The Only Pirate at the Party

by Lindsey Stirling

  Another one of our failed moneymakers was Movie Night. We made cookies and popcorn, and created personalized placemats. For only two dollars, all three could be yours! Our older sisters always had babysitting money, but they were never going to give it to us. One Saturday before a viewing of The Shaggy D.A., Dawnee’s older sister Sherri walked up to our concession stand at the kitchen counter. She placed her hands on the granite, cocked her hip to the side, and examined our goods.

  “How much for one of those burnt cookies?”

  Dawnee looked hurt. “They’re not burnt—”

  “Fifty cents,” I cut in before the argument escalated. I was willing to take anything.

  “Too much,” Sherri said.

  And with that she walked to the cupboard, grabbed a bag of popcorn, and put it in the microwave herself. I wanted to call attention to the injustice, but Dawnee turned the other cheek. “It won’t taste as good as ours. We added a secret ingredient,” she said proudly.

  Sherri grinned. “I’m not sure if extra butter counts as a secret, but it could certainly pass for disgusting.”

  Our only interested buyers ended up being my younger sister Brooke and Dawnee’s younger sister Heidi, and of course they didn’t have any money. Eventually, we ended up paying them a quarter each to clean up the kitchen, which they gave back a few minutes later in exchange for a small bag of popcorn and half a cookie. We threw in their placemats for free since we had already decorated them.

  A few months later, my school started their annual candy bar fund-raiser. After the motivational speech, involving a slideshow of outrageous prizes, I was determined to win the mini-fridge and a bike. According to the motivational sales guy, “It would only take twenty thousand orders,” or something like that. Notwithstanding my zealous attitude, I returned my catalogue the next week with two orders—one from Mrs. Boyle down the street, and the other from Sherri Ray. It turns out she did have a soft heart; it was simply hidden beneath a mound of overpriced holiday chocolate.

  The Ready-To-Work Girls was a third Lindsey-Dawnee enterprise that was eventually quite a success. We made business cards and distributed them throughout the neighborhood, advertising our services for basically anything. WE’LL DO YOUR JOB FOR YOUR PRICE. Sometimes we got lucky and a generous benefactor would overpay us, but more often than not, we got royally ripped off.

  One of our most reliable customers was Mr. Hult. He was a portly man, to put it kindly, and every day he wore a starched button-up. When we first advertised our services at his door, he handed us five shirts, a can of starch, and offered us a dollar for every one we ironed. At first this seemed like a great deal—until we tried ironing one of his shirts and realized it was a time-consuming and sweat-producing chore. Did I mention Mr. Hult was a size infinity? I mean, the guy was short, but the more I ironed his shirts the more I was convinced I could use them as bedsheets. Every time we returned his shirts he handed us five more, and my heart sank. Sometimes I thought about leaving the wrinkled shirts on the doorstep and making a run for it. Instead, Dawnee and I took turns starching and ironing, starching and ironing . . .

  Then there were people like Patty Miller down the street who called for our services and paid us in half-consumed boxes of food. Even with the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from helping an elderly woman, I wasn’t quite satisfied with a few bags of fruit snacks and a box of Cheerios in return for three hours of yard work. After doing this a few times, I tried to convince Dawnee that we didn’t have to answer every time Patty called.

  “I mean, if she doesn’t pay well enough we don’t have to keep going back. We could just say we’re busy . . .”

  Dawnee listened, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

  A few days later, Dawnee called and I got to the phone as she was leaving a message.

  “Hi Limesey, it’s Dawnee. Patty called. There are some weeds in her flower garden that she can’t reach. It’s okay if you can’t make it today, but I’m going over there now.”

  There was no good reason I wouldn’t be able to make it, and Dawnee knew that. Her refusal to acknowledge my selfish attitude left me feeling more ashamed than any formal reprimand could have. Dawnee would never openly tell me I was wrong, but her message was a quiet invitation to change my mind. She was going to help Patty with or without me, so I grabbed my gloves and ran outside. She was already halfway up the street, carrying a small shovel and dragging a rake behind her, its teeth collecting stray rocks and sticks from the pavement as she walked.

