Jackie's Jokes

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Jackie picked up Biff, which was the catnip dog's name, and hurled his brown and black body across the length of the room.

  Seven cats immediately tore themselves away from their life of leisure—Anthrax, Dandruff, Greatorex, Minx, Precious, Rambunctious, and Zither—to chase after Biff. We also saw a tiny gray and white dot whiz past us. When we heard a crash and saw Jaguar leaning against the far wall, Biff in her mouth, we realized that that gray and white dot had been Jaguar. Poor Jaguar. We could almost see the stars swirling around her head; she was probably dizzy from crashing into that wall. Oh well. At least she'd beat the others.

  "So now we know," Jackie said. "Our power doesn't tire Jaguar or me out, but running into objects at high speed will always be a risk for us."

  "Wow," Pete said. "I suppose this is a real example of 'Hey, kids, don't try this at home.'"

  "Or perhaps you should make that cats," Marcia corrected.

  "I don't think Jackie will be foolish enough to chance running indoors anymore," Durinda said.

  "But what if she does?" Petal worried. "What if she runs indoors and she's running with scissors and she runs into me and—"

  "I say we take the cats outside to play." Annie cut Petal off.

  Our cats were true indoor cats. They didn't usually like to go outside, probably because we made life inside so comfy for them. But on that day, Jaguar seemed happy for the chance to stretch her four speedy legs.

  We stood outside at the end of the driveway, still in our dresses and Armani, as Jaguar exercised her new power. She raced a delivery truck and won. She raced a teenager in a little red sports car who was driving far too fast for our quiet little street and won. She even raced a plane flying overhead, and, we would have said, she won. Then she and Jackie faced off against each other, the twin pair of them turning instantly into a blue dot and a gray and white dot.

  "Look at Jackie go!" Durinda cried.

  "Except we can't really see her anymore, can we?" Rebecca said sourly.

  "Why, I'll bet Jackie's faster than a speeding bullet now!" Zinnia said with a happy sigh.

  "Too bad she's not more powerful than a locomotive," Georgia said.

  "I wonder if she can leap tall buildings in a single bound?" Marcia wondered.

  When they returned to us a few minutes later, Jackie declared that it had been a tie. As for Jaguar, if it hadn't been a tie, the cat wasn't saying.

  "I always knew," Rebecca said darkly, "when Jackie cut her hair and then her cat's, it would lead to ... something."

  ***

  Back inside, we still didn't get to enjoy our juice boxes.

  "Mr. Pete," Jackie said, "I was wondering if you'd be willing to look at something for us, give us your expert opinion..."

  Seven of us were shocked when Jackie led Pete to Mommy's private study. After years of keeping away from that room, we still found it hard for any one of us to go in, and we'd never invited an adult, although we'd tricked the Wicket into reading a fake file in there.

  We all watched as Jackie, with her new confidence, turned on the computer, typed in the password—88888888—and located the file marked Persons of Interest.

  And suddenly, there was that odd trio of pictures again: the Wicket, Crazy Serena, and Principal Freud, also known as Frank Freud.

  "Okay," Pete said, "now I recognize the one in the middle. That's the one who held you lot hostage back in March, the one I had to run out of town for you."

  "Yes, that's Crazy Serena," Annie said.

  "We think she might be somehow related to Mommy," Durinda said.

  "Even if she might be a relative, we are very scared of her," Petal said.

  "I can't say as I blame you," Pete said. "Crazy Serena might look great in a turquoise dress, but that is one scary crazy lady." Pete studied the screen some more. "And I recognize the one with the egg for a head. Er, I mean, the bald guy. That's your principal, Principal Freud, right?"

  Eight heads nodded. Of course, Pete was studying the screen right then, rather than looking at us, so it probably didn't matter what we did with our heads!

  "Yes," Zinnia piped up. "He runs the Whistle Stop. We like going to school there and hope we never have to stop."

  "Not ever?"Georgia said.

  "Not even when you're ninety?"Rebecca said. "You still want to be wearing yellow plaid then?"

  It occurred to us that Zinnia was probably the only one of us who liked wearing that wretched uniform.

