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OTHER YEARLING BOOKS
BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
YOU WILL ENJOY
THE BOYS START THE WAR
THE GIRLS GET EVEN
BOYS AGAINST GIRLS
A TRAITOR AMONG THE BOYS
A SPY AMONG THE GIRLS
THE BOYS RETURN
THE GIRLS TAKE OVER
BOYS IN CONTROL
GIRLS RULE!
BOYS ROCK!
For Kathleen's grandchildren,
born to West Virginia daddies:
two families of girls: Katie, Elizabeth, and Caroline;
Kalyn;
one family of boys: Adam, Gavin, and Philip;
and one family of both: Juliann and Joseph;
with best wishes for happy reading,
especially to their grandma,
who always gives them books
Contents
One: A changes in the wind
Two: December project
Three: The promise
Four: Phone call
Five: company
Six: Class Report
Seven: Humiliation
Eight: Peter on the Hot seat
Nine: The Explorer's Club
Ten: Truce
Eleven: A Case of Murder
Twelve: Calling 911
Thirteen: Hot, Hot chocolate
Fourteen: Letter to Georgia
Fifteen: Trapped
Sixteen: Another Letter to Georgia
Seventeen: Slave Labor
Eighteen: Mistake #1
Nineteen: Mistake #2
Twenty: The Worst Christmas Ever
Twenty-one: Paying the Debt
Twenty-two: Company
One
A Change in the Wind
Caroline Malloy had just hung a Christmas wreath on the door when she had a wonderful, awful thought. It was the kind of thought that made her lips curl up at the corners.
Ever since her father had moved the family to Buckman, where he was coaching the college football team for a year, Caroline had been having these thoughts. So had her two sisters, Beth, who was ten, and Eddie, who was eleven, and whose real name was Edith Ann.
Caroline herself was only eight, but she was considered precocious for her age and had skipped a grade, so she was in the same class as Wally Hatford, who lived across the river. And the wonderful, awful thought had something to do with Wally and his brothers.
She dashed back into the house, her dark ponytail flopping behind her, brown eyes snapping, and clattered upstairs to where Beth, her feet propped on the radiator and her instruction book against her knees, was attempting to knit a lavender scarf for Mother for Christmas.
“I've got a terrific idea!” Caroline said breathlessly. “Want to hear it?”
“Hmmm,” said Beth, studying the page, then the wool in front of her.
Thunk… thunk… thunk, came a noise from the next bedroom, where Eddie was bouncing a rubber ball on the floor. Caroline decided to tell both sisters together.
“Eddie?” she called. “Want to hear my idea?”
The thunk, thunk, thunk grew louder as Eddie ambled in from the next room, bouncing the ball with one hand and holding her Christmas gift list in the other. She was the tallest of the Malloy girls, with long legs, short blond hair, and brown eyes that matched Caroline's. “Well?” she said, waiting, her attention still on the list.
“My idea,” began Caroline, who loved an audience more than she loved chocolate cream pie, “is to give each of the Hatford brothers a Christmas present. From us to them. Beautifully wrapped, of course…”
“Are you nuts?” asked Beth, her feet thudding to the floor in shock.
“But inside each box will be something really awful.”
“Like what?” asked Eddie, finally looking up.
Caroline hadn't figured that part out yet. She was thinking about the time, just after the Malloys had moved to West Virginia, when the Hatford boys had dumped dead birds and stuff on the girls' side of the river to make them think the water was polluted. And the time they had lured Caroline into the cellar at Oldakers' Bookstore, then stood on the trapdoor so she couldn't get out. And all the other times they had tried to make the Malloys so miserable that the girls would persuade their father to move back to Ohio when the year was up.
“I don't know,” Caroline said at last. “A dead squirrel, maybe. A rotten banana. Whatever we can find to gross them out. Can't you just see their faces on Christmas morning, untying a bow and finding this thing in the box?”
She had expected her sisters to jump at the chance. She had thought Eddie, in particular, would come up with an idea even more gross than she could imagine.
Instead Eddie said, “Oh, I don't know, Caroline. These pranks are getting a little stale, aren't they?”
Caroline stuck her fingers in both ears and pulled them out quickly to unplug them. She couldn't have heard right. This was Eddie talking?
“Yeah, it's Christmas, after all!” said Beth. “Where's your Christmas spirit?”
Caroline blinked, then blinked again. This couldn't be happening! Since her family had moved to Buck-man and the Hatford boys had tried to drive them out, she had never had so much fun and excitement. She'd thought that Beth and Eddie felt the same way.
“What's happened to you two?” she cried. “I thought we'd been having fun! I thought we were going to drive the Hatfords so bonkers they'd wish they'd never messed with us! Don't you remember all the fun we had pretending I'd died and you just dumped my body in the river? And the time we climbed on their roof and howled and…”
“Softball season will be coming up in a couple of months, and I've got other things on my mind,” said Eddie. “I really want to get on the team. If I get a bunch of guys mad at me, it's not going to help.”
