trumpet around the dead elephant with their trunks up in the air. Then they cover his body with branches. When a baby elephant dies, often his mother won’t leave the graveside. Mother elephants love their babies. Once, after a man in Africa used his tractor to haul a baby elephant out of a mudhole, the baby’s mother rushed up to him and wiped the mud off his clothes with her trunk.
Last year when I was eight, I had to say goodbye to Granddad MacKeamish at a human funeral. Just a few months before that, I said goodbye to my father too. But he’s not dead. It just feels like it sometimes.
Today after school, I didn’t stick around the playground like I sometimes do. Bird had gone home with his mother, and besides, I saw Lyle over on the monkey bars and just didn’t feel strong enough to risk being picked on. My mother says Lyle is the spawn of similarly small-minded cretins and that I should just stay away from him. She says I’ll meet lots of small-minded, life-sucking cretins all through my life. Why does she torture me like that? The Lyles in my life are going to grow bigger and bigger and that’s supposed to help me feel better?
Sometimes I have really, really bad thoughts about Lyle – the being-picked-apart-by-vultures-and-bursting-into-flames kind. And one day I said póg mo thóin to him. It means kiss my something. It’s Gaelic and I learned it from my grandfather. Lyle just looked at me confused. He doesn’t speak Gaelic. In fact, he’s not very good with languages, period. In French class, he asked Mrs. Wardman what je ne sais pas means and she said, I don’t know. He got really mad and gave her the finger behind her back.
The reason I didn’t feel like I had enough strength left over to risk Lyle is because I was still thinking about how Mrs. Wardman was irritated with me again today. It happened in math class when we had to do logic questions. First we read this sentence: ‘Paula gave out 47 treats for St. Patrick’s Day.’ And then this one: ‘Paula received 50 treats for St. Patrick’s Day.’ Then we had to read ten statements and write T for true or F for false or M for maybe. For the question ‘Everyone who received a treat from Paula gave her one as well,’ I answered M for maybe, but Mrs. Wardman marked it wrong and put a T for true.
I just couldn’t figure out why Mrs. Wardman had done that so I went up to her desk to ask her about it. She said that since Paula got more treats than she gave out, she must have gotten a treat from everyone she gave one to.
I said, ‘But how can we know that for sure?’
She said, ‘Phin, it’s logic. Go back to your seat and think more about it.’
So I did. I thought really hard about it, but it didn’t seem like logic to me. How could anybody be absolutely sure that Paula got a treat from everybody who gave her one?
I went back up to Mrs. Wardman and told her I thought really hard about it, but it still didn’t seem like logic to me.
Mrs. Wardman sighed and said, ‘It is logic, Phin. Here, I’ll show you the answer in the teachers’ book.’ She showed me and, sure enough, it said exactly what she said.
I went back to my seat and thought some more, but still it didn’t seem like logic to me. So just to be sure I had it right in my head, I drew one hundred stick kids and put a big circle around forty-seven of them to show who Paula could have given treats to. Then I put a big circle around a different fifty stick kids to show who Paula could have gotten treats from. I took my drawing up to Mrs. Wardman’s desk and showed it to her.
That’s when she sighed – again – and rolled her eyes. She said, ‘Phineas, there are fifty kids in Paula’s class, not one hundred. Now that’s enough of that – please go back and get out your social-studies notebook like everyone else. Mrs. L’Oiseau will be here in a minute.’
I could tell she was mad with me, so I went back to my seat. Her being angry made me angry, and it sure made that logic sheet cac, which is Gaelic for something most people do about once a day.
It did make me feel better to see Mrs. L’Oiseau, though. She’s Bird’s mother and she works as a Thumbody who travels around to all the schools in the city. She came into our classroom wearing a funny hat and dressed up like a big thumb – although she looked more like a big peanut to me.
She gave us each a sheet of paper and then got us to press our thumbs on an inkpad to make prints. It made me think of how it would feel to be a prisoner, except our prison was the school. I put eyes and whiskers on my thumbprint and made it into a cat. Bird put teeth on his, and it looked like I don’t know what. Then we cut out our prints and put them into round pieces of plastic and made them into pins, which we put on our shirts.
Bird’s mother told us that we’re all special, and that we should all feel good about ourselves because we all have our own thumb-prints and no two thumbprints are the same. I didn’t know how that made us special, but I didn’t say anything. No two worms have exactly the same skin pattern, and nobody thinks they’re special. On the Green Channel I learned that humans have 50 percent of their DNA the same as worms. And we’re 50 percent like bananas too.
After the Thumbody thing, school was over. It was kind of embarrassing seeing Bird and his mother walking to their car together, with her still dressed like a big thumb. I figured I may as well be embarrassed for Bird since he wasn’t embarrassed for himself. I think I even blushed for him. I do a better job at that anyway because his skin is dark and you can’t see his blushes very well.
When I got home, my mother was working in her office but she wasn’t on the phone. I was still upset about the logic problem so I told her about it. My mom agreed with me. She said Mrs. Wardman was making an assumption that wasn’t really in the problem; she assumed there were only fifty kids.
I said, ‘But doesn’t assume make an ass of u and me?’ I learned that from Bird who learned it from his cousin. He also learned from his cousin that you can guess the size of somebody’s penis – only he didn’t use that word – by looking at the distance between the tip of that person’s pointer finger and the tip of the thumb when he makes the letter L with his hand. But he’s wrong because I checked it out.
My mother told me that ass of u and me wasn’t a very nice expression, and that I shouldn’t use it.
I said, ‘Why is it so bad? It’s more of an insult to donkeys than to humans.’ But I was just pretending that I didn’t know the other meaning for that word. I still felt angry at Mrs. Wardman. I imagined her face on an ass – on a donkey ass, not on a human one.
My mother said that sometimes people – even teachers – make mistakes. She says that sometimes it’s not a good idea to point out to people that they’re wrong. She said that sometimes it’s better to just let it go and be right inside your own head instead of worrying what’s inside the other person’s head. I have to think more about it. Don’t people want to know when they’re wrong? Why does being wrong make people happy?
I told my mother that if I was wrong about something and somebody told me the right answer, then that would make me happy. She said she would always do her best to tell me when I’m wrong. I think she already does that, and that made me happy.
Then I went up to my room to draw and try to forget about whether or not Paula got treats from all the kids she gave treats to. Who gives out treats on St. Patrick’s Day anyway?
I drew the Oster, which was a species hunted by Gorachs – who think they’re the most intelligent beings in the universe – for their five-nostrilled noses, which the Gorachs used to hold things upright, like pens and pencils and things like that. Gorachs also liked to use them for sprinkler nozzles. They did this by drying them out for weeks and weeks and
