Dear Opl (2 page)

It didn't.

Mom had just rented space in an old building she wanted to turn into a bookshop and was up to her earballs in work. She was always mumbling about how hard it was trying to get money from Dad's life insurance policy, and until she did, she had to keep working as many shifts at the library as they would give her.

It didn't matter. I couldn't imagine any amount of money that could help with the new bookshop. The place was a dump, boarded up for years. And our town was desperate for a bookstore since none of the big chains were allowed to mess up our dead presidents' ground. She wanted to get the shop open before Christmas, in less than four months, but it was probably way more than she could handle. This was why we never had dinner together, like they do on TV.

Mom ate at her desk, which is an old card table she bought at a garage sale and set up in the corner of the kitchen. Ollie and I ate at the kitchen table, scattered with all my homework, textbooks, and library books. And now, my laptop as well. And G-pa ate in his chair, reading his online newspaper before catching the Evening News with Gina Jacobs.
THAT'S ONE CLASSY DAME WHO DOESN'T TALK TURKEY
, he wrote after her interview with the first lady.
SHE
KNOWS
HOW
TO
GET
TO
THE
REAL
PERSON. SHE GOES RIGHT TO THE
UNDERNEATH.

I'd bet Gina Jacobs is a great mom. She doesn't talk to people about what they're wearing or how their hair looks. G-pa was right. She sees their insides.

I heard Mom crumple up the wrapper from a breakfast bar—her dinner—and watched her toss it into the garbage beneath her desk. She looked at the garbage for a few seconds and then went back to work.

“Don't forget to start that blog, Opal honey. Remember to write down all the things you eat to keep track of them.” Mom waved that hand around in the air again without looking up from her papers and then tucked some of her blond hair back on top of her head with a pencil.

I wished I had hair like Mom. Not the way her hair looked now, but the way it used to be. Happy hair. Perky. Mine is the color of muddy water. Mud has a hard time being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I keep it in a ball, all bunched up in back, so I don't have to see any of it fall down around my shoulders. I never look at mirrors anymore. It's not that I have a huge nose or ears that stick out or even eyes that grow too close together. I have all the right features in all the regular places. Except now, I have two chins.

I dragged the laptop close to my dinner plate and noticed a new email from G-pa.
I
DO
N'
T THINK YOU NEED TO WRITE A GROCERY LIST OF FOOD AS IT DISAPPEARS DOWN YOU PIEHOLE. USE THE FORUM AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE USED. BLOG IS JUST A FANCY WORD FOR VENT. GO FOR IT.

If I thought about it, I'd have to say that Mom sees the inside of me too. But it's only the inside of my stomach, so it hardly counts in my opinion. It never used to be that way. Before Dad died, the first thing she noticed about me every day was my smile or my eyes or the fact that it was about time for another hug. Not that I had chocolate above my top lip and
how
come?

I decided to take G-pa's advice. For the next half hour, I followed the directions my computer gave me to set up a blog. It was super easy. I don't doubt Mr. Muttonchops could have done it himself. As a reward, I tiptoed over to the pantry and pulled out a few of the Oreos. Mom was wrestling with her own computer problems, so she didn't hear the plastic crinkle beneath her stream of grumbles. One of G-pa's eyes caught both of mine, and I watched his eyebrow arch like the top half of a question mark. I looked away.

Back at my laptop, the sweet smell from the only pitch-black food I know reached my nose. I let the ridges rub against my lips. I needed to think of a good name for my blog. It had to sum up everything.

“Oh, Opal,” Mom said, slumping into the chair across from me. She looked at the Oreos with bleak, puffy eyes, the same way she looks at the endless line of black ants that march into the kitchen every summer. She clucked her tongue and sunk onto the table.

I thought about the
Dear
Opal, you're fat
letter from last night. It's not the first one I've gotten. I'm pretty sure she has a drawer full of stationery, all waiting patiently for their turn, all with the crisp, black headline
Dear
Opal
printed at the top.

“This is too hard.” Mom's arms wrapped around her head and muffled her voice. I heard her forehead clunk against the wood. She looked up just above her forearms to frown at me. “You shouldn't be eating those. Those are not the diet cookies I bought for you. Didn't you see those in the pantry?”

