing and sniffling, I dragged myself downstairs and opened the freezer door. Out came the chicken wings and necks I always kept on hand to make stock. Out came the onions and celery, carrots and parsley. Out came the pot. I sliced the onions—under cold running water to keep from crying. The circles within circles, white on white, led me into a zenlike calm. And when I chopped rib after rib of celery, each little half moon seemed to smile at me.
That
was what was missing from canned soup, besides the taste—that incredible energy, the relationship that flowed from cook to food to guest (or, in this case, from cook to food and back to cook again). Assembly-line soup had no heart in it; it could nourish the body, but not the soul.

But my parents didn't get this. Canned soup didn't bother them.

As I trudged to school, the words “Just today and tomorrow, today and tomorrow” pounded in my head like a march. But the closer to school I got, the less likely my living till tomorrow seemed. Tomorrow I only needed to show up and let Mrs. M. see my near-perfect flour sack. Dekker wouldn't try anything then, not after Mrs. Menendez had seen Cleo. So today would be his last chance, and that meant all-out war.

“I'm in danger, Bertie!” I could almost hear the whisper from my knapsack. “Don't let anything happen to me.”

“I'll keep you safe,” I whispered back, before I knew what I was doing. I spent the rest of the walk to school making sure I didn't talk to my flour sack.

In class, half the kids had that jiggly “Summer's here, let me
out!”
itch, while the other half had mid-June sleepies. Foot tapping competed with snores. Indra put her head down on her desk. I watched as she carefully arranged her long loose hair across her face like a curtain to block out the sun. Even triple A+ Judy Boynton was staring openmouthed out the window at the sunny day.

Mrs. M. took the homeroom roll. All the flesh-and-blood students were present. Both flour-sack students were present. We were ending the year with a full house.

The day continued lazily through the afternoon, with most of the teachers as summer-struck as we were. By last-period math, most of the kids were reading comics or
books they had brought from home. Cleo was watching me use her memo pad to make tiny paper airplanes.

The intercom buzzed. Mrs. M. picked up the receiver and listened.

“Oh,” she said into the intercom. “No, there's no problem. It's just unfortunate timing. I meant to cancel, then forgot.”

Mrs. M. forgot something? The shock registered on the Richter scale.

“No, don't say anything,” she said into the receiver. “Just send her in.”

Send
her
in?

This could be bad, very bad. I could already hear my mother telling about the time she painted hieroglyphics on our roof in glow-in-the-dark paint.

A moment later, there was a knock. Mrs. Menendez opened the door, and I tensed up, prepared to hurl myself out the classroom window.

In walked the fattest woman I had ever seen. She was short, too, so she was like a ball walking into the room. I expected her to roll.

“Look out!” someone whispered. “Free Willy escaped her tank.”

The woman wore a black jacket, black slacks, a black-and-white dotted vest, and a frilly white blouse beneath. There was no way to escape the image of a killer whale.

“Hello, Mrs. Menendez!” she said right away, reaching
out and pumping Mrs. M.'s hand. Then she waved. “Hi, Nicky! Surprise!”

Surprise? How about catatonic shock?

“Hi, everyone!” she called. “I'm Mrs. Dekker, Nicky's mom.”

Most of the class mumbled a stunned “Hi,” though Jerome Lindsay next to me said, “Gee, Dekker, you're lucky she didn't squash you giving birth.” Dekker turned. He stared at
me
, his face as mean and scary as it had ever been. There was no point in saying I wasn't the one making the wisecracks. I had
seen
his mother. That was enough.

Now I knew why he had been holding cans of diet drinks when I ran into him in the supermarket.

And now I knew why Mrs. Menendez had meant to cancel. After the fiasco with my father, having Dekker's mother in to talk was weird and awkward. What I didn't understand was how Mrs. M. could have forgotten.

“Mrs. Dekker is a lawyer, class,” Mrs. Menendez said, as mildly as if I should not be out this very second getting measured for my coffin. “You may have heard about the student who recently sued her teacher, her school, and her school district. The student claimed that assigning homework and penalizing her for not doing it was an invasion of her privacy. Her lawyer said it was similar to a company trying to restrict what an employee does in his or her personal life. That made homework and penalties for not
doing it a violation of her Fourteenth Amendment rights. Mrs. Dekker successfully defended
against
the claim, and the student lost.”

Kids started to groan. Right away, Mrs. Dekker waved both hands no and stepped up to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she began. “I can see that you're already prejudiced. But I ask you to put your own feelings aside and keep an open mind as I present my case.”

In fifteen minutes, that woman had us convinced that homework was not only legal, it was the moral and cultural base upon which the whole world's civilization rested. She was so good I forgot I hated homework. I forgot she was fat. I even forgot she was Dekker's mother. When she asked for questions, my hand was first in the air.

The class gasped. I yanked my hand back down, but it was too late.

“You in the back.” Mrs. Dekker tilted her head to get a better look, then broke into a laugh. “Oh, another flour sack!” she said. “Mrs. Menendez did say another boy had the ‘same challenge' as Nicky. How's it going?”

“Fine, ma'am, thank you.”

“Your question?”

“I, uh, oh, I forgot,” I blurted out. For some reason, the class laughed.

Smiling, Mrs. Dekker shook her head and
tsk-tsk
ed. “You'd make a very bad witness,” she said.

“Yes, I know, I mean, actually I wouldn't know—because I'd forget. I can't remember anything. For example, I won't remember you were ever here. In fact, I've already forgotten.” I wiped my damp palms on my pants. “Did I just say something?”

This time the laughter was unreasonably long and unreasonably hard.

“What do you think?” Mrs. Dekker turned to Mrs. M. “Should I mark him as a hostile witness?”

“I'm not hostile!” I protested in alarm, glancing at Dekker. He was facing front, his jaw clenched so tight I could practically count his teeth through his cheeks. “I like you, I really do.”

“It just means you're uncooperative,” Mrs. Dekker said.

“I'll cooperate, please. Just tell me what you want. If you want me to testify, I'll testify. If you want me to love homework, I'll love homework. Heck, I'll even
do
homework.”

“This smells of bribery. Do homework in return for what?” Mrs. Dekker asked.

“Uh, live through the day?”

She frowned. “‘Live through the day'? Have you been threatened? Are you suggesting that you need the witness protection program?”

Yes, against your son
—the words danced in my mouth, frantic to get out. I choked them back.

“No, no threats, not from no one, no one at all,” I finally managed to say.

“Well then, I have a question for
you.”
Mrs. Dekker narrowed her eyes as she looked at me. “Why is your flour sack wearing a baby hat?”

“To protect her from drafts.”

“Oh. Uh, thank you, that's all. Any other questions?”

“Yeah,” said Jerome Lindsay. “How did you get so fat?”

“Eating too many bratty kids. They make me bloat.”

Dekker jumped up and flew out the door.