by A. J. Stern
“Did you quit your job?” I asked as she came near me.
“No,” she said. “My dad was showing me where Mrs. Zucker will give her speech.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a little sad that I did not get to save the day. As soon as I sat back down in my chair, the front doors opened and a very late-looking woman ran in. She had black hair, but it was not in a bun. It was loose and wild, and she was rushing all over the place. She didn’t look like any ballerina I ever saw, but I knew it was Tina Zucker.
I looked down at the box and got my finger ready to point. And that’s when my heart breathed extra hard and I gasped the biggest gasp of ever. When I looked down at the box, I realized that I wasn’t forgetting anything; I was missing something. The box! It was gone!
CHAPTER 10
Everything seemed to happen very slowly and very quickly at the same time. Mrs. Zucker and Henry both turned to me. Henry was pointing her finger at me. As Mrs. Zucker started to walk in my direction, I froze like an ice cube. That’s how shocktified I felt.
“Are you Frannie? Do you have my box?” Mrs. Zucker was standing right over me.
Just when I opened my mouth to tell her the bad news, a smile broke onto my face. “There it is!” I cried and ran over to a table that said MAIL TABLE. It had lots of envelopes and boxes on it, including Mrs. Zucker’s Air Express box.
Mrs. Zucker rushed over and picked it up, and then Henry led us up the stage and through the curtains to the backstage area. Mrs. Zucker put the box down and then hurried onstage. She must have been a real professional because she knew exactly how to use the microphone and everything.
“Hi, everyone. I am so sorry to keep you all waiting. I had a disastrous flight. First, my plane was delayed, then my baggage was lost, then my car never came, and then the bus stalled! I was afraid I was going to have to give my speech from the highway!”
The audience laughed and I thought to myself, Wow—Mrs. Zucker is the best guest speaker I’ve ever heard in my worldwide life!
Then she started talking about some things that were business-ish and said something about the box and how Henry and I were going to hand out some papers in a minute. That’s when she turned to us and called out, “Girls, will you open that box and bring me my speech and those papers?”
We opened the box and that is when I noticed the most horrible truth of the world. There weren’t any papers in the box at all! What was in the box exactly were juggling pins. I didn’t know what they were doing there. Juggling pins are not very conference-ish.
“Where are the papers?” Henry asked me.
“I don’t know!” I said, and then I got a really bad day feeling on my skin when I realized something worse than horrible. Not only was this the wrong box, I didn’t know where the right one was!
“Let’s hurry up now, girls,” Mrs. Zucker said into the microphone. It was the most humilifying moment.
“What should we do?” Henry asked me.
“I don’t know!” I told her. “You’re the boss!”
“I guess this is taking longer than expected,” Mrs. Zucker said. “My speech is in the box. If I could remember my speech, I’d start giving it, but, of course, I don’t.” The audience was very quiet and I heard people fidgeting.
Fidgeting is a very bad sign because that’s what people do when they are not paying attention. This is a scientific fact. My teacher, Mrs. Pellington, tells us this all the time.
“Frannie, what’s going on?” I heard an angry voice ask. My father’s angry voice as a matter of fact and nevertheless.
I tried to think of an answer that was truth-telling, but also please-do-not-get-one-more-inch-mad-at-me sounding. But I couldn’t think that quickly. “The box doesn’t have Mrs. Zucker’s papers in it. Only juggling pins,” I told him. His face turned as bright orange as the highlighter he had used at breakfast.
When he was at his most orange, Henry said she’d go looking for the box. I did not prefer to be left alone with my father at that exact moment actually.
“How could you have let this happen? Weren’t you supposed to be watching the box?” he asked, his voice channel still on angry.
Before I could even answer, he jumped off the stage and ran toward a door that Henry and I didn’t even know about! It was all the way on the opposite side of the auditorium.
“Where’s everyone running off to?” Mrs. Zucker asked again.
Just when I thought my life was ruined forever, I got the idea to dump some of the pins out and see if maybe the papers were underneath everything!
“Um ... one minute,” I shouted as I took out a bunch of pins. My brain started to wonder who the pins belonged to and whether someone else was in trouble for losing a box.
That’s when Mrs. Zucker made a noise into the microphone that sounded a little bit like a giggle. But what was happening wasn’t funny, so it couldn’t have been. Except then I heard it again. I stopped pulling pins out of the box and looked up.
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Zucker said. “Sometimes when I’m nervous I start to—” She stopped and bent over in a laughing fit. Her shoulders bobbed up and down. Uh-oh. I really hoped someone would find the right box.
Mrs. Zucker stepped away from the microphone for a moment. Then she came back.
“Okay, I’m better. Now, where was—” And then it started all over again!
Finally Henry came back, but with no box. “Did something funny happen?” she asked.
I shook my head no. “She just started laughing and won’t stop.”
“Okay, sorry again,” Mrs. Zucker said into the microphone. “I’m better now. I got all the giggles out. I promise.”
Then the audience giggled a little bit and Mrs. Zucker turned to us again.
