Girls Rule!

  Miss Applebaum, for example, was reading another book aloud to the class, Hatchet, about a boy who finds himself alone in the wilderness with only a hatchet to help him find food and shelter. Could I do that? Wally wondered. If somehow he got lost in the hills of West Virginia and nobody knew where he was, could he stay alive for a week? A month?

  “You coming, Wally?” Josh called, turning around at the corner.

  “Yeah,” said Wally, realizing that he’d been so absorbed in his daydream, he had fallen behind Josh and Peter. How about a hatchet and a tent and ten jars of peanut butter? He was pretty sure he could survive for a while then.

  Kids were swarming all over Buckman with their collection cans. Someone even came up to Wally to ask if he wanted to contribute any money.

  “If I had any money to give, it would go in my own can,” said Wally.

  The boys walked to the low wall surrounding the library, where Josh propped up some of his paintings that he had mounted on cardboard. He kept the rest in the box so they wouldn’t blow away.

  original drawings by josh hatford, $1.00, read the sign. all money goes to the buckman hospital fund.

  Josh hoisted himself up on the wall beside his paintings, legs dangling. Wally set up his shoeshine station a few feet away. He had brought a box to sit on, as well as the wooden shoeshine kit. There was a slanted footrest on top of the kit where a person could rest his foot, and Wally thought he would invite each customer to sit on the wall and put a foot on the wooden kit.

  Peter, however, went to the corner, and as each person walked by or crossed the street, Peter smiled, held out his can, and said hopefully, “Save a child? Save a child?” And always, it seemed, the person would drop money into his can.

  Wally and Josh were a little embarrassed to try to snag people as they passed. It was one thing to say “Save a child?” It was another to say “Buy a drawing?” And it was something else to say “Shine, mister?” when Wally was not even sure he remembered how to shine shoes.

  He opened the wooden box. There were three tins of shoe polish inside—one marked BLACK, one marked BROWN, and one marked OXBLOOD. Oxblood? Wally wondered. Who would ever call a color oxblood? He twisted the lid of that tin. The polish had a dark burgundy color. It could be the color of anyone’s blood, Wally figured.

  There was a soft rag in the box with dark stains on it, obviously the rag used to dig into the creamy polish and smear it on shoes. And there was a brush, which Wally remembered he had used to make his shoes really shine once they were polished.

  “Shine, mister?” he asked a man coming down the sidewalk. “Only a dollar. And all the money goes to the hospital building fund.”

  The man smiled and shook his head, and Wally saw that he was wearing white sneakers.

  Now that he thought of it, Wally had never seen so many sneakers in his life! Were people even wearing black and brown leather shoes anymore? There were white sneakers with blue writing on the sides. Gray sneakers with red stripes. Blue sneakers with gold writing. How was he supposed to shine people’s shoes if no one was wearing black, brown, or oxblood?

  Josh wasn’t having much luck either. People seemed unwilling to stop and look through his box of drawings. Some stopped to look at his paintings of cars and tigers and basketball stars.

  “Did you draw this?” they would ask. Or they would say, “You’re a pretty good artist, aren’t you?” They would take a drawing and drop in a dollar bill or a couple of quarters. Or they might drop in a dime and not take any drawing at all.

  Josh turned his sign around and wrote, ORIGINAL DRAWINGS, TWO FOR A DOLLAR. Wally began to call, “Shine, mister? Only fifty cents.”

  From the corner, however, came the constant clunk, clunk of change dropping into Peter’s collection can. After a while he walked over to the wall where his brothers were sitting.

  “My arm’s getting tired,” he complained. “The can’s getting too heavy.”

  “Poor you!” Josh muttered.

  “Yeah. We feel so sorry for you,” said Wally.

  “Isn’t anyone buying your pictures, Josh?” asked Peter. “Isn’t anyone getting shoes shined, Wally?”

  “Sure. Can’t you see the line around the block?” said Josh. A woman was coming down the sidewalk just then, and Josh jokingly held his collection can over Wally’s head. “Save a child? Save a child?” he chanted.

