The Great Googlini Read online

  The more divisions, the bigger the chance for things to go wrong. Cancer is when the divisions go weird—the cells take on strange shapes or sizes or colour. A chemical might have gotten into the system—through the water or air—and messed things up, or cigarette smoke, or maybe the cells are getting old, or maybe there’s something genetic—a disease that runs in the family.

  The main treatments are radiation, where a bunch of X-rays are beamed at the cancer, and chemotherapy, where a bunch of chemicals are injected into the blood. The treatments often make the patient sick. But you have to fight fire with fire.

  Rap-rap. Mrs. Zupan is dangling a noodle. “Look what was in my lettuce!” she sings. Not a noodle. We transfer the worm across the Chasm carefully. It’s our first exchange since the fork dropped.

  “Hito will love it,” I say. “Thank you.”

  But Hito isn’t in her aquarium! She isn’t hiding in her tinfoil pond. She’s not in the pile of leaves. “Hitokage! Where are you?”

  I move to take the lid off and poke around, but the lid already is off. Somehow it got knocked askew.

  Hito has climbed out of her tank!

  This is bad. A salamander can’t go long without water. I ask Google for help. Turn down the heat, it tells me. Put wet towels on the floor—your salamander will be looking for moisture. Put food on the floor as a trap.

  I ask Mrs. Zupan if she has more worms. She rustles through her head of lettuce. No luck. I run down to the yard and start digging.

  Frances comes by, goggles swinging from her hand. “What are you doing?”

  “I need worms. So I can find my salamander.”

  “I’m waiting for a ride to my swimming lesson. A pool carpool.”

  “Ha.”

  Frances digs around in a flower bed with me. “Did you have a good birthday?”

  “Actually, it was lousy.”

  “It looked like you were having fun. With the fork. And the vest.” She smiles her Frances smile, which normally makes everything else in the world disappear.

  “Then I found out my uncle has cancer.”

  “Oh. That’s terrible.”

  “I know.”

  “My grandma died of cancer.”

  “I hope Uncle Mato will live.”

  “I hoped my grandma would live.”

  The conversation isn’t helping.

  I find two worms tangled together in the dirt. “These should do,” I say, standing.

  “I got one too.” Frances hands me a red wiggler, then wipes her hands on her jeans, leaving streaks of dirt. “I hope you find your salamander.”

  “You too,” I say, heading toward our shoe box’s front door.

  I lay wet towels on the kitchen floor and scatter the worms around the apartment. But Hito doesn’t show up. Finally I pour myself a bowl of cereal and sit at the computer again.

  My hands hover over the keyboard as I think up a question that will solve everything. I’m like a pianist about to launch into a great song.

  “Okay, Google,” I say into the microphone. “Will Uncle Mato be all right?”

  Hito! She scrambles across the keyboard and knocks my cereal over.

  Crash! “Got you!”

  I put her straight into the tinfoil pool. Eventually the pouch of skin above her heart rises and falls at its normal rate. Seventy-seven beats per minute. The same as mine.

  I’m so relieved. I give her the red wiggler. “This worm is special,” I tell her. “It’s from Frances.”

  Back in the kitchen, the computer is rumbling weirdly. I grab the tea towel from the fridge handle and wipe off the milk and cereal splattered on the screen. I rub every inch of the glass.

  Rumble-rumble. The computer isn’t happy. Shuzzle. Schazzle.

  Steam rises out of its vents, little tornadoes joining up in a big cloud.

  Shuzzuzzle. Schazzazzle.

  Then the rumbling stops. The steam clears.

  “Hello.”

  A tiny woman is cross-legged on top of the computer! She has dark skin and curly hair and thick eyeglasses. She’s wearing jeans, a green sweater and pink Converse runners.

  “I didn’t know Converse made such small sizes,” I blurt.

  “You have to do a special order.” The little woman extends her hand. I pinch it gently between my finger and thumb.

  “I am the Great Googlini. That makes me sound like a genie, but really I’m a librarian more than an Aladdin. I’m an archivist, information scientist, database technician. When people google questions, I’m the one who answers.”

