Chelsea peeked into the bag. The cookies were practically blinding. They were bright green with gobs of M&Ms in the center. Did she have to put them out? They would completely ruin the arrangement she’d made on the table. “Um, why are they green?” She knew it wasn’t the most polite question, and she’d really been trying hard to be polite lately, but she had to ask.
“They’re supposed to look like birds’ nests,” Gaby answered. “The M&Ms are the eggs.”
“But why green?” Chelsea pressed. “Aren’t nests brown?” Not that that would be much better. It would help a little, though.
“Nests can be made of grass—green grass,” Gaby reminded her. “I have something else for you, too.” She handed Chelsea an orange folder.
“What’s—” Chelsea began. The beep-beep of a car horn interrupted her. She peered over Gaby’s shoulder and saw Valerie climbing out of a VW Bug.
“Hey, we got here at the same time,” Valerie said to Gaby. “That’s a whatchamacallit? A good omen. We’re going to have an awesome planning session.”
“Definitely,” Gaby said. “This is for you.” She handed Valerie an orange folder like the one she’d given Chelsea.
“What is it?” Valerie asked as she and Gaby stepped into the entryway.
“It’s everything we need to have the ultimate scavenger hunt at Home Away From Home,” Gaby answered.
Chelsea froze, not even finishing closing the door behind them. “What?” she managed to get out.
“I have maps of the whole house, all three of the main floors, plus the basement and the attic. I went over there and drew them myself. The place is big enough to do the whole hunt inside,” Gaby explained. “I already made lists of possible objects to search for. Or I guess I should say scavenge for.”
“A scavenger hunt could be fun,” Valerie said, flipping open her folder.
Chelsea’s hand tightened on the doorknob. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Gaby had totally gotten her way about doing activities instead of cooking or…whatever that thing Val wanted to do was. And now she thought she could plan the activity entirely by herself? Did she really think she got to run the whole thing with Chelsea and Valerie as her little helpers?
Of course she does, Chelsea thought. She didn’t even let me handle snacks for the meeting. She had to bring them herself!
Bang! Chelsea finally shut the door. A little too hard.
Valerie and Gaby both jumped. Good. That meant Chelsea had their full attention. “I have an idea, too,” she announced. “I thought we could do a singdown. And we could use the big fireplace to make s’mores.” She flipped open Gaby’s stupid orange folder and stabbed her finger at the fireplace on the map. “It would be like everybody at the Home was at camp for the night. Nothing could be more fun. Am I right?”
Gaby frowned. “I already did all this work on the scavenger hunt.”
“But we haven’t decided that’s what we’re doing,” Chelsea protested.
“It’s the perfect idea, though,” Gaby shot back. “As soon as I came up with it, I knew it was what we had to do.”
“Maybe you should have e-mailed us before you did the map and everything,” Valerie suggested.
“Volunteering at Home Away From Home was my idea!” Gaby exclaimed.
“So? That doesn’t mean you get to decide everything. We’re volunteering, too,” Chelsea snapped.
“Why don’t we just try to come up with a bunch of ideas?” Valerie suggested. “That’s what today was supposed to be for, right?”
“We don’t need a bunch of ideas—” Chelsea began.
“Because mine is the best!” she and Gaby said at the same time, glaring at each other.
Chelsea wanted to be nice. She really did. But it was just so hard around Gaby.
“You know what? I’m out of here,” Gaby announced. “There’s no way we’d be able to come up with a better idea than the scavenger hunt. That big house could have been built for it. I can’t believe you’re too stupid to realize that.”
Bang! Gaby slammed out the door.
Chelsea and Valerie stared at each other. “I have a whole bunch of snacks in the kitchen,” Chelsea finally said. “Do you want to go in there? I could tell you all the details of my Night at Camp plan.”
“I don’t think it was right for Gaby to plan everything herself,” Valerie began.
“I know! Can you believe her?” Chelsea exclaimed.
