Brynn must have seen the pain on Candace’s face, because she reached over and touched Candace’s arm. “Hey, I was just kidding around. Sometimes joking about stuff can make you feel better. That’s why you get the stomachaches, you know?”
Candace felt her forehead get all wrinkly. “Huh?”
“Because you’re so serious all the time. You’re always stressed. You’re not like that at camp. That’s why you don’t get stomachaches there. I think. It’s not like I’m a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV,” Brynn said lightly.
“The stomachaches do always get worse when I’m trying to do math,” Candace admitted.
“See?” Brynn said. “You’re the most stressed when you’re trying to do math. Stress equals stomachache.”
“So does that mean you’re stressed?” Candace asked.
Brynn frowned. “I thought I just ate my lasagna too fast. I was in a hurry to get to the library. But…this school is pretty intense. I’ve never had so much homework. And being on the debate team is like having another class. I have to do a ton of research.”
“What do we do?” Candace shook her head. “How can you go to the Wilton Academy and not be stressed?”
“Hmmm,” Brynn said. “Hmmm,” she said again. Then she smiled. “I have two ideas. Second, I’m going to help you with math. We can have a mini, low-stress study group.”
“Second? But what’s first?” Candace asked.
Brynn’s smile stretched into a grin. “First is a surprise.”
To: Rosemary, Drew, and Candace
From: [email protected]
Subject: Fun!
Hi guys,
You are hereby invited to a battle of wit, skill, and craziness. Mostly craziness. Meet me on the front steps fifteen minutes before the first bell. There will be prizes. Please come. It’ll be fuuuun! (Candace, if you don’t, I’m withdrawing my offer of help. This is my first idea. The surprise.)
–Brynn
For the first time since she’d quit drama, Brynn was excited about getting to school. She spotted Rosemary and Drew standing on the steps. Yay! She hadn’t been sure they’d show. She raced over to them.
“You two are the coolest!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know if you’d ever want to talk to me again.”
“Us? We were sure you didn’t want to talk to us again. We practically begged you to hang out, and you were all, ‘no, no, no, I must study,’” Drew answered.
“We figured you’d just contracted the Wilton Academy Plague. The one where all you think about is homework,” Rosemary added. “But when we got your e-mail, we thought maybe there was hope for you.”
“Yeah. That e-mail was very dramatic. And you said there would be prizes,” Drew said. “You did bring the prizes, right?”
“No worries.” Brynn patted her bulging backpack.
“There’s Candace,” Drew said. “She’s part of this whole mysterioso competition, right?”
“That’s the real reason he’s here,” Rosemary teased.
“No it’s not,” Drew muttered, but his ears turned red.
Brynn stood on her toes and waved. “Over here, Candace.” She waited until Candace had joined the group, then she unzipped her backpack and pulled out a small stuffed hamster wearing a ninja outfit. “This lovely creature is the grand prize. He will be awarded to whoever gets the most points during the competition.”
Rosemary and Drew both burst out laughing. After a few seconds, Candace joined in.
“What is the competition, anyway?” Rosemary asked.
“I’ll get to that. But first—” Brynn pressed the hamster’s left paw. “Hwaaah!” the hamster cried out in a high voice. Then it started dancing. And singing “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting.”
“I just wanted you to see how special the grand prize is,” Brynn said.
“I want it,” Drew said. “I need it. I must have it!”
“Then let me tell you how you can win the fabulous, insanely talented hamster,” Brynn said in her best game-show announcer voice. She pulled three bright yellow envelopes out of her backpack and presented one to Rosemary, one to Drew, and one to Candace.
Drew got his envelope ripped open faster than anyone. He pulled out a sheet of neon orange paper and began to read. “Blow bubbles in the hallway between classes—15 points. Wear a clown nose at lunch—15 points. If a teacher asks you a question and you know the answer but you say you don’t know the answer—100 points. Talk to someone in pig Latin—10 points. Color in a coloring book during study hall—10 points.”
