September Surprises

  “Yeah. There’s still plenty to do,” said Olivia.

  Nikki was aware of a rift between Ruby and the rest of them. Not a great one — not a chasm or a gulf — but something subtle and unpleasant that separated younger from older. And she realized that she didn’t necessarily want to be on the older side. But there she was.

  “Come on. I’ll race you guys to the maze!” shouted Flora then, and Nikki and her friends took off running. Along the way, they passed a ring with four ponies plodding around and around, each ridden by a nervously happy child. Ruby looked longingly at the ponies. And Nikki thought, I’ll come back here. I’ll come back to Davidson’s with Mae and she can ride a pony and the carousel and I’ll watch her, just like I watched her sit in Santa’s lap. It will be almost as much fun.

  Homework time was sacred to Olivia. She cherished it and she guarded it. This year, because she had so much homework, she had made a sign that she hung on her closed bedroom door whenever she was studying. The sign read WOMAN AT WORK. Olivia’s parents and brothers knew not to disturb her when the sign was displayed.

  On Sunday evening, Olivia, door closed, was seated in front of her computer, working on a composition titled “Why I Like Dogs.” Olivia was more than competent at writing, but it didn’t come as easily to her as other subjects did. Plus, because Olivia did not have a dog, she was having a bit of difficulty with the assignment. This wasn’t a topic she would have chosen for herself. She had, in fact, drawn it out of a hat during English class on Friday, and she hadn’t been able to trade for a different topic. As each student had pulled a slip of paper from the hat, he or she had been asked to read the topic aloud, and Mr. Barnes had kept a list of students and their topics. Jacob — lucky Jacob — had drawn a piece of paper with the words “Dreams and Nightmares” on it. He had confessed to Olivia at lunch that day that he wished he had chosen Olivia’s subject. “Oh, and I wish I had chosen yours,” she had assured him.

  Now here she was, thinking about dogs she knew, and the people who owned them, and why they liked the dogs, and attempting to make the whole subject interesting and maybe even a bit funny. She was trying to finish a sentence she had started with — “I think dogs have a sense of humor because” — when she heard a knock at her door.

  “Hello! The sign is hanging!” called Olivia.

  “I know. I’m sorry,” she heard Henry reply. “But there’s a phone call for you. It’s that girl Melody again. I told her about your sign and she’s still on the phone. I’d hang up, but I already did that once and she called back.”

  Olivia heaved an annoyed sigh. “That’s okay, Henry.” She got up from her desk and opened her door. She was about to add “Melody is a major pain,” when she realized that Henry was holding the phone out to her. Olivia put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Did Melody hear what you just said?” she hissed.

  Henry shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Olivia took the phone into her room and closed the door behind her. She felt her heart begin to pound, and she drew in a deep breath. She had done Melody’s science homework for her on Tuesday and her math homework for her in Thursday’s study period, and she had fielded phone calls from her on Wednesday and Friday nights. Olivia had hoped not to hear from her again until at least Monday, but now Melody was on the phone and Olivia felt like a trapped animal.

  She let her breath out and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Why didn’t you talk to me when I called before?” was Melody’s reply.

  “I didn’t know you had called. My brother didn’t tell me.” Olivia added, “My family knows I don’t like to be disturbed when I’m doing my homework.”

  Olivia heard a noise at the other end of the phone that she couldn’t quite identify. A snort? A laugh?

  “Well, all I need is ten minutes of your pre — of your time,” said Melody.

  “Okay …”

  “Tell me the answers to the science questions.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “All right, please tell me the answers to the science questions.”

  Olivia’s stomach took on an unpleasant hollow feeling. There were so many, many things wrong with what Melody was demanding of her. Olivia suddenly saw them all clearly, as if someone had listed them on a blackboard for her:

  The list went on and on, but Olivia was jerked back to reality when she heard Melody say sweetly, “I said ‘please.’”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking. Melody … the answer is no.”

  “What?”

