Laura Ingalls Is Ruining My Life

by Shelley Tougas

  “Just forget it,” I said. “I’m going to bed.” And as Freddy stared at the phone and Rose stared at me, I walked out of the room, put on my pajamas, and crawled into bed. I didn’t even say good night to Mom or brush my teeth.

  Sleep didn’t come, though. I tossed and turned, fuming about Freddy’s texting addiction, steaming about Rose’s stupid accusations, until I decided to get up. I went to the kitchen for some water and crackers. The basement was dark. Mom and Rose had gone to bed. But Mom’s laptop was on the kitchen table. Without thinking, I opened it and looked at the websites she had open in her browser. One tab was the New York Times bestseller list for children’s books, which made sense. Someone writing a book for kids would study the list. The other page was Secrets of Bestselling Novels, which also made sense.

  Then I looked through her documents. She had four folders: short stories, essays, nonfiction, novels. I clicked on novels. Inside that folder were two files: Prairie.doc and Mars.doc. I opened the Mars file.

  Page one said, Untitled Mars Novel.

  Page two said, Chapter One.

  That was it. Two pages; five words.

  We’d come to Walnut Grove three months ago so Mom could write her novel, and her fingers had barely touched the keyboard. Five words! Rose wouldn’t be able to find a rainbow here, Freddy abandoned me, and Mom had Prairie Madness.

  What was next? Grasshoppers dropping from the sky? An outbreak of fever ’n’ ague? Blindness?

  Walnut Grove was cursed.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  When the lunch bell rang the next day, Bao tapped me on the shoulder. “You’re coming to lunch, right?”

  I had the Dust Bowl article in my backpack. I’d even read a second article about hungry migrants leaving Oklahoma and heading west for jobs. Plus I’d brought my favorite lunch—leftover pizza—and my nose told me a stomach-churning tuna fish casserole would greet us in the cafeteria.

  So you know what I said?

  “Sure.”

  I don’t know how it happened. I meant to say no. I meant to say no while shaking my head so there’d be no doubt. But my mouth had other ideas.

  “Sure.” My mouth said it again. “Mrs. Newman, is it okay if I have lunch in the cafeteria? I forgot my lunch at home again.”

  “That’s fine. Give us a minute, Bao.”

  Bao left the classroom with everyone else, and I went to Mrs. Newman’s desk.

  “Charlotte, if everything goes well today, is there a chance you’ll forget your lunch at home again?”

  I felt my face turn red. “Maybe.”

  “Your reading seems to have improved dramatically. How does it seem to you?”

  “Better.”

  “I think we can be done with these sessions. Enjoy your lunch.”

  My heart pounded at the thought. I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Newman?”

  “Yes?”

  “What if today is fine, but tomorrow is a disaster?”

  “Let’s assume it’s going to go well. And if it doesn’t, we’ll come up with a plan.” She handed me an article. I glanced at the title—something about Native Americans and a Trail of Tears. “Here’s one more thing I want you to read. You can take your time, but I do want to discuss it.”

  I left the article on my desk and went to the cafeteria. When I sat down next to Bao, Julia was already telling her about the gizzard soup. Then Emma talked about her grandma’s liver and onions, and Bao said something about her grandma using fish oil in soup, and suddenly it seemed like it was my turn to say something. I couldn’t think of any weird food stories. I felt nervous and empty, but then I had an idea.

  “What are you going to do with your museum money, Julia?”

  Julia talked about a bike and new clothes. Bao and Emma tossed out ideas for Julia’s wish list, and I added things like The Hunger Games DVD set and a Hermione Granger wand. My idea worked! I came up with a new observation: if you don’t have clever stories or jokes, then ask questions. I wondered if Freddy had noticed the same evidence. Maybe that’s how he’d survived the week I was sick.

  Before I had a chance to start feeling sad about Freddy, the bell rang. Everyone’s food was gone, including mine. Lunch had passed in a blink.

  Stupid bell.

  * * *

  As winter descended, the world got colder and darker, but I felt warmer and brighter. I saw rainbows everywhere—in the lunchroom, in the classroom, in the museum.

