Rebel McKenzie

by Candice Ransom

  “Shoo!” I said to the dog. “Go on!” The last thing I needed was a fight around my sore heels. “Grab your stupid dog before she gets hurt!”

  “You better be worrying about the cat,” Bambi yelled over Kissy’s barking. “Kissy is a terrier. She’s not afraid of anything.”

  Doublewide watched nonchalantly as Kissy raced around in tight circles. Then he drew himself up, waited until the dog was within swatting range, and—thwack!—boxed Kissy with his Brontotherium-sized paw. Squealing, the dog rolled over like a sow bug.

  Bambi snatched Kissy up. “Get that big bully out of here!”

  I stuck my face close to Bambi’s. “I know you think you’re greatest thing since sliced bread, but get ready. Me and Lacey Jane entered the firemen’s carnival pageant. In the same category as you.”

  “Oh, please,” she said with a harsh laugh. “You two will never be in the same category as me.”

  “Better take your own beauty advice,” Lacey Jane said. “You finally have serious competition.”

  We walked back across the street, satisfied. Me in my sleep-shirt, Lacey Jane in her red shorts and matching ankle socks and barrettes, Rudy in his NASCAR pajamas, Doublewide padding along, his round stomach swaying.

  Rudy thoughtfully worked his finger up his nose to the second joint.

  “Rude,” I said, “wait till we’re home before you clean the bat out of the cave.”

  “My knees hurt,” I complained to Lacey Jane as I scattered Ritz crackers on a silver tray. “This gig better pay good.”

  “Because you did the pivot turns wrong. Rebel, don’t dump stuff on the tray. Fix it nice.”

  “Why? They’ll just mess it up. Remember how these ladies eat?”

  For the second time in two days, me and Lacey Jane were serving food. This time at Viola Sandbanks’s Madame Queen jewelry party. And for the second time in two days, me and Lacey Jane had had a pageant lesson from Miss Odenia.

  This morning, Miss Odenia showed us how to do this neat turn at the end of our pageant walk. You place one foot in front of the other, raise your heels, and spin so you’re facing the other way. The foot that was behind is now in front, and you walk back in the direction you came.

  Unless you’re me and you turn the wrong way so your knees crash into each other.

  “Right foot first,” Miss Odenia kept telling me. “Pivot to the left. Your other left.”

  Lacey Jane pivoted like she was on roller skates at the end of her walk, and even in the middle of her walk, while I had to have Miss Odenia pry my legs apart with a soup ladle. At the end of our lesson, I could barely crawl home.

  Viola Sandbanks sailed into the kitchen, no small feat since she wore at least sixty-five pins on the front of her dress. Swags of pearls and beads swung out from her bosom, and bracelets were stacked clear up to her elbow.

  When she moved, she clacked and clanked like the Tin Man. Now I know why she asked us to serve. Weighed down with all that jewelry, she couldn’t pick up a marshmallow.

  “How we doing, girls? Lacey Jane, that cookie platter is simply lovely.” She frowned at my cracker tray.

  “I saw this in the latest Good Housekeeping,” I fibbed. You dump out a whole box of crackers. It’s called The Volcano.”

  “Really? Well, if it’s the latest—”

  Palmer Sandbanks fluttered in. She had rings on every finger, even her thumbs. “Mama, everybody’s coming up the walk.”

  “Let them in, dear.” To us, Viola said, “Make the punch, girls. The recipe is on the counter.” She clanked into the living room.

  “Volcano. What a crock,” Lacey Jane said, pouring ginger ale into the huge glass bowl. “How much cranberry juice do I add?”

  I glanced at the stained index card. “Six quarts.”

  Craning my neck, I saw Miss Odenia with Mrs. Randolph, the old lady from Better-Off-Dead Pest Control and Bridal Consignment. Right behind them strutted Bambi’s mother…and Bambi herself, decked out in a pink polka-dot sundress. She carried Kissy in a wicker basket. The dog sported a pink rhinestone collar.

  “Six? That sounds like a lot.” Lacey Jane began taking bottles from the fridge.

  “Guess who’s here?”

  “Not the Scourge of Grandview Estates?”

  “In the pink,” I said. “Complete with dog.”

  Bambi heard our voices. She whispered something to her mother, then hiked her nose in the air.

  Viola clapped loudly. “Ladies, I want to call your attention to the new arrivals in the Madame Queen collection on the coffee table. Black-and-white enamel is all the go this summer.”

