My Life in Dioramas (4 page)

“I mean, yeah. I'm totally doing it.” She looked at me hard. “But I mean, what if you move?”

“I'm going to tell my parents I have to stay for this. Or if that doesn't work, figure out how to delay things. Naveen gave me a great idea about how I can—”

“But if we all learn a routine together and you have to drop out, it might mess everything up and—”

“Everything okay?” Miss Emma appeared by the fountain.

I just stood there. How had we gone from Stella offering to let me stay at her house to finish out the school year to
this
?

“Yes, everything's fine,” Stella said, then went to take a drink.

Stella and I got into
the backseat together.

“How was class?” my mom asked.

“Great!” Stella said. “They're starting a dance troupe. If you sign up, you get to compete in Albany in June.”

“That's exciting,” Mom said, and you could hear in her voice how little she actually cared. My parents had tried to get me to play soccer and piano, and nothing had stuck but dance.

“Yes, very exciting,” Stella said. “Though I doubt everyone will do it. It's a big commitment.”

She looked at me.
What is her deal?
But it was a good idea to talk about how important this was to us so that my parents would postpone the move.

“Yes,” my mother said. “A dance troupe is not something to be entered into lightly.”

And right then, I realized that a dance competition was not going to be something that my parents would think was important enough to make them change their plans. They weren't going to get it.

At all.

Neither one of them.

I usually moved up to the front seat after we dropped Stella off, but this time I stayed put. I waited for my mom to say, “Where to, madame?”—an old joke—but she didn't. She said, “I want you to start cleaning your room tonight so it's not all left to tomorrow or Saturday.”

“I need to make a diorama,” I said.

“I thought that was yesterday.” She turned into the driveway at Big Red.

“It was. And I didn't do it. So I actually have to do two. Since I was late.”

“Kate,” she sort of whined.

“What?”

I sighed and she did, too.

“Well, go in and get started.” She killed the engine and got out and closed the door.

I snapped a photo on my
phone of Pants and the kittens still hanging out on that old insulation in the barn, then went upstairs in the house and grabbed my diorama shoebox and another one from the back of one of my closets. Then I went down to the room in the basement where we kept all the arts and crafts stuff.

This room had an old staircase to nowhere running up along one wall and I had a desk there. The next room, through another too-short door, was actually set up as a bar. My parents called it “the Salon” and spent a lot of Saturday nights there with friends during the winter—when it was too cold to hang out down by the fire pit. I thought it would make a cool diorama: a bar and some stools. A coal burning stove. A fluorescent Miller High Life sign, calling it “The Champagne of Beers.” But it probably wouldn't make a good impression, us having a bar in the house and all.

With blue construction paper, I covered one shoebox and made what looked like a barn wall out of wooden sticks I colored red with a marker. I made cats out of cotton balls and twine. Before I could make a figure of myself, my parents called me up to dinner. I decided to at least feel them out a bit.

“I was wondering,” I said, as I sat with my plate of chicken and rice. “Why now?” I was trying to sound really casual. “I just mean, like, couldn't I finish out the school year?”

My dad stopped midchew for a moment, then continued to eat.

My mother got up to fetch her water glass from the counter.

“We talked to a
bunch
of real estate agents,” Dad said, “and everyone says summer is a dead zone so it has to be now for us to hopefully be set up somewhere else in time for September.”

“But it's just three months,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “But they matter.”

“Could I maybe stay with Stella?” I dared.

“Yeah, we're not doing that,” my mother said, tilting her head at me. “Is this about the dance competition thing Stella was talking about?”

“No.” I lied because I didn't like the tone of her voice. “I'm just wondering, what if you don't sell the house until the first week of June?” I shoveled my food in between sentences.

“Then we'll talk about
maybe
finishing out the school year,” my dad said, and he gave my mother a look. “But I wouldn't get your hopes up, Kate. The house is priced to sell.”

“You better get back to work on those dioramas,” my mom said, when she saw my plate was cleared.

I didn't want to be around them anyway.

Back downstairs, I made a mini-me out of Play-Doh, with some black string on top of my head. Everyone always commented on my mom's blonde hair being so different from mine, which was more like my dad's, and for a second
while I was making that mini-me, I was sad that I didn't need shimmering golden yarn.

My mom came in a while later, just as I was prepping my second shoebox. She stood quietly behind my chair for a minute. She looked for a second like she was going to cry or say something like “It's beautiful” or “I'm so sorry about all this,” but then she just said, “Time for bed.”

“But I didn't do the second one yet.”

“Kate, it's late.”

I was tired—bone tired—so I didn't argue any more. I just went upstairs to brush my teeth and put pajamas on. I set my alarm early for the morning so I could get up and make a second diorama.

Then I pulled out the dance troupe forms.

I grabbed a pen and filled out the registration form, then counted out some money I had stashed in my drawer from my last birthday and put it in an envelope with the form.

I sat staring at the parental permission slip a good long while.

I picked up a pen.

Just as I was about to forge my mom's signature, I paused.

I had to at least
try
to talk my parents into it.

I put it all in my dance bag and zipped it up.

Climbing into bed, I looked out the window. The sky looked like a piece of black construction paper that someone
had attacked with a tiny hole punch—so many stars.

Maybe tomorrow I'd make a diorama of me, asleep in this room.

Not for Mrs. Nagano, but just for me.

June fourteenth we could move.

Not a day before.

I drifted off trying to think of ways to make the house smell bad.

5.

Mrs. Nagano was acting pretty
unimpressed on Friday—“Just put them with the others, Kate”—but I could tell from the hint of a smile on her lips that she was pleased I'd followed through. I'd managed to put the diorama of me on the scooter together over breakfast and a little bit on the bus, and also in homeroom. The worst grade she could really give me would be a 90. I mostly got 100s on the tests in her class so my final grade wouldn't be too bad.

Just yesterday I'd been thinking I wouldn't be around long enough to fail, but I had changed my thinking entirely.

I was going to stay.

With Dance Nation in the mix, I had to.

We were moving on to a new social studies unit, something about family life in different parts of the world, and
I studied the pictures in our textbook, of whole families sleeping on the floors of huts, of villages near rivers in countries I'd never heard of. Here I was, mad about the possibility of living with two measly grandparents, whose house was actually pretty nice, when there were people in the world sleeping on floors. I wasn't sure whether that made me a bad person or not.

I turned to a blank sheet in my notebook and wrote a note, then poked Naveen in the arm and passed it to him when Mrs. Nagano wasn't looking. It read,
Stuff that can make a house smell bad. Go.

I'd made a blank numbered list, one through five.

Naveen was all poker-face. He totally looked like he was taking notes on whatever it was Mrs. Nagano was saying when he wrote something on the sheet in reply. I held out my hand but he kept on writing and writing and pausing in between. It was actually sort of annoying how long he was taking. But finally, he folded the page, and when Mrs. Nagano turned to the board again, he handed it back across the aisle.

I opened it and read:

1. Fecal matter

2. Spoiled food

3. Dead animals

4. Mildew

5. Cigarettes

Have I mentioned how awesome Naveen is?

I looked over at him and he looked at me and I mouthed the word, “Thanks.”

“What are you plotting, Kate?”
Naveen asked me on the way out of the room after class.

I looked around to make sure no one around us would be bothered listening to us.

“
Please
don't tell anybody,” I said, “but my parents are trying to sell our house and I'm trying to stop them or at least slow things down. Significantly. There's an open house this weekend.”