Clementine and the Spring Trip Read online

  They weren’t.

  “No,” Morris-Boris was saying. “What it smells like is this: If you find cat throw-up lying on the sidewalk on a hot day and you wrap it in one of your socks after you’ve been out playing soccer, and then you accidentally stuff the cat throw-up sock into the chimney of your sister’s dollhouse, and then hide the dollhouse in the back of your closet for six months and then accidentally put it back in your sister’s room…that’s what it smells like.”

  We all stared at Morris-Boris. I knew everyone was thinking the same thing: Morris-Boris was the nicest person in our whole class, maybe even the whole school.

  “You did that? You?” I asked. “You really did that to your sister?”

  Now Morris-Boris looked shocked. “Of course not!” he said. “I don’t even have a sister. I was just saying The Cloud smells like if you did all that.”

  Just then the recess-is-over bell rang. The kids kept on arguing about the smell as we filed inside.

  “No,” Adrian said as he hung up his jacket. “It smells like once, after my dog ate an entire—”

  Our teacher held up both his Stop! hands. “Okay, okay, that’s enough. I get the picture,” he said. “I’ll send a note along to the bus company, have them look into the problem.”

  From the back, my mom still looks like my mom. But from the front, these days, she looks like a pear, which is lucky for her because I am even better at drawing fruit than people. When I got home from school Monday afternoon, she looked so round I grabbed my sketchbook to make a picture. I drew a floating pear, and then drew overalls on it. Then I put my mom’s head on the stem, added arms and legs, and erased the leaf coming off her shoulder. Here is a picture of that:

  When I showed the drawing to my mother, she went into her bedroom to look at herself in the mirror. I heard her sigh a couple of times. “You’re right,” she said when she came back. “I look like a pear.”

  That is how good of an artist I am: in my drawings, people even know what fruit they are.

  My mom lowered herself onto the couch. She patted her belly, which looked like it had a watermelon strapped to it, and sighed again. “I miss my waist.”

  I looked at my drawing, and then at my mom’s belly, trying to figure something out. “Mom, where do all your guts go? Like your stomach. Or your lungs.”

  My mom laughed. “Oh, everything’s still in here. The baby does make things a little crowded, though. A little squashed. And it’s a good thing skin is so stretchy, because this little guy or girl is still growing.”

  I erased the clogs from my mom’s feet and drew on her favorite shoes—green sparkly dragonfly high heels—which she can’t wear anymore because of having pregnant feet. Then I put down my pencil. “I still can’t decide what I want it to be,” I said. “If it’s a boy, then there will be three people on the boy team. If it’s a girl, we’ll have another one on the girl team, but it won’t be just you and me anymore. I don’t know which is better.”

  “What do you mean? You think there are teams in this family?”

  “Of course. You and me, and Dad and Watercress.”

  “First of all, your brother’s name is not Watercress. And second of all, is that really how it feels to you? As if we’re on different teams?”

  “Well…” I said slowly, since suddenly I didn’t know if it did or it didn’t.

  My mom rolled over on the couch to face me. “Maybe you could think of our family as one team, together,” she said. “But we’re not the kind of team that’s against anybody.” She raised herself up. “And it’s the same for all people!” she said, her voice getting higher. “There’s no ‘us against them.’ We’re ALL us! And we’re ALL them!”

  I scrambled to my feet. When my mom gets like this, my dad calls it “going crunchy.” He says it’s something he really likes about her—that she cares so much about things being fair and right. But I have noticed that he does exactly the same thing I do when she starts going crunchy, which is: get out of the room. But before I could escape all the way, she asked me a good question.

  “Clementine, can you think of a single reason girls and boys would be on different teams?”

  I turned at the doorway.

  “Don’t you think all people want the same things?” she went on. “Boys and girls? I’m talking about the big things, the basics. Like…freedom, and the right to a good place to live.”

  “You mean like a nice home?”

