Happy Kid! (2 page)

“What about Lukie?” Mom asked me. “You guys were friends for years.”

“Luke, Mom. Nobody says ‘Lukie' now. We don't do things together anymore because we weren't in any classes together last year. We didn't even have the same lunch section. I didn't see him for most of sixth grade. You can't do things with someone you never see.”

“He was in a different classroom, not on the other side of the world,” Mom insisted.

“He might as well have been.”

“Kyle, for the first time in your life you didn't have friends over for your birthday this summer!” Mom said.

“I was twelve, Mom. Give me a break.”

“I had a
big
party for my twelfth birthday,” Lauren recalled happily. “I had
boys
at my twelfth birthday party.”

I spent part of my twelfth birthday with my grandmother. Oh my gosh. I am
such
a loser. A hairy loser.

“When you got your schedule from the school, did you even call any of your friends to find out if they have the same classes you do this year?” Mom asked.

I had a hard time imagining just which
friends
she was talking about. What with all the different classes we had last year at the middle school, I hadn't seen much of the people I'd known in grade school during the day. I had so much homework that I couldn't see much of anyone after school, either. You can't just call people you've hardly talked to since you left elementary school and hope they'll think you're
friends
. I wouldn't have been in good shape in that department even if there hadn't been the “problem with Mr. Kowsz,” as Mom liked to call the worst thing that ever happened to me.

She was right, though. After the “problem,” I did become notorious. Being famous for something no one wants to be famous for didn't suddenly make me a people magnet, either. Except for Jake Rogers, of course. He was the last straw. Once he started following me in the hall and hanging around me in the locker room before gym class (mine—he stopped going to his back in March), anyone who had been thinking about so much as asking if I'd been able to do last night's homework changed his mind.

A lot of people stared, though.

I didn't want to make my mother feel bad because I had no one to call, so instead of telling her that, I yelled, “Would you leave me alone!”

“No,” Mom said. “I won't. Tell us what was wrong last year, and we'll try to help you fix it.”

“Bert P. Trotts Middle School is the gateway to hell!” I shouted. “How are you going to fix that?”

“Yeah, I'd like to know that, too,” Lauren said.

Mom turned so her back was toward Lauren. Which meant she was giving me all her attention. Yippee.

“Why is it the gateway to hell, sweetheart?” Mom asked me.

I decided I'd had enough of trying to be nice to my mother. I tried to change the subject and said, “I don't want to talk about this.”

“Nah, he just wants to whine,” Lauren announced.

“Lauren,” Dad warned.

“I do not whine!” I shouted. “All the kids at Trotts spend all day every day being ordered around. ‘Take this subject!' ‘Listen to that teacher!' ‘Run to your next class.' ‘Read this book you don't like, do this homework you don't understand, sit with these kids you don't know.' ‘Do this. And this. And this.' It never lets up. Not for a minute. ‘You got your homework done? Great! Here's some more.' ‘And what do you think about what happened in the book we're reading? Really? Well, you're
wrong
!' ”

“Wait until you get out in the work world,” Dad told me, man-to-man. “You'll
wish
you were back at the gateway to hell.”

“Honey,” Mom said to me, “we know the new accelerated English and social studies classes you took last year were tons of work. I felt just terrible when you had to drop out of Boy Scouts because you didn't have time for the meetings. And then there was the . . . well, the problem with Mr. Kowsz . . . in June. But you need to understand, sweetheart, that there are two responses to difficulty. One is positive and one is negative. You've become very negative and defensive, and we'd like to help you become positive and accepting. We'd like to help you—”

I couldn't listen to any more of that stuff. “I am not negative!” I exclaimed.

“Not negative?” Lauren repeated, laughing. “Kyle, your glass isn't just half empty . . . it's broken and the water has spilled all over the floor.”

I could have added that the water was muddy and full of bacteria, but I didn't. I have a much sunnier personality than I get credit for.

Mom either smiled or gritted her teeth at me. “You always look for the worst in every situation, Kyle. And then you get all upset about it. It's as if you don't know how to do anything else anymore. We're worried about your happiness. Your father and I think it's time for you to start fresh.”

Oh, yeah, sure, like Dad had anything to do with any of this.

“Kyle, read this book,” Mom insisted. “It could change your life.”

“Is it part of a trilogy?” Lauren asked. “Because one book is not going to be anywhere near enough to fix what's wrong with him.”

“
You'd
need an entire set of encyclopedias,” I shot back.

“Read the damn book, Kyle,” Dad said. “At worst it will be a waste of time. And at best my ulcer will shrink up because there won't be squabbling at the dinner table anymore.”

“Dad, you do not have an ulcer,” Lauren groaned.

Dad corrected her. “No one has been able to
find
my ulcer. But it is there. And it's growing. Terrorist threats, unemployment, new diseases, and now two adolescents living in the same house with me. Why I'm not on a liquid diet by now is a mystery to me.”

My father isn't exactly what I'd describe as positive and accepting. Why doesn't Mom ever jump on him?

“I'm not reading that book,” I announced. “You can't make me.”

“I'll pay you a dollar for every chapter you read,” Mom suddenly offered.

