Moans and Groans and Dinosaur Bones

“W
inter is boring,” sighed Molly Duff to her best friend, Mary Beth Kelly.

“It’s too long,” said Mary Beth. “And too cold. The snow is all dirty, and my boots leak.” She kicked a pile of gray snow.

“Nothing exciting ever happens. Just school and more school and Pee Wee Scout meetings every Tuesday,” said Molly.

“Even Pee Wee Scouts is boring in the winter,” agreed Mary Beth. The girls were on their way to a Pee Wee Scout meeting.

“I bet we’ll just do some project, and Sonny will wreck his with too much glue, and Roger will stick Rachel’s braids together. It’s so boring,” said Molly.

“Let’s not go to Pee Wee Scouts!” said Mary Beth. “Let’s do something exciting instead!”

Molly stopped in her tracks. Not go to Pee Wee Scouts? What a scary idea! Molly got shivers down her back just thinking about it. Was such a daring thing possible? And what would her mother say when she found out? Unless, of course, she never found out …

“What would we do instead?” asked Molly.

“Something,” said Mary Beth. “Anything.
Something different than looking at creepy Roger.”

“What if we get caught?” said Molly. “It’s like playing hooky from school. We could get arrested.”

“Pooh,” said Mary Beth, waving the idea away with her mitten. “Scouts isn’t like school. I mean, there’s no law that says you have to go to a Pee Wee Scout meeting. It’s something you volunteer to do, like joining the army.”

Molly thought about that. Was her friend right? If there was no danger, then why did it feel so scary?

The girls sat down on a park bench to think about it.

“We’re going to be late for the meeting,” Molly said nervously.

“We’re not going to the meeting,” said Mary Beth. “While they’re having their boring old meeting and talking about good
deeds, we’re going to be having the time of our lives!”

“Yeah!” shouted Molly. “Good for us!”

The girls sat in silence. Then Molly asked softly, “What are we going to be doing?”

“Well,” said her friend, “we could go to a movie.”

“I don’t have any money,” said Molly.

“Or,” Mary Beth went on, “we could go sliding on the hill.”

Molly looked at the rivers of melting snow running down the street.

“Too wet,” she said. “Half the hill is dead grass.”

Then Mary Beth jumped up and said, “Let’s do something bad instead of something good! Let’s do bad deeds instead of good deeds! Let’s ring someone’s doorbell and run and hide!”

Molly looked at Mary Beth in surprise.
Molly might agree to miss Scouts, but she hadn’t lost her senses.

“That’s dumb,” she said. “I don’t feel like being a criminal just because we want to have some fun.” Missing a meeting was one thing. Facing her mother across a desk at the police station was definitely something else.

The girls listed things to do. Molly even wrote them on a corner of her spelling test paper.
Make cookies
. No good, because they’d need a stove and then their mothers would know they were skipping Scouts.
Roller-skate
. Too wet. And skates didn’t fit over snow boots.
Go to the zoo or the mall
. How would they get there? They didn’t drive.

“There isn’t much excitement around here,” said Mary Beth with a groan. “If we lived in California like Ashley, we could go to Hollywood and see the stars.”

“If we lived someplace with a racetrack, we could go to a car race. I saw it on TV.”

“I guess we live in a boring place,” said Mary Beth.

The girls picked up their mittens and their books. They both knew where they were going. Even if they were late and it was boring, Pee Wee Scouts was still the only thing around.

“W
here were you guys?” shouted Roger White as the girls walked down Mrs. Peters’s basement steps. Mrs. Peters was their troop leader. Troop 23 met in her basement. Sonny’s mother, Mrs. Stone, was assistant leader. She was already passing out cupcakes. The same boring kind of cupcakes they had every week, Molly noticed.

“Where were you? Where were you?”
Roger pestered the girls again.

“Nowhere,” said Mary Beth.

“Hey, how could you be nowhere?” shouted Tim Noon. “You have to be somewhere!”

“It’s good you got here, girls,” said Mrs. Peters. “I was just about to tell everyone the big news.”

I’ll bet, thought Molly. Big news to Mrs. Peters meant things like a visit to a farm to see baby pigs, or a trip to the market to shop for an easy meal as a surprise for their parents. Molly began to wish she’d decided to ring doorbells after all.

“The news,” said their leader, “is that we are taking an overnight trip! We are going to Center City on a train, and we’ll stay overnight in a hotel! We’ll go to the Science and History Museum, where we’ll see real dinosaur bones and learn about people who lived in the past.”

Molly almost choked on her cupcake. Mary Beth looked stunned.

“We almost missed this meeting because of your silly idea!” she whispered to Molly.

“It was your idea!” said Molly. “Not mine.”

But Molly couldn’t even remember whose idea it had been. And it didn’t matter. Because all of a sudden Pee Wee Scouts appeared to be more exciting than it ever had been in the past. A trip on a real train! Overnight in a real hotel! Dinosaur bones! What a close call that was. She might have missed it all just to go to a movie or to go sliding on brown grass.

Everyone was talking at once.

“Do our parents have to come?” shouted Sonny Stone, glaring at his mother.

“Can we sleep on those little shelf beds on the train?” asked Patty Baker. “And put our clothes in those little net hammocks? I saw that in an old movie.”

“I’m scared of trains,” said Tim Noon. “Sometimes they crash.”

“Scaredy-cat,” scoffed Roger White.
“I’m going to sit in the cockpit and help the driver drive.”

“He doesn’t sit in a cockpit,” said Kevin Moe, who knew a lot of things. He was very smart, and Molly wanted to marry him someday. Him or Jody, that is. Jody George was smart too and had a wheelchair he let the Pee Wees ride in sometimes.

“A cockpit is for a pilot in a plane,” Kevin went on. “An engineer drives a train.”

“My uncle is an engineer,” said Kenny Baker. “And he doesn’t drive a train, he works in an office.”

“That’s another kind of engineer,” said Jody.

“My uncle’s a pilot,” said Lisa Ronning. “He flies those jumbo jets across the ocean.”

Now everyone wanted to hear about jumbo jets.

Mrs. Peters held up her hands, which meant silence. One by one people stopped talking.

“Remember to raise your hand when you want to speak,” she reminded them. “We won’t be sleeping on the train, and parents won’t be coming, and the train will not crash,” she went on.

Rachel Meyers’s hand was waving. “Mrs. Peters, I’ve been to Center City with my aunt and we ate in a fancy restaurant at the top of a big tower and it turned around while we ate. The whole restaurant. Will we be going there?”

“How could a restaurant turn around?” asked Tracy Barnes.

“Maybe it’s on wheels or something,” said Kenny.

“I don’t know if our restaurant will revolve,” said Mrs. Peters firmly. “But we’ll have a good time. Now I have to tell you the next part of the news. On this trip, we’ll earn a brand-new badge.”