Nixie Ness

by Claudia Mills

  Grace and Elyse had started meowing as they saluted the sun in P.E. Nixie and Grace didn’t even whisper during class anymore because Mrs. Townsend had threatened to start switching desks if people couldn’t settle down and focus. With Nixie’s luck, Mrs. Townsend would end up moving Grace right next to Elyse.

  On Saturday Nixie and Grace barely had time to talk during the soccer game, which their team lost again. Grace’s mother was the one who drove this time, and she didn’t invite Nixie to go out for lunch afterward. She said they had “other plans.”

  Nixie had a terrible feeling the “other plans” might involve a girl named Elyse and a kitten named Cha-Cha.

  Nixie needed another Plan of her own.

  What she really needed was for her mother to quit her job so she’d be home after school again. Then there would be no reason for Nixie to go to After-School Superstars, and Grace would come to Nixie’s house after school instead of going to Elyse’s, and everything would be the way it used to be.

  Unless…what if Grace picked Elyse’s house with a kitten over Nixie’s house without one? But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She’d choose Nixie’s kitten-less house in a heartbeat because she’d really be choosing not Nixie’s house, but Nixie.

  So the Newer and Even More Improved Plan was to make her mother want to quit her job, to make her mother have to quit.

  And suddenly Nixie had a brilliant idea for how to make that happen.

  * * *

  On Sunday afternoon Nixie’s father took her to visit her mother at the bookstore. The store was in an old house, on a shady street, with a staircase up to a reading loft, each step painted a different pastel hue. Her mother bustled about helping one kid find a book on how to knit and another find a book on how to do yo-yo tricks.

  Did the store sell any books on how to win your best friend back? If only there was some book that would tell Nixie how to make Grace like her better than Elyse, better than anyone else, always and forever. Maybe she could ask her book-expert mom to help her find one.

  At least she had her new Plan, her best Plan yet. But it gave Nixie a pang to see firsthand how much her mother seemed to love her new job, the job that had wrecked everything. Curled up in one of the bookstore’s cozy armchairs, Nixie watched her mother’s face light up as she recommended a book to a customer whose little boy was fussing. The boy hugged the book and wouldn’t let his mom put it down, even when it was time for her to pay.

  But if Nixie didn’t do the Newer and Even More Improved Plan, she might lose Grace forever.

  IN camp on Monday Chef Michael announced that this was bake-sale week. Monday would be cookie-dough-making day. Tuesday would be cookie-baking day. Wednesday they’d decorate whatever cookies needed decorating and start baking the cakes. The rest of the cake-baking and cake-frosting would happen on Thursday. Then they’d sell the cookies and slices of cake in a huge fund-raiser on Friday. The principal was going to advertise the bake sale to the whole school in her News You Can Use weekly email home.

  First, the campers got to vote for their favorite charity. The choices on the list were the community food pantry, the local art museum, and the Humane Society. Nixie was glad when the Humane Society won. Even if her parents wouldn’t let her adopt a dog, at least she could help raise money for dogs that would be adopted by other people.

  Or she would have helped raise money for dogs if today wasn’t going to be her last day at camp ever. Today was the day Nixie had to make herself carry out her Newer and Even More Improved Plan, which also happened to be the scariest Plan yet. But if the Plan worked, Nixie wouldn’t be there to bake and decorate any cookies. And Vera, Nolan, and Boogie would have to bake every cake all by themselves.

  Every time Nixie thought about the Plan, she felt like an elephant had wrapped his trunk around her chest and was squeezing too tight. But every day she waited would be one more day for Grace and Elyse to get that much closer to being the best friends that Grace and Nixie were supposed to be.

  She practiced her speech in her head, imagining how she would make her voice come out sounding weak and trembly. As weak and trembly as she was starting to feel at the thought of actually saying it.

  My stomach hurts. I think I’m going to throw up. I need to go home.

