Marshmallow Masquerade

by Cynthia Blair

  MARSHMALLOW MASQUERADE

  Cynthia Blair

  Chapter One

  “Even if I live to be a hundred, I’ll never understand boys!” declared Christine Pratt with a loud sigh.

  Her best friend, Holly Anderson, looked over at her with surprise. “Why, Chris! I always thought you were the world’s expert on that subject.”

  “I did, too,” Chris admitted. “That is, until I met up with Scott Stevens,”

  “Uh-oh,” Holly teased her. “Not the captain of Whittington High’s basketball team—not to mention the school’s number-one heartthrob. What’s going on with you and Scott?”

  “There’s absolutely nothing going on with me and Scott,” Chris wailed. “Not for lack of trying, either—at least on my part. I’ve been running through every trick in the book. I go out of my way to run into him ‘accidentally’; I talk to him in history class every day.... I even offered to help him study for the big test on the Civil War. And I still can’t get him to notice me!”

  The two girls were in the Pratts’ kitchen, making hot chocolate. It was late on a Friday night in mid-November, just two weeks before Thanksgiving, and Christine Pratt and her twin sister, Susan, had each invited a friend to sleep over.

  The evening had turned into an informal slumber party: four girls staying up till all hours in their bathrobes and slippers, giggling and eating and talking the entire night away. And so it was inevitable that sooner or later the topic of conversation turned to boys.

  “And here I was hoping that Scott would invite me to the Homecoming Dance next Saturday night,” Chris grumbled as she stirred cocoa and sugar into the saucepan of hot milk on the stove. “But at the rate things are going, I might end up without any date at all!”

  “You could always go with Peter Blake,” Holly teased her. “I get the distinct impression that he’s got a crush on you.”

  “Oh, no!” Chris groaned. “Not Peter Blake, the number-one nerd of Whittington High! Why, the only thing he ever talks about is bugs!”

  “Bugs?”

  Chris nodded seriously. “He’s a real nut about nature and animals and all that. Haven’t you ever heard him go on about how all animals are wonderful, even ugly little bugs?” She shuddered at the thought. “Oh, if only I could get Scott to ask me to that silly dance....”

  Holly, usually bubbly, was pensive as she took four white ceramic mugs off the shelf above the kitchen sink. “Hey, I just thought of something. Maybe Scott already has a girlfriend.”

  “Not a chance. I already checked into that. According to my in-depth research, the only thing that makes Scott Stevens’s heart go pitter-patter is basketball.” Chris bit her lip and shrugged. “Maybe I’m losing my touch.”

  “You, Chris? Never!”

  “Well, then, maybe I’m just not his type.”

  As she poured the hot chocolate into the mugs, she said, “Even though I think he’s the dreamboat of the century, I’m on the verge of giving up. Writing him off forever. Admitting, once and for all, that Scott and I simply were not meant to be.”

  “Well, Chris, if it’s any consolation, things between Hank and me aren’t going all that smoothly, either.”

  “Hank! Wait a minute. Didn’t you two go out just last weekend?”

  Holly nodded. She leaned against the kitchen counter and twisted a strand of her long blond hair around one finger. “Yes, we did. We went to the movies together last Saturday night.”

  “And how did it go?”

  “It was great! We both had a terrific time.” Thoughtfully, she added, “At least, I did. And it seemed like he did, too.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, ever since then he’s acted as if we were total strangers!”

  “You mean he hasn’t called you?”

  “Not only hasn’t he called me; whenever I see him at school, he acts as if I’ve got the bubonic plague or something!”

  Chris shook her head slowly. “Boys! What on earth goes on in their heads? I sure wish I could figure them out!”

  “Believe me, Chris, if you could, you’d be a millionaire by the time you were eighteen. You could travel around the country, giving lectures to girls just like us!”

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful! Finally, we girls would be able to find out what makes boys tick!”

