One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street (4 page)

“Fire away!” said Manny.

“One-on-one, privately,” Robert said. Robert could feel his flushed face progressing to Embarrassment Level Two (tomato). And when exactly did his face start looking like some sort of produce whenever he was around these girls?

“Sorry, Rob-o. I'm working now,” said Manny. “How about stopping by the Garcia's while Edgar's napping, say one
P.M
. or so?”

“Great,” said Robert. Maybe his mission will have been accomplished by then. He shifted his big shoebox to his other arm, hoping one of the girls would ask him what was in it. Then he'd be able to answer, “Nothing. Yet.” Heavy emphasis on the “yet.” Just to keep them in suspense.

But nobody asked him anything. “See you later,” said Robert, before slowly walking away.

“Now, where were we?” Leandra asked, glaring after him.

“Your great ideas,” said Manny. He began to feed Edgar an orange slice. Edgar chewed it slowly, the juice dribbling down his chin.

“Right,” Leandra said. “I was thinking—”

“Robert is lonely,” Manny interrupted. “Maybe he wants to join your club.”

Ali and Leandra giggled.

“Robert doesn't want to join the club. He just wants to eavesdrop, then make fun of us in front of my brothers. You should hear them go on and on,” Leandra said.

“But really,” said Manny. “I know the club is for girls with long hair, but maybe you could change your focus to include him.”

“That's what I wanted to tell you. That's what
my
idea is about.
Changing our focus!” Ali said. “But not with Robert,” she quickly added.

Manny began to push Edgar in the swing again. “How would you feel if your best friend suddenly moved to New Zealand?” he asked.

“Well, that's life,” said Leandra, gruffly.

“Right. That's life,” said Ali, feeling a twinge of guilt like a pinprick. That's exactly what her mother had said, but in a much kinder voice, on the awful day they'd told Ali about the tumor growing inside her brother's brain. In his cerebellum.
Cerebellum
was one fancy word she wished she'd never had to learn! “Why? Why? Why?” Ali had cried. “That's life,
mi vida
,” her mother said. “It's nobody's fault.”

Now Ali was afraid to look up and see Manny's disapproval, so she began busily digging in the dirt again.

After a while, Leandra said, “I'm not waiting for Bunny. Here's my idea.”

Ali wasn't listening. Her trowel had dug deep, scooping up some more nails, and a small piece of charred wood. She put everything into her bag.

“Why do you bother with that junk?” Leandra asked.

“It's not junk,” Ali said. “OK, maybe this stuff is junk, but it's fun to think I'll find something really important. And look at this find!” She took the little blue stone from the pocket of her shorts. “It's shaped just like a heart.”

“Let's see,” said Leandra, leaning closer. “Well, I think it's liver-shaped. Actually, no. It's shaped like a lung.”

“Very funny,” Ali said, frowning. She rubbed it again, then pressed the stone to her lips.

“I'll bet you're making a wish right now,” said Leandra. “You are! You're actually making a wish.”

Ali shrugged. “So what? It just felt like a wishing moment. I didn't want to waste it.” She hurriedly dropped the stone back into her pocket.

“Oh, grow up!” said Leandra. “Anyway, back to my idea.” She looked at Manny and twirled a lock of hair around her forefinger. “I think we should all have dreadlocks, like yours, Manny. I really like dreads, and then it will also be easier to see whose hair is the longest.”

Manny grinned and made an OK sign with his thumb and finger, but Ali frowned. “That's not going to fit in with my own idea.”

“Why not?” asked Leandra, looking annoyed.

So Ali told her about the imaginary, theoretical angel, and how the angel had whispered something that Ali had known, but just hadn't known she'd known all along: her amazingly kind and generous idea.

“Get to the point,” said Leandra.

“OK, let's say we grow our hair so long we can sit on it. What's the good of sitting on our hair? So what? Then what will our club do?”

“Well . . .” said Leandra.

Ali continued. “But let's say we grow our hair really long, and then we
cut it off
! Then we can send it away to an organization that makes wigs for sick children who need them, like Edgar. I'm not saying Edgar should wear a wig. But lots of other children who've lost their hair would like to. And we would be growing our hair for a
reason
, to help other kids! It would be
altruistic
!”

A fancy, fitting word she was finally able to use.

“And our club could have another focus,” Ali continued. “It could be the Girls Who Dig Club, for instance.”

“You mean cut our hair
all
off?” asked Leandra, who had been thinking of a long, magnificent ponytail of dreadlocks with ribbons and tinkling silver bells threaded through it.
“That's the dumbest idea ever! And so is the Girls Who Dig Club!”

Ali caught her breath, tears springing from her eyes. “Well, I think the Girls With Long Hair Club is the dumbest idea ever!”

“It is not!” yelled Leandra. “And anyway, I wouldn't cut off my hair for
anybody
! Even Edgar!”

Invisible orangey electrons buzzed, or angels giggled, depending on your theory.

Edgar began to cry. Leandra stomped off. Manny shushed Edgar and put him gently into his stroller. He told Ali to cool down, hang loose, and schedule another meeting.

Soon the lot was empty, except for Robert-behind-the-vine again, still seeking to fulfill his secret mission.

henever her mother had to go on a business trip by plane, Bunny Perkins knew what she had to do. She chewed only on the right side of her mouth, tied her sneakers in double knots, and wore her mother's purple gardening hat outdoors, where she avoided sidewalk cracks. If she saw a squirrel or a hummingbird, she had to tap the hat, then blink rapidly three times. She also wished on a cloud (or weather permitting, the sun) at flight time. If school was out, she climbed the orange tree next door to actually touch the sky, then waved at her mother's plane for good luck. She always knew what time it was scheduled to fly by.

