• Sophie Nelson needs … a miracle.
• I need a break.
Tuesday lunch is usually a good time for me to look over my open accounts. It’s just me and Harry Homework at our table today. Nobody’s waiting to speak to either of us, which is lucky. I have too many unfinished jobs right now, and I can’t afford to disappoint a client and lose a potential friend. Harry flips through his notebook and munches on his usual lunch of oily sardines in a tin. “High protein,” he says. “Good for brain development.” I try not to gag at the smell/sight/thought.
Harry is the closest thing I have to a real friend here at Elmhaven Middle School. Like Agnes, Harry is a pint-size genius—he’s only ten, because he skipped two grades already, and he should probably skip the rest and go straight to, like, Brain Surgeon School or Astronaut Academy, but his mother doesn’t want him to skip any more grades because it would “ruin his social life.”
Haaaaaaaa!
She doesn’t want to ruin his social life. His social life, which consists of sitting in the back corner of the lunchroom with Glad the Fixer, selling homework so he doesn’t get beat up or harassed by older kids. Because nobody really cares what André the Anti-Bullying Aardvark has to say about befriending kids with differences. The only thing keeping Russell Sharpe and the other eighth graders from permanently stuffing Harry into a locker is Harry’s homework business.
“Heads up,” Harry mutters to me.
I’m about to ask why when I see Ms. Schellestede coming our way. Tall, gray-haired, and imposing, Ms. Schellestede is our school’s vice principal, our grade’s guidance counselor, and my personal walking nightmare.
“Gladys,” says my nightmare, approaching the table. “And Harrison.”
Ms. Schellestede makes the kind of eye contact that burns through your eyeballs all the way to the back of your skull. You try not to look, but her stare is like a tractor beam from an alien spacecraft. If you get caught in it, there’s no escape. You’re going to the spaceship to get probed.
“Well,” says Schellestede probingly, as Harry and I look down at the table. “I see we’re eating our lunch undisturbed today. As opposed to yesterday, when you were both so popular.”
There is a long pause while we try to figure out how to answer this. “Tweens,” says Harry, venturing a look up at her. “They’re so fickle.”
“Yeah,” I say. I force a weak smile. “One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.”
Ms. Schellestede gives us a raised eyebrow. She was not born yesterday. She wasn’t even born this century. “As I recall, we have talked about this. Both of you have been in my office to discuss your ‘businesses,’ and both of you were warned to stop plying your trades immediately.”
Okay, these are facts.
About six weeks ago, Schellestede called me into her office, tractor-beamed me with her eyes, and told me she knew what I was up to. She knew I had helped Saffron Navinder come up with a way to get out of gym (she faked having terrible balance). She knew I came up with Kathy Park’s excuse for not having her history report (she got so interested in the topic that she kept reading about it, so she fell behind on writing about it). She knew I was behind Rafe Sotomayor’s explanation for disrupting assembly (he thought he saw lice crawling on the back of the seat in front of him). There was no proof and no way Schellestede could have known those things for sure, so I confessed to nothing. She threatened me with detention anyway.
“But … I didn’t do anything. I didn’t break any school rules,” I protested, incredulous.
Schellestede’s eyes narrowed, focusing her glare into two sizzling lasers aimed directly at my face. “I’m charging you with ‘accessory to lying.’”
Harry was called into her office right after me, and he got it even worse than I did. Schellestede said she knew he was helping people to cheat and plagiarize, and if he got caught in the act, he could be expelled. He had to do some advanced lawyer-type negotiating to keep her from dropping the hammer on him right then and there, pointing out that he didn’t do assignments for other students, he simply “gave them the resources to help them complete their assignments in a timely manner.” Which is true. Harry won’t write your report for you. He’ll just provide you with an outline. A single-spaced, page-and-a-half-long outline.
Now Harry opens his mouth to do more lawyering, but Schellestede turns on him with the Stare and he wilts. She puts both hands on the table and leans toward us. We shrink back in our seats.