Lauren gasped—one of those big fake ones that involve a huge, noisy sucking-in of air. She's tall and thin, and she usually wears her dark hair in a ponytail or pinned up on the back of her head with a clip. With her hair up you really notice her gray eyes popping open when she's surprised.

I look just like her except I don't have breasts.

Actually, she doesn't, either.

“You're going to bribe him?” Lauren asked.

“It's behavior modification,” Mom said grimly. “Read a chapter, get a reward.”

“And that's different from bribery because . . . ?”

I picked the book up and looked it over. It was pretty big.

“Not worth it,” I said.

“Kyle, you idiot,” Lauren exclaimed. “You only get seven dollars a week for allowance. If you read a chapter a day, you'll double your income. How long are the chapters? They're only a page long! Give me that book. For a dollar a page,
I'll
read it.”

“No,” I said, pulling the book away from her. “It's mine.”

When I woke up on the first day of seventh grade, I wanted only three things from life. I wanted to keep people from staring at me and whispering. I wanted to get my name off any school lists of students who were likely to snap and go violent. And I wanted to buy one of the bacon, egg, and cheese bagels the Bert P. Trotts Middle School lunch ladies sell before first-period classes start.

I thought I had a chance for the first two items on my list if I could just be quiet and keep people from noticing me for, say, six or seven months, so everyone would forget I'd ever existed. I didn't have a clue how I could get the third item because, unfortunately, bacon, egg, and cheese bagels aren't handed out free in the hallways. It was no use hitting up my mother for money because she couldn't understand why we didn't love the lame food she made for us at home. I could probably find seventy-five cents in change on the floor of my bedroom, but I needed a dollar and a half. Where would I get the rest of it?

I rolled over onto my side and moaned. Then I noticed something shiny off to my right. A ray of sunlight was reflecting off some gold lettering. I saw the words
Happy Kid
peeking out from under the shirt I'd been wearing the day before. Suddenly I experienced a feeling of great peace.

That bacon, egg, and cheese bagel was mine.

The book felt as if no one had ever even opened the cover, because the binding was incredibly stiff. But when I managed to pry a few pages apart, I found I was looking at a chapter that was only a paragraph long. That was very convenient since it just happened to be all I wanted to read.

As I slammed the book shut, I was overwhelmed with a powerful emotion. It was embarrassment for my mother. I hoped no one our family knew had seen her buying the sappy thing. Then I got over it, jumped to my feet, and headed out to the kitchen.

“I won't be needing that,” I told Mom, who was slicing grapefruit. She had already poured out two bowls of a cold cereal that had been invented someplace in Scandinavia where all the healthiest and worst-tasting breakfast food comes from. “I'm getting a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel this morning. Could I have a dollar?”

Mom kept right on working away over that grapefruit and said, “You know I'm not paying for you to kill yourself with that stuff.”

“But you are paying me to read that book you got me.”

Mom stopped what she was doing and slowly turned around. Her face looked as if it might explode. Then she calmed down enough to just look sly and confused. I knew she was wondering how to find out if I'd really read a chapter without accusing me of lying. I decided to give her a break and get my dollar a little faster. I was not going to miss the bus that day and risk getting to school late so everyone would gawk at me while I was walking into class.

“
Hello,
Mom,” I said cheerfully. “Lovely pair of black corduroys you're wearing. I particularly like the way they whistle when your legs rub together while you're walking.”

“That wasn't in the first chapter,” Mom said as the telephone started to ring.

“It was in whatever chapter I happened to find. I read a chapter, I get a dollar. That's what you said,” I reminded her. Then I picked up the phone.

“Put your TV on!” a voice ordered from the other end of the line. “They're changing the colors for the terrorist alerts!”

“Why,
hello
, Nana dear,” I replied, holding out my open hand to my mother. “Have you read the paper already this morning, or were you just watching the news?”

“Kyle? Is that you? Did I get a wrong number?”

“Great book, Mom,” I said. “I say hello to my own nana, and she doesn't recognize me.”

“Take a dollar out of my wallet,” Mom sighed as she took the receiver from me.

I carried my dollar up the stairs toward my room, pausing just long enough to pound on the bathroom door as I passed it and shout, “
Hello?
That bathroom is supposed to be for both of us!”

“Go use Mom's!”

I'd had to use my mother's bathroom in the mornings ever since I got out of elementary school and had to take the same bus as my sister. We have two bathrooms for four people. I may be bad at math, but even I can figure out that you would never divide four by two and come up with an answer that involved putting one person in one bathroom and three in another. So I try to remind Lauren of the unfairness of that situation whenever I think of it.

I've had appliances glued to the roof of my mouth to correct a cross bite twice (because
of course
it didn't work the first time) and tiny chains attached to impacted second teeth so they could be pulled down out of my gums. I've had braces with elastic bands for nearly three years now. You wouldn't think a little tiny rubber band would be capable of causing the kind of ache and sometimes real pain that these things are able to cause. And the crud that gets on the brackets on my teeth whenever I forget to be careful about what I eat takes more than a little time to pick off. So I think it just stands to reason that I should be able to get into my own bathroom where all my toothbrushes, floss, wax, and dental mirrors are stored.