“Not very good,” Toby said glumly.
“Well, you know the rule. Let’s talk about a punishment after dinner,” Ms. Michaels said, sighing.
“Ms. Michaels?” Ellie said, looking up. “I got in trouble earlier this week—”
“Yes, the pickles, I heard. Or I smelled, rather. Pickles do smell awfully strong in this heat.”
“Yes, well, my punishment is helping Mrs. Curran all week. If that was Toby’s punishment too, I bet we could be really helpful to her.”
Ms. Michaels looked unconvinced, and so did Toby, actually—probably because they’d told him earlier about stuffing all those envelopes and how boring it was. But being punished together with your friends had to be better than being punished alone, right?
Finally, Ms. Michaels nodded. “All right, all right. Fine,” she said, and walked down the driveway to get the mail. “And while you’ve got the hose running, water the begonias, please!”
“Happy to, Mom! Whatever I can do to help!” Toby said in a very too-chipper voice. He spun around to face the others, looking relieved. “Do any of you know which of these plants are begonias?”
Ellie felt good about today. Maybe it was because she’d had so much fun on the water-slide the afternoon before, even though Toby had gotten in trouble. Or maybe it was because they’d had the not-shell-shaped boxed macaroni for dinner last night, which was Ellie’s favorite. Or because last night while she was falling asleep she’d had some good ideas about her elevator design and had even thought to write them down before she conked out completely. It was probably all those things—and the fact that both Toby and Kit were going with her to Mrs. Curran’s house today. More friends meant more fun, usually.
Besides, there were no more envelopes to stuff, so no matter what happened, today would be better than yesterday.
“Oh! You’ve brought another friend,” Mrs. Curran said when she opened her door. She was sipping something hot out of a teeny cup and was wearing high heels again.
“Toby Michaels. A pleasure,” Toby said, jutting his hand out in a very Toby way. Mrs. Curran looked charmed—people always looked charmed when Toby did this—and shook his hand politely.
“Is that a doll teacup? It’s so tiny and cute!” Kit said, pointing to Mrs. Curran’s cup.
“No, this is an espresso.” Mrs. Curran chuckled. It must have been obvious they didn’t understand, because she added, “It’s a fancy coffee.”
“Ohhhhh,” the three of them said together, even though it still seemed pretty bizarre to Ellie that a grandma-age person drank a fancy coffee instead of tea.
“Well—how can we help you today, Mrs. Curran?” Ellie asked, then hurried on to say, “I brought my tool belt over again, so maybe if you need something—”
“I see that! I do have quite a big job for you this morning, so it’s good you brought some friends,” she said, turning and walking toward the kitchen. Ellie thought they were being led to the kitchen table again, and she could practically taste the envelope glue on her tongue at the memory of yesterday. Instead, Mrs. Curran opened a door to her garage. It was a very tidy garage, with all the lawn tools hung up on hooks and not a single dead bug in the corners. Up against the door were lots and lots of boxes addressed to Mrs. Curran.
“These are some of my painting supplies. It’s tricky for me to get these upstairs, with my arthritis. They’re just so heavy,” Mrs. Curran said. “I hoped perhaps you could carry this pile to my studio for me?”
Ellie tried not to let her disappointment show that they still weren’t building anything. Hey, it was better than stuffing envelopes, at least! “Of course we can, Mrs. Curran,” she said.
“Excellent,” Mrs. Curran said with a smile. “Now, can I offer anyone an espresso? Oh, hmm, probably shouldn’t. Children don’t drink espresso, do they?”
“Not regularly,” Toby said.
“Perhaps some . . . some sparkling water, then? When you’ve finished?” Mrs. Curran suggested. Ellie had no idea what sparkling water was, but sparkly things were usually great, so she nodded and then they all got to work hefting boxes into their arms. They were the sort of boxes that were just heavy enough that you could carry only one at a time—and some were so heavy they took two people. Mrs. Curran was hard at work in her studio each time they walked upstairs, her paintbrush flashing over doll faces. She even painted little toenails and fingernails on the dolls! It was hard not to stop and watch, especially for Kit, who was very good at painting. When they had art class on Wednesdays at school, her pictures always got hung right at the front of the hallway.
