Counting Thyme (20 page)

YES AND NO

“IT WAS GOOD, YES?” MRS. RAVELLI ASKED ON OUR WAY HOME
after the production meeting. Most of the snow had melted, except for the lumpy hills the plows had left on the street corners. But it still felt like the Arctic outside, or at least what I imagined the Arctic must feel like.

“It was fun,” I admitted, “but I have no clue how to do anything.” My breath left a trail in the air.

“Yes and no,” she said. “This is okay. Sometimes, it is hard to see the way when you are in the middle of things. My uncle, he come to America one year before me. He let me stay with him, and he get me a job at his deli, too. My first day, I broke the cash register!
Ay
, it was hopeless!”

She rested a hand on her forehead, as though the memory alone might make her faint, and I laughed. “It took me many days to learn the new ways,” she said, “but I did it. You will learn, too. This I know.”

While we walked, I told her about all of the different sounds we had to create, and how they would make the play seem more real to the audience. When we got to the apartment building, she mentioned that she'd seen Mr. Lipinsky
that morning, and that he was feeling much better since our visit on Monday, which made me happy. I didn't like seeing him confused.

On our way up the stairs, I whistled a song from
The Wizard of Oz
, and by the time we got to the third floor, I could hear Sylvie whistling back. Sure enough, Mr. Lipinsky's door popped open. “Keep it down out there,” he said before he slammed the door, but he didn't really look that angry. In fact, I thought I might have even seen him smile.

Upstairs, Mom and Val were already home. Mom was sitting at the dining table with a bunch of papers. And for the first time that week, Val was on the couch instead of back in her bedroom.

“T!” he said. “I rode the 4 train!” He held up a new model subway car.

“Let's keep it calm,” Mom warned, and Val set the train down again, although he was obviously feeling a million times better.

Mrs. Ravelli gave him a little wave and headed into the kitchen.

“How'd it go today?” I asked Mom.

“Pretty well.” She glanced up, and I thought she was going to ask me how my theater meeting went, but she just said, “Dr. Everett says we can expect the 3F8 infusions to go better later in the week, but the first few days of treatment will always be hard.” I knew I should have been happy that she was sharing something with me, but all I heard was the word
always
.

“Did Dr. Everett say when we can go home yet?” I asked, and Mom's face closed up.

She glanced at Val. “Let's not worry about that right now.” She gathered her papers and said, “I'll be in my room.” Then she left like she couldn't get away from me fast enough.

I wanted to shout at her the way Cori did, but then I saw Val watching me from the couch. That's when I knew. I didn't want to be there, and he knew it.

Talk about a horrible feeling. I was the worst sister on the planet.

I plastered a smile on my face and plopped down next to him. “Guess what?”

“What?” he said eagerly. Val loved news. And secrets.

I leaned closer. “I learned how to make fake thunder today,” I whispered, like I was letting him in on a very, very important piece of information.

His little blue eyes lit up. “Can you show me?” he whispered back.

Mom was still in her room. “Okay, I'll be right back.” I snuck into the kitchen and stole a wooden spoon and one of Mom's sheet pans, right behind Mrs. Ravelli's back. In the living room, Val sat up on his knees, grinning with excitement.

“Ready?” I asked.

He squealed.

Then I nailed the sheet pan with the spoon, and a super loud (and pretty terrible) crash exploded in the air. It wasn't exactly right for thunder, but it was startling as heck. Mom and Mrs. Ravelli both came running. When Mom saw me
standing there with the spoon and the pan, she looked like she wanted to strangle me. Val grabbed the spoon and started whacking away at the pan.

“Sorry!” I shouted over the racket. “I'm just practicing for my theater group.”

But the truth is, I wasn't sorry at all.

The next day at lunch, I went straight to the auditorium and got there ahead of everyone else. The door that led backstage swung open silently, and for a split second, I felt like I was sneaking around somewhere I wasn't supposed to be. Then a woman's powerful voice burst into song from beyond the stage curtains, in the direction of the piano. Only there was no music, just the sound of her voice.

I crept past the trunk of sound props and peeked past the stage curtains. Mrs. Smith was there, sitting at the piano while she waited for us to show up, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” a cappella. But not the way I was used to hearing it. This version of the song was slower, more drawn out, and with a different beat. Words melted like whispers into the highest notes. And in between the words, the most beautiful hum filled the silence. I let the words wash over me, even though I felt them stirring something up—some sorrow buried deep down inside.

“
Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chim-iny tops, that's where, you'll fi-ind me.
” As I stood there, listening, tears sprang to my eyes, fast and hot. The kind of tears no
amount of blinking could hold back. It felt almost like homesickness again.