“If I see a line of people at your table again,” she says, enunciating every word, “you had best be selling lemonade.”
She continues the Stare for another minute. It is the longest minute in the history of time. It is seriously like an hour-long minute. Clocks around the world get annoyed and walk off the job. We all grow long Rip Van Winkle beards that dry up and fall off our faces. This minute will never end, and we will never be released from Schellestede’s deadly gaze.
Harry and I are frozen silent until Schellestede takes her hands off the table, straightens up, and walks away. She is halfway across the cafeteria before we exhale.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” says Harry. “Quit?”
I know he’s not seriously suggesting that we quit. I can’t quit—people need me. And I need them to need me. “I can’t quit,” I confess.
“I know.” He slumps in his chair. “I can’t, either. But I think about it sometimes. I’m so sick of trying to find something new for people to say about Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery.’ It’s an allegory for the desperate brutality of society under capitalism! The end!”
(I laugh, but that’s a freebie, and I’m writing it down.)
I don’t know. Maybe quitting would be a relief. I could throw my to-do list of favors into the trash. Let Madison Graham write her own fake texts from her fake boyfriend. Let Evelyn Ferszt pound Sam Boyd into next week. Let me just live my life. But (a) I’m not sure I have a life outside of fixing, and (b) if I quit, everybody will be mad at me for letting them down. I can’t let that happen.
So when this girl Izzy comes toward our table, even though Schellestede is still in eyeshot, I don’t turn her away. Tuesday favors are usually urgent, and Izzy looks fully upset.
“Hey, Izzy!” I crow loudly as she approaches, winking at her like I’m trying to take flight using only the lashes of my right eye. “Thank you for offering to help me with my … soccer playing! I can’t wait to discuss it some more! Why don’t you walk with me to my locker?”
Izzy frowns for a second, trying to remember when in her life she ever promised to help me with soccer. Then she sees the demented winking and gets it. “Uh, yeah, sure,” she says. “Soccer.”
I grab my bag and wave bye to Harry as Izzy and I start heading out of the cafeteria. As we pass Schellestede, I nudge Izzy with my elbow.
Automatically, she says, “First thing about soccer, Coach always says, is the mental game. It’s just as important as the game on the field.”
“That’s so interesting! Please, tell me more.”
As soon as we’re in the hall and out of earshot, Izzy stops and turns to me. “I need your help.”
Yeah, duh. Why else would she be talking to me? Izzy is the star of the girls’ soccer team and the coed softball team. Not only does she have a million friends, she has a million admirers, like the sixth grader who looks at Izzy with awe as she scurries past us in the hall.
Izzy notices and gives the girl a nod of recognition, and the girl looks like she might need CPR for her multiple heart attacks.
“In here,” I say, and lead Izzy into the girls’ room.
We left lunch early, so the bathroom is vacant for now, but in five minutes, a horde of girls will pile in. Izzy follows me into the wheelchair stall, and I shut the door behind us.
“We don’t have much time,” I say. “What do you need?”
She sighs. “I need to save my clothes.”
Okay. This is a new on
e. I’m not exactly sure what she means, since Izzy’s clothes are, like, two pairs of holey jeans, three busted T-shirts, a pair of raggedy sneakers, and a ball cap. It’s not like she’s Sophie, who’s wearing something new every week.
“Can you be more specific?” I ask.
Izzy takes off her ball cap, tucks her sandy chin-length hair behind her ears, then replaces the hat. “My grandma’s coming, and she hates my clothes. My dad makes me dress girly when she visits, so she won’t spend the whole time nagging him about how I look, but she usually comes over the summer, so I just go along with it and wear whatever she wants when I’m hanging around the house. But my dad told me last night, she’s coming on Saturday for a week, and she said she’s gonna throw out all my clothes and buy new stuff while she’s here.” She looks at me with tears in her eyes. “I can’t wear that girly stuff. I can’t. I’ll do anything not to have to wear a pink dress to school. It’s too humiliating.”
