“Go for it!”
Fourteen
I’m not brave enough to do this.
But Quinny thinks I am, and just in case she’s right, I aim the hose at my brothers and press the handle. Water bursts out, fast and freezing cold.
“Aaaaahhhh!” Trevor yelps as I soak him in the stomach.
“Grrrrrrrrr!” Ty roars as I spray him in the nose.
“Wait, wait, wait!” cries Quinny.
She leans over and changes the setting on the hose sprayer from stream to jet. The water blasts out faster now. Trevor and Ty scream louder.
Quinny puts her hand over mine on the hose. We press that handle down, hard.
I’m dead meat, for sure.
But I think it might be worth it.
Fifteen
How was I supposed to know that Mrs. Porridge would pick this exact moment to walk into Hopper’s yard?
And that she would come by with her cat on a leash?
And that both she and that cat—who is so huge it looks more like a bear cub—hate being accidentally sprayed with freezing water from a garden hose?
“Reeeeeeeee!” screeches that soaked cat.
“Good heavens,” cries that soaked old lady.
“BOCK BOCK BOCK!” bocks muddy Freya, who suddenly wants a piece of that cat.
“Hiiiissssssssssss!” hisses the cat, trying to sink its fangs into Freya’s feathers.
Mrs. Porridge kicks that killer chicken away from her chubby cat, but they all get tangled up in the cat’s leash. “Leave my Walter alone, you birdbrained terrorist!”
“Good morning, Mrs. Porridge!” I call out. “How are you? This must be your cat, who you just called Walter, so I think he’s probably a boy cat, right? But how did he get so huge? And why are you walking him on a leash? Is he part dog?”
“My dress!” cries a soaked girl, who was walking with Mrs. Porridge and Walter, except I didn’t even see that girl until now. Because if a gigantic, wet cat starts fighting a muddy killer chicken, that’s usually the first thing people notice.
“Wow, Mrs. Porridge, I didn’t know you have a girl, too!”
“This is my grand-niece, Victoria,” huffs Mrs. Porridge. “She’s visiting for the day, and I was under the mistaken impression that you two might like to meet each other.”
I look at Victoria again. She’s wearing a very glamorous, very complicated itchy-pink dress. A very soggy itchy-pink dress. Her sparkly headband and stylish purse and high-heely sandals are also itchy-pink and wet-ish. She looks like the kind of beautiful, expensive doll you are not allowed to touch, except that someone dropped that doll into a puddle.
Before I can ask Victoria if she was on her way to a party, she sputters, “This dress is dry clean only!”
Uh-oh.
Dry clean only = you have to take it to a special store + pay a lot of money to have it cleaned with chemicals that are not good for our planet, according to Mom. But Daddy used to dry-clean-only all his work shirts back in New York City, which is how I know so much about it.
I also know we owe Victoria an apology. Hopper looks too scared to say it, so I do.
“Sorry, Victoria. Hey, too bad that dress isn’t wet clean only.”
Victoria glares at us.
“Dry clean? Wet clean? Get it? By the way, I’m Quinny and this is Hopper.”
Victoria stomps off wetly without even laughing at my joke. Mrs. Porridge picks up her giant, drippy cat and follows in her grand-niece’s foot stomps.
“Quinny, what on earth is going on?” says Mom, who must have shown up while I wasn’t looking and does not seem too happy.
Then I notice Piper, too, peeking out from behind a tree, all half naked and sneaky-smiley. “Quinny didded it!” she blurts out. “She soaked that old lady and her cat and her pretty girl!”
“Didded is not a word,” I inform my grimy little sister. “And put a shirt on, you chimpanzee.”
Now that we live in the middle of nowhere, Piper has stopped wearing clothes. She likes to go outside in her underpants or a swimsuit bottom and roll around in the grass like some wild animal. She won’t even come inside to pee—she just squats behind this one tree in our yard, like a dog. Daddy calls that spot her “invisible toilet”—you won’t catch me going anywhere near it.
“I sawed the whole thing,” Piper tattles. “It was Quinny.”
