My vase was ready to be fired over the weekend.
What Friends Are For
“Mission control to Alpha Seven,” said Hannie. It was Saturday afternoon. She was sitting on the rug in my room. “Come in, Alpha Seven.”
“Alpha Seven here,” said Nancy into her pretend wrist-communicator. She was sitting on my bed. “I was forced to crash-land on the planet Zornax. Aliens have the ship surrounded.”
“Rrrawk!” I roared. I sprang up from the floor and leaped on Nancy. I started tickling her.
“Mayday, mayday!” Nancy yelled, trying not to giggle. “Alien attacking!”
“Firing Earth-to-Zornax missile!” Hannie shouted. She jumped on top of Nancy and me.
We wrestled around on the bed, shrieking and giggling. Space Explorers is a gigundoly fun game, but it never lasts very long. Someone always winds up death-ray-blasted.
“Zzzap!” Nancy fired her finger into my stomach. “Got you, you hideous nine-armed Zornaxian freak!”
“Arrrgh!” I clutched my stomach and rolled off the bed. I writhed on the floor, thrashing all nine of my tentacles. At last I lay still. (I do great death scenes. I might be an actress when I grow up.)
“That was fun,” said Hannie. “Do you want to play again? I will be the alien this time.”
“Or we could call Midgie,” said Nancy. “Maybe she would be up for a game of Tiger on the Loose.”
“Okay.” I leaped off the floor.
We ran through the house, calling for Midgie. For some reason we could not find her. (It was almost as if she were hiding from us. We could not find Rocky either.)
Finally we met back in my room.
“I guess the tiger is not on the loose,” I said.
“I guess not,” said Nancy.
“So what do you want to do now?” Hannie asked.
“We could play School,” I suggested.
“That is a good game,” said Nancy. “Who wants to be the teacher?”
“I will,” I said. “I will be Merry.”
Oops. As soon as I said it, I knew it was a mistake.
“I mean Ms. Colman,” I said quickly. “I will be Ms. Colman.”
“No, you can be Merry,” said Hannie. “We can play Pottery Class. It will be good practice for when Nancy and I are actually in the class.”
“Yes,” said Nancy. “And by the way, Karen, when are we going to be allowed in the class?”
“Um…” I said. “I have some good news and some bad news.”
“Oh, no!” said Hannie. “Not this again! You had better have some good news this time, Karen.”
“I do, sort of,” I said. “But first the bad news. The bad news is I really do not think Merry is ever going to let you into the pottery class.”
“I had a feeling that was going to be the bad news,” said Hannie.
Nancy nodded. “I had that feeling too. So what is the good news?”
“The good news is you would not want to be in the class anyway,” I said. “You should be glad you are not taking Merry’s class.”
“What?” said Nancy.
“Why?” asked Hannie. “Is Merry a bad teacher?”
“No, no,” I said. “Merry is a wonderful teacher.”
“Then why should we be glad we are not in her class?” Nancy asked.
I had to tell them about the Big Switch. They were my best friends. They would understand.
So I did. It all came out. I told how I had tried to copy Isabel’s vase. How I had switched hers for my own. How I had changed her initials. (Hannie and Nancy gasped at that.) How I had decorated it during the last class, when Isabel was absent.
“What should I do?” I wailed. “My vase is getting fired today. It is too late to put it back in the recycling tub. What will happen when Isabel figures out what happened?”
Hannie and Nancy stared at me. Their eyes were wide.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“We cannot believe you,” said Hannie.
“I would never have been able to steal someone else’s vase,” Nancy said.
“What should I do now?” I asked.
“Well, you could confess,” said Nancy.
“Maybe Merry would not be too mad at you.”
“But she probably would be,” said Hannie.
I agreed with Hannie.
“You say you decorated the vase?” Hannie asked. “It does not look the way it did when Isabel put it on the recycle pile?”
“Right,” I said.
“Then you are in too deep to back out now,” said Hannie. “You just have to hope for the best. Maybe Isabel will not come back. Even if she does, she will never in a million years recognize her old thrown-out vase that has new decorations on it.”
Nancy nodded. “You do not seem to have much choice, Karen.”
I sat silently for a minute. Finally I said, “You are right. I will just have to hope I get away with it.”
Hannie and Nancy nodded.
“And you were right too, Karen,” said Hannie.
“Right about what?” I asked.
“Right when you said you had some good news. I certainly am glad I am not in Merry’s pottery class. I could not take the excitement.”
I laughed. I was lucky to have friends like the two Musketeers.
Isabel Returns
By Tuesday afternoon I had decided I was going to get away with it. Maybe Isabel would not be back in class yet. Even if she were, she would never recognize her old vase.
I might even win some sort of prize, for best coil project.
Andrew and I hurried into the classroom with Merry. Who should I see at our table but — Isabel Linden!
“Isabel!” I said. “You are back!”
“Yes,” she replied. “I just had a cold. I came to class early today to work on my vase.” She held up her unfired vase from last week. “I need to catch up with the rest of the class.”
