I sighed again. I didn’t see how any of this stuff about some lab assistant nobody even remembered was going to help. I scribbled it in my notebook anyway, then turned to the H2O entry. I’d read it before, all four pages, roughly a million times. I didn’t find anything new.
I slid the Overlord encyclopedia back on the shelf (pages unwrinkled, spine uncracked, dust cover completely straight).
“Thanks,” I hollered to Caveman.
Caveman, still buried in his graphic novel, grunted. I think.
I pushed out of the cave and up the steps, squinting against the sudden bright light. I unlocked my bike and pedaled away. Past the flickering Caveman sign. Toward Weaver’s. Toward the mannequins under their sign: FALL DANCE DRESSES!
I pedaled along, picking up speed, thinking maybe, if I could get Beech to watch cartoons, I could sneak into my room and work on Beanboy.
The late afternoon sun glinted off the Weaver’s window, turning the dresses into a glimmering blur of color—blue, pink, lavender, orange.
And on the end, red.
With straps.
And sparkles.
I nearly rammed into a parking meter.
I wobbled to a stop. Climbed off my bike. Rolled it over to the Weaver’s window.
I pressed my hands against the glass. Squinted. Squinted some more.
The more I squinted, the more I was sure. Sam’s drawing, the not very excellent one with the eraser hole in the armpit? It was exactly the same as the red dress in the Weaver’s window.
Twenty-Eight
I slipped through the door. Tried to act like I was on time.
Sam was scraping Beecher’s leftover waffle crumbs into the trash. She cocked an eyebrow at the glowing red numbers on the microwave: 5:03. Pierced me with a glare.
But she didn’t bark.
She just set the plate in the sink, snatched her babysitting money from my hand, and tromped out the door.
Beecher sighed. Licked syrup off his hand.
“Give money to Papa,” he said.
I looked at him. “What?”
“Give. Money. To Papa,” he said. Like he was explaining to somebody slow.
I frowned. “She gives her babysitting money to her grandpa?”
“Has to.” He held his hands out. “No beans. No tune-up.”
I thought about that for a second. “You mean turnips? No turnips?”
He nodded again. “No beans. No tune-up. No dress.” He let out a big breath. “Life suts.”
Yeah. Sometimes it did.
I scrubbed the syrup off and set him in front of the cartoon channel.
And then what I should’ve done was, I should’ve marched into the Batcave and pulled out the Bristol board I’d brought home from Art Club. I should’ve started working on Beanboy before Beech came in to bug me.
So that’s what I decided to do.
Except first I slipped into my mom’s room. I tiptoed across the rug, knelt down to slide the sewing box out from under the desk—
—and noticed something pink stuffed into the wastebasket. Something fluffy and pink that filled the whole basket and spilled over the side. Something fluffy and pink and billowy that hadn’t been there before.
I pulled it out. Kept pulling and pulling. Pulled till I had an entire pink armful of . . . dress. Except I was holding it upside down. I think. And partly inside out. I turned it over and gave it a shake. Held it up.
It was some kind of fancy dress. The kind you’d wear to a dance maybe. Not a dance this century, except maybe for Halloween.
And only if you were a zombie. Because somebody’d taken scissors to the whole top part of it. Chopped off the fluffy sleeves, which—I glanced into my mom’s trash—were lying dead at the bottom of the wastebasket. Tried to sew on some straps. Which were kind of bunched up and bumpy and not exactly the same length and not quite in the right place.
And the thing was, I recognized that dress.
I’d seen it before. The exact same dress. Outside Caveman. When Sam was standing in front of the Weaver’s window. When she drowned my comic book so I wouldn’t notice her grandpa carrying it out of the thrift store in an old paper bag.
“We try. Just touldn’t.”
I turned. Beech was standing in the doorway.
“You and Sam?” I said. “This is what you’ve been up to?
He nodded. “Try to sew.” He held up his hands, then dropped them to his sides. “No good.”
