Violet and the Pie of Life Read online

  I got a big part in the school play. I’m the lion in The Wizard of Oz. My best friend, McKenzie, got a part too.

  I hope I can see you soon.

  I stopped. If I emailed him tomorrow instead, I could delete the line about waking up to drink water, which seemed dumb.

  But maybe Dad would read my email right away and get back to me tonight. If I waited until morning, he’d be sleeping. When he woke up, I’d be in school, so he might put off answering. Maybe he wouldn’t answer at all. Which made me think I should ask him a question he’d have to answer.

  But Mom had said he might be out of town. If he was in a different time zone, maybe he was sleeping now anyway.

  If I waited until morning to email, I’d have trouble sleeping.

  But if I emailed him now, I’d also have trouble sleeping because I’d keep checking to see if he’d responded.

  But if I waited, I’d have trouble sleeping two nights in a row: one night worrying about what to put in the email and the next wondering when Dad would write back.

  I definitely had to send the email tonight.

  I tried to think of another excuse besides wanting water, like a loud noise waking me. But I didn’t want Dad to worry. Well, I sort of did want him to worry, but I didn’t want him to think I was babyish.

  I could write that I’d stayed up late studying for a test. But then he’d think I was cramming at the last minute.

  Needing water seemed simplest.

  I looked at my email again. Maybe I should add exclamation points after mentioning the play. But McKenzie said girls who used exclamation points were a “type,” the same type who giggled around boys and wore ugly clothes just because they were in style—a bad type. Plus, if I added an exclamation point after writing about the play, I’d have to use one in the part about hoping to see Dad. Otherwise I’d seem more excited about the play than about him. I decided not to add any exclamation points.

  I checked the time on my laptop. It was getting really late, much too late to wonder about punctuation.

  I quickly typed the rest of the email.

  You could email me. I mean, if you want.

  Remember when we drove up to San Francisco and got clam chowder in bread bowls at the pier? We all stayed in the same motel room and you taught me poker and we played for M&Ms. You said when you won big playing real poker, we’d fly to San Francisco and stay in a hotel suite there and go to fancy restaurants.

  Do you still want to do that? That would be really cool. Or we could stay at a motel again, because that was fun too.

  Love,

  Violet

  I sent the email before I could think about it too much and chicken out.

  Then I went to bed.

  But I didn’t fall asleep for hours and hours.

  3 in a motel room > 2 in a hotel suite

  SIX

  MY MORNING IN FIVE SENSES AND FIVE EMOJIS

  1. Seeing Mom’s face close up:

  2. Hearing her say, “You slept through the alarm”:

  3. Smelling her morning breath:

  4. Feeling after finding no emails from Dad:

  5. Tasting the lump in my throat:

  I didn’t have time to go to my locker before school, so I had to ask my first-period teacher if I could borrow a textbook.

  “Violet Summers,” Ms. Merriweather said as I approached her desk.

  I was surprised she knew my name, since it was only September and she taught approximately 163 kids (five classes of about thirty to thirty-five kids each).

  The bell rang. Once it stopped, I said, “May I please borrow the class textbook?”

  Instead of handing me the math book, Ms. Merriweather said, “I was going to ask you to see me after class, but we might as well talk now.” She spoke quietly, though I was sure the kids sitting near her desk could hear.

  We might as well not talk now, not while my classmates were eavesdropping. That’s what I wanted to tell Ms. Merriweather. Instead, I silently stared at my sneakers.

  As I stared, I realized it was Mom’s fault that Ms. Merriweather was embarrassing me in math class.

  “I’m concerned about you, Violet,” Ms. Merriweather said.

  Uh-oh.

  “Whenever I look over at you in class,” Ms. Merriweather continued, “you’re either checking your phone or doodling.”

  I’d hardly call creating mathematical charts of my life “doodling.” But charts weren’t in the syllabus, and the syllabus was what teachers cared about. So I said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Merriweather.” Teachers cared about apologies too.

