Feeling more cheerful than he had for some time, Mitchell rode to the corner where the newspaper carriers gathered to fold their papers across the street from the real-estate office, but no one was there yet. He waited a few minutes, watching some old newspapers blow against the fence, before he rode on, ringing the bell of his bicycle from time to time just for the satisfaction of making a noise. He cut through the parking lot of a church and headed toward home on a pleasant level street lined with hedges and pine trees. There was no traffic and the street was in bad repair so Mitchell amused himself by weaving in and out among the gravelly patches that showed through the broken asphalt. He was pretending his bicycle was a destroyer working its way around icebergs when he became aware of someone approaching on a bicycle.
It was Alan Hibbler. Uh-oh, thought Mitchell. Here we go again. If there had been a cross street, he would have turned off, but the block was long and there was no way to avoid meeting Alan face-to-face. Since Mitchell could not ignore him this time, he pedaled along, trying to look unconcerned. Maybe, if he was lucky, Alan would be in a hurry. Maybe he was on his way to substitute for one of the paper boys.
“Hi,” said Alan, as he stopped his bicycle about twenty feet in front of Mitchell.
“Hi,” answered Mitchell, braking his bicycle and putting one foot on the ground. Now what? A showdown like the end of a Western movie? Mitchell squinted at Alan even though he was not staring into the sun.
“Whatcha doing?” Alan seemed friendly enough.
“Riding around.” Mitchell was wary, wondering if Alan had stopped bullying after all. Maybe bullying was something he had outgrown like playing with Tinker Toys or kicking lunch boxes on the school grounds. Or maybe he did not feel so much like a bully when he was alone and face-to-face with Mitchell. Mitchell hooked one thumb in the top of his jeans and waited to see what happened. It just might be that ignoring Alan had worked after all.
“Play you a game of chicken,” said Alan.
“How do you play chicken?” asked Mitchell.
Alan explained. “We ride our bikes straight at one another as hard as we can, and the first one to turn aside is chicken.”
“What’s the point?” asked Mitchell.
“To find out who gets scared and chickens out.” Alan was beginning to sound as if he thought Mitchell was not very bright.
“But that’s a stupid game,” said Mitchell logically. “If nobody turns aside, you’ve got a couple of wrecked-up bikes and maybe a few broken legs. I don’t get it.”
“I thought you’d be chicken,” scoffed Alan. “The way I chase you to school practically every day.”
“You don’t chase me,” said Mitchell, trying not to show that he was beginning to get angry. “I don’t pay any attention, is all.” He took his thumb out of his belt and grasped his handlebars until his knuckles were white.
“Not much you don’t,” jeered Alan. “Not much you don’t pay attention.”
“I do not!” Now Mitchell really was angry, and the thing that made him angriest of all was the unfairness of the situation. He knew he was right and Alan was wrong, just as he had been right and Alan had been wrong when he smashed the skateboard. Chicken was a stupid game and smashing other people’s skateboards was wrong. Alan was the one who should be unhappy, not Mitchell, but there sat Alan cocky as anything while Mitchell felt confused, not knowing what to do next.
“Well, why don’t you say something?” Alan demanded.
“What do you expect me to say?” Mitchell did not know what else to answer. He couldn’t sit there on his bicycle telling Alan he was unfair, that the whole situation was unfair. “Sure, I’ve felt a couple of eucalyptus buds, but who cares about a couple of eucalyptus buds?”
“You do.” Suddenly Alan bent over his handlebars and began to pump his bicycle. In only a fraction of a second Mitchell grasped what was happening—Alan was forcing him to play chicken, whether he wanted to or not. Mitchell knew he did not have a chance unless he got moving in a hurry. He got that other foot on the pedal and stood up and pumped as hard and as fast as he could with Alan bending over his handlebars heading straight for him.
Mitchell had another fraction of a second to make a big decision, and that fraction was all he needed. Let Alan call him chicken. He was not going to risk wrecking his three-speed bicycle for an old bully like Alan or anyone else. An instant before their bicycles would have clashed, Mitchell swerved.
