“Yes?” he said.
“Dad, you eat so slowly. You take, like, one bite per minute.”
Mr. Goodenough was just about to say this was good for his digestion when his hand started shoveling food in his mouth so fast that the fork turned into a blur. His plate was clean in a matter of seconds.
Tulip stared at him. “Wow. I’ve never seen you eat like that before. It’s like you’re normal.”
But poor Mr. Goodenough put one hand over his stomach and the other over his mouth and let out a long, loud belch.
“Cool!” said Rusty. “I didn’t know grown-ups could do that.”
Mrs. Goodenough, however, looked alarmed. “Marcel? Are you all right?”
He groaned. “I already have heartburn. I think I’ll go lie down for a while. Can you call the office and tell them I’ll be late?”
Rusty glared at his sister. “See what you did?”
“Well, gosh, I didn’t know that would happen.”
On the way to school, Tulip told Rusty to hurry up. “No,” he said, “I don’t—” But suddenly his feet were hurtling him along the sidewalk, and he slipped in a puddle of slush and crash-landed on a snowbank. He stood up and faced his sister angrily. “Look what you made me do! Now my library book is all wet. I’ll have to pay a fine.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tulip, who looked much more awed than she did sorry. And in fact, the morning, as far as Tulip was concerned, was quite awesome. She pointed out to Samantha that her clothes were covered in cat fur, and the fur disappeared immediately. Tulip was pleased, but Samantha looked embarrassed.
She mentioned to Egmont Dolittle that he smelled like a wet dog.
“That’s what happens when you walk a dog in the rain,” Egmont informed her. “And anyway, it isn’t nice to point out things like that.”
But the wet dog smell went away, and Tulip felt satisfied.
It was during recess, which was held in the gym because of the rain, that trouble occurred. Melody and Samantha were standing under a basketball net, deep in conversation. Melody kept patting the French braids in her hair, and Samantha was turning Melody’s head from side to side.
“What’s going on?” asked Tulip.
Samantha and Melody looked at each other warily.
“We’re discussing Melody’s hair,” Samantha said after a moment.
“It’s finally long enough for braids!” exclaimed Melody. “I’ve been waiting and waiting for this. Now I can do anything with my hair. Braids, ponytails. I can put it up or let it hang loose. I can even—”
“What’s that?” said Tulip, squinting. She leaned forward and plucked something from the end of one of Melody’s braids. “Huh. A little piece of food. Your hair is too long now, Melody. You should get it cut.”
“But I just grew it out! It took forever!” She paused. “What?” she said when she saw the expression on Samantha’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Uh-oh. Um, your hair…” Samantha’s voice trailed off.
Melody reached for one of her braids and felt only the fabric of her sweatshirt. She patted her head. She felt a helmet of short hair and let out a shriek. “My hair! My hair!”
“It’s so cute!” cried Tulip.
“I don’t care. It isn’t what I wanted. And anyway, it’s none of your business what I do with my hair.”
“Call Missy. She’ll help you,” said Samantha. She took Melody by the elbow and led her to the principal’s office to use the phone. Before they left the gym, Samantha turned around and glared at Tulip.
Missy knew what to do, and by the time Melody had hung up the phone, her hair had been restored to the French braids. But neither Melody nor Samantha spoke to Tulip for the rest of the day.
“This is so unfair!” Tulip kept exclaiming as she hurried home behind her silent friends that afternoon. “All I said was you should cut your hair, and now you won’t even talk to me.”
At last Melody exclaimed, “Cut your own hair!” and ran ahead, arm in arm with Samantha.
The news of Melody and her hair spread quickly, and by dinnertime Helene and Marcel had heard all about what happened.
“Do you really think we should give her the last pill?” Marcel whispered to his wife. “It was one thing when she could change things. Now she’s changing people.”
“Missy always knows best,” Helene replied loyally.
* * *
Tulip went off to school the next day with the Level 3 pill in her stomach and new mittens on her hands. She was surprised to find Melody and Samantha waiting for her outside school. “I thought you guys were mad at me,” she said.
