Okay for Now (34 page)

be able to touch me."

"Is that a bet?"

"Mr. Bottom, that is a bet."

Now you know what Lucas will be doing all summer.

There was only one more thing that needed to happen for June to be perfect—and it did. For a little

while. The last week of the month, when everything was warm and green, when there were hawks

gliding on the high breezes, Lil came home. On the first Saturday back, we went to the library together

and I showed her the Arctic Tern in John James Audubon's
Birds of America.
She looked at it and

started to cry.

I told you what art can do to some people.

June.

But Lil was only home for a couple of weeks, and then she went to Middletown Community

Hospital. I think she kept her eyes closed the whole way there.

Mr. Spicer took me to see her the morning that
Apollo 11
blasted off.

You remember how Mr. Daugherty seemed so big in our house? You remember that? Lil's room

was filled with huge machines, and they made the room tiny. There were pictures of birds on the

walls, not even close to good. There were two windows, but they were small and so high up that you

could only see the sky, and you could only see the sky if you angled your head just right.

More tubes. Stuff dripping into the tubes. Into Lil.

Lil with a kerchief on when I came in, which she pressed down, dragging her tubes up with her

arms, pressing down the kerchief so that I couldn't see that she had no hair. Crying.

I turned the television on and then lay down on the bed beside her—which took a lot of figuring

out. And we watched
Apollo 11
blast off to the moon. It was something. First, this flash of light leaps

out everywhere, all this fire behind it. And then big clouds of smoke right behind the fire, and then

slowly, like it is barely moving at all, this huge tower of a rocket starts to go up, and you can't believe

it's really going up, but it is. And then it starts to tilt a little bit, and then it heads up with the fire

beneath it, and up, and suddenly it's hurtling through the blue, flying faster than Audubon could ever

imagine. And then it gets smaller, and smaller, and you hear people at Mission Control clapping,

laughing—and you want to clap and laugh too.

Which Lil and I did together.

"It was beautiful," she said.

I looked at her. "Beautiful," I said.

We watched as the flickering light of the fire beneath the Saturn rocket—and I could tell you about

the thermodynamics of the fuel if you want to know—we watched as the rocket moved farther and

farther up into the sky, heading to the moon. To the moon!

To the moon!

I held Lil's hand.

It was trembling a little. The needle.

And when I looked at her, I could tell she was thinking of stats, even though they don't mean a thing.

"You know," she said, "if I close my eyes, I could almost be an Arctic tern flying over the water."

"Close them," I said.

She did.

"Imagine a whole lot of Arctic terns flying around you. A whole lot."

She smiled.

"Now imagine one coming down to fly right next to you to show you the next spectacular thing that's

going to come into your life."

Bigger smile.

"Like landing on the moon?" she said.

"Like landing on the moon."

Even bigger smile. Her eyes still closed.

"Will he stay next to me?" she said.

"Always," I said. "You think the moon's all there is? There's a whole lot more for us to see. Haven't

you ever heard of New Zealand?"

She snuggled closer, over the tubes.

"Always," she said.

"Always," I said.

And I'm not lying, I heard, all around us, over the sounds of the huge machines in the room, over the

sounds of
Apollo 11
heading to the moon, I heard, all around us, the beating of strong wings.

THE WEDNESDAY WARS

BY GARY D. SCHMIDT

Read on for a sneak peek at THE WEDNESDAY WARS, the Newbery Honor-winning companion

novel to OKAY FOR NOW!

September

Of all the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated

with heat whiter than the sun.

Me.

And let me tell you, it wasn't for anything I'd done.

If it had been Doug Swieteck that Mrs. Baker hated, it would have made sense.

Doug Swieteck once made up a list of 410 ways to get a teacher to hate you. It began with "Spray

deodorant in all her desk drawers" and got worse as it went along. A whole lot worse. I think that

things became illegal around Number 167. You don't want to know what Number 400 was, and you

really
don't want to know what Number 410 was. But I'll tell you this much: They were the kinds of

things that sent kids to juvenile detention homes in upstate New York, so far away that you never saw

them again.

Doug Swieteck tried Number 6 on Mrs. Sidman last year. It was something about Wrigley gum and

the teachers' water fountain (which was just outside the teachers' lounge) and the Polynesian Fruit

Blend hair coloring that Mrs. Sidman used. It worked, and streams of juice the color of mangoes

stained her face for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next day—until, I suppose, those skin

cells wore off.

Doug Swieteck was suspended for two whole weeks. Just before he left, he said that next year he

was going to try Number 166 to see how much time that would get him.

The day before Doug Swieteck came back, our principal reported during Morning Announcements

that Mrs. Sidman had accepted "voluntary reassignment to the Main Administrative Office." We were

all supposed to congratulate her on the new post. But it was hard to congratulate her because she

almost never peeked out of the Main Administrative Office. Even when she had to be the playground

monitor during recess, she mostly kept away from us. If you did get close, she'd whip out a plastic

rain hat and pull it on.

It's hard to congratulate someone who's holding a plastic rain hat over her Polynesian Fruit Blend

—colored hair.

See? That's the kind of stuff that gets teachers to hate you.

But the thing was, I never did any of that stuff. Never. I even stayed as far away from Doug

Swieteck as I could, so if he did decide to try Number 166 on anyone, I wouldn't get blamed for

standing nearby.

But it didn't matter. Mrs. Baker hated me. She hated me a whole lot worse than Mrs. Sidman hated

Doug Swieteck.

