The Way I Say It Read online

  Text copyright © 2022 by Nancy Tandon

  Cover illustrations © 2022 by Chris Hsu

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Charlesbridge and colophon are registered trademarks of Charlesbridge Publishing, Inc.

  At the time of publication, all URLs printed in this book were accurate and active. Charlesbridge and the author are not responsible for the content or accessibility of any website.

  Published by Charlesbridge

  9 Galen Street Watertown, MA 02472

  (617) 926-0329

  www.charlesbridge.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tandon, Nancy, author.

  Title: The way I say it / Nancy Tandon. Description: Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge, 2022. | Audience: Ages 10+. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: “Rory Mitchell has always had an issue saying his R’s correctly (which is a real problem given his name); now in sixth grade his former best friend, Brent, suddenly sides with bullies against Rory; but then Brent is hit by a car and suffers a serious brain injury, which requires Rory to reevaluate everything.”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020051003 (print) | LCCN 2020051004 (ebook) | ISBN 9781623541330 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781632899118 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Articulation disorders—Juvenile fiction. | Brain damage —Juvenile fiction. | Best friends—Juvenile fiction. | Bullying —Juvenile fiction. | Middle schools—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Speech therapy—Fiction. | Brain damage—Fiction | Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Bullying—Fiction. | Middle schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.T3754 Say 2022 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.T3754 (ebook) | DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051003

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051004

  Ebook ISBN 9781632899118

  Production supervision by Jennifer Most Delaney

  Ebook design adapted from print design by Jon Simeon

  a_prh_6.0_138931606_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: Hello, My Name Is…

  2: Alphabetical Order

  3: Me, Myself, and R

  4: The Champ

  5: Contagious

  6: Passing Notes

  7: Float Like a Butterfly

  8: Dad

  9: Robots

  10: Upside Down

  11: Cards and Candles

  12: Broken

  13: Someone New

  14: Operation Taffy

  15: Lockdown

  16: The One-Two Punch

  17: Muscle Memory

  18: Rehab

  19: Loser Land

  20: Mithter Thimth

  21: Sleepovers

  22: The New Brent

  23: Announcements

  24: Ali’s Brain

  25: Ali and Me

  26: No Hitting

  27: Tickets and Snowflakes

  28: Courage and Strength

  29: Winter Dance

  30: Surprise

  31: Slow Dancing

  32: All Good Things

  33: He’s Baaack…

  34: A Rock and a Hard Place

  35: Partners

  36: Bus Bust

  37: Breaking Point

  38: Man-to-Man

  39: Heavy

  40: Backfire

  41: A Lonely Job

  42: And in This Corner…

  43: Crime and Punishment

  44: Doing Time

  45: Free

  46: Showtime

  47: The Comeback

  48: New Song

  49: One Last Fight

  A Note About the /r/ Sound

  Acknowledgments

  I can’t say my name. Not because it’s a secret or anything. Honestly I’d shout it into a microphone right now if I could. I’d give up anything to be able to do that. Even my guitar-playing fingertip calluses, which took like a million hours to get. The first half-million hours hurt. A lot.

  “Go ahead. Introduce yourself and tell us one fun thing you did this summer,” Mrs. Nash repeats, as if I’m not answering because I forgot the instructions.

  Standing in front of the class, I grip and release the fabric of my mesh shorts. I try to take a deep breath but manage only a fluttery gulp. I look toward the back of the room and focus on the crammed bookshelf and the ripped beanbag chair in front of it. Anything but all the faces staring at me. Waiting.

  I glance at the clock. When the second hand reaches the ten, I’ll do it.

  No. I’ve already been up here too long. Get it over with. Now! Big breath. Tense tongue muscles. Squeeze the side edges hard against my teeth.

  “I’m Wohwy.” I push the words out on a rush of air.

  Mrs. Nash bunches up her eyebrows and flicks her fingers through her short, spiky hair, taking forever to scan the class list before she looks back up. She says, “Oh, Rory. Here you are. Rory Mitchell.”

  Someone whispers. The already warm room suddenly seems ten degrees hotter.

  “Well, Rory,” she says, emphasizing the two r‘s as if that will help me say them better, “what did you do for fun this summer?”

  My mind starts to buzz like an amplifier set at max sound. I was hoping to skip this part. As nervous as I’ve been about starting a new school, I figured that by sixth grade the teachers would have knocked this question off their playlists.

  I pretend to clear my throat, and the cough comes out as a dry little squeak. The clock ticks. Say something. Say something.

  Just go with your gut. That’s what my guitar teacher at music and arts camp always said when we were improvising. But I can’t. I have to carefully choose what I say next. I force my brain to work, scanning for r‘s and skipping any idea that has one: riding my bike, running my first 5K, going to Rhode Island. Come on! Something without an r!

  Kids shift in their seats and the whispers spread.

  “Let’s give Rory our full attention, please,” says Mrs. Nash.

  Not helpful.

  “I went to the beach,” I manage to blurt out.