  “You answer forty thousand searches a second?” I say. “Three billion searches a day?”

  “Well, there are a few of us. But I am very busy.” The Great Googlini reclips her barrette. “Which is why I can’t stay long. I hope you’ll understand. I just wanted to tell you that I can’t answer your question. I can’t tell you whether your uncle Mato is going to be all right or not. That’s outside my scope.”

  “But you know everything.”

  “No. No one, not even I, can know the future. It’s kind of a logical impossibility, since everything we do now shapes the future. The future can’t be until it is made. It’s like asking for a tapestry before anyone has woven it. Or for a cake before you’ve shopped for the ingredients. Anyway, would you really want to know? What if it was bad news? What would you do then?”

  “I’d spend lots of time with him.”

  “You can do that if he’s going to be okay too. What else?”

  “I’d tell him how much I love him.”

  “You can tell him that anyway.”

  “Would it help?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “That’s the best I can tell you. Anyway, I really have to go. The searches are pouring in.” The Great Googlini glances at the wet towel on the kitchen floor. “That advice seemed dubious.”

  “Yeah. But I did find Hito. Frances helped too.”

  “Frances?”

  “A kid I know.”

  “You’re lucky to have friends.”

  “You’re lucky to have so much informa—”

  But the Great Googlini has already snapped her fingers and become steam. She funnels back through the computer vents.

  I touch the computer’s moist top. “Bye.”

  Tap-tap. Mrs. Zupan is at her window, waving a fire extinguisher. “Are you having a little fire?”

  “No, no. Everything’s fine.”

  “What was that cloud?”

  “It was a—a sort of genie!”

  I expect Mrs. Zupan to scold me for being silly. But instead she smiles the way she does when I put on Croatian music. “You have to be sly with genies,” she says. “I’ve made you a walnut bread. Catch!”

  A dense loaf sails across Apatosaurus Chasm. I hug it to me like a football. It feels like a normal loaf of bread, but inside, I know, there’s a spiral, a whorl of cinnamon, like a surfer’s tunnel wave.

  There are wonders in the most normal-looking things.

  And horrors. Such as rogue cells.

  Malignant. The ugliest word in the world. It is Dad’s face crumpling as he holds the phone to his ear. Mom sucking in her breath like someone is yanking on her heart.

  Chemotherapy. The second-ugliest word. Therapy with chemicals. Aren’t chemicals what we’re supposed to get away from? Isn’t that why Paprenjak customers ask if the borscht is organic?

  Mom dries her tears on the tea towel. “People bounce back,” she says. She looks at me. “And Uncle Mato’s tough. But he won’t be able to play soccer for a while.”

  I remember what the Great Googlini said about spending time with Uncle Mato. “Can I video-chat with him instead?”

  “That’s a nice idea,” Mom says. Then she gives me a hug, squeezing a little too tightly.

  So on Wednesday, instead of playing soccer, Uncle Mato and I meet on my computer. He’s in a hospital bed under a green sheet. Chemicals flow into his arm through a small hose from a plastic bag. He
raises his iPad and gives me a tour of the room. All around him, other people are in beds under green sheets, getting chemotherapy too. Uncle Mato aims his iPad at a dark-haired nurse carefully removing a tube from someone’s arm. She sticks her tongue out. “Mato! Stop!”

  “That’s her!” I say.

  “Your uncle’s doing great, Filip,” Eileen says, putting her face close to the screen. “He’ll be hanging out with you again in no time.”

  “In the meantime, Filip, you can do me a favor,” Uncle Mato says. “I’d like you to go to the park and kick the ball around, even though I’m not with you. It would make me feel better. Or go for a bike ride and feel the wind in your face, which is what I’d like to do.”

  A machine beeps, and Eileen fiddles with the tube feeding chemicals into Uncle Mato’s arm.

  “Are you scared, Uncle Mato?”

  “Part of me is terrified.” Uncle Mato holds up his little finger. “This part. But the rest of me is hopeful.”

  “You’ve just got to be patient,” Eileen says.

