She was biting on a nail, fidgeting all over the place—something I haven’t seen her do in a long, long time. “Look, just don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it? Don’t worry about it?”
“You’ve done plenty of stuff for me—just forget it, okay?”
The phone rang and she snatched it off an entry hall table, snapping, “What!” into the receiver. Two seconds later her face looked instantly sunburned. “Uh…hold on.” She covered the receiver and mouthed, “It’s Danny.”
I pulled a little ooooh face and couldn’t help chuckling—it was nice to know I wasn’t the only one who did stupid things with a phone.
She composed herself, then said, “Hello?” all cheery and sweet-like. “Huh? Oh…” She dropped her voice. “Yeah, that was my mom. She’s kinda stressed.” She went cheery again. “So, what’s up?”
She eyes me like, Was that believable? So I gave her the thumbs-up and listened as she fidgeted around the room, saying, “Uh, yeah…I’m sure that’s all right…you know, as long as you can vouch for them….” She looked at me suddenly and smiled. “Well, Casey’s a no-brainer, of course. Billy too.” She raised an eyebrow my way. “They’re probably already invited.”
I cringed and looked away. She’d been telling me to invite Casey to Brandon’s pool party, but for some reason I just hadn’t done it. Something about mixing the old with the new felt…uncomfortable.
Or maybe it was something about having Casey see me in colorful underwear that was making me uncomfortable.
Slightly!
But it was too late now. The deed was done.
And once again I’d come out a Casey-calling coward.
When Marissa hung up, she put her hands on her hips and craned her neck toward me. “I can’t believe you never called him!”
“Stop that!” I said, looking away. I eyed her and muttered, “You look like a vulture.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re a chicken!”
I sighed and toed the floor with my high-top. “Look, I just want to play water hoops. I don’t want to worry about—”
“Being with friends? Having a little fun?”
“Looking like a dork!” I said, facing her straight on. “Like I want him to see me in a bathing suit? Soaked?”
“You look great in that suit! And you look great soaked!”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. Look, can we go do something? How about the movies? We could sit Mikey up front…?”
Marissa frowned. “No cash, no credit, remember?”
I spread my arms out and looked around. “In this whole house, you can’t scrape together enough money to go to the movies?”
She shook her head. “Isn’t that pathetic?” She hesitated. “Maybe I could sell CeCe some knickknacks?”
The McKenzes’ “knickknacks” are expensive works of art or, you know, outrageously priced blobs of glass. There’s one that Mrs. McKenze calls the Kraval that I’m afraid to even breathe near. It just looks like a hollowed-out crystal basketball, but apparently it’s worth a fortune.
Anyway, the point is, there was no way Marissa would ever take any of the McKenzes’ knickknacks to CeCe’s Thrift Store. It would be, like, a death sentence. So very casually, I said, “I could buy us tickets.”
Marissa’s eyes bugged. “How much money do you have?”
I laughed. “I worked for André this morning, remember?”
“Still!” She cocked her head a bit, then laughed. “Well, sure! Let’s get Mikey’s leash and go.”
“His leash?”
Turns out, she wasn’t kidding.
TEN
The McKenzes don’t have a dog, so why they even had a leash was a mystery to me. But then Marissa explained that it’s how Mrs. McKenze used to keep tabs on Mikey at amusement parks and stuff, so he developed a positive association with the leash.
Or something.
Whatever, he really didn’t seem to mind. He just let Marissa clip it to a belt loop of his jeans, and off we went.
From Marissa’s house to the movie theater was all downhill, so walking Mikey there was no problem. We actually had a good time. Plus, it was nice and cool in the theater, the movie was funny, and we ran into Dot and her brothers, which was fun.
Afterward I made a quick detour to the Senior Highrise to switch Mrs. Wedgewood’s laundry into a dryer while Marissa finished wiping out the rest of André’s money by bribing Mikey with a Double Dynamo ice cream from Maynard’s Market.
But when we finally started the trek back to Marissa’s house, Mikey started rattling off complaints. “My feet hurt. I’m tired. I’m thirsty. It’s too far….”