  Lunches went by in a blink. There were so many things to say I barely had time to eat my tater tot hot dish.

  Bao and Emma weren’t fake-nice; they were nice-nice. Sometimes we laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

  I made sure to do my homework every night, and it came back with notes from Mrs. Newman that said Excellent! and Outstanding!

  And the most surprising rainbow: Julia Ramos started acting less like Nellie Oleson. Working at the museum with her wasn’t horrible. It was okay.

  I’d say fun, but let’s not start exaggerating, right?

  I tried to bring my rainbow attitude home, but it wasn’t contagious. Rose found out she wasn’t going to Greece with her dad for Christmas. She cried for two hours, and Mom didn’t change out of her pajamas for three days. The Mars book still had only five words on two pages.

  Everything about Freddy was contagious, though. When he broke a shoelace, Mom found a stray purple shoelace in a drawer. Freddy went to school with a black shoelace on his right shoe and a purple one on his left. Soon nearly everyone in class was wearing different-colored shoelaces. Not me, of course. Freddy and I were talking again, but it wasn’t Twin Superpowers talk. It was pass-the-salt, give-me-the-remote kind of talk. Definitely no laughs. He spent most of his time in his room while Rose followed me around the basement.

  A week before Christmas break, Julia and I were ready to show Gloria and Teresa sample pages of the scrapbook. We gathered around the computer, and in a few clicks I pulled up a page of farm equipment and tools used in the late 1800s. Together we’d written descriptions of how the items were used. I had to admit it: Julia worked hard, she always gave me credit for what I did, and she had good ideas of her own.

  “Here’s a page of tools,” I said.

  “Goodness!” Gloria said. “Is it on the website now?”

  “Not yet. This is just a template,” I said. “We want to finish the whole scrapbook before we publish it online. We still have to figure out the technical stuff.”

  Julia cleared her throat. “I have an idea, too, if you want to hear it.”

  “Sure.”

  “This is for down the road. You know, like phase two. I’ve been thinking we could tape interviews with the oldest people in town about their memories, and we could upload the videos, too.”

  “Goodness!” Gloria said again.

  “You are simply amazing.” Teresa patted Julia’s shoulder. “I never even thought this was possible.”

  For a second I felt annoyed, maybe even a little jealous. Then I saw the smile flash on Julia’s face, and I remembered how I felt that day I walked home from the museum, the day Teresa said I was brilliant. I knew exactly how Julia was feeling, and I wasn’t going to take it away from her.

  “That’s a good idea, Julia,” I said.

  I even meant it, you know?

  While we finished up, I got an idea. Maybe it was a terrible idea. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe, in fact, it was a good idea. Maybe I was finding a rainbow.

  As Julia and I walked home from the museum, I asked a question.

  “Julia, do you have a lot of homework?”

  “No. Why?”

  Then I blurted out my idea and braced myself for her answer. “Do you want to walk to the diner and have hot chocolate?”

  She smiled. “Awesome. Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  “It cracks me up every time Gloria says, ‘I’m not an Interneter.’” Julia blew on her hot chocolate before taking a sip. “Did you hear Teresa say, ‘Can we send this on the email?’”<
br />
  “And Gloria asked about putting it on the Facebook,” I said. “They’re hilarious.”

  “Seriously, Charlotte, the scrapbook is a great idea.”

  “Thanks. The video is even better. Some of those tools are so weird looking, you can’t even imagine what they were used for. It’d be cool if someone could do a quick demonstration of how they were used.”

  “If the tools don’t fall apart.” Julia gulped. “Gloria and Teresa would have heart attacks!”

  “We’d get fired.”

  “Arrested.”

  “Jailed for life.”

  We both laughed. Julia said, “People can just talk in the videos. No demonstrations. We’ll stick with your original scrapbook plan for the tools.”

  Then it was quiet, and I wasn’t sure what to say, but I remembered the trick from lunch: ask questions.

  “So what are you doing for Christmas?”

  Julia wrinkled her nose. “Seeing my dad. Do you see your dad at Christmas?”