  Then her mother would have to leave work to come to get her, and she’d see what a bad idea it was to have a job away from home so that her poor daughter had to be sick at camp with no parent to give her loving care. Her mom would gather Nixie into a big comforting hug, settle her on the couch with a fluffy blanket, and read her favorite Betsy-Tacy books aloud to her. And then she would remember that her old work-at-home job had been perfect, after all.

  But Nixie didn’t have to do the Plan right this minute. She could still have the fun of cookie-dough-making first.

  The campers were going to be making dough for chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, gingersnaps, and butter cookies. Both chefs told the campers not to eat any raw cookie dough: raw dough contained raw eggs, and raw eggs could give you salmonella poisoning.

  Boogie ate some chocolate chip cookie dough anyway. And then he ate some of the dough for the oatmeal raisin cookies. At this rate, Nixie thought, Boogie would be the one going up to Colleen with a speech about how his stomach hurt and he was going to throw up and needed to go home.

  Nixie wanted so badly to stay to make the gingersnap dough, and the butter cookie dough, and to see if Boogie ate both of those, too. But if she did, by then it would be time for her to go home anyway, sick or not sick, and that wasn’t the Plan.

  Nixie made herself walk up to where Colleen was helping another team measure out molasses for the gingersnaps.

  “My-stomach-hurts-I-think-I’m-going-to-throw-up-I-need-to-go-home,” she said, getting the words out as quickly as she could.

  “What?” Colleen asked her. “Tell me again, please, slowly.”

  This time Nixie added in some gestures. Hunching her shoulders to look extra-pitiful, she clutched her tummy with both hands and repeated her speech.

  Colleen cocked a suspicious eyebrow.

  Nixie added her best attempt at gagging, even though she knew it looked totally fake. But apparently Colleen wasn’t in the mood for finding out whether one of her campers was really about to throw up all over the cafeteria floor or just pretending.

  The next thing Nixie knew, she was sitting alone in a corner of the cafeteria, holding the bowl Colleen had given her to throw up in.

  At least when her mother came, she’d see how pitiful, lonely, and miserable Nixie looked, and her heart would break with guilt over abandoning her own sick daughter to go sell books to other people’s healthy kids instead. Tomorrow afternoon Nixie and Grace would be back at Nixie’s house again, making their own cookie dough together.

  But it wasn’t her mom who came walking into the cafeteria ten minutes later.

  It was her dad.

  * * *

  It was one thing to make fake gagging noises for Colleen; it was another thing to fool her father. Nixie felt her face flaming with guilt at her lie.

  “What’s going on?” he asked her mildly. “Colleen said you were feeling sick to your stomach? You look fine to me, honey.”

  “I do feel sick!” It was almost true. The rest came out in a torrent of words: “And I miss Mom, and I want to be with Grace after school again, and I want things to be the way they used to be!”

  “Oh, Nixie,” was all her father said as he signed her out of camp. But on the car ride home he had seven more things to say, in a no-nonsense voice that drummed each one into Nixie’s head:

  Nixie’s mother loved her job.

  Nixie’s mother wasn’t going to quit her job.

  Nixie’s father wasn’t going to quit his job, either.

  Saying you were sick when you weren’t sick was lying.

  And it was inconsiderate.


  And it made people Very Annoyed.

  And Nixie should never ever do it again.

  After her mother returned from the bookstore, she pulled Nixie into a hug that made Nixie feel guiltier still.

  “This is a big change for everyone, honey,” she said, dropping a kiss on top of Nixie’s head, as Nixie snuggled against her. “But change can be a good thing.”

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG.

  * * *

  To bake the chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies on Tuesday, Nixie’s team dropped the dough in rounded spoonfuls onto lightly greased baking sheets. For the gingersnaps, they made the dough into little balls rolled in granulated sugar, with Nolan making ten balls for every one Vera made. Most fun was rolling out the dough for the butter cookies and then cutting them into various shapes with cookie cutters, as they had with the pet treats.

  “So you’re feeling better?” Vera asked Nixie as she pressed a perfectly positioned star-shaped cookie cutter into her evenly flattened dough.

