Short Read online

  “I wasn’t here for auditions because I didn’t arrive until yesterday. I was finishing up a show in Pigeon Forge. I’m certain that all of you are up to the assignment of playing a Munchkin, but I picked you from the audition footage. I’m not saying you have to earn the role; however, I reserve the right to cut anyone I do not believe has the ability to do the job!”

  Again, I keep my head steady but move my eyes. Most of the kids look like nothing is going on, but I can tell that a few of the Munchkins are nervous.

  Olive and Quincy and Larry don’t seem afraid, but they have a lock on their parts.

  Luckily, Shawn stops talking about firing us for not having “the ability to do the job.” And that’s when I realize some part of me—a big part on the inside—must want to be here, because right now not being in the show feels like it would be terrible.

  And to think that only three hours ago I was throwing myself on the ground and trying to twist my ankle!

  But I did that before I met Shawn Barr and before I knew that Olive and Quincy and Larry even existed in this world.

  Shawn has been talking and I haven’t been paying attention. I think he was speaking some lines of Shakespeare, which didn’t make any sense to me. He’s finished with it, because he clears his throat and his hands lift high in the air and he says, “Performers—I need your brightest light! You will all shine! You are all my stars!”

  I look over and Olive is sort of crying.

  Maybe she’s a big fan of Shakespeare. I know he was a playwright who died hundreds of years ago but can still make people sad. At least the people who understand the words.

  But then I see that she’s smiling through the tears. So maybe she’s crying because she’s so happy. Quincy puts his arm around her and then Larry takes her hand. I guess they are old friends.

  Across the stage, leaning against the back wall, is a mirror. I look over in that direction and I can see myself. My little brother is right at my side, and I realize that somehow, without me even noticing, he’s gotten taller than I am. Even sitting down his head is above mine.

  This is shocking.

  I was okay with us being the same size, but now he has passed me by and no one in my family has said anything.

  I blink about ten times in a row because crying in here would be horrible.

  I concentrate on Shawn Barr. He leans forward. It’s like he’s on a ship and the wind is blowing hard. He’s on a tilt. He lowers his voice as if he’s going to tell a secret, but instead he says: “Do we have any questions?”

  I have a million questions, but I’m not going to ask even one, so I can’t believe it when a kid in the front raises his hand. He’s got curly yellow hair and he is wearing black shoes with metal plates on the bottom, which I can see because he’s sitting cross-legged. He says, “Where’s Pigeon Forge?”

  I don’t think that this was the question Shawn Barr was expecting. His forehead scrunches up and his nose lifts like he smelled something stinky. He looks at the yellow-haired kid and says, “Pigeon Forge is a resort city in Tennessee. They have excellent dinner theater there.”

  Olive and Larry and Quincy nod, so I follow their lead.

  I notice now that all of the Munchkins are nodding as if they have been to Tennessee and to resort cities and to dinner theater.

  That’s when I decide that this is going to be the summer when the little people call the shots. And moments later we are all following Shawn Barr’s swirling hands as we sing “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.”

  FOUR

  My dad takes most of the pictures in our family, and he makes scrapbooks.

  This means that he gets to figure out what’s important for us to remember. We have seven big blue spiral notebooks and they are kept in the cupboard above the towels in the hall closet. One of my favorite things is to take down the scrapbooks and look at our life. I do this even when it’s not raining.

  I guess my mom could make a scrapbook, but she doesn’t. And I could do it and so could my brothers, but then we would need extra pictures. Plus we’re just kids and we don’t have time for that.

  I know the scrapbooks we’d make would be different from Dad’s.

  But the person who does the work gets to write the history.

  I wish that I’d asked Mrs. Vancil about this idea. Right before the year ended we were going over the American Revolution, and I keep thinking about the parts that were left out. I’m wondering what the kids of that time thought of people fighting with cannons and muskets.

  Musket would be a good name for a dog. No one uses muskets anymore, so this dog name would show some knowledge of the weapons of the past.

  Thinking about all of this makes me decide I’m only hearing part of any story. I have the family scrapbooks memorized and I know the best pages and the ones to skip over. Dad puts our grades from school in these books and also holiday cards if they have photographs. I wish he’d leave out both of these categories. I don’t know a lot of the people in the cards, and I really don’t think we need to have my grades glued onto a page for everyone to see.

  I do okay in school, but it’s not like I need to be reminded in the comment section that I could be trying harder instead of staring out the window. What my language arts teacher never knew was that a hummingbird was building a nest—the size of an apricot—and I could see it in the tree branch. I kept track of what was happening and I couldn’t tell anyone because kids would go out there and try to get a look. If people like Noah Hough knew what the hummingbird was doing I feel certain that all the little bird’s hard work would’ve been on the ground and the baby bird inside would’ve been dead in maybe two minutes.

  I was protecting wildlife by staring outside all the time.

  But I guess you don’t get credit for that when you miss a few spelling words every week.

  Besides the grades, Dad glues newspaper stories onto the scrapbook pages. That’s only happened once. But of course we all hope it will happen again because being in the news means that something you’ve done is worth talking about.

