Azalea, Unschooled
Page 5
“In it goes!” sang Nola, and, removing the molasses funnel, she poured great glugs of it into the switchel jug.
“I feel sorry for those field hands,” I said. “All those hours working in the hot sun, and this is their reward.”
I hated to admit it, but I was starting to enjoy myself a little, too. I didn’t even mind much that my investigation was going nowhere.
“Nonsense,” said Nola. “It’s delightful.”
She added an extra shot of vinegar to the mixture. “They’ll love it.”
“And finally, the ginger,” Gabby said. “I remember reading about this. People used to think it was good for the workers’ stomachs.”
She opened a different cabinet and examined a spice rack. Each little compartment had a different type of spice in a glass container.
“I keep telling Spirit to alphabetize these, but she says she has a system. Here! Ginger.”
She pulled out a little round jar and tossed it to Nola, who caught it.
“Maybe a teaspoon,” Gabby told Nola.
“Or maybe a little more,” I said.
“Coming up.”
Nola opened the container and looked at the yellow powder inside. She wet a finger with her tongue and stuck it in, then tasted the powder.
“Weird,” she said. “Hot.” She opened the lid and poured a lot into the jug.
“That’s way more than a teaspoon!” Gabby cried.
“Is it?” asked Nola innocently. “Well, it will be that much better for their stomachs.”
I opened a couple of drawers until I found a long wooden spoon.
“Mixing time!” I said. The top of the jug was too narrow for the spoon, so I stuck the handle in and stirred.
Gabby got out three small glasses.
“Wait—let’s add just a dash more ginger,” said Nola. She shook the container over the jug.
“That’s enough!” said Gabby. “It’ll be way too hot.”
“That would be such a shame,” said Nola.
She managed one more shake before Gabby yanked the container away. Then Gabby poured a tiny bit of the liquid into each glass.
“Ladies,” Gabby said, “a toast! To the beverages of other centuries!”
I picked up my glass and clinked it against Gabby’s. “To switchel!”
Nola clinked both our glasses. “To giving hardworking people exactly what they deserve.”
I laughed.
We all took a sip. I sputtered and spat mine back out.
“Nola, you put way too much ginger in this,” I said. My eyes were tearing. “This is extra terrible.”
Nola savored hers thoughtfully.
“I disagree,” she said. “It has a nice kick.”
But I could see that her eyes were watering, too.
Gabby took a second sip of hers. She didn’t flinch.
“This is either incredibly great or completely awful. I haven’t decided yet.”
“I’m going with awful,” I said.
“Get a couple of clean glasses,” Nola ordered Gabby. “I’ll carry the jug.”
We went outside and walked over to the shed where the boys were standing with their backs to us, looking at their pile of boards and a large blueprint that lay next to it. They seemed to be trying to figure something out. The air was cool and damp, and they didn’t exactly look like field hands dying for a drink. Still, Nola called out to them.
“Hey, guys,” she said. “You look like you could use a little refreshment. We made some lemonade.”
“It’s actually switch—” Gabby started to say, but Nola turned around and shushed her.
“It’s basically lemonade,” Nola said. She took one of the glasses from Gabby and poured some. “Gibran? Want some?”
“Maybe later,” he said, his back still turned. He knelt down and fiddled with the boards. “This one needs to be, like, up against here,” he said to Charlie.
Nola didn’t give up.
“Charlie, you must be thirsty. How about it?”
She held out the glass to her brother. He took a sip, grimaced, and handed the glass back to Nola.
“What is this stuff?” he asked.
“It’s just a delicious old recipe we know about,” Gabby told him, and the three of us looked at each other. I saw that Gabby had understood the plan all along. A laugh bubbled up in me; I couldn’t help it. I gave a sort of snort. That made Nola snort, too. Maybe it wasn’t so crazy to think that she and I could be friends.
“I don’t think the sides are going to line up with the transom,” Gibran said to Charlie, like we weren’t even there.
“I know,” Charlie agreed. “Something looks wrong.”
“Delicious beverage, anyone?” Nola asked. “Gibran?”
She rocked Charlie’s drinking glass so the switchel swirled around in it. It looked pretty good, if you didn’t know what it tasted like.
“Nola,” Charlie said, “hold the transom up for us.”
Nola didn’t think twice before going over to the enemy. She set down the glass and the jug and grabbed the board he was pointing at.
“Here?”
“Yeah. Just keep that steady so we can see how the sides fit next to it.”
“Got it,” she said, crouching down and gripping the board—and just like that, she was one of the field hands.
Gabby and I, fine ladies still, stood watching while Charlie and Gibran wrestled with the sides of the boat.
This wasn’t going the way I wanted. I needed it to be the way it had started out: the girls united on one side, the boys on the other. The whole point of this was for Nola and me to be on the same side.
“If they don’t want our switchel,” I said loudly, “we can just take it back inside. Right, girls?”
Nola continued holding the board. I had ceased, once again, to exist.
