Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff Page A

started to get a sour feeling in my stomach, and when Mom got up for more water, I did math with a pencil on my napkin, and I realized I only tipped Wei sixty cents.
    I was pretty sure I would never end up treasurer of anything.

thursday.

    O n Thursday Mr. Clifton raised his eyebrows at all of us and said, “If you had two tennis balls in your left pocket and seven tennis balls in your right pocket, what would you have?”
    We all sort of shuffled around in our seats and didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what everyone else was thinking, but
I
was thinking that this was supposed to be joke time, so why was Mr. Clifton trying to make us do math? I wasn’t too happy about it either.
    But then Mr. Clifton lowered his head and looked at us over the top of his glasses and said, “You’d have . . .
really big pockets
!” And just like that, the room pretty much exploded with laughing. I was giggling so hard I almost fell out of my chair. Even Savannah was laughing, so I knew it was a good one.

friends.

    O n Saturday when I was at the park with Erlan and his brothers and sisters and two of their nannies, I saw Darren Ackleman throwing a football with his dad. Me and Erlan were playing poker on the bench while the other kids ran around screaming. The cameras were everywhere, but they couldn’t film me because I was “no release!” I think that made Erlan happy, because it meant they mostly stayed away from our card game.
    â€œThat’s him,” I whispered to Erlan. “That mean kid from my school. Darren. With the bug.”
    Erlan lifted his head and turned to look behind him at Darren with his dad across the grass. He sort of showed me his cards when he did it, but I tried not to look, because that would be cheating.
    Next to us on the bench, Calista looked up to see Darren too, but she didn’t say anything about him, just went back to drawing in her sketchbook.
    â€œThat kid with the football?” Erlan asked, turning back to look at me.
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    â€œHe looks like he smells.”
    I laughed. Darren didn’t smell, not really, but I liked that Erlan thought he might.
    â€œI raise you three acorns,” I said.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    After Erlan and his family had to go home and the whole camera crew left too, Calista and I decided to stay in the park and play cards a little longer, because it was a nice day outside, and also because Dad was home and he had a bad headache and said he didn’t want to be bothered by anything. Calista said the best way not to bother anybody was to stay in the park. So we stayed.
    Calista was teaching me a new card game called Spit, where you had to slap your cards down really fast. I was good at it, faster than Calista most times. Only sometimes I’d get
too
fast and my cards would fall between the slats of the bench onto the ground, and then we had to make the game pause while I picked them up.
    I’d just won my third game in a row when all of a sudden I heard, “Hey, Albie.” I looked up, and Darren Ackleman was standing right next to me.
    I waited for Darren to say something mean, but he didn’t.
    â€œHow’s it going?” That’s what he said.
    I looked over at Calista, but she wasn’t paying any attention. She was just shuffling the deck of cards, over and over. I didn’t know you had to shuffle them that much, but I guess so.
    â€œPretty good,” I told Darren, which was true.
    Darren stuck his hands in his pockets. “How come all the cameras were here?” he asked. “Were they making a movie?”
    Calista’s shuffling got really loud, and she started cracking the cards on the bench between shuffles. But she still wasn’t paying any attention to us.
    I shook my head at Darren, to answer his question about the movie. “It’s for my friend Erlan’s family,” I told him. It was weird because Darren