A Month of Mondays Read online

  Praise for Month of Mondays:

  “As real as it is heartfelt. When 13-year-old Suze hears her mother’s voice for the first time in ten years, she’s torn between an oath she made to her sister and overwhelming curiosity. A Month of Mondays is a tender story of a girl’s desire to heal her family.”

  —Suzanne Selfors, author of

  the Ever After High School stories

  Chapter 1

  I have three women who think they’re my mom. My sister Tracie has mothered me since I was three, when ours left us. Aunt Jenny steps in when an authority figure is needed and she thinks my dad’s being a slacker. Caroline, the one who gave birth to me? She sends the checks.

  So you can imagine how put out I was when Principal Farbinger kept saying he was going to call my mother. You’d think he’d know by now that I live with my dad. After all, I’ve spent half of junior high in his office for one stupid thing after another. I have never seen my school record, but I’d bet money Caroline’s name isn’t anywhere on it. Not if Dad had anything to do with it.

  I looked down at the khaki overcoat Farbinger had ordered me to put on over my costume. “It’s too big,” I said. “I’ll trip and fall.” I was hoping the idea of an accident would make him nervous enough to change his mind, but he just ordered me to sit down.

  “You should’ve thought of the possible consequences when you chose your outfit this morning, Miss Tamaki,” he said.

  “It’s Halloween,” I reminded him.

  He grunted, but didn’t answer. This was totally gross. Farbinger had been a pain in my side since day one, grade six, but you’d think by grade seven he would’ve moved on to some other kid. I wrapped my arms tightly around my middle and glared at the floor. Did he seriously expect me to wear his trench coat for the entire day?

  The material billowed around my feet, and the icy plastic of the chair seeped through the coat, making my legs cold. Maybe someday they’d bronze this chair for me and stick a plaque on it that said something like: In memory of Suze Tamaki—for dress code violations, habitual tardiness, and all-around smart-alecky attitude. Eventually I’d make it to high school, but my legend could live on here.

  Resigned, I sighed, leaned back, and took a look around. Not much had changed since last week. Coffee rings still marked the top of Farbinger’s metal desk, papers overflowed onto the bookshelves, and there was a thick layer of dust on the slate-gray blinds. His coat smelled sickening too. Like cigarettes. I figured part of his plan was to accuse me of smoking when I returned it and then suspend me.

  It was so stupid that he was making me wear his stinking coat all day just because my pink shorts said Sleeping Beauty across the butt. It was Halloween. I didn’t know the school rules about no writing on our butts counted today.

  I’d come to school in what I wore to bed. My theory was that I could sleep in until the last possible minute, put my hair up in pigtails, and make a run for the bus. And it had worked. I even brought my pillow to school for naps during my boring classes (which is all of them).

  “I’m surprised your mother let you out of the house in such…such…attire,” he said, taking the all-too-familiar yellow detention slip out of his desk drawer.

  I wanted to shout: My dad! I live with my dad. But why bother?

  The bell rang, ending third period, and I hoped Farbinger’d hurry up, so I could talk to Jessica before English. I shook my long bangs into my eyes to hide my impatience. He’d definitely make sure I was late if he thought I was anxious to get going.

  “Miss Tamaki, I’m afraid I have no choice but to give you a detention tomorrow afternoon. I want you to think about what is and what is not appropriate for school.”

  Like I hadn’t heard that one before. Just give me the slip and let me go. As if he were doing something of incredible importance, like signing the Constitution of Canada, he filled in my name with a gold pen while I squirmed.

  “This is precisely the reason we have a dress code here at Maywood Junior High,” he told me.

  Hurry up already!

  After a million years, he handed me the form.

  “I think I need a pass for English,” I said.

  “You still have two minutes.” He shooed me out the door. “And Miss Tamaki? If I hear that you’ve taken that coat off during the day, it’s an automatic suspension.”

  Tempting offer. I could stay in bed and read all day. I raced out into the almost-deserted halls, his coat flapping behind me like a sail. Naturally, my locker was all the way on the other side of the building. When I finally got there, I spun the combination and thumped the door a couple of times—that was the only way to get it open. It still took three tries. There was no way to make it now. Our English teacher was really big on us being in our seats when the bell rang, and so far I’d disappointed him at least six times. About to be seven.

  The bell clanged in my ears as I came tearing around the corner by the gym. Unfortunately, Mr. Franklin and Morty, two of our school janitors, also happened to be coming around the corner—only from the opposite direction.

  We were on a preordained custodial collision course.

  Like a conspirator, the belt from Farbinger’s coat snaked itself around my ankles, tripping me. I crashed into Franklin’s enormous belly and bounced off. Morty caught him under the arms and swayed ominously from Franklin’s weight, but in the end, they stood their ground. Nobody bothered to catch me, though. My right knee smashed into the tiled floor and books shot out of my arms, like they’d been flung from a car window. I don’t know if Franklin was angrier at me for crashing into him, or at Morty for having to save him. Either way, he was not a happy custodian.

  “What’s your name?” he yelled after me as I scooped up my books and dove through the door into the classroom.

