The Life of Ty: Penguin Problems (3 page)

W
hen I wake up the next morning, there's something under my bed.

It's past seven o'clock, and Mom has told me three times to GET UP. But I can't, because the thing under my bed is bumping and lashing its tail. It's Winnie's cat, Sweetie-Pie. Every time I sneakily sneak my foot out, Sweetie-Pie swipes at it.

I hear Mom on the staircase. She's heading toward my room.
Uh-oh
.

“Ty, this is the third time I've had to call you to breakfast,” she says, sagging against the door frame.

The fourth, actually. “I'm getting up. I promise.”

“Baby, you're not. You're lying there like a lump.”

“Okay, but . . .”

“No ‘buts,'” she says, and she uses her sharp voice. “Get your hindquarters moving, bucko.”

Then she just leaves! Without even asking what's making me stay stuck in bed!

I stick my tongue out at her even though she's gone. Teensy Baby Maggie gets to sleep in her crib, la la la, until Mom goes and gets her.
I
have to get up by myself, only I can't because of Sweetie-Pie.

I stick my tongue out at Teensy Baby Maggie, even though she's in her own room. In my head, I say,
Big Fat Meanie Baby
.

It cheers me up, so I say it outside my head. But quietly. “Poop on you, you Big Fat Meanie Baby!”

Anyway, cribs are stupid. They're like cages, and if Price came over and climbed into Maggie's crib? He'd get his head stuck between the bars for sure.

I imagine Price in Maggie's crib. I imagine his head sticking out between the wooden bars, and I giggle my man-giggle. My man-giggle is awesome. I use my stomach muscles to push it out—
heh heh heh—
and Winnie says it makes me sound like an evil criminal.

Then I remember that I still don't know how to get out of bed because of Sweetie-Pie, and being scared of a cat makes me feel like a scaredy-cat. It dries up all my man-giggles.

I'm not usually scared of Sweetie-Pie. When she sits in my lap, I pat her and say, “Good Sweetie-Pie.” Then Winnie pats me and says, “Good Ty. Good Ty for petting my good cat.”

Hey! That gives me an idea! Sweetie-Pie
is
Winnie's sometimes-good-sometimes-sneaky-clawed cat, so I use a whispery yell to call out, “Winnie!”

“What?” Winnie calls back.

“I need you!”

“Why?”

“I just do!”

She growls, loud enough for me to hear. But she comes to my room. “Yes?”

“Sweetie-Pie's under my bed.”

“So?”

“If I put my foot out, she'll eat it.”

“She will not.”

“She might.”

“Then stand up and
jump
off, so she can't reach you.”

“What if she's in a pouncing mood?”

Winnie puts her hands on her hips. “Ty, you're acting babyish. Just get out of bed.”

My ribs go
whooomph,
like someone tied a rope around them and pulled it tight.

“Never mind,” I say. “You can leave now.”

She does.

Sweetie-Pie meows.

• • •

It's my pee that finally gets me. I hold it until I can't anymore. Until I almost explode, which would be awesome, but messy. Tinkle-sprinkles everywhere! Ahhhh!

I lean over my bed and say, “Sweetie-Pie,
out
.”

Her eyes gleam. I jerk back.

What am I going to do?

There's no point calling for Sandra. She'd say, “Deal with it yourself. You're a big guy.” And Dad's already left for work. So what do I
do
?

If I had a broom, I could jab her out.

If I had an eagle, the eagle could swoop down and grab her and fly off into the distance. Bye-bye, Sweetie-Pie!

Only that would be sad, because the eagle would eat her. Anyway, I don't have an eagle.

I
do
have eagle eyes, though. Mom's always telling me that. She'll say, “Ty, will you see if you can find the safety pin I dropped?” And when I do, she says, “You, my darling dude, have eagle eyes. Thank you.”

I turn on my eagle eyes and scan my room. There's got to be
something
I can use.

My Lava lamp?

My copy of
Toys Go Out
?

