Frankly, Frannie

by AJ Stern

Without looking up, she said, “Well, it is the advice part of the show.”

  She was right. It was the advice part of the show. I had to press the blinking light. I had to answer the phone. As I reached toward the blinking light, there was even more banging on the window. Now, a different man was making signals with his hands. He looked like an umpire in a baseball game. And since my dad watches baseball games, I know what the signals mean. When the umpire shakes his head no while moving a hand across his neck, it means, “You’re out!” That was what the man was doing now. He was saying that Mr. Sanders was “out.” Which meant he was in big trouble. A different man was making the “safe” sign, which meant I was safe to answer the phone.

  I pressed the red blinking button. Then some people in the booth slapped their palms against their foreheads. Another guy put his head down on the table. They were really impressed.

  “Hello?”

  I heard my hello fill the headphones. I was a radio host! I was saving the day! I was ON AIR! It was the best feeling in the entire universe. And that is not an opinion.

  CHAPTER 8

  Right when I answered the phone, I saw Mrs. Pellington and my entire class race down the hall to watch me. I felt so much pride-itity that they were running back to see me. They must not have wanted to miss a centimeter of my show!

  When they reached the window outside the DJ booth, Mrs. Pellington slapped her hands against the window, too. She did it over and over like people stamp their feet at games when their team is winning. I felt so proud of myself.

  “Hello?” I said again.

  I turned to smile at my class just then. The first face I saw was Elliott’s. He breathed on the glass window and with his finger wrote: “WOW!” I was WOWING everyone, even Elliott! And he is very hard to wow. Then Mrs. Pellington tried so hard to come into the studio to be part of the action, but she couldn’t get the door open. She motioned to Millicent, who was reading. Millicent was going to get in BIG trouble now because she was reading and not paying attention!

  A woman’s voice said, “Hi. Is this The Sandy Sanders Show?”

  “Yes,” I answered proudly.

  “But you’re not Mr. Sanders.”

  “No, I’m Mrs. Frankly B. Miller. I’m taking over for Mr. Sanders. Do you have a question?”

  “Ahhhh . . . okay. Well, Mrs. Miller, I do have a question and I’m hoping you can help me with it.”

  That was my chance to say the thing Mr. Sanders always said: “I’ll give it my best shot.”

  I was really good at this!

  “My husband and I are having a little disagreement. He says the polls at Chester Elementary are open until 8 PM tonight, but I think they close at 5 PM like the post office. Who’s right?”

  I could not believe my luck! Someone was asking me the most adult question I’ve ever been asked in my entire life! I wanted to memorize the feeling and tell it to my parents and their parents and their parents’ parents and everyone’s parents! I looked over at Mrs. Pellington whom I imagined was thinking how much I’d grown up since the Cambridge Magazine visit. Mrs. Pellington was holding one hand to her chest and the other to her open mouth. It is a scientific fact that people do that when they are really happy that someone is saving the day.

  It was a good thing that I was also good at doing two things at once. I was very good at daydreaming and listening at the same time, which is how I remembered that Mrs. Pellington said that thing about how the elections wouldn’t be at our school anymore.

  “Well, actually, you are both wrong,” I said. I couldn’t believe my own ears! I was telling one adult that she and anotheradult were wrong and I wasn’t even getting in trouble for it!

  “What do you mean?” the woman asked.

  “The election moved. It’s not even at Chester Elementary School. It’s somewhere else.”

  “It’s somewhere else? Well, where?”

  I squinched my brain to try and remember where Mrs. P. said all the elections would be. And then, I remembered!

  “The local theater!” I said.

  “You mean the Morristown Playhouse?”

  “Yes! The Morristown Playhouse. That’s the local theater.”

  “But that’s in Morristown!”

  “Well, they don’t have voting in schools anymore. It’s a new rule. You can only vote in local theaters, so everyone has to go to the Morristown Playhouse if they want to vote.”

  The strangest thing is that when I said these words, they didn’t make a lot of sense, not even to my own two ears. But I was saying exactly the words Mrs. Pellington said, so they had to be true. Then an even stranger thing happened. I heard voices talking in my headphones and they weren’t my voices!

  “Bob, call Victoria. Get her down here. Now!” said one man’s voice.

  “Little girl? Little girl? Can you hear me? Get off the mic. Get off the mic,” said a woman’s voice.

  A different man said, “Steve, Victoria doesn’t have the master key. Get Sandy, he’s got a copy. Or get a janitor!”

  I did not understand the code words of radio station people. But I would make sure to ask them what everything meant later. Now there were several people at the door, trying to get it open! People were trying all different keys. That’s how much they wanted to come and watch me!

  I looked over at Millicent with the biggest grin that my face ever invented. And that was the exact moment she reached the last page in her book and looked up. Mrs. P. motioned for her to open the door.

  “It’s locked,” Millicent called, confused.

  When I looked over at the door, I saw the janitors searching their gigantic key chains for the right key. Even they wanted to personally congratulate me. And then Mr. Sanders came back! Sometimes after being upset with my parents, I come downstairs to let them know I’m feeling better. I guess that’s what Mr. Sanders was doing now. I wondered if it was a good time to give him my résumé.