  “Violet.” Ms. Merriweather lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “Don’t be embarrassed if you’re struggling with the concepts.”

  I let out a snort, then tried to disguise it with a cough. The only concept I struggled with in math class was boredom.

  My snort/cough made even more kids stare at me. Great.

  “Instead of tuning out, raise your hand and ask questions,” Ms. Merriweather said. “Or see me at lunch or after school.”

  I bit my lip to stop myself from snorting again.

  “It’s crucial to pay attention because the concepts build on one other. For instance, this week we’ll be learning about pi. Next week we’ll use pi to calculate circumferences of circles. Once we have that down, we’ll calculate the volume of spheres.”

  I already knew all about pi. I’d found an amazing YouTube video about it a couple months ago and binged-watched and read everything I could about pi—which is probably the nerdiest thing any kid ever did on her summer break.

  But there are so many interesting things about pi! It isn’t just that pi and the best food ever—pie—sound exactly the same. Pi is infinite, with no patterns, no repetitions. Pi was first studied four thousand years ago and people are still trying to figure it out. Even computers can’t figure out pi. In fact, calculating pi is used as a stress test for computers, because it can never truly be calculated. Dividing 22 by 7 is impossible.

  “Violet, please pay attention.” Ms. Merriweather handed me the loaner textbook. “And bring your book to class next time.”

  I walked to my desk, pretending I didn’t notice everyone gawking at me.

  Ms. Merriweather talked about pi while I forced myself to seem interested in her slow-motion explanation. My brain drifted as I stared at her. She didn’t look like the other math teachers at our school, out-of-shape old white guys with ugly glasses and greasy hair. Ms. Merriweather was tall and muscular, like she spent her spare time lifting weights or playing lacrosse. She was young for a teacher, and her glasses had pretty turquoise frames. Her short, non-greasy magenta hair matched her magenta lipstick and looked nice against her brown skin.

  Ms. Merriweather finally said, “Open your textbooks,” so I slowly leafed through the loaner copy, stopping to read the graffiti: “Sam was here” and “Abby loves Ben.” I wondered why anyone wanted to announce being in math class or declare their love in a textbook.

  “This is way too hard,” Logan Menendez said. “Someone should round pi to just plain three, because that’s close enough.”

  “Yeah,” Zelda Buchman said, “Pi has too many decibels.”

  Even though Ms. Merriweather had just lectured me about my “doodling,” I couldn’t resist making one simple graph.

  When I finished, I looked up to find Ms. Merriweather towering over me, staring at my graph. I flipped over my paper fast. I wished I could melt into the floor like the Wicked Witch, to save myself from humiliation. I mouthed “Sorry” to Ms. Merriweather.

  She raised her thick eyebrows at me. She had that trying-not-to-laugh expression McKenzie and I got sometimes in the back seat of Grandpa Falls-Apart when we texted funny stuff about my mom while she was driving.

  When the bell rang, I rushed out of math class like it wa
s on fire. I waited in the hallway for McKenzie, whose first-period class was two doors down from mine. Then we walked to my locker together.

  It was my mom’s fault that I hadn’t had time to go to my locker before school started. So it was also her fault that I got to my locker with McKenzie, and that McKenzie saw the envelope.

  She pointed to it and said, “What’s that, Violet?”

  “That” was small and white and taped to the middle of my locker.

  Before I could answer, McKenzie walked up to my locker, peered at the envelope, and announced, “It’s not from a boy. Look at the writing.”

  I looked. My name was on the envelope in blue ink, with a large, straight V, a perfectly round circle dotting the i, another perfect circle for the o, a pretty loop for the l, and a smooth e and t. Two parallel, curvy lines swished underneath my name. McKenzie was right: not from a boy. Not that it would be. Even if a boy were interested in me, which was impossible, I didn’t think boys sent notes to girls they liked.

