Beetle Boy (6 page)

Dad never got anywhere with Liam's kindergarten teacher. Apparently, she was a newlywed. She appreciated Dad's willingness to meet her after school, but he came back to the apartment from his meeting telling us that she had “a bone up her ass” and was “too strict,” “too picky,” and even “prejudiced against boys.”

“Did you talk some sense into her?” Liam asked hopefully.

“Try not to piss her off for a few days,” Dad instructed. “I don't want to talk to her again. She gave me a headache with all her whining. She did admit that you're smart, Leemster. We both know who you get
that
from.”

Later, I approached him while he was grinning at the television and watching his favorite team win—the Oakland Raiders. “Did you find out what's wrong with Liam, Dad?” I asked.

Still smiling, not looking at me. “Nothing wrong with Leemster.”

“Dad, he does really weird stuff. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff. Just ask Rita.”

Staring at the screen. “Rita's not your babysitter anymore. I'm finding you a new one.”

I was devastated. “Dad, she's good. She's the
best
. She helps me with my homework. She does the dishes.” Actually, I did the dishes and said it was Rita. I wanted to add: Her hair smells like peaches. Her teeth are perfect. Her fingernail polish blinds me. I finished hopelessly, inaccurately, “She's very fair.”

Not that Dad was listening. Apparently one of his new girlfriends had a daughter who needed money, and so Rita was out of the picture. (I saw her a few more times before she and her mother moved away. She told me on the rusted steps of the apartment complex that she didn't like babysitting because she hated little kids. This only increased my love for her.)

The next babysitter was Trudy. Daughter of Melissa, briefly known as Delicious Melicious. Trudy didn't last very long, though, because Delicious didn't last long. Apparently, the last few times Trudy babysat for us, Dad didn't bother to pay her. Her mother left a message on our answering machine, saying it was bad enough that he had cheated on her without also cheating her daughter out of her money. He owed Trudy fifteen dollars.

I was in the kitchen when Dad played this message back. He looked at me, shook his head, and muttered “women.” The next day I took fifteen dollars from the food money jar, and I took it to school and made a show of presenting it to Trudy in the hallway outside of her classroom. I told her it was from my dad and that he was sorry. “He's also really sorry about what he did to your mom.”

She made a disbelieving face but took the money.

I had become aware of a terrible pattern in Dad's behavior: he changed his mind about women way too fast, sometimes after only one date—a date that he would have gone to all kinds of trouble to arrange. I was also noticing that he spent a lot of our limited budget on impressive first dates at expensive restaurants and dance clubs. It kept us constantly broke, and nobody made him the least bit happy for more than a few weeks.

After the Trudy incident, my dad accepted my role as the babysitter finder. I made sure never to hire anyone with any ties to him. At school, I studied the sixth graders, always on the lookout for a cute girl to make mac and cheese the way I liked it (extra soupy), to stay up late with me on the couch (and not push me away if I wanted to get right up next to her), to let me smell her hair. I hired half a dozen babysitters this way, approaching the girls, asking them if they were interested in a job, even tracking down their phone numbers so that my dad could call the parents if a girl seemed willing.

But they did not last. We were routinely left alone with these girls, sometimes for four or five nights a week. Either my dad found a way to alienate them, mostly by forgetting to pay them or being rude to them when he came home drunk, or maybe the girls themselves found the hours spent with two anemic boys too much to deal with for more than a few months at a stretch. I always turned on the charm with these girls, but no one ever measured up to my memories of Rita, the first girl in the bachelor pad, the first girl who let me be physically close to her. Did I love her more than I love Clara?

I'm not sure. I swear, I'm not sure. What a miserable excuse for an adult male I am.

Mrs. M.'s voice comes into my ear. “
Choose a girl who is nice. Will you promise me that, Charlie?”

And I did promise. Although, at the time, I didn't understand why this was suddenly so important to her.
I found somebody who's nice, okay?
I tell her silently.
But I don't know how to do this. I think I might be fucking it up. Could we talk about it? God, I wish we could talk about it.

