The One and Only Zoe Lama (5 page)

The next evening,
I’m lying on my bed studying for my French test, and thinking
caniche
doesn’t really sound like it should mean “poodle” in French. It sounds more like some sort of greasy pastry filled with duck meat and walnuts. Just when I’m realizing France messed up poodles’ reputations even more by inventing that crazy pom-pom haircut, a warbling sound comes from my computer. An instant message!

I race to my computer hoping it’s from Riley. But it isn’t.

g-ma: yo zo ☺

I stare at the message, trying to figure out who g-ma is. Could it be Gina Mercer from health class? I answer…

zoelama: heeeyyyy

g-ma: met qt @ bingo

Bingo? What kind of seventh-grader plays bingo? Even more curious—since when are cute guys at bingo?

zoelama: ?name?

g-ma: ♥ Fritz ♥

Good grief. It’s worse than I thought. This is exactly why I discourage my clients from running around bingo halls. They’re drafty, crowded, and full of gamblers and boys named Fritz.

g-ma: he likes cigars

Gross!

zoelama: gina–I no Rodney broke yor ♥ last year but u cant lower yorself like ths. Unwritn Rool #20 clearly st8s: Smokng is Despcble and Loathesm.

g-ma: ?whoz gina?

zoelama: U!!

g-ma: Im GRANDMA!

zoelama: grandma? wat r u doing online?

g-ma: rofl, signed up 4 a class—Seniors on Surfboards

I try to imagine Grandma sitting at a keyboard in her flowered housecoat and curlers.

g-ma: g2g…nos!!

zoelama: ?nos?

g-ma: nurse over shoulder!

I sit back in my chair, stunned.
My
grandma
, who’s only been in Shady Gardens Home for Seniors for a month,
has turned into some kind of instant-messaging hipster
who picks up cigar-smoking, gambler boys named Fritz. And she calls herself g-ma!

The thing about Grandma is—she has Alzheimer’s. Which sometimes makes her do and say some pretty wild stuff. But now that she’s in a special home, Mom and I know she’s safe. So…maybe it’s not such a bad thing that she’s having a bit of fun. What’s the worst that can happen? That her curlers start to stink from Fritz’s cigar smoke? Suddenly I’m happy for her. My grandma is getting a life.

And, other than the g-ma part, it’s kind of cool that Grandma is IMing, since I’ve missed being able to ask her for advice. Like with this whole Devon thing—Grandma is about the only one who would know exactly how to make me feel better.

zoelama: Grandma? U ther?

zoelama: g-ma?

She’s gone.

“Aagh!” My mother wails from the kitchen.

I tear out of my room to find her on her hands and knees, beating the linoleum floor with our dish scrubber. “Bugs!” she says. “A whole revolting family of them.”

I look back into the hall to see a small brown insect with a shiny shell crawl out from under the wall. He stops and acts confused—like he expected to be someplace else and is disappointed—then wiggles his antenna thingies at me. Before my mother sees him and scrubs him to death, I try to poke him back under the wall. But I guess he likes what he sees in our apartment, because every time I poke at him, he runs around my finger so he can get back into the room. He scoots right past my sock and zooms—

WHACK!

That’s the thing about bugs—they never listen.

“I’m telling you, this building is falling apart!” Mom says. “The elevator, the front door, the incinerator, and now roaches?” She looks at me like I should have an answer.

But all I have is a question. “What’s wrong with the incinerator?”

She murders another bug. “There’s something stuck in the chute. I have to go down to the fifth floor to dump our trash or it gets stuck. This never would have happened when your father was around, I can tell you that much!”

I scoot closer and drop down onto my knees.
Stories about my father,
who died before I turned five,
are pretty much my favorite thing in the world.
“Why? Were roaches scared of him?”

“No. But he’d have made sure the owner did a better job of running this building. And if things didn’t improve, he’d make sure we moved someplace else. Like when we moved here. Our last apartment had walls so thin we could hear our neighbors snoring. It kept me up all night, so your dad found us this place. And do you know what sold him on it?”

“Thicker walls?”

She smashes a bug, then smiles. “Well, that was one thing. But it was very important to your father that you be able to see Hunter’s Park from your bedroom window. You didn’t want to move from our old place because you were madly in love with the little French boy down the
hall. He used to wear a powder-blue sweater with a woolly elephant on the front and pom-poms on the shoulders. Anyway, we couldn’t afford a place really close to the park, but your dad made sure that when you looked west, you could see a nice sliver of greenery peeking out from between the buildings.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. You were the number one most important thing in the world to your dad.”

