Happy Kid! (10 page)

“What other kind of ‘after Nana' is there?”

Mom made me tell her every word Mr. Kowsz had said and how he looked and how Nana looked.

“This is wonderful!” she exclaimed.

“How can you possibly get that out of what I just said?”

“Do you know how many years it's been since your grandmother has had a date?” Mom asked me. Then she started jumping up and down and shouting for Lauren so she could tell her the whole thing.

“Get a grip, Mom,” I told her. “You're blowing this all out of proportion.”

Dad stayed calm when he heard about Nana and Mr. Kowsz. Too calm.

“Trotts is the gateway to hell,” I reminded him, “and Mr. Kowsz is the gatekeeper! You have to do something to stop them from seeing each other. How much more embarrassment can I take?”

Dad laid his hands on my shoulders and smiled sadly. “Don't worry. You're going to find that there is no limit to the amount of embarrassment you can take. And by the time you get to be my age, you'll be so used to being embarrassed, you won't even notice anymore.”

“That's something to look forward to,” I said. “But what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Try to remember that there are no documented cases of people dying of embarrassment. You can live a long and healthy life while being totally humiliated.”

After dinner I went upstairs to do homework. I hadn't been able to get much done after school because I was so sure that the telephone was going to ring any minute and Nana was going to announce that Mr. Kowsz had asked her to go to bingo with him or something. I still had plenty of stuff to do that I hadn't even pulled out of my backpack yet. I worked for almost an hour, then reached into my backpack for my social studies book. Instead
Happy Kid!
came out.

I looked at it and thought how funny it was that Mom had bought it for me, because she really needed a self-help book herself. I ought to find her a book called
Get Real!
It could be filled with passages like “You're happy to have your mother-in-law go out with a guy who patrols middle-school bathrooms for evildoers as if he's some kind of undercover agent? Get real!” “You think it's just fine to be wearing the wrong kind of underwear in front of absolutely everybody? Get real!” Yeah, Mom needed a book that would wreck something for her the way
Happy Kid!
had wrecked the first day of school for me.

The stupid thing was just sitting there in my hand. What does a person do when he's holding a book? He either puts it down or opens it up. I'd been doing homework for an hour, and almost anything will distract a person at that point. So I opened the book up and read a page.

“Ahh!” I shouted and slammed the book shut.
Something to look forward to.
I had just said those very words to my father.

I figured I must have read the passage wrong, so I picked up
Happy Kid!
again, planning to try to find that same page and check it out. I didn't actually have to look at all. The book fell open wherever it would, and I looked down.

There it was, the same page.

I had spent enough time watching the Sci Fi Channel to be able to tell what was going on. The book's binding wasn't too tight. Not after all this time. No, the book was sending me
messages
. Wasn't it? Or was that just too crazy to be true? Maybe not. Because if there was a creepy book with superpowers anywhere in the area, wasn't
I
the most likely person to get stuck with it?

“Something to look forward to”? How could that be a message for me? What could I possibly have to look forward to?

Maybe . . . Chelsea? Talking on the phone with Chelsea? Walking in the halls with Chelsea? Going to the prom with Chelsea? Okay. That would be cool.

Over the next couple of days the book fell open to the exact same “Something to Look Forward To” spot whenever I held it by its spine and let it flop open on its own. It wouldn't go away. But if that chapter was a message for me, what was it supposed to mean?

I couldn't get it out of my mind. After a while, I started noticing things happening that I thought
might
relate to the passage in the book.

On Thursday afternoon, while Lauren was setting the table for dinner, she asked my mother—again—to buy her a car.

“No,” Mom said without looking up from where she was chopping a lot of green peppers and onions, even though she knows I hate them.

“Okay, then. Can I take yours to the movies tomorrow night?”

“Why don't you take your brother with you?” Mom suggested.

“What?” Lauren and I both shouted.

“Tomorrow is Friday. Maybe Kyle would like to go to the movies, too.”

I should never have told my mother about Luke going to the movies without me. I should never tell my mother anything. I wanted to go to the movies with Luke. With Bradley. With a group of guys. With Chelsea! But with my sister?

“You only allow me to drive with one other teenager in the car,” Lauren said. “I want that one other teenager to be Jared.”

“Shouldn't your boyfriend be driving
you
to the movies instead of you driving
him
?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't want her riding with Jared,” my mother objected.

“None of my friends have to follow these insane rules about having to have their driver's license for three months before they can have other teenagers in the car with them and another three months before they can have more than one,” Lauren complained. “
And
my friends all have cars. What are we, Amish or something?”

“Lauren, dear, don't make fun of people who don't have your access to electricity, cosmetics, and zippers,” Mom said.

Car fights can go on for hours at our house. Days even. I started to head back up to my room, when all of a sudden I realized something. “A car is something you need to wait for, Lauren. Think of it as something to look forward to,” I said.

“I'm seventeen years old. I've looked forward to it long enough,” she yelled at me.

“I was just pointing out that you shouldn't go nuts and get down on the whole world because you can't get what you want right away. And now that I've said that, I'll be on my way.”

“Oh, wait, Kyle,” Mom called when I had almost made it out to the hallway. “
Do
you want a ride to the movies Friday night?”

“He can't sit with us,” Lauren said. “Not that he'd want to because we're not going to see anything about depressed superheroes or geeks saving the world.”

“That's supposed to be some kind of slam about
Master Lee II: The Undead
, isn't it? Well, it's not coming out until November,” I told her. “And, no, I do not want to go to the movies Friday night. I plan to finish the book I'm reading for social studies then. It's an excellent book.”

