The Girls Take Over (2 page)

The others laughed.

“Or maybe he'd call to say that as soon as he read the name
Caroline Malloy,
he threw the bottle back in the ocean and washed his hands with soap and water,” Jake teased.

It was hard to concentrate on schoolwork when there were notes to be sealed in bottles, Caroline thought. Her desk was right behind Wally Hatford's, and when she had nothing better to do, she would trace letters or words on Wally's back with the end of her ruler and dot the
i
's with her pencil. Or she would blow on the back of his neck and whisper romantic words, just to see his ears turn red.

But this morning she was content to stare out the window as rain trickled down the pane, and imagined a lonely aspirin bottle adrift at sea with a tiny piece of paper rolled up inside it. She imagined the handsome sea captain in his blue-and-white uniform bending over the side of the boat to scoop it up, and—

“Caroline?”

The voice of the teacher suddenly intruded, and Caroline blinked and snapped to attention.

“The answer, please?” said Miss Applebaum.

#x201C;The Ohio River?” Caroline said quickly.

“What?” said the teacher as the class turned to stare.

“The … the Gulf of Mexico?” Caroline bleated.

“Caroline, we happen to be doing long division, and I assure you that if you divided four thousand, six hundred and sixty-eight by twelve, you would not get the Gulf of Mexico,” the teacher said. “Not even the Ohio River.”

Two
A Horrible Thought

W
ally took off his jacket, soaked through with rain, and hung it on a hook by the back door. He and his brothers kicked off their wet sneakers and left them in a heap against the wall.

All the way home from school that day Wally had been thinking about the bottle race they were going to have on the Buckman River. At last his brothers were going to do something that interested
him
for a change. Not dump dead birds and squirrels on the girls' side of the river. Not howl outside the Malloys' windows at night, trying to frighten them into going back to Ohio so that the Bensons would return. The Benson brothers were the best friends the Hatfords had ever had, and it had been a sad day when Coach Benson moved his family to Georgia for a year and Coach Malloy moved
his
family to Buckman. Into the Bensons' house, no less!

Putting notes in bottles to see how far they would
travel on the river was just the kind of thing Wally Hatford loved to do, however. But he couldn't help suspecting that Caroline would try to do something crazy and turn the race into a theatrical performance, starring … who else? Caroline Malloy!

In some ways, Wally was a loner. He could entertain himself for an hour just blowing fog on a windowpane and tracing designs in it. He could spend half an afternoon in summer lying on the porch on his stomach with his face over the side, watching ants trying to carry a bread crumb to their anthill. He seemed to live a life half in and half outside his head and didn't always need other people around to make him happy.

The boys had barely started across the kitchen when the phone rang. Wally, who was closest, picked it up. Even before the person on the line said a word, Wally said, “We're all here, Mom, and nobody's been murdered or anything.”

Their mother always phoned the house as soon as she thought they'd be home from school, to be sure everyone was accounted for. She worked in a hardware store, and Mr. Hatford was a mail carrier, so the boys were on their own for a while each day after school.

“There's a little potato salad and some Swiss cheese in the fridge,” Mrs. Hatford said in answer. “But don't touch the chicken. That's our dinner.”

“Okay,” said Wally. “If you have any homework, now is a good time to do it, with all this rain,” said his mother.

“Okay,” Wally said again. Then he told her about
the bottle race, and Mrs. Hatford promised to bring home seven white plastic bottles with tight-fitting lids.

Jake got out the potato salad and Josh found the cheese. Peter had discovered a half-eaten box of animal crackers in his closet and was sitting at the table, swinging his legs and humming a song while he chewed.

“We should all throw our bottles into the water at the exact same time to make the race fair,” said Josh, stuffing some cheese into his mouth.

Jake, however, grinned as he set a box of crackers on the table. “Who says the race has to be fair? Who says we couldn't put messages in a whole bunch of bottles and send them out on the other side of Island Avenue a day or two sooner to give them a head start?”

“That would be cheating!” said Wally.

For once, Josh agreed with him. “I don't want to do that, Jake. I'd really like to see whose bottle goes the farthest when they all begin at the same place at the same time.”

Jake folded a slice of cheese over a cracker and opened a can of pop. Each boy was allowed only one can of pop a day. “Well, if my bottle goes farthest,” he said, “I'm going to make everyone do my homework.”

“If
I'm
King for a Day, everyone will have to do all my chores around the house,” said Josh.

Wally thought about what he would most like the others to do. “If
my
bottle goes farthest, you each have to give me your can of pop for the day,” he said.

“If
my
bottle wins, everybody has to bake a big, big batch of cookies all for me!” crowed Peter, beaming at the thought.

The boys chewed awhile longer, smiling as each imagined himself King for a Day. And then Wally had a thought—a terrible, awful thought. Maybe it wouldn't be a king at all. Maybe it would be a queen.

He looked around the table. “What if one of the girls' bottles goes the farthest?” he said. “What if it's Caroline's?”

