Clara cleared her throat. “Well, in my library book, it said that one time a miner in a camp saw a lady from another tent baking biscuits. He was so hungry for something good to eat that he paid her ten dollars for one biscuit. But you can all have one for free. It’s my grandma Bee’s recipe and it’s really good.”
“That is absolutely superb information,” Mr. Dudeny told her.
Clara beamed. Then she passed out her biscuits. She also had brought in a jar of strawberry jam.
Nancy smeared some over her biscuit and took a bite. Ooh la la. Yummy! Delectable! Scrumptious.
Mr. Dudeny was looking at the wall clock. “I think we have time to hear from one more person. How about you, Miss Clancy?”
Enfin! (In French that meant “At last!”) Nancy stood. She had a bottle of water, a plastic bowl, and the pie pan. It was filled with dirt and gravel from her driveway.
“One way miners in California found gold was by looking in streams,” she told the class. “They called it panning because they used a pan. Sometimes it was the same pan they used for cooking. They’d scoop up some gravel and water.” Nancy paused to pour water into the pie pan. “Gold is heavier than water or dirt or gravel, so any gold sank to the bottom. Prospectors—that’s another name for miners—would swirl their pans around until all the water and other stuff ran out. And sometimes . . .” Slowly Nancy drained all the water and gravel into the plastic bowl. “Voilà! There’d be gold!”
She tilted the pie pan so everyone could see the glittering bottom.
“Cool!” said a few kids. But after Nancy handed Mr. D her paragraph and took her seat, she couldn’t help feeling a little let down. She had worked pretty hard on her project and it was good. But it wasn’t superb. Not like biscuits.
Nancy and Bree were not the only kids in 3D trying to get rich quick. Everybody was—everybody except Grace. “I don’t need to,” she said. “I’m already rich.”
Later that week, Lionel brought in something he called “Insta-Beard.” Wads of cotton balls, painted brown, were glued on the end of a stick—the flat kind that doctors used when you had to open wide and say “Aah.” Lionel showed it around the cafeteria.
“Insta-Beard!” he said. “This is going to be the next big fad. Like Pet Rocks.”
Tamar looked up from her sandwich. “Pet what?” she asked.
“Pet Rocks. They were a fad in the seventies,” Bree piped in. “My dad still has his. It was a rock you pretended was a puppy. It came with a book on how to feed and care for your pet rock.”
“A pet rock.” Clara giggled. “That’s so dumb.”
Lionel was nodding. “That was the point. The guy who thought it up made millions.” Lionel popped his Insta-Beard in front of his mouth.
Clara giggled again, but Nancy thought she was mostly doing it to be nice. Pet Rocks were dumb but funny. To Nancy, the fake beard just looked kind of dumb.
“I can turn these out really fast.” Then Lionel told the kids something that Nancy already knew. His mom was a dentist. “I have a box of tongue depressors at home. Cotton balls too. . . . We can all look like Mr. D.”
“I liked him better without the beard,” Nola confessed, and everyone else at the table nodded in agreement.
Sadly for Lionel, Insta-Beard was a flop. During recess he showed his sample beard around. He tried to get orders from younger kids. A first-grade boy seemed interested until he heard the price.
“A dollar? No way,” he told Lionel.
“As a special introductory offer, I’ll charge only seventy-five cents.”
The kid shook his head and ran off to join a game of dodgeball.
At recess the next day, other new businesses opened. Grace was selling old coins. Ones she had doubles or triples of.
“Wait a minute. You told us you didn’t need to get rich,” Nancy said.
“So? It can’t hurt to get richer,” Grace replied. She tried selling Nancy a penny with a picture of wheat on the back side. “It’ll cost you a dime.”
Bree heard Grace and said, “Oh, no! You told me the one I found was only worth a nickel, tops. It has the same stalks of wheat on it.”
Grace scowled. “Well—well, this one is shiny and looks new. You said yours was all dirty.”