  “The answer is no. I can’t tell you the answers to the questions. In fact, I can’t help you with your homework anymore. Not at school and not over the phone.”

  “Olivia, that really is not very nice. I think you’re being awfully selfish. We’re friends. You’re smart. I need help. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Well, actually,” said Olivia, “I think there’s another way to look at the problem. You should be getting help from our teachers or from a tutor, not from me. Last year, when my brother Jack needed help with his reading, my parents talked to his teacher and they found a tutor for him. He saw the tutor twice a week for —”

  “Are you kidding?” interrupted Melody.

  “What?”

  “You’re really not going to help me?”

  “Melody, this isn’t ‘help.’ What we’re doing is … cheating.”

  “So?”

  “So? So I’m not going to do it anymore.” Olivia paused, then said what she had wanted to say to Melody five days earlier. “And you can’t make me.”

  There was such a long silence from Melody’s end of the line that Olivia actually held the phone out and shook it. When she put it to her ear again, she heard Melody saying, “… going to regret this. Because you’re right, I can’t make you do my work. But I can make you wish we never had this conversation.” Olivia said nothing. “Olivia? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to change your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Whatever happens, remember what you said to me tonight … friend.”

  The line went dead. Olivia pressed the OFF button and let the phone slip onto her bed.

  “Uh-oh,” she whispered.

  The moment Nikki stepped off the school bus on Monday morning and caught sight of Olivia and Flora, who were waiting for her near the bicycle racks, she sensed trouble.

  “Hi,” she called to them. “What’s wrong?”

  “How can you tell something’s wrong?” asked Flora.

  “Your faces. You look like you just glimpsed, um,” (Nikki tried to conjure up an appropriate image) “death,” she finished.

  Flora smiled, but Olivia remained solemn.

  “Come on,” said Nikki. “Tell me.”

  Olivia sat down heavily on one of the bike racks. “Melody called last night. She wanted me to help her again —”

  “She didn’t just want help,” interrupted Flora. “She wanted Olivia to give her all the answers to their science assignment. Just give them to her.”

  “And I said no,” Olivia continued. “I said I wasn’t going to help her anymore. If you can call it help. Not over the phone and not in school.”

  “But that’s great!” exclaimed Nikki.

  Olivia shook her head. “I don’t think so. Melody said I was going to regret it.”

  “What’s she going to do? Tell the teachers you won’t cheat?”

  “She could tell them I already cheated. And you know she’s going to tell her friends about last night. They can make things difficult for me. I don’t know exactly what Melody is going to do, but she’s going to do something.”

  “We’ll protect you,” said Nikki.

  “Thanks,” replied Olivia. “Maybe I should get a bodyguard,” she added as a towering upperclassman brushed by them.

  “You’re coming to the meeting this afternoon, aren’t you?” asked Nikki.

  “What?” said Olivia, her mind on Melody. “Oh, yeah. The book cl
ub meeting. Yeah, I’ll be there.”

  “Hey!” exclaimed Flora. “You know what I forgot to tell you guys? I found out that Mr. Barnes lives across the street from Aunt Allie.”

  “No way,” said Nikki.

  “Yup. I saw him going into his house when Min drove Ruby and me over there.”

  “Cool,” said Nikki. “I think he’s my favorite teacher.”

  “Mine, too,” said Flora.

  “Mine, too,” said Olivia.

  Nikki found it difficult to concentrate in school that day. She was mad at Melody, on Olivia’s behalf. She spent some time worrying about what sort of revenge Melody might try to exact. Then her mind drifted to the meeting that afternoon — the first actual meeting of the book club — and she wondered if it would be a success. What if no one showed up? Well, that was silly. Nikki knew that plenty of kids were planning to attend. Her thoughts returned to Melody. And revenge.

  When school ended that day, Nikki slammed her locker shut and went off in search of Olivia and Flora. She caught up with Olivia outside the door to Mr. Barnes’s room. “How was your afternoon?” she asked her. “Did anything happen? Hey, look how many kids are here!”

