Nixie’s fizz had fizzled out completely. Grace obviously thought Nixie was nice enough that she wouldn’t bring a surprise treat for one friend and not the other. But how could you be best friends with more than one person?
“Yes!” Nixie said brightly. “These are special lunches! I made them!” Then she added a feeble “Ta-da!”
“But where’s yours?” Grace asked.
It was an excellent question for which Nixie had no excellent answer.
“I made them for you and Elyse,” she said, hoping she hadn’t hesitated too long before replying. “Because you don’t get to go to cooking camp like I do.”
It came out sounding braggier than Nixie meant it to. But she might as well brag about something, given that Grace and Elyse had been bragging nonstop about Elyse’s kitten and the fun the two of them were having without her. Well, she was having fun without them, too!
Except that she wasn’t. Not really. Nothing could really be fun if Grace wasn’t there to share the fun with her.
“So are you getting pizza?” Elyse opened the lunch bag closest to her and started exploring the treats, which looked extra-delicious to Nixie right now.
“Sure!” Nixie said.
Her parents had paid ahead for a bunch of lunches, so there was money on her account.
“Umm! This is sooooo good!” Elyse said, gulping down a huge spoonful of the yogurt parfait that should have been Nixie’s.
“Muffins!” Grace squealed, as she took the first bite of hers.
“Morning Glory muffins,” Nixie corrected her.
Glorious Morning Glory muffins.
She could still hear Grace and Elyse squealing over the adorableness of the fruit kebabs as she trudged over to get her tray, onto which the lunchroom lady would dump one piece of limp, saggy, greasy, un-glorious pizza.
* * *
Nixie and Grace had their third soccer game of the season on Saturday morning. Thank goodness Elyse did gymnastics instead. Nixie’s dad took both girls out for lunch afterward while her mom was at the bookstore. Her mom’s hours varied a lot at the store: most weekday afternoons, but some Saturdays and Sundays, too, as those were the store’s especially popular shopping times. But even on the occasional school-day afternoons when her mom was still home, her parents had said they didn’t want Nixie to “miss out on the full camp experience.” But what about missing out on the full best-friend experience?
While they waited for their burgers, Grace made Nixie feel better about the ball Nixie had kicked out of bounds, and Nixie told Grace how unfair the ref had been to call two fouls on Grace.
“I love soccer,” Grace said. “Even when we lose.”
“Me too!”
“I’m trying to talk Elyse into switching to soccer once her gymnastics class ends, and I think she’s going to!”
Nixie knew she was supposed to say: That’s great! But she couldn’t make the words come out of her mouth. Luckily at that moment their burgers and fries arrived at the table.
Clearly, given the failure of her first attempt, Nixie needed a New and Improved Plan.
If only she could invite Grace over for something extra-super-duper special, like a sleepover. But every time she had asked in the past, Grace’s mother had said no. She didn’t believe in sleepovers. She claimed they should be called stay-awake-overs.
Nixie was almost relieved when lunch was done.
“WHO has a pet?” Chef Maggie asked on Monday afternoon, once Colleen had taken attendance and sixteen campers had washed up at the sinks.
At every station hands shot up into the air, frantically waving as if to say, Call on me! Let me tell you about my pet and how amazing she is!
Nixie’s hand did not go up.
Neither did Vera’s.
The two girls exchanged a small, sad smile.
Nixie already knew Boogie had a pet. She had seen him one day last summer walking a dog as big as he was, huge enough to ride like a pony. But she was surprised when Nolan raised his hand to be counted as a pet owner. He didn’t seem the type to have a pet.
“What kind of pet do you have?” she asked him.
“An iguana.”
Okay, that made sense.
“Campers!” Chef Maggie called over the din of kids comparing notes on their pets. “Settle down! We’re going to be making pet treats today—dog biscuits and cat cookies that are a delectable and nutritious way to reward your pet for good behavior and to supplement a healthy pet diet.”
“What if you don’t have a pet?” someone asked. Nixie waited to hear the answer.
“Then you can give the treats to a friend who does,” Chef Maggie suggested.
