Two Naomis (2 page)

“Why did your mom leave the no-head ladies here?” My best friend, Annie, and I are packing up what was once Mom's sewing room. And what Dad promises will soon be our library/TV/music/relax-and-also-we'll-be-allowed-to-eat-in-there room.

“You can't take no-head ladies on a plane,” I explain. “There are rules about what you can take on planes.” Mom, by the way, doesn't call them no-head ladies. To her they are the mannequins. Or dress forms. Also, they aren't only missing heads. They have no arms or legs either. She uses them when she designs costumes, which is her job.

“I know about planes,” Annie says. “I went to North Carolina
last summer, and they didn't let me bring the milk shake I had just bought through that security thing, which makes no sense, because what problem is a milk shake going to make?”

It's a good question.

Mom went to California three months ago because she was offered a great job making costumes for a movie. She had to get there in a hurry. She brought what she knew she'd need right away: sketch pads, her laptop, her lucky eraser. Months before that, when Mom and Dad got separated and then divorced, she wasn't in such a hurry. And she still hasn't moved all her sewing stuff out of our house. So now we're packing it up to send to her, because it looks like she's going to be in California for a while.

Annie and I have been working for almost an hour, and the room doesn't look any more like a library/TV/music/relax-and-also-we'll-be-allowed-to-eat-in-there room than it did before we started. Well, one box is filled up with ribbons and material and thread and stuff—that one's ready to be taped and labeled.

“Gnomes, we should take a break.” Without waiting to see if I agree, Annie pats a no-head lady on the shoulder and heads toward my room.

No one but Annie calls me Gnomes. To be honest, I always thought she was calling me Nomes, a pretty good nickname for Naomi, which is a really hard name to nick. But one time she handed me a note, and she'd written “Gnomes” because she thinks those ugly little elf things some of our neighbors have on their small front lawns are actually cute. Whenever she says it, I hear it as Nomes. Because Nomes is better.

“Wanna ‘read'?”

“Reading” is different from regular reading. It started when Annie's grandparents sent her family a huge box of books. Annie and her brothers were excited—there were so many books! But they were all in German—which no one in her family speaks. Annie never figured that one out. But it was the beginning of our “reading” tradition: Annie takes a book with lots of pictures and tells the story of the pictures. She does it with our English-language books too. It's why I kept so many of my old picture books.

She moves my old stuffed animal Lambikins and slides a book out of my bookcase. “This,” she says, “is the story of a mouse in a dress and red shoes beneath a banana tree.” I know that's
NOT
what the story is, but she's right—that's what the cover shows.

I smile.

“A baby mouse sleeps in a crib beneath a duck. And sleeps some more. Then lots of things happen that aren't interesting.”

She starts laughing, because this is one of our favorite books from when we were little, and everything in it was incredibly interesting to us then. And the thing about Annie is that she never laughs a little. I know I'll be waiting awhile for her to continue, and even though I try to keep a straight face, her laughing makes me laugh too.

She tries to get it together. “The girl mouse writes a word over and over and then dances with three butterflies.”

That sets me off, because the butterflies are just in the art and have nothing to do with the story. But then she drops the book, says, “I'm hungry,” and is off.

Annie has the refrigerator door pulled open and is staring inside, like she lives here. I love that. She
should
live here. She'd be my perfect sister. And she'd definitely rather have me for a sibling than Leo and Chase because,
ugh
. Her brothers are gross.

Dad looks miserable, with envelopes and letters spread all over the table. Then he piles the papers up and shoves them into a big folder. “Hungry?” he asks. Because of the refrigerator hint. And because we're in the kitchen. And because Annie is always hungry.

“Wait. Naomi, did we have lunch? Were we supposed to give Annie lunch?” We don't go hungry, my dad and me, but I'm pretty sure there are some days when we have five meals and some when maybe we have two or even one and also a lot of snacks. Dad and I are champions of snacking.

“I'm fine,” Annie says, straight into the refrigerator. “Ate before I came over.”

“I had an apple,” I say. I don't mention that I cut it and arranged the pieces around a big puddle of chocolate syrup, because Dad thinks apples and chocolate don't go together, which is all kinds of crazy.