  It took Nixie a few seconds to figure out what Vera was talking about. Then she felt her cheeks flush. “Uh-huh.”

  “Did you puke?” Boogie asked hopefully.

  “Boogie!” Vera scolded him.

  “Well, did you?” Boogie persisted.

  Nixie just shook her head.

  “I thought maybe you wouldn’t be at school today,” Vera said.

  “Well, I am,” Nixie snapped. Why was Vera making her say something so completely obvious? Was Nixie supposed to admit she had been lying yesterday? Yet Nixie couldn’t help being glad she was still there at cooking camp. She hated to think of Vera, Nolan, and Boogie baking the cookies without her.

  Nolan glanced up from cutting out a series of circle-shaped cookies and gave her a searching look.

  He knows, thought Nixie.

  * * *

  On Wednesday Chef Maggie showed the campers how to fill plastic baggies with a rainbow of colored icings. Then she showed them how to cut off one tip of the baggie so the icing would come out in a thin, even line.

  Nixie’s team was decorating “emoticon” cookies: round cookies covered first with bright yellow icing, with eyes and mouths added afterward. If you made the mouth a little round O, the cookie looked surprised. If you added slanted eyebrows, the cookie looked worried. If you put a small red circle on each cheek, the cookie looked embarrassed.

  Right now Vera’s eyebrows were scrunched like a very worried emoticon cookie. She had already cut the smallest possible tip off her baggie to make the narrowest possible icing line. But her icing line was too skinny, and when she tried to go over it again to make the mouth thicker, the cookie lips smeared.

  “My cookie looks horrible!” Vera practically wailed. “Like—like—a cookie clown!”

  The cookie looked fine to Nixie. Half of her own cookie smiles and frowns were crooked. So what? The cookies would taste just as yummy with twisty mouths.

  Nolan’s cookies looked the best so far. He had made a cookie assembly line, as if he was working in a cookie-decorating factory. First, he laid ten cookies in a row on his paper towel and spread them evenly with yellow frosting. Then he gave all ten cookies two black dots for cookie eyes. Finally, five cookies got smiles, and five cookies got frowns.

  “Did you know someone invented the smiley face, as a thing?” Nolan asked. “In the 1960s. This guy just sat down and drew a yellow circle and put a smiley face on it, and then everyone in the world started to do it, too.”

  Boogie had more icing on his hands, arms, face, and T-shirt than on his cookies. Nixie had already seen him eat three cookies, too. If some Humane Society dog somewhere didn’t get a new home, it would be Boogie’s fault for eating up their fund-raising efforts. She wondered if Boogie’s dog had gotten any of their dog biscuits or if Boogie had eaten the whole bag himself.

  “Here!” Vera thrust her smudgy cookie at Boogie. “Eat this one!”

  Nixie grabbed Boogie’s arm to save Vera’s cookie in the nick of time.

  “We aren’t going to have any cookies to sell if Vera takes forever to decorate one cookie, and then Boogie eats it,” Nixie protested.

  Vera’s mouth drooped like a sad-emoticon cookie.

  Nixie hadn’t meant to make her feel even worse. “I like your cookie,” she said. “I would buy it at the bake sale. I would.”

  “My mother wouldn’t,” Vera said. “And she’s going to come to the bake sale on Friday.”

  At least Vera’s mother would be at the bake sale, unlike Nixie’s parents who would be working.

  But wait: Why wouldn’t Vera’s mother be at work, too?

  “Won’t she be at her job?” Nixie asked.

  Vera shook her head. “She takes time off whenever there’s something special I’m doing.”

  “I wouldn’t call a bake sale special.” Nixie inspected her twisty-mouthed cookies, Boogie’s cookies that had most of their icing on Boogie, and Vera’s cookie with its puffy clown lips. “Not with these cookies!”

  Vera’s eyes crinkled. Was she going to turn into the emoticon cookie that had blue-icing droplets dripping out of its black-dot eyes?

  Instead Vera burst out laughing. Relieved, Nixie burst out laughing, too.

