Double Dog Dare

by Lisa Graff

  Kansas was heading to his desk with his head down, pretending to ignore the whispers of his fellow club members, when Miss Sparks clapped her hands together. Suddenly, every head in the class was turned his way.

  “Good morning, Media Club!” she said. “Before we get started on today’s announcements, I want you all to take a good look at Kansas and Francine.”

  Kansas’s insides turned to Jell-O. What was going on? Had Miss Sparks finally had it with the dares? Was she going to make an example of them? Next to him, Francine looked equally perplexed.

  From the back of the room, Luis snapped a picture.

  “Everyone,” Miss Sparks went on. She put one hand on Kansas’s shoulder and the other on Francine’s. “This”—Kansas closed his eyes and waited for the humiliation to go away—“this is what true school spirit looks like.”

  “Huh?” Kansas’s eyes popped open.

  “What?” Francine said.

  “Today,” Miss Sparks continued, “is School Spirit Day. We were all told to wear our school colors, green and white. And I see a few of you who tried”—she nodded at Alicia, in the far corner, wearing a green dress, and Natalie, with a flowery green and white headband—“but no one put as much effort into their school spirit today as Kansas and Francine here, and I think that’s really commendable, don’t you?”

  Commendable? Kansas looked down at his white tutu, and then up at Francine’s grass-green hair. Well, how about that? Maybe they were commendable.

  Miss Sparks squeezed his shoulder. “As you all know, Mrs. Weinmore will be visiting every classroom this morning to see which class has the most school spirit, and the winning class gets an ice cream party this afternoon. And I’d be willing to bet that with Kansas and Francine on our side, we just may be the ones to win it.”

  There was a cheer from somewhere in the back of the room, and then a squeal of “Ice cream!” And before Kansas knew what had happened, there was applause and a chant of “Kansas and Francine! Kansas and Francine!” And slowly, bit by bit, Kansas began to feel less like a dork in a tutu, and more like a champion of the fourth grade.

  “Francine and Kansas,” Miss Sparks went on, her teeth flashing full force, “I really have to hand it to you two. Not only did you wear the school colors, but you did it in a way that demonstrates your commitment to teamwork, which is what school spirit at Auden Elementary is really all about. It truly is an extraordinary effort on both your parts. I think this just goes to show that with the two of you working together, amazing things can happen.”

  Kansas glanced sideways at Francine. He could tell, from the look of burning hatred in her eyes, that for once in her life, she was thinking the exact same thing that he was.

  There was no way that the two of them would ever, ever, work together.

  13.

  A towering stack of CDs

  When Francine’s mother opened the curtains on Sunday morning to let the light stream across Francine’s bed, Francine was less than super thrilled about it.

  “Mmmm-fwuhp-aggh!” she cried, thrusting the crook of her elbow across her eyes to block the sun.

  “Good morning to you too, darling,” her mother said. And Francine could tell, without even looking at her, that her mother had a smile on her face.

  “I thought it was Sunday,” Francine said from underneath her arm.

  “It is Sunday, sleepyhead.” Her mother sat on the edge of Francine’s bed and gently removed Francine’s arm from her face. “We’re going to morning yoga today. Won’t that be fun?”

  Francine frowned. “Can’t we go to morning yoga after lunch?” she said, and she rolled over onto her side, planted her face in her vine-green hair, and pulled her blankets over her head.

  “Oh, now, silly, come on,” her mom said, tossing back all of Francine’s blankets. Francine’s chilly toes immediately curled up in protest. “We’ve been planning on going to Mommy and Me Yoga for ages, and we never get around to it. But today’s the day. Up, now. That’s a girl.” And she hoisted Francine up by the armpits.

  “Mmmmfle-blug,” Francine replied.

  That proved to not be enough of a compelling argument for Francine’s mother. By eight forty-five, they were sitting at the breakfast table, Francine’s hands wrapped around a salmon-asparagus wrap.