“Chicken!” yelled Alan in triumph, as the front wheel of his bicycle struck a patch of gravel and he and his bicycle went sprawling on the street with a thump and the sound of metal grating against asphalt.
Mitchell stopped to see what had happened. Alan was picking himself up slowly and stiffly. A bleeding knee showed through a tear in his jeans, and there was a scraped and muddy place on his face. The fall must have hurt and hurt a lot. Painfully Alan leaned over and lifted his bicycle upright.
Mitchell was tempted to laugh and yell, Don’t you wish you were chicken? But he decided not to. Why rub it in? “Tough luck,” was all he said, as he turned and started pedaling toward home. They both knew he had won, and nothing else mattered. This should put an end to the eucalyptus buds.
“I’ll get you for this!” shouted Alan. “I won’t let you get away with it!”
Mitchell did not look back. He did not want to see Alan standing there bleeding and shaking his fist. Boy, thought Mitchell bitterly, as he wove his way around the patches of gravel, how unfair can a fellow get? He takes a spill that was his own fault, and now he says he’s going to get me for it. Well, Mitchell had learned one thing even if he had to learn it the hard way. His father and all the people who said that ignoring a bully would make him go away were wrong. At least they were wrong if the bully was Alan Hibbler.
Mitchell wondered if the other people were wrong, too, the people who said that if you fight a bully he will back down. As Mitchell pumped hard to get a run at his steep driveway, he knew that sooner or later he was going to have to find out.
6
Rainy Saturday
Amy decided being a twin was much harder on a rainy Saturday than at any other time. Mitchell could be so exasperating. By the time lunch was over, she and Mitchell were in the midst of an argument over which television program they should watch. The argument was their second that day, not counting the one over which had received the shinier twenty-five cent piece for his allowance. Amy could not resist giving Mitchell a shove when he reached over to switch the set from the program she was watching to an old Western movie.
“Every action has a reaction,” Mitchell informed his sister as he shoved back. “It’s just like the scientist told us at school. If you shove me, I have to react and shove back.” Once a week a scientist talked to the fourth grades about all sorts of interesting things—molecules, air pressure, and how a satellite moved through space without a motor.
Amy was a little surprised at this application of the scientist’s talk about action and reaction, which had been illustrated by a movie of a cannon reacting to firing by recoiling, but she lost no time in getting into the spirit of this new scientific development. She shoved back at Mitchell and said, “And when you shove me back, I have to react and shove you back again.”
At this point Mr. Huff smiled a bit grimly, walked across the room, and turned off the television set. “When you two scuffle in front of the television set, your action causes a reaction in me. I turn off the set. No more television today.”
“Aw, Dad,” protested Mitchell. “That’s no fair. We are the only kids in the whole school who don’t get to watch TV on school nights. It isn’t fair to take it away on Saturday, too.”
“That’s right, Dad,” said Amy. “Everybody else in our room gets to watch TV on school nights.”
“You poor underprivileged children,” said Mr. Huff. “I can think of plenty of other things there are for you to do.”
“Well, I guess I’ll go practice,” Amy said quickly, knowing that if her father skip
ped the evils-of-television lecture, he was sure to begin the you-children-don’t-appreciate-your-opportunity lecture about practicing music lessons. This reaction set off a similar one in her brother. If Amy was going to practice without being told, Mitchell had to do the same or appear at a disadvantage beside his sister.
For a while the Huff household was peaceful but noisy. Amy was in her room playing Brahms’s Lullaby on the cello, Mitchell was in his room playing Sweet Betsy from Pike and taps on the French horn, and their father, who had always wanted to take music lessons when he was a boy and who was teaching himself to play the banjo, was in the living room plunking away at Poor Butterfly.
“Quite an orchestra,” observed Mrs. Huff affectionately, when her family had finished practicing and put down their instruments.
“Mom, could we look at TV now?” asked Mitchell, as soon as his father had left the house to do some errands. “We wouldn’t fight. Honest we wouldn’t.”
“We wouldn’t fight anymore,” said Amy earnestly. “Besides, there isn’t anything to do.” She knew almost at once that she had made a mistake.
