Mallory on Strike

by Ann M. Martin

  “I’m sorry, Mary Anne,” I said, “but I have to turn this one down.”

  Everyone stared at me in surprise. “Do you have another sitting job?” Stacey asked.

  I shook my head. “No. I just would rather not take this one, if that’s okay.”

  I was about to tell the club about Young Authors Day, and how important the contest was to me, but the looks on their faces made me stop. I was afraid they’d think I was being selfish. I pursed my lips and stared at my hands in my lap, hoping they’d stop staring at me.

  “Well …” Mary Anne shrugged. Her voice trailed off as she studied the notebook. “I guess we’ll just have to call one of our associate members.”

  Kristy picked up the phone. “I’ll call Shannon Kilbourne. She told me she needed some work.”

  I barely looked up during the rest of the meeting. I was too embarrassed. Luckily it lasted only a few more minutes. At six o’clock, when Kristy announced that the meeting of the BSC was officially adjourned, I hurried out of the Kishi house and grabbed my bike. I didn’t even wait to talk to Jessi. My feelings were too jumbled up. I needed time to think.

  I set my alarm for seven o’clock the next morning. Believe me, it was agony getting up so early. Usually I try to sleep at least until eight on Saturdays. Vanessa was still in bed, so I got dressed as quietly as I could and tiptoed down to the rec room on the bottom floor of our house. I’d made up my mind to finish my homework early. Then I would have the rest of the day to work on my award-winning story.

  It was weird to hear so much quiet. Usually our house is filled with noise, but the only sound I heard as I worked on my math problems was Mom in the kitchen above me. I listened to her grind the coffee beans and fill the coffee maker. Then I heard her slippers shuffle across the linoleum to the refrigerator. Since it was Saturday, I guessed she was whipping up pancake batter for breakfast. It’s a Pike family favorite. Sometimes for a treat she puts chocolate chips in the pancakes.

  After I got used to the quiet, I focused all my attention on my homework. It was amazing. I finished the math problems in less than an hour and hurried on to my science. By then, the house was starting to sound like itself again.

  I heard the triplets clatter down the stairs and turn on the stereo in the living room. Shortly after that I heard Nicky leap down the stairs to join them. They had their usual Saturday morning argument over which station to listen to. Finally I heard my father’s voice say, “Truce! Now, we’ll decide this fairly and squarely.” Fairly and squarely meant Dad was going to flip a coin. There was silence, then Dad said, “Call it!” and shortly after that, Nicky’s voice shouted, “I won! I won!”

  I could just imagine him hopping up and down, grinning wickedly over his victory. I hummed to myself as I worked on my final assignment. It was a book report for Mr. Williams’ English class. I had read the final chapter the night before, so the story was still fresh in my mind.

  Just as I closed my notebook and put the cap back on my pen, my father called me from the kitchen.

  “Mallory! Are you in the rec room?” Dad shouted. “Breakfast!”

  I stretched my arms and arched my back. I had been working solidly for two and a half hours, and the rumble in my stomach made me realize that I was starving.

  “Be right there, Dad!”

  I have to admit it, I felt great. I’d finished my homework, and now I was going to devote the rest of the day to being an authoress.

  I took a deep breath when I reached the top of the steps. The house smelled like frying bacon, which is one of my favorite foods, and I hurried to the kitchen table.

  “Where’ve you been, Mallory?” my mother asked as she set a platter of pancakes in the middle of the table. “I haven’t seen you all morning.”

  “I finally finished my homework!” I flashed everyone my biggest smile and slid into a spot between Claire and Margo. From the looks of their clothes, they had already been in the backyard, making mud pies.

  “Good for you!” my mother said. “Then you won’t mind taking Claire and Margo into the bathroom and washing their hands. They’re a mess.”

  Claire gave me a toothy grin. “I made mud pie surprise.”

