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  For my dad

  1

  Monday Lunch

  I am sitting in the cafeteria at school on a Monday, minding my business.

  And I’ve got a lot of business to mind.

  “Hey, girl.” Sophie Nelson, vice president of the seventh-grade student council, slides into the newly empty seat next to mine and puts her hand on my arm, as though we’re friends. “I have a favor to ask…”

  Taye, our class’s designated Hot Guy, has been standing in front of my table. When Sophie sits down, he crosses his arms over his chest and glowers at her. “Uh, Sophie?” he says. “I was waiting…”

  “Hurry up,” urges Jasmine, band geek, standing behind Taye. “There’s other people waiting, too.”

  Business is always brisk on Mondays. Fridays, too—there’s the rush before the weekend, then there’s the rush afterward. Midweek, I’m eating lunch alone, or with Harry Homework, who’s on the same schedule as me: super-popular on Mondays and Fridays, yeah-whatever the rest of the time. Looking to my left, I see Harry’s line is as long as mine. Why can’t anybody need a favor on a Tuesday?

  We’ve got to move this crowd along, or Ms. Schellestede’s going to notice. Out of the three people in front of me, I like Jasmine the best, and I want Sophie to like me the most.

  But Taye has the next spot in line, and I’m curious what he has to say.

  “What do you need?” I ask him.

  Sophie and Jasmine roll their eyes and move a few feet away, as Taye sits down in the spot Sophie just left. He puts his backpack on the table in front of us and scoots closer to me so we’re (mostly) blocked from view.

  “Hurry,” Jasmine insists. “We only have ten minutes left.”

  Ten minutes left for lunch, and I haven’t eaten half of the hummus sandwich I made this morning. I pick it up and take a huge bite, alfalfa sprouts falling like shriveled four-leaf clovers in my lap.

  Taye drops his voice to a murmur. “I need you to slip this box of chocolates into someone’s bag.”

  Ooh! Taye has a crush. From the front pocket of his backpack, he removes a small square box. There’re maybe four chocolates in there, but they’re the really good kind, you can tell from the box. It’s glossy bronze with a purple ribbon and surprisingly hefty in my hand as we make the transfer. I wouldn’t mind if somebody gave me a box of chocolates like that, and I allow myself a brief fantasy where I’m Taye’s crush before I snap back to reality and stash the box in my bag.

  My first question: “Who?”

  Taye cups his hand over his mouth and whispers a name. I’m surprised, but I don’t show it. I keep my face and voice neutral as I ask the rest of the basic questions: What does the bag look like? When does Taye want it done? Where does the Target go after lunch?

  I don’t ask him How. The How is up to me. And the one question I never ask a client is Why.

  Taye fills me in and I confirm the details, but he still looks nervous. “You won’t tell anybody, right? I don’t want them to know it’s from me.”

  “No way.” I take my position very seriously. For me, being a problem-fixer is like being a priest, or a therapist—anything you tell me is confidential. I remind Taye of my pledge: “I know nothing, I remember nothing, and I delete everything.”

  Taye’s face relaxes and he grabs his pack and rises to leave. “You’re the best,” he says, shooting me with finger guns as he departs. “I owe you one.”

  I wave Jasmine over, and she takes the seat Taye vacated. She’s practically chewing through her lower lip with anxiety.

  “I need an excuse,” she says quickly. “Like, right away.”

  Jasmine explains that she skipped band practice last week. Which is weird, because Jasmine loves playing the drums. Every teacher in our grade has a drawerful of drumsticks, chopsticks, pens, paintbrushes, and rulers they’ve confiscated to stop Jasmine from drumming in class. I wonder why she would purposely skip band. But I don’t need to know her reasons for skipping band. I just have to solve her problem.

  I quickly review the classic excuse options:

  1.  Illness/personal injury

  2.  Family tragedy

  3.  Transportation woes

  4.  Other appointment

  Options one through three have been used on teachers since school was invented, so we’ll go with the rarest and the finest: other appointment. But not a dentist or doctor’s appointment—Jasmine doesn’t have a note.

  Jasmine’s leg jiggles and Sophie makes little frustrated grunting noises from her spot a few feet away. I know they want me to hurry, but I can’t just pull something out of thin air. That’s not how I work.

  Here’s how I work: I concentrate on our music/band teacher, Mr. Gerber. Gerber used to play bass guitar in a real rock band, before he had kids, and he still wears one earring and a leather jacket. He tries to be the “cool teacher,” saying things like, It’s lit up in here, or Hashtag goals, while everyone sits there quietly burning to a crisp with the embarrassment he’s too clueless to feel. What Gerber wants more than anything is for kids to think of him as a friend.

  Aha.

  “Okay,” I begin, as Jasmine looks at me eagerly. “You were auditioning for a garage band some high school kids are starting. But your mom’s against you joining the band, so you didn’t tell her about the audition, so she didn’t write you a note. And Gerber can’t call your mom to check your excuse or he’ll get you in trouble and ruin your chance to be in the band.”