“Come on,” Marissa said, clipping the leash back on.
“But I’m tired.”
“How can you be tired? We’ve barely even started!”
“I’m thirsty!”
“You just had an ice cream!”
“But I am thirsty!”
“Maybe if you hadn’t hogged all the popcorn at the movies, you wouldn’t be thirsty!” Marissa grumbled, dragging him along.
“But I am,” he said, then pulled a total bulldog face and sat down in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Come on,” Marissa said, yanking on the leash. “How else are you going to get home?”
“Call Mom!”
“I don’t have a phone anymore, remember? And she won’t come anyway. We’ve got to walk.”
He crossed his arms, and his face sort of buried in on itself. “No!”
“Get up!”
“No!”
Marissa yanked again, but the only thing that budged was his belt loop. It gave way, and the leash came flying toward her. “Why am I doing this?” Marissa asked, throwing her hands in the air. “Why am I even doing this?”
I squatted in front of Mikey. “How old are you, Mike? Five?”
“Shut up! I’m nine!”
“Nine?” I said with my eyebrows up. “You’re kidding, right? There’s no way you’re nine. Six, maybe. At the most.”
“I’m nine!”
I snorted. “You’re six. Max.”
He turned all red in the face, then stood up and started after me. I darted off, then held back, letting him almost catch me before speeding up again. “See?” I said after I’d yo-yoed him along for a while and he was starting to give up. “You’re wimping out, just like a six-year-old.”
“I’m NINE!”
He started after me again, but after a while he just couldn’t run anymore. So I called, “Hey, I bet I know where we could get you something cold to drink.”
“Really?” he said, gasping for air.
“Follow me!” I called, and took off again.
Marissa kept up with me, checking over her shoulder the whole way. “Let me guess—Hudson’s?”
I tossed her a grin. “Uh-huh.”
“Good ol’ Hudson,” she said, tossing one back.
Hudson may be seventy-three, but he’s one of my best friends. He’s got a never-ending supply of patience, iced tea, and good advice, and his porch is where I usually wind up when I’ve got problems.
And Mikey McKenze was definitely a problem.
“Sammy!” he said, swinging his yellow cowboy boots down from the porch railing when he saw me coming up the walkway. “How are you, stranger?” Then right away he added, “And you’ve brought Marissa. What a nice surprise!” He cocked his head a bit when he saw the leash in her hand. “If you’re here to walk Rommel, I’m afraid he’s no longer with us.”
“Oh! Hudson, I’m so sorry!” I said, because even though Hudson’s dog had gotten old and deaf and hobbly, he’d been Hudson’s little buddy forever.
“No tears, now,” Hudson said when he saw my face. “He had a really good life. And it was definitely time.”
Suddenly Mikey comes blustering up the walkway, ruddy-faced and mad. “I’m telling!” he cries. “I’m tellin’ Mom you tried to ditch me, and she’s gonna ground you!”
“I’m already grounded,?
?? Marissa shouts back, “by you.”
“Oh my,” Hudson says, his bushy white eyebrows raised high.
“Hudson, this is Mikey,” I say with great, dramatic flair. “Mikey, this is Mr. Graham.” I zero in on Mikey. “And you’d better be polite, or you can forget about getting anything cold to drink.”
Mikey just glowers as he pants at the base of the porch.
“Ah,” Hudson says, heading for his front door. “It’s a long walk up to Jasmine Street, isn’t it, Mike?”
When Hudson’s safely inside, Mikey pulls a squinty little face and says, “He’s old. And he’s wearing yellow boots.”
“That’s his style,” I tell him. “He’s got boots in all kinds of colors and styles.”
“Yellow’s weird,” he grumbles, then just stands there, his forehead gushing sweat.
Hudson reappears a couple of minutes later with two pitchers, a stack of plastic cups, and a bowl of strawberries. “What’s your pleasure, Mike, iced tea or ice water?”
Mikey frowns. “Don’t you have any Coke?”
