CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO AVAILABLE
COPYRIGHT
“A sardine chocolate cake,” I said.
My sister Maria made a gagging noise and went off into a storm of giggles. When she’d managed to get control of herself, she answered, “A broccoli milkshake with chopped onions.”
“Euuuuuw,” I said, grabbing my throat and making a face.
Maria began to giggle again.
We both looked at Tiffany. But she didn’t seem to be listening. She just stared out the window as our school bus pulled to a stop in front of our house.
The three of us got out, Maria with a hop, Tiffany with her head down, and me last, with a wave to the driver. As the bus pulled away, I paused to look up and down our street. The day was bright and quiet and still, and you could feel spring just waiting to happen in Stoneybrook, where we live. My sisters Maria and Tiffany and I had been playing an old game of ours on the bus ride home from Stoneybrook Day School: Gross Food.
At least, Maria, who is eight, and I had been playing. Tiffany hadn’t said anything at all.
I looked over at Tiffany as she walked beside me. Her head was still down and she was holding her backpack across her chest. Maybe now that she was eleven, Tiffany thought she was too old for the Gross Food game. Maybe she thought her older sister (that’s me) shouldn’t be playing it either. Maybe I’d embarrassed her and that’s why she was ignoring us.
Or maybe she hadn’t even noticed what Maria and I had been doing. It was hard to tell with Tiffany these days. She’d gotten very quiet lately, even quieter than usual.
“Marshmallow and spinach pie,” said Maria.
I smiled. “Hmm,” I said. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Shannon!” shrieked Maria in delighted disgust.
“I’m raising spinach in my garden,” said Tiffany softly.
I looked back at Tiffany in surprise. She had been listening after all.
“You are?” I said.
Tiffany nodded. She’d just started a garden in the very back corner of the backyard and was spending hours there these days.
“Is it hard?” I asked.
“No. Spinach grows well in cool weather, like early spring and in the fall,” answered Tiffany. After a moment, she added, “Broccoli, too. And cabbage. And peas.”
Maria, bouncing happily on her toes, said, “I wish you could grow chocolate in your garden, Tiff.”
Tiffany smiled, but she didn’t answer.
“Maybe it’s a good thing you can’t,” I said. “Chocolate is really bad for dogs, but they love it. Astrid would probably come out and eat any chocolate right up!”
“I’m glad I’m not a dog,” Maria said. “I’d hate not to get to eat chocolate.” She paused, then added thoughtfully, “I’m hungry.”
“How about some nice pepper ice cream with garlic sauce?” I teased.
Maria kept her face straight with an effort. “I can’t,” she said as we pushed open the door of our house. “I have swim practice, thank you.”
“We’re home,” I called.
Maria bounded off to her room to get her swimming gear. As silently as a fish in water, Tiffany slipped away. I had a feeling she would be changing out of her school uniform and into gardening clothes.
I headed for my room.
“Shannon?” My mother’s voice came from the den.
I stopped and looked in. My mother was sitting on the couch holding a book. “Did you have a good day at school?”
“Same as always,” I said.
“No new teachers? New friends? New news? What about your club meeting?”
“The Baby-sitters Club meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Mom,” I said. “Today is Thursday.”
“Oh. Right.” My mom nodded and smiled. I smiled back.
Some people think my mother and I look alike, but I think she and Tiffany look more alike. All three of us have thick, blonde hair and blue eyes and high cheekbones. But my mom and Tiffany wear their hair short and I wear mine long. And they both have these incredible dark eyelashes. I have to wear black mascara every day to make my eyelashes as dark as theirs. It’s funny how families look alike in such mixed-up ways. My face is longer, shaped more like my father’s. He’s not very tall, and I’m not going to be really tall either, I can tell. But Mom is tall, and so is Tiffany and so is Maria. Maria, however, has the same dark coloring as my father and his brown eyes. If you looked at us altogether, though, you’d know we are related, that we’re a family.
“An anchovy cheese slush!” cried Maria, skidding down the hall outside the den.
“Maria, slow down!” said my mother. Hearing my mother say that was funny, because she moves at hyper-speed a lot herself, just the way Maria does.
“Can’t,” said Maria breathlessly. “I’ve got to go to swim practice.”
Just at that moment, a car horn sounded outside. “That’s my ride!” exclaimed Maria.
“A peanut butter and ketchup sandwich,” I called after Maria as she bolted for the door.
“Euuuuuw,” she said. The door slammed behind her, cutting her off.
“The Gross Food game,” said my mother. “How about — chocolate-grapefruit sundae?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Sometimes I think chocolate goes with everything.”
My mom laughed a little. “That’s true. Well, then … a … a …”
I laughed a little, too. “I think Maria might be the family champion at this. I’d better go start on my homework.”
“Shannon? I was thinking of taking Astrid for a walk. Do you want to come along?”
I stopped and turned around.
“I really have to get my homework done,” I said. “Thanks anyway. I’ll take Astrid later if you want.”
