The Life of Ty: Penguin Problems (4 page)

W
hen I get home, I tell Mom about my loose tooth. She's supposed to say, “Oh my goodness!” and be shocked. Instead she says, “Yeah? That's great, Ty.”

That's
great
? She is not listening. She's fixing dinner, and Baby Maggie is strapped to her like a caboose. I mean papoose.

“No, because it didn't get loose on its own,” I say. “It's only loose because Taylor hit me.”

“What?!” Mom swivels. Baby Maggie swivels with her. “
Who
hit you?”

“Taylor! Right in the mouth! I
told
you!”

She comes over to look, and she says, “Oh, sweetheart. My poor baby!”

I'm not a baby, because Maggie's the baby, and even so, I'm seven.

But I don't mind.

Just this once.

She hugs me, and in the middle of it, she sniffs my head. “Ty. You have
got
to take a bath.”

“I think I'll pass, but thanks for the offer,” I say politely. I'm not a fan of baths.

“Wrong answer, bug,” Mom says. “You don't want to be the kid who everyone says, ‘
Ooo
, he smells' about.”

“Yes, I do.” Except I think about Price, and I know she's right.

“Bath. Tonight. Especially since you have a field trip tomorrow.”

“The field trip isn't tomorrow. It's the day
after
tomorrow. Did you buy my Lunchable?”

“Not yet. I will. Now back to Taylor. Did you tell a teacher he hit you?”

I shrug.

“Maybe you should hang out with someone else during recess,” she suggests.

Maybe, but who? Lexie was doing rubber-band guns. And it was fun being Big Fat Babies until Taylor whacked me.

I remember something, and my brain lights up.

“Hey, Mom? Can you get down my old pacifiers?”

“Your old . . . ? No, Ty. Why in the world do you want your old pacifiers?”

I eye the cabinet above the fridge. “Please?”

Teensy Baby Maggie
pluhs
. Mom groans. There's a dribbly bit of yuck on her shirt.

“Ty, I'm trying to fix dinner
and
take care of Maggie,” she says. “I can't do everything.”

“I just want to see them.”

“Not now.”

“When?”

“I don't know, Ty. When you can get them down for yourself. Why don't you go play on your Wii, okay?”

Because I don't want to play on my Wii. I want to see my old pacifiers
.
And since Mom said “when you can get them down for yourself,” then I will.

Because I can.

I drag a stool over to the fridge.

“Ty, don't you climb on that,” Mom warns, even though she's facing the sink. She thinks stools are only for sitting on, because they're high and the seat part is just a round circle. But I have very good balance. I
might
be a circus person one day.

But, fine. I'll climb on the counter. Mom doesn't think counters are for climbing on, either, but I
know
they are. Otherwise why would they be there?

I hear Dad pull into the driveway, which isn't the best news. Dad also doesn't think counters are for climbing on. But the good news is that the garage-door-opening noise will cover up my climbing sounds.

Vrrrrmmmmmm
. The garage door rattles, and I backward bottom-hop onto the counter by the fridge. I twist around, get to my knees, and rise to my feet
.
So far, so good, even in my socks.

Clunk clunk clunk
. That means the garage door is almost open, because that sound isn't supposed to happen. Dad keeps saying he needs to get it fixed.

With my left hand, I hold on to the cabinet closest to me. With my right hand, I reach for the cabinet above the fridge. My arm isn't long enough, so I stand on my tiptoes and use finger nudgings to coax it open.
Come on, cabinet door,
I tell it
. That's right. Just a little farther.

It opens! On the shelf is a glass bottle filled with brown stuff, and next to that is the hot glue gun. Behind the hot glue gun is a six-pack of Perrier. Behind the Perrier is . . .
yes
! A plastic kids cup from the Olive Garden with pacifiers sticking out of it!

The garage door thunks to a stop. I hear Dad's car door open, I hear Dad's door shut. I hear the garage door start to go down. All of this means
hurry
.

I pretend I do have an extendable arm, and I grope for the Olive Garden cup. I'm touching it . . . I've almost got it . . .
come on, come on
—

The back door opens, and one second later—
half
a second later—Dad's deep voice says, “
Ty. Get off the counter
.”

I almost fall from being startled, but I catch myself, and I don't give up on my mission. “Mom said I could! Mom said if I could get them myself, then I could!”

“Excuse me?” Mom says. Then, “Ty! What are you
doing
up there?”

My finger wiggles over the rim of the cup.

