“I have a seat saved for you, right here in the front row,” Mrs. Larson tells Jill.
Jill gives Darby a sad face, and I feel a little bit jealous. I can’t believe Darby’s best friend is back. What’s going to happen to Darby and me? And to the Rizzlerunk Club? I can hardly hear my own thoughts, it’s so loud. Everyone wants to talk to Jill at once, but when SHTV comes on, they all settle down.
“And . . . don’t forget to guess our Mystery Kid of the Week!” the announcer says.
“Everyone knows it’s Lily!” Mikey shouts.
“Who’s Lily?” asks Jill.
Darby points at me. I can tell I’m bright red. This whole Mystery Kid thing is my worst nightmare. It’s Wednesday already, and I’m going to have to go on SHTV on Friday. I’m thinking about pretending to be sick, but I already know that doesn’t work very well with Mom and Dad.
“’Ello, Lily!” Jill says. “Lovely to meet you.”
“For those of you who don’t know her,” says Mrs. Larson, “this is Jill Johnson. She left us last year to move to London, but circumstances have brought her family back, and we are happy to have Jill join our class.”
Clearly everyone but me knows Jill.
We open our math books and start working quietly on fractions. Then Darby passes me a note. I open it. It says:
I tuck the note away and work more on my fractions. I don’t know what to think about this.
It’s confusing. The bell rings for first recess.
Jill grabs Darby’s arm and says in her silly accent, “Let’s go play with the Jilly Beans! It will be so lovely to be back together!”
“You have an accent already?” Darby asks. “In eight months?” She stops Jill so I can catch up.
“British accents are simply contagious!” Jill says. “Oh, Darby, I’ve so much to tell you! London was just brilliant! I had ever so many lovely friends. It’s too bad Mummy had to move back to her dull Seattle office, and we had to move house again. We really expected to stay there permanently.”
“Mummy?” Darby says, then she gets a sad look on her face. “Jill, why didn’t you tell me you were coming back?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise!” Jill says. “Plus, Mummy didn’t know it would happen. It was really fast. All of a sudden we had to pack up and leave.”
I feel completely awkward standing there.
“Oh, yeah,” Darby says, pointing to me. “This is Lily, my new friend. She moved here at the beginning of the year.”
Jill looks me up and down.
“Brilliant unibrow,” she says.
I stand there.
“Come, Darby,” Jill says. “Let’s go play with Gabriella and the rest of the Jilly Beans!”
“Um . . .” Darby says. “Okay. Come on, Lily.” We follow Jill. Darby looks at me.
“It’ll be fine,” she says.
When we get there, the Jilly Beans are playing four square with three people. Jill says, “Darby and I play winners!”
Gabriella catches the ball.
“Lovely catch, Gabby,” Jill says, “but you bodged it. In a proper game of four square, you don’t catch the ball! You’re out. Darby, shall we?”
Darby and Jill step into the four-square court, and I stand by Gabriella at the edge. There is what Mom would call an awkward silence.
Jill’s words repeat in my head. “Brilliant unibrow.”
I know I have a unibrow, but I don’t like having it pointed out by a stranger. I feel stupid. I want to go hang out in my turtle shell.
To my relief, the bell rings and we go in from recess. But the next thing I know, it’s lunch, then lunch recess. It’s all the same — Darby, Jill, and the Jilly Beans, with me feeling left out. I decide to go into the library, my safe place, for last recess. I’m reading on the big chair next to Iris when Darby comes in.
“Lily!” she whispers, waving for me to come outside.
Jill is outside the door with Darby.
“Gabriella’s being cheeky,” Jill tells me, “so I quit the Jilly Beans. Darby says that I can be in the Rizzlerunk Club with you!”
“That’s okay, right, Lily?” Darby asks me.
“I guess,” I say, looking at Darby.
I thought she said that she didn’t want Jill in the club, but I guess she changed her mind — already!
I realize that I’d better try to be friends with Jill. So far I don’t like her very much. Mom says you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I feel like I already read the cover.