“But it seems like you did almost the same thing,” Valerie reminded her.
“Not true. I didn’t make folders!” Chelsea cried.
Valerie let out a sigh and pulled out her cell. “I’m calling my mom. I’m going home. If the three of us are running the activity night together, we should plan it together. That’s obviously not happening today.” She stepped outside and quietly closed the door behind her.
Great, Chelsea thought. I spent hours making those snack trays, and no one even got to see them.
Posted by: Chelsea
Subject: Niceness
I thought all of you might be interested to know how Gaby’s decision to become a nicer person is working out.
IT’S NOT. AT ALL.
Supposedly she wanted to volunteer at Home Away From Home because she wanted to be saintly. Actually, she just volunteered so she’d have people to boss around. By people I mean me and Valerie, who she convinced to volunteer with her.
See, Gaby thinks that just because it was her idea to volunteer, she should be in charge. She thinks she should get to decide what we should do at Home Away From Home. I came up with the coolest idea for the activity night that we signed up to run. And Gaby wouldn’t even listen. She just didn’t think it was possible for anyone else to come up with something cool. She actually stomped out of our planning meeting because she didn’t want to hear my suggestions.
Val left, too. And Valerie’s usually really nice. So look out everyone—I think Gaby’s UN-niceness is catching.
chapter
FIVE
Candace took a tiny bite of her cheeseburger and managed to swallow it. The burgers in the cafeteria really stunk. And her stomach was upset. Again.
You have to eat something, she told herself. You can’t perform the way you should if you’re running on empty. The voice in her head sounded almost exactly like her mother’s.
Candace forced down another bite of the burger. Maybe if she was able to finish half of it, she’d be ready to attack those last two math problems again. This was her last chance to get them done. Mr. Merrill always collected homework first thing.
“Hey, Candace, did Ms. Luttinger give a quiz in history?” Samantha asked.
Joshua jumped in before Candace could answer. “She’s not telling, and neither am I,” he told Samantha. “Why should you get an advantage just because you have history after lunch? We didn’t get advance warning—if there was a quiz, which I’m not saying there was. Why should you?”
“Statistically, it’s twenty-two percent more likely that we’ll get a quiz on Friday than on any other day of the week,” Allen said. “My theory is that by Friday, teachers are tired of teaching and just want to sit at their desks and monitor us.”
“Yeah, they just want to sit at their desks and monitor us,” Candace repeated. Why couldn’t she stop doing that? Why?
The real question was why hadn’t she just asked for help with her math homework last night? Why?
Her parents or Max would have been happy to help her. Although her dad would have insisted they sharpen all her pencils first. He had this thing about dull pencils. He insisted you couldn’t do math unless you had a nice sharp pencil point.
Max might have even turned the homework problems into a game. He did that sometimes, if he didn’t have too much homework of his own.
The thing was, if she’d asked anybody in her family for help, it would have meant admitting she was already having trouble in math. And that would have been a big deal. There would have been a huge discussion about what should be d
one with the Candace-slash-math situation.
Her stomach tensed up just thinking about it. Candace covered her cheeseburger with her napkin. She couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. Forget about eating it.
Brynn bounced up and down on her toes. She felt like she’d drunk two massive bottles of Pepsi. Or like somehow she’d been plugged into an electrical outlet overnight and gotten supercharged. It was always like this before she went onstage: insanely awesome!
“You guys ready?” Drew whispered. “We’ve got a full house.”
Yep. Nearly every seat in the caf was taken. Of course, the kids in those seats were there to eat, not to watch the skit. They didn’t even know a performance was about to begin.
“Ready, Freddy,” Rosemary answered.
“I’m so ready,” Brynn said.
“Then let’s do this thang!” Drew raced toward the front of the room, Rosemary and Brynn on his heels. They leaped up onto the stage, not bothering with the three stairs.
“Hello, Wilton Academy!” Rosemary called. “Today Drama League has a special presentation for you.”
