Double Dog Dare

Sorry, my mom says you can’t come over today. Guess you’ll have to go to your aunt’s. Next week for sure.

  Francine

  She didn’t even bother to try refolding it into a heart, just poked Emma in the back to ask her to pass it up. Suddenly, Francine found she didn’t care all that much.

  8.

  A CRUMPLED BALL OF PINK PAPER

  When the final bell rang, Kansas couldn’t have been more thrilled. It had been a miserable day, and he was looking forward to getting home as soon as possible. He was just shuffling down the aisle out of the classroom, stuffing his arms through his backpack straps, when he noticed something small and pink crumpled on the floor. It was a note from the office. And it had Francine’s name on it.

  Kansas stopped walking. Everyone else was streaming past him, but Kansas was fixated on that balled-up pink note on the floor. It must have fallen out of Francine’s desk. Kansas knew he shouldn’t look at it. He knew it was none of his business.

  Kansas picked up the note.

  When he was absolutely positive no one was looking, Kansas unfolded it quickly and read.

  Mother called. Working late.

  Francine and friend to go to father’s after school.

  Father will pick up.

  Kansas sucked in his breath as he reread the third sentence. Francine and friend to go to father’s after school.

  “Kansas?”

  Kansas’s head shot up. “You forget something?” Miss Sparks asked.

  “Uh …” Kansas looked down at the note once more, then quickly crumpled it back into a ball. “No. No, I’m fine.”

  “Good. I’ll see you in Media Club tomorrow. Don’t forget to wear your school colors. Green and white.”

  “Yeah,” Kansas said, crossing to the front of the room. He tossed the pink note in the garbage. “School colors. Right.” And he left the classroom, squeezed his way through the sea of students in the hallway, and walked across the sidewalk to the bus pick-up zone, where Ginny was waiting for him. He couldn’t help thinking, the whole bus ride home, how Francine’s parents were divorced. Divorced, just like his.

  Somehow, that one little fact changed everything.

  “No, you should put it by the dog poster. Kan-sas, I said, it looks better over there.”

  Kansas lowered the picture he’d been trying to put on his wall, the one of the underwear on the flagpole. He’d printed it as soon as he got home, fuzzy as it was. “Gin-ny,” he said, in his best little-sister voice. He accidentally pressed his hand against the Scotch tape on the back of the photo, and the tape came off on his hand and got stuck between his fingers. “I told you, this is my side of the room. You have to stay on your side. Now leave me alone.”

  As if it weren’t bad enough that Kansas’s family had moved to stupid California, now Kansas had to share a room with Ginny. She always wanted to talk to him, or play with him, or bug him about one thing or another. That’s why Kansas had made a barrier out of unpacked moving boxes—GINNY’S SHOES, GINNY’S SUMMER CLOTHES, all stuff his sister didn’t need yet—stacked up three boxes high in the middle of the room. But last week Ginny had discovered that she could poke holes in the sides of the boxes to get things out, and now monster-sized craters appeared daily. Kansas told her if she kept it up, she was going to make the wall fall over, but she didn’t seem to be listening.

  “You want to see my headstand?” Ginny asked him.

  “No,” Kansas replied. He ripped another piece of tape off the roll and circled it over on itself, sticking it to the back to the photo. He wondered if Francine had to deal with stuff like this, sharing a room with an annoying little sister.

  “I’m getting really good at headstands,” Ginny said, and from the corner of his eye Kansas could see her toppling over as she attempted one. He concentrated on his Wall of Dares. “Well, Mrs. Muñoz is gonna teach me. She said she’d take me to Mommy and Me Yoga this weekend.”

  “Mrs. Muñoz is not your mom,” Kansas told her, placing the photo just above the one of him and Ricky climbing on Will’s roof. “And no way can she do a headstand. She’s, like, a million.”

  “She’s not a million. I think she’s sixty. And she can too do a headstand. I saw her. She’s really good at yoga, and I’m gonna do it too. She said it’d be good for my asthma.”

