Jake and Lily (3 page)

I
loved the Cool-It Room. Jake knew it but our parents didn’t. They saw me grumping and slumping and they thought I hated it. I was like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch.
No! No! Anything but that! Pleeeeeze don’t throw me in the Cool-It Room!

The Cool-It Room was on the third floor. Still is. It’s a big old house we live in, and most of the third floor is a dusty attic loaded with junk from renovated houses. But there’s also a door that leads to a little room. Dad says I first got sent there when I sawed Jake’s foam-rubber football in half because I was mad at him. I guess I couldn’t stay out of trouble, because I kept getting sent to the attic dungeon, which Dad started calling the Cool-It Room. Jake started getting sent up too, but only
about once for every ten times for me. We were always sent up with a cooking timer. Dad set the timer according to “the horribleness of the crime,” as he used to say. When the timer went
ping!
we could come out.

Dad was a genius. He knew that the worst punishment for a kid is boredom. And that’s what the Cool-It Room was: B-O-R-I-N-G. Ceiling, floor, four walls—it was nothing but six bare sides. So I don’t blame Dad for figuring I’d be good just to stay out of there. But it just wasn’t in the cards, I guess. I kept messing up, Dad kept pointing: “Lily—Cool-It Room.” So I figured as long as I was going to be spending a lot of time there, I might as well make myself comfortable. I started sneaking stuff from the attic into the room. Braided rag rugs. A white wicker rocking chair. A bench. Cushions. Books. Games. And my carnival prize, Joe the grinning gorilla. Whenever I wasn’t in the room, Joe got to sit in the rocking chair.

It got to be so nice in there I started getting in trouble just so I’d get sent up. Even Jake liked it. Which he didn’t at first. He would just mope and grumble and stare at the timer till it went
ping!
But
after I fixed up the room, we did coloring books (when we were little) and Monopoly and Old Maid. We had burping contests, which of course I always won. And we played tic-tac-toe on the walls. Those were some of the happiest times of my life, playing games and writing on the walls of the Cool-It Room with Jake. Sometimes we kept playing after the
ping!

So yeah, I confess. So yeah, I get in trouble. What’s the big deal? You do the crime, you do the time. What’s there to be afraid of? Be smart and you can even make it fun.

My only regret was that Jake wasn’t up there enough. Sometimes I tried to frame him and get him banished with me, but it never seemed to work. He lives his life in the lines, like he colors. Hates trouble. I asked him a thousand times. I’m asking now: What are you so scared of?

Oh, another regret. I don’t get sent to the Cool-It Room anymore. Dad says I’ve outgrown it. Now I get “big girl” punishments, like grounding and cutting my allowance.

I
am
not
scared. I just don’t get into trouble, that’s all. Why should I? Trouble means punishment. Who needs that? I’d have to be loony. And I’m not loony. I’m sensible. Even my mother says it. “My sensible boy,” she calls me sometimes. “My spunky girl,” she calls Lily. “Cool,” says Lily. “I’d rather have spunk than sense.” I rest my case.

Anyway, when Lily came down from the Cool-It Room on the day of the big sombrero choke-off, she said to Mom and Dad, “That was a lie what Bump said, wasn’t it? Me and Jake are really twins, right? Even if we look different?” I thought her voice sounded wobbly, and when I looked I saw she was ready to cry. Mom grabbed her. “Of course you are, honey. You know why?” “Why?” sobbed
Lily. “Because you were both twin eggs inside Mommy at the same time. So there.” Suddenly Lily was beaming and dancing and shaking her fist at Bump, wherever he was: “Yeah! Twin eggs!”

But all that got me thinking. That night in our bunks I said up to Lily, “So I guess we can be twins and still be different.”

“Duh,” said Lily. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re a boy and I’m a girl.”

“I mean different in other stuff,” I said.

“What other stuff?”

“I don’t know, like, almost everything.”

She threw her stuffed pig at me. “That’s a lie. We’re not different in everything.”

I ticked off a few things. “You get in trouble. I don’t. You can’t stay still. I can. You collect train stuff. I collect stones. You hate dogs. I hate worms. You like chocolate. I like strawberry—”

“We
both
like pumpkin seeds,” she butted in.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t steal yours.”

She crowed, “And we
both
have goombla! What about
that
?”

“Big deal,” I said. “That’s the only thing. Everything else is different.”

“We are
not
different.”

