Milo Read online

  “I need this like I need a hole in my head,” my dad says as he puts the letter down on the table and then puts his own head in his hands, and I feel really sorry I am so much of a mess-up.

  “I can do better,” I lie. “I’ll do hypnosis.”

  Hypnosis worked before when he wanted to quit smoking, so why wouldn’t it help me figure out if x = 10, what is y? Besides, I secretly want to let some hypno-guy, who probably has a glass eye and a pet monkey, put me into a trance with his swinging watch.

  And maybe while I’m under his control getting all those math secrets rewired in my head he can also help me stop thinking of all the bad stuff. Maybe hypnotizing me will make the Fog House go away, and then I can be like everyone else, and Summer Goodman will go to the movies with me and actually know my name.

  Even though I think this is a good idea—I’ve watched enough cartoons to know that hypnotizing someone is great for making them quack like a duck every time someone says the word “pastrami”—but it isn’t a magic cure for anything real, unless it’s smoking, in which case it totally rocks, even though my dad still sneaks a cigarette or two when he thinks my sister and I aren’t looking.

  I leave him in the living room just staring at the letter and go up to sit on my bed in my room, where I can shut the door and not let anything in. I know it’s just stupid math, but I also know my dad is downstairs hating me, and suddenly September—which is almost over—is a really hard month all over again, and I really, really wish my mother were here to tell me it doesn’t matter.

  But she’s not here, and it does matter, and I want to climb inside myself and hide but instead I just turn off the light and lie on top of my bed and wonder if Dabney St. Claire ever has any problem figuring out what x and y really are.

  my dad

  egghead

  MR. SHIVNESKY’S BALD HEAD IS THE reason math and I do not get along.

  I know I can’t blame my teacher’s scalp for my awful grade, which is wavering between a C and an F but is really a D-minus.

  The real problem with Mr. Shivnesky’s head is that he isn’t bald in the “oh no, there’s nothing I can do about it” kind of way. He’s bald in the worst way ever.

  The ON PURPOSE way.

  He shaves his head, and I know because when you pass his desk and he’s busy grading papers or flipping through a magazine that he says is all about “education” but sure looks like People magazine to me, if you look down at his head, you can see it’s got a five-o’clock shadow like my dad’s face. Then the next day you walk by his head and he’s obviously just shaved and shined it, and unless he’s doing this for some medical reason or national security, I think Mr. Shivnesky needs to stop making his head look like a bowling ball, and if he has to, he can borrow a baseball hat from Pete down at the Pit Stop, who I know has more than one.

  I think when you do something on purpose that other people do without even trying, then it’s kind of like cheating on a test, and that is something, no matter how bad my grade might be, I would never ever do.

  See, unlike Mr. Shivnesky, the people who are really truly bald have no choice of hairstyles and probably feel really bad about how they look in family photos or on the JumboTron screen at major sporting events.

  Those people are bald because that’s just the way the DNA dice rolled out.

  But other people—they’re bald because maybe they got sick and had to have medicine that made their hair fall out, and then you never know if you should knock real softly and ask if they want juice or if you should maybe just stay downstairs watching TV with the sound so low that you don’t know what’s happening on your favorite show . . . and for the first time in your life that’s pretty much okay.

  Those people have no hair and have no choice about it, and they have to wear wigs or floppy hats, or some days when they don’t care, they just walk around the house in their bathrobe, bald as the eggs inside the fridge.

  One day we all sat in the kitchen and drew faces on hard-boiled eggs so that the whole family could be bald together. My sister made a paper crown for my mom’s egg, and I drew a bow tie and goofy glasses on mine, and my mom laughed a lot, which made me feel great, especially when she decided that all four of our eggs were at a big fancy party. And so we all made our eggs dance around the table.

  I tried saving those eggs for a long time by wrapping them in toilet paper and hiding them in my closet, but some things don’t last as long as you want them to.

  fooling the fog

  WAKING UP IS THE HARDEST PART of the day. That’s when my “Before” and my “After” get confused which side of the fog they belong on.

  It’s not quite day yet, and the little light sneaking through my window shade nudges against my eyelids and my brain tries making sense of the bits of dreams and weird thoughts that flash on and off inside my head—and I taste my own bad breath, and then I need to go to the bathroom—and even with my eyes still closed, there’s a sound of laughter rising to my room along with the smells of bacon and coffee, and that’s when I picture her and know everything is fine, and as soon as I think that, my smile goes bad with the memory of how wrong I am.

  I’m in my room. In the bed she never tucked a single sheet into. There are dirty clothes piled everywhere and taped boxes in the closet just waiting to be moved to another house. And I’m alone. And it’s just my dad downstairs making another breakfast of oatmeal with raisins. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t fall back asleep and find the exact moment she’s still here.

  top 5

  BECAUSE I LIKE TO EAT CHEERIOS ONE “o” at a time I sometimes miss the school bus. When that happens, it means I have to walk to school, which I absolutely hate to do mainly because I’m almost positive one leg is shorter than the other and my stride isn’t being maximized. I read a story online about a kid whose stride was underused and he had to have six operations just to correct it, so I know I have a good argument here.

