Mya's Strategy to Save the World Read online

  “Mom’s going to Myanmar.”

  “Without us?” Nanda made it sound like Mom was setting off for Mars and might not return until we were senior citizens.

  Mom gave her a big hug. “Oh, honey, I’ll call or email you every single day until I’m home. And it won’t be long. We’ll get Grandma healed as quickly as we can.”

  It’s disconcerting when grown-ups get watery eyes.

  “Don’t worry about us. We can handle things,” I said. Then I glared at Nanda until she wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve (gross) and nodded.

  “Who’s going to make breakfast every morning?” she said.

  Which was okay because it made Mom laugh.

  As it turned out, we had breakfast at the airport the next day, then we waved goodbye to Mom as she passed through the security gates and disappeared. The time between (a) getting the call and (b) dropping her at the airport was just over twenty-four hours.

  (By the way, if you’re looking for Myanmar on our classroom globe, look for Burma instead. That’s the old name for the country. Some people still use it to show they don’t agree with the military guys who switched the name in the 1980s. It’s also possible our classroom globe is an antique from before the name change happened.)

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Dryness

  What did you get on your English assignment? I got an A, and Ms. Martinson said my piece was “touching,” but she also said she liked my use of “dry humor.” My essay was totally serious! I think she might be confused.

  Also, I got your email about Drew and your theory about his class-clown act being a disguise for above-average intelligence. If that’s true, he’s an excellent actor. Definitely Oscar-winning.

  Was it his shoes or Ian’s that smelled so bad yesterday? I almost suffocated.

  * * *

  —

  I MISSED DAD WHENEVER HE WENT AWAY, AND I MISSED Mom whenever she went away. Equally. But it was a lot easier when Dad was away and Mom was at home because Mom knew more. Even though she worked full-time, just like Dad, she still remembered which days were hot-lunch days at school, which one of us ate bananas for snack (NOT me) and where everything belonged.

  After dinner on Thursday, Nanda tore apart our bedroom looking for her soccer shin pads. The place looked so messy, I thought the government was going to have to declare our house a national disaster area.

  “Mya, I need beep-sistance!” she said. My sister refuses to say the word ass, even if it’s part of another word. This has been going on for so long, our whole family now says “beep-sistance” and “beep-sparagus” without even thinking.

  “Look in the laundry bin.” It was a good bet, because no one had done laundry in the week since Mom left.

  “I already looked. They’re not there.”

  “Ask Dad.”

  “He says I have to be responsible for my own things.”

  This sounded reasonable.

  “Mya!” She looked so pathetic that I started to feel sorry for her. But it was her own fault that she tried too hard in soccer and made the under-nine elite team, which meant she had to do year-round practice with no winter break like other teams got. (Nanda’s soccer league had obviously never read the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.)

  “I’m going to be late for practice!”

  I double-checked the laundry bin, her dresser drawer and under her bed. No shin pads.

  “Nanda, you’ll have to go without them.” Not that her coach would let her play with no shin pads.

  I was talking to an empty room. My sister had disappeared.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the bathroom!”

  I found her sitting on the tile floor, one soccer sock up and one down. Beside her was a box of Mom’s maxi pads.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

  “I found pads!” she said. “These’ll work. They’re even sticky.”

  She’d peeled the backing from four of them and lined them up in a double layer along her shin. As I watched, she rolled her sock right overtop.

  “You can’t…”

  Dad honked, long and loud, from the driveway. Before I could say anything else, Nanda hopped up, brushed past me and thundered down the stairs, leaving me staring at the square blue maxi-pad packages scattered across the bathroom floor.

  There was no way I was touching them.

  I stomped back to my bedroom, threw myself onto the bed and allowed myself to really miss Mom. She would have known where Nanda’s shin pads were and she never, ever would have let my sister leave the house wearing feminine hygiene products.

  I was going to have to repress this memory, immediately.

  * * *

  —

  I SHOULD HAVE GONE TO MYANMAR WITH MOM. I COULD have been a huge help with Grandma, and Mom and I could have gone shopping too. Mom was born in Myanmar. We’d all been there a few times, but not since I was nine. On that trip, we went to a massive market that had stalls piled with gold bells and carved wooden elephants and shell necklaces. I also remembered six billion relatives kissing me, everything smelling like sandalwood and a LOT of food. Most days, I thought I was going to pop from eating too much.

  Right now, there was violence on the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh because the army was burning the villages of a Muslim ethnic group called the Rohingya. Dad said not to panic, the fighting was far away from Yangon, where Grandma lives. But of course I worried. I worried about Mom because she was traveling without us, and Grandma because she had pneumonia, and the entire Rohingya population because families were fleeing through the jungle toward Bangladeshi refugee camps, which were not exactly five-star resorts. As a future United Nations representative, it was my job to worry.

  On my list of other world problems—I might starve.

  Mom called on Friday to tell us she wouldn’t be staying at Grandma’s house anymore. She was moving to a guesthouse closer to the hospital. Here’s what I thought: she probably moved because there was a cook at the guesthouse who made all her meals for her. She told me that for dinner she’d had chicken curry, stir-fried watercress and sour soup. I LOVE sour soup, but Mom can hardly ever find the right ingredients to make it.

