Happily Ever Emma (3 page)

Like—
ka-boom!

Meanwhile, most of us kids will be either too hot or too cold today, depending on what wrong thing we wore to school. And in addition to the almost-bad weather, it’s Monday, which makes everything worse—for kids
and
for teachers, probably.

Monday is bad the way Friday is good, when you’re in primary school.

“I’m freezing,” Annie Pat Masterson says ten seconds after joining me under the pepper tree. Every so often, a tiny red berry plonks down onto our heads, and we shake it off, fast, just in case it’s an insect and not a berry.

Annie Pat is wearing skinny jeans today, and a red turtleneck shirt, and a pullover sweater that matches her navy-blue eyes perfectly. Her red pigtails—not the same color red as the turtleneck—look extra springy in the damp morning air. She shivers, demonstrating how cold she is.

“Well, I’m too hot,” I say, adjusting my puffy pink jacket so that some cool air seeps down my neck.

“But I’m
just right,”
a chirpy, confident voice says as its owner comes skipping up behind us.

It’s Cynthia Harbison—doing her Goldilocks imitation, I guess. Cynthia is a girl who’s perfect every day, in every way.

Except she’s not a very good friend. I learned that the hard way. Cynthia will talk about you behind your back—or to your face—just to stir things up when she’s bored, or to make herself interesting. And she hardly ever gets in trouble for it.

For Cynthia Harbison, crime pays.

She does look “ just right” today, however. She is wearing a short, faded denim jacket over T-shirts layered so carefully that their bottom hems seem to make little ribbons of color around her hips. And she is wearing jeans that flare out perfectly at the bottom.

“Hi, Cynthia,” Annie Pat says, but Cynthia is already long gone and up the stairs, heading toward Heather and Fiona, her loyal sidekicks, who are waiting by the school’s front door. Each of those two girls is okay on her own, I have learned, but they change for the worse when they’re together—or, for sure, when they’re with Cynthia.

The only girl in our class who gets along well with everyone is Krysten “Kry” Rodriguez, who started school late this year. Kry isn’t even here yet. She’s really pretty, but she’s not stuck-up about it.

I hate to admit it, but I think I might be stuck-up a little, if I were that pretty. But I would be
kind.

“Want to go hang out on the playground?” I ask Annie Pat. “There’s still ten minutes before school starts. I’ll let you wear my jacket,” I add, before she can tell me it’s too cold to play outside.

“But what’ll
you
wear?” Annie Pat asks.

“I’ll be okay,” I say bravely, steering her toward the chain link gate. “I have to tell you something important. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“Okay,” Annie Pat says, her eyes wide. She pokes her arms down into my jacket’s pre-warmed sleeves and waits patiently. The cold sinks into my sweaty, long-sleeved T-shirt like icewater, but I just stand there, trying to figure out where to start.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,”
Annie Pat says, quoting the old promise, and so I start talking before she gets to the part that goes,
“And stick a needle in my eye.”
Because—yow!

“My-mom-went-out-on-a-date-last-Friday-night,” I say, speaking as fast as I can. I peek around to see if anyone else is listening in, but so far, so good.

“Huh? Say that again, Emma,” Annie Pat tells me. “Only slower this time.”

“My mother went out on a
date,”
I repeat, hating the words.

“Cool,” Annie Pat says, her navy-blue eyes shining with the so-called romance of it all. “Was the man handsome? Did he bring her candy and flowers?”

“I didn’t meet him,” I tell her. “I don’t even know his name.”

Annie Pat’s eyes grow wide. “So it could be
anybody
?”

“Anybody in Oak Glen,” I say, narrowing it down a little. “And don’t look so happy about it, Annie Pat. Because this is a disaster. It’s—it’s
nuclear acid
.”

Annie Pat’s brow wrinkles. She wants to be a scientist when she grows up, too, and she probably knows there isn’t any such thing.

“I mean it’s
like
nuclear acid,” I say quickly. “It’s nuclear acid –
ish.”

“But—why?” Annie Pat asks, still frowning a little as she decides not to challenge me about the acid. “Maybe he’s nice?” she says cautiously, making it a question.

“He is
not
nice,” I say fiercely.

And because Annie Pat is my friend, she slowly nods her head in agreement. “Not nice,” she echoes as we walk to class.

My brain feels as though it is pounding inside my skull.

