Happy Kid! Page 2

  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.

  It All Begins with Hello!

  Building great relationships begins with the word “hello”! You can’t build a satisfying relationship with someone if you won’t even open your mouth. You have to let people know you’re there! Say hello to those strangers you’ve been sitting next to for years. Once you’ve started talking, it’s easy to keep talking. Compliment someone on a new outfit. Pass on something you’ve read in the paper. Make a point every day to speak to the people around you. Before long, you’ll be doing it without even thinking!

  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.

  Wait! What was I thinking? Of course taking a shower and trying out different ways to put your hair up into a ponytail are more important than something petty like pain and suffering.

  I grabbed some clothes and headed off to my parents’ bedroom at the other end of the hall. Once I was in their room, I tiptoed past the lump under the covers on the bed. I stopped and looked at it, thinking, He’s asleep. It’s not necessary to speak to a sleeping person. Not only is it not necessary, it’s mean. Why would I—

  Then, right in the middle of a thought, I said, “Hello, Dad.”

  Dad raised his head up a little bit off the pillow and tried to open his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” he said groggily. “Smoke alarm go off? Fire? Somebody sick?”

  “I just said hello,” I repeated, feeling a little bit guilty for shaking him up like that. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Did I hear the phone ringing? At this hour? Is somebody dead?” Dad asked.

  “Your mother called.”

  “What does she want?” he groaned as he started to stretch for the telephone by the bed.

  “She wanted us to know that the Homeland Security dude was changing the colors for the terrorist alert.”

  “Up or down?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  Dad collapsed back onto his pillow as I went on to the bathroom.

  “It must be up,” he muttered. “She never calls with good news.”

  “Have a good day,” Mom called when we went out the front door a while later.

  As if telling me to have a good day will make it happen. My mother lives in a fantasy world.

  Our driver, who had pretended she didn’t know me for the last two weeks of sixth grade, was all smiles when I got on the bus, as if she figured that over the summer I’d forgotten all about her part in the “problem with Mr. Kowsz.” Well, if the newspaper hadn’t been full of stories about me until nearly the Fourth of July, maybe I would have. I started to move by her as fast as I could.

  But at the last minute I suddenly gave her a big “hello.” Then I kept saying “hello, hello, hello” to everyone as I went down the aisle. I didn’t stop until Lauren, who was right behind me, slapped the side of my head and told me to stop being a jerk.

  I found an empty seat and tried to disappear into it. What had I been thinking? Nothing. I hadn’t been thinking anything at all. Because never, ever would I have thought to say hello to a whole bunch of people. Some of the kids on that bus were high school kids I didn’t even know. Some of them I didn’t even like. You don’t keep people from noticing you by saying hello to them.

  I pulled the copy of Killer Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Tsunamis that my father had given me for my birthday out of my backpack and concentrated on making people forget I existed by pretending to read. />
  The bus left us off in front of two large brick buildings that shared an enormous parking lot. We split up on the sidewalk, with the middle-schoolers heading over to Trotts and the high school students walking over to their school. From the curb I could see our principal, Mr. Alldredge, standing by the front door. With his black hair and mustache (both dyed, according to Lauren) and very square, toothy smile, he looked like Saddam Hussein, which helped to explain why he wasn’t the most beloved adult at school. I tried to act as if I didn’t know he was watching me as I walked by him.

  By the time I was safely inside, I was starving. I could practically taste that bacon, egg, and cheese as I entered the building and headed right for the cafeteria. I could feel its greasiness in my mouth. I could see it glistening in my hand. What I couldn’t do was smell it. When I reached the cafeteria door, I found out why.

  BREAKFIST SERVISE BEGINS AGAIN NEXT WEEK.

  The lunch ladies will never win any spelling bees. But they can make a bagel sandwich worth going to war for.

  “No!” I wailed, letting my backpack slide slowly to the floor.