“You have a very cool job, Mrs. Curran,” Ellie said as she put down a box. Mrs. Curran was just finishing up a doll with light brown skin and a purple dress that looked like it would twirl really well. Ellie was a little jealous, since twirling dresses were the best sorts of dresses.
“Thank you, dear. I do love it so much—I get to play with dolls all day!” Mrs. Curran said, laughing a little at herself. “It’s difficult to keep working, of course. With my studio being up here, I have a hard time getting things up and down the stairs.”
“Dolls do seem to need an awful lot of things,” Toby said as he rounded the corner with another box and set it down on top of all the others.
Mrs. Curran nodded. “Yes. Different paints, and wigs, and glues, and brushes, and pieces, and then of course I have to ship them back out, so there are boxes that must go back downstairs sometimes.”
“What if you moved your studio to a room downstairs?” Kit asked—she’d arrived just behind Toby. “We could help you move it there!”
Mrs. Curran smiled at them. “That’s very sweet, but the light is best up here. Light is very important when you’re painting, and no light bulb is ever as good as the sunshine, if you ask me.”
“They make special lights that are like the sun,” Toby said, leaning on the doorframe. “People in Alaska use them because during the winter the days are only four hours long there. That’s because of the tilt of the earth.”
“Aren’t you clever! Well, perhaps that works for Alaskans, but I think I’ll just stick with my studio up here. When it gets too hard to get upstairs, I suppose that will mean it’s just time to retire.” Mrs. Curran said this with a smile, but it was crinkly and you could see through it to how she was actually very sad. Ellie wondered what it would be like if she couldn’t engineer anymore—and it made her feel the same kind of miserable that Mrs. Curran looked.
“Well!” Mrs. Curran said, sniffing and sitting up. “That’s not today, since I have you three to help me! How many more boxes are down there?”
“A bunch—let’s go, guys!” Kit said in her most everyone-be-cheerful voice. They headed back downstairs, and Ellie knew without asking that Kit and Toby were feeling as badly for Mrs. Curran as she was.
“Maybe we could come over and carry boxes up for her every week?” Toby suggested.
“What about when we go back to school? Or if we get the flu at the same time? That happened to me and Kit in kindergarten,” Ellie said, shaking her head.
Toby heaved another box into his arms and took a few steps, then put it back down. “Whoa. This one is extra heavy. What’s in it?”
“Eyeballs,” Ellie said, reading the label on the side. “Well, doll eyeballs. I guess a lot of doll eyeballs?”
Toby looked a little queasy at the thought of a lot of eyeballs, even if they were just doll eyeballs in a box. “I guess two of us will have to carry this one.”
Ellie suddenly had an idea. “Or . . . we could build something to take more boxes upstairs at once.” Ellie looked from side to side, seeing what sort of stuff Mrs. Curran had stored in the garage. Building materials were everywhere, if you just knew how to look. She spotted two long shovels and some paint-mixing sticks, which, of course, were stacked neatly, like they were slices of bread. Then she whipped out her notepad and began to sketch as fast as she could.
Toby was peering over her shoulder. “Hey, I’ve seen those
before! They used one to bring in our new refrigerator when the old one stopped working. We had to eat all the ice cream before it melted. It was a great day,” Toby said, sighing happily at the memory.
“It’s called a dolly,” Ellie said, nodding. “We’ll be able to stack the boxes up, then pull them from the garage right up to the bottom of the stairs. I bet we can make one quick, but we need a few more supplies. Toby, you run to my house and get the wagon out of the garage. Kit, go look in the workshop and find a nice flat piece of wood. Something about the size of a grown-up’s shoebox.”
Toby and Kit took off, and by the time they’d returned, Ellie had nailed the paint sticks to the shovels so they looked like a ladder. She took the wheels and an axle—that’s the thing the wheels spin on—off her wagon. Ellie had done this so many times she could practically do it in her sleep—she needed wheels for a bunch of her builds. Then it was hardly a whole after-school cartoon’s worth of time before they had a dolly!
“This looks almost exactly like the fridgey we used!” Toby said, grinning.
“The what?” Ellie asked.
“The fridgey. The one we used to get the new refrigerator in?”
