by Janice Repka
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - Aphrodite Wigglesmith Gets It Started
Chapter 2 - Mindy Loft Tells It Like It Was
Chapter 3 - Aphrodite Describes Meeting Mindy for the First Time
Chapter 4 - Mindy Describes Meeting Aphrodite for the First Time
Chapter 5 - Aphrodite Ducks Squash
Chapter 6 - Mindy Ducks Aphrodite
Chapter 7 - Aphrodite Glues Them to Their Seats
Chapter 8 - Mindy Wows Them in the Alley
Chapter 9 - Aphrodite Calls for a Showdown
Chapter 10 - Mindy Has a Meltdown
Chapter 11 - Aphrodite Takes Aim at the Problem
Chapter 12 - Mindy Takes Aphrodite Shopping
Chapter 13 - Aphrodite Dresses Up
Chapter 14 - Mindy Fesses Up
Chapter 15 - Aphrodite Makes Them Gush
Chapter 16 - Mindy Shows Her True Color
Chapter 17 - Aphrodite Resumes the Dog and Pony Show
Chapter 18 - Mindy Gets the Short End of the Baton
Chapter 19 - Aphrodite Gets the Fast Cab out of Beantown
Chapter 20 - Mindy Faces the Lions
Chapter 21 - Aphrodite Finds Some Luck
Chapter 22 - Mindy Figures it Out
Chapter 23 - Aphrodite Figures It Out
DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by the Penguin Group | Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. | Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) | Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England | Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) | Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) | Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India | Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) | Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa | Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Janice Repka
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Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 www.penguin.com/youngreaders
ISBN : 978-1-101-51774-1
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for Daisy
1
Aphrodite Wigglesmith Gets It Started
Here’s something fun you can do. First, get out of your chair. (I’m trusting you on that.) Next, stand in an open space. (Trusting you again.) Now spin like a quantum mechanical particle. (Or a top or tornado, whatever.) Faster. Faster. STOP. Did you feel it? That slip-in-time moment when your brain hadn’t caught up with your body and it felt like you were still spinning? I love that. It’s like my body has outsmarted my brain, which is not easy to do. Excuse the pun, but my brain kind of has a mind of its own. If you put a math problem, no matter how hard, in front of my eyes it sets off this switch and I have to try to solve it. So my life’s been a little weird, I guess you could say.
The weirdness started the day someone flushed a firecracker down a toilet in the boys’ bathroom on the second floor of Carnegie Middle School. The potty shattered, a weak pipe burst, and sewage water rained into the school office below.
“Holy crap!” Principal DeGuy yelled to his secretary. “Get someone here fast.”
My mother, Cecelia Wigglesmith, was the “plumber on call” that day. She loaded crescent wrenches and extra piping into her truck while I climbed into my car seat. Although only four years old, I was already a mini-version of my mother physically—petite, with pale skin and black hair. But intellectually, I was bored silly and hungering for stimulation. To keep busy on the way to the plumbing job, I counted each church we passed on the left and each bar we passed on the right and kept a working ratio.
A few miles later, a sign announced we had reached Carnegie Middle School, “home to the division champion wrestling team, the Carnegie Spiders.” The school was ten times as long as my house and five times as wide. Inside the office, Mother set me down on a desk.
“You stay here while I find the shutoff valve,” she said. She turned to the secretary. “I hope you don’t mind keeping an eye on my daughter. I’ll be back as soon as things are under control.”
The secretary was also perched on top of a desk. She was wearing a flamingo pink dress and held up her right foot. Her right shoe, which must have dropped when she hopped up, was floating out the door. The smell alone would have reduced most four-year-olds to tears, but to me, it just smelled like Mother had come home from work.
After Mother left, a piece of soaked ceiling tile fell and splattered us with sewage water. The secretary screamed and I jumped. The office phones began to ring. I counted the number of rings. I counted the number of ceiling chunks that fell and the number of times we screamed and jumped. I found that: 5 rings + 1 splash = 1 scream + 1 jump.
“You’ve got a shattered toilet and a burst pipe in the boys’ bathroom,” Mother said when she returned.
“Can you fix it?” asked Principal DeGuy, following her. He was middle-aged, but most of his hair hadn’t made it that far. What was left covered his lower head in a U-shape. “We’re scheduled for state testing in the morning, so I can’t cancel school tomorrow.”
“Once the pipe’s repaired, I’ll have to bail,” said Mother. “Pumps will only pull so many gallons per hour. You’ve got four inches of water on the first floor, eighteen in the basement. Goodness knows how long that could take.”
“Three hours and twenty-five minutes,” I said.
Despite his ample ears, Principal DeGuy did not seem to hear. “I’m not interested in what goodness knows,” he told Mother. “How long will you need to get this water out?”
“Three hours and twenty-five minutes,” I repeated.
