The Secret Book Club

“The rats were ‘just rats’ and they thought of something,” said Olivia.

  “Hey, I know!” exclaimed Nikki. “How about if we plant a vegetable garden?” She turned to Ruby. “That will make more sense to you after you finish the book.”

  “Oh, that’s a good idea,” said Flora. “And we could keep some of the vegetables for ourselves, but we could donate the rest of them to the food bank — to help feed people who don’t have enough to eat.”

  “This is great,” said Olivia. “I love it. But is it too late to start a vegetable garden? It’s almost July. And what’s that old saying? Corn is supposed to be knee-high by the Fourth of July? Our corn would have to grow awfully quickly to catch up.”

  “Plus, we don’t know anything about vegetable gardening,” pointed out Ruby.

  “But I know who does,” said Olivia. “Mr. Pennington.”

  “Let’s call him!” said Nikki.

  So Olivia phoned him but got no answer.

  “Well, I think we can do it anyway,” said Flora. “This is going to be fun. What should we plant?”

  Flora, Olivia, Nikki, and Ruby made lists and charts. They looked up the answers to several questions on the Shermans’ computer. They called the food bank. They made more lists. By the time Min’s car pulled up, Ruby was bouncy with energy and plans. So when, to the girls’ surprise, Mr. Pennington climbed out of the passenger seat, Ruby ran to him, nearly knocking him off his feet.

  “Mr. Pennington! I can’t believe you’re here! We tried to call you! We’re going to start a vegetable garden! For the food bank!”

  Ruby’s words tumbled out in such a rush that Flora had to step in and give Mr. Pennington and Min a more coherent explanation.

  “Well, I think I can help you out,” said Mr. Pennington. “It is a bit late to be starting a garden, but you can do it.”

  He answered the girls’ questions patiently, and by the time Min said that they really had better be on their way, the girls had decided exactly what they needed for their garden, and Olivia had suggested that the garden be planted in her backyard, conveniently next door to Mr. Pennington in case his help was needed. “Which,” said Olivia, “I’m sure it will be.”

  At last Min’s car, now carrying five people, drove down Nikki’s lane. As Nikki watched it disappear in the distance, a slow smile spread across her face. This Saturday, she said to herself, had been as much fun as any of the Melendys’.

  Ruby stood in the doorway to Flora’s room and peered inside curiously. “Flora?” she said. “What are you doing?”

  Flora’s bed was heaped with clothes. So was her floor. And her armchair. Clothes had been flung everywhere. The room looked like a beach after a storm. The only spot empty of clothes was the wardrobe, in which, as far as Ruby knew, all of these same clothes had been neatly folded or hanging just the night before.

  “I’m trying to find something to wear,” answered Flora.

  “For gardening?” Ruby looked down at her own body, which was clad in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. The shirt sported a ring of tiny holes around the neck binding, and the jeans smelled faintly of the outdoors; when Ruby studied them more closely, she saw grass stains on the knees. These were not Ruby’s best clothes (she had, in fact, pulled the shirt out of Min’s ragbag), but they were perfect for gardening.

  “No!” cried Flora. “Not for gardening. For the party tonight. Tanya’s party.”

  “Oh.” Ruby lifted a white blouse from the edge of Flora’s bed, moved it to a pile of skirts, and sat in the empty space. “So you and Nikki are definitely going?”

  Flora didn’t answer right away. She appeared to be studying a pink-and-green-flowered sundress. At last she replied, “Yes. We talked about it again with Olivia. You know, Nikki and I don’t really want to go, but we thought it would send some kind of message if we decided to stay home on account of Olivia.”

  “Couldn’t you have just said you can’t go because you’re already busy?”

  “Yes. But then Tanya wouldn’t have known the real reason we stayed home.”

  “But I thought you didn’t want her to know!” exclaimed Ruby. “And anyway, aren’t you sending her another kind of message by accepting her invitation even though she didn’t ask Olivia to the party?”

  Flora sighed. “It’s all very complicated.” She tossed the sundress onto her bed. “I’ll decide about my outfit later. Come on. Let’s go to Olivia’s. After all, it’s another Saturday.”

