So the four of us sat at the kitchen table and had “Roberts Spaghetti” for dinner again. Even David ate it now, though mom cut his up into really small pieces. I don’t think mom liked it very much, but I liked it because it wasn’t too tasty.
“So Cloob, are you going over to Molly’s to watch that movie?”, mom asked me.
“Yeah”, I said, nodding.
“Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, dad said, “Jack says the kids will enjoy it. French lit is not my expertise, but it’s one of Verne’s best known works, and Jack says the movie’s well done from a science and engineering point of view.”
I felt someone banging their hand on my shoulder and I heard someone saying “Coo”, over and over so I opened my eyes. I was in bed under the covers and David was looking at me and hitting me with his hand on my shoulder. I could tell he thought something was different. Something DID feel different.
We were getting ready to go to Molly’s birthday party. She was now five but I was still four. Mom said I was “four and five sixths”, but that was still four. I watched her put that red stuff on her lips and then push them together twice. I thought it made her look kind of silly like a clown. She put the shiny gold thing that had the red stuff inside it back in her “purse”. Grownup men didn’t put that red stuff on THEIR lips, and they didn’t have “purses”, they just put stuff in their pockets.
“So you’re taking Coop to the Arb to try out the sled”, mom said to dad, as he tied my shoes.
Mom said a special “movie musical” was going to be on TV and she thought I would really like watching it. Molly said that even her mom was telling her about it too, which was strange because Molly’s mom didn’t even like TV. Molly’s mom came over to our house this morning and she and mom were talking about it as they drank coffee in the kitchen. I spied on them, quietly climbing up the basement stairs and sitting near the top step where I could hear them but they couldn’t see me.
I felt some cold on my nose so I opened my eyes. The wind was blowing outside and the window by my bed creaked. It wasn’t nighttime any more but there was no sunshine, just gray light outside that barely came into my bedroom. The rest of my body felt warm and cozy under the covers.
Mom told me that Margie was going to come over after dinner to babysit David and me. Mom and dad were going to someone else’s house to play that “Bridge” game. I’d seen them play it once, but I’m not sure why they called it “Bridge”, because there weren’t any real or even pretend bridges. I liked real bridges, because they hooked things together and they let you go over something else, or also go under something else, though that could be a tunnel instead, though a tunnel would usually be longer.