Nancy Clancy, Secret Admirer

by Jane O'Connor

  Dedication

  To Doug Stewart,

  from your out-in-the-open admirer

  —J.O’C.

  For Garrett, Jessie’s fiancé,

  which is a fancy word for not-so-secret admirer

  —R.P.G.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Beating Hearts

  Chapter 2: Guitar Hero

  Chapter 3: The Best Babysitter in the Universe

  Chapter 4: Hearts and More Hearts

  Chapter 5: Operation Eternal Love

  Chapter 6: A Private Conversation

  Chapter 7: When It Rains, It Pours

  Chapter 8: A Close Call

  Chapter 9: The Messenger

  Chapter 10: Sweet Success

  Chapter 11: Teenagers in Love

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  “On your marks, get set . . .” Mr. Dudeny paused for a second. “Go!”

  Right away Nancy started counting. One, two, three. The tips of her fingers were pressed against her neck.

  Four, five, six, seven, eight.

  All the kids in room 3D were counting how many times their hearts beat in a minute. This was called taking your pulse.

  Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two.

  Mr. Dudeny was watching the seconds go by on the wall clock.

  Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one.

  For the past week, room 3D had been learning about the heart. Real hearts didn’t look anything like the hearts that Nancy drew.

  Seventy-two, seventy-three.

  Real hearts weren’t even red like the ones on Valentine’s Day cards.

  Eighty-five, eighty-six.

  Nancy closed her eyes and tried to feel all the blood that her heart was pumping around inside her. But she couldn’t feel anything. It was kind of hard to believe that she really had a heart like the one on the poster in her classroom.

  “Okaaaaaay—stop!”

  “My heart beat ninety times,” Bree said.

  “I think I got eighty-nine,” Nancy said.

  Robert got eighty-seven. Olivia got ninety-three.

  “Me too,” said Nola.

  “Ha! My heart beat the fastest!” Grace shouted. “I got ninety-seven.”

  “This wasn’t a race, Grace,” Mr. Dudeny said. “And nobody’s heart beats at the same rate all the time.” Then he turned to Clara. “Is something the matter?”

  “My heart only beat seven times!” she said.

  Lionel jumped up. “Call an ambulance! This is a medical emergency!”

  “Dude, sit down and stop acting silly.”

  Just then the bell rang. Everybody grabbed their backpacks and headed for the door. Everybody except Clara.

  “Bye, Mr. Dude. See you Monday,” Nancy called.

  Mr. Dude waved. He was standing over Clara’s desk. Nancy heard him saying, “Don’t be upset. You are not having a heart attack. Your heart is strong and healthy.” Then he took Clara’s fingers and helped her take her pulse again.

  Mr. Dude was the best teacher ever. Not only was he smart and funny, he was nice, too. No, he was much better than nice: He was kindhearted!

  As she walked home with Bree, Nancy thought more about that word—“kindhearted.”

  “We say people are kindhearted. But a heart can’t really be kind, can it?” she asked.

  “I guess not.” Bree was busy sucking on a grape Ring Pop.

  “And we call mean people heartless,” Nancy went on. “Like they don’t have a heart. But everybody has one.”

  Bree nodded. Nancy could tell that she wasn’t really interested. To Nancy, however, it was important. If the heart was just some muscle, like Mr. Dudeny said, then what made people fall in love?

  Andy arrived soon after Nancy got home. He high-fived her, then slung his guitar off his shoulder and tossed his Red Sox cap on the couch. He wore his baseball cap everywhere. Nancy thought he looked much cuter without it.

  This was Nancy’s sixth guitar lesson. Andy was teaching her an old rock song. It was called “Wild Thing.”

  “What’s up, JoJo?” he asked Nancy’s little sister. Only the way he said it was like this: “Wazzup.” That was how teenagers talked. Then Andy picked JoJo up and twirled her around and around. It looked like she was flying.

  “Again!” JoJo said.

  Nancy’s mom came in. “Oh, no, missy! We have to leave Andy and Nancy alone.”