  “I meant a nice planet, but sure, like a nice home. Clean and safe and comfortable. Do you think boys and girls are on different teams about wanting that? Or how about the chance to grow up to be whatever you want? Like the chance to be a musician. Or a carpenter. Or a nurse. It shouldn’t matter if you’re a girl or a boy for any of that, should it?”

  I sighed and sat down on the arm of the couch. This was going to take a while.

  “And since everyone wants to eat food, don’t you think both girls and boys should help prepare it? We’re not on different teams about that, right?”

  Thinking about food made me remember about Thursday, about how bad it was going to be to have to eat with the fourth graders. My mom was wrong that people weren’t on different teams against each other. The fourth graders and the third graders sure were.

  “So you see?” my mom was saying. “Human beings aren’t on different teams, are they?”

  I figured my mom had it bad enough with her lungs being squashed without having her heart crushed too. So I just said, “Sure, I guess. Thanks for explaining that.” Then I picked up my drawing and erased the pencil lines down my mom’s sides. I redrew them so they went in instead of out at the middle, even though usually I like to draw things the true way they are. Then I signed my drawing and gave it to her.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I still don’t know which I want the baby to be.”

  “Just as well,” my mother said. “We don’t get to decide anyway.” She looked at my drawing and smiled. “I appreciate the waist,” she said. “If we were on teams, Clementine, I’d make you the captain of mine.”

  Just then Snap Pea woke up from his nap, and my mother went in to get him. “I’m going to check on my apple tree,” I called out. I filled the watering can and left.

  In the lobby, I found my father, cleaning out the display case.

  I put the watering can down. “What are we decorating for this month?”

  “Oh, April is jam-packed,” my dad said. “It’s National Poetry Month, National Welding Month, National Humor Month, and a whole bunch more. It was a tough choice.”

  “So what did you decide?”

  My dad pointed to a cardboard box on the floor next to a pile of plastic branches. It was full of brown plastic nuts.

  “National Pecan Month,” my dad said. “I’m going to stick them onto these branches.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Pecans get their own month?”

  “The pecan is the only nut tree native to North America,” said my dad. “Of course it gets its own month. Its own day, too—the fourteenth is National Pecan Day.”

  My dad handed me his list of holidays. Besides the monthly ones, he decorates for some of the daily ones, too. He lets me choose one each month.

  “April is packed,” I said. “And confusing. The fourth is Tell-A-Lie-Day, but the thirtieth is National Honesty Day.” I read down the list. As usual, the not-choosing part was the worst. Blame-Someone-Else Day, Jugglers’ Day, and Cheeseball Day were all hard to pass up. But then I found the perfect one. “April eighth is National Draw-A-Bird Day. I’ll do that one.”

  We got to work sticking the nuts onto the branches. Just as I hung up a PECANS ARE POPPING! sign, the elevator gears whirred behind us.

  I dropped the tape and spun around, because elevator doors are like game-show prize doors: until they open, you never know what valuable stuff is hiding behind them. Okay, fine—in our building, it’s usually just the same old people, riding up and down from their condos. But once I thought I recognized a man from the Post
Office’s Most Wanted poster, and once I definitely saw a woman carrying a mannequin’s leg in a grocery bag, so you never know.

  Also, I watch the elevator doors because sometimes it is Mitchell who gets out. Which does N-O-T, not mean he is my boyfriend.

  And this time it was Mitchell! He was smiling even harder than usual when he got out of the elevator. Then I saw who was with him.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Stuff,” Mitchell said.

  “I was asking Waylon,” I said. “Waylon, what are you doing here?”

  “Stuff,” Waylon said, glancing up at Mitchell and covering a giggle.

  A couple of months ago, when Waylon was over to work on our science project, I introduced him to Mitchell. Since then they have been getting together all the time. They act like they have this big secret project going, but I know that all it is, is baseball. Waylon is teaching Mitchell the scienciness of it, and Mitchell is teaching him how to actually play.

  Waylon and Mitchell high-fived their mitts.

  “We’re not on teams, you know,” I said.

