Nixie Ness

by Claudia Mills

  “Sure,” Nixie said, relieved. “I mean, thanks.”

  Before they could start cooking anything, they had to put on chef aprons and wash their hands in the kitchen’s three enormous sinks, supervised by both chefs and Colleen. With sixteen campers, it took so long that Nixie thought the camp should be renamed Hand-Washing Camp. Ha! Let parents try convincing their kids to sign up for that.

  Back in the cafeteria, the four teams were each assigned a station at one of the four tables. Standing behind the kitchen counter that opened onto the cafeteria, Chef Maggie showed the campers the kid-safe knives they would be using to chop the filling ingredients into little pieces: carrots, celery, apples, and something dark green with frilly edges called kale. Fortunately, whatever needed to be washed had been washed ahead of time, or else the whole camp would have been spent doing nothing but standing at the sinks washing, washing, washing.

  Chef Michael gave a long demonstration about peeling and chopping techniques, but it was hard for Nixie to make herself listen to every single word.

  “All right, teams,” he finally said. “Have at it!”

  He stopped by Nixie’s team for a minute or two to watch them start peeling their carrots before going off to check on another team at another table. Peeling looked so easy when Chef Michael did it, but it turned out to be surprisingly hard to peel the skin off carrots without also peeling the skin off fingers.

  At last it was time for chopping. Nixie was in charge of celery. Trying not to think about Grace and Elyse, she concentrated on her task as if she were a celery-chopping machine. Chop. Chop. Chop.

  Vera leaned over to look at Nixie’s celery pieces. “Are yours too big? Or are my apple ones too small?”

  Nixie paused to compare her celery pieces to Vera’s apple pieces. Hers were bigger, but so what? Was there a law that every single item put into a pita pocket had to be exactly the same size?

  “They look fine to me,” Nixie said.

  “I think Chef Michael said they should be a quarter of an inch in each direction.” Vera sounded worried.

  Nixie couldn’t believe anyone would care so much about the size of celery pieces that were just going to be stuffed into a pita pocket where nobody would see them anyway.

  She checked out the chopping of her other two teammates.

  Boogie was chopping too fast. Already the floor beneath the table was thick with flying carrot bits.

  Nolan hardly glanced at his heap of kale as he chopped. He was too busy explaining the origin of pita bread in some place named Mesopotamia four thousand years ago. Had he known they were going to be making pita pockets today, or did he just happen to have a bunch of pita bread facts crammed into his head?

  “I’m going to start making my apple pieces a tiny bit bigger,” Vera said. “And maybe you should make your celery pieces a tiny bit smaller? Then they’ll both be the same size.”

  Nixie had no intention of being pita-pocket twins with Vera.

  “Look at Boogie’s carrot pieces,” she said, as Boogie stooped down to retrieve a whole carrot that had somehow landed on the floor. “Some of them are teensy-weensy, and some are humongous.”

  “I know,” Vera said, lowering her voice. “But the thing is…Well, Boogie…”

  Nixie knew Vera didn’t want to come right out and say that Boogie was a terrible carrot-cutter-upper.

  “I read somewhere that pita bread is the oldest bread in the world,” Nolan was explaining. “That’s pretty cool, don’t you think? Right now, we’re standing here cutting up fillings to stuff into the oldest kind of bread on earth. And guess what—ow!”

  A piece of Boogie’s carrot hit Nolan squarely in the forehead.

  “Are you okay?” Boogie asked, red-faced.

  Nolan gave Boogie a comforting grin as he rubbed his forehead.

  “What’s the deal with carrot pieces?” Boogie asked mournfully. “Why do they fly around so much more than celery or apple pieces?”

  “I think,” Nolan said, in his usual serious, scientific-sounding way, “it’s not the fault of the carrots.”

  Nixie looked over at Vera and almost burst into giggles. But in the nick of time she caught herself. Nixie didn’t want to laugh at anything if Grace wasn’t there laughing with her.

  “Time to finish up your chopping!” Chef Michael called.