Nancy was already backing away. Was Grace trying to swindle her? “Merci, mais non merci,” Nancy said. In French it meant, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
On the other side of the yard, Nola was selling baseball cards. She had a huge stack. A crowd of kids surrounded her. It looked like she was doing pretty good business until Mr. Dudeny appeared. “Sorry, I’m closing down this operation.” Then he went over to Grace and made her put away the coins.
“Dudes. Recess is for running around, playing games, or just spacing out for forty minutes if that’s what you want to do,” he said once everybody was back at their desks. He scratched his beard. He’d been doing that a lot. Clearly he wasn’t used to so much hair on his face. “Not that I don’t admire your entrepreneurial spirit.”
“Our what?” Yoko asked.
“Entrepreneurial spirit. An entrepreneur is someone who comes up with a smart idea to make money. You say it like this—on-truh-prenn-ur. It’s a French word.” As he said this Mr. D smiled at Nancy. He knew Nancy Clancy was absolutely crazy about everything French.
“Everything starts with an idea,” Mr. Dudeny went on. “Some ideas don’t work.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Lionel said. He couldn’t give away his Insta-Beards for free.
“And some ideas are so superb they change the way we live. Telephones, airplanes, computers. They all started from an idea and people who simply refused to give up on their dream.”
Even though school was off-limits, that didn’t stop the entrepreneurs in 3D from coming up with new ideas for making a fortune.
Robert started offering lasso lessons at his house. He had once lived in Texas and knew lots of rope-twirling tricks. Five kids signed up right away.
Yoko invited kids over to show them the bead jewelry she’d made. She wanted to sell it. She didn’t get many orders. Most of the girls already made the same kind of bracelets themselves.
Clara’s business was the biggest success. She opened a biscuit stand. Nancy and Bree saw it on Saturday when they biked by her house.
“I’m doing great!” Clara said, and gave them each a free biscuit.
“You have a wonderful product,” Bree told her.
“Simply delectable,” agreed Nancy, wiping biscuit crumbs from her lips.
“What’s wrong with us?” Nancy asked Bree when they were back at the clubhouse. “Everybody else is making money.”
Bree was sprawled on the beanbag chair. “We just have to figure out what we’re great at that nobody else is.”
They pondered awhile. That meant they were thinking really hard.
“We have the most superb fashion sense,” Nancy pointed out.
Bree agreed but said, “Who will pay us to tell them what clothes to wear?”
“Well, we know how to make the most of our natural beauty,” Nancy said. “What if we opened a spa?”
“Where? Here in the clubhouse?” At first Bree looked excited. But then she shook her head. “There’s a real spa in town. Who’d come to ours?”
Nancy frowned. Bree was right.
Then Bree sat up straighter. “But we could sell homemade beauty products!”
“Like for skin care?”
“Sure. Why not!”
Bree and Nancy high-fived each other. Then they dashed over to Nancy’s house. In the den, Nancy turned on her mom’s laptop.
“Recipes for homemade skin cream,” they typed into a search engine.
In five minutes they had copied down one. They needed vanilla yogurt, honey, and nutmeg.
“I’m pretty sure we have all the stuff. Let’s check in the kitchen.”
Luckily Nancy’s dad had bought the wrong yogurt—vanilla, not plain—for a meatball dish he was making for dinner.
“Sure. Take it,” he said. When he heard what it was for, he rubbed his jaw. “Softer skin? Put me down for a jar.”
Ooh la la! Their first customer!
The only ingredient missing was nutmeg.
“How important can that be? We only have to use a half teaspoon.” Nancy was searching through the spice rack. “We have cinnamon. You think that’ll work?”
“Probably,” Bree said. “Anyway, we shouldn’t copy the recipe exactly. It has to be our special secret formula.”
While Nancy and Bree whipped up their first batch, they discussed names for their skin cream. Nancy wanted something French. So she wiped her hands on a paper towel and went to find the Clancys’ French-English dictionary. A few moments later—voilà—they came up with a superb name . . . Crème Secrète. It meant secret cream.