The smiles disappeared from the boys' faces. If Eddie was queen, she might make them do something dangerous, like crawl high up in a tree to get a squirrel's nest. If Beth was queen, she'd probably order them to make her lunch. But if Caroline Lenore Malloy was queen, she would dress the boys in ruffled shirts and knee breeches and make them carry her down Main Street on a throne.

“We can't let that happen!” said Jake. “It would be murder!”

The phone rang again, and this time Jake answered. “Hello?” he said. Wally watched as a slow grin spread across his brother's face. “Sure!” Jake said. And then, after a minute, “Sure! Okay.”

When he hung up, he said, “The girls are on their way over. Eddie wants to make some rules for the contest.”

“Okay by me,” said Josh.

But Jake's eyes narrowed. “How do we know the
girls
aren't planning to cheat? How do we know
they
aren't going to put
their
bottles in the river ahead of ours? Eddie's up to something, you can bet.”

Wally slumped down in his chair. The cracker he had been chewing stuck to the roof of his mouth. The war between the Hatfords and the Malloys would go on forever and ever, he was sure of it, until either his family or theirs left Buckman.

Three
Deal

“W
hat are you
saying
?” Beth asked Eddie as they sat in Beth's room after school, watching the rain stream down the second-story window.

Caroline, sitting on the floor playing jacks, thought her oldest sister was like a tiger, the way Eddie paced back and forth upstairs from one room to another. The rain made Eddie crazy.

“I just don't trust those Hatfords,” Eddie said. “You
know
they're going to rig this race so that one of their bottles will get a head start. We shouldn't have agreed to this slave business.”

“Oh, it might not be so bad,” said Beth hopefully. “If Josh got to be king, it might be fun. Besides, what if one of
us
wins?”

“That's what we have to make happen,” said Eddie. “We've got to make sure one of
our
bottles goes the farthest by April thirtieth.”

Caroline's hand dropped, and the little red ball
rolled under Beth's bed. “But that would be cheating!” she said.

“So do you think that's going to stop
them
?” said Eddie. “They would never have agreed to this if they didn't know they could rig it to win.”

“Then I don't want to do it if it's not a fair race,” said Beth.

“If
they're
going to cheat, I'll cheat, but not if they're not,” said Caroline, not quite sure of what she'd just said.

“How are we going to know?” asked Beth.

Eddie plopped down on the bed. “Here's what we'll do.” She outlined a plan, and five minutes later she called the Hatford boys to say that the girls were on their way over with a contract.

In their yellow rain slickers the three Malloy sisters pulled on their boots in the kitchen.

“Where are you off to?” asked Mrs. Malloy from the dining room, where income-tax forms covered the table.

“We're just going over to the Hatfords' to make some rules for a bottle race on the river,” Eddie said.

“Well, don't get too near the water,” their mother called after them. “The river's starting to go down, but it's still fairly high.”

“We won't,” said Caroline.

The river and sky were gray, but there was a feathery fog of green on the trees—only wisps of leaves, the lightest of greens and yellows. The girls slogged down
to the bridge, crossed over, and went up the sidewalk to the Hatfords' porch.

Josh opened the door. “Hi, come in,” he said. They stopped to deposit their boots on the porch. Inside, the boys were waiting for them, and Peter offered the remains of his animal crackers.

“There's a whole bear in there somewhere,” he said.

“Don't eat it,” Josh warned. “That box of crackers has been in Peter's closet for months, and you should see his closet!”

“You want some popcorn?” Wally offered, holding up a couple of microwave bags. That sounded more appealing, so the seven of them sat around the kitchen table listening for the popping to stop.

“Now!” said Jake.

“No … see, there's another pop,” said Wally.

“Okay, now!” said Caroline.

“Nope. Two … three more pops,” said Beth.

Finally the bag was removed and another inserted, and five minutes later two metal bowls of popcorn were making the rounds of the kitchen table.

“Okay, here's the deal,” said Eddie. Her real name was Edith Ann, but she said she'd fight anyone who called her that. “If we're going to do the race, it's got to be fair. There are all kinds of ways we could cheat and the others wouldn't know about it, so it's got to be cheat-proof.”

“How are you going to do that?” asked Wally.

“Like you said, we have to get seven bottles all the
same size, with tight caps, and we have to put them in the river at the same place at the same time,” said Eddie.

Caroline looked at the faces around her as Eddie explained the rules. There was a cheating smile on Jake Hatford's face if she'd ever seen one.

“And to make sure that nobody puts the same kind of a bottle with his name and address in it a day or so early,” she continued, which made Jake suddenly snap to attention, “the girls get to put something secret in each of the boys' bottles, and the boys get to do the same with the girls' bottles. This way, if someone calls us to say that they found one of our bottles, we'll ask what was in it, and it had better have the secret something or we'll know it's an extra bottle somebody put in the river, and that won't count.”