  Nixie laid down her knife as Chef Maggie started showing the teams how to mix chickpeas—whatever chickpeas were—with lemon juice squeezed from real lemons. She wondered if Vera would freak out about exactly how much lemon juice to put on the chickpeas, and if Nolan knew as many facts about chickpeas as he did about pita bread, and if Boogie would manage to avoid injuring any of his teammates with flying chickpeas.

  But mostly she wondered what Grace and Elyse were doing right now.

  AT lunch on Thursday, Nixie chomped down hard on her cashew-butter sandwich and chewed with all her might.

  “I tried and I tried, but I couldn’t think of the right name for him,” Elyse was saying. “At first I thought Button. Because he has this little white spot in the middle of his tummy.”

  “Besides,” Grace said to Nixie, “you know that expression ‘cute as a button’?”

  Nixie took a big swallow of sandwich, but it stuck in her throat. Grace had never asked Nixie, Do you mind if Elyse eats with us? She hadn’t said, I’m sorry, but she really wants to, and I can’t get out of it without hurting her feelings. Instead, Elyse had showed up at their cafeteria table on Tuesday and had now sat with them at lunch for three whole days. During P.E. that morning, Elyse had placed herself right between Nixie and Grace, and when Nixie had said, “Hi, sun!” Elyse had said, “Hi, sun!” too, and Grace had laughed equally hard for both of them.

  “But I don’t know, Button didn’t seem to fit,” Elyse went on. “Then yesterday we came up with the absolutely perfect name!”

  Grace took up the story. “We were doing this dance called the cha-cha.”

  So now Grace and Elyse were dancing together?

  “It goes like this,” Grace continued. “One, two, cha-cha-cha.” She stood up to demonstrate: one step forward, one step back, three quick steps in place.

  “And my kitten kept getting in the way of our feet,” Elyse interrupted. “So it was more like one, two, cha-cha-crash!”

  “And then I said, that’s it, that’s his name!” Grace finished.

  “His name is Crash?” Nixie asked, trying to have something to contribute to the conversation. At lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday, Grace had asked her a whole bunch of questions about what cooking camp was like, but Nixie hadn’t felt like talking about it when Elyse was right there listening, so she had hardly said anything. Now all they talked about was cats, cats, cats.

  “No!” both Grace and Elyse said together. “It’s Cha-Cha!”

  This might have been the dumbest name for a cat Nixie had ever heard. But Grace and Elyse were both laughing so hard at its funniness and wonderfulness they didn’t even notice Nixie wasn’t laughing with them.

  Then and there Nixie decided: she needed to make a Plan.

  A Plan to get her best friend back soon—like now—or lose her forever.

  The only problem was that she had no idea what the Plan could be.

  * * *

  At cooking camp that afternoon, they were baking healthy muffins to put in a healthy lunch. On Monday they had assembled the healthy pita pockets. On Tuesday they had put together healthy yogurt parfaits (nonfat, low-sugar vanilla yogurt layered with blueberries and raspberries, and homemade granola) and healthy fruit kebabs (alternating grapes and melon balls stuck on extra-long toothpicks). On Wednesday they had made healthy pasta salad with whole-grain pasta that looked like little bow ties, lots and lots of veggies, and chopped-up hard-boiled eggs. Nixie had to admit everything had been surprisingly tasty.

  Now they were baking heal
thy Morning Glory muffins, which had nothing to do with morning glories, which Nixie knew were blue flowers that climbed up a trellis in her front yard in the summer. The Morning Glory muffins were healthy because they were made with whole-wheat instead of white flour and honey and orange juice instead of sugar, and had grated carrots and apples, walnut pieces, sunflower seeds, shredded coconut, and raisins added into them, too.

  “Why are they called Morning Glory muffins?” Nixie asked Nolan, after Chef Michael and Chef Maggie had finished their demonstration and the teams were busy at their stations.

  “Because people eat muffins for breakfast in the morning?” Nolan suggested. “And because these muffins are so nutritious and delicious that they’re glorious?”

  That made sense. Everything Nolan said made sense.