  Mrs. Nash looks as relieved as I am when I’m done, and Melanie Franklin, whose desk is next to mine, stands up to take her turn. We’ve been in the same class since third grade, and her hairstyle has never changed. Two long, straight braids every day. She won our school spelling bee in fourth and fifth grade. The girl is a human spell-check.

  “I detest this,” she whispers as we pass in the aisle. Up at the front, she tugs on her braids, and her words rush together. The only time she doesn’t look completely tortured is when she tells us that today is her birthday.

  I nod at her when she sits down, and she rolls her eyes and sticks her tongue out to the side. I settle into my chair and push my damp, sweaty hair up off my forehead. From the safety of my seat, I survey the room again. There are a ton of people I don’t recognize, now that we’re all mixed together for middle school. I see only four other kids from my elementary school—five if you count me, but I’m trying not to be seen.

  Just then the door creaks open, and Brent Milliken walks in.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Locker.”

  I tense when he comes down my row, but he walks right by me like I’m invisible. He heads over to a chair next to a kid who didn’t go to our old school. He looks kind of familiar, though.

  “Saved you a spot, bro,” the guy says, picking up a folder he’d put on the seat. His wide head is plopped right on top of massive shoulders stuffed into a green hoodie, and his hair is buzzed on the sides with a fuzzy yellow strip in the middle. He reminds me of a Minecraft cornstalk.

  They bump fists. I try to hide my surprise by focusing on the “Welcome to Language Arts” handout in front of me. In the margin, I draw a bass-clef staff and start filling in a low, steady beat: thwamm, thwamm, thwamm.

  “Everything okay back there, Rory?” asks Mrs. Nash. I look down at my clenched left fist and realize I’m pounding the desk.

  I nod and turn my paper over. When the introductions start up again, I draw another music staff, treble clef this time. Then I fill in six simple notes.

  I glance up occasionally. Kids parade to the front of the room in new sneakers and stiff first-day clothes. The room smells like clean laundry. Most girls are wearing boots and sweaters even though the real fall weather won’t start for a while. It’s like watching a back-to-school episode of the Fashion Network show Who! What! When! WEAR! Why! that Mom pretends not to be obsessed with.

  We’re coming to you live from Kensington Middle School in Lakeville, Connecticut! Or should I say Perfectville, Bob? Hahaha. Look at these wonderful students in the exact right clothes! And listen to their impeccable speech. Not one of them has any problem saying their own name. Well, almost none of them. (Cut to close-up of my mouth.) Back to you in the studio, Bob.

  At least my turn is over, and I have lunch with Jett and Tyson to look forward to. After today, maybe I won’t be so freaked out about meeting new people. At least that’s what I tell myself.

  The problem is, I don’t really believe it. I’m suppo
sed to go with my gut, right? Well, mine is seriously considering asking to be homeschooled.

  When the bell rings, I tear off part of my paper and hand it to Melanie.

  “What’s this?”

  Pointing to each quarter note, I hum: hap-py birth-day to you.

  “Thank you!” she says, covering her smile with her hand. “You have extremely advanced doodling skills.”

  “That’s me.” I bow and wave for her to go first out the door.

  I smile all the way to my next class, happy there’s something I can do right.

  Things I used to be able to count on: Brent wanting to do the same stuff as me, Brent doing the talking whenever we were in new situations, and Brent being next to me in alphabetical order. We called ourselves the Michigan Twins, because of the Mi‘s—Mitchell and Milliken. Mom used to say we sounded like a law firm. But that was then.

  Now as I worm my way through the wall of kids in the hallway, I wish my last name started with anything besides M. Brent is standing at the locker next to mine, twisting the dial of his combination and chewing on his lip. Shoulders hunched, he yanks down on the latch and slaps his palm against the locker when it doesn’t budge, which makes me flinch.

  “Stupid thing must be broken,” he mumbles.

  I’ve already got mine open. Brent looks from me to his lock and back again.

  The warning bell rings. Brent gives his locker three swift kicks, as if breaking it might be the only way in.

  “You have to pass the numbuh when you go left,” I say just as Cornstalk comes up behind us and claps his hand down on Brent’s shoulder with a loud smack.

  “Yo, Milliken! You coming to wrestling tryouts today?” he asks.

  “You know it.”

  “Hope you can take down your locker by then. Or maybe you need your little fwend to help?” He laughs in a loud blurt-snort combo.

  When I glance over, my eyes are at the level of his sweaty pink forehead.

  “Nah,” says Brent. His locker finally clicks open, and he grabs a folder. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  The tiny bit of okay I was feeling vaporizes.

  “That’s the kid from the bike path, right?” Cornstalk asks, glancing back at me as the two of them walk away.

  “Yeah, total loser,” I hear Brent say.

  So that’s where I’ve seen him before. The fact that Cornstalk was there that day feels like a knife in my belly, but it’s Brent’s words that make the blade twist. I force my language arts binder into my locker and slam the door.

  “What’s up with you?” asks Tyson, passing me on his way to second period.

  “Idiots,” I say, nodding toward where Brent and Cornstalk have stopped to talk to another guy.

  “Dude, Brent Milliken is so last year. Forget about him.”

