by Lindsay Eyre
Josh lifted his head and covered his eyes with both hands. “F-R-O-N-Z-E,” he said.
Everyone looked at Miranda. Everyone held their breaths. I knew that was not how you spelled fronds. Say “correct” anyway! I thought at Miranda. Pretend he got it right!
“Incorrect,” Miranda said.
Georgie opened his mouth to buzz, but Josh still had his hands over his eyes. Georgie looked at me instead. “This is stupid. Josh is too sick to spell.”
“Come on, Josh!” I whispered. “You can do it. Just one word. Maybe crescendo. Could you spell crescendo?” The munions wouldn’t know he already knew how to spell that word.
Josh dropped his head onto his arm and rolled it back and forth as if he were shaking his head no. “I gotta go,” he whispered. His body slipped away from the window, his arms and hands disappearing last.
“Josh!” everyone shouted.
“Oh my gosh!” Giselle cried. “He’s dead. Josh is dead!”
Josh stood up and darted away from the window like he had to get somewhere in a hurry. Probably to the bathroom. Probably to be sick.
“Where’s he going?” Ezekiel called.
I jumped down from the tree. “Time to go,” I said briskly. “He’s just tired. He’s been practicing really hard. Constantly. He’s still a little sick, and when you’re sick, it’s impossible to spell correctly.”
“Oh yeah,” munion number one said with sarcasm dripping from her nostrils. “No one can ever spell when they’re sick.”
“But when they’re not sick, they can suddenly remember everything!” munion number two said in the snottiest voice ever produced by a fifth grader. They stalked off together, their hair swishing. They seemed to be saying Mission Accomplished. Josh stinks and everyone knows it.
Oh, how I hated those munions! They didn’t deserve to win! They deserved to lose and lose again and lose forever!
“We’re never going to win,” Giselle said before walking sadly in the direction of her house.
“We’ll never play baseball again,” Tiger and Ezekiel said before slumping off together.
Alistair just looked at me as if everything that had ever been wrong in the history of ever was my fault.
And, at that moment, I thought he was right.
When I slumped into my house a few minutes later, my mom was waiting for me with a mommish smirk. “You have a letter,” she said.
I looked at the small white envelope in her hand. “A letter?” I said. I’d never had a letter in my entire life except for every year at my birthday and two other times.
She handed it over. “The return address is in our neighborhood, but it doesn’t say who it’s from. There isn’t a stamp, so I’m assuming it was hand delivered.” She smirked her mommish smirk again. “Maybe it’s an admirer.”
I crossed my arms at her, because that was not funny. It was not only not funny, it was also stupid. Stupid and rude and inconsiderate and impolite and dumb. D-U-M-B.
“All right, all right!” she said after I said this two times. “I’m sorry. I’ll go —” She paused to look at the envelope. “Unless — would you like me to watch you open it?”
I stared at my mother because she had gone completely crazy.
“Or maybe not,” she said. Then she shut the door to leave me in my privacy.
I opened the envelope. The letter was written on very nice white paper with terrible handwriting that was almost impossible to read.
It took me only three minutes (or maybe seven) to decipher this confusing letter. Someone wanted to give me something that had to do with the spelling bee, someone with the initials D. F. I only knew one person with those initials: Daniel Fink. The boy who watched me. He’d noticed the spelling bee folder too — he’d even asked me about it!
Oh my gosh! What if Daniel Fink had taken that spelling folder?
I stared at the letter for a long time, because there were two Sylvies having an elbow fight in my head. One Sylvie knew the truth: Josh could not spell when he was sick. Maybe he couldn’t spell at all, and if he couldn’t spell, we’d lose the field, and it would be all my fault. The other Sylvie knew the other truth: getting the spelling bee folder from Daniel Fink was a bad idea. I didn’t know anything about him, and taking the folder might be cheating. Josh would not want to cheat. I did not want to cheat! Nobody wanted to cheat, except maybe Daniel Fink.