In the spring of that awful first year in the bachelor pad, my dad found an article in the Saturday Arts Calendar of our paper about a book signing for a few local authors at a little bookstore in downtown Hudsonville. He waved the article in front of my face and hollered, “This is where it starts, Charlie-boy! This is our foot in the door!”

He called the bookstore, turned on the charm, and within ten minutes had arranged for me to be one of the local authors. They were calling the event Night of the Stars, and I would be there as the youngest star—the youngest published author in history, a kid so enterprising and talented that he had written not one but two books about a beetle, with two more exciting publications on the way. Then Dad called the
Hudsonville Daily
and told them they had mistakenly forgotten to mention me in the article about the local book signing, and he insisted that they should do a separate piece on me and my books by way of apology.

I was sitting on the sofa, listening to these two very different but equally urgent conversations. Up until that moment, the idea that Dad was really going to push me into the spotlight in this crazy-ass way—turn me into a pint-sized celebrity, call me a published author—none of it had seemed real. It was an abstraction. I was not the kind of kid who went for the spotlight in any way. But on that Saturday afternoon, I saw the spotlight coming for me like a big, searching beam, and I also saw that there would be no stopping Dad. He had a dream. It involved books and money and me. My life as a kid nobody noticed was coming to an end. I started chewing my fingernails frantically. Dad startled me by knocking my hand away from my mouth.

“The reporter's coming Monday after school,” he said. His voice was tense and determined, as though he expected me to resist. His eyes, as he stared at me, held a trace of panic. I realized that his confidence was flagging now that we were closer to actual liftoff.

“I got this, Dad,” I said, although I was way more scared than he was.

“We need to get you a haircut. And maybe a little sport coat. And some business cards. And we have to practice for the interview. We'll have them photograph the first cover and then maybe a photo of you sitting at the computer, writing your next book. Because you were born to write. Can you say that in the interview, Charlie?”

“I was born to write,” I repeat.

“Born to it! Unstoppable! Unbelievable! You'll be on the front page, Charlie! Come on, let's get you a haircut. Let's get you dressed for success. Let's rock this town!”

He slicked back his own blond hair and put on a sport coat and changed out of his sneakers. It was, apparently, time for us to dress for success. We left Liam with Valerie, our latest babysitter, and went downtown to buy a suit, get me a haircut, and check in with the nice ladies at the bookstore. In the car, Dad interviewed me and told me the five most important things I needed to say to the bookstore ladies. And the reporter on Monday. And anybody who came up to me at my book signing. They were

• I was born to write (lie).
  
• I have always loved beetles (lie, scared of bugs).
  
• I have already sold a lot of books (lie).
  
• I get straight As in school (big lie).
  
• I have more books on the way (true).
  

At one point, Dad got mad at me for stammering. “Are you an idiot? Do I have to explain again how important this interview is? This is
it
, Charlie!”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay, okay.” I was trying not to cry. I wanted Dad to get his confidence back, but I was so miserable. I had the shortest haircut I had ever had in my life, practically a buzz cut, and I hated the suit Dad had bought for me—it was powder blue—a ridiculous color—and two sizes too big for me so that I could grow into it. It made me realize that in Dad's estimation, this gig was going to last awhile. I would be caught in a jar, on display in that shiny blue suit, for years.

Soon after the wildly successful book signing (we sold forty books), I met Mrs. M. for the first time. It was an author festival on a college campus, somewhere near Grand Rapids—I can't remember exactly where—one of the women who had come to the bookstore had pulled some strings in exchange for a date with Dad. The festival was called Autumn Author Jubilee, and it involved twenty or so authors from all over the state. They were set up with tables all around the edges of the room.