  Tyson knows that Brent and I stopped hanging out, but he doesn’t know why. He’s good about not being pushy like that. He starts humming and tapping to the beat of a song he made up this summer, and I can’t help smiling.

  “There you go,” he says. “You know what I’m sayin’! Never let ’em see you drop. Don’t sink to the bottom, gotta float to the top! Float on!” He thumps his chest with his fist, then points at me as he turns into his classroom.

  I picture myself relaxing and floating down a river as I walk to my next class. In the glass hallway overlooking the courtyard, a kid I don’t even know nods hello. Maybe this will work. Go with the flow, Rory, I tell myself. Float.

  The rest of the morning isn’t so bad, especially because the next two teachers, Mr. Leigh in PE and Mrs. Lucas in math, take attendance by calling names off the list. I answer “yup” instead of “here”—learned that one a long time ago. My classes are easy to find because the main hallways make a big square around the courtyard. But there are so many new kids everywhere that by the time the bell rings for lunch, I feel like I’ve used up all the lives in my personal game of Please Don’t Ask Me My Name. I’m relieved to meet up with Tyson and Jett inside the cafeteria.

  “Isn’t this place cool?” Tyson runs a finger along the zigzag design shaved on the back of his head as we check out the bright room full of clean, round tables.

  “Epic upgrade. Oh, hang on—are those vending machines?” He takes off toward them.

  “Let’s join that platoon,” says Jett, pushing up his glasses and pointing to a half-filled table behind a big pillar. “I know some of those guys from baseball.”

  Jett’s part military the way I’m part Irish. It’s just in him. He has a huge collection of army stuff that started with his great-grandpa’s World War II dog tags and grew from there. Back when we were show-and-tell age, everyone agreed that Jett brought in the coolest things. Today he’s wearing a US Coast Guard cap he got at his cousin’s graduation from the academy last year, and when we pass an older kid wearing a coast guard T-shirt, they nod at each other like they’re in the same club.

  I open my lunch and pull out dessert first. Taped to the top of the little plastic container is a note from my mom: Have a sweet first day! Classic Mom. Recruiting an innocent cupcake as an accomplice in her continuing quest to embarrass me.

  “Oooh, what’s that?” I hear a voice behind me.

  For such a solid guy, Cornstalk has a pretty good stealth mode. I had no idea he was standing there. He reaches over and snatches the note, bumping our table hard enough to spill the chocolate milk Jett just opened.

  “Oh, man, your mom still writes you love notes?” he says.

  “Give that back!” My voice wobbles.

  He turns to the laughing clump of kids behind him. I recognize a few of them. Wrestling friends of Brent’s. “You know who this is, right?” he asks them.

  One guy snorts and nods and another makes a hissing sound. Nerves jiggle through every part of me, except for my heart, which has stopped. This is not happening.

  Cornstalk leans in and whispers to me, “I’ll bet your mom still tucks love notes in your diaper bag too.”

  I go totally red.

  “Mind your business, Sherry,” says Tyson, pushing his way past the posse. He grabs the note out of Cornstalk’s hand and shoves it into his pocket.

  “Whatever. Rejects.” Cornstalk walks away, and the other guys follow. They take over a big table in the back corner of the cafeteria, kicking out a few kids who made the mistake of sitting there.

  “You know that kid?” I ask as Tyson scoots in next to me.

  “Sort of.” He tears into the fake-orange-colored peanut butter crackers he just bought. “His name’s Danny Pulaski. Real genius, that guy. Speaks two languages: WWE and dirt bike. His mom used to be my dad’s manager at the insurance company, so I’d have to hang out with him sometimes. Get this. His actual name is Sheridan, and his mom calls him Sherry. He hates that I know that.”

  Then Tyson leans in and motions us close. “And guess what else? His mom got fired and almost went to jail, like real jail, because she stole some money from the business.”

  “No way,” says Jett. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “From my dad! He had to talk in court and everything. And then Danny’s dad flipped out on someone in the hallway of the courthouse, and he almost got arrested too. It was this whole big thing. Anyway, it ended up Danny’s mom can’t work at the insurance company anymore and has to pay all the money back. Of course, I’m not supposed to be telling you any of this.” He zips his fingers across his lips.

  “Whoa,” I say.

  I look over and see Danny slide out of his chair and chest-bump another guy, knocking the kid off balance. The two of them laugh and food spits out of Danny’s mouth. At the same moment, the water I sipped goes down the wrong pipe, and I cough until my eyes water.

  When the bell rings, we stop outside the cafeteria and pull out our schedules to see what’s next.

  “This is kind of confusing. Is it an A day? I think I have study hall,” Jett says, reading from his.

  “Same,” says Tyson. “Specials are on B days. I’m pretty sure we go this way.” He points toward where most kids are walking. “You with us, Rory?”

  “Not today. Um…I’ve got speech.”

  “Ooh. That’s tough,” says Jett. He apologized when he stopped coming to speech at the end of last year for ranking up and leaving his wingman.

  “Nah, I hear it’s what all the cool kids do,” I say.