The Mother-Daughter Book Club

  Mrs. Sloane and Courtney arrive, yawning, along with the Wongs. Mrs. Wong is carrying a cardboard container lined with coffee cups. “Soy lattes,” she says, handing them to the grownups. “A healthy wake-me-up.”

  Megan waves to Becca, who is standing with her mother alongside the families of the men playing British soldiers. Their crowd seems a little subdued, and keeps apart from the rest of us, which of course is silly since we’re all Americans now. Still, like I said before, I’m glad Dad and Darcy get to be patriots.

  “Samuel Prescott!’ someone shouts, and the crowd surges forward straining for a glimpse of the man on horseback. Sure enough, on the far side of the bridge a black horse appears. It thunders across the wooden slats spanning the river and comes to a halt. The rider faces the gathered soldiers and shouts out the traditional warning: “The British are coming!”

  The crowd takes up the cry as the minutemen all take their places.

  I shiver, as much with cold as with excitement for the coming battle. At least it’s not raining. Or worse, sleeting. One year we even had snow. Family tradition or no family tradition, there’s nothing worse than standing in a soggy field at five in the morning, shivering under an umbrella.

  A flash of scarlet across the river signals the arrival of the redcoats. A musket cracks and I flinch. The battle has begun.

  “Cool!” says Cassidy, watching the action unfold in front of us. As the patriots and redcoats fire on one another, smoke from the muskets drifts across the field like mist. A minuteman falls, and then another. A British soldier, too. I think its Mr. Chadwick.

  A few minutes later, it’s finished. The fallen dead stand up again and brush themselves off, and the troops shake hands, then line up for the twenty-one-gun salute. I like this part of the ceremony best. As the cannon booms out again and again across the meadows, I close my eyes, feeling its thunder echo in my bones and in the hollow of my chest.

  “Would you girls watch the twins for a few minutes?” my mother asks. “There’s someone here I’d like Clementine to meet.”

  She hands Dylan and Ryan off to us and drifts away with Mrs. Sloane and the Wongs. Cassidy watches her go, a funny expression on her face. Last night she told us that she thinks maybe her mother has a boyfriend. I guess Mrs. Sloane has been spending a lot more time than usual checking her e-mail, and once or twice Cassidy and her sister have seen the name “Fred” in the return address field. She gets packages and mail from him all the time now too. Cassidy is not thrilled with this idea at all, of course. I wouldn’t be either.

  As we line up for pancakes and sausages, Jess’s little brothers are afire with excitement and it’s all we can do to hang onto them. The hot food tastes good, and we tuck in hungrily. All around us, minutemen and redcoats alike do the same, mingling cheerfully as they eat.

  Well, mostly cheerfully.

  “Lobsterback!” I hear Dylan cry.

  “Rotten redcoat!” Ryan adds.

  We turn around to see that the twins have armed themselves with sticks, which they’re jabbing at Stewart Chadwick, who’s trying to eat his breakfast. Dylan’s makeshift bayonet accidentally hits the plate, and the pancakes go flying.

  Becca grabs Dylan’s arm and shakes him. Hard. He cries out and Jess whips around.

  “Hey!” she calls. “Leave my brother alone!”

  Becca’s eyes narrow as she looks from one to the other. “He’s your brother, is he? I should have known by his manners.” She smirks at Dylan. “Raised in a barn just like your sister, were you, Goat Boy?”

  Jess’s face flushes with anger. She marches over to Becca. “His name isn’t Goat Boy, it’s Dylan,” she snaps. “Let go of his arm.”

  Cassidy and I exchange a glance. What’s gotten into shy Jess?

  “Who’s going to make me?” Becca demands. “You?” She gives Dylan another shake. “Little beast shouldn’t be running around without a leash.”

  Cassidy and I hurry over to stand beside Jess. Ashley and Jen drift over next to Becca, looking a little sheepish. As well they should—they both have pesty little brothers of their own. Megan walks over too, but she doesn’t join either group. Instead, she stands apart slightly. “Let him go, Becca,” she says.

  Becca lifts an eyebrow. “I should have known you’d side with your little book club friends,” she sneers. “Traitor.” She glances over at Ashley and Jen. “It’s us or them. Right, girls?”

