The Mighty Quinn (10 page)

“So, your mom couldn't swear off the candy bars?” Mr. Standers chuckled. “I don't blame her. But resolutions don't have to be about giving things up. They can be things you vow to start doing, or things you decide to do better. For example, you might resolve to eat healthier or get more exercise.”

“Those are typical, boring, adult resolutions,” Neally sniffed. “And then there's
my
New Year's resolution. You know what that is, Dad.”

“No, can't say I do. Care to refresh my memory?”

“It's to figure out how to stop bone density loss in astronauts.”

Mr. Standers placed his hands on his stomach and
laughed heartily. “During Christmas break we watched a lot of videos,” he said to Quinn. “The first one was a documentary on the Apollo program. Ruthanne, Neally's mother, decided our holiday video theme should be space travel. We rented everything we could about the subject, and had some interesting discussions about the problems humans face in long-term weightless environments.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Quinn said nonchalantly. What he got was that Neally's resolution wasn't a wacko statement out of the blue, and that his own half-hearted promise to help his sister clean out her rat's cage every Saturday seemed insignificant by comparison.

“Quinn, eh?” Mr. Standers turned his chair backwards and sat facing the kitchen table, his legs straddling either side of the chair's back. “That's a great name.
The Mighty Quinn
.”

Quinn stared blankly at Neally's father.

“You've never heard that?” Mr. Standers hummed a tune that was unfamiliar to Quinn.

Neally groaned, burying her face in her hands. “All oldies, all the time ... you've got to find another radio station, Dad.”

Mr. Standers grinned at his daughter and continued to hum.

“Oh,
that
one,” Neally said. “I recognize the tune, but what's it about?”

Mr. Standers shrugged his shoulders. “It's a song from the sixties, so who knows?”

“The Mighty Quinn,” Neally said slowly. “That's way cool.”

“That's way
not true
,” Quinn muttered. “Could you please not say it in class or anything?”

“So, Neally” Mr. Standers said, “you wanted to know about the Three Musketeers?”

“Who?”

“The ESL students in our class: Arturo, Janos, and Lily,” Quinn said. “The kids started calling them that because the three of them are always together, but no one ever says it in front of the teachers.” He grinned at Neally's father. “How'd you know that name?”

“I didn't, but your teacher did.” Mr. Standers ran his fingers through his beard and lowered his voice. “It's
scary sometimes, to think of what the grownups are aware of.”

“Adults think they know everything,” Neally huffed.

“Your Three Musketeers are a great group of kids.
That
should be common knowledge,” Mr. Standers said.

“I know Arturo, a little bit. He understands way more English than he speaks. He said he'd teach me to say ...” Quinn felt his face heat up. “He said he'd teach me, uh, some names for someone who acts like a jerk.” Quinn covered his eyes and giggled.

“Busted!” Neally exclaimed. “Arturo's going to teach you dirty words in Spanish!”

“No!” Quinn protested. “Not dirty. Just colorful and ... descriptive.”

“Young man, do you have enough ‘colorful' words for the entire class?” Neally spoke like a substitute teacher with a head cold.

Quinn decided a change in subject was called for. “I'm not sure about Janos. He seems happy enough, but I don't think he's learning a lot. About all he ever says is, ‘Duh.'”

“That's ‘da.'” Mr. Standers chuckled. “It means ‘yes' in his native language, which is a Ukrainian dialect, similar to Russian.”

“Janos has the biggest teeth I've ever seen,” Quinn said.

“Big, how?” Neally asked. “Big as in their width, or
length? Or quantity?” Neally looked thoughtfully at her father. “How many teeth do people usually have, at our age? We could look it up, in one of Mom's medical books.”

“No, Janos' teeth are just big,” Quinn said. “You should check 'em out.”

“I'll make a note of it,” Mr. Standers said. “And yes—or ‘da'—it's true that of the Three Musketeers, Janos is having the hardest time learning English. There aren't many resources in this area for foreign languages other than Spanish. Still, he understands more than you might think. And for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why Lily was in the group ...”

“Me too,” said Quinn.

“Me three,” added Neally.

“Until Ms. Blakeman explained it to me. It's not that Lily doesn't speak English. After my first fifteen minutes with the ESL group I could see that her grammar is better than half the kids in your class. She's in the group to get extra help, mainly to work on her pronunciation. Did you know that Lily can speak at least a little bit of five languages? Some Afrikaans, German, French, a Bantu dialect,
and
English. It's not uncommon for people to speak three or more languages in Namibia, which is where she's from.” Mr. Standers ran his fingers around his teacup. “I'd bet there's some interesting stories with Lily's and Janos' families.”

