A sister wonders how—or if—she can help her brother during a difficult time.
Learning Objective: to analyze the title of a work of fiction
Lather, rinse, repeat. An endless loop. I stood under the hot, pounding water and let the shampoo stream over my face, over my closed eyes, and tried not to think.
Or to think only of shampoo. Shampoo, shampoo, shampoo. If you say anything enough times in a row, it sounds like gibberish, but shampoo is in a class by itself.
Ugh.
Everything brings me back to my brother and what he is going to face this morning, heading into school for the first time in two months. To class, by himself.
It would be better if it were me, I thought for the billionth time. Poor Calvin; it’s not fair. He already has so much to deal with. Life bumps hard up against Calvin. I used to think maybe he was bringing it on himself; if he would just toss the ball back instead of getting all weird and possessive and wanting to pretend it’s a pizza . . . if he would just act normal, he’d have friends, he’d get chosen in gym, he’d have people to sit with at lunch. But maybe he didn’t choose all that awkwardness any more than he chose cancer.
I blinked my stinging eyes but didn’t let myself rub them, and grabbed the conditioner. It was still way early—I’d gotten out of bed in the deep gray before six—so I rubbed the conditioner into my hair, from roots to ends. I thought about what I’d wear to school. Maybe shorts? It was hot already, really hot for May.
My mother had bought me two new T-shirts. Maybe I’d wear one of them so Calvin wouldn’t be the only one wearing new clothes. He’d lost so much weight that none of his old worn-in clothes fit, and my mother had already given all his old stuff away to the Salvation Army.
Calvin doesn’t like new clothes. My mother washed everything four times for him and cut out all the tags. Man, even when he was little, Calvin would jump like he was scalded if a tag touched his skin.
I had to smile, thinking of how he looked back then, a study in circles—big chubby red cheeks, huge round brown eyes, loopy blond curls. So different from now.
I rinsed the conditioner from my hair.
I shouldn’t have said anything to Mackey. It’s not that I thought he’d make fun of Calvin. No way. The opposite, if anything. It’s just that, well, we’re pretty private in my family. Was I asking for sympathy? How unfair is that? Or attention? What Calvin had whispered to me had torn a hunk out of my heart, and I wasn’t even sure why.
“I wish for once I could just blend in,” he’d said, without looking up from the video game he was playing in the den. I wasn’t sure, at first, if he was talking to me or to himself.
“You wish what?” I asked him. I was chugging orange juice from a tall glass, still sweating after soccer practice.
“Stupid, huh?” he said. “Waste a wish on that. Should wish for a cure, for remission.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How you feeling today?”
“But still I wish it,” Calvin said, then grunted. A crash and an explosion lit the screen. “I died,” he explained and turned off the game.
I drained my glass.
He swiveled in his chair. “Not that I blended in before, but now, well, Monday morning, I’m not just the weird kid walking into school all alone, but the weird, sick, bald kid, with a terminal disease.”
I forced a smile. “You look good bald. You have a good-shaped head.”
“Yeah?”
“Nobody will even notice.”
He blinked slowly, his no-eyelash eyes closing and opening in their weirdly birdlike way.
“Sure,” he said. “Lots of kids in middle school are bald.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just put my hand on his bony shoulder for a few seconds.
“Want to play Doom with me?” he asked.
I so didn’t. “I have to take a shower.”
I went up to my room.
That night, when I went to a party one of the guys was having, Mackey and I took a walk, and I told him what Calvin had said. He put his arm around me, and we just walked along the deserted streets in the dark together.
It felt good but also bad. We’ve been going out almost a year, me and Mackey, and have been friends even longer than that. It’s not like with a lot of kids in eighth grade—getting from Will you go out with me? to We have to talk as fast as possible. There’s no drama with us. Nowhere on my notebooks does it say Mrs. Jodie MacFarlane, Mr. and Mrs. John MacFarlane Jr., or even just Jodie and Mackey. He did write our initials like an addition problem on the back of his math notebook. But then, he’s a nut.