  "Now who's this third person?" Pete said, interrupting our thoughts. "She looks like a toadstool."

  Pete had never met the Wicket. Perhaps she took her vehicles somewhere else to be serviced? Oh, that's right: she always took taxis. So we explained all about her being the first evil person we'd encountered and had to deal with after Mommy and Daddy had disappeared.

  "Or died," Rebecca added.

  It used to scare us whenever Rebecca said that, but now we'd come to find it peculiarly comforting. At least one thing in the world hadn't changed and was still reliable: Rebecca's sourness.

  "She really does look like a toadstool in person," Marcia said.

  "Oh yes," Petal said fearfully, "a poison toadstool. I suspect that if someone tried to eat her, they would die."

  "We don't eat other people around here," Annie said, for once disgusted with Petal.

  "Maybe if I were really hungry, and there was no other food in the house—" Rebecca started to say, but Jackie cut her off.

  "Here's the thing," Jackie said. "No matter how much I think about it, I can't figure out why Mommy would have a picture of Principal Freud in the same file with those other two."

  "I can," Marcia said.

  All eyes turned toward her.

  "I've been giving it a lot of thought," Marcia said, "and the way I figure it, this is just like when they have us do Which Item Is Not Like the Others? at school."

  "I'm afraid I don't follow," Pete said. "It's been a long time since I was at school. Could you explain?"

  "It's this thing they have us do," Annie said.

  "They give us a list of words," Durinda said.

  "Or a series of pictures," Georgia said.

  "And nearly all of them are the same," Petal said.

  "Like all fruits or all nouns," Rebecca said.

  "Except for one, which is a vegetable or an adjective," Zinnia said.

  "And then they ask," Marcia said, '"Which item is not like the others?'"

  "Interesting theory, but no," Pete said, looking more serious than we'd seen him all day. "I don't think it works that way at all. At least not this time."

  "How do you mean?" Jackie asked.

  "It's like this," Pete said. "If Crazy Serena is evil—and she is, I know, because I saw it with my own eyes—and this Wicket person is evil—and you tell me she is, and I believe you—then if Principal Freud's picture is here with these two..."

  We knew what Pete was going to say even before he said it, but the words were still a shock to hear:

  "Then Principal Freud must be evil too."

  CHAPTER NINE

  This was new and shocking information: the idea that someone we'd known for years, someone who was the head of our school, could be evil.

  "What do we do now?" Jackie asked Pete.

  "Well, I would think it would be obvious," Pete replied. "Someone needs to get to the bottom of things, find out what's been going on."

  We saw that he was right, of course. But how?

  Two questions burned in all our minds:

  What did Principal Freud know, and when did he know it?

  ***

  Sunday passed uneventfully, or at least as uneventfully as a day could pass when the day before you'd visited your CPA and later learned there were even more forces for evil in the world than you'd previously imagined.

  One thing kept our minds off some of our other problems: the cats. They were becoming a huge problem themselves, what with all the powers they'd acquired.

  "I have been talking to them," Zinnia t
old us.

  "Of course you have, dear," Durinda said. Sometimes we wondered at Durinda's endless capacity for humoring the loony among us.

  "Are they really planning a kitty coup now?" Petal asked.

  "Oh, brother." Rebecca rolled her eyes.

  "What are they saying?" Jackie asked seriously.

  "Well," Zinnia said, "it's the four youngest who are most upset: Minx, Precious, Rambunctious, and Zither."

  "We do know who the four youngest are," Marcia said. We were reminded yet again that Marcia always had a chip on her shoulder because she felt that being the oldest of the four youngest should give her more power, but it didn't.

  "They say," Zinnia said, "that it was bad enough when the first three got their powers: Anthrax bossing everyone around, Dandruff freezing the others where they stood so she could eat all the kibble, Greatorex making herself invisible whenever she felt like it. But now with Jaguar being so fast, they are all deeply depressed. They say there's no point in even bothering to chase after Biff when we throw it, because they will never be able to beat Jaguar to the catnip again." Zinnia paused to take a breath. It had been a long speech for her. "They blame it on Jaguar's haircut and say they never liked that haircut to begin with."

