by A. J. Stern
I went into my own bathroom and took a short shower because long ones waste water. I could not wait to see everyone’s impresstified faces when room service came. Especially Henrietta, even though I didn’t know what kind of face she had.
I put on an important-looking dress and my shiny shoes, combed my hair, and went into my parents’ room.
“Oh, Frannie,” my mom said. “You look so cute!”
“Adorable!” my dad added.
I scrunched up my face at them. Cute and adorable are kiddish.
“Sorry! I mean extremely fabulous,” said my mom.
“Smashing!” my dad said.
I smiled. Extremely fabulous and smashing were much more adult.
“Thank you, and you look extremely fabulous and smashing as well!”
Just then there was a knock at our door and my dad and mom exchanged question mark looks. I did not know why they looked so confusified. I went to the door, opened it, and then gave the biggest I cannot believe how amazing room service is and I wish that I had this in my very own home gasp. There was a man in all white with two rolling tables that had a hundredteen covered silver platters on it.
“May I?” the waiter asked.
I could not even speak, so I just nodded and opened the door wider.
“What on earth?” my dad asked.
“Oh, this must be a huge mistake,” my mom said to the waiter.
“No, it’s not!” I said. “You told me I could order room service for dinner!”
My parents looked at each other and then back at me.
“When did we say that, Frannie?” my dad asked.
“At the pool. Mom said it.”
“That is not what I said at all,” my mom said in a voice that was a little bit scoldish.
My stomach filled up with moths and butterflies. “You didn’t?”
“No.” Then she turned to my dad. “Dan, did you hear me say Frannie could order room service tonight?”
“Nope, that’s not what I heard at all. What I did hear was that tomorrow, after we all picked what we wanted off the menu, Frannie could call room service and place the order for the three of us,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t think my ears were turned on at the tomorrow part.”
“No, Frances, clearly they were not,” my mom said. When my parents Frances-ed me, I knew I was in a worldwide of trouble.
The room service man had taken all the lids off the platters and when they looked over, my parents each made the biggest gasps of the world.
“FRANCES!” my mother said loudly, putting both her hands over her mouth. Two Franceses in one conversation meant a double worldwide of trouble.
“Lobster?” my dad said, even louder than my mom’s Frances. “You ordered”—then he counted—“FIVE lobsters??” His face was almost as red as the lobsters.
I knew the lobster part was bad because of all the Frances-ing, but I did not know exactly why.
“It was the special,” I explained.
“What are we going to do with five entire lobsters?” my dad asked my mom.
“Why can’t we just eat them?” I asked.
“Because we have dinner reservations with the Tilsons in the hotel restaurant.”
The hotel restaurant?
“Oh,” I said with a big gulp. Then I looked over at the waiter, who stood there holding the lids for the platters. All that food would now be wasted. I was not exactly sure what a person in a situation like this was supposed to do.
CHAPTER 6
If you don’t already know this about lobsters or specials, they are usually the most expensive things on the menu. I learned this the hard way.
One other thing you might not know is that when your parents tell you something, you should turn your ears on. If you are not one hundred percent sure that your ears are turned on, you’re supposed to ask them to repeat their words.
My dad tried to talk the waiter out of everything. He said it had been a big mistake, and I hadn’t been listening, and that he was very, very sorry.
The room service man was certainly nice, even when he was giving us the bad news of the world. The lobsters had already been cooked which was a for instance of why we had to pay for the most expensive thing on the menu. Five times, as a matter of fact.
My dad and mom tried everything they could to make this problem go away, but the waiter said there was nothing he could do about it.
“But we’re meeting people for dinner in the dining room. We’re late, actually,” said my dad.
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what to tell you,” the waiter said. And that’s when I had the most geniusal idea on the planet of earth.
“Mom, isn’t that stuff you buy in the summertime called lobster salad?”
“Lobster salad?” she asked. “What about it?”
“What if we put the lobsters in the refrigerator for right now and then we made lobster salad with them. We could eat it tomorrow.”
My parents looked at each other.
“That’s not a bad idea actually,” my dad said.
“We could have a picnic at Princessland!” I suggested. “That way, we won’t spend any more money actually!”
My dad looked at me with a look that said Frannie, you are a genius of the earth. However and nevertheless, we still had more problems to solve.
“Who exactly is going to make the lobster salad?” asked my dad, looking straight into my eyeballs.
I looked over at the lobsters and scrunched up my face at that question. Their antennas were so ... antennas-ish. Their little, black eyes were so . . . black eyes-ish. But I knew the answer.
“Me?” I asked my dad.
“Yes, exactly. You.”
“And what about the mayonnaise, celery, pepper, and lemon juice that we’ll need to make the salad?” asked my mother, also looking right into my eyeballs.
“Does your kitchen have those ingredients?” I asked the waiter.
“Of course!” he answered.
The moths and butterflies in my stomach were starting to calm down. “Can we borrow them?”
“I think that can be arranged,” he said.
