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  The Manny Files

  Christian Burch

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Christian Burch

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Kristin Smith and Jessica Sonkin

  The text for this book is set in Egyptian 505 BT Roman.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burch, Christian.

  The Manny Files / Christian Burch.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A shy young boy learns how to be more outgoing and self-confident from his male nanny.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-0039-9

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-0039-X eISBN 13: 978-1-439-13618-8

  [1. Nannies—Fiction. 2. Sex role—Fiction. 3. Self-confidence—Fiction. 4. Family life—Fiction.

  5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B91583Ma 2006

  [Fic]—dc22 2004026957

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  To Mom, Dad, and Amy with love

  And to Scotty and Sage Craighead; Laramie, India, Keats, and Marrakech Maxwell; Henley Blayne Turner; and Fletcher Christian Whittington—Thank you for sharing your childhoods with me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Alexandra Fuller and Caitlyn Dlouhy for helping me bring this farther than I could have done alone.

  1

  … And Wished I Were an Only Child

  You probably won’t remember it later, but my name is Keats. I’m the smallest boy in my class. Actually, it’s worse than that. I’m the smallest person in my grade. My third-grade teacher never calls on me for answers because she can’t see me. I sit behind a tall girl with red poofy hair.

  I wish I had red poofy hair.

  My hair is the same color as dead grass in November.

  My teacher is named Ms. Grant. Ms. Grant is from the South and says things like “y’all” and “fixin’ to.” My older sister Lulu was in her class a few years ago. Whenever we have to write a book report or do an art project, Ms. Grant shows us one of Lulu’s old assignments as an example. When we made snowflakes to hang from the ceiling, she pulled one out from her closet that was covered in colorful sequins and battery-operated Christmas lights. Ms. Grant said, “Y’all, this was made by Keats’s older sister,” as she pointed to Lulu’s school picture on her bulletin board.

  The girl with the red poofy hair raised her hand and asked, “Who’s Keats?”

  I wasn’t looking where I was cutting and cut myself with the scissors.

  I had to go to the school nurse to get a Big Bird Band-Aid.

  Lulu is president of the seventh-grade class. Mom calls her an overachiever. Lulu hates the sound of some words, like saliva. I made her cry once by writing the words panty hose on her math homework. One Halloween she used mascara to paint her eyebrows together, and put on a colorful dress that Mom bought for her in Mexico. She made a heart out of clay and carried it around. She said that she was Frida Kahlo, the tragic Mexican painter. I dressed up as a television news anchor. Instead of saying “Trick or treat,” I said, “Our top story tonight: Children across America dress up in elaborate costumes in hopes of receiving handfuls of treats. More on this story after you give me some candy.” Nobody knew what I was supposed to be.

  My other older sister, India, usually dresses up as a butterfly for Halloween. In fact, most of the time she looks like a butterfly. She wears bright, rainbow-striped tights and flashy hair bows. She’s the only girl at our school who carries a purse instead of a backpack. At the last parent-teacher conference her fourth-grade teacher told Mom and Dad that when she had asked India what she wanted to be when she grew up, India’s response was, “I’m just going to get by on my looks.” Dad laughed and Mom kicked him underneath the table. Dad thinks that India is going to be a brilliant clothing designer someday.

  Dad says the word brilliant a lot.

  India has a sign on her bedroom door that says, DO NOT ENTER, THIS MEANS YOU, BELLY. Belly is my three-year-old baby sister, whose real name is Mirabelle. We call her Belly because she hates to wear clothes. One time my mom took Belly and me to the mall to buy me the bow the that I wanted for my birthday. It was silk with yellow and blue stripes and looked exactly like the one that I had circled in the catalog. When we were inside the mall, Belly screamed with glee and ran to the fountain that was filled with glittering pennies on the bottom. I used to scream and run to the fountain when I was littler, but now I just racewalk. My mom dug through her purse for a penny so that I could toss it in and make a secret wish. While Mom was struggling to find a penny, Belly stripped naked and, before we could stop her, was stealing other people’s wishes from the middle of the fountain. The grandmothers who were walking laps around the mall pointed and laughed at my sister’s bare bottom bobbing up and down as she looked for pennies.

  Mom grabbed Belly from the fountain and said, “You’re crazy,” like what she had done was cute.

  I threw my penny in the fountain and wished I were an only child.

  2

  Crazy Cheese Head

  My dad does business. It looks like fun because he gets to wear a suit and read the New York Times. Mom picks out his clothes for work, but I get to pick the tie. Dad says that he always gets compliments on his ties because I have brilliant taste.

  Grandma thinks I have brilliant taste too, except she says that I have a “good eye.” One time when we visited Grandma’s house, I took her a picture that I had painted for her in school. It was an orange and red striped box with a person standing next to it. When I gave it to her, she said, “Oh my, I completely get this piece. It’s about getting outside of the box. I love it. What do you call it?”

  “Outside of the Box,” I said, even though I hadn’t really named it. I thought Grandma’s interpretation was much better than the real reason why I had painted it (boxes and people are easy to paint).

  “Masterpiece,” said Grandma.

