Cassidy's Guide to Everyday Etiquette (and Obfuscation)

by Sue Stauffacher

  “Sabrina?”

  “Yup. She competes in beauty contests. She was Miss Runner-Up Teen Decatur last year.”

  “And she’s your age, right? So she wouldn’t want anything to do with a runt like me.”

  “But you could come with me and drive her crazy so she gets the idea that being friends with me wouldn’t be so fantastic.”

  I thought about it for a minute. Driving people crazy is one of my hobbies. “Nope. But I will let you borrow my book. I’m sure there’s a whole chapter on meeting the new neighbors.”

  Magda couldn’t resist. She turned to the index. “Let’s see what Emily Post’s Etiquette has to say. Neighbors, neighbors…borrowing from neighbors, pets, noise issues…wait. Here it is: new neighbors.” She proceeded to read: “When strangers move into an established neighborhood, it is courteous and friendly of the residents nearby to call on them. The newcomers wait for present residents to issue the first formal invitation—”

  She slammed the book shut. “Ugh. Mom was right. Please come with me, Cassidy.”

  You’d have to know Magda to know why something as simple as introducing herself was such a hardship. Magda is like a big floating head. When she gets into her decomposition zone, she doesn’t think about anything else: eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom. According to Mom, she has no interest in what most fifteen-year-old girls like—boys, music, boys, dressing up, boys. Mom figures if Magda ever does get interested, she’ll get married in her lab coat to a boy version of herself. They won’t dare have any babies because they’d forget where they put them on a regular basis.

  “I hope you two are de-escalating,” Mom said, pushing her head through the door. Without knocking first. “Why haven’t you dimmed the lights, Cassidy?”

  After eight-thirty, I wasn’t supposed to have any bright lights on in my room. Magda stepped on the dimmer switch. “Mom. This is private.”

  “Just checking in to make sure you haven’t let any more boys through your window.”

  “It was Jack, Mom.”

  She closed the door and Magda started in on her thumbnail again.

  “Say, Mag. What is karma, exactly? Is it like luck? That reminds me…I gotta find my lucky rabbit’s foot.” I did a couple of scissors kicks under the covers, just in case the foot had worked its way to the bottom of the bed.

  “About that rabbit’s foot…”

  “Did you decompose it? Are you kidding me? I won that at Niagara Falls! They don’t even sell colored ones in Grand River.”

  “I just needed a little bit.” Magda stared off into space. “I couldn’t figure out how they dehydrated it…there had to be a chemical involved…. ”

  I grabbed my sister’s hand and squeezed.

  “Let go, Cassidy! I’ll tell you everything I know about karma.” Magda has a very low pain threshold.

  “Which is?”

  “Well…wait a minute while I revive.” She massaged her hand as if I’d done real damage. “Karma is…I guess you could say karma is ‘you get what you deserve.’ ”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. If you do bad things, bad things get done to you. And if you do good things, like let your sister have a tiny patch of rabbit fur, then good things get done to you.”

  I fell back on my pillows. “That’s not karma, Magda. That’s blackmail.”

  “Well, there you have it. Now, I have to go to bed and get my beauty rest. I’ll have to sleep all week to get ready to meet Sabrina the beauty queen.”

  “Anything’s gotta be better than the Fensters.”

  “I don’t know. I liked them.”

  “That’s because they donated their dead canary’s body to science.” (Which means Mr. Fenster gave it to Magda so she could watch it decompose.) The real truth was the Fensters were ancient and their house smelled like cabbage. I tried a couple of times to train Percy, their yappy little dog, with treats so he would let me jump over the fence to get back all the balls and tin cans that accidentally got into their yard. I used quality stuff—pepperoni-and-cheese beef jerky—but the little mongrel bit me every time. He’d wait until I poked my finger through the fence, bite me and make me watch him eat the jerky I’d dropped on his side.

  Percy did things on his terms, Jack said. He was full of admiration for that dog.

  After Magda left, I buried myself alive under my covers again, and thought hard about what possible good could come from a beauty queen living next door. Maybe she would want my etiquette lessons! Nah. She probably already knew that stuff. Maybe I could skip half the lessons due to an unexplainable and highly contagious disease and she could tutor me.

