Matt nudged his dad and said, “The nice thing about boys is they’re quiet!”
Megan’s dad said, “I’m with you.”
Right on cue, the front doorbell rang and all the girls screamed again. Matt opened the door to find Cindy on the doorstep in an extremely silly pair of violet pj’s.
“Am I late? Am I late?” she cried, visibly upset. “I hate being late!”
“You’re not late!” snapped Megan, grabbing Cindy’s arm and yanking her into the party.
“Oh, no!” cried Matt, looking at his watch. “I’m late too! Mom, where’s my baseball uniform?”
“Upstairs,” Lainee shouted from the kitchen.
Matt charged upstairs two steps at a time.
Megan and Cindy headed for the living room, where all the other girls burst into shrieks, squeals, and giggles at their arrival.
David winced. “I’m ready when you are,” he shouted after Matt, dangling the car keys. “I’ll be waiting in the car!”
David opened the door to find two more girls on the doorstep.
“Hello,” he said. “What are your names?”
“Elizabeth,” “Bethany,” the girls murmured politely before bursting into another volley of shrieks at the sight of Megan behind him.
“Is everybody here now?” David asked Megan as the girls pressed past him and into the party.
“Almost, Dad,” said Megan.
David tried to exit once more but ended up holding the door for Trina and Keisha, the Dunbar twins, who were running up the walk with big purple birthday presents in their hands.
• • •
“Say hello to Lizzie!” Megan cried.
Megan and eleven of her friends crammed into the kitchen alcove to holler “Hey!” into the camera at Lizzie.
On the screen Lizzie was wearing a purple nightcap and purple sunglasses and waving “Hey” right back to them. She blew a noisemaker and tossed a handful of confetti into the air.
Cindy leaned low into the camera frame and signed, “Hey, Lizzie, remember me?”
“Of course, Cindy!” Lizzie signed. She had met Megan and Cindy at the same time at summer camp. “Hey! You guys have to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Megan with me!”
The girls started singing a ragtag version of “Happy Birthday” into the camera, but Megan interrupted. “Wait, you guys, not yet,” she protested. “Not everybody is here yet!”
“Who’s not here?” asked Lizzie.
At that moment Matt charged downstairs. “Mom, I can’t find my baseball glove!” he hollered. “I need my baseball glove for the team photograph!”
“Where’d you leave it?” said Lainee.
“I don’t know, but I can’t leave home without it!” said Matt, pushing through the girls in his baseball uniform to cross the kitchen.
“Look at Matt in his uniform!” said Tracy, as Matt nudged past. All the girls cooed and chattered excitedly.
Megan leaned toward the computer camera so that she could sign to Lizzie and point across the kitchen at Matt. “Lizzie, that’s my brother, Matt, in his new baseball uniform!”
“Mom, make them stop,” muttered Matt.
“I’m afraid they have us outnumbered,” said Lainee. “Megan, have you seen your brother’s baseball glove?”
“In the front hall closet,” said Megan.
“Where in the front hall closet?” asked Matt, shouting to be heard over the noise.
“Girls, girls!” cried Lainee, clapping her hands for attention. “Too much chaos in the kitchen! Say good-bye to Lizzie! I need you to move this party back to the den.”
“Good-bye, Lizzie!” the girls chimed toward the computer.
“Good-bye! Happy birthday!” signed Lizzie.
Megan signed, “Thanks! I’ll talk to you later!” to Lizzie. Then she corralled the girls and nudged them toward the kitchen door. “Back to the den!” Megan cried.
“What should we play?” cried Cindy. “Pin the Tail on the Purple Donkey?” All the girls laughed as they pressed through the door into the den.
“Or maybe Duck, Duck, Purple Goose!” shouted Maya, and the girls laughed even harder.
“We can’t play anything yet,” Megan protested, “because all the girls aren’t here yet!”
“Who’s not here yet?” asked Casey. “Who could it be?”