  “And we have a vegetable garden to plant,” added Ruby.

  Ruby thought about the past week. She and Flora and Olivia and Nikki had been busy. And they had worked hard. First they had gotten permission from Olivia’s parents to plant their garden in the Walters’ backyard. Then, with plenty of help from Mr. Pennington, they had staked out a plot, pulled up the grass, turned the earth over, and begun to prepare the soil.

  “Since it’s so late in the season,” said Mr. Pennington, “you won’t have time to start your plants from seeds. You’ll need to buy seedlings at the garden center. Those are already sprouted plants.”

  Ruby, grubby from her work in the garden, had glanced at her equally grubby sister and their friends. “We also have to buy … what did you say, Mr. Pennington? What’s that stuff we need to put in the dirt?”

  “You’ll probably want some peat moss and organic fertilizer to turn into the soil before you begin planting.”

  Ruby had thought sadly of her piggy bank. “I only have two dollars and forty cents in the hog,” she said. “How much money do the rest of you guys have?”

  “Not much,” said Olivia.

  “Hardly anything,” said Nikki.

  “Next to nothing,” said Flora.

  “Well, how are we going to buy all this stuff?” wondered Ruby.

  This conversation had taken place on Monday afternoon in Olivia’s backyard. The very next day, an envelope had mysteriously appeared on the counter at Needle and Thread. On the front was written:

  Gigi had picked it up, said, “What’s this?” and given it to Flora.

  Flora frowned at the handwriting, which she didn’t recognize. Then she opened the envelope and inside found several twenty-dollar bills and a brief note, in the same handwriting, stating that the money was for supplies for the girls’ green project. Gigi and Min protested that they knew nothing about the money and had no idea when or how the envelope had arrived. Flora was inclined to believe them.

  The next day, Mr. Pennington had driven the girls to the garden center and helped them select the peat moss and fertilizer, as well as a few tools.

  “What about the seedlings?” Ruby had asked.

  “We’ll come back on Friday and buy them then,” Mr. Pennington replied. “We don’t want them sitting around for too long before they go in the ground.”

  On Friday, they had returned to the garden center and bought seedlings for green peppers, two kinds of tomatoes, broccoli, eggplant, two kinds of squash, radishes, cucumbers, spinach, and lettuce.

  “And the corn?” asked Olivia. “What about the corn? We could buy knee-high seedlings to stay on schedule.”

  Mr. Pennington smiled. “No corn,” he said. “Corn needs lots and lots of room. You don’t have enough space to grow corn properly in your garden. But you’ll have plenty of other good things.”

  And now it was the morning of the girls’ next Saturday adventure. Ruby was looking forward to planting the garden. Shortly after lunch, she and Flora ran next door to Olivia’s house. Nikki arrived at the same time, and the girls met Mr. Pennington in the backyard. Moments later, Ruby found herself standing at the edge of their garden, a tray of spinach seedlings in her hands.

  “Use the trowel to dig nice little holes,” Mr. Pennington said. “Just about the size of each section of the tray. Then carefully lift the plant out and put it in the hole, dirt and all. We’ll water the garden as soon as all the plants are in.”

  Planting the seedlings took less time than Ruby had thought it might take. Even so, the girls and
Mr. Pennington were still hooking up the sprinkler and tidying the Walters’ yard when Flora said, “Well, um, I’m sorry to say this, but I guess Nikki and I have to go now. Can you guys finish up?”

  “Sure!” said Olivia brightly. “Of course we can! Don’t mind us.”

  Ruby watched Flora and Nikki as they began to edge toward Min’s house.

  Mr. Pennington, who was kneeling in the garden, glanced up, curious. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Ruby whispered in his ear, “It’s a whole big thing. I’ll tell you later.”

  Mr. Pennington pinched back a smile and resumed adjusting the sprinkler.

  “Well … bye,” called Flora from Min’s yard.

  “See you!” said Olivia cheerfully. But she didn’t look at Flora and Nikki. Instead, she continued collecting the empty seedling containers.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” said Nikki.