  There were a lot of possibilities to think over. Could one of them be that Magda was right? No, I decided. Anything had to be better than Mr. Fenster with his smelly cigars and his hairy shoulders, leaning over the fence giving me advice about how to fix my Rollerblades.

  Mr. Fenster had sided with Magda. “Just remember, Cassidy,” he’d said when he informed me that he and Mrs. Fenster were moving to Sunny Pointe Senior Center. “There are worse things than living behind a couple of old farts.”

  “Hungry?” I asked Jack after school the next day.

  “Starving.”

  “Your house or mine?”

  “No question. Didn’t you look at the calendar? It’s the fourth Monday of the month.”

  I smacked my forehead. My mom was so sly she hadn’t said a thing that morning. On the fourth Monday of every month, Mom and her friend Mrs. Pearce drove an hour east to the Lansing Garibaldi’s Import/Export Store to stock up on essentials, like meatless meatballs, navy-bean hummus and spinach-and-kale dip. It’s probably obvious from that list that Mom and Mrs. Pearce are health nuts. After years of lobbying, Magda and I got one more item onto the essentials list—cookie butter!—which if you’ve never heard of it means you live in a one-horse town like Grand River, with no Garibaldi’s.

  Eating cookie butter is like mainlining a gingerbread house. They take a million gingersnaps and grind them into a paste. What a brilliant and efficient way to get more of my favorite food group—dessert.

  “Hi, sweeties.” Mom kissed the top of my head. Then Jack’s. I looked around. Everything had been put away: the fabric bags, her insulated Garibaldi’s cooler.

  Cool as a cucumber, she said, “You two hungry? I could make you a smoothie.”

  Jack looked at me and shrugged. “You hungry?”

  I could hear his stomach growling. “Nah. You?”

  “Not really.”

  I turned to Mom. “Those fish sticks and that irradiated apple they gave us at lunch really hit the spot.”

  “I would have been happy to pack you a lunch, Cassidy, but you said you’d rather take your chances with the slop they serve at school.”

  Jack and I just stared at my mom without blinking.

  “That’s a direct quote.”

  We didn’t respond because, without even agreeing to it beforehand, we’d become iridium. You see, Jack and I have a number of superpowers that drive our parents crazy. Tops on the list has to be density. When we don’t like what’s happening—or we’ve just done something that other people won’t like, such as one of our famous pranks—Jack and I become osmium and iridium. I can never remember which metal is denser, but since they are both considered thicker than anything else, it doesn’t really matter. I like the word “iridium” better, so I usually call that.

  “Very funny, you two. I know exactly what you’re doing, but all the obfuscation in the world will not get you to your goal.” Grabbing her sweater and her cell phone, she continued, “I’m assuming Janae is home, Jack. There’s something I need to talk to her about.”

  I wondered if Jack would emerge from his density to grill Mom. When there’s “something she needs to talk about” with Janae, it usually has to do with an improvement project, like getting us to watch less TV or volunteering us to pick up the trash after the May Day parade.

  But Jack stayed in position. He’s a real pro.r />
  “Fine.” Tugging on her sweater, she added, “You’ll never find it.”

  As soon as we heard the front door close, Jack sat down at the kitchen table and said, “What’s that mean, anyway? Obfuscation?”

  “Not a hundred percent sure; she only says it when she’s annoyed.”

  We stopped talking and concentrated on the problem. Hunger really helps you focus.

  “All we have to do is think like your mom.”

  “I’m becoming her right now.” I froze. When I started moving again, I was in character: “Jack and Cassidy will never think to look where I keep the peanut butter. They don’t think I’m clever enough to hide it in plain sight.”

  We both made a grab for the cupboard, but Jack was faster. I curled my arms around his chest. Normally, I could lift him a few inches off the floor to mess with his footing, but he wasn’t budging. It’s like his feet were made of iron all of a sudden; so I put him in a choke hold. In seconds, he had me down on the floor, my choking arm behind my back.

  “No more wrestling in the kitchen, remember? Your mom’s soap dish?”

  “You’ve been practicing that move.”