  “Breakfast,” her mother told her, as though maybe if she hadn’t clarified, Francine would have thought it was a snow boot. Francine took a bite before she was awake enough to remember that she hated salmon-asparagus wraps.

  The phone rang, and her mother picked it up. “It’s Natalie,” she said, handing the cordless to Francine.

  Francine swallowed her bite. “Hey,” she said into the phone. “What’s up?”

  “Can I come over now to help train Samson?” Natalie asked. She sounded like she’d already eaten breakfast, brushed her teeth, and done forty jumping jacks. “My dad said he’d drive me over when you woke up, and now you’re awake, so I’m coming. You want to work on climbing up ramps today?”

  “My mom’s making me do yoga.” Francine rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “But definitely after I get back. I have lots of good ideas.”

  “Cool,” Natalie said. “Call me as soon as you get home. And when we’re done with training, I can do your hair.”

  “My hair?”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna give you a makeover. I have some ideas to make you look less slimy.”

  “Okay,” Francine said with a laugh. “Well, I’ll see you then.”

  “Bye!”

  Francine hung up the phone and went back to her breakfast wrap. Talk about slimy, she thought, taking a bite.

  As Francine chewed, her mother sat across from her, staring, one hand wrapped around her tea mug. It took Francine a moment to realize that what her mother was staring at was her.

  “Mom?” she said. “You okay?”

  Her mother blinked. “Oh. No, I’m fine. I …”

  “Mom?”

  “It’s just …” She heaved a deep sigh. “It wasn’t some sort of preteenage rebellion thing, was it?”

  “Huh?” Sometimes talking to parents was like trying to crack a code.

  “Your hair,” her mother replied. She lifted her mug to her mouth, but then set it down again without taking a sip. “I mean, I know you said you did it because that boy dared you, but I can’t help wondering if this is your way of … What I mean is … are you upset about the divorce?”

  Francine rolled her eyes. Jeez, her parents went and got one idiotic divorce and suddenly that was the only thing either of them could talk about. “I told you, I did it so I could be the news anchor at school.” She took an enormous bite of her breakfast wrap. Even eating salmon and asparagus was better than having this conversation. “Not everything I do is because of you and Dad, you know.”

  Her mother stared into her mug for a long minute, silent. Then she got up, walked to the sink, and poured all her tea slowly down the drain. When she turned around, she leaned against the sink, arms jutting out from her sides, and studied Francine. “I think it looks nice,” she said at last. “Your hair. It’s unusual. And sort of lovely.”

  Francine squinted one eye at her mother. If Francine had gone and dyed her hair green a month ago, her mom would not have said it was lovely. She would’ve grounded her until she was old enough to vote. Maybe getting a divorce made you nutty. “I look like a frog,” she told her mother. She wadded her napkin into a ball. “And it’s never gonna come out, either.” Francine had already shampooed her hair thirteen times in the past two days, and it was still as green as a fern. And the worst part was that she couldn’t even come up with any terrible dares to get Kansas back. After Friday morning, the Media Club had decided that Francine and Kansas couldn’t dare each other anymore. Even if the two of them had accidentally won the class an ice cream party, the other members were slightly miffed that they hadn’t gotten to vote on their dares ahead of time. So now every dare had to come from them. It made sense, really, Francine thought. But a lot
of good it did her now. She was still losing—three points to four—and at this rate it looked like she might never catch up.

  “I’m going to be a frog forever,” she said.

  Her mother considered that for a moment. Then she pushed herself away from the counter. “I have an idea,” she said, grabbing Francine’s hand and hoisting her to her feet.

  After leading Francine to the armchair in the front room, her mother plopped her down and told her to wait. “I need supplies!” she said, disappearing down the hallway. When she returned, she had a fistful of bobby pins and hair ties. Francine craned her neck around to inspect them, but her mother twisted her head forward again. “It’s a surprise,” she said. And she proceeded to brush and yank and tug at Francine’s hair, not in a way that hurt, but carefully, gently, the way she used to when Francine had been really little.

  “Don’t we have to go to yoga?” Francine asked.