Two truths and no solution, unless —
I got out my special pen. I found paper every bit as nice as Daniel’s and sat down to write.
DF, I wrote.
O.K. I WIL MEAT U ATT MY HOWSE 2MAHROW AT 4.
SS
I would meet him just to see what he had. It might not be the spelling bee folder, or it might be something that was not cheating but was helpful. Like a special medicine that would save Josh from the stomach flu. Meeting Daniel did not mean Josh was going to cheat, and if he just stared at me when he got here and said nothing, I could run inside my house and slam the door.
I sealed the letter up in an envelope, wrote Daniel Fink on the front with his address beneath, wrote my address in the left hand corner but not my name, because two can play at that game, and then I put the letter in our mailbox. Then I remembered that you have to put a stamp on the letter, so I ran out to get it, stuck on a stamp, and put the letter back in the mailbox. Then I remembered that I forgot to put the flag up on the mailbox, so I ran back out to put up the flag. Then my mom yelled at me for leaving the house again when it was time for dinner, so I couldn’t run out one more time to make sure the stamp hadn’t fallen off, but I stared at the mailbox through the window for five minutes to make sure no one stole the letter.
To my surprise, Daniel Fink limped out from a hiding spot in our neighbor’s yard. He walked over to the mailbox, took my letter, then walked away.
Josh did not come to school on Friday, because his mom said he was still recuperating, which reminded me of chickens, which is not a good thing to think about when you are trying to keep everyone happy. Miranda and Georgie were quiet and slumpy during class. Two kids got hurt while we were playing colored eggs at recess, and the recess monitor made everyone get off the field. Daniel Fink watched me from the trees again, like I was the weirdest person he’d ever seen.
“Can you play today?” Miranda said as we walked home.
I wish, I thought. But I have to meet Daniel Fink all by myself in order to save the field. “No,” I said.
“So, what are we going to do if Josh is sick on Monday?” Georgie said.
I sighed and rubbed my cheekbones. “He’s not going to be sick on Monday.”
“I think we should tell the principal,” Alistair said. “Maybe she’ll put the spelling bee off for a week or two.”
“Never tell principals anything,” Georgie said.
“People don’t stay sick on Mondays,” I said with great firmness.
“Maybe one of us could pretend to be Josh,” Alistair said, even though Miranda and I are girls, and all of us are shorter than Josh and different colors.
“Maybe Ms. Bloomen would let Miranda go in his place,” Georgie said.
“I haven’t been practicing!” Miranda said in alarm.
“But that would still be better than no one,” Alistair said.
“We shouldn’t tell Ms. Bloomen anything either,” Georgie said.
“Would you all just stop!” I said. Okay, shouted. “Josh is not going to be sick, he will win the spelling bee, and we will keep our baseball field! Everything is going to be fine!”
“Then why are you shouting?” Alistair said.
* * *
When I got home, I found my brothers in the kitchen again, eating carrots and celery and cabbage.
“Tate thinks eating rabbit food will give us magic powers to change the vote,” Cale said as he nibbled on a giant leaf.
Tate was not eating the vegetables. He was stealing bites from a cookie he was hiding under the table. “It’s our only hope to win,” he said. “Our campaign has
been shut down.”
“Shut down?” I said.
“Mr. Takaru made us throw away our posters,” Tate explained.
“But posters are a great idea!” I said. “Why did he make you throw them away?”
A tear ran down Cale’s cheek. It was followed by a million more. “He said we can’t hang bloody lizards on our desks, because there would be nightmares at nap time.”
“You drew bloody lizards?” I said.
“Green is so boring!” Cale cried. “Our posters needed more colors.”
Tate pounded his fist on the table. “The rabbit we drew ate the lizards only after they were dead.”
“The lizards were squished by cars,” Cale explained. “Tree wouldn’t eat alive lizards.”
“Did you tell that to your teacher?” I said.
Cale shook his head. “He wouldn’t even listen!”
“Not even after I called him a lizard!” Tate said.