“Please enjoy this lunchtime performance of The Dramatics!” Brynn cried.
There wasn’t any applause. No cheers. But Brynn figured that everyone was just waiting to see what happened next.
Drew strode across the stage and mimed opening a refrigerator door. “We’re out of milk,” he gasped.
Rosemary let out a high, piercing scream. “Noooo!” she screeched. “I bought some at the store yesterday!”
Drew rummaged around in the imaginary fridge. “Well, there’s none in here now.”
My turn, Brynn thought. She sucked in a deep breath and began to sob. She got actual tears flowing and everything. “I’m sooorrrry,” she wailed. “I spilled the milk!”
“What?” Drew roared. “I can’t believe this. I cannot believe this!” His hands curled into fists and his face turned red. Brynn had never known anyone who could make their cheeks go beet red on command like that. It was truly impressive.
Brynn upped the volume on her sobs. Then Rosemary started to laugh, big, loud hee-haws. “You’re crying over spilled milk!” Rosemary told Brynn.
Now it was Brynn’s turn to get angry and throw a tantrum because Rosemary had laughed at her. Then Rosemary would start crying. Which would make Drew laugh. Then Brynn and Rosemary would yell at him until he cried. It was important to keep the skit moving fast, fast, fast. It only worked if every few seconds at least one of them switched emotions.
The skit ended with Brynn, Drew, and Rosemary all happy and laughing. Brynn broke out her best high-pitched giggle. It was so loud that at first she didn’t realize that no one but the three of them was laughing. Everyone in the audience should be laughing by now. This was the big finish!
Drew stepped forward. “Thank you! Thank you!” he called. Even though almost no one was applauding. “We loved putting on this show for you. And we want you to know that there’s lots of room in Drama League. So head on over to our table and sign up!”
“All the geeks are already in the club,” Joshua, that friend of Candace’s, shouted back. “There are none left to sign up.”
That got a laugh from the lunch crowd.
The smile didn’t slide off Drew’s face. He kept on going with the speech they’d come up with, as if he hadn’t even heard what Joshua said. “Join the League and next time it could be you up here.”
“Like that’s a good thing,” somebody muttered.
Brynn gave a bow—just the way she and the others had rehearsed. She kept the smile on her face, too, even though she felt like crying for real. She walked to the edge of the stage and took the three steps down. She didn’t feel like she could jump. All the bounce had been sucked out of her legs. She needed to be plugged back into the outlet ASAP. Brynn was almost out of juice.
She couldn’t believe it. They’d bombed. They’d totally bombed!
“You were great, Brynn!”
Brynn turned toward the voice, disbelieving, and saw Candace smiling at her. “Thanks, Candace,” Brynn said. “Seems like you’re the only person who thought so.”
She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought that joining Drama League was the way to deal with being a new girl. Okay, she had a few friends. But the rest of the people at school thought she was a geek. A geek! And being a geek girl was a lot worse than being a new girl.
“That’s not true,” Candace protested. Protested weakly, Brynn noted. “It’s just that pretty much everyone who goes here is so into academics that they don’t really pay attention to anything else.” She hesitated. “Maybe it would be good if you joined the debate club. Joshua suggested that, remember?”
What Brynn really remembered was Joshua shouting out the G-word. “I don’t know…It’s not really my thing,” she answered.
“It’s kind of like drama,” Candace said. “But it’s cooler.”
“So nobody calls kids in the debate club geeks?” Brynn asked.
“Definitely not,” Candace told her.
Brynn shook her head. “I’m staying in drama. Acting is my life—even though it wasn’t too much fun today.”
“I get that,” Candace said. “Um, Brynn…”
Brynn thought Candace was going to make one more attempt to convince her that she’d be better off in debate. Instead Candace said, “I was up until one o’clock last night, doing research for history. I only got partway thought the math homework, then I fell asleep. Do you think…” Candace swallowed hard. “Would it be okay if I copied the last two problems from you?”