“Tattletale for sale!” I call out. “Tattletale for sale!”
“All right, Quinny, that’s enough trouble for one day,” says Mom. “In the house, now.”
“But it’s not even lunchtime!”
Mom drags me home anyway. I look back at Hopper, who’s getting dragged off by his own mad mom, along with the bully twins, whose two mouths are blaming the whole thing on Hopper, which is a lie, but I can’t even defend him, because Mom shuts our door and orders me upstairs and makes me take a whole entire bath, even though I just took one two days ago.
Piper tries to jump in the tub, too, because we sometimes still take our baths together, but I don’t want that snoopy wild animal anywhere near me right now. “Get your germy butt out of here!” I screech at her, making my best ferocious face.
Mom plucks chicken feathers from my hair and scrubs my muddy face and mutters, “How on earth, Quinny? How on earth?”
After my bath, she makes me write a letter saying sorry to Mrs. Porridge and offering to pay to dry-clean-only Victoria’s dress from my allowance. Which isn’t fair, because Trevor and Ty started it with the water hose. Just like they started it with the broken vase yesterday. Why oh why did we have to move next door to such beastly bully twins? I don’t even want to think about what those monsters are doing to Hopper right now. I just hope he’s still alive.
I sit there, sinking to the very bottom of this very bad mood, when I feel a licky-wet finger slime my ankle. It’s Piper again, under the table. She almost gets away, but I grab that nosy little beast by the tail—I mean ponytail—and pull her back to me, ever so gently.
“Hello, tattletale.” I squish her cheeks between my knees. “This is not your lucky day.”
Sixteen
Because of all the trouble with the water hose, Mom sends us to our rooms to “spend some quiet time thinking about how to make better choices.”
I know I should have said sorry to Victoria and Mrs. Porridge for accidentally soaking them. But Victoria makes me nervous. She never says hi to me, even though we were in the same second-grade class last year. She acts like it costs her money to be nice to people, and she doesn’t think I’m worth it.
Being sent to my room is usually my favorite punishment. But this time Trevor pounds on the wall between his room and mine. “Dead meat! Dead meat! Dead meat!” Ty plays his brain-exploding video game really loud. I wonder how my brothers will get me back for getting them back with that water hose. I’m sure they are wondering the same thing.
At dinnertime, I pretend I have a stomachache so I can stay in my room.
At bedtime, I pretend I’m already asleep so I can keep staying in my room.
Mom brings me plain toast and touches my forehead to see if I have a fever. Dad pulls the covers up to my chin. After my parents leave, I get up and drag my chair over to block my door. Just in case Trevor and Ty get any crazy ideas in the middle of the night.
When I wake up in the morning, luckily I am still alive. And my brothers have to leave for soccer camp before they can do anything too horrible to get me back.
“You’re still dead meat,” says Trevor as he punches my arm good-bye.
“You and that crazy chicken,” says Ty as he slaps the side of my head. “We’re gonna eat that thing for dinner when we get back.”
Dad helps them pack their duffel bags into the minivan. They’re taking a lot of stuff because they’ll be living at soccer camp for the rest of the summer. That’s fine with me. Now the house will feel calmer. My body will feel safer.
As Trevor and Ty ride away, Quinny waves out at them from her bedroom window and sticks he
r tongue out. “Bock bock bock!” she screams.
After the minivan turns the corner, she runs outside and into my yard and over to my brothers’ soccer net. She tips the whole thing over.
“What are you doing?” I catch up to her.
“Trespassing!” She smiles.
The soccer net falls forward onto its metal frame with a thump.
“If you break that thing, they’re going to kill you,” I tell her.
Quinny climbs onto the sideways net and lies on it, like it’s a hammock.
I stare up at her staring up at the sky.
“What are you waiting for?” she says. “Get up here!”
I think about it. I shake my head.
“Come on, Hopper! It’s fun.”
I look around. My brothers are gone. I get up there. I lie there next to Quinny. We swing a little in the warm breeze. My body feels lighter now. Like I’m floating on my back at the town pool.
“See?” Quinny smiles.
