Slug Days Read online

  I sighed. “Use the mat, watch my fingers, and close the knife when I’m done.”

  “Good. You may start.”

  Using the box cutter made me feel grown up, but I had to say the rules every time we worked on Insectia. Mrs. Patel never let me use a knife at school. Knives were not part of my safety plan. “How do I make a hexagon?”

  Mom passed me a ruler. “Cut six pieces exactly the same size. I’ll help you fit them together.”

  I worked on measuring while Mom took out the clay and began rolling pieces of yellow into little balls. That was how we worked—I built the houses and she built the insects. We made that plan after pieces of clay got stuck under my fingernails and made me itch, and my fingers bled because I picked them so much.

  Mom looked at her watch. “We have forty-five minutes before it’s time for bed.”

  I frowned. I didn’t like bedtime. But I did like Mom telling me how much time we had. It was part of my safety plan at home. Mom gave me lots of warning, and then I didn’t flip my lid when she told me time was up.

  Chapter 7

  Fitting the hexagoN pieces together was hard. They didn’t make perfect hexagon shapes the way I wanted. Mom reached over to help me, but I batted her hand away. I heard her huffing like a bear again. I didn’t want her to flip her lid and stop working on Insectia, so I let her help me. When she held the first two pieces together it was easier, and soon I had two bedrooms and a kitchen for the bees.

  “You’d better get busy making those bees,” I said. “I’ll paint the house.”

  Dad came home with the baby just as Mom said, “Ten minutes left.”

  I didn’t want to waste any time, so I didn’t say anything to Dad.

  He stood beside me. “What do you say when someone comes into the room, Lauren?”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “And where do you look?”

  I breathed the way Mom does, put down my paintbrush, and looked at Dad. “Hello.” I looked at the baby. “Hello.” She was asleep in the front pack, with her legs dangling like two sausage links. She didn’t answer me. I went back to painting.

  “Eight minutes,” Mom said.

  “Nice hexagons,” Dad said. “They are very regular.”

  “They aren’t regular. They are special bee-house hexagons.” I showed him my excellent black-and-yellow-stripes painting job.

  Dad smiled. “Regular is a math word. It means the sides and angles are all the same.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s what I wanted. It was hard. Mom helped.”

  “Two minutes,” Mom said.

  I rushed to finish my painting and accidentally globbed black paint on the front of the bee kitchen. “No!” I cried. All my work was ruined. My face grew hot, and lava started to bubble and boil inside of me. I could feel angry steam filling my head.

  Mom sucked in a deep breath like she was going to blow up a balloon.

  My volcano was about to erupt. I opened my mouth to scream, and lifted the paintbrush to throw. Dad caught my arm and held it. “That’s a nice door you just painted.”

  “What?”

  “See?” He outlined the smear I’d made. It did look like a bee-sized door.

  I nodded. The volcano cooled off. “I need to give it a doorknob.” I dabbed a yellow dot on the smear.

  Mom let out a big whoosh of air. “Cleanup time,” she said.

  Chapter 8

  On Thursday I went to see Ms. Lagorio in room 272. She once told me her name meant green lizard in Italian. It was a good thing she was a very pretty lady. Imagine if she had old skin and looked like a lizard.

  When I arrived, she said we would be working on having conversations. We practiced where to stand when talking to a friend. She made me stand up and pretend to talk to her.

  “Why do we need to practice this?” I asked. “I know how to talk to people.”

  “Sometimes other people don’t like it if you stand too close to them,” Ms. Lagorio said.

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about. I never stood too close to people.

  Ms. Lagorio put her hands on my shoulders and nudged me backward a few steps. “That’s a good distance to stand.”

  “But now I have to talk louder,” I said in my outside voice.

  Ms. Lagorio smiled. “No, honey. I can hear you just fine in your regular voice.” She told me to hold my arm out straight. “That’s how far you should stand.”

  After we practiced, she let me have a jelly bean because I listened so well, and she let me look at Where’s Waldo for an extra ten minutes.

  Chapter 9

  When I weNt back to the classroom, we did “Think, pair, share.” Normally I didn’t like it because it took me too long to think, and nobody wanted to pair and share with me. But I was excited to try the new arm-distance talking Ms. Lagorio had taught me.

  Mrs. Patel said we should think about the province of Manitoba, which we have been studying. That was easy. I knew lots of facts about Manitoba. Like one time it was colder in Winnipeg than it was on Mars. And it is home to the largest den of garter snakes in the world. And Winnie-the-Pooh was named after a real bear that was named after Winnipeg.

  I stopped thinking after three facts so I would be able to remember them when we paired and shared. I squeezed my eyes tight so the ideas wouldn’t float out of my brain.

  Mrs. Patel drew names to choose partners. She chose Dan and me to be together.

  “No way!” Dan shouted.

  Mrs. Patel stared at him until he muttered, “Fine.”

  I went to stand in front of him. I used what I learned from Ms. Lagorio and stretched out my hand until it touched Dan’s shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me.” Dan stepped back.

  I moved forward and touched his shoulder again, so we would be the right distance apart.