  Freddy and I didn’t talk about our dad to other people. How do you explain that your dad wasn’t the man your mom thought he was and that your sister has an entirely different father? And that he wasn’t the man your mom thought he was, either? You don’t. And why was Julia so interested anyway? Julia’s nose-wrinkling thing let me flip the conversation back to her. “You don’t seem happy about seeing yours.”

  “I’m not. But there’s a judge who makes sure he gets to see me. He has to visit at my grandparents’ though. We don’t go anywhere. It’s weird. He just asks me questions about school, and then we watch TV. I hate being in a room with him.”

  “Why?”

  Julia looked down at her hot chocolate. I waited. I wished I could take back asking why, but it was too late. Rose loves seeing her dad, so I didn’t understand why Julia would hate being in the same room as hers.

  Finally Julia leaned closer and spoke quietly. “My dad robbed Shorty’s gas station. So I don’t usually tell people when he’s here. Don’t tell anyone he’s visiting, okay? He drives a different car now.”

  My eyes opened wide. “Your dad robbed a gas station?”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t already know. Everybody knows. It was the night my mom dumped him. She’s doing good now. She got cleaned up, and she even got a scholarship. And when she’s done with school in Chicago, she’ll move back and I’ll live with her again.” Julia looked so proud. “Just promise you won’t say anything about my dad visiting.”

  I’d never been asked to keep a secret before. Freddy and I had our Twin Superpowers, so we always talked about everything. That’s how it used to be. But the secret with Julia was different. She didn’t have to tell me about her dad, but she did. It was a secret for friends.

  “I won’t tell. Promise.” I wanted Julia to feel better, so I said, “Maybe we’ve spent too much time in the museum, but it seems like Walnut Grove has an image of the perfect dad, and it’s Pa Ingalls.” I wrinkled my nose in support. “The perfect fiddle-playing dad.”

  Julia snorted. “Mr. Hard Work.”

  “Mr. Church Bell Donor.”

  “Right? He finally gets some money from that farming job, and instead of buying his kids shoes or bonnets, he buys a bell for the church.”

  “Did you write about Pa in your essay?” I asked.

  “I wrote about Walnut Grove and the Hmong immigrants.”

  “What’s Hmong?”

  “The Asians here are Hmong, which is like Vietnamese, but not exactly. Tons of them came to Minnesota after the war in Vietnam.”

  “Seems kind of random.”

  “It’s like a new group of settlers came to the prairie.”

  I thought about homesteading laws, and all the people who moved west thinking they were going to a farming paradise. Those people actually ended up in Oklahoma and northern Texas. “Were they tricked into thinking Minnesota was paradise?”

  “Compared to war, it is paradise, don’t you think?”

  “Definitely. But there are forty-nine other states.”

  She shrugged. “For whatever reason, they moved to Minnesota. The Hmong mostly lived in Saint Paul, but the old people worried about the crime in the city and whether their kids would get in trouble, and they wanted to live in a small town where things are safe and clean and good for families. I heard that someone’s kid was a fan of Little House on the Prairie, so she said, ‘How about Walnut Grove?’ And some of them moved here and sent word to their friends and families that it was a good place. More and more moved here, and now the town is twenty-five percent Hmong. Maybe even more. That’s a bigger percentage of Asian people than in most big cities. So that’s what I wrote about.”

  “Wow. I never thought about that. I’ve never lived in a small town so I didn’t really notice. That’s a really good essay. No wonder you won.” My hot chocolate was cool enough to drink, so I gulped half of it.

  “I thought Lanie would win.”

  “Who?”

  “Lanie Erickson. She sits behind me. You know, Lanie.”

  “Curly Hair Girl?”

  Julia raised her eyebrow. I covered my tracks. “Oh, Lanie. Right. Why’d you think she’d win?”

  “She wrote that we should have a museum for Native Americans because they lived around here first, and they had these battles with settlers. She said the early farmers shouldn’t be called settlers because the land was already settled. They were more like invaders.” Julia leaned forward and whispered, “My grandma heard Mrs. Newman liked Lanie’s essay because it showed critical thinking, but Gloria and Teresa said no way. Basically I was the second choice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Grandma heard it from Connie Melby, who goes to church with Mrs. Newman’s mother. I knew I’d won the essay contest two days before Mrs. Newman announced it.”

