“Did you know,” added Zephyr Mason, “that my mother put a hamper in my brother’s room, and he’s so lazy he throws his clothes on top of it instead of opening the lid?”
“Well, you can sit right there,” said Rachel, pointing to her bed, which was covered with a perfectly smooth checked spread and had none of her old dolls or stuffed animals on it. (The old dolls and animals were lined up on a shelf, each one exactly two inches from the next.)
“Or you can sit on my bed,” said Elena.
But everyone was afraid to make wrinkles in all the smoothness.
The bedroom belonging to Mama Tricia and Mama Eloise was just as tidy as their daughters’.
And then there was Louie’s room.
Luckily for Mama Tricia, Mama Eloise, Rachel, and Elena, Louie usually kept his door closed. Even so, Rachel shuddered each time she passed his room. Just knowing what was on the other side of the door made her feel slightly queasy. “Can’t you clean things out once in a while?” she asked her brother one night.
“Clean out my collections?” Louie exclaimed. “But I collected my collections! I got all those things on purpose. Why would I throw them out?”
“You can’t walk across your floor without stepping on something.” She peered through his partially open door. “In fact, where is the floor? I can’t even see it.”
“I made a path,” Louie replied with dignity. “Right there. See?”
Rachel followed her brother’s finger. “I don’t see a path.”
“It’s very narrow.”
“You mean invisible?”
Louie shrugged. He gazed proudly around the room at his collection of bottle caps and soda tabs, and his collection of boards and nails, and his collection of bark and leaves, and his collection of newspapers and magazines. Most of these things were strewn across the floor. On his desk was an album exploding with stamps. On his chair was a box overflowing with coins. On his bed sat a rubber band ball so big, he thought it might set a record for having been made by a ten-year-old.
“Can you believe I found all those rubber bands just lying around?” he asked Rachel. “On the street, on the sidewalk. Some of them were in trash cans. People actually threw them away!”
“You’ve been going through trash cans?” shrieked Rachel. She slammed Louie’s door shut and fled down the hall and into the living room. “Mama Tricia!” she said breathlessly. “Mama Eloise! Louie’s rubber band ball—did you know he got some of the rubber bands out of the trash? The trash!”
Mama Tricia glanced at her wife and smiled. “He’s quite a scavenger.”
“Scavenging animals eat other animals,” pronounced Rachel. “Even dead ones.”
“He’s more like a hobo,” said Elena, who was perched on the couch between her moms. “He walks around town with a bulging trash bag. He’s disgusting.”
“Don’t say that about your brother,” said Mama Eloise.
“Well, he is.”
“You could probably catch the plague in his room,” added Rachel.
“Enough,” replied Mama Tricia. But when Elena and Rachel went off to do their homework, she turned to Mama Eloise and said, “Perhaps we should have a look around Louie’s room sometime.”
“Isn’t that an invasion of his privacy?”
“It sounds like his room might be turning into a health hazard.”
* * *
The next morning, when Louie and his sisters left for school, Louie didn’t bother to close the door to his room. His mothers stood at the threshold and looked in. “Anyway, I should collect his laundry,” said Mama Eloise, as if she were continuing a conversation. She stepped into the room. “Goodness.”
“It’s messier than ever,” said Mama Tricia. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”
Mama Eloise sniffed. “Old peanut butter?” she suggested. “Mold?”
“Maybe it’s just all the leaves,” said Mama Tricia, and sneezed.
Mama Eloise toed some of the leaves aside and bent down. “What’s this?”
Mama Tricia peered over her shoulder. “It looks like a snakeskin.”
Mama Eloise jumped backward and fell onto her bottom. “Are you sure there isn’t a snake inside it?”
“Yes,” said Mama Tricia, who wasn’t sure at all, and hastily covered the skin with the leaves again. She watched the leaves for several moments to make sure they didn’t rustle.
Louie’s moms settled themselves gingerly on his bed. “Is this Louie’s T-shirt?” asked Mama Eloise. She held up a shirt that had been crumpled into a ball on the pillow.
