Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (16 page)

“It’s safe,” I assured her.

“How are you going to break the plastic?” Nina asked.

I showed her my pocketknife. She shook her head again. I knelt down on the grass and decided where I should make my cut.

“I think I smell something,” Nina said.

I thought I smelled something too. Something nasty. But like a true paleontologist, I pressed on. I held the knife in my right hand and pinched my nose with my left. As I put my knife to the plastic, I heard a soft bark and then a crunching noise. When I looked up, I saw Pinky, Mr. Lively’s spotless, pink-nosed, deaf, albino Dalmatian, darting through my mother’s garden toward us. Nina dropped her shovel and screamed.

“Don’t run,” I warned. “He’ll chase you. He’ll bite.” Rarely was Pinky aggressive, but when he was a puppy he had nipped my mother’s gloved hand. And last week, as the Avon Lady was leaving, Pinky had sunk his teeth into her briefcase and tugged.

“That beast should be muzzled,” the Avon Lady had snapped, inspecting the tear marks on her leather case where Pinky had hooked his teeth.

I was sure that the reason Pinky had bit my
mother’s gloved hand and the Avon Lady’s case was because he knew that they were made out of leather and somehow Pinky’s nose knew that leather came from cows. On some level, I thought, Pinky thought he was biting a cow.

“Don’t run!” I yelled again. I wasn’t sure how much leather Nina was wearing, but I did know that Pinky was a dog, and a dog was an animal, and all animals liked to chase things, especially things that were running away.

But Nina didn’t listen. She sprang away from me and Pinky gave chase. I called for them to stop, but neither one did. Nina’s blond pigtails and chubby belly bounced as she ran. It didn’t take long for Pinky to catch up to her, knocking her to the ground. He wagged his tail happily, trying to lick her face.

Nina blocked his tongue with her arms. She curled her legs in to her stomach, trying to make herself into a ball, to protect every part of her against Pinky’s paws and teeth.

“Does it have rabies?” she cried. “Is it foaming at the mouth?”

I tried to be perfectly honest.

“He probably doesn’t have rabies,” I said. “But he is foaming a little bit at the mouth.”

“Ahhh!” Nina screamed.

Losing interest in Nina, the human ball, Pinky leapt
in my direction. He tore through the long grass, flattening the weeds as he ran. When he stopped in front of me, I reached out to pet him. But he tightened his body and growled. He lowered his wet nose to the sack and gave it several quick sniffs. Slobber dangled from his mouth.

“It’ll eat Muffin!” Nina yelled. “Big dogs eat cats!” She stood up and ran back toward us.

Pinky pawed at the plastic, tearing it open in three ragged lines. Nina rushed to do something, but she tripped. She picked up her shovel but it tumbled from her hands and I watched the handle come down hard, swatting Pinky on the snout. He let out a cry, pain mixed with surprise, and then bolted through the field back home.

Nina caught her balance and picked her shovel back up. Using its blade, she nudged the bag back into the hole.

“This is the worst smell I’ve ever smelled in my whole life, Camille,” she said. “I’m going home. I’m building a volcano.”

The hem of her khaki pants and her shoes were caked with dirt. Her elbows, stained with grass, were red from her fall.

“I didn’t plan it this way,” I said, helping to move some dirt back over Muffin.

“Really, Camille. What were you thinking?”

Nina didn’t look at me when she talked. She filled the hole and patted down the dirt with the back of her shovel.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Nina threw her shovel on the ground and turned toward my house. “It smells so rotten.” She walked through the unplanted rows of corn, and passed a pile of seed potatoes my mother was getting ready to plant.

I didn’t know what to do.

“Put my name on it too!” I called after her. “I’ll buy the batteries.”

Chapter 23
Gumdrops

N
ina Hosack may have been a chubby wimp, but she was an excellent walker. That day, she trudged three long miles to get home. She called to let me know she’d made it there safely.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

I was hoping she’d give me useful information about the state of our volcano.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. And then she hung up on me. And after that happens, after somebody
hangs up on you, there’s really nothing more that you can say. Because there’s just a dial tone.