  Mrs. Muñoz was their new next-door neighbor, and she’d been watching them the past week or so, while their mom looked for a regular babysitter. She seemed nice enough, if you liked old ladies.

  “I’m gonna get really good,” Ginny went on, trying for another headstand. She braced her arms against the floor and kicked her feet into the air. “And then I’m gonna do headstands in the talent show. You think I could win, if I did headstands really good? It’s in two weeks, and there’s a prize.”

  “No way anyone would ever give you a prize for doing headst—”

  There was a tremendous clatter as Ginny fell over on Kansas’s bin of Legos, spewing them across the floor. She missed the cardboard box wall by three inches.

  Kansas sighed and climbed down from his bed, picking his way across the Lego minefield. He didn’t know how much longer he could put up with all this.

  “Kan-sas!” Ginny called as he left the room, scooping up his backpack on the way. “Where are you going? Don’t you want to see me try again?”

  Kansas didn’t even bother to answer that one.

  “Whatcha working on?”

  Kansas looked up from his sheet of poster board. His mom was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a thick book and a pad of notebook paper. Kansas was starting to notice that as soon as his mother got home from the gift shop, she usually grabbed one of her textbooks right away. She didn’t go outside, or take a nap, or eat a snack, or any of the things she used to do when she got home from work. Now she just studied for her night class.

  “Geography homework. We have to draw the whole U.S. and label the states. It’s due on Monday.”

  “And you’re working on it now?” Kansas’s mother raised an eyebrow. “Is it midnight on Sunday already?”

  “Ha, ha. You should be a stand-up comedian.” The truth was that doing his homework was the only way to get Ginny to stop bothering him. Ginny was as allergic to homework as she was to peanuts. As soon as she’d realized that Kansas was going to work on his map instead of watching her do headstands, she’d gone next door to bother Mrs. Muñoz.

  His mother ruffled his hair. “You get a hold of Will and Ricky?” she asked.

  “Nah,” Kansas said, pushing his hair back in place. “They weren’t at home when I called, and they’re not online, either.” Kansas had left the computer in the living room on, just in case, and he was still logged in to his IM account, so he’d be able to hear if they messaged him. But he didn’t have his hopes up. Because even if he did manage to talk to them, what was he going to do, beg them to dump Mark H. and take him camping instead?

  “Well, I’m sure they’ll call back soon,” his mom replied. “They’re your best friends.”

  “Yeah,” Kansas said. But he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  “Mind if I join you? I have homework too.”

  Kansas nodded, concentrating on getting the bottom tip of Florida just right, and his mom sat next to him. Her textbook was so big, it made the whole table shake when she set it down. Kansas didn’t know how anyone could read a book that big. He was never going to be a nurse. He was going to be something that didn’t require any reading, like a video game tester.

  While Kansas drew, copying the picture from their geography book as carefully as he could, his mother read her textbook and scribbled furious notes to herself. Every once in a while, she’d close her eyes and mumble under her breath, the way Kansas did when he was trying to memorize something.

  “Test tomorrow?” he asked her.

  “Big one.” She flipped to a new page in her notebook, but didn’t write anything. She stayed like that for a moment, pen in hand, and then she looked over at Kansas. “Feel like a grille
d cheese?” she asked him.

  He set down his pencil. “Sure.”

  “Great. Brain food. I’ll get the bread, you get out the cheese.”

  Five minutes later, Kansas and his mom were back at the table with their grilled cheeses and glasses of ginger ale. Kansas’s mom put her feet up on the chair next to her and studied Kansas’s map. “Looking pretty good,” she told him.

  “It looks like a headless dog,” he replied, wiping a string of cheese off his chin.

  She squinted at the map. “Yeah.” She laughed. “A little bit. But now that I think about it, the United States is kind of doggy.”

  Kansas laughed back. “What’s yours?” he asked.

  “My homework? Anatomy. Bones of the body tonight.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.” Kansas took another bite of his sandwich. A whole test just for that? “How many are there?”

  “Two hundred and six.”

  Kansas’s mouth dropped open. “No way.”