“Oh, honey, you can read another time. Are you sure you wouldn't enjoy getting out of the house?” Mom insisted.

“No, he wouldn't. He loves it here,” Lauren said.

“She was talking to me!”

“Kyle, you've got to get out of this house,” Mom said. “It's not healthy for you to be here all the time by yourself.”

“If I had a car, I could take him places,” Lauren offered. “Except not to the movies.”

“I don't
mind
being here,” I said. Though I did. The place was driving me crazy.

“Well,
I
mind,” Mom said. She shouted it, actually. “I cannot stand seeing you here alone any longer! I don't want to hear that you have too much homework. You think of something you want to do, or I'll think of something for you.”

Lauren looked from Mom to me and said, “Like what?”

“I've been thinking that maybe Kyle would like to do something at the new Teen Center,” Mom suggested.

“Oh, Mom, nobody goes there,” Lauren objected. “Please. I can't have it get around that my brother has been going to the Teen Center.”

Mom smiled at me. “There's always the youth group at the church here in town. I've met the woman who runs it many times, and I know she'd love to have you join them.”

Both Lauren and I screamed, “No!”

“Taekwondo!” I shouted. “I'll do taekwondo!”

“Get me a car, and I'll drive him there,” Lauren offered.

“What is going on in here?” Dad asked as he came in the back door. “I can hear you guys shouting out in the yard.” He dropped his briefcase on the kitchen counter and sighed. “You know, I used to come in here after a hard day of work, and these sweet little creatures would come running up to me shouting ‘Dada!' and throw their arms around me. Where did they go?”

“Dada!” Lauren shouted as she threw her arms around him. “Kyle is doing taekwondo, and I'm getting a car.”

She had that only half right. I was going to do taekwondo, but owning a car was still something Lauren was going to have to look forward to.

 

 

After the way my mother had carried on about me doing something after school, I thought she'd shove me into the car and have me in a taekwondo class that very night. But no. Three more days passed, another school week had started, and I still wasn't enrolled at Goldman's Taekwondo with Luke and Ted.

And Chelsea.

“Your mother talked with my mother about it for forty minutes on Saturday,” Luke said on Monday. “What's left to know?”

We were in art class, which was sort of like a study hall with pictures. Each day Mr. Ruby gave us a little lesson on some kind of cartooning, which seemed to be the only kind of art he did, and then carried his own sketchbook over to the window and left us to do pretty much whatever we wanted so long as we pretended to be drawing and didn't make enough noise to attract teachers from other rooms.

“My mother spent an hour and a half this weekend on-line doing research on how to choose a martial arts school,” I told Luke. “I kept telling her she was wasting her time because I was going with you or I wasn't going at all, but nothing would get her out from in front of that monitor. She's planning to stop at a store after work today so she can buy a book on the subject. Then she'll have to read it. And
then
she says we have to make an appointment with Mr. Goldman so the two of us can meet him and discuss his educational philosophy.”

“All my mother discussed with him was his fee,” Luke said. “You know, once you finally sign up for classes, you'll still have to meet with Mr. Goldman for a couple of private lessons. He's got to show you how to do the kicks and tie the belt on around your dobok and give you a talk about self-control, being humble, and what he'll do to you if you hurt anybody.”

“Oh. Well, that's something to look forward to. I hope.”

That was when it hit me. It was so obvious. The message in
Happy Kid!
wasn't about Lauren having to wait for a car at all. It
was
about Chelsea. It was about me waiting to be with Chelsea—at taekwondo. It was about taekwondo being something I could look forward to.

I was practically jumping up and down on my stool, thinking, Yes! That is something I can look forward to! when I caught a glimpse of Mr. Kowsz looking in at us through the classroom's open door. I accidentally made eye contact with him, and he smiled at me. I gasped, my hand slid across my paper, and the superhero I'd been drawing was left looking as if he'd thrown himself on a long spear.

“Luke! Mr. Kowsz just smiled at me,” I whispered.

“Uh-oh. His head looks just like a skull when he does that.”

“I'll get rid of ol' Moo Kowsz for you,” Jake offered without even looking up from the cartoon he was drawing of a guy putting out a fire without a hose . . . or a watering can, either. His right arm flew up in the air, and he gave Mr. Kowsz the finger. Mr. Kowsz whipped out his detention pad.

“That was so worth it,” Jake said after Mr. Kowsz waved the detention at him and moved off to bother somebody else. “Moo is always hanging around people like you and me. He thinks we're troublemakers.” Then he laughed and nudged me with his elbow. “We are.”

“Mr. Kowsz is the one person in this school who really ought to know that I'm
not
a troublemaker,” I insisted.

“Isn't Moo hot for your grandma?” Jake asked. “You think he's copped a feel yet?”

I squealed like Jamie and Beth, I'm embarrassed to say, and then I had to apologize to Mr. Ruby for interrupting his work.

“How do you know about that?” I hissed at Jake. “Not about copping a feel. I mean how do you know . . . anything . . . about Moo . . . Mr. Kowsz and my grandmother.”

“I was in the cafeteria when he came in and asked you about her. She was standing there in the doorway drooling over him. I'm pretty sure I saw him put his hand on her ass as they were leaving,” Jake said right out loud.

I cringed and closed my eyes, trying to shut that image out of my mind.

“My grandmother hasn't said anything about him, and no one in my family has the guts to ask her,” I explained.

“You know her telephone number? They'll let me use the phone down in guidance. I'll find out what's going on for you,” Jake offered.