  “Oooh, I’m gonna get me that black-and-white daisy brooch,” Palmer gushed. “Mr. Beechley won’t be able to take his eyes off me.”

  “Palmer, I’ve told you a thousand times to stop chasing after the mailman,” her mother said. “If he was interested in you, he’d have asked you out by now.”

  “He’s just a slow mover. He’ll come around,” Palmer said, unfazed.

  I rolled my eyes at Lacey Jane. Poor Mr. Beechley. I wondered why he didn’t quit being a mailman and take up a safer job, like Hollywood stuntman.

  “You’ll have time to look at the samples during refreshments,” Viola said. “Let’s play a game to break the ice.”

  What ice? It was five hundred degrees outside. Plus, everybody knew each other.

  “Palmer, pass out the tablets and pencils. Ladies, see how many words you can make from ‘Madame Queen.’ The winner gets the door prize,” Viola said grandly.

  “How many words are there?” Miss Odenia asked.

  “I found twenty,” Palmer replied.

  I flipped the recipe card over and grabbed a pen. “Does ‘Madame’ have an ‘e’?”

  “Yes,” Lacey Jane said. “Put down ‘queen.’ And ‘madam.’”

  “Duh.” I scribbled furiously. This was one game I was good at. Mad. Dam. Dean. Meat. An. Ad. Ma. Am. Need.

  “‘Deem’?” Lacey Jane suggested. “Is that a word?”

  “Yes indeedy!” My pen flew. Name. Made. Man. Men. Den. Due.

  “Time’s up!” Viola chirped. “Who got ten words?” Everyone raised their hands. “Twelve?” Miss Odenia’s hand went down. “Thirteen?” Mrs. Randolph dropped out.

  “I have fourteen,” said Mimsie Lovering. “But my princess has a big long list.”

  “Did you get all twenty, Bambi?” Viola asked.

  Bambi flashed her tablet. “Yes! I won!”

  “No, you didn’t!” I stormed into the living room waving the index card. “I got twenty-two.”

  “The help isn’t allowed to play!” Bambi protested.

  “Girls, let’s be nice.” Viola read Palmer’s list, then mine, then Bambi’s.

  “‘Que’ is not a word!” I said, pointing at Bambi’s babyish printing.

  “Is too,” Bambi tossed back.

  “Is not.”

  Palmer checked the dictionary. “Rebel’s right. There’s no such word as ‘que.’ At least not spelled that way.”

  “Rebel is not in the game,” said Bambi’s mother. “Bambi still has nineteen words. She wins.”

  I guess Palmer and Viola figured Mimsie Lovering was good for a big sale and I wasn’t. Palmer handed Bambi a silver charm in the shape of a dog.

  “Oooh! It’s perfect!” Bambi squealed.

  “I wonder what a liar charm would look like?” I whispered loudly to Lacey Jane.

  Viola snapped her fingers. “Bring the refreshments now.”

  We took in the snack plates first. Then we hauled in the sloshing punch bowl.

  “Ewww,” Bambi remarked. “That looks like blood!”

  Viola took us aside. “How much cranberry juice did you put in?”

  “Six quarts. Like the recipe said,” I replied.

  “It’s supposed to be three!” Veins pulsed in her temples.

  I shrugged. “Can I help it the card was smudgy? Say it’s lava punch to go with the cracker volcano.”

  Lacey
Jane passed the chips and dip to Bambi’s mother. “Your hair looks pretty tonight,” she said shyly.

  Mrs. Lovering fluffed the ruffle on Bambi’s dress and didn’t answer. The corners of Lacey Jane’s mouth turned down. Suddenly I realized why Lacey Jane hated Bambi so much, aside from the obvious fact that Bambi was a horrible human being. Bambi’s mother fussed over her constantly. Lacey Jane’s father worked all the time. Nobody made over Lacey Jane anymore.

  “Punch?” I offered a brimming cup to Bambi.

  As she reached for it, I put my right foot in front of my left, lifted my heels, and twirled in a perfect pivot turn. Then I pivoted again so I was facing her, accidentally-on-purpose tipping the punch down the neck of her sundress.

  “Oh my! How clumsy of me.”

  Miss Odenia, who had seen the whole thing, gasped. “Rebel!”

  Bambi sprang up. “Mama! Look what she did! I’m soaking wet!” She began to cry huge crocodile tears.

