Double Dog Dare (6 page)

“Sorry I’m late,” she told Miss Sparks, handing over her pass. “I had to, um, talk to Mrs. Weinmore about something.”

“Thanks,” Miss Sparks said. “Oh, and Francine?” She held out a thin pink square of paper, the kind the office secretary used to record messages. “This came for you while you were at lunch.” Francine took it and headed back to her desk.

The thing Francine couldn’t figure out was how Mrs. Weinmore knew about her buying Kansas’s underwear. Brendan had to have been the one to tell her, because he was the only person who knew about it. But why would he do that, if he was the one who stole them?

There was a note poking out from the front of Francine’s desk, and Francine knew it must be from Natalie, because it had been carefully folded into the shape of a heart, and Francine’s name was written across the front in perfect bubble letters. Francine opened it.

Francine twizzled her mouth into a knot. There
was
one other person who knew about the underwear, she realized suddenly.

Natalie.

But no way Natalie would ever fink on her, not in a
million years. Even if she did think Kansas was so cute she couldn’t stop twirling her hair a mile a minute every time she saw him. She’d been on Francine’s side from the beginning.

Hadn’t she?

Francine shook her head. This war had made her nutty. No way Natalie would ever rat her out.

She was just about to write a response to Natalie’s note when she remembered the other slip of paper. She unfolded the pink square, the thin paper crinkling between her fingers. It was a phone message, written in the secretary’s thin, tight handwriting.

Francine stared at that third sentence for a long time.
Francine and friend to go to father’s after school
.

Francine’s dad was staying in a
hotel
. He’d been there for the past two weeks. Natalie couldn’t go
there
. It wasn’t what she was used to. She wouldn’t like it.

Francine crumpled the note into a pink ball and shoved it into her desk. Then she fished out her pencil and scribbled a response to Natalie’s note.

She didn’t even bother to try refolding it into a heart, just poked Emma in the back to ask her to pass it up. Suddenly, Francine found she didn’t care all that much.

8.

A CRUMPLED BALL OF PINK PAPER

When the final bell rang, Kansas couldn’t have been more thrilled. It had been a miserable day, and he was looking forward to getting home as soon as possible. He was just shuffling down the aisle out of the classroom, stuffing his arms through his backpack straps, when he noticed something small and pink crumpled on the floor. It was a note from the office. And it had Francine’s name on it.

Kansas stopped walking. Everyone else was streaming past him, but Kansas was fixated on that balled-up pink note on the floor. It must have fallen out of Francine’s desk. Kansas knew he shouldn’t look at it. He knew it was none of his business.

Kansas picked up the note.

When he was absolutely positive no one was looking, Kansas unfolded it quickly and read.

Kansas sucked in his breath as he reread the third sentence.
Francine and friend to go to father’s after school
.

“Kansas?”

Kansas’s head shot up. “You forget something?” Miss Sparks asked.

“Uh …” Kansas looked down at the note once more, then quickly crumpled it back into a ball. “No. No, I’m fine.”

“Good. I’ll see you in Media Club tomorrow. Don’t forget to wear your school colors. Green and white.”

“Yeah,” Kansas said, crossing to the front of the room. He tossed the pink note in the garbage. “School colors. Right.” And he left the classroom, squeezed his way
through the sea of students in the hallway, and walked across the sidewalk to the bus pick-up zone, where Ginny was waiting for him. He couldn’t help thinking, the whole bus ride home, how Francine’s parents were divorced. Divorced, just like his.

Somehow, that one little fact changed everything.

“No, you should put it by the dog poster.
Kan
-sas, I
said,
it looks better over there.”

Kansas lowered the picture he’d been trying to put on his wall, the one of the underwear on the flagpole. He’d printed it as soon as he got home, fuzzy as it was. “
Gin
-ny,” he said, in his best little-sister voice. He accidentally pressed his hand against the Scotch tape on the back of the photo, and the tape came off on his hand and got stuck between his fingers. “I told you, this is my side of the room. You have to stay on your side. Now leave me alone.”

As if it weren’t bad enough that Kansas’s family had moved to stupid California, now Kansas had to share a room with Ginny. She always wanted to talk to him, or play with him, or bug him about one thing or another. That’s
why Kansas had made a barrier out of unpacked moving boxes—
GINNY’S
SHOES,
GINNY’S
SUMMER
CLOTHES,
all stuff his sister didn’t need yet—stacked up three boxes high in the middle of the room. But last week Ginny had discovered that she could poke holes in the sides of the boxes to get things out, and now monster-sized craters appeared daily. Kansas told her if she kept it up, she was going to make the wall fall over, but she didn’t seem to be listening.

“You want to see my headstand?” Ginny asked him.

“No,” Kansas replied. He ripped another piece of tape off the roll and circled it over on itself, sticking it to the back to the photo. He wondered if Francine had to deal with stuff like this, sharing a room with an annoying little sister.

“I’m getting really good at headstands,” Ginny said, and from the corner of his eye Kansas could see her toppling over as she attempted one. He concentrated on his Wall of Dares. “Well, Mrs. Muñoz is gonna teach me. She said she’d take me to Mommy and Me Yoga this weekend.”

“Mrs. Muñoz is not your mom,” Kansas told her, placing the photo just above the one of him and Ricky climbing
on Will’s roof. “And no way can she do a headstand. She’s, like, a million.”

