Auggie & Me (24 page)

He's blind, stupid. He's blind, stupid. He's blind, stupid.

Another vomit of words. It's almost like I was
trying
to get Ximena Chin to hate me!

I waited for her to hit me with a sarcastic comeback, something that would slap me like an invisible hand across the face.

But, instead, to my utter and complete amazement, she started to laugh.

Summer started to laugh, too. “He's blind,
stupid
!” she said, imitating the way I had said it exactly.

“He's blind,
stupid
!” Ximena repeated.

They both started cracking up. I think the horrified look on my face made it even funnier for them. Every time they looked at me, they laughed harder.

“I'm so sorry I said that, Ximena,” I whispered quickly.

Ximena shook her head, wiping her eyes with the palm of her hand.

“It's fine,” she answered, catching her breath. “I kind of had that coming.”

There wasn't a trace of snarkiness to her right now. She was smiling.

“Look, I didn't mean to insult you earlier,” she said. “What I said about Auggie. I know you're not
only
nice to him in front of teachers. I'm sorry I said that.”

I couldn't believe she was apologizing.

“No, it's fine,” I answered, fumbling.

“Really?” she asked. “I don't want you to be mad at me.”

“I'm not!”

“I can be a total jerk sometimes,” she said regretfully. “But I really want us to be friends.”

“Okay.”

“Awww,” said Summer, stretching her arms out to us. “Come on, guys. Group hug.”

She wrapped her fairy wings around us, and for a few seconds, we came together in an awkward embrace that lasted a second too long and ended in more giggles. This time, I was laughing, too.

That
turned out to be the biggest surprise of the day. Not finding out that people have
noticed
me. Not finding out that Summer knew the accordion-man's name.

But realizing that Ximena Chin, under her layers and layers and layers of snarkiness and mischief, could actually be kind of sweet. When she wasn't being kind of mean.

The next few weeks flew by! A crazy blur of snowstorms, and dance rehearsals, and science fair projects, and studying for tests,
and
trying to solve the mystery of what had happened to Gordy Johnson (more on that later).

Mrs. Atanabi turned out to be quite the little drill sergeant! Lovable, in her own cute, waddly way, but
really
pushy. Like, we could
never
practice enough for her. Drills, drills, drills.
En pointe!
Shimmy! Hip roll! Classical ballet! Modern dance! A little bit of jazz! No tap! Downbeat! Half toe! Everything done her way, because she had a lot of very specific dance quirks. Things she obsessed about. The dances themselves weren't hard. The twist. The monkey. The Watusi. The pony. The hitchhike. The swim. The hucklebuck. The shingaling. But it was doing them exactly the way she wanted us to do them that was hard. Doing them as part of a larger choreographed piece. And doing them in sync. That's what we spent most of our time working on. The way we carried our arms. The way we snapped our fingers. Our turnouts. Our jumps. We had to work hard on learning how to dance
alike
—not just together!

The dance we spent the most time working on was the shingaling. It was the centerpiece of Mrs. Atanabi's whole dance number, what she used to transition from one dance style to the next. But there were so many variations to it—the Latin one, the R&B one, the funk shingaling—it was hard not to mix them up. And Mrs. Atanabi was
so
particular about the way each one was danced! Funny how she could be so loosey-goosey about some things—like never
once
getting to a rehearsal on time!—and yet be so strict about other things—like, God forbid you do a diagonal
chassé
instead of a sideways
chassé
!
Uh-oh, careful, the world as you know it might end!

I'm not saying that Mrs. Atanabi wasn't nice, by the way. I want to be fair. She
was
super-nice. Reassuring us if we were having trouble with a new routine: “Small steps, girls! Everything starts with small steps!” Surprising us with brownies after a particularly intense workout. Driving us home when she kept us rehearsing too late. Telling us funny stories about other teachers. Personal stories about her own life. How she'd grown up in the Barrio. How some of her friends had gone down a “wrong” path. How watching
American Bandstand
had saved her life. How she'd met her husband, who was also a dancer, while performing with Cirque du Soleil in Quebec. “We fell in love doing arabesques on a tightrope thirty feet in the air.”

But it was intense. When I would go to sleep at night, I had so much information bouncing around my head! Bits of music. Things to memorize. Math equations. To-do lists. Mrs. Atanabi saying in her smooth East Harlem accent: “
It's the shingaling, baby!
” There were times when I would just put my headset on to drown out the chatter in my brain.

I was having so much fun, though, I wouldn't have changed a thing. Because the best part about all the crazy rehearsing and Mrs. Atanabi's drills and everything else—
and I don't want to sound corny
—was that Ximena, Summer, and I were really starting to get to know each other. Okay, that
does
sound corny. But it's true! Look, I'm not saying we became best friends or anything. Summer still hung out with Auggie. Ximena still hung out with Savanna. I still played dots with Maya. But we were becoming friends. Like,
friend
friends.