If I could, I might just put this book, unopened, back on the shelf — in London.
Darby comes home with me after school, as usual. Now that it’s just the two of us again, it feels like nothing’s changed.
“I can’t believe Jill’s back!” I say as we help ourselves to some celery and almond butter.
“I know,” says Darby. “I can’t believe I didn’t know she was coming back. We used to know everything about each other.”
“Are you happy she’s back?” I ask her.
“I guess,” she says. “But how could she have a British accent already? And why did she wear her dumb school uniform?”
“It’s kind of weird,” I say. “And I kind of don’t like what she said about me having a unibrow. I mean, I know I have one. Do you think I have one?”
“Oh, yeah,” says Darby. “You have one!”
“Well, I hate it,” I admit, “and I don’t want it anymore. I want two eyebrows, like everyone else. Except my dad, of course.”
“You could pluck them,” Darby says. “That’s what my mom does.”
“No way. I tried that once. It hurts. But I could shave between them,” I say. “I’ve seen my mom do it!”
I lead Darby into Mom and Dad’s bathroom, open a drawer, and pull out this pink razor thing that Mom says is for ladies. I pick up the razor and turn it on. It starts buzzing.
“Let me see that,” Darby says.
She takes the razor and shaves off a bunch of her arm hair. She has a two-inch bald patch on her arm.
“This thing really works!” she says. “Here, I’ll do it so you don’t mess up. Hold still!”
Darby brings the razor up to my eyebrows. I cross my eyes and try to see it.
“Stop it!” Darby says. “You’re squeezing your eyebrows together. Relax!”
She puts the razor against my face and moves it down between my eyebrows. “That looks good!” she says.
I look in the mirror. Now it looks like a unibrow with a little strip in the middle. “Do some more,” I say.
She puts the razor back onto my face and moves it downward. I feel it go right over my closed eyelid onto my cheek.
“Oops,” Darby says. “I think I cut off some eyelashes.”
I open my eyes and look in the mirror. Half of my right eyebrow and half of my right eyelashes are GONE!
“It was an accident,” she says.
“Now what am I going to do?” I ask. “I have to go on SHTV tomorrow!”
“We can fix it!” Darby says. “Don’t worry.”
She gets some brown eyeliner out of Mom’s drawer. “Let me do it,” I say, grabbing it out of her hand.
I try to draw in the missing part of my eyebrow, but it looks like crayon. I feel like I’m going to cry.
“Don’t get upset, Lily,” Darby says. “I have an idea!” She picks up the nail scissors.
“Hold still,” she says. “This is totally going to work.”
She takes my hair and cuts off a chunk next to my face.
“Now my hair looks weird, too!” I shout.
“No, it doesn’t,” she says. “You can’t even tell.”
She cuts the hair into pieces about the length of eyebrow hair. “Where’s your superglue?”
“Superglue?” I ask.
We find it in the junk drawer in the laundry room, then go back into the bathroom. “Let me do this,” I say. “I don’t want it to get any worse.”
I dab a little superglue at the edge of my eyebrow, t
hen take some of the hair that Darby cut from my head and press it to the superglue.
“That’s good!” Darby says.
“Oh, no! My finger’s stuck!” I yell. I try to tug it off, but it hurts. Darby tries, and she gets more hair stuck to my face.
“This is so bad! What am I going to do about SHTV?”
“I have an idea,” Darby says.
“Oh, great,” I say sarcastically. “Because this is a super good idea.”
“We look alike!” she tells me. “I’ll go on SHTV instead of you.”
“No one’s going to fall for that!”
“We can trick them!” Darby says. “We can trade clothes. I’ll go in early to be on SHTV, and you go to class and sit at my desk. No one will know the difference since we haven’t been on before.”
“But my hair’s longer than yours,” I say.
“That’s an easy one!” Darby says. “We’ll just cut it.”
She sounds so reassuring that I let her cut my hair all the way to my chin, just like hers. I watch it falling to the floor. When I look up, my hair is so shaggy that I look like Snort, and my finger’s still stuck to my eyebrow. Now I do start crying. I don’t want to tell Mom because I’m so embarrassed, but I decide there’s nothing else I can do.