  Mrs. Lovering glowered at me. “I don’t want to see you at another party!” She swept Bambi into the bathroom. When they came out ten minutes later, Bambi’s dress was still stained. “I’ll send you my dry-cleaning bill,” she told Viola Sandbanks.

  “Wait, Mama,” Bambi said, still sniveling. “Can I have that blue stone bracelet?”

  “Of course, baby. How about one for Kissy so you’ll be twins?”

  Bambi smiled, showing all of her teeth and forty-eleven dimples.

  After the party, Lacey Jane and me poured about hundred gallons of punch down the sink. Nobody drank it, for some reason. When we were ready to go, I asked Viola about our payment.

  “Here,” she said. Two plain fake-gold pins clattered on the counter, the cheapest of all the Madame Queen jewelry.

  “Um,” I said. “I was hoping for cash.” Like, at least five dollars.

  “After the shenanigans you pulled? Take the pins or nothing.”

  We took and left. Our paid serving career was over.

  When we reached our street, I walked over to the Loverings’ house.

  “What are you doing?” Lacey Jane asked.

  “Something.” I dug in my pocket for my Madame Queen list and the pencil I’d swiped. One word on my list hadn’t been on Palmer’s or Bambi’s.

  I circled the word mean and slipped the paper under the door.

  From the Field Notebook of Rebel McKenzie

  The Gobi Desert is brutal in July. All you see is sand, sand, and more sand. The sky is white, the sand is white, and the sun is round and red like a jawbreaker.

  I am working on a grinding tooth of a woolly mammoth. Mammoths were—well, mammoth—big, and needed to eat a lot of grass and leaves and stuff. Their teeth had ridges that helped them chew plants.

  This tooth was attached to a boulder way down deep. I chipped at the rock with my hammer and chisel. My kneepads were scorching.

  My chisel hit something. I stopped to look at it through my magnifying glass. Smoke poured between my fingers. It was so hot, my magnifying glass had set the rock on fire!

  A shadow fell over my dig site. A vulture, waiting until I keeled over. It wouldn’t be long now.…

  Christmas Lights in July

  “Folks, it’s gonna be hotter’n a two-dollar pistol today. All you sugar boogers out there, stay cool. Put a tub of ice in front of your fan and lap up the breeze, but don’t twitch your dial from WKCW—”

  “Lynette, cut that stupid radio off. The guy’s making me sweat just listening to him.” My voice echoed off the bathroom tile.

  I lolled on the bathroom floor, the coolest place in the trailer, my head propped on The How and Why Wonder Book of Prehistoric Mammals. I had on a halter top and short-shorts. Baby powder coated me from my forehead to my toenails. I lay motionless as an amoeba in a coma, but heat still radiated from me. You could deep-fry okra on my stomach.

  Lynette’s bare feet slapped into the bathroom. “You look like you’ve been dipped in Shake ’N Bake.” She sat down on the closed toilet seat and opened her cosmetology book. Then she slammed it shut. “I don’t want to study scabies and impetigo today.”

  “Who would? Why do you need to learn that gross stuff for anyway?”

  “Some skin diseases are contagious. If somebody wants their hair done and they have scabies, I tell them they should go to a doctor. And that I’m not allowed to work on them. I might catch it.”

  “See, this is why I like paleontology. The animals are already dead and I can’t catch anything.”

  Rudy scooted into the bathroom, shirtless and barefoot. A wicked heat rash blotched his chest.

  “Look,” he said, holding up an outdoor thermometer. “The red thing is all the way at the top!”

  I sat up. Baby powder sifted from my arms. “Where did you have that thing?”

  “On the front steps. What’s it say, Rebel?”

  “A hundred and forty degrees.” My eyes popped out. “Lynette, it’s a hundred and forty degrees and we don’t have a speck of air-conditioning.”

  “Rebel, he set the thermometer in the sun.” She tugged the rubber band from her ponytail, gathered up her hair, and pulled it into a higher ponytail. “I don’t have the money to get the A/C fixed, you know that. The man said I need a whole new compressor or whatever, and I can’t afford it.”

  “Can you afford a paper fan?” I knew money was tight, but it was just too hot to live.

  “Quit it, Rebel. Just quit it.” Then she said to Rudy, “Snooty-kins, you aren’t supposed to be out in the sun. It’ll make your rash worse. Let me put some more powder on you.” She frowned at my flour-white legs. “If Rebel hasn’t used it all.”

