by Meg Cabot
And she only looked excited about it because of the extra credit she was going to get from the fancy costume she was going to make her mom rent for her.
‘We’re going to need that kind of enthusiasm as we finish up our unit on the fascinating life of the early settlers to our area,’ Mrs Hunter went on. ‘I’m also going to need a permission slip signed by your parent or guardian so that you can all come with us to Honeypot Prairie on Friday. Rosemary, the permission slips are sitting on my desk. Will you hand them out, please?’
Rosemary got up and went to Mrs Hunter’s desk to get the pile of permission slips. When she handed me mine, I was careful to fold it up and slip it into the front pocket of my jeans so I wouldn’t lose it. There was no way I was going to make the mistake of letting someone else hand it in for me. Or not hand it in for me. Not this time.
Honeypot Prairie may have been boring and stupid (at least, according to everyone I knew who’d ever been there).
But it was the only field trip I had.
And at least I was finally going to get to ride on a bus.
Rosemary had told me that if you sat towards the back of the bus, over the rear wheels, and the bus went over a pothole or the train tracks too fast, you went sailing up into the air.
Because there were no seat belts on the school buses in our town.
This was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard.
‘Oh,’ Mrs Hunter added, ‘and one last thing. Because of school budget cuts, we don’t have enough money to hire a bus to go to Honeypot Prairie on our own . . .’
All of us froze. I don’t know about anyone else, but I immediately began to pray: Please don’t ask our parents to drive us, please don’t ask our parents to drive us, please don’t ask our parents to drive us.
I mean, this was my one chance to go somewhere in a school bus! Why would I want to spoil it by going in my own boring car driven by my own boring mom or dad?
‘. . . so we’re going to have to share a bus with another fourth-grade class that will be going the same day we are,’ Mrs Hunter went on.
I relaxed. Phew! So not the family car.
Cheyenne’s hand shot up into the air.
‘Yes, Cheyenne?’ Mrs Hunter definitely sounded tired now.
‘With what other school will we be sharing a bus, Mrs Hunter?’ she asked primly.
‘Ms Myers’ fourth-grade class,’ Mrs Hunter said. ‘From Walnut Knolls Elementary.’
I couldn’t believe it:
Walnut Knolls Elementary was my old school, and Ms Myers was my old teacher.
My first real field trip, and I had to share it – and the bus getting there – with my old class.
Including my ex-best friend Mary Kay Shiner, who’d ruined my last chance at going on a field trip.
Rule #5
When You’re Feeling Bad, the Worst Thing You Can Do Is Inflict Your Bad Mood on Others
This stank more than my mom not letting me buy a cellphone with my own money.
‘You don’t know for sure that Mary Kay is going to try to ruin this field trip for you,’ Erica said. We were working on our Honeypot Prairie Group Project that Mrs Hunter had assigned us, clustered around Lenny Hsu’s desk. Because he was in our group, and Lenny Hsu’s desk is the tidiest desk of anyone in our group. ‘She and those other girls could have gotten over what happened at Brittany’s birthday party by now.’
‘With my luck?’ I shook my head. I felt like crying. I really did. I don’t think so.’
Sophie patted me on the shoulder. ‘Poor Allie.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Elizabeth Pukowski, who was in our group, said. ‘What’s the big deal about sharing the bus with some girl from Allie’s old school?’
‘Mary Kay Shiner isn’t just some girl from Allie’s old school,’ Sophie said.
Then she went on to explain to her about the incident I’d had a few weeks earlier at a birthday party given by Brittany Hauser – who is basically the Cheyenne O’Malley of Walnut Knolls Elementary – at which she and my ex-best friend Mary Kay Shiner and some other girls had tried to humiliate me and undermine my self-esteem . . . just because it had gotten around the fourth-grade rumour mill that I had a boyfriend (which is definitely not true) and they were jealous.
It had gotten so bad that Uncle Jay’s girlfriend Harmony had had to drive one hour each way to come rescue me.
Never go to a birthday party given by the most popular girl in your old school just because her mother has rented a limo to take you there. It will not turn out well. That’s a rule.
