Here’s something about parents they don’t teach in parenting class. When Mom says no, go around to the snoring side of the bed.
“Dad,” I whisper. “Wake up.”
He sounds like Darth Vader with asthma. I’m surprised he doesn’t wake himself up with all that wheezing.
“Dad, need a little help here.”
When a mom wakes up in the middle of the night, she does it with the ease of a light switch turning on. A dad wakes up like a guy being electrocuted.
I poke him in the arm.
“What?! What?! What’s the matter?”
“Bibliography,” I say.
In the office, I flip through my stack of index cards, alphabetized by author’s last name or, if there’s no author, by title. My dad believes kids should take responsibility, but for things that make sense for kids to do, like feeding their pets, fixing their own bikes, or safely operating power tools. Not bibliographies past midnight. So he types for me.
“Hey, Sam,” he whispers between sources. “Next Monday is Columbus Day. Three-day weekend. Maybe we can start the treehouse then.”
“Maybe,” I say. But the truth is, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea. Even if we find time to build the thing, when will I play in it?
The office door opens. Mom is standing there with her arms locked across her chest. She looks like an exclamation point.
“He has to have a bibliography,” Dad says.
“Sam knew about this project two weeks ago. He should have finished it.”
“I did finish. Forgot one thing.”
“It’s okay to let him fail, you know. Failure is the greenhouse of success.”
Then they get into a debate over parenting styles. A LOUD debate, which only ends when the door flies open, and a teenager with purple hair and dark circles under her eyes stares us down.
My big sister, Sadie. Technically, half sister Sadie. She’s Dad’s daughter from his first marriage. Her mom, Emily, died when she was five, which was a tragedy. But some tragedies lead to good things. In this case it led to me. After Sadie’s mom died, Dad decided to sell their house.
He fell in love with the realtor.
Guess who the realtor was.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Sadie says. “Some of us are trying to study.”
Note that she did not say some of us are trying to sleep, which would be a healthy response from a teenager at two in the morning. If you think I have it bad, you should see how much homework Sadie gets. On average, four hours a night. She’s in the HGM Program at North Hollywood High. It stands for “Highly Gifted Magnet,” and you have to score in the 99.5th percentile on standardized tests to get in. On top of that, she’s captain of the speech and debate team, does mock trial twice a year, and has a bunch of essays to write because she’s a twelfth-grader applying to college.
No wonder she drinks coffee at night.
Sadie stomps back to her room and slams the door. The slam sets off a massive explosion in the kitchen. It sounds like a cross between a car alarm and a night full of hungry coyotes.
You wouldn’t think two small dogs could make this much noise. But Lucy and Mollie, our twin terriers, yip and howl whenever they hear a high C on the piano or a stranger at the door.
Or their pack wide-awake in the middle of the night.
While our dogs are causing all the other dogs in the zip code to howl, the phone rings. My bibliography just woke the neighborhood.
“Hello?” Dad says. “Yes, Mr. Kalman, I know what time it is.”
It’s the old man across the street. He’s a retired lawyer, and believe me, you don’t want to annoy him.
“No, I don’t know how many sleeping pills you took four hours ago. Three, huh? Twenty-seven left in the bottle. Yes, I agree twenty-seven would be a fatal dose for two small dogs.”
If Mr. Kalman gets anywhere near their bowls, Lucy and Mollie will be stiffs.
2
I Stand on a Desk
Next morning before school we line up for handball. There’s Jaesang, Catalina, Alistair, and me. The Fab Four of Reed Middle School. Jaesang’s a sports genius—he knows every stat of every player of just about every league. On Career Day he announced his plans to own the Lakers someday. I like that about Jaesang. He dreams big. He promised me my own skybox at Staples Center. That’s a friend.
Every day we thank our stars for Catalina. She’s like our very own math tutor, only better because she helps us for free and explains math in a way kids understand. She loves numbers so much, when she heard there would be a pi contest next March, she set her goal of learning a thousand digits past the decimal. She wants to beat the eighth-grade boys.
Cat doesn’t do math just in her head. She even does it in her hair. At least two feet long, dark and wavy and wild if she’d leave it alone. But her abuelita tames her hair, braiding it into one long rope.
“It’s the power of three, Sam,” she tells me. “Una cuerda de tres hebras no se rompe rápido. A three-strand rope is not easily broken.”
Alistair is our resident goofball and the most disorganized person on the planet. If not for his hands, arms, knees, and toes—on hot days he wears sandals—he’d never remember a thing. Early on his mom taught him to write stuff down. But Post-its and planners don’t work for Alistair. There’s only one surface he can count on not losing, and that’s his own skin.
But put him in a kitchen, and my friend Alistair remembers everything, down to how many teaspoons of vanilla are in his red velvet cupcakes. Weird how people keep track of the things they love.
“You watch MasterChef Junior last night?” Alistair says. “They’ve got this Louisiana girl on. Man, can she flambé! Brought the judges to their knees. Literally.”
“How do you have time for MasterChef Junior with all the homework we get?”
“I
