Counting by 7s(18)

He just kept writing down my junk.



On my way home I evaluated my situation.

Being a Sequoia Giant had been a colossal disappointment.

But going to the new school led to seeing the round-headed counselor, and that enabled me to meet my new friend, Mai.

School was better since I figured out that all I had to do to get out of P.E. (and the violent sport of volleyball) was say I had a migraine headache.

I claimed that I was going blind from the pain, and I then got sent to lie down in the nurse’s office.

I knew that the nurse, Miss Judi, liked me because we discussed things like flu outbreaks and the statistics behind spontaneous nosebleeds.

So by the time I walked back up Citrus Court to the front door of our house, I was very happy.





Chapter 13


jairo hernandez

A pilgrim is a traveler going to a spiritual place.




Jairo looked over at the paperwork on the seat next to him. His license. His vehicle inspection infor-mation.

When he started driving a cab, it was only supposed to be a temporary job.

And now years had passed.

Jairo picked up his radio and told the office that he was going on break.

He then drove straight to Bakersfield College, where he picked up a brochure for the Career Pathway program, which was a continuing education opportunity for people over the age of thirty.

He was going to investigate the requirements to be a medical technician.

The girl he picked up that afternoon had rattled his mobile cage.

He realized that she was some kind of shaman when she said: “Never let someone tell you that you can’t do it.”

She was a blinking warning light.

And Jairo paid attention to signs.



For the first time in his career, Dell thought about his work when he went home that day.

Fate had delivered Alberta Einstein into his life and he had to figure out a way to take advantage of that.

Maybe she could make him smarter?

It certainly appeared as if she could improve his financial situation.

One thing was for certain: With her in his life, everything was happening so fast!





Chapter 14





The next week I went online and ordered a cab from Mexicano Taxi again. In the special comments/requests box I asked for Jairo Hernandez.

He was on time and had his license and vehicle inspection records ready for me on the front seat.

I checked them again because I think it’s important to always be thorough.

As Jairo pulled away from the curb, I noticed two things.

The first was that he had just gotten a haircut. The second reveal was more alarming.

Because his hair was shorter in the back, I could now see a nevus on his neck.

This means I saw a mole.

But not a regular-looking mole. It had, in my opinion, the signs of trouble: It was asymmetrical and it had flecks of red and blue on the broken edges.

One infant in one hundred babies is born with moles. I doubt that’s fun for the parents.

Who wants a spotty kid?

But almost all moles appear in the first twenty years of a person’s life.

And that is why if a new mole appears, or an old one changes into something else, attention needs to be directed to this area (medically speaking).

I didn’t want to alarm Jairo Hernandez.

But there was a real possibility that he might not be aware of this bad-looking mole, because it was on the back of his neck and he couldn’t see there very easily.

So while we drove across town to my appointment with Mr. Dell Duke, I stared at his skin issue.

And I felt compelled to write the following on an index card:

You need to have a dermatologist perform a punch biopsy on the mole (nevus) on the back of your neck. If it is not too much of an invasion of your privacy, I would very much like to look at the pathology report. I will be taking a taxi next week at this same time. This is important, so please do not take this medical suggestion lightly.

Willow Chance

I handed him the message when I got out of the taxi.



Mai and I were able to talk more easily now in Vietnamese.

I had effectively mastered the tones and accent by obsessive listening at night to audio lessons designed for state department employees.

You could download the sessions if you had a password, which was not hard to get if you knew what you were doing.

It was like we had a secret language, because on the school property no one else but Quang-ha spoke Vietnamese.

We walked around the buildings and the parking lot, still half looking for Cheddar, but really just talking.

We were both interested in botany, and I tried to explain some of the things I knew without sounding like the host of the Discovery Channel.

We were sitting under one of the few trees out in front of the main school district office when I said to her, in Vietnamese: “You are my new best friend.”

Mai was silent. I knew that she had many friends at school, and that her friend Alana was the one she considered to be her closest friend.

I was just a little kid, and I realized that I had overstepped.

What kind of person only knew someone for a few weeks and said something like that?

So I added:

“Since I just started at a new school, you’re right now sort of my only friend, so that makes the distinction perhaps not much of a difference.”