  Mr. Baker stopped in the middle of roll call, and everyone looked at me standing in the doorway. Laughter rippled across the room. I must’ve looked pretty comical—my pigtails coming loose and Farbinger’s coat hanging all the way to the ground.

  “Glad you could join us,” Baker said.

  “No problem.” I limped my way through a maze of backpacks to my seat.

  “From your coat,” he said, “I take it you’ve gone literary on us, Suze. Let me guess…. You’re dressed as Sherlock Holmes for Halloween.”

  “Nope,” I grinned. “I’m a flasher.”

  Chapter 2

  When the last bell rang, I was so hyped up on the candy corn Jessica had given me during art class that I practically bounced down the hall. I zipped around a corner and barely missed crashing into Yoda, the night janitor who always arrives right when they let us out of school. Today might have been Halloween, but this guy looked so much like the Star Wars character that kids had been calling him Yoda for forever.

  “Hello, Sooooz Tamaki,” he said. “Why you running in the halls?”

  “Sorry, Yoda. Too much sugar, I guess.”

  Smiling, he shook his head, and I jumped over his push-broom, making him laugh. I found Amanda and Leigh in front of their lockers and skidded to a stop, throwing my arms around them football-huddle style.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi, Suze,” Leigh said. “You’re coming to my house, right?”

  “Can’t. I promised Jessica I’d go with her.” She was stuck taking her little sisters trick-or-treating, and I’d said I’d go along.

  “Y’all can both come.”

  “Leigh has MoonPies,” Amanda said, unwrapping my arm from around her shoulder so she could dig through the bottom of her locker for her bike helmet.

  “My nana sent them to me,” Leigh told us.

&nbs
p; MoonPies are these really gooey chocolatey-cookie-marshmallow things from the US. You might be able to get them here in Canada, but Leigh swears the ones from Tennessee are different and way better, so she makes her grandma mail them to her. When Leigh comes back to BC after spending the summers in the South, she always lugs home a whole case of MoonPies in her suitcase.

  “Why didn’t you bring me any?” I asked.

  “I did,” Leigh said, “but Amanda scarfed them all.”

  “I had four,” Amanda said.

  “Yeah?” Leigh laughed. “Fourteen, maybe.”

  “Okay, maybe five. Come with us, Suze,” Amanda said. “We always spend Halloween together.”

  “I know, but I already told Jess I’d go with her.”

  Amanda and Leigh liked to think of us as the Three Musketeers, and mostly I do too, but sometimes I’m more like a third wheel. And sometimes I’m not even sure if I really like them. I mean, I do, but we had more in common when we were kids. Now we’re into different stuff. I was really glad when Jessica transferred to our school this year. For the first time since Leigh moved here in grade four and stole Amanda from me, I actually had my own friend.

  “I gotta go,” I said. “Bring me some tomorrow.”

  “If Amanda doesn’t eat them all,” Leigh said.

  I heard Leigh yell “Ow!” as I ran off down the hall. Amanda had probably slugged her.

  ^^^

  We all stood on Jess’s porch while the twins pushed the doorbell and banged on the screen door. Jessica and I rolled our eyes at each other.

  “Trick or treat,” they screeched when their mother opened the door. Their four-year-old laughter echoed through the neighborhood. “We tricked you!” one of them yelled. I had no idea which one it was because I couldn’t tell them apart, but Jessica seemed to have no trouble at all. Of course, she’d known them since birth.

  “It’s about time you got back,” their mother said, taking baby Elise out of Jessica’s arms.

  “They were having fun,” Jess said. Her mom tried to usher us into the house with the girls, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  “We’re not staying,” I said. I reached into the foyer and got my backpack from where I’d left it. “We’re going to my place to hand out candy.”

  “How’re you getting there?”

  “Walking,” we said together.

  She wrinkled up her forehead at that one. “You know I don’t like you out after dark.”

  “Yeah, but it’s only five o’clock,” Jess said. “And there are streetlights.”

  “Not to mention fifty million goblins, ghouls, witches, and parents hitting up all the houses between here and there,” I assured her.

  “Please, Mom?”

  “My dad will give Jess a ride home,” I told her.

  “Well…all right. But be careful.”

  We made our escape before she could change her mind and waded through their muddy driveway back to the unpaved street. Jessica lives on a dead end, which is practically a bog this time of year. Her house is really, really old, even though all around it are newer houses. The mud sucked at my cold feet, and I hoped I wouldn’t lose a shoe.

  “My mother drives me crazy,” Jess said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  “How so?”

  There was this pause as she realized what she’d said, because we both knew she was thinking about how controlling her mother was and that I didn’t have one.

  “Well, your dad’s pretty cool,” she said.

  “Nice save.” I laughed so she wouldn’t think I was mad or anything, and she looked relieved. Believe me, she might have thought her mom was a pain, but having Caroline split when I was three was no joy either. I hardly ever thought about her, though, and I wasn’t about to start. “Check this out.” I handed her the bulging pillowcase.

  “Not a bad trade-off,” she said, feeling the weight of the candy we’d scored.

