He howled like he was a bear and I had stepped on his big bear paw.
I opened my eyes wide and blinked slowly, which is my I’m so sweet and innocent face. I learned it from Cora. It’s what her face always looks like.
“Oopsy daisy,” I said.
“Oopsy daisy!” repeated Pearl from her high chair. She repeats absolutely everything, which is so funny, except when she repeats bad words. To be honest, I think that’s the funniest of all, but my parents don’t. They raise their eyebrows and say, “Oh no, no, Pearl! That’s not a nice word at all!”
She must’ve really liked the way oopsy daisy sounded, because she started saying it over and over again: “Oopsy daisy, oopsy daisy, oopsy oopsy oopsy daisy!” She had spaghetti sauce all over her face, which made it even funnier.
I couldn’t help but giggle, and my giggling just made her do it more.
“Don’t encourage her,” my mom scolded. But it was too late.
“OOPSY DAISY! OOPSY DAISY!! OOOOOOO—” Pearl shouted at the top of her lungs.
I was laughing so loud, I snorted. That made Pearl laugh, too.
“It’s not funny!” Jude yelled.
“NOT FUNNY!” Pearl screamed. She scrunched up her little face to imitate his mad face.
My dad blew on his fingers to make a whistle sound. I don’t know how he does that, but it’s really cool. Kind of almost like a superpower.
Then Jude and I wiped up the water, and after we’d finished eating, Dad got out the vacuum cleaner to suck up the cheese from the rug.
“But Dad!” I said. “You-know-who doesn’t like you-know-what!”
Pearl is absolutely terrified of the vacuum cleaner. Imagine if the bogeyman and a werewolf and a brain-gobbling zombie were all rolled into one. Now imagine how terrified you’d be if you saw that creature in your living room. That is how Pearl looks every time Mom or Dad takes out the vacuum cleaner.
I thought maybe Dad forgot about this. But he said, “Yep, I know she’s scared of the vacuum, kiddo. But if we keep her away from it, she’ll never stop being scared. She has to face her fear.”
“Sounds like you’re trying to torture a poor little baby to me,” I said.
My mom piped up. “I think it was Eleanor Roosevelt who said, ‘Do one thing that scares you every day.’”
My mom loves quoting famous people. It’s her favorite hobby.
“You mean, Eleanor Roosevelt wants me to hug a shark today? And climb in a volcano tomorrow?” I joked.
“She didn’t say, ‘Do something really dumb every day,’” said Jude.
At just that moment, Pearl saw the vacuum and her eyes got enormously big. Her lower lip started to tremble.
“No vakzoom, Daddy! I NO LIKE DAT VAKZOOM!”
Dad told her we had to use the vacuum but she could go into the other room if it was too loud. So she ran into her bedroom as fast as her little legs could carry her. She gets to have her own bedroom, and I have to share one with Jude, which kind of isn’t fair. But her room is so teeny tiny, it is more like a closet than a room, and I don’t think all my stuffed animals would fit in there. Plus, our room is upstairs next to my parents’ bedroom, which makes me feel safer when I go to bed. So I’m really not that jealous.
Pearl stayed in her room for a minute, but then she walked into the hall and peeked out around the corner.
“Vakzoom too WOUD!”
“Yep. It is loud,” said my dad as he sucked up all the cheese. “You can say, ‘Quiet down, vacuum!’”
“BE QUIET, YOU NAUGHTY VAKZOOM!” she shouted.
Then we all laughed and she laughed, too. So she said it again and again, and she even came out into the living room and shouted it right at the vacuum.
“Pearl!” I shrieked as I gave her a giant hug. “You did it! You’re not afraid of the vacuum anymore!”
“Well, it’s probably not as simple as that,” said my mom, “but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.” She was putting strawberries and whipped cream into bowls for dessert.
“It’s just like when you were Pearl’s age, and you were scared of going down the drain in the bathtub,” Dad said to me.
“Me? Scared of the bath?” I snorted. “I love baths! I’m practically a mermaid.”
