Now at least I had some company. I was glad she came out, even though I didn’t catch her. I had to concentrate on finding Mouse or Sondra. If they all got Home Free I would wind up as It again. Jane walked around with me and we found Sondra sitting in the bathroom in Mr. and Mrs. Ellis’ bathroom. Now all we needed was Mouse. We looked and looked but we couldn’t find her.
Finally Jane said, “Do you suppose she’s in the laundry chute again?”
“No,” Sondra said. “She got in awful trouble the last time. Remember. . . .”
“What laundry chute?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s this hole in the wall where Mrs. Ellis drops the dirty clothes. They fall down to the basement, where she does the wash. Come on, let’s look,” Jane said.
We walked down the long hallway to the attic door. Next to it was a smaller door that looked like an oven. Jane pulled it open and looked inside. “No Mouse,” she said.
“How did she hide in there? Didn’t she fall down to the basement?” I asked.
“Oh . . . she can really hang on,” Jane said.
“But the last time her mother caught her and she got it good!” Sondra told me.
“Where do you suppose she is?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Jane said.
Just then we all heard a scary noise.
Whooo whooo whooo
All three of us grabbed hold of each other and Sondra started laughing like crazy. Then Jane started. So I laughed as loud as they did. Even louder, to show I thought it was funny too.
Whooo whooo whooo
Jane pulled away and flung open the attic door.
Mouse shouted, “BOO!” and jumped out at us. “Ha ha . . . I really scared you!”
“Scared who?” I asked. “You think a little noise like that could scare us?”
“Yeah,” Sondra said, “we all knew it was you.”
“And besides that,” I told Mouse, “you broke the rules. The attic is supposed to be off limits! You said so yourself.”
“Yeah,” Sondra and Jane said together.
I didn’t want to play any more hide-and-seek after that, but Mouse promised not to scare us again. She said she’d even be It just to show what a good sport she was. So Sondra, Jane, and me hid while Mouse stood at the sink and counted up to one hundred—no cheating allowed.
I ran to Mrs. Ellis’s room and hid inside her closet. My heart was thumping so loud I thought it might explode and that would be the end of me. I crouched in the corner and waited. I never know when to run for Home Base. Other kids get Home Free. Why don’t I? I sat still for a long time. Why didn’t Mouse come? Should I try for Home Base? I heard footsteps. So, she was finally going to have a look in her mother’s room, I thought. It’s about time.
The footsteps came closer and closer. I hid behind a long bathrobe. Maybe she wouldn’t find me after all, and as soon as she was gone I could run for Home Base.
The closet door opened. I peeked out from behind the robe. All I saw were feet. They didn’t belong to Mouse. They were much too big.
Whoever it was started moving the clothes around. The robe I was hiding behind wiggled, and then there was a terrible scream. I think it came from me!
“Sheila Tubman!” Mrs. Ellis shouted. “You nearly scared me to death!”
I tried to say something but I couldn’t make the words come out. I was shaking. Mrs. Ellis reached down and helped me up. “Come out of there,” she said. “What are you doing in my closet?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“You better know. I’m waiting to hear your answer.”
“Well . . . you see . . .” I began.
And then Mouse, Sondra, and Jane came into the room. “Hi, Mom,” Mouse said.
“Mouse! What is going on here?” Mrs. Ellis asked.
“We were playing a little hide-and-seek,” Mouse said.
“You are supposed to be at Sheila’s house,” her mother said. “Mrs. Tubman is going crazy trying to find you.”
“No kidding,” Mouse said.
“That’s right!” Mrs. Ellis turned to me. “Sheila, go and call your mother right now and tell her where you are.”
* * *
That night Mr. Ellis boarded up the milk door and Mrs. Ellis put out a regular milk box. And we all knew that was the end of indoor hide-and-seek at the Mouse House.
After three weeks of day camp my favorite activity is still pottery. Mouse, Russ Bindel, and Sam Sweeney agree. The four of us haven’t switched activities yet, even though we are supposed to try something new every week. Denise says by the end of the summer we should each have a really good bowl to take home with us. My mother is not as happy about pottery as I am. This is because I come home covered with clay every day. It even gets in my hair and ears. The only bad things about pottery are I have to put up with a lot of shampoos and Mom is always chasing me with the Q-Tips.
Russ Bindel’s mother runs the camp office. She’s pretty nice. Russ looks just like her. He’s a year older than me, but so small he looks about eight. And between Russ and his mother I have never seen so many freckles.
Sam Sweeney reminds me of Peter Hatcher. He thinks he knows everything. And when his clay elephant broke in the kiln he blamed it on me and Mouse for making too much noise while it was baking. Denise told him it wasn’t anybody’s fault. And maybe he left too many cracks in his elephant because besides breaking in half one tusk also fell off. Sam is the only one of us who doesn’t use the pottery wheel. He’s always making animals, and elephants are his favorite. I can’t imagine what he does with all his elephants. Mouse and I call him Babar in private.