  Just then, I looked down and not just one line was blinking red for me, but ALL THE LINES WERE BLINKING RED FOR ME! I felt more important than a doctor!

  As I went to answer another call, a high-pitched shriek came through the headphones. It was so loud that it hurt and I had to throw the headphones off. When I put the headphones back on, there was no sound. I thought for at least one centimeter of a second that I was deaf. I tried talking into the microphone and was very relieved when I heard my own voice. What I did not hear, though, was my own voice in the headphones like I did before. The microphone didn’t make my voice sound louder than it was. That’s when I got a very bad feeling.

  I wished and hoped for one thing. And that was that I didn’t break the radio station.

  CHAPTER 9

  At just the instance that I wondered whether I broke the radio station, the janitors opened the door, but the only person to rush in was Mr. Sanders. He ran toward me. I thought he was going to shake my hand or hug me or ask for my business card, but he didn’t do any of those things. What he did, actually, was lift me up out of his seat and put me down right next to Millicent! Then he sat where I was sitting and put the headphones back on his head. He started pushing buttons and pulling at levers. He didn’t seem happy like I thought he’d be. I decided to wait and give him my résumé later.

  Then Mrs. Pellington came rushing in saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” What was she apologizing for? There was a lot more yelling back and forth. Mr. Sanders was yelling about circuits to the engineers and the engineers were yelling about “kids today.”

  And then Tuesday, the tour guide, came rushing in with a very red face. She told us to hurry up and get out.

  We were all so confused. We had only been there for forty-five minutes and we were supposed to be there for three entire hours! Drew started to complain that he didn’t get to see as much as I saw. Then everyone (except Elliott, Elizabeth, and Millicent) complained that they didn’t get to see anything, either! Mrs. Pellington was grabbing at her hands and looked more worried than I’d ever seen her. We didn�
�t know why in the world we were leaving.

  Going down the elevator wasn’t as exciting as coming up. Passing all the important people and going through the turnstiles and saying good-bye to security wasn’t as much fun. Instead, everything felt bad, like I had done something really wrong. Did I just have another Cambridge Magazine accident? No, it couldn’t be that. I didn’t spill anything on any originals. I didn’t even see any originals to spill on. I was just trying to help Mr. Sanders.

  We all stood crowded on the street, but our school bus wasn’t there. “We’re not supposed to be finished for another two hours!” said Mrs. Pellington, who sounded very worried. Then she started to dial her cell phone like crazy.

  All my classmates surrounded me to ask a machillion questions about what it felt like to be on the radio. There was no way I could actually answer all of them. That’s how many there were. I felt like a movie star. It was only when I realized their questions were getting hard to hear that I began to notice all the cars honking. The honking was really bad, and when I looked up, I saw the hugest traffic jam in the existence of the planet. Drivers were getting out of their cars and yelling at one another. Other drivers were hanging out of their windows waving their fists in the air. I wondered if something very bad had happened. I really hoped not.

  Mrs. Pellington was talking to the people who worked in the lobby and all they did was shrug at her. Even when she said in her very worried voice, “We’re going to be stuck here forever!”

  But we weren’t stuck there forever. Even though it took a long time, a bus finally came to pick us up. There was so much traffic that we didn’t move a centimeter for a really long time. In that really long time, Mrs. P. said she was too angry to speak, and that we would discuss this “fiasco” at our class meeting tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 10

  The second I walked into our house, my parents had their “You’re in big trouble, young lady” faces on. I don’t know how they already knew about the radio station visit.

  I’d never seen my dad so burning mad before in all of my life. He had his arms crossed and my mom had her hands on her hips. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there, holding my briefcase, waiting for something to happen.

  “You promised us you’d be on your best behavior!”

  “I was!”

  “Taking over a radio show was your best behavior?”

  “It was an emergency! Mr. Sanders was in trouble!”

  “It was not an emergency and Mr. Sanders was not in trouble!”

  “He was, too, in trouble! He left the studio . . .”

  “Mr. Sanders left the studio because he went to the bathroom!”

  Huh?

  The bathroom?

  I hadn’t even thought of that.

  I had a very big trouble feeling.

  “You were not thinking, Frances.”

  My mom Frances-ed me. I was in even bigger trouble than I thought.

  “We are extremely upset with you,” my father said as he began to pace.

  “You caused absolute mayhem, not just for the radio station, but for the entire town!” my mother cried.

  Huh? The entire town? How in the whole wide world of America could that have been true?

  “There are still traffic jams out there,” my father said.

  I did not know what the traffic jams had to do with anything. Maybe my parents were so mad that they decided to blame everything bad that ever happened on me!

  “Do you know how long it took me to get home?” my mother said, with her voice raised.

  “How long?” I asked, but when she didn’t answer I realized that it was a trick question. The kind you’re not supposed to answer out loud.

  “Where on earth did you get the idea that the polling station moved?”

  This was an easy one!

  “Mrs. Pellington told us that the election was canceled in all the schools!”