Saw
them
and
ate
them.
I just stared at Mom.

“You know the deal, Opal. The low-fat and diet things I buy are all yours. It's your special food. Ollie and G-pa have promised not to touch it. They get just regular, old plain food.”

I put the Oreo down.

“Thank you,” Mom said with a weak smile. “I just want to help. I'm
trying
to help. How you look on the outside can tell people something about your insides. It's something I need to remember for the bookshop. I want people to find me…approachable. Maybe that thought can help you too.”

Help me? How does
Opal
you're too fat to be likeable
help?

She picked up the Oreos. “Don't look so sad, my sweet Opal.” She planted a kiss on my forehead and left with my treasures. Left me…her
sweetless
Opl.

I wondered if she would hide them now. Or maybe put a new
Dear
Opal
letter in the bag. It didn't matter. At least she gave me a blog title. And a way to prove I was a whole lot more than a file cabinet of food.

Gina Jacobs would be proud. I wasn't going to talk about turkey either. I was going to find my own underneath.

First blog entry:

My name is Opl, I'm thirteen years old, and this is my blog. My mom wants it to be a food journal. A log of chow. But I can't see that being a good idea at all. Then it would just be a catalogue of crimes. My grandfather says I should use it to write about things that make me angry. He says it'll be more interesting than listing everything I eat. It's true. Anything would be more interesting than that. And because I know my mom will never read this, I might as well unbolt the floodgates.

Number one. No more Tylenol syrup. It's now pills. That sucks.

Number two. Kids who don't wash their hands after they go to the bathroom. I see it all the time and it's disgusting. Everything you touch in school has already been touched by somebody else who didn't wash their hands. It is the world's most super-gross thing. Except for seeing grown-ups kiss. That's grosser.

Number three. Getting in trouble for falling asleep in my boring history class. Pinching doesn't work. Wiggling gets me snapped at. And you can't listen to our teacher's voice. It's a soft, buzzy drone. Within thirty seconds, it feels like my brain is being sucked out of my skull. My eyes spin around to the back of my head just before my chin slides off my hand. Last week I had to walk around looking only to the left for two days because I wrenched a neck muscle.

Finally, I'd like to complain about our school's new lunch menu rule as of today. Last year my lunch was perfect. Monday through Friday at exactly 11:50, my grade went to the cafeteria. My plate held a double cheeseburger with ketchup, mustard, and extra mayo—pickle on the side. I also had cheese fries with extra cheese—except on Fridays, it was chili fries. And finally, I adored my jug of chocolate milk. I loved that lunch. I needed that lunch. And now someone has taken away the chocolate milk and replaced it with plain.

PLAIN!

I asked one of the lunch ladies if there was more in the back, but she just shook her white-netted hair at me.

“Well, where's the strawberry milk?”

She pressed her lips together.

“Did the milkman run out? Why are we short?” I wanted to bang my tray on the counter. This needed fixing. And fast.

Another woman leaned over the cash register and barked, “New state policy. No. Flavored. Milks.”

“What?” I actually thought my shoulders were going to fall down to where my elbows hung. I was that disappointed. I'd been hearing the annoying buzz about some schools around us making changes like this. But not my school. My school was fine the way it was.

Tomorrow I'll bring in a container of Hershey's syrup and store it in my locker until lunchtime. “Never mind,” I told the lunch ladies. “Today I'll have a blue Gatorade.”

I can think of a bunch of other stuff I'm all huffy about these days, but it's getting late. I'm not sure how I feel about this bloggy thing, mostly because Mom has high hopes pinned on its big ole donkey butt. It's no different than the rest of my silly diaries. Except now my bellyaching is electronic.

Later gator,

Opl

I pressed the Publish button, sending my gripes out to the World Wide Web. The big black hole where lots of people talk, but nobody really listens. It was a little like our house but without the furniture. Okay, maybe that's not entirely true. G-pa and Ollie have big eyes and open ears, but Mom has developed a case of convenient blindness and hearing loss. G-pa and Ollie might be like a couple of comfy chairs, but it feels as if Mom had a huge garage sale and sold everything I used to like about her. It's pretty empty.