  Holly’s dreamy smile faded abruptly. “Unfortunately, that’s not about to happen. So in the meantime, let’s get this hot chocolate upstairs before Susan and Beth come down to see what’s taking us so long.” She placed all four mugs on a tray, then added spoons and paper napkins. “For now, we’ll just have to resort to the one sure-fire cure for the blues.”

  “What’s that?”

  Grinning mischievously, Holly replied, “Why, drowning our sorrows in food, of course!”

  Chris laughed. “In that case, we might as well go all the way!”

  She pulled out a kitchen chair and climbed up to the cabinet above the refrigerator. After rummaging through the boxes and cans that were tucked away up there, she finally came up with a clear plastic bag printed in red and blue. Triumphantly she waved it in the air.

  “What’s that?” Holly demanded.

  “Marshmallows!” cried Chris. “If we’re going to drown our sorrows, we might as well do it right! Here, catch!” She tossed the bag to Holly, down below.

  “Hey, you two, we were just starting to wonder what happened,” said Susan Pratt, Chris’s twin sister, once the two cooks reappeared in Chris’s bedroom on the second floor. She was sitting on the window seat,

  lazily scratching the Pratts’ pet cat, Jonathan, under the chin.

  “That’s right,” agreed Beth Thompson, Susan’s best friend, who was lounging on the bed. “We were afraid you got so thirsty that you ended up drinking all the hot chocolate before we even got a chance to get near it!”

  “I wish,” moaned Chris. “No, I’m afraid we were busy complaining.”

  “About what?” Beth asked, cocking her head so that her short black curls bounced.

  “What else?” Holly replied. “We were complaining about boys!”

  “Gee,” Beth returned wistfully. “At least you have something to complain about! I hardly ever go out. I’m so shy that every time I try to talk to a boy, I end up turning red and stuttering. Half the time, I just feel like running away.”

  “Well, we have a temporary cure, anyway,” Chris said. “Four hot chocolates, coming up. With marsh-mallows!”

  “Great!” cried Susan. “Just the thing for a cold winter night.”

  The girls were silent as they sipped their hot chocolate. Susan, the more thoughtful of the Pratt twins, took advantage of the first quiet moment of the night to look around at the rest of the foursome lounging comfortably in Chris’s bedroom.

  Holly Anderson, she decided, was a lot like Chris. It seemed fitting that the two of them were best friends, as they had been since junior high school. They were both outgoing and popular, taking part in so many school activities—committees and clubs and anything else that came along—that they could have

  made good use of a social secretary to keep track of their busy schedules.

  Tonight they were even dressed similarly. Chris, with her shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair and dark brown eyes, was wearing a bright pink nightshirt with the faces of the members of one of her favorite rock groups printed in front. And Holly, so different in coloring, with her long blond hair and blue eyes, nevertheless looked as if she were cut from the same mold in the red oversized tee-shirt that she claimed she had talked her older brother, Michael, into giving her.

  On the other hand, Susan and her best friend, Beth, were dressed in old-fashioned flannel nightgowns trimmed with lace. Susan’s
was pale blue, sprigged with tiny white flowers. Beth wore a white one with a pale pink stripe running through it. With her dark, curly hair, she looked like a character in a picture book of fairy tales.

  Yes, we certainly do make an odd group! thought Susan. What a strange mixture of seventeen-year-old girls!

  What was even more difficult to believe, however, was the fact that Chris and Susan were twins. After all, the two of them were so different. While Chris was an extrovert, Susan was quiet, preferring reading and listening to music and simply daydreaming to planning a school dance or trying out for the cheer-leading team. Her real passion, however, was art. Susan was quite a talented painter, and she hoped to attend art school after high school graduation.

  Even though the Pratt girls were so different from each other, they looked exactly the same. After all, they were identical twins. Both had shining chestnut-brown hair, which they wore at shoulder length, and

  dark brown eyes, high cheekbones, and ski-jump noses.

