The Good, the Bad & the Beagle (23 page)

Sylvie went first, leaving Veronica to man their station. Veronica wished they could meet in the bathroom to talk about the dollhouse! What was Mr. Bower going to do? She tried her best to answer questions from the girls who gathered around her project but it was really hard to get that dollhouse out of her mind. No matter what the rules were, there was always a kid whose parents caved and bought them a finished project. Sometimes it was the parents, not the kids, who forced this kind of perfection. Veronica wondered if she would ever find out which way it was with Athena and Sarah-Lisa. Something about the chauffeur and how Sarah-Lisa jumped up and down made Veronica think it was her idea, not her parents’.

Becky Shickler roared with laughter when she saw the yellow wilting Barbie doll with its missing arm and its Randolf uniform. Veronica noticed her write a big
A
on her grading form.

Melody came over and said, “I really like your project. It looks like you worked really hard.”

Veronica hugged her. Veronica really hoped this meant they’d made up. Melody was such a good egg.

“I’m really looking forward to checking out your biosphere,” Veronica said.

Tillie Allen asked about the flipbook and Veronica demonstrated the way it showed deterioration and death if you flipped it to the right, and recovery and the return to life if you flipped it to the left.

“That’s awesome!” Tillie said.

Sylvie returned for her shift and Veronica went to look at the other projects.

One of her favorites (besides her own) was Liv and Darcy’s ant farm. They had painted a whole country scene with a farm. It made the ants look like they were doing things for the farm, like carrying bales of hay to the barn and sticks of butter to the kitchen. Veronica loved it. She gave them an
A
.

“All right, may I have your attention?” Mr. Bower said. “Ladies! Please! Selma and Auden are twisting their rubber band and lubing the loops so their plane can ascend at its scheduled takeoff.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t do this on the playground, Mr. Bower?” Selma asked.

“It’s raining,” Mr. Bower reminded them. “I don’t want your plane to be ruined. Use less tension in the windup and aim it toward the closet door. I set up blankets in there to catch it. People, gather round.”

Auden was painting a glue-like substance onto some very long-looped rubber bands. When she was finished, Selma twisted them up with a little hook. The plane was quite large and Auden said it was a copy of a Korda Wakefield plane from the 1940s. It was yellow and red and Veronica liked the way they’d painted it. Mr. Bower told everyone his grandfather had flown in the original. He must have really liked his grandfather because he was unbelievably excited about the takeoff. The countdown began.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five…”

Veronica could feel how nervous Selma and Auden were. Auden’s parents were really strict about her grades. Veronica wondered if they wanted an
A
so badly they actually built the plane for her. But the way the girls handled the rubber bands indicated that they knew what they were doing.

“… four, three, two, one and takeoff!”

Auden let go of the plane and it rose into the air, the propeller spinning just like a real plane. Everyone applauded and Auden and Selma beamed. Mr. Bower was beside himself as the plane sailed through the air.

Sarah-Lisa was so busy whispering into Athena’s ear about how great their project was that she didn’t notice the plane. Athena ducked but it was too late for Sarah-Lisa, who threw up her hands and batted it away. The plane tumbled through the air and into Athena and Sarah-Lisa’s country house, where it knocked the roof off and left a trail of tiny shingles and furniture and broken windows in its wake before bouncing off Mr. Bower’s desk and landing softly in the salad he was snacking on. The propeller eventually stopped spinning but not before making a storm of shredded carrots and cabbage and sunflower seeds.

“Oh my God! Our project!” Sarah-Lisa said, looking at the destruction of her gorgeous country house. “Who is going to fix this?” she demanded.

Mr. Bower ran to his desk and picked up the plane like a nervous parent whose child had just fallen off a jungle gym. He held the plane gently and carefully unwound Sarah-Lisa’s hair from the propeller. He picked off the lettuce and shook the plane free of sunflower seeds. He turned it slowly in all directions looking for damage. “The wing is cracked, but we can repair it during lunch,” he said, returning the plane to its builders. “Wonderful work, Selma, great job, Auden.”

Then he faced Sarah-Lisa and Athena.

“You girls will have to stay in from recess today,” he said, “and repair your house.” Sarah-Lisa looked at Mr. Bower in disbelief.

