Double Dog Dare

by Lisa Graff

  “Someone vomited on the camera?” Kansas said, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “But me and Francine were too far away. We couldn’t have—”

  “Emma Finewitz,” the principal told him, turning back to her papers once and for all, “was number forty-five.”

  21.

  A sketchbook

  What happened when you got suspended at 8:16 on a Friday morning, Francine discovered, was that you had to go to your dad’s morning art class, and the whole way there, he wouldn’t even look at you or call you “pea pod,” and every time you tried to talk to him, he’d just frown and say, “We’ll discuss it later, all right, Francine?”

  All through her dad’s never-ending slideshow about the Impressionist art movement, Francine shifted in her seat in the last row, trying to get comfortable. She didn’t understand how college students could sit at such teeny-tiny desks. Her desk at school was at least three times as big, and she was only in fourth grade. She studied the graffiti that had been carved into her desktop. JBCL. JBTK. JBIN. And then, the most perplexing, one large scrawl that simply read Rocketship.

  Francine scooped her father’s sketchbook out of the book bag he’d left beside her desk and flipped through it to see if he’d been working on anything new. Sure enough, near the very end, there was a new machine. This one involved dominoes and bike tires, a sprinkler system, hammers and seltzer bottles, and three cantaloupes. At the very end, a string yanked on a fork to turn on a light switch. Francine stuck her nose right down into the sketchbook, counting. Thirty-seven steps.

  Suddenly Francine snapped the sketchbook closed with such a thud that her father frowned at her from the front of the room.

  Thirty-seven steps. Thirty-seven steps, all to do something that in the end might not even work anyway.

  Francine sank down low in the tiny metal desk chair. It was all so pointless, she realized. Nothing seemed to really matter anymore. Not her father’s machines—because they were never going to build one for real, even if her dad kept promising they would. Not Samson training—because he’d never be able to do anything more than crawl straight forward and squeak. Not even the dare war—because Media Club was canceled, so who cared who won? All the plans Francine had ever made, all the steps for her life she’d spent so long plotting out in great detail, were as meaningless as the pen strokes in her dad’s sketchbook. Things never worked out the way you planned them. There were always hitches in the middle, problems you didn’t see coming. So what was the use in even trying?

  That evening, Francine called Natalie’s house. She needed someone to talk to, her best friend, and she figured maybe it was finally time to tell Natalie about her parents. But Natalie’s mother informed Francine that Natalie was at Alicia’s house. She’d be spending the whole weekend there, she said. Would Francine like to leave a message?

  “No,” Francine said. “Thank you.” And she hung up the phone.

  22.

  A TENNIS BALL

  What happened when you got suspended at 8:16 on a Friday morning, Kansas discovered, was that your mother had to leave her shift at the gift shop to pick you up at school, and the whole car ride home she yelled at you and lectured and wondered how you could possibly get yourself in trouble at a school you’d only been attending for three weeks. And then, just as you were about to defend yourself, she told you that you were becoming more and more like your father every day, and that you better get your act together, young man, or God help you.

  “But—” Kansas tried to protest.

  “I don’t even want to hear it, Kansas.”

  Kansas’s mom said no computer, no video games, no TV. If he really wanted to be useful, she told him, he could clean up the mess of broken boxes in his and Ginny’s room that had been sitting there for the past four days. So Kansas spent most of the day lying on the floor of his bedroom in front of the boxes and not cleaning them up at all, staring at the toys and books and sweaters that had spewed out everywhere. The only things that were left of their old life.

  Kansas opened the front door and poked his head outside, checking the Muñozes’ house next door. The night was crisp and dark, just a few stars in the sky, but Kansas could still make out the basketball hoop.

  He poked his head back inside and shut the door.

  Then he opened the door again.

  And shut it.

  “What the heck are you doing?”

