Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus ...

by Kristen Tracy

  “What’s the deal?” I asked.

  “I need to let you know that I didn’t just build a regular volcano.” As she talked, Nina looked over each of her shoulders to make sure that nobody was listening.

  “What did you build?” I asked, looking over each of my shoulders too.

  “A volcanic monument to our country,” Nina said, placing her hand on her heart.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said. “But if it doesn’t require batteries, then I want my five bucks back.” Because I really missed having an emergency five dollars in my underwear drawer.

  “It still uses a battery,” she said. “It’s like a volcano, except better. Instead of red lava, I made ours blue. And instead of a regular old brown earthlike-looking volcano, I made ours red and molded it in the shape of America. The volcano’s cone is located over Missouri. And I filled the magma reservoir with the blue lava and white plastic stars. So when it erupts, it will be a tribute to our country. I brought a flag for each of us. During the eruption, I think we should sing ‘God Bless America.’”

  I wasn’t sure how to react, so I raised my eyebrows and pressed my lips together. I raised my eyebrows to communicate to Nina that I was surprised by her level of creativity. I pressed my lips together to let her know that I wasn’t sure if her idea was a good one or a bad one. Nina said the idea came to her when she was walking home from my house and every car that passed her had either an American flag flying from a window or a USA bumper sticker pasted to its back end.

  “Why Missouri?” I asked, keeping my eyebrows lifted and lips tightened. “Do they have volcanoes there?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s symbolic. Missouri is in America’s heartland. Got it?”

  I got it. But I also got tired of communicating with Nina through my eyebrows, so I relaxed them. But I kept my lips tightened, because I’d just discovered that this helped me think. Staring at Nina, I noticed that she looked a little crazed. Her eyes were unfocused and she kept darting her gaze from the ceiling to the floor. Little drops of sweat beaded her upper lip.

  “Are you running a temperature?” I asked.

  “I’m just fired up,” she said, grabbing on to one of my shoulders. “It’s cool to be patriotic. We’ll win the prize money for sure.”

  I hoped she was right. Then I took a step back. I had never seen Nina act crazy like this before. I was used to seeing her wimpy side.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you fired up,” I said.

  Nina smiled. “Do you know what I think it is?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked. Because I was very curious about this.

  “Fighting off that dog at your house boosted my self-esteem,” she said.

  That is not the way I remembered things happening when we dug up Muffin and Pinky showed up. But I didn’t have the energy to disagree.

  Nina moved toward me and grabbed my shoulder again. A wide grin broke across her face as she gently shook me.

  “This is going to be so great,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure whether I know all of the words to ‘God Bless America.’”

  Nina let go of me and twirled one of her blond pigtails around her pointer finger. She was thinking about something. Sweat beads formed on her forehead and around her hairline. Then her face flashed with happiness and she let out a squeal.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “You just hum and I’ll sing.” And then Nina handed me my very own flag and saluted me. “God bless America,” she said as she flipped around the other way and ran down the hall.

  When I got to class, everybody’s projects were set up in plain view on their desks. Except for ours. Nina had draped a red sheet over our project so that nobody could see it. I sighed when I saw that five other groups had built volcanoes. Polly and Hannah had built the solar system using Styrofoam balls and wire. I thought their Mars looked just as big as their Jupiter, but because I’m not a rude person, I didn’t say anything.

  I couldn’t tell what Tony Maboney and Boone Berry had made. All I could see on Tony’s desk was a dead fish in a clear plastic box. The fish was smaller than my thumbnail. And it wasn’t any color at all. It almost looked invisible, except for a thin, neon green line that ran through the center of its body.

  When it came time to present the projects, Nina shot her hand up and asked if we could go last. Tony Maboney shot his hand up and said that he wanted to go last too. I didn’t know what was so great about going last, but I decided to support my partner. Mr. Hawk said that because we’d asked first, we could go last.

  Nina reacted by screaming, “Woot, woot!”

  By the time we got to Tony Maboney’s dead fish, I was bored out of my skull. Four out of the five volcanoes were duds. No eruption. Not even a little. Watching a volcano not erupt is about as exciting as watching a faucet not drip. Nina didn’t seem to feel this way.

