The Girls Take Over

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  To Gretchen Corcoran

  Contents

  One: Dreaming

  Two: A Horrible Thought

  Three: Deal

  Four: Tryouts

  Five: Into the Drink

  Six: Double Cross

  Seven: Rescue

  Eight: Conversation with Caroline

  Nine: Letter to Georgia

  Ten: Letter from Georgia

  Eleven: Contests

  Twelve: Go Directly to Jail

  Thirteen: Jail

  Fourteen: The Fatal Word

  Fifteen: Clean and Beautiful

  Sixteen: Bad and Worse

  Seventeen: Inspection

  Eighteen: The Decorators

  Nineteen: Not Again!

  Twenty: Apology

  Twenty-one: What Caroline Saw

  Twenty-two: And the Winner Is …

  One

  Dreaming

  It was the month Eddie Malloy had been waiting for—tryouts for the Buckman Elementary baseball team—only sixth graders allowed. For Caroline, however, April looked as though it might be the most boring month since they'd moved to Buckman. She didn't care much for sports, but she knew how desperately her oldest sister wanted to get on the team. What Caroline most wanted was for something exciting to happen to her—something so dramatic it would get her picture in the newspaper.

  But Eddie was fuming about the rain. “Look at it!” she wailed, staring out at the dismal West Virginia sky. The sun, which took its sweet time rising above the hills each morning, hadn't shown for a week. “I'll bet we won't have tryouts today after all!”

  Eddie, Caroline, and Beth were finishing their toast, getting ready to return to school after spring vacation.

  “You've got a whole month, Eddie. The games don't begin till May,” Beth told her. Beth was in the fifth grade, and Caroline, being precocious, was in fourth, having been moved up a year. “Relax!” Beth said.

  “I can't,” said Eddie. “This is my one chance to show Jake Hatford that he's not the only good player around.”

  Mrs. Malloy came into the kitchen in her robe. “Gracious, I overslept!” she said. “It's a good thing you girls got yourselves up. This rain just makes me want to stay in bed. It's a good day for dreaming.”

  Mr. Malloy followed next and went directly to the coffeemaker. He was singing his usual song, the words being “I hate to get up in the mooorning,” and the girls rolled their eyes at each other. He was coaching Buckman College's football team this year in a teacher-exchange program. Whether or not he would move his family back to Ohio in September was still very much up in the air.

  “Better wear your yellow slickers,” Mrs. Malloy told the girls. “It's supposed to rain all day.”

  Eddie groaned and looked out the window and down the hill toward the river. The Buckman River, ordinarily shallow, was swollen now by all the rain. It entered town on one side of Island Avenue, where the family was staying, looped around under the road bridge to the business district, and went back out of Buckman again on the other side.

  “Well,” Eddie said finally. “If I never become a professional baseball player, I guess I'll be a scientist. That's my second choice.”

  “Good thinking,” said her father. “Keep your bases covered.” He grinned.

  Beth had her nose stuck in a book as usual while she ate, her hand blindly reaching out to feel around the table for her orange juice. She never once took her eyes off the page.

  “If she'd only read decent stuff !” her mother had once complained, because the stories Beth liked best were about human centipedes and creatures under the sea. Beth was currently reading a book called The Village of the Vampire Ants. Beth didn't give much thought to what she wanted to be when she was grown.

  No one ever asked Caroline what she wanted to be when she grew up because she talked about it constantly: the world's greatest actress, that's what. She could see her name in lights on Broadway: Caroline Lenore Malloy, starring in … play after play after play.

  As the Malloy girls crossed the swinging bridge that took them to College Avenue, they saw the Hatford boys waiting for them on the other side. Despite all the boys' tricks and teasing since the girls had come to Buckman, the Malloy sisters had started walking to school with them when a strange animal—which the newspaper called an abaguchie because no one knew what it was—had been sighted in the area. It had later been found to be a cougar, and the Hatford and Malloy parents had insisted their seven children walk together to and from school for protection. Now that the cougar had been caught and taken down to the Smoky Mountains, the kids, out of habit, still walked together every day.

  The boys weren't exactly waiting patiently for the girls. What they were really doing was standing on the swinging bridge at their end, and as soon as the girls stepped on it, the boys began jumping up and down so that the bridge wiggled and swayed and bounced.

  “Ha, ha, we're so scared!” Eddie said dryly.

  “Look how high the water is!” Peter called. Peter was in second grade, the youngest of the boys. Wally was next, in fourth grade with Caroline, and the twins, Josh and Jake, were in sixth grade with Eddie. Beth was the only girl who wasn't in a class with a Hatford. Lucky you, Eddie had told her once.

  “What's the highest the river's ever been?” Beth asked when the girls reached the other end and they all set off for school.

  “It was up over the road in front of our house once,” said Wally.

  “Did you ever have to be rescued in rowboats or anything?” asked Caroline. She could just see herself, waving a white handkerchief from a window, the water rising to her waist, then her chest, then her throat— how she would faint just as the rescuers reached her and would have to be carried out to the boat.

