The expression on the new girl’s face when Mr. Graham had her stand up to be introduced was different too. “Boys and girls,” Mr. Graham said, “I’d like you to meet our new fifth-grade student, Portia Smithson.” He went on then being humorous about how lucky they were that Portia was a girl because the upper grades were short on girls, and long, “or at least heavy,” on boys. Then he looked at Ronnie and Bob, who were pretty “heavy,” all right, and everybody snickered. Everyone except Dani and the new girl, at least. Dani didn’t snicker because it wasn’t particularly funny, and the new girl didn’t either. But, on the other hand, she didn’t look as nervous as you might expect.
What you’d expect, under the circumstances, was a certain amount of terror, and for a second she did look a little bit scared. But almost immediately Dani began to get the feeling that even that little bit wasn’t for real. It was as if the whole thing, the clasped hands and down-turned eyes, was an act. It was pretty believable, except now and then when the eyes flashed up and around the room and then quickly dropped back down.
It must have been those fiery glances that made Dani curious enough to decide to talk to the new girl as soon as possible. At least curiosity was part of it. The other part just might have been a little bit of sympathy for someone else who was coming to the Rattler Springs school and getting off on the wrong foot. Coming possibly from some big-city school, maybe even a private one, judging by the school uniform look of her clothing. It had been bad enough for Dani, and she’d be willing to bet it was going to be even worse for this poor kid. So at the first recess Dani followed Portia Smithson out onto the playground.
Just outside the door she grabbed the new girl’s arm and said, “Hi, Portia. My name is Dani. Dani O’Donnell.”
The big eyes were wide, and at that moment, as blank as a painted doll’s. “Hi, Dani,” the girl breathed in a feathery whisper. “But my name is Pixie now. I haven’t been Portia for a long time.”
Dani looked Portia/Pixie/whoever over with increased interest. “Okay then, Pixie,” she said. Grabbing the other girl by the sleeve, she pulled her back toward the schoolhouse wall, away from some fifth- and sixth-graders who were hanging around staring. There were five or six of them, all boys except for Jeannie Wallace. “Scram,” Dani yelled, and then waited for their reluctant retreat before she said, “Just look at them, standing around goggle-eyed just because you’re new.” She sighed. “That’s the way it always is here. Don’t you hate it? Don’t you hate being here?”
The eyes flashed a signal that, again, Dani didn’t quite get. Anger maybe, or perhaps just curiosity. But the voice was more like little-girl wonder. “Do you hate it?” she asked.
“Sure I do. The school, the whole town, everything.” Dani looked the new girl over again, checking out the pleated skirt, the stiff new shoes and the wide-eyed, innocent stare. “You know. The whole place. All of it.” She gestured, taking in the schoolyard and on and on, clear out to the distant hills. “Gruesome, isn’t it?”
Portia’s eyes followed the gesture. “Yes. Yes, it is gruesome,” she said eagerly. “It’s probably the most gruesome place I’ve ever been.”
A puzzling thought occurred to Dani. “Hey, why’d you come? To the school I mean. It’s going to be summer vacation in a couple of weeks. Couldn’t you have skipped the rest of the year? I’ll bet you’re way ahead of the fifth grade here.”
“Well, yes. I guess I could have …,” the new girl started to say, when the noise level on the playground suddenly went up to a deafening roar. It sounded like a riot but it was probably just that the little kids had been let out for recess. Dani started to check to see if that was it, but before she’d even gotten completely turned around something hit her in the middle of the back. “This is Stormy,” she said without even looking.
They were almost the same height, Stormy and the new girl, although Stormy was a lot heavier. Standing only a few feet away, he was staring as if he’d seen a ghost. “Hey.” Dani thumped him on the head to get his attention. “This is Por—Pixie. Pixie Smithson, she’s in the fifth grade.”