At that moment, the front doorbell rang. Cindy tugged on Megan’s sleeve. “The doorbell! I hear the doorbell!” she said.
“I’ll get it!” Megan cried. She crawled over the Dunbar twins on the sofa and ran for the door, skidding on the front hall tiles in her fuzzy purple slippers. Matt was on his knees inside the front hall closet. “Megan,” he said with irritation, “my baseball glove is in the front hall closet—where?”
“Right in front of your nose,” said Megan, reaching for the door. When she yanked it open, nobody was there. That was odd. Megan stepped into the doorway and looked left and right.
“Surprise!” cried Alexis as she jumped from the bushes.
Megan screamed and laughed. It was Alexis.
She entered the front hall and the entire gang of girls jumped with excitement.
At that same moment Matt spotted his baseball glove inside the tote bag in the front hall. He snatched the glove and yanked it from its hiding place. Unfortunately, the bag of purple feathers slipped from where Megan had stowed it and sailed clear up to the ceiling where it snagged on the rafters overhead. Big billowing clouds of purple feathers fell onto the girls in the front hall. Feathers plummeted all around and all the girls screamed. It was a fuzzy blizzard of purple, purple everywhere. A snowstorm of purple.
Some girls started spinning with their arms outstretched as the purple feathers swirled past. A few girls opened their mouths to catch the feathers like snowflakes. Other girls pumped their arms like birds taking flight, to keep the flurry of feathers in the air—and the feathers caught in their hair and covered their shoulders and clung to their clothes.
“Oh, no!” cried Matt. His uniform was covered with purple fuzz. “I’ll be the only purple player on the entire baseball team!” All the girls laughed.
“Welcome to my Positively Purple Party!” cried Megan. “The most purple party ever!”
ALSO BY MARLEE MATLIN
DEAF CHILD CROSSING
ALSO BY DOUG COONEY
THE BELOVED DEARLY
I KNOW WHO LIKES YOU
Author photograph by Exley Foto, Inc.
MARLEE MATLIN deaf since she was eighteen months old, won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in Children of a Lesser God. She was also nominated for Emmy Awards for her performances in Seinfeld, Picket Fences, The Practice, and Law and Order: SVU. Her film credits include It’s My Party and What the Bleep Do We Know!?. She is the author of Deaf Child Crossing. She has made numerous television appearances and currently appears on The West Wing. Marlee Matlin lives in Los Angeles with her husband and four children. Visit her at www.marleeonline.com.
DOUG COONEY is the author of the middle-grade novels The Beloved Dearly and I Know Who Likes You. His musical adaptation of George Saunders’s The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip recently premiered at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, produced by the Mark Taper Forum P.L.A.Y. Cooney also teaches songwriting and collaboration for Voices Within, an educational outreach program of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. He divides his time between Los Angeles and South Florida. You can visit him at www.dougcooney.com.
VISIT US ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB
KIDS.simonandschuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Marlee-Matlin
authors.simonandschuster.com/Doug-Cooney
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SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Marlee Matlin and Doug Cooney
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Book design by Yaffa Jaskoll
Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket photograph copyright © 2006 by Plush Studios / Getty Images
The text for this book is set in Bembo.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matlin, Marlee.
Nobody’s perfect / Marlee Matlin and Doug Cooney.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Megan, a popular and outgoing fourth-grader, is sure that the “perfect” new girl dislikes her because she is deaf, but persistence and a joint science fair project help Megan see that the two girls have something in common after all.
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86986-0
ISBN-10: 0-689-86986-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-481-45639-5 (ebook)
[1. Deaf—Fiction. 2. Science projects—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Autism—Fiction. 5. People with disabilities—Fiction.] I. Title: Nobody is perfect. II. Cooney, Doug. III. Title.
PZ7.M4312Nob 2006
[Fic]—dc22 2005016111
Nobody's Perfect Page 13
