He gagged and waved me away.
I pulled my pen from my back pocket and wrote O’Malley on his hand. “Thank you!” I leaned over for a hug. He blushed a furious shade of red but didn’t try to escape.
Just our luck, Dameon Swenson strutted down the stairs with a group of his friends in time to see the hug. “Aww, you got yourself a Mrs. Ginger, Bugden? You know you two can’t breed, right? Your kids will have pink hair.”
I reached over, grabbed Nickel’s face, and kissed him right on the mouth. His lips were drier than I’d expected, and tight with surprise and panic. My first kiss was supposed to be romantic, but sacrifices had to be made at times like that.
I looked up at Swenson and said, “At least someone will kiss him. I know for a fact every girl in sixth grade swears they’ll die of mono before they’ll kiss you.”
Swenson turned a grape-jelly shade of purple. Nickel turned a similar color himself.
“I’d rather date the older girls in the seventh grade, anyway,” Swenson said.
I shook my head. “They all think you’re a little puke too.”
He muttered something about geeks and wackos and stamped off. His chuckling friends followed a respectful distance behind.
Nickel’s face had gone all pale, and he looked like he might hurl. “You kissed me, you weirdo!”
That was a bit rude, but I grinned anyway. “You’re welcome.”
He took a big swig from his soda cup, swirled it around in his mouth, and spat it into the dried-up strip of garden by the steps. A pigeon let out a noisy protest and flapped out of the way.
“You sure made Swenson look like an idiot, though. It was almost worth it,” he said.
I decided to listen to that and forget how he had washed out his mouth. “I’ve seen Mom deal with jerks like him. The trick is to embarrass them worse than they embarrass you. It only works if you can think of a good comeback, though.”
“Next time,” Nickel said, tossing his empty soda cup into the trash, “maybe you could try using your words.”
One day Nickel would like my kisses just fine. He just wasn’t ready to admit it yet, and Swenson had been watching, that was all. Next time I’d let him think kissing was his idea, even though it might take him forever to get around to it.
Oh well, we’d be married when we grew up if I got my way—and I usually did.
Unless the satellite got me first.
* * *
• • •
It was almost dark by the time Nickel’s mom dropped me off at home. I thanked her and waved as they disappeared into the distance. I doubted I’d hear from Nickel before the next day, even if he found anything on the computer. He hated to text, and I’d already used my computer time for the day.
Mrs. Cuthbert stood in her front garden with a dripping hose in her hand. If she planned on watering her garden, it would take a while like that.
“That your boyfriend?” she asked.
Feeling kind of smug, I said, “Yep.” Even though it wasn’t strictly true.
“I don’t approve of dating at your age.” She shook her head. The hose coughed and sputtered and spat out a single plop of water that disappeared into the dry lawn.
I looked at her plaid shorts and orange button-down shirt. This was the woman who had nearly squished me with her giant tree and who spent her days spying on us. I didn’t much care what she approved of.
“My mom is proud of everything I do,” I said.
“That doesn’t surprise me one bit!”
I twirled toward our house and stamped off inside. Mom didn’t like plenty of things I did, but she never stopped being proud of me. The details weren’t important, though.
If Mrs. Cuthbert didn’t approve of me, I had done something right.
I always slept in on Saturdays, but this time I woke up early to the sound of Mom and Mrs. Cuthbert arguing in our front yard. This happened at least once a month, but usually not before Grandma’s pancakes filled the house with a smell so happy even a cranky neighbor couldn’t ruin the day.
Saturdays meant fairy parties, and often more than one. If I wasn’t careful, Mom would have me wearing a tutu and wrangling toddlers. I stayed in my room until I could hear Mom’s angry voice in the kitchen as she told Grandma about whatever awful thing Mrs. Cuthbert said this time.