“
Ty,
” Dad says, coming my way. “When I tell you to do something, I expect you to do it.” He
lifts
me off the counter, and my scrambling fingers tip over the Olive Garden cup. The cup and the pacifiers clatter to the floor.

“Go to your room, Ty,” Dad says. “You just earned yourself a break.”

I kneel and gather the pacifiers. There are a lot of them, seven or eight, and they have cute pictures on them. A car. An elephant. A teddy bear.

“But, Dad . . .” I say.

“Keep arguing, and it'll be even longer.”

I bundle the pacifiers in my shirt and go upstairs. Well, not all the way up, but far enough that they can't see me.

I don't like being sent to my room.

“Sorry, Joel,” I hear Mom say. “I didn't know what he was doing. You have no idea how long a day it's been.”

Dad lets out a big breath. “Well, I shouldn't have snapped at him. He scared me, that's all.”

“It scared me, too. And just so you know, I did
not
give him permission to climb up there.”

What? Yes, she did.

“He needs more attention,” Mom says. “The baby . . . me being tired all the time . . .”

I get a tightness in my chest. I scooch one step farther up.

“Don't worry, Ellen. Ty is okay, and you're okay. We're all okay.” There's a smooch sound. “But I'll go talk to him.”

His footsteps come toward the stairs, and I scurry to my room. I shove my pacifiers under my pillow just in time. Phew!

Only, Dad passes right by. He said he was coming to talk to me, but he doesn't. He just passes right by.

• • •

Here is what I learn about pacifiers. I like them! When I suck one, it's like something safe is pressing up close.

Another interesting thing is their smell. They smell like my pillow, when I first wake up.

I hold the green teddy bear pacifier to my nose and breathe in. Then, right at the very second when I've stopped expecting him, Dad appears out of nowhere. I shove the green pacifier under my leg. The others are by my crossed legs. I swoop them behind my back.

“Hey, bud,” Dad says. “Can we talk, man to man?”

“Okay. How was your day?”

He settles himself on the edge of my bed. “Having a new baby in the house . . . It's a big change, huh?”

“No.”

He studies me. He's got beard stubble on his chin.

“Are you doing okay with it?” he asks.

“What ‘it'?”

“The new baby. Baby Maggie.”

“Baby Maggie's an ‘it'?”

Dad bows his head. He breathes. He looks back at me and says, “I know she takes up a lot of Mom's attention. And she cries sometimes. But she's kind of cute, don't you think?”

“Like seaweed,” I mutter.

“
Seaweed?
How is your sister like seaweed?”

“The way her arms wave about. Like seaweed deep in the ocean.”

“Ahhh. But your sister is a little girl.”

My face warms up. I never said she wasn't.

We sit there. Finally, Dad smacks his hands against his thighs and pushes himself up. “Well, try to help your mother out. Don't cause her any trouble. And why don't you give me those pacifiers, huh? I think it's time we got rid of them.”

“Why?”

“Because pacifiers are for babies. And you, Ty, are a big guy.”

“I won't
use
them. I just want to
keep
them.”

Dad holds out his hand. “C'mon, buddy. Pass 'em over.”

My stomach tightens.

His hand stays where it is.

I scowl and give him the seven pacifiers that were behind my back. Greenie is a hard plastic lump beneath me. So? I don't look at Dad, because I don't even want to.

“Thank you,” Dad says.

“Don't throw them away,” I say. “I want to give them to my own children one day.”

“Ty,” Dad says wearily. “When you have kids, you can buy them new pacifiers. These are too old.” He tugs on the rubber tip of the blue pacifier,
and part of it comes off
. What's left is a ragged hole.

Dad looks shocked. He stands up straighter and says, “See? If a baby was sucking on that, the baby would have choked.”

I dig my fingernails into my palms. I would have
never
ripped off the head of my blue pacifier. Also, I want to touch the torn part. But I can't. Dad would say no.

Dad puts all the pacifiers into his pockets, plus the scrap of rubber that used to be part of the blue one. The way he does it says,
There. Done
.

What he doesn't know is that I still have my green one.

A
fter school the next day, Sandra takes me to Piedmont Hospital to visit my best friend, Joseph. Piedmont Hospital is where Teensy Baby Maggie was born, so I know all about it; plus I've visited Joseph before. I even have permission to visit Joseph without having a parent with me. Sandra drops me off at the front entrance and says she'll be back in an hour.

I wave at the nurses in the Pediatric Ward. They wave back. When I get to room 512, I peek through the crack to see if Joseph's mom is in there, and when she isn't, I barge in and go, “Boo!”

Joseph jumps in his hospital bed and screams like a girl. Or a dolphin. They sound the same.