  We seriously could have used a cook around our house. We’d had rice, scrambled eggs and broccoli for the third night in a row, and the broccoli was burnt. Dad said it was caramelized, but I’d never tasted caramel like his before.

  I was going to repress that memory too.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Missing you

  Is Grandma feeling any better?

  * * *

  —

  SOMETHING HORRIFIC HAPPENED AFTER DINNER ON Friday. Nanda was having a bath, and I was reading in my room when Dad came in and sat on the end of my bed.

  He cleared his throat.

  He didn’t look mad, and I couldn’t think of anything I’d done wrong.

  He crossed his legs. Then uncrossed them. Then cleared his throat again.

  “I think there are lozenges under the sink,” I said.

  “Speaking of the sink…” he said. “When I was in the bathroom yesterday, I noticed you had some…products…out.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “With your mom gone…usually she would talk to you about this…you probably know from school…”

  I put my book down and sat up on my bed so I could be ready to call 9-1-1 if Dad was having a stroke or a nervous breakdown or some sort of early dementia.

  “When a girl reaches puberty, there are certain changes in her body…”

  Red flashing lights and alarm bells went off in my brain.

  “Dad!!”

  “It can be hard to talk about, but there’s no need to be embarrassed if…”

  Nanda’s maxi-pad wrappers. All over the bathroom floor. Dad must have found them and thought—

&
nbsp; “Dad! Stop! Stop talking! Stop talking right now!” I clapped my hands over my ears and closed my eyes.

  It didn’t work.

  “If you want, we can get your mom on the phone again…”

  “They weren’t mine!”

  I gave up on the ear-blocking technique. Instead, I stood up and tried to push him off my bed and out of my room.

  “Not yours?”

  I shook my head firmly.

  Though he still looked confused, he raised his arms in surrender and allowed himself to be evicted.

  “I don’t want to ever, ever talk to you about this again. Understood?”

  He nodded. “Understood.”

  Then I closed the door in his face.

  I decided to never leave my room again.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Our continuing friendship

  I was waiting for you to call me and you didn’t, probably because you’re texting or growing dragons. You’re going to forget all about me now that you live in cell phone–land. Don’t talk about anything important without me! And if anyone texts you anything interesting, call me right away.

  Also, we have to plan for our club meeting on Monday. Call me, call me! Or email. Or chip some hieroglyphics into a stone and push it to my doorstep. My house is crazy and you’re my only link to the wider world…

  * * *

  —

  CLEO AND I ARE BEST FRIENDS BECAUSE OUR MINDS work the same way. For example, when Ms. Martinson asked us what technology had made the biggest difference in human history, Cleo and I said “cell phone” at exactly the same time. It was as if our brains were formed on the same planet.

  Nanda’s brain, on the other hand, was formed on Pluto and came hurtling through outer space until it landed in Vancouver. It’s my theory that on its way through space, her brain received high doses of radiation, making her a complete mutant.

  On Saturday morning, I walked out the front door and straight into a net of multicolored wool.

  “Nanda!”

  It was like being caught in a giant spiderweb. The more I struggled, the more wool wrapped itself around my limbs.

  “You’re wrecking them!” Nanda shrieked, her head appearing in the second-floor window above me. “You’re wrecking my zip lines!”

  “I’m trying to go outside!”

  “Stop pulling them!”

  “Get me out!”

  Things continued that way until Dad appeared at another upstairs window, with his hair sticking up in the back like a rooster’s tail. He said our neighbors were going to move away if we kept shouting like lunatics at nine on a Saturday morning, and where did I think I was going anyway?

  So this was all my fault?

  Nanda had covered half the house in webs of wool, making zip lines for her collection of army men, and I was the one in trouble for trying to use the front door. Sometimes I wished I could snap my fingers and a judge and jury would appear beside me to give an objective ruling.

  “Mya?” Dad waited, eyebrows raised.

  “I was going to Cleo’s. Just for a while.” I’d left him a note on the kitchen table. It was important that I get out of the house early that morning because if I didn’t…

  “I need you to rake the leaves, and don’t forget lunch with Auntie Winnie.”

  Why didn’t he just throw a boulder out the window and spatter my guts on the sidewalk?

  “Can’t Nanda rake the leaves?” My sister was obviously in need of productive activity.

  “She’s going to clean her room.”

  Here was another example of why I needed a magically materializing judge. My side of our room was spotless. Did I get credit for this? NO! I got sent outside to rake masses of leaves, which were half from the neighbors’ trees anyway and sometimes had disgusting bugs in them. Nanda got to stay inside and tidy her ridiculous stuffed animals.

  I never found time to visit Cleo. Instead, I stayed and taste-tested all the food Auntie Winnie brought with her, which wasn’t so bad, I guess.

  I love food from Myanmar—Aunt Winnie is a great cook. My favorite dish is called Ohn No Kauk Swe. You pronounce it “oh-no-cow-sway.” It’s chicken and coconut sauce poured over noodles. There are lots of other good meals too.

