Extraordinary

by Miriam Spitzer Franklin

  Suddenly, Anna stopped making noises. She dropped her toy to the ground. I picked it up and handed it to her. Was she upset that I was going to Madison’s house? Or was she simply just tired?

  I swallowed. I would have rather worked on the badge with Anna any day, even though neither of us knew how to bake. I thought about the time we baked brownies from a mix, and a grin spread across my face. “Hey, do you remember when my mom let us bake brownies by ourselves, and we added four cups of oil instead of one-fourth cup?” I giggled.

  Anna looked up at me and smiled.

  “But Madison says her mom lets her bake all the time. And don’t worry,” I told her before I left the room. “Madison is nice, but I already have a best friend.”

  ***

  “We’re going to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for tomorrow’s meeting,” Madison said as I followed her up the steps of a large white house with black shutters. Her mother had picked both of us up from school so we could work on our Girl Scout badge together. “We’re making them from scratch.”

  I guessed scratch meant that we weren’t using a mix, which sounded even more risky.

  “All right, girls,” Mrs. Poplin said as we entered the kitchen. “I know you’re trying to earn a badge, so I’ll leave you to it. If you need any help, I’ll be upstairs.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Madison said. “We’ll call you when we’re ready for a taste test.”

  Mrs. Poplin smiled and left the room. She was trusting us alone in the kitchen, so I took it as a good sign that Madison knew what she was doing.

  I sat down at the table while Madison searched for a cookbook. I wasn’t someone who usually noticed kitchens, but this was the best one I’d ever seen. Bright and sunny with yellow walls, white cabinets with glass fronts, and shiny tile counters. Mom was always complaining about our kitchen. She would have loved a clean, beautiful one like this.

  I watched as Madison pulled out the ingredients, measuring cups, and baking pans and piled them onto the wooden kitchen island. “You ready?” she asked.

  I nodded. My stomach tightened as I got up to join her. What if I messed up everything? I could imagine Hannah’s face as she bit into one of our cookies at the meeting. She’d yell, “EWWWW! This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted!” Then she’d spit the cookie right out into her napkin.

  Madison read ingredients from the cookbook. I tried to stop picturing all of the Girl Scouts making faces and falling out of their chairs as they ate our horrible cookies.

  “Slow down,” I said to Madison, “or this could turn out to be a total flop.”

  Madison giggled. “These are super easy! I make them by myself all the time.”

  “You don’t always have me as a helper.”

  “Don’t worry, Pansy. I promise, they’ll turn out perfect.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. I made Madison repeat everything twice, and then I double-checked my measurements before dumping anything into the mixing bowl. Luckily, Madison was telling the truth. The first lesson I learned was that a cook needs to be organized. She had all the exact measuring cups and spoons lined up in a row. She knew all about using a sifter to blend the flour, how to grease the pan so the cookies wouldn’t stick, and she even knew how to crack eggs without dropping in the shells.

  By the time the smell of fresh-baked cookies filled the room, my stomach was no longer in knots. Baking cookies turned out to be a whole lot easier than I thought—and much easier than learning forward swizzles.

  “You want to see my room before the timer goes off?” Madison asked while the first batch was cooling on racks.

  “Sure!” I jumped up to follow her. I noticed the kitchen wasn’t the only room that looked like it belonged in one of those magazines you find in the dentist’s office. Everything was neatly decorated; even the hallway had photos arranged in matching frames.

  “Is this you?” I stopped in the stairwell and pointed to a photo of a little girl, her hair in curls, a crown on top of her head.

  “Yeah,” Madison said. “My first beauty pageant.”

  “But you’re just a little kid!”

  “I was three-and-a-half.”

  That sounded nuts to me. I kept wondering what it would be like to be a three-year-old on stage in front of judges and tons of other people when Madison said, “Come on!”

  I followed her to her room and entered a world of pink. Pink canopy bed, pink rug on the floor, pink lamp, pink knobs on the dresser drawers, pink curtains, pink frames for pictures. The only things that weren’t pink were the white walls and furniture.

