NO, Mommy.
Did you really JUST fall, Jeffrey?
Why does everybody in my family talk in these dramatic CAPITAL LETTERS all the time? Why am I the only calm one?
You know what, Mom? I body-slammed him, OK? I decided it would be really fun to set a five-year-old on a bar stool at 6:42 a.m., take a running leap, and knock him down like we were trying out for the WWF. It worked great, too.
Son, don’t be defensive with your mother!
Defensive, Dad? DEFENSIVE?
Now they had me sinking to their capital-letter level.
YES! Defensive!
And FRESH!
Thanks for chiming in, Mom.
This could have gone on for months or even years, in an unending round of guilt-trip Ping-Pong, except Jeffrey stopped us all in our tracks. Mommy, it hurts.
This came out muffled, and we must have looked confused. So Jeffrey pushed my hand with the towel out of the way. It was another one of these frozen moments that always seem to happen to me; we all just looked at the towel, and Jeffrey’s nose, and the front of my pajama shirt. There was an unbelievable amount of blood!
Oh God, Jeffy.
Oh, my God.
Get my shoes, Steven. I’m taking your brother to the emergency room.
I’d never seen my mom take one of our injuries so seriously before.
Honey, do you want me to go with…?
Ahem, Dad.
No, you take this one to school.
Great—for the crime of attempted breakfast-making, I got demoted from “beloved firstborn” to “this one.”
So my mom grabbed Jeffrey off of my lap, put another towel to his face (this one with ice wrapped in it), somehow got her shoes, his winter coat, her jacket, keys, her cell phone, and her purse, and got almost to the front door, before Jeffrey had time to say, Beppie!
Go get your brother his blanket, Steven.
For once I went to get my brother something without saying a word about it.
When I gave it to him, and my mom opened the door, I got one last long look at his frightened face over my mom’s shoulder. As she started down the driveway toward the car, I had this weird feeling that my brother was getting smaller and smaller.
My dad closed the door and told me to go get ready for school.
Dad, is he—
I’m sure he’ll be fine, Steven. Noses bleed a lot. Go!
That’s when I looked at the kitchen clock and saw that it was already 7:09. We had to be out the door in eleven minutes. So I went upstairs, tossed the bloody PJ shirt in the bathroom sink, took the world’s fastest shower, combed my hair into some kind of shape, and hurled myself into jeans and a Sum 41 T-shirt. By 7:14, I was at the door.
Dad! I’m ready!
My dad appeared with the attaché case I’d bought him for Christmas two years ago—Guess what, Dad? It’s a REAL accountant briefcase, with a REAL pocket for your calculator—and got into his coat without a word.
Dad, are you, uh, OK?
I never particularly noticed my dad’s moods, but he was looking kind of pale and tense. I glanced over at the kitchen and noticed that he had cleaned up Jeffrey’s blood from the floor, which couldn’t have been fun.
Fine. Come.
Great! And now for a fun ride to school with Caveman Dad.
In the car, things were 100% silent until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I put on the radio to WZZO, the rock station, and started playing drums on my legs along with the Rush song that was on. My dad reached out and turned off the radio, which was very unusual for him. Even though my mom has always been my big “drum fan,” my dad had at least succeeded in tuning out my tapping (OK, he called it “pounding” and my teachers always referred to it as “banging”) on hundreds of car rides before this one.
Sorry, Steven. He said this with a weak little “I’m sorry” smile. I need to concentrate on the road right now.
Another few minutes of that weird “we’re ignoring a topic” silence brought us to my school.
Before I got out of the car, I turned toward my dad for one more bit of whatever comfort he could give. Dad, is he…
I told you, Steven. Noses bleed a lot. Noses…just…bleed a lot. Now get going!
When I got to my locker, Renee Albert said hi to me from about a foot away—her locker has always been next to mine—and I realized I hadn’t brushed my teeth.
Perfect.