I looked at my parents with a big grin. “Solved!”
“Fantastic,” my dad said. “Now, please help us put everything in the refrigerator, and then you can help”—my dad looked at the waiter’s name tag—“Clark put the lids back on all the platters.”
My face almost fell off my head. All that was going to take a pamillionteen hours! I wanted to meet Henrietta already! But my dad’s face said I am not joking, Frannie. Not even for a centimeter of a second.
After helping to put the stuff away, we all left to meet the Henriettas.
“Are you still mad at me?” I asked my mom in the elevator.
“I’m a little cross,” she said.
“Oh,” I said as all my worries gathered up in my stomach. I do not like when my mom is cross because it lasts longer than angry.
Then my dad added, “We’re going to have a good, long talk after dinner tonight, all right, Frannie?”
I looked down at the floor and took my mom’s hand.
“Okay,” I said. I did not like good, long talks. Good, long talks are the ones we have whenever I’m in trouble with the law. And when you’re in trouble with the law that means your parents are really cross at you.
I knew they still loved me, though, because they let me press the elevator button for R. R is the floor where the hotel restaurant is and pressing it is something they knew I would prefer. (Prefer is a word that grown-ups use. It is a way to fancy up something that you like better. Like is a kid word and that is why I prefer prefer.) I had planned to let go of my mom’s hand once we got inside the restaurant, but that plan did not work. My hand was very overwhelmified by the hotel restaurant. I could not even believe my eye sockets about how gigantoristic it was.
Once I got used to how many tables there were (probably eighteen thousand), I noticed actually that it was my favorit
e kind of restaurant. It was the buffet kind! At a buffet, you can put exactly what you want on your plate. There were about eighty-hundred buffet areas. It was a good thing that the word buffet means you can go back as many times as you want.
“There they are,” my dad said as he walked toward a man and one very regular-looking kid. All my excitement dried right up. Henrietta wasn’t fancy at all. All she wore was a pair of white jeans and a T-shirt. I felt a little bit standout-ish in my dress. I wished my mother hadn’t told me to dress up, but since I was in trouble with the law, I didn’t say anything about it.
I noticed that Henrietta’s T-shirt said “California Girl” on it. That gave me an idea to make a shirt like that for myself that said “Chester Girl.”
“You must be Frannie,” Mr. Henrietta said. “I’m Fred Tilson.”
“Hi, Fred Tilson,” I said. When you repeat someone’s name after they say it, you will never forget it, ever.
“This is Henry,” Fred Tilson said. I put my hand out to shake, but Henrietta just waved and said, “Hey,” like someone woke her up in the middle of the night and made her talk. I did not appreciate that her hello to me was in a bad mood. But I did like that her nickname was Henry. I’d never met a girl with a boy’s name before.
“You can call me Frankly,” I told them.
Henry’s name sounded sort of professional to me, so I decided I was going to use my professional name also.
Fred Tilson smiled and said, “Frankly it is.”
When we sat down I noticed that Henry’s grumpy was not just about her hello. Her grumpy was about everything!
“Do you want some bread, Henry?” Fred Tilson asked.
“No!” She snapped at him like he offered her poison balls and not delicious restaurant rolls.
“How about a breadstick then? You just told me you were starving,” Fred Tilson said.
“No,” she said again, crossing her arms and turning her head away from him.
“Maybe it would be fun to talk about Princessland and what rides you girls might want to go on,” my mom said. My mom is very smart about bad moods and changing the subject.
Henry and Fred Tilson exchanged looks, and then he turned to us and said, “I’m afraid we have some bad news.”
“Oh no,” my mom said, worried.
“I’m sorry to say that Henry isn’t going to be able to join you tomorrow.”
Henry crossed her arms even harder.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It turns out that we’re short a couple of helpers. So I need Henry to work at the conference tomorrow. I’m hoping one helper will be enough.”
Helpers? Work? Conference? These were some of my favorite words in the world.
Except for conference. I had no idea what that meant.
I looked up at my dad, and he knew me so well, he read my question right from my brain.
“Tomorrow Mr. Tilson and I are going to a big meeting with all of our co-workers. There will be different speakers throughout the day. The speakers talk to us about subjects we’re all interested in. That meeting is called a conference.”
A conference sounded great! I wanted to go to a conference! I had twenty-three eighteen interests!
“Mr. Tilson and I happen to have arranged this particular conference,” my father explained.
I stood up.
“You’re in charge of the conference?” I asked.
He smiled. “And so is Mr. Tilson.”
“You’re the BOSSES of the conference?” I asked again. I could not believe my own father was the actual boss of a real, live conference.
He and Fred Tilson laughed, but Henry did not.
“We are both the bosses of the conference,” my dad told me.
“I’m glad that you’re so impressed,” Fred Tilson said.
I sat back down and looked at them both with brand-new eyes. “I am very impresstified,” I said. “Very impresstified, indeed.”