  “No,” said Wally. “It was never that high.”

  Both Eddie and Jake were glum as they headed for school because Jake, too, wanted to try out for the baseball team, and they certainly couldn't do it in the rain. The rest of the crew was in good spirits, however.

  “You know what we ought to do?” said Josh. “We each ought to put our name and phone number in a bottle and float them down the river. We could ask the people who find them to call and tell us where they were found, and whoever's bottle travels farthest by the end of the month wins.”

  “Wins what?” said Wally, who loved fooling around and liked the idea.

  “Well, whoever wins could be king or queen for the day,” suggested Josh.

  “Queen of what ?” asked Caroline.

  “King or queen of the rest of us. The rest of us would have to be his slaves for a day and do whatever he wanted.”

  “Oh no you don't!” said Eddie. “If one of you guys wins, you'll make us do
all kinds of gross things.”

  “Okay, they have to be things within reason,” said Josh. “And the bottles should all be the same size. Maybe Mom could get some for us.”

  “Sounds fun!” said Beth.

  “We'd better do it while the water's flowing fast, though,” said Wally. “The bottles will go farther then.”

  “They might even get to the ocean!” Peter cried excitedly.

  “And then one of them could be picked up by a ship at sea!” Caroline said dreamily. “I could be sitting in a chair at breakfast, calmly eating my cereal, and get a ship-to-shore message from a handsome captain of an ocean liner saying that he was coming to West Virginia to meet the maiden who had put her name in a bottle.”

  The others laughed.

  “Or maybe he'd call to say that as soon as he read the name Caroline Malloy, he threw the bottle back in the ocean and washed his hands with soap and water,” Jake teased.

  It was hard to concentrate on schoolwork when there were notes to be sealed in bottles, Caroline thought. Her desk was right behind Wally Hatford's, and when she had nothing better to do, she would trace letters or words on Wally's back with the end of her ruler and dot the i 's with her pencil. Or she would blow on the back of his neck and whisper romantic words, just to see his ears turn red.

  But this morning she was content to stare out the window as rain trickled down the pane, and imagined a lonely aspirin bottle adrift at sea with a tiny piece of paper rolled up inside it. She imagined the handsome sea captain in his blue-and-white uniform bending over the side of the boat to scoop it up, and—

  “Caroline?”

  The voice of the teacher suddenly intruded, and Caroline blinked and snapped to attention.

  “The answer, please?” said Miss Applebaum.

  #x201C;The Ohio River?” Caroline said quickly.

  “What?” said the teacher as the class turned to stare.

  “The … the Gulf of Mexico?” Caroline bleated.

  “Caroline, we happen to be doing long division, and I assure you that if you divided four thousand, six hundred and sixty-eight by twelve, you would not get the Gulf of Mexico,” the teacher said. “Not even the Ohio River.”

  Two

  A Horrible Thought

  Wally took off his jacket, soaked through with rain, and hung it on a hook by the back door. He and his brothers kicked off their wet sneakers and left them in a heap against the wall.

  All the way home from school that day Wally had been thinking about the bottle race they were going to have on the Buckman River. At last his brothers were going to do something that interested him for a change. Not dump dead birds and squirrels on the girls' side of the river. Not howl outside the Malloys' windows at night, trying to frighten them into going back to Ohio so that the Bensons would return. The Benson brothers were the best friends the Hatfords had ever had, and it had been a sad day when Coach Benson moved his family to Georgia for a year and Coach Malloy moved his family to Buckman. Into the Bensons' house, no less!

  Putting notes in bottles to see how far they would travel on the river was just the kind of thing Wally Hatford loved to do, however. But he couldn't help suspecting that Caroline would try to do something crazy and turn the race into a theatrical performance, starring … who else? Caroline Malloy!

  In some ways, Wally was a loner. He could entertain himself for an hour just blowing fog on a windowpane and tracing designs in it. He could spend half an afternoon in summer lying on the porch on his stomach with his face over the side, watching ants trying to carry a bread crumb to their anthill. He seemed to live a life half in and half outside his head and didn't always need other people around to make him happy.

  The boys had barely started across the kitchen when the phone rang. Wally, who was closest, picked it up. Even before the person on the line said a word, Wally said, “We're all here, Mom, and nobody's been murdered or anything.”

  Their mother always phoned the house as soon as she thought they'd be home from school, to be sure everyone was accounted for. She worked in a hardware store, and Mr. Hatford was a mail carrier, so the boys were on their own for a while each day after school.

  “There's a little potato salad and some Swiss cheese in the fridge,” Mrs. Hatford said in answer. “But don't touch the chicken. That's our dinner.”

  “Okay,” said Wally. “If you have any homework, now is a good time to do it, with all this rain,” said his mother.

  “Okay,” Wally said again. Then he told her about the bottle race, and Mrs. Hatford promised to bring home seven white plastic bottles with tight-fitting lids.