“You can straighten your rooms,” Mrs. Huff said promptly and walked down the hall for inspection. “Amy, look at your room—yesterday’s school dress not hung up, your petticoat draped over a chair, paper and bits of cloth strewn all over the floor, your desk a jumble of crayons, jacks, doll clothes, music, crumpled paper, and old homework. And your hair things! Clips, barrettes, rubber bands, hair bands—why on earth can’t you keep them all in one drawer instead of scattering them all over your room? No wonder you can never find anything. Your room is a regular mouse nest.”
Mrs. Huff continued. “And Mitchell’s room. Just look at it—batteries and wire tangled with coat hangers, a dried banana skin draped over the lamp, Old Maid cards and peanut shells scrambled together, little cars and marbles all over the floor. It’s a wonder someone doesn’t fall and break his neck. Dirty socks on the bed and probably under the bed, too, because your room smells like an old muskrat. It’s a mystery to me why you can’t—”
“Relax, Mom,” said Mitchell. “I’ll straighten it up.”
Amy resisted, even though now she was appearing at a disadvantage beside her brother. “I hate picking things up. I like a messy room.”
Mrs. Huff looked stern.
“Oh, all right.” Amy reacted with a sigh and walked slowly down the hall to her room. Rainy Saturdays so often turned out this way. She could hear Mitchell in his room busily opening and closing drawers and making a great display of tidiness. She knew he was trying to make her look extra bad by being extra good. Amy understood this strategy, because she often behaved in exactly the same way.
Amy made a space on her desk where she quickly printed a sign, Welcome to My Mouse Nest, and with her crayons added a picture of a mouse peeking out from a hole with Welcome on a doormat. She taped it to her bedroom door before she closed it and set about straightening her room in a leisurely way.
Amy hung up her dress and petticoat and stacked her music neatly on the bed, but somehow the faster Mitchell bustled about in the next room, the slower Amy worked. She was about to straighten her hair things when the sight of the scattered crayons on her desk tempted her to pull a sheet of paper out of a drawer and consider it a moment before she began to draw.
A lovely feeling of peace came over Amy. She drew a square box in the middle of the paper and added dials and knobs and a dozen rubbery-looking arms reaching out from the box. Each arm ended in a claw, and each claw held a picture of something she should have been picking up. One claw held a doll’s dress, another a sneaker, a third a plastic hair band. Around the machine she sketched her untidy room. Then she labeled her drawing The Handy-dandy Room Picker-upper, tacked it to her bulletin board, and felt as if she had straightened her room. And someday she really would. She would discard practically everything—all the old birthday-party favors and broken crayons and outgrown toys—and have a plain bare room like a pioneer girl, a room with a bed, a chair, and one treasured old doll. Keeping a modern room neat was too much work.
Next Amy picked up her Girl Scout Handbook to see if she could apply her picture of the Handy-dandy Room Picker-upper toward a badge. She studied the list for the housekeeper badge, but as she had expected her picture was of no use. Her eye continued to travel over the requirements. She did not feel like helping her mother clean out the refrigerator, and she had already demonstrated how to use a broom, dust mop, and vacuum cleaner. She paused at, “Clean the kitchen or bathroom floor, sink, and fixtures.”
Amy was suddenly full of energy. Handbook in hand, she went into the living room and asked, “Is it all right if I clean the kitchen or bathroom floor for my housekeeper badge?”
Mrs. Huff looked at Amy in astonishment. “Do my ears deceive me?” she asked. “Did you say what I thought you said?”
“Yes,” said Amy smiling.
“Are you feeling all right?” asked Mrs. Huff.
“I feel fine,” said Amy.
“By all means, go right ahead,” said her mother. “But you had better do the kitchen floor. I scrubbed the bathroom yesterday.”
Amy, who had pictured herself sweeping a bathroom, had not thought in terms of actually getting down on her hands and knees and scrubbing. She thought quickly.
“Is it all right if I ask Bonnie and Marla over to help, too?” she asked. “They’re in the Agonizing Alligator Patrol, too, and are working on the housekeeper badge.”