It’s a little ironic that Izzy worries about people making fun of her for wearing a dress, when people already make fun of her for dressing like a boy. Nobody says anything to her face, because she has a million friends and can kick anybody’s butt, but behind her back, some of the snottier dance squad girls call her Izzy-or-Isn’t-He.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” I say, thinking out loud. “First step is to save your clothes. Bring your favorite stuff to school every day this week, and I’ll keep it safe from your grandma. Then go buy a bunch of junk clothes from Goodwill that you don’t care about and stuff your drawers with them. Then your grandma can throw them out. She can even burn them, if she wants.”
Izzy shades her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks. She’s red from embarrassment—I don’t think anybody at school has ever seen Izzy cry before. But if you’re going to cry in front of anybody, it should be me, the human version of the say-no-evil monkey, my paws permanently clasped over my mouth.
“Now we have to find a place for you to store your real clothes and change into them before school. Do you have any friends who live close by you?”
Izzy shakes her head no.
“Friends who live close to school?”
Another no. I frown. You’d think one of Izzy’s gazillion friends would live somewhere geographically convenient.
“Maybe…” Izzy hesitates, something I imagine she does about as often as she cries. She peeks up at me shyly from behind her hand. “You’re on Lincoln Road, right? Could you keep them at your house? And I could come by in the morning to change? It’d only be for five days next week…”
“Hmmm.” I try not to show my total surprise. This is a much bigger favor than I’m used to doing. And it involves my home life—I like to keep work and home separate. And am I really the most convenient person Izzy could think of for this? Izzy’s house isn’t even that close to ours. I’d say it’s about a twenty-minute walk.
“I can run to your place in five minutes,” she says.
Of course she can.
“And I wouldn’t have to come back in the afternoon! I could change back into the pink stuff at school, after softball practice, when everyone else goes home, and leave my real clothes here to give you the next day. Please, Glad? Just a week!”
Huh. Now that I’m considering it, it wouldn’t be so bad if Izzy came over in the morning, changed in our bathroom, and walked to the bus with me. If she and I became friends, I’d be instantly popular, automatically invited to sit at her lunch table, with the top jocks and beauty queens. I could leave the back corner of the cafeteria and stop scrambling to do favors for everyone. I don’t think Dad would mind if Izzy came by in the mornings. And it would shut Mabey up about me not having friends.
Izzy clasps her hands to say “pretty please” and wrinkles her forehead.
“All right,” I agree. “I’ll do it.”
The first few girls have begun to trickle into the bathroom. I start to exit our stall before we’re seen in there together.
“Wait,” says Izzy, and I turn to her, surprised. “Do I need to pay you? How does this work? Taye just said you did fixes for people. He didn’t say what you charge.”
That’s because I don’t charge anything. I’m looking for something more valuable than money. I’m looking for someone to sit next to me on the bus. An invitation to a party, an offer to hang out after school sometime—that’s what I really want. But I don’t know how to ask for those things, so I usually wind up settling for the promise of a return favor.
“No charge,” I tell Izzy. “But I might ask you for something in the future.”
She gives me the grateful look and says the magic words. “Thanks, Glad. I owe you.”
Izzy leaves the stall, steps up to the sinks, and starts washing her face with cold water, trying to hide her swollen eyes. I wait a second before leaving the stall, then I brush past her on my way out of the bathroom like we never spoke a word. As much as I want to be seen talking with Izzy, I don’t want people to know we were talking about a favor.
Anyway, we’ll be talking all the time soon, if everything goes according to plan.
I have a good feeling about this one.
6
Tuesday After School
Agnes and Baxter aren’t home when I get there, but Mabey is, as I can tell by the coat and boots by the door. I am starving, so I throw my stuff down in the living room and go to the fridge.
There’s only dregs in there: half a lemon, one last splash of milk, and a door full of mostly empty condiment jars with crusty brown gunk around the rims of the lids. That quarter inch of mustard, I realize, has been there since Mom bought it over a year and a half ago.
We really need groceries.