  By the time we left the diner, it was dark. Snow had melted during the day, and the puddles on the street were turning into mini ice-skating rinks. Even in thick-soled boots, you had to walk in slow, delicate steps with your legs wide apart. Rose and I called it the Minnesota duck walk.

  “Let’s cut through the park,” I said.

  Julia wrapped her scarf around her face. “Okay. It got cold fast.”

  Halfway to the picnic pavilion, I saw two people in the moonlight.

  “Bad Chad,” Julia whispered.

  He spotted us before we could backtrack. I grabbed Julia’s coat sleeve and steered us to the left, but it was too late.

  “It’s the Little Museum on the Prairie girls!” Bad Chad shouted as he and his friend charged toward us. “Where’s your covered wagon?” Even Bad Chad knew we worked at the museum, which was proof everyone knew everybody and everything in this town, including a guy so mean nobody talked to him.

  The other guy said, “You going to the mercantile to buy a pencil and a slate?”

  We ignored them and ran as fast as we could through the snow toward the street. A snowball hit my back. It felt like a rock. More snowballs zinged past but missed us. As soon as we got to the street, they stopped hollering. Julia looked back and said, “It’s okay. They turned around.”

  “What a jerk,” I said.

  “I can think of better words than jerk,” Julia said.

  “Better not say them. It’s Walnut Grove. Your grandma will hear about it before we get home.”

  You know what?

  The sound of Julia’s laughter was worth the pain from the snowball.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Christmas dinner was a flop. Rose wanted turkey, but turkeys are huge. Too big for four people, Mom said. She decided she’d get a chicken, but since a whole chicken is mostly bones, why not just get chicken meat? Boneless, skinless chicken breasts are expensive, though, so she bought frozen chicken strips and served them with creamed corn and runny instant mashed potatoes. She also planned to make a cake for dessert, but then she said she was too tired. We ended up smearing the canned frosting on crackers.

  After
dinner we opened presents. We got board games, hoodies, bags of caramel corn, and books. Rose hoisted her book in the air. “A Laura book! I can’t wait to read it!”

  “I thought you’d read them all,” Freddy said.

  “I have, but this isn’t one of her novels. It’s a biography of her life.”

  “Her novels are about her life,” Freddy said. “Or am I missing something?”

  “They’re mostly about her life, but not entirely,” Mom said. “She changed the timeline and left out lots of things that weren’t appropriate for kids to read.”

  “Like what?” Rose asked.

  Mom said, “Like witnessing alcoholism and violence and—”

  “Prairie Madness,” I said. “People went crazy because it was so hard to live here.”

  “Daddy is calling at five, so hurry and open my presents.” Rose giggled as she handed each of us a small box. “You need to open them at the exact same time.”

  On the count of three, we ripped off the paper and opened the boxes. Rose beamed as we discovered we’d all received a mug, a stick of candy, and a shiny new penny.

  “From Little House on the Prairie. Very clever!” Mom said.

  I laughed so hard my eyes watered.

  Rose said, “It’s funny, but it’s not that funny.”

  “Just wait.” I handed out my gifts. “It will be.”

  When they opened my presents and discovered another mug, another candy stick, and another shiny new penny, they bent over laughing, too. If Freddy pulled the same gag gift, I thought, it’d be the perfect Christmas. He’d be the old Freddy with Twin Superpowers. Two birthdays in a row we’d given each other the same present—Harry Potter posters the first time; supersized candy bars the second time.

  But Freddy didn’t give us boxes. He passed out three square flat packages. I knew what it was before I opened it: puppy calendars from the dollar store. I’d looked at them myself, but unlike Red Fred, I was sensitive to Rose’s feelings and didn’t want to make Rose think about Jack at Christmas.

  Who was this weird boy and what had he done with my brother?

  “Very sweet, Freddy.” Mom hugged him.

  Rose said, “Daddy is late.”