  “What was the surprise?” Vanessa asked, coming into the kitchen. She tried to stifle a yawn as she slumped onto a seat at the table. The back of her hair was tangled in a big knot that stood up like a bird’s nest.

  “Walnuts,” Claire and Margo called back as I ushered them into the bathroom.

  “Where did you get the nuts from?” I asked, grabbing a washcloth and running some water on it.

  “The walnuts were really rocks, but we pretended we made a chocolate walnut pie,” Margo explained. The girls squeezed their eyes shut as I first cleaned their faces, then wiped off their hands.

  “Sounds delicious,” I said, trying not to laugh. It actually did sound good. Not the rock and mud part but the chocolate with nuts. It made me hungry just thinking about it. I quickly dried their faces with a towel, and we hurried back to the table.

  The second I sat down, Byron knocked over his milk, reaching for the syrup.

  “Uh-oh,” he said solemnly, as it ran all over the table.

  “Mallory, honey,” my mom called. “Would you get that? I’m helping Jordan get these knots out of his shoelaces.” She looked directly at Nicky. “Somebody tied his shoes together.”

  I leaped out of my chair once more and grabbed a sponge. With eight kids, you can imagine that spilled glasses of milk are a daily occurrence in our house. Usually it can be kind of irritating. But today, because it was only ten o’clock and I had already finished my homework, I didn’t mind.

  It wasn’t until after breakfast that things started to get out of control. I helped load the dishwasher and then followed Vanessa up to our room. Once inside, I shut the door and faced my sister, who was busily pulling on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

  “Vanessa?”

  “What?” she said without looking up.

  “I’m working on a very important story for my creative writing class.”

  “Oh,” Vanessa answered. “What’s it about?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I have to plan it out. But I need absolute privacy to work on it.”

  My sister just stared at me. Finally I spelled it out for her.

  “Which means I’m going to need our bedroom all to myself today. So … would you mind staying out?”

  Vanessa scrunched her eyebrows together in thought. She was obviously considering my request. “For how long?” she finally asked.

  “All day. Or at least until I’ve stopped working.”

  Vanessa’s eyebrows were still pressed together, which meant that she wasn’t too keen about not being able to come into her own room. Thinking quickly, I added, “I’ll give you a quarter.”

  After a few more seconds of thought, she nodded. “It’s a deal. But you have to pay me now.”

  I figured she must want to buy something, so I didn’t mind handing over the money in advance. I opened the door of my nightstand and reached into a little tin decorated with horses, where I keep some of my baby-sitting earnings. I pulled out a shiny quarter and placed it in her palm.

  “Don’t forget,” I reminded her, “you have to stay out until I’m done working.”

  “I’ll remember,” Vanessa said, dropping the coin into her purse. Then she scooped up a few books and left the room.

  I leaned two pillows against my headboard and sat up on the bed with my notebook in my lap. As I took the cap off of my favorite pen, I sighed. “It’s going to be a perfect day,” I thought.

  Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not five minutes after Vanessa left, a knock sounded on the door.

  “No fair, Vanessa!” I complained. “You promised.”

  “It’s not Vanessa.” My mother opened the door and stuck her head into the room. “It’s me. I have a tiny favor to ask.”

  Tiny was an understatement.

  “I saw an ad in the paper for a use
d lawn mower at this garage sale,” my mother continued, “and your father and I want to drive over and take a look at it. The triplets are coming with us. Would you watch the other kids for thirty minutes?”

  My pen hadn’t even touched the page and already I had to stop working. “Okay.” I shut my notebook reluctantly and went downstairs to baby-sit.

  At least my parents were true to their word. They were back in a half hour. But before I could return to my story, another knock sounded on my door. This time it was my father.

  “Mal? May I talk to you for a second?”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said, trying not to sound too irritated.

  “Listen, I’m going to help Margo and the boys set up the badminton net in the backyard,” he said. “Would you mind making Claire a PBJ?” (A PBJ is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — another Pike family favorite.)

  “She just ate breakfast,” I said, not budging from my bed.