“That’s not fair, you’re repairing Auden’s plane,” she said.

“I know Auden and Selma would be able to fix their own plane, but because I take special interest in Korda Wakefield reproductions, I’m lending a hand. Since you designed and built your house, you’ll know how to repair it, right? Correct me if I’m wrong,” Mr. Bower said. “Is there a problem?” He and Sarah-Lisa had a staring match and Sarah-Lisa lost.

Mr. Bower had a very strong backbone after all and Veronica Morgan might have just fallen in love with him.

Weather Patterns

“I don’t believe it,” Sylvie said. “They barely tried to disguise the fact that they didn’t build that thing.”

“They are amazing,” Auden Georges said, slamming her tray down.

“Are you sure we’re not just jealous?” Veronica said, because she was jealous of everything about them and her emotions in this department often hampered her ability to think clearly.

“Are you talking about that million-dollar store-bought thing that was supposed to be a handmade science project?” Darcy asked.

“Well, if you are,” Coco said, “move over and make room for me.” Veronica hadn’t sat with so many girls in her class since her first week, back when she was under Athena’s wing.

“Jealous? Veronica, did you look at that thing?” Sylvie asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you look at them looking at that thing?” Sylvie said. And then she leaned in and said very quietly, “They don’t even know what that thing is. I asked Athena if the water was solar heated on the third floor and she had no idea.”

“Mr. Bower seemed so impressed. It’s so unfair,” Selma said, staring at her noodles. “It’s half our grade. For the whole year.”

It was like being a kid in a candy store. Hearing her own fears and suspicions coming out of other people’s mouths was delicious. Veronica grinned at Sylvie across the table.

“You guys,” Sylvie said, “none of it matters. Mr. Bower is totally onto them. I bet they’re going to have to hand in another project. One that they actually made themselves, not one that their parents paid for.”

Melody arrived and put her tray next to Veronica’s.

“Are you talking about Athena and Sarah-Lisa? They make me so mad,” Melody declared. There was no question mark. It was a statement!

“I propose a toast,” Veronica said. She raised her milk container in the air. “First, to Melody Jenkins, the hardest-working friend I have ever had. I’m sorry I did not help you at all with our Monet project and I’m glad you had a worthy partner for science. Your project was awesome.”

Melody blushed. Veronica hoped she hadn’t embarrassed her too much, but she really did think the biosphere Melody and her partner had made was amazing.

“Hear, hear,” Sylvie said, “let’s toast all the people here and everywhere in Randolf who worked hard on their science projects. Let us be acknowledged.”

Milk cartons crisscrossed the table as everyone toasted.

“Cheers!” Darcy said.

“Hear, hear!” everyone said. Veronica felt like she and Sylvie were the leaders of a new generation of Randolf girls: girls who weren’t afraid of the A Team, regardless of how popular they were.

In the Closet World

Mary had been home for two weeks now and really did seem better than new. Veronica and Sylvie had been coming to Veronica’s for a change.

“All right, what you like for snack?” Mary asked the girls.

“Can we have Oreos?” Sylvie asked. “And bananas?”

“Of course, my baby,” Mary said.

Veronica was always surprised that Sylvie enjoyed plain old Oreos and bananas over all the complicated things she made for herself at home.

“It is such a beautiful day. You should go to the park,” Mary said as she peeled the bananas. “Run around. Exercise your hips! Why do you stay inside all the time?”

“We have stuff we have to do here,” Veronica said.

They took the tray and went to her room. Sylvie always went straight to where Cadbury’s ashes were.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Sylvie asked. She put her backpack on the floor and made herself comfortable at the foot of Veronica’s nightstand.

“Sure,” Veronica said. She sat next to her and put the Oreos between them.

“I have my mom’s ashes too. Or some of them.”

Veronica hadn’t seen them. She had only seen the clothes. Sylvie had an entire closet filled with her mother’s clothes, which she planned on wearing as soon as they fit her. But Veronica had never seen her ashes.

“But that’s not the secret,” Sylvie said. “When we scattered her ashes, after she died, I kind of ate some of them.” It felt like Sylvie wanted Veronica to say something. “You did?” was all she could come up with.

