With that in mind, we all trooped off to the drawing room.
"You do the honors," Annie said to Georgia as we stood before the wall. "It was your gift."
"Yeah," Rebecca said, "until she gave it back."
Ignoring Rebecca, Georgia carefully removed the loose stone. Then she reached into the space and pulled out a note. We all crowded around her to read what it said:
Dear Georgia,
This is the part where I'd normally say, "Nice work. Five down, eleven to go." But, sadly, I can't do that this time, can I?
As always, the note was unsigned.
Georgia looked so sad that we couldn't help feeling sorry for her, despite what she'd done.
We watched as Georgia let go of the note; it floated idly down to the floor like a feather on a breeze.
"It's still only the first day of my month," she said glumly, "and already I'm not handling things very well, am I."
We tried to there, there her—not just Annie and Durinda and even Jackie, but all of us. But that dark and stormy night, there were not enough there, theres in the world to soothe Georgia's upset feelings.
If only Daddy Sparky and Mommy Sally were our real mommy and daddy, we thought as we put Georgia to bed. They could have at least helped us kiss her good night before we turned out the lights.
CHAPTER TWO
The next day, Sunday, passed in silence and misery.
This was all Georgia's fault, of course. She was so sad that she'd blown her big chance to receive her gift early that she spent the whole day moping around the house in her bathrobe and slippers. It didn't help any of our moods that it was still raining so hard. This meant that we couldn't even go outside to play, which at least would have gotten us away from Georgia's endless whining.
"Perhaps a nice cup of tea would cheer you up," Durinda offered Georgia. "Shall I make you a cup of tea? Or coffee?"
"I don't drink tea," Georgia groused from her curled-up position on the sofa. She had placed a hot-water bottle on her head.
"Are you an invalid?" Rebecca asked her, pointing at the hot-water bottle. "Maybe you will die a gruesome death and then we will all have to mourn you." She shrugged. "At least that would leave more frosting for me."
We all knew how much frosting meant to Rebecca.
"None of us drink tea," Georgia said to Durinda, ignoring Rebecca. "Can't you remember that? And only Annie ever drinks coffee."
"The rest of us like juice," Jackie said.
"Mango, if we can get it," Zinnia added.
"I do believe Georgia is starting to look genuinely sick," Marcia observed.
"That may be," Annie said, "but it's no reason for her to snap at Durinda so. She was only trying to help. Besides, if Georgia's not careful, Durinda might get angry and then tap her leg three times, point at Georgia, and make her freeze."
"Do you think we could get Durinda to do that even if she's not angry?" Rebecca asked hopefully.
"This rain worries me," Petal said, looking out the window.
"Why?" Annie asked. "At least it's made the last of the snow wash away."
"Yes," Petal said. "But it just keeps going on and on. It's not natural! Do you think it will rain for forty days and forty nights, and we will have to build an ark to sail away in before we all drown?"
"No," Rebecca said firmly. Then she got a teasing gleam in her eye. "It might rain for thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights, but it will surely stop before it gets to forty."
"Do you really think it'll rain for thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights?" Petal asked.
If someone didn't say something sensible, Petal would work herself into such a worrying frenzy, she'd spin right up into outer space.
"No," Annie said. "Rebecca is just pulling your leg."
"But why would she want to do that?" Petal said. "If she keeps pulling my leg, and it's always the same leg, one leg will eventually be longer than the other. Then I will be lopsided and people will make fun of me wherever I go. They will all say, 'Ooh, look! Here comes Lopsided Petal!'" She shuddered. "It will be awful."
Annie threw up her hands. "I give up," she said. "Why don't you put on your bouncy boots and go bounce in the drawing room for a while."
Bouncy boots, one of Mommy's inventions, were the puffy silver boots that had been our biggest present the year before. When we wore them on our feet, they made us bounce high with each step we took. But we could use them only in the drawing room, with its high cathedral ceiling, because Mommy had accidentally put too much bounce in them. When we tried to use them in any of the other rooms, we bounced too high and our heads hit the ceiling.