  “No I haven’t.” Jack stuck out his hand and pulled me up before moving aside all the jars anywhere near the peanut butter.

  Nothing.

  “I’ve got it!” I snapped my fingers. I was now in the character of a TV detective. “Remember the time she hid it in her sock drawer?”

  We raced into the hallway. Jack caught my ankle on the stairs and stepped right over me. By the time I got to my parents’ bedroom, he was holding up a sticky note. “Give your mother a little more credit than that,” it said.

  Jumping onto my parents’ bed, Jack lay back and crossed his ankles and his arms in his best thinking position. “Maybe we should channel the cookie butter.”

  I lay down next to him and did the double cross, too. We could generate some good electricity between our two brains that way. For a whole minute, Cassidy Corcoran and Jack Taylor were completely still. And silent. Which might have been the first time in recorded history.

  It’s also what helped us crack the case.

  “Did I hear Magda’s door close?” I asked Jack.

  “You mean the same Magda who programs her phone to alert her to your mom’s Garibaldi runs?”

  Holding our breath, we spider-crawled down the hall. “She’s opening a package of crackers,” Jack said, his ear to the door.

  Despite the sign on the door that warned NOXIOUS FUMES PRESENT. DO NOT ENTER UNLESS DRESSED IN A FULL HAZMAT SUIT AND A RIOT MASK, we burst in anyway.

  “Magda Corcoran. I am arresting you on suspicion of stealing the cookie butter and eating it in your room. Officer Taylor, where are the handcuffs?”

  “Obviously, I’m eating in my room, but I didn’t steal the cookie butter.” Magda held up the disgusting jar of soy-nut butter that Mom tried to sneak by us during her most recent evil campaign to get us to eat health food.

  Jack rubbed his chin, TV detective–style. “Something’s not adding up here.”

  Magda tried to look at us without blinking—as dense as iridium—but her cheek was twitching and she couldn’t maintain eye contact.

  “We’ll need to bag that as evidence.” I held out my hand for the soy stuff.

  “You will not. I’m…conducting an experiment.”

  “Really.” Now I double-triple knew something was fishy. Mom just bought that stuff a week or so ago. It wasn’t even near to rotting! “And what kind of an experiment would that be, Professor Corcoran?”

  I glanced over at Jack, who nodded to show he understood my plan. I’d distract. He’d swipe the jar.

  “It’s an experiment about…” Magda tried to pinch the rim of her glasses and look all scholarly, but, as I think I mentioned, her new glasses didn’t have rims.

  “Magda, are you sweating?”

  “No! I’m…it’s an experiment about…aflatoxins and, uh, how they accelerate the rate of— Jack!”

  Jack had accomplished a clean lift of the jar and was now sitting on Magda’s dresser, swinging his legs. “Don’t you find it interesting, Officer Corcoran”—he held out the jar to me—“that this jar of soy-nut butter smells suspiciously like gingerbread?”

  “How can that be, Officer Taylor…?” I almost fainted from hunger after taking a big sniff. “The label clearly says healthy, disgusting soy-nut butter.” Giving my sister’s shoulder a push, I said, “Spill it, Mags, and we’ll put in a good word for you down at the station.”

  “I almost got away with it. If only Mom and Dad would let me put that dead bolt on my door!”

  “We’ll share,” Jack said. “C’mon. Hand over the knife. How’d you find it?”

  “Two key pieces of evidence. Remember when Mom hid the cookie-butter jar so well even she couldn’t find it?”

  “Of course I remember. Mr. Fenster brought Percy over to see if he could sniff it out and he wee-weed on my bedpost!”

  “He was marking his territory,” Magda explained.

  “You don’t see me hopping the fence to do that on his doggy lounger, do you?”

  “Stay on task, Officer.” Jack handed me a graham cracker.

  “We remember,” I said. “That jar has never been recovered.”

  “To your knowledge.” Magda licked her fingers. She’d already been indulging. “Dad’s insulated lunch bag did have traces. Anyway, I heard her tell Dad she had to make the jar easier to find. Then, when I came home today, I found this on the counter.” Magda held up one of the single-use superglue tubes we go through by the dozen in the Corcoran household.

