Mom stared at me. "What's so awful about Daphne?"
I screwed up my face, trying to figure out a way to explain someone like Daphne to my mother. "Well, she's really weird. She never does anything in school, and I know she won't do her share of the book." I paused. "Couldn't you ask Mr. O'Brien to let me be partners with Tracy?"
"Have you talked to him?"
I nodded. "But he won't let me change."
"I'm sure that Mr. O'Brien has a good reason for pairing you with Daphne. What did he say when you talked to him?"
I looked down at the pillow again. "He said I was the best writer and Daphne was the best artist, and he said I was a sensitive person and I should try to be Daphne's friend."
I sighed and leaned against Mom's side, letting her encircle me with her arm. "I don't want to hurt Daphne, Mom. I've never teased her or laughed at all the dumb jokes Tony and Michelle and Sherry make. I'm just scared that they'll tease me. I don't want Tracy to stop liking me. I don't want to be like Daphne."
"Oh, Jessica, nobody will hate you if you work with Daphne on a project." Mom hugged me. "Mr. O'Brien must think a lot of you, honey. Do as he says. Try to be friendly to Daphne. Put yourself in her place—imagine how lonely and unhappy she must be."
I looked at Mom sadly. "You just don't understand," I said. "You don't know how kids at Oakcrest are." Sighing deeply, I got up from the couch. "I think I'm going to go to bed, Mom."
She pulled me close and gave me a kiss. "Good night, Jess." Then she smiled. "Give her a chance, sweetie. Don't let Mr. O'Brien down."
Slowly I climbed the steps. Of course I didn't want to let Mr. O'Brien down. I couldn't help feeling pleased that he thought I was a nice person, and despite all the bad thoughts I was having about Daphne, I did wish I could help her. But at the same time, I knew I couldn't. Not if I wanted to keep Tracy as a friend. Not if I wanted to stay on Michelle's good side.
Three
THE NEXT MORNING it was still raining. Lying in bed, looking at the gloomy sky and bare branches outside my window, I wished I could stay home. I didn't want to go to school, I didn't want to see Michelle and Sherry, I didn't want to be Daphne's partner.
But as usual, Josh started banging on my door. "Rise and shine, Jess-o!" he croaked in his horrible half-changed voice. "It's another beautiful day."
"Shut up," I moaned. "Go away and leave me alone." I pulled the covers over my head, but nothing could muffle the sound of that voice.
"Doodle-dee-doot-de-do!" He trumpeted, his voice cracking and going up three octaves.
"Josh, stop that racket!" Mom yelled from downstairs. "And Jessica, you get up this minute!" she added, just to prove she didn't have any favorites.
"Okay, okay," I mumbled. Unlike Josh and Mom, I don't have the strength to yell first thing in the morning, not before breakfast anyway.
"And don't spend an hour in the bathroom," Josh said as I stumbled past him. "I haven't brushed my teeth yet."
Ignoring him, I slammed the bathroom door and turned on the shower, praying he'd left enough hot water for me this morning. By the time I finished blow-drying my hair, Josh was pounding on the door and shouting at me to hurry up.
Mom was finishing her coffee when I came downstairs. "What a horrible gray morning." She frowned at the rain falling endlessly from the cloudy sky.
"Just think, if it were snowing instead of raining, they'd close the schools," I said.
"But they wouldn't close the library," Mom said glumly. "Mr. Shepperd would expect me to be there even if we had ten-foot-high drifts blocking the roads." She sighed and got up to rinse her cup.
"Has anybody seen my English homework?" Josh ran into the kitchen, his red hair standing out in a halo of frizzy curls around his thin face. "I left it right there!" He pointed at an empty space on the kitchen counter. "Who moved it?"
"What's that?" I pointed at a messy pile of notebook paper heaped on the buffet.
"Well, / didn't leave it there." Josh scooped up the papers and stuffed them into a textbook already oozing sheaves of ragged assignments. "'Bye, Mom. 'Bye, Jess-o." He opened the door and let in a blast of icy air before slamming it behind him. As he passed the dining room window, hunched like a scarecrow in his dirty blue parka, he waved once more.
