“What?” I ask.
“Getting hungry?”
I nod. Sunday is my favorite day of the week, since Mom usually has to work on Saturdays. First, we have waffles for breakfast; then we go to a free museum or walk around Central Park. Afterward, we come home and read on the couch till it’s time to make supper, which on Sundays is always alphabet pasta with olives and artichoke hearts. Every week we see who can spell the longest words with her pasta. Mom knows lots more words than I do, but I know more disease names, like hemochromatosis and pneumoconiosis, so I can hold my own.
“Chocolate milk or hot chocolate?” she asks.
I look out the window to evaluate. We have chocolate milk when it’s hot out and cocoa when it’s cold. It’s early September, so we’re almost getting into cocoa weather. The late afternoon sun makes warm gold rectangles on our walls, and it’s starting to smell like fall in the park. But I’m not ready for winter yet.
“Chocolate hot,” I say, talking backward without realizing it. My hero is the brilliant and talented Leonardo da Vinci. He wrote backward sometimes, so I decided talking backward was a good idea, too. Only my friends can understand me when I do it. It’s good when we need to talk secretly and grown-ups are listening.
Mom, however, has declared our house a No Backward Talk zone. She says if I talk backward to her, she’ll answer me in Latin, and we’ll never get anywhere.
I realize she’s giving me the you-just-talkedbackward- to-me look. “I mean, hot chocolate,” I add quickly.
