“I thought—I mean—I was wondering if you think they’d make good buildings for Brambletown.”
“Yes, they would,” he said. He rubbed the top of his head. “Do you want me to help you bring them over?”
“No,” I said.
Nick looked down at the ground.
“I want you to help us build Brambletown.”
He grinned. “Okay.”
“Okay.” I grinned back. And that was that.
A thousand pounds of rocks—gone.
We carried four stacks of crates out to the cul-de-sac, making a couple of trips. Dad gave us a drop cloth and we decorated two of the crates in a crazy rainbow pattern. I sprayed Brambletown Paint and Decorating in purple letters next to the crates.
“Cool,” Nick said. I wondered what Mrs. Fanelli would say when she saw him. He looked pretty much like a rainbow himself.
“Ready for a test run?” I asked.
We got our skates and followed Summer as she towed Zack and Contact around the new-and-improved Brambletown in the bike trailer. Remembering my unplanned skating visit to Summer’s neighborhood, I practiced stopping—a lot.
“One more loop, Zack, and I have to go home,” Summer warned. “It’s going to get dark.”
“Kitty’s already night-night,” Zack said from his passenger seat.
Summer took Zack and Contact for another spin around our town. Nick and I took off our skates and sat on the curb.
“I’ve been thinking about some other things we could add to Brambletown,” Nick said. “Maybe even a ramp—it could be like a bridge or something.”
“I like that,” I told him.
Summer stopped her bike in front of us. “Last stop, Rostraver Station,” she called out. “All human passengers must exit.”
Zack climbed out. He leaned his curly head back in to give Contact a kiss. “Night-night, Kitty,” he said.
“Come back tomorrow,” Nick told Summer. “We’re going to have a lot of work to do.”
“Deal,” Summer said. She pedaled away down the street.
“Want some pudding?” I asked Nick.
A little while later, Nick and I were talking over our plans at the kitchen table. Dad was unloading the dishwasher. Zack cooed to a toy truck wrapped in a towel. He’d named it Contact. All of a sudden we heard Mrs. Fanelli’s frantic voice.
“Nick! Nick! Where are you?”
Nick jumped to his feet. His mother burst into our kitchen and ran straight to Dad. She grabbed Dad by the arms. “My Nick is not home!” she cried. “Where can he be? I have looked everywhere!”
“I’m here,” Nick said.
Mrs. Fanelli whirled. She pulled Nick to her and hugged him. Then she pushed him back. A tear spilled onto her cheek. “Tuh!” she exclaimed, flinging the tear away with her hand. She turned and hurried out of the house.
“I guess I should have left her a note or something,” Nick said. “Now you guys don’t get any dinner.”
“Your mom was too upset to think about that,” Dad said. “We can manage on our own for once.” He opened cabinets and scratched his head. He looked in the fridge. “Eggs?” he asked me.
“Eggs, tuh!” Mrs. Fanelli snorted, banging back into the kitchen. She set a pan of lasagna, an antipasto platter, and a layer cake on the table.
Dad held up his hands. “Really, you don’t have to—” he began.
“Don’t argue with me, Dan Rostraver,” Mrs. Fanelli said. “Nick, time to go.”
Nick followed his mother out the door and down the path.
“Good work,” Dad said after they’d gone.
“You mean for finding Nick for Mrs. Fanelli and getting us dinner?” I asked innocently.
Dad smiled. “I mean for finding Nick,” he said. “Your friend Nick.”
I took a sweet cherry tomato from the antipasto and popped it into my mouth. The good news—and the bad news—was that Nick and I would have to go back to pretending not to be friends in school. I picked a hot pepper from the platter and turned it around by the stem. Now Summer and Nick were friends, too, and I wasn’t so sure Summer was good at that kind of pretending.
I closed my eyes tight and took a bite of fire.
17
ALMOST A REGULAR
ANY-OLD DAY
Ready?” Nick called through the screen door the next morning. He pressed his nose against the mesh, filling the little wire squares with freckles.
