The Manny Files book1 by Christian Burch Read Free Book Online

front of my jeans and started jumping up and down and said, “I have to pee like a racehorse.” I had heard Uncle Max say this at the movies once when he’d finished his extra-jumbo soda. Now I just raise my hand and Ms. Grant knows that I have to pee like a racehorse without my having to tell her.
    While the manny added carrots to the stew that was brewing on the stove, India, Belly, and I made signs to hold up at the airport. We wanted Mom and Dad to be able to spot us in the crowd of people standing and waiting for the airplane to unload. Sometimes when I wait with the crowd at the airport, I like to pretend that I’m outside of the
Today Show
studios, hoping that I will be the one that Al Roker, the weatherman, notices and puts on television.
    India made a sign that said WE MISSED YOU, MOM AND DAD. WHAT’D YA BRING ME? Then she wrote J/K at the bottom. She told me that J/K means “just kidding.”
    My sign said I LOVE YOU, MOM!!! I LOVE YOU, DAD!!! I LOVE YOU, STEWARDESS!!!
    I wrote J/K after the word
stewardess.
    The manny wrote PLEASE DON’T HAVE ANY MORE CHILDREN! on his sign, with a big J/K at the bottom.
    Belly didn’t write anything. She stripped naked and painted herself blue and rolled across her sign. It looked like a big blue blob, but you could see the print of her bottom perfectly. She wrote J/K on hers, even though she didn’t understand what it meant.
    Lulu finished hanging her sign in the entry-way and stepped back to congratulate herself. She was impressed, even though she had to spend twenty minutes painting red hearts over Belly’s blue footprints that she had left when she walked across it.
    “It looks great, Lulu,” said the manny. I could tell she was annoyed that he didn’t take her sign personally. The manny was carrying Belly, who was dressed in her prettiest pink dress and sparkling ruby red slippers, just like Dorothy’s from The
Wizard of Oz.
She had been scrubbed clean, but there were still blue stains in the creases behind her knees.
    The manny told me that I looked like a younger, shorter version of Ralph Lauren (India told me that Ralph Lauren was a polo player). I had used hair gel and was wearing my wedding blazer and my birthday bow tie with my blue jeans. India talked me out of wearing my sunglasses. She said it was overkill.
    It was dark outside anyway.
    We loaded into the Volkswagen Eurovan, and the manny drove us to the airport. The manny usually drives Belly to the Tomato Plant Preschool in the Volkswagen Eurovan. The door at her school says THE TOMATO PLANT PRESCHOOL—WHERE YOUR KIDS SPROUT AND GROW LIKE VINES. When I went to school there, we used to yell, “Where your kids shout and show their behinds.” The teacher told us that it wasn’t an appropriate thing to say. For three years after that I thought
behind
was a bad word. Whenever my dad would say, “Don’t lag behind,” I’d say, “Ummmm! You said a bad word.”
    Because we were all in the Volkswagen Eurovan, Belly thought that she was going to the Tomato Plant Preschool. She began to sing her going-to-school song that the manny had taught her. She sings it to the manny every day when they drive to school.

    I’m going to school.
I’m going to school.
Where the kids are cool.
And the teachers drool.
     

    Belly sang it once to her preschool teacher and classmates for show-and-tell. Her teacher. Miss Kim, didn’t think it was as funny as Dad did when she called to tell him about it.
    Lulu told me that she had devoted a whole four pages in “The Manny Files” to inappropriate things the manny had taught Belly. The going-to-school song was listed between “Throwing wet marshmallows at the ceiling” and “Singing opera songs in the mall.”
    We parked the car and raced down the long hallway of the airport. Inside the airport everybody was moving very quickly, the same way they do around someone who has a cold in the cold-medicine commercial. India read the blue monitor that looked like a television,