Ivy and Bean No News Is Good News

by Sophie Blackall

  “This newspaper is getting good,” gasped Ivy.

  A HOT STORY

  “Boy, I thought I knew everything that happened on Pancake Court,” said Bean as they walked away from Sophie W.’s house.

  “You know how Ms. Aruba-Tate is always saying how important it is to understand other people?” Ivy said. “I think I understand people a lot more after I look in their windows.”

  Sophie W.’s mom had had blue goo all over her face. Also, most of her hair was inside a bag, except for some strings poking out the top. She was painting the strings with a paintbrush. It was very interesting.

  Bean leaned the box up against Trevor and Ruby’s house. Ivy held it there so she wouldn’t fall again. Bean stood on top of the box and peered in the window. “It’s just their living room,” she said, looking at the empty chairs and sofa. “Pretty boring.”

  “Let’s go around back,” suggested Ivy.

  Ruby and Trevor were twins. They were eight. They didn’t go to school. Their mother taught them at home, which meant they did whatever they wanted and then they had to write about it. Ivy and Bean thought the whole thing was completely unfair.

  “Bean!” yelled Ruby and Trevor together when they saw Bean’s face peeking over their back fence. “Whatcha doing? Come on over!” they yelled.

  “We can’t,” said Bean. “We’re working.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Ivy’s down here, holding the box,” said Bean.

  “Hi!” called Ivy.

  “Hi, Ivy!” yelled Ruby.

  “We’ll help you work,” said Trevor. “We’re going to croak if something doesn’t happen soon.”

  “You can’t help. We’re making a newspaper and we have to do it ourselves,” said Bean.

  “Why’d you come over, then?” asked Ruby.

  “We were hoping to find something exciting to put in the newspaper,” said Bean.

  “There’s no news here,” said Ruby glumly. “Nothing exciting ever happens around here.”

  “Okay,” said Bean. She started to lower herself off the box.

  “No! Wait!” yelled Trevor. “Don’t go!” He looked around his backyard. “I’ll make something exciting happen. Something you can put in your newspaper.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes. “Dream on.”

  “No! Watch!” Trevor jumped up and yanked a leaf off a bush. “I can set this leaf on fire without a match.” He pulled a magnifying glass out of his pocket and held it over the leaf. “It’s magic!” he said.

  “No, it’s not. It’s a magnifying glass,” Bean said.

  “Still, I’m starting a fire. That’s news,” Trevor insisted. The sun’s rays collected on the glass and shone down on the leaf.

  Bean looked down at Ivy. Ivy shrugged. “It’s just a leaf.”

  The leaf began to smoke.

  “I don’t think that counts as news,” Bean told Trevor.

  Trevor looked up at Bean. “What if I light the whole bush on fire?” he asked.

  “Then there’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight,” Bean said. That was a line from a famous song about a fire, but she couldn’t remember what came next.

  “Fire! Fire! Fire!” yelled Ruby.

  Oh yeah, thought Bean. That’s the next line.

  Except that’s not what Ruby meant. Trevor had dropped the smoking leaf on the lawn and now a little bit of grass was smoking, too. Yikes!

  “Fire!” yelled Bean.

  “Really?” asked Ivy. “Let me see!” She stopped holding the box and jumped up on it.

  “Fire!” shouted Ruby.

  “Told you I’d make something happen!” yelled Trevor. “Ha!”

  “Put it out!” cried Ruby. She ran to get the hose.

  “No! It’s my fire!” Trevor shouted. “Leave it alone!”

  Ruby twisted the faucet and whirled around, drenching the grass, the fence, and Trevor with water.

  “HEY! YOU RUINED MY FIRE!” screeched Trevor. “It was news!” He grabbed the hose from Ruby’s hand and sprayed her right in the face.

  “AAAAAAaaaaaah!” shrieked Ruby.

  “Firefighters on Pancake Court?” suggested Ivy, watching Ruby hit Trevor over the head with the hose.

  “That’s pretty good,” said Bean. “Now we have Mr. Columbi’s dirt, Sophie’s mom, Trevor and Ruby, and”—she giggled—”Crummy Matt!”