  Every time a volcano was a dud, she had a hard time containing her happiness. She drummed her feet on the floor and shot me wicked-looking smiles. I started to wonder if Nina had somehow sabotaged the other projects. But when the fifth volcano did erupt, I just chalked up all the other duds as coincidences.

  Tony and Boone stood in front of their desks and announced that they were going to perform a resurrection. When they said this, some of the churchgoing kids gasped. Mr. Hawk jumped up from behind his desk.

  “We have frozen this fish,” Tony said, “and now we’re going to thaw it and bring it back to life.”

  Mr. Hawk sat back down. Tony and Boone didn’t look very confident. Tony shoved both of his hands deep down into his front pockets. Both he and Boone were biting their lower lips. And when Boone opened up the plastic container, his hand trembled so badly that he almost dropped the lid.

  “Freezing the fish is not easy,” Boone explained as he scooped the fish up with a plastic spoon and moved it onto a paper plate. “You can’t just pop it in the freezer. We have used a colorless, odorless chlorofluorocarbon to freeze this fish.”

  “Where did you get that?” Penny asked. “That sounds illegal!”

  “No interrupting,” Mr. Hawk said.

  “My Uncle Rick got it for me,” Boone said. “He’s a high school chemistry teacher in Utah.”

  Penny frowned. She didn’t look happy. But it didn’t matter. Several of us in the class let out a series of “oohs.” Even I did. If Tony and Boone had figured out how to bring a fish back to life, nobody else stood a chance of winning. I looked at Nina. She crossed her fingers on both hands and glared at the fish like it was pure evil.

  When Tony plugged a navy blue hair dryer into an outlet, everybody sat on the edge of their seats.

  “Thawing the fish is very difficult too,” Boone said, flipping the hair dryer on to its lowest setting. “If the fish doesn’t freeze fast enough, the fluid in its tissue will crystallize. If ice crystals form, they will act like daggers and knives, puncturing the fish’s cells. This same thing could happen when it thaws.”

  A chorus of “oohs” floated through the room again. It was like we were watching a real scientist. Boone was using words that were so big, nobody would have been able to spell them. Gracie screamed when the fish’s body twitched. Boone quickly shut the hair dryer off and lifted the paper plate over a bowl filled with water. He gently shook the plate until the fish slipped off and plopped into the water. Their fish still acted a little dead, like it had been only partially resurrected. But in a couple of seconds it zigged and zagged around the bowl. Boone dropped some food flakes into the water and his resurrected fish darted straight to the surface and gobbled them up.

  Everybody clapped and stomped their feet. Tony and Boone took several bows in front of the class. They slapped each other a high five as they cleaned up their project.

  “Nina and Camille,” Mr. Hawk said, “are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir!” Nina said.

  Nina stood beside her desk and took hold of two
of the red sheet’s corners.

  “Feast your eyes on this!” she said, trying to rip the sheet off the volcano in one, dramatic pull. But it didn’t quite work out the way she wanted. The sheet caught on something.

  “Feast your eyes on this!” she repeated, tugging the sheet so hard that the volcano flipped right off her desk and into the lap of Zoey Combs. Blue lava oozed out of the volcano’s cone and onto Zoey. Unfortunately for Zoey, she was wearing a knee-high skirt and no tights. She had a lot of exposed skin.

  “Ahhh!” Zoey yelled, flipping our volcano onto the floor. “It’s gooey!”

  I didn’t react. Just like Tony and Boone’s fish before it was resurrected, I was perfectly still. Nina dove after our volcano and dropped her flag on the floor.

  Tony jumped to his feet. “You’ve got to burn that flag now,” he said. “When you drop an American flag on the ground you have to burn it. It’s in the Constitution.”

  “It’s not in the Constitution,” Mr. Hawk said, walking toward Zoey with a wad of paper towels in his hand.

  “This stings! What’s in it? Is it acid?” Zoey hollered, furiously wiping the lava off her.

  “I think the stars are poking you,” I said.