  “You’re funny, Nixie,” Vera said, as she squeezed out two perfectly spaced eye dots on her next cookie.

  “You’re funny, too,” Nixie told her. Well, maybe Vera didn’t exactly mean to be funny, but sometimes the things she said made Nixie laugh almost as much as she used to do with Grace.

  Vera hesitated before making the cookie mouth. Then in a rush she said, “Do you want to come over to my house? Like, this weekend? I want to make a comic book, about animals. You could help me think of funny stuff to put in it.”

  Nixie felt her cheeks flushing to match the embarrassed-emoticon cookie. She was glad she and Vera were on the same cooking team, and making an animal book sounded like tons of fun. But Nixie couldn’t betray Grace that way, she just couldn’t. Even if Grace hadn’t been following the best-friend rules, Nixie was going to follow them anyway. Otherwise, it would be like saying she and Grace weren’t best friends anymore and would never be best friends again.

  “I can’t,” Nixie said. “On the weekends I do stuff with Grace. Because she’s, you know, my best friend.”

  “Oh,” Vera said. “That’s all right. I understand.”

  But Vera gave her perfectly iced cookie a perfect little cookie frown.

  THE Longwood Elementary School cafeteria was mobbed after school on Friday for the bake sale. Hungry students and their parents streamed in past tables bearing cookies galore, as well as plastic-wrapped slices of half a dozen different kinds of cake.

  Nixie’s team stood behind two tables covered with emoticon cookies and delectable slices of German chocolate cake topped with pecan-and-coconut frosting.

  “What adorable cookies!” said someone’s mother, taking a dozen of the emoticons.

  “See?” Nixie said to Vera. “Our cookies do look great!”

  Vera gave a small smile. Was she still hurt that Nixie had turned down her invitation for the weekend? Nixie pushed that thought aside.

  A group of fifth-graders grabbed five pieces of German chocolate cake. They didn’t look interested when Nolan told them that, contrary to its name, German chocolate cake hadn’t been invented in Germany. Boogie sighed heavily. “What if the whole entire cake gets bought, and we don’t get any?”

  “Well, you can bake your own German chocolate cake at home,” Nixie told him. “Now that you know how.”

  Vera stood up straighter and smiled more broadly as a tall woman in a peach-colored suit approached their tables.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, honey,” she told Vera. “I got tied up in a meeting.”

  “That’s okay,” Vera said.

  “That cake looks
scrumptious!” her mother said. “I’ll get two slices, one for each of us, and two of the smiley-face cookies. Which ones did you decorate, sweetie? Let me guess.” Vera’s mother gazed down at the table, her eyes passing over Boogie’s smeary faces, which were sure to be the last ones sold, and Nixie’s with eyes spaced too widely apart.

  “These?” She pointed at two particularly neatly iced cookies. “Am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” Vera said. “It’s not like we signed our cookies, or anything. We all made all of them.”

  “Well, these two look very nice,” her mother persisted. “Why don’t you introduce me to your friends?”

  “Mother, I’d like you to meet Nixie, Nolan, and Boogie,” Vera said, as if reciting an approved script of introduction. “Nixie, Nolan, and Boogie, I’d like you to meet my mother, Mrs. Vance.”

  Her mother gave everyone a gracious smile. “What is your real name?” she asked Boogie.

  “Brewster,” Boogie muttered.

  “What a lovely name! It’s a pleasure to meet you, Nixie, Nolan, and Brewster. All right, dear, I’ll run back to the office to finish up a few things and come pick you up when camp is over.”

  “Brewster?” Nolan asked when Vera’s mom had left to line up at the payment table where Colleen was taking the money, assisted by a volunteer from the Humane Society. “I didn’t know your name was Brewster. Why does everyone call you Boogie?”

  “When I was little, I loved to dance, you know, to boogie,” Boogie said. “It’s not because of boogers!”

  Nixie started to laugh, but the laugh died in her throat.

  Grace and Ely se were there at her table, followed by a man who had to be Elyse’s stay-at-home dad.