“Agonizing Alligators—what a stupid name for a patrol,” remarked Mitchell on his way through the living room with an overflowing wastebasket.
Mrs. Huff ignored him and spoke to Amy. “Certainly you may ask Bonnie and Marla, but you had better tell the girls to bring their own scrubbing brushes.”
“What about Mitch?” Amy asked her mother, when two invitations had been extended and accepted by telephone.
“What about him?”
“Does he have to hang around?” Amy wanted to know.
Mrs. Huff glanced at the rain slanting against the windows. “We can hardly shove him outdoors in this weather.”
“But, Mom, he’ll get in the way,” said Amy. “You know how he is.”
“Now, Amy,” said her mother, “Mitchell lives here, too, and there is not much for a boy to do on a rainy day.”
“Well, can’t he stay in his room and work on some models or something?” asked Amy. “I don’t want him hanging around.”
“Who wants to hang around a bunch of Agonizing Alligators?” asked Mitchell from his room and made a gagging sound.
The two girls with their Girl Scout handbooks and scrubbing brushes came splashing through the rain. “You’re lucky,” said Marla wistfully, when Amy had taken her raincoat. “My mother would never let me scrub our floor. Our cleaning lady might not like it.”
“I had a hard time finding our scrubbing brush, because one of my little brothers had taken it to use for a hairbrush,” said Bonnie, who had several young brothers and sisters.
“Amy, the scrubbing bucket is—” began Mrs. Huff, but Amy interrupted.
“I know where it is, Mom. Now you stay out of the kitchen. We know how to scrub a floor.”
Mrs. Huff sat down on the couch and opened Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “Go right ahead,” she said with a smile. “I won’t say another word. Not another word. Just use plenty of elbow grease. That’s all I ask.”
Amy went out to the garage for the bucket, and, since there were three girls and only one bucket, she also brought back the yellow plastic bathtub she and Mitchell had used when they were babies.
“What do we do first?” asked Bonnie, pushing up the sleeves of her sweater.
“Our cleaning lady sweeps first,” said Marla.
“All right, Marla, you start sweeping,” said Amy, taking charge, “and we’ll get the water.”
The kitchen door opened, and Mitchell stuck his head in. Bonnie and Marla squealed. “Eeeee! A man!” Then they began to giggle.
“Mitchell, you’re supposed to stay out of here,” said Amy.
“Can a fellow help it if he’s hungry?” Mitchell demanded, looking pleased with himself.
Amy broke off a banana from the bunch in the wooden bowl on the counter and handed it to her brother. “Now go away,” she said. “We’re busy.”
“Can’t I watch?”
“No, you can’t.” Amy shut the door in her brother’s face.
She found a box of soap powder under the sink and poured some into the bucket and then into the plastic bathtub. Then, just to be sure, she added some more. Bonnie turned the water on full force, and the suds began to rise. The girls lifted the containers to the floor and swished their hands back and forth in the water until they had good thick suds. All three knelt, dipped their brushes into the suds, and began to scrub. Swish-swish-swish went the scrubbing brushes on the asphalt tile. Amy had never realized there could be so many drips and dribbles and scuff marks on what looked like a perfectly clean kitchen floor.
Mitchell opened the kitchen door and dangled a banana skin at arm’s length into the kitchen. “What do I do with this?” he asked. All three girls stopped scrubbing. Marla and Bonnie always enjoyed watching a good fight between Amy and her brother.
“Mom!” cried Amy. “Make Mitch stay out of here!”
“Mitch, stay out of there,” said Mrs. Huff.
“How’s a fellow supposed to put his banana skin in the garbage if he can’t go into the kitchen?” Mitchell wanted to know.
“Pest!” hissed Amy, leaving her brush on the floor and snatching the banana skin from her brother. Any other time he would drape the banana skin on his lamp or put it in his pocket. “Mom! Does he have to hang around interrupting all the time when we are trying to work?”
“Who’s hanging around?” asked Mitchell. “Can’t a fellow put a banana skin in the garbage without being accused of hanging around?”
Mitch and Amy Page 6