  She didn’t hang it on the refrigerator with the rest of the grandchildren gallery. Instead she made me sign and date it, and she put it in a frame. She hung it in her living room right next to a painting that Mom did when she was little. Grandma says that I inherited my artistic ability from my mom. She also says I got my mom’s big forehead.

  Mom says that a big forehead means you have a big brain. She uses her big brain at the museum downtown where she’s a curator. She’s in charge of hanging artwork for shows. Whenever I go with her to work, I get to bring home a postcard or coloring book from the museum shop. One time I brought home a postcard with a Picasso painting on it. Picasso paints like I do, with noses and eyes all over the place.

  My mom and dad are very smart and very busy, so we have a nanny who helps us.

  We have had a lot of nannies.

  Our first nanny was named Mary. Mary loved my sisters. When they were little, she used to dress them up in bright, frilly dresses. Mom thought they looked pretty, but Dad said that they looked like piñatas.

  “Did it make you want to hit them with sticks?” I asked.

  Dad giggled when I said this.

&n
bsp; Mary gave Lulu and India hairdos and painted their fingernails and toenails. She gave them necklaces and bracelets with fancy diamonds and jewels hanging from them.

  She gave me dental floss.

  A few years ago Mary got married and had a baby. She sent Mom a picture of the baby. She was bald and looked like a boy except she had a pink bow Scotch-taped to her head.

  Then there was Madge. Madge was as old as Grandpa Dub, my dad’s dad. Grandpa Dub came over to visit us a lot more when Madge was there. Once when my sisters were gone to piano lessons, he told me that Madge was a tall glass of water and that he was thirsty.

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but he winked at me when he said it. I think it must have been code. Grandpa was in a war where they had to use code.

  Grandpa and Madge liked to hold hands, and I even saw them kiss. Lulu said that Madge had passed out and Grandpa Dub was giving her CPR. Madge passed out a lot. They got married in Las Vegas and moved to Florida to practice CPR.

  After that we went through nannies faster than Belly could strip naked. I heard my uncle Max say that once. There was Jenny, Heather, Patty, Maggie, Judy, Amy, and Sue. Sue forgot me in the grocery store once. My sisters loved almost all of our nannies, but they all seemed like Miss America contestants to me. I used to imagine them saying things like, “Hello, I’m Sue and I’m from Kansas, the Sunflower State. Although I have a very busy life riding the unicycle, picking up litter alongside the highways, and rescuing abandoned kittens, I still find the time to brush my teeth for two minutes every morning and every night.”

  I got used to playing alone while my sisters played with the “nanny of the month.”

  That’s what Uncle Max called them. Uncle Max is my favorite uncle. He’s my only uncle, but even if he weren’t, he’d still be my favorite. He likes it when I walk on his back to crack it. It’s my job because Lulu and India are too big and Belly is too little. Uncle Max says I’m perfect.

  One rainy Monday I was coloring with Belly on the living-room floor. I was coloring a Keith Haring picture in my new pop art coloring book. Belly was actually coloring on the living-room floor. I was getting ready to tell on her when the doorbell rang, and Housman, our dog, started to bark and ran upstairs. Housman isn’t like other dogs. He runs away from the door and hides in my bedroom when the doorbell rings. Mom answered the front door, and a man shook her hand. When she invited him inside, I saw that he had a bald head and wore glasses like mine, the dark-framed kind that make a person look very smart and serious. I once saw a whole article about architects and their dark-framed glasses in the New York Times. That’s when I decided that I wanted a pair.

  The visiting man was wearing a button-down blue shirt that was tucked into his jeans. He had a leather belt that matched his driving moccasins. I had seen the same brown driving moccasins in the L.L. Bean catalog last month. They looked even better in real life. The bald man wore them without socks, and his ankles were tan and had hair on them.

  Lulu had run out of her room to see who was at the door. She always thinks that the telephone and doorbell are going to be for her. She recorded our answering-machine message. It says, “Hello. You’ve reached the Dalinger family. Lulu’s not home right now. Please leave me a message.”

  Mom started to introduce the bald man to us, when he politely interrupted and said, “Oh, please call me the manny. It’s what kids have always called me, and now it’s become my stage name. Like Cher or Madonna or Charo. Or you can call me by my J. Lo name, T. Man. Or Puff Manny.”

  I wondered if Manny was short for Manuel. He didn’t look Latino.

  Mom continued introducing the manny to us. India curtsied when she shook his hand. India had started curtsying after she watched Gone with the Wind on television. She’s named after one of the characters. Belly curtsied too. I just shook his hand and noticed his fancy watch with the brown leather band. After we were introduced, Mom told us that the bald man was going to spend the day with us and that if things worked out, he would be our new nanny.

  A man might be our nanny. A male nanny. A manny. No wonder that’s what he wanted us to call him. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to rush to the bathroom to pee, but I didn’t want to miss Lulu’s reaction to the news of the man nanny.

  I waited for Lulu to have a fit.

  She did.

  Lulu put her hands on her hips and huffed, “I bet he doesn’t know how to brush hair or paint fingernails.”

