Читать книгу Toast - Laurie Foos - Страница 5

Chapter 2

Last week at the bus stop I thought about telling my friend Hannah about the babysitter. Then I remembered that Hannah has a different babysitter every time I’m over there. Since we met in fourth grade, she must have had around twenty of them. For some reason they all have long dark hair and wear gray hoodies. Once when I asked Hannah if she ever noticed that, she said sometimes she wonders if her parents rent babysitters from some company. I imagined all these babysitters with dark hair and hoodies lined up on a conveyor belt. I wondered what would happen if the conveyor belt pushed its way to our door instead. It’s not that I was jealous, but I wondered. Hannah said the babysitters let her stay up late and drink soda. Some of them even let her curse.

Now that we’re actually getting one, though, I’m not wondering so much. Instead I have this little squeezing feeling in my stomach. There will be someone staying with us who won’t know all the things that Will likes and doesn’t like. Someone who won’t know all the important things there are to know about Will.

I go into Mom’s room and sit on her bed while she packs. There are at least four pairs of jeans laid out on the bed. It looks like she dumped her whole underwear drawer on there, too. I’d rather not look at Mom’s underwear, so I scoot up by the pillows.

“Mom,” I say, “what if Will doesn’t listen to the babysitter when you’re gone?”

Mom looks at me as she folds and refolds a black sweater before putting it into the suitcase that already looks too full.

“Shelby,” she says. “Her name is Shelby. And he will. He’ll listen.”

I pick up one of her pairs of socks and squeeze it.

“What if he throws things in his room again while you’re gone?”

Mom sighs a little and holds one of Dad’s T-shirts in her hands.

“She’s studying to be a Special Ed teacher,” Mom says. “I told you this already. Remember?”

I lie back on the pillow and press my face against the comforter. I squeeze the ball of socks and think about what she told me about this babysitter, Shelby, when she first brought up the idea.

She puts Dad’s T-shirt in the suitcase and looks at me. She tells me again that the babysitter is not a stranger, that she’s the daughter of some old friend of the family. We did meet her, but I had a social studies test the next day and wasn’t paying much attention. I remember she had long red hair. Will stayed on his iPad the whole time watching videos. When Mom asked if it was okay with Will if Shelby came to babysit one day, Will didn’t look up from the iPad.

“Will,” Mom had said, “can you look at Mommy?”

He looked up and blinked.

“Is it okay if Shelby comes to babysit you and Mia next week?”

Will lifted the collar of his shirt into his mouth and chewed on it a few times. I remember I wished he would stop eating his shirt and went back to studying for social studies.

“Yup, it’s okay,” Will said. “Yup.”

Will always says “yup,” “never,” “yeah,” or “yes.” It’s just one of the things he does.

“Shelby is an aide in a classroom for kids on the spectrum,” Mom tells me. She shoves more shirts into the suitcase. “She knows all about Will.”

There’s something about those words that I don’t like. On the spectrum. They always make me think of some cheesy rainbow drawing full of yellows and purples and reds. I don’t like anything that’s cheesy. It’s not like I love the word autism, either. If I had to pick between the two, though, I guess I would choose the word autism.

“Okay,” I say, “but what if . . .?”

Mom doesn’t let me finish and sits down on the bed next to me.

“Mia,” she says, “you have to stop with all the ‘what-ifs.’ That’s what moms are for, right?”

I say, “Right,” but I don’t stop, not really.

“Look, honey,” she says with her hand on my leg, “I’m a little nervous, too. We’re only going ten minutes away. It’s going to be fine.”

I want to know why they have to bother going at all if they’re only going ten minutes away, but I don’t say this to Mom.

Instead I just say, “I’m not nervous.” Then I leave her there to deal with all of her underwear and socks and the millions of other things she’s stuffing into her suitcase.

What if Shelby doesn’t know that Will needs to line up his stuffed animals on his dresser before he goes to bed? What if she doesn’t know how to make his frozen pizza, that it has to be just the right amount of crispy? What if she doesn’t know what he means when he says things from TV and movies and the iPad? What then?