  Ashley and Jen snicker nervously. They look over at Megan, then at Becca. Finally, they shrug and nod. “Stupid wannabees,” I mutter to Cassidy.

  “Buzz, buzz, buzz,” she mutters back.

  We all stand there glaring at each other, the Mother-Daughter Book Club versus the Fab Four. Or possibly Fab Three. Something is hanging in the balance here, something important. A line has been drawn in the sand It’s like we’re fighting our own private war of sorts, right here on this historical battlefield. I hold my breath, wondering what Megan will do.

  She doesn’t even hesitate. Glancing over at me, she smiles a real honest-to-goodness Megan smile. Then she calmly plops her plate of pancakes right on top of Becca Chadwick’s head.

  “Aaauugh!” cries Becca, dropping Dylan’s arm as her hands fly up to her syrup-covered hair.

  “Way to go, Wong!” says Cassidy in astonished admiration.

  I am speechless. So is Jess. Dylan runs over to her, and she puts her arms around him protectively.

  “You creep!” screams Becca. “What did you do that for?”

  “Pick on someone your own size next time,” says Megan.

  “You’d better believe I will!” Becca grabs Ashley’s paper plate and throws it at Megan.

  Megan ducks and the pancakes hit Cassidy instead, who launches herself at the Fab Three with a howl of rage. In a flash, pancakes and sausages are flying everywhere. The crowd quickly moves away from us as Ryan and Dylan get in on the act too.

  I look up from mashing my plate against the side of Jen Webster’s face to see Mrs. Chadwick bearing down on us. She grabs a twin in each meaty hand. “Where are your parents?” she demands.

  “The boys are with me,” says my mother, who is right on her heels. She unhooks the twins from Mrs. Chadwick’s grasp. “And so are these four wildcats. The battles over, girls.”

  Becca’s mother puts her hands on her ample hips. “Who started this?” she demands.

  Becca points to Megan. “She did!”

  “It’s the influence of that terrible club,” Mrs. Chadwick says. “I knew it!”

  “Megan didn’t start it, Becca did,” says Jess. “She hurt my brother.”

  Mrs. Chadwick swells up at this accusation. “It’s hardly my daughter’s fault that your beastly little brother is so out-of-control,” she says. “Now, if your mother were here—”

  “That’s enough, Calliope.” My mother’s voice is sharp.

  “Well,” she huffs. “All I’m saying is you should keep them under better control.” She trundles off, dabbing at Becca’s sticky hair with a napkin. Ashley and Jen slink after them.

  My mother, Mrs. Sloane, and Mrs. Wong turn and stare at the four of us silently. I can barely see through the bits of pancake squished into my glasses, and I can feel syrup dripping down the back of my neck. Cassidy fishes a piece of sausage out from behind her ear, inspects it, then pops it into her mouth. Her mother closes her eyes and shakes her head. Her shoulders start to twitch. I relax a little. She’s laughing.

  “They had it coming, Mom,” I tell my mother.

  She gives me a rueful smile. “I don’t doubt it,” she replies. “Well, whoever started it, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that we get you girls cleaned up before the parade starts.”

  Trailing bits of breakfast, we head toward home. At the top of Buttrick Hill we pass the Concord militia, who are gathered under a stand of elms. We all wave to Dad and Darcy and Mr. Delaney. Their mouths drop open when they see us.

  “Don’t even ask,” my mother tells them.

  “Hey, look! There
’s Third!” cries Cassidy.

  Sure enough, Third and his father (do they call him Second, since he’s Cranfield Bartlett II?) are there with the others. Technically, Third is too young to be a minuteman, but he’s been playing the drums since he was in a playpen, practically, and he’s really good, so they made an exception. He’s the regiment’s drummer boy. He sees us and rattles out a quick beat on his snare drum, showing off.

  “Hey, Beauty,” says a familiar voice behind me. I turn around to see Zach Norton, and feel a stab of envy when I realize he’s talking to Jess.

  “Hey, Beast,” she replies, smiling shyly.

  He picks a piece of pancake out of her hair. “I saw the food fight,” he says. “Way to stick up for your brother.”

  Does Zach really think Jess is beautiful, I wonder, or is he just saying that because of the play?

  He turns to Cassidy. “So what do you think, Sloane? You have anything like this back in Laguna Beach?”

  Cassidy snorts. “Food fights? We’d leave you in the dust.”

