I walked through my house and fell face-first onto my bed. This was all very marvelous news. In fact, it was so marvelous I thought about calling Aunt Stella and telling her that she had been right. I was ten. I didn’t need to worry about money. Or being in the hole. Besides, the hole must not have been as big as my dad thought. My parents had declared a truce! They didn’t need mediation after all! This made me feel so fantastic that I decided to go for a walk around my house and celebrate. I grabbed a banana and went to the backyard.
“I’m going outside to do some stuff,” I said.
“Wear your gloves,” my mother said. “On your hands.”
This was a good reminder. Sometimes I kept them tucked inside my pocket.
Even though the ground was snowy, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled around like a very thrilled dingo. That’s when I saw something. It was a squirrel. And I’d seen this squirrel before. It had been visiting my window for over a year. It did this for two reasons. One, the squirrel liked me. Two, I often left the squirrel yummy food like popcorn and lunch meat.
That’s when I realized something important. This squirrel probably wanted to be my pet. Because it was always looking for me. I squinted to make sure it was the same squirrel I’d been taking care of all year. I remembered it as being fluffier during the summer. But then I realized that squirrels might not look exactly the same all year long. Because they lived in the wild, and those conditions were severe.
The squirrel twitched its tail. It looked cold. But was I really ready for another pet? What if I found Checkers? Would she get along with my new pet squirrel? My dad had told me that I was never going to see Checkers again, due to the fact that she was in heaven. He was firm on this. But my mother always said there was hope. Sometimes, when this topic came up, my father looked out the window and didn’t say anything else. I guess he didn’t like talking about heaven. Even though, from what I heard, it sounded like a pretty fantastic place. Except for the fact that you had to be dead to get there. The squirrel stood up very straight and froze. It had cute ears. I decided to name it Rhonda.
Since squirrels are such excellent runners, I stood up too. Because chasing my new pet squirrel Rhonda on my hands and knees would have meant losing my new pet squirrel. She crouched down again. I made sure my gloves were on tight and lifted up my hands. She was investigating something in the low branches of the yew bush beneath my window. I sneaked closer. The cold kept making Rhonda twitch. I knew she would be very grateful to live in my house.
“Rhonda,” I sweetly called. “Welcome to your new, warm home.”
That’s when I learned many terrible things about Rhonda. First, she wasn’t very grateful after all. Second, she was evil. And one of the things that made Rhonda evil was that she was an unkind mammal. Rhonda turned around and ran toward me. She was acting like she wanted to bite me. Maybe to death. That’s when I pictured heaven and ran very fast.
It was awful.
“I don’t want you anymore,” I said. “Go away!”
I hoped the evil squirrel would run up a tree. But it didn’t want to do that. Because it was evil. The squirrel followed me into the front yard. And made barking sounds. It was a pretty rude squirrel, too. I think I was screaming really loud, because Polly came running over.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“That evil squirrel isn’t grateful at all. It hates me!” I said.
“What evil squirrel?” Polly asked. “Are you playing a game?”
I thought her questions were pretty dumb. First, I was not okay. I was sweating. Second, there was no such game as running away from an evil squirrel. And even if there was, there’s no way I could’ve been playing it, because I was screaming for real, and when I played games, I didn’t scream for real. But when I turned to point at the evil squirrel, it had totally disappeared. I hated that thing.
“It was right there,” I said, pointing to an empty patch of snow. “Look, you can see its tracks.”
“I don’t need to see its tracks,” Polly said. “I believe you.”
Then she did this awful thing. I was totally unprepared for it. Polly smiled at me. I didn’t want her to do that. Why did she think I wanted her to do that? What was wrong with her?
“Do you want to come over and paint?” she asked.
This offer was more awful than the first awful thing and way more awful than that evil squirrel. I didn’t know what to say. The silence lasted a long time. Her smile melted. Then the sad Polly face I was used to seeing at the bus stop returned.
“Maybe another time,” she said.
I watched her leave. I watched her hurry across my yard and hers. I watched her climb her cement steps and go back inside her house. I watched her stringy-haired head move past her living room window as she disappeared into a room deep inside her home. I let out a big sigh. I think it was mostly filled with relief. I didn’t need a friend. I needed an international calling card. And I hoped that Polly could understand that.
Chapter 10
Avoid the Spark
When I woke up the next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about quarters. I really liked quarters. Maybe too much. Because out of the fifty dollars that I’d saved, almost all of it was in quarters. And those things are heavy, and if I was serious about buying an inter national calling card, I was going to need to pay for it in bills. If I didn’t, people in line behind me would hate me. And when people in line behind me hated me, it made me feel rotten.
I thought a good person to talk to about this was Mrs. Bratberg. Because she was the person who was paying me in quarters. Because I had told her many times that I preferred quarters to everything. I called her on the phone, and she was very nice about my idea.
“I would like to be paid in bills today,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
“Also, I have too many quarters. I need to turn them into bills.”
“Bring them over,” she said. “I can use them to teach Dustin a practical lesson in math.”
