The Manny Files book1

The Manny Files

Christian Burch

Atheneum Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Christian Burch
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Kristin Smith and Jessica Sonkin
The text for this book is set in Egyptian 505 BT Roman.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burch, Christian.
The Manny Files / Christian Burch.—1st ed.
p.   cm.
Summary: A shy young boy learns how to be more outgoing and self-confident from his male nanny.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-0039-9
ISBN-10: 1-4169-0039-X eISBN 13: 978-1-439-13618-8
[1. Nannies—Fiction. 2. Sex role—Fiction. 3. Self-confidence—Fiction. 4. Family life—Fiction.
5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B91583Ma 2006
[Fic]—dc22   2004026957
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Thank you to Alexandra Fuller and Caitlyn Dlouhy for helping me bring this farther than I could have done alone.

You probably won’t remember it later, but my name is Keats. I’m the smallest boy in my class. Actually, it’s worse than that. I’m the smallest
person
in my grade. My third-grade teacher never calls on me for answers because she can’t see me. I sit behind a tall girl with red poofy hair.

I wish I had red poofy hair.

My hair is the same color as dead grass in November.

My teacher is named Ms. Grant. Ms. Grant is from the South and says things like “y’all” and “fixin’ to.” My older sister Lulu was in her class a few years ago. Whenever we have to write a book report or do an art project, Ms. Grant shows us one of Lulu’s old assignments as an example. When we made snowflakes to hang from the ceiling, she pulled one out from her closet that was covered in colorful sequins and battery-operated Christmas lights. Ms. Grant said, “Y’all, this was made by Keats’s older sister,” as she pointed to Lulu’s school picture on her bulletin board.

The girl with the red poofy hair raised her hand and asked, “Who’s Keats?”

I wasn’t looking where I was cutting and cut myself with the scissors.

I had to go to the school nurse to get a Big Bird Band-Aid.

Lulu is president of the seventh-grade class. Mom calls her an overachiever. Lulu hates the sound of some words, like
saliva.
I made her cry once by writing the words
panty hose
on her math homework. One Halloween she used mascara to paint her eyebrows together, and put on a colorful dress that Mom bought for her in Mexico. She made a heart out of clay and carried it around. She said that she was Frida Kahlo, the tragic Mexican painter. I dressed up as a television news anchor. Instead of saying “Trick or treat,” I said, “Our top story tonight: Children across America dress up in elaborate costumes in hopes of receiving handfuls of treats. More on this story after you give me some candy.” Nobody knew what I was supposed to be.

My other older sister, India, usually dresses up as a butterfly for Halloween. In fact, most of the time she looks like a butterfly. She wears bright, rainbow-striped tights and flashy hair
bows. She’s the only girl at our school who carries a purse instead of a backpack. At the last parent-teacher conference her fourth-grade teacher told Mom and Dad that when she had asked India what she wanted to be when she grew up, India’s response was, “I’m just going to get by on my looks.” Dad laughed and Mom kicked him underneath the table. Dad thinks that India is going to be a brilliant clothing designer someday.

Dad says the word
brilliant
a lot.

India has a sign on her bedroom door that says,
DO NOT ENTER, THIS MEANS YOU, BELLY.
Belly is my three-year-old baby sister, whose real name is Mirabelle. We call her Belly because she hates to wear clothes. One time my mom took Belly and me to the mall to buy me the bow the that I wanted for my birthday. It was silk with yellow and blue stripes and looked exactly like the one that I had circled in the catalog. When we were inside the mall, Belly screamed with glee and ran to the fountain that was filled with glittering pennies on the bottom. I used to scream and run to the fountain when I was littler, but now I just racewalk. My mom dug through her purse for a penny so that I could toss it in and make a secret wish. While Mom was struggling to find a penny, Belly stripped naked and, before we could stop her, was stealing other people’s wishes from the
middle of the fountain. The grandmothers who were walking laps around the mall pointed and laughed at my sister’s bare bottom bobbing up and down as she looked for pennies.

Mom grabbed Belly from the fountain and said, “You’re crazy,” like what she had done was cute.

I threw my penny in the fountain and wished I were an only child.

My dad does business. It looks like fun because he gets to wear a suit and read the
New York Times.
Mom picks out his clothes for work, but I get to pick the tie. Dad says that he always gets compliments on his ties because I have brilliant taste.

Grandma thinks I have brilliant taste too, except she says that I have a “good eye.” One time when we visited Grandma’s house, I took her a picture that I had painted for her in school. It was an orange and red striped box with a person standing next to it. When I gave it to her, she said, “Oh my, I completely get this piece. It’s about getting outside of the box. I love it. What do you call it?”

“
Outside of the Box,
” I said, even though I hadn’t really named it. I thought Grandma’s interpretation was much better than the real reason why I had painted it (boxes and people are easy to paint).

“Masterpiece,” said Grandma.

