The Girls Get Even (8 page)

‘Dear Mrs. Malloy:

If you hadn’t said you made that pie yourself, I would have sworn it came from Ethel’s Bakery. Thank you so much. It was delicious.

Ellen Hatford’

Is that an insult or a compliment? I can’t even tell.”

“She thinks you bought the pie?” asked Eddie.

“It certainly sounds that way to me.”

“So isn’t that a compliment?” asked Caroline.

“Not to me it’s not. Not when it was Great-
Aunt Minna’s recipe. Maybe she’s just trying to take me down a peg—my bragging on about that recipe as I did. Oh, dear heaven¡ People were so much easier to get along with back in Ohio!”

After Mother went back in the house, Beth whispered, “What do you think happened to the pie? You don’t think they threw it in the river, do you?

“Well,
something
happened to it, or they wouldn’t have bought a store pie and tried to pass it off as homemade. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened too,” Eddie said.

“Maybe it was just so good that once they took a taste, they kept eating and couldn’t stop,” Caroline suggested.

“I doubt it,” said Eddie.

•

At school on Monday, Caroline leaned forward and whispered, “Wally. Mom wants her pie back.”

Miss Applebaum was over in one corner helping a group with a geography assignment.

Wally turned around. “What?”

“She says that since you didn’t give it to your mother, she wants it back.”

Wally stared.

“Well?” said Caroline.

“Well, nothing¡ We ate it!”

“Your mother didn’t,”

“How do you know?”

“The Goblin Queen knows all.”

“Drop dead,” said Wally.

“If we win the costume contest, you’ll have to say, I hear, my Queen, and obey/ for a whole month. Did you ever think of that?”

“And if we win … ?”

Miss Applebaum turned around. “I hear people talking. Is that you, Caroline? Caroline and Wally? Suppose you share it with the class.”

“Just practicing our lines, Miss Applebaum,” Caroline said sweetly.

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Ten
•
The Grand Finale

T
he buffalo costumes were not working out. Even Josh, the artist in the family, could not make brown grocery sacks look like the shaggy heads of buffalo, no matter how much stuff he glued on them. Every time he changed them still again and showed them to Mother, she’d say, “Is that a goat? No, wait. I’ve got it—a sheepdog.”

“Why don’t we just forget the girls and do something we think will win?” said Wally.

But Jake had other ideas. “What we need is a costume the teachers will like and the principal will love, that can still destroy anything in its path. Then no matter
what
the Malloys come up with, we can devour it.”

“Think
, Wally!” said Josh. “Think of something that can sort of suck up everything in its path.”

“A vacuum cleaner,” said Wally.

“Naw. What else?”

“A tidal wave.”

“Yeah, what else?”

“A tornado.”

“Keep thinking.”

“An amoeba,” said Wally.

“C’mon, Wally,
think!”

Wally closed his eyes tight and thought so hard, his eyebrows hurt. “An alien spaceship,” he said at last.

“That’s it!” cried Jake. “We’ll be aliens!”

“They can do anything!” said Josh. “We could get one of those huge truck inner tubes, and all of us could stand inside the middle, holding it up around our waists, and we’d knock over everything we bumped into¡ I’ll design our helmets….” He reached for his sketch pad and began. All you had to do was give Josh an idea, and he was already drawing a picture of it in his head.

“Wow,” said Peter softly, as he watched the alien spaceship appearing right at the end of Josh’s pencil.

When they asked their dad if he could get a giant inner tube for them, Mr. Hatford answered, “Why, I think that could be arranged.”

At last everything seemed to be working out. The Halloween parade was only four days off, but
meanwhile Wally had another worry. The play.
The Goblin Queen.
Caroline Malloy, in particular.

The trouble with Caroline was that she never stopped being queen. If she was eating lunch, she set her empty milk carton on top of her head like a crown and kept it there. If she had to go to the blackboard to explain a problem, she always picked up Miss Applebaum’s pointer and used it like a scepter, anointing a knight. And she would slowly, regally, make her way up and down staircases, back straight, head high, looking neither to the right nor left.

