Invisible Inkling

“You all had pizza without me?” Kim says, hitting his head with his palm. “That is so unfair. You would not believe how many vegetables I had to choke down before I was allowed to come here.”

He leaves his family and comes to sit with us at the front of the store. He’s full of questions for Dad. How is the ice cream stored? (There’s a walk-in freezer in the back.) How did Dad learn to make it? (It was his hobby in college; he learned from a book.) How do you make hot fudge? (Long boring explanation Dad gave that I won’t repeat here.)

Patne, Chin, and I order cookie-dough sundaes with fudge and pumpkin-colored sprinkles. Dad makes them. “Do you have special flavors for holidays?” Kim asks.

“Do we ever!” I say.

“But not for Thanksgiving,” Dad says from behind the counter. “We’ll have candy cane and eggnog for Christmas, though. I’m making them already. They go on the menu after Thanksgiving.”

“What about Hanukkah?” Kim asks. “’Cause I’m Jewish.”

Dad shakes his head. “No.”

“Latke and applesauce!” I yell.

Patne and Kim both laugh. Chin makes a gagging noise.

“It’s not going to be good,” says Dad. “You don’t want fried potato and onion in your ice cream. Do you, Henry?”

“No,” says Kim, suddenly looking serious. “But I bet we can think of a Hanukkah flavor that would be good.”

“Bring it on,” says Dad.

“Matzo ball!” I yell. Because how awesome would that be, tiny matzo balls inside your ice cream?

“Wouldn’t that be chicken-soup flavor, though?” asks Chin, sticking out her tongue.

“It could be vegetable soup,” I say.

“Matzo balls are for Passover, not Hanukkah,” says Kim.

Okay, fine. Not matzo ball.

“Maybe gelt?” Patne muses. “You could do something with the chocolate coins people get on Hanukkah.”

Now we’re getting somewhere! I get out my flavor notebook, which I tend to carry around with me now, and show it to Kim, Patne, and Chin. They lean in, looking at the pages.

They read my ideas and look at my drawings. They’ve got ideas of their own. Patne suggests different applesauce flavors. Kim flips back to see my Halloween ideas. Chin wants to talk about toppings and sprinkles and mix-ins.

We make notes. We make jokes. I do a couple sketches.

This killing-with-kindness thing? I think it might be working.

Next morning before school, I look for Inkling in my laundry basket. “Are you there?” I say, feeling around the clothes.

“Umumumumumum.” He makes a groggy noise.

“Perfect,” I say—and pour a jug of warm water over him.

Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that when he was in my laundry basket. Now all my dirty clothes are wet. But in my own defense, most of the time I don’t know where Inkling’s sitting. If he was awake, I couldn’t sneak up on him with the water.

I can’t write down the things Inkling says when he wakes up wet and visible. They are not polite.

Still, he’s cute. His ears are huge. His tummy is round. His eyes are large and curious. It’s nice to actually see him. “Everyone’s eating breakfast,” I say, when he stops yelling and throwing wet socks at me. “I need you to help me with something while they’re busy.”

“This had better be urgent,” he says. “I stayed up late last night.”

“It’s not exactly urgent,” I confess, “but it’s fairly important.”

Inkling growls. “How important? Is it going to help defeat Betty-Ann?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Will it save the bandapats from extinction and bring some of them here to Brooklyn to hang out with me?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Well then, what will it do?” Inkling asks, irritated. “Because those are the only things I’d really call important enough to be dousing me with water before eight o’clock in the morning.”

“It’ll make me a Cuttlefish,” I say.

Inkling demonstrates swimming techniques on the rug in my bedroom. I lie down next to him. “Watch,” he says. “You’ll go a lot faster with your breaststroke if you rotate your feet like this.”

I can see what he’s doing, this time.

I rotate my feet.

Then he shows me how to lift my elbows in the crawl, and how to loosen my knees in the flutter kick.

I can see him.

I lift my elbows. I loosen my knees.

He shows me how to turn my head so I don’t swallow water.

I turn my head.

We do these things over and over, and as Inkling demonstrates swimming, even though we’re both facedown on the rug, I think about—swimming.

Just swimming. Not shipwrecks or drowning kittens or giant hammocks.

“I was head of peewee bandapat aquatics in the Norwegian deserts,” Inkling brags. “I coached our team through four winning seasons.”

“You did not,” I say.

“I most certainly did.”

I stop flutter-kicking and sit up. “Inkling! The whole point of deserts is that there’s no water for peewee aquatics.”

“Says you.”

“Norway doesn’t even have a desert.”

A guilty look flits across Inkling’s face. “Stop wasting time,” he tells me. “Your flutter kick is getting better, but the frog kick still needs work. Let’s see it again.”

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