  “Fine,” Olivia replied. Ruby thought she heard her add a muttered “Whatever.”

  “Olivia, you know, Nikki and I could always —” Flora started to say, but Olivia flung the containers onto the grass, stomped on them furiously, and cried, “Go! Just go, okay?”

  Flora and Nikki let themselves into Min’s house and closed the back door quietly behind them.

  Mr. Pennington, looking from one to another of the girls, rose stiffly to his feet. He stood for a moment, rubbing his knees. “Well,” he said, “maybe I should be on my way, too. Olivia? Everything all right?”

  “Yes,” said Olivia curtly. Then she added, “Really. It’s okay, Mr. Pennington.”

  “Olivia and I have the whole rest of the afternoon planned,” announced Ruby.

  “We do?” said Olivia.

  “Yes,” said Ruby, even though the thought had just occurred to her. “We’re having our own Saturday.”

  “Ah, The Saturdays,” said Mr. Pennington fondly. Mr. Pennington had once taught in the very same elementary school Ruby now attended, a fact that fascinated her.

  “Hey, Mr. Pennington,” said Ruby as her previously unformed plans now began to take shape in her mind, “would you like to have a book discussion with Olivia and me? I have just finished reading a, um, an intriguing book called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.”

  “You finished it?” asked Olivia in surprise.

  Ruby nodded proudly. “It had very small print,” she informed Mr. Pennington. “But it was worth it.”

  “I have an idea,” said Mr. Pennington. “Why don’t you two come over and we’ll have the discussion in my yard? Jacques would like to see you.”

  “So that’s what we did,” Ruby told Flora that evening. “I mean, we cleaned up — Olivia and I — and then we went to Mr. Pennington’s and sat in his yard and talked about the book. It was great.”

  “You enjoyed a book talk,” said Flora, managing to sound both dubious and incredulous at the same time.

  “It’s not an impossibleness.”

  “Impossibility,” Flora corrected her automatically.

  “Okay.” Ruby, perched on Flora’s bed in the once-again impeccably tidy room, said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “You know what! The party! Tell me everything about the party!”

  Flora gazed soberly out her dark window. “It was fun,” she said at last.

  “That’s it? It was fun?”

  “Ruby, sometimes it’s kind of hard to put my thoughts and feelings into words,” said Flora in her most annoying older-sister way.

  “Just start by telling me what you did.”

  “Okay. Well, when we first arrived, everyone —”

  “How many people were already there?” interrupted Ruby.

  “About five or six. Anyway, everyone was out back by Tanya’s pool. First we just swam for a while and talked and stuff. Then Tanya’s parents put hamburgers and hot dogs and chicken on the barbecue. We ate dinner at two picnic tables.”

  “Did you and Nikki stick together the whole time?” asked Ruby.

  “Not the whole time. We both knew everyone there.”

  “Were all the other kids from your class there except for Olivia?”

  “Not all,” replied Flora. “But most of them. I don’t know if the others were away or what. And then there were about five girls from Mrs. Annich’s class.” (Mrs. Annich was the other sixth-grade teacher at Camden Falls Elementary.)

  “So you had fun?” prompted Ruby.

  “Yes,” said Flora. “I really did.”

  Flora remembered the jumpy feeling in her stomach when Min had dropped her and Nikki at Tanya’s house. What if no one except Nikki spoke to her at the party? What if the invitations had been a bad joke after all? Flora had imagined dozens of horrifying situations — being snubbed, ignored, teased — but of course nothing even resembling these scenarios had taken place. She had merely swum and eaten chicken and chatted with the other girls. They talked about their summer plans and movies they’d seen. At one point, Tanya had whispered in Flora’s ear, “Will Price has a crush on Sophie and she has one on him!”

  Flora, smiling, had looked around at all her classmates — laughing, swimming, wiping barbecue sauce off their fingers — and thought with some surprise, So now I’m part of this, too. She was part of her new family with Min and part of the Row Houses and part of Main Street and part of her small circle of friends. And now she was part of this bigger circle of girls.