  Trevor was stuffing wet grass down Ruby’s T-shirt. She was kicking his shin.

  “That’s only four,” said Ivy. “I think we should get one more. Five seems more like a real newspaper.”

  “Okay,” said Bean. “Let’s go see what Jake the Teenager is doing.”

  Trevor and Ruby’s mother charged down the back stairs, shouting, “STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!!”

  Ivy and Bean quietly climbed down from their box and walked down the driveway as the shouting continued behind them.

  “I wish I were homeschooled,” Ivy said. “Don’t you?”

  FACING THE MUSIC

  It was hard to tell which of the teenagers in the garage was Jake the Teenager. They were all big, they were all wearing sunglasses, and they were all yelling and kicking each other. They were a band. The name of their band was Ball Control.

  Pretty stupid name, Ivy and Bean thought.

  “I think Jake’s the one in the red shirt,” said Bean. The one in the red shirt was telling everyone else to be quiet, only he didn’t say be quiet. He said something else. A lot.

  Finally, the other teenagers stopped kicking each other and yelling. Jake the Teenager stood in front of a microphone. “Ah-one, ah-two, ah-three, ah-four!” he said, and then he began to scream.

  All the other teenagers began to scream, too. They pounded on their instruments and screamed and screamed.

  It was the loudest thing in the world.

  Ivy and Bean plugged their ears. They scrunched their eyes. They hunched their shoulders. No matter what they did, it was still the loudest thing in the world.

  Then it stopped.

  Slowly, Bean unplugged her ears. She unscrunched her eyes. Then she unhunched her shoulders.

  Oops. Jake the Teenager was standing on the other side of the window, looking at them.

  “Hi,” said Bean.

  “Hi,” he said. After a second, he asked, “What are you doing?”

  Bean thought fast. “Listening to your cool band!” she said enthusiastically.

  Jake the Teenager took his sunglasses off. “Not bad, huh?” he said.

  “Totally!” said Bean.

  He nodded. He seemed to be waiting for more.

  “Totally awesome!” said Bean.

  “But you were plugging your ears,” he said.

  “It was loud, but it was great,” Bean explained.

  “What was the name of that great song?” asked Ivy.

  “They liked it!” Jake the Teenager yelled over his shoulder. “That one was ‘Lizard Hurricane.’”

  “Oh boy, we sure liked that song,” Bean said. She shook her head as if she were amazed at how much she liked the song.

  “Wanna hear the rest?” asked Jake. “We got six songs.”

  “We would for sure, except we’re working,” said Bean. “We’re writing a newspaper about Pancake Court.”

  “Dude!” said Jake the Teenager. “Write about our band! Write, like, a music review, you know, about how awesome we are!”

  “Sure,” said Ivy. “No problem.”

  “Sure,” repeated Bean.

  “The next one’s called ‘Nebulizer,’” he said. “You’re gonna love it.”

  “We have to get writing,” said Ivy.

  “Deadlines,” said Bean, trying to look like she wished she could hear his song. “Got to go!”

  “Say we’ll play for parties,” he yelled after them as they went down the driveway.

  “Dude! Trust me!” said Bean, waving.

  “Wow, you can really talk teenager,” said Ivy.

  “Anyone can do it,” said Bean modestly. “You just have to pr
actice.”

  It was getting late. “We’d better go to your house and get started,” Ivy said to Bean. She thought for a moment. “You don’t think your dad ate the cheese, do you?”

  Bean shook her head. “He wouldn’t do that.” She looked worried. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Grown-ups like cheese,” Ivy said.

  “We’d better work fast.”

  THE PANCAKE FLIPS

  They wrote The Flipping Pancake until it was time for Ivy to go home for dinner. The next day after school, they rushed home to finish it.

  By the time they were done, Bean’s kitchen table was covered with paper, pencils, scis-sors, erasers, glue sticks, and mess-ups. In the middle of the table was one perfect copy of The Flipping Pancake.

  Ivy and Bean looked at it admiringly. It was beautiful. At the top, Bean had drawn a pancake with little lines coming out of it to show that it was jumping in the air. Around the pancake, she had written in her best printing The Fliping Pancake. So what if she had forgotten the other P? It still looked great.