  I couldn’t think of any girls who would send me a note either. No one besides McKenzie, but that careful writing—the perfectly round circles and pretty lines—definitely wasn’t hers. Her writing always seemed like part of a ransom note or an SOS, scribbled in a state of emergency.

  McKenzie tore the envelope off my locker, handed it to me, and said, “You can read it in private if you want.”

  “I don’t need privacy,” I said, because I couldn’t imagine telling McKenzie I did.

  But after I opened the envelope and we read the note, I wished I had asked for privacy.

  “Now I know why Ally’s so popular,” McKenzie said. “Phony compliments to make people think she’s nice.”

  I felt my face tighten. Was it so hard for McKenzie to think of me as really talented? Or as a person who makes someone happy?

  I glanced at her and noticed she was clenching her jaw. Maybe she felt that the beautiful, popular girl—the girl who had gotten the starring role McKenzie had wanted—was now trying to get her best friend, too.

  So I said, “Sounds like Ally is desperate,” and McKenzie relaxed her jaw a little. Then I said, “There must have been a sale at the exclamation point store.”

  I crumpled Ally’s note and added: “Where’s the trash can?”

  McKenzie smirked.

  Then I stuffed the note and envelope in my pocket and hoped there wasn’t a trash can nearby.

  SEVEN

  As soon as school ended, I went to the nearest bathroom.

  An eighth grader with raccoon eye makeup and black lipstick stood against the sink, painting her nails black.

  I looked down to avoid eye contact. Clumps of wet toilet paper littered the floor. I dodged them as I rushed into the nearest stall, locked the door, and took the crumpled note out of my pocket.

  As I reread it, I forgot about the scary girl at the sink and the bad bathroom smells and even my dad.

  I didn’t think Ally’s four exclamation points made her seem desperate, like I’d told McKenzie. Actually, they made Ally seem kind of nice. (Anything more than four exclamation points might seem desperate though.)

  McKenzie thought Ally acted nice to get popular. But maybe Ally simply was nice and people liked her for that.

  When I walked out of the stall, I made eye contact with the girl at the sink, smiled, and said, “See you later.”

  “Hope not,” she said, and spat at the floor.

  I hurried out and checked my phone again. Nothing from Dad.

  I got to the auditorium about two seconds before Mr. Goldstein, which was good timing, because he had us rehearsing right away.

  We sang “We’re Off to See the Wizard” a quadrillion times. Mr. Goldstein said we needed to sound peppier, except for Diego/the Tin Man, who needed to take it down about eight notches.

  I thought he was in the perfect notch. He looked perfect too, wearing the long-sleeve red shirt that was my favorite.

  “How about we compromise, and I take it down four notches,” Diego said.

  Mr. Goldstein raised his eyebrows.

  “Five notches?” Diego asked.

  Mr. Goldstein’s eyebrows stayed raised.

  I wondered if keeping your eyebrows raised so long would give you a headache, so I tried it.

  “Now I’m annoying Violet, too,” Diego said.

  I dropped my eyebrows. I didn’t have a headache, but my face burned with embarrassment.

  “Okay, eight notches,” Diego said.

  “Let’s move on,” Mr. Goldstein said.

  I couldn’t move on. My brain was whirling.

  SOME OF MY WHIRLING THOUGHTS

  Does Diego really think he annoyed me?

  Is it too late to tell him I wasn’t annoyed?

  Why had he been looking at me in the first place?

  Where is my dad?

  We each practiced our big solo songs onstage while everyone else watched from the front row. I’d thought it would be terrifying, but it wasn’t. We clapped and cheered for one another as if living in Orange County, three thousand miles from New York City, was the only thing stopping us from starring on Broadway.

  Mr. Goldstein dismissed Ally and me early so he could work with Sarah the Scarecrow and Diego. Ally and I stood together near the parking lot, waiting for our parents. We’d been so busy, I hadn’t talked to her during rehearsal. Plus, I didn’t know what to say. But now there was nothing to do but talk. So I said, “Thanks for the note.”

