Double Dog Dare (7 page)

“Oh.”

She grinned at him. “Want to see if I can get all of them in five minutes?”

Four minutes and twelve seconds later, Kansas was stuck with yellow from head to toe and his mother had almost run out of Post-its. They’d set the timer on the microwave so they’d know exactly how much time she had left to go.

“Lumbar vertebrae!”
she shouted out, scribbling it down. “The lower back! Kansas, spin around, let me stick this on your spine.” Kansas spun and his mother stuck. “Um …” He could practically hear the wheels turning in her brain.
“Cranium!”
She slapped a sticky on his forehead. Kansas laughed as she started to scribble a new one. “Twenty-seven seconds!” she cried, looking at the clock. “What am I missing?”

Kansas pointed to his jaw. “Is this one?” he asked.

“
Mandible!
Yes! Thanks.” She scribbled, then stuck. “And
tibia
, and
fibula
.” Scribble, stick, scribble, stick.
“Sacrum!”
she shouted, scribbling again.

She had just made Kansas kick off his shoes so she could slap Post-its on his toes, and the clock was down to thirteen seconds, when there was a loud
bloop!
from the living room. Kansas’s head shot up. His instant messenger!

“Kansas!” his mom called as he raced for the computer, strewing Post-its across the floor. “Where are you going? We haven’t finished yet!”

But Kansas was already at the computer, shaking the mouse to jump-start the screen awake.

Sure enough, there was a message in his IM window. But it wasn’t from Ricky or Will.

Kansas stared at the screen. Francine? Francine was messaging him? Why would she do that?

“Kansas?” From the kitchen, the timer on the microwave went off.
Beep beep beep beep beeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Slowly, Kansas stretched his Post-it-covered hands across the keyboard.

He began to type.

9.

A trained guinea pig

“Hey, pea pod,” Francine’s father greeted her as he pulled into the parent pick-up driveway after school. “Where’s your other half?”

“Natalie wasn’t at school today,” Francine lied, opening the passenger’s side door and dumping her backpack inside.

“I hope she’s not sick again,” her father replied. “That would be terrible.”

“Yeah. Terrible.”

“Well, I have something that will cheer you up. I brought a little surprise for you.”

Francine climbed inside the car, clicked her seat belt closed, and then allowed herself to look to where her father
was pointing, the backseat. This day had been miserable, start to finish, and she knew there couldn’t possibly be anything back there that would cheer her up.

But she was wrong.

“Samson!” she cried.

Sure enough, there was her guinea pig, his two round eyes peeking out at her from under thick tufts of fur. He pushed himself up against the side of his cage and made the
snuffle-snuffle-gurgle-snuffle
noise that meant he wanted to be petted.

“I picked him up from the house when I went to get your clothes for tomorrow,” Francine’s dad told her. “I figured it was high time I saw all the little fellow’s new tricks.”

Francine tugged against her seat belt to wrap her dad in a tight hug around the neck. She squeezed him close, getting a good whiff of that smell she only just now realized she’d missed so deeply. In the past two weeks, Francine hadn’t spent more than two days with her dad. Evening phone calls and weekend movies just weren’t enough. Suddenly she was glad her mom had to work late, even if it did mean that Natalie couldn’t come over.

“Thanks, Dad,” she whispered.

He hugged her back. “I missed you, pea pod,” he said.

Francine stayed in the hug until the smell of her father’s shirt was completely familiar again. Then she whipped her door shut and shifted around in her seat to get a good look at Samson. “Hello, Sams,” she greeted him, reaching back to set a hand on the top of his cage.

Snuffle-snuffle-grunt-grunt-snuffle
.

The hotel her father had been staying at wasn’t too far away from the school, just across the street from the Stater Bros. Market. It was different from any of the hotels Francine had ever stayed in before with her parents. This room was divided into two big areas—a bedroom of sorts, and a living room, with a fold-out couch in front of the TV for Francine to sleep on. Against the wall of the living room area there was what her father called a “kitchenette,” a tiny space set up for cooking, with a stove and an oven and a sink and a mini fridge. It wasn’t bad for a hotel room, Francine thought, but it wouldn’t be spectacular enough to make her want to up and leave home forever.