  “Way.” His mom set her sandwich down and took Kansas’s left arm. “This,” she said, pointing to the upper section of his arm, “is your humerus. And you have two bones right here.” She poked him below the elbow. “The radius.” She ran her finger along it. “And the ulna.”

  “Really?” Kansas said, taking his arm back and studying it. He hadn’t had any idea he had two bones in that part of his arm.

  “Really. And there are twenty-seven in each of your hands. The carpals, the metacarpals, and the phalanges.”

  “That sounds made-up,” Kansas said. “Like animals from Australia or something.”

  “Now you see why I have to study so much.”

  “Yeah.” Kansas took another bite of his sandwich and looked at his mother’s textbook, open on the table. There were so many words. So many billions of things she had to memorize before she could be done with school and finally be a nurse. He looked up at her. “Can I help?” he asked.

  She thought about that for a second, then took the last bite of her grilled cheese and got up from her chair. She crossed the kitchen to the junk drawer and pulled out a pack of yellow Post-its. While Kansas sat, she scribbled something with her pen on the top Post-it, then peeled it off slowly and stuck it to his shoulder.

  Kansas twisted his neck to look at it.

  Clavicle, the Post-it read.

  “What’s that?” he asked, still looking at the Post-it.

  “That,” his mother said, “is the name for your shoulder bone.”

  “Oh.”

  She grinned at him. “Want to see if I can get all of them in five minutes?”

  Four minutes and twelve seconds later, Kansas was stuck with yellow from head to toe and his mother had almost run out of Post-its. They’d set the timer on the microwave so they’d know exactly how much time she had left to go.

  “Lumbar vertebrae!” she shouted out, scribbling it down. “The lower back! Kansas, spin around, let me stick this on your spine.” Kansas spun and his mother stuck. “Um …” He could practically hear the wheels turning in her brain. “Cranium!” She slapped a sticky on his forehead. Kansas laughed as she started to scribble a new one. “Twenty-seven seconds!” she cried, looking at the clock. “What am I missing?”

  Kansas pointed to his jaw. “Is this one?” he asked.

  “Mandible! Yes! Thanks.” She scribbled, then stuck. “And tibia, and fibula.” Scribble, stick, scribble, stick. “Sacrum!” she shouted, scribbling again.

  She had just made Kansas kick off his shoes so she could slap Post-its on his toes, and the clock was down to thirteen seconds, when there was a loud bloop! from the living room. Kansas’s head shot up. His instant messenger!

  “Kansas!” his mom called as he raced for the computer, strewing Post-its across the floor. “Where are you going? We haven’t finished yet!”

  But Kansas was already at the computer, shaking the mouse to jump-start the screen awake.

  Sure enough, there was a message in his IM window. But it wasn’t from Ricky or Will.

  FRANCINEHALLATA: is this kansas frm school?

  Kansas stared at the screen. Francine? Francine was messaging him? Why would she do that?

  “Kansas?” From the kitchen, the timer on the microwave went off. Beep beep beep beep beeeeeeeeeeeeep!

  Slowly, Kansas stretched his Post-it-covered hands across the keyboard.

  He began to type.

  9.

  A trained guinea pig

  “Hey, pea pod,” Francine’s father greeted her as he pulled into the parent pick-up driveway after school. “Where’s your other half?”

  “Natalie wasn’t at school today,” Francine lied, opening the passenger’s side door and dumping her backpack inside.

  “I hope she’s not sick again,” her father replied. “That would be terrible.”

  “Yeah. Terrible.”

  “Well, I have something that will cheer you up. I brought a little surprise for you.”

  Francine climbed inside the car, clicked her seat belt closed, and then allowed herself to look to where her father was pointing, the backseat. This day had been miserable, start to finish, and she knew there couldn’t possibly be anything back there that would cheer her up.

  But she was wrong.

  “Samson!” she cried.

  Sure enough, there was her guinea pig, his two round eyes peeking out at her from under thick tufts of fur. He pushed himself up against the side of his cage and made the snuffle-snuffle-gurgle-snuffle noise that meant he wanted to be petted.

