Better Than Weird (9 page)

The waiting room was filled with people. There was an old man in bedroom slippers slumped in a wheelchair; a woman pacing the aisle, crooning to a crying baby; a man cradling an arm wrapped with a bloodstained towel; a girl in tight jeans yelling into the pay phone: “It's not my fault! I was puking all night. What did you want me to do?”

“Sit there,” Gran said, pointing Aaron to one of two empty chairs. She stood over him until he was settled before she sat down herself.

“How long do X-rays take?” Aaron asked.

Gran shrugged. “Depends.” She peered at him. “Are you feeling dizzy or sick or sleepy or anything?”

“Uh-uh.” Aaron started to shake his head, but thought better of it. “It only hurts if I do that.”

“Then don't do that,” Gran said, and for a moment her worry lines softened and she grinned.

He opened his eyes wide. “Do my pupils look big? The nurse said that if my pupils are delated I might have a concussion.”

“Dilated. If your pupils are dilated.” She peered at his eyes. “Yours look fine to me. You look a little tired.”

“Yeah. I'm tired.” He yawned, then giggled when Gran yawned too.

“A concussion,” he said. “That's like…that's like a crack in my head, right?”

“Sort of.”

“If I have a concussion, will my brains leak out?”

“Stop it. Your brains won't leak out.”

“But if I did? If I did have a concussion? Would I be a nut with a crack?”

“You're not a nut.”

“I'm different.”

“Everybody's different.”

Aaron sighed.
Yeah. Mostly not as different as me.

* * *

“There's a crack in this bone,” the doctor said, and he showed Aaron the X-ray of his arm and the broken bone. “We'll put a cast on it. You'll be fine in no time.”

He gave Aaron a choice of colors. Aaron picked the white one. “Then everybody can sign it,” he said. “Jeremy and Mr. Collins and my dad. And you, Gran. You can sign it first.”

The clock at the nurses' station read eleven thirty by the time they were getting instructions about how to take care of the cast. Aaron leaned on Gran as the nurse's voice droned on. His eyes burned with tiredness.

Behind them, the big emergency doors whooshed open. A gust of cold air came through as paramedics wheeled in a woman wrapped in blankets. She looked old and frail behind the oxygen mask that covered her face. Her skin was as gray as her hair.

The paramedics wheeled the gurney to a spot beside the wall. One took a clipboard and went to talk to the triage nurse. The other stayed, checked the mask, then turned to talk to a man in a green uniform.

The old woman's eyes opened and darted from side to side. She's scared, Aaron thought. Her face looks scared
.

Her head turned, and when her frightened eyes found his, he jumped in his seat. It was Tufan's grandmother. He recognized the long gray hair that lay bunched on her pillow. He looked around, expecting to see Tufan nearby. He wasn't there.

The woman's hands fumbled under the restraints that held her to the gurney. She pulled one free and reached out. Aaron got up and walked to her side. He put out his good hand and felt her tiny, bird-bone fingers close around his. Small as they were, her fingers felt hot and strong as they grasped his hand.

“I got a cast,” Aaron said, lifting his right elbow a little. “See. The doctors…they're really nice. They'll take care of you too. They'll make you better.” He tried to smile. Her fingers fluttered. She pulled them back.

“Aaron?” Gran called.

“I gotta go,” he whispered. “But don't worry. They'll take good care of you.”

He was behind Gran, walking toward the exit, when the emergency doors whooshed open. They stepped aside to let a woman rush through. Behind her came Tufan. Aaron saw them hurry toward the gurney. He saw Tufan lean his head toward his grandmother. Her tiny hands reached out and patted his face.

FOURTEEN

When Gran said, “I suppose it wouldn't hurt you to miss one day of school,” Aaron sighed in relief. At home, he wouldn't have Tufan to worry about.

For a while he tried working on his space project, but without Jeremy, building a space city wasn't much fun. Besides, even opening the lid of a paint jar was hard with one hand.

“I'm bored,” he complained when he went back upstairs. “Why don't we have a television, or…or a game system or a computer? Then I'd have something to do. Everybody else has that stuff.”

“Not everybody,” Gran said. “We don't.”

Aaron huffed. “You never want anything new.”

“That's all I need,” she said. “Another expensive gadget I don't know how to use.”

“You know how to use a tv. We had one before.”

“We did. And
you
know why we got rid of it.”

He cringed. When they had a tv, Gran had complained because all he wanted to do was sit and watch. She kept making him turn it off. Once she even pulled the fuse, but Aaron, who knew about fuses, put it back. That annoyed her. Then last year, when she found him watching a movie in the middle of the night, she got really mad.

“It's two o'clock in the morning!” she had stormed. “You should be in bed.” And on the next garbage day, she asked a neighbor to carry their set to the curb. Out it went, and it was never replaced.

“I was a kid then,” he argued. “I didn't know any better. Why can't we get a new one now?”

“It's one less problem for me,” Gran said, and she refused to say any more about it.

Aaron stomped into the living room and slumped to the floor in front of the couch. He sat cross-legged and began rocking back and forth as he continued the argument in his head:
My dad. My dad will let me have
a
tv
. Probably he'll let me have a computer and an iPod and other stuff too. Dads are better than grandmothers.
My dad is.

His argument went on until he heard a voice from the kitchen radio. The voice was talking about how to make soup. “You can't make soup without onions,” it said.

“You can't make soup,” Aaron repeated, making the words match the beat of his rocking. Soon he was chanting:

You can't make soup,

You can't make soup,

You can't make soup,

Without ooon-ions.