  “But we’re supposed to put them in healthy lunches,” Vera pointed out. “So when we eat them it won’t be morning anymore.” Nixie had visions of Vera at home checking her clock to make sure it wasn’t too late in the day to eat a morning-only muffin.

  “I want to be eating them right now!” Boogie chimed in.

  Nixie started reading out the list of dry ingredients while Vera did the measuring. The good thing about Vera doing the measuring was that you knew every single ingredient would be measured perfectly. The bad thing was that it took Vera forever to do it.

  “Two cups of whole-wheat flour,” Nixie read.

  Vera transferred flour into the measuring cup, one slow spoonful at a time, until it was full to the very top. With the side of a butter knife, she leveled off the flour so there wasn’t a single speck extra and carefully poured it into the mixing bowl. Then she began measuring the second cup with the same precision.

  Boogie was working on the wet ingredients—honey, vegetable oil, orange juice, vanilla, and three eggs—while Nolan was busy peeling and grating the carrots and apples. Maybe Boogie should have been the one peeling and grating, and Nolan should have been the one breaking the eggs. But Boogie already had the first egg in his hand.

  Crack!

  The eggshell shattered on the side of the stainless-steel mixing bowl. Part of the egg fell into the bowl. Most of the egg splattered onto the table.

  Vera looked up from leveling off her first teaspoon of baking soda, eyes wide with horror. Nixie stifled a giggle.

  “I can scoop up the rest of it,” Boogie promised cheerfully.

  The egg, dripping off the side of the table now, was plainly beyond scooping.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll get another egg from Chef Maggie!”

  Boogie was already darting into the kitchen. And then he was on his way back, waving the egg in the air as if it were a toy flag at a Fourth of July parade, when he dropped it, sending it smashing onto the linoleum floor.

  Chef Maggie brought over the next egg and supervised the breaking. Finished with all the grating, Nolan took over some of Vera’s measuring. He was not only their team’s best grater, but as a measurer, he was accurate and fast. Once they had stirred all the ingredients together in the big mixing bowl, and the batter had been spooned into the muffin tins, the muffins from all the teams went into the kitchen’s huge double oven to bake for twenty minutes. Colleen told the campers they could either use the break to get a start on homework or head outside for a game of tag.

  Nixie didn’t see a single person choosing to do homework except for Vera who probably needed extra time to check each math problem five times to make sure every answer was perfect. But Nixie didn’t feel like playing tag, either. She hated tag, where she always ended up as “it,” with everyone else screaming as they ran away from her. If only she could be baking Morning Glory muffins at home with Grace. Or even having Grace baking them with her here at camp. Grace would have thought Boogie’s egg calamity was hilarious, too.

  Instead Grace was at Elyse’s doing the cha-cha with a cat.

  Nolan must not have liked tag, either, because he joined Nixie outside in the shade by the brick wall of the school. Boogie, who had chosen to be “it,” yelled cheerfully as he dashed around in unsuccessful pursuit of everyone else.

  “I’m going to surprise my sisters by making some healthy lunches for them next week, using our recipes,” Nolan told Nixie. “They’re both stressed about middle-school cheerleading tryouts, so I thought I’d give them a treat.”

  “Wow,” Nixie said. She didn’t even make her own lunches, let alone make lunches as a surprise for anyone else.

  Just like that, the perfect Get Your Best Friend Back Plan popped into Nixie’s head. Yes! She’d make one big, ultra-surprising, mega-amazing lunch for Grace, with all the healthy things that they had made in it, the best lunch that anyone had ever made for anyone else in the history of the world.

  Grace would say, I can’t believe you went to so much trouble to make such a delicious and nutritious lunch for me!

  Oh, it was nothing, Nixie would say. It’s just, you know, what best friends do for each other.

  Then Grace would remember she was best friends with Nixie, not with Elyse. Even if Elyse brought an even better lunch for Grace next week—not that Elyse could make a better lunch because Elyse didn’t go to cooking camp—it would be clear Elyse was copying Nixie. Who would want to be best friends with a copycat?

