All the Answers (8 page)

“Maybe.” Ava had actually planned to leave the pencil in her locker today, so she wouldn't be tempted to use it on the vocabulary quiz. But by the time they got to school, the first period bell was ringing, so she didn't have a chance.

Ava still had the pencil in her backpack when she got to English. That's where it stayed during the quiz. She only longed for it once, when she couldn't quite remember what the word “obdurate” meant, but she guessed. Even if she got it wrong, she'd have a grade of ninety.

“You have the goldenrod gall things, right?” Sophie asked on the way to science.

Ava nodded. “We're doing a lab with them today.”

When they got to Mrs. Ruppert's room, every table was set up with paper towels and a steak knife, as if they were going to eat the goldenrod galls for a snack.

“Have a seat so we can start,” Mrs. Ruppert said from her demonstration table. “We're going to be cutting open the goldenrod galls you brought today. If you don't have any, that's okay;
I have extras. You'll insert the knife partway into the gall and then twist it.” She did that, and the gall split open. “What we're looking for is …” Mrs. Ruppert squinted at the two halves. “Oh, this is gorgeous!” She sounded as if she'd found gold or at least chocolate inside, but when she walked around, all Ava saw was a wiggly, white grub type thing.

“Here we have a goldenrod gall fly larva,” Mrs. Ruppert went on. “This one's lively, but when you cut open your galls, you'll find that not all the larvae will have fared so well. Some will have fallen prey to parasitic wasps or beetles. And if there's a visible hole in the gall, your larva may have been eaten by a downy woodpecker or chickadee. Ready to get started?”

Ava and Sophie were in different groups for science. Sophie went off to a table with Alex Weinstein and Leo Kim, while Ava left her backpack by the door and set to work cutting open galls with Luke Varnway and one of the Mason twins—Kylie or Marissa. Ava could never tell the difference and figured it was rude to ask.

It was a pretty neat lab. Ava's group got off to a rough start when Luke forgot they were supposed to insert the knife halfway and twist, so he sliced their first larva right in half. But then they found a whole bunch of live larvae and two galls where those special wasps had broken in and eaten the larvae.

“Whoa! Do that again!” someone called from a table across the room. Ava wondered what they'd found. When she looked up, she saw two lab groups gathered around Sophie. But Sophie
wasn't holding a goldenrod gall with a larva or wasp or beetle. She was holding the pencil.

Ava put down her knife and rushed over. “Why'd you take that out of my backpack? What are you doing?” she whispered.

“I'm showing everybody how we've been working on our psychic powers.” Sophie grinned, then started writing on a note card in her hand.

“Oh, great goldenrod gall fly spirits …” Psychic Sophie whispered as she wrote. “Tell me what rests in the great unknown of the goldenrod gall in Alex's hand.” She looked up at the ceiling for a few seconds, then turned to Alex and said, “Inside, you will find not one but two live beetle larvae!” She motioned for him to cut the gall open, and everyone gasped when Alex showed the milky-colored larvae inside.

“Sophie, put that away,” Ava whispered urgently, while everyone was busy with Alex and the larvae. “We're going to get in trouble.”

Sophie glanced up at the front of the room. Mrs. Ruppert was busy trying to teach Annika Rock how to cut open a gall without slicing the larva in half. “No, we're not. Come on.” She held the pencil out to Ava and whispered, “You do it. It's fun!”

Ava shook her head. “Put it away. We shouldn't—”

“Sophie, do your psychic powers work with everything?” Leo asked.

“Pretty much,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

“Varnway's middle name. He won't tell anybody.”

“Dude, she's not gonna guess,” Luke Varnway said, “and I'm not telling you. You'd never let me hear the end of it.”

“I do not guess. I know.” Sophie scribbled on the index card in her hand and announced, “And your middle name is Quack-enbush.”