Each table was covered with a white tablecloth and had a stack of books for teachers to purchase on their way around the room. Every author got two metal stands for displaying their newest books. The idea was that all the teachers and librarians would buy tons of books and carry them around in free tote bags supplied by the Jubilee. I had my first two books—
Meet Beetle
Boy
and
Beetle Boy
Crawls Again
, but my dad had made a poster with the next two book covers on it and “COMING SOON FROM BEETLE BOY” in bright blue letters across the top. We made the poster at the breakfast table with scanned covers that Dad had made on his new scanner, but before we got from the parking lot to the building, everything we had glued onto the poster board had fallen off because we used old glue.

While he unpacked our books, Dad sent me to ask one of the two Jubilee organizers if they had any Scotch tape. One of them found me a roll, and I scurried back to our table. “Hurry it up,” Dad ordered. “People are already coming in, and we need to sell fifty books today to pay the rent.”

I was taping the book covers back onto the poster board when Mrs. M. arrived; her table was the table beside ours. She was wearing a long black cape and what was pretty obviously a wig—an afro of orange curls. Her face was pasty white. Under her cape, she was wearing a black dress with a trailing skirt. I swear, my first thought was
a witch.
I glanced over at her table, thinking her display book would be a collection of spells and curses. But it was a book called
Franklin Firefly
, with a fat firefly smiling on the cover. My dad saw it the same time I did and looked at me meaningfully. His eyes said, “I'll handle this.”

Mrs. M. stepped behind her table, took off her cape, adjusted her wig, and looked around, taking in the meeting room and the other authors at their tables. Finally, she glanced over to the table beside hers—mine. My dad was ready for her, and when her eyes rested on him, he smiled. It was his Caring Man smile. It worked really well on women of all ages.

“Quite a group,” he said. “Hope we all sell some books today!”

She looked at my book, took in the fact that it was also a bug book, a fact that seemed to momentarily pain her, but she said, still friendly, “Yes, let's all hope for a good day.” She squinted at the book cover and added, “Charlie.”

“No, I'm Dan,” he said. “Charlie is my boy, here.” He sat back in his chair so that she had a clearer sideways view of me. I was wearing the powder-blue suit Dad had bought me for the book signing. I managed a smile. Mrs. M. stared at me for a long moment.

“Charlie's the world's youngest published author,” Dad explained.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Mrs. M. said. “Oh, you have really got to be kidding me.”

“I'm not kidding!” Dad protested. “My boy here is the world's youngest published author!”

She looked him right in the eye and said, “Your own child. And what is he … five?”

“I'm
seven!”
I cried. It hurt me that she thought I was five.

“Be quiet, son,” my dad said. “We are not talking to this mean lady.”

“No, you certainly are not,” she agreed.

Then she marched from her table to the middle of the room where the two organizers were counting the occupied author tables, writing on clipboards. Mrs. M. started talking to them, and she pointed to our table. It was pretty obvious that she was complaining about us. I asked Dad, “Why doesn't she like us?”

“Because she's a bitch. And her book is a piece of crap.”

I looked at her book—it had a glossy book jacket and a hard cover. Our books were paperback and very thin. Also, her colors were bright and glossy and ours were dull. The firefly was smiling, and it had teeth like a human's. I thought that was a little strange.

A few minutes later, the two organizer ladies came over and picked up all of Mrs. M.'s books and carried them to another table on the other side of the room, where she had been relocated. The ladies seemed embarrassed. My dad put on his best Caring Man smile and asked the prettier one, “Does she have something against little children?”

“She's a character, that Martha,” the pretty one said. She was wearing a tight pink turtleneck.

The other lady said, “Always fussing about something.”

“Maybe you shouldn't invite her next time,” my dad suggested helpfully.

Pink Turtleneck said, “Maybe not.”

My dad was smiling as they walked away, a triumphant smile, like the smile he always wore after he'd won an argument with Mom, using male logic. “She won't be invited again,” he said. “But we will.”

“Way to go, Dad.”

But I couldn't help watching Mrs. M. during the rest of the Author Jubilee, sitting behind her new table on the other side of the room. She looked small, although when she had been glaring at us, I had the impression she was huge!
Maybe she is a witch
, I thought. I was already in awe of her. She had insulted my dad. He muttered something about her under his breath every few minutes.