Before I went over to the Bratbergs’, I put all of my change in one of my dad’s socks and put that sock in my coat pocket. I also packed my cooler and said goodbye to my mother.
“Don’t tell your father,” she said.
“I won’t.”
My dad was on a business trip in Utah. Which worked out for me. As I walked over to the Bratbergs’, I did a little bit of looking for Checkers. I also did some looking for that evil squirrel. But I didn’t see either. I also stopped by my mother’s old Chevy, because I had been finding lots of change in there. Mostly in her ashtray.
But I didn’t find any change in there that day. Instead, I found a note:
Camille, stop taking all my change. I use it to pay the parking meters in town. Without any quarters, I’m going to get a ticket.
This note made me feel pretty bad. So I opened up my sock and gave my mom two quarters. Then I found a pen and wrote:
Here you go, Mom. Enjoy my quarters.
When I got to the Bratbergs’, I learned some good and some bad news. First, Brody had a sprained ankle and wasn’t allowed to get out of bed for anything. Except to use the bathroom. That meant I only had to focus on the other two Bratbergs. Then, Mrs. Bratberg told me the bad news.
“Camille,” she said, grabbing her coat. “There’s been an incident.”
“Does that mean you don’t need a mother’s helper today?” I asked. I didn’t understand why she’d put on her coat. I didn’t think their house was cold.
“The post office just called me. I made a mistake on postage, so they’re holding my packages. If I don’t go down there and take care of it right now, my shipments won’t go out today. Do you know what that will do to my seller’s-reputation score?”
“Lower it?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Bratberg said.
“So we’re going to the post office?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Camille, I need to ask you to do something that I don’t no
rmally ask you to do.” She placed one hand heavily on my shoulder.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Just for today, for the next hour, I need you to be more than a mother’s helper. I need you to be a babysitter.”
“A babysitter?” I asked. I didn’t think I’d be one of those until I was in high school.
“You’ve got my cell phone number,” she said, picking up her purse. “What do you think? Can you do it?”
I glanced at Samantha and Dustin. Then I looked back at Mrs. Bratberg.
“I’ll pay you double,” Mrs. Bratberg said.
I heard myself say, “Okay.”
“I’ll be back in one hour,” she said. “Except it might take an hour and a half.” Then she slammed the door.
“See you,” I said. But the door was already closed.
After Mrs. Bratberg left, I decided to lay down the law with Samantha and Dustin.
“You are not allowed to take your turtle out of its aquarium,” I said.
They nodded.
“And you can’t put your underpants in the microwave. Or touch any glue. And nobody is allowed to put anybody in a plastic bag.”
“We won’t,” Samantha said.
“Today, I’m the babysitter,” I said.
Samantha and Dustin smiled at me.
“Okay,” Dustin said.
I was relieved to hear them agree with me so quickly. They were pretty good at keeping their word. I let out a deep breath. Then I checked on Brody. Peeking through the crack of his barely open bedroom door, I saw his foot resting on a stack of pillows. He didn’t look like he was going anywhere. Even to the bathroom. So I shut the door, found some snacks, took my sock (because I didn’t want to leave it unattended), grabbed the remote control, and found a comfortable place to sit.
“Can we go outside?” Samantha asked. She was wearing a big, red, puffy coat zipped to her chin. She’d wrapped her scarf around her head, leaving only her dark brown eyes showing.
“It’s cold out,” I said, tossing potato chips into my mouth. I was comfortably seated in the middle of their enormous beanbag. And I’d turned on the Science Channel. A badger was chewing on a rotten log. Inside, he had found a thick wall of honeycomb. Bees were stinging him like crazy.
“I’ll only be out for five minutes,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me.
“Where’s Dustin?” I asked.
“He’ll come too,” she said, slipping on her gloves.
I didn’t think it was a great idea, but I didn’t think it was the worst idea in the world either. Because their turtle was inside. And so was the microwave. And their underpants. And all their glue. And everything else that was off-limits.
“Don’t you want to watch the badger?” I asked. I pointed to the screen. That badger had a real sweet tooth. Even when the bees stung his pink gums, he kept biting at the log.
Samantha looked at the TV and shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Five minutes,” I said.
I heard her boots pound down the hall. Had I been listening more closely, I would have realized that I heard one set of boots thumping out the door, and one set of boots being dragged out the door.
You’d think that I would have gotten tired of watching that badger eat honey. But I didn’t. When Samantha came back inside, I knew that she had been gone for a lot longer than five minutes.
“Your face is really red,” I said. “You should come sit down and watch this badger.” She stared at me hard, unblinking.
“I guess we can watch something else,” I said, reaching for the remote. “Go get Dustin.”
Samantha didn’t move.
“I can’t,” she said, speaking through her scarf.
“Why not?” I asked, rolling off the beanbag onto my hands and knees.
“Because I don’t have the key.” Her brown eyes had grown very big.
“What key?” I asked.
“The Halloween key,” she said. One perfect tear rolled out of her eye and dripped onto her coat.
“Did you lock him in a pumpkin or something?”
She didn’t answer. Then I remembered. For Halloween all three of them had dressed up as sheriffs, and all three of them had handcuffs.
