Katy Kelly_Lucy Rose 01 (2 page)

I made a postcard back. My grandmother gave it to me. It is not so interesting on the front because it just has a picture of the Lincoln Memorial which you can see anytime you want if you look at a penny.

On the other side of the card, I wrote my old address and my dad's name and I called him Mr. Bob Reilly. Next to that I wrote: “Dear Dad, It's okay, I guess.”

That was not the whole, exact truth.

One hard part about being an original thinker is that sometimes it makes teachers glare at you and Mrs. Washburn is a big one for glaring. Also she likes people to “STAY SEATED” just about all the time. When I explained about her at dinner last night, my grandfather said, “Mrs. Washburn doesn't have an original bone in her whole body.”

Then my mom said, “It's only September and she might get better in a month or two.” Which I doubt.

Luckily Mrs. Washburn is only a two-morning-a-week teacher who comes to help with reading.

My everyday teacher is Mr. Welsh and he does not glare. Today he came up to me at lunch and he said, “How are you settling in, Lucy Rose?”

And I said, “Okie-dokie.”

And he said, “That's great.”

And I said, “Well, a little okie-dokie.”

“Only a little?” he asked me.

I told him, “Actually, it is not the easiest to be the new kid in the neighborhood and the new kid at school at the exact same time especially when you don't know any friends yet.”

He had sympathy for that because he told me, “I had a hard time when I was a new teacher and I didn't know any of the other teachers or any of the kids and, to tell you the truth, the principal made me a little nervous, but after a while it got better.”

“Are you still nervous of the principal?”

“Nope,” he said. “But it took a little time for me to get the hang of everything. I think that will be true for you, too.”

“Doubt it,” I said.

“Lucy Rose,” Mr. Welsh said, “I'll eat my hat if things don't get better for you next month.”

I have never seen him wear a hat so he might be kidding but I hope he is not because it is almost October and that is the next month and I would really like it to be better.

Here are some things about Mr. Welsh: He has a nice look of not too much hair and little round
eyeglasses and he is skinnier than my dad and my grandfather, probably because he is one for good eating habits. Plus he has two daughters who are in junior high and a son who is still a kid and a wife who works at the organic store. Mr. Welsh is a big one for jokes. Also palindromes, which are words that are spelled the same forwards and backwards. I know about them from my father and so far I have six. One of them is Dad. I told Mr. Welsh another one which is the girl name of Eve. And he said, “You have a way with palindromes, Lucy Rose.”

And I said, “Yes, I absolutely do because I'm the one that figured out that we should call my grandmother Madam and my grandfather Pop.”

“What did you used to call them before?” Mr. Welsh asked me.

“We called my grandmother Grandma but she likes Madam better.”

“How come?” he asked me.

“She says it makes her feel rich and she says who wouldn't like that?” I told him. “And we always did call Pop, Pop, it's just that in the beginning I didn't know he was a palindrome.”

Mr. Welsh is an original thinker.

There are some things I like about school and some things I don't. One that I do is my table which is really four desks pushed together. Jonique McBee sits at my table and she is very beautiful and has pierced ears which is a dream of mine and she has a zippering pencil case with purple tassels and her best thing is math. She doesn't talk very much, but on Monday she did tell me that she thinks freckle faces are pretty which was a pleasing thing to say to me since I have that kind of face exactly. So I said, “I wish I had the kind of hair that can have lots of braids and lots of barrettes,” which is the kind she has exactly.

And she said, “I like hair that is red like yours.”

So I said, “I get it from my father.”

I did not tell that he lives in Ann Arbor.

And then she said, “When I get older I am going to get a retainer.”

And I said, “You are the luckiest duck ever.”

Also at my table there is a boy named Bart Bigelow who picks his nose which is something you are way too old to do in third grade but he does it anyway and then he wipes it on his jeans which is so gross and disgusting that I know already that no matter how old he gets he will never get a wife because that is not the sort of thing grown ladies stand for. But for now he is making me gag, which is another palindrome. The other person at our table is Sam Alswang and he is so funny he could be on TV. One thing that we do is change tables every so many weeks. I don't know why.

Also in our class we have a table with fish fossils that came from about a million years ago and animal teeth that came from the National Zoo on Connecticut Avenue because Mr. Welsh has a friend that works in Small Mammals.

And we have a small mammal that's a guinea pig named Jake but he is not on the table. He is in a cage. He is four and he has all his teeth and I am wild for him like anything, partly because he is cute in the face but also because of his personality which is extremely excellent, especially considering he can't talk. If you call out “Jake” he won't turn around. That is probably because Mr. Welsh lets every class pick a new name. Last year his name was Bubba and the year before that he was named Sheila and the year before that he was named Nick after Nick at Nite. When he is sleeping he looks like a wig.

Yesterday we learned a poem about fourteen hundred and ninety-two when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and Mr. Welsh said that Christopher Columbus is such an important guy for discovering America that we get off from school because of him and that his holiday is coming on next Monday and when Mr. Welsh said that I felt like I had to talk to him right that minute and I got up from my chair and ran to his desk and he said, “Lucy Rose, do you have an emergency?”

And I said, “Yes.”

And he said, “What is it?”

And I said, “Can I take Jake home for the three-day weekend of Columbus's Day?”

And he said, “No.”

So I said, “But otherwise he will starve to death.”

And Mr. Welsh said, “Lucy Rose, Jake will be fine because he is going to stay with Kathleen Sullivan.”

And then he said I should go back to my table and sit down so the class could do some more talking about Christopher Columbus.

I already knew about him and his boat and his holiday from second grade so I double did not care.