“Hi,” I say, grinning.

Joseph grins back. “Hi. Do it again.”

So I go, “
Boo,
” and he screams like a dolphin. We crack up.

And then we just talk. About gum-by-the-foot, about a mole on one of the nurse's cheeks, about alligators and how they let their meat rot before eating it. Joseph reads a lot, so he knows all kinds of stuff.

I tell him about Lexie, and how she was mad at me, but how she isn't anymore. He tells me his white blood cells are getting better, and I say, “That's awesome.” I
really
want him to come back to school.

When it's time for me to leave, he says, “You stink, by the way. Like, smelly-stink.”

I look down at myself. I sniff.

“It's okay, though,” he says. “I don't care.”

“I don't care, either,” I say. I kind of do and kind of don't. “I was supposed to take a bath last night, but I didn't.”

“Cool.”

“I'm not going to take one tonight, either. I'm going for an Olympic record.”

He gives me a thumbs-up and lies back against his pillow. “Cool.”

• • •

I'm a man of my word and
don't
take a bath that night, just like I said. Mom tells me to right after supper, but I hop into bed instead, and then ka-boom! I wake up and it's Thursday, the day of our field trip! Sharks! Starfish! Beluga whales!

I wake up so excited, and then
whoosh,
my excitement gets sucked out of me, like someone sucked it out with a giant Dustbuster. Only not a fun Dustbuster.

First, I find out that Mom forgot to buy my Lunchable, and that I have to bring a juice box, an apple, chips, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a stupid plastic grocery store bag. When I get mad, she says, “Ty, I hate to break it to you, but the world doesn't always revolve around you.”

That makes me madder, and also hurts my feelings, because saying that is like saying I'm acting like a baby, when I'm not.

Then, at school, Lexie is back to being more friends with Breezie than with me. Breezie's mom, Mrs. Hammerdorfer, is our chaperone, and Lexie wants to show off by being Breezie's specialiest friend. That's what I think.

Even so, I try to win her back.

“Hammerdorfer,” I whisper in her ear as Mrs. Webber has us line up by the door of our classroom. “
Hammer
dorfer.”

She pretends not to hear.

“Someone should only have that name if they smash things with hammers,” I whisper.

“Ty, hush,” she says, without whispering. “It's not nice to make fun of people's names.”

Mrs. Hammerdorfer pinches up her lips at me.

“‘Hammerdorfer' is an old German name,” Breezie says prissily. “The Hammerdorfers come from great wealth. Do you come from great wealth, Ty?”

I stomp on her toe, only not really. I
do
pretend she's a bug, and not the cute kind.

“Mmm-hmm,” she says, like she knew it all along.

The third bad thing is that the sand shark exhibit isn't open, so we can't pet the sharks, and the fourth bad thing is that the beluga whales stay in their special private area and don't come out. I really wanted to see their giant, marshmallow bodies. I didn't know how much until now.

“Can we stop and eat lunch?” Lexie asks after she, Breezie, Breezie's mom, and I have walked around the aquarium for five thousand hours.

“I think that's a fine idea,” Mrs. Hammerdorfer says.

There's an eating area in the middle of the aquarium, with puffy green sofas and chairs, and we plop down and pull out our lunches. Lexie has a Mini Hot Dogs Lunchable, and each mini hot dog has its own mini bun. Breezie has a Grilled Chicken Wrap Lunchable with a special Lunchables Brigade trading card. She gets Abel the Super Inventor, the rarest trading card there is.

I eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and don't even care.

Lexie whispers something to Breezie.

“Hey, Mom?” Breezie says. “Can we go to the gift store?”

My eyes fly to her, then to Lexie. Then to the gift store, which is across the way.

Breezie's mom glances at the other kids scattered around the food court area. Most of them are still eating. She glances at her watch and says, “I suppose.”

I yelp.

“What's wrong, Ty?” Lexie says. Her eyebrows go up innocently, but there is a glint in her eyeballs that says,
You keep your mouth shut about Mrs. Webber and her stupid rules, mister.

I breathe through my nose, loudly and quickly.

“You sound like a bull,” Lexie says.

“Do not.”

“A bull shark,” Breezie says. “Also known as the Zambezi shark.”

Her mother looks at her like she's a miracle. I look at her like she's a Zambezi bug, and not the cute kind.

“Anyway, are you coming?” Lexie asks.

“I haven't finished my chips.”

She gets up. So does Breezie. “Okay, bye,” they say, and they flounce off.