  “I picked him up from the house when I went to get your clothes for tomorrow,” Francine’s dad told her. “I figured it was high time I saw all the little fellow’s new tricks.”

  Francine tugged against her seat belt to wrap her dad in a tight hug around the neck. She squeezed him close, getting a good whiff of that smell she only just now realized she’d missed so deeply. In the past two weeks, Francine hadn’t spent more than two days with her dad. Evening phone calls and weekend movies just weren’t enough. Suddenly she was glad her mom had to work late, even if it did mean that Natalie couldn’t come over.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she whispered.

  He hugged her back. “I missed you, pea pod,” he said.

  Francine stayed in the hug until the smell of her father’s shirt was completely familiar again. Then she whipped her door shut and shifted around in her seat to get a good look at Samson. “Hello, Sams,” she greeted him, reaching back to set a hand on the top of his cage.

  Snuffle-snuffle-grunt-grunt-snuffle.

  The hotel her father had been staying at wasn’t too far away from the school, just across the street from the Stater Bros. Market. It was different from any of the hotels Francine had ever stayed in before with her parents. This room was divided into two big areas—a bedroom of sorts, and a living room, with a fold-out couch in front of the TV for Francine to sleep on. Against the wall of the living room area there was what her father called a “kitchenette,” a tiny space set up for cooking, with a stove and an oven and a sink and a mini fridge. It wasn’t bad for a hotel room, Francine thought, but it wouldn’t be spectacular enough to make her want to up and leave home forever.

  “Okay, so here’s his newest one,” Francine called to her father, after she’d set up Samson’s obstacle course. She was kneeling on the floor snuggling Samson, just in front of a tunnel she’d made out of her father’s art books. “He’s supposed to go inside the tunnel, then turn around and come back through the other way. You ready to time us?” Samson’s pink nose was twitching, anxious to begin the race and snag the guinea pig treats Francine had left for him at the end.

  Francine’s dad snapped shut his sketchbook and stuck his pencil behind his ear. Then he squatted on the ground next to Francine and tapped a few buttons on his watch. “On your mark!” he said to Francine. She tensed her hands more tightly around Samson’s back end, lifting his feet just a few inches off the ground. Samson’s nose darted this way, that way, ready to race. “Get set!
” Francine lowered Samson to the ground. “Go!” And she let him loose.

  As soon as Samson’s feet hit the floor, he was off.

  Unfortunately, he went in completely the wrong direction, racing his way straight up Francine’s T-shirt.

  “Samson!” Francine cried, unhooking his claws from her shirtfront. “He did it yesterday,” she told her dad. “Okay, time us again.”

  The second time, Samson went all the way around the tunnel and snarfed up all his treats before he’d even done anything. The third time, he sat in the middle of the tunnel and pooped.

  “Well, good thing he’s cute, huh?” Francine’s father said as he cleaned the floor with a wad of toilet paper.

  Francine had to admit that was true at least. Samson was pretty much the cutest guinea pig that ever existed, with his tufts of long silky hair that spiked out all over and his tiny pink nose. His face and his middle were white, and his butt and the top of his head were black, with one stripe of chocolate brown that stretched across his two round eyes. But if he was ever going to be a world-famous guinea pig on Francine’s animal training TV show, he was seriously going to have to get his act together.

  While Francine fed Samson a few more guinea pig treats, her father sat down at the table again and turned back to his sketchbook, immediately lost in thought. Francine’s father was lost in thought a lot. He taught art classes at the local community college, and Francine’s mother often said that his brain was like a collage, lots of pieces that didn’t quite fit together but somehow managed to make art anyway. Well, her mom used to say that. Francine wasn’t so sure her mom would think her dad’s brain was art anymore.

  “What are you working on?” Francine asked as Samson snuggled himself into the crook of her elbow, grunting. “A new machine?”

  “Hmm?” Her dad flicked his pencil across the page a few times before looking up at her. “Oh, yes,” he said, as though he’d only just heard her. “A brand-new one. Want to see?”

  Francine climbed eagerly into the chair beside her father and peered down at the sketchbook in front of him.