“Okay, so here’s his newest one,” Francine called to her father, after she’d set up Samson’s obstacle course. She was
kneeling on the floor snuggling Samson, just in front of a tunnel she’d made out of her father’s art books. “He’s supposed to go inside the tunnel, then turn around and come back through the other way. You ready to time us?” Samson’s pink nose was twitching, anxious to begin the race and snag the guinea pig treats Francine had left for him at the end.

Francine’s dad snapped shut his sketchbook and stuck his pencil behind his ear. Then he squatted on the ground next to Francine and tapped a few buttons on his watch. “On your mark!” he said to Francine. She tensed her hands more tightly around Samson’s back end, lifting his feet just a few inches off the ground. Samson’s nose darted this way, that way, ready to race. “Get set!” Francine lowered Samson to the ground. “Go!” And she let him loose.

As soon as Samson’s feet hit the floor, he was
off
.

Unfortunately, he went in completely the wrong direction, racing his way straight up Francine’s T-shirt.

“Samson!” Francine cried, unhooking his claws from her shirtfront. “He did it yesterday,” she told her dad. “Okay, time us again.”

The second time, Samson went all the way around the tunnel and snarfed up all his treats before he’d even done anything. The third time, he sat in the middle of the tunnel and pooped.

“Well, good thing he’s cute, huh?” Francine’s father said as he cleaned the floor with a wad of toilet paper.

Francine had to admit that was true at least. Samson was pretty much the cutest guinea pig that ever existed, with his tufts of long silky hair that spiked out all over and his tiny pink nose. His face and his middle were white, and his butt and the top of his head were black, with one stripe of chocolate brown that stretched across his two round eyes. But if he was ever going to be a world-famous guinea pig on Francine’s animal training TV show, he was seriously going to have to get his act together.

While Francine fed Samson a few more guinea pig treats, her father sat down at the table again and turned back to his sketchbook, immediately lost in thought. Francine’s father was lost in thought a lot. He taught art classes at the local community college, and Francine’s mother often said that his brain was like a collage, lots of pieces
that didn’t quite fit together but somehow managed to make art anyway. Well, her mom
used
to say that. Francine wasn’t so sure her mom would think her dad’s brain was art anymore.

“What are you working on?” Francine asked as Samson snuggled himself into the crook of her elbow, grunting. “A new machine?”

“Hmm?” Her dad flicked his pencil across the page a few times before looking up at her. “Oh, yes,” he said, as though he’d only just heard her. “A brand-new one. Want to see?”

Francine climbed eagerly into the chair beside her father and peered down at the sketchbook in front of him.

Mostly, her dad drew portraits and cityscapes, sketched with his tiny, precise crosshatch strokes. But lately he’d taken to drawing curious sorts of inventions—chain reactions of objects and events that all led to one simple, final task. He’d told Francine once that they were called “Rube Goldberg” machines, after some famous dead guy, but Francine liked to think of them as her father’s own creations. In his latest, a bowling ball was poised at the top of
a large ramp, and if it were pushed, it would crash
down-down-down
into a stack of books, which would topple over to squeeze against a bottle of dish soap, which would pour out into a hanging bucket. When the bucket got heavy with soap, it would fall on top of one end of a seesaw, which would flop a teddy bear into the air, sending it careening into a basket of Ping-Pong balls … There were dozens of steps, and Francine pored over every one of them, until she got to the very last, where a toy car knocked over a broomstick that pushed down the lever on a toaster. Francine grinned as she counted—twenty-seven steps just to make a piece of toast.

“You think we could make one of these for real someday?” she asked her dad.

He gazed for a moment at the page in front of him. “Maybe. It would be fun, wouldn’t it?”

“Totally.”

He shut the sketchbook and ran his hand over the cover. “So this isn’t so bad, right?” he said. “Just the two of us? Well”—he nodded at Samson—“two and a half? It’s kind of cozy.”

Francine shifted in her chair. It was sort of nice to have
her dad to herself for a change. “I guess,” she replied. “But …” What he
needed
to do was come back home as soon as possible. “I don’t think you should stay here forever, though.”

