Donnica looked around and wondered why they didn’t just toss the whole place in the throwaway box.
Mrs. Cooder left Oggie and Donnica and returned to the task of rescuing her hats.
“You sit here,” Oggie said, getting a chair for Donnica and putting it next to the shoe mountain. “I’ll get you started, and then I can match shoes while you practice charving.”
Oggie spent about ten minutes showing Donnica the basics.
“It’s all about taking little bites,” he told her. “Start with Kansas. Kansas, Wyoming, and Colorado are the easiest.”
Donnica opened the atlas on her lap and peeled the wrapper off a fresh piece of cheese. For the next hour they worked side-by-side, Donnica charving and Oggie digging through the old shoes looking for matches. Every now and then, Donnica would stop and ask Oggie for his opinion.
“How’s this?” she’d say, holding up a lopsided, chewed-up piece of cheese.
“Horrible,” Oggie would answer honestly. Then he would put down the shoe he was holding and take a fresh piece of cheese out of the package.
“You need to take smaller bites,” he’d tell her. Or, “It helps if you tilt your head when you go around the curves. See?” Then he’d quickly nibble the cheese into a perfect Tennessee, or Oregon, or West Virginia.
“How come you’re so good at it?” Donnica asked, tossing yet another mangled piece of cheese into the reject pile that was quickly growing at her feet.
“Practice makes perfect,” he said. “But if it turns out that even after you practice you still stink at it, maybe you can buy a book of magic tricks and learn one of those instead.”
“Why would I want to do that?” Donnica asked, peeling the cellophane wrapper off a fresh piece of cheese.
“For the party,” said Oggie.
“Oh, right,” Donnica said. “The party.”
The bells on the front door jingled.
“Is that you, Dennis?” Mrs. Cooder called, thinking maybe her husband had returned.
“Uh, no,” a woman’s voice called back. “Sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if you might have any lamps for sale.”
“We’re closed for inventory right now,” Mrs. Cooder answered. “Plus we’ve sprung a leak, but, well, come on in. I’ll show you what we’ve got.”
Mrs. Cooder came to the front of the store and escorted her customer to the furniture section.
“Sorry about the mess,” Oggie overheard her saying. “Plumbing problems. Can you believe one measly pipe could cost ten thousand dollars to replace?”
“Ouch,” said the woman sympathetically.
“Heaven knows where we’re going to find that kind of money. A lamp, you said, right? How about this nice green one, or if you want something unusual, this kitten has a nose that lights up when you plug it in.”
“Oh, that one would be perfect for my daughter’s room,” said the woman.
Oggie was busy pawing through the pile of shoes, looking for the match to a blue one with rhinestones on the straps, when he glanced up and saw Amy Schneider standing there watching him.
“Hi,” he said.
Amy gave a little wave.
Donnica, who didn’t want anyone to know what she was up to, was unhappy to see Amy. She quickly shoved the piece of cheese she’d been working on into her mouth, then hid the rest of the package behind her back.
“What are you doing here?” Oggie asked Amy.
“My mom’s looking for a lamp,” Amy answered softly.
“Oh, well, I’m matching shoes for my mom,” Oggie told her, “and Donnica is —”
“Matching shoes, too,” Donnica interrupted, quickly swallowing the lump of cheese in her mouth and then jumping off the chair to throw herself into a sudden frenzy of shoe sorting. “We’re very busy, Annie.”
“You mean Amy,” corrected Oggie.
“Whatever,” said Donnica. “The point is, we’re very busy and there’s not much room back here. And besides that, you know what they say about three being a crowd, right?”
Amy got the message loud and clear, but Oggie, as usual, missed the point and didn’t understand that Donnica was trying to make Amy feel unwelcome.
“I can scooch over and make more room if you want to help, too,” he said. He reached into the pile of shoes and pulled out a red one with a big flower on the toe. “Why don’t you see if you can find the other one of these?”
But when he turned around to hand Amy the shoe, she was gone.
“I wonder where she disappeared to,” he said.