She said it quietly, but Leo heard and made sure everyone else did, too. “Quackenbush! No way!” He might have thought Sophie made it up until he saw the look on Luke's face. For a few seconds, his mouth hung open wide enough to catch a hundred goldenrod gall flies. Then Leo burst out laughing, and Luke whirled to face Sophie. “Who told you that?”

She made big, innocent eyes. “No one told me. I just knew.”

“Quackenbush? Seriously?” Leo made pretend wings out of his arms and started flapping around making duck sounds.

“Boys!” Mrs. Ruppert glared from her desk.

“Sorry!” Leo called, but he didn't stop quacking; he just quacked more quietly.

“Shut
up
!” Luke hissed. “It was my grandma's maiden name, okay? My parents wanted to honor her family and they didn't figure anybody would ever use it.” He glared at Sophie.

“Soph, we have to finish this lab.” Ava squeezed through the crowd around the table to try again. “Just give me—”

But Jessica Bainbridge darted in front of her. “Sophie!” she said, then lowered her voice. “Can you tell me if Jason Marzigliano likes me?” Her face was all flushed.

Sophie didn't bother to write that one. “Nope. He doesn't.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“How about Tucker Ulster? He's an eighth grader.”

“Sophie, come on,” Ava whispered. Things were getting louder at their lab table. Ava was sure Mrs. Ruppert would be swooping in any second. She wasn't as strict as Mr. Farkley, but when she got mad, she had this super-calm voice that was scarier than any yell Ava had ever heard.

“Give me the pencil!” Ava whispered urgently. She held out her hand, but Sophie ignored it and started writing casually while she made a big show of asking the ceiling if the other kid liked Jessica.

“The great goldenrod gall fly spirits say Tucker doesn't know who you are,” Sophie told her. “But who knows? Maybe he would like you if he did know.”

“Hey, Sophie!” Alex shouted.

“I'm not going to warn you again. Keep your voices at a low working level!” Mrs. Ruppert called, frowning over her glasses.

Ava tried again. “Soph, if we don't get back to work she's going to—”

“Sophie!” Tyler Choe squeezed in front of Ava. “How about using your psychic powers to see where I left my math binder this morning?”

“Hold on a second …” Sophie scribbled and gazed at the ceiling. “It's in the garbage can in the gym locker room,” she said. “Luke swiped it and dumped it there while you were shooting baskets before school.”

Tyler whirled around toward Luke, who held up his hands. “Dude … that's not true!”

He was way too loud. Ava looked up in a panic. Mrs. Ruppert was coming, and she did not look happy.

Ava held out her hand urgently. “Sophie, give me the pencil!”

“You're such a jerk!” Tyler stepped toward Luke. “My homework was in there and now it's late and—”

“Is there a problem?” Mrs. Ruppert stood glaring at them, hands on her hips.

“Yeah, there's a problem.” Tyler pointed to Luke. “Luke
Quackenbush
Varnway threw out my homework.”

“I did not and don't call me that!” Luke pointed at Sophie. “
She
started all this!”

Ava watched Mrs. Ruppert's eyes settle on Sophie. And then, on the bright blue pencil in her hand.

The pencil wasn't glowing or shooting out sparks or doing other magical things, but it might as well have been, the way Mrs. Ruppert was looking at it.
She knows
, Ava thought, and her heart squeezed up into her throat.
She totally knows and it's my pencil and all my fault and now we're going to be sent to the office and expelled and whatever else happens when you're messing around with a magic pencil instead of doing your goldenrod gall lab
.

Why couldn't Sophie have listened to her? Ava swallowed hard and hoped she'd make it to the office trash can before she threw up, because puking on the goldenrod galls would only make things worse.

But Sophie just smiled. “Sorry, Mrs. Ruppert.” She casually dropped the pencil on the lab table. Ava could barely breathe, but she forced herself to reach out and pick it up while Mrs. Ruppert was looking the other way.

“I guess our group got a little off task,” Sophie went on. “But this is a great lab. We found one gall with
two
beetle larvae in it. Leo, can you show her?”

