with its flaky, tender, golden crust

in lattice strips across the top

and the cinnamony juice of the apples

that bubbled through as it baked.

She doesn’t even see it.

“I’m going to lie down for a while,” she says,

the minute she comes in the door from work.

“Can you find something in the fridge

you can have for your dinner?”

This time she looks so awful,

so pale and drained and sad,

that I can’t not ask her,

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

At first, I think she’s not going to tell me.

But then she does.

“I didn’t get the grant.

Apparently recording dying languages

before they go extinct is a low funding priority right now,

given agency budget cuts. After all, if one

more language is lost forever, who cares?”

Lizard and I do!

But anything I say will only make it worse.

So I have another slice of deep-dish apple pie

and a glass of milk for dinner,

all by myself.

When My Dad Calls That Night

He calls me on my phone,

since he tells me Mom didn’t answer hers.

When I tell him about the grant, he says,

“Oh, no.”

Then he says,

“This is really bad.”

Then he says,

“Maybe I should come home early.”

Then he says,

“But I can’t. I really can’t.”

Then he says,

“But this is bad, honey.”

Then he says,

“This is really, really bad.”

Saturday Morning

I walk over to Lizard’s house

after eating breakfast alone.

What if my mother never

comes out of her room again?

I’m still afraid Lizard might be mad

that I baked the pie with Zoey.

But once we’re in the clubhouse, I tell her Mom’s bad news,

and right away she turns back into the best friend ever.

“Your poor mom! This is so unfair! Someday, Bumble,

you and I are going to have a million dollars.

No, ten million, and we’ll be the ones giving out the grants,

and we’ll call ours the Lizard-and-Bumble Grant for Saving

Endangered Languages, and we’ll give it all to your mom!

But you know what we should be doing now, right?

Even if Zari, Veronica, and Zoey have abandoned us?

And even if nobody—as in nobody—came to our club?

You and I can keep learning all the Guernésiais we can.

We can learn more and more. We can learn faster and faster.

There’s still us, Bumble.

There’s still us.”

While We Practice Our Guernésiais

Lizard tells me every bad thing she knows about Zoey.

You may remember that Lizard is always the first one

to know anything bad about anybody.

Now she tells me that Zoey wet her pants in kindergarten,

which is something girls hardly ever do,

because boys are always the ones who are pants-wetters.

Plus she tells me that Zoey was the worst one

of anybody in the tap-dancing camp,