“No, Dad’s right! I remember that!” Jude said. He was cutting his berries in half with a knife and fork instead of just popping them into his mouth like a normal person. “You were so scared. Mom bought you every kind of bubble bath and rubber ducky and stuff, but you refused to get in the bath for weeks!”
He laughed so hard, he doubled over.
I really, really wanted to grab the whipped cream and spray it in Jude’s big laughing face.
But that seemed like a waste of good whipped cream. So I squirted that cream into my bowl instead. The only thing I love more than extra cheese is extra whipped cream.
“Then, one day, I just tossed you in the tub,” Dad said. “You cried for a minute, but then I made your windup scuba diver swim, and you calmed down. After a few days like that, you were pretty much over your terror of baths.”
I stood up really fast then and shouted, “BINGO!”
“BINGO!” shouted Pearl.
“What is it?” Mom asked.
“I think I know just how to solve Maya’s problem!”
I shoved the rest of the berries and cream in my mouth real fast so I could get to work in my bedroom.
“Uh-oh,” Jude groaned. “I don’t think I like the sound of this.”
Chapter 8
The next day, at the beginning of recess, Minnie told me she had seen Maya walking into the office with her lunch box. So I ran right up to Miss Tibbs and asked if I could go see Maya in the office. Cora came with me.
“Do you plan on knocking over an entire can of pennies?” Miss Tibbs asked me.
“Nope,” I said. Of course, I didn’t plan on it last time. It just happened. Things like that just happen to me sometimes.
Miss Tibbs looked at me for a second and frowned. Then Cora piped up.
“I’d be happy to go with her, Miss Tibbs!” squeaked Cora. “I went to preschool with Maya, and I think I can help. With your permission, of course.”
Grown-ups love Cora. It’s like she puts an enchanted spell on them with her cuteness. Here are the ingredients of the spell:
1. Squeaky voice.
2. Bouncy red curls.
3. Polka-dot dresses that are always very tidy and never have any rips or chocolate stains on them.
All these things make her seem sweeter than a double-fudge brownie with whipped cream on top. But the secret ingredient is:
4. Perfect manners.
Not just “please” and “thank you” but “if you insist” and “pardon me.” Her twin sister, Camille, doesn’t have these manners, so I don’t know where Cora got them from. But what I do know is they work like magic to get grown-ups to do what she wants. Including Miss Tibbs.
When Cora started talking, Miss Tibbs’s grumpy expression melted into a peaceful one. Her eyebrows un-scrunched. Her frown really and truly turned upside down! It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was as close as Miss Tibbs gets. I have never seen Miss Tibbs really smile. I don’t think it is actually possible.
“Thank you, Miss Klein, for the kind offer,” Miss Tibbs said. “You may both go. Just be sure there are no disasters this time.”
“Absolutely, Miss Tibbs,” Cora squeaked. “Thank you very much!”
We grabbed our lunch boxes. I peeked inside mine to make sure the special surprise was still in there. Then we zoomed over to the office.
Jude wasn’t there, because it wasn’t one of his recess mediator days. What a relief.
Jude’s best friend, Ezra, was there, though. Ezra is so nice. If he were my brother, instead of Jude, I bet we would never fight. We’d just hold hands and skip around happily like elves. Here’s what Ezra looks like:
1. Braces! He was the first person I know to get braces, and they
are so fascinating. He can’t eat corn on the cob or taffy anymore, and he can’t ride bumper cars! Plus he has rubber bands in his mouth. Real, true rubber bands! And he says he got to pick the colors.
2. Huge brown eyes with very long eyelashes.
3. Brown hair that is super curly and fluffy. Cora has big curls, but Ezra has little ones. For my birthday last year, I asked Mom and Dad to buy me a set of little pink foam hair curlers. I really thought they’d make my hair as curly as Ezra’s. But Mom said I had to sleep with them on my head, and how can a person sleep with a whole bunch of rollers itching her like crazy all night? So they didn’t work.
