has legs too. And also a few times Mrs. Wardman made me do group work with Lyle – even though I told her my mother said I should stay away from that kid.
Then came the part I was hoping wouldn’t come. ‘What did you call Lyle?’ asked my mother.
‘Lady,’ I told her.
‘You called him lady?’
‘Yes.’
‘Since when is lady a bad word?’
‘Since fourth grade.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, how about next time you insult Lyle you call him man instead?’
I just rolled my eyes at her. Sometimes she just doesn’t get it, but I was glad to get off that subject.
Then I said, ‘Mom, if I lie down on the couch, could you sneak up on me and cover my nose and mouth at the same time?’
‘Why?’ asked my mom in a surprised voice with a surprised face.
‘Please. Just do it, please.’
‘That’s kind of a creepy request, Phin. I need to have a good reason for doing something like that.’
‘What’s creepy about it?’
‘Well, Phin, it sounds a little like a smothering and, you know, I rather like you. Besides, I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in the penitentiary. I’ve written stories about some of those inmates, you know, and I don’t think they’d be very nice to me.’
‘Yeah sure, Mom, sure.’
‘Seriously, why do you want me to do that?’
‘Because I read in a book today that if you plug a dolphin’s blowhole, that feels to him like having your nose and mouth covered at the same time would to you. I want to know how that feels exactly.’
My mother said, ‘Oh, okay.’ So I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, she covered my nose and my mouth with her hand – but only for a couple of seconds. She wouldn’t do it for any longer than that, but I think I know a little bit better what that feels like to a dolphin. Not good.
At lunch today, Bird and I went to the edge of the playground by the apple tree. The tree has a branch that sits straight out and it’s almost like sitting on a bench except that it is a lot higher off the ground and it bounces up and down a bit when we move around on it.
Bird and I were careful not to jump down on the side of the tree facing Mr. Byers’ house. At the beginning of the year we were told in school assembly that we could play only on the school-facing side of the apple tree. Mrs. Wardman even went out to show us where we could go and where we could not.
Bird said, ‘Can we step here, Mrs. Wardman?’
And she said, ‘Yes.’
Then he said, ‘How about here, can we step here, Mrs. Wardman?’
And she said, ‘No.’
He said, ‘But what about right here, Mrs. Wardman, can we step right here?’
And she said, ‘You can, but you may not, Richard, and your allowable questions are up.’
Richard is Bird’s real name. Everyone calls him Bird because his last name is L’Oiseau, which is bird in French. Bird likes his nickname better. It irritates him that Mrs. Wardman won’t call him by that, so he makes sure not to call her by the name she prefers either – just not to her face.
Bird stopped asking questions. But when Mrs. Wardman wasn’t looking, he stepped over to the side she told him he couldn’t step on, and then he jumped back before she looked around. But nothing happened to him when he was where she told him he shouldn’t be.
I don’t want to go anywhere near Mr. Byers anyway. He makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
One day I got Silly Putty stuck in the hairs on the back of my neck. I’m not sure how I did it – I think I forgot to put it away before I went to bed, and I lay down on top of it. When I got up the next morning, it was stuck to me.
I went to my mother and she said, ‘Geez, Phin, you’re turning green.’ She tried rubbing it off with soap and water but it wouldn’t come off. Then she tried baby oil, and she pulled some off but the problem was she pulled off the hairs on the back of my neck too.
I yelled because it hurt, and then I said, ‘Great, Mom, now how am I going to know when I’m scared of someone?’
She said, ‘Phin, sometimes you exhaust me.’ She says that a lot. But then she smiles.
When we were on the tree branch I told Bird that I thought I hated Lyle who pushed me yesterday and then told on me for calling him lady. Then I told Bird I would like to call Lyle an F-er to his face instead of behind his back.
The F word is one of the very first words I think of when I’m really mad. For example, in third grade we had to write down words that described our French partner, and the only word I could think of was the F word because I really didn’t like him. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t know what that word was in French – especially after he bit me. When that happened, I yelled the F word, but just inside my head.
This morning I woke up to an awful sound – it was like a wolf trying to howl after swallowing one of those birthday-party noisemakers. And it was standing over me.
I was a little worried about what I might see – maybe a pack of wolves having a birthday party and the cake just happened to be me – but I took a chance and opened my eyes. My mother was standing there and that awful noise was coming from her. She was smiling so I figured she wasn’t choking on something, so I asked her what the heck she was doing.
‘I’m yodelling, Phin,’ she said.
‘But you’re not on a mountain,’ I said. ‘You’re standing over me making that awful sound. I thought you were a wolf with something caught in its throat. If you were a wolf, you’d have to be the alpha because if you were a submissive, the others would attack you for making a sound like that.’
Since my mother seemed to be interested in awful sounds, I told her that a science show I watched was about how researchers asked people across lots of countries to rate how horrible different sounds are. The top five were:
5. a metal drawer being opened
4. scraping wood
3. scraping metal
2. Styrofoam being rubbed together
1. scraping slate with a garden tool, which makes the fingernail-on-a-chalkboard sound
I told Mom that I figured her yodelling would be pretty close to the top of the list if the scientists had used it in their study.
‘Ha ha,’ she said. ‘I actually think I’m pretty good. Anyway, I’ve been asked to give you a message. Your father is in Switzerland covering a story about how the permafrost is melting in the Alps and he emailed me and asked me to say hello
