All Four Stars (6 page)

MEATBRAIN

A COLD GUST OF WIND WHIPPED ACROSS
the yard as Gladys jogged back to her house.
Sandy just doesn't understand how much is riding on this contest,
she thought. His mom might shoo him away from the computer sometimes, but she had never all-out banned him from his favorite activity. Gladys's parents would never let her back in the kitchen unless they believed that she had other interests in life, too.

At home, Gladys wandered around the kitchen, poking through the cupboards in search of a snack. But all she found was the old box of energy bars from her first day back at school. There was a faded picture of a mountain biker on the box, which seemed fitting to Gladys, since the bars tasted like gravel.

Wishing now that she
had
taken a cookie from next door, Gladys climbed the stairs to her parents' home office. She turned on the computer and settled into the enormous swivel chair. Maybe she could change the format of her essay and write it like a cover letter applying for a veterinary job. That probably wasn't what Ms. Quincy was expecting, but it might impress her a little anyway.

The monitor came to life, and the log-in page for DumpMail popped up automatically. DumpMail was the local e-mail service that everyone in town used, including Gladys's parents. Gladys knew that most of the kids at school had DumpMail accounts because she sometimes heard them talking about the Instant DumpMessages they sent to one another.

Gladys didn't have an account, but this had never seemed like a big deal to her, since she didn't have friends to e-mail with anyway. She would have liked to e-mail with Aunt Lydia, but her aunt didn't believe in the Internet. She said it disturbed the vibrations of the universe, or something, so they stuck to letters and phone calls.

But looking at the heading on Ms. Quincy's letter, Gladys saw that real professionals had e-mail addresses. And if she wanted her letter/essay to show that she was serious about becoming a vet, she'd better have one, too.

With a click on the
Sign up now!
link and a few quick keystrokes, the task was done. Gladys made sure to choose a professional-looking e-mail address ([email protected]), rather than a silly one like her dad's ([email protected]) or her mom's ([email protected]).

Next, Gladys had to will herself not to open a new window and surf directly to the
New York Standard
website. It was Wednesday, the day that new reviews and recipes came out in the Dining section, and she liked to look at them online when she couldn't get a paper copy at Mr. Eng's. But instead she opened a new document and typed her name and new e-mail address in the upper right-hand corner. Then, looking between the screen, Ms. Quincy's neatly typed letter, and her own marked-up paper, she began to rewrite “My Future as a Veterinarian.”

She was a couple of paragraphs in when the will to keep going failed her. Ms. Quincy was right—the essay was boring. Passionless. But how could she fix it? She stared at the screen, but no great ideas came to her. She was considering picking a new fake future profession—pro cyclist?—when the doorbell rang.

Grateful for an excuse to take a break, Gladys leapt out of the swivel chair and bounded down the stairs. But her excitement faded when she looked out the peephole and saw Sandy and his mom standing on the porch.

She knew that she'd been rude to Sandy earlier. Had they come over to force her to apologize? Sheepishly, Gladys opened the door.

“Hello, Gladys!” Mrs. Anderson said. She didn't seem like she was angry. Her hands were tying an orange bandanna over her curly hair. “I just got called in as an emergency sub at the yoga studio, so I gave your mom a ring at her office. She said it would be fine to drop Sandy off here.”

Sandy didn't look particularly thrilled. “I tried to tell her that I'm old enough to stay home alone,” he said.

“Not 'til you're eleven,” Mrs. Anderson insisted, adjusting the yoga mat that was strapped across her back. “Besides, I didn't have time to make you dinner, and Gladys's mom was nice enough to invite you to eat with them. Isn't that great? She said they were going to make a meatloaf.”

Gladys felt the blood drain from her face. “Great” was
not
the word she'd use to describe this situation. She'd been avoiding inviting Sandy to her house precisely to save him from her parents' cooking.

Sandy, on the other hand, suddenly seemed excited. “Dinner here? Excellent!”

Mrs. Anderson leaned down to give him a peck on the cheek. “Be good,” she said, then she dashed across the lawn to her car.

Sandy turned to face Gladys. “So, can I come in?”

Gladys moved aside to let Sandy step into the foyer. “I thought your mom was a computer programmer,” she said.

“She teaches yoga, too,” Sandy told her as he shrugged out of his coat. “Just usually while I'm at band or karate.”

“Look,” Gladys said, “you don't have to eat the meatloaf. You can just tell my parents you're a vegetarian. Or that you're allergic to ground meat, or something.”