  Jasmine’s jaw drops so far, the rubber bands around her braces nearly fly off and ricochet around the room. “That’s … that’s perfect,” she says gratefully. “You’re incredible. Thanks, G. I owe you one.”

  “No problem,” I say, and I actually mean it. I enjoy doing things for people I like, and I glow with the satisfaction of a job well done. Jasmine jumps up from her chair and dashes off to deliver this freshly baked excuse to Mr. Gerber.

  Immediately, Sophie takes over the seat. I bite into my sandwich and motion for her to begin.

  “So this favor…,” says Sophie. “It’s not really a favor for me? It’s more for a friend.”

  Asking for a friend. LOL. As much as I would like to believe that one of Perfect Sophie Nelson’s snobby friends needs my help, I know better. Of course the “friend” Sophie is talking about is herself, but I’m not going to force her to admit that.

  Sophie continues, “So … my friend, she borrowed something, and she has to give it back.”

  Uh-oh. This is the second time Sophie’s come to me because one of her “friends” needed to replace or return something. Not coincidentally, this is the second time Sophie has talked to me.

  Last month was the first time. Liz Kotlinski’s silk scarf went missing, and Liz was threatening to personally search every single student’s locker and bag until she found it. Sophie had grabbed me in a panic between classes—“Hey, I need your h
elp”—then thrust a paper bag containing the scarf at me. Apparently, one of Sophie’s “friends” had taken the scarf “by mistake,” but neither Sophie nor her “friend” wanted to be the one to return it to Liz, because “it might look weird.”

  I call these jobs “reverse retrievals.”

  I nod in understanding and motion for Sophie to hurry up and get on with it. Kids around us have started packing up and throwing away their trash; we don’t have time for her stalling. “What can I do for your friend?”

  Sophie cringes like she’d rather not say. I notice her flawlessly manicured nails digging into the palms of her hands. She leans in and whispers in my ear.

  I have a hard time keeping a straight face when I hear her request. Sophie’s not making a life-or-death request, but what she’s asking is nearly impossible.

  Sophie needs a big, big favor.

  2

  The Present (and the Past)

  I’m Glad.

  Go ahead, get it out of your system:

  “Glad to meet you!”

  “Well, I’m happy, too!”

  “What are you so Glad about?”

  Etc. These are just the top three. I have heard infinite variations on the joke that is my name. Yours will not amuse me.

  Yes, my name is Glad. It’s short for Gladys. This was my mom’s idea. She named all three of us girls: I’m Gladys, my older sister is Mabel, and my younger sister is Agnes. If we’d been boys, Dad would have named us—that was Mom and Dad’s bargain—and we might have semi-normal names. But Mom has always been pretty artistic, so of course we had to have quirky names. Which leads to quirky nicknames. For as long as I can remember, people have called me Glad, and they call my big sister Mabey. They call my little sister Agnes, because Agnes refuses to answer to a nickname. She’s only nine years old and three and a half feet tall, but Agnes doesn’t let anybody talk down to her.

  Agnes is probably my favorite person these days. She’s so curious and enthusiastic about the world, in that innocent way little kids get to be before they hit middle school and have to start pretending that everything is boring and stupid. She’s always excited to tell me things she learned that day: “I watched this incredible video of a sea horse having babies—it looked like there was a hundred of them, exploding out of the father’s pouch—did you know that male sea horses carry the babies?”

  Agnes is literally a genius. She’s going to be a scientist—actually, she’s already started being one, since Dad bought her a chemistry set and helped her create a small lab in the basement. Now Agnes spends most of her time in her basement lab, instead of in our shared bedroom, which feels much bigger and emptier when she’s not around.

  Actually, the whole house feels big and empty. Mabey’s always upstairs in her attic room, listening to early ’00s emo and taking comments on famous people’s Instagrams very personally. Dad’s always at his boring job (tax lawyer). And Mom’s been staying with a bunch of her old college friends on a communal farm in New Mexico, a ten-hour drive away, to “get her head together.”

  Mom was only supposed to be gone a few weeks—a “trial separation” Dad called it on that fateful night when they gathered us girls in the living room and gave us the terrible news. “Two or three months, at most.”

  A year and a half later, she hasn’t come back. Not even for a visit. She was going to come home for a visit around Thanksgiving last year, but then she and Dad got in a fight and she canceled. Dad doesn’t know it, but I still haven’t forgiven him for that.

  If I met a genie, I’d ask for Mom to come home first, and then I’d ask for billions of dollars and world peace. I keep hoping she’s going to come through the door and scoop me up and tickle-hug me, the way she always did. Then I’d follow her upstairs and sit on the bed while she changed into her house sweats and told me about the funny thing that happened that day.

  Because Mom can make anything funny. The stupidest show on TV becomes the most entertaining when she comments along with it. “Is the lead guy supposed to be handsome? He kind of looks like a thumb with eyebrows.”