“She’s not a million. I think she’s sixty. And she can too do a headstand. I saw her. She’s really good at yoga, and I’m gonna do it too. She said it’d be good for my asthma.”

Mrs. Muñoz was their new next-door neighbor, and she’d been watching them the past week or so, while their mom looked for a regular babysitter. She seemed nice enough, if you liked old ladies.

“I’m gonna get really good,” Ginny went on, trying for another headstand. She braced her arms against the floor and kicked her feet into the air. “And then I’m gonna do headstands in the talent show. You think I could win, if I did headstands really good? It’s in two weeks, and there’s a prize.”

“No way anyone would ever give you a prize for doing headst—”

There was a tremendous clatter as Ginny fell over on Kansas’s bin of Legos, spewing them across the floor. She missed the cardboard box wall by three inches.

Kansas sighed and climbed down from his bed, picking
his way across the Lego minefield. He didn’t know how much longer he could put up with all this.

“
Kan
-sas!” Ginny called as he left the room, scooping up his backpack on the way. “Where are you going? Don’t you want to see me try again?”

Kansas didn’t even bother to answer that one.

“Whatcha working on?”

Kansas looked up from his sheet of poster board. His mom was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a thick book and a pad of notebook paper. Kansas was starting to notice that as soon as his mother got home from the gift shop, she usually grabbed one of her textbooks right away. She didn’t go outside, or take a nap, or eat a snack, or any of the things she used to do when she got home from work. Now she just studied for her night class.

“Geography homework. We have to draw the whole U.S. and label the states. It’s due on Monday.”

“And you’re working on it now?” Kansas’s mother raised an eyebrow. “Is it midnight on Sunday already?”

“Ha, ha. You should be a stand-up comedian.” The
truth was that doing his homework was the only way to get Ginny to stop bothering him. Ginny was as allergic to homework as she was to peanuts. As soon as she’d realized that Kansas was going to work on his map instead of watching her do headstands, she’d gone next door to bother Mrs. Muñoz.

His mother ruffled his hair. “You get a hold of Will and Ricky?” she asked.

“Nah,” Kansas said, pushing his hair back in place. “They weren’t at home when I called, and they’re not online, either.” Kansas had left the computer in the living room on, just in case, and he was still logged in to his IM account, so he’d be able to hear if they messaged him. But he didn’t have his hopes up. Because even if he did manage to talk to them, what was he going to do, beg them to dump Mark H. and take him camping instead?

“Well, I’m sure they’ll call back soon,” his mom replied. “They’re your best friends.”

“Yeah,” Kansas said. But he wasn’t so sure anymore.

“Mind if I join you? I have homework too.”

Kansas nodded, concentrating on getting the bottom tip
of Florida just right, and his mom sat next to him. Her textbook was so big, it made the whole table shake when she set it down. Kansas didn’t know how anyone could read a book that big. He was never going to be a nurse. He was going to be something that didn’t require any reading, like a video game tester.

While Kansas drew, copying the picture from their geography book as carefully as he could, his mother read her textbook and scribbled furious notes to herself. Every once in a while, she’d close her eyes and mumble under her breath, the way Kansas did when he was trying to memorize something.

“Test tomorrow?” he asked her.

“Big one.” She flipped to a new page in her notebook, but didn’t write anything. She stayed like that for a moment, pen in hand, and then she looked over at Kansas. “Feel like a grilled cheese?” she asked him.

He set down his pencil. “Sure.”

“Great. Brain food. I’ll get the bread, you get out the cheese.”

Five minutes later, Kansas and his mom were back at the
table with their grilled cheeses and glasses of ginger ale. Kansas’s mom put her feet up on the chair next to her and studied Kansas’s map. “Looking pretty good,” she told him.

“It looks like a headless dog,” he replied, wiping a string of cheese off his chin.

She squinted at the map. “Yeah.” She laughed. “A little bit. But now that I think about it, the United States is kind of doggy.”

Kansas laughed back. “What’s yours?” he asked.

“My homework? Anatomy. Bones of the body tonight.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.” Kansas took another bite of his sandwich. A whole test just for that? “How many are there?”

“Two hundred and six.”

Kansas’s mouth dropped open. “No way.”

“Way.” His mom set her sandwich down and took Kansas’s left arm. “This,” she said, pointing to the upper section of his arm, “is your
humerus
. And you have two bones right here.” She poked him below the elbow. “The
radius
.” She ran her finger along it. “And the
ulna
.”

“Really?” Kansas said, taking his arm back and studying
it. He hadn’t had any idea he had two bones in that part of his arm.

“Really. And there are twenty-seven in each of your hands. The
carpals,
the
metacarpals,
and the
phalanges.
”

“That sounds made-up,” Kansas said. “Like animals from Australia or something.”

“Now you see why I have to study so much.”

“Yeah.” Kansas took another bite of his sandwich and looked at his mother’s textbook, open on the table. There were so many words. So many billions of things she had to memorize before she could be done with school and finally be a nurse. He looked up at her. “Can I help?” he asked.

She thought about that for a second, then took the last bite of her grilled cheese and got up from her chair. She crossed the kitchen to the junk drawer and pulled out a pack of yellow Post-its. While Kansas sat, she scribbled something with her pen on the top Post-it, then peeled it off slowly and stuck it to his shoulder.

Kansas twisted his neck to look at it.

Clavicle,
the Post-it read.

“What’s that?” he asked, still looking at the Post-it.

“
That,” his mother said, “is the name for your shoulder bone.”