• • •

The next day at morning break, I showed Summer my new diary blog on my laptop. My best friend since she and her family moved here from England in second grade, Summer has been with me through thick and thin. Literally. She never holds anything back and gives her opinion on everything whether you asked for it or not. She told me once that I make her laugh, and since she thinks the English are the funniest people in the world, and because she misses home, I'm her substitute. Apparently, my sense of humor must be growing just as much as my body.

“I think it's a good idea to have someone be the voice for eighth graders,” she said in her perfect English lilt after reading my blog post.

I looked at her sideways. “I'm not the voice of our grade.” I hopped from foot to foot. I had to use the bathroom.

“Sure you are. Don't you think we're all a little nervous about choking on Tylenol tablets? And that everyone in history class wishes they had a pillow for a desktop?”

I shrugged. “I suppose.” The bathroom prayed on my mind a lot lately. For some wonky reason, I had to use it all the time. It was hard to concentrate on what people were saying when you needed to pee.

“And everyone's wound up about the new milk menu. I think you speak for us all.”

“Huh,” I said, nodding and pulling her toward the girl's room. “Glad I could do my part.” I used to have a big mouth, back before the rest of me got big, but not a big mouth large enough to cover the entire grade. Now I did a lot less chatting, mostly because I was too busy chewing. Okay, and maybe because talking meant eye contact, and I know from experience that other people's eyes rarely stayed glued to mine. They wandered to places I didn't want them staring at. Better to keep quiet and keep chewing. But maybe I would try round two of wind-bagging on my blog tonight after supper.

On my way home from school, I thought a lot about what to write. It helped to keep my mind off the fact that I had to pass the soup kitchen. Well, the soup kitchen wasn't really on my route home, but passing by it was the zippiest path to Diggerman's Mom and Pop Sweetshop and that
was
a necessary stop between my classroom and my bedroom. Actually, I've never seen a Mrs. Diggerman. Maybe she only works in the back and doesn't know how to handle customers. Or maybe Pop Diggerman thought it necessary to add a female to the sweetshop's name, because otherwise, it's just some old guy selling candy to little kids.

The red-and-white gingham awning was like a giant, colorful eyelid winking at every kid who passed by. It flapped an encrypted message, like G-pa's old Morse code machine, naming everything inside: candy bars, licorice, gum, sodas, and chips. Exactly what I needed to absorb the prickly bits of the day. Pop Diggerman liked to say he understood how times were tough for kids and he hoped to make life's bitter medicine go down a little sweeter.

Mom doesn't know about Diggerman's, and she has no idea that's where I spend every penny of my weekly allowance, but she's warned me plenty of times about the soup kitchen and to stay far away. She said the people there are rough and dangerous. So each time I've passed, I zip on by. But there's a hitch in my zip. Every day I saw the same man out front, sitting on one of the four steps up to the building's entrance. His clothes were dirty, his beard bristly, and his hair was tied back with a twist tie. He holds the same ragged Styrofoam cup and has a cardboard sign perched at his feet. It says, “Will work for food.”

I hated that sign. It made me feel like I had rocks in my stomach. And this made zipping a lot harder. I closed my eyes for four steps, opened them for a quick peek at the pavement, and closed them for another four. My breath
whooshed
out in a big sigh. I'd make it to the other side of the steps and only catch a glimpse of his battered shoe.

Having gotten my afternoon stash, I made it home and found Ollie at the front door, dressed as Lady Macbeth. He wore my costume from last year's middle school play. My part was to walk around looking miserable and guilty. Sometimes I feel like I'm still playing her part.

“Hey, Opal? What would happen if you stood on your head and threw up?”

I looked at Ollie. “Why, don't you remember?”

His eyes went wide. “Did I see it happen?”

“Experienced it, you big doofus. Three years ago after Thanksgiving dinner. You bounced around way too much and then hung upside down on your swing set with cousin Pearl.”

“Cool,” he said with a face-splitting grin.

“Eww. Not cool, Ollie. Icky. Very icky.”

He licked his lips. “I think I remember now.” He sprinted up the stairs to his room and I threw my backpack onto the kitchen table. G-pa snoozed in his chair, his late-afternoon nap in full swing, but I didn't have to tiptoe around. He said if you can't sleep through a little noise, you weren't tired enough to begin with.