  “I mean the battle, you dork.”

  Cassidy shakes her head. “Historical in California means, like, anything more than two weeks old,” she replies. “I never even heard of the Revolutionary War before we moved here.”

  Zach doesn’t say anything to Megan or me.

  Third rattles out another drum tattoo, and the militia throw their paper plates and cups in the trash and fall in line. As the ranks of men head off toward downtown Concord, where they’ll assemble for the parade, the fife and drum corps start to play “Yankee Doodle.”

  “Stuck a pancake on her head and called it macaroni!” sings Cassidy at the top of her lungs, falling in behind them. She turns and grins at us.

  Megan and Jess and I grin back. We hurry to join her, and the four of us link arms like victorious soldiers and march off toward home.

  Megan

  “The best of us have a spice of perversity in us, especially when we are young and in love.”

  Emma and I are standing side by side in front of the bathroom mirror. “You look ridiculous,” I tell her.

  She sticks her tongue out at me. “Look who’s talking,” she says, and we both burst out laughing.

  Back in the kitchen, the Mother-Daughter Book Club is assembled in the Sloanes’ breakfast nook. Everyone’s hair is pulled back with terrycloth headbands, and all of our faces are bright green. All but my mother’s. She’s the one holdout, naturally. Tonight is the Spring Fling dance, and Cassidy’s mom is giving us all facials with something called Madame Miracle’s Mint Mud Mask Mrs. Sloane is trying to convince my mother to try it.

  “See?” she says, pointing to the ingredients. “It says right here: all-natural.”

  “Shannon sent it from New York,” Mrs. Hawthorne points out. “She said it’s really popular with the cast of HeartBeats.”

  Mrs. Delaney heard about the “beauty party,” as Mrs. Sloane calls it, and sent a whole bunch of makeup and stuff for us to try.

  Jess squints at the small print on the tube and reads off the ingredients. “Mrs. Sloane is right,” she tells my mother. “They’re all herbal.”

  “I’ve seen it on the shelf at Nature’s Corner,” coaxes Mrs. Sloane.

  Nature’s Corner is the organic grocery where my mother does most of our shopping. When she’s not buying things from Half Moon Farm, that is.

  “Really?” says my mother. She sniffs the tube suspiciously.

  “Smells nice, doesn’t it?” says Mrs. Sloane.

  “I guess so,” my mother concedes. She grudgingly allows her face to be smeared with some of the green goop. “But I’ll bet Marmee never did anything like this.”

  “I don’t think they had Madame Miracle back in the Marches’ day,” says Mrs. Hawthorne.

  “If they did Amy would have liked it,” says Emma, giving me a sly look.

  “So would Meg,” I retort.

  “Jo would have hated it,” says Cassidy, her green mask set in a scowl. We had to practically hold her down when it was her turn.

  “There,” says Mrs. Sloane. “Done. Now we just need to let it stay on for half an hour. To work its mint miracle.”

  She goes to the kitchen sink and washes her hands, then calls upstairs, “Nail polish time!”

  Courtney comes clattering down. She opens her eyes wide in mock alarm. “The Martians have landed!”

  Her mother holds up her hands and wiggles her fingers. “Yes, and it’s time for us aliens to get our nails done,” she says.

  Courtney pulls out a stool from the kitchen island counter with a flourish. “Moms first,” she orders. “I’ll start with Mrs. Wong, then you’re next, Mrs. Hawthorne.”

  “Age before beauty, eh, Lily?” says Mrs. Hawthorne.

  “Speak for yourself,” my mother retorts. “I’m sure this mask is peeling years off my face.”

  They both giggle.

  The Sloanes’ kitchen is huge, nearly as big as ours. It’s cozier than our ultramodern one on Strawberry Hill, though. Our kitchen is all stark stainless steel and granite. The Sloanes’ is more homey, with blue gingham curtains and a panel of stained-glass windows in the breakfast nook that’s making pretty patterns of yellow and blue and green on the white farmhouse table.

  “Who makes up these names?” asks Mrs. Hawthorne, squinting at the labels on the jars of nail polish from Mrs. Delaney. “Listen to this. ‘Siren Song.’ ‘Apple-icious.’ ‘Tickled Pink.’” She shakes her head. “Somebody, somewhere, is getting paid to come up with these ridiculous things.”