  My father stopped pacing and faced me. He and my mother looked at each other confused. This news made them a little less angry, which meant I was not grounded for foreverteen—probably just forever.

  “What did she say exactly?” my father wanted to know.

  My father only asked for exactly things when he thought I didn’t have the facts straight. But I DID have the facts straight.

  “She exactly said something about how there would be no more school voting ever in the world. That it would only be in local theaters,” I said.

  Now they looked even more confused.

  So I added, “Or something like that.”

  “But our town doesn’t have a local theater,” my mom said.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. I forgot that every time we wanted to see a play, we had to drive all the way to Morristown. Morristown wasn’t local at all.

  “So if our town doesn’t have a local theater, how could anyone in our town vote there?” my dad asked me.

  Now I was stumpified.

  “I don’t know.”

  I squinched my eyes close together to try and remember exactly what Mrs. Pellington had been talking about. And just then, I felt some little memories start to drizzle in.

  A big ocean wave swelled inside my belly and up to my head as I sort of, kind of, maybe, possibly, perhaps remembered a tiny detail that must have fallen into one of my brain creases . Which meant there was a chance that I sort of, kind of, maybe, possibly, perhaps wasn’t paying the most carefulest attention to Mrs. Pellington. I was, however, (however is a very grown-up word) paying the carefulest attention to note-passing with Elliott. And that’s when I had the big realization and looked up at my parents with the guilt of the world in my eyes.

  When Elliott and I started to pay attention, I thought Mrs. Pellington was talking about voting being moved from our school to the local theater, but she wasn’t. She was probably still telling us the story she had started about her childhood. But, because I wasn’t paying attention so well, I thought that by the time I started to pay attention she must have started a new story. I was in a worldwide canyon of trouble.

  “Do you know what kind of trouble you created for everyone?”

  See what I mean? I shook my head no. That was the truth of the world. I really didn’t know. Now my father started pacing again.

  “Well, first of all you gave out wrong information. The voting was at Chester Elementary. That’s why you were on a field trip all morning. To get you out of the way for the early morning voting rush. Second of all, you had no business sitting at Mr. Sanders’s desk. Third of all, you had no right to answer a phone that wasn’t ringing in your own home.

  There was a huge traffic jam today because all the Chester people and all the Morristown people were heading toward the Morristown polling place. By the time the Chester people finally figured out that they were supposed to vote at your school, they almost missed their chance to vote in the proper district! You might have cost Mr. Meloy the opportunity to be mayor. And he’s the one you like!”

  “Oh,” was all I could manage to say. The traffic jam was my fault? I felt terrible. I hadn’t meant to do anything wrong at all. In fact, I meant to do the exact opposite of wrong.

  “I was just trying to be an adult.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing when you pass on information before getting the facts straight?” my mom asked.

  I shook my head no. Again.

  “You’re starting rumors,” she answered.

  “Oh.”

  “That’s a pretty kiddish thing to do, huh?”

  Finally, a yes I could shake my head to.

  Then my dad had a very good idea. “Let’s go make dinner and we’ll discuss this some more later.”

  I followed them into the kitchen, where they turned on the news and guess what the top story of the day was? Mrs. Frankly B. Miller nearly ruins it for the community. It felt terrible. I had a very heavy weight on my shoulders.

  That was definitely not the way I imagined hearing about myself on the radio!

  CHAPTER 11

&
nbsp; My parents didn’t seem to want my help in the kitchen so I sat in the dining room and stared at my dad’s old briefcase. I felt sad that my résumé was still in there. It didn’t even get the chance to see any of the exciting offices at the radio station. Come to think of it, neither did I. Come to think of it again, neither did anyone in my class. I was starting to realize that saving the day might have actually ruined it. What in the world was a person in my position supposed to do?

  Then I heard this on the radio: “It’s still unclear which way the election will go. It was a straight shot for Frank Meloy before Mrs. Frankly B. Miller steered our entire town in the wrong direction.”

  I slumped down in my chair.

  For the first half of dinner, I thought maybe a miracle had occurred and my parents forgot all about the big mess of today’s events. They were laughing and talking about their day and something funny that my father’s assistant did. But at the part about family news, my parents put their serious faces back on.

  “Do you remember that conversation we had about emergencies?” my dad asked.

  I squinched my face to try and remember. Then I pressed my hands against my head so my memory would work and va-voom!

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s an emergency?”

  “When there is a big accident or catastrophe. Something you tell an adult.”

  “Looking back, do you really think, in your heart of hearts, that there was an emergency in the radio station?”

  I did not like where this was going.

  “No.”

  “And looking back,” my mother added. “Do you see how your actions affected the radio station and the entire community?”

  “Yes,” I said and a tear ran down my face. My parents did not like when I cried, but even though they leaned closer and my mom even put her hand on my arm, they did not say anything comforting.

  My dad fixed his face so it looked nice and professional at the same time. This was his speech face.

  “I know that you want to be helpful. And we think that’s a wonderful quality to have. But you need to know when you are helping and when you are creating more trouble,” he said. I nodded, but he was not finished.