“Yeah, Smithson. I heard.” Stormy nodded and gulped before he started to say, “The ge—ge—”
“Geologists,” Dani said. She turned to Pixie. “That’s right, isn’t it? Your folks are the geologists, aren’t they? The ones who are renting my mom’s ranch house?”
“Your mom’s ranch house? We’re renting your house?” Pixie’s face registered surprise. At least it looked like surprise. Dani was definitely getting the feeling that Pixie’s face was not going to be all that easy to read. Stormy’s, on the other hand, was only too easy, and what it was registering at the moment was suspicion and something pretty close to shock.
“Are you—I mean—are your folks really spies?”
“Yeah, spies? Are they spies?” another voice chimed in, and it wasn’t until then that Dani noticed that the fifth- and sixth-grade bunch had edged its way back into hearing distance. It was Eddie Bailey, Bob’s sixth-grade brother, who was asking. “Are you guys really spies?”
Pixie looked bewildered. “Spies?” Turning to Dani, she said, “What do they mean, spies?”
But just at that moment the bell rang for the end of the upper grades’ recess. On their way back to the classroom Dani whispered, “It’s just a stupid rumor. I guess some of the kids are saying that your folks are spies.” She laughed. “And that’s just for starters. There’s a whole lot of even more ridiculous stuff going around.”
Pixie hung back, asking questions like “What kind of stuff?” “Who said it?” and “What did they say?”
So Dani began to explain but she hardly got into the rumors about the counterfeit money printing press, and barely mentioned the one about Frankenstein-type scientists. Pixie was obviously interested, hanging on to Dani’s arm to keep her from leaving, and asking all kinds of questions.
“Hey, we’ve got to go in,” Dani told her finally. “Mr. Graham is really fussy about coming in after the second bell. I’ll tell you some more later.” One thing she especially wanted to tell Pixie was that she’d just have to get used to the fact that in crummy little hick towns like Rattler Springs people didn’t have anything better to do than make up stupid rumors about everything and everybody.
Back at her seat Dani got out her math book, checked the seventh-grade assignment on the board and started to work. But every now and then she glanced back at the fifth-grade corner, where, considering the fact that she’d just been accused of being a spy or something even worse, Pixie was behaving in a surprisingly normal manner. Watching her, Dani felt puzzled and strangely fascinated.
It was partly, she told herself, a certain amount of sympathy for someone who was going to be going through a lot of the same kind of Rattler Springs torment that she’d been through her own self. But there was more to it than that. Some of it was how hard the new girl was to figure out. Usually when you met new people you started forming a kind of mental picture of them right off the bat. Sometimes the picture changed later on, but it tended to be a gradual kind of thing. The Pixie picture seemed to be nothing but changes. A change every split second. Like one of those little moving-picture books that you flip with your thumbnail, and as the pages turn a figure runs and jumps, or a face smiles and frowns. That was it, she decided. That was what the new girl made her think of. A thumbnail movie book.
When Mr. Graham dismissed the class that afternoon he called the new girl up to his desk to “go over a list of books and supplies you’re going to need.” At least that was what he said he wanted to talk to her about, but Dani thought there was more to it than that. Watching Mr. Graham and the Portia/Pixie character chatting away while most of the class dawdled and fooled around on their way out, Dani wondered if what he really was doing was trying to keep the new girl from being picked on. Trying to keep her safely in the room until some of the most dangerous types, like Ronnie Grabler, for instance, had given up and gone on home.
After a while Dani pretended
to give up too and went outside. She was still walking very slowly toward the road when Pixie finally came out.
“Wait. Wait a minute, Dani.” Pixie was running after her. “I have to talk to you.”
What Pixie wanted to talk about, of course, was all the rumors about her folks. “Tell me about it again,” she said eagerly. “All that stuff about spies and monster machines.”
But Dani had just gotten started when Pixie said, “Uh-oh. Got to go,” and ran toward the road. Crawling toward them through a floating sea of dust and heat waves was the strange vehicle that was somewhere between a tank and a Cadillac. When it coasted quietly to a stop, a door opened and Pixie disappeared inside.