I bent to pick up the jug that Nola had set down.
“Last chance!” I sang, swirling the liquid around like Nola had. “Doesn’t it look tempting?” I gave the jug an extra, emphatic jerk, and some of the switchel sloshed down the side. A large drop of it landed on the blueprint.
“I’m sorry!” I said. As I quickly stepped away from the paper, I kicked over the glass Nola had put on the ground. A dark stain spread across the boat plans.
“Oh, nice work,” said Gibran, dragging the blueprint across the grass, away from me. “It’s all wet now. Gabby, would you get your friends away from here?”
“Yeah, nice going, Azalea,” Nola said, one hand on her hip. “Way to be helpful.”
She didn’t move when Gabby and I turned to go back to the house.
“So much for the revenge plan,” I said, setting the jug on the kitchen counter. “It didn’t work at all.”
Nothing had worked. Not my attempt to find out what Nola knew about the bus, and certainly not my stupid idea about getting her to like me so that she’d stop trying to make my family leave. Now she hated me more than ever. I wasn’t any too fond of her, myself.
“I know!” agreed Gabby. “Nola totally changed sides!”
She put the glasses next to the jug on the counter.
“The old bait and switchel,” I said. “It’s the oldest trick in the book.”
We shook our heads solemnly. Then I raised the jug to salute her and she raised one of the glasses back. We tipped the liquid ceremoniously into the sink and watched it swirl down the drain.
Chapter 6
Unschool Library
It was time to step up the sleuth work.
Someone out there had vandalized our bus, and whether or not it was Nola, I was going to find out who had done it. Anyway, that was what the feisty kids in novels always resolved to do, and it seemed to work out for them. So when Gabby and I arranged to meet downtown at the library a week later, I had a plan.
Mom dropped me off in front of the library’s sliding doors and I ran inside. The public library was always one of our first stops in a new town, so I was already familiar with this one.
“Guess what?” I said, careful to keep my voice at a library-appropriate level.
Gabby looked up from her book. “What?”
“We have a mystery to solve!”
Gabby slammed the book shut. “Where do we start?”
This seemed a little abrupt. “Don’t you want to know the mystery?”
“I figured it was the bus. Don’t we want to know who wrote that stuff in the bus?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I tried to think of something more dramatic to add, but I couldn’t.
“That’s it. And I have a plan.” I waved my arm at the books all around us. “We’re going to do some research.”
“What?”
“Research. We’re going to read everything we can about tour buses. The history of tour buses in Portland. People who have operated tour buses here. Whatever’s going on here, we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
I wondered if I should mention Nola. I wasn’t as sure about her as I’d been before, but I still had my suspicions. Maybe it would be better if I didn’t say anything outright to Gabby—at least, not until I felt more sure. In any case, it was time to broaden the search.
“Where is all this information going to be?” Gabby asked, looking around. “In the tour bus section of the library?”
“Very funny.”
Gabby stood up and pulled her empty canvas library bag over her shoulder.
“Listen, Azalea: you’re right about needing to do research about tour buses—but not here. Come with me.”
“What?”
“We’ve got to figure out who would want to force you out of here.”
She was already halfway between our table and the library entrance.
I followed her across the lobby. “Where are we going?” I asked.
The glass doors of the building slid open and we stepped out into the humid summer air. A few teenagers lounged sullenly on the grass beneath a statue across the street, and I wondered if Zenith, caught up in her new school life, her new teenaged self, would join them one day soon.
“We’re going,” Gabby announced, “on a spying mission.”
Did she suspect Nola, too?
“Who exactly are we spying on?”
“The competition,” Gabby pronounced darkly.
I trailed her across the street, and we worked our way down the brick sidewalks, through the part of the city called the Old Port, where there were lots of shops and shoppers.
We headed toward the harbor, where boats carried fishermen, tourists, and passengers to the islands in Casco Bay. Dad’s pickup and drop-off spot, which came with the bus, was right in the busiest part, in front of the sidewalk by the ferry terminal. A nearby walkway led to a pier stretching into the water. Just behind the shops and restaurants, boats bobbed in the harbor. Seagulls strutted around, wrestling with bits of food and trash on the sidewalk.
“The thing is,” Gabby explained as we walked, dodging parents pushing strollers and young couples holding ice-cream cones, “there’s only one theory that really makes sense. And that’s that someone else who runs tours is scared of the competition.”
She looked over at me in triumph while I thought this over.
“You might be right,” I said slowly.
It did make sense that someone currently running tours would want us to leave. Maybe it made a lot more sense than my theory about Nola. But I had a feeling, still, and I wasn’t ready to let it go.
We stopped to listen to a street musician playing a fiddle.
“I wish I could do that!” said Gabby. “I need to learn how to play an instrument.”
She dug through her pockets and pulled out a dollar bill, which she laid carefully in the fiddle case among a scattering of coins.
We continued walking.
Why not say something about Nola, I thought. Nothing outright. Just a tiny hint to steer Gabby in the right direction.