  “Hey Dawnsey!” I called as I jogged toward her. “Wait up!”

  She turned and smiled.

  “Here, take this rattle bagger,” she said, handing me the rake.

  Since I know you’re all wondering, we got paid that day with polar punch popsicles. They made our mouths turn blue, so Dawnee called me “Sal” and accused me of stealing all her berries. I thought it was hilarious, and we giggled the entire walk home.

  Thanks, Dawnee, for teaching me how to work hard and be kind; and for showing me how to properly pose for the camera—belly out, hand limp.

  SAVE THE

  WHALES!

  The summer of ninety-six was one of the best my neighborhood had ever seen. For starters, Hunter Spalding got in trouble for accidentally setting fire to his kitchen and had to spend the entirety of May, June, and July digging up rusty fence posts in his front yard. He was a bad boy with good hair and the face of a baby angel. Dawnee and I were nine and he was three years our senior, but that didn’t stop us from “casually” riding our bikes past his house every five minutes. Lucky for us, it was also the year that Brooke and Heidi took a liking to horses. We convinced them to be our majestic steeds by pulling us around the neighborhood in a garden cart for hours at a time. We gave them lavish names like Black Ebony and Star Dancer, and fed them carrots until they thought we were doing them a favor.

  Once we had them trained, we commanded them to pull us past Hunter’s yard. We stood in the back of the cart like Roman charioteers as Brooke and Heidi struggled to pull us slowly along, Dawnee and I nodding nonchalantly as we passed. If the way we’d enslaved our sisters didn’t impress him, the boys’ department cargo shorts we were wearing certainly would. That summer was also the year I became secretary for the NAAEC—the Nature, Animal, and Environment Club.

  The neighborhood obsession with animals all started with my sister Jennifer. One of the things I loved most about her back then was her Ranger Rick animal-page collection. Each month, a new page arrived in the mail and she would place it gently into an alphabetized binder. Sometimes, she let Brooke and me sit next to her while she read through all the facts within the shiny bifold, so long as we didn’t touch the pages. The pictures were so vibrant, I wanted to rub my hands all over them. When Jennifer wasn’t home, I occasionally took the binder out from under her bed and flipped through the pictures. The blue-footed booby was my favorite. It really is a beautiful bird, but mostly I liked any excuse to say the word booby.

  One day a humpback whale page came in the mail, and Jennifer read aloud the tragic statistics on survival rates. The room fell silent, Brooke got teary, and Jennifer said solemnly, “We have to do something.”

  This was before the days of Google, so Jennifer called the customer service number on the back of the page. She waited on hold for two hours and twenty-three minutes, got transferred around for another hour, and finally got the name of an organization that protects whales. When she emerged from her room three and a half hours later, Brooke and I had long forgotten about the cause. In fact, whales annoyed me a little. If you need air to survive then what are you doing living under water, anyway?! But Jennifer was determined, and trying to change her mind once she was set on something was like trying to discuss sandwich boundaries with a ravenous goose.

  “We’re going to adopt a humpback whale,” she said matter-of-factly.

  It sounded great in theory, but where were we going to keep a pet whale? I decided to let her figure out the details and agreed to help.
Jennifer explained her plan.

  “The lady on the phone said it’s thirty dollars a year to adopt a whale. If we each put in twenty-five cents a week, we can save a whale in ten months . . . but if we can get ten people to donate twenty- five cents a week, we will have enough money in three months.”

  It sounded simple enough, but I still wasn’t sure how we were going to persuade ten people to donate a quarter for the upkeep of an air-breathing water dweller every week. Naturally, Jennifer had a solution for that too.

  “We need to start a club,” she said.

  And that was the start of the Nature, Animal, and Environment Club. Once we had a name, the recruitment process began. First stop: the Rays’ house.