How about . . .
ah-ha!
My old pal the Dustbuster! Mom gave it to me because I love it, and because I begged. I get lots of things that way:

—a gold belt of Winnie's with two hearts that hook together. I think it came from a pirate ship.

—a dragon puppet I gave Dad for Father's Day.

—one of Teensy Baby Maggie's burp cloths because it already
was
mine. It says
TY
on it and everything. So even though it was a handy-down, Mom wasn't allowed to say, “Here, Teensy Baby Maggie, this can be yours now.” It has a football embroidered on it, and a little boy wearing a red cap and a yellow shirt, and it's
mine
.

The Dustbuster is blue and called “The Shark.” It's cordless except when it's plugged into the wall. When the light on the side is red, the battery needs charging. When the light is green, Sharkie is ready to suck up anything in its way.

I kick off my covers and scooch to the end of my bed closest to my dresser. That's where Sharkie lives, plugged into an outlet in the wall.

His charged-up light is green.
Yes
.

I think for a bit, and then I wrap my hand in my sheet. I lean off my bed and
s-t-r-e-t-c-h
over the ocean of carpet, and I almost fall. But I don't!
I grab Sharkie and sit back on my bed. I yank the cord out of its bottom, and when it falls to the ground, a black-and-white paw snakes out and snags it.

I think,
Too bad for you, Sweetie-Pie, because the cord is just a cord
. Sharkie, on the other hand, knows how to roar.

I aim Sharkie under the bed and slide the power button to on.
ROOOOAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

Sweetie-Pie yowls and dashes out. Her fur goes spiky like Tom's from
Tom and Jerry,
and her ears pull back. I hop out of bed and chase her, jutting Sharkie in front of me.

“Hai-ya!” I cry. “Hai-ya, hai-ya!”

Mom yells something.

“What?” I yell back.

Sandra, from her bedroom, yells something.

“What???”

Winnie storms into my room. “Ty!” she says angrily. She snatches Sharkie out of my hand and switches off the power.

The roar dies down.

Now I hear what all the yelling was about, because . . . someone else is yelling, too. Someone who isn't Mom or Sandra. Except actually, the someone isn't yelling so much as making really high fire engine siren sounds.

I suck in a BIG
uh-oh
breath.

“Great, Ty,” Winnie says. “You woke up Maggie. That's just great.”

She spins around to go to get her and passes right by Sandra, who stomps into my room and glares. Sandra is pretty like a princess, but not right now.

“
God,
Ty,” she says. “What is
wrong
with you?”

More stomping sounds come from the staircase. Double-triple uh-oh.

Mom sticks her head into my room. Her mouth is a Magic Marker slash. “Ty, I asked you to do one thing,” she says in a voice even worse than her sharp voice. “I asked. You.
To please be quiet
.”

I take a step backward and almost stumble.

She doesn't care. She says, “And so you turned on the Dustbuster and screamed like a banshee?”

“I didn't—”

“Don't,” she says, and
not
like a Momster. Like a monster. “Just
go,
Ty. Go downstairs and fix yourself a bowl of Cheerios.”

My blood does a weird thing in my head, like
bum bum bum
. Moms aren't supposed to say
just go
.

Winnie returns with Teensy Baby Maggie, who's wailing.

Mom takes her and holds her close and pats her back, and since looking at Mom is scary, I look at Teensy Baby Maggie's bald head. She's not bald everywhere. Just in one round spot.

Baby Maggie's un-bald hair is the color of the dishwashing stuff Mom keeps under the kitchen sink. Pale, pale, very pale gold.

My hair is the color of honey, Mom says, but really it's brown.

“I am going to try—
try
—to rock Maggie back to sleep,” Mom says. “I got three hours of sleep last night, and if I don't get a nap, there's a good chance I'll have to check myself into a mental institution.”

No one speaks.

“Sandra, can I count on you to get everyone to school on time?”

“Yeah. I mean,
yes
. Of course.”