  “Really?” says Emma. “I want that job.”

  “No, you don’t, darling, you’re much too smart.” Mrs. Hawthorne looks at our green faces. “You’re all much too smart, even if maybe you don’t look it right at this moment.”

  I smile, and I can feel my mud mask crack. A few minutes later the buzzer goes off and Mrs. Sloane lines us up at the kitchen sink, where she scrubs off our masks with a wet washcloth. Then she slathers on moisturizer that smells like watermelon, and starts in on fixing our hair.

  “Jess, there’s a note at the bottom of the box from your mom,” Mrs. Hawthorne calls from the manicure station. “Why don’t you read it to us while we’re being bee-yoo-ti-fied?”

  “Okay,” says Jess. Things haven’t been the same with her since Patriot’s Day either. Emma says Jess finally found her voice. That’s a good way to put it, I guess. Anyway, she’s not nearly as shy as she was when we started the book club last fall.

  She opens the envelope. “‘Dear fans of Little Women,’” she reads. “A few goodies are enclosed to make my already gorgeous daughter and her gorgeous friends even more stunning.” Jess looks up and smiles at us. “Wish I could be there for your debut ball, but HeartBeats is going on location to Paris for a week, imagine that! It’s honeymoon time for Judd Chance and Larissa LaRue. By the way, I’ve got the whole cast reading Little Women and we love it. We all cried when we got to the part where Beth dies.’”

  Jess looks up. “I cried too,” she admits.

  Mrs. Sloane holds up her hand. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Ditto,” says Emma, and pretty soon we all have our hands up except Cassidy, who says it was stupid and mean of the author to kill off one of her main characters.

  “I think I detected a tear or two, when we got to that part,” counters her mother in a stage whisper.

  I guess they’re still reading the book aloud together. I thought that was dumb and babyish when I first heard about it, but now I think that I wouldn’t mind, if my mother wanted to.

  “Does she say anything else in the note?” asks Mrs. Hawthorne.

  “Nope,” says Jess. “Just au revoir and oodles of love.”

  I drift over to the manicure station. “Mom, couldn’t you have picked something more exciting than that?” I ask, disappointed to see that she has chosen a boring beige called “Sand Dune.”

  “I wanted something natural-looking,” my mother says.

  “Naturally,” I reply
with a sigh.

  When it’s my turn, I decide to go with blue, to match my dress. I help Jess pick out a shade of raspberry to match hers, and try convincing Cassidy to give “Gather Ye Rosebuds” a whirl (“No way,” she says, and won’t budge this time after giving in on the facial). Then I ask Emma what color her dress is.

  “Yellow,” she says.

  “You should try this one, then,” I say, handing her a soft lavender. “Purple and yellow are complementary colors. It’ll look great.”

  Emma peers at the bottle. She shudders. “‘Shrinking Violet’? Who’d want to wear something called that?”

  “So what? The color is perfect.”

  “Words are important to me,” she says stubbornly. “I’m a poet, remember?”

  We look at each other and suddenly we both freeze. We’ve never talked about what happened at the ice rink last winter, never mentioned “Zach Attack.” Fortunately, the back door opens just then and Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Delaney and my dad come in with Chinese take-out, and the awkward moment is smoothed over in the general rush for food.

  Afterward, the four of us go upstairs to get changed.

  Nobody has seen Jess’s dress or mine. I made them here at Cassidy’s house, using Mrs. Sloane’s sewing machine just like she promised. She gave me some pointers on design details, and let me look through all her fashion magazines. She has tons of them. And she gave me some leftover ice-blue fabric for my dress.

  I designed Jess’s dress to look like the prettiest cupcake in the bakery, all frothy pink and scallops and poufed sleeves. My slim sheath is more sophisticated The dresses are different, but they’re both really pretty. At least I think so.

  Jess and I are the first ones down. I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks. “Ta-da!” I cry, as we float into the kitchen. Well, as Jess and I float. Cassidy clomps. She’s wearing one of Courtney’s old dresses. It’s white, with tiny little roses all over it. Cassidy hates it, of course.

  “Wow!” says Mrs. Sloane. “You girls look amazing!”

  “You did a fabulous job with Jess’s dress,” says Mrs. Hawthorne. “Yours, too.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. H,” I reply modestly.