  “We have a few minutes. Keep your head up. There.”

  Francine’s mother twisted and tucked, parted and pleated, until finally she announced, “All done!” She stuck the last bobby pin deep into Francine’s hair. “Come on, I’ll show you in the mirror.”

  Francine followed her mother to the bathroom, where she was turned around in front of the mirror. Her mom raised a handheld mirror in front of her face so Francine could see the back of her hair.

  It was all braids. Big ones and small ones, curled over and around one another. One large, green maze of hair.

  “I love it,” Francine said, gazing at herself. “Thank you.”

  “See?” Her mom set her head on top of Francine’s so that their faces were one on top of the other in the mirror. “You’re not a frog at all. You’re a frog princess.”

  Besides the teacher, there were only nine people at Mommy and Me Yoga. Which made sense, Francine thought, because who wanted to go to yoga while you were still digesting breakfast? There was a skinny twelve-year-old boy who wore his sweat shorts up so high they were practically under his armpits. Both he and his mother looked much too serious for yoga. The curly-haired sisters and their mother were all so stretchy that Francine could tell they’d been going to yoga for ages. There was also an older lady with a girl who was probably about five or six, the youngest of the group. The girl had her brown hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail, and she spent most of the time falling over and giggling. Francine thought that maybe the older lady was the girl’s grandmother, until she heard the girl call her Mrs. Muñoz.

  Francine tried her best to stand straight as a board with her left foot in the crook of her right knee, but no matter how many times the instructor, Lulu, told her to “focus your mind to find your balance,” Francine kept falling over. She decided Lulu was the one who was unbalanced.

  “Isn’t this great?” Francine’s mother asked while they were doing downward-facing dog, their butts up in the air and their legs stretched almost to breaking behind them. “I can feel all my stress just melting away. We’re definitely coming next week.”

  Francine didn’t even have the energy to argue.

  After the class was over, Francine’s mother went to the front desk to sign them up for a month of lessons and Francine plopped herself on the bench outside the classroom to wait. She hadn’t been sitting there three seconds when the giggly girl with the sloppy ponytail sat down beside her.

  “Hi,” the girl said. “I’m Ginny.”

  Francine just shrugged. She wasn’t in the mood for chatting.

  But apparently Ginny was. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Francine.”

  “I like your hair.” Ginny kicked her feet in the air.

  “Anyone want a snack?”

  Francine looked up. Lulu was standing in front of them with a bowl of granola bars. “I always like to keep a few for my students. Just in case they need a little sustenance after class.”

  Francine shrugged again and dug a granola bar out of the bowl.

  “Ginny?” Lulu said, offering her the bowl.

  Ginny shook her head. “I’m allergic.”

  Francine ripped open her granola bar as Lulu went to talk to the parents. Next to her, Ginny kept swinging her legs. Francine sort of wanted to ask her to stop, because she was shaking the whole bench, but that would involve talking, and Francine wasn’t really in the mood.

  “Have you ever seen The Parent Trap?” Ginny asked suddenly.

  Francine looked up.

  “My friend Stephanie at school was talking about it,” Ginny went on. “I’ve never seen it. It sounds really good.”

  Francine nodded. She’d seen that movie, years ago. It was about twin girls who tricked their divorced parents into falling in love again so they’d get remarried. She took a bite of her granola bar. “Yeah,” she said in between chews. “It’s okay.”

  “Mrs. Muñoz said she’d rent it for me. I wanna watch it ’cause my parents are getting divorced.”

  Francine stopped chewing. “Oh,” she said.

  “Stephanie said in the movie they make their parents have, like, a really romantic date, and then they remember how much they love each other. You think something like that would work on my parents?”

  Francine plucked a granola crumb from where it had landed on her T-shirt. “Maybe,” she said, popping the crumb in her mouth.

  “I bet my brother’d help me,” Ginny said, back to swinging her feet again. “He’s real nice. He loves helping me. Except when he’s doing his homework. He has homework a lot. He’s real smart. What would you do if your parents were getting divorced?”

