by Betty Hicks
Mrs. DeVaughan tells Eric that she’ll probably give the shirt to her son in Iraq since it will fit him better. “I can’t wait to tell him all about this,” she says excitedly. “You kids are incredible! When will you know how many soccer balls you’ll be able to send?” she asks. She’s as eager to know as we are.
“As soon as we figure up our profits,” Eric answers.
We all look over at V, who is busy adding up the money in the cash box and writing numbers down on a yellow legal pad.
She is not smiling.
HANDS DOWN SHAKEDOWN
BY RANDALL MERCER
Staff Writer
What does it mean when a hundred people show up in a quiet Charlotte neighborhood shaking their fists? A Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament, that’s what. This project, the brainchild of V Stone, was created to raise money to send soccer balls to children in Iraq, and was carried out with the help of her sister and brothers.
Dozens of people of all ages competed in the timeless children’s game in which the shape of a hand determines the winner. Rock smashes scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. The grand-prize winner, Ellen DeVaughan (whose son Daniel is stationed in Iraq) received a much-coveted T-shirt, from the World RPS Society, which was founded in London in 1842.
The event was a giant success in terms of fun, but less triumphant as a fund-raiser. V Stone’s Insect-insides (her clever name for Twinkies stuffed with cicadas) had to be withdrawn from the refreshment stand due to health risks, resulting in a substantial loss of profits. The Stone children still plan to send at least four soccer balls to Iraq.
Regardless of the outcome, the initiative and generosity of these young people is to be applauded.
Lily
V Stone’s Insect-insides!
Her clever name!
The Stone children!
I can’t believe V grabbed all the credit!
Just when I thought she was turning human.
I don’t even have a name.
V
My Insect-insides!
My clever name!
The Stone children!
Who is Randall Mercer and why hasn’t he been fired? Where did he get his facts?
Lily and Parker’s last name is Evans, not Stone. And they do have first names for God’s sake! The name “Insect-insides” was Lily’s idea. RPS was Eric’s!
I didn’t tell him any of that other stuff!
But who’s going to believe me?
And why does this keep happening to me?
Parker
“Reporters get facts confused all the time,” said Mom, trying to patch up the huge hole that had just blown wide open again in the middle of the family.
Lily glared at V.
V stuck her chin up in the air as if to say, I don’t care anymore.
Eric sat slouched in a chair, one leg thrown over the arm, reading a book.
“Remember when Frank’s first store opened?” Mom continued, almost pleading. “And the newspaper gave the wrong address?”
Nobody remembered. At least nobody said they did.
Parker couldn’t believe this was happening. Just when everything had been looking good again. He hadn’t even had a nightmare where his head got knocked off in over a week.
Plus, Eric had said you don’t have to confess things if nobody asks. Hadn’t he said that?
So now what was he supposed to do? Lily hated V again, and V was acting all stuck-up and claiming that she never told the dumb reporter any of those things. He just got his facts mixed up.
But nobody believed V, because V was a proven liar.
Except Parker knew she wasn’t.
And why, he groaned to himself, had Mom let him buy too many stupid Twinkies?
ERIC
Journal Entry # 183
We read A Tale of Two Cities in English class. Now we’re ending the year with poetry. A poet named W. H. Auden wrote,
“The kitchen table exists because I scrub it.”
Which made me think that my kitchen table exists because Dad built it, and how much roomier it is than the old one, but that—am I crazy?—I miss the crowded one.
Mostly we’re reading sonnets about love and flowers. I’d rather read Hemingway.
Lily
Thank you, Cassie.
For being my friend.
“Look,” she says, sprawled out on my bed while I slump over my desk, cleaning pencil stubs and old papers out of my drawer. “Forget about V. I mean, you just have to live with her for a few more years, not marry her.”
She has a point. I think.
I examine an empty CD case, wondering where the disk went. “But I wanted a fun sister. One who doesn’t lie,” I add.
“Doesn’t everybody?” Cassie replies.
Another good point.
“Besides,” she says, “you don’t need any kind of sister right now. You need a science project.”
Oh, yeah. Do I ever.
I wad up the Hands Down Shakedown newspaper article, which has somehow ended up on my desk, and pitch it at the wastebasket. I’ve pretty much decided to turn in my cicada research without the final results and hope I get a passing grade. Unless my lost fairy godmother suddenly remembers she’s got a daughter in Charlotte that she forgot.
Cassie scoops up the ball of newspaper that missed the wastebasket and flattens it back out. As I watch her read V’s lies, I notice the headline on the back: Birth Order Affects Personality.
Huh?
Suddenly V flies into my room shouting, “Lily! You’ve got to see this! Where’s Parker? Hi, Cassie. Where’s Eric? Look!”
Cassie and I stare at V, who is holding a stack of opened envelopes. She pulls a check out of one and hands it to me.
I stare at a blue personal check for $10 made out to V Stone and signed by somebody named Martin Witherspoon. Who is Martin Witherspoon?
She hands me a pale green one signed by Mary Rodriquez.
“Donations!” shrieks V, then shoots out of the room shouting, “Parker! Eric!”