  “I know,” my father said. “But she wants to have a picnic with her dolls in the backyard.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  I slammed my notebook shut and followed my father. I made Claire a sandwich as quickly as I could, then sliced it into little doll-sized triangles. This time I didn’t even get to the kitchen door before my mother called me to do something else.

  “Mal, honey, would you help me fold these clothes?”

  “Mother!” I blew my bangs off my forehead in exasperation. “I have to work on my story, you know.”

  “This will only take a minute. Then I promise to leave you alone.”

  It didn’t take a minute. It took an hour because Margo got hit in the face with a birdie from the badminton set. It didn’t break her nose or anything, but it still hurt a lot. Mom had to comfort her and I had to make another set of PBJs for Claire because the neighbors’ dog came over and skarfed them all down when her back was turned.

  Once I was back in my room, I tried to shut everything out of my mind except writing. But just when I’d have a possible story forming in my head, Dad or one of my brothers would interrupt and I’d have to start all over. This went on all afternoon. I wanted to scream. I took my pen and scratched in big, bold letters on the top of my blue-lined notebook paper: Two may be company, and three may be a crowd, but ten is a mob!

  “Mallory!” my mother called at six o’clock. “It’s suppertime. Please come down and help me serve.”

  “Mallory!” I repeated, imitating my mother in a singsong voice. “Wash the dishes, scrub the floors, take out the garbage. Be my slave!”

  I wanted to throw my notebook against the wall. Instead, I took a deep breath and tried to calm my temper.

  I don’t know why I felt so resentful about being asked to do chores. I’ve been doing them my whole life. I guess I just felt as though I’d wasted a lot of things. Like my quarter. I paid Vanessa to leave me alone, and it was Mom and Dad who turned out to be the problem. And what about the rest of my day. Six hours of work on my story, and I had only written one sentence.

  “At this rate,” I muttered as I trudged down the steps, “I’ll never finish it.”

  Mr. Dougherty’s creative writing class meets on Tuesdays and Fridays in what used to be a teachers’ lounge. I love walking into that room. Mr. D has filled it with plants and bookshelves crammed with books. It doesn’t feel like a classroom at all. It’s more like a comfortable library in someone’s home. Every time I step through the door a little shiver of excitement runs through my stomach, as if something wonderful is about to happen. Like maybe I’m really on my way to becoming a writer.

  On Tuesday I wore my navy blue wool skirt and knit sweater vest with a white starched blouse and penny loafers, so I would look more studious. It’s extremely important to me that Mr. Dougherty take me seriously.

  Mr. D was busy writing on the chalkboard, and his back was turned to the room. I took my usual place in the half circle arranged around his desk. Mr. Dougherty says that makes our class more like a seminar, a type of class you get in college in which students exchange ideas with their teacher. Being in a seminar made all of us feel very mature and special.

  Everyone in the class — there are ten of us — was at his or her desk long before the bell rang. We sat up straight in our seats, eager for the period to begin.

  As the bell rang, Mr. D set down his chalk and turned to face us. He wore a brown corduroy coat with brushed leather patches at the elbows, a red-and-yellow-plaid shirt, and baggy tan chinos. (I personally think all teachers should dress that way. It makes them look very acute.)

  “ ‘The Write Stuff,’ ” he declared, pointing at the words he’d written on the board. He smiled at us. “Have you got it?”

  I folded my hands in front of me and swallowed hard. I sure hoped so. The boy sitting beside me shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.

  “Now, there’s the right stuff in everyday life,” Mr. D continued. “That’s having the courage to do a physically dangerous job, like flying a space shuttle, or fighting forest fires.” He paused dramatically. “And then there’s the Write Stuff — which means having the creativity, the persistence, and the inner strength it takes to do the writing job.” I held my breath as he walked in front of us, looking each one of us in the eye. Finally he said, “I think you’ve got it.”

  The room was filled with a sigh as the ten of us exhaled with relief.

