“Sorry, Claire,” he said. “I’m not going with anybody.”
I couldn’t quite believe it.
“So you’re saying no?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
I went on. “You have to be there, one way or another. Attendance required. Why not be there with me? Your old friend Claire?”
He looked sort of horrified that I wouldn’t drop it. He shook his head and said, “I’ve got to go.”
Then he ran off.
It’s funny. I didn’t really expect him to say yes. I braced myself for the worst. I told myself he’d probably say no.
But actually hearing it … it hurt. It hurt bad.
I went to the clubhouse to recover. I was glad I had a place to go where no one could see me.
Then I drew a scene on my wall. I drew a little me talking to a little Henry, with a speech bubble coming out of his mouth. I wrote “NO” inside the bubble. I drew a tiny tear on my face.
I guess I could ask another boy, but why bother?
No matter what I do, I’m going to be the round peg at the square dance. Har har.
I came up with a prank to play on Webby. What do you think of this?
We all go to the dance. Mr. Unitas and Pow-Pow are making us choose partners and line up in two rows, while Hee Haw Higgins talks through the mike, saying stuff like, “Yee haw, this is a real country hoedown! Yahoo!” and whatever. All the boys will be dragging their feet, grumbling about how they don’t feel like dancing.
Meanwhile, I’ve got Dad’s old boat horn, the one that makes that funny sound? I hide the horn under my jacket or something. And every time Webby bows to his partner, I honk the horn. Everyone will laugh at him! And when they find out I’m the one playing the joke, I’ll be their hero.
The dance is this weekend. Maybe I should keep thinking.
And, in case you forgot (but I know you would never forget), my birthday is the weekend after that. I usually look forward to my birthday. Remember last year, on my tenth birthday, when my dad took you, me, and Henry to the Spring Carnival in St. Anselm? And we rode all the rides and ate ice cream and Dad got a bunch of carnies dressed as zombies to sing “Happy Birthday” to me in the haunted house? Even the guy getting sliced open on the buzz saw table was into it.
I’ll never top that. I’m not expecting to. But I don’t know if I should even try to have a birthday party this year. Who would come?
Mom is insisting, though. She said I’m having a party if it kills her. She’s going to make a big cake and she told me to invite everyone in my class. I told her nobody will come but she said, “How will you know for sure if you don’t try?”
She doesn’t get it. I don’t WANT to know for sure that nobody wants to come to my birthday party.
Thanks to Mom, who would not stop bugging me, I sent out seven invitations, one to every boy in my class. Here’s one for you, Bess. If only you could come! The two of us would have a great time. If you came, I wouldn’t wish for anything else.
YOU’RE INVITED to:
Claire’s Eleventh Birthday Party
At her house
303 Eliot Point Road
Saturday, April 23
Two o’clock
Games, cake, piñata, the usual …
If you can’t make it, don’t worry, you won’t
miss anything.
RSVP
I haven’t heard back from anyone yet.
How much are plane tickets from California?
Claire
Dear Bess,
What do you mean, it’s not a very inviting invitation? I INVITED people. I asked them to come. That’s the definition of inviting.
Okay, I know what you mean. Mom said the same thing.
“You have to make the party sound like fun if you want people to come,” she told me. “You can’t tell them they won’t be missing anything!”
But I sent the invitations anyway.
Maybe I’M the one who wouldn’t be missing anything if nobody came. What am I going to do at an all-boys party? Kickbox? Pop the balloons and smash the cake? If anyone in the world knows what boys do, it’s me. All they can talk about is smells and snot and sports. Oh, and video games. Not that there’s anything wrong with video games. But I think they’re really, really boring to talk about.
I hear you saying I’m not being fair. Not all the boys are thugs or gross all the time. Most of them aren’t.
Webby definitely is. Yes, he was nice to me one afternoon during a soccer game. But after that: nothing.
Which didn’t stop my mom from forcing me to send him an invitation.
Really, forget about visiting from California.
I think I’m going to move there instead.
Claire
Dear Bess,
I sent out the invitations four days ago. My classmates have definitely received them. But no one has said a word to me about the party.
This morning at school, Mr. Harper was teaching us about verbs in language arts. He told us about infinitives—to be, to eat, to go, etc., and showed us how to conjugate them:
To Be
I am
You are
He, she, it is
We are
You are
They are
After a few rounds of this he asked, “Who can give us another verb to conjugate?”
I raised my hand.
“To invite,” I said after he called on me. “I invite, you invite, he invites, we invite, you invite, they invite.”
“Good,” Mr. Harper said. “Who has another one?”
I didn’t wait for him to call on me this time. I said, “To reply. I reply. YOU reply. Or maybe you don’t reply?”
I gave all the boys in the class my most intense stink eye. They shrank back in their seats. (As you know, I give good stink eye.) But not one of them said anything.
Mr. Harper looked mystified.
“You didn’t finish conjugating that verb, Claire,” he pointed out. “But I think you’ve got the idea.”
