Fabulous Five 015 - Melanie's Identity Crisis

THE
FABULOUS FIVE #15

MELANIE'S IDENTITY
CRISIS

BETSY HAYNES

A BANTAM SKYLARK
BOOK®

NEW YORK • TORONTO •
LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

RL 5, IL age 9-12

MELANIE'S IDENTITY
CRISIS

A Bantam Skylark
Book / February 1990

Skylark Books is a
registered trademark of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc. Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and
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All rights
reserved.

Copyright
©
1990 by Betsy Haynes and James Haynes.

Cover art
copyright
© 1990 by Ralph Amatrudi.

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ISBN 0-553-15775-2

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CWO      0 9 8 7 6 5
4 3 2 1

"Eeek! I'm having an identity crisis!" squealed
Melanie Edwards. She held her ballpoint pen by two fingers and let it drop like
a bomb onto the open notebook in her lap as she looked helplessly at her
friends. "I can't answer all these questions about myself."

"Maybe I can help you," Katie Shannon said with a
grin. "Name: Melanie Edwards. Favorite sport: flirting with boys. Favorite
indoor activity: thinking about boys. Favorite outdoor activity: looking at
boys. Favorite subject: studying boys."

"Shhh!"
Melanie said quickly, looking
around the crowded gymnasium where most of the Wakeman Junior High students
were spending a rainy lunch period after leaving the cafeteria. "Someone
might hear you and think I'm boy crazy."

"Don't worry. Everybody already knows," said Beth
Barry with a laugh, and then she ducked as Melanie pretended to throw a book at
her.

"I agree with Melanie about the questionnaire,"
admitted Jana Morgan. "It's hard. I don't know my library card number, and
I'm not sure about some of the other things either, especially the questions
about my favorites."

"But remember what Mrs. Blankenship said in Family
Living class," Christie Winchell reminded them. "Answering these
questions will help us know ourselves a little better before we begin looking
for our ancestors in the genealogy project." Then she added, "I think
it's going to be fun. I've always wondered if there were any skeletons in the
old family closet."

Beth's eyes gleamed. "Yeah. Murderers. Pirates. Bank
robbers."

Melanie nodded to Christie. "Mrs. Clark said the same
thing in our class. She also said that if we traced our families only as far
back as 1625, we'd find over
sixteen thousand
people directly related to
us, and that's only parents and grandparents. It doesn't count brothers and
sisters or aunts and uncles."

"Wow. I wonder how many great-great-greats that is?"
asked Beth.

"I don't know," said Melanie. "But I thought
it was neat when she said that we're all unique because each one of our
ancestors contributed a little bit of themselves in the genes they passed on to
us, and that's why we're all so different from each other."

"Different, but still best friends," Jana said
emphatically. "No matter what, we'll always be The Fabulous Five."

Everybody agreed with that, then went back to working on the
questionnaires. Melanie tried to concentrate on the next two questions
—Favorite
food? Food you dislike most
?
—but instead she glanced at the groups
of kids milling around in the gym while thunder crashed outside and rain
streamed down the windows. Some sat in the bleachers just as she and her
friends were doing. Others stood beside the big double doors leading into the
hall or near the rest rooms. Mostly the girls were talking quietly, and lots of
the boys were horsing around, but just as the Family Living teachers had said,
no two were alike. Unless you counted the Dalworth twins, of course, thought
Melanie. Mike and Mitch were so much alike that even their teachers couldn't
tell them apart, but they were identical twins and shared the same genes.

When the bell rang, Melanie headed for her afternoon
classes, promising the others that she would meet them after school to go to
Bumpers, the fast-food restaurant where the junior high kids hung out. As she
walked through the halls, she thought about what Jana had said about The
Fabulous Five. They certainly were all different. Jana was the unofficial
leader, the one who could hold everything together in a crisis. Christie was
the studious one and the math brain. Katie was the feminist and the person who
worried most about things being fair. Beth was the actress who did everything
with dramatic flair. And of course, everybody always says that I'm boy crazy,
Melanie thought, when the truth is that I'm just
interested
in boys.

Thinking of boys reminded her that if she speeded up a
little and turned the next corner at the right instant, she might just meet
Garrett Boldt heading in her direction. She usually only managed to get her
timing right once or twice a week, but Garrett was so totally handsome and
terrific that she almost slid around the corner in anticipation of seeing him.

"Hi, Garrett," she yelled when his head appeared
above the crowd. He was in the eighth grade and one of the tallest boys in
Wakeman, which made him easy to spot. She bounced on her tiptoes and tried to
get his attention with a wave. "Gar
-rett!
" she called
insistently. "Hey, Flash," she added, using the nickname he had
earned as sports photographer for the school yearbook,
The Wigwam.

But Garrett moved on past her, looking straight ahead. The
crowd was moving too fast in each direction for her to have time to call out
again. He hadn't heard her, and yet she felt sure she had yelled loud enough.
Could he have been ignoring me? she wondered.

When she got to her seat in biology class, the first thing
she did was look for Shane Arrington. Shane was one of her major crushes along
with Scott Daly, her old boyfriend from Mark Twain Elementary. Shane liked her,
too. Well enough, anyway, to ask her out now and then and kiss her good-night when
he brought her home. And he was
soooo
handsome, a dead ringer for River
Phoenix.

"Hmmm," she murmured to herself as she watched him
walk in the door. "I wonder what my Family Living teacher would say about
that. They can't possibly have the same genes."