Chapter 10
WALKING HOME THAT AFTERNOON, Dani moved as slowly as a desert tortoise. The heat pressed down like a heavy hand on her head and shoulders, but that wasn’t the only problem. On that particular day there was also something weighing on her mind too. Something known as Portia—or Pixie—Smithson. But the heat must have messed up her brain, because she hadn’t come up with a single useful conclusion by the time she reached Silver Avenue.
Was poor little Pixie really as calm and unconcerned as she’d seemed? And if she was—was it because she was really that brave? Or was it just that she was too stupid to know how much trouble she was in? When Dani was nearly home she suddenly decided to make a little detour past the bookstore so she could ask Linda a question or two that might help to clear things up.
The dusty little bookstore was, as usual this time of year, incredibly hot and almost empty. Seated behind Mr. Cooley’s beat-up old desk, Linda was reading a book, while her heat-frizzled hair framed her face in a halo of curly corkscrews. Nobody else was in sight.
“Hey, Mom,” Dani said, forgetting for the moment that she had decided, nearly a year before, that she wouldn’t call her mother Mom again until she started acting more like a responsible parent. Started doing something responsible, for instance, to get herself and her only kid out of the desert and back where they belonged. “Hey, Mom,” she said. “Did you know that those geologists had a kid? You never said anything to me about it.”
Linda looked up from her book. “Why, yes, I think Mrs. Smithson mentioned a daughter. Ten years old, I think she said. But I believe she’s staying with her grandmother and she won’t be joining them for quite a while. Not till the fall term, I think Emily said.”
Dani shrugged. “Oh yeah? Well, I guess somebody changed their minds. Because she’s here right now.”
“Who’s here?”
“The daughter. She’s in the fifth grade and her name is Portia. When it isn’t Pixie, that is.”
Linda looked puzzled, and she was still looking puzzled when Dani left the store and headed for home. She was in the alley between the general store and the post office when out of nowhere Stormy was walking beside her. Out of nowhere like always, but at least this time he didn’t whack her on the back.
“Hi,” he said. “What did she tell you?”
Dani pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about. “What did who tell me?” she asked.
“That new girl. I saw you talking to her after school. What did she say about being a spy?”
“Oh, that,” Dani said. “She didn’t exactly say. But I don’t think they’re spies. What I think is that they’re more like crazy scientists who make monsters out of dead people. You know, like Dr. Frankenstein. You remember when I told you about Frankenstein?” Right after she said it, Dani wondered why she’d told Stormy the Smithsons might be Frankenstein-type scientists. Of course she herself had gotten the idea from old ghost-crazy Clara, but she had to admit there was no special reason she had to repeat it to Stormy.
If Linda had been there she’d probably have said the reason was just Dani’s “natural-born contrariness.” Contrariness, according to Linda, was when a person took one point of view just because the other person was taking the opposite one. There had been times, not often but just now and then, when Dani might have confessed to a certain amount of contrariness, but this wasn’t one of them. She hadn’t said Frankenstein just because Stormy was saying spies. It was just that she was getting bored with spy stories, and a couple of crazy monster producers seemed, for the time being, a little more original. But what she hadn’t counted on was Stormy’s reaction.
“Yeah?” he said. “Yeah?” Then he just stood there wide-eyed and openmouthed for several seconds before he said, “They’re Frankensteins? Frankensteins. Wow!” Then except for an occasional “Wow!” he didn’t say anything more until they got to Dani’s house. In the stifling heat of the kitchen he got himself a glass of water and somehow managed to go on looking stunned and horror-struck while he drank it. It wasn’t until he’d finished and put down the glass that he said, “Dani. Tell me about Frankenstein again. Okay?”
There was something about the look in Stormy’s eyes that made Dani a little nervous. A kind of stiff, fish-eyed look, like somebody who’d just seen a ghost. “What about White Fang?” she asked. “We’d better finish White Fang before it’s overdue.”
