Better With You Here (9781609417819) Page 3

  Also, I can stop time. I can make the world stop. Everybody around me freezes, and then I can get up and do whatever I want. I can get my favorite eraser back from Ms. Hubacek’s desk. I can draw a funny picture on Michael’s binder. I can go to the bathroom real fast, then be back at my desk when time starts up again.

  Also, I can hold my pee for as long as I want. I can hold it until recess, or until I get home, or forever.

  Alex

  I peed my pants. I didn’t ask Ms. Hubacek for permission to go to the restroom because I already knew what she’d say. “You were supposed to go right after lunch. Only kindergartners don’t know when they’re supposed to go to the bathroom, Alex.” That’s what she said last time, and everybody laughed.

  This time we’re in Resource Room, and I really couldn’t hold it. So it’s not just a little bit of pee, and there’s no table to hide it. Devonique sees and raises her hand. “Ms. Hubacek, Alex had a accident over here.” I don’t like Devonique.

  Ms. Hubacek gets mad. I hate it when that happens. She breathes real loud and says, “Alex.” She gets up and comes over to my carpet square and sees how it’s dark and wet all around me. She grabs my arm, and her sharp orange nails pinch through my shirt. Everybody’s staring at me. She drags me to her desk and writes the paper for me to go to the nurse. My legs are starting to itch inside my jeans. Ms. Hubacek slams her pen on the desk and hands me the note. I go out the door and down the hall.

  The nurse looks like my grandma, but nice. She’s not dressed like a nurse or a teacher. She just looks like a regular lady. She doesn’t get mad. She just reads Ms. Hubacek’s note and then gets up to check her cubbies. There’s no extra clothes with my name on them. She says, “I guess your mama never sent any.”

  She sits back at her desk and looks at her computer. Then she calls somebody on her phone. She says, “Mrs. Davila? I’m calling to tell you that Alex has had an accident and he needs some clean clothes to be brought to the school.” Then she hangs up and says, “She didn’t answer. I guess we should call your daddy.”

  She calls on the phone again. She says, “Mr. Davila? I’m calling to tell you that Alex has had an accident.…Mm-hmm.…No, I mean a bladder accident.” She tells him I don’t have any clothes in the cubby and then says “Mm-hmm” a bunch more times. Then she hangs up and says, “I guess your daddy’s friend is coming to bring you a change of clothing.” I think she means Missy, my dad’s girlfriend.

  The nurse tells me I can go sit in the other room, the one with the orange plastic chair and the cot where kids sleep when they’re sick. So I go in there. I don’t know if I’m supposed to sit down with my pants wet, so I stay standing up and just wait. I hear the nurse typing on her computer for a long time.

  The nap-room door is open a little bit, so I can see when Missy comes in. She’s wearing her sunglasses and carrying a bag from Target. The nurse stares at her, probably because Missy has long legs and long blond hair. That’s what my dad said he first noticed about her, and he couldn’t stop looking. I heard him tell his friend that. He said Missy actually works at keeping herself in shape, unlike some other women he could mention. That means she’s good at sports. My dad likes sports a lot.

  Mom used to be good at sports, but she stopped playing when she got out of school. She doesn’t keep herself in shape, Dad says. So she just looks normal, like all the other moms.

  Missy talks to the nurse and makes her laugh. Then they call me out of the nap room and give me the Target bag and tell me to change and use the wipes on myself. So I go back in the nap room and close the door. I open the bag and see jeans and Transformers underwear.

  I don’t wear Transformers anymore. I only wear Spider-Man now.

  I take off my peed pants and underwear. I don’t know where I’m supposed to put them, so I leave them on the floor, in the corner, under the cot. After I put on my clean clothes, I see the wipes that they were talking about on the counter. I get one and use it to wipe my hands.

  When I come out of the room, Missy and the nurse are talking. Missy says, “…missing his dad.” The nurse is nodding. They stop talking when they see me.

  “Where are your dirty clothes, tiger?” Missy says.