  I liked the color pink all right, but all that pink made me a little dizzy.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Pink’s your favorite color.”

  Madison nodded. “Mom went a little overboard. She did all the decorating herself.”

  “Oh.” Luckily Mom let me decorate my own room. It was a mixture of colors—pinks, purples, blues, and yellows. Posters of animals and photos of friends stuck to the light blue walls with putty. Even my furniture was a mix from the thrift shop—a white dresser with different colored knobs and an old brown desk that people had carved their initials in. “Did she decorate the whole house?”

  Madison shook her head. “Are you kidding? Mom interviewed five designers before she picked someone. She likes everything to look nice.”

  “I can tell. Your house is so pretty!”

  “Thanks.” Madison sat down on her bed.

  I studied a shelf full of ribbons and trophies. “Is it fun, dressing up and entering all those beauty contests?”

  Madison shrugged. “Mostly, it’s kind of boring. There’s a lot of waiting around, and you have to smile even when you don’t feel like it. But Mom thinks pageants are the most fun thing in the world.”

  “Well, you must be good at it. Looks like you’ve won a lot of contests.”

  “Anyone could do it,” Madison said. “All you have to do is dress up and try to look pretty.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. You couldn’t just try to look pretty—you had to actually be pretty! “Well, you have to be talented, too. Don’t you have to sing or dance or something?”

  “Sure. I take voice, dancing, and piano lessons. But that’s not why I win pageants.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that. It sounded like Madison had just said she thought she was the prettiest girl in the world, but she didn’t say it in a bragging way. Which struck me as kind of weird.

  “I’m quitting when I turn thirteen,” Madison said. “Pageants, not piano, I mean.”

  “Will your mom let you?”

  “She can’t tell me what to do forever. Hey, there’s the timer!” Madison jumped up from the bed and raced back downstairs.

  A few minutes later, we sat at the kitchen table, ready to test our oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

  “You ready?” Madison asked, holding up a cookie.

  “On the count of three,” I said. “One, two, three!”

  We both bit into our cookies. Delicious! Awesome! Super amazing! My cookie was crunchy and melty all at the same time.

  Madison’s mom popped into the kitchen for a sample. “Perfect,” she declared after taking a bite. “These cookies could win a contest.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Madison said with a grin.

  The phone rang, and Mrs. Poplin disappeared again.

  “You really do know how to bake cookies, Madison.” I said.

  “Not just me.” Madison gulped down some milk. “Us. We know how to bake cookies.”

  I grinned. “We’re definitely going to earn a badge for this.”

  Madison put two more cookies on each of our plates. “If we don’t eat them all before the meeting!”

  I giggled and munched away happily.

  “One thing about being in pageants,” Madison said as we were cleaning up the kitchen a little later, “is it keeps you busy. Sometimes too busy for friends.”

  “Really? But you have tons of friends.”


  “At school, maybe. I’ve never had a best friend, though.”

  I was shocked. “What about Emma?”

  Madison shrugged. “We’re good friends. But whenever she comes over, all she wants to do is talk about clothes and hair and pageant stuff. It gets pretty boring, actually.”

  “Oh. What about Hannah, then?”

  “Hannah?” Madison shook her head. “I could never be best friends with Hannah.”

  “Why not?” I asked. Even though I knew why I didn’t like Hannah, I wanted to know if Madison felt the same way.

  “I mean, I’ve known Hannah since kindergarten. Our moms went to high school together. She’s okay, but she always copies everything I do. And she’s a big bragger, which really gets on my nerves.”

  “I don’t think she likes me at all.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Madison said. “She doesn’t like a lot of people. The only reason I let her hang around with me is because our moms are friends. Plus, I feel a little sorry for her. Did you know her dad left a few years ago, and she doesn’t even know where he is?”

