The Good Egg

by Mariko Tamaki

  Ripley watched as April opened her notebook, which was full of a night’s worth of ideas, all laid out in sparkly pink pen.

  Ripley liked watching April hatch her plans. Sometimes April reminded Ripley of her oldest sister, Amy, who always knew where people were supposed to sit at breakfast and who was allowed to watch what on TV.

  Amy said Ripley had to sit at the end of the table because she was the littlest. And Amy thought table sitting should go by age. Which Ripley never understood, because what does age have to do with pancakes?

  “Okay.” April took one of the giant breaths that usually preceded her having a lot of ideas about something. “Okay, so I was thinking about this all night last night, and considering all the possible routes available, I was thinking maybe we need to do something BOLD, you know? So, I’m a huge fan of the Mermaid Lemonade Stand series—AREN’T WE ALL—and I realized, Holy Chita Rivera, this series would be a great way to approach Goldi-Scout and the Three Bears! And then I thought, we could do a whole thing as MERMAIDS!? Under the Sea, Fanta-sea! What do you think? Eh? Amazing, right?”

  April paused and waited for everyone else to think it was a good idea.

  A very good, big, complicated idea.

  “Uh,” Jo said, trying to imagine an underwater play. “So, it’s Goldi-Scout and the Three Bears, but the bears are mermaids?”

  “Yes! And our HERO”—April waved her pencil in the air—“would be Annabella Goldi-Scout, underwater detective. DETECTING who slept in whose mermaid bed!”

  Hes looked like her left eyeball was going to explode out of her face.

  “Okay.” Jo paused, sat back on the grass, and looked up at the sky like she was trying to picture it. “So, the whole play would be under . . . water?”

  April nodded vigorously.

  There was a tick or two of silence.

  Finally, Hes, dressed in her hamburger hoodie (which is a hoodie with a picture of a hamburger on it and not a hoodie made of hamburger), pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Man! This seems, like, REALLY complicated.”

  Like everything Roanoke did, Hes wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Hes wished she was playing basketball and not talking about plays.

  “Uh.” Wren raised her hand. “Why don’t we just do the play, like, a regular play?”

  Wren was moderately excited to be doing a play but wished it was a play about a goth girl who loved poetry and not a mermaid bear.

  “Oh.” April looked down at her notebook. “Yeah, I mean, y-yeah. I suppose we could just . . . do that . . .”

  A soft silence fell over the group.

  Ripley raised her hand to say something.

  Ripley wanted to say that, actually, it wouldn’t take Goldi-Scout long to figure out the mystery of who was sleeping in the MerBears’ beds since, if her memory of the story was right, it was GOLDI-SCOUT herself who had done the sleeping, ending up in Baby Bear’s perfect, not-too-soft bed. But before she could say anything, Miss Panache swooped in like a big purple velvet bird.

  “GREETINGS, thespians,” Miss Panache crooned. “I’ve been told to remind you that this work will help you earn your Get Your Act Together badge for playwriting, as well as the Acting Out (a.k.a. Nobody Knows I’m a Thespian) badge.”

  The scouts nodded, Panache thought, somewhat solemnly.

  “Yes. Okay. I’m getting a sense. A feeling. What? What’s happening here?” Panache waved her hands over Jo’s and Hes’s heads, stirring the air with her open palms. “You know what? I’m not getting a creative vibe from this group. I’m getting . . . a ‘no.’”

  April sighed. “We’re just . . . having a little bit of discussion around the staging. Which, as we all know, is a crucial element of a play’s success.”

  “Certainly, certainly.” Miss Panache curled her finger under her chin. “Perhaps if you are stuck on staging, you could shift to the WHO of your play. WHO are your characters, what are their motivations? Yes?”

  “Sure.” Jo shrugged. “I mean, yes.”

  Miss Panache clapped her hands.

  “Remember,” Panache trilled, as she pranced off to the next group, “there are no small parts, only short plays! YES!”

  Not far away, sopranos Susie Woo of Dartmoor and Sarah Smithereen of Woolpit—part of team The Scout Who Cried Wolf—were doing their best wolf impressions.

  “AOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Susie trilled, holding her hands out.