“Oh!” Ellie said, eyes going wide. “They aren’t named after the thing you’re moving. It’s called a dolly if it’s moving dolls or refrigerators.”
“I think ‘fridgey’ was a really fun word though,” Kit said helpfully, so Toby wouldn’t be too embarrassed at his mistake. He only turned a little bit red, so it must have halfway worked.
They stacked boxes on the dolly—it held seven—and then rolled it into the house. They still had to carry the boxes up the steps, but it was a lot faster than carrying boxes all the way from the garage.
“Why, what in the world? Is this what all that noise was about?” Mrs. Curran said, one hand fluttering over her chest in alarm—but the good kind of alarm. Ellie had gotten pretty good at telling the good kind of alarm from the very bad kind of alarm when grown-ups were concerned.
“We made a dolly to get boxes up here faster. I bet we only have one more trip now,” Ellie said proudly as she helped Toby and Kit unload.
“How clever!” Mrs. Curran said. She looked at Toby. “Did you learn how to use tools from your father?”
Toby looked at Ellie, confused. She shrugged—she had no idea why Mrs. Curran was asking Toby that question, either. Toby finally said, “I guess. Mostly Ellie learned from her dad, though.”
Mrs. Curran nodded. “That’s very nice indeed. Well, thank you so much. I’m so glad you brought Toby over, Ellie! With his dolly you’ve made quick work of those boxes.”
Ellie’s mouth dropped open, but it was like someone had sucked all the words right out of her brain. His dolly? It was their dolly! They’d made it together—and Ellie had designed it! Why did Mrs. Curran think Toby had made it? She wanted to ask, but all the words seemed to have flip-flopped right out of her brain, like a fish on the ground. Ellie looked over at Kit and Toby—it looked like all their words were flopping fish, too.
“Thank you, children. I guess if you’re done with the boxes now, you can go for today. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” Mrs. Curran waved them toward the door. They stepped out into her perfect garden, and she closed the door behind them.
Well, it was more important that the dolly worked, and the boxes were moved upstairs, wasn’t it? And besides, she still got to build the dolly, which was what she’d really wanted to do anyhow. It didn’t much matter who Mrs. Curran gave the credit to, did it?
Nope.
It didn’t.
Did it?
Ellie, Kit, and Toby arrived at Mrs. Curran’s house bright and early the next day. Mrs. Curran was drinking an espresso and wearing high heels again. Ellie couldn’t help but wonder if she ever stopped wearing high heels. She really was unlike any grandma-age person Ellie had ever met.
Today, Mrs. Curran wanted them to help by dusting the downstairs. She gave them some dusting spray and cloths and a lot of advice on how not to break the fancy porcelain dolls (like don’t touch them too hard or too much or at all if you can help it), and then she went upstairs to her studio. Ellie hadn’t seen Mrs. Curran going up the stairs before and noticed now that it took her quite a long time to get up there. Her ankles wobbled in the high heels, and she had to hold tight to the railing.
“It would be easier for her to go upstairs, I bet, if she didn’t wear high heels,” Ellie said very quietly.
“High heels are very hard to wear,” Kit said solemnly. “Remember that time I fell in the Miss Peachy Keen Pageant? It was because my high heels were so high.”
“Why do they make shoes that are so dangerous?” Toby asked, shaking his head. “Hey, Ellie—maybe you could engineer her some better shoes!”
“I think she likes her high heels,” Kit said, sounding a bit defensive. Ellie knew why—Kit really liked high heels, too, even though she’d fallen that one time. She just walked super carefully in them at pageants now.
“But even if you like them, why wear them all the time if it makes walking so much harder?” Ellie asked.
“You wear your tool belt almost all the time, even though it makes jumping on the trampoline so much harder,” Toby pointed out thoughtfully.
Ellie frowned. That was true. Her tool belt was a part of her. Maybe high heels were a part of Mrs. Curran.
“Anyway,” Ellie said, and pulled out her notebook. “I was thinking—Mrs. Curran really liked that we made that dolly yesterday, even though she didn’t exactly ask us to make it. Maybe today we can do some other helpful things she didn’t ask us for. After we finish dusting, I mean.”