Mama Tricia was still watching the leaves on the floor. She turned to look at the shirt. “What’s that a picture of? A sea turtle? I don’t remember Louie getting a shirt with a turtle on it.”
“Neither do I. I don’t remember where that came from, either.” Mama Eloise pointed to a clock on the bedside table. It was shaped like a racing car.
“Maybe it was in a goody bag at a birthday party?”
“Maybe. It’s kind of fancy for a goody-bag item. And what about the shirt?”
“I suppose he might have traded with a friend.”
“I suppose.”
Mama Tricia stood up. “We’d better leave for work.”
Louie’s moms hustled out of the room and closed the door tightly behind them.
* * *
Elena was in charge of watching Louie when he came home from school that afternoon. She never worried when he came home late, because the life of a scavenger is poky and slow. She didn’t hear the elevator door open until almost five o’clock. A few moments later, Louie burst into the apartment with his backpack and a plastic bag.
He was wearing a brand-new red-and-black baseball cap that read I ♥ NY over the bill.
The very first thing Elena said to her brother was not “Hi” or “How was school?” but “Where did you get that hat?”
Louie’s face turned a faint shade of pink. Then he smiled broadly. “I just found it! Can you believe it?”
“No.”
“Well, I did.”
“Where? On some kid’s head?”
Louie hummed under his breath. Then he squatted on the floor and opened the plastic bag.
“Do not open that thing in here!” cried Elena. “Take it to your room.”
“But I want to show you what I found today. Look. Here’s a dead oak leaf for my leaf collection. And here’s a penny from 1951. It was just lying on the sidewalk. Plus I found seven more rubber bands. Oh, and this piece of wood has three holes in it that I’m pretty sure were made by a woodpecker. Isn’t that cool?”
Despite herself, Elena leaned over and peered at the wood. “It is kind of cool,” she admitted.
Louie was just reaching back into the bag when two things happened at once:
1. Mama Eloise walked through the door to the apartment.
2. A shout came from the girls’ bedroom, and Rachel stomped into the living room with a red face.
“Hi, everybody!” said Mama Eloise cheerfully.
“Give it, Louie!” demanded Rachel. She held out her hand.
Mama Eloise frowned. “Rachel?”
Rachel glared at her brother. “I said, give it!”
Louie looked at her blankly.
Mama Eloise set her bags on the couch. “What’s going on, Rachel? Please explain so that we can understand you.”
“I’ll show you instead.” Rachel spun around and marched back to her room. Mama Eloise, Elena, and Louie followed her in a line. Louie walked more slowly than the others, and by the time he’d dragged himself into his sisters’ room, Rachel was standing by the shelves with her arms crossed. “That,” she said. She pointed to the third shelf from the bottom.
“What am I looking at?” asked Mama Eloise.
“Stuffed animal, stuffed animal, doll,” said Rachel, touching each item on the shelf, “stuffed animal, big empty space, doll.”
Elena frowned. “Why is there an empty space?”
�
�Good question,” replied Rachel. “Louie? Would you care to tell us?”
“No.”
“If I go into your room, will I find a stuffed giraffe somewhere?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if there’s a giraffe in your room, or you don’t know if I’ll find it?”
When Louie didn’t answer, Rachel flung open the door to his room.
Mama Eloise almost shrieked, “Watch out for snakes!” but stopped herself just in time.
“It’s right there!” exclaimed Rachel. “Sitting in plain sight. Poor Jerry Giraffe.” She picked up the old giraffe and hugged it.
“Gosh,” said Louie, “I wonder how he got in here.”
Rachel turned to her mother. “He just went in our room and took it!”
Elena narrowed her eyes. “Hey, is that my seashell? The one I found in Florida?” She snatched a conch shell from the swirl of leaves and bark and bottle caps.
Louie snatched it back. “That’s mine!”
“You’re telling me you found this on the beach,” said Elena.
“Um, yup.”
“And then you wrote Elena inside it with pink nail polish?”
“Louie, this has to stop,” said Mama Eloise. “Collections are fine, but you can’t take things that belong to other people.”