"Well, it's almost time for me to leave." Mom put her cup in the dishwasher. "Be sure and turn this on before you leave, Jessica. I don't think we have a single clean glass."
I watched her button her coat and put on her hat. "Have a nice day, Mom," I said.
"You too, honey." She gave me a quick kiss. "And try not to be so unhappy about the Write-a-Book thing."
I nodded. The door shut behind her and the house got very quiet. No radio or stereo blasting my ears, no Josh pounding up and down the stairs, no Mom bustling around. Just the refrigerator starting up and Snuff crunching her cat food.
I finished eating my cereal, rinsed my dishes, and put them in the dishwasher. Feeling responsible, I turned it on, glad that I'd remembered.
As I gathered up my books, Snuff stalked past me, jumped up on the couch, and curled herself into a contented little ball.
"You lucky cat." I bent over and scratched her behind the ears. She opened one eye and stared at me suspiciously, but she didn't leap up and run away.
"You can stay here all day, nice and dry and warm," I said enviously. "You have the whole house to yourself, and you can eat and sleep whenever you feel like it. You don't have to go out in the cold rain, you don't have to be Daphne's partner, you don't have to worry about people liking you. You really have a great life, you big fat furry monster you."
Snuff stretched and purred. She looked very smug, as if she understood every word I said.
Grabbing my parka, I opened the door. Ugh. It was even worse than yesterday. "Why can't you be snow?" I snarled at the raindrops.
In English, Mr. O'Brien started class by telling us he'd changed our seats so we could all sit next to our partners. Unhappily I picked up my books and moved to the desk beside Daphne, dropping everything with a thud so loud that Mr. O'Brien frowned at me. Daphne, of course, didn't even look up. She just sat there doodling on a piece of notebook paper, her long hair tumbling down and hiding her face.
"Let's get quiet now." Mr. O'Brien looked around the room. "I want to explain this assignment."
Passing out a dittoed bibliography, he told us that he was going to take us to the public library to look at picture books. "You should see some good examples before you start working on your own books."
Tony leaned back in his seat indignantly. "These are baby books. Why do we have to waste our time reading kid stuff?"
Everybody laughed, and a lot of kids started agreeing with Tony. Mr. O'Brien sighed and smoothed his beard. "I knew somebody was going to say that," he said. "In my opinion, most of these books are too good to limit them to little children. I think most of you will really enjoy looking at them." He paused and smiled at Tony. "But if you don't buy that, Tony, think of it this way. Each one is only about thirty-two pages long."
"That's probably more than Tony can handle," Mike DeSales said. "The longest book he ever read was the special anniversary Spiderman comic book. It couldn't have been more than twenty-four pages long."
"Yeah," Scott Turner added, "and it was mostly pictures. Except for the POW'S and ZAPP'S and OOOH'S."
By now everybody was laughing, even Mr. O'Brien, and Tony was muttering, "Okay, okay. Big deal, man, big deal."
Curiously I shot a quick, sidewise look at Daphne, but she was still bent over her drawing as if she were on another planet. Her bibliography lay untouched on her desk, and she seemed completely indifferent to the laughter rippling around her.
"Well, enough for now about our books," Mr. O'Brien said. "Let's get back to the unit on paragraphing."
As Mr. O'Brien did his best to make his subject interesting, I slumped in my desk, staring at my textbook. I was too depressed to find the topic sentence in a boring paragraph about wheat production in Kansa
s. To tell the truth, I didn't care whether the paragraph had a topic sentence or not.
Although I tried not to think about Daphne, I was uncomfortably aware of her every time she shifted her position, coughed, sniffed, or sighed. The sound of her pencil scratching across her paper irritated me, and so did the sight of her foot, clad in black tights and a red Scholl sandal, swinging back and forth, catching my eye as it moved. When the bell rang, I jumped out of my desk, eager to get away from her.
"Don't forget, we go to the library tomorrow. Be sure to bring in your signed permission slip," Mr. O'Brien said as we all started for the door like a herd of cattle heading for the feeding trough.
Going down the hall to the cafeteria, I caught up with Tracy. I managed to stick with her through the line and eased in beside her at the lunch table.
"Do you have an idea for your story yet?" Tracy asked me.
