Authors: Sienna Mercer
“
Humans
eat that?” Olivia blurted.
“All the time,” her dad replied, sitting down across from her with his own plate. He cut a huge piece and popped it in his mouth. He shut his eyes blissfully, savoring the taste. “Mmmmm.” He gestured toward Olivia’s plate encouragingly, but she couldn’t move. She was too busy concentrating on not breathing through her nose.
“Go on.” He nodded.
Olivia’s fork and knife shook in her hands. She forced herself to cut a piece the size of her pinky fingernail. She adjusted her glass of water so the moment she took a bite she could chug.
“Don’t let it get cold,” her father directed.
Olivia felt like the whole Franklin Grove cheerleading squad was doing handsprings in her stomach.
You have no choice,
she told herself.
You have to eat it!
She shut her eyes as tight as she could and raised the trembling fork to her mouth.
Ivy tilted the living room lamp so that it shone on Casey and Stacey like a spotlight. Olivia’s mom and the girls’ own mother, who’d arrived to pick them up, watched from the couch. Instead of teaching the girls a dance or a cheer, Ivy had helped them write a little play, and now was their big performance.
“And so Princess Casey and Ballerina Stacey were trapped by the evil wizard,” Ivy narrated. She swung the lamp toward Olivia’s father, who was sitting in the corner in an easy chair, rubbing his hands together. “The infamous AccountantO!” she announced. Mr. Abbott laughed menacingly.
“Eeeeeeeeeeekkkkk!” shrieked the girls. “Isn’t Steve frightening?” Audrey whispered happily to her friend, who nodded. “They waited for their princes to rescue them,” Ivy continued.
“My prince will rescue us,” said Casey, ruffling her yellow tutu nervously with her fingers. “He has twenty-three racing cars, plus he’s a veterinarian.”
Stacey stepped forward. “My prince will save us,” she enunciated, “because he’s really rich and he has a mustache.”
The moms giggled.
“They waited and waited,” said Ivy. “Accountant-O’s dungeon was really gross.” She reached into a plastic bag full of props. “There were worms.” She reached out a hand and showered the girls with cut-up pieces of string.
“Eeeewwwwww!” they screeched.
“And there was a monster chained to the wall in the corner,” Ivy added. She gave a huge roar, and the girls ran around screaming. Ivy reached into her prop bag and pulled out a spray bottle. She sprayed the girls with mist. “It sneezed on them.”
“Yuck!” the girls yelled, shielding their eyes.
“But still their princes did not come,” Ivy intoned. Casey and Stacey pouted dramatically. From the shadows, Mr. Abbott laughed evilly again.
“Princess Casey and Ballerina Stacey grew impatient,” Ivy said.
Stacey reached into an imaginary pocket in her pink tutu and pulled out an imaginary cell phone. “Where are you?” she said. “You were supposed to be here hours ago!” She listened like a real actress, and then hung up. “I don’t know what his problem is,” she huffed.
Casey crossed her arms. “Boys!” she exclaimed. “They’re so unreliable.”
“Finally,” narrated Ivy, “Princess Casey and Ballerina Stacey decided not to wait around any longer.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Casey said to Stacey.
“They snuck up on the evil wizard AccountantO,” Ivy went on, following the girls with the lamp as they tiptoed up to Mr. Abbott, who was punching things into an imaginary calculator and muttering numbers triumphantly.
Casey tapped him on the shoulder.
“What the—?” Mr. Abbott spun around in mock surprise and leaped to his feet.
Stacey balanced on one foot and raised her hands over her head, howling like a kung fu master about to execute a killer move.
Mr. Abbott’s eyes widened. While he was distracted, Casey ran up and stamped on his foot.
“Ouch!” he cried. Ivy winced. They hadn’t rehearsed that part.
Stacey karate chopped him in the back.
“Ooh!” Mr. Abbott said.
“You meanie!” Casey said and kicked him in the shin.
Doubled over, Mr. Abbott craned his neck and shot Ivy a desperate look. “Happily ever after!” he whispered. “Happily ever—”
Both girls leaped on his back, and the three of them collapsed to the living room carpet with a crash.
“Uh, then Princess Casey and Ballerina Stacey ran away,” Ivy said quickly.
The girls sprang off Mr. Abbott and dashed out of the room.
“And they lived happily ever after as best friends forever!” Ivy concluded.
The moms leaped up from the couch, cheering wildly. Casey and Stacey skipped back into the living room and curtsied daintily to their audience.
“Bravo! Bravo!” Audrey called. “You take a bow, too, Steve!”
“I can’t,” Steve groaned from the floor. “My back,” he said apologetically.
Ivy helped him to his feet and settled him into the easy chair. Then the girls came over, took her hands, and dragged her back in front of the couch. Ivy bowed with a flourish, her ponytail whipping forward.
