Quinny & Hopper (13 page)

Thirty-eight

The ride home is much quieter without Freya’s clucking. Much darker, too. The sun is going down fast.

I look over at Quinny sitting next to me in the backseat of Grandpa Gooley’s car. Her face is turned away, and her dimples are hiding. She looks tired.

“Quinny? Are you asleep?”

“No more Freya,” she says in a voice that’s smaller and softer than her regular voice.

“Freya’s happy now,” I tell her. “She’s safe.”

“I’m going to miss her,” sighs Quinny.

“Oh, snap out of it,” says Mrs. Porridge.
“T
hat chicken didn’t even like you.”

“
We
all had a wonderful time today,” says Grandpa Gooley. “I bet Mr. McSoren will invite us back to visit soon.”

Grandpa Gooley’s right. So why does Quinny seem so sad? She turns to me with a worried look and asks, “Is there a backpack store around here somewhere?”

“A
what?”

“Cleo scribbled on my backpack. Victoria said it’s ruined and I have to get a new one.”

“A
re you referring to my grand-niece Victoria?” asks Mrs. Porridge.

“Grandpa Gooley, please can we stop?” Quinny begs. “Is there a store that sells backpacks on the way home?”

Grandpa Gooley gives us a confused look in the rearview mirror. I look back at him and tell him with my eyes: I’ll handle this.

“Quinny, it’s kind of late,” I say.

“Please, you don’t understand,” she cries. “I can’t show up at school tomorrow with that ugly, ruined backpack! Victoria’s going to be so mean.”

“I’ll have a little talk with that young lady,” snaps Mrs. Porridge.

“No, don’t! She’s already mad I lost her itchy-pink friendship bracelet—”

“Quinny, you don’t need a new backpack,” I tell her. “Who cares what Victoria thinks?”

“Everyone! All the friends belong to her. She won’t let me have any unless I do what she says.”

“Not all the friends belong to her,” I remind her. “I don’t.”

Quinny’s face calms down a little. “I guess you’re right.”

She tries to smile at me, but beneath the smile she still looks worried. And tired. “I wish we didn’t have school tomorrow,” she murmurs as her eyes close.

Pretty soon Quinny starts snoring. Her head droops onto my shoulder and stays there, all big and heavy and noisy. But her hair smells like peaches. It feels soft against my cheek.

Then her arm flops over onto my side of the seat. The back of her hand brushes against my wrist. Just her knuckles. Just a little.

This is how we ride the rest of the way home.

I look down at those two hands, hers and mine. It’s not like I’m holding a girl’s hand or anything. It’s just Quinny, and we’re barely touching. And she’s asleep, so she won’t even remember it.

But it makes me remember how it felt to hold Mom’s hand when I was little. It felt good. It felt safe. It felt like I was not alone.

I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in school tomorrow.

But I know one thing for sure. I can’t let Quinny down again.

Thirty-nine

“Quinny, wake up. Let’s get moving.”

But I like it here under the covers, all safe and warm and cozy.

“Quinny, you’re going to miss that school bus.”

I hope so.

“Quinny, chop-chop! I mean it. I don’t have time to drive you. Get up!”

Mom’s voice is an annoying buzzy-bug in my ear, so I finally sit up. But I slept so long that it’s REALLY LATE o’clock now, so I have to rush-brush my teeth and get dressed in a flash and speed-chew my French toast and dodge Piper’s sneaky-spitty fingers and pull on my sneakers and stuff my lunch box into my ugly, ruined backpack. Except I can’t even find that backpack.

I look all around the kitchen. “Mom, where’s my ugly, ruined backpack?”

Mom’s in the middle of feeding Cleo her breakfast mush. “Did you look everywhere?”

I did. I looked everywhere. I look everywhere some more. Just when I’m about to give up and blame Piper for hiding my backpack, I finally spot it.

It’s sitting right by our front door, where I didn’t even leave it yesterday.

That’s weird. What’s my backpack doing over there? I walk over to grab it, and then I notice something shocking.

Something very, very, extra-very shocking.

