The Trophy Trap

  Chapter Four

  Abby stopped breathing. She picked it up. It was still slightly slick with grease. She didn’t care.

  “My trophy my trophy my trophy!” she murmured and hugged it to her chest. She was blissful. Liam had not expected her to hunt in her own bedroom, in her own toybox, amongst her most familiar things.

  And he was right. It would never have occurred to her. She would never have found it if it hadn’t been for the broken light shade and her need for glue.

  “Oh, I love you,” announced Abby to the trophy. Liam must have hidden it while she was in the garage. She looked around, wondering where she could hide it, in turn, from him.

  “No, stop!” she commanded herself. “Think.”

  She thought. At the moment she had the advantage. She knew where the trophy was, and Liam did not know she knew. If she hid it somewhere else now, he would go squealing to Mum, Mum would get all stern and Abby would have to hand it back again.

  So she needed to pretend she didn’t know it was here.

  Abby frowned, trying to puzzle it out. If she just left the trophy in her toybox, Liam might remove it before Friday morning. She couldn’t be in her room to guard it all the time. She had to use the bathroom, eat, and watch TV.

  She wanted to take the trophy, but she needed to leave it where it was. She couldn’t do both.

  Abby stared at her toybox. “Oh, yes, I can,” she said.

  She could make a dummy trophy, wrap it in the blanket, and put it in the toybox. If Liam checked, he would feel it through the blanket. He wouldn’t bother unloading the whole box. It would take too long. Meanwhile the real trophy would be safely hidden somewhere else.

  So all she needed to do was make something that felt just the same.

  Abby ran downstairs and crept into the kitchen. She borrowed the small mixing bowl, a plate, and on reflection, the large mixing bowl as well. Liam came in through the back door in his football kit. He looked muddy and bad-tempered.

  He looked at the bowls. “What are you doing with those?”

  “Just an experiment. Don’t tell Mum. I’m grounded in my bedroom.”

  Liam shrugged. He threw his boot bag in the corner, and reached for a banana out of the fruit bowl. Abby thought he looked a little worried at the mention of her bedroom.

  “It’s to do with school,” she said. “Miss Lewis wants us to try dissolving things.”

  “I wish you’d dissolve,” said Liam, squirting salad cream on his banana. But his worried expression stayed. Abby slid out again before Mum came in.

  “Liam?” she heard Mum say. “Was Abby in here? She’s grounded. Don’t encourage her. And put that kit in the washing machine now, before you do anything else.”

  Liam grunted.

  “Don’t,” said Mum. “You’re not fifteen. And don’t forget your boots.” Liam always forgot his football boots, or rather, he ignored them. They festered in his boot bag from week to week. Mum refused to touch them, on principle.

  Safe in her bedroom, Abby cut out two cardboard handles from her scraper-board kit and taped them to the small mixing bowl. She glued the plate to the bottom of the bowl and then taped it too for good measure. Now she had an approximate trophy shape.

  She made a quick visit to the bathroom to fill the big mixing bowl with water. Then she fished out one of the plaster-casting kits from her toybox, read the first line of the instructions and emptied half the bag of plaster powder into the bowl.

  It was as fine and pale as flour, but interestingly gungy once she mixed it into the water with her fingers. She plastered the small bowl, its scraper-board handles and its plate base; and also, less intentionally, her jeans, her towel and the carpet.

  The plaster of Paris began to set quite fast, within ten minutes or so. Abby stood the fake trophy upright, proud of her work. While it continued setting, she drew a picture on the wall over the bed.

  It showed her being presented with the trophy at the prize assembly. Miss Hill, the Headmistress, had a speech bubble coming from her mouth that said:

  “Well, Abby, I am very impressed. I did not know that you were so talented.”

  Abby drew the speech bubble coming from her own mouth and chewed her pencil, trying to think of a response that was both dignified and modest. In the end she wrote:

  “I am very proud to be a champion at table tennis. Horse riding is not the same at all, as the horse does all the work.”

  Immediately she imagined Liam with his speech bubble saying, “And I did eighty per cent of the work for you.”

  “No you didn’t,” said Abby. She dropped the pencil and clambered off the bed. There were greyish smears of plaster on the quilt now, but that would wash, along with the pillowcase. She quite admired the plaster on her jeans: it made her look like a workman. And it could probably be chiselled off the carpet once it was fully dry.

  Now she needed a hiding place for the real trophy. It didn’t need to be an ingenious hiding-place, because Liam wasn’t going to go looking for it. He would think it was still in the toybox.

  So she just needed to put it somewhere out of sight. She wrapped it in two carrier bags and hid it in her wardrobe. That was good enough.

  And the fake trophy, once it was fully set, was also good enough. When it was wrapped in the blanket, the lumpy bits were hardly noticeable at all. You could certainly tell it was a round cup sort of thing with two handles and a base.

  She buried it carefully in the toybox and piled the kits on top of it until it looked about right.

  Satisfied with her evening’s work, she went down to tea.

  Liam eyed her plastered jeans.

  “It didn’t dissolve, then,” he said.

  “Some of it did.” She smiled at him, quite good-tempered now that she possessed the trophy. He didn’t smile back. He looked fed up.

  “What didn’t dissolve?” asked Mum.

  “Just stuff for school.” Abby hoped Mum would not need the large mixing bowl for a while, since it now appeared to be concreted. She had stowed it under her bed.

  Remembering that she was supposed to hate Liam, she switched her smile to a scowl.

  “Are you going to lend me the trophy for Friday? I haven’t kicked you all week.”

  “No,” said Liam roughly.

  “I only need it for one morning!”

  “Stop nagging me. I need it too.”

  “No you don’t!” cried Abby, astonished. “What do you need it for? You’re just being mean. You’re selfish. You just want all the glory for yourself.” She was only saying it for form’s sake: but Liam slammed down his fork into his pasta.

  “I can’t stand this,” he said. “Stop going on about that trophy. It’s mine. I won it, I deserve it, and you’re just a little squirt with no co-ordination and two left feet.”

  “You’re the one with two left feet!”

  Liam flushed red. “A little squirty non-stop nuisance.”

  Abby screamed like a steam train.

  “Honestly,” said Mum, as Liam stamped out of the room. “Stop winding him up. I’d like to have him staying at the tea-table for longer than ten minutes. You know you’ll get that trophy in a week.”

  “Four and a half days,” Abby said complacently, and she tucked into her tea.