Counting Thyme (18 page)

Mom stared at me like she didn't know what to think. I wanted to tell her I was just trying to help, but the words wouldn't come out. I felt like I was in a dream, like none of this was real, and we were all trapped in it together, only the dream was a nightmare.

Dad's hand settled on my shoulder. “Let's go,” he said, and I went.

NEWS

IN THE MORNING, WE WERE ALL EXHAUSTED, BLEARY FROM TOO
little sleep and sore from snapping at each other. Mom barely looked at me, but Dad explained that what had happened to Val was called a night terror. That's a thing that can happen when you're really scared about something—in Val's case, that meant going back to the hospital to start 3F8 again. On some level, he was afraid of the pain.

Val didn't even remember what had happened during the night. He was the only one smiling and acting normal at breakfast, back to his usual brave self. I gave him a high five before I left with Mrs. Ravelli and promised I'd play games with him when he got home from the hospital.

“Pinkie swear?” he said.

“Pinkie swear.”

When I walked into MS 221, kids were crowded around the trophy cases. That's when I remembered the casting announcements for the Spring Fling. I squeezed through the crowd and caught a glimpse of my name—on sound production, right next to Jake Reese's. I couldn't believe that I'd
done it. Then I wondered if Jake had seen the list, too, and my face flushed. Suddenly, I felt like I was about to cry. I was just so tired from the night before.

I pushed my way out of the crowd and found Celia and Delia waiting at our lockers.

“Have you heard the news?” Delia squealed.

Celia grabbed my arm. “Thyme! Did you see the list?”

“Yeah. I'm on sound production. Yay!” The twins were always so dramatic. Like what I signed up for was a big deal.

“That's not what we're talking about.” Delia circled closer to me. Celia wrapped her other arm around her sister, and they both bent forward, creating a little bubble of privacy in the middle of the hall. “It's
Emily
,” Delia whispered. “Mr. Calhoun gave her the alternate! Lizzie got Dorothy!
Lizzie!
”

“What do you mean?” I'd been so busy thinking about me and Jake on sound production that I hadn't even checked the other sheets. “What's an alternate?”

Celia was practically panting. “The alternate gets to be a Munchkin, too. But she doesn't get to be Dorothy unless Lizzie can't do it!”

“Oh wow.”

“I know, it's terrible,” Delia said, her eyes glowing. Celia giggled. Obviously, the twins didn't think Emily's loss was all that terrible. More like exciting. Entertaining, even.

At lunch, Emily didn't have much to say about the Spring Fling. In fact, nobody had much to say about anything. Everyone was too busy stealing glances at Emily and Lizzie, waiting
to see what would happen next. Then the twins brought up the science fair, which was in a few weeks, and Lizzie said she was going to build a battery out of a lemon.

“That's so stupid,” Emily said. “You can't get electricity from a lemon.”

The table hushed and Lizzie turned pink. “Actually, you can,” she said quietly.

“I'm just kidding! I'm sure your experiment will be awesome,” Emily said with her big fake smile. Then everyone went back to eating, even though we all knew Emily wasn't kidding.

“See you guys,” Lizzie said a minute later, slipping away from the table early.

Rebeccah gave Emily a sympathetic look. “I can't believe she still
sat
with us.”

Emily said, “I know,” but her eyes followed Lizzie out of the cafeteria. I got up to follow Lizzie, too. After what Emily had done for her at the audition, I'd thought that maybe they could make up. But with Rebeccah spouting garbage in Emily's ear, that wasn't going to happen. I wished I didn't care, but the truth was, that bothered me.

On the way out of the cafeteria, Jake fell into step beside me. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” He was wearing a shirt with a drawing of a guitar on the front. It said
Keep Calm and Play Guitar
. “So they posted the Spring Fling assignments,” I said. “I'm on sound production.”

“Really? Do you play an instrument?”

“Not . . . exactly. I mean, I just thought I'd try it.”

He smiled. “That's cool. I'll see you at the meeting?”

“Yeah.” According to the morning announcements, we were supposed to report to the auditorium after school on Wednesday for our big orientation to all things
Wizard of Oz
.

“I'll save you a seat,” he said. Then he bumped my shoulder with his, and my heart sped up. I wondered if his heart was speeding up, too, or if it was just me. I needed to ask Shani how this worked, liking someone. Was I supposed to tell him? Was he supposed to tell me? Is that what he was doing when he smiled like that and said nice things and—
augh
.

Then Jake pressed his earbud into place and started humming. He didn't seem like his heart was trying to jump out of his chest. But still. The more I thought about it, the more sound production sounded, well, exotic. Like working on a movie. Maybe there was a sound booth behind the stage. Or a fancy sound-effects machine. The possibilities were endless.

After school, Mrs. Ravelli was waiting at the bottom of the steps with a small white box tied with red string. When she saw me, she lifted the box and wiggled it like a worm on a hook. She said pastries were
come il cacio sui maccheroni
, which meant “like cheese on macaroni.”

“Did you get angel ears?” I asked.