“All right. Fine. Then I'll see you all when you get home.” She turns to go.

“Wait!” I say.

She turns back.

“Hug?” I say in a smallish way.

Mom doesn't want to.
She doesn't want to hug her own son
. I can see it on her face.

Stupid hot wet splots push their way into my eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Mom sighs. She shifts Teensy Baby Maggie to one arm and opens her other arm. I go to her, and she hugs me.

“Kiss?” I say in an even smallisher way.

She kisses my cheek. Then she says, “Now, go. All of you. I love you, but I'm beat.”

Mom shuffles out of my room, and Teensy Baby Maggie—Big Fat
Meanie
Baby!—gazes at me over Mom's shoulder. Her head bobs as Mom walks, and her eyes are wide, like she's surprised.

But I think she's faking.

I think she likes hogging Mom all to herself.

A
t school, when it's time for recess, I have to play with Taylor because Lexie's grouchy at me. She's grouchy because I'm not wearing any rubber bands. I don't have any in my pockets, either.

“Did you forget?” Lexie demanded when she found out.

“I don't want to do rubber-band guns,” I told her. “Let's do something else.”

“I don't want to do something else.”

“We could be Boingees,” I said.

She made a sound like being Boingees was dumb, when she's the one who invented Boingees. Well, we both did. Then she went to find Breezie.

That's why I'm stuck with Taylor.

He says, “Let's do puny arms.”

I say, “I don't want to do puny arms.”

He says, “Then I'm going to put you in a headlock,” and he will, because he has before. And if he puts me in a headlock, I'll have to kick him in the shin, and then I'll have to scramble up and
run
. Then I'll have no one to play with.

So, fine. We do puny arms. We draw our arms up into our sleeves so that our elbows are inside our shirts and the only parts sticking out are our hands.

We slap each other with them, and I laugh. Puny arms
can
be fun, which I forgot. Lexie is over by the fence with Breezie. Even so, I don't look at her. Well, sometimes I do.

“Now let's be robots!” Taylor says. “Robots in a robot war!” He lands a good one on my shoulder.
Thwack!

“Okay, only let's be something else instead,” I say. Because robots wouldn't have puny arms unless their maker made them wrong, and then they'd get thrown in the trash. We
could
be robots in a trash heap, but another idea pops into my mind.

“Let's be babies! Giant babies who can't even talk, and all they can do is go
waa waa waa
and flap their giant puny arms.”

“Yeah!” Taylor says. He turns his body sideways and swats me. “
Waa! Waa!
I'm a big dumb baby!”

“
Waa!
” I say. I swat his hand with mine. “I'm a bigger, dumber baby! Better watch out, or I'll poop on you!”

Taylor scoots sideways. He keeps flapping. “If you poop on me, I'll poop on you. And pee. And stab you with a sword!”

“Yeah?” I say. “Well, I'll throw a
pacifier
at you! A yucky, gross, spitty one!”

Baby Maggie doesn't use pacifiers, but I did. Mom says I had a zillion different pacifiers when I was a baby, and I slept with all of them. She says I'd suck on one for thirty seconds, then spit it out and pop in another.
Suck, spit, pop. Suck, spit, pop
. I think it sounds very cute of me.

Then, when I turned three, Mom told me I had to give my pacifiers to a new child. That was THE LAW, she said, and I remember this part of the story myself. Only Mom didn't really give my pacifiers to a new child. She just put them in a cup on the shelf above the refrigerator. She admitted it after Teensy Baby Maggie was born.

Hmm
. After school I'll ask her to get them down for me, so I can look at them.

Taylor flaps his puny arms. “Passies are for babies!”

“We
are
babies!” I remind him.

He lunges close and thwaps me
hard
. My head snaps back, and Taylor laughs.

“Taylor,
stop and I mean it
!” I say in a not-me voice. I think I taste blood, and inside of me is a big, hot, mad feeling, so maybe it's a mad voice. Super mad, because I don't like it when people laugh at me. Also, I might be getting teary again—for the second time this day!—and I really don't like people seeing my tears.

