Keeping Secrets (4 page)

“A pox on Melody and Tanya,” said Olivia aloud. “Especially on Melody.”

Melody was Olivia's nemesis, a word she had discovered recently in a mystery story.

“A pox!” said Olivia more loudly.

“Olivia?” called her mother from the hallway. “Everything all right in there?”

“Yes,” answered Olivia, and she could feel herself blushing.

She saw her sneakers by the bed, jammed them onto her feet, and headed for the bathroom, grateful that Melody and Tanya could be balanced — outweighed, actually — by all the good things in her life, especially Nikki, Flora, and Ruby, her true friends.

 

The year before, back when Olivia still went to Camden Falls Elementary, she and Flora and Ruby had walked to school together every day and waited outside to meet Nikki's bus. This year, Olivia, Flora, and Ruby could walk together only one block, to the point at which Aiken Avenue intersected with Dodds Lane. There, Ruby turned right, heading for the elementary school, usually side by side with Lacey Morris, while Olivia and Flora turned left to continue their walk to the central school on the other side of town, where once again they would meet Nikki's bus.

“There she is,” said Flora that morning, as a line of students, some of them looking very sleepy, was disgorged from a Camden Falls Central School District bus.

“Hi!” Nikki called as she ran to her friends. “Guess what.”

“What?” said Olivia. “Something good?”

“Yup. My mom said we can visit Tobias next month.”

“Really? That's great!” said Flora.

“I know.” Nikki grinned. “She's nervous about it, but she's going to do it. And I'll get to see a real college.”

The girls joined the students streaming through the front entrance of their school. Olivia never ceased to be impressed by some of the oldest students, the ones in eleventh and twelfth grades. Would she ever —
ever
— be as tall or as, well,
shapely
as they were? She glanced down at her perfectly flat chest and stick-straight body. It didn't seem likely.

“Hey!” said Flora. “Look at that.”

Olivia and Nikki turned in the direction in which Flora was pointing, and along one wall of the main hallway saw an enormous hand-lettered sign announcing …

“A Halloween dance,” said Nikki.

“For seventh- and eighth-graders,” said Flora.

“Our first school dance,” said Olivia. “Actually, our first dance ever. Mine, anyway.”

“Mine, too,” said Nikki and Flora.

Olivia now read the entire sign. “‘Camden Falls Central High School presents the annual Halloween dance for seventh- and eighth-graders. Halloween night. Six to nine o'clock. Food! Music! Fun! No costume necessary.'”

The girls looked at one another.

“Our first dance ever,” Olivia said again.

“Should we go?” asked Nikki.

“We don't need costumes,” said Flora. “I don't know whether that's good or bad. What should we wear instead?”

“Yeah. I wonder if people get dressed up,” said Nikki.

“In evening gowns,” said Olivia, and the others laughed.

“Gosh,” said Flora. “Dancing with boys. I'm not sure I want to dance with boys.”

“Sometimes girls all dance together in a group,” said Nikki. “I've seen that on television. Boy, it's a good thing my father isn't around anymore. He'd never let me go to a dance.”

“Your mother will let you go, though, won't she?” Olivia asked anxiously.

“Definitely. I think she'll be excited about it.”

“How dressed up
do
we get?” Olivia wondered aloud, and it was while she was waiting for an answer that she became aware of voices behind her.

“Should we get out our ball gowns?” someone said.

“Right after we make sure our pumpkin coach is available,” someone else replied.

The first voice became high and adopted an unconvincing British accent. “Oh, Maximilian, how
chah
-ming of you to invite me…. What? A rose corsage? … Oh, no, darling, that isn't necessary.”

Olivia closed her eyes. The voices, derisive and sarcastic, belonged to Melody Becker and Tanya Rhodes. She didn't need to turn around to know that. She could even tell that Melody was the first speaker and Tanya the second. Tanya was rude and thoughtless, but Melody — Melody was out-and-out mean. Almost as soon as school had gotten under way in September, Melody had tried to take advantage of Olivia by enlisting her to help with her homework (okay, to do it for her). Olivia, at first pleased to have been befriended by someone as popular and sophisticated as Melody, soon realized she was being taken advantage of. And she'd worked hard to outwit her. (“What did Melody expect?” Ruby had said later. “She was using you because you're smart and she needed your brainpower. Didn't it occur to her that you would use that brainpower to get back at her?”)

Olivia opened her eyes and glanced first at Nikki, then at Flora. She was about to say that maybe she was hallucinating — she was hearing the voices of stupid people in her head — when behind her Melody whispered loudly, “She has nothing to worry about. No one will want to dance with a nine-year-old.”

Olivia whirled around. “I am
not
nine —”

“Hey, you guys!” a cheerful voice called. “What's going on?”

Nikki poked Olivia and whispered, “Jacob's here.”

“Hi, Olivia.” Jacob smiled at her. “Hi, Flora. Hi, Nikki.” He glanced at Tanya and Melody and said nothing. His eyes landed on Olivia again, and then he noticed the poster. “Cool! A dance!” He touched Olivia's arm. “I have to go. See you later.” He strode down the hall.

Olivia looked after him. By the time he turned a corner, Tanya and Melody had disappeared.

“They slunk away like cats,” announced Nikki with satisfaction. She paused. “Although I probably shouldn't say that. It's mean to cats.”

Olivia laughed.

“
He
seemed pretty interested in the dance,” said Flora.

“Melody seemed pretty interested in him,” remarked Nikki.

“Yes. Unfortunately, he can't stand her. Poor, poor Melody,” said Flora. “Well, that's what she gets for being a, um, a …”

“A toad?” suggested Nikki.

“A worm?” suggested Olivia.