  That’s why on Cheerios days I do my best to make sure I get a ride to school from my dad, who says it’s totally inconvenient because it takes him way out of his way, but he does it anyway because I think he doesn’t want me to have to have all those operations. Part of the problem is that he also drives my sister, which is also out of his way but in the other way so I do see his point but don’t think it’s a good enough reason to get so mad.

  My sister goes to the high school, which starts even earlier than my school, so we drop her off first and then it’s just him and me and “The Top 5 Topics of Conversation.”

  As soon as we’re alone in the car, my dad starts by picking a question from the list (1–5), and I usually answer it with the shortest response possible. My favorite answers are: “Nope,” “Uh-uh,” “I dunno,” and “Okay.” These pretty much cover anything he asks, and sometimes I toss in a “We’ll see,” just to mix things up.

  Depending on traffic and what oldies come on the radio, we usually move through about three or four topics before the ride is over and we both sigh.

  I normally don’t mind that this is how we talk. It’s way, way easier than actually talking about real stuff. And when I think about it, I don’t want to talk about anything anyway, so having the Top 5 is a great crutch.

  Sometimes between the pauses and the constant fidgeting with the radio—when I desperately try to keep him from listening to news or a song that he half knows and will try to sing to—I look at my dad and wonder if he’s also glad we have the Top 5. Maybe he’s as foggy as I am and maybe it makes him less worried to simply ask me questions—the same questions over and over so he doesn’t ever have to ask me any of the new ones, like Are you okay? and How can I make us feel better?

  Secretly I think I want to be asked something real, and even though I don’t have any answers, it’s the questions I wish I could hear just so I’d know someone was thinking those things.

  But the radio station starts playing a song he sort of knows, and then he’s singing and the car is pulling up to the school, and I just let
the fog take over and say, “See ya” and get out of the car reminding myself why tomorrow I am definitely just having toast for breakfast.

  The door closes, and I’m about to walk off into the flow of kids with great names when I hear the car horn honk. I turn and see he hasn’t driven off. The window near me is rolling down, and then my dad is leaning across the passenger’s seat toward me.

  “I forgot to tell you,” he calls out loud enough for anyone to hear, but no one does even though it’s being yelled at me. “We have a meeting with your math teacher after school.”

  And then the window goes up and he drives off, and I hate Mr. Shivnesky’s head more than ever, and not even walking past Summer Goodman’s locker three times while I pretend to look for a piece of paper makes me feel better.

  If you’ve ever needed extra help in a school subject, then you know what I mean when I shout, “I HATE SCHOOL!”

  Of course, I don’t really shout it; in fact, when it comes to school, I barely even talk much. I once counted how many words I said aloud in one school day (bus ride not included) and that number was pretty low: 426. You should really try that some day and see just exactly how many words you let everyone else hear in one day.

  The people I like to talk to are Marshall (duh) and Mrs. Favius, my English teacher, who really knows her stuff. I am not one of those “honor roll” kids whose hand is always in the air and knows the answers without even hearing the full question. I bet if the honor students counted how many words they say every day, it would be in the millions because they raise their hands just to hear the sound of their own voices!

  My day inches forward toward my after-school appointment with . . . MATH.

  When I get to the doorway of Mr. Shivnesky’s classroom at 3:35, my dad is already inside, and I can tell they were talking about me because they both instantly stop talking and smile and straighten up in their chairs.

  “Milo,” Mr. Shivnesky says, his smile as shiny as his head, which from the looks of it has just been waxed. “Look who’s here.” And that’s just a dumb thing to say because of course I knew my dad was coming, but maybe he’s just trying to cover up the fact that they were both just talking bad stuff about me and that I’m in big trouble, and I just want to shrink up and go home.

  The next thirty minutes are a blur of me mostly not listening but nodding a lot. Adults really like it when you nod. I think it makes them feel like you’re paying attention even when all you’re really doing is counting from one to one hundred forward and then backward as many times as it takes just to get through this.

  “So it’s settled,” Mr. Shivnesky says somewhere around my secretly thinking the number 72 for the eighth time. “Two days a week after school. Milo and I are going to crack this puppy.”

  Crack this puppy? And then I realize what he’s said: Two days after school? With him? With math?

  And then my dad and I are walking down the empty hallway together, and I can feel all those lockers watching me and it kind of feels weird to be in school with my dad, who as usual doesn’t know what to say except, “That went well.” Which is so what it wasn’t that it makes me want to scream. But I don’t.

  And then Mr. Shivnesky shouts something down the hallway, and it stays with me a long time even after we get in the car and stop by the Chicken Cluck to buy take-home dinner. Mr. Shivnesky, the bald-headed evil genius, says, “Don’t worry. Once you get past the confusing part, math makes sense.”

  Yeah, right.

  pumpkin goop

  I KNOW IT’S OCTOBER BECAUSE THE PIT STOP has a new Freezie flavor called “Booger Breath,” which is neon orange and tastes like something you use to clean up the mess you just made from spitting out the stuff because it tastes so bad.