  “However,” Mr. Dougherty said, raising one finger, “it’s something you have to work at. Being a writer takes a lot of self-discipline. You’ve got to make yourself work. No one can do it for you.”

  Boy, that was the truth. Other people always seemed to get in a writer’s way. Like my family, who still wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to let me write even a page.

  Mr. D perched on the edge of his desk. “How many of you will be writing a piece for Young Authors Day?”

  Ten of us raised our hands.

  “Good.” He twirled his mustache. “Let me take down your names so that I can arrange for enough teachers to read and judge your work.”

  We waited patiently as he scribbled down our names on a pad of yellow paper. When he was finished, Mr. Dougherty looked back at the class.

  “Today I want to talk to each of you individually about your entry,” he said. “While I’m doing that, I’d like the rest of you to pick an object in this room and make up a one-page history of that particular item. Where it came from, its name — if you care to name it — and how it ended up in this room.”

  Immediately everyone pulled pieces of paper out of the binders, then sat nibbling on the ends of their pens while they stared around the room for a suitable object. I was trying to make up my mind between the slightly rusty wastebasket and the prickly cactus on the windowsill, when Mr. D called me to his desk.

  “As I recall,” he said, twirling his mustache and leaning back in his chair, “you said you were going to enter the Best Overall Fiction contest. Is that right, Mallory?”

  “Yes, sir.” I felt like I was being tested, and my voice shook a little. It was silly for me to feel that way because Mr. D is so nice. But he’s also an author, and at that moment he was talking to me, author to author, about my story.

  “Tell me a little about the plot.”

  That was the one thing I had managed to work on between doing my chores, baby-sitting, and working on homework. “My story is about a girl named Tess. She comes from a large family and feels left out. Her mom and dad hardly seem to notice she’s there. They’re too worried about her older sister, who wants to date a boy they don’t like, or her younger brothers, who are always getting into trouble at school. So, even though Tess is in the middle, she feels the farthest from their affection.”

  “Nicely phrased,” Mr. Dougherty said. “What happens to Tess?”

  “Well, one day, her parents have to go away, and they leave her in charge. That’s when Tess finds out how important she is to the family.”

  Mr. D stroked his mustache as he nodded his head. That made me feel good. B
ut that only lasted a few seconds because then he asked to see what I had written.

  I flipped open my notebook and stared down at the first page of my story. The blank spots looked huge and I tried to cover them with my hand, but it was too late.

  “Three paragraphs?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “That’s all you’ve written?”

  “Uh, I — I really haven’t gotten a chance to write it yet,” I stammered. “I’ve been kind of busy at home, and I’ve mostly been concentrating on the plot.” It wasn’t a lie. I really had been thinking about the plot.

  Mr. Dougherty took a deep breath and sighed. It was a disappointed sound, one that I would have given anything not to hear. “Thinking about your story is important for any author,” he said quietly, “but until you actually put the words on the page, Mallory, you can’t call yourself a writer.”

  I stared down at my notebook, too ashamed to look him in the eye. “I know that,” I murmured. For one terrible moment, I thought I was going to cry. It took every ounce of willpower to stop myself. I just couldn’t humiliate myself in front of Mr. Dougherty and the whole class. It was too awful even to think about.

  Mr. Dougherty stood up, letting me know that our conference was over. He must have sensed how rotten I felt because he patted me on the shoulder and said, “I know you can write, Mallory. I just want to remind you that time is running out. Young Authors Day is only three weeks away.”

  I shut my notebook and clutched it to my chest. “Don’t worry, Mr. Dougherty,” I said in a shaky voice I hardly recognized as my own. “I’m going to spend every spare minute working on this. I won’t let you down.”

  My words echoed in my head walking home from school that day. I was afraid that I might actually let Mr. Dougherty down, and then I’d never be able to face him again. As I climbed the steps to my front door, I decided to make a work schedule for myself and stick to it.