I dressed, put on my hat and sunscreen, and took a paper bag outside to collect the toys that had fallen from the roof with the skydiver. Most of the tennis balls were fine, but anything plastic was faded and brittle from the sun. They still added up to enough to earn a few quarters on the school black market, maybe even a cinnamon bun’s worth.
I slipped the last Frisbee into the bag as a car pulled up outside our house. A mother climbed out to unbuckle a squawking toddler from her car seat. Party time. Toddlers were loud and always sticky, but they turned into chubby little balls of human flypaper once they hit the Fairy Wonderland.
I made a run for Robyn Headquarters, a tree house my great-grandpa had built in our backyard for Grandma. Then it became Mom’s when she was a kid, and now it was mine. When I inherited it, I redecorated it to hide the flaky old boards and cracks. It had been great until Mrs. Cuthbert decided to get rid of her tree. My headquarters would have been destroyed if the tree had fallen a few inches closer. But it survived, mostly hidden high up in the ancient elm. It was missing a whole wall and could get pretty drafty in winter, though.
There were four rules for Robyn HQ:
1. No birds. (This rule was hard to enforce on account of one missing wall and birds not understanding the meaning of “no trespassers” or “Don’t eat my cookies.”)
2. No boys. (The only boys who got near were out of their minds from preservatives and food coloring from fairy parties. They couldn’t even see the rope ladder, much less figure out how to use it. I would make an exception for Nickel, but he had a very sensible toddler phobia and never visited my house.)
3. No falling out of, acknowledging, or otherwise encouraging the ginormous hole in the wall.
4. If you hear a chainsaw, forget the rope ladder and jump. Jump for your life.
Hopefully, I would never have to jump. It’s hard to outrun a crash-landing satellite or find a father while wearing a plaster body cast.
The rope ladder creaked as I climbed the old elm tree, one careful step at a time. The wooden rungs were getting awful gray and splintery, and the rope had frayed in places. If I found my dad, maybe he could fix my ladder, since Mom and Grandma were always too busy fixing the house to have time for my headquarters. I stopped noticing that the rope felt hard and crackly, and imagined shiny new rungs with rubber grips instead.
Things inside the headquarters were a bit grim. Most of my pictures had blown out of the hole, been torn to bits by the wind, or been carried off to make bird nests. The one proper window still had its little red-and-white-checked curtains, although they were a bit battered.
I opened my notebook on the floor in front of me, took my favorite orange pen from my pocket, and wrote an excellent title with swirly bits at each end to show how important it was.
~ My Dad: Pros and Cons ~
by Robyn Tinkerbell Goodfellow
Pros:
1. He could help me change my name. Mom chose “Goodfellow” for us when I was little, and she changed our names legally. He could change mine to something else. Robyn O’Malley, for instance.
2. He could tell me where I got my curly hair.
3. He could take me to family get-togethers.
4. He could buy me a pet iguana.
I doodled a picture of an iguana in the margin. What if my dad wasn’t interested in helping? He never visited. Never sent birthday cards. He might not know my birthday, but he definitely knew about Christmas and didn’t send presents then either. Mom had always lived in our house, so he must have k
nown how to find us if he wanted to. But he never did. Maybe Mom didn’t talk about him because he had hurt her feelings too badly.
Cons:
1. He might disagree with owning lizards as pets.
2. He might already have kids. Maybe he was there in the park and some of those kids were his. He might not even want me. In fact, he already didn’t want me, since he wasn’t around. Unless Mom never told him. She could be very sneaky.
Mom always said if she could line up every girl in the entire world and choose exactly which one she wanted for her daughter, she would still pick me every time. If that was true, he would be sure to like me. Wouldn’t he?
Frowning, I added the last item to the list.
3. He might not care, even if he had the coolest daughter in the world.
I slammed my notebook closed and tucked it into the front of my sweater, scolded a crow perched outside my picture window, and started down the ladder. My foot went straight through the last rung with a loud snap, and I landed hard on the grass with a thud.