  I point behind me, to the floor in the little room. I wish Missy wasn’t here. I wish I hadn’t peed my pants, or I had the superpower to go back in time. Or to make Ms. Hubacek let us go to the restroom whenever we want.

  The door to the nurse’s office opens. It’s Mom. She’s here. She looks mad. When she gets all the way inside and sees Missy standing there, she looks even madder.

  Ms. Garcia, the school secretary, comes in behind her. I’ve never seen Ms. Garcia come out of the main office before.

  Mom says, “And I’m trying to find out why exactly I wasn’t called.”

  Ms. Garcia looks at the nurse. The nurse says, “Well, we called your work, Ms. Davila, but we couldn’t reach you, and that’s why we called Mr. Davila, and he sent over Ms.… um…He sent over his friend.”

  My mom looks the way she did that one time when we went to Grandma’s and Grandma gave Lucia that pink dress and it didn’t fit her, and Grandma said she’d have to return it and get a bigger one. And Lucia asked if Grandma could get her a black dress instead. And Grandma said that Lucia ate too much and that she wasn’t very ladylike. When Grandma said that, Mom stood up real straight and crossed her arms, like she’s doing right now. Her eyebrows went down, and her mouth got skinny, just like right now. She told Grandma, “I’m not going to let you give her a freaking complex. If you’re so worried about the kids’ weight, quit giving Alex so much candy.”

  But I don’t think Mom’s going to say that Ms. Garcia and the nurse are giving me a freaking complex. I think she’s mad because they didn’t tell her what happened. Mom hates it when she doesn’t know what’s going on.

  She tells Ms. Garcia, “So now anyone off the street is allowed to come into the school and undress my son?” She means Missy, except Missy didn’t undress me. But I guess Mom thinks she did. Now Missy looks mad, but she doesn’t say anything.

  “Well, no, Ms. Davila,” says Ms. Garcia. “But your husband’s—your ex-husband’s—friend is an authorized contact for Alex. Mr. Davila added her name to the list two weeks ago.” She means Dad. Mom hates it when people forget that Dad’s her ex-husband and call him her husband instead. She always calls him “my kids’ dad.”

  Mom’s voice gets loud now. “Why didn’t anyone call my cell? I didn’t get the message until I got back to work, and then I had to drive like a maniac to get Alex’s clothes and get over here. And now that I’m here, you’re telling me that instead of calling my mother or my cousin or someone else that I put on the emergency contact list, you called a woman I barely know to come here and take my son’s clothes off?” She’s yelling at them now. Everybody in the office looks scared.

  Missy says, “I didn’t take his clothes off.” She’s looking at the floor, not at Mom. “I was just trying to help. But I’ll be leaving now.” She walks behind Mom and goes out the door. My mom is looking at her like she has laser rays in her eyes and wants to burn Missy with them.

  Mrs. Garcia says, “Well, we’re sorry, Ms. Davila. We thought your ex-husband or his girlfriend would tell you. Or…well, that Alex would tell you what happened when he got home.”

  Mom turns around and sees me watching everything through the door. How did she know I was watching? Oh, no. She’s going to yell at me next.

  But no, she’s smiling now. Not like she’s happy to see me, but like she’s telling the secretary and the nurse that they’ve gotten on her nerves so bad that she’s not going to waste her time talking to them anymore. She tells me, “Hi, sweetie. Let’s get you cleaned up, okay?”

  She comes into the nap room and closes the door behind us and looks at my dirty clothes on the floor. Then she looks at the jeans I’m wearing and shakes her head. “Missy didn’t help you change?” she says.

  I shake my head no.

  She ope
ns the door again and tells the nurse, “There’s no sink in here.”

  I hear the nurse saying something, and then Mom says, “Well, how about a towel and a bucket of water, then? Something. And I need real soap.” Then she says “Jesus” real quiet, like she does when she’s driving or talking on the phone to my dad.

  She opens the black bag she brought with her and takes out jeans, my underwear, some socks, and a new pair of tennis shoes. They’re the same as my regular shoes, the ones from Payless that have Venom on the sides. She says, “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know. I just had an accident.”