One handy thing about my grandparents is that they are both writers and they are the kind of writers who work at home. When I am in school Madam writes “Dear Lucy Rose” in her office upstairs and Pop writes stories for magazines in his office downstairs and when it is lunchtime they meet in the kitchen and Madam tries to get him to like eating tofu. Most days I am at their house from after school until my mother comes to get me and that is pretty fun most of the time.

Today after school Pop and I took Gumbo for a walk to the Lustre Cleaners so we could pick up
Madam's speech-making dress and Pop asked me, “What is on your mind, Lucy Rose?”

One funny thing about Pop is that he can always tell when my mind has something on it. I told him about Kathleen getting to take care of Jake. “It is not fair because she already has a dog plus a parakeet plus a baby brother and I have not one living thing,” I said.

“I guess the problem is that there are a lot of kids and only one guinea pig,” Pop told me.

And I said, “For the first two weeks of school we had two but Jake kept fighting him so Mr. Welsh sent the other one that has the name of Wilson down to live in the kindergarten room with Miss Freeman which seems all right to me because she is one agreeable lady. Yesterday when I stepped on Adam Melon's sandwich I had to spend recess in Miss Freeman's room and she helped me clean the Nutella off my cowgirl boot. She also did not ask me if I did it on purpose, which I appreciated.”

Pop made the noise of “Hmmm.”

“Adam Melon,” I said, “is one big problem.”

“How big?” Pop asked.

“Gigantic huge,” I said. “He has been bothering
me since even before the first day of school when we both had to visit our classroom ahead of time to meet Mr. Welsh on account of we're both new. Only he came to live in Washington because his father works for a congressman from Florida which he thinks is a hot-stuff job, which it is, but I don't tell him that because he would just brag more than he does already.”

“No,” Pop said. “You don't want to encourage a boy like that.”

“No, I don't,” I said. “But ever since that visiting day he keeps chasing me when I don't want to be chased plus he said I had a stupid lunch which is why I stepped on his.”

One good thing about Pop is he is not an over-reactor. “He said you had a stupid lunch, did he?” Pop asked me, skipping right over the stepping-on part.

“Sorry to say he was right,” I said. “My mom doesn't approve of Chee-tos and she buys fake Oreos to save money plus she makes roll-ups with turkey and cheese which are embarrassing.”

“Maybe Madam could make your lunch sometimes,” Pop said.

“Even worse,” I said. “She is crazy for lentil salad and also soy bars.”

Pop said he has sympathy for that because he himself is no fan of soy foods.

When we got back to my grandparents' house I sat around in Madam's office while she typed her answer to a lady who e-mailed about her teenager daughter who dillydallies with her homework and then has to stay up until midnight to finish it and then she doesn't want to get up in the morning so they are always late for school and then the whole carpool gets tardy on their report cards. Instead of writing her name at the bottom of the letter the lady called herself Frustrated in Franconia. I asked Madam, “How come she doesn't say her name?”

“Sometimes people are too embarrassed to tell me their real name,” Madam said. “And sometimes I suspect a letter comes from someone I know but they want privacy so they don't use their real name.”

“Oh,” I said. “What did you tell Frustrated to do?”

“I told her to make her daughter go to bed on time even if her homework isn't done
because that is the way to cure dillydallying fast.”

Pop came into Madam's office right when I was telling Madam, “I know about being frustrated because of Adam Melon chasing me every minute.”

And she said, “He might be doing that because he likes you.”

“Man-o-man,” I said. “That is dumb.” “

True,” Madam said. “But that's what boys do sometimes.”

Then I said, “In my brain I call him Melonhead.”

Madam said that is rude but Pop said it's funny. Then Madam said, “Lucy Rose, what you need to do is make a good friend and then maybe Adam Melon won't seem so important.”

To which I said “Poop” which is, by the way, a palindrome. Like I said, Madam is one for advice.

Even though I had decided to skip Madam's recommendation I changed my mind this morning when I was at school. Mrs. Washburn was reading out loud about the house on the prairie but I did
not feel in a mood to listen to that book. I was thinking about how October was supposed to be better and how it actually isn't.

Later, when I was supposed to be doing nouns, I wrote a list on the back of my language arts worksheet called WHAT MY NEW FRIEND SHOULD BE:

1. Funny.
   

2. An original thinker.
   

3. Doesn't like Melonhead.
   

I took it home and showed my list to everybody at family dinner.

“Those are three important things,” Pop said.

But Madam told me, “You might want to think about it some more.”

Then my mom said, “Lucy Rose, you should give kids a chance and try to be friendly and ask them about themselves.”

And then all of a sudden, right there in Madam and Pop's dining room, I shouted at everybody, “I am sick of school and I want to go home to Ann Arbor where I already have friends!”

I didn't expect to say it. It just came out and I'm not even sure it's all the way true.

“Well,” Pop said, “you have a point about school. I used to tell your mother and her sisters and brother, ‘School is as close to prison as I hope you children ever come.’”

Then Madam gave him her sharp look and said “Not helpful” in a whispery way which I could hear.

So my grandfather said, “I just don't think people should have to go inside when a bell rings or have to go outside just when they might be doing something interesting.”

My mom says my grandfather has never been one for taking too much direction. I say that is a sign of an original thinker.

After dinner we walked to Grubb's and I got a lime Popsicle out of the Igloo freezer which are not as good as Good Humors but it is fun to hang your head down in the box while you are looking. And I used my own quarter to buy a postcard with a picture of the Capitol on the front to send to my Ann Arbor friends who are twins and have the names of Frannie and Annie Rhineburger. Also at Grubb's my grandfather bought a box of white Tic Tacs,
which is the only kind I like, and told me I could carry them around in my pocket which is good because one thing I am big on is fresh breath.