But Petal was in no mood for bouncing just then.
"I can't believe I just let my gift fly out the window!" Georgia moaned from her position on the sofa. Then she sighed a great sigh. "Am I really the stupidest Eight who ever lived?"
"No, you're not," said Jackie. "After all, we might have some relatives somewhere that we don't know about yet."
"You could be," Marcia said. "But first, we'd need to do a scientific survey to find out."
"I don't think it's worth worrying about," Annie said. "Robot Betty is dumber than you are, if it makes you feel any better, but that's probably not what you had in mind."
Robot Betty, another one of Mommy's inventions, was supposed to clean our house, but she hardly ever got anything right.
"Would you like me to make you some cocoa?" Durinda offered. "Oh, and Carl the talking refrigerator is dumber than you are too, at least when he's in love. But Carl's not a blood relative, and neither is robot Betty, so I don't think either one of them counts."
"If you were the stupidest Eight who ever lived," Petal fretted, "this could be very bad for the rest of us. I mean, what if one day you do something even more stupid than this, and then we all die?" She paused for a moment's thought, then addressed the room at large. "The cats are all definitely smarter than Georgia, and the cats are family. But what about the plants? Do plants count?"
"If I tell you that you're not the stupidest Eight," Zinnia offered Georgia, "will you buy me a gift?"
"Yes, you are the stupidest Eight," Rebecca said. "Now get over it."
So that was what our day was like—soggy and moany—and our night was no better.
It didn't even get better when Jackie, hoping to snap Georgia out of her funk, suggested we do our Waltons routine at bedtime.
The Waltons is this show that was on television sometime in the last century. Mommy once brought a DVD of it home for us to watch. She said something about how maybe if we watched it, we'd be more interested in doing chores around the house, since all of the Walton kids had to do chores and they always looked so happy to be doing them.
But the Waltons lived on a farm. We, however, didn't, and we had no cows to milk or hens to collect eggs from, and although we would have liked to have had a small horse to exercise, we didn't have one of those either. So we'd told Mommy that we didn't think the show applied to us.
As for the tractor on the show, we didn't have one, and if we had had one, we wouldn't have known how to fix it. Still, we did have our own personal mechanic—Pete—whom we'd inherited from Daddy and who was great for helping us out whenever we had any problems with our purple Hummer, which our scientist mother had fixed so it was environment-friendly. Plus, Pete was good at all sorts of other stuff.
We did like watching The Waltons. You know: nostalgia. It was about this small family—only seven kids!—although their grandparents lived with them, so we supposed that what with the old people and all the animals, their household was more crowded than ours.
At any rate, at the end of each episode, they'd show the outside of the Walton house with just one light on. The audience couldn't see any of the characters but they could hear the family members call out random good nights to one another from their rooms. We always thought it was a great way to end the day, but sometimes we forgot to do it.
That Sunday night, in a group effort to cheer up Georgia, we r
emembered.
"Good night, Durinda!" Annie called.
Annie slept in one room with Georgia, Jackie, and Marcia, and Durinda slept in the other with Petal, Rebecca, and Zinnia. It hadn't always been that way. Used to be, the four oldest slept together in one room and the four youngest in another. But when Mommy and Daddy disappeared on New Year's Eve—or died, as Rebecca would have us add—Annie thought it best to make the second-oldest, Durinda, sleep in the room with the youngest three to give them greater comfort. We suspected that none of this sat well with Marcia, who used to be the oldest in the younger bedroom but was now the youngest in the older bedroom. So far, though, Marcia had kept her feelings on this subject to herself.
"Good night, Annie!" Durinda called back. "Good night, Jackie!"
"Good night, Durinda!" Jackie called. "Good night, Petal!"
"Good night, Jackie!" Petal called. "Good night, Rebecca!"
"What are you saying good night to me so loudly for?" Rebecca wanted to know. "I'm right here in the same room with you, Petal." Then: "Good night, Marcia!"