“We’ve all learned to read, thank you,” Rosemary joked, elbowing Drew in the side. He finished reading the list silently—but mouthed all the activities as he read.
“You have until the final bell to earn points. The hamster will be presented right here on these steps as soon as school is out,” Brynn told them.
“I’m in,” Rosemary said. “That little hamster is mine. There’s only one problem. I forgot my coloring book and my bubbles.”
“And I left my clown nose in my other pants,” Drew said.
Brynn reached into her backpack again. She handed out small gift bags with everything Drew, Rosemary, and Candace would need to compete. She had a set of the supplies for herself, too. She wasn’t going to let the others have all the fun.
“Excellent,” Drew said. He stuck on the big, red, rubber clown nose. “Do I get bonus points if I wear it all day and not just at lunch?”
“No,” Rosemary answered for Brynn. “The points on the list are the points you get. No bonus ones, or it isn’t fair. Oh, and, just so you know, I’ve decided to change my name to Tamesala. I won’t answer to anything else.”
“Woo-hoo! That’s twenty points for Rose—I mean Tamesala.” Brynn applauded.
She noticed that Candace was being very quiet. The other two seemed to understand the whole contest right away. It was a way to make school fun, and they were onboard with that.
But what about Candace? Would she even try anything on Brynn’s list?
Candace shoved Brynn’s gift bag into her locker. She wouldn’t be needing it. There was no way she could do any of the things on the list. Her friends would check her into a mental institution. And anyway, she had to study.
She grabbed her history textbook—the only book she hadn’t had to lug home for homework yesterday. The gift bag tipped over, and the red rubber clown nose rolled out of her locker and bounced down the hall.
Nobody noticed it. They were all too busy racing to class. Candace started to giggle. The nose just looked so funny bouncing along with all the Wilton Academy students in their neat little uniforms.
Candace’s giggle upgraded to an actual laugh. It was a nose. It was bouncing. And nobody even glanced at it. The words Brynn had written at the bottom of Candace’s list sprang into her mind: Fun shouldn’t be something you only have in the summer. Do this.
As she stood there thinking, Drew hopped around the corner, blowing bubbles. He must have added the hopping just for more fun. He looked like he was having an amazing time. Even with people staring at him like he was stupid or crazy or both.
Fun shouldn’t be something you only have in the summer. Do this.
I will, Candace decided. She left her locker door hanging open and chased after the bouncing nose. She started laughing again as she snatched it up.
“Candace?”
Candace glanced up to see Samantha and Joshua staring at her. “What is that?” Samantha asked.
Pig Latin, ten points, Candace thought. “An own-clay ose-nay,” she replied. She stuffed the nose in her skirt pocket and went back to her locker.
“What did you just say?” Joshua called after her.
“A clown nose,” Candace told him. “In pig Latin.”
He looked at her blankly. So did Samantha.
“Pig Latin,” she repeated. “Remember? From when we were little?”
“Oh. I guess.” Samantha was frowning. “But why are you talking in pig Latin now?”
/> “Just for fun,” Candace said.
They kept looking at her with confused expressions on their faces.
Wow, Candace thought. I wonder if they’re even capable of doing something just for fun.
Was that how she seemed to Brynn? Was that the way she was during the school year—incapable of having fun?
Candace reached into Brynn’s gift bag and pulled out the bubbles. Fifteen points for blowing bubbles in the hallway. She unscrewed the bottle, pulled out the wand, and blew a stream of perfect, shiny bubbles into the air. She didn’t even wait for them to pop before she blew some more.
“Bubbles!” somebody yelled.
A boy passing by jumped into the air and stabbed one with his finger, laughing as it burst.
Candace grinned. So what if her friends thought she was nuts? She was having fun.
“You should have heard Mr. Hannity ranting about how I was wasting my parents’ hard-earned tuition money,” Rosemary said at lunchtime. “Just because he asked me to define foreshadowing and I said I had no idea what it meant. I thought he was going to burst something, he was so horrified.”