That part sure was true. When it came to sewing, Beecher and Sam were pretty much no good.
Beech and I stood side by side, squinting at the chopped-up, cockeyed, old pink dress. Beech crawled under the desk and dug a wadded-up ball of paper out from under the dead pink sleeves in the trash can.
“Posed to be this.” He unballed the paper. Smoothed it out along the edge of the desk and handed it to me.
It was my drawing. My drawing of the sparkly dress.
I held it up next to the pink dress. Looked at them side by side. Sam had been trying to turn an old dress from the thrift store into the sparkly dress from the Weaver’s display window.
I put the dress back in the trash. I folded it first, carefully tucking in the bunched-up straps. Don’t ask me why. I mean, it was just going to get set on the curb with the rest of the trash Monday morning, so it really didn’t matter.
But it didn’t seem right to just stuff something somebody’d been working that hard on into a trash can all wadded up. Especially not something somebody’s grandpa had gotten for her in the first place.
Come to think of it, it didn’t seem right to put it in the trash at all, even nicely folded.
I pulled it back out. Which didn’t make any sense. Because clearly, Sam didn’t want it anymore, and I sure didn’t need a dusty old cut-up dress.
I got a plastic grocery sack from the kitchen, slid the dress inside, and tucked the whole thing behind my computer, under the poster, next to the pickle jar.
And then—finally—I did what I should’ve done in the first place and pulled out the Bristol board. Beanboy had to be in the mail and on his way to the contest judges by midnight Monday, which gave me less than four days to turn him into the greatest sidekick ever. All this Zawicki stuff had gotten me way off schedule.
I looked over my notes.
Mary Ann Goodnight.
Madame Fury.
Godfrey Mann.
H2O.
Beanboy’s gassed-up superpowers.
There was something there. Some . . . clue. I could feel it.
I swiveled in my chair. Caught a glimpse of the pickle jar, which I’d barely thought about since I started drawing Beanboy. I dug it out from under the poster. Ran my thumb over the paper taped to the front. $61.24.
I looked at the sack of pink dress and slid open my drawer. Pulled out the wrinkled dance ticket I’d tried to give Sam. Smoothed it out on my desk.
Sam wanted a dress. Not an old pink out-of-style, do-it-yourself dress for zombies from the thrift shop. A new, sparkly red dress, with straps, from Weaver’s Department Store, that she could wear to the Fall Fling and find out what it was like to wear the same kind of clothes as everybody else, even though she said she never wanted to.
Except that a gallon of milk and big gusting thunderstorm wiped her out and she ended up giving her money to her grandpa instead.
I shook my head. What was I doing? Beanboy had to be in the mail by Monday.
Monday.
Four and a half days from now.
I pushed the jar and the sack into the corner and pulled the poster down over them. I didn’t have time for Sam Zawicki’s dress problems. Even if I knew what to do about them.
Twenty-Nine
I huddled at our lunch table, ignoring my lunch tray, sketching in my notebook.
Around me, Earhart Middle crackled with excitement. Tomorrow was the Fall Fling, and Emma and the Kaleys were spending their lunch period stringing up balloons and glittery stars to get the cafeteria ready. Emma unrolled
a banner that said WELCOME TO THE FALL FLING! in tempera paint. The Kaleys twisted blue and silver crepe paper into long streamers and taped them along the wall over the trash cans.
And I’m sure they didn’t notice, and probably wouldn’t care if they did, but while they twisted and taped, Sam pierced them with a Zawicki Glare of Bad Luck and Ruination.
Now that Dillon wasn’t kicked out anymore, he was back to eating lunch at the Zawicki table under the EXIT sign. He chowed his sandwich, slugged down his milk, then ambled from the cafeteria, shooting a three-pointer at the trash can with his lunch sack on his way out. It bounced wide, but he didn’t go in for the rebound. He left it lying on the floor and clanked out the door.