  Below the title was the first story, the one about the rats and salami in Mr. Columbi’s house. Ivy had decided it was mean to say he was dirty, so she had called it “Mr. Columbi’s Secret.”

  After that came Guess the Naked Baby. They had pasted the picture of Crummy Matt to the paper. There he was, drooling and smiling on a white rug, his rear end waving in the air. Ivy and Bean had almost stopped laughing about it by now. But not quite.

  Bean had drawn a picture of Sophie’s mom with her hair in a bag and blue goo on her face. Beneath it, she had written, “Mrs. W. is up to something!” That was really all she could say, since she didn’t know what Sophie’s mom was doing.

  Together Ivy and Bean had written the exciting story about the fire at Trevor and Ruby’s. In fact, they made it a little more exciting than it really had been. They said the entire backyard burst into flames. They also said that Ruby had saved Trevor’s life by running over flames to get the hose. “People like to read exciting stories,” Bean said.

  Down at the very bottom of the page, Ivy had written about Ball Control. She said that they were famous for “Lizard Hurricane,” and if you wanted to drown out a loud noise, you could ask them over to your house for a party. The story looked a little skimpy, so she also wrote that there were no bad words in their songs. She said that a lot of the other music that Jake the Teenager listened to had bad words in it. She put down the first letter of the really amazingly bad word they had heard. Then she drew an arrow and wrote, “Not in Ball Control songs!”

  There had been just enough room to squeeze in a weather report down at the bottom. Bean had drawn a picture of the sun.

  “Wow,” said Ivy. “I can’t believe we made such a great paper. It looks so real.”

  “We could get famous for this,” said Bean. “I mean”—she picked up the paper—”not many kids could do a whole newspaper all by themselves.”

  Ivy nodded. “Let’s copy it on my mom’s copier,” she said. “Do you think we should give a copy to Sophie W.’s mom, even if she didn’t pay for it? You know, because she’s in it?”

  “No way!” said Bean.

  “But she might give us money when she sees how great it is,” Ivy explained.

  “Oh. Right,” said Bean. “Yeah. Also we have to make one for my dad, so he’ll give us our cheese back.”

  “He’s going to be surprised,” said Ivy.

  Bean nodded. “They’re all going to be surprised.”

  + + + + + +

  And they were surprised, but not exactly in the way that Ivy and Bean had imagined.

  After they delivered The Flipping Pancake to Jean, Jake the Teenager’s dad, Ruby and Trevor’s mom, Liana and Katy’s father, Dino and Crummy Matt’s mom, Mrs. W., and Mr. Columbi, they brought a copy to Bean’s dad. He was on the living room couch, reading a magazine.

  “Here,” said Bean. “Can we have our cheese now?”

  “You just hang on to your engines, kiddo,” he said. He put down his magazine and picked up The Flipping Pancake. “If I see that you two put real work into it, you can have your cheese. There are standards that you have to—” He stopped talking and made a funny sound.

  “Which one are you reading?” asked Ivy.

  “Mr. Columbi’s Secret,” he said, but his voice was funny. He was snorting. Or choking. Or something. “Is that Matt?” he asked in a strangled voice. “Does he know?”

  Bean looked at Ivy and shrugged. “Probably, by now.”

  Her father wasn’t paying attention. “What is this picture of Sheila?” That was Mrs. W.’s name. “What’s she doing?”

  “Got me,” said Bean. “She was painting her hair. I don’t know what she had on her face.”

  He read on. “The twins set their yard on fire? When? Does their mom know?”

  “Oh sure. She was there,” said Bean.

  Bean’s dad stopped reading and frowned. “How did you get all this, anyway?”

  Bean put her hands on her hips. “Look. We did exactly what you told us to do. We went out and found the story.”

  He opened his mouth but he didn’t say anything. For a second, he just stared at her. And then he started laughing. He laughed really, really hard. He almost fell off the couch.

  “You do that, too,” said Ivy.