  There is a parade every year in our town in October and it’s called the Pet Parade. It starts by the courthouse and ends at the park by the river. The newspaper sponsors the whole thing, which is pretty smart, because they take a lot of pictures and everyone wants to see if they made it into the edition, so sales probably are great that day.

  Every year we are in the parade. My dad never seems that excited, but my mom loves the whole thing because even though she works in gardening supplies, she likes costumes. Two years ago there was a picture of me and Ramon and my brothers on the front page! I’m dressed as a goat. So is my little brother. But the best part is that we dressed up Ramon as a goat too. He’s got a pair of my little brother’s underwear on his head. My mom cut out a hole for his face and she sewed horns on top. Ramon didn’t like wearing the underwear very much, but he liked to be part of things, so I guess that’s why he went along with it. We all have bells around our necks.

  My big brother, Tim, is dressed like a goat herder. He has a white beard that was from an old Santa Claus costume Mom bought at a garage sale and he’s carrying a stick. We goats have ropes tied to the collars and he’s pretending to pull all of us. He really just has to pull on Ramon.

  My mom came up with the whole plan. It paid off because we got the biggest photo in the newspaper. She was pretty happy.

  These days when I take down the sixth scrapbook I skip over the Pet Parade. It once was my favorite part of the book, but now it’s just a bad reminder of what’s missing in our family.

  I wish we still had the underwear with the horns that was Ramon’s costume, but he chewed it up a week after the parade. I guess he never wanted to wear it again.

  We do have a few costumes that are worth something. Mom once found a clown outfit at the Goodwill on Eleventh Street and it was her exact size. So of course she had to buy i
t. For a while she tried to find work on the weekends as a clown. But she didn’t have any training. She takes care of the inventory in the outdoor section at the Home Depot. She’s good at details. At least I hope she is.

  But when my mom wasn’t at her regular job she did sometimes put on her costume, which came with an orange wig. She painted her face white and drew blue triangles under her eyes and took lipstick and made her mouth the size of a hot dog. I’d come home from Piper’s house, and Mom would be in the kitchen looking over her inventory sheets, but wearing her enormous clown shoes on her feet. She likes tea in the afternoon, and her big red mouth was always coating the rim of the cups. And that stuff doesn’t wash off in the dishwasher.

  Mom put up advertisements offering clown services and she got a few jobs. She passed out discount flyers for the dry cleaner’s on Elm Street. Another time she gave away balloons at the car wash, and once she got paid to dance in the window of the ice cream store on Coburg Road.

  It wasn’t as rewarding as she thought. Plus she said the shoes hurt her arches.

  My mother isn’t a quitter, but after a few months of weekend clowning she moved on. The important thing is that in the scrapbook there are some very good pictures of Mom as a clown.

  Maybe that’s why she was doing it.

  She looks happy in the photos. I’m wondering if when my mom was younger she wanted to be a performer instead of someone who checks that there are enough bags of river rock in the landscaping section of a building supply store.

  It’s possible she made me and Randy go audition because she was too tall to be a Munchkin herself. I would ask her, but I don’t want to make her feel bad. If she had a dream maybe she’s being sneaky and giving it to us. Or maybe she just wants a free babysitter for the afternoons. Either way it’s working out, which just shows that you can have “mixed motives,” as Dad says.

  There are so many pictures of Ramon in all of the scrapbooks. Dad acted like he thought Ramon was always getting in the way, but if you look at the pages he made you can tell that he loved him, because otherwise there is no explanation for how many shots he included.

  Soon there will be photos of my brother Randy and me being Munchkins glued down in the newest book.

  I also feel sure that there will be a review of the play in our newspaper because the theater critic goes and sees all the shows at the university.

  I’m guessing that they will make a program for the show and that it will have my name inside and also Randy’s. But I’m thinking mostly about mine. I feel pretty sure the cast list will be alphabetical, and Julia Marks comes before Randy Marks, so that’s good.

  Suddenly I get worried that Dad will not understand how important it is to be a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. He might miss a lot of the details of the next seven weeks.

  I decide I need to take care of the history of this summer myself.

  I’m not sure why I don’t want to tell anyone that I’m doing this. I guess I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. Since Mom works in inventory, we have all kinds of supplies. I go get a notebook from the big box she keeps in the garage. I take the same kind my dad uses, only mine is red. I don’t want to be copying him.

  Right away I have to ask myself if I’m making this scrapbook to remember or to share information with someone in the future who might want to know about a person named Julia Marks.

  Every president of our country gets a library where they put all their stuff once they are done being in charge. They call the places libraries because it would be awkward to say museums while the presidents are still alive. But I’ve visited two and it’s not like the presidents write a thousand books. Or even collect a thousand books.

  So it’s not that kind of library.

  They put papers there. Not school research papers (like mine about the top of a rooster’s head, which is called a comb and can be used to make medicine to help arthritis), but papers that say stuff like what time our president had coffee with the president of Romania. I’m not sure why it’s a big deal to keep this stuff, but organizing things gives a lot of people jobs, and that’s important to remember.