The bell rang and everybody went to lunch. I was going to take my lunch to the clubhouse to eat alone as usual, but Mr. Harper stopped me and said he wanted to talk to me.
“Is anything bothering you, Claire?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Really? Because you don’t seem very happy. Last year you were a lot more cheerful.”
“I was?”
Hearing him say it made me sad. Sadder than I was already feeling. It’s just that I didn’t see any point in telling him my troubles, because what could he do about them? Could he bring you back from California? Could he magically make a new girl appear in town?
He went on. “I know it’s hard, being the only girl in the whole school. Do the boys pick on you?”
I couldn’t really look him in the eye. “Most of them are okay.”
“Is one of them bothering you?”
Yes, I thought. Webby. And Henry.
But if I told him, he would then go tell them I said they were bothering me. And I didn’t want them to know they were bothering me. I wanted them to think that nothing they did had any effect on me. That I was completely free of them. That they had no power over me at all.
So I said, “No. Everyone is very nice to me.”
I think he knew I was lying, but he didn’t press me.
“Okay. Just know you can come talk to me any time you like. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Outside in the hall, there were shouts and laughter. Mr. Harper and I went to the door. Mr. Jones had just mopped the floor and Gilbert had slipped on the wet spot and fallen. Webby was pointing at him and screaming with laughter, just like he did to me on the soccer field.
“What a jerk,” I said under my breath … but not that far under my breath, because Mr. Harper heard me.
“Mm-hmm” was all he said back.
Mm-hmm,
Claire
Dear Bess,
Tonight was the square dance.
Today at Assembly Mr. Unitas reminded us that we all had to go. He said, for the tenth time, “Attendance is required.”
Maybe he knew something I didn’t.
I put on some blue jeans and a red-and-white-checked shirt that I thought looked “country.” I ate an early dinner and said a grim good-bye to my brothers and mother. Dad drove me to school. He escorted me to the door of the gym. It was all lit up and we could hear fiddle music playing. It sure looked like a dance was happening there.
Dad kissed me good-bye. “I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours,” he said. Then he drove home.
I walked into the gym. Hee Haw Higgins stood on a platform with a microphone, dancing in a circle around a fiddle player. The teachers huddled by the refreshments table. They looked strangely relaxed, teasing each other and laughing and joking.
I’ve seen the teachers act that way before, just once. Last year, I happened to walk by the teachers’ lounge when the door was open. I peeked inside. Mr. Strickland was telling some kind of funny story, and all other teachers were sipping their coffee and hanging on his every word, and when he said, “I left my harp in Sam Clam’s disco,” they all broke up laughing. Not in a classroom joke way, but the way my parents laugh when they have friends over for dinner and think we’ve gone to bed and don’t know we’re spying on them.
That’s what the teachers looked like when I got to the square dance tonight. But when they noticed me, they stiffened up.
“Hey!” Mr. Harper walked over to greet me. “One of you showed!”
“What?” I asked.
I looked around. The gym did feel very empty.
That’s because it was empty. I was the only student there.
None of the boys had shown up.
“Claire!” Mr. Unitas shouted. “I’m glad you could make it.” The teachers all cracked up again. They were still a little bit in their no-kids-are-around mode.
Hee Haw clapped his hands. “Come on, everybody! Let’s start the hoedown!” Behind him was a little band, a trio—a fiddle player, a stand-up bass, and a guitar, all wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots. Hee Haw gave the signal and they started playing.
“Line up, everybody!” he called. “Ladies on the left, gents on the right.”
Ms. Ruiz, Ms. Teitelman, Mrs. Grimes, and I were the only ladies there. We lined up, and the men lined up across from us. We were outnumbered ten to four, so a few of the men joined our side. Hee Haw and Mr. Unitas were not going to let us get away with not dancing, not with the band there and all. So we shrugged our shoulders and started dancing. Hee Haw told us what to do, just like last year.
“Gents, bow to your partner,” he called. The men stepped forward and bowed.
“Ladies, curtsy to the gents.” My line stepped forward and curtsied. The men in our line bowed, except for Mr. Strickland, who got a big laugh by curtsying and batting his eyes at Mr. Unitas.
Then Hee Haw did his thing. See if you can imagine the dance from the calls he made:
Swing your partner round and round, till the
hole in your head makes a whistling sound, Ace of Diamonds, Jack of Spades, meet your
partner and promenade!
Swing with Mary, swing with Grace, Allemande left with Old Prune Face!
Stop where you are and don’t be blue, The music quit, so I will too.
After a few rounds of dancing we stopped to take a breather. It’s real exercise, square dancing. I went to the refreshments table for a soda. Suddenly, the gym door banged open and there stood Gilbert, all out of breath like us.
“Sorry I’m late!” he called out.
I’ve never seen Mr. Unitas so happy to see a student before.
“Gilbert!” he called back. “Join the fun!”
Gilbert came over to me.
“Can I be your partner?” he asked.
I had been dancing with Mr. Harper, but he stepped aside.
“Um, okay,” I said.
I mean, Gilbert was the only person in the room close to my height, so it made sense.