“I’m glad you think that too,” her dad said.

“You are?”

He nodded. “I’ve found an apartment. I move in on Sunday. I think you’ll really like it.”

Francine pulled another guinea pig treat out of her pocket and fed it to Samson. When he finished that one, she gave him another, before he could even squeak about it. “I think he’s gotten a little bigger the past few weeks, don’t you?” Francine said, examining Samson’s belly. “Maybe he needs to go on a diet.”

“Francine?” her father said softly. “Pea pod? You know that none of this is about you, right? Your mother and I still love you. We always will. We’ll never stop being your parents, no matter what.”

Francine just shrugged. Of course her parents loved her. That was their
job
. It was the way they were doing their job that bothered her. Francine might only be nine years old, but she already knew that if things weren’t working out the
way you planned, then you fixed them. If you weren’t getting the grade you wanted in school, then you asked the teacher for extra credit. If your guinea pig wasn’t doing well in his obstacle course, then you increased his training. Her parents just weren’t trying hard enough. Because, sure, they argued sometimes, but no more than most people’s parents. She’d seen Natalie’s parents argue. Emma’s, too. Alicia’s parents practically murdered each other every time they drove the girls to soccer practice. But none of
them
were getting a divorce, now, were they? If only Francine knew the right thing to say, the exact right thing to do, she could fix everything. But she couldn’t think of the exact right thing.

“Can we have pizza for dinner?” That’s what she thought of.

Her father blinked at her for a moment, then stood and kissed Francine on the forehead. He crossed the room to get his cell. “Pepperoni and olives?”

Francine nodded. “With extra cheese.”

Her father flipped through the takeout menus on the side table until he found the right one. When Francine’s mom was in charge of dinner, they never ordered out, but
Francine’s dad couldn’t even cook pasta without ruining it. “So how was school today?” he asked, while he was on hold with the pizza place. “How are things going with that boy—what’s his name, Arizona? Did you have to do a dare today? Did they vote you news anchor yet?”

Francine placed Samson carefully back in his cage. “His name’s Kansas,” she told her father. And then, between the pizza ordering and the delivery, she filled him in on her entire miserable day—minus some tiny details that she thought her dad might not want to hear about, like the part about the boys’ bathroom and the principal’s office.

“And he just did the dare like it was nothing!” she said, taking a bite out of her piping hot slice of pizza. “Can you believe that? He’s never going to quit, and he doesn’t even care about being news anchor, either. I can tell.”

Francine’s father offered Francine a napkin to wipe the pizza sauce off her chin. “That sounds pretty rough, pea pod. But maybe this Kansas kid isn’t as awful as you think he is. It can’t be easy, being the new kid in school.”

“
Dad.
You can’t be serious. He’s
awful.
He thinks he’s
so
cute and so good at everything.”

“All I’m saying is that there’s a second point of view to
every story.” Her father walked to the sink to refill their plastic cups with water. “Maybe you should give him more of a chance. Who knows? Maybe he just wants to be fr—”

Her father was cut off when, from the center of the table, his cell phone began ringing. Together, Francine and her dad dug through the mound of papers and books and pizza plates to find it.

“Hello?” her father said, when at last he’d found the phone and answered it. Francine couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, but she knew just from the look on her dad’s face that it was someone he hadn’t expected. “Yes,” he said, raising an eyebrow at her. “This is Francine’s father.”

Francine’s eyes went wide. Who was calling about
her
? Was it Mrs. Weinmore, calling to report her visit to the office?

But it couldn’t be, because her dad was smiling. Laughing, almost. “Hold on,” he said into the phone. “She’s right here.” And he handed the phone to Francine.

“Who is it?” she asked. No one ever called her on her dad’s cell.

Her dad raised his eyebrows in that all-knowing fatherly
way of his that Francine found so annoying. “It’s Kansas,” he told her.

Kansas?

Maybe her dad was right, Francine thought, looking at the phone in his hand. Maybe Kansas did just want to be friends. Maybe he wasn’t so terrible after all.

She took the phone.

“Hello?”

10.

A BASKETBALL

Kansas typed his message, stared at it for a moment, and then pushed Enter.