  We certainly don’t look like identical twins tonight! thought Susan with amusement. But that was almost always the case. Unless, of course, the twins made a special effort to look that same. And that was something they had done more than once ... usually in order to play a mischievous prank.

  “So are you two having trouble with your social lives?” Susan asked. Now that she had had a chance to enjoy some of the tasty hot chocolate her sister had just prepared, she was eager to return to the discussion that had been abandoned so abruptly in favor of sweeter pastimes.

  Chris rolled her eyes dramatically. “When aren’t I?” she groaned. “This boy-girl thing is never very easy, is it?”

  “It’s like a big game,” Holly joined in. “Trying to guess what a boy really means when he says something, spending hours on the telephone with your girlfriends trying to predict what he’s going to do next ... Really, I get so tired of the whole thing sometimes.”

  “I know what you mean,” Susan agreed. “I wish boys and girls could just be more direct with each other. Say what they mean, without worrying about what the other person is thinking.”

  Beth sighed. “I wonder if what boys and girls want is really so different. I mean, here we are, talking about boys as if they were—I don’t know—Martians or something!”

  “I think you’re onto something!” Holly joked. “Finally, we’ve figured out what the problem is!”

  “No, really,” Beth went on. “They’re human beings, just like us ... aren’t they?”

  “Then why is everything always so difficult?” Chris moaned. “Look at us. We’re four perfectly nice, normal teenage girls. And yet I’m all in a tizzy because I don’t know what’s going on with Scott Stevens, Holly’s upset because Hank is suddenly giving her the runaround, Beth is convinced that boys are just like girls, but she just admitted that she can’t even talk to them, and Susan ...”

  “I’m just as baffled as you are,” Susan laughed. Even though she was among her closest friends, girls she felt she could trust one hundred percent, she didn’t feel like admitting to the secret crush she’d developed lately on Michael Anderson, Holly’s older brother. “You know one thing that’s always bothered me? I mean really bothered me?”

  “What?” asked her twin.

  “The fact that girls aren’t supposed to telephone boys. It doesn’t make any sense. They’re allowed to call us, but all we’re supposed to do is sit around and wait for them.”

  “Yeah,” Beth agreed somberly. “It’s like something out of the Dark Ages, isn’t it? This is the twentieth century, after all! But things haven’t changed much since my mother was our age. My grandmother, even!”

  “And then there’s the problem of what to do if a boy doesn’t call,” said Holly. “We end up wasting our time worrying about if we said the wrong thing or if they don’t really like us or if we’re too tall or too fat or ... or too something!”

  “Do you know what we need?” Beth said, suddenly excited. “We need a spy. Someone to find out for the female population, once and for all, what boys are all about.”

  “Gee, what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall at Hank’s house one afternoon when he had his friends over!” Holly whooped.

  “ ‘A fly on the wall’?” Beth was puzzled. “What does that mean?”

  “It means she wishes that she could listen to everything the boys we know say when they think they’re alone,” Susan explained. “You know, without their realizing anyone could hear them.”

  “Oh, I see.” Beth turned to Holly. “Then you could find out what’s been going on in Hank’s mind all week. Why he hasn’t called you.”

  “Exactly. And I bet we’d hear a lot more! Imagine: If we could do that, we could find out what each and every boy we know is really like! What they talk about, how they feel about girls, how they feel about each one of us ...” Holly was growing more and more excited as she continued to fantasize about her idea. “Just think! Listening in while all the boys we know talk to their friends! It’s ... it’s mind-boggling!”

  “I’ll say,” Chris agreed, sounding a trifle glum. “Unfortunately, it also happens to be impossible.”

  The four girls were silent as they thought about Holly’s idea. It was, indeed, wonderful. But Chris was right; accomplishing such a feat was something that could never be done.

  “Hey, wait a second,” Beth said suddenly. “Maybe it’s not impossible.”

  “What do you mean, Beth?” Susan blinked.

  “Well, you and Chris are so good at pranks. Maybe

  one of you could ... oh, I don’t know, hide in one of the lockers in the boys’ locker room or something.”

