Petal's Problems (2 page)

"We won't swim to France." Annie was getting more exasperated by the minute. "And we won't fly like birds either. We'll take a plane."

"
Aiyeeee!
" Petal cried. "That's the worst idea you've come up with yet!"

Zinnia crossed one arm over the other and then swept them apart, like an umpire making a call at home plate. "Can we all just ignore Petal for a moment?"

"Gladly," Georgia said.

"Do you have something to say, Zinnia?" Durinda asked.

"Yes," Zinnia said, extreme if cautious happiness entering her eyes. "Did anyone else hear what I just heard?"

"You mean Petal losing what's left of her tiny little mind?" Rebecca said.

"But that's nothing new," Georgia said. "She loses what's left of it practically every day."

"I didn't mean that," Zinnia said, growing more excited still. "I meant Annie. She said, and I quote, 'We'll take a plane.' She was talking in the present tense. That must mean we're going to the wedding. We're going to France!"

We all turned to Annie, wondering. Was this true? Even Petal stopped running in circles long enough to look at her.

"' Fraid not," Annie said, answering our questioning looks with a rare blush. "That was just a slip of the tense. I meant that's how we'd get there if we
were
going, which we most definitely are not."

"Thank the universe!" Petal said, collapsing into a happy, exhausted heap.

"But why not?" Zinnia, the most disappointed among us and the last to hold on to any shred of hope, said.

"Because it is in France," Annie said. "Because we would have to fly there and we would need passports, which none of us have."

We didn't?

"Well, do you?" Annie demanded.

Sadly, we shook our heads. It would be nice to be international travelers, people of mystery and intrigue like James Bond 007, but that wasn't us. Even Mommy and Daddy always said it was scary enough just taking us across state lines.

"No," Annie said with a satisfied nod of the head, "I didn't think so. On top of
that
problem, there's the even bigger problem of what we would tell people."

"How do you mean?" Durinda asked. She may have been willing to go along with whatever Annie dictated, but even Durinda secretly longed to go to the wedding.

It would be so much fun. It would be
different.

We liked different. Or at least most of us did.

"It's like this," Annie said. "Whenever we have to explain to nosy parkers why Mommy and Daddy aren't around, we always say—"

"That Daddy is in the bathroom and Mommy is in France," Jackie cut in, beginning to see what Annie was getting at.

"Or vice versa," Georgia added. "Sometimes we say it the other way around. It's good to have variety, mix things up a bit."

"And that's the problem," Annie said. "How can we go to the wedding of Aunt Martha and Uncle George—Daddy's sister and Mommy's brother—
without
Mommy and Daddy? How could we ever explain their absence on such an occasion? Obviously, we can't say that one or both of them are in France because—"

"Because the wedding is
in France,
" Zinnia finished, thoroughly getting it and thoroughly glum now.

"Exactly," Annie said gently.

"So what do we do?" Durinda asked.

Annie sighed. Sometimes she seemed like Atlas, trying to hold the weight of the whole world on her shoulders. Some of us thought that it could get pretty heavy, but only occasionally did Annie appear to mind. And even then, we suspected that her appearing to mind was just for show.

She studied the invitation again.

"They've included a reply card," she said at last. "It says to RSVP no later than June seventh." She handed the card out toward Durinda. "You'll take care of this for us?"

"Of course," Durinda said, reaching for the card, but before she could grab hold of it, a smaller hand snatched it.

"May I do this?" Zinnia asked timidly. "I know it's not the kind of job you'd usually entrust to the youngest—you know, the importance of RSVPing and all—but I am so sad we are not going to the wedding, I think it would make me feel just the slightest sliver better if—"

"Say no more." Annie patted Zinnia on the shoulder as another tear threatened to overspill Zinnia's eyelid. "If it makes you feel better, of course you can be the one to RSVP no for us."

"Really, people!" By now Marcia's hands were on her hips. "Doesn't anyone else think this is all too strange?"

We all stared at her. What
was
she going on about?

"
June?
" Marcia tapped her foot impatiently. "Isn't it high time for it to be
June?
"

***

And then it was June.

First it was June 1, a Sunday, and then it was June 2 and time to go to school.

But one of us was nowhere to be seen.

So we searched for Petal and found her in the first place we looked.

Petal was under her bed.

TWO

June had always been a sweetbitter month for us. It was sweet because it meant the end of another school year and graduation into another grade—yay! summer vacation!—but it was also bitter because the end of another school year meant being separated from our classmates for most of the summer. We would miss those classmates. Or at least we'd miss Will Simms. And maybe we'd even miss Mandy Stenko, a little.

This June was no different in that regard.

But this June
was
different, because Petal wouldn't come out from under her bed.

"The bus will be here any second," Durinda informed Petal gently.

We were all crouched down, peering under the bed, trying to get Petal to come out.

"If we miss the bus," Georgia pointed out, "we'll have to call Pete for a ride and that hardly seems fair. You know he does have to work for a living."

"I won't come out! I won't come out!" We heard Petal's muffled shout.

"You have to come out sometime," Marcia said, reasonably enough. "You'll need to eat."

"Durinda can shove my meals under the bed," Petal said. "I'm never coming out! Or at least, not until July first."