“That’s crazy,” Brynn commented. “Why did he even ask that question if he was so sure everybody knew the answer?”
“Yeah, that’s crazy,” Candace repeated. She didn’t mean to keep repeating everything. But it was crazy.
“He thought it was a rhetorical question,” Rosemary said, taking a big bite of her veggie burger. “And it was—who doesn’t know what foreshadowing is?”
“Still, you did it. A hundred points for you.” Brynn jotted it down in her notepad. “Nobody else has been brave enough to tell the teacher they don’t know something.”
Candace looked around the lunch table. She’d never eaten with anyone other than her popular friends before. And from the looks on their faces, they weren’t at all pleased that she wasn’t eating with them today.
But she was loving the change. Everything looked different from over here at the Drama League table. Of course, that could just be because she, Brynn, Rosemary, and Drew were all wearing red rubber clown noses.
“I’m going to do it next period,” Drew announced. “I have math. I’m going to pretend I don’t know the quadratic equation.”
“I don’t even have to pretend that,” Candace cracked. “I really don’t know it!”
They all laughed. “That doesn’t count,” Rosemary said. “You only get points for pretending.”
Candace spooned some beef stew into her mouth. She sort of couldn’t believe she’d just admitted out loud that she was having trouble in math. If she’d been sitting at her own table, she never would have said anything like that. Her friends would have been shocked, as if she was admitting a weakness or something. But Drew and Rosemary and Brynn didn’t seem to care.
“I can’t believe you’re eating the beef stew,” Drew said, peering into her bowl. “Rosemary—I mean Tamesala—swears up and down that it will give me an ulcer if I even let it onto my tray.”
“It’s true. I’ve never seen anybody eat the beef stew without getting sick,” Rosemary agreed. “What’s your secret?”
Candace glanced down at the nearly empty bowl on her tray. “I don’t know,” she said. “I usually don’t eat this much of it.”
“And your stomach doesn’t feel like it’s going to explode?” Rosemary asked.
“No.” Candace hadn’t even noticed her stomach all day today. She looked up at Brynn and smiled. “No. My stomach doesn’t hurt at all.”
“X equals 14,” Candace announced after school that day. She squinted at her math notebook. “Doesn’t it?”
“You bet it does,” Brynn told her. “You did that problem in, like, thirty seconds. You didn’t even have to think about it.”
Candace leaned back in the library chair and stretched. “I know! It was almost easy. Like I knew what I was doing.”
“So what changed?” Brynn asked. “Was it just my brilliant tutoring?”
“Well, I’m sure that helped,” Candace said, laughing. “But…I don’t know…I just wasn’t worried about it for a change. I don’t feel as stressed as usual.”
“Okay, so it wasn’t my brilliant tutoring. It was my brilliant plan for having fun,” Brynn said. “You spent the day thinking about stupid things like clown noses and pig Latin instead of stressing about math.”
“You’re right. I didn’t stress about math at all,” Candace replied. “I feel totally relaxed.”
“Good, that was the plan,” Brynn told her seriously. “It’s so cool that you did everything on the list, by the way. I wasn’t sure if you would.”
“I wasn’t sure I would, either,” Candace admitted. “It’s easy to have fun at Camp Lakeview. But it never occurs to me to do anything fun during the school year. I guess I feel like fun isn’t allowed, not when I should be thinking about my grades and my future.”
“See, that’s the thing. Fun and relaxation are a necessary part of life,” Brynn replied. “If you never relax, you’ll be so stressed out that you start doing a bad job at everything. Even things you’re usually good at.”
“How did you figure that out?” Candace asked.
“It’s an acting thing,” Brynn explained. “Acting is hard. So one of the things they teach you in drama is that you always have to be relaxed. If you’re relaxed, you do a better job at the hard stuff. You can concentrate better because your brain isn’t filled with all kinds of stressful thoughts.”