I walked into the pantry—my favorite room in the house—and scanned the shelves for something to ditch Ollie's awful memory dredging. Chocolate usually helped. What was I saying? Chocolate
always
helped.

Mom kept all the really good stuff on the top shelf, but you needed the pantry steps to reach it, and she hadn't figured out that I've found her hiding spot. Toblerone and Ghirardelli live up there side by side, eyeing one another and competing for my attention. I told them I wasn't here to judge and grabbed some of each. You had to treat chocolate fairly and you had to eat it super quick. Otherwise it would turn on you and go all white and gross looking. Mom said it wasn't mold, just old. So I made sure our chocolate never felt neglected.

Once I'd gotten my other afterschool snack of G-pa's potato chips and the diet root beer Mom bought for me, I made a dash to my room, laptop under one arm, food under the other. That way, Mom didn't have to see me eat and G-pa's snoring wouldn't bother me.

I dumped everything on my bed and scrambled to my closet to pull out the one thing I managed to salvage of my dad's. It was a big sweatshirt. It said,
Inconsistency. It has its ups and downs.
I stripped off my tee and pulled the sweatshirt over my head. It still smelled of him. Just a little. A bit like soap, but the big green bar he'd used, not the kind I have. I had to remember to be extra careful so it won't need washing. I didn't want to lose that too.

I rolled over on my scrappy blue-and-green checkerboard quilt and looked up at the ceiling. It was September, which meant it was ladybug season. They scrunched together along the ceiling above my window, a convention of crimson-colored beetles chatting about the unusually warm weather. Dad used to stalk them with a Dustbuster. He looked so smug afterward, holding the vacuum up with one hand. The ladybugs buzzed around in a bright red panic inside the clear plastic case that had a wad of tissue stuffed in the end to keep them from escaping. “Now beware to the rest of you!” he'd shout. “Let this be a lesson! We will not harbor squatters!”

I counted the ladybugs. When finished, I pulled out my bedside drawer and the bag of M&M's inside it. “Twenty-four, twenty-five…twenty-six. That's one for each bug you're not here to take care of.”

I scooped them up from my bed and popped them all in my mouth. I closed my eyes and tasted nothing but the sugar-crisp coating as the multicolored pebbles slowly dissolved. Then their flavor bloomed into the gooey thickness of melting chocolate. That's how I felt: easy to break on the outside, heavy and dark on the inside. Suddenly I had a horrible feeling like there was a giant fist squeezing my heart.

“You're supposed to be here. Why aren't you here?” My eyes went hot and a huge bubble of breath shot up from my stomach. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't get enough air. “Why aren't you here?” I panted. I squished my face into my pillow and wailed the question again, trying to push the words ahead of my panicky gasps for breath. I stopped, listening for an answer.

No one heard me. No one ever did.

I took a few more deep breaths, waiting for it to be easier. I wiped my eyes and sat up. I opened my laptop and went to a clean, white page. I needed to think about something else. Anything else. Homework or the maybe the blog. Eventually, the weight of an English assignment won out.

English 8

September 25th

My Greatest Achievement Thus Far

First of all, it's necessary to define achievement. My online dictionary,
Merriam-Webster
, says it's one of several possibilities.

a.) a result gained by effort

b.) a great or heroic deed

c.) the quality and quantity of a student's work

If I answer with “a” in mind, I would say surviving PE class. There are few people who can breeze through the President's Challenge fitness test. I have seen many people crash and burn during the dreadful few days when Coach screams at us to, “Overcome your bodies by utilizing your minds!”

Most of us shrink when someone shouts in our ears to Move faster! or Stay up! or Get up! And frankly, hollering, “Move your big fat butt, toots!” when I jog past will only slow me down as I spend precious seconds swiveling my head back and forth to see who heard. This happens right before I plow into the person in front of me, tripping us and adding extra time to our Endurance Run score as well as scrapes to our knees.

And if this isn't bad enough, the Flexed-Arm Hang should be banished as a spectator test. It should be done in private. Some of us cannot keep our bodies in the air once you pull out the chair, no matter how many promises and prayers fill the space of the gymnasium. I have heard that angry parents phoned the school because of the chipped teeth their child received when their arms gave out after five or six seconds. There is no honor in sporting the President's Badge with no teeth for the pictures.