  “Cut it out,” said Wally. The woman walked on by.

  A man came out of the bank building next door to the library.

  “Shine, mister?” called Wally. “All the money goes to the hospital fund.”

  The man stopped and looked at his watch. “Well, I guess I’ve got time for a shine,” he said. He sat down on the wall and pulled out a newspaper from under his arm.

  Wally swallowed. The man was wearing a light brown summer suit and light brown shoes to match. Wally looked in the shoeshine kit. There was only one color of brown. Dark brown. But maybe it didn’t matter. He took out the polish, the rags, and the brush. Then he lifted the man’s left foot and set it on the footrest on top of the box. The man went on reading his newspaper.

  Wally opened the brown polish and carefully smeared it all over the man’s shoe. He used the soft rag to rub it in. Then he took the brush and rubbed the shoe hard till it shone.

  When Wally lifted the man’s left foot from the box and put his right foot there in its place, the man turned the page of his newspaper and glanced down at his feet.

  “My shoes are two different colors!” he said. “What have you done?”

  “It … it was the only color of brown I had,” said Wally.

  “You ruined my left shoe! What am I supposed to do?” said the man.

  “Well… maybe I’d better do the other one so they’ll both be the same color,” Wally suggested.

  The man was angry. “I guess you’d better,” he said. He didn’t read his newspaper anymore. He frowned at Wally as his right shoe was polished, and when it was done, he didn’t put any money at all in the can. “I ought to charge you for ruining my shoes!” he complained, and stalked off.

  “I’m really sorry,” Wally called after him, but the man didn’t even turn around.

  Wally climbed up on the wall beside Josh. “This was a bad idea,” he said.

  “Yeah. Tell me about it,” said Josh, shoulders hunched.

  When an hour and a half had gone by, Josh took another sheet of paper and made another sign: ORIGINAL DRAWINGS BY JOSH HATFORD, FOUR FOR A DOLLAR.

  At the end of the afternoon, Josh had earned a total of two dollars and seventy-five cents and Wally had earned nothing. Peter’s can, however, was almost full, and he had to turn it in at the bank and get another.

  Seven

  Help! Help!

  The girls were having no better luck. Beth had spent all Saturday baking, but the neighbors who had welcomed gifts of cookies at Christmas had about all the cookies they could eat. Early Sunday afternoon, Beth went door-to-door with her tray of homemade cookies on one arm, her collection can ready, but found that other students had gotten there first.

  “Oh, dear. I’ve spent five dollars on cookies already this morning,” one woman told her. “I’m sorry.”

  Beth kept going till she got to the next block, where she said to each person who answered the door, “Twelve cookies for the price of ten?” And when there were no takers there, she told the people on the third block they could have twelve cookies for the price of eight.

  “If I eat all the cookies and cupcakes I’ve bought so far, I’ll look like a blimp,” one man told her, but he put a dollar in her collection can anyway.

  Because the cans could be opened only by the bank, the girls had to estimate how much they had earned. As they could see through the cans, it was easy to figure out how much money was inside by tipping them back and forth. But Beth didn’t even have to do that. After having spent the previous day baking, she came home with only one dollar in her can and no cookies sold at all.

  Eddie was
having a hard time too.

  “Scrub your porch, ma’am?” she’d ask at each house along Island Avenue, except that some didn’t have porches. Then she would offer to wash windows instead, but no one liked the thought of her climbing up on ladders, so everyone said no.

  By the time Eddie got to the third and then the fourth block, she could see other students ahead of her, already knocking on doors, with buckets and rakes and scrub brushes in hand, offering to do any job at all. She turned around and went home. Caroline and Beth were sitting on the front steps waiting for her, failure written all over their faces.

  “It’s not even that I want to be in the parade as much as I just want to show I can do it!” Eddie said, flopping down beside them. “I mean, who cares if I get to ride on a float or not? But if I’m not in the parade, it will show everyone that I couldn’t earn twenty dollars, and when there’s a competition, I want to win!"