Ha! As if Nixie was going to give cat treats to Grace to give to Elyse to give to Cha-Cha! Cha-Cha wasn’t going to get any cat treats made by Nixie—never ever. Luckily Boogie’s dog could probably eat all the cat and dog treats made by all the campers and still be hungry.
Nixie didn’t really listen as Chef Maggie explained how to make dog and cat treats. Luckily, Vera listened extra-hard to anything any teacher said, and Nolan usually knew everything they were going to say already. But Nixie did collect the team’s cookie cutters: bone-shaped for the dog biscuits, fish-shaped for the cat cookies.
“Why do you have an iguana?” Nixie asked Nolan as he began measuring out two cups of whole-wheat flour for the dog biscuits. “Did your parents say you couldn’t have a dog?”
“I like iguanas,” Nolan said. “Besides, dogs slobber.”
“What about cats?” Nixie hoped he’d have something bad to say about cats, too.
“Cats scratch.”
Nixie wondered if Cha-Cha had ever scratched Grace or Elyse. If he had, they certainly hadn’t mentioned it.
“Why don’t you have a pet?” Nixie asked Vera.
Vera didn’t answer until she finished measuring exactly one tablespoon of bacon bits. As if dogs would be so fussy about having every single flavoring in their biscuits exactly right.
“My mother doesn’t like pets,” Vera replied.
“Any pets?”
“Any pets. She thinks they’re ridiculous.”
Nixie’s parents didn’t think pets were ridiculous. They thought pets were too much work. And expensive.
To make the dog biscuits tasty to dogs, the whole-wheat flour was mixed with bouillon, a little cube of chicken-soup flavoring dissolved in hot water. When all the ingredients—flour, salt, vegetable oil, egg (Vera cracked open the egg this time), bouillon water, and extra treats (bacon bits)—were mixed together, the dough was kneaded into a ball. The kneading was the best part: grabbing at the dough with floury hands and giving it lots of squeezes. When the dough became a lopsided ball, the campers rolled it out, then cut it into bone shapes with the cookie cutters.
The cat cookies had tuna mixed into the dough, which was utterly unappealing in Nixie’s opinion. She didn’t mind eating tuna herself, but the thought of tuna cookies made her feel like gagging.
While the dog biscuits and cat cookies were baking, Chef Michael showed the campers how to make a treat for wild birds: something disgusting called suet.
To make the suet they measured two cups of vegetable shortening—white, slippery, shiny fat that came in a can—and heated it in a pan on the stove. There were two enormous stoves in the school kitchen, but with sixteen campers, the space was crowded enough that the teams took turns, two teams in the kitchen at a time.
Once the shortening was melted, they poured it into a bowl and took it back to their table. There they added cornmeal, flour, and whatever extra treats they thought birds might like. Chef Michael and Chef Maggie had provided sunflower seeds, chopped nuts, and bits of dried fruit. The final step was to shape the mixture into patties and wrap them up in tinfoil.
“It looks gross!” Nixie moaned as she gazed down at her suet-sticky hands.<
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“I’m glad I’m not a bird,” Vera agreed. She said it so seriously, as if she had narrowly escaped being a bird, that Nixie giggled. She could totally relate. After making those tuna-fish cookies, Nixie had been glad she wasn’t a cat.
“It’s all ingredients that people eat,” Nolan pointed out.
“Vegetable shortening?” Nixie said. “People don’t eat that!”
“Of course they do,” Nolan said. “Not straight out of the can, but mixed in with other stuff to make piecrust, and pastries, and all kinds of things. You’ve just never cooked anything with it yourself before.”
That was the strange thing about cooking: seeing exactly what everything you ate was made out of.
“It tastes okay,” Boogie reported, taking his finger from his mouth.
“Boogie!” Nixie and Vera shrieked together.
“You stuck your finger in that?” Vera accused him.
“And then you licked it?” Nixie demanded.
“I wanted to see what it tasted like,” Boogie said. Then he cheeped like a bird, for good measure.