  "Huh," Jackie said, looking offended at this insult to the haircut. "Well, I don't think they should blame the hair." We knew Jackie was pleased with her own haircut. And who could blame her? Everyone—Pete, Will, evil Principal Freud—kept telling her how nice it looked. "But could you do me a favor?" Jackie asked Zinnia.

  "That all depends," Zinnia said, her eyes narrowing. "You're not going to ask me to give you my gift when I finally get it, are you?" Gifts were so important to Zinnia.

  "Nothing like that," Jackie assured her. "Could you please tell Jaguar that I, as her mistress, ask that she let the other cats win every now and then when they chase after things?"

  We watched as Zinnia whispered into Jaguar's furry ear.

  "I can't believe," Rebecca muttered to Jackie, "that you humor the little loony like this."

  "Have you ever wondered what would happen," Annie asked Rebecca, "if it turns out that Zinnia is right and that she can talk to the cats? The way you treat her, she might one day order them to eat you in your sleep."

  That shut Rebecca up.

  "Jaguar says," Zinnia told Jackie, "that she is sorry for causing the other cats to be upset. She says she promises to let the other cats win the catnip chases at least half the time."

  "Very good," Jackie said.

  "She also says," Zinnia went on, "that you should heed your own advice: you should let the rest of us humans beat you at least half the time."

  Jackie didn't look quite as pleased about this, but at last she nodded her head. "Point taken."

  "Great," Rebecca said. "So now that another kitty emergency has been averted, what are we going to do about Frank Freud?"

  It was funny. We'd started calling our former substitute teacher Crazy Serena, rather than Ms. Harkness, after we'd realized she was evil, and it was tough now for us to talk about Frank Freud using the respectful title of Principal. We didn't like to be rude, and certainly not to adults, but what can we say? Cross us Eights once and you are off our respect list.

  "We are going to act as cops," Annie said with authority. "We will make him tell us the truth."

  "But how?" Georgia wanted to know. "We don't have any guns here." Then her eyes lit up. "Although we do have that spear from Daddy Sparky..." Georgia was obsessed with that spear.

  "We're not going to use any kind of weapons," Annie said, "except if you consider our wits weapons."

  "And we're going to do it ourselves," Jackie said, "without Pete." She nodded decisively at Annie. "It's time we stood on our own sixteen feet."

  ***

  Since September, the beginning of the school year, we'd done a lot of things around the McG to which her response could best be described as "You could have knocked her over with a feather." We'd put a toad in her desk (Jackie); become invisible (Georgia); and turned out to have a secret life that no doubt both thrilled and terrified her (all of us). But nothing we'd done in the past prepared her for that Monday when Jackie raised her hand in the middle of math and asked:

  "Could we all be excused to go to the principal's office?"

  The McG didn't exactly fall over, but she did drop her chalk, and it looked like her bun bobbled a bit.

  "What?" she said. "But that makes no sense. Students get sent to the principal's office, and most students usually try to avoid that. But no one ever asks—"

  "Well, I'm asking," Jackie said. "May we eight go now, please? We have something to discuss with ... the man who runs this school."

  "Fine." The McG turned her eyes toward the heavens and threw up her hands. "Go."

  We went.

  ***

  Eight fists knocked on Frank Freud's door. Later on it would occur to us that it must have sounded very odd to him: eight fists knocking. We felt none of the fear kids are supposed to feel when they are about to talk to a Person of Authority. On the contrary. We were excited. We were finally going to get to the bottom of ... something.

  "Enter!" that familiar voice called out to us.

  We didn't have to be asked twice.

  "Oh!" he said, his eyebrows shooting all the way up to his absent hairline. "You! All eight of you!"

  "Yes," Annie said, closing the door behind us with a satisfying click."All eight of us."

  "Well, what are you doing here?" He laughed nervously. "Did Mrs. McGillicuddy send you? Are you in trouble again?"

  "We're not," Durinda said.

  "But somebody is," Georgia said.

  "What did you know, Principal Freud," Jackie asked, "and when did you know it?"

  "I—" he started to say, but Marcia cut him off.

  "You know the Wicket, don't you?" Marcia accused.

  "The who?"

  "The Wicket," Petal said.

