The Girls' Revenge

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OTHER YEARLING BOOKS
BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
YOU WILL ENJOY

THE BOYS START THE WAR

THE GIRLS GET EVEN

BOYS AGAINST GIRLS

A TRAITOR AMONG THE BOYS

A SPY AMONG THE GIRLS

THE BOYS RETURN

THE GIRLS TAKE OVER

BOYS IN CONTROL

GIRLS RULE!

BOYS ROCK!

For Kathleen's grandchildren,
born to West Virginia daddies:
two families of girls: Katie, Elizabeth, and Caroline;
Kalyn;
one family of boys: Adam, Gavin, and Philip;
and one family of both: Juliann and Joseph;
with best wishes for happy reading,
especially to their grandma,
who always gives them books

Contents

One: A changes in the wind

Two: December project

Three: The promise

Four: Phone call

Five: company

Six: Class Report

Seven: Humiliation

Eight: Peter on the Hot seat

Nine: The Explorer's Club

Ten: Truce

Eleven: A Case of Murder

Twelve: Calling 911

Thirteen: Hot, Hot chocolate

Fourteen: Letter to Georgia

Fifteen: Trapped

Sixteen: Another Letter to Georgia

Seventeen: Slave Labor

Eighteen: Mistake #1

Nineteen: Mistake #2

Twenty: The Worst Christmas Ever

Twenty-one: Paying the Debt

Twenty-two: Company

One
A Change in the Wind

C
aroline Malloy had just hung a Christmas wreath on the door when she had a wonderful, awful thought. It was the kind of thought that made her lips curl up at the corners.

Ever since her father had moved the family to Buckman, where he was coaching the college football team for a year, Caroline had been having these thoughts. So had her two sisters, Beth, who was ten, and Eddie, who was eleven, and whose real name was Edith Ann.

Caroline herself was only eight, but she was considered precocious for her age and had skipped a grade, so she was in the same class as Wally Hatford, who lived across the river. And the wonderful, awful thought had something to do with Wally and his brothers.

She dashed back into the house, her dark ponytail flopping behind her, brown eyes snapping, and clattered
upstairs to where Beth, her feet propped on the radiator and her instruction book against her knees, was attempting to knit a lavender scarf for Mother for Christmas.

“I've got a terrific idea!” Caroline said breathlessly. “Want to hear it?”

“Hmmm,” said Beth, studying the page, then the wool in front of her.

Thunk… thunk… thunk,
came a noise from the next bedroom, where Eddie was bouncing a rubber ball on the floor. Caroline decided to tell both sisters together.

“Eddie?” she called. “Want to hear my idea?”

The
thunk, thunk, thunk
grew louder as Eddie ambled in from the next room, bouncing the ball with one hand and holding her Christmas gift list in the other. She was the tallest of the Malloy girls, with long legs, short blond hair, and brown eyes that matched Caroline's. “Well?” she said, waiting, her attention still on the list.

“My idea,” began Caroline, who loved an audience more than she loved chocolate cream pie, “is to give each of the Hatford brothers a Christmas present. From us to them. Beautifully wrapped, of course…”

“Are you nuts?” asked Beth, her feet thudding to the floor in shock.

“But
inside
each box will be something really awful.”

“Like what?” asked Eddie, finally looking up.

Caroline hadn't figured that part out yet. She was thinking about the time, just after the Malloys had
moved to West Virginia, when the Hatford boys had dumped dead birds and stuff on the girls' side of the river to make them think the water was polluted. And the time they had lured Caroline into the cellar at Oldakers' Bookstore, then stood on the trapdoor so she couldn't get out. And all the other times they had tried to make the Malloys so miserable that the girls would persuade their father to move back to Ohio when the year was up.

“I don't know,” Caroline said at last. “A dead squirrel, maybe. A rotten banana. Whatever we can find to gross them out. Can't you just
see
their faces on Christmas morning, untying a bow and finding this
thing
in the box?”

She had expected her sisters to jump at the chance. She had thought Eddie, in particular, would come up with an idea even more gross than she could imagine.

Instead Eddie said, “Oh, I don't know, Caroline. These pranks are getting a little stale, aren't they?”

Caroline stuck her fingers in both ears and pulled them out quickly to unplug them. She couldn't have heard right. This was
Eddie
talking?

“Yeah, it's Christmas, after all!” said Beth. “Where's your Christmas spirit?”