ANXIETY WITH
TIC TACS
I don’t know about any of you, but when I’m nervous about something, I tend to think about it all day, unless I come up with a complicated mental trick to distract me. And even then, I’m still actually thinking about the thing by NOT thinking about it, if that makes any sense. It’s like, if someone came up to you and said, “All right, now whatever you do, DON’T think of the color red.” You’d try to picture a different color or repeat a recipe over and over in your head or count to a hundred and fifty-nine, but somewhere in the back of your mind, you’d be going, “Yellow…orange…red…DOH! Three eggs, separated…five slices American cheese…red…DANG! One hundred seventeen…one hundred eighteen…look at Renee’s red lipstick…ARGHH!”
And that’s how my October 7th went. I worked mightily to think about anything other than Jeffrey’s gushing nose, but the distractions were truly pointless. In homeroom, after I figured out that my breath was going to present a challenge, I looked in the pocket of my Trapper Keeper for my box of Tic Tacs, and found that it was about three-quarters full. I quickly popped in a Tic Tac (orange, which I’m not even sure helps your breath anyway) and ran off to first period—Miss Palma’s class. I did all the usual take-out-your-notebook stuff but then became lost in my own little don’t-think-about-Jeffrey world. I used a trick that is pretty powerful for me; I came up with a really complex math problem to solve in my head:
“A boy has a box of forty Tic Tacs, and the box is three-quarters full. The Tic Tacs need to last through an entire school day and a bus ride home. The school day has seven periods. Each period is forty-four minutes long, with three minutes for passing between classes. Additionally, there is a twenty-two-minute lunch period and a four-minute afternoon homeroom period. The bus ride takes fifteen minutes, including the wait for the bus, boarding, and the actual time in transit. If the boy wants to make his Tic Tacs last until he arrives at home, how many minutes must he wait between Tic Tacs?”
So while everybody else was writing whatever the day’s journal was supposed to be, I was agonizing over the details of this math problem. “OK, there are HOW many three-minute passing times? Seven, not counting the one before lunch. So eight. Eight times three is twenty-four. Plus the time in class, which is forty-four minutes times seven…ummm…OK, that’s three hundred and eight minutes right there. And lunch is another twenty-two minutes, plus the bus is, like, fifteen minutes…WAIT! Do I have to eat Tic Tacs during class? Who cares about my breath when I’m alone at my desk? But there IS group work in some…”
Steven! Would you like to read your journal entry aloud?
No, thank you, Miss Palma.
Steven, I know I phrased that as a question, but it was really a command.
Yes, but mine is…ummm…private.
Private, Steven?
Yes, Miss Palma.
PRIVATE, Steven?
Again with the capital letters?
Yes, private.
Through my haze of math and memory, I gradually noticed that the class was cracking up.
Steven, I respect privacy as much as the next teacher, but how private can your thoughts on this question BE?
Well…I…
As it turns out, the topic was “Should foreign languages be taught in middle school?”
Things like that happened all day. After math, just as I popped in my seventh Tic Tac, Renee Albert said to me, Steven, you are so, like, out of it today. Are you suffering from some kind of traumatic head injury or something?
Well, sort of.
Are you sort of recove
ring, or was it sort of an injury?
Both. My brother fell off a stool this morning, and…
Oh, sorry, Steven. I have to go talk to Jenna and Steph. Wait up!
While Renee was attractively speed-walking away, Annette suddenly appeared next to me. It wasn’t the first time I noticed this—how Renee kind of swished around in a cloud of perfume, and Annette just popped up like some spastic hand puppet.
Steven, I heard about Jeffy. What happened?
Annette sometimes watches Jeffrey on weekends.
He fell, and…
Yeah, I heard you telling the PRINCESS that part.
Well, his head hit the counter in the kitchen, and his nose was bleeding.
A lot?
Yeah. My mom went charging out with him. They went to the emergency room, and now I’m going to be in trouble, but I didn’t even do…
Is he OK? Was he really scared?
I don’t know.
