Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  But then I stopped myself from thinking about the past or the future. I stopped and just enjoyed the moment. After all, I was having cookies and milk with a cop in my secret hideaway.

  How unreal is that?

  So you know, I'm going to try to apply Hudson's advice to life in general. He told me that the best thing I can do for my happiness is live in the here and now, and I think he's right. Yeah, it'd be nice to go back in time to when I actually had a mother around. Yeah, I'm looking forward to being able to drive, and to having people not treat me like such a kid. But one's the past, and one's the future, and I can't be either place today.

  Today, I'm here. Today, I'm thirteen.

  A week ago I thought that was the worst thing ever, but so far I can't complain. And who knows?

  Thirteen may turn out to be the luckiest year of my life.

  Grams says that most people have some sort of skeleton in their closet—something they really don't want other people to find out about. I always thought that was just grandma talk. Or, at least, her way of excusing the fact that she's got secrets from me.

  “Skeletons are not just secrets, Samantha,” she told me when I accused her of this. “They're life-changing secrets.” Then she hurried to add, “And mind you, I'm not saying that I have skeletons in my closet, but if I did, that's exactly where I'd want them to stay.”

  I just laughed and said, “I bet you would!” ‘cause I've learned that my grams can be pretty cagey—especially when it comes to things I'm dying to know about.

  But shortly after our conversation I discovered what having a skeleton in your closet really means.

  And how a closet isn't always a closet…

  It's funny how you can think you know someone pretty well, and then something happens or they do something which makes you understand that you didn't really know them at all.

  My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Ambler, is that way. I always figured she was just another long-suffering adult who was sick to death of dealing with junior high school kids. I also always thought that she was at least fifty. Probably well on her way to sixty. You know, old.

  Then one day she came into homeroom with two lovebirds. I'm talking the feathered variety, not the gross pimply kind you see swapping spit behind the locker rooms.

  Anyhow, these birds would've looked perfect on the shoulder of a midget pirate. They had orange faces, green bodies, a little splay of bright blue tail feathers, and I thought for sure they were baby parrots.

  But when Mrs. Ambler parked the white domed cage on her desk and Tawnee Francisco asked, “Are they cock-atiels?” Mrs. Ambler smiled at her and said, “No, they're lovebirds.”

  Now, this may seem like a perfectly normal exchange to you, but (a) I didn't even know there was actually such a thing as a lovebird, and (b) Mrs. Ambler's voice when she said “lovebirds” was all soft and sweet and….feathery.

  Then I noticed her face. It was all soft. And sweet. And … well, not feathery, more glowy.

  It was not the Mrs. Ambler I was used to seeing, that's for sure. I glanced at my best friend Marissa McKenze, who sits way up front in the corner, and she was sort of blinking at Mrs. Ambler, too.

  Then Heather Acosta pipes up with, “Lovebirds, Mrs. Ambler? How adorable.”

  I rolled my eyes and Marissa did the same, because ever since end-of-the-year elections for Class Personalities started drawing near, Heather's been on the world's most revolting kiss-up campaign.

  The whole idea of Class Personalities is stupid to begin with. It may be a “tradition” at William Rose Junior High School, but what it really is, is an overblown popularity contest. But since popularity is the pulse that drives Heather's blood, I guess that explains why she's dying to win something. Anything. You should see the way she's been circulating through campus lately, oozing a diabolically contagious form of congeniality. She's nice. She's sweet. She's helpful. She's concerned. And she's all that with such true-blue sincerity it's frightening.

  Unfortunately for her, after nearly a full school year of her schemes and lies, I think that most people are smart enough to be suspicious, except for one thing — Heather's also been acting contrite. You know—she's just so, so sorry for her part in any trouble this year. I've heard her tell teachers, “I know I made mistakes, but I've learned so much!” and “You know, I'm just so grateful for the experiences—I feel I've really grown as a human being!”

  That's the kiss-up game she's been playing with other people, anyway. To me she's been whispering, “Count ‘em and weep, loser.”

  Please. Like I care if she wins some stupid popularity contest?