Then the stage door slammed open behind me, and Mrs. Smith stopped singing.

I hid my face as the other kids filed inside carrying bag lunches from the cafeteria. The air heaved in and out of my lungs in great, rattling bursts. It was like Mrs. Smith's voice had reached right into my chest and squeezed the feelings out of my heart.

Mrs. Smith walked past me. “Thyme!”

I wiped at my eyes. “I, ah, I just got here. I wasn't sure what to do.”

“Well, first you eat lunch with everyone else. I don't need anyone running on empty when we have so much to do.” Her voice sounded stern, but when I looked up, her smile glowed.

I ate with the rest of the sound crew, including Jake. Then Mrs. Smith gave me a list of sounds to work on with Amelia, while Jake worked with Davis. “Remember, these sounds will be amplified by microphones. But we need them to really
snap
!” She snapped her fingers for emphasis. “Show me what you can do.”

Amelia dug in the prop trunk while I read Mrs. Smith's list aloud. Some of the sounds seemed easy, like a cowbell. Others I had no idea how to make, like howling wind.

“How do we make something howl?”

Amelia's head popped up from the trunk. With her
straw-colored hair going this way and that, she was a perfect match for the Scarecrow. “That's a tough one. We'll have to brainstorm some ideas. We might need some new materials for a good howl. Here's something.” She twisted a blue plastic place mat into a cone and blew through the smaller end. A sound came from the cone, but it was more like a foghorn than a howl.

She tossed the place mat back on the pile. “Close, but no tamale.”

“So . . . where do we get new materials?”

“Look around at home. Or in the art room. Try to find stuff that might work. Mrs. Smith said that's what they did last year. If we can't figure it out, she can buy some stuff. But we have a really small budget, and she needs to save it for CDs if we can't make the sounds ourselves.”

My mind raced with possibilities for making sounds, like Mom's old plastic watering can. I wondered what kind of noise would come out of it. Then I remembered I hadn't seen the can since we'd moved. What did we need a watering can for in the city? We didn't even have a yard.

I ran my finger down the list of sounds, noting the ones that seemed toughest. It would be fun to figure these out. Movies were full of cool sounds. Someone, somewhere, had to make every single sound. I could be like the Wizard himself, the one behind the scenes, making the magic. Which sounded just about perfect to me.

NO TAKE-BACKS

AT THE END OF THAT WEEK, VAL FINISHED HIS SECOND ROUND
of 3F8, which meant he was done for January. He was tired, but he still helped me work on sound props over the weekend. We used things we had around the apartment, like rubber gloves tied to a ruler to make a flapping sound for flying monkey wings. Mr. Lipinsky called it a “hopeless contraption” when I ran downstairs to show him on Sunday afternoon, but it got a smile out of Val even though he was still puffy and itchy. Mom warned me not to wear him out, but she smiled when she said it.

Right before bedtime on Sunday night, the phone rang. Dad appeared in our doorway, and Cori pulled her headphones off. “Is it Liam?” she asked.

Dad smiled. “No. It's Shani, calling for Thyme.” He handed me the phone. “Just a few minutes, or we'll have the warden in here.”

Cori put her headphones back on, and I pressed the phone to my ear.

“Did you forget?” Shani said. “We were supposed to talk yesterday.”

I looked up. I hadn't marked the call on the Calendar of Us like I usually did. “Shoot. I'm sorry. I've just been busy working on stuff for the Spring Fling.”

“Well, I can't talk long,” Shani said.

“Me neither.” I thought of all the things I wanted to tell her. About sound production, and Jake playing his Dad's guitar for me, and Val—

“Well, if you don't have anything to say . . .” Now she sounded mad.

“No, no. I do! Val finished his second round of 3F8. It wasn't as bad for him by the end of the week, either. He actually laughed.”

“Does that mean you're coming home soon?”

“Well, Val still has to have his treatment for February. Then he has to have scans, and it takes a while to get the results, so I think it's going to be a little longer—”

“I meant
you
,” Shani said, and it finally clicked.

“Oh. No, I haven't asked my parents yet.”

“Well, how much time do you have now?”

I looked at the Thyme Jar. I hadn't exactly counted every single slip since Shani and I had talked the weekend before, but with the time I'd earned that week, I had to have over a hundred and thirty hours saved up. Which was so much time.

So. Much. Time.

What was I waiting for?

Shani was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “You're never coming back, are you?”

“No! No, I am. I am no matter what. You should see how cold it is here. It's like living inside a giant walk-in freezer, only there's no free ice cream.”

Shani didn't laugh.

I glanced at Cori. Her eyes were shut. “I'm serious. I'm going to ask soon. It's just been hard with everything that's been going on with Val.”