That night, I flipped and flopped on my new mattress. All of my dreams were horrible. In them, nobody at school would talk to me because they said I smelled like a dead cat. Nina had told everybody. And I didn’t do a very good job defending myself, because for some reason I showed up to school that day wearing only my underwear. I was too embarrassed to explain anything. All I could do was fold my arms across my chest and run away. That’s how a lot of my dreams when I’m only wearing underwear end.

But the next day when I got to school, it turned out that Nina was a lot more mature than I realized. As soon as I saw her I gave her five dollars for the batteries. She took the bill, folded it up, slipped it in her pocket, and told me, “We’re square, Camille.”

I decided not to ask her about the volcano. I pretended like I didn’t care. It was a nice break to pretend that my big problems didn’t matter.

Then I turned a corner and saw something very marvelous. It was Ms. Golden. I was so happy to see her that I jumped up and down and ran in her direction.

“Ms. Golden! You’re back!” I yelled.

And she let me hug her. I couldn’t wait for math and social studies and health to end, so that I could head straight to gifted reading and my beanbag.

When Mr. Hawk dismissed us for gifted reading, I had a hard time not pushing ahead of everybody else and yelling, “Run! Run!”

“I wonder if Ms. Golden’s voice changed,” Penny said. “My uncle had his tonsils taken out and now he sounds like an otter.”

This made me very curious.

“What does an otter sound like?” I asked.

Penny made a
bah
sound and pinched her throat and jiggled the skin on her neck.

“Ms. Golden doesn’t sound like an otter,” I said. “I talked to her this morning.”

I thought when Ms. Golden got back that we’d read a folktale. But we didn’t. We read “The Mouse at the Seashore,” a fable written by Arnold Lobel. Before we started, Ms. Golden asked us to close our eyes and picture something that we really wanted. I didn’t close my eyes right away. I looked at everybody else. Then Ms. Golden smiled at me, so I closed my eyes too.

As I pictured things that I really wanted, I was surprised at what popped into my head. Money. A hot dog. Sally. Jelly beans. But then I stopped thinking in pictures, and a whole movie played in my head. I was at the airport with my mom and dad. And we had tickets to fly somewhere. And I was eating cotton candy…

But then Ms. Golden told us to open our eyes. And
my movie stopped playing before I found out where I was going.

“This is a story about a mouse,” she said.

And I didn’t think I was going to like it. Because I saw an actual mouse once, and it scared me so much that I jumped up onto a chair. But hearing about this mouse was kind of enjoyable. He wanted to visit the seashore. But the mouse’s parents didn’t want him to go. Because it was dangerous. But the mouse went anyway. He was almost eaten by a cat. And he got attacked by birds and dogs. But the mouse finally made it to the seashore. And he sat under the stars and watched the ocean. Then, Ms. Golden read the moral of the fable, which is the fable’s message, something all fables have. “All the miles of a hard road are worth a moment of true happiness.”

After Ms. Golden closed the book, she looked at us and asked us what we thought. But none of us said anything.

“Maybe this isn’t the kind of story we talk about. Maybe this is the kind of story that we think about,” Ms. Golden said.

We still didn’t say anything.

“You’ve all gotten very quiet while I was away. Doesn’t anybody have anything to say?”

“I didn’t know a dog would go after a mouse like that,” Jory said.

“I did!” Penny said. “My dog, Hustle, found an entire mouse nest in a field and ate them all!”

“That’s terrible,” Nina said.

“No it’s not. Mice are vermin,” Penny replied. “They eat our grain.”

“Okay,” Ms. Golden said. “Who wants to hear a fable about a bad kangaroo?”

And of course, we all raised our hands. Penny raised both of hers.

During lunch, I was expecting to sit at my fourth-grade table and eat my turkey sandwich and be mostly bored. But that’s not what happened. Because Gracie Clop finally brought the picture of her grandpa feeding a grizzly bear a gumdrop.

“This is amazing!” Lilly said, before she passed it to Hannah.

“His hand is right by its mouth!” Hannah cried.

“I want to see it,” Tony said.

“Be careful not to get your taco on it,” Gracie said.

Tony wiped his hands on his pants and took the photo by its corner.

“This isn’t a grizzly bear!” Tony said. “It doesn’t have a hump.”

Gracie snatched the photo out of Tony’s hand.

“It does too,” Gracie said.

Then she passed the photo to Polly. I leaned over and looked at it too.