“But I thought maybe I would start collecting shells and stuffed animals.” He paused to consider. “And hats and T-shirts.”
“Well, find shells and stuffed animals that aren’t in our room,” said Rachel, and she stomped off, followed by Elena.
* * *
That night Louie’s moms had a talk with him. They explained that it was wrong to take things that didn’t belong to him.
“The stuff I find on the street doesn’t belong to me,” said Louie, wide-eyed, “until I put it in my bag. Then it does.”
Mama Tricia sighed. “No. More. Pilfering,” she said sternly.
But the next day Louie came home with a new baseball glove, and the day after that he came home with a large unopened candy bar. He was made to return each item to its owner, and Mama Tricia went along with him, which Louie found embarrassing. For several days after the candy bar incident, Louie came home with nothing more than rubber bands.
Then on Sunday morning Mama Eloise poked her head into Louie’s room and let out a scream. “Louie! What’s that on your pillow?”
It turned out it was a ferret, and it had been living in Louie’s room for a day and a half.
“Whose ferret is it?” asked the moms when their hearts were beating normally again.
“Mine now,” said Louie.
Elena poked her head into the room. “I’ll bet that’s Zelda. She belongs to Stephanie on the second floor.”
“Stephanie is probably frantic with worry,” said Mama Eloise.
Mama Tricia accompanied Louie and Zelda to Stephanie’s apartment. When Stephanie opened her door, she gasped, then glared fiercely at Louie. “It was you!” she cried. “You took her!” She grabbed Zelda from Louie’s arms, hugged her so tightly that Zelda let out a tiny squeak, and then glared at Louie once more before swiveling around and closing the door with her foot.
“She didn’t even thank me!” exclaimed Louie, looking at the door.
“For stealing Zelda?” asked Mama Tricia, and shook her head.
Upstairs, Mama Eloise phoned Missy Piggle-Wiggle.
* * *
Winter or summer, weekends at the upside-down house were usually very busy for Missy. Her doorbell started ringing early, and children trooped in and out until it was suppertime and their parents called them to come home. The children wanted to play games and walk Wag and feed the animals in the barn and dig for pirate treasure in the yard if the ground wasn’t frozen. But on this sad Sunday, the right-side-up upside-down house was silent, and two sorry signs hung outside.
Missy sat in an armchair in the parlor and watched Lightfoot float slowly across the room above her head. She peered through a window and saw Melody bundled up in a lawn chair in the yard, reading Mary Poppins and chewing on her hair. She watched the Freeforall children walk slowly down the sidewalk, stop, stare at the house, wave forlornly to Melody, and keep on going.
Missy’s doorbell hadn’t rung since the moment she had posted the signs. Her phone had rung, however. In fact, it rang more often than usual. Missy stared at it now, and it rang again.
“Hello?” said Missy.
“Hello?” replied an unfamiliar voice. “Is this Missy Piggle-Wiggle?”
“It is.”
“Oh, good. My name is Eloise Grubbermitts.”
“Ah. Louie’s mom.”
“Exactly. I’m also Elena and Rachel’s mom.”
“But you’re calling about Louie, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes. You see”—Eloise Grubbermitts chuckled—“things keep turning up in Louie’s room that don’t belong to him.”
Missy frowned slightly. It was not as if the things had feet and had walked into his room on their own. “Hmm,” she said. “How did they get there?”
“I suppose that Louie has, well, sticky fingers.”
“Hmm,” said Missy again. “How sticky are they?”
After a pause, Eloise said, “Sticky enough to pick up a neighbor’s ferret.”
“Good heavens.”
“I know.” Suddenly Eloise sounded as if she might cry. “It’s actually a very big problem. At first he was just gathering things for his collections, but now he’s taking things that belong to other people, and he doesn’t seem to understand that this is wrong.”
“Don’t worry,” said Missy soothingly. “I have just the cure. I’ll leave it for you on the porch. Just follow the instructions in the bag.”