A few seconds later, they’re all back in my room, and we’re counting money. People who saw the newspaper article have sent money!
We cheer and jump up and down and whoop. Mom comes in, then Frank, and we all cheer some more, then rush out of the house, straight to Swenson’s for ice cream sundaes to celebrate. Cassie comes, too.
The minivan seats only six, so we get ready to pile into two cars.
Eric says, “If I had a hearse, we could all ride together.”
“What about seat bel—” Frank starts to say, but shuts up when Mom elbows him in the ribs. “Yeah, son. We sure could.”
At Swenson’s we all order different flavors of ice cream and sit in a huge booth.
“How much money?” Parker asks V. He’s jiggling up and down as if he’s riding an invisible pony.
“Fifty-seven dollars,” she answers. “But the newspaper said they wouldn’t be surprised if they forward us even more envelopes over the next few weeks.”
“This is so unbelievable,” says Mom, spooning up a bite of French vanilla with caramel sauce.
“Who would have thought?” says Cassie, licking butter pecan off a cone.
“Did you know that babies are born without kneecaps?” says Frank.
We all look at him as if he has lost his mind.
“Dad,” says V, “what has that got to do with—”
“Unbelievable things,” says Frank, with a mouthful of chocolate macadamia nut crunch. “We were talking about unbelievable things, right?”
“Peanuts are one of the ingredients in dynamite,” says Eric.
“Really?” says Mom, amazed.
“It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open,” says Cassie.
Parker tries to fake a sneeze, but instead sprays the whole table with half-chewed chunks of banana split and fudge sauce.
“Parker!” shouts Mom, giving him an irritated look.
“Sorry,” says Parker. “I was just—”
>
“There’s nothing in the English language that rhymes with purple,” I say, hoping to distract Mom from Parker’s mess.
“Burple does,” declares Parker, vigorously wiping the table with his napkin.
“Burple?” Frank asks, lowering his chin and raising his eyebrows into a “what the heck is burple?” face.
“Yeah,” says Parker. Then he lets out a belch that turns every head in the place. Burp-ull!
Only Eric laughs.
“Gross,” says V.
I agree.
Frank glares his disapproval while Mom makes a shush sign at Parker with her fingers.
Parker slumps into a pout.
“A dime has one hundred and eighteen ridges around the edge,” says V.
“And a quarter has two million!” screams Parker.
“You can’t just make things up,” I tell him.
“I didn’t!” he yells back.
“Did you know that ‘dreamt’ is the only word in English that ends in the letters mt? says Mom.
“You made that up,” objects Parker, banging his ice cream spoon on the table. “‘Dreamt’ is not a word.”
“Shhh,” cautions Mom. “Keep it down.”
“Actually,” says Eric, “‘dreamt’ is a word. Poets use it.”
Parker droops into another pout.
“Come on, buddy,” says Frank encouragingly. “I bet you can think of something true that no one else knows. Did you know that butterflies have twelve thousand eyes?”
Parker squirms and pulls on his shirt, as if cicadas were crawling on him. He’s not even listening.
“Did you know that nothing rhymes with ‘orange’?” I say.
“Or ‘silver,’” adds V.
“Or ‘whistle,’” Parker adds stubbornly.
“How about ‘thistle’?” says V, and then I can tell she wishes she’d just agreed with him. Suddenly, we all do. Because Parker is about to blow. Explode. Bust wide open if he can’t think of something nobody else knows.
“Did you know that I killed Lily’s flower?” he shouts.
V
“Did you know that I killed Lily’s flower?” Parker shouted.
For a second, I thought he was making it up, just like he had when he’d blurted out that a quarter had two million ridges.
But then I looked at his face.
His eyes widened in surprise, as if he couldn’t believe what had just leaped out of his mouth. Then they filled up with tears and spilled over onto his cheeks.
“It was an accident,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You what?” said Dad, lowering his spoon and staring at Parker.
“My sunflower,” said Lily, looking totally bewildered. “You?”
Mary Beth and Eric gaped at Parker with their mouths slightly open. Speechless.
“Lily,” whimpered Parker. “I’m really sorry.”
Lily! I thought. What about me? I’ve been taking the blame for your crime for weeks!
“V,” he hiccupped, looking up at me and wiping tears away with the palms of both hands. Watered-down fudge sauce smeared across his cheeks. He hiccupped a couple more times before he finally managed to squeak out, “I’m sorry I … I … let them blame you.”
I tried to squeeze out a forgiving grin, but it got stuck halfway and probably ended up looking pretty pinched. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I’m easy.”
Dad’s eyebrows raised in surprise. He reached across the table, squeezed my hand, and gave me a small, proud smile. Then he turned to Parker.
“Now, young man, what do you have to say for yourself?”
Which was such a typical stupid-parent thing to say, because he’d already told us exactly what he had to say for himself—he was sorry. And he was crying. And he was clearly pitiful. Come on, Dad. Take a look.
Parker didn’t answer. Instead he lowered his head and said, “Everybody hates me.” Then he glanced up at Eric.
“Man, Mud Boy,” said Eric. “You are in deep doo-doo.”