  “You know what? What if it was a growl?” Sarah stepped forward, rubbing her temples. “What if you sneered and went, like, GRRROOOOOOOOOOO?”

  Susie frowned and tugged on her braids. “That’s not CRYING wolf.”

  “Right,” Sarah said. “Well, try it in a middle C.”

  “AOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo!”

  “Oh, I’m loving that,” Sarah cooed, pressing her hands together. “That’s a yes for me. Do THAT again.”

  “AOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo!”

  “Okay,” April sighed, flipping a page over in her notebook. “So, roles.”

  “I mean, I can be Mama Bear,” Wren offered. “I have this super cool apron thing I could wear. It’s got, like, a skull on it.”

  “I can be Papa Bear,” Hes said.

  “Shirley Prendergast, here’s an idea.” Jo smiled. “I can not be in the play. I can do the lighting and technical stuff.”

  Everyone looked at Ripley, who was actually thinking about eggsportation and the best way to move Eggie back to the nest.

  “What part do you want, Rip?” April asked.

  Ripley had kind of been expecting, ever since she found out they were doing Goldi-Scout, that she would be Baby Bear.

  Ripley had been some version of Baby Bear ever since she was a baby. Because she was the Baby. The youngest. The smallest. All the time. No matter what.

  She was a baby in all her siblings’ games. She’d been a baby puppy and a baby kitten. She’d been a baby crying and a baby in a store. She’d been dress-up baby and even a unicorn baby.

  She was also Baby Jesus at her grandma’s church Christmas pageant every year. Even when the manger was a tight fit.

  “I guess I’m the Baby Bear,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be,” April said. “I mean. You can be Goldi-Scout. If you want. I mean, I could also be Goldi-Scout, because I’m older and Goldi-Scout is older . . .”

  “Nah.” Ripley shrugged. It felt so obvious that April was Goldi-Scout. That’s who April WAS. “It’s okay. I’ll be Baby Bear.”

  “Okay, great!” April turned back to her notebook. “So, I’m Goldi-Scout. Now we just have to write it up, I guess.”

  “AOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo!”

  “Well,” Wren said, “maybe we should talk about how we want to change the story, because we get to change it, right? Maybe we don’t have to use beds?”

  Ripley blinked. Baby Bear had the perfect bed, she thought. Soft, but not too soft.

  Just then, a smile spread across Ripley’s face.

  “Socks,” she said to herself. “Socks!”

  “Not LOCKS,” April corrected, squinting as she scribbled new ideas into her notebook. “SCOUT. Goldi-SCOUT and the three everyday, run of the mill, perfectly ordinary bears.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Fortunately, the pile of socks Mal had found under her bunk the day before was still sitting in front of Roanoke when Ripley rocketed back with a wheelbarrow and Barney in tow.

  “How long is the rehearsal break?” Barney asked.

  “Long enough to get to Eggie and back,” Ripley promised. “’Cause I am Ripley and I am superfast!”

  Ripley tossed the socks into the wheelbarrow, Barney climbed on board, and Ripley rocketed them back to the forest.

  “What a great idea!” Barney smiled somewhat nervously, gripping the wheelbarrow tightly with both hands as they bumped and swayed, buffered by a pile of socks. “Hey, where did all these socks come from?”

  “Feet,” Ripley guessed, swerving to avoid a tree.

  “It�
�s a Lumberjane mystery!” she huffed. “Good thing is, now we can wrap Eggie in socks and wheelbarrow him up to the nest.”

  “Like an EGG ROLL!” Barney grinned as they ground to a halt in front of Eggie.

  Who had not moved.

  Because eggs, generally, can only roll down a hill.

  And the nest was at least twenty feet away, uphill.

  “EGGS-ACTLY!” Ripley tossed handfuls of socks into the air.

  “So, why do you think Eggie is a him?” Barney wondered, jumping out of the wheelbarrow.

  “Oh.” Ripley looked at Eggie. “Maybe it’s not. I mean, Eggie is an egg. It could be a her!”

  “Or. Maybe Eggie is a they,” Barney offered. “You know . . . like me.”

  “WHUT!” Ripley said, smiling at Barney. “That would be SO COOL.”

  “Sure,” Barney said. “Eggie can be just . . . Eggie!”

