Lions & Liars

by Kate Beasley

  Frederick stepped between the Professor and Joel and leaned against the railing, holding his daiquiri between his hands and watching the boy he had pretended to be sail away.

  “Where’s he going?” the Professor said, nodding at the boat.

  The boys started calling out guesses, but Frederick didn’t join them. To tell the truth, he wasn’t that curious about where Dashiell Blackwood wound up.

  Nosebleed cupped his hands around his mouth. “Bye, Dash!” he yelled.

  Dash didn’t look back.

  Farther down the railing there was a scuffle, and Raj yelled, “Get off me,” and the next thing Frederick knew, Raj’s black-framed glasses were flying over the railing and dropping into the sea.

  Specs let out a triumphant whoop, and then he turned and ran up the deck, his feet pounding. Raj tore after him, cursing. Joel and the boys from Camp Omigoshee followed, leaving Frederick alone at the railing with a few tourists who were pointing at the escaping boy and muttering in concern.

  Sunlight sparkled on the water. Frederick finally turned away and followed the others back toward the pool.

  There was no way to sugarcoat it. Life could be pretty hard. A lion might horrifically eat you at any moment, even if you were in North America, where lions were not supposed to be. And hurricanes could come right for you, even if you canceled your vacation just to avoid them. And people had all kinds of problems, and sometimes those problems couldn’t be fixed.

  When Frederick had gotten back home, he’d found that even after his big adventure, he hadn’t transformed into that guy, that guy who got laughs in class and walked through the school like he owned the place. He still kind of felt like a flea sometimes. And Devin Goodyear was still a lion. So yes, life could be hard. But Frederick had a theory that if—

  “Hey, Frederick!”

  Frederick looked up. Ant Bite was ahead of him. He’d stopped and was looking back, waiting. He gestured with a hand, beckoning Frederick. “Are you coming or not?”

  “Yeah!” Frederick jogged to catch up.

  Anyway … Frederick had a theory that no matter how hard life was among all the hungry animals, if you could find some people who would help you survive and who you could help in return, and if you took some time off every now and then to get away from your problems, then it could actually be pretty great. And hey, at least it wasn’t boring.

  Frederick fell into step beside Ant Bite. He plucked the plastic saber out of his drink and dragged a frosty cherry off it with his teeth.

  Author’s Note

  In case you were curious, the book the Professor reads at breakfast is Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The spy book Ant Bite has at the end is I’d Tell You I Love You, but Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter.

  xoxo Kate

  1

  A Monstrosity of Science

  The bullfrog was only half dead, which was perfect.

  He hunkered in the dark culvert under the driveway and gazed at Gertie Reece Foy with a tragical gleam in his eye, as if he knew that her face was the last lovely thing he would ever see.

  Gertie stuck her head and shoulders in the culvert and grabbed the frog. His fat legs dangled over her fingers.

  She ran to the house and pushed the kitchen door open with her back. Laying the frog on the counter, she ripped open the drawer that held all the unusual and exciting kitchen equipment. She rummaged through cheese graters, bottle openers, and tongs, glancing up every other second to make sure the frog hadn’t moved or, worse, died.

  “What’s going on in there?” Aunt Rae yelled from the living room.

  “Nothing!” Gertie whipped out the turkey baster.

  She wiggled her index finger between the frog’s lips—if you could call them lips—and poked the pipette into his mouth. Then she squeezed the blue bulb at the other end, forcing oxygen into his lungs.

  The air must have revived him quickly, or maybe he was a little less dead than Gertie had hoped, because he sprang for the edge of the counter. Gertie lunged sideways and cupped her hands over him.

  “There, there,” she said. “You’re safe now.”

  She peeked at him through her fingers, and he peeked back at her, his eyeballs quivering with gratitude. Or maybe they quivered with rage. It was hard to tell.

  She wrapped her hands around the frog’s middle, turned on her heel, and crashed into a soft, flowery stomach.

  “Oof,” said Aunt Rae. She blinked at the frog in Gertie’s hands. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?”