I closed my eyes. I wished that when my eyes opened, my brothers wouldn’t be so difficult, but when I opened them, they still were. I felt sorry for Tate and Cale, but they needed to take this rabbit problem into their own hands. “You’ll have to go underground,” I told them firmly. “You have to take this campaign to the people.”
“Under the ground?” Tate said.
“Undercover,” I explained, trying to remember the words my dad used when he talked about running for student representative. “A whisper campaign.”
“We should whisper to people under the covers?” Cale said.
I looked out the window at my front yard, where Daniel Fink would appear any minute. “Sometimes you have to do things you wouldn’t normally do so people don’t get mad at you and nobody is sad. That’s why you have to whisper,” I said. “So things stay secret.”
“Secret?” my brothers said. “What secret?”
I thought of spelling folders. I thought of spelling lists. “I’ll explain more later. Right now, I need your help, and it will have to be a secret.”
“I don’t like secrets,” Cale said. “Because when I tell them on accident, I get really sad.”
“Why do we have to be a secret?” Tate said.
I spotted some bushes at the side of the house that would be perfect for my brothers. “Because you’re going undercover,” I said.
Five minutes later, my brothers were hiding like good magic bunnies in the bushes. “You stay right where you are and listen carefully,” I told them. “A big and staring fifth grader named Daniel Fink is coming over. He thinks I’m weird.”
“Yes,” Tate said, as if he agreed with Daniel Fink.
“That’s Mary Fink’s robot brother!” Cale said.
“Daniel Fink is not a robot,” I said. “You shouldn’t listen to those evil munions!”
“We didn’t listen to those evil munions,” Tate said. “We hate them, like you told us to. Mary told us about her brother. He’s not a whole robot, he’s just part of a robot. He’s got a robot leg.”
“I don’t like Mary Fink,” Cale said. “Even if she does have a robot brother. She wants the class pet to be a lizard.”
I sighed, because I didn’t have time for a lecture, but my brothers needed one right away. “Even if you don’t like someone, you need to find a way of getting along with them,” I said. “And if you can’t agree about something, you need to find a way to share. The end.”
“We can’t share,” Tate said, his little hands on his little hips. “You can’t have half a lizard and half a rabbit. That would be a lizbit!”
“Or a razard,” Cale said. “And the rabbit part would want to jump while the lizard part would slither! Slither-jump, slither-jump — it wouldn’t work!”
“Of course that wouldn’t work,” I told them as I struggled with all my brains to think of a way they could share the class pet. But it was just like the baseball field. Mary Fink and the rest of their class wanted a lizard. Tate and Cale wanted a rabbit. We wanted the field every day. The fifth graders wanted the field every day. There was no way to share, and I refused to share with those munions anyway. Over my dead baseball body.
“Psst! Psst!” Cale practically shouted. “Giant boy alert! Giant boy alert!”
“He’s heading this way!” Tate cried. “All magic bunnies into the bunny hole!”
“We’re already in the hole,” Cale said. “Except it’s not a hole, it’s a bush.”
“Be quiet!” I hissed at them. “You are here for my protection!” I turned around to face Daniel Fink. He was even bigger on my lawn, especially because he was wearing fancy black pants and shiny shoes and a white shirt and tie.
“Did you just come from church?” I said.
Daniel shook his head.
“A wedding?”
He shook his head again.
“A cookie festival?” Tate asked from his spot in the bushes.
Daniel looked at the bushes, where you could see my brothers perfectly because they are so bad at hiding. “No,” he said.
To distract him from Tate and Cale, I thrust out something I’d put together for him last night. It was triple-wrapped in plastic grocery bags. “Here,” I said.
Daniel took it from my hand as if it might be elephant poop.
I lowered my voice so my brothers wouldn’t hear. “That’s payment,” I said. “So you’ll give me the folder with no shoelaces attached.”
“The folder?” Daniel said.
I sighed in frustration, because Daniel had been standing on my grass for practically lots of minutes. These sorts of deals were supposed to be quick so no one spotted them. “The spelling bee folder on the school secretary’s desk!” I hissed. “You have it, right?”