And the bell rang, which meant I’d be late to social studies, and Annette would be late to science. While Annette ran away down the empty hall, it suddenly hit me that I hadn’t even thought about how Jeffrey was feeling. And I didn’t really want to think too hard about it, because I knew he’d be terrified. Plus, now I had to go get a late pass, which probably meant I’d get a detention. So Jeffrey was getting me in trouble again, as usual.
The high point of my day was my drum lesson. We have this thing called Opportunity Period, or O.P. It’s the last period of the day, and if you don’t owe work in any of your classes or need tutoring or have detention, you get to do fun stuff. Most of the kids like to go to gym during O.P.—the track, the weight room, and the pool are all open, and you can play basketball or volleyball, too. But some go to art or choir. And, of course, every chance I get, I go to the band room. A few times a week, I used to get individual lessons on the drum set with the band teacher, Mr. Watras, during O.P. On this particular day, Mr. W. got called to the office for something, so I had about fifteen minutes to just play drums, with nobody else around. I started out with some simple beats. When my hands and feet started to loosen up, I switched over to this really complicated Latin rhythm I’d been working on. It took a lot of concentration to keep all four limbs moving independently of each other, which was perfect. It meant I wasn’t thinking about Jeffy’s fall or late passes or even Renee Albert. I was just playing.
After keeping the beat going for five minutes or so, I burst into a big solo. I always think of it that way: “Here comes Steven, bursting into his Big Solo. Watch those hands—they’re too quick to follow. Holy cow, this kid is a magician!” Like there’s a Monday Night Football commentator standing over my left shoulder. Anyway, I really was flying. I started with both hands doing a kind of shuffled march on the snare drum, pretty quietly. As I gradually got louder, I started flicking little quick shots at the high toms. Then I threw in some big “bombs” with my bass drum foot. Soon, I had an incredibly fast paradiddle going between my left hand and my right foot, while my left foot was keeping time on the hi-hat cymbals and my right hand was going back and forth between the ride cymbal and the floor tom.
The door opened, and I opened my eyes and looked up (I never open my eyes when I’m practicing by myself—my private teacher always used to say if you don’t know where the drums are, you’re probably playing the wrong instrument). Mr. W. was back. Behind him, I could see a few kids I didn’t know—probably sixth graders on their way somewhere—looking in. They started clapping when I looked their way, which was pretty cool. I hadn’t been showing off on purpose, but I can’t say I minded the applause. I stood up and took a quick bow for them. Mr. W. smiled and complimented me on my “showmanship.” That’s yet another cool thing about music: If you show off in sports, you’re a “hotdog,” if you show off in class, you’re a “brainiac,” but if you show off in drumming, people love it.
Mr. W. told me that my Latin rhythm was sounding a little stiff, and put on a CD for me to listen to. It was this old jazz album by Dizzy Gillespie.
This should help you out. It’s a cat named Dizzy.
Yes, he said “cat.” Music teachers have their own lingo.
Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpet player, right? My grandfather once told me about him.
Yeah. This is called “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop.”
When the tune came on, I couldn’t believe it. There were probably about five drummers on the track, and they were going crazy! The conga drum player was especially wild, playing insane fill-ins all over the place. At the same time, the trumpets were blasting like a herd of elephants, with Dizzy’s horn flying high above everything else. Then, just when it seemed there couldn’t possibly be any way to get more energy into the music, everyone stopped playing except the conga guy, and a man’s voice started chanting in what sounded like Spanish. The chant got faster and faster, the congas got louder and louder, a whole chorus of men came in, shouting “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop” over and over, and the horns all roared back to life. Then, with one last explosion from the conga player, the song was over.
Could you feel that, Pez?
Mr. W. is the conductor of the All-City High School Jazz Band, which is how I got in. He knew that the nickname “Peasant” bugged me, so one day he started calling me “Pez” for short, which was much better.
Could I feel it? Oh, my God! That was the coolest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Good. You have about seven months to get that conga part down.
What do you mean?