  Jake got out the potato salad and Josh found the cheese. Peter had discovered a half-eaten box of animal crackers in his closet and was sitting at the table, swinging his legs and humming a song while he chewed.

  “We should all throw our bottles into the water at the exact same time to make the race fair,” said Josh, stuffing some cheese into his mouth.

  Jake, however, grinned as he set a box of crackers on the table. “Who says the race has to be fair? Who says we couldn't put messages in a whole bunch of bottles and send them out on the other side of Island Avenue a day or two sooner to give them a head start?”

  “That would be cheating!” said Wally.

  For once, Josh agreed with him. “I don't want to do that, Jake. I'd really like to see whose bottle goes the farthest when they all begin at the same place at the same time.”

  Jake folded a slice of cheese over a cracker and opened a can of pop. Each boy was allowed only one can of pop a day. “Well, if my bottle goes farthest,” he said, “I'm going to make everyone do my homework.”

  “If I'm King for a Day, everyone will have to do all my chores around the house,” said Josh.

  Wally thought about what he would most like the others to do. “If my bottle goes farthest, you each have to give me your can of pop for the day,” he said.

  “If my bottle wins, everybody has to bake a big, big batch of cookies all for me!” crowed Peter, beaming at the thought.

  The boys chewed awhile longer, smiling as each imagined himself King for a Day. And then Wally had a thought—a terrible, awful thought. Maybe it wouldn't be a king at all. Maybe it would be a queen.

  He looked around the table. “What if one of the girls' bottles goes the farthest?” he said. “What if it's Caroline's?”

  The smiles disappeared from the boys' faces. If Eddie was queen, she might make them do something dangerous, like crawl high up in a tree to get a squirrel's nest. If Beth was queen, she'd probably order them to make her lunch. But if Caroline Lenore Malloy was queen, she would dress the boys in ruffled shirts and knee breeches and make them carry her down Main Street on a throne.

  “We can't let that happen!” said Jake. “It would be murder!”

  The phone rang again, and this time Jake answered. “Hello?” he said. Wally watched as a slow grin spread across his brother's face. “Sure!” Jake said. And then, after a minute, “Sure! Okay.”

  When he hung up, he said, “The girls are on their way over. Eddie wants to make some rules for the contest.”

  “Okay by me,” said Josh.

  But Jake's eyes narrowed. “How do we know the girls aren't planning to cheat? How do we know they aren't going to put their bottles in the river ahead of ours? Eddie's up to something, you can bet.”

  Wally slumped down in his chair. The cracker he had been chewing stuck to the roof of his mouth. The war between the Hatfords and the Malloys would go on forever and ever, he was sure of it, until either his family or theirs left Buckman.

  Three

  Deal

  “What are you saying ?” Beth asked Eddie as they sat in Beth's room after school, watching the rain stream down the second-story window.

  Caroline, sitting on the floor playing jacks, thought her oldest sister was like a tiger, the way Eddie paced back and forth upstairs from one room to another. The rain made Eddie crazy.

  “I just don't trust thos
e Hatfords,” Eddie said. “You know they're going to rig this race so that one of their bottles will get a head start. We shouldn't have agreed to this slave business.”

  “Oh, it might not be so bad,” said Beth hopefully. “If Josh got to be king, it might be fun. Besides, what if one of us wins?”

  “That's what we have to make happen,” said Eddie. “We've got to make sure one of our bottles goes the farthest by April thirtieth.”

  Caroline's hand dropped, and the little red ball rolled under Beth's bed. “But that would be cheating!” she said.

  “So do you think that's going to stop them?” said Eddie. “They would never have agreed to this if they didn't know they could rig it to win.”

  “Then I don't want to do it if it's not a fair race,” said Beth.

  “If they're going to cheat, I'll cheat, but not if they're not,” said Caroline, not quite sure of what she'd just said.

  “How are we going to know?” asked Beth.

  Eddie plopped down on the bed. “Here's what we'll do.” She outlined a plan, and five minutes later she called the Hatford boys to say that the girls were on their way over with a contract.

  In their yellow rain slickers the three Malloy sisters pulled on their boots in the kitchen.

  “Where are you off to?” asked Mrs. Malloy from the dining room, where income-tax forms covered the table.

  “We're just going over to the Hatfords' to make some rules for a bottle race on the river,” Eddie said.

  “Well, don't get too near the water,” their mother called after them. “The river's starting to go down, but it's still fairly high.”

  “We won't,” said Caroline.

  The river and sky were gray, but there was a feathery fog of green on the trees—only wisps of leaves, the lightest of greens and yellows. The girls slogged down to the bridge, crossed over, and went up the sidewalk to the Hatfords' porch.

  Josh opened the door. “Hi, come in,” he said. They stopped to deposit their boots on the porch. Inside, the boys were waiting for them, and Peter offered the remains of his animal crackers.