“Tay knew you were talking to Ms. Blakeman about the service project during recess,” Neally said to her father. “He said that all the dumb projects get passed off to the volunteers. How is that going to work anyway?”

Quinn answered, “Every year all the classes do one and vote for a winner. It's going to be even bigger this year. There's a trophy, and a committee of adults votes for the winner, instead of just the students.”

“You're interested in that project, aren't you?”

Quinn felt his face flush under Mr. Standers' attentive gaze. “I guess,” he mumbled, slumping in his chair.

“Your friend Tay is partly right, Neally, but it′s not dumb. In fact, it sounds interesting and worthwhile to me.”

“Me too.” Quinn straightened up. Looking into Mr. Standers' eyes was like sinking into the cushions of a comfy couch. Somehow, Neally's dad understood that the project was important to Quinn. No one else cared about the community service project because it was the one project for which there was no pizza party given to the winners. There was no reward for participating, aside from “the respect of our peers,” as Matt Barker scornfully put it. Josh, of course, agreed with Matt, but Tay did too, and even Sam. And so Quinn felt like a dork for caring about some stupid class project ...

“... but I do.”

“Excuse me?” Neally elbowed Quinn. “You do what?”

Quinn realized he must have spoken out loud. “Nothing.” Quinn glanced at the clock on Neally's kitchen wall. “If Sam isn't here in ten minutes, can we take his muffin to Mickey?”

“Thanks for the bag of muffins.” Quinn waved goodbye to Mr. Standers, who stood on his front porch and blew a kiss to his daughter as Neally and Quinn set off for Quinn's house.

“Mickey loves muffins. Mickey loves anything she can chew. She'll be so excited for the treat she might forget about not getting to come to your house and see your cats.”

“She can come over next time,” Neally said. “She can have Sam's muffin too, if he's a no-show again. What did he say when you called?”

“He said he can't find his piano books, and that he'll meet us later at my house. I didn't know you lived so close; you're just three blocks away.” Quinn looked up at the soft, silvery clouds and shifted his book pack to his other shoulder. “Think it's gonna rain?”

“Yep.” Neally lifted her hands, as if to push up the sky. “Sooner or later, it always does.”

No one responded to Quinn's
I'm home!
when he and Neally opened the front door. “Mom's probably out back. You can leave your jacket here.” Quinn dropped his pack on a wooden bench in the entryway. “I'll show you Mickey's room, upstairs. That's where the rodents are.”

Neally bounded up the stairs. “I've always wanted a hamster, or a guinea pig. I'd settle for a mouse, but Mom says Yin and Yang would find a way to break into the cage, and the mouse would soon be mincemeat.”

It was neither Quinn's hamster nor Mickey's rat that caught Neally's attention when she entered Mickey's room. “Fantabulous!” She pointed to the wall by the closet, where a quilt hung from a wooden rod nailed across the top of the wall. The quilt covered the entire wall, down to the carpet. The quilt's background was a pink cotton cloth, with an overlay pattern composed of a series of interlocking circles made from patches of multicolored fabrics.

“Grandma Andrews, my dad's mom, made it for me before I was born,” Quinn said. “See how the circles overlap? That's called a double wedding ring, which is a famous quilt pattern. We call this the Hamster Patch Quilt. Grandma told dad she knew his first child would be a girl ...”

“Ha! What'd I tell you? Adults think they know everything, even when they're wrong.”

“... so she made the quilt's background pink.”

“Why is it the Hamster Patch Quilt? The circles don't look like hamsters.”

“I used to keep the cage on a table at the end of my bed. One day, Peppy the First ...”

“The First?”

“All of our hamsters have been named Peppy. It's a tradition. Anyway, I used to have the quilt for a bedspread, and one morning I threw the covers back too far, and Peppy reached through the bars of his cage and got hold of the quilt. When I got home from school, Mom said I had to check out the fanciest hamster nest in the world. A bunch of colored shreds were mixed in with the wood shavings in his cage; Peppy had made his nest from parts of the quilt he'd chewed off! He was so proud of what he'd done. He kept running onto his wheel and then back to his nest, to make sure I saw it.”

“You have to be kidding me.”

“I kid you not.” Quinn pointed to a corner of the quilt where a pink patch of cloth covered a segment where two rings intersected. “Mom made this patch, to fix the part Peppy chewed up.”