  She's not just after Friendliest Seventh Grader, either. Oh no. She's hedging her bets by going for Most Unique Style, too. One day she comes to school looking like a punk princess in black and chains and ratted red hair; the next she's all decked out like an old-time movie star, wearing satin shoes and a matching handbag, her hair all smoothed back.

  It's so transparent it's pathetic.

  But anyway, the minute Heather finds out that Mrs. Ambler's birds are lovebirds, she kicks into total kiss-up mode. “Oh, how adorable,” she gushes. Then she asks Mrs. Ambler, “Were they a gift from your husband?” like that would just have been the sweetest, dearest thing a man could do for his wife.

  Well, Marissa and I may be able to see right through Heather, but not Mrs. Ambler. She goes from, like, forty watts of glow to about seventy-five and gives Heather the brightest smile. “How did you know?” Then she nuzzles her nose at the cage and says, “He gave them to me for our anniversary.”

  “How romantic,“ Heather sighs. “How long have you been married?”

  Mrs. Ambler smiles at her again. “Fifteen years today.”

  “Fifteen years? Wow! And he buys you lovebirds? He must be terrific.” Then she asks, “So how'd you meet?”

  Mrs. Ambler keeps on letting herself be suckered. “In graduate school,” she tells Heather. “We got married shortly after I got my master's degree.”

  Whoa now! A master's? A master's in what? Honestly, all I've ever seen Mrs. Ambler do is take roll and read the announcements and reprimand kids when they get out of line. I know she's in charge of the yearbook and has some class with special-ed kids. Oh, and she teaches eighth graders how to study or get focused on their goals or… I don't know what. But nothing that would seem to take a master's degree.

  So while I'm busy trying to digest that, I'm also chewing on the math involved in this new Ambler Information. I mean, let's say you're twenty-two when you graduate from college. A master's is what? Two more years of college? So even if you tack an extra year on for good measure, Mrs. Ambler would have been at most twenty-five when she got married. And if she'd been married for fifteen years, that meant that this fifty-, well-on-her-way-to-sixty-year-old woman that I'd seen nearly every day for the whole school year was only… thirty-nine or forty?

  I was stunned. I mean, forty is plenty old, but not nearly as old as I'd thought she was. And she was probably also a lot smarter than I'd given her credit for. Plus, at that moment she wasn't just my boring, worn-out homeroom teacher, she was a woman who was embarrassingly in love with her husband.

  “I hope I find a man like him someday,” Heather was saying. “Somebody that'll give me lovebirds after fifteen years of marriage!”

  She was laying it on thick, but Mrs. Ambler was oblivious. “I hope you do, too, Heather.”

  Heather nodded at the birds. “So what did you name them?”

  “Tango and Hula.”

  Tango and Hula? Boy, this was getting weirder by the minute! Did this mean she was into dancing? Did she and her husband tango around the house?

  Did she have a funny grass skirt in her closet?

  Whatever. For the rest of the week Mrs. Ambler brought the birds to school every day. She would park them on her desk, where they'd flutter around the cage during the day making chirping and chattering noises and little kissing sounds, then she'd take them home at night.

  Th
ey were actually pretty entertaining. Especially Tango, who'd kind of spin around on the perch or just hang upside down and make kissing noises up at Hula.

  Mrs. Ambler became entertaining, too. Once when I came into homeroom, I saw her nuzzling up to the wires of the cage, cooing, “Who's so cute? Who's so sweet? Who's got little angel feet?”

  Angel feet?

  She was also training them to perch on her shoulder, and you'd catch her cooing at them, saying stupid stuff like, “Hula-hoop, now don't you poop!” and “Does my little Tango want some mango?” She told us she didn't believe in clipping a bird's wings, so sometimes they'd flap around the room, but pretty much they stayed in their cage or on her shoulder.

  Anyway, it was during lunch on our second Wednesday with birds that we found out that Heather's ridiculous Vote-for-Sweet-Little-Me campaign had worked.