She didn’t hang it on the refrigerator with the rest of the grandchildren gallery. Instead she made me sign and date it, and she put it in a frame. She hung it in her living room right next to a painting that Mom did when she was little. Grandma says that I inherited my artistic ability from my mom. She also says I got my mom’s big forehead.

Mom says that a big forehead means you have a big brain. She uses her big brain at the museum downtown where she’s a curator. She’s in charge of hanging artwork for shows. Whenever I go with her to work, I get to bring home a postcard or coloring book from the museum shop. One time I brought home a postcard with a Picasso painting on it. Picasso paints like I do, with noses and eyes all over the place.

My mom and dad are very smart and very busy, so we have a nanny who helps us.

We have had a lot of nannies.

Our first nanny was named Mary. Mary loved my sisters. When they were little, she used to dress them up in bright, frilly dresses. Mom thought they looked pretty, but Dad said that they looked like piñatas.

“Did it make you want to hit them with sticks?” I asked.

Dad giggled when I said this.

Mary gave Lulu and India hairdos and painted their fingernails and toenails. She gave them necklaces and bracelets with fancy diamonds and jewels hanging from them.

She gave
me
dental floss.

A few years ago Mary got married and had a baby. She sent Mom a picture of the baby. She was bald and looked like a boy except she had a pink bow Scotch-taped to her head.

Then there was Madge. Madge was as old as Grandpa Dub, my dad’s dad. Grandpa Dub came over to visit us a lot more when Madge was there. Once when my sisters were gone to piano lessons, he told me that Madge was a tall glass of water and that he was thirsty.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but he winked at me when he said it. I think it must have been code. Grandpa was in a war where they had to use code.

Grandpa and Madge liked to hold hands, and I even saw them kiss. Lulu said that Madge had passed out and Grandpa Dub was giving her CPR. Madge passed out a lot. They got married in Las Vegas and moved to Florida to practice CPR.

After that we went through nannies faster than Belly could strip naked. I heard my uncle Max say that once. There was Jenny, Heather,
Patty, Maggie, Judy, Amy, and Sue. Sue forgot me in the grocery store once. My sisters loved almost all of our nannies, but they all seemed like Miss America contestants to me. I used to imagine them saying things like, “Hello, I’m Sue and I’m from Kansas, the Sunflower State. Although I have a very busy life riding the unicycle, picking up litter alongside the highways, and rescuing abandoned kittens, I still find the time to brush my teeth for two minutes every morning and every night.”

I got used to playing alone while my sisters played with the “nanny of the month.”

That’s what Uncle Max called them. Uncle Max is my favorite uncle. He’s my only uncle, but even if he weren’t, he’d still be my favorite. He likes it when I walk on his back to crack it. It’s my job because Lulu and India are too big and Belly is too little. Uncle Max says I’m perfect.

One rainy Monday I was coloring with Belly on the living-room floor. I was coloring a Keith Haring picture in my new pop art coloring book. Belly was actually coloring on the living-room floor. I was getting ready to tell on her when the doorbell rang, and Housman, our dog, started to bark and ran upstairs. Housman isn’t like other dogs. He runs away from the door and hides in my bedroom when the doorbell rings. Mom
answered the front door, and a man shook her hand. When she invited him inside, I saw that he had a bald head and wore glasses like mine, the dark-framed kind that make a person look very smart and serious. I once saw a whole article about architects and their dark-framed glasses in the
New York Times.
That’s when I decided that I wanted a pair.

The visiting man was wearing a button-down blue shirt that was tucked into his jeans. He had a leather belt that matched his driving moccasins. I had seen the same brown driving moccasins in the L.L. Bean catalog last month. They looked even better in real life. The bald man wore them without socks, and his ankles were tan and had hair on them.

Lulu had run out of her room to see who was at the door. She always thinks that the telephone and doorbell are going to be for her. She recorded our answering-machine message. It says, “Hello. You’ve reached the Dalinger family. Lulu’s not home right now. Please leave me a message.”

Mom started to introduce the bald man to us, when he politely interrupted and said, “Oh, please call me the manny. It’s what kids have always called me, and now it’s become my stage name. Like Cher or Madonna or Charo. Or you
can call me by my J. Lo name, T. Man. Or Puff Manny.”

I wondered if Manny was short for Manuel. He didn’t look Latino.

Mom continued introducing the manny to us. India curtsied when she shook his hand. India had started curtsying after she watched
Gone with the Wind
on television. She’s named after one of the characters. Belly curtsied too. I just shook his hand and noticed his fancy watch with the brown leather band. After we were introduced, Mom told us that the bald man was going to spend the day with us and that if things worked out, he would be our new nanny.

A man might be our nanny. A male nanny. A manny. No wonder that’s what he wanted us to call him. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to rush to the bathroom to pee, but I didn’t want to miss Lulu’s reaction to the news of the man nanny.