My mother looked disappointed for a moment. Then she said, “Maybe Tiffany will want to go.”
“Well, if she doesn’t, I’ll make it an extra-long walk for Astrid,” I promised. “As soon as I get the math out of the way.”
“If you change your mind,” my mother said.
“I’ll let you know,” I finished. I walked down the hall and up the stairs to my room.
Putting my books down on my desk, I looked out the window. Tiffany was already hard at work on her garden, with Astrid sitting nearby, watching attentively. Tiffany had changed out of the SDS uniform and was wearing faded jeans, sneakers, a big, grubby sweat shirt, and some old gloves that looked too large for her. Probably my father’s, I thought. He’d been a serious gardener for awhile, back when I’d been just a kid, but he hadn’t done anything outside in the yard for a long time except cook at a Fourth of July barbecue my parents had had last summer.
I smiled, remembering that: my father in his barbecue apron with a tall, silly chef’s hat on his head, chasing Astrid, who had managed to grab two hot dogs off the end of the fork as he was lifting them from the grill onto a plate. He hadn’t been able to catch her but it had been a lot of fun. He and my mom had laughed and she’d told us the story of how she and Dad had cooked dinner for our grandparents, Dad’s parents, when she and Dad had first gotten married, and Mom had dropped the pot roast in the middle of the kitchen.
“What did you do?” cried Tiffany.
My father had wriggled his eyebrows and said in a high voice
like Julia Childs, “You’re always alone in the kitchen.”
“You ate it?” Maria had asked.
“We washed it first,” said my mom and she and Dad had started laughing all over again.
The grill was in the garage now. I wondered if we’d have a cookout this Fourth of July.
As I watched, Tiffany knelt down, picked up a spade, and began to dig in her garden. She worked with slow, intense concentration. She was like my father that way.
Concentration. It was time I concentrated on my homework. I had a math test coming up the next week, and if I didn’t study now, I’d have to work on it over the weekend. That was definitely not part of my game plan.
I pulled out my math book and sat down with a sigh.
I’m not crazy about math the way Maria is, but I do well in school and that’s important to me. So I concentrated pretty intensely that afternoon. When I finally stood up to take a break over an hour had passed.
I looked out the window. Tiffany was still in the garden. She wasn’t digging now. In fact, she wasn’t doing much of anything. She looked as if she were just sitting there. And Astrid was still sitting next to her.
She didn’t look as if she’d gone on a walk with Astrid and Mom. I decided that I had time to take Astrid for a good long walk before our father got home for dinner. Besides, I reasoned, if I did any more math, it was going to spoil my appetite.
Slamming the math book shut, I headed down to get Astrid’s leash.
“Shannon?” My mother’s disembodied voice came from the kitchen this time.
I felt a twinge of exasperation. Who else did my mom think it would be? “Yes?” I said, unhooking Astrid’s leash from the back of the hall closet door.
“Where are you going?”
“Out to take Astrid for a walk,” I said.
“Now?” said my mother. She came to the door, holding a stirring spoon in her hand.
“There’s plenty of time before dinner,” I said.
“It’s your turn to set the table, you know,” my mother reminded me.
“I know. I’ll get it done.”
“You don’t want to keep me company while I finish up dinner?”
“Let me give Astrid that walk first,” I said.
I closed the closet door and turned to see that my mother was frowning. “What is it, Mom?”
“You should wear a jacket,” she said. “It’s still kind of chilly out.”
“This is a heavy sweater. It’ll be plenty warm,” I answered.
“You really should wear a jacket,” my mother insisted.
“Mom! I don’t need a jacket!” I heard how sharp my voice sounded and felt bad. But why wouldn’t my mother listen to me? Why did she keep treating me as if I were eight years old, like Maria, instead of thirteen and old enough to know whether or not to wear a jacket?
I could tell my mother was about to say something else, and I braced myself, but the telephone came to the rescue with a shrill beep.
“I’ll get it!” I said hastily and swooped down the hall and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”
“Shanny?”
“Hi, Dad. How’s it going?”
“I’m not going to be home for dinner. Would you tell your mom for me?”
So what else is new, I wanted to say. Instead I said, “Okay.”
“Work,” said my father.
For a moment I thought he was talking about me, asking if I’d finished my homework. I almost told him that I had the math nailed down. But as he went on, I realized he wasn’t talking about me at all.
“It’s gonna drive me crazy. But what can I do?”
“Okay,” I said again.
“Right. Well, I’ve got to go. See you guys later.”
“Okay,” I said for the third time. “Goodbye.”
But my father had already hung up the phone. I put the receiver down slowly and walked back to the kitchen.
My mother was stirring something on the stove, staring off into space.
“Mom?”
She looked around. “Oh. Shannon. Phone for me?”
“It was Dad,” I said.
“He won’t be home for dinner, right?” asked my mom.
“Good guess,” I said.
She smiled, a little smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I suppose it’s some trial, as usual.”