“You know what you should do?” Dad asks. He doesn't care that we don't answer. “You should go outside.”

Annie is still standing in front of the open refrigerator, looking in, not moving.

“It finally dried out from all the rain. You can take a break from packing up Mom's stuff. Or are you done? Is it ready to go?”

I shake my head no and gently close the refrigerator, pulling Annie out of the spell she seems to have fallen under. I grab a bag
of popcorn from the pantry and say, “Come on.”

My backyard is tiny, but I love, love, love it. Our house is attached to another on one side—it's called a row house—but it's also on a corner, so it gets a lot of sun. It has an old swing set that Annie and I have played on forever, and everything about it fits us exactly right.

In the back corner, where the sun shines for most of the day in the summer, I have my own garden. Last summer I grew strawberries and tomatoes. I loved picking them when every last bit of green faded away and they were the perfect shade of ready-to-eat red. When they're ripe, you almost don't have to pull—they practically drop into your hand. It makes me so happy to watch tiny little plants with a few leaves grow into . . . food! And I love the way the big leaves on a tomato plant smell like tomato even before there's the tiniest little tomato growing there.

Annie grabs a soccer ball (it's hers, but she keeps it at my house) and kicks it in circles around the tree. Yes, our tiny perfect backyard has a tree. Only one. But in the spring, in just a few weeks, it will bloom with pink blossoms, and two years ago there were actual apricots that were beautiful. They tasted awful, but they were great to look at.

“Next weekend, on Saturday, do you want to come over?” Annie has what I call soccer feet. She usually can't keep them still. But now she stops the ball and lies on her stomach on the swing next to mine. Like a little flying superhero, she pushes up. “It's Chase's birthday party so we're skipping soccer, and Mom said you could come.”

I'm smiling and nodding yes, because it's what I WANT to do, but I'm also remembering that Dad said next Saturday I have to meet a lady, not the no-head kind. Someone he has been seeing a lot. She has two kids, daughters. And for some reason, it's really important that we have a meal together.

“I wish,” I say. “I have to go with my dad to have lunch with Valentine, I think her name is. His new lady friend.”

“Lady
with
a head probably, right?”

“Probably.” I smile. Annie's the best. The best best friend.

And without even saying a word, because that's how it is with best friends, Annie kicks the soccer ball to its spot by the back door, and we both go back inside, to Mom's sewing room. Because I want to be there, and Annie somehow gets that. I really want to be with my mom, but being with her stuff is better than not being with her at all.

“Why aren't you wearing a fancy dress?” asks Brianna for the seven hundredth time. “Momma said this was a special 'cay-zhun. That means ‘fancy.'”

“I haven't decided what to wear, and it's
o
ccasion, and it's not, actually. It's only lunch. With Tom.” I turn away and mutter, “Big whoop,” so she can't hear.

“I'm telling,” sings Brianna, who has magic supersonic ears whenever I don't want her to.

“Of course you are,” I answer. Momma is wearing the long skirt she got at the Dance Africa festival last year. Like it's a holiday or something! “Come on, you have to clean up all these Legos and clay,” I say.

“I can't. I'll mess up my fancy dress. If you put yours on, then neither one of us will have to clean up!” Brianna happy-dances, and I join her for a few seconds because that's pretty good thinking for four years old. I've taught her well.

Still. “It doesn't work that way,” I say, holding out the Legos bin. Being four must be nice. I don't remember. Because ten is all about being responsible. Like cleaning up your room to play nicely with Tom's daughter, though she may not even be capable of playing nicely. But no one is thinking of that, are they? No, they aren't.

Momma has been so nervous and jumpy and making fancy Thanksgiving food, even though it's nowhere near Thanksgiving, just because Tom and his probably mean daughter are coming over today. I even had to miss my Saturday-morning library visit! Which is always a great follow-up to my Friday-afternoon visit, because lots can happen in between. But nooooo, even though Tom's daughter probably hates libraries, I have to be neat and polite. And I will. Because I am responsible. I will hold my head high like Queen Nefertiti and smile (only a small one) and remember to put my napkin in my lap, but I will not, I repeat, NOT wear a fancy dress. Take that, mean library-hating daughter of Tom-who-needs-to-make-his-own-lunch.