  “I resuscitated him.” Gertie held the frog closer.

  Aunt Rae moved to stand over the air vent in the kitchen floor, and her housedress ballooned around her legs. “You what?”

  “Resuscitated,” said Gertie. “It means I brought him back to life.”

  “I know what it means.” Aunt Rae swayed her weight from foot to foot. “Why’d you resuscitate a ugly old bullfrog? That’s what I don’t know.”

  Gertie sighed. She spent a lot of time explaining things that should have been obvious to people. “I did it so he could become a miracle of science,” she said.

  “Huh.” Aunt Rae wrinkled her nose at the frog. “Looks more like a monstrosity of science to me.”

  Gertie gasped. “Oh my Lord.”

  “What?”

  “Aunt Rae, that’s even better!”

  The monstrosity of science wriggled in her hands, and Gertie tried to hold him tighter but not so much tighter that his eyes would pop right out of his head and fall on the floor.

  “I’ve got to get him in his box, Aunt Rae,” Gertie said, “before his eyes roll around on the floor and we have to stick them back.”

  “Why would—” Aunt Rae began.

  “Oh my Lord! I don’t have time to explain every little detail!”

  “All right, all right.” Aunt Rae patted down her skirt. “But I want you to use bleach on my counter when you’re done, you hear me?”

  * * *

  Gertie put the frog and some nice wet leaves in a shoe box. Then she rubber-banded on the lid and went out to the porch. The Zapper-2000, a bug zapper big enough to fry baby dragons, hung from the rafters.

  Phase One of the mission was off to a good start.

  Gertie always had at least one mission in the works, and she never, ever failed to complete her missions. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the fastest or the smartest or the tallest, because what made Gertie a force to be reckoned with was the fact that she never gave up. Not ever. Her father liked to say that she was a bulldog with its jaws locked on a car tire.

  Gertie was thinking about having that printed on business cards she could hand out to people.

  She crouched in the fluorescent blue beam of light beneath the Zapper-2000 and collected a handful of the mosquito bodies that littered the ground. As she worked, the cicadas and crickets started sawing their night song. Gertie stood and watched the sun set on the last day of summer vacation.

  With these tasty mosquitoes, the bullfrog was sure to be fat and croaky tomorrow. And with a fat and croaky bullfrog to take with her, Gertie was sure to have the best summer speech of any student at Carroll Elementary. She curled her toes over the edge of the porch boards.

  She, Gertie Reece Foy, was going to be the greatest fifth grader in the whole school, world, and universe!

  And that was just Phase One.

  2

  You’re in My Seat

  Gertie had a reason for wanting to be the greatest fifth grader in the world. Two days before the resuscitation of the bullfrog, something big had happened. She had seen a sign.

  Not the kind of Sign with a capital S that people saw in crystal balls or tea leaves or unusual mold formations on cheese. No. Gertie had seen a Sunshine Realty sign.

  The sign was in front of the house where Gertie’s mother lived, and it said For Sale by Sunshine Realty. That sign was the reason Gertie was on her most important mission yet. And it was the reason why, when she woke up on the first morning of fifth
grade, she launched herself out of bed, ran to the bathroom, and brushed her teeth with extra froth in front of the mirror.

  Gertie had brown hair which she wore in a ponytail that stuck straight out the top of her head, which encouraged blood flow to her brain, which made her have lots of ideas. She also had a biggish nose and a pointy chin. She had freckles on her face, and she had elbows halfway down her arms. As always, she looked exactly like herself.

  She pointed her toothbrush at her reflection. “This is your moment,” she said, and she wiped away her toothpaste beard.

  In her bedroom, she put on shorts, her favorite blue T-shirt, and the twenty-five-percent-off sandals Aunt Rae had bought her. Then she fastened a gold locket around her neck. Gertie dropped the locket down the front of her shirt and picked up the shoe box, enjoying the weight it had to it. Nothing, she decided, was as comforting as the weight of a nice, healthy bullfrog.