I knew it on Monday, the first day of seventh grade, when she called the class roll—which told you

not only who was in the class but also where everyone lived. If your last name ended in "berg" or

"zog" or "stein," you lived on the north side. If your last name ended in "elli" or "ini" or "o," you lived on the south side. Lee Avenue cut right between them, and if you walked out of Camillo Junior

High and followed Lee Avenue across Main Street, past MacClean's Drug Store, Goldman's Best

Bakery, and the Five & Ten-Cent Store, through another block and past the Free Public Library, and

down one more block, you'd come to my house—which my father had figured out was right smack in

the middle of town. Not on the north side. Not on the south side. Just somewhere in between. "It's the

Perfect House," he said.

But perfect or not, it was hard living in between. On Saturday morning, everyone north of us was at

Temple Beth-El. Late on Saturday afternoon, everyone south of us was at mass at Saint Adelbert's—

which had gone modern and figured that it didn't need to wake parishioners up early. But on Sunday

morning—early—my family was at Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church listening to Pastor McClellan,

who was old enough to have known Moses. This meant that out of the whole weekend there was only

Sunday afternoon left over for full baseball teams.

This hadn't been too much of a disaster up until now. But last summer, Ben Cummings moved to

Connecticut so his father could work in Groton, and Ian MacAlister moved to Biloxi so his father

could be a chaplain at the base there instead of the pastor at Saint Andrew's—which is why we ended

up with Pastor McClellan, who could have called Isaiah a personal friend, too.

So being a Presbyterian was now a disaster. Especially on Wednesday afternoons when, at 1:45

sharp, half of my class went to Hebrew School at Temple Beth-El, and, at 1:55, the other half went to

Catechism at Saint Adelbert's. This left behind just the Presbyterians—of which there had been three,

and now there was one.

Me.

I think Mrs. Baker suspected this when she came to my name on the class roll. Her voice got kind

of crackly, like there was a secret code in the static underneath it.

"Holling Hoodhood," she said.

"Here." I raised my hand.

"Hoodhood."

"Yes."

Mrs. Baker sat on the edge of her desk. This should have sent me some kind of message, since

teachers aren't supposed to sit on the edge of their desks on the first day of classes. There's a rule

about that.

"Hoodhood," she said quietly. She thought for a moment. "Does your family attend Temple Beth-

El?" she said.

I shook my head.

"Saint Adelbert's, then?" She asked this kind of hopefully.

I shook my head again.

"So on Wednesday afternoon you attend neither Hebrew School nor Catechism."

I nodded.

"You are here with me."

"I guess," I said.

Mrs. Baker looked hard at me. I think she rolled her eyes. "Since the mutilation of 'guess' into an

intransitive verb is a crime against the language, perhaps you might wish a full sentence to avoid

prosecution—something such as, 'I guess that Wednesday afternoons will be busy after all.'"

That's when I knew that she hated me. This look came over her face like the sun had winked out and

was not going to shine again until next June.

And probably that's the same look that came over my face, since I felt the way you feel just before

you throw up—cold and sweaty at the same time, and your stomach's doing things that stomachs aren't

supposed to do, and you're wishing—you're really wishing—that the ham and cheese and broccoli

omelet that your mother made for you for the first day of school had been Cheerios, like you really

wanted, because they come up a whole lot easier, and not yellow.

If Mrs. Baker was feeling like she was going to throw up, too, she didn't show it. She looked down

at the class roll. "Mai Thi Huong," she called. She looked up to find Mai Thi's raised hand, and

nodded. But before she looked down, Mrs. Baker looked at me again, and this time her eyes really

did roll. Then she looked down again at her list. "Daniel Hupfer," she called, and she looked up to

find Danny's raised hand, and then she turned to look at me again. "Meryl Lee Kowalski," she called.

She found Meryl Lee's hand, and looked at me again. She did this every time she looked up to find

somebody's hand. She was watching me because she hated my guts.

I walked back to the Perfect House slowly that afternoon. I could always tell when I got there without

looking up, because the sidewalk changed. Suddenly, all the cement squares were perfectly white, and

none of them had a single crack. Not one. This was also true of the cement squares of the walkway

leading up to the Perfect House, which were bordered by perfectly matching azalea bushes, all the

same height, alternating between pink and white blossoms. The cement squares and azaleas stopped at

the perfect stoop—three steps, like every other stoop on the block—and then you're up to the two-

story colonial, with two windows on each side, and two dormers on the second floor. It was like

every other house on the block, except neater, because my father had it painted perfectly white every

other year, except for the fake aluminum shutters, which were black, and the aluminum screen door,

which gleamed dully and never, ever squeaked when you opened it.

Inside, I dropped my books on the stairs. "Mom," I called.

I thought about getting something to eat. A Twinkie, maybe. Then chocolate milk that had more

chocolate than milk. And then another Twinkie. After all that sugar, I figured I'd be able to come up

with something on how to live with Mrs. Baker for nine months. Either that or I wouldn't care

anymore.

"Mom," I called again.

I walked past the Perfect Living Room, where no one ever sat because all the seat cushions were

covered in stiff, clear plastic. You could walk in there and think that everything was for sale, it was

so perfect. The carpet looked like it had never been walked on—which it almost hadn't—and the

baby grand by the window looked like it had never been played—which it hadn't, since none of us

could. But if anyone had ever walked in and plinked a key or sniffed the artificial tropical flowers or

straightened a tie in the gleaming mirror, they sure would have been impressed at the perfect life of an