  “Yeah, we are,” Mitchell said. “Team Vector!” He and Waylon bumped mitts again, and then they left.

  “You’re not on a team together against me,” I said. To myself.

  The elevator doors opened again. This time it was my mother and Swiss Chard. Mom charged over to take a closer look at our decorations. She grabbed hold of her hair and shook her head with it, as if she was so upset her neck wouldn’t even do that job for her. “What on earth…? Never seen anything… Lobby full of plastic…” she sputtered.

  “I know,” my dad said. “It’s so beautiful I’m practically speechless too. National Pecan Month might be my finest creation.”

  “Where did you even get plastic pecans?” my mom asked. She shuddered and backed away from the display case, because she feels about plastic the way Margaret feels about germs.

  My dad beamed. “It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. I’ve been searching for years. First, I tried—”

  My mom put up both hands. “Never mind. I can’t bear to hear it. But please—how about a bowl of actual pecans if it’s Pecan Month? How about putting out a bowl of real, crack-them-and-eat-them, actual nuts? Isn’t that a better way to celebrate? I could go to the store right now and get some.…”

  “Good idea,” Dad said to my mom. He put a hand on my shoulder and picked up my brother. “I’ve got these two nuts. You go get us some actual pecans.”

  “Are you going to start decorating the lobby with real things now?” I asked when my mom was gone. “What about the fire codes?”

  He smiled down at me. “Probably not. But your mom was about to go crunchy on us. It’s a beautiful day out, and I thought she would enjoy a walk. Besides, a bowl of nuts is a nice idea. People will eat them.”

  “Dad, why do you call it ‘going crunchy’ when Mom gets like that?”

  My dad sat down on the lobby bench with Coleslaw on his lap and patted the space beside him. “Did I ever tell you the story of how I first fell in love with your mother?”

  I sat down because my dad has about a hundred stories that end with “I fell in love with your mother that day,” and they’re all good.

  “Well,” he said, “we were talking to some friends outside the library. Her hair was flying around and her arms were waving in the air—she was so worked up she was practically levitating. She looked so pretty I could barely pay attention to what she was saying—I just knew it was something about the big problem of food not being crunchy enough. I didn’t really see how the world would be a better place with crunchier food, but I fell in love with your mother that day.”

  “But, Dad,” I reminded him, “what about the time she made you empty the vacuum cleaner bag because she thought you’d sucked up an ant? I thought you fell in love with her then. And what about when she spit the cherry pits?”

  “Well, sure,” my dad said. “I fell in love with that woman lots of times!”

  At school Tuesday morning, after the “Yet?” and “Not yet” stuff, I had a big surprise. A girl with short black hair and a purple backpack was standing on the other side of Mr. D’Matz’s desk.

  When we were all in our seats, our teacher said, “Class, please say hello to our new student, Olive. I know I can count on you to make her feel welcome.”

  Mr. D’Matz made us introduce ourselves, and then he led Olive to the empty desk in the back of the room. When he told her she could put her stuff inside, we all gasped: nobody had used that desk since Baxter left in September.

  Even though he had only been with us for a few days, I really missed Baxter, and not just because he’d let you look at his webbed toes as long as you wanted for only a quarter. He pried the legs off his chair, loosened the screws on the coat hooks so our jackets fell down all morning, and filled the classroom soap dispenser with creamed corn from lunch. And that was just the first day of school.

  Because I have extra-great hearing, I overheard what our teacher said to Principal Rice out in the hall when he handed Baxter over to her that afternoon: “He certainly is a resourceful young man.”

  Okay, fine—I had to go up and sharpen my pencil with my ear stretched out to the cracked-open door to overhear that.

  “‘Resourceful’ is an understatement,” I overheard Mrs. Rice say when she returned him half an hour later.

  “Clementine, what are you doing?” my teacher asked when he came back into the classroom with Baxter.

  I held up my pencil, which was by now sharpened on both ends. “And excuse me, I please need to use the dictionary, thank you.” I thumbed through it until I found “resourceful.” It means “able to use any ways and means available to achieve goals.”