“The ashes got all over my hands and under my fingernails. When we got back my dad told me to wash my hands before dinner but I didn’t want her to go down the drain. So I rubbed what was left on my hands as hard as I could hoping it would go into my skin. And later that night I was biting my nails and I thought, Oh my God, I am eating my mother.”

“So, she’s, like, inside you,” Veronica said. She knew she should be grossed out. But Sylvie opened Veronica’s mind in ways that surprised her.

“Yeah. I guess.”

Cadbury’s ashes had been on the table next to her bed for a couple of months now. It made sense that Sylvie had scattered her mother’s ashes. There were probably more rules about what to do after you lost someone that important.

They spent their afternoons playing a game they had invented: Truth or Wish.

Today Sylvie went first. She chose truth.

“Okay,” Veronica asked, “are you mad every day that your mother died?”

“Yes-ish,” Sylvie said. “But maybe bad things happen to people so that when they meet other people who something bad happened to they can be friends.”

Veronica thought that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said. Probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said to anyone in the whole world. Once again, she had no words to express her appreciation for this friendship. She might as well have been mute. She wondered if she did anything that made Sylvie feel this special. She really hoped so.

*   *   *

Since Sylvie had started coming over, blankets and pillows and various knickknacks had found their way into Veronica’s room, becoming part of a secret world created inside her closet.

“We’re like the Boxcar Children,” Sylvie said, sitting down at the makeshift table they had built on the closet floor.

“Except you are a much better cook than any of those girls,” Veronica said.

“That’s because they never cooked. They just ate bread and milk and berries. By the third book I was so sick of their meals. Hand me that pillow, will you?” Sylvie shifted pillows around the floor until she was comfortable.

“If you could have one wish, Sylvie, what would it be?”

“To talk to dead people,” Sylvie said. “Then it wouldn’t really matter so much that they were dead.”

“Okay,” Veronica said. “In here we can.” She took Sylvie’s hands and told her to close her eyes. Veronica did not like to think about Cadbury because it made her sad, but for some reason she loved thinking about Sylvie’s mom. She had spent so much time at Sylvie’s looking at her photographs and touching her things, it was like she had gotten to know her a little bit. She closed her eyes and re-created Sylvie’s mother’s face in her mind.

“Okay, I am talking to your mother,” Veronica said. “She loves you so much and she also wants you to get a real haircut, at a real place. She said the place on Lexington and Sixty-Fourth is good.”

“What else is she saying?”

“She adores you and is proud of you every single second of every single day and she enjoyed your science project. She also said she has been spending a lot of time with Princess Diana, who also thinks you need a proper haircut.”

Sylvie giggled.

“More,” she demanded. “Who else is she hanging out with?”

“John Lennon. He likes your hair this way, but he thinks you should wear glasses. He wrote a song about you yesterday and he would also really like to meet me.”

“Oh my God!” Sylvie yelled.

“What? Are you okay?”

“Cadbury just told me to tell you he is eating the most delicious bone right now and he still loves you.”

A Net Is There

On a Friday morning in mid-April, Veronica’s mother burst into her daughter’s room.

“Lovey, wake up. Hurry. I overslept.”

Veronica could barely open one eye, let alone two. She was supposed to be out the door in five minutes and her body felt like lead. It would not cooperate. She could hardly swing her feet over the side of her bed, and when she finally did, they did not want to support her weight. Veronica dressed like a robot that was running out of power. The second she was dressed, her mother pushed her out the front door with a bagel and a paper towel.

If you were late for Morning Meeting, you weren’t let into the auditorium. It was almost the only consequence the school had that resembled shaming. Veronica wanted to hurry, but Fifth Avenue was surprisingly empty of people and peaceful. Thickly scented hyacinth buds were pushing their way open. There was nothing like that smell. Veronica stopped and stuck her nose right into one of the tight purple bundles.

If she stood there all day she bet she would actually see one open all the way like in a stop-motion animation. The daffodils and the tulips would be next to bloom. Several times over the winter bulbs had started to open. (What was a flower to do when the temperature was in the seventies, even in January?) And every time she saw them stick their little heads up, months too early, she wished she could tell them to go back underground. She wished she could warn them that it wasn’t really spring yet, only an illusion of spring due to global warming. Today, though, it was safe. Spring was really here and the flowers would survive.