Uh-oh, I thought.
Pretty soon Merry started class.
“Here are the coil projects that were fired over the weekend,” said Merry. She brought out a tray full of pottery. Instead of a dark wettish gray, the fired pieces now were a lighter, sandier color.
“You have done some excellent work,” Merry said. She started walking around the room. “Jessica Orvieto’s bowl is very nice.” She handed a bowl to one of the students. “Stewart King’s pencil holder is well made.” She handed the pencil holder to a boy. She passed out several more pieces.
Merry headed toward me. “Karen Brewer’s vase is quite nice too,” she said. She gave me the vase and whispered, “Good work, Karen.”
“Thank you,” I whispered back.
Then I glanced across the table at Isabel. She was staring hard at the vase in my hand.
Suddenly I felt the back of my neck go warm. I could feel myself blushing.
Isabel’s eyes met mine.
Her eyes went back down to the vase.
Then up to my eyes again.
Back to the vase.
Up to my eyes.
“May I see your vase, please, Karen?” Isabel asked sweetly. She held out her hand.
How could I refuse?
“Uh, sure,” I said. I reached across the table and placed the vase in her outstretched hand.
“Thank you,” she said.
I watched Isabel closely as she examined the vase. Turned it over to check the initials on the bottom. Held it this way and that. Turned it over again.
She set the vase on the table in front of her.
At last she spoke. “I made this,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
My heart started thumping hard. My mouth went dry. I could hardly get a word out in reply.
“It is not yours,” I croaked.
“Yes, it is,” Isabel said. Her voice was louder. “I made it. Somehow you stole it.” I wanted to say Indoor voice, Isabel.
“I did not steal anything,” I said.
“Did too!” Isabel practically shouted.
&
nbsp; The classroom fell silent.
“What is all this commotion about?” Merry asked.
Isabel held up the vase. “This vase is not Karen’s. I made it. I know I did.”
“That is the vase I have been working on all week,” I said. (That was true.) “My initials are on the bottom.” (That was true too. I did not want to lie to Merry.)
“Maybe so,” said Isabel. “But I made it. And I can prove it!”
Caught in a Coil
“You cannot prove anything,” I said to Isabel.
My face was burning. Did I look as guilty as I felt? As long as Isabel could not prove the vase was hers, I would be okay.
I hoped hard that Isabel would not be able to prove a thing.
“I can too,” said Isabel.
“How?” asked Merry. (Merry was standing next to me, but I did not look up at her. I was too ashamed to meet her eye.)
“Yeah, Isabel,” I said. I tried to sound confident. “How?”
“Just wait,” said Isabel. She started rolling out some fresh clay into a long snake.
“Here,” she said, finishing the clay snake. She handed it across the table to me.
“What do you want me to do with this?” I asked.
“Coil it up. Make another vase,” said Isabel.
She did not think I could make a coil vase at all. Well, I would show her. I had made a coil vase. Maybe it had collapsed and become a coil bowl — but still, I knew how to do it. I had not been going to pottery class for nothing.
I started coiling up the clay. I did the base, then started building the sides.
But the sides started to droop and drop.
“This is not fair,” I said. “I am very nervous. I am not taking my time.”
The vase fell in on itself. Another bowl for Emily Jr. I placed it on the table in front of me.
“Of course I cannot make a good vase right now,” I said. “If I were not in such a hurry, I could do much better.”
“Maybe so,” said Isabel. She put the fired vase (which she had been holding all this time) next to my droopy fresh vase. “But that is not the point.”
“What is the point, Isabel?” Merry asked.
“Look at my vase” — Isabel stressed the “my” — “and look at hers.” She picked them up and held them in front of Merry.
“Yes?” said Merry.
“Look at the way her coil runs,” said Isabel. “Starting from the center, the clay coils out clockwise. See? I noticed last week that everybody’s coils go clockwise.”
“So?” I butted in. “What has that got to with — ”
“Let Isabel finish, Karen,” said Merry.
“I was about to say, everybody’s coils go clockwise — except mine,” said Isabel. She handed the fired vase to Merry. “See? The coils run the opposite direction. All of my coils go counterclockwise.”
Isabel handed Merry her other vase — the unfired one that she had saved from last week.
“My coil is different because I am left-handed,” said Isabel. “Everybody else in the class is right-handed. Including Karen.”
Merry looked at the three vases for a long, long time. Then, without saying anything, she walked around the room, looking at other coil projects. She was checking to see whether the coils ran clockwise or counterclockwise. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me, vase and all.
Finally she made her way back to my table.
“Karen?” Merry asked. “Isabel has a point. I am going to ask you one time, and one time only: Did Isabel make the vase that you have been working on?”
I could have lied. If I had lied, Isabel would have been furious. But that was not what worried me. Merry would probably have taken my word for it. She was my nanny, after all. And she had said she would not ask me about it again.
So all I had to do was lie.
But I would never be able to look Merry in the face ever again.
“Merry, I — ” I started to say. I couldn’t finish. I burst into tears. Between sobs, I finally managed to say, “Isabel is right! The vase was hers.”
