Nanny X (2 page)

The sign on my sister's door says Keep Out, and I am pretty sure she has the exact same sign hanging on her brain, because she acts like she doesn't want anyone in there. Especially “pesky little brothers.” I am not pesky and I am almost as tall as she is, but she ignores me when I say that. My friend Ethan says that this is unsurprising because fifth grade is the year older sisters turn snotty. But Ali started off the year being kind of nice. It wasn't until our mom started talking about the nanny thing that she turned into a Super Snot, which is what I decided to call her. But not out loud. I just call her that in the keep-out part of my own brain. Sometimes I just use initials.

I decided that if Ali was going to ignore everything I say, then I could ignore the things she says. Like “keep out.” Anyway, I wasn't really breaking her privacy, because Ali wasn't even in her room, plus, it's a stupid sign. Plus, I was
mostly
keeping out. I just wanted to set Yeti free.

I cracked her door open.
Swoosh
. Yeti shot right out of
there. He didn't stop to lick my hand, but I could tell he was glad that I'd taken care of things.

“Arf-arf-arf-arf-arf.” Yeti ran downstairs, straight for the kitchen and probably straight for Nanny X. He always jumps on strangers, and Nanny X was a pretty strange stranger—stranger than Mr. Frank, the mailman. Yeti always barks at Mr. Frank, who shouldn't even be a stranger by now because he's been coming to our house almost every day for five years.

Yeti is named after the abominable snowman. He looks kind of like a polar bear, except he's not as big. I read in
Fantastically Freaky Animal Facts
that even though polar bears look white, their fur is
translucent
. Yeti's fur is white. I wished he could be in charge of us, like that dog in Peter Pan. Then the Super Snot could go back to acting the way she did in the good old days. If the new nanny was unconscious in the kitchen because Yeti jumped on her, maybe he'd get the chance to take over.

But Nanny X was not lying on the floor. When I got to the kitchen, she was standing up. She had taken off her sunglasses, and she was staring right into Yeti's eyes. I didn't see laser beams, but Yeti stared back as if Nanny X was controlling him with her mind.
If she looks away
, I thought,
he'll jump on her for sure
. But when she looked at me, Yeti kept looking at
her
, like she was the best thing since bacon-flavored dog treats.

“Why don't you get in a few minutes for your reading log before school?” Nanny X said. She didn't say anything about mind control or about the Honey Berry Bombs on the floor. I thought maybe she was good at ignoring things, too. “Try the sports section,” she added. “It counts.”

I was so happy that reading about the Nationals game counted for my reading log that I didn't stop to wonder how she knew I had a reading log in the first place. I took the paper and went into the living room. I looked out the
window, hoping to see a motorcycle that matched Nanny X's jacket, maybe with a sidecar and some extra helmets or something. But I just saw a regular, boring minivan. Rats. I looked at the paper. Rats again—the Nats lost. But then my eyes found something that had nothing to do with the Nationals but still had lots to do with me.

LOVETT—Rawlings Park, a favorite among Lovett youth, will close if the mayor has his way. The scenic park, which features a playground, a baseball diamond, and tall oaks, is in what Mayor John Osbourne calls a “prime business location.” Osbourne confirmed that the county is considering selling the land to make way for a factory. “It's going to be big, big, big,” he said. A public meeting will be held in the park today at 2 p.m., in advance of the Lovett Planning Commission meeting.

“They can't do that.” I slammed the paper down like my dad does when he doesn't agree with something.

“What are you even talking about?” I hadn't heard my sister come into the living room, but there she was, grabbing the newspaper away from me without even asking.

“The mayor closing the park,” I said. In my head I added:
Super Snot
.

My baseball team practices at that park. Half of our games are there. Plus, the playground has a blue slide that looks like an intestine. According to
Fantastically Freaky Facts about the Human Body
, the small intestine is about twenty feet long, but the large intestine is only five feet long. It's wider, which is how it got its name.

“Maybe I could handcuff myself to home plate,” I said.

“There's no place to attach the handcuffs,” Ali said.

“I could lie down on top of it.” I pictured myself on the news, surrounded by a bunch of construction dudes who couldn't turn on their bulldozers because of me.

“Two minutes until the bus,” Nanny X called. “Jake, Brush your teeth.”

“I already did,” I called back.

“Yes, but you forgot your tongue,” she said. I went to brush again while Ali finished reading the article.

On the way to the bus, my Super Snot sister walked the length of a small intestine in front of the rest of us. Yeti trotted beside me with half a Honey Berry Bomb on his lip, which meant that he'd helped clean up the kitchen. Actually, “trotted” is not the right word; Nanny X was too slow for trotting. She didn't look like she could pitch, either, which is something I'd been hoping I would get in a new nanny. But between staying on her feet when Yeti jumped on her and figuring out that the sports section counted on my reading log, which always came back marked “More variety, please,” her batting average seemed okay.

It dropped at lunch.

Dead fish is not the smell you want coming out of your lunch box, but it was coming out of mine. Nanny X had packed me a peanut butter and anchovy sandwich. The smell was so bad I couldn't get past it to see if she had packed me anything else. The smell was so bad Ethan moved to the peanut-free table to get away from me. I threw the sandwich in the trash, but the smell did not go in the trash with it. It
lingered
, which is one of my reading connection words. The definition is: when a dead-fermented-fishy smell won't go away and you have to bury your lunch box.