Before we started dancing, I noticed he had a toy handcuff attached to one of his wrists.
“What’s that for?” I asked him.
Gilbert tugged at the handcuff. “I can’t get it off. Webby and those guys tried to keep me from coming, so they handcuffed me to my kitchen table. I managed to get one hand free, but this cuff won’t open.”
“Where are the other guys?”
“Boycotting the dance. Not just in our grade, but in every grade. They wanted me to stay home, but I wouldn’t. They had to handcuff me to the table to stop me from coming, Claire.”
I tried to think of something to say, something that showed I appreciated the gesture but didn’t want to encourage him to like me any more than he already did.
What I ended up with was, “You’re very … persistent.”
Now that I think of it, maybe Gilbert deserved better than that.
“I knew you’d be here all by yourself,” he said. “And, well, I wanted to dance with you.”
At that point, Mr. Harper stepped in and said, “Let me help you get that off.”
He found a screwdriver and removed the handcuff from Gilbert’s wrist.
“Now you won’t bonk us with it when we’re swinging you around,” Mr. Harper said.
Everybody had a cool drink. Then the band started playing again, and we lined up to dance.
Hee Haw called out:
It ain’t going to rain, it ain’t going to snow, all
join hands and away we go!
Swing your partner round and round, any old
way but upside down.
Swing her, Mack, don’t break her back!
Gilbert is a very enthusiastic dancer. He swung me around so hard I twirled off and bumped into Ms. Teitelman! But she didn’t mind. We were all laughing and dancing and swinging each other by the elbow and stumbling around getting dizzy. It was kind of fun, actually. Webby and those guys missed a pretty good time.
Dad got to the gym a little early to pick me up. Mr. Unitas waved to him. “Hey, John! Join the party.”
I looked at Gilbert. “Oh no,” I said under my breath. I didn’t want my dad dancing!
But Gilbert said, “What difference does it make? It’s just us and the teachers anyway.”
He was right. I shrugged and we all did one more Virginia reel. Dad really got into it, just like I knew he would.
First you whistle, then you sing. All join hands and make a ring.
Do-si-do, don’t you know, you can’t catch a rabbit till it starts to snow.
Right and left on heel and toe, peek behind you, look there’s Joe!
Comb your hair and tie your shoe, promenade home like you always do.
Ladies to their seats and gents all foller, thank the fiddler and kiss the caller.
We all bowed to the band and clapped for them. The dance was over.
I said good night to Gilbert and Mr. Harper and all the other teachers. Then Dad and I got into the car.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
It was better than I expected, anyway.
“Took me back to my own school days. We had a square dance every spring back then too. Only, more kids showed up …”
Dad pulled into the driveway. As the headlights swept across the yard, I thought I saw somebody peek out the shed window. But maybe it was just a reflection in the glass.
A line from one of Hee Haw’s calls echoed in my mind:
Peek behind you, look there’s Joe!
I bet he meant Smuggler Joe.
Maybe Hee Haw’s calls hid coded messages from the old smuggler days! Some of them were kind of hard to understand. Like, what did he mean when he said, You can’t catch a rabbit till it starts to snow?
Why can’t you?
And who’s Old Prune Face?
Of course, once Smuggler Joe was in my mind, I couldn’t stop thinking about him—and about the face
I thought I saw in the shed.
I waited until everybody was asleep, and then I grabbed a flashlight and sneaked outside to look. The shed was empty.
But something glinted on the floor, catching a beam from my flashlight—a glint of light near my right foot. I reached down and picked it up.
It was a gold coin! With a picture of a treasure chest stamped on the front, and some blurry words on the back.
I swept the light over the shed one last time. No one was in there. I put the coin in my pocket and went back inside the house.
I’m looking at it now. It’s definitely metal, but I’m not sure it’s gold. It’s kind of light for gold.
I’ll show it to Mom and Dad in the morning and see what they think.
At breakfast this morning I showed everyone the coin I’d found in the boat shed.
“Is that a chocolate coin?” Gabe asked.
“No,” I told him. “It’s metal. I found it in the boat shed last night.”
Dad didn’t like the sound of that. “What were you doing in the boat shed last night?” he asked.
I didn’t want to say I thought I’d seen a face in the window. He would have gotten mad at me for going out there alone.
“I went out there to get … my homework. I left it on the worktable.”
I don’t think Dad believed me, but he let it slide.
Mom picked up the coin and studied it.
“It’s not old,” she said. “I think it’s made of aluminum.”
“Let me see,” Jim said.
He looked at it. Then he bit it.
“It’s a token from the game arcade in St. Anselm,” he announced.
“It is?” I asked.
I was hoping it was pirate treasure or smuggler’s gold.
Jim nodded. “Yep. See? It says Andy’s Arcade.”
I should have noticed that before. I had seen letters stamped onto the coin, but I assumed they said something like Ye Olde Englande.
“Somebody must have dropped it,” Dad said.
I asked Gabe if it was him. He said no. Then I asked Jim and he said, “Not mine. Must belong to one of your friends.”