  I shook my head. “That’s terrible,” I said, wondering what it would be like if Dad walked out of the house and never came back. It wasn’t even something I could imagine. It seemed like everyone had secrets—not just me—though I wasn’t sure why that would make Hannah act so stuck-up. Did it make her feel better about her dad leaving when she put other people down? It didn’t make sense to me.

  Madison said, “Anyway, she’s a lot different from you. She’s always worrying about what people think, and you don’t care at all.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Of course not. You cut your own hair, and look at your shoes!” Madison giggled. “Plus, you say what’s on your mind.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “It’s great! I wish I could be more like you.”

  I felt my cheeks heat up. “Thanks,” was all I could say. We were silent for a moment while sloshing around the soap suds in the kitchen sink.

  “So . . . I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Madison said quietly. “What was it like? When you saw Anna for the first time, after she got sick?”

  My stomach clenched. Where had that come from? Here we were, talking about Emma and Hannah, and now Madison wanted to switch the subject to Anna?

  “It must have been really . . . hard,” Madison said when I didn’t answer her.

  I nodded as I stared down at my best friends necklace. How could I tell Madison what it felt like to see my best friend in a hospital bed, a blank look in her eyes when she used to be so full of life? How could I tell her what it felt like to lose your best friend—your other half?

  “When I saw her at the park this summer, I couldn’t believe it,” Madison said. “It’s so sad! It’s almost like she died.”

  I shook my head and looked up at her. “No, she’s still right here. She knows what’s going on, even if she doesn’t show it. Besides, she’s not finished healing.”

  “What do you mean?” Madison asked me. “My parents said there’s no cure for brain damage.”

  “Not yet.”

  I poured the water out of the mixing bowl and set it on the counter. Hard. Then I rinsed the last measuring cup and stuck it in the dishwasher. I glanced at the clock. “I better wait for my parents out front. They’re picking me up at five, and they might not remember which house is yours.”

  “Okay,” Madison said, drying her hands on a towel.

  I looked around the kitchen, which was mostly cleaned up. “Sorry I have to leave,” I told her. “Mom doesn’t like to wait.”

  “It’s all right. We’re almost finished anyway,” Madison said, following me out the door. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean anything about Anna—”

  “I know.”

  Then she spoke so softly, I couldn’t tell if she was speaking to me or to herself. “It’s just—I think Anna is lucky to have you as a best friend.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Six Weeks, Four Days

  I’ve printed out the latest Independent Reader scores,” Miss Quetzel announced as she posted the print-out on the bulletin board. “Looks like quite a few of you have earned enough for popsicles in the room at lunch this Friday. So, now’s a good time to take a few minutes so that you can spend your money.”

  I felt a tap on my shoulder while Miss Quetzel was calling students to collect their rewards.

  “Are you going to use your bucks on popsicles?” Madison asked me.

  I nodded. “Are you?”

  “Of course!” Madison grinned at me. “We’ll have so much fun!”

  I glanced over at Andy. “How about you?” I asked him. “Do you want to stay in the room on Friday with us and have popsicles?”

  Andy shrugged. I turned around and started talking to Madison, and a few minutes later, Andy got up to spend his money on a homework pass. Maybe he hadn’t earned enough points for the popsicles. Or was it that he didn’t want to stay in the room since I was talking to Madison? Whatever the reason, he didn’t say anything more about it. He just stuck the homework pass in his folder and turned back around in his seat instead of joining our conversation.

  “Now,” Miss Quetzel said once she’d finished with the Reading Bucks, “it’s time for social studies. Today we’re going to begin group projects on the Civil War. I’ve decided to let you choose your own group members—no more than four to a group.”

  An excited buzz filled the room. Miss Quetzel had never let us choose our own groups before. I’d work with Andy, of course, but before I could turn to him Madison leaned forward and said, “Come on, Pansy! Join our group. This is going to be awesome!”

  I glanced at Andy. He shrugged and stared down at his desk.

  “Um, what about Andy?” I asked Madison.

