Flying Lessons & Other Stories(19)

When my alarm goes off I don’t even hit snooze.

I run to my book bag and unwrap the skull shoelaces—carefully, because, duh, it’s a Calvin strip and I don’t want to tear through the punch line—and rewrap the paper around the makeup kit.

Mom asks me if anything is “up” at breakfast: “You didn’t even hit snooze,” she says. But I go, “Nothing’s up—I just want to get to school,” and she looks at me like I’m a llama or a cactus or something, because I guess I’ve never said that before.

—

Language arts is my best chance to slip Blade her gift if I want to actually watch her open it—and I do!—but I’m scanning the room and there isn’t a strong ninja candidate among any of these people.

All the boys except Ryan P. are terrible secret keepers, and Ryan P. is out today for personal reasons (the rumor in the halls was “lice”). And forget the other girls—they are a giant clique. Frankly, I still feel like the new girl, even with an actual new girl around.

So I do the unthinkable, right by the aquarium. I pull Miss Lee aside.

“Miss Lee, could you please, um, be my ninja?”

She does an ace job sneaking the makeup kit onto Blade’s desk, because at one point during class Blade goes to the water fountain. When she gets back, I’m wiggling around in my seat so much that it makes the chair squeak.

Blade then does the cutest thing I’ve ever seen a non-kitten do: she takes my origami rabbit card and makes it “hop” across her desk, just for herself. And then she opens the card and her forehead goes red.

Then Blade picks up my gift and tears right through the Calvin cartoon.

And she dangles the makeup kit in the air like it’s a snake.

Like it’s three scary snakes.

When Blade seems to realize that the whole class is staring at her, she makes the exact same face I make every year on my birthdays, right after Mom gives me a new dress or a perfume set.

Miss Lee asks us to take out our notebooks and turn to a blank page. But as I fumble beneath my desk for my book bag, a gift baggie falls from the top of it.

I had completely forgotten I was going to receive a present myself this week.

“Open it,” somebody says.

Inside the baggie I discover a pink purse made of fake leather. It glimmers like a mermaid’s tail. A sparkle bag for Sparkles is scribbled on a sheet of crumbly yellow paper.

And that’s when I ask to go to the nurse’s office, “for personal reasons.” And I don’t mean lice.

—

The nurse isn’t sure what to do with me, and neither am I. I feel like I’m going to sneeze except instead of a sneeze it’s crying. My temperature is fine, so the nurse gives me a lollipop, and paces.

Mom comes to see me at school—a first. “Sammy, why the tears, why the tears?” We have been working on me not crying so much, but as soon as I see her, I’m a goner.

“Nobody gets me,” I say, and I hold up the pink purse as evidence.

I can’t stop thinking about Abby and Regan and how they just knew that the other person would like mood-changing gifts. Basically everyone in my class got perfectly picked presents this week, but I didn’t.

And neither did Blade. I saw it. I felt it. I know.

Mom gives me a big hug. The nurse leaves us alone on the cots.

“We’ve had a tough couple of years, and you are amazing to me,” Mom says—and that should make me cry harder, but it stops my tears up like a bathtub plug.

“I am?”

“Yes! It’s your first Christmas with Daddy and me being divorced, and you’re still getting used to the new apartment, and it’s been a lot for you. Frankly, it’s been a lot for me, too. For us.”

Her phone rings, and even though Mom’s eyes flicker toward her own purse—which is also pink—she reaches in and silences the call. Which is ten kinds of great.

But the important part is that as she reaches into her purse, I see the skull shoelaces inside.

“Mom!” I say. “Can I have those shoelaces? Please?”

Mom looks thrown off. “Well, you caught me! I was heading to the mall to find you boots.”

“Boots?”

“To go with the shoelaces!”

“Oh! Thank you! But they’re not for me!”

“I’m confused.”

“I have an idea of how to make today better,” I say—because that’s something Mom and I used to do when I’d cry: we’d make a list of five ways to make it better, and usually by the third way we’d found the way.

“O…kay?”

“But the idea needs shoelaces!” I say.

Mom pauses for two seconds that feel like forever. But then she hands me the laces and kisses my sweaty bangs and says, “Then I guess you’d better take them.”

—

At lunch I commission Henry to wipe Cheeto crumbs across a crisp white piece of paper that I “borrowed” from the librarian’s printer.

Then I draw a tiger tail on Henry’s best thumbprint smear, using my trusty orange marker to re-create the torn Calvin comic. And then I wrap my new drawing around the skull shoelaces.

I can’t stop thinking about how they’ll look in Blade’s boots, on Blade’s feet, on Blade’s legs. Even though she’s shorter than me she has the longest legs, I swear.