I shook my head. "I haven't really thought about it."
"Maybe you should find out what Daphne draws best and write about that," Tracy said.
"Ducks, Daffy draws ducks best!" Michelle almost choked on her milk, laughing and quacking at the same time.
"Did Tracy tell you what her and me are doing?" Michelle asked after she'd calmed down. "We're writing this story called 'The Nightmare Slumber Party.' It's about these girls who get killed one by one at this slumber party. It's really scary because they keep hearing these weird sounds and all these horrible things happen." Michelle paused and took a bite of her tuna fish sandwich.
"Like they step on this squishy thing, you know," she continued, "and they think it's a grape, but it's really an eyeball, and this girl gets her head cut off, and they find it hanging by its hair from the chandelier. All kinds of stuff like that happens, but in the end, just as the girl who's giving the party is about to be killed by this crazy man who escaped from the insane asylum, she wakes up and finds it was just a bad dream. It's a kind of surprise ending, you know?"
I glanced at Tracy, but she wasn't laughing and she didn't look embarrassed. "I've already started drawing some of the pictures," she said. She opened her notebook and pulled out a piece of paper. "This is going to be the cover."
She'd drawn five girls with huge chests and tiny waists like Barbie dolls. They were wearing tight jeans, high heels, lots of makeup, and perfect, flipped-back hair like Michelle's.
"But I thought it was supposed to be a picture book," I said.
"It's going to have plenty of pictures," Tracy said.
"And it's a lot more interesting than some dumb Jack-and Jill story," Michelle said. "One of the girls is going to have a boyfriend who sings in a rock band and drives a red Camaro." She looked at me and shook her head. I knew Michelle was thinking I was incredibly naive.
"Only I can't draw cars," Tracy said.
"So Tony's going to draw the Camaro if Tracy draws the soldiers for his story," Michelle added. "Tony can draw jeeps and tanks and planes, but he can't draw people."
"Only I can't draw men very well," Tracy said. "They always look like girls with mustaches. I draw girls, flowers, and horses best."
"I don't think Tony's story is going to have any of those things in it." Michelle looked doubtful.
Before I could ask any more questions, the bell rang and we hurried off to biology to learn about the fascinating life cycle of the amoeba.
While Mrs. Kaufmann described the amoeba's style of reproduction (which Tony found hilarious), I doodled little geometric designs in the margin of my notebook paper. Looking across the room, I noticed Daphne sitting a couple of rows away. Her head was turned toward the windows, and I wondered what she was thinking about.
It occurred to me that she probably wasn't any happier than I was at the prospect of our being partners. No doubt she thought I was just like all the other kids at Oakcrest. I tried to picture myself as she saw me. Just another girl in a Shetland sweater and blue jeans, following Tracy everywhere, too stuck up to speak to a person like Daphne. She'd probably never noticed I didn't quack or laugh at her.
Sighing, I stared at the picture of the amoeba in my text book. Its life was certainly boring, virtually pointless, but at least it didn't have anything to worry about. No complex social problems beset the amoeba.
As Mrs. Kaufmann passed out dittoed sheets of questions about one-celled creatures, I glanced at Daphne again. Why did she look so sad? For a second, I found myself wishing I could see her smile at least once.
Four
THAT NIGHT I lay in bed worrying about the Write-a-Book contest. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't come up with a good idea.
What was the matter with me? I'd always thought of myself as a writer. In my closet were boxes full of stories I'd written, some of them dating back to the second grade, but none of them seemed good enough to haul out and rewrite.
Turning onto my back, I stared at the moon outside my window. The size of a quarter, its full face seemed to return my stare. "It must be Daphne's fault," I said to the moon. "If I had a different partner, I'd have my story all written by, now. I know I would. And it would be good too. A lot better than The Nightmare Slumber Party.'"
I grimaced, thinking of Michelle sitting there at the lunch table, her mouth full of tuna fish, talking about her dumb story. She was such an idiot. How could Tracy stand her?
With a little thump, Snuff jumped up on my bed and walked up my legs. Stopping on my stomach, she stood there staring at me, kneading my blankets with her hard little paws. Stroking her, I coaxed a resistant purr out of her.
