Happily Ever Emma (2 page)

“Don’t interrupt me again, young lady,” Mom says, raising her warning finger.

“Okay,” I mumble. “But why can’t I go out with you guys? How come I have to go over to Anthony’s house?”

“Because I’m going on a date, that’s why,” my mother blurts out.

She
confesses.

I am outraged. “A date?” I say. “But—but you’re already married, Mom!”

“I—am—not,” Mom says, almost biting off the words. “Your father and I have been divorced for more than four years, Emma. And what’s more, you know perfectly well that your father got remarried two years ago. To Annabelle. In England.”

“I don’t know it
perfectly
well,” I say, trying to sound calm. “Nothing’s perfect, Mom. Like you always say. And maybe Annabelle doesn’t even count.”

“Now, how do you figure that?” Mom asks, as if she really wants to know.

“They eloped,” I say, spelling it out for her. “So we didn’t even get to go to the wedding. We don’t have any
proof.
”

“Well,” Mom says, “I agree that
you
should have been there, Emma. But I’m not all that sorry I missed it.” Now she is even smiling a little.

“And anyway,” I say, trying to ignore the smile, “I don’t believe in divorce.”

I heard Cynthia Harbison’s mom say this once—to a couple of mothers in front of school. She sounded pretty sure of herself.

“I never used to believe in divorce either,” my mom snaps back. “Nevertheless, I’m here to tell you that it exists whether I want it to or not.”

I am a little scared of how angry she looks. Who is she mad at, though? Me? My dad?

Annabelle?

My mom scoops me into a hug. “Look, Emma,” she says, her voice muffled by my tangly brown hair, which will never look like TV hair in a hundred years. “This is just one Friday night. There will be plenty of others. And you always have fun with Anthony.”

“Yeah, but he can be extremely
aggravating
, Mom,” I inform her.

“Oh, Emma,” Mom says, laughing. “Where did you come from, sweetie?”

“San Diego,” I tell her a little sourly. “Remember?”

Mom shakes her head and sighs. “Well, grab your puffy jacket,” she says, glancing at her watch. “We can look at some pretty Christmas lights on the way to Anthony’s house, if you hurry. I think that big house on the corner finally got those funny-looking reindeer hoisted up onto the roof.”

“I wish
we
still had a house,” I grumble. “I wish
we
had funny-looking reindeer.”

“My mother is on a date,” I tell Anthony gloomily, trying out the word—not that my mom’s so-called social life is any of his business. I am sitting amid what looks like a sea of LEGOs on his bedroom floor. Anthony Scarpetto has toys in boxes he hasn’t even opened yet! And he has a million relatives,
and
a mom and a dad who are still married to each other, and everybody loves him.

I guess people love me, too, only they’re scattered all over the world.

Well, scattered all over London, England.

“A date? Like Barbie?” Anthony asks, interested. His brown eyes sparkle.

“Yeah,” I say. “Except Barbie isn’t real.”

“She is
too
real,” Anthony tells me. “Natalie at school has one. I seen it.”

“‘I
saw
it,’” I say, correcting him.

“So you
know
Barbie’s real,” he says, probably wondering why I am arguing with him.

Spend five minutes with Anthony and you too will feel like you just walked into a wall.

“Can you take this apart?” he asks, giving up on the mysterious LEGO lump he has been wrestling with so hard that his plump cheeks are even pinker than usual. “I need the blue one in the middle,” he says, pointing to it.

“They’re all the same shape, Anthony,” I tell him wearily.

“Ant,”
he says.

“What?” I ask, trying to pry apart the LEGOs, which seem to be stuck together with glue. Or oatmeal.

“My name’s Ant, now,” he says, sneaking a look at me out of the corner of his eye to see how I am taking this stupendous news. “We all have nicknames in Miss Becky’s class,” he adds, trying to sound grown-up.

“What about Natalie?” I say, still working on the stuck LEGOs.

He frowns, suspicious. “How do you know Natalie?” he asks.

“You just told me about her,” I say. “And
she
doesn’t have a nickname.”

“Yes she does,” Anthony says. “Natalie
is
her nickname. Her real name’s Nat.”

“Gnat?” I say, wasting a joke on him. But gnats are very interesting insects. More interesting than you’d think! They do not eat after they are larvae. They only live long enough to lay their eggs and die.

That would be kind of like kids never eating anything after middle school, not even pizza or French fries. Poor gnats.

“Nat,” Anthony repeats, nodding.