  How lucky Nixie was that the first after-school camp had been cooking and not robotics! Instead of making a special lunch to win Grace back, she would have had to build Grace her own personal robot. Nixie giggled at the thought of smuggling a robot to school in her backpack.

  She gave Nolan a radiant smile and kept on smiling as the campers headed inside. Five minutes later she tasted the first bite of a warm, soft, sweet, totally luscious Morning Glory muffin.

  By this time tomorrow Nixie would have her best friend back again.

  “OH, Nixie,” her mother said, when Nixie explained the Plan to her parents at dinner that night. She didn’t tell them it was a Get Your Best Friend Back Plan. She just said she wanted to make a special lunch for Grace tomorrow the way Nolan was making special lunches for his sisters. “We’ve had such a long day. I don’t think I can face going grocery shopping.”

  “But I already have the muffins,” Nixie said. Each camper had gotten a bag of muffins to take home. “So I only have to make the pita pockets, and the yogurt parfaits, and the fruit kebabs. Oh, and the pasta salad.”

  “Those are the only things you have to make?” her father asked in a teasing voice.

  Nixie ignored him and turned her pleading gaze on her mother, who usually gave in faster than her father did. She tried to pretend she was an irresistibly cute puppy dog with huge, brown, sad-sad eyes, begging for a puppy treat.

  Please, please, please, please, PLEASE!

  “Oh, all right,” her mother finally said. “We’d better go now before I collapse in an exhausted little heap.”

  As her mother was getting her purse, Nixie overheard her saying to her father, “I’m just glad it sounds like she’s enjoying the camp activities. This is a big adjustment for her.” And she overheard her father saying, “I know.”

  Nixie remembered to grab the sheaf of photocopied recipes chefs Maggie and Michael had sent home, so she’d have the lists of the ingredients she needed. She and Grace hardly ever talked on the phone, but as soon as she got back, she’d call Grace and tell her, Don’t bring a lunch tomorrow! Because I have a tremendous, stupendous, fabuloso surprise! And Grace would say, What is it? And Nixie would say, If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, and Grace would laugh the way Nixie loved best.

  * * *

  It would have been more fun preparing the huge healthy lunch if Vera, Nolan, and Boogie had been there to help. Of course, it would have been the most fun if Grace had been Nixie’s lunch-making partner, the two of them working together. But then Nixie wouldn’t have needed the Plan in the first place.

  Nixie was more grateful than e
ver that she already had the muffins. Her mother had vetoed the pasta salad: “You’ll have plenty without it.” But there was still lots of tedious, lonely peeling and chopping to do by herself.

  The next morning her mother helped her pack the lunch in two matching insulated lunch bags she had found at a yard sale. Patterned with purple pansies edged with purple piping, the bags looked adorable sitting on the kitchen counter side by side. Nixie tingled with anticipation, as if she had swallowed a huge gulp of soda that was now fizzing deep inside her.

  She kept the lunches hidden in her backpack so Grace wouldn’t see them until the big moment. Then at lunchtime she told Grace to go ahead to the cafeteria while she retrieved the lunches from her cubby.

  As she entered the cafeteria, Grace waved to her from their favorite table by the window.

  Elyse waved at her, too.

  The fizzy bubbles in Nixie’s stomach felt a little less fizzy and bubbly.

  As Nixie had instructed, Grace had no lunch box on the table in front of her.

  Neither did Elyse.

  Maybe Elyse was going to buy the school lunch. Lots of kids did, especially on pizza day.

  But then why wasn’t Elyse standing in line with the other pizza buyers?

  Slowly Nixie approached the table, clutching a purple-pansy-patterned bag in each hand.

  “Ooh!” Grace said, as Nixie set the matching bags on the table. They looked even more darling there than they had at home.

  “Are those for us?” Elyse asked.

  No! They’re not for you! One is for Grace, and one is for me! Because we’re the best friends, and you’re the best-friend stealer!

  But Nixie couldn’t make herself say that.

  She just couldn’t.

  “I was going to buy pizza,” Elyse continued, “but Grace told me you had a surprise for us, and we weren’t supposed to eat anything first.”