“Are you sure you don’t just want to build something?” Kit asked, but she was just teasing. Though she was probably right. (Okay, she was definitely right.)
Ellie had a list of things she’d noticed around Mrs. Curran’s house that needed fixing. None of them were builds, exactly—just repairs. Some crooked cabinet doors and some wobbly tables and some doors that didn’t quite shut smoothly. Ellie didn’t say it out loud, but she also reasoned that maybe Mrs. Curran would have an easier time believing Ellie was an engineer if they did lots of stuff around the house, instead of just one big thing like the dolly.
They dusted as fast as they could, which was actually not very fast because Mrs. Curran had lots of fancy little objects on shelves that you had to be really careful around. And, of course, there were lots of dolls. Most of them were in cases, so they didn’t need to be dusted, but some were out in the open and Kit, Ellie, and Toby were extra careful as they blew dust off their little doll heads. It was hard for Ellie not to play with them, and it seemed hard for Toby not to play with them, but it was clearly very, very, very, very hard for Kit not to play with them.
“This one is my favorite,” Kit would say, but then a few minutes later, she’d say, “Wait, no, this one! Look at her pants! I think she’s an explorer. Those look like explorer pants, I think. Oh, but look at that one over there!”
A little while later they were finally finished, so Ellie waved the list in the air eagerly. Together, they unscrewed the hinges on cabinet doors and adjusted them so they didn’t hang crookedly. They hammered a bit on the frames of the doors that didn’t close neatly to smash in the wood a little so there was more space for the door to swing. For the tables, Ellie asked Toby to cut some tiny circles out of a cardboard box. They pancaked them together, then stuck them under the table legs so everything was level.
“Let’s go tell Mrs. Curran!” Ellie said proudly when they’d finished. Even though big builds were a lot of fun, sometimes it felt really good to finish lots and lots of little things like this.
“Tell me what?” Mrs. Curran asked from the bottom of the stairs. The three of them jumped in surprise, but then Ellie grinned.
“That we finished dusting! But we also did lots of other stuff to help you. See? Come look,” she said, and waved Mrs. Curran over to one of the doll cabinets. “Remember how this door was crooked? We strai
ghtened it out!”
“So you did,” Mrs. Curran said, looking impressed. “My goodness. I’ve never so much as held a hammer, and look at what you lot have managed!”
“Yes! And we also made the table in the kitchen not wobble,” Ellie went on. “And the door that goes to the little bathroom shuts better now.”
“You really did all that?” Mrs. Curran asked.
“Yes. I’m an engineer,” Ellie said firmly. She felt a little bad, though, because it wasn’t like Kit and Toby hadn’t done all the work, too. She fixed it by saying, “I’m an engineer, but we all did the work.”
Mrs. Curran was still marveling at how straight the doll cabinet door was, opening and shutting it several times. Finally, she looked up. “This is just wonderful. You know, I think—yes. Let’s see . . .” She slowly stooped down and opened one of the lower doll-cabinet doors, then reached inside. She rummaged around for a moment, then withdrew two dolls with braided black hair and bright eyes. She handed one doll to Kit, then the other to Ellie. Kit looked like she very truly might faint right then and there.
“For keeps?” Kit asked, eyes wide.
“Yes, yes. They’re plastic, not porcelain, so they aren’t quite as fragile as the ones I paint these days—but I think they’re lovely all the same,” Mrs. Curran said, smiling at them. She turned to Toby. “I’m afraid I don’t have any toys you would be interested in, Toby! It’s a pity that boys don’t play with dolls.”
Toby frowned—in fact, all three of them frowned. Toby played with dolls plenty—in fact, he really liked it when they played tea party with Ellie or Kit’s dolls. He knew all the rules about throwing fancy tea parties and which forks to use and never minded when the tea-party dolls suddenly became undercover spies who were only pretending to be at a normal tea party.
Toby looked at the ground, then over at Ellie’s new doll a little sadly. Mrs. Curran must not have noticed, though, because she stood up and shut the cabinet doors. “I think it’s very gentlemanly of you, Toby, to invite girls to help you build things. Plenty of boys wouldn’t do that, you know, much less let a girl wear his tool belt.”
The Next Level Page 3