“I’m offering iced tea and water,” Hudson says evenly.
Mikey just stands there with rivers of sweat running down his face.
“I’ll have tea!” I say. “And those strawberries look amazing!” They were, too. They were big and a beautiful deep red.
So while Mikey’s body’s stewing in its own steamy salt bath, the rest of us have a cool drink and delicious strawberries. And when Mikey finally does decide that iced tea is better than nothing, he takes one sip and sprays it out into the bushes.
“Mikey!” Marissa scolds.
“It’s awful!”
“It’s unsweetened,” she says between gritted teeth.
“So where’s the sugar?” Mikey whines.
I was so embarrassed. And I was ticked off, too. I mean, what a brat! But it didn’t seem to faze Hudson a bit. He didn’t lecture or scold, and he didn’t bring out any sugar. He just sipped tea and watched Mikey and Marissa bicker.
Finally I said, “Well! I think we should be going.”
“No!” Mikey whined. He looked at Marissa. “I wanna call Mom!”
Marissa eyed Hudson like, Can we please use your phone? But Hudson just gave her a sage smile and said to Mikey, “Sorry, Mike. No phone available.”
I really wanted to bail on going back to the McKenzes’. My skateboard was still there, but I figured I’d get it later. I’d had more than enough of Mikey McKenze for one day!
But when I said something about needing to get back to Mrs. Wedgewood’s laundry, Marissa latched on to me and said, “You can’t abandon me now! You have got to help me get him home!”
“But…if the Nightie-Napper takes the Wedge’s stuff, I’ll never hear the end of it!”
Hudson’s eyebrows shot up. “The Nightie-Napper?”
“They haven’t caught him yet?” Marissa asks.
Now, the truth is, I didn’t know if they’d figured out who’d been stealing clothes from the Highrise dryers, and I didn’t care. Actually, I suspected that it was all just made up. I mean, what else is there in the way of excitement at the Senior Highrise? But I was so sick of dealing with Mikey that I was desperate for a way out.
Marissa rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on! Who’d want to steal her stuff?”
“No, really,” I said as she dragged me down the steps, “if you were the Nightie-Napper, she’d be just the person you’d want to steal from! You could make curtains for a whole apartment out of just one muumuu!”
“What’s a muumuu?” Mikey asked, trailing behind us.
Marissa kept dragging me along.
I ignored Mikey and continued pleading my case. “It took two machines to wash six pairs of her undies!”
Marissa stopped and faced me. “Undies are not nighties. Or even muumuus!”
“What’s a muumuu!” Mikey demanded.
“It’s a big tent of a dress, all right?” I snapped, then turned to Marissa. “Look, they call him the Nightie-Napper, but he steals all sorts of stuff! Sheets, dresses…. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’ll be in if her good muumuu gets snatched?”
Marissa kept dragging. “You got me into this, you’re getting him home!”
I scowled at her and grumbled, “That’s the last time I take you to the movies!” But really, what could I do? I caved. And pretty soon Marissa switched from dragging me to dragging Mikey.
Ordinarily, it would have taken ten or fifteen minutes to walk to the McKenzes’, but with Mikey dragging and plopping down every half block and crying, it took almost forty-five.
The good thing was that when we got to the McKenzes’, Mikey went to his room and totally left us alone.
As Hudson says, a tired dog is a good dog.
The bad thing was that even though Mikey was no longer being a pest, Marissa was in the world’s worst mood, and I couldn’t seem to snap her out of it. “I hate my life!” she kept saying, then moaned about her stupid brother and her stupid parents and the fact that she had no stupid money.
Frankly, being “trapped” in her bedroom suite surrounded by all her stuff, I was having a little trouble sympathizing. And since I really did need to get back and finish Mrs. Wedgewood’s laundry, I finally just took off.
I loved tearing down the hill on my skateboard. My whole focus was on avoiding cracks, dodging rocks, and hopping curbs. It was like a high-speed obstacle course where I could crash and burn at any time. No puzzling thoughts, no worries, no Mikey…just the wind in my face and the rush of ball bearings battling it out with gravity.