“Is that why actors are always stretching out before performances, and playing games and stuff?” Candace asked.
“Yup. We have to stay loose.” Brynn looked thoughtful. “And we have to learn not to let negativity in. You know, like if people say mean things or if they’re unsupportive. Actors have to learn to let all that negative stuff roll off their backs.”
“It sounds like you’ve learned about a lot more than acting in your drama clubs,” Candace said. “And you’re totally right. I’ve spent so much time worrying about what other people think that it’s made me crazy. From now on, I’m not going to worry anymore about what anybody says. Even teachers and parents. In fact…” She stood up.
“Where are you going?” Brynn asked.
“I’m going to go do something pretty much all my friends would think was a bad idea. All my old friends, anyway!” Candace announced.
I wonder what she’s going to do? Brynn thought as she headed from the library to debate practice.
Joshua smiled and patted the desk next to him as she came in. “I found this incredible statistic about the amount of accidents caused by drunk drivers. Our team was unstoppable in the Boston Tea Party debate before. We’re going to massacre in the debate about bringing back Prohibition.”
Brynn pulled open her backpack, smiling as she saw a bottle of bubbles near the top. She took out her notebook and flipped it open. “I found some great stuff, too. Listen to this quote from Carrie Nation.”
She pulled in a deep breath and began to read. “I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me.”
Brynn got to her feet. She couldn’t stop herself. Suddenly she was Carrie. Getting ready to perform one of her hatchetations, whacking away at a saloon with a hatchet because she believed she was called by God to save men from drinking. She felt strong, and powerful, and a little bit crazy.
“I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet,” she continued, her voice rising with emotion and the strength of her convictions. Carrie’s convictions!
“Wow,” Joshua said. “That was…intense.”
“Aren’t you going to sit back down, Brynn?” Rowan asked.
Every person in the room was looking at her. And it felt good. It had felt even better to be Carrie for that brief stretch of time. She loved that about acting. How you actually slipped into someone else’s skin. She couldn’t believe she’d ever given this up.
“I think I should do the quote as Carrie in the debate. I think
it would be a lot more powerful. And exciting,” Brynn said, still on her feet. “I could read some of those quotes from mothers who had kids killed in drunk driving accidents in character, too. That would be—” She looked over at Joshua. “Now that would be intense. We’d blow everyone away.” And Brynn would get to do the thing she loved more than anything in the world.
“I think it would distract from the points you are trying to make,” Rowan said.
“Me too,” Joshua agreed.
“It doesn’t seem like an appropriate strategy to me,” Serafina, one of the other debaters, offered from across the room.
“Just let me do one of the mom quotes in character,” Brynn said eagerly. She couldn’t wait to get onstage again. Well, sort of onstage.
“Brynn, you aren’t listening. We don’t think it’s a good idea,” Rowan said.
“But—” Brynn protested.
Joshua cut her off. “This isn’t the Drama League, Brynn.”
“You’re right. It isn’t,” Brynn answered. “And that’s the problem.”
Candace sat at the back of the auditorium, watching Drew sing to the man-eating plant. He was amazing. He gave it everything he had.
What’s he going to say? she wondered. Is it too late? Is he going to turn me down because I turned him down?
Her life would be easier if he did. She wouldn’t get any flack from her friends. She wouldn’t have to worry about how she’d even find time to go to the movies with all her homework.
She wouldn’t have nearly as much fun.
Drew finished his song, and Candace applauded until her hands tingled. When he leaped off the stage, she didn’t give herself time to think. She walked right over to him. She didn’t want to change her mind.
“Drew, um, hi,” she said. She wished she were an actor like him and Brynn. Then she could just act like a girl who knew how to ask a boy out.
“Hey, Candace. You were awesome in Brynn’s contest,” Drew said.
Should she try to get the conversation around to movies? Then she could jump from there to asking if he wanted to see one?
Freaky Tuesday #17 Page 10