Her parents knew about the hat-wearing, which was
obvious. They thought that was kind of cute. Bunny didn't bother telling them about all the chewing and tapping and blinking and tree-climbing and sky-touching, which even she knew was less cute. But so far everything had worked, bringing her mother home safely every time. Bunny wasn't taking any chances.

And just before her mother went on a business trip, that's when the questions popped into Bunny's head: all sorts of questions about all sorts of things that needed to be answered right then and there, before her mother went away.

For instance, she had questions about her name. Her parents said “Bunny” was her real name, but maybe there was another name somewhere, a beautiful name that “Bunny” was short for.

“You know it says Bunny on your birth certificate,” said Mrs. Perkins, as she packed her bag.

“But maybe you showed me the counterfeit one,” she said, “and the real one is hidden away.”

“You mean the one with
Rabbit
on it?” asked Mrs. Perkins.

Bunny tried to get a good look at her mother's nostrils, but her mother was bent over the blouse she was folding. Mrs. Perkins's sense of humor was the annoying kind, where it was hard to tell if she was cracking a joke. Unless you studied
her nostrils. If her nostrils flared, that was a sign she was joking.

“You know, it's been nine whole years since we officially named you. I forget where we hid the real birth certificate,” Mrs. Perkins said, zipping her carry-on.

Bunny leaned over and nostril-checked. “Stop joking,” she said.

“Oh, honey, I'm sorry,” Mrs. Perkins said. “I shouldn't be joking now.” She hugged Bunny and squished Bunny's face against her chest. “You know you were named after a wonderful woman.”

“Kids keep asking me if I eat a lot of carrots,” Bunny said, in a squished-face voice. She felt her mother sighing.

“Maybe we made a mistake,” her mother said.

Bunny had heard the story a zillion times about how she was named after someone from long ago whose name was Bunny. How her parents thought the name was just right because their Bunny was such a cute, perky “bunnikins” when she was born. She was a bunnikins all right, a soft, shivery, scared one. She couldn't imagine Leandra, for instance, letting anyone get away with making fun of her (not without punching them in the nose, or something).

Bunny didn't feel perky as she followed her mother down
the hall. She felt the way she always felt when her mother went on a trip by plane: slowed way down, like a turtle or a snail. But then another question occurred to her: Do turtles and snails ever feel perky, in their own way?

Before she could ask her mother that important question, Bunny's eye caught the eye of the wonderful woman she was named after. The wonderful woman was in a photograph hanging on a whole wall of photographs of dead and alive family members. The original Bunny Perkins was one of the dead ones. She had traveled from Missouri in a wagon train to a gold-mining town in California in the 1850s.

No one knew how the original Bunny had gotten her name. Modern-day Bunny's grandmother, Alice Perkins, had a wooden box with long-ago Bunny Perkins's journal inside of it. Not once did long-ago Bunny complain about her odd name in that journal. She had too many other things to think about, such as setting broken bones, delivering babies, smoking peace pipes with Native Americans, and cooking for her six children. Once, she met a roaring mountain lion by the creek near her cabin. She drew herself up as tall as she could, then hollered “AU-AU-AU-GUSTUS!” And that lion lumbered away, defeated. Later, she wrote in her journal, “
I am glad my dear husband Augustus's name sounds like a lion's
roar! I daresay I quaked and trembled, but I did what I had to do, for all of our sakes.”

There was one thing modern-day Bunny knew for sure: Long-ago Bunny didn't look like she quaked. And she didn't look like a cute, perky bunnikins, either. She looked like she
shot
bunnikins, and skinned them and boiled them and gobbled them down in three or four bowls of rabbit stew at every meal, easy. She had a shotgun over her shoulder and she looked as tall as the bright pioneer sky. Her eyes were smart and squinty. Her mouth was a stern, familiar-looking straight line, like modern-day Grandpa Ed Perkins's mouth, just before he soaked his feet bunions in Epsom salts. That was probably because long-ago Bunny's feet were stuffed into skinny laced-up boots, peeking out from under her long skirt.

“I just figured out her real name,” Bunny said grumpily. “It's Bunion. I'm named after someone named Bunion.”

Mrs. Perkins laughed. “
Bunion
is a lovely name,” she said.

Bunny was mad at herself for cracking a joke at such a serious moment, and mad at her mother for laughing, and mad at long-ago Bunny Perkins for being so brave, even though deep down, the wonderful woman was quaking like crazy. But Bunny knew what real quaking was like. You just couldn't hide it that easily, when you were a soft little bunnikins.

Ruff scampered to the front door, his tail going fast like a plane's propeller. Bunny let her dog outside. “I'll be there soon!” she called after him, knowing he was off to dig in the empty lot.

Ruff didn't seem to worry whether she'd be there with him or not. Suddenly, Bunny was mad at Ruff, too. Dogs didn't worry about
anything
! Not about plane crashes, or sad, sick kids like Edgar, or mean kids, or wars, or bad luck. Still, just for one day, just for one
minute
, Bunny wished she could be like Ruff, with no strong feelings about anything, except what was happening right then and there. Instead of worrying about the past and the present and the future, like she herself did, all in one quaking jumble.