  The hallway was crowded with kids who didn’t know where they were going and a few people bumped into me while I stood there hoping none of them had noticed me shouting. Then I just had this feeling that there was someone behind me. Someone who ought to be moving but wasn’t. I looked over my shoulder.

  Mr. Kowsz, the tallest, skinniest, oldest tech ed teacher in the school, maybe the state, was standing there staring right back at me. He looked just the way he did the year before. Except for the cast on his left foot. That was different.

  “Moo” Kowsz was famous for two things: knowing way less about technology than the worst salesperson Radio Shack ever employed, and patrolling the halls of Bert P. Trotts looking for kids gone bad.

  The last time he spoke to me was about a week and a half before school got out. He had called me over to one side of the room during class, slapped me on the back, laughed, and said, “Well, who could have predicted that, huh? Misunderstandings happen. Let’s just move on and forget it.”

  “Move on and forget it?” I’d shouted, right in front of all the other students. “Everybody’s treating me like a mass murderer who was caught just in the nick of time! Everybody saw my picture in the paper! Everybody’s talking about me and looking at me! How am I supposed to forget anything?”

  The room had gotten very quiet, and everyone stared at me—pretty much the way they’d have stared at me if I were a mass murderer who had been caught just in the nick of time.

  Technology education class was really awkward after that.

  And here was ol’ Moo on my first day of seventh grade opening his mouth to say something to me. I didn’t want anyone to see us together in the hallway and wonder what we were talking about. I decided I had to get out of there as fast as I could. So what did I do to make that happen? I sputtered, “Hello.” It just came rolling right out of my mouth.

  He hadn’t been expecting that. His head snapped back and down at the same time, which made his mouth shut. I saw my chance and bent to pick up my backpack. Fortunately, by the time I was standing up again, Mr. Kowsz had turned his head and was sniffing.

  “Somebody’s smoking already,” he snapped and took off toward the nearest bathroom.

  I swear, I didn’t smell a thing.

  I went to look for my advisory classroom. When I found it, the teacher there poked her head full of dark roots and bleached blond hair up over the top of a newspaper as I entered the room. She had a line of dark hair on her upper lip, too. (Not that there’s anything wrong with having a hairy lip. I’d never criticize someone for being hairy.) According to my schedule, this was Mrs. Haag.

  “Hello,” I said. I didn’t know the word was coming until I heard my voice saying it. I had no time to even try to stop it.

  Mrs. Haag dropped her newspaper and looked at me. I could tell not many people said hello to her. She definitely wasn’t used to it.

  “And you are?” she asked me.

  I almost groaned out loud, but I did manage to catch that. If I’d just walked into the classroom and sat down, she would have been able to ignore me until it was time to take attendance. Then she would have just read my name, grunted when I said “here,” and gone on to the next person. But oh, no, I had to say “hello.” Now this Mrs. Haag felt pressured to keep the conversation going.

  “Kyle Rideau,” I whispered.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Kyle Rideau,” I snapped back.

  There was a little lull in the buzz of conversation, and, sure enough, all the students in the room were watching me.

  “Oh, I know who you are,” Mrs. Haag said.

  I looked down at the floor and said, “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Sure. I think I had your sister when she was here. Her name was Laura, right?”

  “Lauren.”

  “Oh, yes. She was an . . . interesting . . . girl.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. Mrs. Haag only knew me as Lauren’s brother. Never had I been so happy that my sister was an . . . interesting . . . girl. Mrs. Haag was even laughing! So I started to laugh, too.

  Then she said, “So it was Lauren Rideau’s little brother who got into all that trouble last spring. I never made the connection.”

  The laughing pretty much stopped after that.

  “I didn’t get into all that much trouble,” I said in a low voice I hoped only she would hear.

  “You would have preferred getting into more?”

  Of course I wouldn’t have! I didn’t want to get into some big discussion about it, either. I didn’t think I was going to be able to avoid it, but then I was saved by, of all people, Melissa Esposito. She came into the room at just that moment, and she can’t pass a teacher without stopping to suck up. I took off while good old dependable Melissa distracted Mrs. Haag by informing her that she was going to be in Mrs. Haag’s health and living class and asking just what would they be covering in class this year. And doing a great job of sounding as if she really cared.

