Pizza Is the Best Breakfast (7 page)

“Why is my bed in the hallway?” she asks.

“Because I don't want it in my room,” I tell her.

“So where am I supposed to sleep?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Wherever you want. But not in my room.” I turn back to my Rainbow Sparkle book, signaling that it is time for her to go. She takes the hint and leaves my doorway, and I go back to reading in peace.

“Amanda. Down here. Now,” Mom calls from the bottom of the stairs, and I groan like a dinosaur and slide off the top of my bed like a snake. I walk out of my room and down the stairs as slowly as I can, and that's when I see it: Mom and Paige sitting on the living room couch, Mom's arm around Paige's shoulder.

And Paige is crying.

“You've made Paige very upset,” Mom says. “Care to explain yourself?” And I am too busy thinking about how I have never made an older
kid cry before to come up with a good answer to Mom's question.

“I'm waiting,” Mom says, interrupting my thoughts.

“I moved her mattress,” I finally answer.

“To where?”

“The hallway.”

“Why?”

“Because I do not want her to sleep in my room.”

“You have to learn to share your space and your things.”

I feel my eyes grow into enormous pancakes then, because Mom is not understanding me. “I
was
sharing,” I say. “Paige is the one who never has to share anything because she doesn't have any brothers or sisters. So she thinks she is the boss of everybody, and that is a lie.”

“I think you owe Paige an apology. A big one,” Mom tells me.

“Why? She is the one who is mean to me.”

“I'm waiting, Amanda.”

“Plus, she only calls me Manda even though I keep telling her my name is Mandy.”

“I'm going to count to three,” Mom begins.

“Timmy should have to apologize too. He helped me move the mattress.”

“I'll speak with Timmy next. This is about you. One . . .”

I sigh a huge sigh then and look at Paige's face, which is red and splotchy around her eyes from crying.

“I'm sorry I moved your bed,” I say, then I look back to Mom. “Am I done?”

“Paige was already going to have a sleepover at Grandmom's tonight anyway,” Mom answers me. “But when she is back, I expect the two of you to work on getting along. You are family. You're going to fight sometimes, of course, but
it's more important that you are there for each other.”

I do not say one thing about this, and neither does Paige. And when Grandmom comes to pick her up, she does not even call me to the door to give her some sugar. Instead, she takes Paige to her car all by herself for the whole night, because maybe Paige really is her favorite grandchild.

*  *  *

I walk right past Mrs. Spangle and into my classroom the next morning, and she calls after me, “Boy, not even a hello this morning after a hug yesterday. What did I do to deserve this?” I scurry back over to her and give her a hug like I mean it, and for a minute I think about telling her about Dennis and my sticker book. But if I do, then Dennis will definitely tattletale on me about the glue stick, and I do not feel like being in trouble at
school, too, since I am already in trouble at home for moving Paige's bed.

I deposit my things in my cubby and walk over to my seat. Dennis is already sitting at our group, but he has his face buried inside of his desk, looking for something, and all I can see is his Mohawk.

“Remember, your seatwork sheets are at the front of the room. Cut out the squares that show the scenes from the story we read yesterday, and then glue them in the correct sequence onto the construction paper. Who can remind me what ‘sequence' is?”

I shoot my hand in the air, but Mrs. Spangle calls on Natalie.

“The order things happened in the story,” Natalie answers.

“Excellent,” Mrs. Spangle says. “When you finish gluing your story sequences, you can color in
the pictures on each square.” I pick up my sheets from the front of the room and return to my desk, and I am shocked to see that Dennis already has his squares cut out and placed on the construction paper, ready to be glued, because Dennis does not usually do any work quickly, if he even does it at all.

I remove my scissors from my desk and begin cutting the squares apart, and I concentrate very hard on staying on the dotted lines. Then I study each square carefully until I decide in which order they should be glued on the construction paper. It is only when I am reaching in my desk for Dennis's glue stick that I see it, and before I can bite my tongue to stop myself, I scream.

And I scream pretty loud, if I am being honest. Because I am an excellent screamer.

Anya and Mrs. Spangle both rush over to my group, and that's when they see it too: Dennis is
not using a glue stick or liquid glue or paste or anything he is supposed to in order to glue his squares to the construction paper. Instead, he is using MY STICKERS. From my sticker book! He is using the stickers like tape to hold the squares onto the paper, and even worse, he is using the gel stickers, which are MY FAVORITES!

“Those are
mine
!” I yell, reaching to try to take his construction paper. My hand grabs one corner, and it rips off a big chunk, but not a chunk with any of my stickers.

“Hey, hey, Mandy, sit down.” Mrs. Spangle puts her hands on my shoulders and presses me back into my seat. “There's no screaming in this classroom. What's going on here?”

“Dennis,” I begin, spitting his name out like it's a disease, “stole my sticker book, and now he's using my stickers.”

Dennis shrugs his shoulders then, like this is
not a gigantic tragedy or anything. “I had to,” he explains. “Because I didn't have a glue stick.”

“If you need a glue stick, you borrow one from your neighbor,” Mrs. Spangle says. “Or you ask me. You don't use Mandy's stickers.”

“But Polka Dot stole my glue stick,” Dennis says.

“No name-calling,” Mrs. Spangle says. “Mandy, did you take Dennis's glue stick?”