  “So?” Andy asked as he handed JoJo over to Mom. “Has my best student been practicing?”

  Nancy giggled. Of course she was Andy’s best student. She was Andy’s only student. Her mom had answered an ad he had put up on the bulletin board at the supermarket.

  Nancy snapped open her guitar case. Her guitar was turquoise with little tuning knobs made of imitation ivory. It was Nancy’s most prized possession. Holding the guitar neck with her left hand, Nancy began strumming with her pick. It was imitation ivory too. As she did, she switched chords from A to D to E major and back to A.

  “Yesss! What I’m hearing is rock . . . and . . . roll!” Andy strapped on his guitar and started playing along with Nancy.

  “Wild thing!” Andy sang. “You make my heart sing! You make everything . . .” Andy looked over at Nancy.

  “Groovy!” She sang in a low, growly voice the way Andy did.

  For the next forty-five minutes Nancy kept playing. Andy showed her how to play a G chord and a C chord. Andy was a superb guitar player. And he was almost a celebrity. His band played at sweet-sixteen parties and bar mitzvahs.

  “You were totally rockin’ the joint today!” he told her afterward. “With the five chords you know now, you can play lots of songs.”

  They were drinking lemonade in the kitchen. JoJo was sitting on Andy’s lap. She was holding his glass.

  “Andy, what are you doing for Valentine’s Day?” Nancy asked.

  Andy shrugged. “No plans.” Then he turned to JoJo and shouted, “More lemonade!”

  JoJo shook her head no.

  “I want lemonade! Now!” It was a game JoJo had made up. Andy had to act like a bratty little kid. He had to remember to say please before JoJo gave him lemonade. It was a dumb game. But JoJo thought it was hilarious.

  “I think you should serenade your girlfriend outside her window.” Serenade meant singing love songs to someone. It was very romantic.

  “What girlfriend?” Andy asked.

  “Margaret! Your girlfriend, Margaret. Remember?” Nancy had asked a million questions about Margaret. Andy’s girlfriend had long brown hair, green eyes, and was almost seventeen.

  “Oh, we broke up,” Andy said. He didn’t sound upset. But Nancy was.

  “Why?”

  “She said we didn’t spend enough time together. I thought we spent way too much time together.”

  Nancy thought about that. “Margaret wasn’t the right girl for you,” she said with certainty. She finished her lemonade. “When you find that special someone, you’ll never want to part.”

  “If you say so.” Andy put JoJo down. He went and got his baseball cap and his guitar. “So? Next week, same time, same place!”

  Nancy waved as he drove off in his pickup truck. She hoped Andy found the love of his life soon. Valentine’s Day was only a week away!

  On Saturday night, as soon as Bree’s little brother, Freddy, was asleep, Nancy and Bree had Annie all to themselves.

  Annie was the best babysitter in the universe. Annie let Nancy and Bree style her hair. (It was so long she could sit on it!) Annie gave almost perfect manicure
s—the polish never smooshed!—and Annie knew all the words to loads of songs.

  Right now they were all dancing to a hip-hop song. Annie had awesome moves.

  “Ooh! That was superb!” Nancy said. “Do it again!”

  Annie spun around, stopped short, and did a hop and a kick while her arms moved up and down like a robot’s.

  When the song was over, they all collapsed on the sofa. Nancy was perspiring. “Perspiring” sounded more grown-up than “sweating.” She was also breathing hard.

  “I bet my heart is beating five hundred times a minute!” Nancy said.

  “No. That’s impossible,” Bree said. Then she told Annie what they had learned about the heart. “Hummingbirds’ hearts beat about a thousand times a minute. But not human-being hearts.”

  “I don’t think that Nancy was being literal,” Annie said to Bree. She explained that literal meant sticking to facts. That was another great thing about Annie. She knew a ton of fancy words.

  At nine thirty, Annie said, “It’s your bedtime. And I have to start studying for my French test.”

  Bree pooched out her lips. “But we didn’t get to look through your fashion magazines.”