Sam crumpled her sack and got up to follow him.
And on her way to the trash can, she very calmly, very quietly, and with a lot more stealth than I ever knew she had, ran her finger along the wall of streamers, popping the Scotch tape loose from each one.
She was out the door and down the hall before the Kaleys started squealing.
Thirty
Saturday morning Mom was at work again, just like every Saturday.
The morning was wet, the kind of wet that wasn’t quite a sprinkle, or even a drizzle, but more like the air itself had soaked up so much water it just clung to your skin like a soggy blanket.
It was the kind of morning I should have spent holed up in the Batcave, trying to draw.
Instead, for some reason, I wheeled my bike through the damp air to the bottom of our porch steps, braced the front wheel with my foot, and lifted Beecher onto the handlebars.
“NO!” He clamped his arms around my neck and buried his face in my neck.
He didn’t like riding on a bike any better than he liked going up and down stairs. And he wasn’t any better at it, either.
“Beech,” I rasped. My Adam’s apple was pinned down by his elbow. “Let go.”
He clenched tighter.
I wrangled his elbows around so I could at least swallow and pushed his head far enough to the side so that I could see, a little bit anyway. And that’s how we rode to Weaver’s Department Store: his butt perched on the handlebars, his arms clamped around my neck, his screechy little voice squealing, “No tip over! No tip over!” in my ear, his soggy pillowcase cape flapping in my face.
Halfway down Polk, I started seeing spots. I don’t think I was getting enough oxygen.
All I can say is, it was probably a good thing Caveman shot down my big comic book delivery idea.
When I finally got us pedaled across town to Weaver’s, I peeled Beecher off the handlebars. And off my neck. I locked my bike to a parking meter and dragged Beech inside.
You know how, when it’s cold outside and you’ve been cleaning out the garage or raking leaves or something till you’ve worked up a sweat, so that you’re this little island of hot in the middle of the cold, and the steam just rolls off you, right through your clothes, till you can feel the white fog rising off your head?
That was me and Beech as we stood in the middle of Weaver’s first floor, trying to figure out how we were supposed to do this.
I’d thought about it all last night (the pink dress wouldn’t let me think about much else) and this morning I rustled Beech out of bed early, shoveled oatmeal (with a raisin face) down his throat, and dug through the couch and all our chairs and in the pockets of the dirty clothes in our laundry hamper and in the junk drawer in the kitchen till I’d rounded up every last bit of money in the MacBean Family Apartment.
Then I strode into my room.
Where I should’ve kept working on Beanboy. Where I should’ve been getting him ready to mail to the contest judges. Where I shouldn’t have reached under the poster behind my computer and pulled out the pickle jar.
Beech had followed me, his face scrunched in a suspicious frown.
“What doing?” he said.
I gripped the lid. “We need the money.”
“NOOOOOOOO!” He launched himself at the jar. Wrapped his hands around it, his fingers suctioned to the glass like ten little tentacles.
“Beech. Listen.” I tried to pull the jar away. “We’ve been saving our money for two months, and look.” I tried to get him to see the paper taped to the front. “This is all we’ve got.”
He clung to the jar. “Mom’s money.”
“But it’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough.”
“No.”
“Just listen—”
“No!”
“It’s for Sam.”
He loosened his grip. “Sam?”
I nodded.
He handed me the jar.
I emptied it out and stuffed the money in my pocket with the change from our couch.
And now here we stood, in Weaver’s Department Store.
And I just about turned around, right then and there, and walked back out again.
But we’d been standing there long enough, steamy and wet in the middle of their clean, polished department store aisle, that I guess the Weaver’s people started to get nervous, because suddenly a lady in a crisp blue suit, wearing her name—Suzanne—on a shiny gold nametag, hovered over us.
“May I help you?” she said, in a voice that sounded like we probably needed more help than she could provide, but she’d give it a shot.