‘Seriously?’ Elizabeth’s eyes widened. ‘That’s bad.’
‘You think that’s bad?’ Patrick Day, who was also in our group, said. ‘Check this out.’ He showed us an extremely large scab that had formed on his elbow. ‘Road rash from riding my skateboard down the driveway. Way worse than anything that ever happened to Allie at some birthday party.’
Sophie, Elizabeth and Erica let out polite screams. Patrick looked pleased with himself.
‘Want to smell it?’ he asked.
Sophie said, ‘If you don’t keep wounds clean, they could become infected, and then might become gangrenous and you could die.’ That’s a rule.
Erica, always the diplomat, decided to change the subject.
‘What about that man?’ Erica asked. ‘The one who was throwing rocks at our windows? Do you think he was Mrs Hunter’s boyfriend?’
‘Of course he was,’ Sophie said. ‘You could tell he’s completely in love with Mrs Hunter, but she’s spurned him.’
‘What’s spurned?’ I asked.
‘Told him to get lost,’ Sophie explained, ‘because she doesn’t feel about him the way he feels about her. That’s why he was carrying a suitcase. She kicked him out.’
My eyes widened. I hadn’t thought about the suitcase. Why had he been carrying a suitcase?
‘I don’t think she’s spurned him,’ I said. ‘I think he was just an old friend, like she said, and he was visiting from somewhere else. And I think she just doesn’t want him throwing rocks at our window. That’s dangerous. Imagine if the window broke, or if Mrs Jenkins had seen him doing that. Mrs Jenkins is the principal, and Mrs Hunter’s boss. Mrs Hunter could get in trouble. Maybe even fired. It was really wrong of him to do that.’
‘I thought it was super romantic,’ Elizabeth said dreamily. ‘I hope when I’m old, a guy will come do that to me where I work.’
‘Can we please stop talking about these very boring things and get back to our report on being female in mid-nineteenth-century America?’ Lenny Hsu looked annoyed. ‘I would like to get a check plus on this project.’
‘I agree,’ I said, relieved. I think we should stop talking about that man. Especially since it was clear from his suitcase that he’s going back to where he came from. He’s probably never coming back.’
‘If he loves Mrs Hunter as much as I think he does,’ Elizabeth said, ‘he’ll probably come back. But whatever. At least we get to go on a field trip. Right? Even if it is to someplace boring. And we have to share a bus with some snobby girls. It’s better than nothing, right?’
‘Right,’ Sophie agreed. She looked over at me to make sure I wasn’t actually crying. Which I wasn’t. Yet.
Although the truth was, every time I thought about having to go to Honeypot Prairie – with Mary Kay Shiner of all people – I teared up a little.
And Elizabeth wasn’t helping with her If he loves Mrs Hunter as much as I think he does, he’ll probably come back remarks. Although don’t even ask me why I cared so much about that.
‘It might be OK, you guys,’ Erica said, trying to look on the bright side as usual. ‘You heard what Mrs Hunter said. They’re going to teach us how to bake bread. And how to shoe a horse! That means there’ll be horses there. And you love horses, Allie.’
‘You can buy bread at the store,’ I pointed out. ‘And you don’t get to ride the horses. You just watch someone else put horseshoes on them.’ I didn’t want to think about h
ow Mary Kay had told me that at the Children’s Museum they’d gotten to play junior fashion stylists and make-up artists, designing Barbies for the next generation using a giant touch-pad screen. That sounded way more fun than anything I’d heard so far about what Honeypot Prairie had to offer. ‘The rest of the time we’ll be crammed into a dinky one-room schoolhouse learning about how bad things were in olden times.’
With Mary Kay Shiner . . . and Brittany Hauser! And Cheyenne O’Malley! At the same time!
‘Like we don’t already know how bad things were in olden times,’ I went on. ‘We practically live in olden times ourselves! At least, those of us who don’t have cellphones do.’
‘Yeah,’ Elizabeth said, shaking her head at me sympathetically, ‘you do.’
That’s when I realized she had a cellphone.
Lenny Hsu had one too! I saw him tapping away at it beneath his desk, bored with all our girl talk.
