The 47 People You'll Meet in Middle School by Kristin Mahoney

Author:Kristin Mahoney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Late that Friday afternoon, when I heard Mom approaching the front door I suddenly remembered I was supposed to have taken spaghetti sauce out of the freezer. I got up from the sofa where I’d been lying down and texting with Sarah and scrambled to the kitchen. You were having a sticker-trading session and dinner at Clarissa’s house.

“Hey, Gus,” Mom said. She glanced at the sofa, and I wondered if she could tell I’d just been lying there. “Texting with Layla?” she asked.

“No, Sarah.” I hadn’t texted Layla much since I’d gotten my phone back, and I hadn’t heard from her many times either. Once or twice she’d send me something dull like UGH! Hate math! but there wasn’t much to say to that other than IKR? It was like neither one of us knew how to act after the awkward Jocelyn meet-up.

“Oh…weren’t you guys supposed to be planning a sleepover?”

“Who, me and Sarah?”

“No, you and Layla.”

“Oh. I don’t know. That was a while ago. We kind of forgot about it.”

Mom didn’t push further, either because she could tell I didn’t want to talk about it or because she was suddenly preoccupied with the rock-solid bag of frozen spaghetti sauce on the kitchen counter.

“When did you take this out of the freezer?” she asked, trying to smush the bag around in her hands to see if any part of the sauce was in liquid form.

“When did I take what out?”

“Gus. This spaghetti sauce.”

“Oh. A while ago?”

She gave me a look. “I’m going to go upstairs to shower and change. Dump the sauce into a bowl and nuke it, and put some water on to boil for pasta. Please.”

When Mom came back downstairs in jeans and a sweater, the sauce still had frosty blobs in it, even though I’d kept taking it out of the microwave and hacking at it with the handle of a wooden spoon the whole time she was in the shower.

“What are you doing to that poor spaghetti sauce?” Mom asked.

“I’m stirring it.”

“Looks more like you’re murdering it. Let’s just see what we can salvage for now,” she said. “I’m hungry.” Mom tipped the bowl and let the liquid part of the sauce pour over the pasta, then she put the rest back for another round in the microwave.

“So you know this is your weekend at Dad’s, right?” she asked after we sat down, as she sprinkled Parmesan cheese over her spaghetti.

“Yeah, why?” Usually when it was Dad’s weekend, we’d eat with him on Friday night, but tonight he had to go to dinner with a big radio station advertiser. Mom’s hospital shift ended early that day, so she said it was fine to start the weekend with her and that she could take me to the dance.

“Well, he’ll be picking you up from the dance.”

“That’s okay.” I didn’t know why Mom seemed weirdly nervous about this. We were getting used to the every-other-weekend-at-Dad’s-place routine. It wasn’t a big deal.

“Okay, good,” Mom said. By now she had sprinkled about half a cup of Parmesan onto her plate.

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