“It’s a black bear,” Tony said. “Anybody could feed a gumdrop to a black bear.”

“That’s not true,” Gracie said.

Polly passed the picture to Zoey.

“Everybody knows that grizzly bears claw your guts out. But black bears lick your face,” Tony said.

“You’re making that up!” Gracie said.

“No I’m not. My dad hunts. I’ve gone with him. I know
a lot
about bears,” Tony said. “I thought your picture was going to be really amazing. But it was just okay.”

“My picture
is
really amazing! Plus, my grandpa is really amazing. And that grizzly bear is really amazing,” Gracie said. “The only person who isn’t really amazing is you.”

She sounded so upset that I thought she might throw some of her lunch at Tony. Boone took the picture and looked at it.

“Tell her it isn’t a grizzly bear,” Tony said to Boone.

Boone squinted. “I don’t know what kind of bear it is. But I think the picture is really amazing.”

Tony shook his head and stood up. Boone stayed seated. He passed the picture back to Gracie.

“I brought something for everybody,” Gracie said. She reached into her lunch bag and pulled out a Baggie filled with gumdrops.

“Yay!” Nina said. “Gumdrops are my favorite.”

I wanted to remind Nina that marshmallows and
potato chips were her favorites. But I didn’t. When the bag reached me, I pulled out an orange gumdrop.

“Is it safe for you to eat sugar?” Polly asked me.

I frowned at her. Who did she think she was? My mother?

“It’s okay if I eat just one,” I said. And then, even though I wanted a green one, too, I passed the bag to Lilly.

Chapter 24
Doom

W
hy couldn’t I be a platypus? Or a snowy egret? Or an armadillo? I could think of a bunch of animals that weren’t even assigned. Penny noticed this too. After practice, she bravely pointed out to Mrs. Zirklezack that several important zoo animals had been left out. But Mrs. Zirklezack had a quick answer.

“I didn’t create a perfect heroine,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “Nora can’t save everyone.”

Penny sighed and walked away. That was the end of it.

All day long, even after I ate a piece of cheese, my mood sank lower and lower.
A drowned cat
, I said to myself over and over. When saying the word
drowned
no longer upset me, I borrowed Mr. Hawk’s thesaurus. A
ruined
cat. A
doomed
cat. A
marked
cat. An
ill-fated
cat. A feline with
bad kismet
. I let these words bounce around in my brain. This worked. I became very sad again.

I was worried that there was something about me that looked doomed. Maybe it was my cooler. I wasn’t sure. But there was one thing I grew more and more sure of during each play practice. If I really were living in a rainy world, I was pretty sure that I’d be one of the first animals on Nora’s bus. Unless my white plastic bucket could also be used as a flotation device, I just couldn’t picture myself standing on top of it dancing and singing. It just wasn’t me. At heart, I knew I was a survivor. Wasn’t I?

My legs felt as heavy as sandbags as I stepped off the bus. Crossing the road, I realized that I was crossing it alone. No Polly. No Danny. No Manny. Sadness gets worse when you’re by yourself. I walked down my long driveway, kicking at the gravel. Then it hit me. I didn’t have to be alone. I could call Sally. Because I had an international calling card!

First, I went to find my mother. She wasn’t in the den. Or the kitchen. But she hadn’t left a note either. She had never gone anywhere without leaving a note.
I felt nervous. And then I heard a rumbling noise. It sounded like our lawn mower. I looked out the kitchen window. My mother was attempting to cut the grass. That’s something that my dad usually did. But since he was gone, our grass had gotten longer than our ankles. She was only halfway done and she did not look like she was enjoying herself. A cloud of dark smoke hung over her and the mower. I hoped it made her miss my dad more.

I went into my sock drawer and found the card and the instructions. I think the person who wrote the instructions must have thought people who used calling cards were stupid, because the instructions began by explaining all the numbers on the phone’s keypad. I skipped the instructions and decided to try to call information in Japan.

To use my calling card, I had to enter a lot of numbers. And after I did that, a woman with a robot voice would repeat what I’d entered and ask me to press 8 for yes and 9 for no. Because I didn’t make any mistakes, I ended up pressing 8 a lot. I also had to look inside the phone book to try to figure out how to dial Information in Japan.