Ezra was walking into the principal’s office, but it wasn’t because he was in trouble. It was because the principal is his mom! I wish my mom were the principal. Then I could rule the school. I’d go on the loudspeaker all the time and make announcements like “Matthew Sawyer, you are in big trouble for being a rotten old stink-bag. Report to my mom’s office IMMEDIATELY!”
Ezra never does stuff like that, which I think is a waste of his good fortune.
“Hi, Ezra!” I said.
“Hi, Ronny,” he said back. Even though I don’t like that nickname, I don’t mind so much when Ezra says it, because Ezra is very kind to me. He always lets me play with Jude and him, even when Jude yells, “Get outta here, you pest!” I think he appreciates little sisters because he is an only child and doesn’t have any of his own. He has a guinea pig named Ziggy, but it’s not the same thing.
Ezra’s mom is super nice, too. She is from Jamaica, so she has a way of talking that makes everything seem like a song. Ezra does not talk like that. He has a way of talking that makes everything he says seem like a hurricane. He talks super, super fast.
“Oh hey, listen,” he said. I did get ready to listen because when Ezra talks, you have to pay close attention. “I’m probably coming to your house after school today with Jude because I thought I had computer class but it doesn’t start for a few weeks so I’m about to ask my mom if I can go home with Jude because we’re making a new movie and we’re kind of at the most crucial scene.”
He can say a whole bunch of sentences in the same time it takes regular people to say just a few words. Sometimes all his words blur together and I don’t know what on earth he’s talking about. But since he has been Jude’s best friend for so long, I’ve gotten good at understanding him.
Ezra talks fast but he types faster. He is a computer whiz. He can make up his own video games and movies and music. Ezra loves music, just like me. The only difference is, I like popular songs that play on the radio, and Ezra likes music from the olden days before we were born. He and his mom even have an old-fashioned record player that works and everything.
When he comes over, here’s what Ezra and Jude do:
1. Make scary movies about funny things like evil parakeets.
2. Play video games.
3. Read comic books.
4. Eat nachos they make in the microwave.
I think video games and comic books are really boring, but I do like nachos. I also like being in their movies because I always get to be the Scream Queen. This is the girl who screams bloodcurdling screams of terror. Ezra says there is always one in every scary movie.
“Okay, see you later!” I told Ezra as he went into his mom’s office. Then Cora and I turned to Maya.
Cora gave Maya a little wave. Maya gave a little wave back.
“Mind if we sit down?” I asked oh-so-innocently.
“Okay,” Maya whispered. She had her hair in a long black braid down her back. I thought of how fun it would be to snip the braid off and wear it on my head. No matter how much I try, I can never grow my hair long like that. I wondered if Maya’s mom gave her special vitamins to make her hair grow long. I wanted to ask right then, but I figured first we should take care of business.
So I sat down in the empty chair next to her, and Cora sat down next to me. I hummed a little song, just to show how everything was hunky-dory. I put my lunch box on my lap. It is a supercool lunch box. The front is all blue with a poodle wearing earmuffs and ice-skating.
I slowly unzipped my lunch box … and then I shrieked.
Right there was the world’s most enormous spider. It was as big as my hand and very black with furry legs. It was sitting right on top of my cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich.
“A spider!” I shrieked. Well, I pretended to shriek. Of course, I had known the spider was in there the whole time. I put it there myself. And it wasn’t a real spider, just a fake one from last Halloween. But it doesn’t look fake at all.
I looked over at Maya really fast to see what she would do.
She didn’t jump up. In fact, she didn’t even move a muscle. She just opened her eyes really, really, really big. And she screamed.
You know how in the cartoons when someone screams super loud, all the glass in the windows break?
That is how loud she screamed. Maybe even louder.
I think I’m a great Scream Queen, but the sound that came out of Maya’s mouth was a hundred times louder than even my best scream.
Principal Powell and Ezra came running into the room. She must have been in the middle of eating lunch because she was holding a thermos of soup in one hand and a spoon in the other. Well, she ran so fast, the thermos of soup splashed all over her clothes and onto the floor. And I guess that made the floor really slippery, because before I knew it, she was yelling, “Ahhhh!” and Ezra was saying, “Mom! Watch out!” while she fell backward onto her butt. Which made the soup splash everywhere.