She is not even dressed up! Tom's daughter has on a purple shirt with a bear holding a sign that says California, and old jeans, and she's carrying a gray sweatshirt. What she doesn't have is a smile, and I'm standing there with mine on, all big and fake just like
Mrs. Banco on the first day of second grade, right before she yelled at Sarafina Wilson for crying.

In addition to my smile, I have on my skating jacket and leggings with the cool red swirls. I'm actually a little hot, but I think my skating outfit makes me look strong and confident, like a girl in a poster. Plus it has a tiny hole that no one but me knows about. So there. I do have on the dangly gold earrings Nana gave me, which I usually save for special occasions, but also for days when I need to be brave. I almost wore my “Daddy's Girl” T-shirt. But that would be mean, and I don't want to be mean, like Tom's daughter probably is.

“Hi, guys, come on in,” says Momma in a really loud voice.

Which is maybe why, when Tom's daughter says hi, it seems really quiet. I
hope
that's why and not because she has, like, quietude, which is a good way of pretending you're behaving when you're actually thinking uncooperative thoughts. I can beat anyone at the quietude game. I narrow my eyes.

“Hi, girls!” booms Tom, like a ringmaster.

“Hi!” Brianna yells back. So I say hi too, in my quiet-but-not-quietude voice, because Momma is giving me a look.

They start taking off their shoes, and I look down. “Hey!” I blurt out. “I have those in red!” Tom's daughter has green high-tops with purple laces, the same ones I got last week. I point to mine on the shoe rack by the door.

“Cool! I got mine last week,” she says, and there isn't any attitude, so maybe she's only feeling the same way I am, which is WEIRD.

“You have good taste,” I say, and I smile a real smile, to make things a little less WEIRD.

We all move into the living room and stand looking at each other until Brianna flops down on the couch; then everyone else fake-laughs and sits down.

“Well, isn't that funny,” says Momma, glancing at Tom. She laughs a tinkly, fairy godmother laugh just like Mrs. Driscoll before she gave us that pop quiz on all the bridges in New York City. Tom laughs too, and clears his throat.

“What?” me and Tom's daughter say. At the same time. Heh.

“Well,” says Tom, “it's quite funny, because we already have quite a coincidence here. . . .” He trails off.

“Dad, it's not like they only made one pair,” his daughter says, and we catch each other's eyes because, PARENTS. Once Momma met some lady at the bodega who was buying the same brand of toilet paper and had a son who used to go to my school, and they were all, What an Amazing Coincidence. And when I said that actually it didn't seem that remarkable to me, all I got was a side-eye from Momma and no points for using the word
remarkable
in a sentence.

“Oh, it's not the shoes,” says Momma. “It's, well . . . we thought this would be
such
a
funny
little surprise for you girls. We've been waiting to tell you. . . .” She trails off too, and I can tell Tom's daughter is getting as scared as I am, because we both say “WHAT!!!!????” in very loud voices.

Momma and Tom look at each other again, and oh my goodness, if I were stalling like this, Momma would be calling
me
Naomi Marie
, which she usually does when she's either really mad or really glad about something I did.

“Naomi, meet . . . ,” Momma starts in a low voice, like when she's about to tell me that we're actually not going out for pizza but having leftovers instead.

“Naomi!!!!” Tom finishes, like he's actually taking us out for pizza. Which he isn't.

Whoa. He must be really nervous. Naomi? He can't even remember his own daughter's name. A teeny tiny bit of
Poor Tom
pops up in me.

“What's
her
name?” Brianna says, pointing to Tom's daughter.

“That's it!” says Momma, laughing harder and faker. She grabs Tom's hand, which makes me not feel that
Poor Tom
for him anymore. “Naomi, meet Naomi!”

“We have two Naomis!” Tom says, smiling like he just got birthday cake on a regular day.

Wait,
what?!!!

Brianna starts to cry.