* * *
Eloise Grubbermitts was so desperate for help with Louie that she arrived at the right-side-up upside-down house just seconds after Missy had set the cure on the porch. Eloise hurried along the walk, looking curiously at the girl curled in a lawn chair reading a book, and snatched up the bag. “Thank you!” she shouted to Missy. “I hope you get well soon!”
Back at the apartment, Mama Eloise and Mama Tricia examined the jar that had been inside the paper bag. The label on it read SFC.
“SFC?” said Mama Tricia. “What does that mean?”
Mama Eloise shrugged. She opened the jar and peered inside. “It’s some kind of powder.” She sniffed. “It smells nice, sort of like cinnamon.” She reached back in the bag and pulled out a slip of paper.
* * *
Sprinkle ½ teaspoon of Sticky-Fingers Cure on breakfast cereal. Repeat dose in two days if necessary.
* * *
“But what does it do exactly?” asked Mama Tricia.
“I suppose we’ll find out.”
* * *
The next morning Louie announced that he planned to go scavenging again after school.
“Scavenging, not pilfering,” Mama Tricia reminded him.
Mama Eloise hurriedly sprinkled the SFC powder on Louie’s cereal and handed him the bowl.
“Mmm. Cinnamony,” said Louie, and he gobbled it up.
On the way to school that day, Louie found two rubber bands in the gutter, a soda tab at the edge of a garden, and the dusty wing of a moth. He placed them in his bag. In the hallway outside his classroom, he found a paper clip and decided to start a paper clip collection. Then he walked into the room and found a pen that wrote in three colors. The pen was sitting on Ashleigh Dalmatian’s desk. In his head, Louie heard Mama Tricia say, “Scavenging, not pilfering,” but he couldn’t help himself. The pen would be perfect for keeping notes about his collections.
Louie picked up the pen and opened his bag. He tried to drop the pen inside but discovered that it was stuck to his hand. He shook his hand. The pen waggled back and forth but remained stuck. He shook his hand harder. The pen waggled faster.
“Hey! That’s my pen!” cried Ashleigh, hurrying toward her desk.
Louie didn’t know what to say.
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Ashleigh hesitated. She was known in the fifth grade for being pleasant and polite and caring. “Did you want to borrow it?” she asked.
Louie nodded.
“Well, okay. You can use it until the bell rings. Then I need it back.”
Louie, his face red, sat at his desk and tried to write with the pen. When the bell rang, Ashleigh said, “Could I please have my pen back now, Louie?”
“Um, okay.” Louie used his left hand to yank at the pen in his right hand. The pen remained stuck. He held his hand toward Ashleigh. “Here,” he said hopefully.
Ashleigh grasped the pen. She tugged it. She pulled it. She pulled so hard that she and Louie fell over. But the pen wouldn’t come off Louie’s hand.
“Huh,” said Louie.
Their teacher clapped his hands. “Everyone in your seats, please.”
Louie made his way wonderingly to his desk. Ashleigh glared at him.
* * *
At lunchtime, Louie, the pen still attached to his hand, glanced across the table at Rusty Goodenough’s tray and saw a nice blue feather resting on a napkin. I could start a feather collection, Louie thought, and reached for it. It was very small, and Louie was sure Rusty wouldn’t notice that it was gone.
Louie whisked the feather into his pocket. When he withdrew his hand, the feather was still in his palm, next to the pen.
“Hey, where’s my feather?” cried Rusty. He looked at Louie’s hand. “Give it back! I need that for my science project.”
“Oh,” said Louie. “I didn’t know.” He extended his hand to Rusty.
Rusty grabbed the feather. He tugged and tugged. “What did you do? Glue it to your hand?”
“No.”
Louie spent the rest of school with the pen and the feather attached to his right hand. By the time he returned to his apartment that afternoon, a candy bar (the same kind he had been made to return several days earlier) was stuck to his left hand, along with a book and an iPhone. A pair of shorts was stuck to his chest, and a yo-yo was stuck to his cheek.
“What on earth?” exclaimed Rachel, who was in charge of her brother that day.
Louie tried to smile at her.
Suddenly Rachel laughed. “Those are things you stole, aren’t they?”
Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Sticky-Fingers Cure Page 3