And even though the whole rest of the day I tried hard to be like Erica and look on the bright side and not bring everyone down into the dumps with me – When you’re feeling had, the worst thing you can do is inflict your had mood on others. That’s a rule – all I could think about was how horrible my life was lately. My friends kept assuring me that, no matter what, they’d stick by me and not let Mary Kay and those other girls be mean to me on Friday.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my first field trip ever was going to be totally spoilt by a lot of mean girls from my past.
I was still fuming about that – and Mrs Hunter’s maybe boyfriend – when I got home from school at the end of the day and saw a big red van parked in our driveway.
A+ ROOFERS, it said in yellow on the side.
‘But that isn’t what you said just eight months ago,’ my dad was saying to a man holding a clipboard who was standing in the hallway outside my brother Mark’s bedroom. ‘When you inspected the roof before we bought this house, you said it was fine.’
‘Well,’ the man said, scratching beneath his hard hat, ‘that may have been true eight months ago. But we’ve had a lot of snow and rain since then. You’ve got yourself an old house with an old roof with a lot of eaves and gables. If you want to fix the leaks and kill the dry rot going on inside your walls, you’re going to have to replace a lot of shingles.’
I wasn’t sure. But this sounded like a rule to me.
‘Mom,’ Mark said, because he was standing right there between my mom and dad, ‘can I go out on to the roof with Mr Johnson to help replace the shingles?’
‘No,’ Mom said.
‘Can I go inside the hole in the wall in Mark’s closet?’ Kevin, who was standing next to Mark, asked.
‘No,’ Mom said.
‘Then can I wear your hard hat, Mr Johnson?’ Kevin asked, cocking his head to one side like Marvin when he wanted a dog biscuit. When Mark and I had caught him trying this look out in front of the mirror, Kevin had told us it was his ‘cute’ look, and that whenever he used it, people gave him whatever he wanted. We’d laughed at him for a long time over that one. ‘Please?’
‘Tell you what,’ Mr Johnson said, looking down at Kevin with a big smile on his craggy face. ‘If your parents accept my estimate and hire me to do the job, I’ll bring you a hard hat of your very own.’
‘Gee, Mr Johnson,’ Kevin said. ‘That’d be great.’
I couldn’t believe it.
Kevin’s ‘cute’ look actually worked!
It wasn’t fair. Kevin always got what he wanted (well, except velvet trousers).
But did I ever get what I wanted?
No!
After carefully sticking my permission slip under a magnet on the refrigerator door for my mom and dad to sign (I wasn’t letting anything bad happen to this one, even if it was only to Honeypot Prairie and not anywhere good), I went into my room and shut my door (careful not to slam it or I’d have gotten in trouble. No slamming doors is a rule in our house).
What was even the point? I wondered with a sigh, going to stretch out on my bed. Just like the children of the pioneers, I’d worked very hard (earning thirty-six whole dollars), and for what?
And now my big chance to finally go on a field trip had come along, and my ex-best friend had had to come back to haunt me.
I swear I sort of felt like the kid of an early settler. We’d learned in class that summer vacations were invented because this was when the children of the pioneers were needed on the farm . . . to help their parents in the fields during planting time. In some states, Mrs Hunter had told us, they’ve been thinking of getting rid of summer vacations, because parents have a hard time finding childcare for their kids while they’re at work during the summer months. No one is allowed to hire kids to work on farms any more, due to child-labour laws.
I couldn’t believe the unfairness of this! No more summer breaks? That meant no more swimming, no more camp, no more laying around in the backyard, daydreaming and looking for ants to help back to their anthill!
Still, it must have been horrible in olden times to get out of school for summer vacation just to have to go work in a field.
And the kids in those days couldn’t even buy cellphones with the money they earned (if their parents even gave them an allowance), because cellphones hadn’t been invented yet!
Being the kid of an early settler stank.
A lot like being Allie Finkle.
Rule #6
You Should Never Read Other People’s Private Correspondence
Mr Johnson gave Kevin a hard hat. That’s because his company won the estimate to work on our new roof.