I gathered up my resolve.
“I wonder if there could be another possibility, besides a competing tour company.”
“What?” Gabby hummed a version of the fiddle tune to herself.
“Well, what if someone here just doesn’t like us? Someone who wants us to leave town?”
Gabby stopped her humming and laughed.
“That’s silly. No one would just want you to go away, unless they feared for their business. That’s why we’re going to start checking out the other tour buses. See if we can figure anything out.”
At least now I knew that her theory had nothing to do with Nola. I decided to keep quiet about that for a while. Maybe Gabby was on to something with this competition business. It was worth looking into.
I pointed to a sign with a picture of a tour bus on it.
“This is Dad’s pickup spot!” I told Gabby. “This is his sign!”
Dad had given his very first tour just the day before. I had begged him to let Gabby, Zenith, and me come along, but he wanted us to wait until everything was running smoothly. The first day had been, in his words, not a total disaster. I hoped today would be even better for him.
“Okay, so isn’t there another tour company that picks up somewhere right near here?” asked Gabby. “The one with the huge lobster statue on top of the bus?”
“Yeah. It picks up on a side street.” I pointed. “All the way down there.”
“Let’s go,” said Gabby.
I felt a little sad as we left Dad’s spot. People were just walking by, like it was any old place on the sidewalk. Worse, they were probably heading for the lobster bus. They probably thought that a tour bus with a statue of an enormous, grinning sea creature on top gave better tours than one that didn’t. Maybe they were right.
“Okay,” Gabby said as we approached.
The bus was pulled up to the curb, the door shut, the driver waiting inside. The giant lobster clung to the roof like it intended to eat the bus.
“Just act natural—like we’re thinking about taking the tour.”
I tried to think what a person who wanted to take a tour felt like. Curious? Lost? I looked around, wide-eyed, like I had just arrived from someplace entirely different, a thousand miles from an ocean. I smelled the sea in the air. I was glad I lived in Portland.
Gabby found the ticket seller, a lady sitting on a stool outside the bus. A sign next to her said MAINE ATTRACTIONS. The lady made change for a small herd of tourists and handed them each a ticket from an envelope.
“Boarding in three minutes,” she told them.
“How much for tickets?” Gabby asked.
The lady gazed past her. “Ten each.”
Gabby and I did not have twenty dollars. I signaled Gabby by lifting my eyebrows: now what? But Gabby was unfazed.
“So what would you say makes this tour special?” Gabby asked the woman.
I remembered how she’d shaken my hand the first time I met her, the way she had of seeming very grown-up sometimes.
“Is there anything in particular that would make me choose this tour over, say, the one that picks up down the street over there?”
The lady shrugged. “We’ve got a big lobster.”
She could see that Gabby and I weren’t going to purchase tickets. She pulled a phone out of her shirt pocket and looked at the screen through half-lidded eyes, dismissing us.
“But in terms of history, for example,” Gabby continued. “Do you get into the history of the city?”
“Excuse us,” I said, and pulled Gabby away.
“What are you doing?” I hissed. “This is not helping anything!”
“It might have,” Gabby insisted. “I was heading somewhere.”
She let me lead her away from the lady.
“What about walking tours?” she asked. “Maybe our focus
is too narrow here. How about those boat tours that take people around the harbor?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think if it was anyone running tours, it would be someone else with a bus. Unless it’s not that at all.” I let my voice trail off mysteriously, hinting, but Gabby shook her head.
“It must be. Unless it was just a random prank.”
“That’s what my dad thinks. Maybe he’s right.”
We walked down the street, heading back in the direction of the library.
Gabby pointed to a sign. “Look. There’s one. Portland Land and Sea Tours. Maybe they didn’t like your dad competing with the land part of their tour.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“We should go check it out!” Gabby said.
The sun was in my eyes, and I was starting to feel hungry. It was an uphill walk back to the library.
“I don’t think we need to do that,” I said. “Besides, I’m not even really sure it was another tour company that vandalized the bus. I kind of have another theory—an idea about someone who might have done it.”
Gabby stopped walking and turned to face me. A man walking a dog bumped into her and mumbled an apology. We scooted to the edge of the sidewalk so people could get around us.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Gabby demanded. “Who is it? It’s that sweet potato lady you told me about, isn’t it? She’s unstable.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not her.”
“Your upstairs neighbors? The ones who make their cat use a leash?”
I shook my head.
“I thought, maybe . . .”
I pressed my lips together, hesitating. It was very possible I was wrong about Nola, and even if I wasn’t, I had no proof at the moment. As hard as it was to believe, Gabby seemed to like her. Maybe this wasn’t the time to say anything.
“I just mean that someone else might have done it. I don’t really know.”
I checked my watch.
“Anyway, we’d better get back to the library. We’re supposed to be unschooling there.”
“There are all kinds of ways to learn,” Gabby reminded me.
“I know,” I said. “I’m just not sure if this is one of them.”