When the dog biscuits and cat cookies came out of the oven, and the suet patties had cooled and hardened in the huge refrigerator, it was time to divide up the treats to take home.
“I don’t want any dog biscuits or cat cookies,” Nixie said. Not that she wanted any suet, either.
“Chef Maggie said we could give them away to friends with dogs or cats,” Vera reminded her.
“I don’t have any friends with dogs or cats,” Nixie said.
Vera stared at her. “Are you kidding? What about Elyse? She has that new kitten! Cha-Cha would adore fish-shaped cookies!”
Elyse isn’t my friend, she’s Grace’s friend, Nixie wanted to say. But she had a feeling Vera would stare at her even more if she said that.
One thing Nixie knew for sure: giving cat cookies to Elyse wasn’t going to help her get Grace back. Elyse and Grace would have even more fun together feeding the cookies to Cha-Cha.
“Boogie can take mine,” Nixie said. She shoved her dog biscuits, cat cookies, and suet patties toward Boogie.
To her horror, Boogie grabbed one of the dog biscuits, broke it in half, and popped a piece into his mouth.
“Boogie!” Nixie and Vera shrieked again.
Boogie gave a sharp chorus of barks. Then, tossing a cat cookie into his already-full mouth, he meowed.
“Boogie!”
But now both girls were laughing, and Nolan joined in, too.
THE rest of the week was Pumpkin Week at camp. On Tuesday afternoon, a huge pile of pumpkins appeared in a corner of the cafeteria floor, as if the camp was being held in a pumpkin patch.
“Pumpkin soup!” Chef Maggie said. “Pumpkin pancakes! And of course, pumpkin pie!”
Nixie liked pumpkin okay. Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie. But she would turn into a pumpkin if she ate nothing but pumpkin four days in a row.
“And,” Chef Maggie added, “we’ll be videoing your camp for the pumpkin episode of our Kids Can Cook online series. Campers, this is Clove, our videographer wizard.” She pointed to a young woman with spiky hair dyed in bands of bright pink, deep purple, and neon green.
“Your job, campers,” Chef Maggie told them, “is to go about your work as you usually do and leave the filming up to Clove. We’re not following any scripts here. We want you to be yourselves.”
“Are we going to be famous?” Boogie shouted, bouncing on his heels as if he was about to bound up onstage to collect his Academy Award for Best Actor in a cooking video.
“Well,” Chef Maggie said cautiously, “this is going to be a professionally produced video and we can’t guarantee that every single camper will end up being featured in the final version. Clove will make the ultimate decision of what to keep and what to cut when she edits several hours of footage into a five-minute piece about our Pumpkin Week.”
But surely if Clove picked any team, she’d pick Nixie’s. No one else at camp was smarter than Nolan, funnier than Boogie, or more perfect than Vera. And no else at camp wanted this more than Nixie. No one else at camp needed it more than Nixie.
This would be the New and Improved Get Your Best Friend Back Plan! If Nixie’s team was the star of the cooking video, and if the video went viral on the Internet, and if a million people saw it, or even half a million, she would be famous. Maybe she would move to Hollywood and star in real movies, and have a huge mansion with a pool and ten dogs, and she’d invite Grace to fly to California to visit, and pay for her plane ticket, too.
First, though, they had to cut up the pumpkins. The adults helped with the hardest part of the cutting, but the scooping and scraping came next. It was like making jack-o’-lanterns, but a lot less fun, because they had to do the icky part of dealing with the goo but not the cool part of cutting the scary faces.
Why not use canned pumpkin? It would be so much quicker and easier! But when someone else asked that, Chef Michael said it would be quickest and easiest to buy a pumpkin pie from the store. Quick and easy wasn’t the point.
Nixie saw Clove scanning the teams of campers, trying to decide which one was wonderful enough to start filming first.
Pick us, pick us, pick us! Nixie beamed toward her. But it seemed that whenever Nixie looked Clove’s way, Clove had her camera trained on somebody else’s team.
Oh, well. No one was going to become a movie star by taking forever to cut and scoop out a week’s worth of pumpkins and then roast the pumpkin slices on big cookie trays in the ovens. So it wouldn’t be until Wednesday that any real pumpkin cooking could begin, and even then it was only going to be pumpkin soup.