  “They are! They are! The stars are poking me!”

  Nina tried to scoop the lava from the floor back into the volcano’s center. She scooped and scooped. If I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve thought Nina was a professional lava scooper, competing in the Lava-Scooping Olympics. Blue lava stuck to Nina’s red shirt in many interesting patterns. And the more she scooped, the more she sweated. Beads of sweat dropped off her forehead and onto her shirt, staining the fabric a deeper red. And circles began to grow near her armpits—wet, dark, and stinky ones.

  “Help me!” Nina yelled as she struggled to set the volcano back on top of her desk.

  I took ahold of one end of the volcano and slid it onto her desk. But I pushed too hard and the volcano slid off the desk again. The spilled lava had made everything very slippery. Every time we moved, our shoes squeaked. When the volcano slipped this time, I decided to be the one to dive after it. I should have stuck to being a dingo and sat down in the corner and admired myself. But I felt obligated to do something more.

  I jumped in the general direction that it was heading, but I tripped over Nina’s fallen flag. The last thing I saw before my head hit the fishbowl was the expression of terror and despair on Boone Berry’s face. You might think that knocking a fishbowl onto the floor with your head would be terribly painful. But it’s not. Not when you have five pounds of hair to soften the blow.

  Chapter 26

  Meltdown

  When my head smashed into the fishbowl and I knocked it onto the floor, it was like a miracle had happened. Because the glass didn’t break. It landed right-side up and bounced a little. But then the miracle ended and the bowl tipped over onto its side and cracked open. Water gushed everywhere, and the resurrected fish floated onto the floor. It flopped on top of several shards of broken glass.

  “Save it!” Tony yelled.

  Boone scooped the fish up with the plastic spoon and dumped it into a cup filled with water.

  “Is it okay?” Zoey gushed, grabbing at her heart.

  “She killed it,” Tony yelled. “Camille McPhee’s big hippo head killed our fish.”

  “Tony,” snapped Mr. Hawk.

  I could feel tears forming in my eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I slipped.”

  “Fish killer!” Tony yelled. “You should travel on a motorized scooter. There’s no telling when you’ll fall again. Mrs. Zirklezack is nuts to put you on top of a bucket.”

  This made me very sad. I looked down at the sloppy floor. I already felt a lot of pressure about standing on my bucket. Now it was worse.

  “It’s okay,” Boone said. “It’s not the end of the world. I mean, it is the end of the world for our fish, but it’s okay.”

  I had blue lava smeared all over my arms. I was a mess.

  “Do you want me to mop it up?” I asked Mr. Hawk.

  “That’s all right, Camille. Why don’t you girls go visit Mrs. Blaze.”

  Zoey let out a frightened squeak. Mrs. Blaze was the school nurse. She had a reputation for putting stinging medicine on open cuts and knocking people’s knees with a hammer. I’d visited her a bunch of times. But never with a group. We walked down the hallway and stood outside Mrs. Blaze’s door. Pictures of healthy things were taped on it. Apples. A toothbrush. A tall glass of milk. And a clown wearing a Band-Aid on its cheek.

  “That clown looks creepy,” Zoey said. “Like it’s been in a fight with another clown.”

  Mrs. Blaze heard us talking and opened the door.

  “Did somebody say they’d been in a fight?” Mrs. Blaze asked. She reached out toward us and told us to come inside. She had gray hair and gray eyes and she was also wearing gray pants. And to look official, she had on a white doctor’s coat.

  “Camille,” she said. “How are you? I haven’t seen you since your big sugar crash last spring.”

  She rubbed my shoulder with concern.

  “Actually,” I said, “the last time I saw you was in December. Because I ran into problems cutting out my snowflake.”

  “Right,” she said. “How is your finger?”

  I lifted it up and looked at it. Then I bent it four times.

  “Normal,” I said.

  “It looks like you girls have had an accident,” Mrs. Blaze said.

  “Yes! My skin burns!” Zoey interrupted. “I might need to go to the emergency room and take a special bath!”

  “I doubt it,” Nina said. “I used nontoxic ingredients for the volcano. Because I have very sensitive skin.”