  “But why, sweetie?” She’s not mad anymore. She’s just frustrated. “Didn’t you tell Ms. Hubacek you had to go to the bathroom?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Because she doesn’t let us. It’s a rule.”

  “But her class is right after lunch,” my mom says.

  I tell her, “I know. But we’re only supposed to go at after-lunch break, and if we have to go after that, we’re supposed to hold it until recess. Last time I asked her, Ms. Hubacek said that only kindergartners can’t hold it until recess. And then that stupid Devonique laughed and started calling me ‘Kinderbaby.’”

  Mom says, “She did, huh? Well, it sounds like I need to have a talk with Ms. Hubacek.”

  I can tell she’s thinking about what she’s going to do next. I bet she’s going to go talk to Ms. Hubacek right now. Or, if they don’t let her, she’ll write a long e-mail to the principal and get Ms. Hubacek in trouble, like that time before we came to this school, when she got the day-care lady in trouble for calling Lucia “a little beaner girl.”

  The nurse sticks her hands in the door and gives Mom some little blue towels like the ones the cafeteria ladies use, one of the soaps from the restroom, and a bottle of water from the Coke machine in the teachers’ lounge. Mom takes all the stuff from her and closes the door again. She wets one of the towels with the water bottle and rubs soap on it. “Okay, mister,” she tells me. “Strip.”

  The diaper wipes are still on the counter in the corner. I wonder if I should tell Mom that Missy and the nurse only made me use the wipes.

  Mom looks at me and says “Hurry, sweetie.” The towel’s all soapy, and she has the same face like when she gets down on the kitchen floor to scrub it with the brush.

  I decide to keep quiet, and I take off the clothes I just put on. I’m glad that I’m not Ms. Hubacek right now, because I know she’s going to get in trouble after this.

  Natasha

  I always feel guilty. About everything.

  Every workday I leave the office at four-thirty while everyone else stays until five-thirty or six, and that makes me feel bad. Even though I come in at seven-thirty every morning and the others don’t roll in until nine or nine-thirty. Even though many of them come in even later than that, now that I’ve started working here and they know I’m taking care of everything early in the morning.

  No one really expected me to stay late today, to make up the time I lost dealing with Alex’s problem at school. But I would’ve felt like a bad employee if I hadn’t. Like I was letting my bosses down.

  And now it’s raining and traffic is keeping me from getting home. It doesn’t matter that we live only five minutes away, because someone’s stopped on the side of the road with a flat tire and all the rest of us have to slow down and stare and say to ourselves, I’m glad I’m not stuck on the side of the road in the rain.

  By now the school bus has ferried Alex and Lucia home, and Alex has had to use his emergency key to get into the apartment. This is the third time he’s had to do that since we’ve been living here. It makes me feel like the world’s worst mother. I need to call them to make sure they’re safe.

  “Hello?”

  “Lucia.” Why is she answering the phone instead of Alex? “Hi, baby. How was school today?”

  “Good,” she says. I hear the TV in the background.

  “That’s great. I’m almost home. I’ll see you in a few minutes. Give the phone to your brother, baby, okay?”

  Alex says hello, and I immediately lay into him. “Alex, what have I told you about letting your sister answer the phone when I’m not there?”

  “I saw your name on the screen. We knew it was you,” he says.

  It’s my turn to pass the poor sap on the side of the road, finally. I don’t even look at him. Let the guy suffer with one less person in the audience. Now the traffic’s speeding up a little, thank gosh. But I still have to ask Alex certain questions. “Is the door locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go double-check, please.”

  “It’s locked.”

  “What do you do if someone knocks on the door?”

  “Don’t answer it.”

  “What do you do if someone calls and it’s not me?”

  “Don’t answer the phone.” He sounds like he’s reciting multiplication tables, and I wonder if he understands the importance of his answers. How can he possibly imagine the things that I worry about when he and his sister are home alone?