I’d have thought my parents would have been excited about this, since they had bought an old house on purpose to have the fun of fixing it up.
But all my dad did was go around muttering, ‘Six thousand dollars,’ under his breath.
Mom and Dad might have owed the roofing man six thousand dollars, but I was the one who was really suffering. I had to go on a field trip to the most boring place in the entire world, and on the same bus as my ex-best friend, who had accidentally on purpose ruined my last field trip!
Not only that, but I had to walk my little brother to and from school every day, while he was wearing a hard hat.
It was totally embarrassing!
Not that my friends were embarrassed. They thought it was cute, as usual.
But Kevin’s embarrassing affection for his new hard hat and my having to go on a field trip to a totally boring place with my ex-best friend Mary Kay Shiner weren’t the only things that were upsetting me.
And even the fact that my mom still wouldn’t budge on the cellphone issue, despite how responsible I’d been trying to be (and OK, I still hadn’t found my DS, even though I’d searched through my entire closet while looking for something 1850ish to wear on Friday), wasn’t bugging me as much as this other thing.
No, what was really bothering me was what had happened while I’d been presenting our group project to the class the day before our field trip to Honeypot Prairie.
I had been standing in front of Room 209 (because my group had elected me spokesperson. Which was all right, because I am going to be a veterinarian slash actress when I grow up, so I don’t mind speaking in front of crowds. I mean, it’s a little scary, having so many pairs of eyes on you. But I just tell myself one of my favourite rules: It’s all good practice for when you’re famous), talking about life in the 1850s.
‘Being a woman in eighteen-fifties America was very hard,’ I was saying. ‘Basically, the only jobs you could have if you were a woman back then were a laundress, a seamstress, a maid, a nanny, a factory worker, a teacher or a nurse . . . if you were lucky enough to be accepted to one of the few colleges that let women go to them, which weren’t many back then. You couldn’t be anything else, especially if you were African-American or Native-American or Asian-American. For instance, you couldn’t be a veterinarian. You could be an actress, but that would scandalize your family and they would pretend not to know you. You couldn’
t be a lawyer or a doctor or a scientist or a railroad engineer or a writer (unless you wrote under an anonymous name), and you couldn’t be a politician, because women weren’t even allowed to vote. So, basically, being a woman in olden times stank.’
It was right then that there was a knock on the classroom door and Mrs Wright, the administrative assistant from Mrs Jenkins’s office, came in.
And she was carrying the biggest bouquet of red roses I had ever seen. They were so big, you could barely even see Mrs Wright’s head.
‘Mrs Hunter,’ Mrs Wright said, smiling really big from behind the roses, ‘these just arrived for you. I thought I’d better bring them right up because . . . well, there isn’t really room for them in the office.’
She set them in their crystal vase on the stool next to where I was standing and left, still smiling.
We all stared at the bouquet. So did Mrs Hunter, from her desk where she was still sitting at the back of the room, her mouth open just a little bit in astonishment.
Cheyenne was the first one to say anything, as usual.
‘Mrs Hunter,’ she said, her hand flying into the air, ‘aren’t you going to see who they’re from?’
‘Yes, I am,’ Mrs Hunter said. She’d started to turn a little pink. ‘I’m very sorry for the interruption, class.’
Mrs Hunter got up from her seat and hurried to the front of the room, her high heels making tippity-tap sounds on the floor. Then she picked up the little white envelope that was sitting tucked inside the roses. It seemed to take her a long time to get the envelope open.
All of us watched in total silence. I looked over at Caroline and Erica and Sophie like, Can you believe this?
But they just looked back at me like, Whoa. No. So did everyone else in the class . . .
. . . except Cheyenne, who was giggling and whispering excitedly with M and D.
What did Cheyenne know that we didn’t?
Everything, apparently. Well, Cheyenne thinks she knows everything, anyway.
I was sure when I got a cellphone, I’d know everything too.
I was standing next to the huge bouquet, which, sitting on the stool, was as tall as me. I couldn’t believe how much those roses smelt. Also, how many of them there were. It was like being inside a rose garden. Or a beauty pageant.