said, âPhin, I feel like that some days too but my feelings donât make bad things happen. Your thoughts canât do that either, Phin. Youâre not magic.â
I asked her how she knew that for sure and she said, âIf my thoughts could make things happen, then there would be somepeople at my office with giant ears and no mouths. So far that hasnât happened.â
âThe luna moth has no mouth. It can only mate and lay eggs and then it dies because it canât eat,â I told her.
My mother said, âPhin, you never cease to amaze me.â Then she told me to jump out of the car because she was going to be late for work. I didnât want to get out, but I did.
I spotted Bird over by the teeter-totters. He was hanging around two kids from Grade 2. The kid with the white hair was showing Bird the T-shirt he had on under his jacket. It had a picture of a chart like the one at the eye doctorâs office where the letters start out really big and then get smaller and smaller. It said âIseedumbpeoplelookingatmyshirt.â That made Bird laugh when he figured it out.
Bird and the white-haired kid and the other kid and I played freeze tag while we were waiting for the bell to ring. I kept having to be It because I couldnât run very fast. My head and my chest felt heavy and I figured the part of my brain that normally controls my legs was likely being used up by thinking about something bad happening.
I got tired of being It, so I went up onto the top of the slide and made a list in my head of some of the bad things that could happen today:
1. Mrs. Wardman might have been abducted by aliens who implanted an alienâs consciousness in her body.
2. My mother could get necrotizing fasciitis in the paper cut she got on her finger when she pulled a notice out of my backpack.
3. Today a species that all other species depend on could become extinct. That would mean the end of the living earth.
4. I could get spontaneous human combustion.
Even though my logic told me that these things likely wouldnât happen, my imagination fooled me into thinking they might. This made me even more worried and my chest started to get reallytight and hurt. It turned dark purple and the only way to get it to stop hurting was to think of it as being light purple and then to think of it as being mostly whitish. Sometimes when I concentrate hard, I can think my chest white with only a few purple spots, but I couldnât do it. Besides, I didnât want my chest to go white because then I wouldnât be prepared for the bad thing that was about to happen. Purple is a good colour for quick reflexes.
During first and second periods, my mind tried to play tricks on me. It tried to make me think that maybe my mother was right and I was wrong and nothing bad would happen today. My mind went: âSomething bad is going to happenâ (times 82), and then it would say, âNothing bad is going to happenâ (times 3). Then it went, âSomething bad is going to happenâ (times 54), and then it said, âDonât be crazy, nothing bad is going to happenâ (times 23). It kept going on like that until the âsomething badâ thoughts were the same in number as the ânothing badâ thoughts, and then, finally, the ânothing badâ thoughts were more than the âsomething badâ ones, and I felt nearly back to normal. My chest stopped hurting and went whitish.
My mind almost had me fooled. Almost, but not quite â which is a good thing because it was about then that my motherâs theory was proved wrong. I used to keep track of all the times my mother was wrong but as I get older, she has started to be wrong a lot. Today she was wrong again. Just like my feeling told me, something bad â very, very bad â happened: Cuddles started making really weird and really loud noises. I knew this was a distress call.
Mrs. Wardman went over and looked in