When Gran came in to call him for lunch, she looked at him and said, “I think you're probably good to go back to school after you eat,” and nothing he said changed her mind.

* * *

Everybody noticed the cast as soon as he walked into the classroom. There were a lot of questions. People wanted to know what happened. Everybody except Tufan. He didn't ask anything. And every time Aaron looked his way, Tufan looked down.

That afternoon, Karen called for Aaron. “I was worried about you this morning,” she said. “You hardly ever miss school. What happened?”

“I slipped,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. “Really?”

“Yeah. I was running and I slipped.”

“You have to be more careful,” she said. “Snow and ice can be treacherous.”

“Yeah. I could've cracked my head or something.”

Karen studied his face.

“What?” he said. Her look was making him nervous.

“I was thinking about something you said last week,” she said. “Something about running away so you wouldn't get hurt. Remember?”

Aaron looked away from her probing eyes.

“And you mentioned Tufan. You said he made a mad face at you.”

“Yeah.” He looked up again. “That was when the snake got out and Mr. Collins said we should look for it, and I found it at the back of the room. Tufan was surprised. And then…” He paused. “Then he made a mad face.”

Karen waited. When Aaron couldn't stand the silence a moment longer, he said, “Jeremy said probably Tufan was surprised 'cause I wasn't scared. 'Cause I picked up the snake. He said, ‘Probably Tufan is scared of snakes.' Some guys are. And girls. Mostly they don't like snakes. And when I was holding it, I maybe held it too close to Tufan, and he jumped up and his chair fell over. And everybody laughed, and then he was… you know…he was mad.”

“Did he threaten to hurt you?”

“I…I didn't say that.”

“No, you didn't.” She tilted her head and peered at his face. “If he did, and you told me, I'd be able to help.”

Aaron looked at Karen. She was small for a grownup. And she was skinny. Tufan was pretty big. Probably he was stronger than her. Aaron didn't want anything to happen to Karen.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?”

“I'm okay.”

“Well, good. I'm glad you're okay,” Karen said. After a pause, she added, “I want you to know that Tufan is going to start coming to see me too.”

“But…but…but,” Aaron stuttered, panicked at the thought of sharing Karen with Tufan.

“I'm telling you so you'll know it has nothing to do with you,” she said. “You'll both come on your own. And besides, everything you've told me is private between us. I don't share the things I know. Okay?”

Aaron peered at her face. “What does it look like when somebody tells the truth?” he asked.

Karen's face turned pink. “Look at me,” she said. “See my face? That's what truth looks like.”

Aaron shook his head. “Sometimes I don't get it.”

“What don't you get?”

“Like, how come sometimes people smile and they're not happy at all? And sometimes they sound mad, but their face looks all smiley. How come?”

“Hmmmm.” Two small lines appeared on Karen's forehead, one on each side of her nose. “That's a good question,” she said. “I'd have to say that reading faces isn't a perfect science. It doesn't work exactly the same for everybody. Some people react differently. They might smile when they're nervous or worried, or even scared. It's not something they can help. You just have to know them to tell if they're smiling happy.”

Aaron nodded. He was going to watch Ms. Masilo and see if he could tell when she smiled happy.

Karen walked Aaron back to the classroom. As she dropped him off, she asked for Tufan.

“No problem,” Mr. Collins said. But it must have been a problem for Tufan, because he stomped all the way to the door, and before he left, he turned his thundercloud face at Aaron. Aaron knew what that meant.

FIFTEEN

For the rest of the afternoon, Aaron watched the door, wondering when Tufan was coming back.
He looked
mad when he left
, Aaron thought. Would he be more mad when he came back? The end-of-the-day bell rang, the closing announcements finished and Tufan still wasn't back. Aaron wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.

As the class got ready to leave, Mr. Collins came to sign his cast. Jeremy and Horace and some of the other kids signed it too. One of them was Karima. When she wrote her name, she drew a happy face instead of a dot over the letter
i
in her name. Aaron hoped that meant she wasn't mad at him anymore.

He was putting his speller into his backpack when he overheard Horace talking to Jeremy. “Our names are on the helper board for Thursday,” Horace said. “Mr. Collins wants us to come in early and clean out the fish tank, but I can't. I have to bring my little brother to daycare and pick him up after school. Can you do it without me?”

“I can do it,” Aaron jumped in. “I can clean the fish tank.”

“You've got a cast,” Jeremy said. “You probably shouldn't get it wet.”

“I won't get it wet. I'll use my good arm.”

Jeremy looked at him. “Yeah. I guess. If you want to,” he said. “We have to be here early, like at quarter after eight.”

“Okay! No problem,” Aaron grinned. He was glad he had come back to school after all. He felt good about the whole afternoon until Mr. Collins said, “Aaron. Your name's on the detention board.”

“I have to…I can't stay in,” he called out.

Some of the kids snickered.

Mr. Collins said, “I'm still missing your math sheet from yesterday, so unless you have a note, I'd like you to stay until that's done.”

Note. Note.
Aaron shook his head. “I…I don't have a note,” he squeaked, as panic filled his throat. “And…I don't know where it is. The math sheet. I think I lost it.”

Mr. Collins shook his head. “Why don't you have a look in your desk and see if it's there.”

“I can't…I don't know…”

The dismissal bell rang, its buzz vibrating in his ears. Mr. Collins motioned for the front of the line to go. “You might as well start looking while I walk the class out,” he called back as he left.