“Girls, help me out here, would ya? My speech?”
That’s when I knew I had to tell her what was happening. I waved her over.
“Excuse me for one second,” she said into the microphone and headed toward me.
“What is going on?” she asked.
My mouth was very dry, almost like I had an entire beach of sand in there.
“We have the wrong box,” I told her.
“What do you mean?” She looked at the box and saw all the pins on the ground.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” she snapped. “I can’t believe this. How hard is it to keep track of one box?” Then she stormed back to the microphone.
“It seems the girls who were supposed to keep an eye on my box ended up losing it.”
I was completely humilified.
CHAPTER 11
Even though Mrs. Zucker couldn’t remember her speech, she said she’d try. But her try sounded like this:
“How to describe imagination? Imagine if your brain opened up and . . . oh goodness . . . I can’t remember . . .”
She was sweating a lot and clearing her throat. I could hear a lot of people in the audience coughing and I saw two people leave! It was becoming the most gigantoristic moment of awful I’d ever seen.
Then, just when things could not get any worse, they did. Mrs. Zucker’s microphone went dead. She tapped on it, leaned in, and asked, “Hello? Can you hear me?” A couple people yelled, “No!”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake! What a mess!” Mrs. Zucker pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her face. She took the microphone out of its holder and hit it again and again, but there was no sound. Then, holding the microphone, she turned to us, and Henry called out, “I’ll get help!”
She was very fast and came back quickly with a microphone man. That is a for instance of a man who fixes microphones. He took it from Mrs. Zucker and handed it to Henry to hold.
I scrunched my face at her because I was jealous. I wanted to hold something, too!
Mrs. Zucker was yelling so that people could hear her bad-memory speech. It is not an opinion that her speech was not a good one. She wasn’t even saying anything about imagination that was very true. A for instance of what I mean is that her speech sounded li
ke this:
“Sometimes we get stuck, but we need to really concentrate. Because we have a deadline. So . . . uh . . . how do we focus? We . . . well, we stretch in our chairs or we pace in our office or we ... um”—Mrs. Zucker looked in our direction and then back at the audience—“sometimes I just shut my eyes and repeat a word . . .”
Henry rolled her eyeballs about the speech, and I leaned over and said, “This is the most boringest speech in America!”
And you would never guess what happened no matter how hard you tried. As those exact words came spilling out of my mouth, the microphone started to work again. A for instance of what I mean is that everyone heard me call Mrs. Zucker’s speech boring!
Henry’s mouth dropped off her face. I looked over at the microphone man who stood up and smiled.
“I guess it’s fixed,” he said.
That is when I felt my entire body turn the color of beets. I looked out at the audience. A lot of people were whispering and some people in the front row looked embarrassed like they were the ones to have said the awful thing and not me. My skin burned up with humilification when I realized that it wasn’t just the audience who heard me. I turned to Mrs. Zucker. She was staring right at me with the most hurtish kind of face. There was so much quiet everywhere I bet if I had really tried, I could have heard my own hair growing.
It was the worst moment of my entire life. The only lucky part was that my dad hadn’t heard me because he was still outside the auditorium looking for the box. But Mr. Tilson was there, and he looked angry enough for himself and my dad put together.
I wanted to turn the color invisible. I was very afraid that Mrs. Zucker was going to yell at me in front of the whole conference of America. And I felt horrendimous times twenty millionteen for making her feel bad.
If someone called me boring in front of a room full of people, I would cry until there were no tears left behind my eyeballs, and then I’d drink a machillion more gallons of water so I could cry some more. It was the kind of moment where you wished it was any other moment in the whole worldwide of other moments.
I opened my mouth to push a sorry out, but before I could even make a sound, Mrs. Zucker tried to say something and then just started laughing again! She laughed so hard, she had to sit down on a nearby chair. This made me confused, but also a little relieved. I looked at the audience and they seemed a little relieviated, too.
Then, from the chair, she announced, “I can do this!” and walked back to the microphone. But the second she got there, she burst into laughter again, and then she started crying. But it wasn’t a sad kind of crying. It was a laughing kind of crying. Henry gave me a what should we do? kind of face. Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me out onstage.
“Do you need our help?” Henry asked Mrs. Zucker.
Still giggling, Mrs. Zucker pointed at me. “She said my speech was boring. Right into the microphone!”
“I’m really, really, really, sorry,” I said. “Really, really.”
Mrs. Zucker’s laughing started to calm down a little.
She took a couple of deep breaths. Henry and I stood there gripping each other’s hands.
Then Mrs. Zucker looked at me. “What was boring about my speech?”
I couldn’t believe my ears were hearing this question. Everyone was staring at me and the hot lights were shining down on my head. Did Mrs. Zucker want me to hurt her feelings again? Then I thought maybe she liked getting her feelings hurt because it made her laugh.
“Well, I don’t think stretching and stuff is very imaginationary.”
“It’s not. It’s just a way to get your ideas flowing.”
“I just don’t think that it’s the best way,” I explained.