Gritting my teeth and rubbing my nose to get rid of the tearful prickles inside it, I got to my feet and half stamped, half limped toward the back door. Stupid fathers. Stupid ladder.
I had almost made it when Mrs. Cuthbert’s voice stopped me. “Robyn. You’re precisely the girl I wanted to see.”
Putting my best and sweetest smile on my face, I turned and gave her a feeble wave in reply. Her head popped up over the top of the fence Grandma had built after Mrs. Cuthbert made it her personal mission to prove we were spies for a corrupt oil baron. The fence did a pretty good job at keeping her out, but I sometimes caught a flash as sunlight hit the glass of her binoculars peering through the knotholes in the wood.
“Hi, Mrs. C.”
“Did you hear any wind during the night?” she asked, scratching behind her ear with a clothespin.
I shook my head. Since I had spent half the night tossing and turning, imagining every sound was a satellite speeding to Earth to squash me before I could find my dad or change my name, I would have noticed if there had been any. Wind always whistled around the old house like an orchestra of flutes and violins.
“I didn’t hear any either, and yet when I got up this morning”—Mrs. Cuthbert glanced over her shoulder to point at something in her backyard—“all the sheets were gone from my clothesline.”
“Grandma says you shouldn’t leave your laundry out,” I said, “in case it gets stolen.”
Mrs. Cuthbert sniffed. “Funny she should say that. Look.”
I followed the direction of her pointing finger all the way to the very top of our roof. There, hanging limply from the rooster weather vane, was a sky-blue bedsheet.
“Oh,” I said.
“What are you going to do about it?” Mrs. Cuthbert said. “I told that mother of yours this morning that it’s time at least one of you people acted like an adult. Since she won’t, I guess it will have to be the child who does it.”
My throat burned with angry words. I hated when anyone said anything nasty about my mom, because she never said anything nasty about anyone else.
“You lot can’t keep collecting things from the neighborhood with that roof of yours. You’re kleptomaniacs.”
Heat from embarrassment crept up my neck and into my cheeks. Whatever a kleptomaniac was, I didn’t think we were it. Although our roof might be. “We have plenty of sheets of our own.”
Mrs. Cuthbert’s face puckered up. “If you’re all so well-off, why doesn’t someone fix that disaster of a house?”
I’d never minded the loose boards and flaky paint until she said those words. It stung as if she had insulted me as much as the house.
When I didn’t answer, she growled from the other side of the fence. “Someone needs to put a stop to it. Don’t go thinking I won’t escalate this to a governmental level if I’m pushed. So far, I’ve hesitated to involve my fellow agents because I believe in being neighborly.”
I had to bite my lip to keep my mouth closed when she said that last bit.
Sticking her nose in the air, she said, “You know what people say about your family, don’t you?”
Whatever it was, it couldn’t be much worse than what they said about Mrs. Cuthbert. The words wouldn’t stay inside anymore. “Maybe Grandma could afford to fix up the house if a tree hadn’t fallen on it, or if she hadn’t had to waste time building a new fence to keep you from spying on us!” I spat out the words and ran inside.
When Grandma found out what I said—and Mrs. Cuthbert would make darn sure she did—I’d be grounded forever.
It kind of seemed worth it.
Mrs. Cuthbert had some nerve, arguing with Mom and me in a single day.
When I got inside, I leaned against the bookshelf in the hallway to catch my breath and wait for the angry tears to stop burning. A toddler with wide eyes and a cupcake wrapper stuck to her cheek galloped up to me.
“Bathwoom!” she squealed, hopping around in circles.
I backed away and pointed toward the fairy-party bathroom Mom had designed next to the laundry downstairs.
“Fanks!” the kid hollered, running off down the hall and right past the bathroom door.
I hurried up the stairs before she could come back. At least I knew Mom would soon be too busy cleaning up a pee puddle to find some chore for me to do. I tiptoed along the upstairs hall, dodging most of the creaky boards. I had a hand on my bedroom door when Mom stumbled backward out of her room, dragging a suitcase stuffed so full that little pinches of fabric poked out between the zipper teeth.