  “I know. I inherited it,” said Bean. They watched Bean’s dad laugh for a while, and then Bean said again, “Can we have our cheese now?”

  “What?” Dad said, wiping his eyes.

  She said it again, loudly.

  “Lowfat Belldeloon cheese in a special just-for-you serving size,” said Ivy, in case he had forgotten.

  He was still laughing a little, but he got up. “It’s all yours, girls. You have earned your cheese.” He walked toward the kitchen.

  “We won!” whispered Ivy and Bean together as they followed.

  “Now, kids,” said Bean’s dad, handing them their little red bags of cheese. “Even though I think The Flipping—Flipping—” he started laughing again and covered his eyes. “The Flipping Pancake is a masterpiece, but it just might be too, um, powerful for some people. Maybe Sheila wouldn’t like people to know that she paints her hair. For example.”

  “But she does,” said Bean, carefully selecting the best ball of cheese.

  “But maybe she wouldn’t want other people to know that,” he said. “So maybe we should just keep The Flipping Pancake here inside our own house.”

  Ivy and Bean looked at each other. Grown-ups were so weird. “We already made copies and delivered them,” Bean said. “You said we took their money and we had to deliver what we promised. So we did.”

  The doorbell rang.

  THE WHOLE BALL OF WAX

  An hour later, Ivy and Bean were lying on Bean’s trampoline, squishing their beautiful red wax. Squish, squish, squish.

  They had come outside when the kitchen got too crowded with grown-ups. Ruby and Trevor’s mom had made them promise never to show The Flipping Pancake to Ruby and Trevor’s dad. Mrs. W. had stopped by with a dollar for her copy, just like Ivy had expected.

  But she had also asked them to stop looking in her window. Mr. Columbi did, too. And Crummy Matt’s mom had actually wanted his photo back again. She had even paid for it.

  “Two dollars, just to get a picture back.” Ivy shook her head. “Doesn’t seem worth it to me.”

  “She’s his mom,” said Bean. “She probably thinks it’s cute. I think she’s mad at Dino, though.”

  “Ruby and Trevor are grounded, their mom said.” Ivy frowned. “But if you’re at home all the time anyway, how can you tell?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bean.

  For a while, they lay peacefully on the trampoline, squishing their wax.

  Then Bean sat up. Something was shuffling on the other side of her fence. “Do you hear that?” Bean whispered.

  “What?” whispered Ivy. Then she heard it. “Is it a bear?” She hoped it was.

&n
bsp; It wasn’t a bear. It was whispering. Ivy and Bean slid quietly off the trampoline and tiptoed toward the fence. There was a lot of shuffling going on out there. And a grunt. The grunt sounded familiar. It was Crummy Matt’s grunt.

  “I’ll get ‘em,” he was saying. He was talking as softly as he could, but that wasn’t very soft.

  Ivy bugged her eyes at Bean. Get ‘em? What did that mean? It sounded bad.

  “No,” whispered a voice that sounded like Dino. “You grab them and I’ll get ‘em. But we got to go quick, because Mom’s going to find out we’re gone pretty soon.”

  There was that stuff about getting them again. Yikes, Bean mouthed to Ivy.

  “I brought blue paint,” whispered another voice. “If you hold them, I’ll paint them.” That sounded like Sophie W. Like a mad Sophie W.

  Blue paint? Ivy put her hands over her cheeks. A blue face would be okay, but not a blue face painted by a mad person.

  “Okay. You have a camera?” It sounded like Trevor.

  “Trevor, give me that magnifying glass. You can’t light them on fire.” Ruby’s voice was very high and squeaky.

  Bean grabbed Ivy’s arm and yanked. Time for a getaway. But where? For a second, they just zipped wildly around the yard.

  “Who says I can’t?” Trevor snarled. “We’re grounded already!”

  “Trevor, give it here!”

  “Shhh! They’ll hear!” said Sophie W.

  Ivy looked at Bean. Inside, she mouthed.

  No. Wait, mouthed Bean. She held up her wax. Quickly, she squished it flat and stuck it under her nose. Then she lay down next to the trampoline. Come on, she beckoned to Ivy. Then she closed her eyes.