  “You mean we could eavesdrop.” Chris looked over at her twin. “Well, we’ve certainly tried our hand at pranks before.”

  “That’s for sure!” Susan agreed.

  It was true; the adventurous Christine and Susan Pratt had certainly played quite a few tricks in their time, calling upon the fact that the two of them were identical to do all kinds of things that most people could never get away with. The year before, for example, when they were both sixteen, they had traded places for two whole weeks so that each girl could learn more about what her twin sister’s life was like. They had dubbed that adventure the Banana Split Affair, since Susan bet Chris a banana split that the two of them could never carry it off. In the Hot Fudge Sunday Affair, they had taken turns being Chris in order to share the rewards of being their hometown’s honorary “Queen” during a week-long celebration of Whittington’s one-hundred-year anniversary, an award that the girls had worked together to earn. That time, they had had no doubts that they could fool everyone, and they celebrated at the end of the week with hot fudge sundaes at Fozzy’s, Whittington’s new ice cream parlor.

  Then, during the summer that they nicknamed Strawberry Summer, their being identical also came in quite handy. Their successful history of pranks was bound to catch up with them sooner or later, however, and right before Halloween, while Chris was testing a theory of hers called the Pumpkin Principle, it was the twins who ended up being tricked—in a way that, fortunately, also turned out to be a treat.

  “I don’t know,” Susan said, shaking her head. “Sure, Chris and I have played our share of pranks. But what you’re talking about sounds a bit too difficult, even for two experts like us.”

  “I’m afraid I have to agree with Sooz,” said Chris. “This time, the fact that we’re identical twins can’t be of much help.”

  “Well,” said Holly with a loud sigh, “it was a great idea, anyway. And it was fun while it lasted.” She took another sip of her hot chocolate. “You know,” she said slowly, “the way I look at it, boys are kind of like marshmallows.”

  “Marshmallows!” Chris shrieked. “Holly Anderson, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “Well,” her friend said thoughtfully, “they’re sweet and they’re fun, and they can take something that’s already nice, like hot chocolate, and make it even nicer. But when you come ri
ght down to it, we really don’t know very much about marshmallows at all, do we?”

  “That’s right!” Susan agreed, laughing. “Like, how come they float? And why don’t they dissolve, if all they’re made of is sugar? I think Holly’s found the perfect way to think of those mysterious creatures. They are like marshmallows!”

  The four girls laughed at the image that Holly’s comment had conjured up in their minds. It was ridiculous, of course, but late at night, with all four girls together, giggling and talking and having a wonderful time, comparing boys with marshmallows seemed like an inspired idea. It was a good joke, something to make them all laugh, even though they were feeling a bit down about their inability to comprehend the puzzle that confronted them every single day: the opposite sex.

  As they finished up their hot chocolate and decided to abandon their woefulness for a game of Scrabble, they forgot all about Holly’s teasing remark. It never occurred to any of them that their joking conversation was about to launch the most daring, most intriguing, most delicious prank of the Pratt twins’ mischievous career.

  Chapter Two

  “So, did you girls have fun last night?” asked Mrs. Pratt over lunch the next day.

  The four Pratts were sitting at the kitchen table, finishing up their soup and sandwiches, spending some time together before going their separate ways for the rest of the afternoon.

  “What I want to know is, did you girls get any sleep last night?” the girls’ father teased them. “When I went to bed, just after eleven, I heard an awful lot of giggling coming from Chris’s room. And then, when I got up at seven this morning, I still heard giggling!”

  “Oh, Daddy!” Chris laughed. “What’s the use of having your friends sleep over if all you’re going to do is sleep!”

  Mr. Pratt looked at his daughter quizzically. “I suppose there’s some logic there,” he said. “But I suspect I’d have to be a teenage girl to understand it. And, unfortunately, it’s been a long time since I could honestly call myself a teenager. As for being able to understand the female half of the population—”