“Yes we are.”

“Bull,” she said, and down came her stuffed watermelon.

“See?” I said. “Who else sleeps with a watermelon?”

That bunk-time argument went on for months. Every time we did something different, I said, “See?” Every time we did something the same, she said, “See?” But most of the things we did the same were because she made it happen that way, so she would be right about us not being different. Like one day we got ice-cream cones and she got strawberry.

“I know why you’re doing that,” I said.

“Doing what?” she said, as if she didn’t know.

“Eating strawberry. So we’ll be the same.”

“I can eat strawberry if I want.”

“You never ate strawberry in your life. You hate strawberry.”

“I
love
strawberry,” she screeched. “I hate
you
.” She knocked my ice-cream cone to the ground.

“See how different we are,” I said, all calm. “I would never do that.”

Lily kept trying to cram us into sameness, but
the differences kept popping out.

When we were nine we played Pee Wee Baseball. Our team was the Robins. Lily was a pitcher. I was a catcher. One day we played the Beagles, and Lily was pitching against Bump Stubbins. Bump whiffed at three straight pitches, but when the umpire called, “Strike three!” Bump just stayed there, digging into the batter’s box. “Strike three,” the ump said again, and Bump looks up to him and says, “It’s only two strikes.” “It’s three, son,” says the ump, and Bump goes bananas. His Mohawk is gone by now but his personality is even worse. He starts pounding the plate with his bat and screaming, “Strike two! Strike two!” He slams his cap to the ground. He’s red in the face. He wails like a baby. It’s one of the all-time tantrums. I have a front-row seat. I take off my catcher’s mask so I can see better. Finally the umpire says, “Son, take a seat on the bench. This game is over for you.” Kids don’t usually get ejected from Pee Wee games, but that’s what happened. When Bump didn’t go, the ump put some bite in his voice: “Son—go. Now.” That sent Bump packing, but it wasn’t good enough for Lily. She comes stomping off the mound
jabbing her finger at Bump: “Yeah—yer
outta
here! Back to the bench, ya dumb meatball!” And now the ump points to Lily and goes, “And you too, miss. Your game is over.” As Lily steamed off to the bench, I actually fell on my back, I was laughing so hard.

In our bunks that night I said, “See? Different. You were pitching. I was catching. You hate Bump. I don’t. You were mad. I was laughing. You got thrown out. I didn’t.”

She got quiet. She said, like to herself, “I was mad. He was laughing.” She perked up. “Aha! Mad. Laughing. They’re
both
feelings. See—we’re the same.”

“Get real,” I snickered. “Laughing ain’t feelings.” And I added, just because I felt like it, “Boys don’t have feelings.”

Lily wouldn’t let it go. At dinner the next day she said, “Daddy, Jake keeps saying we’re different. Tell him we’re not.”

Dad put out his hands. “Hey, don’t get me in the middle. You guys sort it out.”

“You’re just exploring your twinness, is all,” said Mom. “Argue away.”

“But Mom,” Lily squealed, “he says boys don’t have feelings. They do too, don’t they? Tell him.”

Mom kept a straight face but her eyes were laughing. “Of course boys have feelings. Sometimes they’re just afraid to show it. Boys are funny that way. Your brother loves you. Love is a feeling. Therefore—pass the salt, please—your brother has feelings.”

Lily stuck her tongue out at me. “See? You have feelings. You love me.”

I didn’t say anything.

T
hat was such bulldung, Jake saying he had no feelings. Even though Mom said I was right, I wanted to prove it for myself. But I was having a hard time.

I made myself cry. I walked up to him with my face full of tears and he said, “What’s the matter?”

“My watermelon!” I bawled. “It’s lost. I can’t find it!”

He shrugged. “It’ll show up.” He walked away.

Another time I pretended I hurt my knee. I fell to the floor. “Owww!” I screamed.

Jake came running. “What’s wrong?”

“I smashed my knee!” I rolled onto my back. “It hurts!”

He helped me to the sofa. He looked at it. “I
don’t see no bump or bruise or nothing.”

“It hurrrrrts!”

He rubbed it a little. “Don’t be a baby. Walk it off.” He went away.

Another time I got the story of Babar the elephant. Even now it makes me cry. I took it to Jake. I showed him the saddest page of all, the one where the hunter shoots Babar’s mother. Jake looked at the picture. He looked at me. “So?” he said, and walked away.