  “Oh.” Ally paused, as if she felt awkward too. Which was ridiculous coming from someone so beautiful, so popular—someone who supposedly had dated a ninth grader. Then she said, “You’re welcome. I was kind of worried I’d get the wrong locker, but I’ve seen you around there and I asked Lily Beggs, who was putting on lip gloss a few feet away, and she pointed to your locker. Mine is way on the other side of school. My locker, I mean.”

  If McKenzie were around, she would have said something like, “Does this girl ever shut up?”

  But McKenzie wasn’t around. She’d gone home after school. We—my mom and I—were going to pick her up for a sleepover on the way back from rehearsal.

  “It’s weird to send notes, huh?” Ally asked.

  The weird thing was having Ally ask me whether something was weird. She would know the answer a lot better than I would. I probably did at least ten things a day that popular people like Ally automatically knew were weird and would never do.

  “Your nose is crinkled up,” Ally said, “like you’re smelling a strong scent of weird.”

  I smiled. “My nose crinkles when I’m thinking hard about something. I guess I should think with my brain instead of my nose, huh?”

  Ally laughed.

  I laughed too, partly from relief.

  Then I said, “I don’t think sending notes is weird. I mean, I guess it’s rare, but not weird.” Violet Summers, Professor of Popularity, at your service.

  “Phew!” Ally said, as if what I thought really mattered to her.

  “It was nice,” I said. “The note.”

  “Major phew!”

  I smiled at her again. “Do you want my phone number? We could text.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled bigger, obviously not realizing I was just trying to ward off more notes.

  While we called each other to exchange numbers, my mom drove into the parking lot.

  I said goodbye and got in the back seat, something Mom usually let me do only when a friend was coming along. She said it made her feel like even more of a chauffeur than she already was.

  When Mom asked me who I’d been talking to, I was in such a good mood that I forgot to give my usual one-word response. Instead, I said, “Ally Ziegler, the girl who plays Dorothy. She’s really nice.”

  “Oh!” Mom squealed, sounding shocked by my use of nine extra words. “It�
��s terrific to make new friends!”

  Mom didn’t want me spending so much time with McKenzie. She really seemed to like McKenzie, but didn’t like that she was the only kid I ever hung out with now. She never said that, but I could tell. It was similar to Mom letting me put ketchup on fries and burgers, but saying, “Really, Violet?” when I put ketchup on teriyaki chicken and quesadillas and corn on the cob.

  And I knew she was upset about McKenzie convincing me to quit Girl Scouts, because Mom had been our leader. She was always arranging field trips and searching for new craft projects for the troop. And cookie season! Besides making me ring about every doorbell within a half-mile radius of our house, Mom tried to sell cookies to anyone unfortunate enough to come by—even the UPS guy and the trash collectors.

  I bet Mom missed being the boss of all those girls. Most of us would follow directions, like the good little Girl Scouts we were. But not McKenzie. When we made greeting cards with suns and smiley faces to cheer up people in the military, McKenzie drew a stick figure lying on the ground with bright red blood coming out of his stomach and the words, I hope you kill the bad guys. And when we sang Christmas carols and one Hanukkah song at the nursing home, McKenzie shouted for the old people to clap along to the beat, even during “Silent Night.” The other moms said that was just plain wrong, but one of the old ladies said the Good Lord gave us hands for clapping, not finger-wagging.

  McKenzie seemed to like Girl Scouts, until something bad happened between our mothers. It was the morning of our big camping trip. Everyone was supposed to meet at our house, but McKenzie didn’t show up and her mom didn’t answer her phone. (This was before we got our own cell phones, which improved our lives a quadrillion percent.) So Mom drove to McKenzie’s house with me. We rang the doorbell and knocked. Then Mom peeked through the front window and told me to wait in the car.

  As I watched from the front passenger seat, McKenzie opened the door to her house a little. Mom pushed it all the way open and stepped inside.