I made it down the hill in one shaky piece, then cruised along catching my breath. And as I approached Cypress Street, I decided to make a quick stop at Hudson’s to apologize for subjecting him to Mikey-The-Whiner-McKenze.
Hudson was still on the porch, or back on the porch—who knows? Shoot, he’d had enough time to mow the yard, wash the windows, and take a nap.
Anyway, his yellow boots were propped up on the rail and he was reading the newspaper, but the minute he saw me coming up his walkway, he closed the paper and sat up. “Say! I’m glad you came back.”
I grabbed my board and went up the steps. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for bringing Mikey over. Marissa’s parents let their nanny go, so Marissa’s stuck with him all day ’cause she’s home for summer and her parents are still going off to work. Nobody can handle him. He’s just…impossible.” Then I nodded at the newspaper and tried to be real casual as I said, “What’s going on in the news? Robberies? Murders? Burglaries?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing.” He smiled at me. “Let’s hope the trend continues, right?”
I laughed. “Right!”
He put the paper aside. “Interesting you should come back,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”
I plopped down in the chair next to him. “Yeah?”
“It seems to me that Mike could benefit from some structure. Some discipline.” He eyed me. “And some better eating habits.” He poured me a glass of tea and handed it over. “From the bits and pieces you’ve told me, I have the impression that the parents aren’t around much…. Is that right?”
“They’re never around. Even when they are, they’re not.”
“Hmm,” he said, and then just sat there for the longest time.
“What?” I finally asked, because I could tell he was thinking something.
“How do you think they would feel about having Mike come here during the day for the rest of the summer?”
“Come here?” I snorted. “Marissa would love that, but you’re crazy! You saw him—Mikey’s a nightmare!”
Hudson gave a wily smile. “He’d be just fine.”
“But…I don’t get it. Why?”
He gave a little shrug. “It’s been pretty quiet around here since Rommel passed.” He laced his fingers together across his stomach. “And the way I see it, it won’t be long before it’s too late to help Mike. Now…well, I believe I could turn him around.”
&n
bsp; I blinked at him a minute. “Turn him around? Do you have any idea what that’s gonna take? He needs boot camp or something.”
Hudson nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
I sat up straighter. “Mm-hmm? So it’d be like Hudson’s Boot Camp?”
Hudson threw back his head and laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I like the double entendre. Although it would be more of a day camp than a boot camp.” He chuckled. “But maybe I’ll buy him a pair of boots at the end of it.”
“So…you’re really serious?”
He took a deep breath, then smoothed back one of his bushy white eyebrows. “It’s probably more up to them than me. They may be insulted, or they may be uncomfortable with the idea. I couldn’t blame them on either account, but yes, I think I’ll make the offer.”
We talked about it some more, and I wound up giving Hudson the McKenzes’ phone number. And the whole way home I just kind of shook my head in amazement at Hudson, thinking about what a cool guy he is. What a good guy he is. I mean, come on, who in the world voluntarily takes on Mikey McKenze?
And thinking about all that got me thinking how Hudson had been a rock-solid friend to me since day one. He was always helping me out. Always helping me figure things out. Maybe it was about time I did something for him.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. But it had to be something totally cool. Something totally unexpected.
And then it hit me that I could actually buy him something! I had money! He wouldn’t have to know it was from me. I could just deliver it to his porch with an anonymous thank-you card.
Or wait—a secret admirer card!
Yeah, I thought as I clicked along toward the Senior Highrise, a surprise gift from a secret admirer would make Hudson feel really good. Really…happy. It wouldn’t be some cheap little knickknack, either. Hudson Graham deserved something nice.
After all, I had the money—why not spend it?
ELEVEN
“There you are, Sammy-girl!” Mr. Garnucci shouted when I came through the front door. “Mrs. Wedgewood called down here wondering if I knew what had happened to you!”
I headed toward the basement. “Hey, I’ve got my own chores at home! It’s not like I live here, you know!”