I look up and I see. The sky is blue, with one small cloud in the shape of a hippocampus. That’s the part of your brain where you remember your life.
Seventeen
This is my luckiest summer ever.
The bully twins just left for sleepaway camp, plus Piper went to the pediatrician because she has an itchy rash on her bottom. (She picked up booty cooties from peeing outside, I think.) So it’s just me and Hopper, hanging out in the clever hammock that I invented from the bully twins’ useless soccer net, and we have the whole day to do whatever we want.
Except I think I feel my body falling.
Crack! Plop! I’m suddenly splat on the ground, with grass up my nose and Hopper’s arms and legs all twisted up in mine. I look around. The metal frame of this soccer-net hammock has cracked into two chunks.
Hopper looks terrified. “This thing was brand-new.”
“Well, if I were your brothers, I’d ask for my money back.”
Hopper is breathing funny now. His eyes bulge out. I can tell he is picturing himself being swung around upside down by his ankles, faster and faster until he barfs.
“Don’t worry, Hopper. Those bully twins are far away at soccer camp for, like, a million weeks, and I don’t think your mom even saw—plus I know just how to fix this thing. Wait here!”
I run over to my house. I find a tape gun—which I’m not allowed to touch, because it has sharp parts, but we’ve got a bunch left over from moving, and I’m more responsible than my parents think, so I don’t see what the big deal is if I borrow this tape gun for just two seconds.
I run back out to Hopper’s yard. I use the tape gun to wrap sticky brownish moving-box tape around the two broken metal pieces of the soccer-net frame.
SCREEEEECH SCREEEECH SCREEEECH, yells the tape gun.
There. Good as new. Sort of.
“Quinny, what are you doing?” Hopper is sitting with his head between his knees now, like how the nurse at school makes you sit when you’re barfy sick.
I drag that slightly crooked, taped-up soccer-net-hammock thing back behind Hopper’s garage. “We’ll just leave it alone to heal,” I tell him.
“Heal? That’s a broken soccer net, not a broken leg.”
“Shhh, it needs to rest. Let’s go play.” I pull Hopper up and over toward my house.
“But—”
“Come on!”
It’s time this boy and I really got to know each other.
I pull him into our kitchen and tell him to close his eyes.
“Why?” he asks.
“Just do it, and no peeking. You’ll find out.”
I open our refrigerator and pull out some mustard and show it to Hopper’s nose.
“Guess what this is. Just from sniffing. And remember, no peeking!”
Hopper sniffs. Then he sniffs again. “Mustard,” he guesses.
“Correct!”
He also guesses orange juice and leftover spaghetti correctly. When it’s my turn, I guess ketchup and pickles correctly, but then I miss on cream cheese, which is a really hard one.
“Hopper, you won the smelling bee! Congratulations.”
Then we go up to the second floor, and I wrap a towel around my head, like a fortune-teller, and I grab my New York City snow globe out of a moving box, and I sit crisscross-applesauce across from Hopper on the floor. I stare into the snow globe, which is almost like a crystal ball. “You will meet a fabulous individual whose name rhymes with skinny,” I inform him. “You will have your luckiest summer ever with this splendid individual.”
Then I show Hopper my room. And what his room looks like from my window.
We figure out that my room’s ceiling, which looks like coconut frosting, doesn’t taste like coconut frosting. It tastes like needles. Ouch!
I show Hopper my accordion, which I share with Mom, but really it’s mostly mine. I offer to play him a song, but his face looks like it’s not quite ready for that.
I show him my tae kwon do certificate, which is framed with the piece of wood that I broke in half with my strong, kicky, bare foot to earn my green belt.
Then Hopper notices my bulletin board, full of photos from school and theater camp and tae kwon do and playdates and birthday parties and sleepovers and Central Park adventures.
He stares at this big photo collage. “Who are all those people?” he asks.
“Those are my friends from the city.”
“All of them?”
“No, not all of them, silly. I didn’t have enough room on there for all my friends. But now that we live here, I’ve got more wall space, so I can get another bulletin board and make a second photo collage and add even more friends! Hey, want to help me do that now?”