She had planned to wait for Shane to walk by her desk so
that she could ambush him with a flirty smile. Then she would start a
conversation by asking him if he had found a girlfriend yet for Igor, his pet
iguana, whom he claimed had been so lovesick that he hadn't eaten for days. But
Shane stopped to talk to Shawnie Pendergast, and an instant later Mr.
Dracovitch called the class to order.

Rats! One perfectly good ambush down the drain, she thought
as she watched Shane slide into his seat without looking in her direction.

Melanie slumped in her seat and halfheartedly listened to
the biology teacher begin the lesson. Nothing was going her way today. Garrett
had passed her in the hall without noticing her. Shane had talked to Shawnie
instead of her, and this morning before school, Scott Daly had streaked by her
on his bicycle without even saying hello.

She sagged a little lower in her desk as she thought about
the three boys. Scott is my very best boyfriend. But Shane is too cute for
words, and he's so kooky. Who else would have an iguana for a pet? And Garrett
Boldt is dreamy. So what if he's an eighth-grader and popular? He likes me a
little bit. At least I thought he did. What's the matter with all three of
them, anyway? They're acting as if I don't exist!

Melanie sighed so loudly that three students turned around
to look at her. Fortunately, Mr. Dracovitch had his back to the class writing
on the board, and he didn't notice.

Mrs. Clark was so revved up over the genealogy project that
Melanie thought she was acting almost hyper when she called the Family Living
class to order the last period of the day.

"Boys and girls, I'm so excited about the things we're
going to do over the next few weeks that I can hardly wait to get started."
She raked her fingers through her short, salt-and-pepper hair as she paced up
and down at the front of the room. "Maybe some of you will find out that
you're related to someone famous or that your ancestors came over on the
Mayflower.
Wouldn't that be fun?"

Some kids nodded and a few even cheered.

"But before we begin our detective work," she went
on, holding up a sample of the questionnaire she had given to each student, "we
still have some work to do. Now, who can tell me what they learned about
themselves from filling out one of these?"

"That I don't like to fill out questionnaires,"
blurted out Joel Murphy.

Mrs. Clark gave him a tolerant nod. "And?" she
said, trying to coax something more out of Joel.

Joel shrugged, and Mrs. Clark looked around the class for
another volunteer.

Melanie ducked her head behind Tony Calcaterra's to avoid
being called on. She had only answered half of the questions. I already know
everything there is to know about myself, she thought grumpily. It was boys she
wanted to know more about. Maybe Mrs. Clark ought to collect everybody's
questionnaire and then put all the ones the boys turned in into a book that she
could run off on the copy machine and give to any girl who wanted it. What a
great idea! she thought. The list of things she would like to know about
certain boys was practically endless.

There were other people she wanted to know about, too. What
made Laura McCall so snooty? Or why did Katie Shannon have such opposite
opinions from hers about boys? And what made Christie Winchell and Whitney
Larkin extra smart? But still, she thought, it was boys she was the most
interested in finding out about.

Across the room, Kim Baxter was waving her hand in the air,
and Melanie turned her attention back to what was going on in class.

"Yes, Kim. What did you find out about yourself?"
asked Mrs. Clark.

"Well, this isn't on the questionnaire, but my mom
reminded me that I'm the only one in our family who has red hair."

Clarence Marshall snickered loudly, and Mrs. Clark gave him
a warning frown before saying, "Isn't that interesting, Kim? I'll bet when
you begin searching, you'll find that one of your ancestors had the same color
hair as you."

"My older brother throws up every time he eats fish,"
offered a boy at the back of the room whom Melanie knew only as Tom something-or-other.

This time the whole class broke out laughing.

"Now, class!" said Mrs. Clark sternly. "I
hope that you have all used these questionnaires about yourselves to see that
we all have specific traits that make us different from each other and that
those traits can sometimes be traced to our ancestors. Now it is time for us to
become detectives and begin digging up our ancestors. We're going to start
looking for clues to why we are certain ways and who was responsible for our
being that way. In order to do that, I am going to give each one of you
genealogy charts to trace your own family tree."

The laughter turned to groans as she passed stacks of papers
down each row.

"More paperwork," muttered Curtis.

Mrs. Clark nodded. "That's right. But you'll see. It's
going to be fun."

Melanie perked up as she looked at the chart in her hand. It
really was a family tree just as Mrs. Clark had said. The main trunk coming up
from the ground contained space for her own name, date of birth, and place of
birth. Two branches grew out of the trunk. In one of them it said
Mother's
name
, and that was followed by spaces for her date and place of birth, whom
she married, and for use in the future, when she died and where she was buried.
The same information was asked for on her father's branch. On each parent's
branch were two branches for their parents, and so on until the top of the tree
contained dozens of small branches for more distant relatives.

"Cool," murmured Tony Calcaterra from the seat in
front of her.

Melanie had to agree. It was going to be fun to fill in all
those blanks.

"For tomorrow's assignment, I want you to talk to your
parents and fill in as much information as you can on your family tree. Once
you've listed everything your mother and father can tell you, I'll teach you
the next place that family detectives always go to find clues."

Melanie glanced at her family tree again. I wonder what I'll
find out when I start digging into our family's history? she mused. Maybe I'm
related to a famous person, just as Mrs. Clark suggested someone might be. Or
maybe I'll trace our ancestors back to royalty.

"Princess Melanie," she whispered, and giggled
softly. Whatever it turned out to be, it was going to be fun.