  “I’m your patient,” Uncle Mato jokes. “But yeah, I’m patient.” He points to his earlobe. “Except for this part. This part of me is very impatient.”

  When we hang up, I jump on my bike and head to Ivan’s. Ivan doesn’t like biking. Or walking. Or any kind of sport. But when I tell him about Uncle Mato, he wants to help. We pump up his bike tires and oil his bike chain and head to the park.

  “Feel that wind!” I shout.

  “It isn’t wind,” Ivan says. “It’s friction.”

  At the park we try to repeat Uncle Mato’s famous ricochet goal. If we get it, I tell myself, Uncle Mato will be all right. But after a hundred tries, we surrender and pedal home in the dark.

  Frances is in front of her building, a jacket over her swimsuit, towel over her shoulders. I squeeze my brakes. “My uncle’s getting chemotherapy.”

  “Grandma got that too. It made her sick. And really tired. And it didn’t help.”

  Frances sure doesn’t help me feel better. Ivan said the right thing. What did he say? Right. He said sorry.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Frances. “That must have been sad.”

  Her shoulders relax. It’s like I turned a key or something. “It’s just so weird that I’ll never eat her cookies again,” she says. “Our phone still speed-dials her apartment. I tried it. I thought the phone would just ring and ring. But someone answered. I had to say sorry, that I’d gotten the wrong number. And the person was rude, like Don’t call here again. Anyway, Grandma was old. Your uncle Mato isn’t old, though, right? Not old old. He could get over it. I hope he will.”

  “Hey, could you—no, forget it.”

  “What?”

  “Could you swim a length at the pool for him? He asked me to do fun stuff, like bike around, since he can’t.”

  “Sure. I’ll swim the butterfly for him. That’s the toughest, most satisfying stroke.”

  Before bed, I add a Playmobil dog to the circle of animals on the shelf. I name it Eileen. Then I place the Stegosaurus—Uncle Mato—right in the center of the circle, so it’s like the others are protecting him. Then I stick the birthday candle with the saved wish into a thick slice of walnut loaf and call Mom to light it. I explain that I’ve still got a wish to make.

  “Please, let Uncle Mato get better,” I say as I blow out the candle. “And then he and Eileen get married.”

  Ivan and I go trick-or-treating together. Ivan is dressed as Frankenstein’s monster, which works because he’s so tall and his head is kind of square. I’m Harry Potter. Again. I couldn’t think up another costume. I just don’t care that much this year.

  Uncle Mato usually takes me out. He just wears his pajamas and a top hat, and paints blood dripping from his mouth. These days, Uncle Mato looks frightening without a costume. He has lost weight, and his face is very white except for dark circles under his eyes. The weirdest thing is, he has lost his hair. Including his thick eyebrow.

  But it’s supposed to grow back. He finished his chemotherapy five days ago, and soon they’ll take a picture with MRI—magnetic resonance imaging. Magnetic-field waves and sound waves will bounce around and map his insides. The MRI will show if the lump is shrinking.

  While we’re trick-or-treating, Ivan and I run into Frances. She’s dressed up as Penny Oleksiak, the Olympic swimmer, with a gold medal around her neck. It’s actually a chocolate coin on a string. Under a huge towel, to keep her warm, Frances is wearing her swimsuit and goggles and swim cap, and she’s written a competitor’s number on her leg in grease paint.

  She points to a house across the street that has no Halloween decorations, just a light over the front step. “I hear they’re giving away toothbrushes!”

  “Now that’s really scary,” Ivan says.

  “I’ve swum a length for Uncle Mato every practice,” Frances tells me. “And I’ve started to swim a length for my grandma too. I know she’s not coming back—but I like thinking about her.”

  “Mrs. Zupan makes a stew that her grandma used to make. It makes her cry. Can you imagine how old that recipe is?”

  Frances smiles. “My grandma made the best chocolate-chip cookies. They had something chewy in them. I’d trade all the candy in this bag for just one.”

  “Filip Horvat to the office, please.”

  What did I do? It’s not my birthday.

