“Nearly,” says Isabella as she hurries into the Hall of Mirrors, checking her braid-of-braids in the most elaborate gilt one. “Kale’s a bush, not a food.”
It’s all a matter of what you’re used to, Sumac supposes. Like, Isabella’s Colombian, so she loves that disgusting cake they soak in evaporated milk, condensed milk, and cream. “Come for a double sleepover on the weekend,” she tells Isabella, “and I promise there’ll be hot dogs.”
“Hey, a new quote,” says her friend, pointing to PopCorn’s loopy letters in wet-erase marker across a tall mirror: Some days you’re the pigeon, some days you’re the statue. “What’s that about?” And then, as Sumac grins, Isabella says, “Oh, OK, OK, I get it.”
“They used stone carpets that never wore out,” Sumac tells PopCorn.
“Practical, if not cozy.” He’s reclined his seat already, though it’s lunchtime and the plane hasn’t even taken off. “Ancient Mesopotamia is Iraq now, yeah?”
“Some of Iraq,” she says, correcting him, “and some of Iran and Kuwait as well. Their language is called Sumerian because the southern half was called the land of Sumer.”
“Sounds like it should be your homeland.”
Sumac nods, grinning. “Especially since they called themselves sag’giga, the black-headed people,” she says, pointing to her hair. “Oh, something I like is, Mesopotamians counted in sixties, not in tens. Look —” She lifts PopCorn’s nearer hand. “Use your thumb to count the … the … there’s a special word for the finger sections —”
“Phalanges,” he supplies.
It sounds like falafel. “The phalanges on that hand,” she says with difficulty, “go on, count them.”
PopCorn does. “Twelve.” Pleased with himself, because he’s terrible at math.
“Then on the other hand, you curl a finger over for each twelve, which makes sixty,” Sumac explains, “and that’s why we count seconds and minutes in sixties; we’re copying the Mesopotamians.”
“Too complicated,” he groans, putting on his eye mask and lying back like a movie star.
The plane’s full of adults traveling on their own and regular small-sized families. If all the Lotterys were here, it strikes Sumac, they’d take up a row and a half. “So what’s wrong with your dad?”
“Don’t really know yet,” says PopCorn. “Apart from the burns, possibly smoke inhalation….”
“No, I mean, why don’t you like him enough to visit except once in a blue moon?”
Her father lets out a long breath. “It’s more the other way around, peanut.”
The dad doesn’t like his own son? But everybody likes PopCorn, even the Lotterys’ scowly letter carrier.
“Sometimes two people can be related without really … clicking,” he murmurs. “Dad’s pretty conservative.”
That puzzles Sumac. “You mean like for voting in elections?”
“Set in his ways. He prefers things how they were, or at least how they seemed to be when he was eight instead of eighty-two.”
Sumac subtracts seventy-four from this year. World War II and no Internet: Who could prefer that?
“Hi, sweetie,” says a flight attendant with too much blusher on. “Where’s your mom today?”
“I’ve got two,” Sumac tells her. “One of them is practicing aikido, and the other is running a free legal advice clinic. Also another dad who’s minding my siblings and making something called mulligatawny soup.”
“Lucky you,” the woman answers in a slightly nervous voice. “Would you like a Junior Activity Pack?”
Sumac glances at the flat square wrapped in plastic with the usual five scratchy crayons. “No thanks. We’re going to be studying Sumerian; it’s the oldest written language in the world.”
“Lovely,” says the flight attendant, and hurries on down the plane.
Sumac wonders if that sounded a bit show-offy. She was just answering a question, not boasting. She doesn’t actually have anything to boast about, because she hasn’t learned more than a couple of Sumerian words yet.
Her and PopCorn’s challenge for this afternoon is to learn ten phrases from the minibook Sumac spent her allowance on at the museum, but he keeps thinking ses means sister when actually it’s brother. The one phrase he manages to remember is a proverb, Nuzu egalla bacar, because it means Ignoramuses are numerous in the palace, and that cracks him up. “Fewer brain cells,” he says, tapping his head, “so I need laughter as the glue to make the information stick.”
But today PopCorn’s not laughing half as much as he usually does, Sumac notices. Not even when he puts in earbuds and watches a comedy with a lot of crashing and falling.
*