  If I hadn’t been so busy making my getaway, I would have been upset about Melissa being in my advisory. I would have also given some thought to how she must have grown two bra sizes over the summer. Her hips looked as if they’d been doing some growing, too. Now she had big curves to match her big brown eyes and her big brown braid. And her big mouth. She has an opinion on almost any subject that comes up and feels the whole world deserves to know what she thinks.

  I saw a desk I wanted at the back of the room. To reach it, I had to pass Jamie Lombardi and Beth Pritchard, these popular girls who nobody really likes. It was going to be a treat spending an extra eight minutes a day with them all year, too.

  “I had to spend, like, all Labor Day with my grandparents and my aunt,” Beth said.

  “Like, why?” Jamie asked Beth.

  “My grandfather has been in the hospital, like, four times this year. It is, like, so gross,” Beth complained.

  “Oh! Oh!” Jamie exclaimed. “I know something grosser than that! I had to, like, go to a funeral!”

  They both stopped talking when I walked between them. Jamie leaned across the aisle toward Beth and gasped, “Kyle Rideau is, like, in our advisory.” As if, like, Beth couldn’t figure that out for herself.

  Maybe she couldn’t.

  “Hello,” I said as I settled into the seat behind Jamie. By that point, I wasn’t even surprised to hear myself say it.

  They were, though. They were both so stunned that I had said something to them that they shut up for a whole second or two. Then they looked at each other and giggled.

  “Did you notice the article in the paper yesterday about the high rate of skin cancer in Australia?” I asked.

  Jamie and Beth looked at each other again. I’m guessing neither one of them had ever read a newspaper in her entire life. Not even the comics.

  “Gross!” they both squealed.

  That was the last the
y had to say about me because they got really involved in a discussion about the birthday present they’d bought for Melissa and whether or not they should give it to her or keep it and buy something else. That left me free to look around for Luke Slocum or maybe someone I used to sit next to in one of my classes last year. But the only people I knew were a couple of kids from my gym class I’d hoped never to see again.

  Math was my first class after advisory. Math is not my strongest subject, and the longer I study it, the worse I get. There are some kids at Trotts who take pre-algebra in seventh grade. I am not one of them.

  “Hello, Mr. Pierce,” I said without even thinking about it as I walked by the math teacher’s desk. A moment or two later, though, I did realize what I’d done. I looked over my shoulder to see if I could catch Mr. Pierce’s reaction.

  He seemed confused. He couldn’t figure out who had spoken to him. He was standing hunched over his book and looking all around the room. I wondered if maybe I ought to tell him I was the one who had said hello, but I couldn’t think of any way to do it that wouldn’t make everyone look at me. So I just headed for an empty seat.

  Then from behind me I heard a familiar voice saying to Mr. Pierce, “Yeah, hello, Mr. . . . um . . . whoever the hell you are.” I looked back toward the front of the classroom and saw Jake Rogers walking down the aisle right behind me, laughing his head off. He raised his arm to high-five me and gasped, “Hey, Kyle! My man!”

  Jake Rogers is enormous, and he always has been. He’s always looked way older than he is. Now he looks as if he’s just escaped from a men’s prison. He may not actually be able to beat the crap out of everyone—student or adult—at Trotts, but he sure looks as if he could.

  I didn’t want to be the one who had to tell Jake that nobody high-fives anymore. But there I was with his arm hovering over me while everyone in the room noticed me. And noticed me with him. My new math teacher watched us as if he could tell we were going to be the two troublemakers who would make the next school year the unhappiest of his life. Beth Pritchard had followed me from advisory, and she was watching, too, and looking not at all surprised to see Jake acting so friendly toward me. In fact, no one seemed to think it was unusual for Jake Rogers and Kyle Rideau to be greeting each other in the middle of the math classroom.