Of course we can’t stay at pottery all day. That’s our main activity, from 9:30 until lunchtime. After lunch we are supposed to have a quiet hour. We usually break up into small groups and sit under the trees. Most of our counselors play the guitar and we sing a lot. I have learned some very unusual songs at day camp. One is about Anne Boleyn, who was married to King Henry the Eighth of England. But when she didn’t have any boy babies he decided she should have her head chopped off. And in this song she is back haunting King Henry’s castle, “with her head tucked underneath her arm.” I like to sing the song but I don’t like to think about her walking around like that. She reminds me of the Headless Horseman.
This morning Denise asked me to go to the camp office to tell Mrs. Bindel that she is expecting an important phone call. When I got there, Mrs. Bindel was trying to use the copy machine. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “It’s jammed again.”
I watched for a while as she tried to get it working. “Want me to help you?” I asked.
“That’s very nice of you, Sheila. But you better get back to your activity. And tell Denise I’ll come and get her when her phone call comes through.”
I still didn’t go. Because all of a sudden I had the greatest idea of how to show the Tarrytown kids that I was an expert at something besides bandaging legs.
“We had a class newspaper last year,” I told Mrs. Bindel. “I used to run off the copies in the office. Nobody had to help me. I did it all by myself.”
“That must have been very interesting,” Mrs. Bindel said. She was trying to pull the jammed paper out of the copier.
“It was. I could use your computer and copier if we had a camp newspaper, couldn’t I?”
“But we don’t have a camp newspaper.” She had the copier pulled apart now.
“We should,” I said.
“Should what?” she asked.
“Have a camp newspaper.”
“But we don’t.”
“Maybe we will!” I called, running out of the office.
I ran right into Mr. Healstrom, the director of our camp. He caught me so I didn’t fall down. “What’s your hurry?” he asked.
“Oh
, Mr. Healstrom! You’re just the one I want to see,” I told him. “Do you know what we need here?”
“No, what?”
“A newspaper. A camp newspaper! And I’ve decided it’s my duty to start one.”
Mr. Healstrom said, “That’s a very good idea.”
“I knew you’d think so. I’ll be in charge of everything,” I said.
“You may need some help, Sheila. Suppose I let you announce your plans this afternoon. Then you can form committees and get started.”
“I don’t need committees,” I said. “I’m very experienced. I know exactly what to do!”
“Running a newspaper is a big job,” Mr. Healstrom said. “And nobody does it alone.”
“I can do it, Mr. Healstrom. You’ll see. I’ve even got a name picked out.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a surprise. You’ll find out next Friday when you read the first issue.”
“Well . . .” Mr. Healstrom said, “you seem determined to try it on your own. So, good luck!”
“Oh thanks, Mr. Healstrom! Thanks a lot!”
I ran back to pottery and told everyone about our camp newspaper.
“When’s it coming out?” Mouse asked.
“On Friday,” I said. “And I’m going to be very busy between now and then. I may have to skip pottery. You know, it’s a big job to put out a paper all by yourself.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” Denise said. “What you need is a committee. Maybe you could get a reporter from each group to tell you what’s going on.”
“I’ll help you,” Mouse said. “I’d like to be a reporter.”
“I don’t need any reporters,” I told everyone. “I can do all that myself.”
“But if I’m a reporter we can work together,” Mouse said. “We can be a team.”
“It’s my idea and I’m doing everything!” I told her.
“Well, if that’s the way you want to be about it,” Mouse said. I could tell that Mouse was wishing she had thought up the idea of having a camp newspaper. And Russ and Sam were really surprised that I knew so much about it.
“Is my mother going to type it into the computer for you?” Russ asked.
“Of course not,” I told him. “I know how to use a computer.”
That night I wrote my first story. I called it “Babar Strikes Again.” It was all about Sam Sweeney and his clay elephants, but of course I never mentioned him by name.
Starting the next morning I made my rounds of all the activities. I carried my pad around with me and kept a pencil tucked behind my ear. I jotted down all kinds of interesting things and story ideas such as “Libby the Dancing Skeleton” and “The Real Reason Denise Goes Barefoot.” I discovered that at lunch. I was crawling around listening to bits of conversation when I noticed the bottoms of Denise’s feet. She was sitting on the grass, leaning against a tree, and the bottoms of her feet pointed up. I don’t know how I ever missed seeing them before. They are covered with warts! No wonder she doesn’t wear shoes.
The next day was very hot, and as I trudged around from activity to activity I wondered what Mouse, Russ, and Sam were doing at pottery. I didn’t come up with any new story ideas so I wrote a weather report, arranged a list of Do’s and Don’ts about the camp bus, and made up a crossword puzzle of counselors’ names. I offered a prize to the first person to hand it in with all the right names.
On Thursday I went to the office to type the first edition of my camp newspaper. I figured it would only take a few minutes and then I could go back to pottery. I was starting to miss Mouse and my regular camp routine. Mouse and Russ were probably having a lot of fun with the pottery wheel, and with me out of the way they’d each have extra turns.
But Mrs. Bindel said she was having a very busy day and couldn’t possibly give up her computer.
