Ellie, Engineer

  “Excuse me,” she said to the garage sale lady, who was picking up the clothing that had been knocked to the ground. “I’d like to buy this.” Ellie held up a water-ski rope.

  “That’s a quarter,” the lady said.

  “I’m going to use it to catch that dog,” Ellie explained.

  “That’s free, then,” the lady said, looking huffy. Ellie took off running with the rope—but not toward Toby and the neighborhood boys he’d gathered, and not toward Muffintop.

  “Where are you going?” Toby shouted across the lawns.

  “Chase him toward your backyard!” she shouted to Toby. “And bring a snack!”

  “But my backyard doesn’t have a fence! And what kind of snack?” Toby yelled, but Ellie didn’t answer. She had to beat the boys and Muffintop to Toby’s backyard, and fast. She ran through the yards, dress and tool belt and water-ski rope flailing out behind her, kicking up newly mowed grass. She slid into Toby’s backyard. There was the soccer goal the boys had been using yesterday. There was no time to sketch this project out, so she just had to imagine the way she’d draw it.

  Ellie scrambled up a tree (she was basically an expert tree climber). It was another minute or two before she heard Muffintop’s barking and the neighborhood boys’ shouting. They were coming! Ellie crouched low and watched Muffintop dash by underneath her. He was still wearing his pants-scarf. Ellie wondered if the garage sale lady would want it back.

  “Psssst!” she whispered when Toby and the boys walked underneath her tree. They looked up, confused. “Did you bring a snack?” she asked Toby.

  Dylan held up a bag of potato chips.

  “Perfect,” Ellie said. “Open them and sprinkle them in the soccer goal.”

  “Huh?” Dylan asked.

  “Just do it!” Toby told him. Dylan darted forward and tore open the bag of chips. Muffintop, who was disappointed no one was chasing him, was sniffing around the back of Toby’s yard.

  “Aw, man. I thought we were going to eat them,” one of the McClellan twins said as the chips fell to the ground.

  “Now what?” Toby asked as Dylan returned.

  “Stand back,” Ellie said. The neighborhood boys and Toby looked a little confused, but they stepped back. Muffintop sniffed closer and closer and closer to the soccer goal. Then a gentle breeze blew, and Muffintop caught the scent of the potato chips. He sniffed at the air, then followed his nose to the goal. There, he lowered his tomato-stained snout to the ground and began to happily crunch up all the chips, tail wagging.

  “I bet they’re really good,” a McClellan said, pouting.

  “Almost . . . almost . . . ,” Ellie muttered to herself. There! She pulled hard on the water-ski rope. The rope snapped tight, pulled round the deck, across the lawn, to the goal. The goal fell over! Muffintop was trapped inside.

  “Wherever did he acquire a pair of pants?” Mrs. Carter asked when they brought Muffintop back to her.

  “It’s sort of a long story,” Toby said. “But here he is! Sorry about that, Mrs. Carter.”

  “Thank you all for bringing him back. Come along now, Muffintop—is that a potato chip stuck to your fur?” Mrs. Carter said, hauling Muffintop inside by the collar.

  “Wait, wait—Mrs. Carter, can we still have some of that wood we were getting? You know, before Muffintop got out? For Ellie’s doghouse?” Toby said.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Carter said. “Yes, yes. Of course. Just go around back and grab whatever you see. I’ll keep Muffintop inside this time, just to be safe.”

  “A doghouse?” one of the boys asked as soon as Mrs. Carter shut the door.

  “Yep,” Toby said. “Ellie’s building one. She’s really good at building stuff.”

  “I’m an engineer,” Ellie explained.

  “Isn’t that the person who drives the train?” Dylan asked.

  “That’s a different sort of engineer,” Ellie said.

  “Can we help?” the McClellan twins asked.

  Ellie frowned. This was turning into a big project, with so many people wanting to help. Plus, she wasn’t so sure she trusted the neighborhood boys when they were all together like this. Boys, as far as she could tell, were sort of like rabbits. One was fine and maybe even interesting to play with, but a whole bunch of them would just be a lot of jumping and running and smelling. Plus, if they—the boys, not the rabbits—started being jerks again, she’d have to fight with them or, worse, start over on her own with the doghouse.