“Although, again, we don't want to be mean to toads or worms,” said Nikki.

Much later, near the end of the day, Olivia and Nikki made a quick stop at Olivia's locker between classes.

“What's that?” asked Nikki, and she pointed to a slip of white paper sticking out of the door.

“Oh, no. Not again,” said Olivia with a moan. She plucked the paper from the crack and held it between her thumb and forefinger as if she had just pulled it from a garbage can. “I'm going to throw it away without reading it. Melody's probably watching from somewhere. Won't she be surprised if I don't even look at it?”

“What if it's from Jacob?” asked Nikki.

“It isn't. Jacob always writes my name in fancy script. He'd never leave a plain old note like this.” Olivia crumpled the paper, unread. “There,” she said.

“What's the matter?” asked Nikki. “I know something's still bothering you.”

“Well … she found my new locker!” exclaimed Olivia. “I thought I was safe from her.”

“All she had to do was follow you. It wouldn't be hard to find anybody's locker.”

“That's true.” Olivia thought uncomfortably of her old locker, the one that had been broken and didn't actually lock. Melody had begun stealing Olivia's homework (always perfectly executed) out of the locker, copying it over, and handing it in as her own — until Olivia had caught on and outsmarted her.

“Anyway,” said Nikki, “Melody can't get into
this
locker. That's the important thing. So you're still safe.”

“True,” replied Olivia. She smiled at Nikki, then tossed the crumpled note in a trash can. “Can't get me!” she exclaimed.

Lacey Morris's house was a mirror image of Ruby's. The same but backward, thought Ruby. This meant that although Lacey, like Ruby, occupied the room on the second floor opposite the top of the staircase, it was in fact on the other side of the house, and because the Morrises lived in one of the coveted end-of-the-row houses, Lacey had a corner bedroom featuring not only a window facing the front yard but one facing south as well. It was a bright, airy room, and Ruby was slightly jealous of it — a fact she did her best to hide.

“You know,” said Ruby one afternoon as she and Hilary Nelson and Lacey sat in Lacey's sun-filled room, “we should really make a decision about our Halloween costumes right now and get started on them.”

“Especially since we might need help with them,” said Lacey.

“Yeah. We should give Min and Flora and your parents plenty of advance warning. Your parents, too, Hilary.”

“Don't we want to make the costumes ourselves?” asked Hilary. She had moved to Camden Falls over the summer. This would be her first Halloween in her new town.

“People around here make costumes that are pretty, um — what's the word?” said Ruby.

“Fancy?” suggested Lacey.

“No …”

“Elaborate?” suggested Hilary.

“That's it. Elaborate,” said Ruby. “Just wait until you go trick-or-treating on Main Street with us. Then you'll see. Even the people who run the stores get dressed up.”

“What — you mean your
grandmother
gets dressed up?” asked Hilary incredulously.

“Yes. Hey, you have to tell your parents about this, Hilary,” said Lacey with sudden urgency. “They'll have to decorate the diner. And —”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Hilary. “I know what you're going to say. My mom and dad will have to get dressed up! Yipes.”

The Nelsons — Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, Hilary (who was ten like Ruby), and Hilary's younger brother, Spencer — had moved to Camden Falls at the beginning of the summer. Hilary's parents had decided to leave Boston in order to raise their children in the quiet of a small town. They had sold their home and bought a small building on Main Street, one in which they planned both to live and to run a diner. They had been busily renovating the building, creating the Marquis Diner on the ground floor and converting the second story into their living quarters, when a middle-of-the-night fire damaged the building and nearly sent the Nelsons back to Boston. But the people of Camden Falls, inspired by an idea of Ruby's, had held Nelson Day, a fund-raiser that had made enough money to get Hilary's family back on their feet. Now the diner was open again, and practically everyone in Camden Falls knew the Nelsons. But the Nelsons were still learning about their new town.

“Won't your parents
want
to get dressed up?” Ruby asked Hilary.

“They're not very, um, dressy-up people. They're kind of shy.” Hilary let her gaze travel out Lacey's front window, through which she could see the back of her apartment on Main Street and even make out her own bedroom window. “What does your grandmother wear on Halloween?” she asked, turning to Ruby.

“Every year she dresses as the Wicked Witch of the West from
The Wizard of Oz
. And Gigi dresses as Glinda, the Good Witch.” (Gigi was Olivia's grandmother.) “Their costumes are really great.”

“Hey, this year Olivia's parents will have to get dressed up, too,” said Lacey. “This will be the first Halloween since Sincerely Yours opened.”

“Well, anyway, let's think about our own costumes,” said Ruby again. “So. What could we be?”

“I always wanted to be a Tibetan spaniel,” said Hilary.

“A … what?” said Ruby and Lacey.

“It's a dog.”

“Oh. I kind of want to be a clock,” said Lacey. “A grandfather clock.”

“Interesting,” replied Ruby. “I was thinking about being an enormous pair of glasses, but that would be hard because the glasses would probably have to stand on end and they wouldn't look as good that way.”

The girls sat in silence for a few moments.

“It might be more fun if we went as three things that go together,” said Lacey. “You know, like the Three Bears.”

“Or the Three Kings. The ones from Orient Are,” said Ruby.

“Oh! Oh! How about the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?” suggested Hilary.

Ruby narrowed her eyes. “Which one of us would have to be the Wardrobe?”

“Well … not me, since it was my idea. I want to be the Witch.”

“I call the Lion!” cried Ruby, jumping to her feet.

“Hey, who said we even decided on the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?” exclaimed Lacey. “What about the Three Bears?”

“Too babyish,” said Ruby, and Lacey glared at her.

“Well, now, wait a minute,” said Hilary. “There are plenty of things that go together. We just need to think.”