I go up to Mabey’s attic, which means climbing a ladder from the second floor and opening a hatch in the ceiling. I’m on the ladder, about to knock on the hatch, but I pause for a second, listening for Mabey’s friends.
These days, if I interrupt her when she’s got people over, she gets savage. When she used to hang out with Kat and Juliana, her two best friends from grade school, it wasn’t a problem for me to come by for two seconds, but now that she has new friends with pierced lips and whatnot, I’m not even allowed to knock.
I hear Mabey talking to someone excitedly, but I don’t hear anyone else in her room. She must be on the phone.
“Are you serious?” she asks. “When?” Pause. “That’s, like, two weeks from now!”
She’s pacing, so her voice goes in and out of earshot. I pick up a few words—“so happy” … “how long?” … “won’t tell them, I promise.”
I am trying to stitch these together to get the full story. In, like, two weeks, somebody is going to do something that will make Mabey happy, for an unknown length of time, but it has to be kept secret from some other people.
She paces toward the hatch again, and I overhear her signing off: “Okay. I can’t wait. I love you. Bye, Mom.”
Mom.
I stand there on the ladder for a second, confused. Mom only calls once a week, always on the home phone, and she only calls in the evenings, when she knows all three of us girls will be here. We can try calling her anytime, but the landline at the farm is constantly busy, and she might not even be there, or she might not have time to talk. I guess Mabey must have called at the exact right time to get through the busy signal. Or she just kept dialing and dialing, the way I used to do.
I wonder if Mabey called Mom or Mom called Mabey. I wonder if this is a special occasion or if Mom and Mabey secretly talk to each other all the time. I did hear Mabey say “I won’t tell them, I promise.” “Them” must mean me, Agnes, and Dad.
We all know that Mabey is Mom’s favorite, but it still hurts to hear that they’ve been talking in secret. Doesn’t Mom want to talk to me, too?
My mind is fully blown, and my body doesn’t know where to be. My phone and stuff are in the living room, any food we have is in the kitchen, and I want to flop down on my bed and bury my face in a pillow. I keep turning to go in one di
rection, then turning around, like a confused tourist. Then I hear Mabey’s footsteps coming back toward the hatch.
“Mabes?” I shout.
The hatch opens, and Mabey sticks her head out. Her long brown hair falls straight down, making her look like she’s in a horror movie. “What?”
“Um…” What was it I had originally come up here to say, before I heard her talking to Mom? Oh, yeah. “We need food.”
“Tell Dad,” she says.
“He’s not home.”
She groans like I’m the single most annoying person in the solar system, unless Mars is populated entirely by idiots. “Then text him.”
She goes to shut the hatch again. I blurt out, “Were you talking to Mom?”
Her face reappears, and it is scowling. “Were you listening?”
“No, I was about to come up to tell you we have no food. All I heard you say was ‘Bye, Mom.’”
Mabey gives me her version of the Lawyer Look, which is the Sullen Stare. I look at her innocently. “Come up,” she decides, moving out of the way for me.
I climb the ladder and pull myself through the hatch.
It smells like a hamster cage in Mabey’s room. There are dirty clothes and empty mugs and food wrappers on the floor, papers and books and various chargers tossed everywhere. Mabey doesn’t seem to mind.
She sits down on her bed, nearly crushing a half-eaten box of powdered doughnut holes, which she passes to me. I sit on her beanbag and start demolishing the doughnut holes one by one.
“Here’s the deal,” she says. “Mom’s coming home for a visit. You can’t tell Dad! And you can’t tell Agnes, because she’ll tell Dad.”
MOM’S COMING HOME.
I gasp, and some donut powder gets sucked into the back of my throat. I start coughing spasmodically. Finally, I get my wheezing under control long enough to ask, “When is she coming? For how long?”
Mabey sighs. “Just a few days, probably around her birthday, but she doesn’t have all the details yet. It’s like, not everything can be nailed down, the universe is in a constant state of flux…”
Let Me Fix That for You Page 3