We’re more like best friends, which is a little weird for me because I’ve never really had a best friend before. Mostly just teammates. Mackey and I crack each other up, and shoot hoops, and study for tests together, and a couple of times he talked about his father, who died a few years ago. When Calvin was diagnosed, Mackey said, “Oh, Jodie,” and pulled me into a bear hug so tight I thought I might suffocate in there. Maybe I hoped I would.
I’m not the girlfriend type. I am more of a sweaty-gym-socks, laugh-at-fart-jokes girl. Still, the fact is, I have a boyfriend. I have someone to talk to, someone to vent to about my brother and how much it hurt me to think about how much it was going to hurt him to walk into school Monday morning. That’s what felt good, and also felt bad.
Who does Calvin have?
I looked into the mirror as I dried off. OK, I thought. I guess that’s who. I combed out my hair, toweled it roughly dry, and pulled it back in a ponytail. He’s got me.
Hard to say if that would help at all.
I’m a grade ahead of him, 19 months older, a girl. What he really needed this morning was a gang of buddies, pals to walk into school with, to call his name from across the playground and smile, thump his back, crowd around him in a pack and head into the school building like brothers, like he was just part of the team.
Oh well.
Even when he was fine, Calvin never had that. He has always watched from the sidelines. And now, well, he hasn’t been in school for two months. A couple of kids have called, but not many.
I slapped my cheeks to snap myself out of it and slid down the banister, determined not to be grim. Last thing he needs.
When I got down to the kitchen, he was sitting there already, his new clothes draped around his skeletal frame, trying to fake a smile for our mother, who had a pan of scrambled eggs in her hand. She was smiling too, but the tightness around her eyes wasn’t fooling anyone.
“We’ve only got five minutes,” I reminded her.
“I thought I could, you know, drive you guys today,” she said, spooning some eggs onto my plate and some onto Calvin’s.
“Oh,” I said. “OK.”
Calvin poked at the toast on his plate. “You don’t have to,” he said to me. “You can take the bus.”
“Are you kidding?” I was talking louder than I needed to, like Dad, lately, when he talks to Calvin. “A ride is sweet!”
Calvin and Mom both flinched. I smiled to show I was psyched, definitely pumped up about getting a ride. Oh yes, this day is going surprisingly well! Everything is great!
I was scaring them both, I could tell, with my jack-o’-lantern grin and wide-open eyes. OK, I was scaring myself too. I took a huge bite of eggs on toast to move the breakfast along, change the mood.
“See?” Mom coaxed. “Jodie’s eating, Calvin. Come on, have some.”
My eggs suddenly felt rubbery in my mouth. Leave him alone, I thought. I couldn’t swallow.
Calvin picked up about a molecule of egg on his fork and placed it in his mouth. “It’s delicious,” he said.
“Just two bites, Calvin,” Mom pleaded. “Two good bites. You need some protein. Please.”
Though it felt like the egg in my mouth had suddenly re-formed itself inside its hard shell, I managed to choke it down. I gasped for air as my mother sighed, so Calvin picked up another speck on a tine of his fork and dropped it into his mouth.
“Attaboy,” my father told Calvin, in his Pep-Talk Dad voice. “Way to get your strength back. Knock ’em dead today, son.”
“OK,” Calvin answered softly.
My parents shot each other a look. Then Mom put her smile on again as she grabbed her keys from the hook and said, “Okey dokey, smokies! Let’s skedaddle!”
Calvin and I followed her through the mudroom to the car.
I sat in the back and let Calvin take the front so he wouldn’t get carsick on the way to school. Sinking down with my knees against the back of his seat, I willed some of my strength into him. Please be strong, Calvin. Don’t . . . just don’t . . .
Oh, please, just don’t let people stare. Please, let everybody just ignore him like they used to. No whispering. No pointing. No guidance counselor with her fake nodding and smiling—please don’t let her be waiting for him to make sure he’s OK. Just let him be invisible like he used to be.