Donnica shrugged and tried to look innocent.
A few minutes later, the bells jingled over the door as the Schneiders left with their purchase. Donnica immediately threw down the shoe she’d been pretending to find a match for and went to retrieve the package of cheese from its hiding place.
“Can’t you lock the door, or something?” she said. “It’s very distracting when people just show up uninvited like that….”
* * *
In the car on the way home, Amy held the new kitten lamp on her lap.
“Won’t that be cute in your room?” asked her mother.
“Uh-huh,” said Amy, but her thoughts weren’t on the lamp. Instead, she was picturing the sneaky look she’d seen on Donnica Perfecto’s face and thinking —
I wonder what she’s up to.
Later, when Mrs. Cooder came over to check on Oggie’s progress with the shoes, Donnica was taking a break from her charving, busy putting nail polish on a pinkie nail, which she’d accidentally chipped on a shoe buckle.
“Dumb, dirty, disgusting old shoe,” she muttered under her breath.
“If you’re not too busy, Donnica,” said Mrs. Cooder pleasantly, “maybe you’d like to give me a hand sorting through some of the dresses on the racks in the back.”
“Me?” Donnica had no desire to touch clothes that total strangers had already worn.
“We have a lot of cute things. Who knows, you might even find something you’d like to take home with you.”
“You mean to wear?” Donnica said, unable to keep from shuddering. “Uh, thanks, Mrs. Cooder, but as soon as my nail dries I really have to get back to practicing. I have to learn how to charve today. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“Life and death?” Mrs. Cooder raised her eyebrows. “That sounds pretty serious.”
“Donnica is going to charve at a birthday party tomorrow,” Oggie explained.
Donnica couldn’t help blushing when she heard her lie repeated.
“Must be a very important birthday party,” said Mrs. Cooder, taking note of Donnica’s bubble-gum-pink cheeks.
Amy Schneider was not the only one thinking, I wonder what she’s up to.
* * *
The bells over the door jingled again. This time it was the pizza being delivered. “Prrrrr-ip!” cried Oggie in happy anticipation.
Donnica wouldn’t have minded a slice of pizza herself right then, but when she peered into the cardboard box, she gasped.
“What is that yellow and pink stuff all over it?”
“Pineapple and ham,” said Oggie.
“On a pizza?”
“Yeppers,” Oggie told her. “It’s my favorite.”
Donnica was about to say something snotty like, “Why am I not surprised that your favorite pizza would be covered with something gross and disgusting that nobody else would want to go near?” But she bit her tongue, reminding herself that she wasn’t quite finished with Oggie yet.
“Can you show me again how to make my edges smoother?” she asked as soon as Oggie was done with his pizza. “Mine still look too jaggedy.”
* * *
At 5:30 Mrs. Cooder turned out the lights and locked up the store.
“Thanks for your help,” she said, giving Oggie’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’ll see you at home. You two ride carefully now, it’s starting to get dark.”
Oggie and Donnica got their bikes.
“Do you want me to come over late
r tonight, after I finish my homework?” Oggie asked as they started pedaling along next to each other.
“Why would I want you to do that?” Donnica couldn’t imagine actually inviting Oggie to come inside her house.
“So I could help you with your charving,” Oggie said. “Your edges are still pretty jaggedy, you know.”
“I just need to practice.”
“Maybe I could give you some more tips. Like you should tilt your head when you do curves.”
Donnica sighed. “You already told me that.”
“And you should take small bites.”
“You told me that already, too,” said Donnica. “Tell the truth — is there anything you haven’t taught me yet?”
Oggie had a feeling there was something he had forgotten to tell her, but he couldn’t for the life of him think of what it could be.
“I guess maybe I’ve taught you everything I know,” he said.
“That’s what I thought,” said Donnica, then she stood up and began to pedal harder, quickly pulling ahead of Oggie’s bike.
“Hey, wait up,” called Oggie. “Where are you going in such a hurry?”
“Hollywood!” Donnica shouted at the top of her lungs, then she rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.