It was hopeless. I couldn’t make him cry. Maybe he was right.

Then I thought of something. Actually, two somethings.

“Mom,” I said, “is mad a feeling?”

“Sure,” she said. “There are lots of feelings.”

“How about scared?” I said. “Is that a feeling too?”

“Absolutely.”

Ha—I had him. He had feelings twice. And they happened the two times Mr. No Trouble got in trouble.

I
don’t believe you’re going to bring that stuff up.

W
atch me.

Trouble & Feeling #1: mad. Jake got in trouble in third grade. The teacher, Miss Ottinger, got fed up with our messy cubbies—except Jake’s, of course, which was always perfect. So she told us to straighten them up and she would inspect them. Anybody with a messy cubby would get a detention. So we all cleaned up our cubbies—except for Jake, because he didn’t need to—and Miss Ottinger inspected them. Imagine our shock when she told us that everybody’s cubby was neat except for one—Jake’s!

To this day nobody knows how it happened. Maybe somebody was mad at Jake and messed up his cubby. Whatever, Jake blew a fuse. “That’s a
lie!” he shouted. “My cubby is neat!”

I don’t know what was more shocking, that Jake had a messy cubby or that he blew a fuse. The teacher’s eyes boggled. Jake was her little angel. “I’m sorry, Jake,” she said (and she looked it), “but fair is fair. You know what I said. You’ll stay after school today.”

Jake screamed, “No! No! I’m being framed! I didn’t do it!”

I already knew some things that Jake couldn’t stand, like strawberry ice cream and mushrooms and me putting my finger in his ear. But now I was finding out the thing he hated most of all: getting accused of something he didn’t do. For the rest of the afternoon he sat there wagging his head and mumbling, “I didn’t do it…I didn’t do it….”

Late bus for Jake. When the bell rang and everybody else got up to go home, Jake stayed put. So did I. I didn’t have any big reason or anything. I just did it. I guess I figured if Jake got detention, so did I. We would both get the late bus.

Jake looked over and growled, “What’re you doing here?”

“I’m waiting with you,” I said.

“You don’t have detention. I do.”

“I know,” I said.

He practically shoved me off my seat. “So go!” He was screaming again. “It’s not you! It’s me! I don’t want you here!”

I ran from the class. I didn’t even get my coat from the cubby. My face was burning.

Trouble & Feeling #2: scared. Jake broke something. One of those tulip-shaped wineglasses. He was snooping in the cupboard where Mom keeps the good dishes and stuff. He decided it would be cool and grown-up to drink water out of a wineglass. So he did. “You better wash it and dry it and put it back so Mom won’t know,” I warned him. He was washing it when it fell in the sink and broke. Jake went into shock. A funny, squeaky sound was coming out of him.

“Clean it up,” I said, “and just don’t say anything.” For once Jake obeyed me. He knew that when it came to dealing with trouble, I was the expert.

He cleaned it up and that was that—for a while. And then one day at dinner Mom said, “I’m missing a wineglass. Do either of you know about it?”

I’ve heard of people freezing with fright. That’s what Jake did. He froze. He stared at his mashed potatoes. I’m pretty sure Mom noticed and figured it out, but right then I piped up: “I did it.”

Why? Who knows? Maybe just out of habit. Maybe I confessed because I took pity on Jake. I knew how he hated getting in trouble.

Or maybe I was just being selfish. Maybe I didn’t want to pass up a chance to get sent to the Cool-It Room and work on my burping.

Anyway, they were Jake’s two big troubles: The Detention and The Broken Wineglass. So one day I reminded him about them. Of course he denied everything. He said he never got mad about the unfair detention and was never scared about breaking the glass. And anyway, he said, even
if
it was true, it just shows how different we are, because I would not have blown a fuse if I had gotten a detention. And about the broken glass, he said he let me take the punishment because “I knew you love the Cool-It Room so much.”

And so the silly argument went on and on—

“We’re different.”

“No we’re not!”

I emailed Poppy from our family computer: “Jake says we’re different. He says we’re different about everything except we came from twin eggs. Tell him he’s wrong, Poppy!!!!!”

Poppy BlackBerried back: “Cool it. It’s just a phase. He’ll get over it.”

Everybody was telling me to cool it. How was I supposed to cool it when I had an aggravating moronic brother?

“We’re different.”

“No we’re not!”

On and on…

until…

One Day at the Beach….