“Does this involve handcuffs?” I asked, grabbing her by the shoulders.
“After you arrest your bandits you have to cuff them.”
My mouth dropped open.
“You cuff them and then you stuff them,” she said.
When you’re the babysitter, this is terrible news to hear. I left my change sock, threw on my coat, and ran outside. In the backyard, I could see a navy blue figure huddled beside the Bratbergs’ propane tank. My stomach flipped. They had a very big propane tank. It’s what they used to heat their whole house. “I hate being the bandit!” Dustin said, yanking on the handcuffs.
Samantha had tightly clamped the cuff around Dustin’s right wrist, fastening him to the tank’s curved metal handle. Even after I took off his glove, there was no way to slip the cuff over his hand. Snot rolled like a little stream out of his nose. He swept his tongue across his upper lip, steering the stream into his mouth.
“You’re not going to die. So there’s no need to eat your own snot,” I said. “I’ll get my mom. We have a saw.”
I turned to run, but Dustin tugged on my coat.
“If you saw metal, you’ll make a spark. I’m attached to a fuel tank,” he said. “What if you blow me up? Or send me to the moon?”
He made a good point.
“When’s the last time you had your tank filled?” I asked.
“Just yesterday,” he said, gulping down air.
“Are you sure?” I asked. Because I thought maybe he was trying to make the situation sound more dramatic. And as the babysitter, I thought the situation sounded plenty dramatic already.
“I’m very sure. It was part of my math lesson. This tank is eighty percent full. Which is the limit. You can only fill a propane tank to eighty percent. Gases can expand as temperatures change.”
“I’m aware that gas expands,” I said. “When it comes to science, my teacher is very advanced.”
Dustin took a deep breath and made more gulping sounds.
“Well, this is a five-hundred-gallon tank. I know, because I had to calculate how many gallons it would take to fill it.”
“You can do that in your head?” I asked.
“No, I used a pencil and paper.”
Wow. Maybe learning math at home was just as good as learning it at school, because that was a tough problem to solve. I couldn’t have done it.
“Are you sure you don’t have a key?” I asked Samantha.
“To make sure none of them got into the wrong hands, after Halloween I smeared the keys with pea nut butter and fed them to three different neighborhood dogs.”
“What?” I cried. “You could have killed them!”
“But I didn’t,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “Because they’re all still running around.”
For a moment, I thought about searching for dog turds. But the ground was snow-covered and it was almost March. Even with three dogs out there, the odds that I could find a five-month-old, frozen dog turd with a handcuff key in it seemed pretty slim.
I threw open my front door and cried for my mother. But the sound of my voice echoed through the empty house. I ran to the garage and the car was gone. On the kitchen table was a note.
Had to teach ab blast class. It was an emergency. Be back soon—with veggie burgers. I’ll probably be back before you. But-you have my number just-in case.
When I tried to call her cell phone, it said she was out of range. When I tried to call the gym, they put me on hold. And when I tried to call Mrs. Bratberg’s cell phone, all I got was her voice mail. I thought about calling Aunt Stella, but she lived in Modesto, and I knew she couldn’t help me. Besides that, she was probably working. In a perfect world, I could have called my very good friend Sally and she would’ve brought me a bobby pin and helpe
d me pick the lock. Or I could have called my father. Problems like this were right up his alley. But I knew that I couldn’t. Being a mother’s helper was a secret. And babysitting? If I told my father the truth, he’d explode. First at me. Then at my mother.
At this moment, I realized how unfair it was to live in a world where people could move to Japan, and perfectly normal kids could have exploding fathers, and mothers who turned forty and went to teach an ab blast class out of range. And aunts who lived in Modesto and worked day shifts at hospitals.
Sweat rolled down my back. I ran my fingers through my hair. Then I bit my fingernails. From the kitchen window, I could see Samantha hopping around her handcuffed brother. This was a serious problem, and I didn’t have any answers. I tried to bite my fingernails some more, but they were pretty much all gone. So I picked up the telephone and called the one number I thought I’d never have to call. I, Camille McPhee, dialed 911.
Chapter 11
No Excuses
I was waiting in the driveway when Officer Peacock rolled up in his squad car. He wasn’t flashing his lights, which was a big surprise to me, because this was a huge emergency. It was below zero. Dustin could get frostbite or hypothermia. If you get frostbite, your fingers, toes, and nose turn black and the doctor has to cut them off. And if you get hypothermia, you get so cold that you go crazy and then you die.
I introduced myself to Officer Peacock as the baby sitter. I told him everything, except the part about Samantha feeding the keys to dogs. I was sure that was against the law. That’s when he said, “So your butt was planted in front of the TV when this happened?”
I was really surprised that a police officer would use that kind of language with a ten-year-old. I figured he was one of those people who hated TV and blamed it for everything bad in the world. Clearly, these people weren’t aware of the good stations, like CNN, or PBS, or the Game Show Network.
“I bet you got the idea to fix your brother like this from some cop show on TV,” he said, wagging his finger at Samantha.
Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus ... Page 6