To Wally there was nothing worse than being in a play with Caroline Malloy. Never mind that he would be doing something special for the younger students. He did not
want
to make primary children happy. The primary children were happy enough as it was. Wally wanted his recesses back. He wanted his lunch hour back. He did not want to spend them standing around a drafty stage waiting for Caroline Malloy to decide that playing good tricks at Halloween was better than playing bad ones. Whoever wrote that play was an idiot. It took thirty minutes for the Goblin Queen to get the point and the Fairy Godmother to make her beautiful, just so Wally could say, “Your throne, m’lady,” and then, “I hear, my Queen, and obey.”

Each day of practice got longer and longer because
Caroline kept ad-libbing her part. If her line was “What do you suppose, dear sisters, the villagers would do if we were to
wash
their windows for a change?” Caroline would say, “What do you suppose, my dear, dear goblin sisters, the villagers would do if, instead of causing them trouble and hardship, we did something kind instead, such as washing their windows ?”

Wally would stand on one foot and then the other, and finally even Miss Applebaum grew tired: “Caroline, if we don’t hurry this play along, our primary students will all be asleep before we’re done.”

And finally Caroline would say, “We must spread the word throughout the Goblin Kingdom, that there will be the kind of tricks on Halloween night that will make it a night to remember and fill all hearts with joy.” Then and only then could Wally escort her to her chair and say, “Your throne, m’lady.”

•

When Thursday came, Wally wasn’t sure whether he wanted to get up or not. It was the day of the play, which was a good reason to stay in bed. On the other hand, once it was over, he’d never have to do that part again, which was the only reason he could think of to get up at all.

He turned over on his back and noticed a narrow shaft of sunlight coming through his window, illuminating the dust particles in the beam. It was as though the beam were full of dust and the rest of the room was clear. If air was always so dusty, he wondered, did you inhale a big wad of dust every time you breathed? Were your lungs like a dust mop? Was that why people sneezed, to shake out their lungs? Was that—?

“Wally, are you up?” Mother called from below. “If you want pancakes, you’d better come now.”

Wally, the footman, got out of bed, pulled on his jeans and socks, and gave a big sigh.

At school the primary students filed into the auditorium about ten o’clock, and the students from Miss Applebaum’s class who were in the play gathered behind the velvet curtain onstage.

“I can’t believe this is really happening,” Caroline said to Wally, both of them wearing their goblin cloaks and hoods. “I’m a real actress at last. Do you know where you’ll see my name someday?”

“On a tombstone?” said Wally.

Caroline flashed him a disgusted look. “In lights¡ On Broadway¡ Someday you and your brothers will go to the movies and see me up there on the screen.”

“If we see you on the screen, we’ll ask for our money back,” Wally told her.

Beyond the velvet curtain the audience had grown quiet, and Wally could hear Miss Applebaum telling them about the play. And then the music started, the lights went out, there was the sound of the curtain being pulled apart, and Caroline was walking onstage followed by five other goblins.

“Halloween again!” Caroline was saying. “I wish we could do something different this year, don’t you? I’m getting tired of the same old thing.” And the play began.

If it wasn’t for Caroline, Wally might have enjoyed the play—a little bit, anyway. It was sort of fun peeping out from behind the curtain to see the younger children watching, Peter with his eyes wide and his mouth open. To hear them laugh at all the funny lines, and giggle when one of the witches tripped over her broomstick on purpose and went sprawling.

He and another boy had to pull the curtain between the first and second acts, too, and that was fun. It was also fun to watch the custodian sitting on a stool offstage, making the lights get brighter or more dim.

But Caroline, as usual, had to ruin it all. She added lines that weren’t there. She added words to
the lines that were. Even Miss Applebaum in the first row was trying to get Caroline’s attention to hurry her along. Finally, when it came time for Wally to say his line, he felt he could not stand it any longer.

“Your throne, m’lady,” he said, escorting her to the chair, and then, just as Caroline sat down, he pulled it backward and Caroline sat down on the floor with a plop.