“Yes.” My voice kind of screeked out. I cleared my throat. Lowered my voice till I sounded like my dad. With a cold. And allergies. And maybe some bubonic plague. “Yes,” I said. “We need this dress, in this size.”
I’d checked the label inside the old pink thrift store dress and written the size on my crumpled drawing of the sparkly dress. Now I showed both of them to Suzanne.
“It’s the red one. In the window,” I said. “It’s for—for our—for—”
“Sam,” Beech said, helpfully.
“We have money,” I added, just in case Suzanne was worried.
She looked at me, then at the drawing, then at me again. Then she smiled, gave a sharp nod, and herded us through racks and shelves to a display of glittery dance dresses along the wall. She flipped through the display, peered down at the size scribbled on the drawing again, and pulled one out.
She held the hanger in one hand and draped the dress over her arm. The red sparkles flickered under the bright store lights.
I narrowed my eyes. Held my hands up to sort of measure it in my head, to make sure it would fit somebody who usually lumbered around in a big flapping army jacket and boots.
Finally I nodded. “That’s the one.”
And then I remembered.
A little white tag dangled from the dress. I took a breath, picked it up, and twisted it around so I could see the price.
“Oh,” I said.
Dance dresses turned out to be way more expensive than I ever thought. Beech and I could scrape through all the change returns in all the Laundromats in all of Wheaton and still not have enough.
“Sam dress?” said Beech.
I shook my head.
Suzanne looked down at me, a smile on her face. “You didn’t see the sale, did you?” She tipped her head toward a red and white sign above the dress display:
I stared at the sign. My mouth fell open. I’m sure I looked like a guppy.
“We need to get rid of the fall dresses,” she said. “To make room for winter coats.”
Beech squinched up at me. “Sam dress?”
I nodded. “Sam dress.”
Thirty-One
I didn’t know very many dress salespeople. Actually, counting Suzanne, I knew one. But of all the dress salespeople in all the world, she was my favorite.
She rang us up, slid the dress into a giant white plastic bag, and tied it at the bottom so it wouldn’t get splashed. The hanger poked out the top, and Suzanne showed me how to hold it so the dress wouldn’t fall off.
Luckily, I didn’t have to carry it far. The farmers’ market was on the street behind Quincy, two blocks down. We walked my bike through the blanket-damp morning, m
e holding the dress bag up so it wouldn’t drag the ground, and wheeled into the farmers’ market parking lot.
And that’s when the total stupidity of this plan hauled off and slapped me in the face.
Most people would probably think that, for a thirteen-year-old kid, buying a girl’s dress would be the hard part. Because that’s what I would’ve thought.
And lots of people would think riding Beecher all the way from our house on my bike, through the damp and the cold and the puddles and the flapping cape, with hardly any eardrums left after all the screaming, would be another hard part. And I would’ve thought that, too.
But that stuff was easy compared to what I had to do next: walk up to Sam Zawicki, the girl who about snapped my head off when I tried to give her a measly dance ticket, and hand her a whole, entire dress.
Clearly, I had not thought this through.
“Well. We’re here now.” I took a breath. “Let’s get this over with.”
Beech nodded. “Over with.”
We wove our way through the aisles and stalls of the farmers’ market, me and Beech and the bike and the dress, my arm about to fall off from holding it up. We reached the rickety pickup truck. Sam’s grandpa stood out front, smiling and friendly, just like before.
But his forehead was wrinkled into a tough little knot, and you didn’t have to be a genius to see why. The duct-taped boxes, piled high with vegetables a few weeks ago, now wilted in the morning dew, barely half full. Some potatoes. A few apples. A couple lonely eggplants. That was about it.
He spotted us standing there.
“Hey there, fella.” He crouched down beside Beech. “How’s that fine-looking pumpkin of yours?”
Beech about smiled himself in half. “Good,” he said. “Sam help me.”
The Adventures of Beanboy Page 10