Only Child(43)

“Oh, I’m not sure. I don’t know if we should involve him…” Mommy turned back around and looked annoyed when she saw I was looking at her.

“Mommy?”

“I…I need to go. But OK, we can give it a try, see how it goes. Thank you, see you then.” Mommy hung up the phone. “Zach, what’s up? Didn’t you see me talking on the phone? Why are you interrupting?”

“Where’s Daddy?” I asked.

“At work. He…went to work.”

“But he didn’t say good-bye to me.” I could feel tears coming into my eyes.

“Sorry, Zach. Why are you looking for him?” Mommy said.

“Do you remember in Dragon of the Red Dawn, the first secret of happiness?” I asked.

Mommy made wrinkles between her eyes. “What?”

“The first secret of happiness that Jack and Annie learn from the man in Japan, and it’s to make Merlin feel better. It’s that you have to pay attention to the small things around you in nature.”

“OK, Zach, sweetie? I don’t know what you’re talking about right now, but I have a lot of things on my mind. Can we talk about this later?” Mommy said, and then she walked past me back into the kitchen, and it looked like she was going to make a new phone call.

I could feel a hot wave come up from my belly up to my head, a mad wave. “NO!” I said, and it was loud like yelling. It surprised me, and Mommy, too, because she turned around fast and looked at me. “I want me and you and Daddy to try out the first secret. We have to try it out so we can feel better again. Maybe in the backyard we could do it, and we have to pay attention to all the small things there, and then we can feel happier. If we do it later, it will be dark and then we can’t see anything. I want to do it NOW. It has to be NOW.”

I didn’t know why my words were coming out so loud, but the hot mad wave came flying out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t want to stop it because it felt good to yell.

Mommy made her eyes really small and she stared at me and she made her voice very quiet: “Zach, Mommy needs you to stop yelling like that right now. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you can’t talk to Mommy like that.”

My heart was beating fast. I stared back at Mommy, and I could feel the tears starting to spill over from my eyes, so I tried not to blink.

“Front door!” the lady robot voice said on the alarm box, and we both jumped. Then Mimi came in the kitchen and put grocery bags on the counter and a ginormous pile of mail. She looked at us. “Everything all right?” she asked.

“Everyone’s losing it in this house,” Mommy said, and she looked at me again with small eyes. Then she went back in the family room with the phone.

I went out on the deck and slammed the door behind me, and that felt good, too. I walked down the steps to the backyard. I tried to stop feeling so mad, because you probably can’t try out the secret of happiness when you’re in a mad mood. I tried to pay attention to everything around me, but it was hard to see with more stupid tears coming in my eyes. And the stupid rain was making me wet and cold all over.

I put my hands inside my sleeves and looked all around. I saw leaves on the ground everywhere, brown and red and yellow, and some green ones still, too. I saw shells from some nuts that squirrels cracked open, they ate the insides but left the shells. There was the skin of the big tree that’s in the middle of our yard, and it had patterns that looked a little bit like the patterns in the sand in the beach picture. I looked for all the small things, but the mad feeling didn’t go away and I didn’t start to feel happy.

“Sweetie, if you want to be out here, you need to put a coat on, OK? You’re getting all wet,” I heard Mimi calling, so I went back inside and slammed the door again on my way in. The first secret of happiness didn’t work.





[ 26 ]


    Making News


YESTERDAY DADDY TOLD ME that the news people were coming today. Yesterday was Tuesday, and it was day number two that Daddy drove me to school before he went to work. Not McKinley, because McKinley was going to stay closed longer, but the school where I was supposed to go for now, Warden Elementary.

On the first day when Daddy said we were driving to school, Monday, I got really upset because I didn’t want to go. Everyone else already went back to school, except me. They were all going to have their eyes on me because I was coming back after them and also because of what happened to Andy.

“You don’t have to,” Daddy said, and he made me a promise that I didn’t have to go in until I felt ready. “Let’s just take a drive over there.”

So we did, and when we pulled up in front of the school it looked like McKinley, except it was brown, not greenish beige like McKinley, and there was a playground on the right side of it that looked fun. The front door looked the same like at McKinley’s, with little windows in it, and I thought about how the gunman came in through the door because Charlie let him in, and maybe a gunman, not Charlie’s son because he was dead, but a different one, could come in through that door, too.

Daddy asked, “Do you want to go in?” and I said, “No.”

“OK, maybe tomorrow,” Daddy said, and we drove home again and Daddy dropped me off and went to work.

On our drive yesterday he told me we weren’t going to drive to school today because the news people were coming to our house. They were coming to give us an interview. An interview is when the news lady, her name was Miss Wanda, asks you questions and you have to answer them. It was going to be about what happened to Andy, and they were going to make a video out of it and then show it on the news.