Hopper looks down and mumbles, “No, thanks.”
“But I noticed you’re so great at art stuff, maybe we could—”
“Bock bock,” says Hopper.
Except it’s not really Hopper saying it—it’s that stylish killer zebra-chicken, Freya! I look outside and see her clucking her brains out again, right at my kitchen door.
I rush downstairs. “BOCK!” Freya glares at me through the window in the door. Her beady little eyes look confused and her crabby clucks sound full of angry hurt. Before I can open the door to ask her what’s wrong, she runs away. Again.
“What’s the story with that chicken?” I ask Hopper. “She keeps coming here and looking inside my house, like she wants to be friends. But then she runs away.”
“That chicken does not want to be your friend. She only likes Mr. McSoren.”
“Where’s Mr. McSoren now?” I ask.
“I don’t know. One day an ambulance came and took him away.”
“Oh no! What happened?”
“My parents said he fell down the stairs,” says Hopper. “And the chicken got out somehow. People in the neighborhood tried to catch it. But it was no use. Freya’s too fast. And she’s mean to everyone except Mr. McSoren.”
I don’t think that chicken is mean in a mean way. I think that chicken is mean in a lonely way. There’s a difference. “Poor chicken. No wonder she comes clucking at our back door—she must be so confused and upset. Why didn’t Mr. McSoren ever come back for her?”
“Maybe he gotted dead,” says Pee-U Piper.
I didn’t realize my little sister was back from the pediatrician. “Stop snooping and go scratch your itchy butt,” I growl at her, then turn back to Hopper. “It’s not true, is it, Hopper? Please say Freya’s roommate isn’t dead!”
“Mr. McSoren was pretty old,” says Hopper. “But I’m not really sure.”
“Well, he can’t be dead, because then what’ll happen to that poor homeless chicken? Who’s going to feed her and take care of her, and what about winter, when it gets really cold—”
“Quinny, breathe.”
“She lost her home and her best friend—we’ve got to find him! Where on earth did Mr. McSoren go?”
“I don’t know,” says Hopper with a sigh. “But I know someone who might.”
<
br /> Eighteen
Who cares about a chicken?
Quinny cares. I have no idea why, but she does.
And that makes me care. I have no idea why, but I do. So I lead Quinny down the street. When she realizes whose house we’re going to, she freaks out again.
“But Mrs. Porridge hates us because we soaked her chubby cat, Walter, plus her grand-niece, Victoria, with that freezing water hose!”
“I’m sure they’ve all dried off by now. Do you want some answers or not?”
I lead Quinny up to Mrs. Porridge’s front door and knock. Nobody answers, so we go around back and find Mrs. Porridge in her garden, yanking weeds. She’s got Walter tied to her fence with his cat leash. He looks about as unhappy as she does.
“What now?” snaps Mrs. Porridge.
We explain what, but she is not interested in helping us help Freya.
“Oh, pish, you won’t see me going anywhere near that crazy old bird,” says Mrs. Porridge. “I tried to catch it once, and all I got for my trouble was a bunch of peck marks! Bottom line is, that chicken won’t tolerate anyone but Herbert McSoren.”
“But where did Mr. McSoren go?” I ask.
“What do I look like, a private detective?” says Mrs. Porridge. “If he wanted that squawky bag of feathers, he’d have come back for it. Or maybe the old geezer finally croaked.”
“Don’t say that!” wails Quinny.
“If you children will excuse me, I don’t have time to waste on things that are a waste of time.”
“But we’ve got to help her, somehow!” Quinny cries. “She’s so upset and confused. She comes clucking at our back door every day.”
“Don’t worry. Pretty soon a possum or a hawk will snatch that chicken up, and you’ll get some peace and quiet.”
“No!”
“Come on.” I pull Quinny away. “I have another idea.”
We walk back to my house. I make a phone call. To a number I know by heart.
“No, he’s not dead,” Grandpa Gooley says to me on the phone. “Herbert McSoren is living up in Milford with his sister now.”
Quinny & Hopper Page 4