That’s when I realized something that made my stomach fill with butterflies and moths. If Fred Tilson and my dad were the bosses of the conference, and Henrietta got to help them, then they all had jobs and I didn’t. Why couldn’t I help tomorrow? Why did Henrietta get to have all the fun?
“How long is the conference?” I asked.
“Just one day. It will be over by five o’clock.”
I was so jealous of Henry. I pictured her running around looking official and important with a clipboard in her hands. Maybe she’d get to wear a uniform! Maybe an HH shirt. Maybe they’d even give her an office!
I probably knew much more about clipboards and office supplies than Henry. What if Henry didn’t know what to do with all of that? I’d be at Princessland and she might need someone like me to help her and explain official business conference things! I worried that the tears that were forming behind my eyes would decide to come out.
“It’s so unfair,” Henry said. “Why does Frankly get to go to Princessland and I have to stay here at the dumb hotel and work at a stupid conference? ”
“It’s just one day, Henry,” her dad said. “It’s not going to hurt you.”
“It is to! It is going to hurt me!” Henry pouted.
Henry wasn’t fancy, but she was very dramatical. She turned to me. “You are so lucky, Frankly. You get to go to Princessland and I have to go to work!”
I did not want to tell her that I thought she was the lucky one. After all, she seemed very grumpified about having to work in the first place.
“There is nothing worse than work!” Henry said loudly.
That was not a scientific fact. I was getting a little angrified that she was saying bad things about jobs. Especially since my dad and her dad were the bosses of the exact job she was yelling about.
“I’ve had jobs before actually,” I told Henry. “I like working.”
I didn’t care if she made fun of me. People should not be mad at things they haven’t even tried before! Like delicious restaurant rolls and jobs!
“What kind of jobs?” Henry asked me, clearly impresstified.
“A food critic, a waitress, and a radio announcer,” I told her. “I’m very workerish.” That’s when I remembered I had my business cards on me. My dad already had one, but Fred Tilson didn’t. I could run upstairs and get my résumé, too. That way, he could hire me, also! Or, maybe I could switch places with Henry. I could work at the conference and she could go to Princessland. But then she’d be with my mom and I wanted to be with my mom! This was the most frustrating kind of problem.
Out of my eye edge I saw my mom give a tiny worried look to my dad. My mom was so excited about tomorrow’s visit to Princessland because that’s where she went when she was my age. She was really looking forward to a ride called teacups. It’s like a merry-go-round but you sit in giant teacups that spin.
I could not disappoint my mom. I did not like when she was sick and I did not like when she gave me worried looks. Those were the two worst things in the entire world. But I really, really, really, really, really wanted to work at the conference. Henry was the luckiest person I’d ever met in my life that day.
After dinner we made the lobster salad. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do. My hands broke trying to crack the lobster shells open and my eyeballs broke from having to look at the lobsters’ horrendifying intestines which were even worser than the tentacles and eyes. The whole thing took four hundredteen hours to do and that is not an opinion.
It is also not an opinion that I will never order lobster from room service again.
After I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed, my parents tucked me in—one person at a time starting with my dad.
“Your mom and I are really enjoying having you here in Florida with us,” he said.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. But I knew for a scientific fact there was a but coming.
“But ... ,” he said.
See what I mean about but?
“I’m still upset about the lobsters. You know about do
uble-checking when you’re not one hundred percent sure about something we said,” he told me.
“But I WAS sure mom said I could order dinner,” I told him.
“One hundred percent sure?”
“Well, maybe not one hundred percent.”
“Maybe now that you’ve made the lobster salad, you’ll have an easier time remembering to be one hundred percent sure in the future.”
“Probably,” I said. Then I sat up. “Dad?” I asked. There was something I was one hundred percent sure about and that was that I wanted to work at his conference tomorrow. And I was going to tell him.
“Yes?”
“Tomorrow—,” I started, and then looked up to see my mom standing in the doorway smiling and waiting her turn to say good night.
“Yes?”
I wanted to say it so badly. But I couldn’t. I could not hurt my mom’s feelings.
“Tomorrow is going to be a great day,” I said.
“I certainly hope so,” he said, kissing me on the head.
Then my mom sat down on my bed and told me about all the different types of things we were going to do at Princessland. She could hardly even wait to get there. She was going to take me on all the rides her mom took her on. She especially couldn’t wait to ride the teacups with me. She hoped I loved them as much as she did.
I knew I was going to have to do the grown-up thing and pretend there was no conference. After all, I have a really good imagination. So tomorrow, when I saw Henry with her clipboard and my dad being a boss with Fred Tilson, I’d just pretend they were doing something else. Something I would never want to do. Not ever.
Like making lobster salad.
CHAPTER 7
The next morning at breakfast my mom had a big Princessland smile on her face while she read the newspaper. Any time a conference thought tickled my brain, I was going to look at her.
But I was not going to think about the conference.
Not once.
Not even for one sip of water.
Or when my dad pulled conferencelooking paper out of his briefcase and highlighted a lot of words with an orange marker.