Hello, My Name Is Scrambled Eggs by Jamie Gilson

Author:Jamie Gilson [Gilson, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-212815-7
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1985-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

8

And That, You Guys, Is the News

AS WE WALKED TO SCHOOL on Monday, Tom was not smiling. Neither was I. “You laugh a big mouth at me,” he said. “Quint say.”

“Quint lied. I laughed because the policeman let us go. I was happy is all.”

“Ba Noi say it bad. She say fingers one time dipped in ink not clean again.”

“You mean you told her?”

He nodded. “I tell about policeman. She no understand why.”

“What did you do?” Julia asked. “What police? What ink? I won’t tell.”

“Nothing. Nothing happened. Now, run ahead and play with your little friends.” She stepped on my foot.

“We throw”—Tom didn’t remember the words, but he tossed an imaginary roll of toilet paper in the air—“in tree and on … pork.”

Julia’s face lit up. Almost everybody had seen our streamers sometime over the weekend. “You did it? You’re the ones who TP’d the pig?” And I could tell by the way she said it that we were going to be her Tell of today’s Show and. She dashed off, arms wide, full of the story.

All weekend long Tom hadn’t mentioned Friday night. Quint had talked to him on the phone Saturday morning. Then he’d gone off to their new house with his dad and grandmother and my mom to learn how to work their new washer and dryer and what the smoke alarm was like. The church was renting the place and fixing it up. The furnace was almost installed, so in a week they were moving from our place to theirs. They’d live in it free for six months and then start paying the rent themselves. That was the deal.

Mom showed Ba Noi what she could, but a Vietnamese man from Jacksonville, who’d been in the country more than a year, drove over to translate the hard stuff. I spent the day as a drugstore drone. Dad said he needed me more than they did.

Sunday the Quackenbushes invited the whole Nguyen family over after church for dinner and a drive in the country to see the maple leaves. So, what with one thing or another, no time seemed right for talking about important things—like their new last name.

I wasn’t sure what Tom was going to make of his first full day of school. I knew it was going to be different from the school he’d known before. My dad had asked about the one in Vietnam, and Tom had told him they always stood up when the teacher came into the room there, but then they sat at their desks memorizing facts and writing out problems and working on handwriting. It sounded like they mostly sat. Girls sat in the front rows, boys in the back. My dad thought it was terrific. I got tired just listening.

Anyway, I knew he hadn’t had anything like our Social Studies class. Or Ms. Ward. She’s young and pretty and always doing stuff to make us argue about what we’re learning. “Try to see both sides,” she says, “before you decide.” The small wooden sign on her desk is painted, I SAID MAYBE, AND THAT’S FINAL.

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