My backpack is not just a backpack anymore. It is now a masterpiece. Cleo’s scribbles have turned into people and trees and houses. There’s my family and our barn-house, there’s Hopper and our soccer-net hammock, there’s Mrs. Porridge in her garden with
Wa
lter, plus there’s Freya wearing a leash! And guess who is holding that leash!

My backpack looks like my neighborhood now. It looks like my life. My real life.

I pick it up and burst out the front door and run over to the bus stop and throw my arms around Hopper. “Oh, Hopper, thank you, thank you! It’s beautiful!”

“I can’t breathe,” Hopper mumbles from inside my excited, grateful hug.

“Sorry.” I let go of him and watch him breathe.
“T
hanks for saving my backpack.”

“No big deal,” he says. “I just finished what Cleo started.”

But it
is
a big deal. Looking at this fabulous backpack makes me feel good again. It makes me feel strong and special. I smile at Hopper. He almost smiles back at me.

Then the bus comes and we get on it.

During the ride to school, I wonder what’s going to happen with Victoria today.

But I don’t have to wonder for long. As soon as I get off that bus, she comes up to me.

“Look what I found on the playground,” Victoria says, holding up my broken friendship bracelet. I wait for her to apologize, because now she knows I didn’t take it off on purpose. But instead she says,
“Yo
u know, Quinny, you shouldn’t be so careless with the presents people give you.”

For some strange reason, Victoria’s nasty words don’t bother me anymore. I turn away from her and walk over to the playground fence.

As I walk, I think about all of her third-grade rules.

I decide I’m going to play tag at recess.

And then I’m going to sit with Hopper at lunch.

I decide I’m going to take a bath with Piper tonight, because I still love baths. Then I’ll read us a picture book (at least until she tries to lick me). And then I’ll paint my nails green. All twenty of them.

I decide that Victoria Porridge is not my BFF. She might not even be my F. I’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

On the other side of the playground fence, I find my watermelon barrette on the ground, right where Victoria threw it yesterday. I wipe the dirt off that fabulous thing and snap it back into my hair, where it belongs. Finally my head feels like its normal self again.

“Whatever,” Victoria says.
“T
hat barrette is not even pink.”

“T
hat’s what I told you before.” I say it nicely. I won’t be mean to her just because she was mean to me. (But maybe I can make her feel guilty for being mean in the first place.)

Then Victoria finally notices my backpack. She doesn’t say it’s ruined anymore. She doesn’t say it’s ugly.

Some other girls come over and look at it. Some boys, too.

One of the girls says, “
Wo
w.”

One of the boys says, “Cool.”

I take a deep, happy breath and glance at the kid standing next to me. The one with the careful, quiet mouth and those big, looking-looking eyes.

I tell everybody, “My friend Hopper is an artist.”

Forty

Summer’s over.

The second day of school is over, and everything has changed.

We
ll, almost everything.

Forty-one

But wait, there’s more!

A few weeks later, Hopper and I get home from school one day, and there’s a letter in the mail from Mr. McSoren, and it’s addressed to BOTH of us, and we tear it open, and it says:

Just then, Mrs. Porridge shows up, and she’s carrying a big box and inside the box are:

Two chirping chickens!

Little, fluffy, beaky mini-chickens…both with stylish black and white zebra stripes!

“It seems that birdbrained bag of feathers has been busy,” says Mrs. Porridge.

“Yo
u mean these little guys are really Freya’s chicken-kids?” I ask. “And they’re really for us?”

“No, they’re for the president of the United States,” says Mrs. Porridge.

I stare at those sweet little zebra-chickens—they’re too beautiful to fit into words.

“But aren’t they going to miss their mother?” asks Hopper.

“T
hey’re not babies anymore,” I remind him.
“A
nd they have each other.”

“Where are we going to keep them?” he asks. “How will we take care of them?”

Hopper and I look at each other. Then we look at Mrs. Porridge.

“Oh no,” huffs Mrs. Porridge.
“A
bsolutely not! I have no idea how to build a chicken coop, and I certainly don’t have the time. Who needs the pain in the neck of raising smelly, squawky chickens anyway? If you ask me, they’re more trouble than they’re worth.…”

But Mrs. Porridge is smiling.