“Uh-huh.” I shoved my plate of telltale cake crumbs into the dishwasher. Dad hadn’t said anything, but I knew why Mom had left that fat slab of Mrs. Fanelli’s cake at my place. Cake for breakfast was Mom’s way of stretching a special day into the next morning. Yesterday had been a great day, but today I just wanted to walk with Nick to the corner of Broom and Laurel, sit across from him at school with breathable air moving between us, and have a regular, any-old day.
I slung my backpack over my shoulder and went outside. Ragged gray clouds spun across the sky, and my hair swirled up into the wind. Nick was standing at the end of our driveway looking at Brambletown.
“I don’t think rain will hurt it,” he said.
“Nope,” I agreed. “It’s staying.”
We turned onto Bayberry. Nick tightrope-walked along the curb, his arms out for balance.
“Did you and Jess finish the Spark editorial yesterday?” I asked him.
“I think so,” Nick said. He hopped off the curb and back on again.
“You don’t know if you finished it or not?”
“Well,” he said, rubbing his chin, “we couldn’t work on it much during that big meeting at lunch, so Jess was going to finish it on her own and e-mail it—”
“You’re kidding!” I blurted out, then immediately wished I hadn’t. The last thing I wanted to do was bring up the Mr. Alien disaster.
Nick shook his head. “I’m not kidding. But she’s e-mailing it to Mr. Allen instead of to the office.” He flashed me an apologetic grin.
“There’s a good idea,” I said. Then I bumped him off the curb. He tried to bump me back, chasing me to the corner of Broom and Laurel. We stopped at the curb.
“Hey, thanks for the potato the other day,” I said.
“Sure.”
“See you at school.”
“Right,” Nick said. “See you.”
And we parted ways for the last several blocks, like usual.
This week’s issue of the Springville Spark was delivered to Room Twenty in the middle of math. Rain sheeted down the classroom windows. This Spark seemed a little rough around the edges. In my opinion, some of the artwork didn’t quite go with the stories and poems. Jess’s editorial, “What Bugs You?” started out with insects and ended up talking about people picking their teeth. But Owen’s poem about maggots really made me laugh.
Maggots live in what they eat,
Manure piles and rotten meat.
They don’t have heads or any legs,
And so can’t think to wipe their feet.
We had another mega-editorial meeting at lunchtime. The room was full of a humming, busy kind of noise. I took a bite of my sandwich. When I glanced up, Mr. Allen was smiling at me. Sunlight shimmered through the last of the raindrops. This was turning out to be a wonderful, any-old day.
“Your assignment for this weekend,” Mr. Allen explained at the end of the day, “is to find one characteristic your insect shares with human beings and write about it in the form of a fictional story, a poem, a newspaper article, or a first-person— make that ‘first-bug’—journal entry.”
“But I’ve got plans this weekend,” Owen groaned. “There’s a Rotten Roger cartoonathon all day Saturday and Sunday.”
Mr. Allen’s black eyebrows shot up like arrows. “Then please consider this assignment as brain protection, Owen. Don’t forget, fellow learners—you’ll take your insects home for observation and inspiration, and then return them to their natural habitats when you’ve finished. Let’s all gather up our things and prepare for an extremely en
tomological weekend.”
Nick went to get his hellgrammite. I already had my pillbug.
“I don’t think my dead tick will be much of an inspiration,” Summer said. “But I can observe the new ones I find right in their natural habitat—Toby’s skin!” Lacey shoved her chair under her desk and stomped to the coatroom.
“Speaking of Toby,” Summer said, “I think he’s feeling a little left out. Okay if he comes over today?”
“Of course.” I lowered my voice, hoping Summer would take the hint and keep it down. “Zack’ll go crazy for him.” I pushed in my chair and started toward the coatroom.
“Hey, Nick,” Summer called. “You never met my dog, Toby, did you?”
I froze. Nick turned slowly. Silence stretched across the room like a rubber band. I stopped breathing. Oh, no, I thought. Summer, don’t do it. Don’t say Brambletown. Don’t say Brambletown.