  “How about I promise to come get you if we need help?” Ellie asked. “And we might. This is a big project.”

  Dylan and the McClellan twins were kind of disappointed, but they agreed and went back to their houses. Meanwhile, Ellie and Toby gathered up all the spare deck wood that they’d thrown to the ground when the Muffintop chase began. They carried it back to Toby’s backyard and dropped it in the grass.

  Toby watched as Ellie drew her doghouse plans. She wanted to use the best parts of all the doghouses she’d studied that day. The shingles on the roof from one. The little deck on the side from another. The border around the door, and the tiny ramp, and maybe the window on one side.

  “Wow. Will it look just like that? Because that looks really good,” Toby said.

  “Mostly. Sometimes you have to make stuff up on the spot when you’re engineering,” Ellie explained.

  “That’s called improvising,” Toby said, and Ellie was getting so used to him being a know-it-all that she didn’t even think about rolling her eyes at him.

  Ellie left Toby to sort out the wood they’d collected as she hurried to the workshop, thinking through all the stuff they’d need along the way. A saw (not the electric one, since she wasn’t allowed to use that without an adult), a level, some more nails, her builder’s square (which wasn’t a square at all—it was a triangle—so it was sort of a weird name). By the time she got everything and made it back to Toby’s house, she saw that he was drinking an orange soda, standing over the spare wood from Mrs. Carter. He’d sorted it into piles according to length.

  “It’s important to stay organized,” Toby explained. “People who are organized are way more efficient than people who aren’t. If you’d been longer, I’d have color coded them—that’s when you assign a color to each piece.”

  “Right,” Ellie said. She laid down the sketch of the doghouse so she could see it. First things first—the bottom. She’d start there and build up to the roof.

  She grabbed a big flat piece of wood from Toby’s pile—that would be a good floor. She nailed a couple of smaller pieces of wood onto the bottom side as a base, so that it wasn’t just sitting flat on the ground. This way water wouldn’t soak into Miss Penelope’s house through the dirt. Then she began nailing in pieces for the walls.

  “Did you take a special class in engineering? Does it meet every week? My karate class meets every week. So if engineering class is on Thursdays, I can’t go,” Toby said, watching.

  Ellie shook her head. “You don’t need a special class to build things. Maybe to build really big things, like skyscrapers or lasers, but you can build things just for fun.”

  “What happens if they don’t work?”

  “You build something new,” Ellie said, shrugging. “Just like how sometimes you have to use a whole bunch of construction paper before you make a really good drawing.” She stuck her pencil behind her ear. “We need something for this wall—we won’t have enough wood. And something for the roof, since we don’t have shingles. Something waterproof . . .” Ellie thought for a moment. What was waterproof? The big thick leaves off the magnolia trees, but they would probably crumble up eventually. Plastic bags, but that wasn’t very pretty, and Miss Penelope was probably going to be a very pretty sort of dog. Metal, but where would she find a bunch of metal? She turned to Toby—

  “That’s it!” she said, and grabbed the orange soda from his hand. “Do you have more of these?”

  “I’m only allowed one per day,” Toby said.

  “More cans, I mean
,” Ellie explained.

  Toby led her to the recycling bin, which was full of orange soda cans. He finished the can he was drinking and tossed it in with the others. “What do we need a bunch of old cans for?”

  “Not cans,” Ellie said. “Shingles.”

  “Those are cans.”

  “But they’ll be shingles for us.”

  “But they’re cans—”

  “Toby!” Ellie said impatiently. “Do you want to learn how to build things or not? Sometimes you have to improvise. I used exercise bands on the water balloon launcher, and those worked just fine for soaking you, didn’t they?”

  Toby nodded, remembering. “Okay. How many cans do we need?”

  “Bunches. And some sharp scissors.”

  She and Toby carefully cut the cans in half, then flattened them by jumping up and down on them. It took the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon too—Ellie really wished she could ask Kit to come help and make it all go faster, but of course, she couldn’t. When they were finally done, they had almost a hundred flat orange soda cans. Ellie nailed them onto the roof one by one.