“Whose child is this?”
Mother picked me up and held me against her hip. “She’s mine. Do you have a calculator?” Principal DeGuy pulled out his computerized planner. Mother told him the formula to figure out how long it would take.
“Three hours and twenty-five minutes,” he said.
They stared at me.
“How did you do that?” Mother asked.
I shrugged and counted the number of teeth in the principal’s open mouth.
“You gave her the answer,” he said.
“I’m sure it was just a coincidence,” Mother replied. “Aphrodite is usually so quiet you don’t know
she’s in the room.”
A chunk of ceiling tile fell and splashed Principal DeGuy with water. The secretary screamed again.
“I’d better get those pumps started. Would you mind?” Mother handed me to the principal and splashed her way out. He set me on a desk.
“How many polka dots are on my tie?” he asked.
I used my method for counting cereal boxes at the supermarket, the number up multiplied by the number sideways. Then I took some away because of the funny shape at the bottom of the necktie. “One hundred and fifty seven,” I answered.
Principal DeGuy hopped onto the desk with me and emptied the water from his shoes. “Who is the queen of England?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is 157 multiplied by 23?”
I pushed the bangs out of my eyes. “3,611.”
He ran the numbers. “Holy human calculator!”
The secretary handed him a telephone, and he dialed the number for the Office of Special and Gifted Testing. “Little lady,” he told me, “if you are what I think you are, your whole world is about to change.”
And, boy, did it ever. Not that I’m complaining. Once they found out my IQ was 204, they let me start school early. It was like a game to see how quickly I could pass each grade (fifth took only eight weeks and I skipped second, sixth, and tenth grades completely). But then, when I was eleven, they ran out of grades, so I had to go away to college. Now I’m a thirteen-year-old graduate student at Harvard University.
At Harvard, everybody’s brain is in overdrive all the time. So sometimes, when my brain is full of numbers and feels like it’s going to explode, I slip away to an empty field on the edge of campus. Then I stretch out my arms and I spin.
2
Mindy Loft Tells It Like It Was
The reason I ramble is that I don’t stay focused when I talk; at least that’s what my eighth-grade English teacher told me at the beginning of this school year. So if I get a little off track, try not to get your poodle in a fluff. Anyway, if I had to pick, I’d say it all began the day that Miss Brenda shared her awful secret. I hadn’t even met Aphrodite yet. I was thirteen years old and living with my mom in the apartment above her beauty shop, Tiffany’s House of Beauty & Nails. We had a sign that Mom changed each week with stupid sayings like “Come on in and be a beauty, from your head to your patootie.”
Mom made me help at the shop, doing gross stuff like sweeping piles of severed hair, boring stuff like refilling the spray bottles, and a little bit of cool stuff like trying out the new nail polish. At least I got an allowance. But no matter how much I got paid, there was no way I was going to be a hairstylist for the rest of my life. My dream was to be a famous baton twirler.
When she was nineteen, my mom had been first runner-up for Miss Majorette of the Greater Allegheny Valley. My dad, John Loft (God rest his soul), had been one of the judges, and they had eloped before her trophy was back from the engraver. He became her manager, and they toured all over the country in a baby blue RV with a bumper sticker that said TWIRL TILL YOUR ARMS FALL OFF.
“With my panache and your talent, we’re gonna set the world on fire,” he told her, and they did.
Not the whole world, maybe, but at least part of the small town of Hermanfly, Nebraska. You see, there was this stupid Hermanfly Fourth of July Spectacular Parade. Dad was in a giant firecracker costume marching next to Mom, who was twirling a fire baton. They got too close and his fuse caught fire. Mom dropped the baton and screamed for help, and some woman in the crowd pulled a pair of scissors from her purse and clipped Dad’s fuse just in time. That was the good news. The bad news was that by that time Mom’s flaming baton had rolled over to a storefront, which was where they were storing the fireworks for the big show.
Most everyone ran off as soon as the fireworks started going off, but Dad sat there in his firecracker costume holding onto Mom and staring up. He said that, next to Mom, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He was so pooped from all the excitement, Mom had to help him back to their motel.
The next morning, Dad was dead.
“Weak heart,” the doctor told Mom. “Surprised he made it this long with that bum ticker.”
Mom said a heart as big and kind as Dad’s couldn’t have been defective. She blamed the whole thing on the baton. So she quit the twirling circuit, moved back to Carnegie, Pennsylvania, and opened up a hair salon. That’s when I was born. Because they reminded her of Dad, Mom still displayed her twirling awards all over the shop. My favorite thing to do when I was little was to pretend a hairbrush was a baton and strike poses like the figurines on top of the trophies.