“Mom?”
She spun around to face me.
“I thought you were outside,” she said, running her wrist under her nose. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she sounded like she had a cold. No way. Mom never cried.
“I was, but now I’m inside. Why aren’t you downstairs herding toddlers?”
Her eyes went all wide, like I had caught her in the middle of mischief making—which was weird. Normally it was the other way around. “Grandma’s giving me a day off. Isn’t she sweet?”
People called Grandma a lot of things, but “sweet” didn’t come up that often. I almost giggled at the idea of my grandmother in wings and a tutu.
I pointed to the suitcase. “Are you running away from the satellite?”
She glanced down at the bag like it had just appeared out of nowhere. “I got to thinking about some old stuff I’ve been keeping for much too long. I thought I’d have a spring clean-out.”
“It’s practically summer.”
“Oh, Bob. Don’t get technical on me.” She grinned and dragged the case on its wobbly wheels toward the stairs.
“I’ll help you get it down,” I said, mostly so I could take a closer look.
There wasn’t much to see. Fabric. Not even any glitter. Whatever treasure Mom had decided to get rid of stayed hidden inside her plaid suitcase.
“What kind of stuff is it?” I asked as we bounced off the last stair.
Mom shrugged, which was when I noticed her wings were missing. “Nothing important.” She sniffled. “And dusty. It made me all sneezy.”
I didn’t buy it, not really. She was up to something, or my name wasn’t Robyn Tinkerbell Goodfellow—and unfortunately, it was. The trouble with mysterious mothers was that they’d had more years to practice lying. Mom was excellent at it. I almost believed the dust story. Anyone who had seen inside her room would.
Other people’s mothers told their kids to clean their rooms. Not mine. Sometimes I thought about suggesting she organize hers, though. Other people’s mothers bought them iguanas, or at least a puppy or a kitten or something, and didn’t wear wings. Again, not mine. Although Sarah-Belle Schue’s mom sometimes wore cat ears. Other people’s moms did lots of things that mine didn’t, and mostly I was okay with that—so
long as no one was looking.
Right then, Mom looked like any other ordinary mother. Wingless, tutu-less, dragging an old suitcase out to the car. I scurried back up the stairs in case Grandma called me to help with the party or the pee puddle. But what was Mom up to? What did she have in that suitcase that she wouldn’t tell me about? There was only one subject she didn’t share with me. My dad.
Dad!
He probably wasn’t in the suitcase, but clues might be. Dad clues.
I had to stop her.
I raced to the window just in time to see our car disappear down the street.
Great. Stupid, slow brain.
I kicked my bed, then hopped around a bit, rubbing my foot, before chucking my pillow at the wall and knocking down a couple of glow stars. After a few minutes of sitting on my bed, picking at the cover of my notebook, I stopped feeling angry and started feeling hungry instead.
The door downstairs had opened and slammed quite a few times as parents came to collect their kids. That meant there might be leftover birthday cake. I hurried down the stairs, my feet skipping fairy-light over each step.
The hallway was empty.
No toddlers. No parents. No Grandma.
“Hello?” I called out.
“In here.” Grandma’s voice came from the Fairy Wonderland.
I pushed open the door, and there, looking tired and a bit wilted, stood Grandma. She wore one of Mom’s tutus with a pair of slightly crumpled wings on her shoulders. I never saw a worse fairy in all my life.
A giggle bubbled up inside me, and even my best Focus Pocus self-control training could not stop it.
“Don’t you laugh, missy. I’m going to need some help cleaning up, and you’re the only one available.”
The smile slipped off my face. “Me? I have satellites to worry about, and Mom just took off and left me to clean up?”
Grandma laughed. “If we’re going to get hit by the satellite, leaving would be a lot smarter than staying.”
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