Melody shrugged. Samantha reached for one of Tulip’s hands. “New mittens? Hmm.”
“What?” said Tulip.
“They’re just a little babyish, that’s all. You should wear gloves.”
“Mittens keep your hands warmer than—” Tulip started to say, but before she could finish the sentence, her mittens had changed to a pair of gloves. “Hey!” she cried. “What happened? I like my mittens.”
“Oh, well,” said Melody gaily. “Time to go inside.”
Tulip stomped through the hallway to her classroom and plopped down at her desk. She pulled out a math worksheet. She had decorated the bottom with pictures of chickens wearing sneakers.
Melody leaned over for a closer look. “Did you draw those?” she asked.
“Yup,” said Tulip proudly. “And it was really hard to get their beaks just right.”
“But why are they wearing sneakers? I’d rather see their feet.”
Just like that, the sneakers erased themselves from the page and were replaced with wrinkly chicken claws and spurs. “But—but—” sputtered Tulip.
“Much better,” said Melody, and pulled out her own worksheet.
This was how Tulip’s entire day went. Petulance Freeforall mentioned that she felt Tulip’s jeans should be shorter, and—poof—they were shorter. “But I wanted them long!” cried Tulip.
“You’re stepping on them. The bottoms are getting all frayed.”
“That’s my business.”
Late that afternoon, Rusty stood in the doorway of his sister’s room and said, “You know what? I think your room is too neat.” Poof. Piles of clothes appeared on Tulip’s floor. Her bed unmade itself. Papers spilled off the desk, and dust bunnies floated into corners. A window shade fell down.
Rusty watched in satisfaction. “There. That’s better.”
“How is that better?” squawked Tulip.
“It looks like a normal bedroom.”
“It does not!”
“I think it does.”
“Well, that’s just your opinion.”
“And it’s just your opinion,” replied Rusty, “that Mom’s earrings are too small and Dad’s glasses are too round. Maybe they like them that way.”
“Oh,” said Tulip after a pause. She sat down on her rumpled bed in her too-short jeans. “And Mom did say she feels sad when the Christmas decorations come down.” Suddenly Tulip put her hand to her mouth. “Oh no!”
“What?” asked Rusty, alarmed.
“I made Melody’s hair short yesterday. I made her braids disappear. She must have felt awful.”
Rusty pulled out his big sister’s desk chair, shoved a heap of socks off it, and sat down. “You know,” he said, feeling very wise, “if you realized that, like, I don’t know, Dad was about to leave for work in his slippers, then you should say something to him. But you really don’t need to mention every single dead fly. Or comment on people’s habits.”
“You’re right,” said Tulip.
In the hallway just outside, Helene and Marcel clutched hands and listened to their children holding a thoughtful, reasonable conversation.
“It’s amazing,” whispered Marcel.
“Maybe it’s a dream,” said Helene.
If they had peeked through the doorway at that moment, they would have seen Tulip’s room tidy itself up, her jeans lengthen themselves, the gloves tran
sform into mittens, and a line of chickens wearing sneakers march across a page of math problems.
On the other side of Little Spring Valley, Missy Piggle-Wiggle hummed a tune as she prepared supper.
8
The I-Forgot Cure
IN MR. GARBER’S FIFTH-GRADE class at Little Spring Valley Elementary were eighteen desks—seventeen identical ones, and one with a footstool under it and a pillow on the chair. At the seventeen identical desks sat thirteen ten-year-olds and four eleven-year-olds. The desk with the footstool and the pillow belonged to Roseate Spoonbill, who had skipped two grades and was just eight years old. Without the pillow she could barely see over her desk, and without the footstool was left with her feet dangling in the air.
Rosie’s mother had worried about skipping her so far ahead in school.
“The other students might be jealous of her big brain,” said Selena Spoonbill to her husband, Vern. This was a year earlier, when she and Vern were driving home from Little Spring Valley Elementary, where they had just met with Rosie’s second-grade teacher and the principal. “Skipping her all the way into fourth grade in the middle of the year? She’ll be the only seven-year-old in a class of nine- and ten-year-olds. How will the older kids feel?”