“I’m going to bring Toby today when I come to do Brambletown,” Summer announced, loud enough for Mrs. Novotny’s class down the hall to hear.
I hid my face in my hands.
“Bram-ble-town,” I heard Max say in a singsongy way. “What’s Brambletown?” There were a few giggles.
“Is it a new game?” someone asked.
“Yeah—a pretend game for little kiddies.” Laughter erupted around the room.
My jaw clenched.
“I made up stuff like that, too,” Alima said. “When I was three.”
I lowered my hands and shot her a fierce a look.
“Maybe Summer and Nick play house in Brambletown,” Owen chimed in. “She’s the mommy and he’s the daddy.”
“It’s not house!” I hissed.
Owen pointed at me. “I bet Nadie is the baby!”
That did it. I blew up. “YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT!” I yelled.
“Nadie?”
I thought that might have been Mr. Allen’s voice, but I kept on yelling.
“For your information, Brambletown’s a place we’re making for skates and bikes—Nick, Summer, and me. And if being in the big-deal upper elementary school means you can’t have that kind of fun or you can’t be that kind of friends”—I whirled on all of them—“then too bad for you! I don’t care what you think!” I shouted into the shocked silence, “Nick Fanelli has been my best friend forever!” I grabbed up my backpack. “I’m sick of these stupid rules about what fourth graders can and can’t do and who can be friends and who can’t! Some rules are for following”—I nodded at Summer— “and some aren’t!” A sob choked its way up my throat, blocking off anything else I might have yelled. I burst out of the room, ran out of the building, and pounded down the block toward home.
18
BUILDING A BRIDGE
Hey…wait…will you?” Nick caught up with me a few blocks from school. By the sound of his voice, I could tell that he wasn’t mad at me for blabbing about being friends. He was just winded from running.
I stopped. Nick held out my pillbug soda bottle habitat, then leaned over with his hands on his knees and huffed.
“Please tell me this is a long weekend,” I groaned, “so I don’t have to go back to school until, like, forever.”
“Just a regular weekend,” Nick said.
“I’m never going back,” I said. I kicked an orangish pebble as hard as I could, sending it flying to the next driveway. “You’ll have to take my assignment to Mr. Allen. It’s going to be about how I curled up at home like a hiding pillbug and never came out again.”
“What will your dad think when you don’t go to school on Monday?” Nick asked, ever practical.
“He won’t know. I’ll walk partway with you,” I said, “and then I’ll go downtown and get a job.” I followed my pebble down the sidewalk and gave it another kick.
Nick fell into step beside me. “I think you have to be at least fourteen to work.”
I rolled my eyes. “Let’s just go eat cake.” I kept kicking the pebble the rest of the way home. When we reached my driveway, I sent it skittering into the grass near our mailbox.
“Hey ho, buddy-pals,” Dad said, holding the kitchen door open for us. “It appears to be drying up outside. What’s the afternoon plan—more Brambletown?”
Nick and I looked at each other.
“What’d I say?” Dad asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure Summer’s coming over, and yeah, we’re going to work on Brambletown.”
I got us milk—regular for me and chocolate soy for Nick. I slid into the seat across from Nick with my back to the kitchen door. We ate our cake, which made me feel better, and talked about things we wanted to add to our skate town. Dad went to pick up Zack. I wished Summer would hurry. I couldn’t wait for my brother to see big old Toby.
“My cousin has a couple of old skateboard ramps, and I’m sure he’ll let us borrow them,” Nick said. “I found a wooden pallet in the garage that we could use to make a bridge. But it has those spaces between the slats, so it’ll need some kind of covering if we really want to skate or bike over it.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Maybe your dad has something?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think photographic paper will do it.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come on in, Summer,” I called. I heard the door open.
Nick looked past me and his eyes widened. “It’s not Summer.”
I turned. Gordon was standing there holding a cardboard box. He brought it into the kitchen and set it down on a chair. “Hel-lo,” he said. “I’ve-got-some old things from-my-dad’s auto parts store for Brambletown.” He only sounded a little like a robot.