“I — I don’t have a folder.” Daniel tucked my triple-wrapped package under his arm while he fished a wad of something out of his pocket.
“Don’t squeeze those too hard,” I warned him, pointing at my package. “They can be delicate.”
“What are they?” he said.
“Jelly beans,” I whispered so my brothers couldn’t hear. “Two hundred different flavors. My entire collection.”
“You’re giving him your jelly beans?” Tate cried.
Cale gasped. “Not the coconuts!”
Daniel paused to look at the package. “Two hundred different flavors?” he said.
“Almost,” I said. “One hundred and four.” Then I held out my hand and waited for him to give me the wad of what looked like folded-up paper. “What is this?”
Daniel dangled it over my palm. “It’s the spelling bee word list,” he said.
“The list?” My head and legs went tingly. “I don’t really want the list. I mean, I do want the list, but I also don’t. I don’t want it so Josh can cheat. No sirree, Bobby. Josh is not a cheater. He is anticheating.”
Daniel said nothing.
“Josh is not going to cheat,” I continued. “Not not not. Most definitely not. He doesn’t even know about the list. I just thought it might be interesting to see what kinds of words they would use in a school bee.”
Daniel still said nothing because he never speaks.
“I will not quiz Josh on this list,” I went on. “I will not. Nope! I probably won’t even look at the list myself. Well, maybe I’ll look at it. But not to cheat! Because we are not cheaters. Josh would never cheat on purpose. But he’s been really sick.”
“Is it okay to cheat when you’re sick?” Cale asked Tate.
“If Sylvie says it is,” Tate whispered. “But that’s probably why we are a secret.”
“So do you want the list?” Daniel said after glancing at my loud and obvious brothers who were never going to get coconut jelly beans from me again.
“Yes,” I said.
But instead of giving me the list, he put down my jelly bean package and got down on one knee. He placed the wad of paper on the palm of his hand. He held it out to me like a waiter holding out his tray of food. “You can have it,” he said with a croak. “But you’ll have to be my girlfriend.�
��
The sky went dark. Thunder clouds clapped. A lion roared far away in a jungle. Okay, not really, but it seemed like it, because Daniel Fink had not just said what I thought he’d said. “Your girlfriend!” was all I could say.
“I don’t like jelly beans,” Daniel said. “And you like baseball. Plus, you’re not like those other stupid girls.” He looked at me as if he meant every word he’d just said.
“I can’t be your girlfriend!” I cried.
Daniel frowned. “You can,” he said. “Anyone could if they wanted to.”
“But I don’t want to!” I said.
“Yeah,” Cale shouted. “Leave her alone! She doesn’t want to be your pinecone!”
“He said girlfriend, not pinecone,” Tate whispered. “Pinecone is worse.”
“Should we call 911?” Cale said.
“Probably,” Tate said.
“Nine one one!” they both shouted at the top of their lungs.
“I can help you win that rabbit,” Daniel said to them.
They immediately stopped shouting.
“You’re in kindergarten with my sister, Mary, right? She says the lizard is going to win for sure.”
Cale and Tate looked at each other like desperate magic bunnies. “How would you help us?” Cale said.
“Will it be a secret?” Tate said. “Because I’ve been a little sick, so it’s okay.”
“Boys!” I cried. “Go into the house this instant!”
Tate crawled out of the bushes and Cale followed. “What would you do?” Tate said to Daniel, ignoring my orders.
“Would it hurt?” Cale whispered, wincing as if it already did.
“I’ll pay you for the list,” I told Daniel. “I have five dollars I can give you right now. But I won’t be your girlfriend!”
“What does girlfriend mean?” Tate said.
Cale walked up beside me. “Will she have to hold your hand?”
Daniel shook his head. “Gross.”
“What about hugs?” Tate said. “Will she have to do that? Because Nathan and Ellie in our class always hug and they are boyfriend/girlfriend.”
Daniel shuddered. “No.”