In desperation, Caroline turned to Beth, but Beth said, “I don't see how we can be mean to them after they invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Easy!” Caroline bleated. “Easy, easy, easy! Right this minute they're probably thinking up something awful to do to us!”
“Then we'll deal with it when it happens,” said Beth. “Now go away. I want to work on this scarf, and I'm making all kinds of mistakes.”
Caroline was speechless. She didn't even make it as far as her room. She just sank down at the top of the stairs and blankly stared at the wall.
They were supposed to be a team! Caroline had always dreamed of having a production company when they were grown—Beth would write the script, Eddie would be the stuntwoman, and Caroline, of course, would be the star. Now she didn't know what to expect.
Nine more months before they went back to Ohio, if they went back at all. Only nine months to get even again and again with the Hatford boys. And don't think the boys weren't having as much fun as they were.
Well, she told herself, if Beth and Eddie weren't interested in playing one of the best tricks she'd ever thought of on the Hatfords, was there any reason she couldn't do it herself? To one of the Hatfords, anyway. Wally sat right in front of her in Miss Applebaum's fourth-grade class. She had to look at his stupid neck and his stupid ears six hours a day for the next six months. Wasn't she entitled to just one little joke to get ev
en for all the stuff he had done to her? And if he hadn't done all that much, Caroline figured he'd thought of doing it, which was just as bad, wasn't it?
She would simply put her mind to thinking up the most hideous, horrible thing she could put in a box for Wally Hatford, and she would wrap it up in gorgeous paper and give it to him whenever she got the chance. Of course, she would have to be nice to him between now and Christmas vacation, or he'd suspect it was a joke and throw it out without looking.
And so, when Caroline went to school the next day, she said, “Hi, Wally. I like your sweater.”
Actually, she didn't. It was an ugly sweater. It had reindeer on it with green antlers. She had never seen a green-antlered reindeer, and what's more, the sweater was too big for Wally. It looked as though it had once belonged to Josh or Jake, the eleven-year-old twins.
Wally looked surprised.
“Thanks,” he said. “It used to be Jake's.”
So far so good, thought Caroline. Every day she would pay at least one compliment to Wally Hatford so that, by the time Christmas vacation got here, he'd just have to accept her present. It would seem rude not to. And maybe, when Beth and Eddie saw how much fun they were missing, they'd go back to making life miserable for Jake and Josh as well.
The only Hatford Caroline really liked was seven-year-old Peter. He couldn't help that he was a Hatford. And he was sort of sweet.
After school that afternoon, when Beth and Eddie went to the library to do their homework, Caroline walked around the yard there on Island Avenue, where the Malloys were renting a house from the Benson family for a year. The Bensons had gone to Georgia temporarily, where Mr. Benson was coaching a football team and teaching college. Sort of an exchange program. It was because the Hatford boys had been best friends with the Benson boys that Wally and Jake and Josh and even Peter resented the girls' moving in.
Caroline was walking around the yard looking for ideas for a gross-out present for Wally. A stray cat that belonged more or less to the neighborhood was sitting on the driveway licking its paws. It had probably just eaten something yucky, Caroline thought. A mouse or something. A mouse with whiskers, its tail sticking out one side of the cat's mouth.
“How are you, Patches?” Caroline asked, bending down to pet the animal behind the ears. “Give me an idea for a present for Wally. Something really, really sick.”
Patches only purred and licked her paws again. She had probably been mousing in the old garage. Caroline walked through the garage looking for grossness. Spiders? Worms? Garbage? Maggots? Garbage and maggots?
Whatever, it had to be so disgusting that Wally and his brothers would trip all over themselves trying to get even. All it would take was one really awful trick against the Malloy sisters, and the feud would be on again. She could count on it, Christmas or not.
Two
December Project
Life for Wally Hatford, age nine, was going surprisingly well.
He had never expected this to happen. Ever since their best friends, the Bensons, moved to Georgia for a year, and the Whomper, the Weirdo, and the Crazie moved in, he had thought life would never be the same again.
Eddie Malloy, the Whomper, could hit a ball from one side of Buckman to the other, practically; Beth, the Weirdo, read the kind of books that were meant to be read at night in a graveyard; and Caroline—well, having Caroline Malloy sitting right behind you in school, breathing on the back of your neck, meant that anything at all could happen.
Wally, unlike his twin brothers, Josh and Jake, did not seem to need a lot of excitement to make him happy. He was happy just to have one day go the same as the one before, peaceful, unhurried, with plenty of time to dream and imagine, to think about what he did the past summer and plan how he would spend his next vacation.
“He'll never set the world on fire, but he's steady,” Wally overheard his mom say to his aunt once. And that was just fine with him.
But when the Malloys moved in, he forgot what peaceful was. He forgot what quiet was. When a strange animal, possibly a cougar, was sighted around Buckman—an animal the newspaper nicknamed an abaguchie—Wally even dreamed that the animal had carried off Caroline, and he would never have to feel her poking him in the back again with her pencil.