“Well, you said he's doing better.”

“Yeah, that's right. And you're right. I'm really sorry I forgot about yesterday.”

“Look, if you're going back on what you said, you should just tell me now.” Shani was practically yelling, and she never yelled.

“I'm not taking it back. I promise.”

There was a pause. “You know how you didn't tell me that crimping my hair made me look like a poodle because you didn't want to hurt my feelings? This isn't like that, right? Because you can take it back and I won't blame you,” she said, sounding like that's exactly what she was doing—blaming me for not trying hard enough. For not being a good enough friend.

“I'm not going back on what I said. I've been really busy, but I'm earning plenty of time, too. I just need to save a little more. I'm getting close to a week.” That was it, right? That's what I was waiting for. To have enough time . . . only a little voice in my head said I could go ahead and ask Mom now, if I really wanted to.

“This isn't easy, you know.” Shani sounded sad all of a sudden. “Jenny is nice, but she's not you. I thought it would be okay, but it's not.”

“I'm sorry.” I didn't know what else to say. It sounded like she was giving up on me.

Shani was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I have to go.”

“I'll call you next Saturday,” I promised, but Shani said she would be gone for a soccer tournament, so it would have to wait. She hung up, and I looked at the Calendar of Us. Then I grabbed a marker and circled January 26, which was two weeks away. I put stars all around the date, too, just in case. I wasn't going to forget again.

At school the next week, Emily acted like she and Lizzie had never been best friends in the first place. She rolled her eyes whenever Mr. Calhoun had them rehearse together and spent all of her time with Rebeccah. Lizzie pretended like she didn't care, but during rehearsals on Wednesday afternoon, I caught her watching Emily joke with Rebeccah while they waited to be called onstage.

“Rebeccah is such a kiss-up,” I said.

Lizzie shrugged and went back to winding a length of yarn from the costume table. I wondered if you could pass some invisible point in a friendship where there was no turning back, where your friend was lost forever. I kept imagining Shani staring at her phone, waiting for me to call. And me not calling.

After a minute, Lizzie said, “I think I'm going to quit.”

“Why? You're such a good singer.”

She frowned. “It's just so hard. I've been counting like my doctor told me to, but every time I go onstage, all I see is everyone staring at me. And that's just Mr. Calhoun and his helpers. What happens when there's a whole audience out there? What if I freak out?”

“We can practice together if you want.”

“Thanks.” She didn't look very optimistic.

“There's got to be a way to fix this,” I said, more to myself than to her, and someone laughed. Emily and Rebeccah had moved closer to us.

Rebeccah looked at Lizzie. “Some things are unfixable, duh.”

Lizzie kind of folded in on herself, and I saw a flicker of sadness on Emily's face.

Just then, Jake walked up to me with a dowel rod for one of the sounds we were working on. “I think I got it,” he said. “We can make notches in the wood—”

“That's so cool,” Emily said, smiling at him. He stopped talking, mouth hanging open, seeming to only just realize that I was standing there with three other girls.

“Are you playing your guitar in the show?” she asked. Jake shook his head and took a step back. “Ooh, I know! You should play at the Valentine's dance. Mr. C says they have a student band every year. They put a stage and lights in the gym and everything.”

Jake took another step back. “I don't know about that—”

“You'd be awesome,” Emily said with a smile that turned into a blush, and it occurred to me that maybe she liked him, too.

Jake mumbled that he'd see me later and snuck away.

Then Mr. Calhoun finally called for Lizzie and Emily, and Lizzie hurried away from us.

“She's so lame,” Rebeccah said to Emily. “If she keeps messing up, you'll get the part for sure.”

Emily smiled, but she didn't look entirely happy even though Rebeccah was kissing up as hard as possible. As she walked away, the smile fell completely off her face. That's when I saw it: that invisible moment when you could lose your friend forever. It was right there in front of me. The same sadness that I'd heard in Shani's voice was on Emily's face.

I ran after her and grabbed her arm.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Just listen to me for a minute. Remember when you said this was just a misunderstanding between you and Lizzie? Maybe that's all it really is. There's got to be a way to fix things. You guys are
best
friends. Don't listen to Rebeccah about this. She's not your friend. Lizzie is.”

“What does it matter to you?” Emily said.

“It doesn't,” I said, only I realized that it did. Somewhere along the way, I'd started caring about these girls and their stupid problems. I even missed sitting at the lunch table
together, listening to Emily and Lizzie argue about stupid stuff the way best friends do. The way I used to with Shani.

When I looked back at Emily, she had a frown on her face. “I've got to go,” she said. Then she marched onstage, leaving me standing in the wings.