  Kansas whirled around and glared at Ginny, standing there in her tutu with her hands on her hips. “Nothing,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

  “If you wanna go out there and play with the basketball hoop, you can, you know. Mr. Muñoz said you could go over whenever you want.”

  “That’s not even what I’m looking at. Like you know everything. For your information I was checking the weather.”

  “Then why are you holding your basketball?”

  “Shut up,” Kansas told her.

  “At least I’m not afraid of a basketball hoop,” Ginny replied. And she leapt back into the living room, doing her best ballerina twirl.

  Kansas wasn’t afraid of a basketball hoop. It was just sort of weird to go shoot hoops in an old person’s driveway. Even if that old person already told you that you could.

  Kansas gripped the ball tight against his left hip and opened the door again. After a full day squashed up in his room doing nothing, he decided, he needed to go outside.

  He’d made eight free throws in a row when Mr. Muñoz stepped out of his front door. “Hoop looks nice there, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “Yeah.” Kansas shot again into the darkness and—swish!—nothing but net.

  “You’re pretty good, you know that?” Mr. Muñoz said, hands in his pockets. “Your dad teach you?”

  The ball bounced back toward Kansas, and he retrieved it, dribbling a few times as he crossed the driveway. Then he lined up another shot and—swish!—sank it again.

  Mr. Muñoz watched silently while Kansas made three more perfect shots. He just stood there, watching. Kansas figured he must be pretty bored, if all he had to do was watch some kid shoot hoops in his driveway.

  Kansas missed the next shot. The ball went wonky, shooting off the rim and hitting the ground without a bounce. It rolled across the driveway, where it landed at Mr. Muñoz’s feet. He picked it up.

  “I was never much of an athlete myself,” Mr. Muñoz said, juggling the ball in his hands a bit as though he were testing its weight. “Always better with mechanics, things like that.” He shot the ball toward the hoop, but Kansas could tell, even before the ball left his hands, that it wasn’t going to make it. His grip was too loose, his angle too high.

  The ball was short by four feet. Kansas caught it and dribbled it back to the leaf he’d been using as his three-point line. He shot again and scored.

  “You should join the basketball team at your school,” Mr. Muñoz said. “With talent like yours, I’m sure you’d be a shoo-in.”

  Kansas shot another three-pointer. “There’s a club,” he replied. Now that Kansas thought about it, he supposed he could join basketball, with Media Club canceled and everything. But … “I don’t really feel like it, though.”

  “Oh?” Kansas could almost feel Mr. Muñoz raising an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

  Kansas just shrugged. He didn’t know how to explain it. How every time he sank a basket, it reminded him just a little bit of his dad. How even though he loved playing basketball—and knew he was good at it—he hated it just a little bit too. How he wasn’t sure if the hate part would ever go away.

  “I don’t know,” he told Mr. Muñoz.

  Mr. Muñoz was quiet after that, just watching Kansas sink baskets. But after a while he said, “You know, I’ve been working on a new project lately. Thought you might be interested in helping me this weekend. I could teach you how to use the power saw.”

  Kansas shot again. “No, thanks,” he said. Swish! “I’m pretty busy. Homework and stuff.” He retrieved the ball and aimed again.

 
Shoot and swish!

  “Well,” Mr. Muñoz said, “anyway. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  “’Kay,” Kansas said. He shot again.

  “Have a good night, Kansas.”

  With that, Mr. Muñoz stepped inside the house and shut the door.

  Kansas stayed outside, shooting and swishing, until the lights went out in the Muñozes’ house thirty minutes later. Then he tucked the ball under his arm and crossed the driveway back to his own house.

  Saturday afternoon, Kansas sat in his room bouncing a dirty tennis ball against the wall, trying to ignore the music from the dumb girly movie that Ginny was blasting from the living room. He’d woken up early that morning to try out the basketball hoop, but even at seven thirty, Mr. Muñoz had been out there, working in the garage with the door open. He asked Kansas if he wanted to play a game of HORSE with him, and Kansas had lied and said that he had just gone out to get the mail. Then he scuttled back inside the house without even remembering to check the mailbox.