Could Nixie really become famous enough to win Grace back by starring in a video on how to make pumpkin soup?
Well, she wouldn’t know until she tried.
* * *
At cooking camp the next day Nixie scrunched her eyes shut and clenched her fists tight to concentrate on beaming her Pick us, pick us, pick us! thoughts to Clove. This time it must have worked because Clove began slowly heading in their direction.
Nixie turned on her biggest movie-star smile. Clove would want to feature kids who acted like cooking was the most fun they had ever had in their lives.
Unfortunately, as Clove approached, Vera was acting like cooking was the total opposite of fun. Brow furrowed, she scowled down at the cutting board with intense concentration, cutting each roasted pumpkin slice into squares exactly half an inch long and half an inch wide. Vera probably thought Clove would want to feature kids who were perfect pumpkin-cutting machines. But at the rate Vera was cutting, it would take a whole five-minute video for her to cut three tiny squares of pumpkin.
“Pumpkins originated in Central America,” Nolan said, speaking more slowly, loudly, and distinctly than he usually did while imparting pointless trivia. “Did you know pumpkins are ninety percent water?”
He evidently thought Clove would want to feature kids who were walking encyclopedias of fascinating pumpkin facts. But Nixie couldn’t imagine Clove would want to include a lot of random pumpkin facts in a video that was only going to be five minutes long.
Nixie wanted to hiss to Vera, Smile!
She wanted to hiss to Nolan, Stop talking!
She wanted to tell both of them to act normal, but this was acting normal for Vera and Nolan. Besides, if she whispered anything to them, the whispering would end up on the video, too.
Nixie was afraid even to look at what Boogie was doing, but maybe it was better to know the worst.
When she stole a peek, Boogie was measuring out the maple syrup that would sweeten the soup. Some of the syrup dribbled onto his fingers, and Boogie, being Boogie, licked them. Then, with the same fingers that had just been in his mouth, he scooped up a handful of Vera’s pumpkin squares to dump into the pot of broth and spices they would carry in
to the kitchen for their turn at the stove.
Nixie stopped herself from giving her usual shriek of Boogie!
Clove followed their team into the kitchen. Nixie made sure to grab the spoon so she’d have her chance at stardom. Forcing herself to ignore her teammates, she did her best to smile brightly enough and stir vigorously enough to make up for Vera’s panicked perfectionism, Nolan’s irritating know-it-all-ism, and Boogie’s total grossness.
As the soup started to bubble around the edges, Nixie gave the mixture such a powerful stir that a square of boiling pumpkin splashed out of the pan and onto her bare wrist.
“Ow!” she yelped. “Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!”
“Are you okay?” Vera asked, her eyes wide with alarm.
“Run your wrist under cold water,” Nolan advised. “Go do it right now.”
Boogie scooped up the offending piece of pumpkin, blew on it a few times, and then popped it into his mouth.
Oh, what on earth must Clove be thinking? But when Nixie turned around to look at her, Clove and her camera had already moved back into the cafeteria.
Clutching her burned wrist, Nixie headed toward the sink to try Nolan’s cold-water cure, tears of pain and disappointment stinging the insides of her eyes.
So much for thinking she could win Grace back by starring in an online video on how to cook pumpkin soup.
* * *
Clove barely filmed their team during the rest of Pumpkin Week. Apparently, Nixie’s team had blown their one and only chance. By Friday Nixie had decided she was never going to eat any pumpkin ever again.
And by Friday Nixie was almost ready to decide she would never eat lunch with Grace and Elyse ever again, either. Grace had been playing with Elyse and Cha-Cha every day after school for two full weeks. Nixie would have thought that by now Cha-Cha’s antics would be less enthralling. But instead she had to hear about how Cha-Cha had gotten stuck in the laundry hamper, and how Cha-Cha had tumbled off the kitchen counter, and how loudly Cha-Cha purred for such a tiny kitten.
Nixie Ness Page 3