  “Nothing happened,” replied Olivia. “Wow, this is great, Nikki.”

  Every seat in the classroom was already taken, and more kids were squeezing onto windowsills and lining up along the back wall. Nikki saw Claudette and Mary Louise and Jacob.

  Olivia sighed. “No Melody or Tanya, thank goodness,” she whispered.

  Mr. Barnes clapped his hands then, and Nikki hurried to the back of the room, followed by Olivia and, a few moments later, Flora.

  “So,” began Mr. Barnes, smiling, “this is a great turnout. I’m glad to see all of you here. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the book club, and I’ve decided that while I will act as your advisor and be on hand at each meeting to give you guidance and answer questions, you should run the club yourselves. And that’s what we need to talk about today: how the club will work. How will you select the books you’ll read? How often will you meet? What will you do at meetings?” He spread his hands wide. “So. Any thoughts? Let’s start with book selection. How will you do that?”

  Jacob raised his hand. “We could take turns choosing the books.”

  “We could nominate a few books each month and vote on one,” said Mary Louise.

  “Can we choose any book at all, or does it have to be, like, age appropriate?” asked a boy sitting on a windowsill.

  Flora raised her hand and said timidly, “Are we only going to read fiction, or could we choose a biography or poetry or something?”

  At that point, everyone began to talk at once, and Mr. Barnes held up his hand like a police officer stopping a car at an intersection. Nikki thought he was going to ask for quiet, but all he said was, “There’s a lot to think about, isn’t there? Let’s go back to the selection process. I heard one suggestion for taking turns choosing and one for voting at each meeting. Thoughts?”

  Jacob raised his hand again. “I just realized something. There are thirty-four of us here, and even if we met every two weeks — which is probably too often — not everyone would get a turn to choose a book by the end of the year. So maybe voting is a better idea.”

  “What do the rest of you think?” asked Mr. Barnes.

  There was general consent, and then a girl in the front row said, “How are we going to nominate the books, though? We can’t each nominate one. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  The discussion continued. When Mr. Barnes said, “We’d better wrap things up in ten minutes,” Nikki looked at the clock on the wall and couldn’t believe how much time had gone by. She had thoroughly enjoyed the meeting and was pleased with the decisions that had been reached: to meet once a month; to open each meeting with a discussion of the book that had just been read; to then break into groups of four or five, each group being responsible for nominating one title; to vote on the new book by the end of the meeting; to be able to read all kinds of books; and (this was Mr. Barnes’s suggestion) to consider having two book-related field trips each year. They planned to meet again on the following Monday in order to choose their first book.

  “This is going to be so cool!” exclaimed Nikki as she left Mr. Barnes’s room with Flora, Olivia, Claudette, and Jacob.

  “I can’t wait —” Olivia started to say and then stopped short.

  “What?” said Claudette.

  “Nothing,” muttered Olivia.

  Nikki followed Olivia’s gaze and caught sight of Melody and Tanya down the hall. They were watching the kids stream out of the classroom.

  “Ha!” exclaimed Flora. “Melody doesn’t look too happy about how many kids went to the meeting. She thought the club was a stupid idea.”

  Nikki turned to Olivia who, eyes averted from Melody, was now looking over a book list with Jacob. “Huh,” said Nikki. “I have a feeling that’s not the only thing she’s unhappy about.”

  Olivia had half expected to get a phone call from Melody on Monday night — one final demand for help — but the call didn’t come. In fact, the phone rang only twice that evening, both times for Mrs. Walter. Maybe, thought Olivia as she slid under her covers and turned out her reading light, the incident with Melody was over. She had a strong suspicion that Melody wouldn’t speak to her again, which was fine with her. But revenge? Melody was probably bluffing. After all, this was just plain old Central in plain old Camden Falls, not a made-for-TV movie. Or perhaps Melody’s revenge was simply to leave Olivia expecting revenge — dreading every ring of the phone, wondering what was around every corner, both literally and figuratively. Ha, thought Olivia. She had trumped Melody, figured her out. Revenge by no revenge. That was fairly lame. But when would Olivia know that no revenge was ever going to be forthcoming? In a week? A month? By the end of the school year? And that, she realized bleakly, was the beauty of such a heavily veiled threat.