  “That’s true,” I added. “When she washes, she uses a special bar of soap.”

  “Okay. Okay,” Mrs. Blaze said. “Tell me what happened.”

  I let Nina describe the situation. She was still very proud of her volcano. Even though it was basically junk now.

  “That’s a very dramatic science fair,” Mrs. Blaze said. She wrung out a bunch of washcloths and handed them to us.

  “Science is disgusting,” Zoey said, wiping the lava off her legs.

  Zoey and Gracie had built a mold terrarium. They’d stuck a bunch of different foods in a glass jar and let it rot. They wanted to show off all the different types and colors of mold. Their lemon grew a blue-green powder. Their strawberries sprouted a gray fuzz. And their bread produced mold that looked very white and puffy. So I wasn’t surprised that Zoey thought science was disgusting. Because not only was her project gross, it was also a real bummer.

  “Science can be very interesting,” Mrs. Blaze said. “That was my college major.”

  “Really?” Nina asked.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Blaze said. “I studied the nitty-gritty truth about how things operate. In plants. And animals. And people. I loved it!”

  “I think I want to be a scientist!” Nina said.

  I looked at Nina like she was sort of crazy. Because from what I knew of her, she wasn’t ready for the nitty or the gritty.

  “But Mrs. Blaze, we lost,” I said.

  “What did you lose?” Mrs. Blaze asked.

  “The science fair,” I said. “And there was a cash prize. Also, I killed that fish. I feel very terrible.”

  I handed her my washcloth and she threw it in a hamper.

  “I know. That’s too bad,” Mrs. Blaze said. “Can I give you some advice?”

  “Okay,” I said. Because I trusted Mrs. Blaze. She wore a neat bun and had a jar filled with tongue depressors. I was sure what she was about to tell me would be very inspiring.

  “Don’t worry about this too much. Because one day you’re going to look back on it and laugh,” she said.

  She smiled at me and handed me a scratch-’n’-sniff sticker with a bunch of grapes on it. I thought that was pretty bad advice. Because, even if I did feel like it one day, laughing at a dead fish seemed lik
e a mean thing to do. I scratched my sticker, but the smell wasn’t very strong. Nina got a blueberry one that gave off a very powerful stink. And Zoey got a banana that smelled so much like a real banana that it made my stomach grumble.

  “Don’t be afraid to come back and visit,” Mrs. Blaze said.

  “Okay!” Nina said. She sounded very thrilled and it bugged me.

  “Stickers are for babies,” Zoey said. But I saw her sniffing hers anyway.

  Every second of that day, all I could think about was how my head had led to the death of an exceptional fish. My mind was like a laser beam. Even when I walked through my front door.

  “Camille!” my mother cheered when I came home. For some reason, my sadness was turning into anger. It ticked me off that my mother sounded so happy. Why was she so happy? What was there to be happy about? We had a big Visa bill. She and my father were separated. Her only child, me, obviously wasn’t doing too well, because I had just taken the life of a resurrected fish. Plus, I’d dug up my dead cat to try to win the science fair. And I was being forced to play the part of an unwanted cat while standing on a wobbly, elevated surface. Not to mention my calling-card disaster. Could my life get any worse?

  My mother didn’t even ask me about my day. Instead, she handed me a DVD.

  “I rented us a movie,” she said. “It’s called The World’s Deadliest Swarms.”

  I handed the DVD back to her.

  “I’ve got homework,” I said, stomping down the hall. I hadn’t been able to finish my spelling at school, due to the fact that I’d been covered in lava and had to visit Mrs. Blaze.

  “But it’s Friday,” she said.

  I had forgotten that it was Friday. This was pretty good news. And to be honest, a program called The World’s Deadliest Swarms sounded interesting. I liked education best when it was about dangerous and gross animals.

  After we talked, my mom flew out the door. She had a kickboxing class to teach. I was surprised that people wanted to go to the gym and work out on Friday nights. But my mother said that she had a core group of followers. She said they were addicted to her Friday-night Turbo Kick It & Bam It class. I just didn’t get that.