Sandy laughed.
“No way!
I want to try one of these famous Gatsby dinners for myself!”

He set off toward the living room, and Gladys scurried after him. “I don't think you understand what awful cooks my parents are,” she said.

“Yeah, well, sometimes my mom tries to teach me how to cook stuff, and I'm not so good, either. But I haven't died yet from eating stuff I've made.” He flopped down onto the sofa and grabbed Gladys's tablet computer from the coffee table.

“I bet that compared to my parents, you're Jacques Pépin,” Gladys said.

Sandy was busy swiping at the screen. “The submarine guy?”

“What? No, that's Jacques Cousteau! Jacques Pépin is a chef, a really great— Ugh, it doesn't matter.” Gladys collapsed onto the sofa next to him. “My dad, when he's shopping? He only buys whatever's on sale. So this meat, it'll be all brown and oozy because it's almost expired. And it's probably full of bacteria—which won't get killed, because they don't even know how long to cook it. I'm telling you, it's gonna be super gross!”

Sandy glanced up from the tablet and gave Gladys a huge grin. “I know,” he said. “But I'm a boy. I like gross stuff!”

“I give up,” Gladys muttered as Sandy turned back to the game he was playing. “But when you're in the hospital with E. coli, don't say I didn't warn you.”

A car door slammed outside, and Gladys slumped back farther into the sofa. Sandy may have been in denial, but she wasn't. The countdown to their last moments of friendship had officially begun.

Her parents appeared in the doorway a minute later, a bagful of groceries rustling on her dad's arm.

“Hey, there!” her mom cried. “Are you kids having fun?”

“I'm glad to see that someone's using that thing,” her dad said, nodding toward Sandy. “Well, other than me, of course. Gladdy never seems to want to play with it.”

“Yeah, it's pretty sweet,” Sandy said, glancing up from the screen. “But my mom won't let me have one. She says I spend too much time on the computer already.”

Gladys's dad chuckled. “Our Gladdy seems to have the opposite problem. But maybe you can get her more interested, show her what that thing can do!”

Gladys groaned under her breath. She knew perfectly well what it could do—she'd used it plenty of times in the kitchen, propping it up against the toaster while she looked up recipes or watched instructional cooking videos. But she'd never let her parents know that.

“Well, we'd better go and start dinner,” her mom said. “I wonder how long a meatloaf takes to cook?”

“Oh, I don't think there's any set amount of time,” said her dad, loosening his tie with his free hand. “We'll just nuke it until it looks done!”

Gladys elbowed Sandy in the arm. “Do you see what I mean?” she hissed. But he just smiled. Only Gladys seemed to understand that he was hurtling toward disaster, just like the poor virtual birds he kept flinging across the tablet screen.

• • •

Thirty minutes later, Gladys and Sandy were sitting at the dining room table. The Gatsbys usually ate dinner in front of the TV, but with a guest to impress, Gladys's parents were making a little extra effort. While she and Sandy were playing that bird game (it
was
sort of fun, she had to admit), Gladys's dad had been rummaging around in the crawl space under the stairs. Now the table was laid with china that Gladys had never seen before, and her parents were marching in from the kitchen with a steaming casserole dish held between them.

“Dinner is served!” they announced together.

Sandy leaned forward to look at the dish. “Excellent!” Then, just loud enough for Gladys to hear, he whispered, “It looks like a
brain
!”

Gladys didn't want to look, but once she did, she couldn't tear her eyes away. In the casserole dish was a misshapen, gray lump of meat covered with a mound of pale, quivering gloop that she could only guess was supposed to be gravy.

“See, there's the gray matter,” Sandy whispered, “and there's the white—”

“Shut up!”
Gladys hissed, pushing herself back in her chair. “I think I might be sick.”

The microwave's distinctive
ding!
sounded from the kitchen. “That'll be the potato puffs,” Gladys's dad said, hurrying off to retrieve them. Gladys breathed a small sigh of relief. Even if you microwaved them, you couldn't really mess up frozen potato puffs, right?

Wrong. When her dad came back carrying a bowl full of mush, it was clear that great harm had befallen the poor puffs. A closer look revealed that the smashed-up potato nuggets were covered with the same whitish gloop that was dripping off the meat.

“This one's a George Gatsby original,” he announced proudly. “Mashed potato puffs with gravy!”

“Ooh, George, how creative!” Gladys's mom cried.

Gladys, meanwhile, thought about the buttery, silky-smooth mashed potatoes she'd made just a few weeks ago—using golden spuds, fresh cream, and a delicate sprinkling of sage—and wanted to cry.