  Pete says the Pit Stop always has a Halloween flavor that is supposed to gross you out but usually just makes kids feel like puking. Last year’s Freezie was called “Gore ’N’ Guts” and according to Pete, it was the exact same drink as Booger Breath except they made it green instead of orange, which to me sounds like it would taste better because mint chocolate chip ice cream tastes great but orange sherbet is the pits.

  I like October, first of all, because it means September has finally bit the dust and, second, because the air starts to get cool enough to wear my hooded sweatshirts, which I love because of the fact that they make me feel invisible, like a superpower that goes in effect as soon as I close out the world by popping the hood over my head. If I were a real superhero, invisibility would definitely be my power, even though Marshall says being invisible would so lose out to practically any of the superpowers he’d have.

  “Being invisible is a wimpy power.” (Marshall says.)

  “Oh, really? Well, you can’t see me, so you don’t know I am laughing in your face!” (I say.)

  “Laser vision. Teleportation. Shape-shifting. Those are real superpowers.” (That’s Marshall, and his list always changes, but you get the point.)

  “Ha! I can listen to whatever people are saying about me and they don’t even know I’m there.” (And I pull the hood a little tighter.)

  This is how it goes for most of the ride on the days I wear a hooded sweatshirt, which is a lot lately, so it’s a conversation we’re having a few days a week. And that’s exactly what I like about having a friend like Marshall. You can talk about the same stuff over and over, like watching your favorite Simpsons episode, and it still feels fun.

  “Even right now—you can’t see me.” (I say, making a weird face at him.)

  “But I can smell you.” (And this is his favorite line.)

  Then we laugh, just as the bus pulls up to my stop.

  I get off the bus two houses from where my house is. That’s when I notice that the old lady across the street, the one who yells stuff at me that I never listen to, has already bought and carved a pumpkin. It’s sitting on her top step like some sort of advertisement of what not to do because everyone knows only an idiot would go ahead and carve a pumpkin three and a half weeks before Halloween.

  The fact that she did this shows how little she knows about things, and I think even less of her than I did before, which wasn’t much mainly because she’s always watching me from her living room window and waving at me, which can only mean she should get a cat.

  There are two main rules when it comes to pumpkins, and the second is more important than the first but the first one matters too. Rule #1 is pretty simple: Pumpkins should only be bought in October.

  There’s no law that says you can’t buy a September pumpkin, it’s just that October is the month when you’re supposed to do it—that’s what my mother always told me every year when I’d beg and beg to get the first one I’d see at the fruit stand, which would usually be the first week of September. And even though the pumpkins were scrawny and looked like the puppy we once found who was so skinny that you could see his ribs and had patches of fur falling out all over, she’d explain the October rule of pumpkins to me and then let me buy it anyway because rules can be broken, especially when it’s just a lopsided pumpkin. And we kept the puppy and named him Patches.

  Rule #2 is the big deal breaker, and if you disobey that rule, then you must just be goofy in the head, which might explain a lot about you-know-who across the street, who sometimes goes outside to get her newspaper wearing a bathrobe and big green rubber boots.

  Pumpkin Rule #2 insists that you don’t carve your pumpkin until exactly one week before Halloween—the same day you scoop out all the guts with your hands and hold up the drippy slime and threaten to wash your sister’s hair with it until she screams at you and you just do it anyway.

  That’s when you clean the guck off the seeds and then you and your mom spread them out on the salted cookie sheet and bake them, and even though the whole house smells good, you really don’t like how they taste, but you eat them anyway because it’s a week before Halloween and everyone’s in the kitchen laughing.

  That’s the day when you carve the pumpkins, and you have four of them—on
e for everybody—and even your sister has fun carving out the fat chunks and making the faces look as scary as you can.

  But the lady across the street obviously doesn’t know this, and by breaking Rule #2, she’ll find out the hard way that by the time Halloween rolls around, the squirrels will have eaten half her pumpkin or it will have already started to rot, which makes the face droop.

  Last year was the second October after the fog settled in but the first time I didn’t carve a pumpkin. No matter how hard my dad begged me to do it, and he even spread out newspaper on the kitchen table and preheated the oven and told me it would be “good” for me, I told him no and just ended up sneaking outside after he’d gone to bed and smashing the pumpkin on the driveway even though I knew he’d done the right thing and bought it in October.

  The next morning I kept waiting for him to talk to me about the busted pumpkin, but he never said a word, and by the time I came home from school, the mess had already been cleaned up like nothing had ever happened, which is pretty much business as usual around my house.

  Up in my room I “get organized,” which means I lift up my backpack and turn it upside down so that all the books and papers and half-eaten things spill out and make even more of a mess of my unmade bed.

  Gum wrapper with chewed gum inside, which represents the “warning” I get in study hall for breaking the No Gum Chewing law

  Stinky balled-up gym shirt, which reminds me not to sweat so much—it’s just gross

  Half of Marshall’s peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwich, which I couldn’t eat during science, where Mr. Gnit would never know because he doesn’t ever look at us, but we had a substitute with actual VISION so now I have to scrape peanut butter and marshmallow off my books