  “Quit it!” Dan said. He stepped back again. This time he backed into the bookshelf.

  I stepped forward and measured the distance between us.

  “If you touch me one more time, I’m going to punch your lights out,” Dan said.

  I dropped my arm. We were the right distance anyway. “I’ll go first,” I said.

  “No. I’m going first.”

  “No, me!”

  Mrs. Patel rushed over. “The person with the longest hair may go first,” she announced to the class in a big voice.

  Dan made his upset face again. I didn’t kiss him to make him feel better. He looked too much like a lizard. Instead, I smiled and got ready to share my thinking. Except by then all the ideas had floated out of my head.

  Chapter 10

  For snack on Thursday, Dad packed me two hard-boiled eggs and a bag of crackers. My favorite. I put the eggs in my skirt and crouched on the ground beside my desk. “Bawk, bawk,” I said, bobbing my head and bouncing up and down. I looked just like a chicken. Alyssa started laughing. So did Dan. Then I tipped forward, and the eggs rolled out of my skirt. “Look, I’m laying eggs!”

  Alyssa started laughing even harder. Dan laughed so hard, milk sprayed out of his nose. Mrs. Patel didn’t like that.

  “Lauren! That’s a warning. Give me those eggs and go back to your seat immediately!”

  “But that’s my snack,” I said.

  “They’ve been on the floor. And obviously you were more interested in playing with them than eating them.” She walked to the compost bucket and dropped them inside. Right on top of Jackson’s icky, mayonnaise-covered ham slice.

  It was so unfair. Dan was the one who squirted milk out his nose. Why was I the only one who got in trouble?

  I took my bag of crackers out of my lunch kit. Just before I started to smash the bag between my fingers to make dust, Mrs. Patel turned around and pointed a finger at me. “No dust.”

  I tried pinching the top of my nose to see if it would make the p
roblem go away, but it didn’t make me feel better at all. I didn’t like eating crackers whole. I liked mushing them up and pouring the cracker dust into my mouth. Then I’d take a sip of water, and it would turn to cracker glue. I wished Mrs. Patel would stop making me have slug days.

  Chapter 11

  Thursday was pizza night. Pulling the cheese from my pizza with my teeth was almost as good as pulling the gooey ice cream out of the groove at the ice-cream store. Without the risk of getting my fingers stuck.

  Dad made my pizza with extra cheese, even though Mom said too much cheese wasn’t good for me, and I should learn to eat it politely. Dad said pizza was finger food, so what difference did it make? And Mom huffed like a bear and fed the baby.

  At the end of dinner, Dad said, “So what’s it going to be, Lauren? Kitchen or baby?”

  “Neither,” I said.

  Dad made a buzzer sound. “Wrong answer. Try again.”

  “You know the deal,” Mom said. “We all help out on pizza night.” She passed me an eraser.

  I squeezed it tight. “Fine. Baby.”

  Mom’s eyebrows shot up her forehead like two caterpillars that had just seen a fresh leaf. “Great! Would you like to read to her or give her a bath?”

  “Read.” Dad once told me the baby sometimes peed in the bathtub. I was not putting my hand in her pee.

  Mom scooped the baby out of her high chair and brought her over to the couch. “You choose a book, Lauren.”

  I chose the shortest board book I could find. Mom plopped the baby right beside me. I scooted over. She crawled closer to me. I scooted over some more. The baby gurgled and put her hands on my shoulders. I tried to shake them off.

  “Lauren,” Mom said. “You’ll hurt her. She’s trying to see the book.”

  I put the book on the couch, and the baby squealed and tried to pick it up and eat it. I snatched it from her hands. It was covered in baby slime, which is not as sticky as slug slime or as stretchy as the goo at the ice-cream store. It is slippery and very gross. I went and took another book from the basket.

  “You eat that one,” I said. “I’ll read this one.”

  “That’s good problem solving,” Mom said.

  She could call it problem solving if she wanted. I called it staying dry. While the baby ate her book, I read the other one. I read fast, because I wanted to finish before she chewed her way through her book and came after mine.

  “Slow down, honey,” Mom said.

  I sighed and read slower.

  Chapter 12

  I fiNished the book and snapped it shut. “Time for bed, Baby.”

  “That was pretty quick,” Mom said. She handed me another book. “Read this one too.”

  Before I could say no, the baby saw the book and started clapping her hands and laughing.

  Each page only had one word. And a big baby face. Since she wasn’t trying to eat it, or me, I decided to read. Besides, it was short.

  “Happy.” I turned the page. “Sad.” It was like the cards that Ms. Lagorio showed me when we talked about reading people’s feelings. “Funny.” I pretended to laugh like the picture of the little boy in the book. The real baby laughed with me. “Grumpy.” I scrunched up my mouth like the girl in the picture. My real baby laughed.

  “You’re supposed to be grumpy,” I said. But I didn’t really care. When my baby laughed, it felt like butterflies fluttering around the room.

  “Surprised.” I lifted my eyebrows and opened my mouth like Ms. Lagorio taught me. My baby laughed and laughed. “That’s the last page. Should we read it again?”