  "Short little woman," Rebecca said. "Looks like a toadstool."

  "Helena Wicket," Zinnia explained.

  "Well," he said, coloring, "I suppose I may have met her once..."

  "And Crazy Serena," Annie said.

  "Crazy who?"

  "Serena Harkness," Durinda said.

  "Back in March," Georgia said.

  "Our substitute teacher," Marcia said.

  "Our pretend substitute teacher," Rebecca said, stealing Petal's turn to speak. But for once we didn't mind. Rebecca made a good point. So much in our world was pretend, fake—too much, really.

  "Yeah. Her." Petal and Zinnia spoke at the same time.

  "You brought her here on purpose, didn't you?" Jackie said. "You must have known she was evil and yet you wanted her here. Perhaps it all has something to do with our mother?" She paused, allowing what she'd said to sink in before continuing. "So what I want to know, what we all want to know, is: What did you know, and when did you know it?"

  Considering how often we'd surprised other people, and considering all the things that had happened to us, it was rare for someone to do something we found truly shocking. And yet that was exactly what happened.

  Frank Freud, perhaps feeling like a trapped animal, rose from his chair, stumbled around it, and backed up to the window behind his desk. Then he wrenched open the window, vaulted over the ledge, rushed across the lawn to the faculty parking lot, ran to his reserved spot, which was marked Principal, got in his car, keyed the ignition, and sped away.

  And then Jackie leaped out the window—thank God we were on the ground floor!—and raced after him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  According to the clock, which we started watching when Jackie left, it had been only a half-hour since she'd disappeared, but those thirty minutes had seemed like an eternity to us. It was the first time one of us had faced off alone against one of the evil adults in our world—with the Wicket and then Crazy Serena, we'd all been there together—and we were very worried for her. If Frank Freud had a gun, would Jackie really pr
ove to be faster than a speeding bullet? We'd sat for a lot of tests during our years of schooling, but that was one test we didn't want to see Jackie take.

  But then a yellow dot came whizzing toward the open window—"Jackie's plaid uniform!" Zinnia cried—and there was Jackie, fully in the flesh, looking exactly like herself as she climbed over the window ledge and came back into the room.

  "What happened?" seven voices shouted.

  "Here, sit," Durinda said, pulling out Frank Freud's chair and forcing Jackie into it. That was Durinda all over: insisting on mothering one of us even while the rest of us—including herself—were dying for news.

  Jackie didn't look winded in the slightest, but we must say, she did look wonderful in Frank Freud's big leather swivel chair. It made us wonder if she might be the head of a school when she grew up. It made us wonder what each of us would do when we grew up.

  "What happened?"Rebecca shouted. "I want to know what happened!"

  "It was really all very simple," Jackie said. "Frank Freud drove to his house, but when he saw me, er, pull up right behind him, he grew very scared. Apparently, the idea of us Eights having special powers is terrifying to him."

  As Jackie continued to speak, we felt like we were all right there in front of Frank Freud's house. It was almost as though we could see what happened, smell the fear in him...

  "I'll ask you again," Jackie demanded as Frank Freud spun around, a look of horror on his face. "What did you know, and when did you know it?"

  Frank Freud raced toward the front door of his house.

  "I'll sic Durinda on you," Jackie called after him. "You know, she has special powers too. She can freeze people where they stand. Why, if I ask her to, you just might remain frozen forever."

  That froze Frank Freud in his tracks.

  He turned to face Jackie, his shoulders slumping.

  "Fine," he said. "I'll tell you what you want to know. I met the woman you refer to as the Wicket once, last December. She came to see me at the Whistle Stop after classes had ended but before I'd left for the day. She said she had some questions about your mother. She kept asking if I knew anything about your mother's work, kept saying something about your mother working to discover the secret of eternal life. Well, of course I assumed she was nuts and sent her away. But then, one day, Serena Harkness showed up—I could see the resemblance between her and your mother at once—and she was saying the same things the Wicket had said about your mother and her work. Then she told me her plan, to kidnap Mrs. McGillicuddy and try to get more information out of you Eights. Well, it did sound a bit extreme. But then I figuredwhy not? I mean, who doesn't want to live forever..."