One day, when I was four, I was doing a dance I made up and twirling a broken curling iron when Miss Brenda, the owner of Miss Brenda’s Baton Barn, walked in the salon. She took one look at me and said, “Really, Tiffany, you can deny it all you want, but you know that little one has baton in her blood.”
That creeped me out at first because I had just seen a cartoon with a vampire in it and I thought she said “bats in her blood.” Even at four, I could be stupid like that. Anyway, I kept twirling whatever I could find (a customer’s umbrella, another customer’s walking cane, Mom’s haircutting scissors) until Mom finally gave in and let me start taking lessons at Miss Brenda’s Baton Barn. I still wasn’t allowed to join the Squadettes (the lame name for the Baton Barn’s competitive twirling team) because those twirlers had to march in the local parades. But Mom and Miss Brenda agreed that I could get unlimited private baton lessons in exchange for Miss Brenda getting unlimited salon services.
This was actually a good deal for Miss Brenda, whose mother had passed on great skin but whose father (who had to be part werewolf) had passed on a unibrow capable of growing so thick it looked like a caterpillar napping between her eyes. Miss Brenda would go to Tiffany’s House of Beauty & Nails for eyebrow waxing, and, after it was gone, I would pretend it had turned into a butterfly and flown away. The day Miss Brenda shared her awful secret, it was sort of a medium larva.
That January morning, I rode my bike to Miss Brenda’s Baton Barn for my private lesson. The studio was empty, and being the only twirler in that chilly space with its twenty-foot ceiling made me feel like the last Popsicle in the box. As soon as my hands thawed and we got started, I asked Miss Brenda to help me with a new trick I had been working on. She grabbed my baton, and it seemed to spin around her neck all on its own. Miss Brenda had this flow when she touched the baton, and a far-off look, like she was the bride and it was the groom and they were in love.
“You’re so smooth,” I said.
“Been doing this thirty-five years,” said Miss Brenda. “Twirl in my sleep.”
I pictured her baton whapping the ceiling with each throw as she snoozed. “Someday, I want to get as good as you,” I said. I put the baton under my chin and used my neck to twirl it around my shoulders.
“You’re something special, kiddo,” said Miss Brenda. “With your natural flexibility and practice ethic, the sky’s the limit.” She gestured skyward and we both looked up. The baton I had gotten stuck in the rafters last week stared back at us. “Well, maybe not the sky. But at least the ceiling,” she added. She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice sounded, I don’t know, heavier. Miss Brenda said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” She grabbed my baton mid-twirl. “I’m not supposed to say anything for another week, but, dang it, Mindy, I’ve known you since you were tiny, even taught your mom. I’ve got to give you a heads-up.” She looked like she would burst into tears.
“Are you okay?” I asked. She led me to her “office,” a desk in a supply closet. I followed her past the photographs on the hallway walls, including the newest one of last year’s Squadettes holding up a small trophy. They were standing in front of a fence, smiling cluelessly while behind each girl’s head metal things poked out like alien antennas. Looking at the team pictures made me feel left out sometimes, but there were lots of photos of me holding the tro
phies I’d won for my solo routines.
“I don’t know how to break this to you, kiddo,” Miss Brenda said as I sat on a box in her office, “but here goes. I’m selling out. Got an offer from the Cluck and Shuck chicken corn soup franchise for the land, enough for me to buy a condo in Florida. Baton is a young gal’s sport. I’ve got no regrets. But at fifty-eight, it’s time to face facts. A girl’s gotta look out for herself. I’ll take you twirlers to the Twirlcrazy Grand Championship in May, but after that I’m through.”
It felt like I’d been whacked in the gut with a 7/16-inch Fluted Super Star. “But Miss Brenda, you’re the only baton studio in town, and, even if you weren’t, there’s no way we could afford to pay someone else for my lessons.”
“Sorry, kiddo. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
“This can’t be happening to me. What will I do if you close?”
“You’ll land on your feet somehow.” Then she must have said a bunch of other stuff to try to make me feel better, but I wasn’t listening because I was thinking about how my life had been completely ruined. “Until I make an announcement,” said Miss Brenda, “this is just between you and me. Right?”
She winked, and I gave her one of those pretend smiles we use in competitions, but inside I was ticked. Miss Brenda was wrong about me. I wasn’t one of those girls who could land on her feet. I was good at only three things: being tall, being tanned, and being a twirler. And let’s face it, being tall and having free use of Mom’s tanning bed weren’t things I could really take credit for. Twirling wasn’t just an activity I did for fun like some of the Squadettes, who also took horseback riding lessons and ballet classes. Twirling was all I had.
When I was twirling, nobody called me stupid, snickered behind my back, or told dumb-blond jokes that they changed to dumb brown-haired to fit me. When I did a perfect split-leap pullout, not a single person in the audience cared what I scored on a standardized test, or that I had failed math my first semester of eighth grade and might get held back.