Mrs. Hammerdorfer pats her mouth with her napkin and folds her napkin into a small square. “I'm going to chat with Jordan's mom for a bit,” she says, and
she
gets up and goes to another sofa with another mom on it.

So now it's just me and my Fritos and the crusts of my sandwich. And a juice box. I'm not angry at the juice box, but I'm not
happy
at it, either.

I put a Frito in my mouth and chew chew chew while I watch Lexie and Breezie through the gift shop's glass window. There are breakable things in there like glass whales, which I would like to hold and which they
are
holding. If they break one, they could get in big trouble. Our whole class could get in big trouble!

Nobody likes a tattletale, but Mrs. Webber needs to know what Lexie and Breezie are doing. I'll just
mention
it, that's all. I shove my lunch trash into my backpack. I peek at Lexie and Breezie—yep, still in the gift shop—then go to Mrs. Webber's group.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Webber?”

“Hi, Ty,” Mrs. Webber says. “Are you having fun?”

“Uh-huh. But I need to tell you something.”

Hannah, Chase, and Taylor gaze at me. Taylor is always in Mrs. Webber's group because none of the parent chaperones want him.

“Yes?” Mrs. Webber says.

“Well,” I start, “it's just that Lexie and Breezie went to the gift store, and you said not to, and . . . well . . . yeah.”

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Webber says. She sounds annoyed, but not
terribly
annoyed. She glances toward the gift store. So do Hannah, Chase, and Taylor. So do I.

“Lexie's about to do the claw game!” Taylor announces.

He's right. Lexie and Breezie are over by the game where zillions of stuffed sea creatures live in a big glass case. To play it, you put in two quarters and use a joystick to move a steel claw around. You have twenty seconds, and then
bam,
the claw drops down and closes. If it grabs on to something
and
carries it all the way to the chute, then the stuffed animal drops through the chute and you get to keep it.

“My dad never lets me do that game,” Hannah says. “He says, ‘You're just throwing your money away.'”

“I'm not allowed, either,” Chase says. “Even with my own allowance.”

“Because the claw never holds on to anything, even it if grabs it,” I say. “Nobody
ever
wins. Right, Mrs. Webber?”

“Should I go stop her?” Hannah says. Hannah likes stopping people.

In the gift shop, Lexie digs around in her pocket. I want Mrs. Webber to hurry and tell Hannah, “Yes, go stop her and tell her she's in big trouble.”

But Mrs. Webber smiles a funny smile. “You know what? Let's let the situation play out on its own.”

“Huh?” Hannah says.

“You kids are right,” she say. “Lexie and Breezie aren't supposed to be over there. When they lose their money, maybe they'll learn a lesson.”

Will they lose their money AND get in trouble?
I want to ask. I want Mrs. Webber to give them a lecture and make them take a time-out.

Lexie slides her quarters into the machine. The claw starts moving. Lexie leans forward, working the joystick.

“She has one! She has one!” Hannah squeals when the claw closes around a black-and-white dolphin. I see Breezie bring her fists to her mouth. I bet she's saying, “
Eeeee!
”

“She has
two,
” Chase says in awe.

I squint. The claw, when it goes up, is clutching the black-and-white dolphin
and
a fuzzy blue dolphin.
Two
dolphins. Two dolphins in one claw.

“She still has to get them to the drop-off spot,” I say. “She'll never get them to the drop-off spot.”

She gets them to the drop-off spot. The claw sways, but holds tight.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Webber murmurs.

“Come on,” Hannah says. She's up and dashing toward Lexie. Chase and Taylor follow. The claw opens its metal fingers
and both dolphins drop straight into the chute
.

“Yes!” Lexie cries. I can hear her from the eating area. She tugs the dolphins out of the bin and does a victory dance. “Oh, yea-ah! Oh, yea-ah!”

My mouth hangs open. Something twists in my gut, like a snake. An ugly snake. A jealous snake.

“Oh, that's just fantastic,” Mrs. Webber says, I think just to herself. “Nobody ever gets the toy.
No
body.”

The other kids in our class are hurrying over to Lexie.

“So much for natural consequences,” Mrs. Webber says. She glances at me. “I suppose it's time to do some damage control, huh, Ty?”

I shrug. I don't know what she means, and the snake inside of me is a mean snake, and anyway, Lexie won
two dolphins
. That's not damage. Plus, it's too late to control, because it already happened.

“You coming?” Mrs. Webber asks.

It's the same question Lexie asked.

“No thanks,” I say. I sound like a robot. I feel like a robot. I feel like I'm not me.

When Mrs. Webber heads to the gift shop, I turn and walk the opposite way.