“Mom!” I call.
Mom opens the door to the bathroom. She looks at me, then at the razor, the scissors, and the superglue.
“Lily, your hair! What have you done?”
I cry harder.
“My finger is stuck to my forehead!” I tell her.
“How did you manage that?” she asks me.
“Darby’s old best friend Jill came back to school from London, and she said that I have a unibrow, so we decided to shave it, but we accidentally shaved off half my eyebrow. Then we decided to glue some hair onto it to fix it, but when we put the hair on, my finger got stuck to my forehead!”
Mom comes over and gently pulls at my hand. It’s stuck.
“Let’s get you into the tub,” she says.
She fills the tub for me and I get in. I lay my head back into the bubbles and soak my forehead.
Mom leaves the room to call Darby’s mom to come and get her, and Darby and I agree on our plan for her to go on SHTV in the morning. Before Darby leaves, she puts on a pair of my sweatpants, my favorite shirt, and my coat, and leaves her clothes behind.
After a while Mom comes in and tries to pull at my finger again, but it still won’t come off my forehead. She gets a spatula from the kitchen.
“Lily, you know you are beautiful just the way you are,” Mom says, edging the spatula down between my finger and my forehead.
Mom always says stuff like this, and it doesn’t help. Well, maybe it helps a little bit.
“You should have asked for help if you were going to use my razor,” she continues, “and you should never use superglue without asking.”
“I know,” I say.
I feel the spatula edge down a little farther. Mom pushes a bit, and my finger pops off of my forehead!
“Thank goodness.” Mom sighs.
“How does it look?” I ask her.
She starts laughing.
“Let’s fix up that haircut,” she says.
I get out of the tub, and Mom wraps me up in a robe and puts a towel around my neck. She lifts up a bunch of my hair and clips it to the top of my head, then starts cutting. When she’s done with the first layer, she takes a little bit more hair from the clips and cuts it to the same length.
“How’s that?” she asks, combing through my hair.
I examine it. I look like Darby, but I still need bangs to make it right. “Can you cut bangs?” I ask her.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “You know how bad I am at cutting bangs.”
“I don’t care,” I say. “I want them. Besides, they can cover my eyebrows.”
Mom brushes a bunch of hair over my face so I look like a hair monster, and starts to clip bangs.
“Below my eyebrows,” I remind her.
When she’s done, she brushes them straight down. I see right away that they are angled across my forehead all uneven.
“Oh, dear,” she says. “Let me straighten those out.”
She cuts straight across my forehead, right at my eyebrows. Now they’re slanted the other way!
“Mom!” I say. “Can’t you cut them straight? I’m NOT going to school tomorrow,” I tell her. “Tomorrow is going to be the worst day ever. I have half an eyebrow and my hair looks like a boy’s!”
“You’ll be fine, Lily. Everything always blows over. Just try to be confident. You’re a great kid. Kids who say mean things usually feel insecure about themselves. The best thing you can do is be nice to them.”
Mom always says this, too.
“This wouldn’t have happened at my old school, Mom. No one teased me there. I had a lot of friends. I hate that you made me move here.”
“It’ll get better, Lily. It takes a while to adjust to a new life. It’s not easy for me, either. I just have the perspective to know that it will get better.”
I don’t know why Mom thinks that I don’t have perspective. I learned it in art.
In the morning I try to play sick, but Mom already knows why I don’t want to go to school. She might have even let me stay home if she didn’t have to work today.
“Let’s just put a Band-Aid over your eyebrow,” Mom suggests. “You can tell everyone at school you cut your head on a branch or something.”
I let her put the Band-Aid on. I look ridiculous.
I get to school wearing Darby’s clothes, and I’m just about to walk into class when Darby comes running. She’s wearing my clothes, she drew on a unibrow, and she does look kind of like me, except for her glasses.
“Lily! We almost forgot the glasses!” she pants.