The following day, Donnica stayed home from school, pretending to be sick.
Mrs. Perfecto brought her daughter tea and toast in bed.
“Is there anything else I can get you, Cupcake?” Mrs. Perfecto asked.
“Uh-huh.” Donnica nodded weakly. “More cheese.”
Mrs. Perfecto couldn’t believe how much cheese her daughter was eating all of a sudden. What was going on? Had she come down with some kind of strange cheese disease? “You’ve already had a whole package this morning,” she pointed out. “Are you sure you want more?”
“I WANT MORE CHEESE,” demanded Donnica.
“Yes, Cupcake, right away,” said Mrs. Perfecto, hurrying out of the room.
While Mr. Snolinovsky’s fourth-grade class did math and spelling and watched a nature video about the Galápagos Islands, Donnica Perfecto spent the morning hiding under her covers, charving cheese. Once when she was lost in concentration trying to perfect the thumb on the lower peninsula of Michigan, she failed to hear her mother approaching and was nearly caught in the act. Fortunately, at the last second, Donnica heard the doorknob turn and managed to toss the evidence up — which is how she discovered that cheese sticks very nicely to a plaster ceiling if you throw it hard enough.
Meanwhile, at Truman Elementary, Donnica’s absence did not go unnoticed.
“Maybe she really was sick yesterday,” Dawn said to Hannah as they sat at lunch together, both feeling at a bit of a loss. They didn’t know what to do, with no one there to boss them around or to provide first syllables for them to finish.
Oggie, who was sitting across from Amy, eating a piece of cold pizza left over from the day before, was wondering about Donnica, too.
“She seemed okay when we rode home yesterday from the store,” he told Amy, as he picked off a piece of pineapple and popped it in his mouth.
Amy, who hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that Donnica was up to something, began pulling off her rubber bands and dropping them one by one onto her napkin.
“Did I tell you that she invited me to come swim in her pool this summer?” Oggie continued.
Amy nodded and, having removed the last of her rubber bands, took an unencumbered bite of her tuna fish sandwich. Oggie had told her about the pool invitation twice since they’d sat down to lunch.
Oggie went on. “They’ve got this cabana banana thing which is full of towels in case anybody needs one. Isn’t that cool?”
Amy nodded. She’d already heard about the cabana banana, too. What she couldn’t figure out (and was too shy to ask) was how Donnica and Oggie had suddenly become such good friends. Amy had seen her making fun of Oggie behind his back plenty of times. Why was Donnica hanging out with him now?
“Hey,” said Oggie, “I just thought of something. Since Donnica is sick, maybe she’ll need somebody to fill in for her at the birthday party this afternoon.”
This was the first time Amy had heard anything about a birthday party.
“Whose birthday is it?” she asked.
“Dawn’s little sister,” Oggie told her. “Donnica’s going to charve for the kids, since the clown couldn’t come.”
“Donnica knows how to charve?” Amy asked.
“Yeppers. I taught her how yesterday.”
Amy was more convinced than ever that something extremely fishy was going on.
* * *
That afternoon in class, Mr. Snolinovsky brought out an old record player that had belonged to him when he was a kid. He’d also brought along some special records. There were pictures of cowboys on the covers, some of them with fiddles tucked under their chins, others in bright red snap shirts holding guitars.
“When I was a boy, we used to square-dance at school,” he told the class. “Every Friday, at the end of the day, we’d push all the desks to one side of the room, bow to our partners, and allemande left, do-si-do, and promenade until we were red in the face. I loved it so much I thought I might try introducing you to the joys of square dancing, too.”
You could have heard a pin drop.
“We gotta dance?” asked David Korben, finally breaking the silence.
“With partners?” whispered Bethie Hudson, her big blues eyes wide in horror.
Oggie was the only one other than Mr. Snolinovsky who thought square dancing sounded like fun. His parents had an antique windup Victrola in the living room at home, and sometimes they would crank it up and dance. Oggie loved to watch his parents twirl around in each other’s arms. His mother had taught him a few steps, but Oggie always seemed to trip over his own feet and end up stepping on her toes.