Back in the kitchen, Bree poured the glop into clean jam jars. “All that work and we only filled three.”
“We can make bigger batches once the orders come in,” Nancy said.
Bree picked up one of the jars. “We need a great label. My dad says that’s really important if you want your product to sell.” Then she snapped her fingers. “The gold wrappers!” She explained to Nancy that her dad had gotten a whole carton of Solid Gold chocolate bars. Bree had saved all the wrappers from ones she’d eaten. “They were too pretty to throw away!”
Over at Bree’s house they made elegant gold foil labels, argued over the right price for Crème Secrète, settled on $2.99, and then decided to make a commercial.
“We can put it up on YouTube,” Nancy said. “We’ll email everybody we know and tell them to watch. Maybe it’ll go viral!” A few months ago, a home movie of Nancy’s act in the third-grade variety show had gone viral. Over a million people had watched it.
Before filming the commercial, they wrote out a script. Figuring out the beginning was simple. It went like this:
“People often compliment me on my youthful, petal-soft complexion. I’m not bragging. That is just a fact!
“Would you like to know the secret to glowing, super-smooth skin?
“It’s Crème Secrète—made with all-natural ingredients.”
But after the opening, Nancy and Bree got into another argument. Nancy wanted to say, “Apply at night before bedtime. You’ll see amazing results the very next morning! That’s a promise—a guarantee.”
Bree wouldn’t hear of that. “We just made this stuff. We don’t know if it really works. That’s false advertising.” Bree was very strict about sticking to the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“Okay. Okay.” Nancy thought for a moment. Then she said, “How about this . . . ‘Apply every night before bedtime. We are almost positive—that’s nearly a hundred percent sure—that you’ll see results pretty soon.’”
“That’s better.”
Nancy and Bree flipped a coin to see who would be the actress in the commercial. Nancy won. She dressed up in a fancy nightgown of Bree’s. Then she added a boa just for fun.
“Okay. Action!” Bree said once she borrowed her mother’s smartphone.
Nancy got through the first part perfectly. After smearing on Crème Secrète, she yawned and pretended to fall asleep in Bree’s bed. She snored to make it seem more authentic, more real.
Then Bree announced off-camera, “It’s morning now. So let’s see if Crème Secrète worked.”
At that moment Nancy sat up and grabbed a mirror that they’d put on the night table.
“Ooh la la!” Nancy said, peering at her reflection. “I look so young!”
Unfortunately, Bree had to keep filming the commercial over and over because every time Nancy got to that part, she burst out laughing.
Bree was getting irritated.
“Sorry,” Nancy said. “It’s just that old people want to look younger. Nine-year-olds don’t. We want to look older.”
So they switched and Nancy filmed Bree. No surprise—Bree went through the whole thing perfectly the first time.
“It’s a superb commercial,” Nancy said.
“But you really think people are going to buy Crème Secrète? Your dad said he will, and maybe Mrs. DeVine will to be nice. But will anybody else?”
Nancy was wiping the last of the cream off her face. Bree had a point. “Yeah . . . plus it was fun making it once, but I wouldn’t want to keep making lots more.” Nancy sniffed and made a face. “It smells a little funny. Doesn’t it? I think maybe we put in too much cinnamon.”
By then it was time for Nancy to leave. So they said au revoir and Nancy took a jar of Crème Secrète home with her. She gave it to her dad for free. He dabbed some on his face. His nose wrinkled. Nancy could tell her father thought it smelled weird too.
Still, Crème Secrète turned out to be a big hit with someone in the family . . .
Frenchy!
The next morning the jar was empty. Somehow Frenchy had managed to get the top off. She’d licked up every bit of Crème Secrète.
It didn’t take long for Nancy and Bree to follow another path on the road to riches.
Tuesday afternoon Bree came clickety-clacketing in her tap shoes over to Nancy’s right after her dance class.
“I know how we’re going to get rich!
