Double Dog Dare (15 page)

Kansas stopped spinning and looked over at Francine, his head barely lifted off his chest. He had never felt so miserable. Pukey and miserable. He was never going to live this down. He couldn’t say that he was the King of Dares, not anymore. He hadn’t finished the dare, so he hadn’t gotten the point, and now they were tied, eight to eight. And the
tiny part of him that felt anything other than pure and utter
awful
was plain angry, because he knew—
knew
—that Francine was going to be so, so happy.

But Francine didn’t look happy.

Actually, she looked like she might …

19.

A dippy bird

Barf.

That was the only word running through Francine’s head.

There was barf everywhere. Barf on her shoes, barf all over the floor, even a little bit flecked on her jeans. And in the glass in front of Miss Sparks’s dippy bird, was that …? Yes. It was oatmeal. Kansas had eaten oatmeal for breakfast, Francine could tell for a fact. And now the dippy bird was dunking down to
eat
it.

Her cheeks went hot.

Her forehead went cold.

Her chest pulsed.

Her eyes watered.

And then, in front of the camera, the school, and everybody …

Francine barfed too.

20.

A DESK FAN

“Well, now,” Mrs. Weinmore said, inspecting both Kansas and Francine carefully over the bulb of her nose. “I had a feeling you would both wind up here sooner or later.”

Kansas looked up at the clock on Mrs. Weinmore’s wall. Eight sixteen. Straight from the nurse to the principal’s office in eight minutes flat. That had to be some kind of record.

“Mrs. Weinmore,” he began. He could still see a little bit of puke on the toe of his shoe. “It wasn’t my fault. I promise. I—”

The principal held up a hand to quiet him. “Mr. Bloom,” she said, her voice sharp as an ice pick, “I strongly suggest you stop talking for the time being.”

Kansas followed her suggestion.

“I was very clear to both of you,” the principal went on, “that no shenanigans would be tolerated in this school. Wasn’t I?” She looked first at Francine, then at Kansas, and Kansas could feel her eyes boring into him like lasers. “Wasn’t I clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kansas mumbled, eyes in his lap, just as Francine squeaked out a “yeah.” Mrs. Weinmore’s desk fan was pointed straight at him, drying out his eyes with a
whirr
. He wondered if that was part of his punishment.

“I
thought
that I was clear. And yet you both went and made fools of yourselves anyway, in front of the entire student body.
Dares
.” She spat out the word as though it left a rotten taste in her mouth. “If someone told you two to march off a cliff, you’d both do it in a heartbeat. I’ve never seen such behavior. I know crushes at this age can be overwhelming, but engaging in
dares
is no way to deal with your feelings.”

A
crush
? On
Francine
? If Kansas had had anything left in him to barf, he would’ve upchucked it right there in the principal’s office.

Next to Kansas, Francine squirmed in her chair. “You
can’t prove we did any dares,” she said. “I just had a booger this morning, that’s all.”

Kansas liked where this was going. “Yeah,” he said. “Francine eats her boogers all the time.”

Francine nodded furiously. “I do. It’s true.”

“And me,” Kansas added, “I just felt like spin—”

“
Mr.
Bloom.
Miss
Halata.” The principal’s voice had changed from ice pick to sledge hammer. “Our janitor, Mr. Grell, informs me that he found a small slip of paper on Miss Sparks’s desk, underneath your other … digestibles. Now, I don’t believe there is a single person on this earth who wants to attempt to read what is on that paper. But I am willing to bet that on it there may very well be written a
dare
.” For someone with such a bulge of a nose, Kansas thought, Mrs. Weinmore really knew how to look threatening. “If I am forced to read the paper instead of having you tell me what it says directly, I will gladly double your punishment. So, do tell me.” She leaned forward on both elbows. “
Was
it a dare, Miss Halata? Mr. Bloom?”

Francine sighed. “Yes,” she admitted. “It was a dare.” And all Kansas could do was nod in agreement.

“
I see. And what do you think might be a suitable punishment for such an offense?”

Kansas was just about to mumble out “getting detention,” when suddenly he realized something.

“All I did was
spin,
” he said. So he’d spun around in a chair during the announcements. So what? Was that really worth getting in trouble for? “And that’s not against the rules. I mean … it’s not, right?”

“Yeah,” Francine agreed from the seat next to him. Kansas snapped his head in her direction, and he could tell that she felt just as surprised as he did to find them both on the same side. “It’s not against the rules to pick your nose, either. If it was, Andre would be in trouble all the time.”

The look Mrs. Weinmore shot them then could’ve shriveled a plum to a prune in three seconds flat. “The two of you,” she admonished, “cannot even
begin
to understand the chaos your little morning high jinks have wreaked in this school.”

“Um … chaos?” Kansas said.

“All across the school”—Mrs. Weinmore swept her arms out to her sides wildly—“we had some of our more …
delicate
students become ill from watching your little capers on the air.”