“Make two lines, one for boys, one for girls, and go from tallest to smallest,” Mr. Snolinovsky told the class.
There were twelve girls and eleven boys in the class, but since Donnica was absent, it worked out evenly. Oggie was the next-to-tallest boy in the line, and as it happened, Dawn was the next-to-tallest girl — so they were partners. As Oggie followed Mr. Snolinovsky’s directions, taking Dawn by the arm and escorting her to their corner of the square, Dawn shot a look of total despair toward Hannah. Hannah was paired up with Jackson Polito, who she secretly thought was kind of cute, so she wasn’t as unhappy about her partner as Dawn was.
Mr. Snolinovsky put on one of the scratchy records, and pretty soon they were square-dancing. Or at least trying to. Oggie did his best to follow the instructions, hooking elbows with Dawn and skipping around in a circle when the caller told them to “swing your partners!” But it wasn’t long before the inevitable happened.
“Ouch!” Dawn cried, suddenly grabbing her foot and hopping around on one leg. “You stepped on me!”
“Oops. Sorry!” said Oggie.
Mr. Snolinovsky told them to sit the next one out so Dawn’s foot could have a chance to recover. Oggie sat beside her on the floor while the others continued dancing. There was a lot of complaining going on, but it actually seemed like most of the kids were having fun, even if they didn’t want to admit it.
After a while, Oggie leaned toward Dawn and shouted over the music, “You must be excited, huh?”
“About what? Getting stomped on?” Dawn said, scowling as she rubbed her sore foot.
“No,” Oggie said. “About the party this afternoon.”
“What party?” asked Dawn.
“Your sister’s party.”
Now Dawn was really confused. “I don’t have a sister,” she said. “I’m an only child.”
“That’s weird,” said Oggie. “Donnica told me she was going to be helping out at your sister’s birthday party today. I spent the whole afternoon with her yesterday teaching her everything I know. Or at least I think I taught her everything. There might be something I forgot, but I can’t remember wh
at it —”
Dawn cut him off.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You were with Donnica yesterday after school?”
“Yeppers. She came to the store with me.”
“She did? How did she seem?”
“Fine,” said Oggie. “Except her edges were a little jaggedy.”
“What about her appendix — was it exploding?”
“I don’t think so,” said Oggie.
“Hmmmm,” said Dawn.
And someone else was added to the growing list of people wondering what in the world Donnica Perfecto was up to.
At 2:30 Friday afternoon, as the sweaty square dancers in Mr. Snolinovsky’s class pushed their desks back into place and got ready for dismissal, Donnica Perfecto was sneaking out her back door clutching the handle of a minicooler containing several slices of American cheese. She had stuffed pillows under her covers in case her mother came into her room to check on her. Since she was afraid of running into anyone she knew — especially Dawn and Hannah — she’d left herself enough time to ride her bike the back way to the Wawatosa Bandshell.
The weather was beautiful that day, sunny and warm, with none of the gusty winds from the previous day, which had blown the lids off garbage cans and sent all manner of things fluttering and scuttering around the neighborhood.
* * *
Hannah and Dawn were standing on the corner, waiting for the light to change, when Oggie Cooder came up behind them. Instead of ignoring him, the way they usually would have, Dawn turned around and faced Oggie.
“Tell Hannah what you told me about Donnica saying she had to go to my little sister’s birthday party today.”
“That’s what she said,” Oggie reported. “She told me the clown was sick.”
“How weird is that?” said Dawn.
“Very,” said Hannah. “She told us yesterday she was going straight home to bed because her appendix was about to explode. But you said her appendix was fine, right, Oggie?”
“Yeppers,” nodded Oggie.
“I think maybe it’s time for us to go pay her a little visit,” Dawn said.
When the three of them reached Tullahoma Street, Hannah and Dawn crossed over to go to the Perfectos’ house to confront Donnica, while Oggie continued on home. He knew Turk would be eagerly awaiting his afternoon walk.