Ximena's snarkiness, by the way, was completely put on. Something she could take off whenever she wanted to. Like a scarf you wear as an accessory until it starts feeling itchy around your neck. When she was with Savanna, she wore the scarf. With us, she took it off. That's not to say I didn't still get nervous around her sometimes! OMG. The first time she came over to my house? I was a complete wreck! I was nervous that my mom would embarrass me. I was nervous that the stuffed animals on my bed were too pink. I was nervous about the
Big Time Rush
poster on my bedroom door. I was nervous that my dog, Suki, would pee on her.

But, of course, everything turned out fine! Ximena was totally nice. Said I had a cool room. Offered to do the dishes after dinner. Made fun of a particularly hilarious photo of me when I was three, which was fair because I look like a sock puppet in it! At some point during that afternoon, I don't even know when it was, I actually stopped thinking
Ximena Chin is in my house! Ximena Chin is in my house!
and just started having fun. That was huge for me because it was a turning point, the moment I stopped acting like an idiot around Ximena. No more word vomits. I guess that was when I took my “scarf” off, too.

Anyway, February was intense, but awesome. And by the end of February, we were pretty much hanging out at my place every day after school, dancing in front of the mirrored walls, self-correcting, matching our moves. Whenever we'd get tired, or discouraged, one of us would say in Mrs. Atanabi's accent, “It's the shingaling, baby!” And that would keep us going.

And sometimes we didn't rehearse. Sometimes we just chilled in my living room by the fire doing homework together. Or hanging out. Or, occasionally, searching for Gordy Johnson.

One of the things I miss the most about being a little kid is that when you're little, all the movies you watch have happy endings. Dorothy goes back to Kansas. Charlie gets the chocolate factory. Edmund redeems himself. I like that. I like happy endings.

But, as you get older, you start seeing that sometimes stories
don't
have happy endings. Sometimes they even have sad endings. Of course, that makes for more interesting storytelling, because you don't know
what's
going to happen. But it's also kind of scary.

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up is because the more we looked for Gordy Johnson, the more I started realizing that this story might
not
have a happy ending.

We had started our search by simply Googling his name. But, it turns out, there are hundreds of Gordy Johnsons. Gordon Johnsons. Gordie Johnsons. There's a famous jazz musician named Gordy Johnson (which we theorized could explain the rumor the eye-shop man had heard about
our
Gordy Johnson). There are politician Gordon Johnsons. Construction worker Gordon Johnsons. Veterans. Lots of obituaries. The Internet doesn't distinguish between names of the living and names of the dead. And every time we clicked on one of those names, we would be relieved that it wasn't
our
Gordy Johnson. But sad that it was someone else's Gordy Johnson.

At first, Ximena didn't really join in the search. She would be doing her homework or texting Miles on one side of the bedroom while Summer and I huddled around my laptop, scrolling through page after page of dead ends. But one day, Ximena pulled her chair next to ours and started looking over our shoulders.

“Maybe you should try searching by image,” she suggested.

Which we did. It was still a dead end. But after that, Ximena became as interested in finding out what happened to Gordy Johnson as we were.

Meanwhile, at school, everything was business as usual. We had our science fair. Remo and I got a B+ for our cell-anatomy diorama, which was more than I thought we would get considering I spent as little time on that project as possible. Ximena and Savanna built a sundial. The most interesting one was probably Auggie and Jack's, though. It was a working lamp that was powered by a potato. I figured Auggie probably did most of the work, since, let's face it, Jack's never been what one would call a “gifted student,” but he was so happy to have gotten an A on it. He looked so cute!!! Like a little happy but somewhat clueless emoticon.

And this was my emoticon when I saw him:

By the end of February, the boy war had really escalated, though. Summer filled me in about what was going on, since she had the inside scoop on everything from Auggie and Jack's point of view. Apparently—and I was sworn to secrecy—Julian had started leaving really nasty yellow Post-it notes for Jack and Auggie in their lockers.

I felt so bad for them!

Maya felt bad for them, too. She had become obsessed with the boy war herself, though I wasn't sure why at first. It's not like she had ever made any attempts to be friends with Auggie! And she always treated Jack like a goofball. Like, back in the days when Ellie and I would point out how cute he looked in his Artful Dodger top hat, Maya would stick her fingers in her ears and cross her eyes, as if even the thought of him repulsed her. So I figured her interest in the war had to do with the fact that, quirky as she was, Maya had a good heart.

It was only one day at lunch, when I saw her hard at work on some kind of list, that I understood why she cared so much. In her notebook, where she designs her dot games, she had three rows of tiny Post-its with the names of all the boys in the grade. She was sorting them into columns: Jack's side; Julian's side; neutrals.

“I think it'll help Jack to know he's not alone in this war,” she explained.

That's when I realized:
Maya has a little crush on Jack Will! Awww, that's so cute!

“Sweet,” I answered, not wanting to make her self-conscious. So I helped her organize the list. We disagreed about some of the neutrals. She ultimately gave in to me. Then she copied the list onto a piece of loose-leaf paper and folded it in half, then in quarters, then in eighths, then in sixteenths. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I don't know,” she answered, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “I don't want it to get in the wrong hands.”