  Lexi crawled onto my lap. And I let her.

  Chapter 13

  On Friday, Mrs. Patel read us a story before lunch. I sat beside Alyssa on the carpet. I knew she liked me, because she laughed at my egg-laying yesterday. Mom said laughing with someone was a way of showing you liked them. So when I sat beside Alyssa, I sat really close. I wanted to hug her, but Mom said not everybody likes getting hugs, and sometimes I hug so tight I’m like a boa constrictor. So I put my head in Alyssa’s lap and played with her hair instead.

  But she must have had an itch, because she kept jerking away from me. I hoped she didn’t have lice, because lice are a very big pain. They make your mom and dad really grumpy with all the laundry, and you have to sit very, very still and listen to audiobooks for hours and hours.

  Thinking about lice made me worried, so I sat up and let go of her hair. “Good choice, Lauren,” Mrs. Patel said. I wasn’t sure if she meant sitting close to Alyssa, or not playing with her hair because of the lice thing.

  I couldn’t wait to go out at long recess and play with my best friend Alyssa. I ran to the cloakroom as soon as the bell rang, and pulled on my rain jacket. I didn’t even want to take off my runners, but Mrs. Patel noticed and made me go back and get my boots. Then she saw me running down the hall, and I had to come back and practice walking to the door.

  By the time I made it outside, Alyssa was already playing tag with Dan and Abdel and Sachi. “Who’s it?” I yelled.

  Nobody answered me, but it looked like Dan was it, so I ran away from him. When he didn’t chase me, I ran toward him again. Then Alyssa was it. “Can’t catch me!” I yelled. But Alyssa didn’t chase me either.

  “I’m it! I’m it!” I called. They all ignored me and ran to the playground. So I chased them over there. They played grounders, but they never let me be it. Then they ran to the basketball court. So I followed them there.

  Alyssa turned at the edge of the court. “Stop following us, Lauren!”

  I stopped. I thought she was my friend. I was wrong. It was a slug, slimy day. “Fine!” I yelled. “I don’t want to play with you and your lice anyway!”

  I ran and hid under my tree. Mrs. Kelly had to come find me and drag me back to class after long recess. Only this time, she didn’t have to waste as much of her valuable time, because she knew where I was. Next time I’d have to find a better hiding place.

  Chapter 14

  When I entered the classroom after long recess, Mrs. Patel said, “I’m glad you’re here, Lauren, because I have a surprise for the class.”

  I didn’t like surprises. Especially not surprises by adults. Usually when an adult has a surprise, it’s followed by them getting sad because you aren’t as happy with their surprise as they are. Like when Mom and Dad told me about the new baby. They had big eyes and smiles when they told me about the exciting change that was going to happen to our family. And then their faces turned all tight and frown-y when I said I didn’t like change, and they could give the baby to another family. And they really didn’t like it after the baby came home, and they had those big eyes again, and I asked if we could give the baby back to the nurses.

  I didn’t like change. They should have known that. Change meant I didn’t know what was going to happen. Change made me feel jittery. Mrs. Patel knew that too. But there she was, smiling like a surprise was going to turn my day into a butterfly day.

  “Everybody, we have a new student joining us today. Her name is Irma. I expect you to make her feel welcome.”

  There was a knock. “That will be her now.” Mrs. Patel walked to the door.

  So that was the big surprise? A new student? Maybe I could live with that change.

  Mrs. Patel led Irma to the front of the class. “Irma is here from Sweden. She doesn’t speak much English, so I need you to be extra helpful and kind.” Mrs. Patel’s eyes stayed fixed on Dan as she talked. “Say hello, class.”

  “Hello, Irma,” we said.

  “Hello, class,” Dan said. Some of the boys started giggling. I wanted to laugh, but I decided to hide my smile behind my hand.

  I needed to be kind and welcoming to Irma. And if I laughed with Dan, it would mean I liked him. Which I did not.

  Chapter 15

  Mrs. Patel led Irma to the desk right behind mine.
I stood up as she came by. I wanted to give her an extra-tight hug to welcome her to our class. But as I was about to, Mrs. Patel looked at me with eyeballs that said, Stop. So I sat down again and put my head on my desk and rolled my special eraser back and forth, smelling its strawberry scent.

  We started math. Two-digit subtraction. I didn’t mind two-digit subtraction when Dad taught it to me. I liked numbers. I knew what to expect. And once you knew the steps, you could do two-digit subtraction exactly the same way each time and always get the right answer. But then Mrs. Patel decided she wanted us to figure out different ways to solve the problems, and we had to show her our thinking. And when I said I liked my way and it worked, she got mad. Now I spent most of math time feeling jittery and angry. I rolled my eraser a lot and did my math problems at home with Dad, when he wasn’t too busy with the baby.

  Irma tapped me on the back. “Hello.”

  I turned to face her. “Hi.” I remembered what Mom taught me about introductions. I stuck out my hand. “I’m Lauren.”

  Irma shook my hand. “I am Irma. How do you do?”

  I looked at her for a second. “How do I do what? Math?”