Nick peered into the box. “Cool!” he said. “This is just what we need!” He pulled out a stack of rubber mats, like the kind you’d put on the floor of a car. “We’re going to build a bridge,” he told Gordon. “These will make the perfect surface.”
“Affir-ma-tive!” Gordon said. “And I brought these old hubcaps, too. I thought you could use them as part of a building or a slalom course or something.”
I thought about the other night when the un-robot Gordon had been here working on the Spark. “Can’t you stay and work on it with us?” I asked him.
He smiled, then leaned down to rummage around in the cardboard box. “I can stay until dinnertime,” he said. Now he didn’t sound like a robot at all.
“Me, too.” Summer opened the screen door, and Toby bounded in ahead of her. “I can stay ’til dinner, too.”
“What took you so long?” I asked.
Summer and Gordon exchanged a pained look.
“What?” I demanded.
“Well,” Summer said, pulling on Toby’s ears, “you left school, and Mr. Allen let Nick go after you, but then he kept the rest of us a little longer.”
“Great,” I wailed. “Now I’m not only a lunatic, I’m a lunatic who gets everyone else in trouble!”
“We weren’t in trouble,” Gordon said. “Mr. Allen just asked everyone to sit down in their seats without talking and think.”
“He said he was going to time us—two minutes,” Summer said. “But he was thinking, too, and he thought a little longer.”
“A lot longer,” Gordon added. “So we sat there a lot longer.”
That settled it. I really never was going back to school again. I put my head in my hands. Toby came over and plastered my face with his slobbery tongue.
“No, doggie!” I heard Zack cry from outside the screen door. “Don’t eat my sister!”
19
JUST WAITING
TO HAPPEN
Pretty early the next morning, which was Saturday, Zack was pushing one of his toy trucks in the middle of the driveway when he saw Summer pedaling up the street. He ran to our kitchen door and almost went right through the screen in his hurry to try and get inside. He still hadn’t recovered from seeing Toby lick my face yesterday, even though the big black dog had wagged and fetc
hed and tried to win him over all that afternoon.
“Toby stayed home today, Zack,” Summer called out to him. “But your old pal Contact’s here.”
“I like Contact!” Zack nodded. He toddled down the driveway and jumped into the kiddie trailer with the fat orange cat.
Nick and Summer picked up where they’d left off on the wooden frame for the bridge. Gordon was designing a slalom course. I started painting crates.
“Nadie?”
I looked up. Lacey and Max were straddling bikes at the edge of the cul-de-sac.
“Um, can we try your—your Brambletown?” Lacey asked.
I looked from her to Max and back again. It all started to make sense. I had to laugh. “Sure,” I told them. “Check it out. But wait,” I folded my arms and tried to look stern. “What really happened with that red money pouch?”
Lacey hung her head. “Max put it in my desk for me,” she admitted.
“I knew it,” I said.
“I thought no one was looking,” Max said. “She always forgets her lunch money. I bike to school, so sometimes after Lacey gets on the bus her mom comes over and gives the money to me. Anyway,”—he pointed to his and Lacey’s saddlebags—“ we dug around in my shed and found some stuff that might be good for the skate town.”
Lacey nodded. “Little plastic fences from an old flower garden. Max’s mom has lots of them.”
“Those are great,” I said. Lacey was rocking back and forth on her bike pedals. “Why not go for a ride first?” I waved them toward Brambletown. They raced each other around the painted roads for a few minutes. I smiled to myself and went back to painting crates.
Lacey turned out to be pretty handy with a can of spray paint, and she only said “eew” once, when she painted over a bunch of dried-out worms. Max designed a park in one corner, using the plastic garden fences. We worked until the sun dipped behind the trees ringing the cul-de-sac.
Zack poked his head out of the kiddie trailer. “Ride?” he asked.
“Last spin,” Summer told him.
Nick and I watched her pedal slowly around Brambletown. “Was this really ever just some empty cul-de-sac?” I asked him.
The Trouble with Rules Page 10