  Brilliant.

  From the living room, Ginny turned the volume on the TV up, and Kansas responded by throwing the ball even harder, chucking it against the wall with a steady thud thud thud.

  Thud, thud, THWACK.

  Ginny turned the volume up so loud that Kansas could have sworn the television was inside his brain.

  “Ginny!” he hollered, snatching up his tennis ball and storming into the living room. “Can you turn that thing down?”

  She stuck her tongue out at him without bothering to take her eyes off the screen. “Stop making so much noise so I can hear it.”

  Kansas looked at the TV. Two girls were wearing camp clothes, hanging up photos in a log cabin during a rainstorm. “Why would you even want to watch this?” he asked his sister. “It looks like the stupidest movie ever.”

  “Is not,” Ginny said. “It’s good. It’s The Parent Trap. These two girls are twins, and their parents get divorced, and they’re gonna try to fix it. Franny from yoga said it was really good. I want to see how it ends.”

  Kansas frowned. He didn’t care what some old lady from Ginny’s yoga class had said. He recognized the movie now. He’d watched it before, when he was just Ginny’s age, right after their father left the first time. And he knew exactly how it ended.

  Kansas dropped his tennis ball, stormed over to the TV, and punched the power button. The image on the screen flashed bright white for a split second, then disappeared with a zap.

  “Hey!” Ginny hollered. “Why’d you do that? Turn it back on!” She was already on her feet, racing to the TV, but Kansas stopped her and pinned her arms to her sides.

  “You’re not allowed to watch that movie,” he told her. “It’s stupid.”

  “I am too allowed to watch it! Let me go!”

  Kansas would not let go. Even as Ginny wiggled in his arms, he held her still and tried to talk sense to her. “You just want to watch it ’cause you want that to happen to Mom and Dad,” he said. “You want them to get back together.”

  “Yeah, so?” Ginny reached out a hand to turn the TV back on, but Kansas caught her in time.

  “So,” he said, “it’s not gonna happen.”

  Five days. It had been five days since Kansas’s father had driven back to Oregon. Five days since “talk to you soon!” And not a word since then. Ginny had tried to call him, of course, several times. But she never got ahold of him.

  It was time to tell Ginny the truth.

  “Dad’s never coming back for good,” he told her.

  “He is too!” Ginny screeched at him. She bit him on the arm then, hard, and when he hollered and let her go, she raced into the hallway. Kansas chased after her, but she got to their bedroom first and slammed the door. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Kansas!” she shouted from the other side. Kansas tried to force the door open, but Ginny had her whole body against it, and she was stronger than she looked. “You don’t even know! He is coming back. He’s gonna move here and live with us. You’ll see.”

  Kansas gave up and slumped to the ground, his back against the door.

  “He loves us,” Ginny said from the other side.

  “Ginny.” Kansas tried to make his voice steady. Calm. “Mom and Dad are getting a divorce.”

  “They are not! Dad’s gonna move here. He is.”

  Kansas sighed. “He left before,” he told Ginny. Kansas didn’t want to tell her, he hadn’t ever wanted to tell her, but he needed to. It was the only way she would understand. “You don’t remember because you were too little, but he left before. He went away all of a sudden, just like this time. And it would have been better if he’d never come back at all.”

  Even through the thickness of the door, Kansas could make out the unmistakable sound of Ginny sniffling. She was quiet for a moment, then, “I don’t believe you.”

  Kansas plucked a piece of lint out of the carpet. “It’s true,” he said. “You were three. And he left for a month.”

  Another sniffle. Kansas could just picture her, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “But he came back,” she said softly. “He came back, and that means he loves us. And he’ll come back again.”

  About a foot away, Kansas spied another piece of lint and leaned over to yank it out of the carpet, rolling it between his fingers into a tiny ball. “He came back,” he said, choosing each word carefully, “because you got sick.”

