Page 40 - SpringBoard_Writing_Workshop_Grade7_Flipbook

Once I knew what I had, I ran like the devil the three houses to mine. My fingers My Notes shook as I searched for the front-door key, and I dropped my schoolbooks all over the
front stoop, I was clutching onto the money so hard.
I got everything together, using what little strength I had left in me, and let myself into the house. Mom was at work, and Danny, my kid brother, was sitting in front of the TV, watching Dance Dynomite and finishing up a bag of potato chips I suspected he’d started not that long ago.
Things hadn’t always been like this. For starters, it wasn’t until this year that Danny had given up superheroes in exchange for girls dancing on TV. And it used to be that Mom stayed at home, making wholesome and nutritious snacks for us to eat when we got back from school, instead of letting us shove potato chips into our mouths. Or at least into Danny’s. He ate them so fast, there were never any left by the time I got home.
Those golden days of nutritious snacks ended when Dad moved out. I have an MIA father. You know the sort. He sends a few bucks every Christmas with a note to Mom telling her to buy herself and the kids something nice, and the rest of the year he’s missing in action. He’s not one for halfway measures, though. When he finally did leave, after threatening to often enough, he moved six hundred miles away. His address is a post office box, and if for some reason you have to call him, his machine answers for him and swears he’ll call right back. Don’t hold your breath waiting.
So Mom, not wanting us to starve, got a job and became a statistic. They do studies about people like her. They call it the feminization of poverty, but I’ve got to tell you Mom looked a lot more feminine before she got poor. Danny looked better in those days too, but maybe the fat and the pimples would have come anyway, once he became aware of girls, and have nothing to do with his potato chip diet. I went up to my room, thinking about how many bags of potato chips a hundred dollars could buy, threw my books down, and stared at the money a while longer. Ben Franklin had the nicest face. He looked great in green.
We ate frozen for dinner that night, each of us picking our own dinner, which Mom then threw into the oven at 350. She cooks everything at 350 these days, for
half an hour, regardless of what the box says to do. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t make
a difference, so she’s probably right going with a single system for everything frozen. “So,” she said, as we each took our trays out of the oven and spread them on the kitchen table. “Anything interesting happen at school today.”
You have to give her points for trying. Nothing interesting has happened in school for the past seven years, but she asks regularly anyway. Seven years ago the goat got loose in the cafeteria, but that’s a whole other story.
“I got an 83 in science,” Danny announced. “And Michelle Grain got sick in English and practically puked all over everybody.”
“No puking talk over dinner,” Mom said automatically. She’s ended a lot of really neat conversations with that rule. “Chris? What’s new with you?”
It was the moment I’d dreaded. I mean, you can hardly deny that finding a hundred-dollar bill is newsworthy, even if, technically speaking, it didn’t happen in school and therefore wasn’t covered by her original question.
I would have kept the news to myself, except there was no way I could come home from having spent the hundred dollars without Mom noticing. And I didn’t want her to think I’d entered into a life of crime. Mom watches a lot of sitcoms, so she worries about things like shoplifting and bank robberies.
“I found some money on the corner of Maple and Grove,” I said, trying to sound real casual about it.
Writing Workshop 4 • Narrative Writing: Short Story 3
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