  That was the deal. We took the girls out and got to keep all of Elise’s candy. She was only nine months old, so she had no idea she’d been ripped off. I picked my way around a pothole. My thrift store Keds already squished with water though, so I wasn’t sure why I bothered. “I’m freezing my butt off,” I said.

  “Maybe you should’ve kept Farbinger’s coat.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Even in the dark, the streetlight reflected enough so that when she smiled, I could see Jess had glitter in her teeth. She had glitter everywhere, actually. I grabbed the bottom of her dress just as she was about to drag it through a puddle.

  “Your costume’s getting soggy.”

  “I hope it’s not ruined. It took me forever to make.”

  I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her costume. It was just really weird. Who dressed up like a fairy from a Shakespeare play? I knew she wanted to be an actress, but still…. She was wearing this weird chiffon dress thingie and had ratted her curly hair so it practically stuck straight out. Then she’d painted her face a bunch of pastel colors, and with all the sparkles, the makeup was totally excessive. Not to be mean, but I think I’d have liked it more if she was…well, cooler. It’s hard to stay under the teachers’ radars when she’s around, because she’s so smiley and friendly to them.

  On the main road, shadowy groups of trick-or-treaters moved up and down the walkways. Flashlights played across lawns, and pumpkins glowed on the porches. It was pretty awesome, actually. Nothing like the boring apartment building where I live. Inside these homes were families who probably ate dinner together and stuff.

  “You know,” I said, after we’d gone a few blocks, “it’s pretty hard to tell you’re twelve years old with all that makeup on.”

  Jessica brightened immediately. “You think I look older?”

  “I was thinking younger.”

  The light in her eyes went right out. “Oh.”

  I knew she was disappointed, but that was because she hadn’t heard my master plan yet. “And I’m vertically challenged,” I said.

  “You’re not that much shorter than me.”

  I waved the pillowcase in her face. “True, but you’re missing the point.”

  “Huh?”

  “We could totally pass for younger and get a ton of candy. No one’s going to know. Your boobs hardly show with all that loose fabric.”

  I could see her blush even under the makeup, and I nudged her with my elbow and snickered. If I had Jess’s figure, I definitely wouldn’t try to hide it like she does, but whatever.

  “If you don’t think we’ll get busted…” she said.

  I resisted the temptation to laugh at her unintended pun. “What’re they gonna do? Arrest us? Come on. Just slouch a little.”

  We only had the one pillowcase between us, but people threw in two of everything anyway. By the time we got within view of my hideous green apartment building, our loot weighed more than my cat.

  We were only about a block away when the skies opened up, dumping rain, drenching us in a matter of seconds. “Aaaggghhhh! Run!” I yelled, and Jessica and I took off full speed ahead. The deluge stopped as quickly as it started, and, by the time we got to my building, it was barely a drizzle. My shorts clung to my hips and the knee-high socks I’d worn gripped my calves with icy fingers.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, panting. “I’m sooooo drenched.”

  “You look like you lost a paintball fight too,” I said, gasping for breath.

  “Well, I can see the flowers on your panties through those shorts.”

  “What?” I totally fell for it, looking down.

  “Joking.”

  “So funny.” We hurried toward the building. “Weird…”

  “What?”

  “My dad’s car is here. He usually works until nine on Thursdays.”

  “Maybe he’s sick,” Jessica
said.

  “No way. He never gets sick.” We stopped at the box to get the mail. I rifled through the circulars, looking for the brown envelope, but it wasn’t there. “Double weird.”

  “Now what?”

  “No support check from Caroline.”

  “Well, tomorrow’s actually the first.”

  “We always get it by the end of the month. Always.” She may be an absent mother, but she has a very reliable accountant. We went around to the back of the building to our second floor walk-up. “Be careful,” I said to Jessica. “These stairs are super slippery.”

  I didn’t have any free hands because of the candy and my backpack, so when something orange and wet came up the stairs from behind and shot between my feet, Jessica had to put her hand on my butt to keep me from tumbling backward right on top of her.

  “Stupid cat. Watch out, Sammy!” I yelled after her.

  It was my lucky day after all, though. The apartment door was unlocked, so we didn’t have to stand in the rain while I dug out my key. Inside, water pooled around us on the cracked linoleum, and two voices filtered in from the living room. One was Dad’s and the other was a woman’s. I knew right off it wasn’t my sister’s, but I didn’t have a clue whose it could be. I nudged Jessica to stop her from going any farther.

  “My dad’s never had a woman here before,” I whispered. “Especially when he’s supposed to be at work.”

  Jessica raised her eyebrows and I smirked.

  “Well, here we are, Jessica! Home sweet home!” I yelled, practically at the top of my lungs.

  We giggled just like her little sisters and stepped onto the living-room carpet. My dad’s expression wiped the smile right off of my face. His mouth was contorted into a sort of sick, twisted grimace that looked like the time he’d dropped an anchor on his foot and had forced himself to bite back a bunch of choice swear words.

  A small woman with short blond hair sat in our only nice chair. She stood up when she saw us. Her dark tan was either fake-n-bake or from a recent trip to Mexico. Diamond rings glittered on her hands, and her long, red, manicured fingernails reminded me of claws.