"Good night, Rebecca!" Marcia called. "Good night, Zinnia!"
"Good night, Marcia!" Zinnia called. "Good night, Rebecca!"
"Would you two stop doing that?" Rebecca groused. "Can't you remember I'm in here too?"
"Good night, Georgia!" seven Eights called at the exact same moment.
But even the old reliable Waltons routine didn't help any.
"Good night," Georgia said softly as Annie switched off the last light and the house went dark.
***
Just as Sunday always follows Saturday, so Monday must follow Sunday ... unless something happens to stop Monday from coming.
But nothing happened to cancel Monday that week. This meant that the morning after Georgia had gone so quietly to sleep, even she had to get ready for school.
"But I'm still so depressed!" Georgia complained when Annie ripped the sheets off her.
"I don't care," Annie said. "Education is important, so you're going. We're all going."
So we all put on our wretched yellow plaid uniforms and went.
"Do you think this bus is one of those amphibious vehicles?" Petal asked, her little pink umbrella bobbing over her head as we boarded the bus we now took to the Whistle Stop every school day. "You know, one of those cars that turns into a boat when it becomes surrounded by too much water, like a lake or an ocean?"
"No," Rebecca said.
There were days when we imagined no was Rebecca's favorite word in her vocabulary. Even the times she said yes, it somehow sounded like no to us.
Still, we made it to school without anyone drowning, which we all agreed was a very fine thing.
But when we arrived at our classroom, a trail of wet footprints and tiny puddles behind us, we discovered...
"Where's the McG?" Jackie asked.
The McG, whose full name was Mrs. McGillicuddy, was our teacher. She was tall and blond and had an amazingly long nose, which held up her horn-rimmed glasses. She always got to the classroom before we did. We suspected this was to make sure that none of us had the chance to sneak a toad into her desk drawer again.
But on that Monday, that fateful Monday, there was no McG. The only people in the room were our classmates, Mandy Stenko and Will Simms.
Mandy and Will were seated at their desks, hands neatly folded, as though to show they were behaving even though there was no McG in sight.
We liked Will. We liked Will a lot. We liked Will so much, we'd even told him the entire story of our parents' disappearance and how we were all now living home alone. As for Mandy, well, we'd been trying lately to like her better, particularly since Will had explained to us that Mandy was just jealous of us Eights because we all had one another and she didn't have anyone. But she didn't always make it easy. For example, right now.
"Why don't you put your things away neatly," Mandy suggested, "and wait with us for our teacher to arrive."
"But there's no teacher here now," Rebecca countered, tossing her ladybug-pattern raincoat at a coat hook and missing wildly. "So I say we have a little fun."
For the first time since Saturday, Georgia's expression brightened. "Yes, let's do," she said. Then she tossed her own frog-pattern raincoat at a coat hook, also missing wildly.
Before long, there was a pile of eight wildlife-pattern raincoats all over the floor.
Getting into the spirit of things, Will, who had neatly hung up his own yellow slicker before we'd arrived, removed his coat from the hook and added it to our pile.
"What do we do next?" he asked enthusiastically.
This was one of the reasons we liked—no, loved— Will: he was always game to get involved with anything we came up with.
"Food fight?" Zinnia suggested shyly. "I've always wanted to take part in one of those."
"No," Annie said sensibly. "We might get hungry for our snacks later, and it will be difficult to eat them if the food is all smooshed."
"Plus, it's wasteful," Durinda added, "and not very nice. You know: people starving in China and all of that."
"I know!" Georgia said, a true gleam in her eye now. "Let's have—drumroll, please—a spitball fight!"
"I don't think that's very sanitary," Mandy pointed out, "and it's certainly not ladylike..."
But none of us was listening.
We were too busy tearing blank sheets of paper from our notebooks and wadding them up into tiny balls held together by spit and a prayer. We were too busy climbing on chairs and desks—even the McG's desk—so we could take better aim at one another.
We had become, in a word, mayhem.