  All of this helps me decide that my scrapbook will be for me when I’ve done so much living that the past seems far away and fuzzy.

  The most important thing to go in my scrapbook would be Ramon’s collar. It’s too big, but I could just put in the tag.

  Only I don’t want to do that because I’m not ready. I decide to leave the first page empty, and I write RAMON on top. But then I get a good idea and I take my mom’s tweezers and pull off some of the hairs from the collar, and I put them on a piece of clear tape and stick this down on the page.

  It’s really not very attractive. But I don’t care. Those hairs have DNA, and maybe one day they will be able to take them and make a new Ramon. It’s a big dream, but who has the energy for a lot of small ones?

  I move on to the second page.

  It seems impossible right now that I’ll ever forget even a second of being in Clara Barton Elementary School. And I’d really like to get some of the stuff out of my brain.

  I can remember like it was yesterday using my coat in kindergarten to hit Johnny Larson. He took a quarter that was mine right off my desk and he wouldn’t give it back and that was stealing. So when it was time to go home I grabbed my jacket, and right by the classroom door I tried to whip him. I wasn’t thinking that the coat had a metal zipper, and it was very bad luck that the zipper hit the thief just above the forehead.

  The area where the hair meets the skin is the beginning of the scalp and that part of a human body bleeds very easily.

  Or at least this area bleeds very easily on Johnny Larson.

  So one minute I was flinging my soft coat at him to get back my quarter, and the next minute he was crying and there was blood all over. He shook his head and some of the blood spun out and a few drops landed on Miss Tilly, who was the classroom rabbit.

  Fact: The red spots on the white fur of Miss Tilly were worse-looking to most of the kids than Johnny Larson’s bleeding forehead.

  I was sent to see Principal Buoncristiani. I’m not sure a five-year-old girl in our school ever had to do that before.

  I tried to explain that Johnny Larson had taken my quarter and wouldn’t give it back, but no one seemed to even hear this part of the explanation. There was a lot of talk about “aggressive behavior.”

  I need to say this again: I HIT HIM WITH A COAT. It was blue and made of nylon and I wasn’t thinking about the zipper. If I had hit him with a brick, I think I would understand why everyone went so crazy.

  But now, trying to figure out what things would explain my life, I realize that the Johnny Larson story has to be part of my scrapbook.

  I find pliers in the toolbox in the garage, and I go to my closet and in the back is the jacket.

  That’s how little I’ve grown. The blue coat is still there. Years later. It’s tight and I never wear it, but really, just seeing the thing calls up a lot of bad feelings.

  Anyway, I grip the pliers and it’s not as easy as it looks to pull part of a zipper from the rest of the thing. I almost quit twice, but then I get a new idea. I find scissors and I just cut into the jacket.

  I’m very happy because now I have a piece of the material of the bottom part of the blue coat, which is a better memory.

  But I also realize I’ve wrecked the jacket, which is wrong. Some other kid could have used it as a weapon to accidentally cut open another kid’s forehead.

  Or to keep warm on a cold day.

  I roll up the ruined jacket and I put it in a paper bag and I walk out to the street and then stuff the sack in Mrs. Murray’s trash.

  My mom said that Mrs. Murray is older than God, which isn’t true but is maybe nicer to say than that Mrs. Murray is older than dirt.

  I heard Mr. Wertheimer say that once. He’s also a neighbor. />
  Mrs. Murray is 102 years old and still lives in her own house. Mr. Wertheimer would like to buy it. He rents a place two doors down, and I think he’s been waiting a long time for a chance to move.

  A lady named Pippi lives in the house with Mrs. Murray to help, but now Pippi is getting sick and maybe Mrs. Murray will outlive her. It would be sad to be hired as a caregiver and then die before the person you were looking after. You wouldn’t be able to let people know you did a good job.

  The point is Mrs. Murray is mostly in a wheelchair and she doesn’t sort through her trash to see if someone put in a wrecked blue jacket filled with bad memories.

  After I get the piece of coat glued down to the page, I’m ready for another scrapbook item.

  The next thing I decide is important in my story is one of my teeth. Most kids lose their first tooth when they are five or six years old.

  Not me. I didn’t have my first tooth come out until I was seven. This is considered very late. I’m not supposed to snoop around in my parents’ things, but I found what was once in my mouth in my mom’s jewelry box. It was my tooth, so I took it back. She’s never noticed that it went missing, which shows that I was more attached to it than she was.

  Because the tooth fell out so late, there was a time when I wondered if I’d be the rare person who grows up with only baby teeth. Does that even happen?

  But it turned out I did have a full set of large teeth up in my head somewhere.

  This year in school they split up the girls and the boys and we had to watch a film called Our Changing Bodies. So now we know in detail about a lot of other surprises, which will probably happen way late for me, if the teeth were any example.

  I stare for a long time at my first tooth. I feel no connection to the tiny, strange thing. It’s like a failed little pearl, only not round. But still I stick it under a piece of clear tape because it does tell part of my story.

  If I look at the page for too long I get sad.

  The tooth is dead.

  I’ll be dead one day too.