“Feel about what?” said Vern.
“About a seven-year-old who can answer all the questions and is reading books the sixth graders are reading.”
“Why, they’ll feel impressed!” Rosie’s father had replied cheerfully.
“I don’t know,” said Selena.
It turned out it didn’t matter much that Rosie was seven and the rest of her classmates were older. After her first day in fourth grade, she’d come bouncing through the front door of her house and announced, “School was great! I told all my new friends that a roseate spoonbill is a wading bird found mostly in South America, and they think I have a very cool name. One-third of them are going to call me Rosie, one-quarter of them are going to call me Roseate, and five-twelfths of them might call me Professor, but they aren’t sure, and anyway, I like all the names so it doesn’t matter.”
“My goodness. Do you have any homework?” asked Selena. She worried that fourth-grade homework might be too much for Rosie, who still had a second-grade bedtime.
“Nope. I mean, I had homework, but I did it already.”
“Are you sure? You didn’t forget to do it, did you?”
Rosie sat down and thought. After a long time, she said, “No. I did it all after I finished my book during silent reading time.”
“Okay,” said her mother uncertainly.
Roseate Spoonbill, who was now in fifth grade, had many good qualities—but she was forgetful. She could remember anything she had ever read and anything she had ever learned about math or science or history, but most conversations with Rosie went something like this:
MRS. SPOONBILL: Time to go, Rosie. Your trumpet lesson is in half an hour.
ROSIE: (after a very long pause) What?
MRS. SPOONBILL: It’s time to go.
ROSIE: Go where?
MRS. SPOONBILL: To your trumpet lesson. I just told you.
ROSIE: Oh. I forgot.
MRS. SPOONBILL: Did you remember to practice?
ROSIE: Practice?
MRS. SPOONBILL: Your trumpet!
ROSIE: Um, no, I guess I forgot that, too.
MRS. SPOONBILL: Well, come along. You can practice in the car.
ROSIE: All right. Just a minute.
Five minutes later:
MRS. SPOONBILL: Rosie? Are you ready?
ROSIE: Ready for what?
MRS. SPOONBILL: Your lesson. What are you doing?
ROSIE: Reading. Gosh, this is a good book.
Rosie’s father fondly called her the absentminded professor. “Her brain is so jammed with facts and theories that it doesn’t have any extra space for remembering things like practicing or brushing her teeth.”
“But Dad,” said Rosie’s big brother, Montrose, “this morning she almost went to school wearing her pajama bottoms instead of pants. She is so embarrassing.”
“Well, we caught her in time,” said Vern.
Rosie’s best friend was a girl named Poppy Fretwell, who was also in Mr. Garber’s fifth-grade class. Poppy admired Rosie’s big brain, but the truth was she was starting to find Rosie a lot of work. One day Poppy sat down in the cafeteria with her tray of food, and after a few minutes Rosie slid into the seat next to her.
“Where’s your lunch?” asked Poppy.
“My lunch?”
“Yes. We’re in the cafeteria? It’s lunchtime?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Rosie looked at the empty table in front of her. “I guess I forgot my lunch.”
“You can buy it, then.”
“I guess I forgot to bring my money, too.”
Poppy scrunched up her nose. A best friend, she knew, would offer her lunchless buddy some money so she could buy a sandwich. But Poppy had lent money to Rosie five times in the last month, and each time she had asked to be repaid, Rosie said, “Uh-oh. I forgot.”
So Poppy gave Rosie half of her sandwich instead.
One night Mr. and Mrs. Spoonbill sat cozily in front of a fire after Roseate and Montrose had gone to bed. They were sipping tea, and Vern was scratching the ears of Honey, the cat who was curled in his lap. Suddenly his wife said, “We have to do something about Rosie. I know she’s bright and she has deep thoughts in her head, but she forgets everything, or she claims to. She doesn’t feed Honey or practice her trumpet or take a bath without being told. She—”
“I know, I know. Our absentminded professor.”