  “Sooo…she soaked off the soy label and put it on the cookie butter. Brilliant. Really.” I took half of Jack’s graham cracker and bit down. “I don’t give Mom enough credit.”

  “You’re spraying crumbs, Cassidy.”

  “Didn’t I tell you, Jack? Hidden in plain sight.”

  My stomach went from growling to purring as we finished off two packets of graham crackers and half a jar of cookie butter.

  “We’d better stop,” Magda said. “Dad told me if the jar was empty when he got home, I should prepare to see a grown man cry.”

  “So why do you think Mom wants to talk to Janae?”

  “Probably some do-gooder idea she picked up from the bulletin board at Garibaldi’s.”

  “Well, I’m not going in on it. I’ll generate enough do-goodness for one hundred eleven-year-olds by going to etiquette class.”

  Just thinking about etiquette class made me want to lick the rest of the cookie butter off my fingers.

  “Maybe we can eavesdrop. Wanna go through the window?” Jack asked.

  It might not seem like it, but there are differences between Jack and me. He likes having a lot of air between his feet and the ground. I’m not so into that.

  “I’ll wait until you reach the porch roof and then I’ll sprint. Better vacuum in here, Mags,” I said as Jack took off for my bedroom window. “Destroy the evidence.”

  “Cassidy, haven’t I taught you anything over the years? There is always residue.”

  As I dashed through the kitchen, I couldn’t resist screeching to a stop in front of my startled mom and huffing a big breath of cookie butter in her face. “Nice try, Mom.”

  —

  It didn’t really matter if there was no one to eavesdrop on now that Mom was back at our house; something was always happening at Jack’s house. Mr. Taylor pulled up just as I arrived. “Look what I discovered at Liquidation Station,” he said, hopping out of the cab of his old Ford pickup and planting a kiss on the hood—which he did every time it successfully got him back home.

  Jack jumped into the back of the truck and tore into one of the boxes. He held up the wooden U, framing his face. “Toilet seats?”

  “Yep. They’re cracked.”

  “Dad? What’s exciting about this?”

  “Use your imagination, Jack-o.”

  Mr. Taylor leaned down and whispered in
my ear. “Think heat.” He smelled like sawdust and paint and something else you smell in hardware stores that I couldn’t put my finger on—maybe engine oil. If they sold that smell, I’d buy a bottle and give it to my dad for Christmas.

  “A hobo would burn them,” I said. “If they’re cracked, that means they’re dried out.”

  “Precisely. I will burn them in my woodstove in the shop this winter. If you and Jack want to pull out the hardware, we can sell the metal and I’ll let you have what’s left over from purchasing the lot.”

  It was just the sort of thing a ’bo would do, take something other people think is trash and find use in it. Jack tossed me a toilet seat. “Let’s get the tools and see if this is worth making a deal.”

  I followed Jack to their garage, which the Taylors converted into a workshop for Jack’s dad. He went to the back wall and switched on an overhead light, illuminating Mr. Taylor’s pegboard filled with tools: hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, mallets. There was always something in the vise grip on the edge of the long bench, always wood shavings on the floor. It was from Jack and his dad that I learned about things like miter boxes, planes and rasps. As Mr. Taylor pointed out, knowing how to put something together would come in handy on the road—even if just to barter for a night in a farmer’s barn.

  “What’s your dad got going now?” I asked, running my hand along a smooth post with a big ball of wood on top.

  “He’s making my mom a garden gate. See?” Jack held up a pair of old iron hinges. “He got these from a house they salvaged in Wayland. There was so much rust, it took me forever to loosen the screws and fasteners. I finally got them free with some cutting oil. I almost used the propane torch, but Dad saved the garage from going up in flames when he reminded me that propane and oil don’t mix.”

  Jack went on, talking about flexible sanding sponges and wire wheels and all that elbow grease that made him better than me at push-ups; listening to the sound of his voice was hypnotizing me…I wanted to lie down in the sawdust and fall asleep.

  If it wasn’t for the stupid fly that had to bumble right into a spiderweb!

  “Jack, get him out!” I shouted, pointing at the fly while keeping my eyes covered, which did not block out the pathetic buzzing.