  “Okay, we can. But after your teeth are brushed and you’re both in your pj’s.”

  “Deal!” Nancy and Bree said together.

  A few minutes later, the trundle under Bree’s bed had been pulled out. Annie sat between Bree and Nancy. Slowly, they leafed through every page of Glamour Girl, deciding which outfits were chic. Annie said chic was French for cool. Annie said it like this: “sheek.”

  On page 156 was a quiz: “Is Your Boyfriend Right for You?” There was a photo of a girl staring at a boy. Over his head was a big question mark.

  “Ooh! Can we give you the quiz?” Bree asked. “Then you’ll know if Dan is right for you.” Dan was Annie’s boyfriend.

  “I don’t need to take the quiz. I already know the answer,” Annie said.

  “Oh, that’s so romantic!” Nancy clasped her hands together. “You’re madly in love with Dan!”

  But Annie was shaking her head. “No. That’s not what I meant. Dan and I broke up. He definitely wasn’t right for me.”

  “What went wrong?” Bree asked. “You loved his dimples and his laugh. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Annie closed the magazine. “Maybe the problem was that he was too nice.”

  Being nice was a problem? Nancy said, “I don’t understand.”

  Annie shut the magazine. “Oh, whatever I wanted to do was always fine with him. Whatever I said, he agreed with. It got boring.”

  Then Annie climbed over Nancy and blew the girls a kiss. As she turned off the light she said, “I have a date with my French book. So bonne nuit!”

  In French that meant good night. Annie said it like this: “bun new-wee.”

  “I wish Annie had a real date tonight,” Nancy whispered in the dark.

  “Then she couldn’t have come to babysit,” Bree pointed out.

  Yes. That was true. But Bree was being too—what was that word Annie had used? Too literal.

  The next morning, Bree and Nancy were in their clubhouse. It was in Nancy’s backyard. They had allowed JoJo and Freddy to come too.

  The sign outside said SLEUTH HEADQUARTERS. A sleuth was a detective. And both Nancy and Bree were superb sleuths. The file for their first case was inside a bright pink folder. It told all about catching the thief who had stolen Mr. Dudeny’s big blue marble.

  Nancy had bought a package of pink folders for all the cases they were going to solve. However, the other folders were still empty. Nobody seemed to be committing crimes lately. So Nancy and Bree were at Sleuth Headquarters doing homework.

  Doing homework was Bree’s idea. Nancy didn’t see the point. Their Appreciation Hearts didn’t have to be handed in until Friday.

  Mr. Dudeny thought that third graders were too grown-up—“mature” was what he said—to give Valentine’s Day cards to one another. Instead, everyone was making Appreciation Hearts. Appreciating someone meant liking them.

  “Dudes, think of a reason why you appreciate each person in 3D,” Mr. Dude had said. Then he passed out envelopes. Inside each were lots of paper hearts, along with a list of the kids in the class.

  “What about kids we don’t like? Can we say why we unappreciate them?” Grace asked.

  “I won’t bother answering that question,” was all Mr. Dudeny said.

  Grace. Finding something good to say about Grace was going to be a challenge. That meant it was going to be very, very, very, very hard. Nancy lay on her back, staring up at the butterfly mobile in the clubhouse. No matter how hard she blew, it didn’t move.

  Already Bree had a stack of hearts finished. Nancy had only done two. For Yoko, she had written, I appreciate Yoko because she taught me cat’s cradle. For Lionel she had written, I appreciate Lionel because he is humorous and artistic.

  “This heart is for Andy.” JoJo held up a scribble. “I love Andy.” JoJo said she was going to make a heart for everybody she loved.

  “Me too.” Freddy put down the space guy he had been playing with. “One for Mama, one for Daddy, one for Nana.” He went on making scribble hearts. “And one for Annie. When I go to bed, Annie sings to me,” he told JoJo. “I love her.”

  All at once, Nancy sat up. She could feel an idea taking root in her mind. Andy didn’t have a girlfriend. Annie didn’t have a boyfriend. “Bree!” she said excitedly.