Mom slowed the car down and pulled up outside the fence. She turned to Calvin and quietly asked, “Should I walk you in?”
“No,” he said, opening his door.
“Sure?” She attempted a smile again.
“We’ll be fine,” I assured her, getting out. Calvin and I slammed our car doors shut at the same time. “Ready?” I asked him.
He shrugged.
I nodded. No fake smiles. “Let’s go.”
We walked into the playground, where most of the kids already were because the buses get there by 8:05, and it was now quarter past. I could hear Calvin beside me trying to take deep, cleansing breaths like his therapist had suggested. By habit, my eyes scanned the playground for Mackey, even though of course I wasn’t going to go off and leave Calvin alone. Not today.
Over by the far hoop, my eye stopped on someone, and it took me a second to realize why—the kid had a bald head. Weird. Maybe there was somebody else going through chemo and I didn’t know about it. Guess I’d been too wrapped up in my own family’s pain to notice, or even to remember, that we didn’t invent this—this ache, this tragedy. It’s so easy to feel sorry for myself, to sink into the feeling that we’re the only ones who ever got dealt an unlucky hand.
We were heading in that direction, but I purposely looked away. That kid didn’t need people staring at him either.
“Calvin!” I heard Mackey bellow. “Yo, Cal!”
I had to smile, just hearing his voice. The guy has a set of lungs, for sure. Calvin and I looked around for him and stopped dead in our tracks when we saw what was coming at us.
It was Mackey, though it took me a second to figure that out. His grin gave him away. He was waving, grinning, flanked by six of his buddies from the soccer team. They were heading straight toward us, with their long, loping, soccer-boy swaggers, shoulder to shoulder, covering the distance between us fast.
And here’s the thing: They were bald.
I don’t mean crew cuts. All seven boys had completely shaved their heads. They surrounded us.
“Hey,” these bald, barely recognizable boys I’ve known half my life said to my brother. “Hey, Cal,” and “Hi,” and “What’s up?”
Calvin didn’t say anything. His mouth hung open a little, then curved into a small smile.
“What do you say we bust outta here?” Mackey asked him. “Go have some fun, shoot some pool, make some noise?”
Calvin’s face tensed, so I said, “Mackey . . .”
“All right, fine, let’s take over the school then. Right, guys?”
“Yeah,” a few of them grunted.
“Yeah,” said Calvin too.
“Let’s DO this!” Mackey yelled and slung his big arm over Calvin’s narrow shoulders. The pack of bald boys turned and strode toward the front door of school together. I couldn’t even see Calvin squashed in among them. I couldn’t move. I just watched them go.
Copyright ® 2007 by Rachel Vail. First published in “Be Careful What You Wish For: Ten Stories About Wishes,” published by Scholastic. Reprinted by permission of Writers House, on behalf of the proprietor.
Viking Books for Young Readers
Writing Contest
Consider the story’s title. Why will Jodie love John MacFarlane Jr. until the day she dies? Entries must be submitted to John MacFarlane contest by a teacher, parent, or legal guardian.* Three winners will each get a copy of Bad Best Friend by Rachel Vail.
*Entries must be written by a student in grades 4-12 and submitted by their teacher, parent, or legal guardian, who will be the entrant and must be a legal resident of the U.S. age 18 or older. See Contest Page for details.
This story was originally published in the October 2024 issue.
Essential Questions: How can we support others in coping with difficulties? How can illness affect a person and those around them? What does it mean to blend in? What makes us want to blend in or stand out from the crowd?
1. Prepare to Read
(10 minutes)
Preview Vocabulary (10 minutes)
Project the Google Slides version of Vocabulary: Definitions and Practice on your whiteboard. Review the definitions and complete the activity as a class. Highlighted words: chemo, flanked, flinched, loping, remission, terminal. Audio pronunciations of the words and a read-aloud of the definitions are embedded on the slides. Optionally, print the PDF version or share the slideshow link to your LMS and have students preview the words and complete the activity independently before class.