“I have to use it,” I told her. “I have a newspaper to get out!”
“Well, I’m sorry, Sheila.” She went back to her work. After a minute she looked up at me and sighed. “Tell you what,” she said. “We have an old typewriter in the closet. I could let you use that.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Bindel.”
But after typing for the longest time, I was still working on “Babar Strikes Again” and the wastebasket was full of my mistakes. That’s when Mrs. Bindel suggested I handwrite my newspaper. I said that was fine with me because everyone in New York knows I have the best handwriting in the whole fourth grade.
“And you’d better use a stencil,” Mrs. Bindel said, “because our copy machine is down again. I’m waiting for the repairman to fix it.”
“A stencil?” I said. “What’s that?”
“It’s what you’ll need to use the old mimeograph machine.”
“Mimeograph machine? What’s that?”
“It’s what we used in the old days, before we had copy machines.”
I helped her dig it out of the closet. It looked even older than the typewriter.
I found out pretty fast that it’s not so easy to write your best on a stencil. I kept goofing. And none of my lines came out straight. They all ran downhill. I threw away the first two stencils and made up my mind that the third one would be it, no matter what!
Across the whole top of the page I printed:
NEWSDATE
by Sheila the Great
That looked really neat except it took up a lot of room, so by the time I got to my crossword puzzle on the bottom of the page, I had to make it very small. I think I spelled “counselor” wrong, but you can’t erase when you’re using a stencil so I had to leave it that way. By the time I finished drawing little pictures of all our activities along the side margins of my newspaper, it was time to go home. And was I glad!
On Friday morning I was ready to use the mimeograph machine. I thought I’d zip out the seventy-five copies I needed and still make it back to pottery. Denise would probably let me use the wheel the whole time because I haven’t had a turn all week.
But I discovered that you can’t just zip out copies on an old mimeograph machine. For one thing, the machine uses a special kind of ink. And after half an hour my hands were full of it but the machine didn’t have enough because every page came out blank. So I poured in a ton of ink and then when I cranked out the first few copies big blobs of purple were all over the paper and you couldn’t read anything I’d written.
That’s when Mrs. Bindel said she would get the machine going for me. I told her, “What this camp needs is better office equipment.”
“You’ll be more experienced next week, Sheila. It probably won’t take so long then.”
I didn’t want to think about next week or the week after that, or spending the rest of the summer putting out the camp newspaper.
Two hours later I was still cranking out copies. They looked better than the first batch, which I had to throw away. This time you could read practically everything. But the pictures in the margins weren’t too clear. Still, if you looked hard you could see that they were pictures. I couldn’t understand why the crossword puzzle came out with such wavy lines though. But at least I had my seventy-five copies of NEWSDATE ready. I didn’t much care how they looked anymore. I was so glad to be done!
I took my seventy-five copies, yelled good-bye to Mrs. Bindel, and ran out of the office. I personally handed a copy of my newspaper to every kid in camp.
When Mouse saw it she said, “What kind of newspaper is this?”
And I said, “What do you mean by that?”
She said, “I never heard of a newspaper that’s handwritten. It doesn’t even look like a newspaper to me.”
“Well, that’s how much you know!” I told her. “Anybody can type out a newspaper. It takes special talent and a lot more work to handwrite one!”
“What are these fun
ny smudges up and down the sides of the paper?”
“Funny smudges! You must need glasses. Anyone with eyes can see they’re pictures of our camp activities!”
“No kidding!” Mouse said, looking closer. “All I see are ink blots.”
“You better have your eyes examined,” I told her. “Everyone else in camp knows that they are pictures.”
That’s when Russ came up to me and said, “Hey, Sheila . . . why didn’t you get my mother to help you? Then you wouldn’t have gotten your papers all smudged up.”
Before I had a chance to say anything two big boys walked over to us and handed me the finished crossword puzzle.
“Okay, Sheila the Great,” one of them said. “What’s the big prize?”
That’s when I realized I didn’t have a prize to give. I was so sure nobody would be able to figure out my puzzle!
“Well?” the other boy said.
I had to think fast. How would it look if SHEILA THE GREAT didn’t have a super prize to give? “Congratulations!” I said. “You are both very lucky. Very lucky. Very, very lucky!”
“So what do we win?” they asked.
“You win the camp newspaper! That’s what you win! Next week you get to run it all by yourself! Unless, of course, you feel you need a committee. Most people aren’t able to run newspapers by themselves.”
“Some prize!”
“I knew you’d think so,” I told them, smiling at Mouse and Russ.
* * *
That night I made up my mind that the next time I think up such a great project I will be the boss and my committee of workers will do everything else!
It turned out that Allen and Paul, the boys who won my contest, liked being in charge of the camp newspaper. They formed all kinds of committees and hardly missed any of their regular activities. And Mrs. Bindel volunteered to run off copies for them. Some people really take the easy way out! They even changed the name of my paper from NEWSDATE BY SHEILA THE GREAT to Allen and Paul . . . Tell All.