The primary children shrieked with laughter, and even Miss Applebaum, who looked horrified at first, seemed to be trying very hard not to laugh.

Wally had thought that would be the end of it. He had thought that Caroline would be so embarrassed that she would want the play to be over quickly.

But Caroline was not hurrying her lines. She was not even getting up. The children stopped laughing. Miss Applebaum leaned forward, looking concerned.

And then, from the floor where she lay with her arms outstretched, Caroline said grandly, “Where are my good and faithful footmen? I am more exhausted than I knew. Please bear me thither, that I might lie among the flowers of the field, surrounded by my people.” And she folded her arms across her chest.

Wally stared at Caroline and then at the other
footman. They looked at Miss Applebaum, who was nodding to them.

There was nothing else to be done. “I hear, my Queen, and obey,” Wally said.

He picked Caroline up by the arms. The other footman picked her up by the feet. And as they carried her offstage, Caroline turned toward the audience and blew them a kiss. Everyone clapped. It made Wally sick to his stomach.

•

That evening the boys tried out their spaceship costume. Mr. Hatford had gone to a truck stop near Elkins and bought a bigger inner tube than the boys even knew existed. All four of them could easily fit in the center hole, one hand holding the inner tube up, the other carrying the space guns that Josh had designed out of aluminum foil. Each of them was facing a different direction, and with the strange helmets Josh had designed, also of foil, they looked like men from another planet. Josh had even made green paper ears that fit over their own.

“Well, if you don’t win first prize, you should get a prize for originality,” their father told them, as the boys practiced moving about the living room, two walking sideways, one walking backward, and Jake in front, leading the way. Naturally
Jake. It was Wally’s idea, yet Jake was always the General. ‘

When Mother came home from the hardware store at nine, the boys showed her their spaceship, and she said it was the best costume they’d ever made, absolutely.

As she hung up her coat, however, Wally heard her say to his father, “Tom, are the Malloys raising chickens?”

“Chickens? I’d think the coach would have enough to do without fooling with chickens. Why?”

“Because the Malloy girls were in the hardware store the other day buying chicken wire, and I just wondered.”

“What?” yelled Wally, and slipped out from under the giant inner tube.

The other boys crawled out, too, and the inner tube landed with a loud
whap
on the floor.

Mrs. Hatford turned around. “Wally, don’t yell. I simply asked if the Malloys were raising chickens.”

Jake and Josh stared at her openmouthed.

“What did I
say?”
Mrs. Hatford looked around her. “It’s not as though I announced the Second Coming¡ All I said was that the Malloy girls were in the store to—”

“How
much
wire?” asked Jake.

“Why, I don’t know … quite a lot, as I remember, but it isn’t our best grade at all. It was that bendable stuff that will sag if even a cat jumps on it.

“Their
costume,”
cried Wally.

“They aren’t going to be a tepee at all, I’ll bet!” said Josh. “Think, Mom¡ Did they buy anything else?
Say
anything?
Do
anything?”

“What’s got into you boys? The youngest one stood there wrapping it around and around herself, while the older sisters were paying for it, but I figured she was just being a bit silly, and …”

The boys huddled around the kitchen table.

“What do you suppose it could be?” asked Josh.

“Something awesome, I’ll bet,” said Wally.

“There’s only one thing to do,” said Jake, when the others turned toward him. “Smash it.”

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Eleven
•
Izzie

T
he “natural habitat” had simply not worked. Murphy’s Five and Dime didn’t carry the little birds and things the girls had wanted to tie to the branches. And when Caroline, Beth, and Eddie were all bound together to make the trunk, it was hard to walk. They finally decided on a lizard made out of chicken wire.

“The principal has a terrarium in his office,” Eddie remembered, “with a lizard and stuff. I even know the name of the lizard—Izzie, he calls it. Why don’t we be a lizard and wear a collar that says IZZIE
?
”

So they bought some chicken wire at the hardware store, fashioned it into a huge lizard in three sections, one for each of them, then spent the evening before the parade tacking green cloth over it, using buttons for eyes, and printing IZZIE on a collar to go around its huge neck.