  And our teacher and Mrs. Rice were right: Baxter sure was resourceful.

  As we were waiting for the buses after school, Baxter told us that in the half hour he had been gone, he had managed to steal the minute hand from Mrs. Rice’s principal clock, and reverse the hot and cold faucets in the grown-ups-only bathroom. So he had achieved some goals, all right.

  The question I had was about his “ways and means available.”

  “Wow, so you bring tools to school?” I asked him.

  Baxter smirked. “Tools are for amateurs.” He slid a plastic bag from his backpack and held it out. Inside were a Popsicle stick, a paper clip, a pack of gum, a couple of thumbtacks, and a bunch of rubber bands. “I’m a professional. I can take apart anything with just what I’ve got in this bag.”

  Some of the kids didn’t believe him. “You couldn’t have done all that with Mrs. Rice right there. I think you’re lying,” Charlie had said on the bus to school the next day. In return, Baxter had stolen Charlie’s sandwich out of his lunchbox and replaced it with a rubber frog. This made Charlie really mad when he found out about it at lunch. “It was Egguna!” he wailed. “I invented it! Egg salad and tuna fish! He’s a liar and a thief!”

  Nobody else was mad at Baxter, and we didn’t care if he was lying or not. We just liked having him around. But then, three days later, he was gone.

  “Baxter moved to Kansas,” I’d told Margaret on the bus that afternoon.

  “Ha,” she snorted. “That’s a good one. He probably got arrested. A prison is probably where he moved to.”

  When I told my classmates what Margaret had said, they all agreed with me that this was good news: Baxter would have no problem busting out of any prison in the world. He’d be back soon with some pretty good stories, we figured. All year long we’d been keeping an eye on his empty desk.

  But now this new Olive-girl was sitting there.

  At recess, everybody crowded around to find out if she was as interesting as Baxter.

  “Can you use your thumbnail as a screwdriver?” asked Willy.

  “Can you pop a lock with a paper clip?” asked Charlie.

  Olive shook her head no to both of those.

  “Have you ever been in prison?” I asked.

 
“No,” Olive said. “Never.”

  She was looking kind of embarrassed by now, so I gave her a cheer-up smile.

  “Me neither,” I admitted. “And I can’t do any of the great stuff Baxter could.”

  Hearing that we had this in common seemed to perk Olive up.

  “And hey, Clementine,” she said, “we both have food names too!”

  I stopped to think about this. All my life I have wished I didn’t have a food name. I call my brother different vegetable names to make it fair. But it’s still not. “Nobody else got a food name,” I tell my parents, over and over. “I’m the only one.” And I was—except for Mrs. Rice, who didn’t count because it was her last name. But now, finally, here was another kid with a first name that was a food! And suddenly, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to share. I turned back to Olive.

  “Do you ever wish you had a regular name?” I asked.

  Olive looked surprised. “Of course not. Olive is a great name. Plus, it’s also a language.”

  All nineteen heads, including mine, snapped to attention at that.

  “Olive-language,” Olive said. “I invented it. You put ‘olive’ into every syllable you say.” She pointed to her shoes and said, “Sholivoos.” She pointed to Willy’s cap and said, “Colivap.” Then she pointed to my jacket and said, “Jolivackolivet.”

  All the kids acted as if this was the most amazing miracle anyone could do in the whole world. They began naming the things around us in her language: “Trolivee!” “Swoliving solivet!” “Dolivodge bolivall!”

  “My name is great too,” I interrupted.

  Nobody even looked back at me.

  “Clementine is a language too, you know.”

  A couple of kids glanced at me.

  I decided to say “A secret language!” in my new language, but I had to stop to invent one first. What I invented is this: put the word “clementine” into every syllable you say. I practiced Clementine-language in my head, and let me tell you, it was not easy. By the time I was ready to say the first word—“Se-clementine-cre-clementine-et”—all the kids had gathered around Olive again.