  “Eggie is Eggie,” Ripley agreed. “YES!”

  Barney grinned, twirling their fingers in the air like Miss Panache. “YES! I’m feeling this. YES!”

  It took a while to lift Eggie into the wheelbarrow and pack Eggie up with mismatched socks and then another effort to roll the wheelbarrow up the relatively steep incline back to the nest.

  Getting Eggie through the hole Eggie had rolled out of also proved to be a bit tricky. For one, the hole wasn’t really a hole but a gap created when one of the branches in the nest had cracked, just enough to create a space the size of Eggie.

  Generally, it is harder to get something back in than to pour something out. Which anyone who has ever poured too much milk on their cereal knows.

  “One, two, three, PUSH!” Ripley growled. And with a large shove, Eggie popped back into the nest.

  “Do you think Eggie’s mom will come back?” Ripley panted as they rolled Eggie to the center of the nest.

  “Actually,” Barney noted, “since both mothers and fathers of various species perform the role of caring for unhatched eggs, it could be the dad who comes back. Like, with seahorses, the female lays the eggs, and the male looks after them.”

  “What if Eggie is a giant baby seahorse?!” Ripley gasped.

  “Now THAT would be something,” Barney said. “The key is to observe what does happen instead of deciding what you think should happen.”

  “That’s a science thing,” Ripley said, unsure.

  “That’s a life thing.” Barney winked.

  Once Eggie was resettled in the nest, Ripley couldn’t help but think the nest looked pretty bare without Eggie’s recently hatched siblings. Like a single cookie on a plate, Eggie looked a little . . . lonely.

  “Maybe we should keep the socks on Eggie,” she said, touching the top of Eggie gently. “In case Eggie gets cold.”

  “Actually, this nest is pretty warm,” Barney said, holding out their hand to test the temperature. “Which is kind of fascinating, given that there’s not an actual heat source in the nest. Maybe there’s something in the shells that has some sort of thermal quality. Anyway, we need to leave the nest as close to the way we found it as possible, so the parent doesn’t get scared off. Even though we’ve already broken the Do Not Disturb rule, we don’t want to disturb any more than we have to.”

  Ripley looked at Eggie. “Sorry, Eggie,” she said quietly.

  “We should get back,” Barney said, stepping up onto the edge of the nest.

  “Okay,” Ripley sighed.

  Ripley leaned forward and looked Eggie in the part of the shell that she guessed would be Eggie’s eyes.

  “Okay, Eggie,” she said quietly. “We have to go. But you’re going to be okay. Even if it gets dark. You can always sing yourself an egg song. And pretty soon your parent will come back for you. Maybe with all your siblings. And I’m going to come back and visit you every day until they do.”

  “Bye, Eggie,” Barney called, hopping over the edge of the nest.

  Ripley leaned in closer. “I was the last egg too,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.”

  As Ripley turned away, she could have sworn she heard a small tick-ticking sound. Like a little claw on a teacup.

  But when she looked back, Eggie was just sitting there. Still.

  After Ripley and Barney left, the purple of evening turned into the black of night over the nest.

  Alone in the dark, Eggie might have heard a little hoo-hooing from a bird in the tree branch above it. Or a skittering of squirrel claws on branches. A snuffling of a passing skunk looking for a meal of berries and grubs.

  If Eggies could hear.

  If so, late into the night, Eggie would also have heard all that noise stop, as if the forest itself were pausing, listening.

  To the sound of an approaching intruder.

  A whizzing sound, the squeak of a wheel. A sharp voice.

  A hand slipped out from in between the bushes, followed by a hat, and a head.

  “Coast is clear,” the voice said. “COME ON, EUGENE! LET’S GO!”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Lumberjanes, since their founding a very very very long time ago, have had a very interesting history of performance and performance art.

  In the early days, most plays were instructional demonstrations, focused on safety and the best way to, say, milk a goat. Over time, larger productions became popular, including a run of the Shakespeare’s Feminist Sister theater company, which produced a string of hits including Julia Cesar, starring Julia “The Boxer” Gadolinium Maybelle Cesar.

  That night, after dinner, April curled up in her bunk with her notebook and scratched away at possible insightful dialogue for Goldi-Scout and the Three (Nonmermaid) Bears.