  When Gertie marched into the kitchen, Aunt Rae held out a package of Twinkies, and Gertie snatched it out of the air with her free hand. She stepped through the screen door, then stopped and tilted her head, waiting.

  “Give ’em hell, baby,” called Aunt Rae.

  Gertie tapped the Twinkies to her brow in a salute and let the door bang shut behind her.

  * * *

  On the bus, Gertie sat next to one of her two best friends. His name was Junior Parks.

  Junior had a lot of nervous energy, which must have burned up a lot of calories, because he was the skinniest boy in their class. He was so skinny that some people said he had worms, which he didn’t, but Gertie would’ve been friends with him even if he did, because she wasn’t squeamish about worms.

  Junior was probably so nervous because of his name. His name wasn’t Mitchell Parks Jr. or Benji Parks Jr. His father’s name was Junior Parks. So Junior’s name was Junior Parks Jr.

  He always introduced himself as Junior Parks the Second, but everyone still called him Junior Jr.

  “What’s in the box?” Junior asked the moment Gertie sat down.

  You could always count on Junior to notice little details. He was worried that anything new might be a threat to him. For instance, right now he was probably afraid that the box held something horrible, like a severed hand or a dead rat or a nice present for everyone in the class except him.

  Gertie settled the shoe box in her lap and patted the lid. “You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?” She nibbled a Twinkie. Most people thought the middles were plain cream-filled, but she could taste a hint of lemon.

  Junior gnawed his lip.

  Gertie gave in. A little. “It’s for my summer speech.”

  Junior’s eyes widened, and his shoes kicked the seat in front of him. “I forgot about the summer speech,” he said in a strangled voice.

  “How could you forget something this important?” Gertie asked.

  On the first day of school, every class at Carroll Elementary spent the morning on the summer speeches. Each student stood in front of their class and told the one most interesting thing that had happened that summer. The teachers said the speeches weren’t a competition, but the students knew better.

  In first grade, Gertie hadn’t known about the speeches, so she hadn’t been prepared. She’d only stumbled through, trying at the last moment to think of something juicy.

  In second grade, she had carefully reviewed her summer and chosen what had to be the most interesting event—when she’d eaten fifteen oysters without throwing up. But that was the year Roy Caldwell had climbed up a pecan tree and refused to come down for two whole days, just so he would have the best story.

  In third grade, Gertie should have won with her reenactment of what had happened on the oil rig where her father worked. Now, that had been a humdinger of a summer speech.

  The important thing wasn’t what you told, but how you told it. It was one thing to say that your father was working on an oil rig. It was another thing altogether if you said that alarms had gone off because one of the pumps was under pressure, and everybody had jumped off the platform and into the shark-and-eel-infested ocean.

  Unfortunately, that was the same summer Ella Jenkins had had her appendix taken out in the hospital, and she had a lumpy purple scar to prove it.

  Gertie didn’t even want to think about the fourth-grade speeches when Leo Riggs had shaved off his left eyebrow.

  But this year was Gertie’s year. It had to be. She licked the last of the greasy yellow Twinkie crumbs off her fingers as the bus turned onto Jones Street. Gertie scooted to the edge of her seat.

  The houses on Jones Street seemed impressively housey to Gertie. Aunt Rae’s house had flaky paint and crooked doorframes. These houses had straight rows of brick and graceful columns and brass knockers that gleamed on tall front doors.

  But that wasn’t the most interesting thing about Jones Street.

  The most interesting thing was that Gertie’s mother lived there. Her name was Rachel Collins.

  When Gertie was just a baby, Rachel had gone off to live in the house on Jones Street. The only things she’d left behind were the locket, Gertie’s father, and Gertie.

  Gertie’s father, Frank Foy, said that Rachel Collins had left because she wasn’t happy and she had to leave to find out if something else would make her happy.

  Gertie thought that wasn’t any kind of reason to leave. After all, sometimes she wasn’t happy about going to school, but she had to anyway. And she was never happy about going to church, but Aunt Rae dragged her along. And plenty of times she was very not happy with Aunt Rae when she wouldn’t let Gertie stay up late or wear her pajamas to the grocery store. But she never left Aunt Rae.

