Do Not Look at the Foam

My plan for eighth grade was simple. The plan was: be a rumor. Not a bad rumor. A boring one. I wanted to be the kind of kid that, if you asked another kid about him, they'd go "Wesley? Uh. Yeah. He's. I think he's in my math class?" and then they'd forget the question. I had spent seventh grade being noticed, on account of an incident with a science fair volcano that I am not going to describe, and noticed is the worst thing you can be in middle school. Noticed is a job. Boring is a vacation. The plan was going great for eleven days. On the twelfth day my dad got a job, and my plan died in the foam. You have to understand my dad had been out of work since the spring, when the appliance store closed. He didn't talk about it much. He just got quieter and started doing this thing where he'd be real cheerful about small stuff, like he'd announce that the spaghetti was "restaurant quality" in this big voice, and my mom would smile at him in a way that had worry folded up inside it. I noticed money got careful around our house. Lights got turned off when you left rooms. The good cereal stopped showing up. Nobody explained it to me, but you don't have to be a genius. You just have to be twelve and paying attention. So when Dad came home on the twelfth day of eighth grade actually loud, actually happy, the real kind, I was glad. For about four seconds I was really glad. "I got a job!" he said, and my mom did the smile without the worry in it, the whole smile, and I felt the house kind of exhale. "That's great, Dad. Doing what?" And my father, my fully grown adult father, put his hands on the kitchen table, leaned in like he was about to tell me he'd won something, and said: "You're looking at the new mascot for the River Rats." The River Rats are our town's minor-league baseball team. They are not good. Their stadium holds maybe two thousand people and on a normal night holds about four hundred, half of whom are there for the dollar hot dogs. And their mascot — I knew their mascot, everyone in town knew their mascot — is a giant foam beaver named Chompers, who has enormous felt teeth, a backwards baseball cap sewn permanently to his head, and a belly you could lose a backpack in. "You're going to be Chompers," I said. "I'm going to be Chompers," my dad said, glowing. "In the costume." "That is generally how mascotting works, bud, yes." I want to be clear that I love my dad. I want that on the record before I tell you that my entire body went cold, because here is the thing they don't tell you about being twelve: you can love somebody with your whole heart and also, at the exact same time, be completely sure they are about to ruin your life, and both of those feelings are real, and they don't cancel out. They just sit there in your chest together, not talking, like two kids assigned to the same project. "Dad," I said carefully. "Does the costume have a head. Like, a full head." "Full head. Great visibility, actually. Little mesh panel right in the mouth." "So nobody can tell who's inside it." "Nobody at all," my dad said, and then, because he has always been able to see me, the actual me, even when I'm trying to be a rumor — he stopped glowing for a second. He looked at me. And he said, quieter, "Wes. It's a paycheck. It's a real one. We needed one." He paused. "And it's at night, and it's a foam beaver, and I promise you, I promise, nobody at your school is ever going to know it's me." He believed that. He really, truly believed that. He was wrong. He was so wrong. But that's chapter two, and chapter two involves the seventh-grade field trip, and a thrown hot dog, and the single most embarrassing ninety seconds of my entire life — so for now I'll just leave you where I was that night, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, a twelve-year-old with a dead plan and a dad downstairs practicing, I could hear him, practicing his big foam wave in the kitchen. I could hear my mom laughing. The whole laugh. No worry in it. And I lay there and I figured out, slowly, that those two things — my dad being a giant foam beaver, and my mom laughing the whole laugh again — were the same thing. They came as a set. You didn't get to keep one and return the other. I decided I could survive eighth grade noticed. Probably. People had survived worse. I just really, really hoped Chompers couldn't run fast.