  This bigger circle, she had mused, did not include Olivia. Was that all right? (This was one of those thoughts she did not yet care to put into words for Ruby.) She supposed so. After all, even best friends couldn’t stick together all the time. And in September, when Flora moved to the central school, she would be part of a much wider world. Why, she and Olivia might not even have any classes together. Still, she thought uncomfortably, Olivia had been her friend since the day she and Ruby had moved to Camden Falls and had helped to ease her into her new life.

  “Flora?” said Ruby.

  “Just thinking.”

  Ruby knew better than to ask what her sister was thinking about.

  Across Camden Falls, in a house far out in the countryside, Nikki Sherman lay in her bed, Mae in deep sleep on the other side of the room. Nikki replayed the events of Tanya’s party, marveling at the very fact that she’d been invited to it. She had had a wonderful time. As she drifted off to sleep, she tried not to recall the look on Olivia’s face when Nikki and Flora had left her behind in the vegetable garden that afternoon.

  “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” cried Ruby the moment the telephone began to ring. She leaped to her feet and pounced on the phone, causing Daisy Dear to let out a bark of alarm, the hackles rising on her back.

  “Ruby, calm down,” said Flora. “Look what you made Daisy do.”

  “The phone made her do that,” replied Ruby.

  “It did not. She doesn’t bark every time the phone rings.”

  Ruby turned her back on Flora. “Hello?” she said into the receiver.

  Flora rolled her eyes and tried to remember if, when she was ten, a ringing telephone had inspired such commotion.

  “Really?” Ruby was saying. “Oh, goody! We’ll be right there. Thanks, Min. Bye!” Ruby clicked off the phone and turned to her sister. “They’re here! I mean, they’re at the store. Our next book club packages! I told Min we’d go get them.”

  Min Read was testing the waters with her granddaughters. “Giving them their independence,” Flora had heard her tell Mr. Pennington one evening. To that end, she now allowed the girls to be on their own every now and then, and Ruby was especially grateful. Flora, who actually enjoyed spending time at Needle and Thread, wasn’t grateful so much as she was pleased to be deemed responsible enough to take charge of Ruby (an arrangement of which Ruby was unaware).

  “Come on!” exclaimed Ruby. “Let’s go!”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Flora.

  Ruby glanced around the living room. King Comma was asleep on a chair. Daisy Dear was now sitting p
lacidly on another chair. Both had eaten breakfast, and Ruby had recently walked Daisy.

  “No,” said Ruby.

  Flora regarded her silently.

  “What?” cried Ruby.

  “Don’t you think we should call Olivia and Nikki and tell them about the packages, too?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Half an hour later, the four girls met at Needle and Thread, Nikki flushed from her long bicycle ride.

  “This is so exciting!” said Nikki as the girls filed into the store.

  “Yes. It’s very exciting,” said Olivia distantly.

  Flora studied Olivia for a moment but said nothing. Tanya’s party had taken place two days earlier, and Flora had seen little of Olivia since the planting of the vegetable garden.

  Ruby took the packages from the counter and carried them to Nikki, Olivia, and Flora, who were sitting on the couches at the front of the store. Olivia, Ruby noted, was sitting by herself; Nikki and Flora were seated together on the other couch. Ruby considered the situation, then decided that unless all three girls were to sit on the same couch, someone had to sit alone. Still … why was it Olivia? Ruby flopped herself down next to Olivia, sorted through the envelopes, and handed Olivia’s to her first.

  When each girl was holding her package, Flora said, “Okay, one, two, three … go!”

  In a flash, the packages were ripped open. Flora looked at the paperback book she had withdrawn. “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” she said softly.

  “By Mildred D. Taylor. I like the cover,” said Nikki, studying it.

  What Flora noticed first when she looked at the cover were the colors — oranges and browns, the colors of sunshine and earth.

  “I almost didn’t see the face,” said Ruby suddenly, noticing the somber face of a young girl. “It blends right into the background.”

  “Not the background,” said Flora. “The world, I think. The girl is immersed in her world. That’s Cassie, by the way. And Cassie and the earth and the air — they’re all connected, all part of one another. You’ll understand when you read the book.”

  “You’ve already read it?” asked Olivia, sounding wounded.