  Bree didn’t answer. She was checking over the class list. “Mmmm. Let’s see. Whose name is next?”

  Andy and Annie. Their names went together like two puzzle pieces.

  Annie and Andy. It sounded like the title of a song!

  Ooh la la! Nancy’s idea kept growing. She could almost feel it blooming into a flower. Not just any flower, but a beautiful red rose for Valentine’s Day.

  “Bree, stop doing homework and listen to me. Let’s make Andy and Annie fall in love!”

  Bree frowned as she let Nancy’s words sink in. For a moment Nancy was worried. Maybe Bree thought this was a crazy idea. But a second later, Bree sprang from the beanbag chair. She started shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and doing the little dance she did whenever she made a soccer goal. “That’s the best idea ever!”

  Nancy smiled modestly and said merci. “You think we can make them fall in love before Valentine’s Day?” she asked once Bree calmed down.

  “Or what about right on Valentine’s Day!”

  “Ooh. That’s way better,” Nancy said.

  Bree had a dreamy look on her face. “Years from now, Annie and Andy will tell their kids about meeting on Valentine’s Day. How they fell in love the minute they gazed into each other’s eyes.”

  “Andy and Annie. Don’t you love saying it?” Nancy imagined double hearts with their names written in swirly letters.

  “So?” Bree flopped back down in the beanbag chair. “How will we get them to meet?”

  Nancy frowned. “I haven’t exactly worked that part out yet.”

  “We need a plan.”

  “Yes!” Nancy said. “We can call it Operation Eternal Love.” Eternal love meant loving someone forever, to infinity.

  “Fine.” Bree bit her lower lip. “What if I call Annie, or you could call Andy and say, ‘Guess what! I know the perfect person for you. You’re definitely going to fall in love. So call this number . . .’” Bree stopped. “No, that’ll never work.”

  “Yeah, Andy’s not going to call some girl because I said so. We need to arrange for them to meet someplace,” Nancy said. “Only they can’t know we’re behind it.”

  Bree wrinkled her nose. “That’s going to be hard.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Nancy assured her. Then she got the package of pink folders, and on the front of one she wrote Operation Eternal Love in big purple letters.

  Sure enough, that very afternoon Nancy stumbled upon a plan.

  Nancy was helping Dad with the grocery shopping. Before gettin
g in line to check out, they stopped at the greeting card aisle. Her dad needed to pick out some Valentine’s Day cards.

  “Hey! This is a good one to give Mom!” He showed Nancy a card. There was a photo of a gorilla in a top hat and it said “I go ape for you!”

  “No, Dad! All wrong! Nothing humorous!”

  Instead Nancy found a card with a puffy red satin heart on the front. It said “For my beloved wife, my heart belongs to you and only you.” Then her eyes fell on another card. Ooh la la! The card was silver, and in silver glitter it said “From your secret admirer.” Inside was a love poem.

  “Get this one, Dad.”

  On the way home, Nancy asked, “What exactly is a secret admirer, Dad?”

  “Hmmm. How can I explain it? It’s when you love somebody but you don’t tell them. Not right away. Instead, you leave presents—like flowers or poems—and write ‘This is from your secret admirer.’”

  That was just about the most romantic thing Nancy had ever heard!

  “Were you Mom’s secret admirer?” Nancy asked at home, while they were putting away groceries. “Did you worship her from afar?”

  Her mom came into the kitchen and heard Nancy.

  “Worship me from afar?” Mom looked at Dad and laughed. “No, sweetie. Your father didn’t know I existed, even though he sat right next to me in a history class.”

  “Is that true, Dad?”

  “If your mother says so.”

  Mom helped put away cartons of ice cream and packages of meat. “Then right before exam time, suddenly Dad started to notice me.”

  “Ooh la la! He realized you were the girl of his dreams!”

  Mom shut the freezer door. “He realized he needed help studying. Serious help.”

  “Were you a bad student, Dad?”

  “Uh, I was more what you might call a student of life.”

  Nancy turned from her dad to her mom. “What does that mean?”