Leo stopped quacking at Luke and started looking for the double-larvae gall while Ava hurried to her backpack and zipped the pencil inside. She looked over at the lab table, where Sophie was asking Mrs. Ruppert something about the wasps. Ava still felt like her heart might bound right out of her chest and go thumping across the floor of the science room. How could Sophie be over there chatting like nothing even happened? But at least Mrs. Ruppert was focused on bugs again, and the pencil was safe.

There was barely time to clean up their lab stations before the bell rang. Sophie was waiting for Ava to walk to lunch. “Sorry. I hope you're not mad.”

“I'm not mad,” Ava said, even though she kind of was. “But we can't do stuff like that.”

“Why not?” Sophie stopped at her locker. “Nobody knows it was the pencil.”

“But Jessica was all upset and Luke was mad and Tyler wanted to punch him and then Mrs. Ruppert came over and asked if there was a problem and I thought I was going to pass out and I just … I want to be careful how we use it, that's all.”

“Okay.” Sophie twirled out her combination and opened her locker. “Will you bring it to lunch, though?”

“No.” It came out louder than Ava intended, but this pencil
was really starting to stress her out. “I want to leave it in my locker for now. I'm going to Mrs. Galvin's Chocolate Chip Cookie Club thing anyway. Want to come?”

“Sure.” Sophie didn't seem upset about being snapped at. “If there are cookies, I'm in.”

They got their lunches and headed for the library. Ava wished it wasn't a club day so she could shelve books. She needed some quiet to recover from the awful pencil-psychic-science-class scene. And she needed control of her pencil back.

“Sophie, we need to set up rules for this thing, okay?”

“Like what?”

“Like not using it in front of people like you just did. And no more quiz answers. It's cheating.”

“But there's no rule against—”

“Only because nobody knows about magic pencils.”

Sophie sighed. “Fine. But we can use it for
some
stuff, right?”

Ava nodded. “But only for good stuff, okay? Like to help people.”

“Does people include us? Because I saw these super-cute boots at the mall, and I'd love to ask it when they're scheduled to go on sale.” Sophie grinned and held open the library door.

Ava laughed. “I think that's okay.”

“Hi, girls!” Mrs. Galvin waved toward the tables that were already filling in. “Take a cookie and find a seat.”

They did, and then Mrs. Galvin passed out the poem for the day, “Always Bring a Pencil.”

Sophie nudged Ava. “See?” she whispered. “Even the poem thinks you should have brought it.”

But this poem wasn't about magic. The poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, was saying that certain things—quiet things—
wanted
to be written about in pencil instead of pen. Ava had never thought about that. The poet must not have had teachers who required one or the other.

Then Mrs. Galvin read another poem called “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” which wasn't about a valentine at all but about poems and where they hide, where to find them. Ava liked that one, too. It was fun to imagine a poem creeping across her ceiling like sunlight coming through the window.

“So think about that, and if you find a poem hiding somewhere, bring it next time, okay?” Mrs. Galvin said as the bell rang. “Ava, you have a study hall next, right? Do you have time to shelve some new books?”

“Sure.” Ava said good-bye to Sophie and rolled a cart of books to the shelf.

Ava always loved ogling new books. Sometimes, she sniffed them when no one was looking. Today, there were a few mysteries that looked pretty good, two books with people kissing on the cover—Ava didn't bother reading the blurbs for those—a bunch of fantasy titles, some nonfiction about the Civil War, and a book called
What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kids' Guide to Overcoming Anxiety
.

Ava arranged most of them on the shelves, but she saved the
worry book for last. Its cover had an illustration of a giant tomato plant that looked like it was about to eat a scared-looking kid standing next to it. Ava glanced back at the circulation desk and saw that Mrs. Galvin was doing something on her computer. She opened the book to see what the killer tomatoes were all about. The first chapter said that worries were like plants, that if you mostly kept busy and ignored them, they tended to wither and get smaller. But if you fed and watered them and gave them lots of attention, they'd grow big and healthy. Only worries weren't healthy, the book said.