  “I just want to ride on the float with the Strawberry Queen,” said Caroline.

  “I wish you would shut up about the Strawberry Queen,” Eddie said irritably. “Nobody promised you that.”

  “I’d just like to see what Buckman looks like from the back of a float,” said Beth. “I’ve been to parades before, but I’ve never been in one.”

  “Then we’d better start thinking of a way to earn money, because performing at birthday parties and baking cookies and scrubbing porches isn’t going to cut it,” said Eddie. “We ought to figure out something the three of us can do together.”

  They tried to think of jobs they had not seen anyone else doing around Buckman.

  “Car wash?” Eddie said suddenly. “I haven’t seen anyone offer a car wash.”

  “That doesn’t mean nobody’s doing it,” said Beth. “I suppose there could always be two car washes, though. What would we have to do?”

  “Get out the hose. Put a sign by the entrance to the driveway. One of us will vacuum the inside of the car, the next will hose down the outside, and the third will rub on the cleaner and wipe it off.”

  Caroline looked doubtful. “Have we ever washed a car before?” she asked.

  “I did once, that time we went through the mud on vacation,” Eddie answered.

  Mrs. Malloy came out on the porch with glasses of iced tea for them. “It’s shadier here than it is out back,” she said. “It certainly has turned out to be a hot one.”

  “We want to do a car wash,” Eddie told her. “It’s the only thing we can think of to earn money for the hospital.”

  “Car washes are a lot of work and they use a lot of water,” her mother said. “But it’s for a good cause. If you girls think you can handle it, I guess it’s okay.” And she went back inside.

  That decided, Eddie made a large sign to post at the end of the driveway: car wash and vacuum—$4.00. money goes to buckman hospital fund.

  Four dollars sounded better than five dollars, she figured, and might mean more business.

  The girls worked together to get things ready. Hose, rags, bucket, cleaner, window spray, vacuum, brushes…

  “I’m tired already,” said Caroline, but stared as a car paused at the end of the driveway, then turned in. “Hey!” she yelled to her sisters. “Our first customer!"

  A man got out of the car. “Where shall I wait while you wash my car?” he asked.

  “Go right up on the front porch and have a seat,” Eddie told him. “We’ll call you as soon as it’s ready.”

  The girls were glad to have him out of the way. They didn’t want him watching on their first job. They opened the doors of his car and picked up all the trash on the floor—gum wrappers and soda cans, leaves and pebbles. Then they brushed off the seats with a whisk broom and used their mother’s vacuum cleaner to suck up the sand and dirt. After that they closed the car doors and turned on the hose.

  “We need to do a really good job,” Eddie reminded the others, “because this will be a rolling advertisement for the kind of work we’ll do.”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when another car turned in. A woman stuck her head out the window. “How long will I have to wait?” she called.

  Caroline looked at Beth, and Beth looked at Eddie.

  “We’ll get to you right away,” Eddie called back, handing the hose to Caroline. She turned to her sisters and said, “You finish up here and I’ll go vacuum her car.”

  Caroline was so eager to finish the first car and help with the second that she wasn’t careful about where she pointed the hose, and as the lady stepped out of her Ford station wagon, Caroline happened to pass a spray of water over her head.

  The woman shrieked.

  “Caroline!” Eddie shouted.

  “Oops! I’m so sorry!” Caroline said, looking at the woman’s wet shirt, not realizing that now the hose was turned on Beth, who was cleaning a wheel.

  “Caroline!” screamed Beth, rolling out of the way.

  “Are you sure you girls can do this?” the first customer asked as he came to the side of the porch to see what was going on.

  “Oh, yes. We’ll do a really good job!” Eddie told him. And to the woman she said, “Please have a seat up on the porch and we’ll call you when we’re finished.”

  She grabbed the hose out of Caroline’s hand and gave it to Beth. “You do the wheels from now on, Caroline,” she said.