Karen’s Confession
The next hour was the longest sixty minutes of my life. I sat at a table in the back of the classroom, away from the other students. I was in disgrace.
Andrew sat with me. He is a loyal little brother, even if he is sometimes a copycat. I think he could not believe what I had done.
Every now and then a student would turn around and look at me, then whisper something to a friend. I could just imagine what they were saying.
Finally class ended.
Merry asked Andrew to help put the chairs back against the wall. When he had gone, Merry said to me, “Karen, what happened? Why did you take a project that did not belong to you?”
I had been thinking about that very question. And I had had one very long hour to come up with an answer. So I explained it to Merry as best I could.
“I do not know,” I said. “It started off as a mistake. Isabel had put the vase on the recycle pile, and I had picked it up to look at it. I wanted to see how she did it. Her work was so much better than mine. Then you saw me with it and thought it was mine. You told me how much you liked it. I did not want to disappoint you. I wanted you to think I was good at pottery. And Isabel was getting rid of it anyway. The next thing I knew, I was pretending it was mine. I changed the initials on the bottom, put it on the shelf, and threw away the vase I had made, which was really a bowl. You know the rest of the story.
“Oh, Merry, I am so, so sorry!” I exclaimed. My eyes started to get teary again, and I sniffled. “You must think I am the worst kid in the whole world. And I just wanted to be your best student so you would like me as much as I like you!”
“Oh, Karen,” said Merry. She put her arm around me and I buried my face in her shoulder.
“You know, Karen, I think I may be partly to blame here too,” said Merry.
“You?” I asked. “How?”
“I should have been more sensitive to your feelings,” Merry said. “Do you remember last week, when you and Andrew had a fight about copying?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. I sniffled and hiccuped.
“Afterward, I had a talk with Andrew,” Merry said. “He told me he missed having your mom around all day. He was feeling lonely and sad. Getting used to a new nanny was not easy for Andrew. I think that is why he was following you around and copying you — he wanted to stay extra close to you.”
“Oh,” I said. Poor Andrew. Now I felt even worse about yelling at him. “But what has that got to do with Isabel’s vase?”
“You are such a grown-up young lady, I figured you would have no trouble adjusting to me,” said Merry. “I see now that having a new nanny was not so easy for you either. You were worried about how you and I would get along. Am I right?”
“I guess so,” I said. “When you said Hannie and Nancy could not take the pottery class, I wondered if you really liked me.”
Merry smiled. “Of course I like you,” she said. “I simply did not want to bend the rules to let anyone else in the class. Anyway, I think you copied my turtle on the first day of class because you were worried.”
“I wanted you to think I was the perfect pottery student,” I explained.
“And that’s why you started copying Isabel too — to impress me. And why you ended up claiming her vase as your own.”
“I am so, so sorry, Merry,” I said again. (I have noticed that once you decide to apologize, you cannot apologize too much.)
“I forgive you, Karen,” said Merry. She gave me a nice warm hug. “There was no need to impress me. I think you and Andrew are the best kids in the whole world.”
“Really?” I asked, feeling a thousand times happier. “Because I think you are the best nanny in the whole world.”
We hugged again.
Setting Things Right
“Whew!” I said. “Am I glad that is over.”
“Karen,” said Merry. “It is not quite over yet. There are some thin
gs you need to do to set things right.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Like apologize to Andrew for yelling at him last week?”
“That would be a good place to start,” said Merry.
“I owe Isabel an apology too.”
Merry nodded.
“That is going to be a tough one,” I said.
Merry nodded again.
“But I will do it. And I guess I should be punished for switching the vases and lying, right?”
“Well, the thought had occurred to me,” Merry said.
I looked around the room. Andrew was dragging the last couple of chairs to the wall.
“How about if I move all the chairs by myself from now on, before and after class?” I suggested.
“Actually, I think Andrew enjoys moving the chairs,” said Merry. “So if he wants to help you, you must let him. Otherwise it is your chore. Also, I would like you to sponge down all the tables after class.”
“That is fair,” I said. Then I swallowed hard. The last thing I would have to do would be the hardest of all, by far. “And I will have to tell Mommy and Seth what happened. Right?”
Merry smiled. “I am afraid you will,” she said. “But here is the deal: You must tell them you got in trouble in pottery class. But speaking as your nanny, I do not think you need to go into too much detail about what happened. It is really between you and your pottery teacher. And speaking as your pottery teacher, I think we have worked it out between us in a satisfactory way.”
“Thank you, Merry,” I said. I gave her another hug.
Andrew ran to us then.
“Hey,” he said. “Do I get a hug?”
“Yes!” I shouted. I pulled him into our hug. “Group hug! Group hug!”
Merry and Andrew and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
And One for All!
“Rain, rain, go away, come again another day,” I sang.
I was sitting in the car with Hannie, Nancy, and Andrew. Merry was driving us to the community center. I listened to the whick-whick, whick-whick of the windshield wipers. I love being warm and snug in the car when it is raining outside.