“Ill?” Francine asked.

“It seems that there can be something of a chain reaction in watching a person vomit.” She closed her eyes for a moment in disgust. “Forty-three students,” she told them. “Forty-three students are currently in the nurse’s office, calling their parents to come pick them up from school.”

So
that
was why there had been such a crowd in the nurse’s office. Kansas had figured there’d been a lice outbreak or something.

Francine’s eyebrows were raised to the ceiling. “You mean, we made forty-three kids …?”

Mrs. Weinmore nodded. “You made forty-three students vomit before first recess,” she confirmed. “Forty-five if you include yourselves.”

Now
that
had to be a record.

“Which is why,” the principal went on, “both of you will be suspended for the rest of the day.”

“Suspended?”
Kansas’s throat felt like it might close up.
He’d never been in trouble in his whole life. He’d never even been to the principal’s office before.

“Suspended,” Mrs. Weinmore confirmed.

Francine’s face went completely pale. “What about …” She took a deep breath. “What about Media Club? You’re not going to … We can still be in it, right?”

Mrs. Weinmore drummed her fingers on the table, studying Francine’s face for a long moment. Kansas sank as far back in his chair as possible, as though maybe, if he stayed far enough out of her way, the principal would forget he was there altogether.

“Under normal circumstances, Miss Halata,” Mrs. Weinmore replied at last, “I would remove the two of you from Media Club immediately. However, it seems that in this instance I don’t have to.”

Francine cleared her throat. “Re-really?”

“Really,” Mrs. Weinmore replied. “Because as of this coming Monday, Media Club will be canceled.”

“What?”
Kansas and Francine cried together.

Mrs. Weinmore had already turned her attention to some papers on her desk. “Yes. As it happens, you need a
camera to run a media club, and the one you’ve been using is broken.” She tapped the bottom of a stack of papers against her desktop. “It seems that modern-day camera equipment is ill-equipped to handle the effects of vomit.”

“Someone vomited on the camera?” Kansas said, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “But me and Francine were too far away. We couldn’t have—”

“Emma Finewitz,” the principal told him, turning back to her papers once and for all, “was number forty-five.”

21.

A sketchbook

What happened when you got suspended at 8:16 on a Friday morning, Francine discovered, was that you had to go to your dad’s morning art class, and the whole way there, he wouldn’t even look at you or call you “pea pod,” and every time you tried to talk to him, he’d just frown and say, “We’ll discuss it later, all right, Francine?”

All through her dad’s never-ending slideshow about the Impressionist art movement, Francine shifted in her seat in the last row, trying to get comfortable. She didn’t understand how college students could sit at such teeny-tiny desks. Her desk at school was at least three times as big, and she was only in fourth grade. She studied the graffiti
that had been carved into her desktop.
JB
CL. JB
TK. JB
IN.
And then, the most perplexing, one large scrawl that simply read
Rocketship.

Francine scooped her father’s sketchbook out of the book bag he’d left beside her desk and flipped through it to see if he’d been working on anything new. Sure enough, near the very end, there was a new machine. This one involved dominoes and bike tires, a sprinkler system, hammers and seltzer bottles, and three cantaloupes. At the very end, a string yanked on a fork to turn on a light switch. Francine stuck her nose right down into the sketchbook, counting. Thirty-seven steps.

Suddenly Francine snapped the sketchbook closed with such a thud that her father frowned at her from the front of the room.

Thirty-seven steps. Thirty-seven steps, all to do something that in the end might not even work anyway.

Francine sank down low in the tiny metal desk chair. It was all so pointless, she realized. Nothing seemed to really matter anymore. Not her father’s machines—because they were never going to build one for real, even if her dad kept
promising they would. Not Samson training—because he’d never be able to do anything more than crawl straight forward and squeak. Not even the dare war—because Media Club was canceled, so who cared who won? All the plans Francine had ever made, all the steps for her life she’d spent so long plotting out in great detail, were as meaningless as the pen strokes in her dad’s sketchbook. Things never worked out the way you planned them. There were always hitches in the middle, problems you didn’t see coming. So what was the use in even trying?

That evening, Francine called Natalie’s house. She needed someone to talk to, her best friend, and she figured maybe it was finally time to tell Natalie about her parents. But Natalie’s mother informed Francine that Natalie was at Alicia’s house. She’d be spending the whole weekend there, she said. Would Francine like to leave a message?

“No,” Francine said. “Thank you.” And she hung up the phone.

22.

A TENNIS BALL

What happened when you got suspended at 8:16 on a Friday morning, Kansas discovered, was that your mother had to leave her shift at the gift shop to pick you up at school, and the whole car ride home she yelled at you and lectured and wondered how you could possibly get yourself in trouble at a school you’d only been attending for three weeks. And then, just as you were about to defend yourself, she told you that you were becoming more and more like your father every day, and that you better get your act together, young man, or God help you.