  “I got sick?” Ginny asked. Sniffle.

  “Yeah. It was when … It was the first time we figured out you were allergic to peanuts, and you had to go to the hospital, and everyone was really worried about you, and you were hooked up to all these machines and we thought you might …” Kansas could still remember Ginny’s little three-year-old face, blotchy and red and scared as they raced her to the hospital. “It was awful,” he told her. “And that’s why Dad came back.”

  Sniffle. When Ginny spoke again, her voice was a whimper. “But he came back,” she said. “And he stayed. And he loved us.”

  Kansas sighed again. He didn’t know how to explain it. When his father had come back that time, Kansas had been just like Ginny—six years old and so excited to see his father. But somehow, all along, in the back of his mind, he’d known. He’d known that his dad was going to leave again. That it was just a matter of time before he left for good. Did he love them? Kansas didn’t know. He thought maybe he did, in some way, but not in the way that made you stick around and be a dad.

  Not enough.

  Kansas dropped the lint back on the carpet and stood up slowly. He took a deep breath. He wanted, more than anything, for Ginny to understand, so he told her clearly and carefully.

  “Mom and Dad are never getting back together,” he said for the last time. “Not ever. So you should stop hoping.”

  Even as he walked away, Kansas could hear Ginny’s sobs.

  23.

  A granola bar

  Samson woke Francine up three times Saturday night, wheeking from inside his cage, begging to play. Francine figured he was probably restless because he’d been left alone, bored for the past two days while she was at her dad’s house, so when he woke her up the third time, she finally gave in. “You need attention, Squeaky Squeaks?” she asked, padding across the carpet to his cage.

  At eight thirty, Francine’s mother pushed open the door to find Francine guiding Samson through a new guinea pig obstacle course made out of a pair of pajama pants. Samson was supposed to go in one leg, then out the other. But he kept getting confused in the waist area.

  “He’s not the brightest bulb, is he?” Francine’s mother said from the doorway, watching Samson turn in circles inside a pant leg. “Although he sure is adorable.”

  Francine smiled, rescuing Samson from the pants and cradling him to her chest. He needed a lot of work before they starred in their TV show together. Francine needed a lot of work too. She hated to admit it, but she’d been absolutely freaked out in front of the camera on Friday, and not only because of the booger and the
barfing. Being on the other end of that blinking green light had turned out to be a lot more nerve-racking than she’d expected.

  “You better get dressed if we’re going to make yoga,” her mother continued. “Breakfast is already on the table. Oh, and Francine?” her mother said, turning around in the doorway. “Your father and I finally figured out Christmas plans this year.”

  Francine didn’t realize how hard she must’ve been squeezing Samson until—

  Squeak!

  “Uh, Christmas?” Francine said, loosening her grip.

  “Yes. You’ll be here Christmas Eve and early the morning after. And then your father will take you to church, and you’ll have Christmas dinner with him. Your father said he’d get a Christmas tree too, so you’ll have two to decorate this year. Won’t that be nice?”

  Squeak!

  Francine must have been super-squeezing Samson again, because he shot out of her hands and across the floor. And by the time Francine had scooped him up and shut him safely back in his cage, her mother had already left the room. She hadn’t even waited for an answer to her question.

  All through yoga class, Francine tried to twist her body the way Lulu showed them, but she found that what was really twisted was her mind.

  Christmas morning with her mom and Christmas evening with her dad—splitting the day right in two. How was her father going to wake her up with a steaming mug of eggnog? How was she supposed to hear her mother singing all her favorite Christmas hymns in church, in her beautiful, clear voice? Was this the way it was going to be every single year from now on?

  Francine was so busy thinking about the mess her parents had gotten her into with their stupid divorce that it took her a while to notice that Ginny was in an even more sour mood than she was. She wasn’t giggly and tumbly, the way she’d been the week before. In fact, she looked downright depressed.