So that's what we were doing—being mayhem— when the doorknob to the third-grade classroom at the Whistle Stop slowly turned, and in walked Principal Freud accompanied by one of the most gorgeous creatures we'd ever seen.
Principal Freud was bald as an egg, but that didn't matter then. Because we were too busy looking at the creature.
There was something familiar about her. She was probably about ten years younger than our own mommy, and she was tall, like Mommy, and beautiful, like Mommy. She had long hair the color of chestnuts and eyes the color of chocolate, which is nearly everyone's favorite flavor if they're not allergic. Her lips were painted red as a candy apple. And that dress! It had a miniskirt and was mostly turquoise but with swirly patterns in bright pinks and purples and yellows, and just a few dashes of white and black. Really! In addition to being a scientist, our mommy was a great seamstress, but we doubted that even she could make a dress as beautiful as that. And when the woman smiled? It was as if she had thirty-two perfect pearls that had been plucked right from their shells in her mouth. Honestly, she was so beautiful, if there had been an actual halo suspended over her head, it wouldn't have seemed like too much.
So it was really too bad that just as the woman walked in the door, Georgia, who'd been squatting on the McG's desk waiting to assault Rebecca, let loose with her biggest spitball of all, nailing the beautiful creature smack in the middle of her pretty forehead.
CHAPTER THREE
We had never had a teacher crush before, but we had certainly heard of them. Teacher crushes are when you have a teacher, male or female, who is so wonderful in every way that all the students instantly fall in love with him or her.
There was a good reason we'd never had a teacher crush before. Our kindergarten teacher, Mr. Thimble, whom we'd had for only about five minutes before we were bumped up to first grade, had had long hairs growing out of his nose. People can't help how they look, but these were very distracting nose hairs, and they made it difficult for us to focus on more important things, like finger painting. And our teachers didn't get any better after that, right up through the McG. There was no way a student would ever fall in love with the McG, not unless that student had been tapped by the Crazy Wand.
But this new creature standing next to Principal Freud, the one Georgia had just beaned in the forehead with the biggest spitball ever?
"This is Serena Harkness." Principal Freud presented the creature to our class.
Even her name was beautiful. It glittered. It was as if the forces of the universe had all gathered together and agreed that no way would she be saddled with an unsuitable name such as Theodora Gumbo.
Before we could try to respond, Principal Freud turned to the creature. This was good, since we were all too awestruck to respond right away.
"Are you sure you're up to this, Ms. Harkness?" he asked gently. "You know, the Eights in particular do have a reputation for being ... um ... a little rough on teachers. If you'd like, there's still time. We can call in someone else to—"
"Oh, no." Ms. Harkness cut him off with a smile that could have ended wars. "I welcome the challenge."
"Very well," Principal Freud said.
Mandy Stenko raised her hand sharply, as though if someone didn't call on her soon, there might be a bad accident.
"Yes, Mandy?" Principal Freud said.
"Is she a substitute?" Mandy asked.
If we'd been standing closer to Mandy at the time, we would have kicked her. What a question to ask! It was like having guests arrive at your home and asking just a minute after they got there, "So, when are you leaving?" Mommy had told us it was rude every time we'd done it, which was whenever Aunt Martha and Uncle George, our only two relatives outside of our grandparents, had come to stay.
"Ms. Harkness," Principal Freud said with obvious pleasure, "is a little bit, um, more than just a regular substitute."
More than a substitute? What did that mean? we wondered. Whatever it meant, it sounded very good to us.
Mandy's hand shot straight back up again.
Really, was there ever a girl who needed kicking more than Mandy Stenko?
"Yes, Mandy?" Principal Freud said.
"But what about Mrs. McGillicuddy?" Mandy asked. "Won't she be coming back tomorrow?"
"I'm afraid not," Principal Freud said. "Mrs. McGillicuddy is sick. And, I'm sorry to add, the friend who called on her behalf said that Mrs. McGillicuddy is the kind of sick that will keep her out of school for more than a day. It could be as much as a week. It could be even longer."
Georgia's Greatness Page 2