Caroline blinked, then blinked again. This couldn't be happening! Since her family had moved to Buck-man and the Hatford boys had tried to drive them out, she had never had so much fun and excitement. She'd thought that Beth and Eddie felt the same way.

“What's
happened
to you two?” she cried. “I thought we'd been having fun! I thought we were going to drive the Hatfords so bonkers they'd wish
they'd never messed with us! Don't you remember all the fun we had pretending I'd died and you just dumped my body in the river? And the time we climbed on their roof and howled and…”

“Softball season will be coming up in a couple of months, and I've got other things on my mind,” said Eddie. “I
really
want to get on the team. If I get a bunch of guys mad at me, it's not going to help.”

In desperation, Caroline turned to Beth, but Beth said, “I don't see how we can be mean to them after they invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Easy!” Caroline bleated. “Easy, easy, easy! Right this minute they're probably thinking up something awful to do to us!”

“Then we'll deal with it when it happens,” said Beth. “Now go away. I want to work on this scarf, and I'm making all kinds of mistakes.”

Caroline was speechless. She didn't even make it as far as her room. She just sank down at the top of the stairs and blankly stared at the wall.

They were supposed to be a team! Caroline had always dreamed of having a production company when they were grown—Beth would write the script, Eddie would be the stuntwoman, and Caroline, of course, would be the star. Now she didn't know what to expect.

Nine more months before they went back to Ohio,
if
they went back at all. Only nine months to get even again and again with the Hatford boys. And don't think the boys weren't having as much fun as they were.

Well, she told herself, if Beth and Eddie weren't interested in playing one of the best tricks she'd ever thought of on the Hatfords, was there any reason she couldn't do it herself? To
one
of the Hatfords, anyway. Wally sat right in front of her in Miss Applebaum's fourth-grade class. She had to look at his stupid neck and his stupid ears six hours a day for the next six months. Wasn't she entitled to just one little joke to get even for all the stuff he had done to her? And if he hadn't done all that much, Caroline figured he'd
thought
of doing it, which was just as bad, wasn't it?

She would simply put her mind to thinking up the most hideous, horrible thing she could put in a box for Wally Hatford, and she would wrap it up in gorgeous paper and give it to him whenever she got the chance. Of course, she would have to be nice to him between now and Christmas vacation, or he'd suspect it was a joke and throw it out without looking.

And so, when Caroline went to school the next day, she said, “Hi, Wally. I like your sweater.”

Actually, she didn't. It was an ugly sweater. It had reindeer on it with green antlers. She had never seen a green-antlered reindeer, and what's more, the sweater was too big for Wally. It looked as though it had once belonged to Josh or Jake, the eleven-year-old twins.

Wally looked surprised.

“Thanks,” he said. “It used to be Jake's.”

So far so good, thought Caroline. Every day she would pay at least one compliment to Wally Hatford so that, by the time Christmas vacation got here, he'd just have to accept her present. It would seem rude
not to. And maybe, when Beth and Eddie saw how much fun they were missing, they'd go back to making life miserable for Jake and Josh as well.

The only Hatford Caroline really liked was seven-year-old Peter. He couldn't help that he was a Hatford. And he
was
sort of sweet.

After school that afternoon, when Beth and Eddie went to the library to do their homework, Caroline walked around the yard there on Island Avenue, where the Malloys were renting a house from the Benson family for a year. The Bensons had gone to Georgia temporarily, where Mr. Benson was coaching a football team and teaching college. Sort of an exchange program. It was because the Hatford boys had been best friends with the Benson boys that Wally and Jake and Josh and even Peter resented the girls' moving in.

Caroline was walking around the yard looking for ideas for a gross-out present for Wally. A stray cat that belonged more or less to the neighborhood was sitting on the driveway licking its paws. It had probably just eaten something yucky, Caroline thought. A mouse or something. A mouse with whiskers, its tail sticking out one side of the cat's mouth.

“How are you, Patches?” Caroline asked, bending down to pet the animal behind the ears. “Give me an idea for a present for Wally. Something really, really sick.”

Patches only purred and licked her paws again. She had probably been mousing in the old garage. Caroline walked through the garage looking for grossness. Spiders? Worms? Garbage? Maggots? Garbage
and
maggots?

Whatever, it had to be so disgusting that Wally and his brothers would trip all over themselves trying to get even. All it would take was one really awful trick against the Malloy sisters, and the feud would be on again. She could count on it, Christmas or not.

Two
December Project