If you have to miss a dad, it would be easier if he was a dad who thought you were, say, the third most important thing in the world. Or even the second. Knowing he loved you that much is kind of like torture. You know everything you do for the rest of your life would have been better with him around. How could it not? I mean, even if I
was
in love with a little French boy with bad taste in sweaters, moving here must have been so much easier because of that sliver of green. Which makes my stomach queasy.

“He would never want you to grow up like this. With groaning elevators and bugs.”

“I didn’t hear the bugs groaning.”

Mom puts her hands on her hips and shoots me an exasperated look.

My stomach kind of flutters. “We’re not moving, are we?”

“Sadly, no. We can’t afford a place better than this.” She stomps down on another bug, but—lucky for the bug—she misses. The bug scoots under the oven. “Listen, I’m expecting my book club any minute and I’m going to need your help.” She hands me the dish scrubber, which has brown roach guts in the bristles and I hope is going into the trash. “You are going to have to be on duty. I do not want my friends to know we have bugs, so
please
kill them quietly. And whatever you do, don’t let any roaches crawl into the living room.”

H
alf an hour later, I’m parked on the kitchen floor with my homework spread out on the floor in front of me. But I’m making absolutely no progress because I have the dish scrubber in one hand and the phone in the other.

“So then…” Susannah says with her mouth full. I don’t have to ask what she’s eating. She just got back from her agent Sammy’s office, which happens to be right above the best donut shop in the city. “Then Sammy tells me
that if I get this Neutrogena facewash commercial, I’ll have weight.”

Huh? “Because of the donuts?” I smack the floor and frighten a bug, who takes off under the fridge.

“No. I’ll have power. Clout. He says if I land this ad, he’ll bump me up to actress. Not just model. He’ll send me out on auditions for TV shows, movies, you know. Big stuff.”

“Wow. You could hang with Hollywood brats instead of regular brats like me and Laurel. Hang on a sec…” From the living room, I can hear my mother and her book-club ladies swooning. I peer around the corner to see Susannah’s mother holding up the cover of her book, which has a muscly, long-haired guy standing on a cliff with his shirt half blown off. Which is weird, because I always thought book-club people read classic books, like
Tom Sawyer
or
Pride and Prejudice.
I’ve never heard of book clubs picking books like
Stormy Passions.
All the ladies study their covers, which are exactly the same, and start saying things like:

“No, I bet he does ab crunches,” and

“Oh, he definitely uses a cross-trainer. You can tell by his core!” and

“I’m looking, I’m looking.”

“Sus?” I whisper into the phone. “Our mothers have seriously lost it. Did you see their crummy book?”

Susannah laughs. “Yeah. The guy on the cover is a total doof. Come on, his name is Thunder!”

“And why is he all oily?”

“I actually don’t mind the oil. It makes his muscles pop.”

“I guess so. But what’s with his shirt? You can’t tell me it was made without buttons. Or that the wind is so strong it ripped them off. I seriously hope when we’re old we never get this desperate—”

There’s a big gasp in the other room. I peek again and right away see the problem.
A very large bug,
maybe the grandfather of all the other cockroaches,
is crawling over the toe of the very fanciest lady’s shoe.
I drop the phone onto the floor with a clatter, and tear into the living room. All of the women freeze as they watch the roach crawl past the other feet and veer back toward the kitchen. No one says a word.

I quickly scoop him up in my hands and laugh. “Oops! My science project is escaping!” Just as I scoot the heck out of
there, my mother catches my eye and mouths, “Thank you.”

Then I hear her say, “Sorry, Lorraine.”

W
hen the ladies finally leave, I’m still on the phone with Susannah, who is worrying because Friday is pizza lunch at school and she can’t afford to get a pimple from pepperoni grease. As Susannah lists all the horrible healthy crap she plans to bring for lunch instead, I watch Lorraine slip my mother a business card. “Call me,” she says, laying her hand over my mom’s.

My mother stares at the card, confused.

Lorraine asks, “Have you considered moving?”

“Are you kidding?” my mom says. “Only every day of my life. But I seriously doubt I could afford much better.”

Lorraine winks. “Call me. Housing prices have really dropped. You might be surprised at what you can afford.”