“Well, what would you say is the best way to come up with creative ideas?” she asked.
“Well, I don’t exactly come up with them. They sort of . . . come up to me.”
Mrs. Zucker tilted her head to the side, which meant she was a little interested. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Like when I am doing one thing, that’s when I get my geniusal ideas for other things.”
“You mean you come up with your best ideas when you’re not trying to come up with your best ideas?”
“Yes!” I said. “That’s it exactly! Like one time when I was drawing hopscotch boxes in chalk, I came up with the idea for coloring book wallpaper! And another time when I was washing the dishes with my dad, I came up with the geniusal idea for how to recycle newspapers and magazines.”
Someone in the audience raised their hand and Mrs. Zucker called on her. It was a lady with bright red hair and she called out, “Do you think getting out of the office and taking a walk might be helpful?” I looked at Mrs. Zucker who said, “I think that question is for you.”
For me? WOW. I couldn’t believe a real, live audience person was asking me a question!
“Yes, I think that is a spectaculary idea. It is best if you do something completely different because then your brain will be homesick for the thing you’re not thinking about and go back to it all on its own!” I explained.
The audience made noises like it liked that answer.
“Do you think you could give us another example?” Mrs. Zucker asked me.
“Sure!” I said. “I could give you a hundreteen examples.”
“Just one more for now would be fine,” Mrs. Zucker said.
I put my thinking face on and came up with the most perfectish example.
“Well, one time I decided to see how things looked through squinted eyes. And I saw a sign that said, ‘Christmases for Sale,’ but when I unsquinted I saw that it really said, ‘Mattresses for Sale.’ Then I got the idea to write a story about a store that sold Christmases. All because of squinting!” I knew this example was a little different from the other two examples I gave, but it was also the same because I wasn’t trying to think of a story about Christmases for sale.
“Frannie, thank you so much,” Mrs. Zucker said. “Those were great examples, and very helpful, too. Right?” she asked the audience.
“YES!” a couple people yelled. Then Mrs. Zucker told everyone they should give me a round of applause, which meant that everyone clapped for me and some people even stood up! That is when I decided to bow. I could not even believe how good it felt to be a guest speaker!
Then Mrs. Zucker said some last words to everyone, which sounded very smart, but were a little too fancy for my ears. When she was done, she thanked me for giving everyone such great ideas. Then everyone clapped again, and it sounded like they were clapping even harder than before.
When we saw that a lot of people from the audience were coming up to the stage to talk to Mrs. Zucker, she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Thanks for helping me out of a jam!”
I smiled so wide one corner of my mouth wasn’t even in America anymore!
That’s when my dad rushed up to me and I realized that I had forgotten I was probably in big trouble. “What happened to the box?” he asked me.
“I don’t know!” I said. “It just disappeared!”
“It just disappeared?” he asked, with a there is more to this story than you are telling me, Frannie face.
“I don’t know what happened!” I told him.
“Mr. Tilson went to look for it and he couldn’t find it, either,” my dad said.
“Let me wrap up here and we’ll all go look for it, shall we?” Mrs. Zucker suggested.
When she was done, my dad and I went with her to look for the box. On our way, I saw Henry with her dad. She caught my eye and gave me a thumbsup. That made all my insides smile. And my mouth, too. She was Good Job, Frannie-ing me!
It turns out the box wasn’t even lost to begin with! It had just been pushed farther under the chair! It was there the whole time!
“Sometimes when people get nervous, they make very silly mistakes they would never make if they were calm,” my dad explained. I guess I was so nervous about losing the box that my brain thought tha
t I lost it when it was right there the whole time!
We dropped the juggling pins box with Ruby at the front desk so she could get in touch with the owner.
“Is there a conference about juggling happening in the hotel?” I asked her. “Because that would be a conference I’d be very interested in going to.”
“Not unless it’s a supersecret conference,” Ruby said.
That is when my mind started imagining how much fun a secret juggling conference would be. That is also when my father started talking to me about something that was the opposite of fun.
“Frannie, we’ve had a thousand conversations about responsibility,” my dad said.
“But I helped Mrs. Zucker! I used my imagination, just like what the conference was all about!” I told him.
“Mrs. Zucker would not have needed help if you had been responsible and watched that box,” he said.
“But I was being responsible!” I argued. “I had to make sure Henry wasn’t quitting her job!”
“Whose responsibility is Henry’s job?”
“Henry’s,” I answered, looking at the ground.
“And whose responsibility is your job?”
“Mine,” I said, burning hot with humilification.
“Next time, what would you do differently?” my dad asked.
“I would worry about Henry not being at her job, and maybe tell a grown-up about it if they walked by, but I would just stay at my job because that is my responsibility.”
“Very good. And just to be sure we never have this conversation again, when we get home I’m going to give you a new responsibility around the house. From now on, it’s going to be your responsibility to keep an eye on the trash and take it out when it gets too full. Understood?”
I made sure my brain understood about my new responsibility.
“Understood,” I told my father when I was absolutely sure.
And you will never believe what happened next.