Grrr: PopCorn says he’s too busy preparing for their trip to come to the exhibition at the Uh-Oh. But he promises Sumac she can teach him all about ancient Mesopotamia on the plane this afternoon instead.
The outing’s by streetcar, subway, then foot. (The Lotterys are way too green to have a car, because it messes up the planet.) Even though it’s just six of the eleven of them — because MaxiMum’s at the community garden dealing with an infestation of tiny bugs called thrips — they take up the whole sidewalk. Aspen jogs backward ahead of the rest, making string figures. At Camp Jagged Falls, the kids each finger-knitted their own cat’s cradle loop from Miley the Sheep’s wool, but Aspen came home obsessed. It’s a great fidget for her hands, though, which is useful because she’s not allowed to bring Slate out in public since the Great Movie Theater Disaster. (Her rat frightens people an awful lot considering he’s only twenty-seven centimeters long, not counting his tail.)
Sumac reads How to Betray a Dragon’s Hero as she walks, because she doesn’t like to waste time.
“I tired,” wails Brian.
Sumac looks up and offers to play I Spy. “I spy something red … something stripy … something yucky you’re about to step on!”
Brian yelps and leaps over it. “I tired again.”
So then PapaDum pulls her along with the Invisible Rope, which always helps for a while. But what works best with Brian is letting her push the Oakmobile — Oak’s huge stroller — which is hard to get up steps but handy to hang bags on. Pushing it must be tiring for a four-year-old, Sumac thinks. It’s definitely more work for CardaMom, who has to lean over Brian and do the steering and most of the pushing while pretending she’s barely touching it.
“I tired!”
“Brian, want to play Battering Ram?” says Aspen.
“Yeah!”
This involves zooming Oak at poles and garbage cans, but going around them at the last minute. Because Brian’s been Oak’s big sister ever since he was born, even before the two of them came to Camelottery, she sees protecting him as her job, so she’d never really ram him into anything — but sometimes she steers him away from an obstacle so sharply, his top half lolls out the other side of the Oakmobile.
Today the game lasts about a minute and a half until they nearly collide with a woman on a mobility scooter and PapaDum says “Game over” in his deep voice that there’s no arguing with.
Here’s the Uh-Oh, a giant crystal, all shards of glass exploding out of the street. It’s really the Royal Ontario Museum, but when Brian first saw it (at two) that’s what she said — “Uh-oh!” — as if somebody’d smashed a vase, so the name stuck.
Sumac stashes her book in her backpack alongside From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (about kids who run away to live in a museum) and Smile (about dentistry, and a lot more exciting than it sounds). She always carries three, because what if you finish one and the next one sucks?
It’s spookily dark inside the exhibition, with spotlights. Oak thinks it’s a game and starts chortling.
“Imagine it’s five thousand years ago in a desert,” Sumac whispers to Brian.
“Napoleons!” Brian says it so loudly, she startles an old lady examining a carved stone. That’s what Brian calls people in the past: Napoleons, because he was a famous one. She has the impression that it was Jesus and his friends the cavemen, then Napoleons, then us.
Aspen keeps on cat’s cradling as she scampers between the exhibition cases. “Eiffel Tower,” she announces. “Ta-dah!”
But to Sumac, her sister’s string looks more like the Eiffel Tower after Godzilla’s stepped on it.
She reads a list projected in light. “Wow. The Mesopotamians invented plows, cities, spoked wheels, dice, looms….”
“Toy cars!” Aspen’s at a touch screen. “They had tiny stone carts with a hedgehog on top, and a hole for a string so kids could pull them.”
“I pull them,” says Brian.
“It’s just a picture,” Aspen tells her, “but you can swipe it.”
Oak wants out of his Oakmobile now. Brian gets down on the floor with him so he won’t be lonely.
Oak’s still not walking like all the other nearly two kids are. The parents say not to worry — that he’s different, remember, but he’s on track, his own track. Sumac does worry, sometimes. Luckily Oak never worries, because he has no idea he’s behind. His plump bare legs keep slipping out from under him now as he wriggle-crawls across the glossy floor. CardaMom pulls his grippers (nonskid socks with the toes cut off) out of her satchel and runs to catch him, wriggling them up and over his knees.
“Look, everybody,” says Aspen, “Burning House. See the flames” — her strings zigzag to and fro — “and the people flying, like the fourth grandfather.”
“Fleeing, not flying.” Sumac can’t help it.
Aspen growls: “Sumac’s spell-checking me again.”
“Try and think of your sister as a help rather than a pest,” CardaMom tells her.