“But she needs to be responsible. She’s eight and a half years old. When Montrose was her age, he was in charge of all the recycling. He did his chores without being asked. He even went to his piano lessons by himself.”
“That’s true. What do you propose?” asked Vern.
“Reminders,” said his wife. “Simple reminders that can’t be missed.”
The next morning, when the Spoonbills gathered in their kitchen for breakfast, Rosie saw a large sign taped to the refrigerator. It read:
FEED HONEY!!
But when Rosie and Montrose had scurried off to school, Selena felt Honey twining around her ankles, looked down, and saw that her dish was still empty. She asked Rosie about it that afternoon. “Oh, was that sign for me?” said Rosie.
“Yes, it was,” her mother replied, and changed the sign to read:
ROSIE, FEED HONEY!!
But long after dinner that evening, Honey’s dish was empty.
“Rosie, did you forget anything?” her mother asked her at bedtime.
“I probably forgot lots of things.”
“What about Honey?”
“What about— Uh-oh. You know what happened? I took the sign into my room where I could see it, and then when I went back in the kitchen, there was no sign, so I forgot.”
The next thing the Spoonbills tried was a chore chart for Rosie.
Montrose glared at it. “How come she gets a prize if she does her chores all week? That’s no fair. I’ve been doing all my chores for years, and I don’t get prizes.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll also get a prize if you do your chores. It’s just that you don’t need a chart to keep track of things. You always remember.”
Rosie was responsible for four chores each day. Since there are seven days in a week, there were twenty-eight boxes on her chart. At the end of the first week, two of them had been checked. The other twenty-six were blank.
“Ha-ha. Now you don’t get a prize!” hooted Montrose.
“A prize?”
“Yes!” said her father. “That was the whole point of the chart. If you fill in all the boxes, you get a prize.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Rosie. “I forgot.”
Montrose took the chart off the wall and tossed it in the recycling bin, where he’d also put the reminder signs.
“I’m running out of ideas,” Selena told her husband that nigh
t after Roseate had forgotten thirteen times in a single half hour to start taking her bath.
“We’ll think of something.”
Mr. and Mrs. Spoonbill sat down on the couch and rested their chins in their hands. They tapped their feet. Mr. Spoonbill scratched his head. They thought and thought. Finally his wife said, “I actually am out of ideas.”
“So am I,” her husband admitted.
“Sometimes I think Roseate ‘forgets’ on purpose.”
“Really?”
“She only did two chores this week. That gave her plenty of time for lying around in her room.”
“She doesn’t lie around in her room. She studies! She reads articles. She thinks deep thoughts.”
“And gets out of all her responsibilities.”
“Hmm,” said Vern Spoonbill.
The next morning as Rosie and Montrose were finishing breakfast, Mrs. Spoonbill said to her daughter, “Remember that you have soccer practice this afternoon. Go right to the field after school. Okay? Right to the field. No dawdling.”
“And I’ll go right to my piano lesson,” said Montrose, just to prove that he didn’t need reminders.
“Rosie?” said her mother. “What are you going to remember to do after school?”
“Huh?” said Rosie, who was thinking about penguins. Then she added, “Oh. Go to soccer practice.”
* * *
All that day Rosie’s parents sat at their separate desks in their separate offices in their separate companies in a city not far from Little Spring Valley. Mr. Spoonbill was pleased that Rosie had remembered about soccer practice that morning. Perhaps, he thought, the reminder signs and the chore chart had had some effect after all.
Mrs. Spoonbill wasn’t thinking about soccer. She had a big problem on her hands, a very boring grown-up thing involving money and investments. When her phone rang at 3:20, she picked it up without looking at the caller ID and said loudly, “I already told you to call Andi about this!”
There was a pause at the other end of the line, and then she heard her husband say, “Call Andi about Rosie?”
“What?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were— Never mind. Is everything all right?”
Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Sticky-Fingers Cure Page 10