“Thank you, my dear,” her dad said, taking a little bow. Then he scooped the lumpy concoction onto plates while his wife, brandishing her dullest knife, hacked thick slices off the meatbrain.

The meat turned out to be tough and gray all the way through, but Gladys thought that was at least better than it being raw. She forced herself to eat a few bland, chewy bites. The mashed puffs, despite their unappetizing form, didn't taste that bad—or at least the parts that weren't touching the scary gravy didn't—so she managed to eat a bit more of those. Sandy, meanwhile, moved things around so expertly and squirted so much ketchup over the whole mess that in the end it was impossible to tell whether he'd eaten anything at all. Gladys made a mental note to ask him for tips on his techniques.

Thankfully, Gladys's parents didn't decide to do anything “creative” with the apples they passed around for dessert, and Gladys and Sandy both crunched hungrily on them. When they heard Sandy's mom's car pull in, Gladys walked Sandy to the front door.

“Good job surviving,” she said in a low voice. “Did you even try one bite of the main course?”

Sandy gave her a look of mock outrage. “What do you mean? I
demolished
that brain!”

But his stomach betrayed him with a loud growl. They both giggled.

“You'd better get home so your mom can make you a sandwich. And maybe next time you'll pay attention when I try to warn you about the food here,” Gladys teased as she passed Sandy his coat. “I mean, how many bad reviews does it take?”

Sandy shrugged. “Hey, what you think sounds gross, someone else might think sounds cool. Or vice versa.”

Gladys thought about her dinner at Parm's house—about how the Indian food she loved revolted her friend. “I guess you have a point.”

Sandy took a final bite out of his apple, which he'd carried to the door with him. “You jusht gotta write whatshu wanna write,” he continued through a full mouth, “and not worry sho mush about what uvver people fink.” Then he shot her a red-apple-peel-flecked grin, pushed open the screen door, and bounded across the lawn.

Gladys found herself nodding as she turned to climb the stairs back up to her parents' office. Sandy was right, of course—and in a way, he was saying the same thing Ms. Quincy had.

She had a lot of rewriting to do.

MS. QUINCY'S CUP OF TEA

THAT FRIDAY MORNING WAS SUNNIER
than usual, and when Gladys finished locking her bike to the rack at school, she noticed a group of sixth-grade girls clustered outside on the steps. A very high brown ponytail was visible over a sea of fuzzy hats and earmuffs. Every few seconds, the group burst into giggles.

Gladys's heart sank. Was Charissa making fun of people this early in the morning?

Gladys would have preferred to avoid the group altogether, but they were blocking the only entrance to the building. Taking a deep breath, she climbed the steps as quickly as she could, bracing for an explosion of laughter as soon as the girls saw her.

But, to her surprise, it seemed like no one even noticed her.

Charissa's loud voice was carrying over the crowd, and as Gladys reached the top of the stairs, she couldn't help but listen. “Sure, it's two months away,” Charissa was saying, “but turning twelve is a big deal. I don't want to just have a regular party with balloons and games and stuff. Those things are for little kids.”

A murmur of agreement passed through the crowd. Gladys noticed that Marina Trillesby was nodding especially hard, even though just yesterday she'd been bragging about all the games she won at her cousin's sleepover.

“I'm going to have an
adult
party,” Charissa continued. “My parents are setting the whole thing up!”

A few of the girls let out squeals of excitement, but Charissa just flicked her ponytail casually over her shoulder.

“What are you gonna do?” asked Rolanda eagerly.

“Oh, you'll hear about it soon enough,” Charissa said.

The bell rang, and the conversation was replaced by rustling coats and clomping boots. Gladys pushed quickly through the door into the lobby and hurried down the hallway to class. She couldn't care less about Charissa's birthday plans, but it was nice to start the day without being made fun of immediately as she had dreaded. She entered the classroom confidently, took her seat, and pulled her new essay out of her bag.

Gladys had stayed up late typing for two nights in a row and was pleased with the outcome. She only wished she could have printed her letter on nice, cream-colored paper like Ms. Quincy's, but her mother's pink-tinted stationery was all she'd been able to find. She could have asked for different paper, but then her parents might have wanted to read the essay, and Gladys knew they wouldn't be happy with her new topic. She could only hope they would take it better if she showed it to them already printed up in the newspaper as the winning entry.