2. Read and Discuss
(75 minutes)
Read the “As You Read” box on page 12 or at the top of the digital story page.
For students’ first read, have them follow along as they listen to author Rachel Vail read her story aloud. The audio read-aloud is located in the Resources tab in Teacher View and at the top of the story page in Student View.
Optionally, have students reread and annotate the story independently. Here are some symbols you might have them use:
❗= I'm surprised.
❓ = This is unfamiliar.
⭐ = This is important.
💭 = “I wonder . . .” (add comments or questions)
💙 = I love this.
Divide students into groups to discuss the questions in the story along with their annotations. (The discussion questions appear in the margins of the print magazine or by clicking on the bolded words on the digital story page.) If you’d like students to respond in writing, an interactive and printable Discussion Questions activity is available in your Resources tab.
Discussion Questions (30 minutes)
1. Why has Calvin lost so much weight? (inference) You can infer that Calvin has lost weight as a result of having cancer.
2. What does Jodie tell Mackey? How does her telling him this relate to what happens later? (text structure) Jodie tells Mackey what Calvin said about wishing he could just blend in for once. It is because Jodie shares this comment with Mackey that Mackey has the idea to shave his head—and get his fellow soccer players to shave their heads—for Calvin’s first day back at school.
3. What do you think Jodie means when she says she’s not the girlfriend type? (critical thinking) Jodie is likely referring to stereotypical or old-fashioned ideas about what girls and girlfriends are like: someone who giggles a lot and enjoys “girly” things like flowers, jewelry, wearing dresses, etc. She might also be suggesting that having a boyfriend was not something she particularly wanted or gave much thought to.
4. Explain what Jodie means when she says the walk with Mackey felt good but also bad. (character) Jodie means that it’s a relief to have Mackey to talk to, but doing so makes her feel guilty—she seems to feel that it’s not fair that she has someone to talk to in a way that Calvin doesn’t, and that it’s wrong or selfish for her to be complaining when Calvin is the one who’s sick.
5. Describe how Jodie, Mom, and Dad are acting during breakfast. Why do you think they are acting this way? (character) Jodie, Mom, and Dad are acting very cheerful—more cheerful than any of them actually feels. In other words, their cheerfulness is forced. It is likely they are acting this way because they think it will make Calvin feel better about his return to school, which he is not looking forward to. Perhaps through their cheerfulness, they are also trying to reassure themselves that everything is OK.
6. Why is Jodie hoping people will treat Calvin like he’s invisible? (character) Calvin told Jodie directly that he wished that when he returned to school, he could just blend in. He is dreading everyone staring at him and whispering about him, or even simply paying attention to him in an effort to be helpful, as a guidance counselor might do. Jodie is wishing for her brother what he is wishing for himself—that people would let him just blend in.
7. How does Calvin feel at the end of the story? How does Jodie feel? How do you know? (character) At the end of the story, Calvin feels surprised and then relieved and grateful to be swept into the group of other bald-headed boys at school, as you can tell from the way his mouth hangs open before he smiles and the way he then says “Yeah” and goes into the school as part of the bald-headed group. Jodie feels deeply moved and grateful to Mackey and his friends for thinking about Calvin and doing the perfect thing to make him feel supported as he returns to school. Mackey figured out a way to give Calvin his wish of blending in. Jodie says she cannot move; you can infer that this is because she is so overcome with emotion.
3. Write
(20 minutes)
1. Have students use the Featured Skill Activity: Character to help them to respond to the writing prompt on page 15 in the printed magazine and at the bottom of the digital story page:
Consider the story's title. Why will Jodie love John MacFarlane Jr. until the day she dies?
2. Alternatively, have students choose a task from the Choice Board, a menu of culminating tasks. (Our Choice Board options include the writing prompt from the magazine, differentiated versions of the writing prompt, and additional creative ways for students to demonstrate their understanding of a story.)
Connected readings from the Scope archives:
