Once Upon a Toad (4 page)

And my stepsister was happy to shove me into the fire.

Olivia and Taylor flipped a coin for first pick, and Olivia won. She looked straight at me and smiled. It was not a nice smile.

“Rani Kumar,” she said.

Rani gave me a regretful look and crossed the gym to stand beside my stepsister. I steeled myself for torture, Olivia-style. It was uncanny the way she knew exactly how to bug me the most in any given situation. By picking the first friend I'd made at school all day, she was hanging me out to dry. There was no way Olivia was going to pick me for her team, and the other girl, Taylor, didn't know me from a hole in the ground, so no way would she pick me either until she was forced to. And since she was picking second and there were an even number of girls, that meant not only would I not be on
the same team as Rani, but I would also be the absolute last person picked.

Which I was.

“You should go home to Texas,” Olivia whispered to me in the locker room afterward.

Can I please go home to Texas?
I wrote that night in my daily e-mail to my mother.
The D'Angelos said I could stay with them.

The answer was no, of course.

Pull up your socks,
she replied.
You're a star—and a Starr! Things with you and Olivia are bound to get better, once you settle in.

But they didn't, and the rest of the week pretty much went downhill from there. Tuesday and Wednesday were no different. Olivia kept up her campaign to send me packing, and the only bright spots at school were band and Hawkwinds practice. Especially Hawkwinds practice. I slipped into the trio-turned-quartet effortlessly, and Mr. Morgan found us a new piece to play for the talent show, a Bach fugue that was one of my favorites.

But even that couldn't make up for Olivia's Reign of Terror, as A.J. had dubbed it. My stepsister talked about me constantly to her friends behind my back and made a big show of giving me the cold shoulder whenever she could, which was often, since we were in the same homeroom and most of the same classes.

Life at home wasn't any better. Because it had been raining nonstop since my arrival, I couldn't even escape outside for a walk. In order to avoid Olivia, I was forced to spend most of my time in either the kitchen or the living room, where Geoffrey would pounce on me to play LEGOs with him. He'd been following me around like a puppy ever since
I arrived, which was cute and everything, but sometimes a person just wants to be alone, you know?

The problem was, there was no place to do that in a house as tiny as my dad's.

If I went upstairs to our room, Olivia would inevitably be there talking about me on the phone to Piper, or worse, sitting there with Piper in person, the two of them making loud, snarky remarks about my clothes (what was wrong with jeans and a T-shirt?), my hair (why should I have to brush it more than once a day?), my lack of makeup (who wanted to smear that goop all over their face?), and everything else they could think of. Oh, and forget practicing my bassoon. I had to barricade myself in my dad's office if I wanted to do that, otherwise Olivia would moan about it hurting her ears.

On top of everything else there were the stupid dioramas. My bed was an island in a sea of art supplies, as Olivia's stuff had soon crept over into my half of the room. Iz had spotted the duct tape on the floor that first night and made Olivia take it off, but it quickly reappeared in the latest Barbie vignette—an exact replica of our bedroom. On one side of the decorated box a Barbie meant to be Olivia (I could tell by the curly blond hair) sat on the bed with her arms folded, staring across the room at the other Barbie—actually a vintage Skipper, Barbie's little sister, thank you very much, Olivia—who was standing by the door with a suitcase in her hand. From it hung a luggage tag that said
HOUSTON, TEXAS.
Above the Skipper-who-was-me's bed hung a little poster of a red circle with a slash through it. The word inside the circle? “CAT.”

Nice.

I got even by sneaking another Barbie into the diorama—this one with dark hair just like Piper's. I placed her by the tiny window in her underwear, looking out. Then I gave her huge red lipstick lips and taped a sign to her back that said
FLEABRAIN LOVES CONNOR.

Olivia and Piper's other favorite pastime, besides torturing me, was swooning over Connor Dixon, the boy next door. That's another big difference between my stepsister and me—she's boy crazy. Our bedroom was at the front of the house, and the window had a perfect view of the Dixons' driveway, where Connor and his older brother, Aidan, spent a lot of time playing basketball. Olivia and Piper were always spying on them. Well, on Connor, mostly. They both had a huge crush on him. I knew Connor from the times I'd visited before, and also now from band, since he played the saxophone. Technically, I supposed he qualified as cute—I never really paid much attention to that stuff—but I didn't think he was worth all the fuss the two of them made over him.

Olivia shrieked when she saw what I'd done to her diorama, but she couldn't tell Iz, of course, without her mother seeing the rest of it. Instead she snapped a picture of it with her cell phone and sent it to Piper. Both of them were spitting mad at school the next day.

Funny, but hardly likely to help improve matters,
my mother wrote back when I e-mailed her about it.
Focus on the good things, Cat.

The good things were Hawkwinds, my new friends, and Mr. Morgan and his delicate, shell-like ears. Also Geoffrey and Dad
and Iz. I dutifully wrote my mother about all of these, and about Mrs. Bonneville and her list of rules because I knew she'd get a kick out of that. My mother has a really good sense of humor.

I didn't mean to complain, really I didn't. I knew she needed to concentrate on her mission at the space station. But who else could I talk to? Iz had her hands full with Geoffrey and her job, and besides, she was living in her own little “Sisters are forever friends” world. It would be too awkward trying to explain to her what a twerp her daughter was, anyway. I knew I should probably talk to my father, but he'd been away the last couple of days collecting data on the spring Chinook salmon run in the Columbia River Gorge.

By Thursday night my spirits were as soggy as the weather. The diorama had disappeared, but Olivia and I were still barely on speaking terms. After dinner Iz shooed us upstairs to do our homework. Which we did, sort of. Olivia was talking to Piper on her cell phone, and I was using Iz's laptop to IM with A.J. With my earbuds in to block out my stepsister's annoying voice, I could almost pretend I was back in Houston. This was what A.J. and I did every night—worked on our homework while we instant-messaged each other.

I have a bad case of Olivia-itis, I wrote.

Poor you, he wrote back, adding a frowny face.

Need cure. Can u help?

No known remedy. Will ask NASA to arrange immediate airlift.

I had to laugh at that. A.J. always managed to cheer me up.

Iz poked her head in the door just then and saw me smiling. “I'm so
glad to see you two getting along,” she said. “One big happy family.”

Olivia waggled her fingers at her sweetly. The second Iz left, though, she looked over at me and pretended to stick them down her throat. I stuck out my tongue at her and turned my attention back to the computer screen. A few seconds later I jumped when Olivia let out a loud squeal at something Piper had said. I pulled out one of my earbuds. “Could you maybe keep it down a little? I'm working on pre-algebra and it's hard.”

“I'm working on pre-algebra and it's
haaard
,” she mimicked in a high voice.

I sighed and stuck the earbud back in. A.J. was right. There was no known cure for Olivia Haggerty.

CHAPTER 4

On Friday morning Olivia sabotaged our bathroom schedule, hogging it until five minutes before the bus came. Usually Dad monitors the schedule closely, since she has a habit of doing this, but he'd left before dawn for Klamath Lake. Every spring he drives down to help out with the annual count of the migrating waterfowl, then stops in Ashland to visit my grandparents. Olivia was taking full advantage of his absence, and Iz was distracted with Geoffrey, who had developed a bad case of spaghetti leg.

Spaghetti leg is what Iz calls it when Geoffrey goes all limp and doesn't want to do something. For some reason he'd decided that he didn't want to go to preschool this morning, so he was on strike, lying flat on his back on the rug in his bedroom. Iz couldn't get him dressed because he wasn't cooperating. I could tell that her patience was wearing thin. My stepmother is not a morning person.

“She's an artist,” my dad always says. “Lots of artists are night owls.”

My father, on the other hand, is an early bird. Which is appropriate, given his choice of career.

“Olivia! Hurry up in there!” Iz shouted, trying to stuff my little brother's legs into his pants. “Give me a hand, would you, Cat? I'll deal with your sister.”

Stepsister
, I thought automatically, but didn't say aloud, of course.

I crossed over to them. “C'mon, G-Man,” I encouraged. “Preschool is fun.”

He shook his head, clutching his blanket. He's had the thing since he was a baby, and if he were my kid, I'd make him throw it away. It's totally disgusting. Once upon a time it was a down comforter, but it had long since lost its feathers and its original color. Now it just hung there like a limp, dingy, bluish gray rag. Plus, it
smelled
.

“All aboard for fun!” I called, trying again. I pretended to be a train and raced around the room on my knees, following the pattern on his carpet. Geoffrey likes it when I do that. It's one of those Traffic Tyme rugs that they sell in all the kids' furniture stores. My dad calls it “little-boy heaven”—it's got traffic lanes and parking spots and stop signs and stuff like that.

Geoffrey pulled his finger out of his mouth and smiled at me.

“Gotcha!” I said, pulling him upright. I wrestled him into his clothes, then gave him a piggyback ride down the hall to where Iz was standing outside the bathroom.

“Olivia!” she called again, rattling the door handle.

“Almost done!” my stepsister called back.

Iz took Geoffrey from me. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

“No problem.”

“Did I take too long?” Olivia asked as she finally emerged,
her eyes wide in feigned innocence.

I pushed past her without a word and closed the door behind me, glancing at the clock on the wall. There was no time for a shower, and Iz had already told me she couldn't drive me because she had to go right from dropping Geoffrey off at preschool to a photo shoot.

I had to settle for washing my face and brushing my teeth and swiping a brush through my hair. I looked at myself in the mirror and sighed. It wasn't much of an improvement. The left side of my hair was still full of snarls and sticking out where I'd slept on it.

To get even, I took Olivia's toothbrush and dunked it in the toilet. Served her right.

The day went from bad to worse. Every time I got anywhere near Olivia at school, she wrinkled her nose and sniffed suspiciously. Pretty soon she had Piper and their friends doing it too. I knew I didn't smell—I might not have showered but I'd remembered to put on deodorant, at least—but still, it was starting to give me a complex.

And then, at lunch, I was sitting at the band table talking to my friends when I heard a tapping noise behind me. I turned around to see Olivia and Piper and the Hawk Creek Tappers heading toward me across the cafeteria.

Tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety
-SNIFF!
Tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety-tappety
-SNIFF! The cafeteria fell silent as they danced their way around our table. On every seventh beat they'd pause, lean toward me, and inhale—then simultaneously hold their noses.

“What's going on?” asked Rajit, mystified.