  Dawnee’s family lived across the street with a houseful of kids and a yard full of cows, chickens, bunnies, pigeons, and cats—it was a no-brainer. Also, the fact that Dawnee and her two sisters were our best friends and accomplices in all things irrational guaranteed us a weekly seventy-five-cent contribution. We also convinced the Heydt kids, Rebecca Crum, and Megan Boyle to join. Hunter Spalding even came to one of our meetings, but after my fascinating presentation on the water beetle, he never returned. One of life’s great mysteries.

  The NAAEC went on for some time. Jennifer was president, the brains, and the researcher behind all our projects; Sherri was vice president, only because she was the next oldest and Jennifer’s best friend; Dawnee was the treasurer, due to her impeccable organizational skills; and I was the secretary—because that was the only position left. Brooke and Heidi begged for titles, so we labeled them townspeople. They took it much better than we expected.

  After a few months we decided our weekly meetings weren’t bringing in enough quarters, so Jennifer came up with the brilliant idea of putting on a play and charging the audience (our parents) admission. The production was called “Animals Fight For Freedom,” and it was written, directed, and starred in by—you guessed it—me. My favorite scene was the one where I turned the couch into a boat, stood on the bow, and gave a moving speech about “helping the underdogs.” Another personal highlight was when I waved our club flag back and forth yelling, “Save the blue-footed boobies!” It never got old. I think we made close to ten dollars, and we were ecstatic. Eventually, we not only adopted a whale but had also saved enough money to protect two and a half feet of rain forest. I know it has made some centipede very happy.

  Me, Dawnee, Brooke, and Heidi in matching club shirts, acid-washed jeans, and bowler hats . . . it made sense at the time.

  PUT THE CANDY

  IN THE POUCH

  Third grade was a big year for me. I placed first in the science fair with an experiment involving potatoes and electricity, and I designed my first homemade Halloween costume. Given the endless amount of dress-up clothes in the basement, picking a costume should have been a breeze. Being a bit of a forward thinker, though, I was never satisfied with a costume in which I’d already played house. My mom is an excellent seamstress, and the weeks leading up to Halloween found her glued to a chair in front of her sewing machine—either altering existing costumes or making new ones. That year as the holiday grew closer, I decided I would take a turn in the hot seat. I thought of the perfect costume, sketched a pattern, and proudly declared I was going to make a kangaroo suit—if not for the sheer challenge, then definitely for the secret candy pouch. No amount of gentle suggestions that I “start with something simpler” could convince me otherwise, so my mom took me down to Sally’s Fabrics and helped me find four yards of brown furry fabric.

  “Just as long as you know this is going to be difficult and will take a lot of work,” she said on the drive over.

  My mom could have saved a lot of time and money by just saying no to my request. But because she never told me I wouldn’t be able to do it, I did it. That’s the best part about being a kid. Nothing seems impossible until someone bigger and older tells you it is. I grew up in a lovely little world where nothing was too far out of reach if I wanted to work for it. I think I still live in that world.

  The finished product had a few minor flaws—mainly that I couldn’t breathe, and I spent the entire night tripping over my very realistic kangaroo feet—but the good news is I was the only kangaroo on the block that year (or any year, as far as I know).

  Note to future costume designers: Make sure you don’t sew the secret candy pouch too low, because then it looks like you’re pulling candy from your saggy Kanga-crotch . . . and people don’t find that cute, no matter how long it took to sew the dang thing on.

  When the Ty Beanie Baby craze hit Gilbert, Arizona, I was in the fifth grade, and looking hard for my next creative outlet. I bought Pinky the Flamingo off a grocery store endcap. A few days later Brooke picked up Chocolate the Moose because I wouldn’t stop bragging about how cool Pinky was. It started out innocent enough, just the two of us and the two of them. But as Beanie Babies grew in popularity, Brooke and I jumped on the bandwagon and hung on for dear life.