  She looked over at Emma and Hannah, who were making their way toward us.

  “No offense, Andy,” she said, “but our group is girls only.”

  “No problem,” Andy said. But from the look on his face, I could tell it hurt his feelings. He picked up his notebook and walked across the room where some boys were looking for team members. I knew he’d find someone else to work with, but I didn’t like the way he’d walked away without even smiling at me.

  Madison, however, gave me a wide smile as I pulled my chair up to her desk. I felt my lips curving up at the corners, even though I hadn’t meant to smile back. I wanted to work with Andy, but working with Madison would be fun, too.

  “We’re going to do the best job in the class,” Madison said once we’d gathered around her desk. She folded her arms in front of her. “I think we should dress up when we give our oral reports.”

  “I call Mrs. Lincoln!” Hannah said.

  “I think Madison should be Mary Todd Lincoln,” Emma said. “She has this beautiful pageant gown that looks just like something Mrs. Lincoln would wear.”

  “That’s true,” Madison said. “Besides, I read a biography about Lincoln last year, so I know all about her.”

  Hannah crossed her arms in front of her chest and pouted.

  “I’ll be Clara Barton,” Emma said. “She was a famous nurse during the Civil War.”

  “I’ll be Abraham Lincoln,” I said. “I have a big black hat at home just like his.”

  “You’ll need a beard, too,” Hannah said.

  “I can make one,” I said. “Unless you want to be Abraham Lincoln?”

  Hannah shook her head. “I’m sure there’s some other famous ladies. I’m not dressing up as a boy.”

  Emma giggled. “Pansy doesn’t mind.”

  “I didn’t say that exactly,” I said. “But someone has to be Abraham Lincoln. Since we’re studying the war and all.”

  “Thanks, Pansy,” Madison said. “I knew you were going to be a great team member!” And she reached over and squeezed my hand.

  Hannah made a face.

  “Girls,” Miss Quetzel said, walking over to us, “You’re supposed to divide up the resear
ch material and get started. After you finish all the research, then you can worry about the presentation part.”

  “Okay, Miss Quetzel,” Madison said. For the next thirty minutes, we argued about who was going to do what and how we were going to do it. Or mostly the other girls argued, and I sat there and watched.

  “It doesn’t matter to me which part I do,” I said when Miss Quetzel gave us the five-minute warning. “Just tell me and I’ll start on it tonight.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Emma suggested. “Why don’t we put all the assignments in a bag and everyone can pull one out?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Madison tore off pieces of notebook paper. Each of us had an assignment in our hand just as Miss Quetzel called time. I’d ended up with Abraham Lincoln, and I really didn’t mind. Hannah took one look at hers and made a grumpy face before returning to her seat.

  “See you at lunch,” Madison said as I pulled my chair back to the front row.

  ***

  Andy was smiling when he came back to his seat after social studies.

  “Did you get a good group?” I asked him.

  “The best,” Andy said. “I’m working with Luke, Bryce, and Daniel.”

  “Daniel? Did you get him to say anything?”

  “Sure,” Andy said. “He’s really nice.”

  “That’s great,” I said, and I meant it. I was glad Andy had found a group to work with. Just because Daniel was standing between me and the reading trophy didn’t mean he wouldn’t make a good group partner for Andy.

  “Hey, Andy,” Emma said as we walked up to the girls at their regular spot in the cafeteria. I sat down next to Madison, and Andy sat down across from me. “Do you think Anna can come to the autumn party next week?”

  My mouth dropped open, but I closed it quickly, not wanting anyone to notice. Invite Anna to the class party? What a crazy idea!

  “My mom’s the room mom this year,” Emma continued, “and she wants to invite her.”

  I looked over at Andy. How did he feel about having Anna in the classroom, everyone gathering around her, whispering and staring? Or even worse, talking to her like she’s a baby? I mean, sure, a lot of kids had already seen Anna, out at the park or in the grocery store or at church. But to have her in our classroom where she used to be one of the top students?