"There are only two weeks of school left," Jackie said. "If you don't go to school for two weeks, you won't graduate with our class. And then you'll have to stay behind next year, all by yourself, and have the Mr. McG again."

"I'll take my chances," Petal said with a rare burst of bravery, however misplaced. "But I'm not coming out! I'd rather stay under here with the cobwebs. So long as I never have to get my power, I'll be happy."

We sighed. Had there ever, in the history of the universe, been an Eight who wasn't eager to get her power?

There had not.

But there was one now.

"But if you never get your power," Zinnia said, "you'll never get your gift, because that's the order these things usually happen in. Well, except for Georgia. Sort of. Don't you want your gift?"

"
No!
" Petal shouted so loud, her voice didn't even come out muffled this time. Really, our evil toadstool of a neighbor the Wicket could probably hear her just fine next door.

"This is getting ridiculous," Annie muttered.

"Hmm, desperate times," Rebecca mused. Then she raised her eyebrows and looked at Annie with a hopeful expression. "Desperate measures?"

Annie straightened to a standing position, gestured with her hand at the bed. "Be my guest."

Rebecca grabbed hold of Petal's ankles and pulled her out from beneath the bed in one swift yank.

Unhappy, Petal rose to her feet and brushed the cobwebs from the skirt of her yellow plaid school uniform.

"Fine, I'll go to school," Petal said, "but it's under protest."

"Works for me," Annie said.

Petal gestured at the bed with her chin and glared down at Rebecca from her one-inch advantage in height. You'd think that after nearly eight years of living together, we'd be used to it by now, but it was always a shock to realize that Petal was in fact taller than Rebecca. Mostly, it seemed like Petal should be the smallest of us, even smaller than Zinnia. As for Rebecca, even though she was the seventh in terms of birth order, there was something timeless about her, and sometimes she seemed even older than Annie, older than the world.

"I can do this every day," Petal informed Rebecca.

Rebecca tilted her head up an inch to meet Petal's eyes, then she flexed her yanking fingers. "So can I."

***

So that's how the first of the last two weeks of school passed for us, at least in the mornings.

"I won't go! I won't go! You can't make me!" from Petal.

Then would come "Oh yes, you will!" followed by a yank from Rebecca.

And then we'd go off to school for the day, where the Mr. McG would continue trying to teach us new things, even though a hint of summer was already in the air, making it hard to concentrate, and at recess we'd play in the yard with Will Simms, and even Mandy Stenko.

***

Then Saturday came.

It started the same way Monday through Friday had, with Petal under the bed.

Apparently, Petal had gotten into a rut.

"It's not a rut," her muffled voice informed us. "It's common sense. I can just as easily get my power on a weekend day as on a school day, and I don't want it."

"Oh, bother," Annie said.

"Can't we just leave her like that over the weekend?" Rebecca said, rubbing her wrists. "This whole process every day—it's fun doing the yanking, but I am getting sore."

"' Fraid not," Annie said. "This weekend we need to do spring cleaning, and Durinda can't be expected to do it all by herself."

"Spring cleaning?" Georgia looked appalled at the very notion.

"But spring started on March twentieth and summer begins on June twenty-first, the same day as Aunt Martha and Uncle George's wedding." Marcia looked puzzled. "Spring is almost over."

"Exactly," Georgia said. "See, Annie? You've left it too late, so there's little point in doing all that work now only to have the season end in two weeks, so why don't we just—"

"Get working." Annie cut her off. "Why don't we all just get working?"

"But Petal has to come out and do her share," Zinnia said. "If one of us doesn't do her share, then it's like getting an anti-present for the rest of us."

"You know, though," Jackie said, not using a mean voice at all, as some of us would have if we were the ones to say this, "it's not like Petal does her share even when she actually does anything." She shrugged. "So would it really make any difference if we just left her under there? I mean, she does seem happy..."

"Of course she has to do her share," Annie said, "even if she doesn't really do anything. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. Rebecca?"

Rebecca flexed her sore wrists and with a weary sigh took hold of Petal's ankles.

"C'mon, Petal," she said with a great yank. "Can't spend your whole life under a bed."

***

So that's what we did, spent Saturday cleaning under Annie's direction, because that's what Annie wanted us to do.

We put on our sloppiest clothes, which made Georgia very happy and Rebecca even more so, and each of us slapped a babushka on her head to keep the dust off.

We had thought of those pieces of cloth simply as bandannas or kerchiefs folded in a triangle shape, but Jackie informed us as we worked that the proper word was
babushka
and that it was Russian.

And oh, did we work!

We dusted and polished and swept and scrubbed and cleaned and scoured.

Even our eight cats got into the act. At first, Anthrax, Dandruff, Greatorex, Jaguar, Minx, Precious, Rambunctious, and Zither were reluctant to join in. They didn't like getting their gray-and-white-puffball paws dirty unless it was their own idea to do so. But when Durinda made a tiny little babushka for each of them, they seemed to like the fashion accessory so much that they really got into the spirit of things, tidying up their own cat room and pitching in with the four seasonal rooms.

Given the strict cleaning regimen Annie had us on, we would have liked to go to Summer, Fall, or Winter-really, anything but Spring—but Annie wouldn't have it.