My Life in Dioramas (24 page)

It was a wish sent out to the universe, a wish that we were open to anything.

We gathered around the
TV together that night. Dad's song “Big Red” was going to be making its network debut. My mom made popcorn and we watched and waited and waited.

A half an hour in, during a montage of people doing things with machines and test tubes and swabs in a lab, the song came on and my dad turned the volume up and stood and reached out for my mom's hand and then mine and he pulled us off the couch and we all danced until the montage ended and the song faded out.

“Excellent.” My mom kissed my dad. “Congratulations.”

“So are we loaded now?” I asked. I knew the check had arrived in the mail that day.

“Oh sure,” my dad said. “Absolutely rolling in it.”

“I think there might be
just enough
room out front for a tennis court,” my mom said, and they laughed. And I finally got the joke. I laughed, too.

32.

I was giddy two weeks later,
watching the movers unload our stuff at the little gray house. Benny came by to say hi and sat out front with me while our furniture got unloaded. It felt like seeing old friends. Our couch. The dining room table. My beanbag chair!

“I did something pretty crazy,” I said to Benny.

“Yeah?”

“I tried to sabotage the sale of our old house by hiding cow turd in that beanbag chair.”

He laughed. “I'll be sure to avoid sitting on it then.”

“I took it out.”

“Still.”

The movers took dining room table chairs off the truck.

“I guess you really didn't want to move, huh?”

“It was the only house I'd ever lived in, so, yeah. I loved it.”

“This place is pretty cool.” He nodded his head back toward the house behind us.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”

A week or so later,
I was rearranging the furniture in my room, trying to get it just right, when the doorbell rang. “Kate, can you get that?” my mom called out. “My hands are covered in chicken juice.”

Gross
, I muttered as I ran down the stairs—having some flashbacks to my Tupperware of stink—and then opened the door.

“SURPRISE!” shouted Naveen and Stella.

I squealed and went to hug them both. “What are you guys doing here?”

“Your mom invited us,” Stella said, presenting a tray. “I brought brownies.”

“And
I
brought my bottle launcher,” Naveen said.

“Awesome,” I said.

My mom came to the door and said hi and went out to talk to Stella's mom by her car.

“Come in,” I said. “Let me show you around.”

I gave them the tour of the house and they said they thought it was great and then we went out onto the front
lawn, where Naveen had left the bottle launcher. My mom came out with a picnic blanket and some tuna salad sandwiches and drinks and we sat and ate and everything felt normal again.

Naveen got up to load the launcher just as Benny skateboarded past.

“Hey, Benny!” I called out.

“Hey!” He hopped off his board, picked it up, and came down the driveway and into the yard to join us.

“These are my friends Stella and Naveen,” I said. “This is Benny.”

“How high does that thing get?” he asked Naveen.

“Highest it's gone so far is probably thirty feet,” Naveen started pumping it up and Benny got up to help hold it. Then Naveen said, “This is going to be epic,” and he let the bottle fly and we all watched it go up and up and up and up, and if it wasn't way past thirty feet high, it sure seemed like it was.

“That is awesome,” Benny said.

“Truly,” I said.

“Nailed it,” Naveen said, high-fiving me.

Stella lay back on the picnic blanket and said, “You guys are weird but I love you anyway,” just as the bottle landed on her stomach with a hollow
thwack
.

We all laughed and lay there talking about nothing much.

But I still felt like the air was too quiet. “I'll be right back,” I said.

Inside, I looked around on the kitchen counter for the car keys, then went out and opened the back passenger side door and slid my mother's wind chimes out from under the front seat.

They clanged and sang as I closed the door and walked them over to the front deck and looked around for a hook to hang them on.

My father's car pulled into the driveway and he got out and came over and said hi to everyone.

Then, looking at me, he said, “I'll get my tool kit.”

He and my mom came back out of the house together a few minutes later and we found a spot where the side of the house had a little overhang. My dad hit a nail in and I hooked the chimes on. The green stone seemed to light up. The wind blew approval.

After Benny took off down
the street, saying “Catch you later,” Stella and I just stood in the front yard for a minute.

“He's cute,” Stella said.

“No, he's not,” I said. Then I counted to five. “He's
really
cute . . . and he's mine.”

“If you insist,” Stella said, and we both smiled and went inside to watch our dance videos.

Mrs. Nagano seemed happy to see
me when I went back for the last week of school. We were clearing out the classroom so it was time to take our dioramas home. I took both of mine to my desk and studied them.

Me and Pants and the kittens first. I wondered how they were doing. Whether Pants even missed me. I wondered whether the new girls had come up with good names like Special K and Bandit.

Then I looked at the scooter diorama, the most thrown-together of all the ones I'd made. It suddenly seemed silly to me that I was so into scootering in circles in my own backyard. Now I had a whole quiet street to ride up and down on.

Across the room, I saw Sam packing up his walkway diorama. He smiled at me but I didn't feel swoony when I smiled back. Maybe because I'd been gone for a while. Maybe because of Benny, some of the magic was gone.

Naveen was boxing up his shark and bear diorama and I caught his eye. “So did you ever decide? Shark or bear?”

“I have absolutely decided, Kate—” He smiled wide. “That it really could go either way.”

I laughed and wondered when Naveen would start thinking of girls as, well, girls.

I wondered whether he'd ever have a crush on me, or
whether I'd approve of whoever he chose.

I was happy that my parents decided to let me finish middle school there in my old school—driving me to and from for one whole year—but also felt like it wouldn't have been the end of the world if I'd had to go to school with Benny and the other kids from the neighborhood.

We went out to dinner
with Stella's family as a sort of end-of-school celebration and got home late. I went up to get ready for bed and stopped to put my first two dioramas with the others, all stacked in the upstairs den. Looking at my weeping willow made of string, I thought about branches that die off and fall away.

I wasn't sure I'd ever make another diorama.

What would I dream up next?

I turned the light off, and out the window, fireflies pulsed in time with my heart.