  I’m almost there now. But I don’t want to hang up. As if keeping him on the phone will keep him safe, I hold on. For instance, if Alex had actually left the door unlocked and a criminal who’d escaped from the county jail came barreling through the door, I would know about it, because I’d hear the whole thing on the phone. And then I could keep the kids safe by…asking Alex to hand the phone to the criminal, right? And nagging the guy to death. Sure.

  “Are you guys eating anything?” I ask.

  “I made ham and cheese for me and peanut butter for Lucia,” he says. “With one bread only, and the new strawberry jelly.”

  “Good,” I say. “Remember…”

  “Don’t use the stove,” he says. “I know. And we’re not putting forks in the microwave either.”

  “Okay,” I say. “How was school this afternoon, baby?”

  There’s a pause. I hear him tell Lucia, “Throw away your trash.” Then he says, “I don’t know. I stayed in Resource Room, when fifth grade was there, to make up my work.” He sounds upset about that. “Dad called, too.”

  “Just now?” I say.

  “Yeah. He said for you to call him when you get home.”

  Damn it. Of course Mike would call right now. He never calls the kids right after school, but the one time he does is the time that I’m not there. Great. He probably wants to curse me out for what happened at school today. But what’s he going to say? “Natasha, how dare you complain that a stranger was pretending to be Alex’s mom?”

  I’m not going to get upset about future conversations with Mike right now, though. Not while I’m on the phone with my son. Alex has had a rough enough day.

  No matter how hard I try, I can’t keep Alex from knowing that his dad and I don’t get along. Lucia is young enough that most of it goes over her head. But Alex is too smart for that. I hate that he has to feel the slightest bit stressed, carrying messages between his dad and me. So I make my voice extra breezy and casual and say, “Okay, baby. I’ll call him when I get there. I’m real close to the apartment now.”

  I haven’t even begun to feel guilty over what I did during my lunch hour. What I did with Hector, I see now, in retrospect, was like those days when I say “Screw this diet” and eat a bunch of doughnuts. A bowl of ice cream. A big, fat slab of red velvet cake to celebrate someone’s birthday at the office. At that moment of indulgence, and for several glorious, sugar-high moments after, I feel fabulous. And then the guilt kicks in and I end up hating myself. Always. Hector was a dozen doughnuts, and the sugar crash is hitting me right now.

  Was Alex’s accident my punishment? Instant karma, boomeranging right in my face?

  No. That wasn’t punishment for me—it was a humiliating experience for Alex, and it’s my job to help him deal with it.

  I can’t sit here reflecting on what happened with Hector. Not right now. Maybe tonight, when I’m alone i
n bed and the kids are fast asleep, I’ll replay it all in my mind and feel guilty as hell.

  At least sleeping with Hector didn’t make me gain weight.

  When I get inside, Lucia is sitting on the couch, holding Mr. Beary’s torn arm against his chest while they both watch television. Alex is standing in the middle of our tiny living room, back in his Venom mask, looking as unhappy as I feel. He stands perfectly still and wrings his little hands.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Alex.” I set my bags on the coffee table and go to him, put my hands on his shoulders. “Talk to me, baby.”

  He sighs. With a glance at Lucia, he says very quietly, “What if I have to go to the restroom tomorrow and Ms. Hubacek says no?”

  Jesus. If I could make his teacher appear here right now and give her another piece of my mind, for putting my son through this…“Come in here with me.” I walk him into my bedroom, where we can talk in private. We sit on the edge of my bed. “Would you please take off your mask, so I can see your face?”

  He hesitates for a moment, then pulls it off.

  I say, “I already talked to Ms. Hubacek about that. If you ask, she’ll let you go.”

  “But what if she’s just lying? What if I ask her and she still says no?”

  I sigh. I don’t think that’ll happen, after our conversation today, but I can see how Alex might have a hard time believing that. “If she says no…well, you just get up and go anyway.”

  Now he’s looking at me. He sniffles. “You mean without permission?”

  “If you have to, yes. If she doesn’t understand that it’s an emergency.”

  He takes a minute to absorb this. Then he says, “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow. Everybody’s going to make fun of me.”