Ivy and Bean Doomed to Dance

by Annie Barrows

  “I should think so!” said her mother. She glared some more. “Well! We’ll talk about the consequences this evening when Daddy comes home. In the meantime, both of you go upstairs and try on your ballet costumes. And I don’t want to hear any complaining!”

  Bean and Ivy walked quietly upstairs. Quietly they closed the door to Bean’s room. “Whew,” said Ivy. “That was a close one.”

  “It’s not over yet,” said Bean. “Your mom still has to get mad.”

  “I know,” said Ivy. “But at least none of them found out about the running-away part.”

  “We’ve got to get rid of the evidence,” said Bean, busily pulling the bag of salt, the Band-Aids, the string, and the underwear out of her backpack. She stuffed it all under her bed.

  Ivy did the same.

  “Jeez!” Bean slumped against her bed. “What a day.”

  Ivy lay down on the floor. “I’m pooped.”

  “Are you trying on those costumes?” shouted Bean’s mother from downstairs.

  “Sheesh,” said Bean, getting up. “Work, work, work. That’s all I do.” The white leotards lay across her bed, stuffed tights legs tangled around them. “Come on,” said Bean. “You have to try yours on, too.”

  Ivy sighed and got up. Together they untangled the tights legs and got undressed and pulled on the white leotards. Bean looked at Ivy in her white leotard with ten white legs dangling from her waist.

  Ivy looked at Bean. “I don’t think Madame Joy has ever seen a real squid,” she said.

  Bean thought about the long, blubbery white legs. It made her head prickle. “Remember its legs?”

  Ivy nodded. “And its eye? Remember how it looked at us?”

  “Like it was excited. Like it could hardly wait to squeeze the life out of us,” said Bean.

  “Like we were food,” agreed Ivy.

  “Squids are not friendly,” Bean announced.

  Ivy lifted up one of her white tights legs and shook it. “A real squid would wrap its legs around Dulcie and squish her.”

  Bean giggled. “And then it would eat the starfish and the sea horses.” She bonked Ivy with one of her tights legs. “And the prince.”

  Ivy bonked her back. “And then it would look at the audience with its humongo eye and say, ‘And you people are my dessert.’”

  There was a pause.

  “You know,” Bean said thoughtfully, “we could use your face paint to make big black eyes.”

  There was another pause. Ivy and Bean looked at each other.

  “Madame Joy will kill us,” said Ivy.

  “We won’t do anything,” said Bean. “We’ll just look more like real squids. She won’t mind.”

  “In a way, she should be glad,” said Ivy. “We’ll be teaching everyone what squids are really like.”

  “Yeah, it’s educational,” said Bean. For the first time, she felt a little bit excited about being a squid. “And maybe, at the very end, after the rest of the dance is over, we can be two squid trying to squeeze the life out of each other.”

  “Yeah!” said Ivy cheerfully. “Like this!” She jumped at Bean and wrapped three of her tentacles around Bean’s arm.

  Bean hit Ivy over the head with a tights leg and growled. The two unfriendly squids bashed and squeezed each other until they had to lie down on the floor.

  “You know what?” said Bean after a minute.

  “What?” said Ivy.

  “By the time we get through with it, ‘Wedding Beneath the Sea’ is going to be a lot like Giselle. Only more exciting.”

  Ivy smiled. “Plus more scientific.”

  “I just knew we’d end up liking ballet!” said Bean happily.

  IVY + BEAN

  BOOK 7

  SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE NEXT IVY & BEAN ADVENTURE

  There had been a problem in Bean’s house. The problem was staples. Bean loved staples. She loved them so much that she had stapled things that weren’t supposed to be stapled. The things looked better stapled, but her mother didn’t think so, and now Bean was outside.

  She was going to be outside for a long time.

  She looked at her back yard. Same old yard, same old trampoline, same old dinky plastic playhouse, same old pile of buckets and ropes and stilts. None of them was any fun. Maybe she could play junkyard crash. Junkyard crash was when you stacked up all the stuff you could find and then drove the toy car into the stack. But it was no fun alone. Bean got up and scuffed across the nice green lawn until she reached the not-so-nice green lawn. This part of Bean’s lawn had holes and lumps in it. The lumps were mostly places where Bean had buried treasure for kids of the future.

  Bean picked up a shovel. To heck with kids of the future. She was bored now. And maybe a kind old guy had seen her digging and added something interesting to her treasure, like a ruby skull or a dinosaur egg.

  Bean didn’t bury her treasure very deep, so it was easy to dig up. This treasure was inside a paper bag, but the paper bag wasn’t doing so well. It wasn’t really a paper bag anymore. “Oh my gosh!” said Bean loudly. “I’ve found treasure!” She pulled apart the clumps of paper. What a disappointment. No ruby skull. No dinosaur egg. Just the same stuff she had buried two weeks ago: dental floss, tweezers, and a magnifying glass. Some treasure.

  Bean flopped over on her stomach. “I’m dying of boredom,” she moaned, hoping her mother would hear. “I’m dyyy-ing.” She coughed in a dying sort of way—“Huh-ACK!”—and then lay still. Anyone looking from the porch would think she was dead. And then that person would feel bad.

  Bean lay very still.

  Still.

  She could hear her heart thumping.

  She could feel the hairs on her arm moving.

  Bean opened her eyes. There was an ant scurrying over her arm. Bean pulled the magnifying glass over and peered at the ant. Her arm was like a mountain, and the little ant was like a mountain climber, stumbling along with a tired expression on his face. Poor hardworking ant. She watched as he dodged between hairs and charged down the other side of her arm toward the ground. She offered him a blade of grass to use as a slide, but that seemed to confuse him. He paused, looked anxiously right and left, and then continued down her arm. He had a plan and he was going to stick to it. Bean watched through the magnifying glass as he scuttled into the grass, rushing along the ground between blades. He was late. He was in trouble. He met another ant by banging into him, but they didn’t even stop to talk. They rushed away in opposite directions.

  Bean followed her ant to a patch of dry dirt. There he plunged down a hole.

  “Come back,” whispered Bean. She liked her ant. Maybe he would come out if she poked his house. She found a thin stick and touched the top of the hole. Four ants streamed out and raced in four different directions. Bean didn’t think any of them was her ant.

  Bean watched the ant hole for a long time. Ants came and went. They all seemed to know where they were going. They all seemed to have important jobs. None of them seemed to notice that they were puny little nothings compared to Bean.

  Bean dragged the hose toward the ant hole. She didn’t turn the hose on. That would be mean. But she let a little bit of water dribble into the hole, and watched as the dirt erupted with ants. Thousands of ants flung themselves this way and that, racing to safety.

  “Help, help,” whispered Bean. “Flood!”

  The ants ran in orderly lines away from the water. Some were holding little grains above their heads. They were the hero ants. But even the non-hero ants were busy. They were all far too busy to notice Bean watching them through the magnifying glass. To them, she was like a planet. She wasn’t part of their world. She was too big and too far away for them to see.

  Bean looked up into the sky. What if someone was watching her through a giant magnifying glass and thinking the same thing she was? What if she was as small as an ant compared to that someone? And what if that someone was an ant compared to the next world after that?

  Wow.

  Bean waved at th
e sky. Hi, out there, she thought.