  “Here’s a problem, though,” Ellie said as they stood back and admired their work. “It needs to be fancy.”

  “It’s already awfully fancy,” Toby said, nodding toward the soda-can shingles.

  “No, I mean pretty fancy. You know. With flowers and sparkles and stuff—fancy like Kit is.”

  “Oh! Right.” Toby frowned. “I might have some stickers we could put on the walls. They have scratch-n-sniff hotdogs on them.”

  “I don’t really think hotdog-smelling stickers are Kit’s sort of fancy. That’s nice of you to offer though,” Ellie said politely.

  Toby shrugged, like he couldn’t see why anyone wouldn’t be interested in hotdog-scented stickers.

  “Normally,” Ellie went on quickly, “I’d ask Kit to do the fancying. She’s good at drawing and putting stripes and paint and cushions on stuff. But I can’t do that since it’s a surprise.”

  “Maybe we could trace something,” Toby suggested. “Like trace our hands to make turkeys.”

  “Turkeys are nice, but I really wanted the big part to have flowers on the wall, like in Kit’s bedroom.”

  “I can’t draw flowers,” Toby said.

  “Me neither,” Ellie answered. She thought for a moment—who did she know, other than Kit, who could draw?

  Of course. Ellie couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this before!

  She turned to Toby. “I think I might have an idea. I’ll go work on that, and maybe we can meet up tomorrow to keep working?”

  “Good,” Toby said, standing up and dusting off his hands. “Engineering really takes it out of you. Tomorrow maybe we should bring snacks. It’s good for your blood sugar to eat snacks.”

  “Sure—I’ll bring snacks. See you tomorrow!” she said, then took off at a run.

  It was late in the afternoon, the part of the day where the sun wasn’t burning you up but the air was still fat and heavy. Ellie cut around the neighborhood, through the school playground and along the fence to a house with a fancy front porch and a swimming pool in the back. There was nothing on it that needed fixing, even though if it had been Ellie’s, she probably would have built a pulley to bring the mail right up to the front porch, since the hill it sat on was really steep and sort of a pain to walk up.

  The house belonged to McKinley Caplan (or, technically, to her parents), but Ellie knew McKinley would have her two best friends, Madison and Taylor, over—they were basically always together in the summer, sort of like Ellie and Kit. Madison, Taylor, and McKinley were also in Mrs. Funderburk’s class, but they were the kind of girls Ellie was mostly friends with only at school. There was nothing wrong with them—they were perfectly nice, and they always went to each other’s birthday and pool parties—it was just that they didn’t have so much in common during the summer, when school was out. Madison, Taylor, and McKinley drew and made their own comic book, called The Presidents since their names were also the names of presidents of the United States (the characters in the comic were superhero president versions of themselves). Ellie liked to read their comic books, but she had trouble sitting still for as long as it took to draw one on her own. Besides, Ellie wasn’t the name of any president so far, so it’d mess up the title.

  McKinley answered the door when Ellie knocked. “Guys, Ellie Bell’s here!” she called back toward the kitchen, and Madison and Taylor hurried down the hall.

  “Hi,” Ellie said to all of them. “I know you’re probably working on a comic, so I’ll be super quick. Remember how I’m an engineer?”

  “Really? Oh! Wait! I remember! You brought that hammer to class last year and got in trouble!” McKinley said brightly.

  “Wait, what? I wasn’t in your class last year,” Madison said, looking between the two of them.

  Ellie sighed. “I brought a hammer for show-and-tell.”

  “And hammers aren’t allowed?” Madison asked.

  “The hammer was okay, I guess, but what really got me in trouble was nailing something into the teacher’s desk. It was just a tiny little nail, and it popped right out. I was only trying to do a demonstration.”

  “It was the coolest show-and-tell, even though she got a note sent home,” McKinley assured Madison and Taylor. This made Ellie grin.

  “Well, anyway—I’m an engineer, and I’m building something for Kit’s birthday party on Saturday, and wanted to see if you could help with part of it.” She reached into her tool belt for her notebook, then flipped it open to show them the sketch of Miss Penelope’s house. The girls clustered around it. They looked impressed.

  “What do you need help with?” Madison asked.