  Francine licked the stickiness off her fingers. “How can you be allergic to granola bars?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  Luckily, Ginny didn’t seem to notice that Francine had changed the subject. “It’s not really granola bars,” she explained, swinging her legs even higher. “It’s peanuts. If I eat a single bite of a peanut, my face’ll blow up red and hivey, and I have to go to the hospital right away or I could keel over.”

  “But then you should just get one that’s not peanut flavor,” Francine replied. “See?” She held out her granola bar wrapper for Ginny to examine. “Chocolate chip.”

  Ginny shook her head. “There’s peanut traces. Everything has ’em, almost. Granola bars, bread, chocolate, chili sometimes.” She counted them off on her fingers. “I gotta check everything. Mom says I’m a pain in the neck to shop for.” She grinned.

  “You can’t eat chocolate?” Francine had never heard of anything so terrible.

  “Check the wrapper if you don’t believe me. I’ll bet you a headstand.”

  Francine flattened the wrapper to read the ingredients. Sure enough, Ginny was right. It was right there on the label: “This product may contain peanut traces.”

  “Headstand!” Ginny cried.

  Even after a full hour of yoga, Francine couldn’t do a headstand to save her life. She tried it with her eyes closed. She tried it holding her breath. She tried it with her back braced against the wall. Each time, she fell—plop!—on the floor in a heap. After the fifth try, Ginny joined her, but she turned out to be no better than Francine. Soon they were both giggling, tumbling out of one headstand, then another. They decided to make up their own yoga poses instead, and Ginny told Francine more about her older brother, who sounded smart and funny and brave.

  “He’s super good at basketball too,” Ginny told her as she twisted her arms around her torso like a human tornado. “He’s practically in the NBC.”

  “You mean the NBA?” Francine asked. She was halfway bent against the wall, one hand next to her head, and the other stretched out for balance.

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “I see you’ve finally taken to yoga,” Francine’s mother said, coming back over to retrieve her.

  Francine looked at her mother’s upside-down face. “I call this one ‘downward-facing guinea pig,’” she said, just before Ginny sneak-attack tickled her in the armpit and she fell over laughing once more.
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  “You’re coming next week, right, Franny?” Ginny asked.

  Normally Francine hated it when people called her Franny, but Ginny was so cute, she somehow didn’t mind so much. “Yep,” she told her. “You too?”

  “You bet.”

  Francine’s mother smiled as they walked to the car. “See, now, that wasn’t so terrible, was it?”

  Francine grunted in reply. Sometimes, she had discovered, it was best not to let parents know when they were right.

  It wasn’t until they were half a block from home that Francine spotted the familiar blue sedan parked in their driveway. “Dad’s here!” she shouted.

  Her mother did not respond. Instead, she inched the car toward their house and stopped in front of their driveway. She didn’t pull in, even though there was plenty of room next to Francine’s father’s car. She just stopped the car, right there in the middle of the street, and stared at the empty spot in the driveway.

  “Mom?” Francine said. “Why aren’t you parking?”

  Francine’s mother rested her hands on the steering wheel. “What do you say we go out for frozen yogurt?” she asked.

  Francine looked at the clock. “It’s eleven o’clock,” she said.

  “The diner, then?” Her mother smoothed her hands across the steering wheel. “You could get strawberry pancakes.”

  The last time Francine had tried to order strawberry pancakes at the diner, her mother had told her she might as well inject sugar directly into her veins. “I want to go see Dad,” she said, and she opened her door.

  “Francine,” her mother said, but Francine ignored her, stretching one leg out of the car. “Francine!”

  Francine pulled her leg, slowly, back into the car and turned to look at her mother.

  Her mom took a long breath, in and out.

  “Your father’s moving to a new apartment this afternoon,” she said at last. “He’s at our house so he can pack, and I told him we’d stay out of his hair while he … I didn’t think it would take so long. I should’ve … let’s go to the diner, huh? I just think it will be easier if we give your dad some time to himself.”