  This week, Auntie Winnie had brought us beef curry and vegetable lentil curry. These would probably save us from having to eat burnt broccoli until at least Wednesday.

  However, there are two universal truths about food from Myanmar. The curries are delicious, spicy and a little bit sweet. The desserts, on the other hand, are slimy squares made with things like sesame seeds, which are NOT reasonable dessert ingredients.

  Along with her curries, Auntie Winnie brought us mango pudding that she’d cooked herself. It jiggled. It jiggled the way Principal Richards’s arms do when she waves her hands around during assembly.

  “I should have been on a cooking show,” Auntie Winnie said, as she put a big plop of the stuff onto my plate. “I would have called it Winnie Cooks the Winning Dish.”

  “Winning with Winnie!” Nanda said, her mouth already full because to my sister, any sugar was good sugar.

  “You’ve certainly fed us well,” Dad said, though I noticed he wasn’t exactly gobbling up his serving.

  Auntie Winnie is six years older than my mom. She has frizzy hair and a large mole on the left side of her nose. I don’t want to be mean, but she doesn’t exactly look like a glamorous TV chef. In reality, she works at an insurance office. She’d just started a job at a new company, which was why she couldn’t go to Myanmar and take care of Grandma.

  The pudding wouldn’t have done well on TV either. It looked like slime mold. I had to pretend to eat it, scooping tiny spoonfuls into my mouth. It wasn’t easy to hold my breath, smile and say “yum” at the same time.

  Finally, Auntie Winnie got up to use the bathroom. As soon as she was gone, Dad sent Nanda to get napkins from the pantry. Then he picked one of Mom’s ferns right out of its pot, slid our puddings into the hole and replaced the fern.

  “Filed them,” he said.

  When Nanda and Auntie Winnie came back, we rubbed our tummies as if we’d turned into Buddhas.

  It was pretty awesome. Dad might not have been the best cook, but he did have some useful life skills.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Snakes and Ladders

  Thanks for the postcards! That reclining Buddha is amaZING! He’s HUGE! How did people hundreds of years ago even build something so big? I mean, I’m sure ladders were invented, but can you imagine carving that guy with no power tools? We should travel back in time and sell electric saws. We would be billionaires!

  Nanda loved her giant python postcard too. She’s been showing it to the entire universe and telling everyone the story about the monk who was reincarnated as a snake.

  BTW, power tools. Dad will need to use one on his hair soon. I am withholding comment, because I’m diplomatic, but if he’s not careful, he’s going to be born again as a hedgehog. Just saying.

  Please kiss Grandma for me, and take lots of pictures, and don’t get eaten by pythons.

  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxo

  Mya

  * * *

  —

  EVERY MONDAY AT LUNCH, WE HAD A “KIDS FOR SOCIAL Justice” meeting. Cleo and I started the club in sixth grade, after Mom told me about the government in Myanmar imprisoning a newspaper editor named U Win Tin. She told me his story on EXACTLY the same day Cleo finished I Am Malala. (See what I mean about Cleo and me being from the same planet? We are seriously synchronized.)

  Until a few years ago, Myanmar was ruled by the military. U Win Tin believed it should be a democracy instead and that everyone should be allowed to vote in elections. The military didn’t like that idea. They threw him in jail. Not just for six weeks to teach him a lesson either. He was there for NINETEEN YEARS. They kept him in a dog kennel with no bed a
nd they didn’t give him enough food. But as soon as he was released, even though he was ancient by that time, he went right back to writing about democracy and visiting the families of political prisoners and basically being awesome.

  Malala was a girl who went to school in Pakistan, where lots of people believe girls shouldn’t go to school. Which at first I thought was a fantastic idea, until I figured out that instead of going to class, they were supposed to stay home and sweep the house and cook eggplants all day. I don’t even like eggplants.

  Malala wrote essays about school being a good thing, then people made a documentary about her, and then some guy SHOT HER IN THE HEAD! How crazy is that? But just like U Win Tin (except younger and with much less ear hair), she got right back to work. She popped out of her hospital bed and started giving talks about how obviously girls should go to school. Then she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

  I told Cleo about U Win Tin and she told me about Malala, in a conversation that went like this:

  ME: He was tortured, and can you imagine prison in Myanmar? And—

  CLEO: —then she was flown to England for surgery—

  ME: Mom says hardly anyone outside Myanmar has even heard of him—

  CLEO: —her dad believed in education for girls too…

  At the end of all that, Kids for Social Justice was born. Cleo and I were determined to win Nobel prizes, like Malala, except without getting shot, or sleeping in dog kennels either.

  At first, KSJ was just the two of us, but we made posters and gave presentations in all our classes. By seventh grade, there were about twelve kids. Some weeks, Cleo and I chose an issue and we all wrote letters to politicians. Other weeks, when we didn’t want to horrify everyone with the world’s ridiculously MAJOR problems, we created art pieces and mailed those instead. (That was Mom’s idea.)

  Unfortunately, thanks to a certain someone not calling me back (let’s just say her name rhymed with “Bleo”), we hadn’t picked a subject for Monday’s meeting.