“Look at this picture I took on my mom’s cell. It’s a little girl in beginner ballet.” Bree handed the phone to Nancy. The photo showed a girl around JoJo’s age whose hair was in a bun on top of her head. Around the bun was a tiny gold tiara.
“Adorable!” Nancy said.
“I thought of a name already. We can call it the Bun Crown,” Bree said.
“The Bun Crown.” Nancy repeated the name out loud. Yes, it was perfect.
“It’ll be easy-peasy to make them.” Bree had figured that out on the car ride home. “We can cut crowns out of cardboard and cover them with gold foil from the chocolate. Then all we need to do is punch in holes for ribbons to tie on the crowns.”
“Wow, you’ve thought of everything,” Nancy said. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed in herself. Maybe Bree had more entrepreneurial spirit than she did.
On Saturday Bree and Nancy began Bun Crown production. They worked on the tool table in Bree’s garage. They decided that their first sample looked too plain. So they stuck on fancy jewel stickers and—voilà—gorgeous Bun Crowns!
After Bree bribed Nancy’s sister with a Solid Gold chocolate bar, JoJo agreed to model the Bun Crown. The photo of her came out a little blurry. But JoJo wouldn’t sit still for a retake. Instead she zipped outside to play in Bree’s yard with Freddy.
While they were making an ad, Bree’s dad came into the garage. He picked up a Bun Crown and read their ad. He thought it looked very professional.
“I’m going to ask Mom to put it up on her Facebook page.”
“I like the slogan,” Bree’s dad said.
“I came up with that,” Nancy told him.
The Bun Crown
What’s très fancy and fun?
A crown for your bun!
Be the first on your block to wear one!
Soon Nancy had to leave. Andy was coming over for her guitar lesson. Bree gave her a sample to take home.
“The Bun Crown! We’re going to make millions,” Nancy said. Then they squealed, hugged each other, and squealed some more.
Andy taught Nancy a new song that afternoon. The name of it was “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”
“The chords aren’t that hard.”
Sure enough, after a while Nancy was able to strum along while Andy sang.
“The moon belongs to everyone.
“The best things in life are free.
“The stars belong to everyone.
“They gleam there for you and me.”
It surprised Nancy that Andy had picked this song to teach her. The songs he liked best had a hard, pounding beat. Rock classics like “Wild Thing” and “Louie Louie.” This song was very different. It was sweet and slow and old-fashioned.
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�My band’s got a gig tonight,” Andy explained. “Friends of my grandparents are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. This is the song they want at the end of the party.”
He made Nancy play it a few more times. Then they took a break.
Over a glass of lemonade, Nancy thought more about the words to the song. Of course the moon and stars were free. All you had to do was look up in the sky to see them. “Do you think the lyrics make sense? About the best things being free?”
“Dunno.” Andy drained his glass. “I never really thought about it.”
Neither had Nancy. Not until now. “You’re an entrepreneur, Andy. Making money is important to you, right?”
“Most definitely.”
“You love playing guitar. But would you give lessons for free?” Nancy asked.
“Listen. You’re an amazingly cool kid, and it’s fun teaching you guitar. But no. I wouldn’t be doing it for free. I need to make money.”
Nancy poured more lemonade for him. “Are you saving up for something extra-special?”
“Sure am. It’s called college. I’ll be going in two years and my parents can’t afford to pay for all of it. So I’m saving as much as I can to help out.”
Back in the living room, Nancy spent the rest of the lesson going over the song Andy had taught her last time—“Rock Around the Clock.” Practicing had paid off, because twice Andy said, “Sweet!”
Just before he left, JoJo came bursting into the living room. She still had on her crown. “Help! The king is after me!”
A moment later Freddy appeared. He had on a towel cape and—Nancy noticed—a Bun Crown too. Only his was taped to his head. One of the points was already ripped off.
Freddy started chasing JoJo around the sofa until Nancy yelled, “Halt!” She turned to Freddy. “Did Bree say you could have that crown?”
Nancy Clancy Seeks a Fortune Page 2