Just as I was starting to relax, Snuff hopped off my bed and stalked over to the closed door. She scratched at it and meowed plaintively. Reluctantly, I left my nice warm bed and let her out.
As I turned to go back to bed, I glanced at my dollhouse. In the moonlight it looked almost magical. Its roof was touched with silver, and its two towers cast sharp shadows on my bedroom wall. Picking my way through the shoes, books, and clothes heaped here and there on the floor, I knelt in front of the dollhouse and groped in the dark for the switch that illuminated its interior.
As the tiny chandeliers lit up the rooms, I saw that Snuff had been sleeping in the dollhouse, wedging her fat, furry body in among the little tables and chairs, scattering them about and leaving cat hair on the carpets.
Although my room was cold, I resisted the urge to go back to bed, and set to work straightening up the dollhouse. As I rearranged the furniture, I remembered the day last summer when Michelle and Tracy had caught me playing with the inhabitants of the house, a family of small stuffed mice that I had bought one by one at a crafts shop in the mall.
I had tried to convince them that I was redecorating the house, not playing with it, but they had teased me for weeks about it. I had been so embarrassed that I hadn't touched the dollhouse since.
When all the furniture, except for a few pieces that Snuff had broken, were in place, I began putting the mice in their favorite rooms. First, Princess Heatherfern. She belonged in the best bedroom, the one with the canopy bed and the bureau with tiny drawers that opened and shut. I stood her near the window, where the moonlight would touch her white fur and make her satin cape gleam.
Cragstar the Wizard was next. Up to the tower he went to stand peering into the fireplace, thinking of grand schemes and magical feats.
Into the cozy nursery went Baby Mouse and faithful Nurse Marigold, and up into the attic went the wicked witch Malvolia, the sworn enemy of Cragstone. There in the shadows she plotted deeds of evil.
But where was Sir Benjamin, my favorite mouse? Dressed in a blue velvet cape, wearing a plumed hat, and carrying a shiny sword, he was the guardian of the dollhouse. Without him, who would protect them from Malvolia?
Crawling around the floor, I looked under my bed, poked about under my bureau, rummaged through dirty clothes, pawed through shoes and books, and even risked my life by searching my closet. Nowhere did I see Sir Benjamin.
Sadly I left Princess Heatherfern keeping a lonely vigil at her wind
ow and crawled into bed. Undoubtedly Snuff had mistaken Sir Benjamin for a real mouse and dragged him away to some secluded spot. There she had probably torn him to shreds, velvet cape, plumed hat, and all. Rolling over on my side, I fell asleep promising myself to look for him in the morning.
"What were you doing up so late last night?" Mom asked me at breakfast. "I heard you moving around in your room after I'd gone to bed. It must have been midnight."
"I couldn't sleep, so I straightened up my dollhouse. Snuff got in it somehow and messed it all up."
"Oh, Jessie, don't let that miserable beast wreck your (tollhouse. Your grandfather spent a lot of time making it, and I want you to take care of it."
I nodded, feeling bad. Grandfather had died four years ago, not long after he'd finished the dollhouse, and Mom and I both missed him a lot.
"Keep your door closed when you're not home so Snuff can't get into your room," Mom added.
"I will." I swallowed some orange juice. "Have you seen Sir Benjamin?"
"Who?" Mom looked puzzled.
"One of my little mice. The one with the plumed hat and sword."
She shook her head. "Can't you find him?"
"I think Snuff ate him or something."
"I could say something about cleaning your room, but I'll do my best to keep my mouth shut." Mom got up and put on her coat. "Have a nice day, sweetie. I have to go." Giving me a kiss, she left for work.
I finished my breakfast and read the comics and my horoscope. As usual, it predicted a dull day: I should visit someone in a hospital, I should heed a colleague's advice and sell my shares in a company owned by a Pisces, and I should avoid taking any transatlantic flights for the next two weeks. Realizing I'd wasted five minutes pondering the meaning of three sentences, I grabbed my parka and ran outside.
The rain and gray skies had disappeared, blown away by the wind that almost knocked me down as I cut across the parking lot. To make it worse, the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. By the time I got to school, I was afraid to open my mouth for fear my face would crack.