Meanwhile, Maya just kept right on screaming. I didn’t even know how she could breathe, because her scream lasted so long. She was like an opera singer!
Cora is a fast thinker. She snatched the spider out of my lunch box and yelled, “It’s fake! It’s fake!” but Maya probably couldn’t even hear her, because she was yelling so loud.
All sorts of people came running into the office. The school nurse came and the custodian and even my own teacher, Miss Mabel. And, of course, Miss Tibbs, too.
Mrs. Rose/Mackenzie helped Principal Powell up. The other grown-ups crowded around Maya. I was absolutely frozen in place. How can a person think with all that noise?
Finally, Cora said, “Look! I’m taking the fake spider out of here!” and she walked out of the office with it. Then Maya stopped screaming and started crying instead.
I felt awful. I felt worse than awful. I felt even worse than the time I’d accidentally whacked Pearl in the leg with the mini golf club when I was trying to get a hole in one.
I was only trying to help Maya, the same way my dad had helped Pearl and me by making us face our fears. I thought if she just saw a bug, right up close, she wouldn’t be scared anymore.
The nurse took Maya into her office, and everybody else went back to work, except for Miss Tibbs, who marched me right into the principal’s office.
Principal Powell was really nice about the whole thing. It helped that Ezra defended me.
“Mom, she didn’t mean to scare her. Well, she did mean to, but only because she really wants to help,” Ezra said super fast. “Her heart was in the right place.”
Principal Powell sighed.
“Your heart is always in the right place, Veronica,” she said. “It’s your big ideas that get you in trouble sometimes.”
I felt so bad about how I’d made Maya cry that I started crying a little bit, too.
“It’s all right,” Principal Powell said. “But how about you give Maya some space for a few days, okay?”
I nodded.
Then Principal Powell handed me a tissue and sent me to lunch. Cora was waiting for me in the hallway, and she squeezed my hand all the way to the cafeteria.
Chapter 9
That night, Dad made sloppy Joes, only he calls them sloppy Giovannis because he’s Italian and he’s funny.
Sloppy Giovannis are the super-supreme best. I mean, you’re allowed to be messy when you
eat them because, well, look what they’re named! And if you think regular people are sloppy when they eat sloppy Joes, just imagine what Pearl looks like! She gets the sauce all over her face and hands and even her hair.
“Oh, you’re my cute little Pearly Pig!” I usually say to her.
But I was feeling so lousy about Maya that I didn’t smile when I saw Pearl rub her sloppy Giovanni on her belly. I didn’t even touch my juicy sandwich.
“What’s up, Ronny?” Mom said. “You look blue.”
“Nothing,” I mumbled. I was so down in the dumps, I didn’t even tell her not to call me Ronny.
“Awww, don’t worry about what happened with Maya today,” Ezra said. He always stays for dinner when we have sloppy Giovannis.
“What happened with Maya today?” Mom asked.
“Didn’t Ronny tell you she got sent to the principal’s office?” Jude asked.
“Would you put a lid on it!” I growled.
I was so furious, I stormed into my room and slammed the door. Then a few seconds later, I opened the door again but just to tape up my sign that said:
I made the sign a long time ago. It was Mom’s idea. She said I should use it when I was blazing mad and needed some time to myself.
I practiced handstands against the wall for a while. Then I put on my pajamas and took out all my stuffed dogs to line them up on my bed, which is the bottom bunk. I have seventeen of them. Most are bulldogs because they’re my favorite breed, but I have other kinds, too, like a cute white poodle and a gigantic golden retriever.
Then Mom knocked on the door.
“Permission to enter?” she said, like we were in a spaceship.
“Permission granted,” I said back.
She sat next to me on my bed and gave me a big hug, and I told her the whole story. Mom is great at listening to my problems. That’s because listening is pretty much all she does all day long, so she gets lots of practice.
The Fix-It Friends--Have No Fear! Page 3