My father’s a lawyer with a big firm. He works a lot. And lately, he had missed a lot of family dinners. Even more than usual. Some case he’d been working on for a long time was just coming up for trial, a big case that had even been written up in the newspaper.
He barely had time for his Rotary club meetings and board meetings and jogging and lunches and dinners with clients.
Or for dinner at home. Sometimes, he wasn’t even home by the time I went to sleep.
I remembered the Fourth of July barbecue again and felt a sudden surge of disappointment. I’d wanted my father to be home for dinner. I’d wanted to sit around the table with my family and talk to them. I’d wanted to listen to my mother and father tell jokes and stories and ask Tiffany how her garden was growing and Maria if going to swim practice every day was turning her hair green.
But I guessed it wasn’t going to happen that night.
“I’ll go walk Astrid,” I said.
My mother didn’t mention the jacket again. She just said, “Don’t stay out too long. Maria will be home from swim practice soon and it’ll be time for dinner.”
“I’ll set the table as soon as I get back,” I offered.
“Fine,” said my mother, turning back to the stove.
I called Astrid in from the backyard, waving the leash. Astrid came racing to me with an undignified, doggy grin, wriggling with delight at the prospect of a walk.
“I’m taking Astrid for a walk,” I called to Tiffany. “Want to come?”
But Tiffany, who’d turned when I’d called, was already turning back as she shook her head no. As we left the house, I looked over the fence. Tiffany was still in her garden at the foot of the yard. I could see my mother at the kitchen window on the side of the house, moving slowly back and forth, her head down. My father was still at work. Maria was still at swim practice.
It made me feel weird. Like my family was a bunch of those magnetized marbles that roll around all over the place and sometimes come together and stick and sometimes repel each other like they don’t belong together at all. It was as if we were all in the “marble-repel” mode. We might look alike, we might look as if we belong to the same family.
But right now, we didn’t feel like it. I felt weird. And sort of sad, somehow.
“Big day today at school?” asked my mother.
I gulped down my orange juice and said, “Well, uh …”
Tiffany didn’t say anything. Dad didn’t say anything either because he had already left for his office.
Maria said, “We’ve got a killer practice this afternoon.”
“You have swim practice this afternoon, too?”
Maria looked at Mom in surprise. “Of course,” she said.
“The bus is here,” I said and we made a break for the door.
“Shannon?”
“Uh, yeah, Mom?”
“You’ll be home this afternoon, of course.”
“French Club meeting, then Baby-sitters Club,” I said. “ ’Bye….”
I hurried out of the house before Mom could ask me any more questions. She knew I had BSC meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Why didn’t she ever listen? Plus I hated when the bus driver sat there with the door open, waiting, while everybody watched from the windows as I ran toward the bus. Maria might like sports, but beyond soccer at school, which I happen to like a lot, I’m not into running or moving fast. I like to do things at my own speed, my own way. It is one of the things that makes me a good student — that and the fact that I like school.
It’s true. In spite of having to wear uniforms (we all do at Stoneybrook Day School, from kindergarten right on up) and having maj
or amounts of homework and a lot more rules than, say, Stoneybrook Academy, or Stoneybrook Middle School, I like learning things. And I like having teachers who know the things I want to learn.
In spite of how conservative it is, SDS is pretty good about letting you take interesting courses. For instance, this year, I was taking advanced French, accelerated math, and philosophy, I was playing soccer for my gym credit, and I was taking an astronomy unit as part of my science requirement — an astronomy unit that I had set up with four other kids. Sometimes, if you are interested in a subject, SDS will even let you set up a unit for credit, a unit you study with just the teacher, like an independent study in college. But then, at SDS, you’re expected to go to college.
SDS even looks a little bit like a college campus. It’s made up of four redbrick buildings set around a grass courtyard and connected to each other and to the administration office in the front by covered walkways. The offices are in an old house (the land for the school was donated by the woman who used to live in the house), and the gym and the track and playing fields are in the back. Of course, the fact that all of the students are wearing uniforms lets you know right away that we aren’t really on a college campus, even if seeing all the little kids in kindergarten didn’t give it away.
Another decent thing about SDS is that I’m not the only one who likes school. Most of my friends there do, too. We all have favorite subjects and it’s cool to talk about something you’re studying if it really interests you. Right now, I’m the “ask the astronomy student” at my table at lunch.
But our current favorite topic is French.
Mais oui.
That means, literally, “but yes” in French. I guess a loose translation would be “of course!”
Mais oui we love French? You better believe it. Because our advanced eighth grade French class is going on a class trip to Paris for one whole week when school is out at the end of May — everyone, that is, with a B average overall and an 85 average in French.
Madame DuBarry announced the trip the first week of school this semester, and we’ve been practicing our French like mad ever since, so we’ll be très, très bon. (Very, very good.)
“Good morning, Ms. Kilbourne.” That was Dr. Patek. She’s the headmistress of SDS. Her office is in the administration house, but she makes a point of being around the buildings when classes are starting for the day. She also makes a point of knowing all our names.