But suddenly, as though she had changed overnight from a dragon to a duchess, Caroline Malloy turned polite. She turned kind. In fact, she turned downright strange.
“Nice pen, Wally,” she said on this particular day as Wally was trying out a pen with five colors of ink in it, which he had bought at the five-and-dime.
“Thanks,” said Wally.
“It was really cold this morning, wasn't it?” Caroline went on. “Do you usually have snow here at Christmas?”
“Sometimes, but not always,” Wally told her.
“Back in Ohio we usually did. I guess we'll have to wait and see.”
Miss Applebaum was taking the roll now, so Wally didn't answer. But he was thinking about what Caroline had just said. Did that mean that she and her sisters were getting to like it here? Did that mean they were going to stay? Could he stand it if his best friends in the whole world decided to spend the rest of their lives in Georgia?
Now Miss Applebaum was talking about something she called the December project. She made it sound as though the December project were the biggest thing since the space shuttle. She made it sound as though, if you flunked the December project, you could say goodbye to fifth grade. Everybody had to do it, and you had to choose partners and work together as a team.
Caroline's hand shot up in the air, and Miss Applebaum looked at her curiously.
“Yes, Caroline?”
“I choose Wally Hatford,” she said.
Wally felt all the blood in his body rise to his ears. A giggle went around the room. Say no! he was thinking, but his lips wouldn't move. Maybe if he refused Caroline as a partner, the teacher would flunk him before he even began.
“Well, we hadn't quite got to that, Caroline, but I'll put it down,” Miss Applebaum said, and made a note in her planning book.
Wally swallowed. Any minute he expected to feel Caroline's breath on the back of his neck, Caroline's pen poking his shoulder. Nothing happened, however, and he listened as Miss Applebaum explained what the December project was.
“We're going to work on improving our listening, observing, and writing skills,” she explained. “Writers will tell you that only a small part of what they do is actually putting words on paper. Most of their time is spent paying attention to what is going on around them, imagining themselves in the place of their characters.”
Wally began to feel sick.
“What I want you to do, after you have chosen partners, is to interview each other. Find out everything you can about your partners—what they like to eat, to read, to watch on TV, to do. And then, for a whole day, I want you to try to live as if you really were your partners, eating what they eat, doing what they like to do. The report you will write for me will be in two parts: part one, your interview with your partner, what you have found out about him or her; and part two, how it feels to ‘be’ that person for a day, the ways in which you're alike and the ways you're different. We have an even number of students in class, so no one should be left out. You may choose your partners now.”
Everyone began talking, calling across the room, friends calling friends, laughter, shouts.
Not Wally. Wally Hatford sat face forward, eyes on the blackboard, wondering what would happen if he just went down to the Greyhound bus depot, bought a ticket to anywhere, and didn't come back till Christmas.
He had to interview Caroline Malloy?
He had to let her interview him?—to ask questions about what he liked, how he lived, what he ate ?
And then, as though that weren't enough, he had to be Caroline for a day? Did Miss Applebaum go to Torture School to come up with these projects or did she think them up all by herself in the dead of night?
“Oh, Wal-ly!” teased one of his friends
in the next row. “How's it going to feel to be Car-o-line?”
“Yeah, where are you going to go for your interview ?” asked a girl, giggling.
But Wally was surprised to hear Caroline say, “We're going to interview like everybody else, and there's nothing silly about it.”
He could hardly believe his ears. She still sounded polite. She sounded grown-up, yet she was a year younger than he was. She sounded, in fact, perfectly normal.
Still, he did not want to be Caroline Malloy for a day. He did not want to be her for even a minute, and he did not want her to be him. He could have chosen Bill Thompkins or Bobby Lister or John Meese—any-one but Caroline.
He did not sit at her table at lunchtime.
He did not go near her at recess.
“Hey, Wally, I hear you've got a girlfriend,” his buddies teased when they came back inside for class.
And one of the girls called, “Caroline Malloy thinks you're cute!”
Wally felt like throwing up. He was not cute. He was not a boyfriend, and Miss Applebaum's December project was one of the dumbest assignments he'd ever had.
After school he waited outside for Peter, who was carrying a school bag with purple dinosaurs on it, and then Jake and Josh, who were wearing baseball caps backward, and the four of them started the walk home along the Buckman River.
“What's up?” Josh asked Wally.
“I don't want to talk about it,” said Wally, staring at the water and thinking how, if it weren't for the river, Caroline Malloy would be living even closer to him than she did now. How could it be that he had been feeling so good when he started off to school that morning, and so awful now?
“Why? What happened?” asked Jake.
“I have to be Caroline Malloy for a day and she has to be me,” said Wally.
“You have to wear her clothes and everything?” Peter asked.
“No!” yelped Wally. But he told his brothers how he had to interview her and do whatever she would do for a day. “Worst of all,” he said, “she chose me for a partner in front of the whole class, and now kids are saying I'm her boyfriend.”