Well, I’ve decided that the spring concert is going to be all Latin music, and that song is going to be the finale. Would you like to play congas on it?
Of course I was dying to play that part, but Mr. W. is one of those rare teachers who can actually take a joke.
Oh, I don’t know, Mr. W. I was really hoping to play cowbell on it. Or…maybe…I don’t know…the triangle?
Get out of here, kid! You’re gonna miss your bus!
I triumphantly popped my second-to-last Tic Tac into my mouth and strolled out of the room, whistling “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop.”
My temporary good cheer lasted until I got on the bus. Renee Albert caught my eye (well, OK, she always catches my eye) and spoke. How’s the brain injury?
Which brought me back to reality really, really fast.
I kept going toward the back of the bus without saying anything to Renee and sat down next to Annette. I had planned to tell her all about “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop,” but now my mind was back on Jeffy.
I heard that, Steven. It’s really cool that you were confident enough to just ignore her.
Ignore her? I didn’t ignore her—I’m just too stupid to think of a comeback. And now I have to go home and find out what happened with my brother and how long I’ll be grounded for making breakfast.
What?
Long story. When Jeffy fell this morning, I was making him oatmeal. I had him up on the stool, and my mom thinks he shouldn’t be on there unless somebody’s, like, an inch and a half away. So if he needed stitches or something, even though I was being NICE by making him what he wanted while the ‘rents were SLEEPING, I’m going to get blamed.
Well, your mom was right, in a way.
What do you mean?
He DID fall, right? So he wasn’t safe on the stool.
Thanks, Annette. Thanks a lot. That’s exactly what I needed to hear right now. You’re a very inspiring person, you know that?
I was just trying to…
Trying to what? Show me the light so I can be saved from being such a horrible brother? So little angel Jeffy can be safe from my evil cooking schemes?
I didn’t mean to make you…
Feel bad? Well, you did. I’ve been worrying about this all stupid day!
By this point, we were pulling up to my stop. I got up to storm off the bus but had to wait while Renee got her stuff together in the middle of the aisle. Plus, Renee took her time walking off, too, so I had to plod along behind her. It’s hard to storm and shuffle at the
same time, let me tell you.
When I got off the bus, I watched Renee walk—no, glide—away. Then I looked up at Annette as the bus started to move. Maybe it was the slanted fall sun glaring off the window, but it almost looked like she was crying.
Great.
I let myself into the house and found my mom standing in the foyer, like she had been waiting for me. When I might be in trouble, I usually try to speak first, before the ‘rents start in on me. So I plunged right in. Mom, I’ve been worried all day. Is Jeffrey okay?
She said, in this strange, soft voice, Steven, your brother is really sick.
Did I? Was it because he…?
The fall this morning had nothing to do with it.
Whew! I’m off the hook.
But he’s…really…sick.
And this was the absolute worst thing about last October 7th, the one moment I’ll never forgive myself for. When my mother began to tell me that my baby brother had leukemia, my first feeling was relief.
THE FAT CAT SAT
Here is the entry I wrote in my English journal on October 8th:
I remember when I was eight and my mom was about to give birth to Jeffrey, my grandfather gave me a big pep talk on the way to the hospital.
Well, Muscles (yes, he really DID call me that), this is your big day.
My big day? Why is it my big day, Grampa?
Come on, Steven, it’s not every day you become a big brother. And you are going to be very, very important from now on.
This was startling news to me. Very important? Why? I’m not a mom. I’m not even a dad. I’m not even nine yet. I still have baby teeth, even.
You’re going to be very important because you are going to be your new baby’s protector.
Really?
Yes, you are. Your baby isn’t going to know all the things you know or be strong like you are, or anything. And you are going to be very important to this baby, because you’re not the mommy or the daddy. You’re the big brother, and the baby is going to love you and need you SO much.
And for about ten or fifteen minutes there in the car, I felt great. I remember thinking, “Wow! A protector. Not everybody gets to be a protector! I’m gonna be like Robin Hood. I might even get to wear a badge…”