  I also discovered that I did care. I choked on my sandwich when they announced the seventh-and eighth-grade candidates in all Class Personality categories over the P.A.—Heather was on the seventh-grade ballot for Most Unique Style and Friendliest. I actually stood up and shouted, “You have got to be kidding!”

  Holly and Dot pulled me back down and told me, “Just forget it. We know she's a phony, and so does everyone else.”

  “If everyone else knows she's a phony, then why is she on the ballot? Twice?”

  “Why do you think she's been kissing up to Mrs. Ambler?” Marissa grumbled.

  “Wait—Mrs. Ambler came up with the nominees?”

  “I'm sure the other teachers helped,” Marissa said, “but she is the one running the Class Personality elections.”

  “But…what does she know about us? Why didn't the seventh graders get to nominate?”

  Marissa nodded. “It is totally lame, huh? I wonder if we should talk to the administration about it.”

  “Oh right.” I snorted. “Like they're going to listen to us?”

  So yeah, the whole thing made me spitting mad, especially since Heather came strutting into science whispering, “Count ‘em and weep, loser” as she passed by. Couldn't the teachers see what Heather was doing? Did they sit around the faculty room going, “That Heather Acosta has certainly turned over a new leaf. I am so impressed with the manner in which she's been conducting herself lately….”

  Did they all have master's?

  In gullibility?

  I brooded about it for the rest of school, wondering if the seventh graders were going to be as blind as Mrs. Ambler when it came time to vote.

  After school I went over to Mrs. Willawago's house to walk her dog. It's a new, temporary job that doesn't pay squat, but thanks to Grams I'm on the hook to do it until Mrs. Willawago's recovered enough from her foot surgery to do it herself. Grams says I'm securing my place in heaven and that this is the kind of thing you're supposed to do for recently widowed senior citizens who've had foot surgery and go to the same church as you.

  I say it's one more reason to avoid church.

  Anyway, Marissa went with me the first couple of times but didn't like the way Mrs. Willawago is so over the top about God and the Bible. “I can't believe she's Catholic, Sammy. She seems like a total thumper to me.”

  Well she was right about that, but I sure wasn't going to risk asking about it. That'd be like walking straight into Sermon City. Besides, I don't really mind hearing “Praise the Lord” and “Amen” and all her other evangelistic expressions—I just kind of ignore them. You can get away with a lot of religious mumbo jumbo around me if you just don't preach.

  And the truth is, going over to Mrs. Willawago's has kind of grown on me. For one thing, she's got the coolest house I've ever seen. I call it the Train House because even though it looks pretty normal from the street— well, except for the cowcatcher that ramps up to her porch—it's got an actual caboose attached to one side of the back of the house and an old parlor car attached to the other. The caboose she uses as a guest bedroom, and the parlor car is where she and her husband used to hold Bible meetings. It's the most luxurious room I've ever seen—rich wood panels, chandeliers, brass trim, green velvet seats.…It's hard to believe that it used to chug along a track, but Mrs. Willawago swears that it did.

  And besides the total coolness of the train cars, the main part of the house is like a museum of railroad gadgets and furniture and signs and photographs and stuff. The more I go there, the more I learn about railroads and trains, and even though I didn't really care about any of that before, now I find it, you know, interesting.

  But the main reason I don't mind going over to Mrs. Willawago's came bounding across the house toward me as I stepped through the front door. “Captain Patch!” I cried as he yippy-yap-barked and dashed in a circle around me. “How are you, buddy?”

  “Happy to see you, as usual,” Mrs. Willawago said as she handed over the leash. “As am I, of course.” Then she added, “Praise the Lord you're here. That dog needs a walk!”

  Patch is kinda hyper and sniffs everything—not exactly the kind of dog you expect an old lady to have. He was a gift from Mrs. Willawago's kids, who live in different parts of the country and thought a dog would be good companionship for their mom after Mr. Willawago “went to be with the Lord.” Supposedly he's a cross between an American foxhound and a golden retriever, but there's nothing furry or golden about him. He's got smooth brown fur and white paws and was named by one of the grandkids because of the big black patch of fur around his left eye.