  “I thought it’d be nice to put wallpaper inside, like the flowery stuff in Kit’s bedroom. You know, so it matches? But I can’t draw flowers. Normally I’d ask Kit, but since it’s a present for her . . .”

  “Oh!” Madison said. “I think we can do that. If we have enough construction paper.”

  “I know where the emergency school-supply drawer is,” McKinley said. “We can raid it if we need extra. We can do this in no time. Can you leave the sketch with us, so we know about how many flowers we need to draw to cover the walls?”

  “Oh, hmm,” Ellie said, looking at the sketch. “I would, but we need this one for the build.”

  “We?” McKinley asked. “Who’s helping you?”

  Ellie bit her lip. The Presidents didn’t get along with the neighborhood boys—Toby included. Sometimes the boys made fun of the comic book, and other times The Presidents made fun of how much the boys liked soccer. Ellie wasn’t so sure she should tell them Toby was helping her build the doghouse—The Presidents might not want to help anymore, or maybe they’d be mad or grossed out or think Ellie only wanted to play with the boys now. It’d probably be easier, she decided, to just not say anything about Toby.

  “Oh, I just meant we like you three and me, that’s all,” she said.

  “Oh! Well, we can just draw lots and lots of flowers to be sure there’s enough. Besides, you can never have too many spare flowers,” Madison said. “This is such a cool present.”

  “Yep,” Ellie said. “Kit is going to love it!”

  “Oh! Ellie! I didn’t know you were over here,” a grown-up voice said. It was Mrs. Caplan, McKinley’s mom. “I heard a rumor about you, Miss Bell. Is it true you launched water balloons at all those boys yesterday?”

  “You did what?” Taylor asked.

  “It’s true,” Ellie said, not sure if she was in trouble with Mrs. Caplan or not.

  Mrs. Caplan smiled. “That sounds like it was a lot of fun. Though you aren’t here to build another water balloon launcher, are you?”

  “No, Mrs. Caplan,” Ellie said.

  “But can she?” McKinley asked. “Please, Mom? We never get to soak the boys! And they always deserve it.”

  “Maybe another day,” Mrs. Caplan said. “You kids have fun! And put my go
od scissors back where you found them, McKinley. I know you’ve been using them.”

  “Sorry, Mom!” McKinley said, while Taylor and Madison giggled. McKinley turned back to Ellie. “Those boys are so gross. I’m glad you soaked them. They’ve been playing Ding Dong Ditch over here all week because they know we’re on a deadline with this week’s comic book.”

  Ding Dong Ditch was a pretty stupid game, if you asked Ellie—you ran up, rang someone’s doorbell, then ran away. Where was the fun in that? Making someone answer their door? Ellie had never understood it, but the neighborhood boys played it every summer all the same. They never got in trouble either, since they’d each say someone else did the actual ding-donging. Ellie supposed Toby was missing the game since he was helping out with the doghouse, and she wondered if The Presidents might like him if they knew that.

  “Can you build something that will throw those boys off the porch when they try to ring the bell? Like a giant spring that boings them away?” Taylor said, rubbing her fingers together at the thought.

  “That’s probably pretty dangerous. And I don’t know where to get a spring that big,” Ellie said, considering it. “But I have an idea. Not to stop them, but to catch them. I bet if one of them gets in trouble, the others will stop.”

  “Okay, but I’m going to look up how to buy giant springs later, just in case,” Taylor said seriously.

  Ellie turned to a new page in her notepad and waved her hand over it, thinking. “Hmm. I think I have an idea. But do you have any red paint?”

  “I have red paint powder. You mix it with water to make the paint,” McKinley said.

  “The powder is even better! Now, if we can just find an empty ketchup bottle . . . ,” Ellie said, and began to sketch out the build.

  When a boy ran up and rang the doorbell, stepping on the mat would cause the ketchup bottle under the mat to squeeze. That would send a big whoosh of air down the tube, which would send a poof of red paint powder up at him. The Ding-Dong-Ditcher would get coated—he’d be caught red-handed and red-faced and red-bodied! Since things hadn’t gone so well with Kit’s mom the day before, Ellie decided they should show Mrs. Caplan the build, just in case.