Nanny X just struck out
, I thought. But I found out later that the game hadn't started yet.

So to answer my mother's question: It was not okay.

My mother going back to work was not okay.

My lunch was not okay.

The mayor closing the park was not okay.

And being taken care of by an unsmiling nanny who knew way too much about us was not okay, either. I hoped she didn't go snooping around my bedroom while I was stuck in the classroom, listening to Ms. Bertram teach us the names for different foods in Spanish. Her idea of the day was to have us draw pictures of food with their proper Spanish names, and then trade them with friends, like Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

I started by drawing a pack of gum,
chicle
, for my friend Ellie, who had to spend the day with
chicle
on her nose. I knew how she felt, which is why I gave her the drawing.

Ellie smiled. Ms. Bertram did not. “Señorita Pringle,” she said. She only uses our last names during Spanish,
which I'm good at because I can roll my R's. Most of the kids just make gargling noises in their throats. “Do we swallow gum? No. Therefore I do not count it as a food source. Make another choice.”

I looked around to make sure Nanny X hadn't suddenly appeared outside the window and overheard all of this, but all I could see was the green field where we had recess and, beyond that, a creek where we collected specimens to look at under the microscope. I took out another piece of paper and drew a fish,
un pescado
. Nobody wanted to trade for it, probably because they'd smelled my lunch. Or possibly because I'd made the fish look as angry as I felt. Finally I traded it to my friend Stinky Malloy for a friendly-looking carrot,
una zanahoria
.

“As long as it isn't lentils, I'll take it,” he said. Stinky has had the same nanny, Boris, since he was two or three years old. Except for an obsession with lentils, Boris actually seemed kind of cool. He also had a real name, unlike another nanny I knew.

The clock ticked toward early release. To make the time go faster, I practiced tying knots in my shoelaces with a pencil. I've been trying to learn different ones, like the figure eight and the cow hitch. It would help if I decided to try mountain climbing or cattle rustling, but mostly, tying knots kept me from biting my fingernails. I'd done pretty well with not biting them this week, until the new nanny showed up. By lunch I'd chewed off every fingernail except for my right thumb and left pinky.

My brother sat diagonally across from me on the bus on the way home.

“Anchovies,” was the first thing he said.

“You could have tried scraping them off,” said Stinky,
who sat behind me. He was wearing his yellow bus-patrol belt.

“You can't scrape them off,” said Jake. “They infect everything.”

Like Nanny X's brain
, I thought. I hoped Eliza was okay.

Stinky moved up a few seats to remind Rebecca Gin, who is in kindergarten, to get off at her stop. When he came back he said: “I have to make my own lunch, to guard against the lentils. You'll probably have to do the same thing. Is she nice, at least?”

“She doesn't smile much,” Jake answered. “I thought nannies were supposed to smile. Mary Poppins did.”

“Not always,” I said.

We'd seen
Mary Poppins
four times in the past two weeks. It was part of my mother's plan to brainwash us into thinking it was okay for her to hire a nanny and go back to being a lawyer. The brainwashing didn't work. The only thing that was different was that now my dad hummed that “Chim Chim Cher-ee” song all of the time.

“Are you going to the park later?” Stinky asked me, changing the subject. My heart got kind of fluttery, even though I absolutely did not have a crush on Stinky. “There's a big meeting this afternoon,” he added. “If we hurry, we can make it.” In addition to being a member of the bus patrol, Stinky was president of the Watson Elementary Green Team, so it made sense that he'd be interested in what happened to the park.

“They can't put a factory there,” I said. I was glad Jake had finally read something besides his Fantastically Freaky books.

“We have to fight to save it,” Stinky agreed, standing up for his stop. “This is our future.” I was pretty sure he meant “our” as in “our planet” and not “our” as in “Stinky
and Ali.” But going to the park seemed like something we should do.

“I'll be there,” I said.

“If we can talk the nanny into it,” Jake butted in.

Our stop was next. The bus doors made a gassy sound as Miss Pat opened them. Nanny X was waiting, holding Eliza, who was wearing a little dress with cherries on it that were even redder than her hair. She was smiling, which I guessed meant that her diaper was clean and that she hadn't eaten ground-up anchovies for lunch. Yeti wagged his tail. The nanny had on her hat and her motorcycle jacket and those mirrored glasses again.

“How was your day?” the nanny asked as we dumped our backpacks in Eliza's stroller. Eliza wasn't using it. “Lunch was good, I hope?” Nanny X's mouth made a straight line, like a zipper. I couldn't tell if she was serious or if the anchovies had been her idea of a joke, or a test—or, like Stinky said, a way to get us to make our own lunches.

“Actually—” I began, but the nanny interrupted.

“Protein. Brain food. A winning combination. And we need our brains today. Push the stroller, Jake. We're off to the park.”

As much as I wanted to go to the park—I was glad I didn't have to convince her, after all—I was hoping to get something to eat first. “What about our snack?” I said.