“I borrowed it,” I say honestly, “because he wouldn't let me use it and mine was empty. But he
stole
my sticker book.”

“Hand them over, both of you.” Mrs. Spangle holds out her hands. Dennis and I reach into our desks, and I pull out his glue stick, and Dennis removes my sticker book. We hand them both to Mrs. Spangle.

“Dennis, place this in your desk,” she says, handing him the glue stick. “Mandy, take this sticker
book home. No more sticker books in school. That goes for all of you.” She looks around the room.

“But what about the stickers Dennis used?” I ask, pointing to his paper. “They're my favorites.”

Mrs. Spangle helps me peel the gel stickers off of Dennis's construction paper, but she still writes my initials on the board for screaming, and she adds
DR
right underneath for Dennis's name, so that is something, I guess. Anya helps me reseal the stickers in my book, but their backs are now covered in construction paper fuzz and they don't stick as well as they used to.

I glare at Dennis before I walk my sticker book over to my cubby to place it in my book bag, and I feel tears tickling the back of my eyes. But I press my palms into them, because I am not going to cry like a big crybaby. I am not like Paige, after all.

PAIGE STAYS AT GRANDMOM'S FOR
another night in a row, which makes me very happy. I wish Grandmom would take Timmy and the twins with her while she is at it. Even if Timmy is getting on my nerves a little less than usual this week, it would be nice to be rid of them all for just one night, so that I could pretend to be an only child again.

“Is Paige staying at Grandmom's until she goes home?” I ask Mom as I eat breakfast (which is cereal and not chocolate pudding or
ketchup pizzas, and so it is not nearly as fun).

“No, she's coming back today while you're at school,” Mom answers. “And now listen to me: I want you to be kind to Paige when she returns to our house. It's not easy to be away from home. It's your job to make her feel welcome, no matter how bossy you think she is. Plus, you can be pretty bossy yourself, you know.”

“I am not—” I begin, but then I stop myself, because Mom is a little bit right. But not about the being away from home part, I think. “I like to be away from home.”

“The only place you've ever stayed away from home is Grandmom's,” Mom tells me.

“No, we slept at Uncle Rich's house before,” I answer. “Before the twins were born.”

“Right, but that was with me and Dad,” Mom says. “It's not the same if your family is there.”

“You said we're Paige's family.”

“We are. But we're not her immediate family—I'm not her mom, Dad's not her father, you're not her sister,” Mom explains. “In fact, she doesn't even know what it's like to have a sister. I'm sure it's hard for her to be away from what she knows.”

“I don't think we're so bad,” I say. “And anyway, I think she should learn what my name is. She keeps calling me Manda.”

“I'll talk with her about that when she gets back this morning,” Mom says. “I agree—that is something simple she can do for you, call you by the name you like. But I think you could make some compromises yourself. Remember how excited you were to have Paige visit? It bothers me that you two are wasting all this time when you could be having fun together.”

“She's not as fun as she used to be,” I tell Mom honestly.

“Promise me you'll try harder with her this
afternoon,” Mom says. “I bet you'll find that the same Paige you liked before is still in there.”

“I don't think so,” I answer.

“You still want to go to the carnival with Grandmom on Friday, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you better try,” Mom says. “Remember, you have to cook five dishes out of that cookbook Grandmom gave you. You wouldn't want Paige to get to go and not you.”

And that is the truth, so when Mom goes into the twins' room, I scurry off of my chair and grab the cookbook from the pile on the counter. I run into the living room and stuff the book in my book bag, because there is no way I am going to let Paige get a head start.

*  *  *

Without any stickers to trade at school, I whip out the cookbook in the cubbies to show it to Anya.

“Why'd you bring that to school?” Natalie asks. “You can't cook here.”

“I know.” I say “know” extra loud because Natalie asks a lot of questions. “I brought it because I did not want Paige to cook out of it while I am at school. Because she might make five whole recipes, and then Grandmom will take her to the carnival without me, and that is not okay.”

Anya takes the book from me and flips through the pages. “Ooh, these look great,” she says, pointing to a picture of marshmallow ghosts. “And they should be easy to make—you just stick pretzel sticks in the marshmallows to hold them up, then use chocolate chips for the eyes and mouth. You could totally cook them.”

“That's not really cooking,” Natalie says. “You're just putting them together. It's more like a craft.”

“I just have to make five things out of this
book,” I tell her. “It doesn't matter how hard or easy they are. But I hate ghosts, so I don't really want to make those.”

“Why do you hate ghosts?” Natalie asks.

“I think there's a ghost in my house,” I answer. “I think it snuck in from the Packles' porch. They always put up a big ghost display on Halloween, and when they took it down, I think a ghost escaped.”

Anya's and Natalie's eyes both grow wide at this story, and I feel goose bumps crawling up my arms just thinking about it.

“Boo!”
a ghost calls from behind the curtain on the other side of the cubbies, and Anya, Natalie, and I all scream, though not as loudly as I did about the stickers. The ghost cackles a laugh at us, and then he appears from behind the curtain.

Only it is not a ghost at all. It is Dennis. Being terrible.

“Knock it off, Dennis!” I yell at him.

“Polka Dot's a fraidy cat,” he says. “Fraidy cat, fraidy cat.”

“Be quiet, Dennis,” Anya says. “No one's talking to you. Go away.”