Which—hooray for Eric—made everybody laugh out loud.
Even Dad chuckled. He didn’t even cut Eric one of his looks that said, please grow up and give the kindergarten bathroom words a break.
I hoped Eric was listening—to the part Dad hadn’t said.
“You’re not mad?” Parker nervously asked the whole table.
“Of course I’m mad,” Lily blurted. “You killed my flower. Fine. So it was an accident. Okay. I’m over it.” Her voice softened considerably when she said this, convincing me that she probably really was over it. “But Parker,” she leaned forward into the table with her palms turned up in dismay, “how could you let me blame V?”
I was trying hard to stay easy, so I had to fight the chin muscles that wanted to push themselves forward.
Lily slumped back in her seat and said, “I’m sorry, V.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t know. And I’m sorry I’ve been mean sometimes.”
I hadn’t known I was going to say that until it popped out. But I’d spent a lot of time lately wondering why everybody found it so easy to believe I was a liar and a creep. And I remembered some nasty stuff I might have said.
“Thank you both,” said Mary Beth, nodding approvingly at Lily and me. “But, Parker, it’s not okay. We’ll deal with this later.”
Talk about a bummer. We went from major soccer-ball celebration to Parker’s no-way-out-of-it prison sentence.
Poor guy. School was going to be out next week and he would be so grounded.
Parker
“You’ll live through this,” said Lily, reaching over to turn off the bedside light.
“No, I won’t,” said Parker from the darkness of his bed. He was going to be grounded from now until the middle of June, and he would miss out on everything.
“Are you still mad?” he asked.
“No. I’m not. Honest. Now go to sleep.”
“Do V and Eric hate me?”
“Of course not. Go to sleep.”
“Lily?”
“What?”
“Will you help me think of one?”
“One what?”
“You know—one of those amazing facts that nobody else knows?”
“Sure,” said Lily.
“Promise?”
“Parker, I said I would. So I will. Now, go to sleep.”
“Lily?”
“What!?”
“Will you call me Mud Boy?”
There was a long silence. Lily’s covers rustled as she turned over. Parker flipped his pillow over nearer to the edge of the bed and waited.
More silence.
“Lily?”
“What?”
“Are you asleep?”
“Yes.”
“No, you’re not,” said Parker.
“Go to sleep, Mud Boy,” said Lily.
Lily
I wake up Sunday morning, wishing I had a good science project. Parker is already up, getting dressed for Sunday school.
I pick up the crumpled sheet of newspaper on the floor by my bed and read the “Hands Down Shakedown” article. Now that I know V isn’t necessarily a liar, I also know that the reporter probably did mess up his facts.
I flip the page over and read “Birth Order Affects Personality.” I keep reading.
It’s interesting. Firstborns tend to be perfectionists and leaders. Middle kids are peacemakers, comedians. The babies are free spirits. Sometimes they’re spoiled.
Then it goes into a lot of detail about how those descriptions can be stereotypes—meaning, not necessarily true. Or they can have variations, like some second children are quiet, or innovative. I make a mental note to look up “innovative” in the dictionary.
Bigger words start popping up, like “propensity,” “manipulative,” and “nuanced.” And I can’t totally follow it anymore, but it makes me think about who I am.
Firstborn. Leader. Idea person. I’m nodding my head as I read, thinking yep, that’s me. T
hen it hits me like a train wreck. No metaphor intended.
I’m not the firstborn! Am I?
I mean, I was born first. But now I’m the third oldest. Or second youngest. And then my brain starts to spin.
I think about Eric—comedian turned into leader-guy. Or V. She got older when Frank married Mom because she had me to boss around. But she thinks Mom treats her like a little kid. So, did she get older and younger? Which way did she go when Ben died? And what happened to the personality stamped on the first V when she turned into V3?
For a minute, my brain aches like I’m doing word problems in math. I’ve always known that we got shuffled, but who knew that our personalities got jumbled up, too?
I decide to make a chart to help me track who we were, and who we are now, and who we might be before this whole rearranging thing is finally over. I do me in green ink, V in red, Parker in blue, and Eric, of course, is in black. Right away the poster looks like a road map, with lines going from leader, to shy, to baby brat, to peacemaker, and back again.
I look at it and laugh out loud. The chart is a joke. No help at all. I’m three people now. Maybe four.
“What’s funny?” asks Mom, sticking her head in the door.
“Nothing,” I say, and wonder if I’m turning into older-Eric-kid, who doesn’t talk to parents.
“Hurry up and get dressed,” says Mom.
“I can’t go to Sunday school today,” I say, hoping I can use a last-born trick I just read about—the one called manipulation, which, I think, means, fooling your parents without telling a flat-out lie.
“Are you sick?” she asks.
“No. I’ve got to rework my science project. It’s due tomorrow.”
I start to add that the reason it had gotten wrecked in the first place was because she wouldn’t let anyone eat cicadas. But I’m afraid she’ll just remind me that another reason we lost soccer-ball profits is that I forgot to allow for sales tax.
“Well,” she says. “Okay.”
Okay? Just like that? I don’t have to go to Sunday school? Wow.