“You tell me. Is the sky blue?”

She untied the box and produced a golden brown pastry made of a thousand crunchy layers. To be fair, they were really called elephant ears or angel wings, but Mrs. Ravelli had
mashed the two names together, and I kind of liked the idea of angels flying around with giant pastry ears.

Back home, my favorite dessert was a cream horn from Hans and Harry's, a layered puff pastry with cream inside. They were too big to eat alone, so Shani and I had always shared. We split the horn right down the middle with a plastic knife and raced to finish. I never won, but I told Shani that was just because she had such a big mouth, which is the kind of thing best friends can say in a totally not-mean way. I'd meant to tell her about the angel ears, but I kept forgetting.

“Is Val home yet?” I asked.

“No,
bambina
,” Mrs. Ravelli said. “Your mama say they will be a little late today.”

“Oh.” I wished I'd known that before I ran out of school after the final bell. Otherwise I might've looked for Lizzie before I left. She hadn't had much to say about what happened at lunch. I didn't understand why she wouldn't stick up for herself. Maybe she felt guilty for taking the Dorothy role from Emily, but she'd won the part fair and square.

Halfway to the apartment, Mrs. Ravelli tapped my nose. “Your face, it look so serious for a young girl! You tell me, was there trouble today?”

I took my time chewing the last bite of the angel ear. Lizzie was still on my mind. And signing up for sound production. And what working with Jake would be like. I had to ask my parents for permission to stay after school on Wednesday, too.

“
Vai!
” Mrs. Ravelli said, clapping her hands. “Come now. You wait too long, you have to talk to me at the Green-Wood,” she said. Meaning,
Green-Wood Cemetery
. Where Mr. Ravelli was buried. And where Mrs. Ravelli planned to be buried, too. Apparently Italians thought that talking about where they were going to be buried was normal. Or maybe that was just Ravioli.

“There's this play,” I said, my face flushing. I hadn't planned to tell anyone about the Spring Fling, because it was no big deal. Right? “And I signed up to work on it.”

“What? You going to be in a play, and you say nothing?”

“No! No. I'm not going to be
in
the play. I'm just working on it.”

She patted my arm. “Very good, Thyme. You make your own way, and that is good.”

I thought back to what she'd said before, about making my own way. That's what was happening, but it still felt new. And private. I didn't want my family getting any ideas about me. They wouldn't understand that signing up for something at school didn't mean I wanted to stay in New York forever.

“Mrs. Ravelli? Would you mind, for now, if we didn't say anything about the play to my parents? It's just, the show isn't until March.”

She studied my face for a moment. She had these creases that showed up on either side of her mouth when she was thinking, parentheses for her worries about undercooked
paste
or the lack of asparagus in our diets. She tapped my nose
with her gloved finger. “I tell you what. You tell me about the play. And for now, it will be our secret,
bambina
. But not forever,
capisce
?”
Capisce
meant “do we have a deal?” Another of Mrs. Ravelli's favorite phrases. Because in Italian, they used fewer words to say the same thing. And that was better, in Mrs. Ravelli's book.

At the apartment building, we stopped by Mr. Lipinsky's to give him some angel ears, too. I still hadn't seen him since the week before. He didn't answer when we knocked, so I thought we would just leave them by his door, but Mrs. Ravelli dug in her big quilted bag and magically produced a key.

“You have his key now?”

“Just in case,” she said with a wink, although I couldn't imagine how she'd talked him into it.

Inside, Mr. Lipinsky was nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Ravelli took the pastries to the kitchen and I went over to Sylvie's cage. She whistled when she saw me. For an old bird, she had a ton of personality.

Mr. Lipinsky shuffled into the living room. “Kicked out of my own kitchen,” he grumbled, while I jiggled the bells on Sylvie's cage. She squawked and tapped them, too.

“If you whistle to her, she'll whistle back,” he said. I tried whistling to Sylvie, and it worked. “She likes you,” he said as he settled into his chair. For once, he wasn't wearing the purple robe. Instead, he had on a button-down shirt, but the sleeves were rolled way up. There were streaks of white flour on his forearms and across the fabric.

“What are you baking?” I asked, hoping it wasn't another
kugel. Mom had warned me never to accept anything like that from anyone ever again.

He gave me a quizzical look. “Who said I was baking?”

At first, I thought he was joking. As in,
W
ho said I like to be grumpy?
Duh! Everyone. I wanted him to tell me how baking was a science based on hundreds of years of innovation. How back in his day, there was some kind of honor to walking around with smears of flour on your forearms. But Mr. Lipinsky seemed confused again, like that day at the bus stop. Maybe it was a bad day.

“Never mind,” I said. “Want to play checkers?” His expression softened, so I got out the checkers case. We set up the pieces. While I waited for my turn, I looked at all the theater stuff on Mr. Lipinsky's walls. Either he was a huge fan, or he'd had something to do with Broadway.

“Where'd you get all this theater stuff?” I asked.

He glanced at the Broadway posters. “My Ada was the top of the town in costuming. Everyone wanted her for their shows.”