See You at Harry's(8)

“How wonderful! Our child’s face is on the side of a truck and now every looney-tunes pervert will know what he looks like! But I won’t say so out loud because I don’t want to upset you!” or





“Gee, I really thought I’d seen the worst of your ideas, but you continue to blow my mind by outdoing yourself! But I won’t say so out loud because I don’t want to upset you!”





But in my dad’s head, it probably just means, “Wow. Exciting!”

So my mom gets to be sort of honest, and they don’t get in a fight.

“It’s all about brand recognition,” my dad explains. “Everyone will love the commercial, but it’s Charlie they’ll remember. We’ve got to help them make the connection.”

Holden and I swap looks. Charlie is a brand? The thought of my little brother’s face riding through town every day with that stupid speech bubble makes me feel sick to my stomach.

I guess my dad was right about brand recognition because within a week of the ad coming out and the truck being on the road, people start recognizing Charlie at the restaurant.

“Look! It’s that cute little girl on TV!” people say when they see him.

My dad never corrects them. Charlie doesn’t, either. He just giggles and blows raspberries at them. And if the person is really excited, he does the bottom shake, too. While I admit this is kind of hilarious, it’s also a little weird and embarrassing. Ran says this is what makes Charlie so cool. Because Charlie accepts who he is and doesn’t care about gender issues.

I point out to Ran that Charlie is only three and doesn’t even know what gender is.

“That’s what I mean,” Ran tells me.

Did I miss something?

No one besides my dad would have expected that an ad with a sweaty fat man and his awkward-looking family waving under a big sign could draw such a crowd, but that’s what happens. They come in and beg Charlie to “say it.” But Charlie always refuses.

“He’s shy,” my dad explains, leading them over to the ice-cream counter and encouraging them to try the “Super Smacker Sundae,” which is the most expensive item on the ice-cream menu.

When my dad suggests printing up T-shirts with the Charlie image from the truck, my mom finally puts her foot down. “I don’t want strangers wearing his face on their chests,” she says. And even my dad has to admit when you put it like that, it’s kind of creepy.

But business keeps picking up anyway. My dad buys more spots for the ad, and pretty soon all we have to do is turn on the TV and when the commercial breaks come on, so do we. My friend Cassie tells me someone even put it on YouTube. We suspect my dad, but when we grill him, he acts all innocent and says, “What’s YouTube?” But the comments, which are all things like “Ben & Gary’s can’t hold a candle to Harry’s!” pretty much give him away. My dad refuses to get their names right. Sometimes he refuses to say Jerry. Or sometimes he refuses to say Ben. But he never says both their correct names together. I think it really kills him that they have such a cool company, with tie-dyed T-shirts and stuff that is so much a part of what my parents used to be, what my mom wanted them to be. Instead, we sell lame dinosaur T-shirts. My dad would never admit this, of course. But I can tell.

Every time I see the commercial, I’m horrified at the sight of us in our pathetic T-shirts. My dad has no sense of style. The only one who looks remotely cool is Holden, who somehow manages to appear calm and oddly above the T-shirt he’s wearing. I swear, Holden could be a model. Only in our town, people don’t become models. In our town, the closest you get to fame is being on local TV with your family wearing ugly T-shirts while your dad sweats and your mom smiles in a strangely vacant way as if she had to go somewhere else in her mind just to get through the moment. And then your three-year-old brother says, “See you at Hawee’s” in the most obnoxious voice known to mankind.

And that is definitely not the kind of fame you want.

Ever.





ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, Holden and I wait for the bus together. I’m so nervous that I keep swallowing in an attempt to avoid throwing up. I wish Ran were here waiting with us. He never worries about stuff like the first day of middle school. He’ll probably wear his black T-shirt that says CHILL in electric-blue letters.

My stomach twists. Chill, I tell it.

Holden stands on the edge of the road at the end of our driveway, finding stones to kick across the street. He’s good at it. He has this way of stomping down at the edge of a stone and sending it flying all the way across. I stand next to him and give it a try, but I end up stomping on the stone and hurting the bottom of my foot.

“That’s just sad,” Holden says to me, then kicks another one.

This is the first time Holden and I have ever taken the bus together. Middle-school students and high-school students share buses because both schools are in one big building — middle school on the first floor, high school on the second.

We hear a truck engine, and he stops kicking and looks up the road. “God, I hate the bus,” he says. “I can’t believe we have to take it.”

“What’s so bad about the bus?” I ask.

He shakes his head and looks for another rock. “Bunch of losers,” he mumbles.