  Caroline hated doing wheels. They were the dirtiest part of an automobile, and her hands got as dirty as the rag. She had smudges of grease on her arms and legs, and every so often spray from the hose drifted down on her head. She didn’t much mind the spray because it was the only way she could keep cool.

  A budding actress should not have to be doing work like this, Caroline thought. It was a shame no one else had called her to perform at a birthday party.

  “How can it be that no other kids in Buckman are having birthdays in June?” she asked her sisters.

  “Well, maybe they’re having birthdays, but they aren’t having parties,” said Beth. “Or maybe they’re having parties, but they’re not having performances. Or maybe they’re having performances, but they’re not having you, strange as that may seem, Caroline.”

  Impossible, thought Caroline. Who would not want a talented, precocious girl who could become all the different characters in a story? Who would not want to say, after Caroline became an actress on Broadway, that they had known Caroline when she was just a little girl back in fourth grade and had seen her perform once at a birthday party?

  “Ready!” Beth called to the man on the porch as still another car pulled into the driveway.

  The man paid his four dollars, but when he slid into the driver’s seat he yelled, “Hey! There’s water in here. Didn’t you girls close my windows?”

  Caroline turned to look and saw a puddle of water on the floor on the passenger side. The window above the seat was open an inch.

  “I…we…I guess we thought you did,” Eddie said. “We should have checked.”

  “For four dollars, you need to do a better job,” the man said, and drove away.

  “We need more help!” Eddie cried. “We need someone to stand out on the road with a sign directing cars in here. We need someone to close the windows and pick up trash, someone to vacuum, someone to do the wheels, wash the windows, use the cleaner, polish and dry….”

  “In other words,” said Beth, “the Hatfords.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Eddie.

  The driver of the third car tapped her horn impatiently.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!” Eddie muttered.

  “Are you sure we want the guys over here?” Beth asked. “Do we know what we’re doing?”

  “I know that if we don’t have some help, we’re going to go out of business,” said Eddie. “Caroline, go call the Hatfords and ask if they want to go in with us on a car wash.”

  Anything was better than cleaning wheels for the rest of the day, Caroline thought. She dropped the rag and went into the house. She knew how suspicious the boys were of any Ma
lloy idea, however. She knew Jake would quiz her and want a contract, probably, stating that the money they received would be divided equally among them. She didn’t have time to stand at the telephone arguing with them.

  So she dialed the boys’ number, and when she heard Wally say, “Hello?” she simply called feebly into the phone, “Help! Help!” And hung up.

  Eight

  Cleaning the Clock

  The Hatford boys enjoyed their usual Sunday chicken dinner. They had just changed from their white shirts and blue pants to T-shirts and shorts and were thinking about going outside to shoot baskets when the phone rang.

  “Hello?” said Wally.

  Nobody said hello at the other end. Instead, someone who sounded remarkably like Caroline Malloy yelled, “Help! Help!” And before Wally could ask what was wrong, she hung up.

  Wally walked to the doorway of the living room, where his brothers were reading the Sunday comics.

  “Who was that?” asked Josh.

  “I think it was Caroline,” said Wally. “I think she’s in trouble.”

  “Why? What did she say?” asked Jake.

  “She just yelled, ‘Help!’ “ Wally said.

  “Help? That’s all?” asked Josh.

  “Actually, she said, ‘Help! Help!’ “ Wally told them.

  Peter jumped to his feet. “Then let’s go rescue her. Maybe she fell in the river again!"

  “Sure, she’s calling from the river. Right!” said Josh.

  “Don’t be in too big a hurry to get over there. You know it’s a trick,” said Jake.

  Wally was uneasy. “But what if it’s not?”

  “Yeah, what if there’s a murderer in her house or something?” said Peter.

  “On a Sunday afternoon?” said Jake.

  “Murderers get in whenever they want,” said Peter.

  Wally thought they ought to go too, trick or no trick.

  “Well, at least it will be more interesting than shooting baskets,” said Josh. “Let’s go.”