She takes them off and hands them to me, then turns around and heads back to SHTV, using her fingers to guide her along the wall. I guess she really can’t see without her glasses. I put them on, and now I can’t see! I slide them low on my nose like an old lady, walk to Darby’s desk, and sit down like we’d planned. I pull the hood of Darby’s sweatshirt over my head to hide. A sweatshirt hood isn’t as good as a turtle shell, but it will have to do.
When SHTV starts, I can’t even listen, I’m so nervous. Finally, they call up the Mystery Kid of the Week.
“And today’s Mystery Kid of the Week is . . . Lily Lattuga from Mrs. Larson’s fourth-grade class! Lily will read today’s sports.”
I push the glasses way down on my nose, so I can look at the screen.
Darby is squinting so much that it looks like her eyes are shut.
“Today’s sports . . .” she says.
“Hey! That’s Darby!” shouts Gabriella. “That’s not Lily!”
“Gabriella, shush!” says Mrs. Larson, looking down at her desk and not paying attention.
“Today’s sports . . .” says Darby again. “The . . . the . . . Rrr . . . Dang it! I can’t read!”
“Move the cue cards closer, Zach,” I hear a teacher’s voice say from off-camera.
“The Rrrr . . . Ssss . . .” says Darby.
“She’s in fourth grade, and she can’t even read!” says the fifth-grader sitting at the news desk next to Darby, laughing.
Suddenly, Darby opens her eyes wide and puts her hand over her heart. What is she doing?
“That’s enough, Lily,” says a man’s voice from off-camera.
“But that’s what they sing at football games!” Darby says.
“Thank you to Lily Lattuga, the Mystery Kid of the Week,” says the voice. Now everyone in the class is cracking up, and Mrs. Larson is paying attention — and looking at me.
“Lily?” she says. “Lily Lattuga! What kind of prank are you and Darby trying to pull? Please come to my desk right now.”
I take off Darby’s glasses and put them on her desk. That’s when Darby stumbles into the classroom with her hands out in front of her, like it’s pitch-black and she
can’t see a thing. I hear everyone laughing. They’re pointing at me.
“Lily got her hair cut!” says Jill.
“What happened to your face?” shouts Ethan.
“Darby, please get your glasses and come here,” Mrs. Larson says.
It’s obvious that Darby can’t see her desk, so Iris gets up and brings her the glasses. Darby joins me at Mrs. Larson’s desk.
“Uh-oh. RTC, here we come,” Darby whispers to me.
Darby told me about the RTC because she had to go last year. She says RTC stands for Retraining Center, which is an empty classroom behind the principal’s office where they do electroshock therapy to train the bad kids to be good kids. She said that they hook wires all around your head. Then they make you do the thing that you did wrong — like maybe they’ll make me pretend to be Darby, and make Darby sing the national anthem — while they send electricity through your body so you will never do it again. Now that I think about it, I doubt that’s exactly true. But still, the thought of it is making my hands sweat, and I wipe them on my jeans.
“What’s going on?” says Mrs. Larson.
“Lily cut off half her eyebrow, and she didn’t want to go on SHTV,” Darby says. “So I wanted to help her by going in her place, but then I messed up.”
Mrs. Larson looks at the Band-Aid on my face, and she kind of smiles. “Lily? Is that what happened?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Okay, well, let’s not play any more switching games, all right?”
“Okay,” we both say.
“You two are quite a pair,” says Mrs. Larson. “Now, please take your seats.”
Everyone giggles as we sit down. I want to cry. This is the worst day, the worst school, the worst everything ever. Until recess — when things get even worse! Everyone is teasing me on the playground.
“Lily Lattuga can’t read! Lily Lattuga can’t read!”
Even the kindergartners are laughing at me, and they can’t read! Then Jill puts her finger and thumb in her mouth and does one of those extremely loud whistles that get everyone’s attention. Amazingly, everyone stops and looks at her. Even kids who weren’t paying attention in the first place.
The Rizzlerunk Club Page 6