“
You're
a
big
dumb
bay
-bee!” Taylor chants. “
You're
a
big
dumb
bay
-bee!”

I could tell on Taylor. He'd have to run a lap around the playground. Instead, I walk away. Away from him. Away from everybody. I lean against the big gray trash bin and touch my tooth with my tongue.

It moves.

Taylor made my tooth loose. One of my
top
teeth, the one that's in the exact front. Except I have two front teeth, and Taylor whacked the one on the right, and now it wiggles.

“Ty?” Mrs. Webber says.

I jump. Where did
she
come from?
I quickly wipe my eyes, hoping I'm not tearstained.

“Are you hiding behind the trash can?” Mrs. Webber asks.

“What? No. I just like it here.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Webber says. “Well, can you please be Price's bathroom buddy?”

Price is standing next to Mrs. Webber. I didn't see him till now. He's holding the part of his pants where the zipper is, which I would never do. Which I never
did
do, even in preschool.

“Um, sure. Come on, Price.”

Inside the school, Price walks fast, but with stiff zombie legs.

“It's a bad pee,” he tells me.

I think of my morning pee, and I speed up my walking. We reach the boys' bathroom, and I say, “We made it! Yay!”

Price gazes at me.

I swing my hand at the urinals. “Go on. I won't watch.”

Price keeps gazing at me. His eyes are round and not like Robo-Thing's eyes at all.

“Price? Don't you need to use the bathroom?”

His forehead gets scrunchy-worried, and I smell a smell.
Ohhhhh
.

“All right, um, don't worry,” I say. “You stay here. I'll be right back.” At the door, I glance over my shoulder. “Don't leave.”

He sucks his lower lip and nods.
He'll
be tearstained soon if he's not careful.

I dash to the office and whisper in Ms. Betsill's ear. She is very nice and not mean at all and gives me a brown plastic grocery bag with spare pants and underwear in it.

“We ask parents to donate used clothing for just this sort of thing,” she says.

Back in the boys' bathroom, I hand Price the bag.

He looks inside. “There's underwear in here.”

“And pants. Yep.”

“Bob the Builder underwear.”

I peer into the bag. Sure enough, there's Bob in his yellow hard hat, driving around the underwear in a dump truck. A
dump
truck. Ha.

But Price is still worried, so I say, “I like Bob the Builder. And they're clean, so . . . yeah.”

“But they're not mine.”

“I know. They're loaners.” I show him the waistband of the underwear. “They say
TRINITY ELEMENTARY
, see? You wear them now and bring them back tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Price shifts his weight. “What do I do with . . . um . . . ?”

That's a good question. What
is
he supposed to do with his own underwear and pants?

“I guess put them in the plastic bag? But go to the bathroom first.”

He turns bright red. “I already did.”

Which I already know, but I try to be nice like Ms. Betsill.

“Go into one of the stalls,” I tell him, because there are urinals
and
stalls in the boys' bathroom. “Take your pants and underwear off and put the new ones on. Then put yours in the bag. And then we need to get back to recess.”

Price's face relaxes. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, Ty.”

Within the stall, he makes preschooler sounds—grunts and mouth-breathing and stuff—and I examine my tooth in the mirror.

“Done,” Price says proudly. He holds out the plastic bag. After a second or two, I take it. We both wash our hands.

We go down the preschool hall, and I hang the bag on Price's hook. After that, we go back outside. Price runs off. Then he runs back and hugs me. Then he runs off again.

For the rest of recess, I mainly just stand there. Lexie and Breezie walk by, and Breezie tosses her hair. She links her arm through Lexie's and says, “Boys are so childish, don't you think?”

Lexie looks at the sky. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”

I think about Price, who is a boy. Breezie would definitely call Price
childish,
if she knew what he did.

But guess what? I'd rather play with Price than Breezie any day. I don't want to play with Price or Breezie, but if I had to, I'd pick Price.