  I whispered the word “bladder,” and she ran screaming from the room. Then I danced around in circles like a circus monkey, until I realized everybody was watching me.

  Mom wrote down her cell phone number for the manny and said that she’d be back early in the afternoon. I hugged her around the waist as hard as I could to show how appreciative I was. She started walking out the door while I was still clinging to her. I finally let go as she entered the garage. Actually, she had to pry me off.

  The manny picked Belly up and we waved good-bye to Mom through the kitchen window. Instead of watching Mom drive away, Belly stared at the manny while she waved.

  “Let’s color!” the manny screamed like he was five years old. Belly jumped because it had scared her, but then she started laughing and grabbed the manny’s cheeks and squeezed them until he looked like a puffer fish.

  I bet the manny was an artist and he’d come to teach me abstract expressionism. I don’t know what that is exactly, but Mom likes it. Or maybe he’d pretend to be my butler, and I could call him Jeeves and he could bring me milk and Oreos. Or he spoke six languages and knew lots of famous people, like Donald Trump or Weird Al Yankovic.

  The manny sat down on the floor, cleaned up Belly’s mess, and began coloring with me. He colored a lot of things red. He said his favorite color was red because he got a present once that was inside a red Saks Fifth Avenue box. I’ve never been to Saks Fifth Avenue, but I think red is my favorite color too. The manny was really good at staying in the lines. I watched his hands while he colored. He didn’t have any dirt underneath his fingernails. I bet he gets manicures like the movie stars do.

  The manny let Belly color the top of his head yellow. It looked like he was wearing a cheese pancake.

  When I needed a different crayon, I said, “Hey, cheese head, could you please pass me the purple?”

  “Crazy cheese head,” said Belly, and then she laughed and rolled around on the ground like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

  The manny laughed so hard that he snorted.

  When we were done coloring, the manny pulled mixing bowls out of the cabinet and let Belly and me make potions. Belly loves to mix different things together. Vinegar and Gummy Bears. Ranch dressing and sugar. Olive oil and flour. She calls them potions. I like making potions too, but I pretend that I’m just helping Belly.

  Lulu says that I’m too old to make potions. I wish I could make a disappearing potion.

  While Belly and I mixed up a maple syrup and rainbow sprinkles potion, India and the manny made us a surprise lunch. They told us not to look in the kitchen, but Belly and I peeked anyway. The manny and India were using microwave-popcorn bags on their heads like chef hats. Lulu was sitting at the kitchen table listening to her headset and scribbling something into a three-ring binder. She looked up every once in a while and rolled her eyes in disgust at India and the manny.

  “You’re going to get butter in your hair,” Lulu grumbled.

  “I don’t have any hair,” said the manny.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Lulu snarled, and turned up the volume on her headset, so that even we could hear Celine Dion belting out the Titanic theme song.

  When we fight in the car, Mom pretends that she’s Celine Dion. She moves her head around and pounds on her chest and wails to the tune of the Titanic song, “Near. Far. No fighting in the car.” It makes us stop fighting and start laughing, except for Lulu. She always yells, “Don’t make fun of Celine.” She calls her by her first name like they’r
e friends.

  The manny threw an old sheet over the kitchen table, and I ran to get a flashlight from underneath my bed. The manny served us lunch underneath the table, and we could see only by flashlight. It was like eating in a tent. Each of our plates had a peanut butter and banana sandwich cut into fourths, sliced carrots with ranch dressing, and a handful of popcorn. The manny even brought Housman’s food bowl underneath there so that he could eat with us. We sat close together underneath the table so Lulu wouldn’t kick any of us. Lulu ate her lunch sitting at the table and pretended to be swinging her legs to her music, but I think she was trying to hit us. She screamed and took her lunch into the other room when Belly stuck a cold carrot between her toes. We all laughed, but not out loud. We covered our mouths and shook-laughed, the same way Grandma did during Belly’s nursery school fall pageant. The children sang “This Little Light of Mine,” and Belly held her dress above her head every time they sang, “Hide it under a bushel? No! I’m gonna let it shine.” Grandma had to leave the auditorium, but we could still hear her laughing from our seats.

  We stayed underneath the table all afternoon, painting pictures with watercolors. India painted a butterfly. Belly painted shapes, but they looked more like blobs. Then she fell asleep in the manny’s kindergarten-style lap. The manny and I painted portraits of each other. He was easy to paint. His head was just a circle with little ears on the sides. His portrait of me made me look really strong and muscular. He even put a superhero cape on me.

  We were still underneath the table when Mom came home. She pretended she couldn’t find us. We huddled close together like she was an escaped convict who had broken into our house and was looking for us. Lulu, who had spent the entire afternoon in the living room listening to her headset and writing in her binder, stomped across the kitchen floor in her bare feet and ripped the sheet off of the table to reveal the four of us huddled together. We screamed at the top of our lungs, and so did Mom. Lulu screamed too, but it wasn’t out of fun. It was more like the “Aaargh!” that Charlie Brown screams every time Lucy pulls away the football in the “Peanuts” comic strip in the Sunday paper.