But Stormy went on insisting until she broke down and told him, as briefly as she could, about how a scientist called Dr. Frankenstein made a monster out of pieces of dead people and how he built an electric machine that sort of shocked the monster into life and then the monster went around getting into trouble. Because the look in Stormy’s eyes was already so strange she purposely tried to do a fairly tame and boring version of the story. She didn’t, for instance, go into the way Boris Karloff had looked in the movie, which had been shown at the town hall a year or so ago, and which Dani remembered pretty well. But even the boring version really seemed to grab Stormy’s attention. He went on staring with glassy eyes and asking dumb questions like “What did the monster eat?” and then, even more fish-eyed, “Did he eat people?”
At last Dani just stopped answering. Making a quick trip to her impossibly hot bedroom, she retrieved White Fang and got out again without breathing, so as not to broil her tonsils. Outside, on the back steps, where it was still hot but a little less unbearable, she started reading out loud. It took a while but, just as she’d planned, Stormy couldn’t resist for long. After only a minute or two the back door creaked open. Stormy sat down beside her and went into his usual listening trance.
Dani went on reading until Linda came home, even though half of her mind went on fooling around with the Pixie thing, instead of really paying close attention to what the story was saying. It sounded all right to her but it must have made a difference to Stormy because as he was going home that night he said thanks as usual and then added, “Thanks for sort of reading to me.”
And when Dani wanted to know what he meant by that crack, he shrugged and said, “I don’t know. But it sounds realer sometimes. I like when it sounds real.”
Some nerve, Dani thought. Here she’d been sitting out there on the splintery steps with the sweat running down her face for almost an hour and that was all the thanks she got. She thought about yelling after him, “Okay, you can read the rest of it yourself.” She was still thinking about yelling when Stormy disappeared into the back door of the hotel.
It took Dani a long time to get to sleep that night, what with the heat and all the things she had to think about. Some of the things she thought about were the mean tricks the Rattler Springs kids had played on her when she was new and how they’d probably do the same things to Pixie. Tricks like slashing her bicycle tires and throwing apple cores or rotten tomatoes at her on her way home from school, or like hanging a dead rattlesnake over her front gate so she almost reached out and touched it before she realized what it was. The snake thing had happened because someone had gone to the trouble to find out that Dani had a kind of phobia about snakes. And if they’d gone to that much trouble for a mere “stuck-up know-it-all,” who knew what they’d come up with for a foreign spy? Or a kid from a family of Frankensteins, for that matter. If she were Pixie Smithson, Dani decided, she would have a planned stoma
chache that would last until school was out for the summer.
But the next day Pixie was there in class, and the day after that too, and to Dani’s surprise nothing much happened. Dani did notice some of the usual classroom teasing, whispered remarks and insulting faces. One time when Ronnie walked past Pixie’s desk on his way to the pencil sharpener he made a monster face by pushing up on his nose and pulling down on the corners of his eyes. Some of the other kids gasped or giggled, but Pixie only looked vaguely pleased, as if she thought Grabler’s disgusting face was some kind of classroom entertainment. But except for the whispers and ugly faces, not much new-kid-type teasing was happening. Dani couldn’t understand it.
Of course, one big difference was that Pixie didn’t have to walk to school. Instead of having to walk right through town past several houses, Lefty’s Bar, the bank and the Grand Hotel, any one of which could provide shelter for a tomato thrower or a rattlesnake smuggler, Pixie Smithson was delivered almost to the front door of the schoolhouse every morning and picked up in the same spot every afternoon. That explained a lot, Dani decided. If she, Dani O’Donnell, had arrived at school every day in an automobile that looked like a Sherman tank, she probably could have managed to stay pretty calm too.
The other possible reason was pretty funny, actually. That possibility was that the usual new-kid tormentors had made up so many scary rumors that they’d scared themselves off. I mean if you really thought the kid who sat next to you in school was Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter, you just might not want to get her especially mad at you.
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