  Anyway, Patch always seems to get my mind off my problems at school and put me in a good mood, but not this time. This time when I walked him, I didn't forget about school, I obsessed about it. How could they have nominated Heather for Friendliest?

  That's like nominating a vampire for Best Kisser!

  Heather Acosta, Most Phony Seventh Grader—that was more like it! How come they didn't see that?

  When I got back to the Train House, I guess Mrs. Willawago could tell I was upset, because after I let Patch go in the backyard, she said, “I thank the Lord every day for your help, Samantha, but if you've had enough…”

  “Huh? Oh no. That's okay. I don't mind.”

  Trouble is, it came out sounding really flat. Like I did mind. And the next thing I know, Mrs. Willawago's opening her purse, saying, “I told your grandmother that I was willing to pay you, but she insisted that I not.”

  “Wait! No. It doesn't have anything to do with that. It's just… it's just this girl at school that's got me all, you know, tweaked.” And because I was embarrassed that she thought I was grumpy because she wasn't paying me, I wound up blurting out a whole lot more than I normally would have.

  When I finally shut up about Heather Acosta, Mrs. Willawago let out a little cackle and said, “Heather sounds a lot like Coralee Lyon.”

  “Who?”

  “Coralee Lyon. You don't read the paper?”

  I scowled. “I live in this town—I sure don't want to read about it.”

  She nodded, then said, “Well, Coralee Lyon—or Coralee Abbot, as she'll always be to me—now rules the roost of our city council, but back in junior high school she was not pleased with her place in the pecking order. She did all manner of sinful things to remedy that.” She gave me a knowing look. “Lucifer still dwells deep in Coralee's heart, but people don't see him because she's learned to disguise her tactics.”

  “Oh great,” I grumbled. “So you're telling me Heather'll never change?”

  She laughed. “Who but God can write history in advance? But until she walks through the door of repentance, it'd be easiest on you to simply avoid her. I haven't spoken to Coralee in years.” She looked toward the ceiling. “Thanks be to God.”

  So you see how much help talking to Mrs. Willawago was. And talking to Grams wasn't much better. “Good heavens, Samantha,” she said. “If her end goal is to win some popularity contest, let her. Besides, the popular people in my junior high and high school all fizzled.”

  “But what if she turns out like Coralee Lyon?”

  �
��Who?”

  “Some brat Mrs. Willawago went to school with who's now ruling the roost on the city council.” I hesitated. “What is the city council, anyway?”

  Grams laughed. “A group of people who make decisions about Santa Martina's growth and development.” She eyed me. “In other words, she's not ruling much of a roost.”

  Still. I didn't sleep very well that night thinking about how people like Heather and Coralee Lyon shouldn't be allowed to rule roosts of any kind, even flea-infested ones like Santa Martina or William Rose Junior High.

  The next morning I woke up ridiculously early and started brooding about the Class Personality nominations some more. And since there was no way I was going to get back to sleep, I finally just got up, took a shower, ate breakfast, packed a lunch, and went to school. And instead of tearing onto campus at the last second like I usually do, I arrived a whole fifteen minutes early.

  There were other kids around and everything, but I didn't see my friends, so I decided to go drop off my backpack and skateboard in homeroom. That's one nice thing about Mrs. Ambler—unlike a lot of the other teachers, she unlocks the classroom early so you can drop off your backpack or just meet up with your friends and get in out of the cold. Usually she's at her desk grading papers or reading a book, but lots of times she's going between the classroom and the office, taking care of teacher business.

  Now, since I was so early, it crossed my mind that I might have the chance to ask Mrs. Ambler how Heather got on the ballot. Or maybe I'd just ask her how kids on the ballot were nominated.

  Of course on second thought, that might make it look like I was sore because I hadn't been nominated for anything, which I didn't care about, but I didn't want it to seem like I cared. I mean, looking like you care is way worse than actually caring.

  It's truly…pathetic.

  But thinking all that through turned out to be a big waste of mental energy, because when I arrived at the classroom, no one was there. Well, no people, anyway. The birds were there, but it wasn't until I was inside that I noticed that one of them was out of the cage. And flapping for the open door.