  “Here.” I tossed the mostly-empty can of baby powder to her. Rudy stood still while she sprinkled his chest. I opened my book and tried to read, but the words squiggled in front of my eyes like tadpoles.

  “You’re always dragging that book around,” Lynette said. “It looks boring.”

  “Not as boring as your ol’ cosmetology book. I help you study all those yucky diseases and body parts, but you don’t know a thing about the Ice Age.”

  “I wished I lived in it,” she said. “The Ice Age would feel good right about now. Rebel, is that my halter top?”

  “I don’t know. Is it?”

  “You know it is. No wonder I couldn’t find it.” She fanned herself with her cosmetology book, scattering baby powder. Rudy sneezed.

  “Are we going to spend all day in this teeny little bathroom?” I asked in disgust. “I can’t wait for the first day of school. My essay will be called ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation Holed Up in a Bathroom of a Trailer.’”

  “Don’t call my house a trailer,” Lynette said.

  “Excuuuse me! The mobile home you rent.”

  “Don’t fight,” Rudy said. “It makes my liver hurt.” Whenever I helped Lynette study anatomy, he hung on every organ. He pointed at the cover of my book. “What’s that animal?”

  “Baluchitherium.” I sounded out the word slowly. “Ba-luck-uh-THEE-re-um. It was twenty-three feet tall! A Baluchitherium could eat the tops of trees.”

  “Bad-luck-a-theem,” Rudy repeated softly, slaughtering the pronunciation.

  Lynette twisted her mouth. “Ba-luck-a-duck, my foot. You’re making that up.”

  “I am not, you Neanderthal,” I said under my breath.

  “I heard that. You think you’re so smart. I’ll find you in my book.” Furiously, she flipped the pages of her cosmetology book.

  “Go ahead. Whatever you find, I’ll pick out a better one that’s you.”

  “Acne pustulosa.” She held up the book so I could see the picture of an oozing sore. “‘The variety of acne in which pustular lesions are present.’ That’s you.”

  “Ewww! Gross!” Rudy sounded delighted.

  “Is that so?” I didn’t even need to look through my book. “Page thirty-one.”

  Lynette found the page. “A—barylamda.” She glared at me. “I do not have a thick, heavy reptilian tail!”

>   “Yes, you do. Plus a short, blunt face so you can grub for roots,” I said, cackling.

  “It’s a long walk back home to Mama’s—”

  “You called me pus head!”

  Lynette set our books on the edge of the sink. “You know what? I got seventeen dollars in tips last week. I was gonna put it on the light bill, but I think we need to buy a couple of fans.”

  “Yay!” I jumped up in a shower of powder.

  I thought we’d head to Sears or True Value Hardware, but Lynette drove The Clunker in the opposite direction. We pulled into the parking lot of Bargain Bin, part flea market, part “junktiques.”

  “You can’t get fans here. You have to go to a hardware store,” I said, ungluing myself from the hot duct-taped seat and leaving behind most of my skin.

  “You can get anything here.”

  “Look, Mama!” Rudy exclaimed. “There’s a little girl for sale! She’s only four dollars. Let’s buy her!”

  “Rude, that kid is not for sale,” I told him. “She’s holding a sign for that extremely ugly lamp.”

  Lynette was right. You could get anything at Bargain Bin, including a lamp made out of a globe sawed in half, fringed with glass beads, and stuck on a large brass dolphin.

  The inside of Bargain Bin was dim and smelled like potatoes stored too long. The place was jammed floor to ceiling with boxes and cartons and bags of stuff. Musty paperbacks spilled from milk crate bookcases. Kitchen utensils were tangled in mildewed doilies. Now I knew where the Hula-Hoop went to die.

  “How can we find anything in this mess?” I said to Lynette.

  “Split up. We’ll cover more ground that way. Rudy, you want to come with me or Rebel?”

  He thought a few seconds, as if choosing between a solid-gold wristwatch and a Shetland pony. “Rebel,” he said at last.

  “Rebel, look for box fans—they sit on the floor. Seven dollars, tops.” She disappeared down a junk-filled aisle.

  “Okay, Rudy. Let’s go this way.” As we stepped carefully around rusted old tools, I couldn’t decide which we needed more, tetanus shots or a compass.

  But at the end of the aisle sat a twenty-six-inch box fan, still in its original carton. The price on the neon sticker—six-fifty. Score!