And I think I may be getting a stomachache, too.

Thanks,
Mom
.

While Ms. Sanchez takes attendance, I look out the window at the cloudy sky. I squint at the trees and try to tell if it is raining yet—because I already know I’m “Here.” Or “Present,” as EllRay or Stanley will probably say when Ms. Sanchez calls their names. So I don’t have to pay attention.

Ms. Sanchez always wears her shiny black hair pulled back into a bun, but on her it looks good. She uses her engagement hand a lot when she is explaining things, because she likes to watch her ring sparkle. Ms. Sanchez is engaged to marry Mr. Timberlake—not the famous one who’s on TV all the time, even though he’s still handsome—but we don’t know when the wedding will be.

I secretly wish I could be her flower girl.

They are going to live happily ever after. Somebody has to.

Ms. Sanchez is wearing very pretty colors today, probably to cheer herself up because of the weather: a coral sweater, which Annie Pat will really like because she wants to be a marine biologist, and real coral is alive and lives under the sea, and dark chocolate-colored boots, which
I
really like because—
mmm,
chocolate.

Ms. Sanchez wears such cute outfits! In fact, Fiona McNulty has started a secret fashion notebook where she draws what our teacher is wearing each day.

I think Ms. Sanchez dresses so nicely because she’s in love. But Annie Pat and I have promised each other that even if we never fall in love, we will wear cute clothes when we grow up, just like Ms. Sanchez does. We will never dress the way our moms do, in baby-spitty turtlenecks and pull-on pants—like Annie Pat’s mother, because of Annie Pat’s baby brother, Murphy—or in pullovers, jeans, and boring flat sandals, which my mom wears, because she works at home.

Scientists can look as cute as anyone, we have decided. And they can wear extremely high heels.

“I have a word-search activity paper for you to do this morning,” Ms. Sanchez announces, surprising us—because activity papers are almost like games. They’re usually for rainy Friday afternoons, not Monday mornings, when you’re supposed to work like crazy to make up for having relaxed your brain all weekend. “And it’s dinosaur themed,” Ms. Sanchez adds, which makes the boys in our class very happy.

“Yes!”
Corey whispers, pumping his fist in the air. He sits next to me.

Jared Matthews glares at him, then sits up importantly in his seat, because dinosaurs are “his thing,” as he likes to tell everyone. It is obvious that Jared intends to be the best dinosaur word-search kid in our class.

Jared’s
real
thing is being a bully, in my opinion, and bossing smaller kids around—which means just about everyone, because he is so huge. Jared has swirly brown hair, large hands, and lots of freckles.

Annie Pat and I are a little scared of Jared, because he has a very bad temper.

Not this morning, though! This morning, Jared is all smiles. He grabs his word-search paper eagerly and scrabbles in his desk for his yellow highlighter pen.

“And—you may begin,” Ms. Sanchez says, sinking into her desk chair. She starts correcting a stack of papers.

I look down at the list of words at the bottom of my word search. Some of the words, like
Jurassic, carnivore,
and
herbivore,
are about dinosaurs, and some of the words—
Triceratops, Allosaurus,
and
Raptor
—are the names of dinosaurs.

But I can’t concentrate.
“Cool. Is he handsome?”
Annie Pat had said when I told her about my mom’s date.

I look at the big square block of letters that form the word search, and my headache starts to pound again, and my stomach churns. Were those the only four words Annie Pat could think of to say? She didn’t get it at all!

“Stop daydreaming, Emma,” Ms. Sanchez says, glancing over at me.

So I look at my word search again. The letters all blur together, though, and they do not start forming any of the given words at all. But next to me, Corey is drawing wavy yellow lines up and down, back and forth across his block of letters, and he’s gleefully checking off words at the bottom of the page.

And Jared seems to be working even faster than Corey.

So I start drawing a yellow line through anything that even
looks
like a word.
Lopisol, greenop,
and
nodub. Oonah, rigneg,
and
rorance.

Corey glances over at my paper and begins to look nervous.

Hey, this is fun! It’s so much fun that I start to giggle, and Corey shoots me a dirty look. Now he is falling further behind Jared.

But I don’t even care. Maybe Ms. Sanchez will ask me to use my words in a sentence. “The
greenop
grazed in the
rorance
forest, until the
nodub lopisol
came along and ate him right before the meteor hit,” I’ll tell everyone, just as if it really happened.