  “Did you hear anything from Melody?” Flora asked Olivia as they hurried down Main Street the next morning.

  Olivia peered longingly into the window of Cover to Cover, which featured a display of books about mammals. “I wish I knew more about skeletons,” she remarked. She turned back to Flora. “Melody? Nope. Not a word. I don’t think she’s going to call again.” Olivia didn’t add that Melody’s very silence may have indicated the brilliance of her revenge.

  “Aren’t you sort of wondering what’s going to happen?” asked Flora.

  “Mm. Let’s not talk about it.”

  Olivia and Flora reached Central early enough to meet Nikki’s bus. The three friends chatted outside and finally made their way through the front entrance. “See you!” they called to one another.

  Olivia ran to the second floor. At her locker, she put on her usual show of twisting the dial around and around. She had made up a pretend combination for the lock — 8-19-41 — and hoped that she appeared wonderfully casual and nonchalant as she turned the knob once to the right, then twice around in the other direction, then to the right again, carefully stopping at 41. Bingo! her hands seemed to say as, with a flourish, she pulled the door open. Olivia stashed all but two of her books on the shelf. Then she placed her completed homework assignments in a special folder (labeled, appropriately, HOMEWORK), laid the folder on top of the books, closed her locker, and, just to complete the show, twisted the useless dial several times before hurrying down the hall.

  She had not so much as glimpsed Melody.

  Later that morning, Olivia stopped by her locker to switch books and to pick up her homework assignments for her next two classes. She grabbed a notebook and her science text, then opened the folder.

  Olivia had placed her assignments in the HOMEWORK folder in the order in which she would need them. Her science paper (Miss Allen’s assignment the previous day had been to answer eight questions about the periodic table of elements) should now have been on the top. It wasn’t. Strange that it was out of order. Olivia shuffled through the other pages in t
he folder. No science assignment. Where could it be? She had spent an hour on it the night before and she distinctly remembered putting it in the folder that morning. Panic rising, she knelt on the floor and shuffled through her notebook, then paged through the science book. Nothing and nothing. The bell was about to ring again. Olivia scrabbled through every book in the locker and shoved aside an umbrella and a jacket she’d forgotten about, but found no assignment.

  And then, in that strange way that thoughts have of jumping into your mind, she saw with great clarity exactly what had happened to her assignment. Melody must have figured out, probably days and days ago, that Olivia couldn’t lock her locker, and she had simply opened it sometime that morning, located the assignment (Olivia now regretted the boldly labeled folder), and removed it. If she had done that early enough in the morning, she would have had time to copy it over in her own writing. So. Melody had found a way to get science assignments out of Olivia after all. And Olivia now had no work of her own to hand in.

  So much for the theory of revenge by no revenge.

  Somewhat to her surprise, Olivia discovered that she was angry rather than frightened. She practically stomped all the way to her science class. By the time she reached the door, she had decided several things: 1. She was not going to tell on Melody, mainly because she couldn’t prove what had happened, but also because she had a fuzzily formed suspicion that it would be better not to let on that she had figured out what Melody was up to. 2. Rather than appear upset in class, she was simply going to tell Miss Allen that she must have left her work at home and ask if she could hand it in the next day. 3. She was going to get revenge of her own on Melody. She didn’t know how she was going to accomplish this, but with the help of Nikki, Flora, and Ruby, she knew she would find a way.

  Olivia entered her science classroom and walked to her desk. As soon as she sat down, she began to page through her books as though searching for her assignment, which she had just discovered was not in its folder. When Miss Allen said, “Homework, please,” Olivia raised her hand.