The Mealworm Diaries (2 page)

Jeremy flinched.
Is he talking about me?
He looked up, relieved to see Mr. Collins waiting to hand him a mealworm. He opened his fingers and allowed the teacher to place the worm into his waiting palm. The mealworm whipped back and forth a few times before it lay still and Mr. Collins moved on.

The mealworm was small and kind of yellow—not even as long as Jeremy's little finger. It was thin and dry to the touch. Jeremy noticed that each time he moved his hand, the mealworm folded itself in half and whipped around again. After a bit it wriggled into a crack between two of his fingers and slid through. Jeremy caught it in his other hand. No problem. The mealworm didn't move all that fast.

“I'm going to call mine Superman,” he heard Aaron say when Mr. Collins reached his desk. “Yeah, Superman!”

The teacher was speaking softly, waiting for what seemed a long time before he put a mealworm into Aaron's palm. He stayed, holding Aaron's hand for a while longer before he let go. Even then he didn't walk away.

Jeremy put his own mealworm down and leaned forward, his chin on his desk, and stared. He noticed a small brown dot, like a freckle, on his mealworm's body, just behind its head. “I'm gonna call you Spot,” he whispered. The mealworm squirmed. Jeremy waited for it to lie still again, and then he blew on it gently. He noticed that the mealworm wriggled each time a breath of air hit its body.

His observations were interrupted when Aaron shouted, “Fly, Superman, fly.” And before Mr. Collins could stop him, Aaron's hand whipped back and his mealworm came sailing across the room in a long arc. Without thinking, Jeremy reached up and caught it.

“Fly ball! You're out, Aaron!” Tufan called. Kids laughed and clapped.

“Great catch, Jeremy,” Horace said.

Jeremy flushed. He glanced at Karima. She was smiling.

Aaron began making hyena noises as if what had happened was the funniest thing ever. He jumped up and down beside his desk; then he fell into his chair and rocked back and forth, clutching his belly as if it hurt.

“New score, Aaron,” Mr. Collins said when the class was settled again. “Jeremy two, Aaron nothing.”

Aaron looked confused. “What? What does that mean?”

“It means,” Mr. Collins said, measuring out his words, “that you've tossed your mealworm away. Since Jeremy caught it, I think it's only fair that he keep it.”

There was a howl of protest from Aaron and snickers from some of the kids, but Mr. Collins ignored them.

Jeremy reached out to corral the two mealworms that were now making their way toward opposite sides of his desk.

THREE

It wasn't fair. Mr. Collins had said, “I'd like you to work with a partner,” and the next thing Jeremy knew, everybody was talking and pairing up. Jeremy turned toward Horace, but he was nodding at some other kid who had called, “Horace! Horace!” from across the room, and when he looked at Tufan, all he got was a frown.

A sick feeling settled into his stomach. Voices swirled around him, but not one of those voices spoke his name. He saw Karima look his way and felt his windpipe close. For one terrible second, he thought she might ask him to be her partner, but she turned to another girl just before he had to gasp for air. He wasn't sure if he was relieved or disappointed.

The classroom noises settled, and still nobody came to say, “Do you want to work with me?” They were all paired up.

Fine,
Jeremy thought.
I don't care. I don't need a
partner.
But even as he lifted his chin, he felt his shoulders droop. A prickly feeling at the back of his eyes forced him to blink. He took a deep breath and sat up.
I am not gonna cry. Not on the second day in this school.
Not ever.

He glanced up to find Mr. Collins watching. Would he say, “We're going to rethink the partners you've chosen”? Or something else…anything that would mean he wouldn't have to be the one left over.

Mr. Collins' gaze turned to Aaron.
Oh no. No. Not
Aaron.
The teacher raised an eyebrow. “Well, Jeremy,” he said, “you and Aaron seem to be the only people without partners. Since you're the keeper of Aaron's mealworm, you get to decide if you're willing to work with him or if you'd rather keep both worms and work alone.”

There was a howl of protest from Aaron, but Mr. Collins kept his eyes on Jeremy, who was beginning to feel that everybody else was watching too.

“Loser,” Tufan called out.

Jeremy's stomach clenched at the word, but it was Aaron who began to screech, “Am not! Am not! Am not a loser! I'm smart. I'm smart! I'm smarter than you are!”

There were snickers.

“That's enough,” Mr. Collins said firmly, and he frowned at Tufan. “I'll talk to you later,” he said. Then he turned back to Jeremy.

“Well, Jeremy?” he asked.

Jeremy looked over at Aaron, who was now tapping his pencil against the edge of his desk. “Can…can I work alone?” Jeremy began. “Can I work alone if it turns out we don't work well together?”

“I can live with that,” Mr. Collins said. “Can you, Aaron?”

Aaron shoved the eraser end of his pencil right up inside his nose and grinned like a gargoyle.

FOUR

As it turned out, Aaron wasn't all
that
bad to work with. Not if you ignored the fact that he repeated everything he said, and if you didn't mind that he jiggled like a Jello boy. He never sat still. But he had ideas. He was full of ideas.

“Count the sections. Count them,” he said, as he hovered over Jeremy. “How many are there? How many?”

“I don't know. More than ten. It's hard to tell,” Jeremy said. “It moves all the time.”
Just like you
, he thought.

Aaron bent down to see too, his nose so close to the mealworm it was almost touching. “Lookit his legs. Lookit his legs. Can you see them? Can you see them? Can you?”

“Not with your head in the way,” Jeremy said. He was surprised when Aaron actually moved aside and gave him a chance to examine the mealworms with the magnifying glass. “I think there are six,” he said.

“Six? Six legs? So it's an insect. It's an insect. Insects have six legs. Here. Lemme see.” Aaron grabbed the magnifying glass.