  “Your mother called,” Principal Jansen explains. “With a message for you. She said she didn’t want you to worry for another minute.” Principal Jansen rustles around for a piece of paper on her desk. “The lump has shrunk,” she reads. “It has shrunk to nothing.”

  I float back to class.

  Uncle Mato’s cancer has been stopped in its evil tracks!

  For the first time in months, Uncle Mato is at The Paprenjak. With the soccer ball. And his eyebrow! Well, most of his eyebrow. It’s a little thinner than before and broken in two. In fact, he looks great! He jumps up when I come in and holds me high in the air.

  “Careful!” Mom says.

  Uncle Mato and I laugh.

  Everything’s like normal. I even ask The Question while we walk to the field. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “I do,” Uncle Mato answers, smiling. “She’s funny and smart and kind, and I’m very lucky.”

  “Lucky? You had cancer!”

  “Yeah. Strange, isn’t it? Cancer is lousy. But it would have been far worse without Boris and Kai and your dad and mom bringing meals, driving me to the hospital for chemo treatments, helping keep my apartment clean. And you telling me about the real world, the unsick world—that made it easier.”

  “That helped?”

  I think of Dad talking to his cheesy potatoes and my postponed birthday wish, and Mom crossing her fingers when the call came through and the lump was malignant. That stuff made us feel better. But it probably didn’t help Uncle Mato much.

  “Yes. It helped. It meant I didn’t have a chance to get afraid, and I was never too uncomfortable. I was never—alone.”

  Uncle Mato drop-kicks the ball.

  The ball hits the tree—two birds flap out.

  The ball bounces off the telephone pole.

  And—goal!

  Uncle Mato and I hit the ground laughing. We lie there until the world quiets.

  “Good riddance, lump!” I shout at the sky.

  “Zbogom!” Uncle Mato yells, shaking his fist. “Nemojte se vratiti.”

  “Yeah! Don’t ever come back.”

  Frances’s mom is lugging groceries from the car. I ask if I can help. Mrs. D’Allaire points to a bag of flour the size of a toddler. “If you could lug that to the door, I would be grateful.”

  There’s a small tear in the bag, so when I pick it up, a puff of flour wheezes out. It reminds me of the Great Googlini coming out of the computer.

  “Mrs. D’Allaire?”

  “Yes?”

  “What kind of cookies did Frances’s grandmother always bake?”

  Mrs. D’Allaire
suddenly looks windblown. “Yes, my mom was a great baker. Her coconut–chocolate-chip cookies were Frances’s favorite.”

  “Coconut–chocolate-chip.”

  “Yes.”

  I put the groceries inside the door of her building. I take a quick breath, like I’m about to jump into cold water. “I’m sorry your mom died.”

  It doesn’t come out as loudly as I meant it to, but Mrs. D’Allaire hears me. I know, because she gives me that look Mom gives me right before she starts talking about how I should win the “noble prize.”

  When I get home, I tap out four words in the Google search bar.

  Uncle Mato is okay.

  I stare at the top of the computer hopefully. Nothing.

  I type again. Uncle Mato is okay!

  Nothing. No steam. No rumbling. I think back to when Hito spilled my cereal. I get the tea towel and rub the screen.

  Rumble. Shuzzle. Shazzle. Steam curls out of the top of the computer.

  Poof! This time, instead of Converse runners, the Great Googlini is wearing Birkenstocks. “It’s hot today. Tons of activity. Hey, that’s good news about your uncle. What made him better?”

  “Medicine, mostly. And people keeping him company. I understand why you couldn’t answer my question before.”

  “From what I have figured out, some questions just can’t be answered. But people still need to ask them. You’ve met an unhappy mystery, Filip. Still, from what I can tell from the questions people ask, most mysteries in this world are happy ones.”

  “I’m ready for one of those.”

  The Great Googlini adjusts her sandal buckle. “I’d better get back to work. You might be interested in a new study. A scientist has proposed that dinosaurs were warm-blooded!”

  “I’ll look it up,” I say as the Great Googlini dissolves to mist and twirls back through the computer vents.

  First, though, I look up the recipe for coconut–chocolate-chip cookies.