  For hours at a time, we sat in the basement sewing intricate outfits for our Beanie Babies by hand. They had ruffled skirts, pleated pants, collared shirts, and veiled hats. They came with names but once they were in our possession we paired them up and married them off, based on appearance, lifestyle, and our own matchmaker intuition. Not only did they have nice clothes and families, they also held jobs and participated in regular town meetings, in which new Beanies were introduced and other important Beanie business was attended to. McDonald’s Happy Meal Teenie Beanies afforded our Beanie couples the joys of having children. They were more functional than the average American family. This went on till the end of my sixth grade year.

  Nowadays, most sixth graders wear makeup and conduct important social business on smartphones. When I was in sixth grade I was wearing some hand-me-down overalls and conducting important social business among my Beanie Babies. Same thing, right?

  I wanted to include a picture of one of my Beanie outfits, but I couldn’t find any. I did, however, find this Mother’s Day marionette I made when I was nine. What mother doesn’t want a saggy-bottomed ostrich puppet in honor of the biggest sacrifice of her life? I know my mom did, or at least that’s what she told me when I presented it to her.

  ON OLDER

  SISTERS

  Before we moved to Arizona, Jennifer and I spent most of our free time at Bianca and Leanne’s house. Or should I say Biancaandleanne’s house. They were twins, the kind you’d imagine on the Disney Channel, and I don’t remember ever addressing one without the other. I was about seven at the time, Jennifer was ten, and Biancaandleanne were nine. It would have been a perfect recipe for friendship had Jennifer and I gotten along. Because we were about as compatible as a Q-tip and a bowling ball, Jennifer spent most of her time trying to convince the twins to lose me.

  I prided myself on my ability to keep up with Jennifer when she didn’t want me around—partly because I liked being included and partly because I liked annoying her. In fact, I think bothering Jennifer was the first thing in life I excelled at. She had a fiery temper, and setting her off was almost too easy. Once, after watching an episode of Sesame Street about sharing, Jennifer took it upon herself to teach me the importance of taking turns. She handed me the most coveted toy in the house, a purple-tailed My Little Pony. Then she sweetly asked if I would like to trade her for Gus, the Breyer horse who was missing three of his four legs. Of course I took one look at the crippled Gus and flatly replied, “No.”

  Jennifer tried again. “Lindsey, will you please share your pony?”

  “No.”

  At this point her gentle request turned into a forceful grab that ended in a customary episode of tug-of-war and screaming.

  “YOU NEED TO SHARE!”

  We pulled and screamed until the poor little pony’s head popped right off. Although I was partially to blame for this one, Jennifer was always breaking things—toys, plates, her wrists (that’s another story)—but my point? The girl could pack a punch.

  Sev
eral of Jennifer’s friends also had younger siblings—most frequently brothers—who were forced upon me for playdates. One day, after playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Princess, Michael and I went looking for our older sisters. They were hiding from us as usual, and during our search we overheard them talking behind some boxes in the garage.

  “Lindsey is so annoying. I would trade her for Michael any day,” Jennifer said.

  “You can have Michael. I’d rather have a younger sister than a brother,” her friend replied.

  “No, you don’t want Lindsey.”

  We stood in front of the garage, listening to our sisters talk us down. Michael looked like he might cry, but I remember thinking, Oh yeah? You think I’m annoying now? I always loved a challenge.

  In the beginning, Jennifer had wanted to be my big sister. The Halloween after I was born, my mom dressed us up as Tom and Jerry—two boys who hate each other—but regardless of the deeper implications of our costumes, Jennifer was very proud of me that year. According to my parents, anytime someone complimented Jennifer’s costume she pointed at me in my mom’s arms and said, “Yes, but look at the mouse!” I too fell easily into my role as the younger sister at first, following Jennifer around and trying to do everything she did. Once, she snuck some holiday chocolate from my parents’ room, and to prove my allegiance I willingly took the blame. When my mom found the wrapper on the floor, she gathered the two of us in the kitchen.