  So far she had,

  Well, look at this very nice house cottage! I wonder who lives here.

  One line. Which she hated. I mean, was it a cottage? Did it have to be?

  Jo headed to the library to look up books on theatrical lighting.

  Mal and Molly spent the night practicing their new parts on their favorite picnic table with their favorite snacks, apples and marshmallows.

  “Okay,” Molly said, finally shaking out her fingers. “We need to stop. I feel like we’ve been playing for hours.”

  “We sort of have been,” Mal said. “Isn’t it awesome! I love getting it right when it just plays and you don’t have to think about it.”

  “I feel like I’m finally getting better,” Molly said, looking at her accordion, with its pearly finish. “Like I can actually do this? You know? Like no one at home would believe it if I told them I was playing an instrument!”

  “You’re so good,” Mal said, biting into her apple. “I still think we should start a band! Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “Would we have to sing in front of people?” Molly wondered, her cheeks getting hot.

  “Yes,” Mal said. “But it would still be amazing.”

  “What would we call the band?” Molly said, resting her chin on her accordion.

  “How about The Radioactive Scout Project?” Mal offered. “Or Indigo MENACE. Or—”

  “Hmmm,” Molly said, trying to picture it in her head. She couldn’t see it. All she could see was the Molly who would never do that sort of thing.

  “CAMPERS!” Jen’s voice cut into the night. “LIGHTS OUT IN TEN!”

  “Tomorrow,” Mal said, hopping off the bench. “Tomorrow I’m going to write our first song. And we can play it in the play. I’ll write a BEASTLY BALLAD!”

  “You ever notice the little songs Ripley sings?” Molly asked, looking at her sneakers glowing white against the dark nighttime grass as they walked back to the cabin. “She’s always singing these little songs.”

  “About what?” Mal asked, looking up at the crowded sky.

  “I think . . . eggs,” Molly said. “I think I heard eggs . . .”

  “Was Ripley at dinner tonight?” Mal asked, as they got closer to the cabin.

  “She was, but she was really quiet,” Molly said, “and she only had one hot dog.”

  “
Well, that’s weird. Do you think she’s nervous about doing a play?” Mal wondered.

  “I don’t think so,” Molly said. “Do you think she’ll be Baby Bear?”

  “I mean, she kind of IS Baby Bear, right? She’s all cuddly and cute and sweet?” Mal held up her arms like she was giving a Baby Bear a big hug.

  Back in the cabin, April lay on her bed, glaring at her notebook like it was a rainy day.

  “It’s just such a dumb story,” she groaned. “So. Some kid breaks into a house and eats some bears’ food and sleeps in their beds? And the Papa Bear has a hard bed and the Mama Bear has a soft bed? These are stereotypes! How is this an interesting play? I’ll tell you what—it’s NOT, and I think it would be better if we could make it underwater, even though I know . . .”

  “Can’t do it,” Jo said, not looking up from her book. “Yes.”

  “It’s not very ODD,” Ripley said, curled up in her bunk. “Going into a bear house.”

  April leaned out over her bed. “ODD?”

  “You’re not supposed to disturb an animal’s home,” Ripley said, solemnly. “Observe. Document. Do Not Disturb.”

  “That’s right.” Jo, who was well read on the scientific process, including the ODD approach, looked up, surprised. “When did you start reading Miss Jane Petunia Massy Acorn Dale?”

  “When I met Eggie,” Ripley said. “And Barney told me about it.”

  “Eggie?” April dropped her notebook and sat up in bed. “Hey,” she said, looking at Ripley, “Were you saying something about—”

  Just then, Mal and Molly walked in the door, followed by Jen, tapping her watch.

  “Lights out in two minutes!” Jen said, collapsing onto her bunk. “We’re going to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. Sleep is golden.”

  “What’s a reasonable hour?” Jo wondered, genuinely.

  “Now is a reasonable hour,” Jen noted, snapping off the lights. “Goodnight, scouts.”

  “GOODNIGHT, JEN!” everyone whispered loudly.

  CHAPTER 11

  By the time the half-moon was high in the sky like half of a pie, everyone in the cabin was asleep.

  Except for Ripley.