Jeremy sucked in a mouthful of air. His fingers curled into fists. This kid was such a pain. In his old school, he'd never have worked with anybody like Aaron. He'd have told him to get lost, or drop dead, or…well, maybe not.

He remembered the time he'd threatened to punch out Charlie Hill because Charlie shouted, “Jer, Jer, the Teddy Bear,” after him in the schoolyard. His father had chuckled when Jeremy complained at home.

“Life is easier if you ignore the dipsticks,” he had said. So Jeremy did his best to ignore the teasing, and after a while Charlie got tired of calling him names and stopped. He sighed. Maybe he could ignore this kid too.

Aaron didn't make it easy. “It pooped. It pooped. Lookit. Lookit. See? My mealworm pooped right on your desk.”

When Jeremy looked, there was a black spot in the middle of his desk, smaller than the period you'd put at the end of a sentence. Was it a mealworm dropping?

Other kids came over to examine the spot too, until Mr. Collins called out, “That's enough now. Let's get back to work.”

But Jeremy heard, “Ewww. Right on his desk,” and there were giggles.

After a while the teacher came around again, handing out small metal pudding tins, the lids peeled away. Each tin had a little bit of brown stuff at the bottom. “Bran,” Mr. Collins explained.

“Can't they get out? Can't they get out?” Aaron asked.

“I don't think so,” Mr. Collins said. “The sides are smooth and straight, and I'm hoping they'll like the food so much they won't try to escape. I'm not sure what the caretaker would say if we let an army of mealworms loose in the school.”

A few of the girls said “Ewww!” all over again, but the boys chuckled.

Aaron huffed when Mr. Collins refused to give him a tin of his own. “It's up to your partner,” he said, handing Jeremy two tins. “He's the keeper of your mealworm, remember?”

Then he raised his voice so the whole class could hear. “Use a marker to print your name and your mealworm's name on the side of the tin, and then tidy up and begin your journal entries.”

Jeremy passed one tin to Aaron and printed the name
Spot
on the second. When he finished, he saw Karima wiping her desk with a couple of wet paper towels. She didn't say anything, but when she was done she handed them to Jeremy, so he wiped his own desk. He was happy to get rid of any mealworm poop, even if it was almost invisible. Tufan reached for the towels next, and then everybody got towels and followed their example. Jeremy felt better. Maybe his desk wasn't the only poopy one.

When Aaron left, Jeremy wrote everything he could think of in his mealworm diary, and he made a quick sketch of two mealworms sitting up as if they were having a conversation. One was wearing little square glasses; the other had a big letter
S
on his chest and a little cape across his shoulders.

Karima's laugh made him look up. “That's really good,” she said.

He smiled and a warm feeling settled into his chest. There was something about her…was it her eyes?

Whatever it was, it made all his Aaron troubles seem less important.

FIVE

“Man, it sucks to be you,” Tufan said as they lined up for recess. “Aaron is such a creep.”

Jeremy chuckled his agreement, but when he saw Aaron watching, not three feet away, he stopped. He didn't like the kid, but he didn't want to make fun of him either. To keep from saying anything else, he stepped to the side and knelt to retie his shoelaces as the line of kids swirled by him and out the door.

When he got outside, he found himself surrounded by a whole lot of kids he didn't know. He saw Karima looking at him and he turned away, afraid she might call him over. When he glanced back, she was unfolding a skipping rope. It wasn't long before he heard a familiar
slap, slap, slap
beating out the song she and her friends were singing as they skipped. He wondered how they'd feel if he asked to join them. He was good with the ropes, really good. But from what he could see, in this school skipping was only for girls.

There were other groups of kids nearby. Some were playing foot hockey. None of them were paying him any attention. At home somebody would have asked him to join in, or he would have walked over and said, “Can I play?” At home he never stood alone. At home he knew everybody.

He looked out into the field beyond the pavement and saw the boys from his class in the baseball diamond. By the way their arms were waving, he was sure they were arguing.

He'd found out yesterday that they played something called soccer baseball. Horace said real bats and balls weren't allowed in city schools, so they played a game with baseball rules, kicking a soccer ball instead of hitting a baseball with a bat. He waited to see if somebody would wave him over. Nobody did.

He turned, spotted the sign for the boys' washroom and thought about going in there. Would it be easier to hide in the washroom than to stand alone in a crowd? He shook his head, lifted his shoulders and headed for the diamond. He'd stand and watch if he had to. It was better than spending recess beside a urinal.

“Hey, Jer,” Horace called as he came closer. “Where'd ya go, man? C'mon. We need you to make even teams.”

To his surprise, Tufan yelled, “He's ours.” And then, “Go play third base.”

Jeremy smiled as he walked to his place.
That's all it
takes to get a good spot on the team,
he thought.
One good
mealworm rescue.

It wasn't until the first kid was standing at the plate that Jeremy noticed Aaron. He was crawling on his hands and knees at the edge of the diamond, combing the grass with his fingers as if he was searching for something. Obviously he didn't play with the guys.

The game went fast. The boys kicked and caught and passed the ball easily. It was a good game, and Jeremy soon got into it. When he had a runner on third, waiting to race home, he watched the kid at the plate angle himself and he knew the ball would come his way. He got ready. The boy kicked hard, but instead of a long drive, the ball rose.

“I got it,” Jeremy called, his eyes on the ball. He positioned himself, arms ready. It would be an easy catch. He stepped back, and back again, and swayed to correct his stance. There were shouts, but his whole body stayed focused on the falling ball. He raised his hands for the catch, took another step back and fell, his arms windmilling. He landed heavily on a body—Aaron's body—as the ball bounced into the dirt beside him.

There were cheers from the other team as three runners, one behind the other, crossed home plate, but his own teammates were hopping mad.