  Gertie’s father explained that Rachel Collins had been a different kind of unhappy. For her, being with them was like wearing a pair of shoes that were too tight. You could limp along for a while, but your feet would just hurt more and more until you were sure that if you walked one step further in those shoes, they’d squeeze your toes off.

  Gertie said that plenty of people did just fine without toes.

  But it didn’t matter what Gertie thought, because Rachel had stepped out of Frank and Gertie’s life and into the housiest house on Jones Street, where a big poplar tree grew in the front yard and where now a Sunshine Realty sign was stuck in trimmed grass.

  The sign still said For Sale.

  Gertie sighed and leaned back against the bus seat.

  Rachel Collins’s house was for sale because she was moving away because she was getting married to a man named Walter who lived in Mobile with his own family. Everyone around town was talking about it.

  Most kids would probably be upset if their mother was getting married to a strange man named Walter and leaving forever and didn’t even tell them about it, but Gertie was not most kids.

  She was absolutely not upset, because she had a plan. More than a plan. She had a mission.

  Now she touched the front of her shirt so that the locket could remind her of what she had to do. As soon as she gave the best summer speech and claimed her rightful position as the greatest fifth grader in the world, she would launch Phase Two. She was going to take the locket back to her mother. She’d show up on her mother’s front porch, gleaming with greatness, swinging the locket on its chain, and she’d say, breezy as a gale-force wind, Didn’t want you to forget this while you were packing. And then Rachel Collins would know that Gertie Foy was one-hundred-percent, not-from-concentrate awesome and that she didn’t need a mother anyway. So there.

  Gertie patted the shoe box.

  “It’s a bullfrog,” she told Junior in a voice low enough that the other kids wouldn’t hear.

  “Wow.” Junior looked even more miserable. “Bet your speech is going to be good.”

  Junior never did well at speeches. He got so nervous that his feet started kicking around, and he wound up knocking over desks and bruising people’s shins. But Gertie was an excellent public speaker because she practiced all the time in front of the bathroom mirror.


  “It’ll be the best,” she promised.

  * * *

  As they walked to their new classroom, Gertie was careful not to let her fingers cover the air holes on the shoe box.

  She pushed through the noisy students and set her shoe box on a desk in the front row. Junior put his bag on the chair beside hers, his arms swinging by his sides even though he wasn’t walking anymore.

  Gertie’s classmates were choosing seats, saying hello to friends they hadn’t seen all summer, and arranging new school supplies in their cubbies. Jean Zeller was turning away from the pencil sharpener.

  Jean was Gertie’s other best friend, and she was the smartest person Gertie had ever met. A long time ago, Roy Caldwell and his friends had called her Jean-ius to tease her, but Jean had liked the nickname so much that she had started writing it at the top of her assignments. Jean blew the shavings off her lethally sharp pencil points and walked over to Gertie and Junior.

  “They’re number twos,” Jean said, brandishing the pencils. “I made sure they were number twos. What kind are yours?” She narrowed her eyes at Junior’s empty desk.

  “Umm.” Junior unzipped his bag and peered inside. “Yellows?”

  Jean rolled her eyes. “It’s okay, I brought extras.”

  Jean took the last seat in the front row, right beside Gertie. Gertie was sandwiched between her two best friends, holding a new pencil, and thinking that she’d accomplish this mission in record time, when something poked the back of her neck.

  “You’re in my seat.”

  3

  Squish

  The finger that had poked Gertie’s neck was bony and had a pink-polished nail. Its owner was a yellow-haired girl who had green eyes and shimmery lip gloss.

  “Did you hear me?” the girl said, and raised her eyebrows. “You’re in my seat.”

  Gertie reassured herself that her shoe box with her frog was sitting on top of her desk before she answered the girl. “I’m already sitting here,” she said.

  “Yes, but I’m new here.” The girl crossed her arms and began to tap her foot, waiting for Gertie to move out of her way.