Ms. Quincy entered the classroom as the bell rang and took a final swig from her travel mug. Gladys had caught a whiff from the mug one morning and been surprised to smell something fresh and grassy—not the bitterness of coffee. During her next visit to Mr. Eng's, she'd sniffed all of his jars until she found the matching aroma coming from one labeled G
UNPOWDER
G
REEN
T
EA
. She wondered whether Ms. Quincy had picked up a tea habit while she lived in China.

Ms. Quincy called the class to order, then began to move up and down the rows of desks, collecting the math homework. When she reached Gladys's desk, Gladys handed her two sheets: the homework and her new essay.

The teacher smiled as she read the first few lines on the pink paper. “I'm excited to read the rest of this,” she whispered to Gladys, and as she continued up the aisle, Gladys couldn't help but smile, too.

• • •

Ms. Quincy didn't mention the contest at school the next Monday, and her silence continued for days. Almost all of the kids in Gladys's class seemed antsy about it, although no one complained at the lunch table as loudly as Charissa.

Gladys wasn't usually a fan of Charissa's tactics, but she was glad when, on Wednesday, Charissa goaded Marti into asking the teacher when they would get the results. But Ms. Quincy just smiled maddeningly and told Marti that the class would have to be patient.

The news finally came after science class that Friday afternoon. But, of course, Ms. Quincy didn't make the announcement in a conventional way. She didn't give any hint as to who the author was, but simply said, “And now I would like to read you our class's official entry for the
New York Standard
Student Essay Contest.”

She picked a piece of paper up off her desk.

The paper was pink.

Gladys's heart stood still in the second that her teacher cleared her throat, but when she heard the first line—“Dear Sir or Madam,”—her heart started pounding again. She'd hoped to be chosen as the class representative, but she definitely wasn't prepared for this moment.

“I am writing to tell you about my plans,” Ms. Quincy read, “to become a restaurant critic for the
New York Standard.
You probably haven't heard of me before, but that's because I've spent the last four years in the little town of East Dumpsford, teaching myself how to cook. I'm an experienced writer, too, and I love writing about delectable dishes—but I'm also not afraid to be honest when food is disgusting.”

The class giggled at this line, and Gladys's heart continued to pound. Ms. Quincy read on, through the paragraph about how Gladys enjoyed all kinds of foreign cuisines, and then about how much she loved to write about food.

“When I was seven, I started reviewing every meal I ate in a journal so I wouldn't forget any of them. There were delicious ones, like tender duck breast swimming in a lake of tea-infused gravy, with a side of slender asparagus stalks dipping their tips in at the shore. Unfortunately, there were less delicious ones, too . . .”

As Ms. Quincy launched into the essay's final paragraph, Gladys used her last few moments of anonymity to glance around the classroom. Most of the other students were focused on the teacher—Gladys even saw one or two of them smiling. Charissa was the only one with a sneer on her face.

Ms. Quincy paused before reading the last line and laid the paper back down on her desk.

“Sincerely, Gladys Gatsby.”

Then she turned toward Gladys and began to applaud. To Gladys's surprise, the rest of the class joined in. She felt herself blushing and unable to look at anything but the top of her desk.

The bell rang shortly after, and when Gladys finally looked up from packing her things, several of her classmates were standing around her.

“Good essay, Gladys!” said Jesse Wall.

“Yeah,” said Leah Klein, “I didn't know you were such a good writer!”

“I didn't know you were such a good
cook
!” said Peter Yang.

“I didn't even know you were in our class!” said Nicky McDonald.

Gladys murmured “Thank you” and slipped past the group as quickly as she could. But out in the hallway it didn't get much better, as Parm Singh and Marina Trillesby came running up to her. “Hey, I heard you won the essay contest for your class!” Marina proclaimed loudly, causing several heads to turn in their direction.

“Nice job,” Parm said. “Karen Newcombe won for ours.”

“Oh, cool” was all Gladys could manage to reply.

The crowd around them pushed toward the front doors, and through the glass Gladys saw Charissa, Rolanda, and Marti standing on the front steps. Charissa had her arms crossed and looked like she had swallowed a bug. As Gladys let herself be swept out the door, she heard Rolanda saying, “It's just a stupid contest. I'm sure everyone will forget all about her by next week.”

“Yeah,” Marti chimed in. “Besides, you're still the prettiest girl in the class.”

“Well,
that's
true,” Charissa said haughtily, and she started to say something else, but by then Gladys was walking quickly to the bike rack, trying to disappear as soon as possible. The chance to achieve worldwide fame in the
New York Standard
was one thing, but being well-known at East Dumpsford Elementary might be more than she could handle.