Brynn blinked at her in surprise. But that’s cheating, she thought.
But Candace was her friend. And besides, it was no biggie. Candace had done most of the problems. And they did give a mountain of homework at this school. She’d barely gotten through last night’s problems herself.
And, truth, it felt good standing here talking to one of the most popular girls at Wilton. Brynn didn’t want to give that up.
“Sure,” she told Candace. “Here’s my math notebook.”
When Valerie logged on to the camp blog, Gaby and Chelsea both had a couple of new messages posted. Uh-oh. For a minute she wanted to leap to one of her other favorite sites and just ignore whatever it was Gaby and Chelsea had to say.
But Val didn’t have feathers. She wasn’t an overgrown chicken. She clicked on Gaby’s message. She figured it was Gaby’s response to that not-so-nice message about the Home Away From Home planning meeting that ended before it really got started.
Posted by: Gaby
Subject: UN-niceness
You want to know what UN-niceness is? Posting a nasty message about people who are supposed to be your friends.
Posted by: Chelsea
Subject: The Truth Hurts
The message wasn’t nasty. It was a simple account of what happened at our so-called planning meeting.
Posted by: Gaby
Subject: You Want Truth?
Here’s what happened at our so-called planning meeting—just a simple account. I arrived at Chelsea’s house. I brought homemade cookies. When Chelsea looked at them she got this expression on her face like she’d just smelled a noxious fart.
I had made up folders for me, Chelsea, and Valerie with my idea for a scavenger hunt. It had hand-drawn maps of the Home Away From Home center with a list of possible hunt items. It had taken me hours of work.
When I showed Chelsea the folder, she threw a total hissy. She slammed the door like she was a three-year-old throwing a tantrum. I expected her to get down on the floor and start kicking her legs. She probably did after I left.
Valerie wasn’t much better. She got all snotty and said maybe I should have e-mailed and gotten her permission before I put in all my hours of work. Which I did because I want the activity night to be awesome for the brothers and sisters of the kids who are dying!
“I did not get all snotty,” Valerie told the computer screen. Her fingers itched to shoot off an answer—o
ne that showed exactly what snotty really sounded like. But that would be like, “Gasoline, I’d like you to meet fire.” No. She would leave the blog war to Chelsea and Gaby.
Valerie decided not to even read the rest of the Chelsea and Gaby messages. She was almost sure they’d just make her crazy angry. She moved on to a post by Brynn instead.
Posted by: Brynn
Subject: Geekiness
I have a question for all of you. How would you define a geek? This is ultra-important, so please answer, okay? And soon, please.
So somebody basically called me a geek today, Brynn thought. So what. They called Rosemary and Drew geeks, too. And they aren’t. Which means I’m not.
“Aaargh!” she groaned. She hated that she cared about the geek incident. But she did.
Brynn checked the clock. It had only been fifteen minutes since she’d posted her question about what exactly made someone a geek. But maybe somebody had answered. She logged on to the camp blog. There were a ton of responses!
Posted by: Chelsea
Subject: Geekiness
Anyone who needs a definition for geek is, by definition, a geek.
Yowch, Brynn thought. But that was Chelsea. The girl could be really harsh. Brynn decided to ignore her—or at least try to ignore her. She went on to the next message.
Posted by: Natalie
Subject: Geekiness
In the movies, geeks are actually the interesting kids. They’re the artists. The rebels. The guys who look really cute with floppy hair and glasses. The girls with the funky clothes. If I could walk into the world of some of my fave movies, I’d definitely want to hang with the geeks.
Posted by: Grace
Subject: Geekiness
Um, I think I am, or at least have been in the past, a geek. Remember all those teddy bears I brought to camp the first year? Some of you thought I was a geek then. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? It’s okay. I thought some of you were geeks, too. And I liked you anyway.
Freaky Tuesday #17 Page 5