I try to figure out how to explain nicknames to him. “A nickname is usually shorter than a person’s name,” I finally say. “Unless you’re someone like Conan the Barbarian, and then it’s longer. But ‘Pete’ is a nickname for ‘Peter,’ for example. And ‘Liz’ is short for ‘Elizabeth.’”

“Maybe I could be ‘Ant’ for short, and ‘Anthony the Barbarian’ for long,” Anthony suggests, sounding a little shy.

“That nickname’s already been taken by Conan,” I tell him.

Anthony sighs. “So what’s
your
nickname?” he asks.

“I don’t have one.”

“I’ll give you one,” Anthony says. “For free!” He’s a generous little guy, in a weird way.

“No thanks,” I say. “What’s for dinner, do you know?” I ask, trying to change the subject. “Is it slippery shrimp, by any chance?”

Dinner smells more like macaroni and cheese, cheese being one of Anthony’s favorite food groups, but a person can always hope.

“Slippery
shrimp?”
Anthony asks, and he starts to laugh. “Yeah, Emma—like that’s a real thing people eat!”

“They do eat slippery shrimp,” I tell him. “It’s Chinese food, Anthony. Which means Chinese people eat it all the time.”

“Slippery
Chinese
shrimp. Oh, sure,” Anthony says, still laughing. He shakes his curly black head like the world’s youngest geezer. “There’s no such thing, Emma.
The End.”

Anthony has started saying “The End” lately, when he wants something to be over. I think he got it from books.

“Forget I said anything,” I tell him just as the gummy LEGOs pop apart. “There,” I say, handing him the blue one.
“Now
are you happy?”

“I was happy before, even,” Anthony says. “I’ve been happy ever since my mom said you were coming over to play tonight.”

“Oh, Anthony,” I say, melting a little.

“Ant,” he reminds me patiently. “Call me Ant, okay? Just for tonight? And I’ll call you Em.”

“Please don’t,” I tell him, but it’s too late. The mind of Anthony Scarpetto has already hopped ahead to something else. Now, he is busily peeling some unknown goo off the bottom of his red sneaker.

“Okay,” I murmur, shuddering. “Call me Em, if you have to. But just for tonight,” I say, echoing his earlier words.

And, looking at the goo, I start wondering how my mom’s date is going right about now—but then I make myself stop.

“The End,” I whisper to myself.

“Watch out, Emma! We’re a train, and you’re standing right on the track,” a boy’s hoarse voice behind me yells when I am almost in front of Oak Glen Primary School. It is Monday morning. I walk to school, because our condo on Candelaria Road is only six blocks away.

Corey Robinson is the boy who is yelling. He’s afraid of arithmetic, but he is a champion swimmer already, even though we’re only in the third grade. Sometimes his blond hair turns green when they put too much chlorine in the pool where he trains.

“Yeah,” another boy’s voice calls out. “And there’s dangerous stuff on board.” It’s Stanley Washington, who is usually a cautious kind of guy. Like EllRay Jakes, he says “Present” instead of “Here” sometimes, when Ms. Sanchez takes attendance. It always gets a laugh, but we’re pretty easy to entertain in Ms. Sanchez’s class. Epecially first thing in the morning.

“It’s nuclear acid,” EllRay roars, bringing up the rear of the imaginary train. I guess he’s supposed to be the caboose.

As I have said before, EllRay is little in size but large in noise.

“There’s no such thing as nuclear acid,” I shout after them as they
whoop-whoop-whoop
their way up the concrete steps that lead to the front hall-way where the school offices are.

Boys like yelling in hallways because they’re so nice and echo-y. (The halls are nice and echo-y, not the boys.) Another thing about boys is that they’re extra brave when there’s a whole bunch of them together, like now. But if I bumped into Corey or Stanley or EllRay on the playground, and whoever-it-was was alone, he wouldn’t be yelling “nuclear acid” at me and be expecting me to get out of his way, that’s for sure.

Well, I guess girls are the same, being braver in groups than they are when they’re alone. Not that a girl would invent something like nuclear acid as a way of having fun. That’s pure boy.

I stand in front of the school under the pepper tree and wait for my friend Annie Pat Masterson to arrive, being careful not to step on any nuclear acid that might have spilled on the sidewalk, ha ha. It was supposed to start raining last night, only it didn’t. All that rain is still waiting somewhere up in the sky, which means that the air will just get heavier and heavier until something finally happens.