My Life as a Stuntboy (10 page)

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Authors: Janet Tashjian

BOOK: My Life as a Stuntboy
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By the time I get home, I'm still stunned. When Matt won the mountain bike at the church raffle last year, I was happy for him. When his father's friend invited Matt to a Lakers playoff game, I thought that was great too. Why can't he be glad when something good happens to me?
Nothing exhausts me more than pondering these kinds of questions, so I walk in the door and collapse on the couch. All I want to do is rub Bodi's belly. But a twenty-something-year-old guy with black nerdy glasses is sitting at the table drinking iced tea with Mom. I figure he's one of her vet interns until I realize she's using her mom voice and not her doctor voice. Which means he's here for the tutoring job.
stunned
pondering
scurries
“Derek,” Mom says, “meet Ronnie. Ronnie, Derek.”
He gets up to shake my hand and knocks over his iced tea. As my mother scurries for a towel, Ronnie blushes and gives a little shrug. I didn't think it was possible to cause more spills than I do; maybe this guy is okay.
Mom asks me to show Ronnie
the sketchbook with my vocabulary drawings. He laughs when he sees them and shows me his own notebook with lots of lightning bolts and wizards in the margins. I'm not sure if Mom's impressed, but any guy who draws instead of paying attention in class is all right with me.
As Ronnie discusses what days he's available, I lift up the piece of fabric covering Frank's cage. He's been very quiet since I got home, and now he's just lying there. I ask Mom if he's okay.
available
“I usually won't take him out of the cage when there's a stranger here—monkeys really prefer to be with people they know—but he does seem sick.” Mom cradles Frank in her arms like a baby.
projectile
“You have a monkey?” Ronnie asks. “That's so cool!”
“You can't hold him,” I say, “but you can pet him if you want.”
Ronnie reaches over to pet Frank just as Frank leans his head back and hurls. Not just a little dribble—big, projectile stuff that lands all over Ronnie and everything on the kitchen table.
“Derek, get a towel from the bathroom! Ronnie, I am so sorry!” Mom quickly puts Frank back in the cage to clean up Ronnie and the kitchen.
Frank is moaning, Mom is apologizing, Ronnie is wiping off vomit from his shirt, and all I'm thinking is, For once, this has nothing to do with me.
“Well, I guess this is the last place
you want to work now,” Mom tells Ronnie. “I can't say I blame you.”
“Are you kidding?” Ronnie asks. “I just got puked on by a monkey—I guarantee things can't get any worse.”
guarantee
“Uhm … I wouldn't hold my breath,” I say.
Mom shoots me a giant piece of MomMad and turns to Ronnie. “You mean you're still interested in the job?”
“Sure.” He turns to me. “If Derek approves, of course.”
As much as I don't want to spend a few hours a week with some stranger standing over me while I read, Ronnie seems pretty cool, and I say yes. He washes his hands and face before he leaves, then says he'll see me on Thursday.
After he's gone, Mom opens Frank's cage. “I'm going to give him a quick exam. There's definitely something going on.”
I hold open the door for Mom and hope everything's okay with my monkey.
 
 
When my mother comes back in the house with Frank forty-five minutes later, she's not happy. She places him gently in his cage, then motions for me to follow her to the office. Her silence makes me think something's wrong, so I take a mental scan of all the things I've done since I've been home and, thankfully, come up empty.
Most of the time, Mom's veterinary office is jammed with people and their pets, so I like it when it's after hours and everything is quiet. She leads me into the first examination room, turns on the light panel mounted to the wall, and puts up an X-ray.
radiologist
“Are those Frank's insides?” I ask.
“Yes.” She points to a spot that's almost the size of a quarter. “What do you think that is?”
I stare at the circle as if I am now a radiologist. “A tumor? Does Frank have cancer?”
“It's inside his stomach, but I don't think it's a tumor.” She looks at me with her Most Serious Face. “Did you let Frank play with anything he wasn't supposed to?”
“No! You told me never to give him things he could swallow. He's
my
monkey too—I don't want him to get sick.”
“Fair enough. Did you ever leave him alone with any of your toys?”
“No—I already told you.” I've barely finished the sentence when I remember lining up my knights on the living room table the other night before dinner. “I left the room for only a second! He couldn't have.”
I run back inside the house and take down my box of small action figures from the shelf. The blue knight, the red knight, the green knight with the mace … I dump the box onto the floor to make sure the whole set is there. I realize with a sinking feeling that the horse with the red banner is not with the others.
“Are you missing any?” Mom's
voice is so calm, it scares me more than if she were yelling.
I check under the living room couch and table but don't find it. “The horse is gone. Do you think Frank swallowed it?”
“We'll find out soon enough. I just paged Melanie to come assist me. Whatever's in Frank's digestive system is too big to pass. I'm going to have to go in and get it.”
retrieve
I close my eyes and lean against the wall. This morning I was on a movie set doing stunts, talking to a movie star. By the end of the day, my best friend's making fun of me, I have a homework tutor, and my mother's going to cut open my adopted monkey to retrieve my horse. How do these things happen? I put all these questions on hold to
deal with my mother's wrath. Except she isn't furious; she just seems sad.
“When I tell you something like ‘keep the toys away from Frank,' I don't say it to ruin your fun. I say it to keep Frank safe.”
“Is he going to die?” Out of all the questions in my mind, it's the only one I care about right now.
“Hopefully not, but he's in distress. He hasn't eaten in several hours, so operating now is the smartest thing.”
wrath
distress
“Are you mad?”
She shakes her head sadly. “I'm not mad. I just wonder when some of your listening and paying attention skills will kick in.”
I don't admit it's something I wonder about too.
abdomen
“Can I be with Frank while you operate?”
“That's not appropriate, but you can help me prep him.”
I've lived with a vet long enough to know what that means.
“Come on,” she says. “I'll let you shave his abdomen.”
Under normal circumstances, I'd ask if I could give him a mohawk or do his back in stripes, but I'm grateful she's not furious, so I don't say a thing.
Even when you include shaving a monkey, this still might be the worst afternoon of my life.

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