  And she wasn’t just funny, she was fun. If Dad wasn’t home, she’d let us run around the house and jump on the furniture, or eat ice cream before dinner, or any of the seventy-five other things Dad didn’t want us doing. And she was exciting. Like the time she took me and Agnes to a movie at the multiplex, and we got bored with the movie we were watching, so she sneaked us into another theater, where the movie was PG-13, and we spent the whole time giggling over what we got away with.

  Funny story: Mom is the first person I ever fixed for. I was nine years old, Mabey was thirteen, and Agnes was six. Even at age six, Agnes was way too smart for the rest of the family, and she needed constant supervision so she didn’t do things like pour baking soda and vinegar into the toilet to make a toilet volcano (note: kind of disgusting, but also kind of awesome). Keeping her out of trouble was an ongoing struggle for Mom.

  Since Dad’s career in tax law paid money and Mom’s career in making lopsided pottery didn’t, Dad kept working and Mom took care of us kids. She drove us places and kept the fridge reasonably stocked and made sure we bathed every so often. She packed our lunches in the morning and picked us up from school. Sometimes she complained about being “just a stay-at-home mom,” and about how much of her “authentic, creative self” she had given up to be a mother, and about how badly she needed an identity of her own. She could get lost in her thoughts at times, and she’d get grouchy if we interrupted and brought her back down to earth. But we always knew that Mom was there for us.

  Until she wasn’t.

  It started when Agnes began kindergarten. All of a sudden, Mom had her days free, and she wanted to go back to making pottery at the studio in town, but Dad wanted her to get a paying job. I eavesdropped on several of their arguments (not hard, since they were shouting), and they all boiled down to three things:

  1.  Dad was tired of being the sole breadwinner for our family of five.

  2.  Dad wanted Mom to contribute more to the household and be less flaky.

  3.  Dad was an uptight, condescending @&%#! who was murdering Mom’s free spirit with his conformist, middle-class values.

  But none of this was new. Mom and Dad were always kind of an “opposites attract” couple. They just didn’t used to fight about it so much.

  One day, about a year into these tense times, when Agnes had just started first grade, I came through the door from a day at school and my mother instantly pounced on me. I noticed that she was still wearing her clay-covered pottery jeans instead of her at-home sweatpants. Mom must have walked in the door just minutes before I did.

  “Gladdy, I need your help. I made a mistake, and I need you to help me fix it.”

  I nodded yes right away, delighted to be singled out by Mom for one-on-one attention. As the middle child, I’ve often felt like the odd one out. Mabey is so much like Mom, dramatic and emotional and forgetful, with those big brown eyes and long lashes. And Agnes is a little female version of logical, dorky Dad, down to the light sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks. But I’m nobody’s child, with a personality and looks that came from nowhere. I’m like a bunch of random Legos someone mooshed together before saying, “Here, it’s a person.”

  I followed Mom into the kitchen. We sat down at the table, and she pulled her chair close to mine.

  Mom spoke quickly, nervously playing with one of her earrings. “I was a little bit late picking up Agnes from school today. I left the studio on time, but there was so much traffic, and … all sorts of commotion, and I wasn’t able to get there when I said I would.”

  She sounded so guilty and upset. “That’s not your fault,” I said, trying to console her.

  “And my phone was dead,” Mom continued. “So I couldn’t call the school and tell them I was on the way, and they couldn’t get in touch with me. It was so frustrating.”

  Stupid phone, I thought. Poor Mom.

  “And your father was suppo
sed to give the school his new phone number, but he forgot. He gave everybody in the world his new number, except the school. So they couldn’t reach him, either.”

  Dad forgot to give the school his new number! And he calls Mom irresponsible! A few weeks before, Dad had started getting a million calls for someone named Speedy, who was in demand with some very angry people, so Dad ditched the number and got a new one. And he forgot to tell the school!

  But the most important thing was Agnes. “Is Agnes okay?”

  “Well…,” Mom said. She gestured to say so-so. “She wasn’t happy about waiting around. She wouldn’t talk to me when I got there, and then she fell asleep in the car. I put her up in your room.”

  Of course Agnes wasn’t happy. Any six-year-old would be unhappy waiting around after school, not knowing when their mom is coming to pick them up, with no way to reach her. It was especially bad for Agnes, who thrived on routine. I stood, ready to go upstairs and comfort her.

  Mom gestured for me to sit again, so I did. “Before you go up there … See, this is where I need your help. We need to make sure Agnes doesn’t tell your father what happened.”

  I frowned. “But it was his fault, because of his phone number.”

  Mom shook her head. “He won’t see it that way. I just know he’ll find a way to blame me, and I don’t want another argument. It would be great if we could keep Agnes from saying anything.” She looked at me pleadingly and softened her voice. “You have such a terrific imagination and you’re so good at solving puzzles. Can’t you think of something, honey?”

  I must have turned pink with pride. Mom needed my help! I loved being helpful, unless it involved cleaning the house. I would not fail Mom. I concentrated my terrific imagination on Agnes. My sister, my roommate, with her restless little feet that kicked at her blankets when she slept …

  Aha.

  “What if it was a dream?” I asked.