I’m getting almost as good at being Olivia as Olivia!
Ivy thought proudly.
I wonder how she’s doing being me right now.
I will never switch with Ivy during mealtime again,
Olivia thought. Her fork was still poised before her lips, with the same tiny chunk of black pudding on it. She kept trying to psyche herself up into putting the stuff into her mouth.
Mr. Vega’s going to get suspicious,
she thought desperately.
I’ll have to do it now.
Suddenly the phone rang in the next room.
“I’ll get it,” her father said, dropping his napkin and rising from the table. She waited for him to leave the room before leaping from her chair. Then she rushed to the garbage can and scraped her two black pudding hockey pucks into it with her fork, burying them under some crumpled paper towels. She’d just gotten back to her chair when Mr. Vega reentered the room.
“Who was it?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“A telemarketer.” Her father grimaced as he took his seat. “He refused to take no for an answer. I kept telling him we do not use coffin wax.” He noticed Olivia’s bare plate. “You’ve already finished?”
“It was delicious.” Olivia gulped.
“I knew you’d like it,” her father said. “I’ll get you another helping.”
“No!” Olivia blurted. “I mean, no, thank you.” She patted her belly like she was full. “But thank you for going to all the trouble of making it for me.” She smiled and her father smiled back.
Early Saturday morning, Ivy quietly slid open the basement window at the back of her house, climbed inside, and crept down the stairs to her room.
Olivia was curled up on top of her bed, wearing Ivy’s pajamas with the gravestones on them and hugging a black cat pillow.
Only four days until Dad and I move,
Ivy thought sadly as she looked down on her sleeping sister.
And then who knows when I’ll see Olivia again?
She decided to let her sister sleep for a few more minutes. She slipped into the chair in front of her desk and powered up the new laptop computer her dad had gotten her for boarding school. Ivy waited anxiously for her new e-mails to appear on the screen. Her heart sank when they finally did; there was still no response from the art museum. She let out a colossal sigh.
“Still nothing?” her sister’s voice came from behind her.
Ivy wheeled her chair around to find Olivia sitting up in bed. “We’re running out of time,” Ivy told her.
Olivia nodded sadly and tightened her clutch on the black cat pillow.
“I know my father wouldn’t turn down this job,” Ivy said, “but we can’t afford to sit around anymore waiting for them to offer it to him.”
“Maybe we should take Sophia’s advice,” said Olivia, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, “except instead of chaining ourselves to your dad’s car, we should chain ourselves to the front doors of the museum.”
That gave Ivy an idea. She spun her chair back around and went to the museum’s Web site. “They open at 10 A.M. on Saturdays,” she told her sister.
“I wasn’t being serious,” Olivia told her.
“But I am,” Ivy said. “We have to go down there and get them to offer Dad the job. Today.”
“In that case”—Olivia stretched her arms— “we’d better call for backup.”
That afternoon, huddled in their own warm clothes on the sidewalk in front of the sleek, slanted marble facade of the Franklin Grove Art Museum, Ivy and her sister waited for Brendan to arrive. Ivy had called Sophia and Camilla to see if they could come, too, but they each had plans. Ivy made a mental note to find time to get the whole group together in the next couple of days—it might be her last chance. She felt like a vampire in one of those old movies: there were only a few precious minutes until sunrise, and after that she’d turn to dust.
Brendan appeared down the block, wearing his heavy black parka, and just the sight of him made Ivy feel a little better. She waved and he picked up his pace. He came up and wrapped his arms around her, dipped her like they were ballroom dancing, and kissed her on the neck.
“Save it for the graveyard,” Olivia deadpanned beside them, and they both laughed. Then the three of them made their way across the slate courtyard and into the museum.
Ivy hadn’t been there since her sixth-grade field trip, and she’d forgotten what an amazing place it was. The interior of the building was like the inside of a huge cone. An enormous ramp dotted with sculptures spiraled its way up the wall. Ivy stood with Brendan and Olivia in the center of the gray marble floor on the ground level, and they could see people admiring art, snaking all the way up to the skylight and observation deck in the center of the ceiling far above, like the hole in the top of a parking pylon.
Olivia went over to look at a glowing map of the building. “The curator’s office is on level four,” she said, and they started to make their way up the ramp.
Ivy couldn’t help slowing down to look at some of the art. There was a life-size sculpture of a skydiver made entirely of wire and a tree that looked utterly real, except it had tiny peepholes carved in its trunk. When Ivy looked through one, she saw a completely realistic 3-D highway running vertically, like a vein in the tree, with dozens of cars racing upward. Olivia was next to her, looking in another hole. “Cool,” Olivia said. “It’s an art class drawing a model.” Every peephole showed something different.
On level two, they passed an enormous papier-mâché zebralike creature with rainbow stripes, huge bloodshot eyes, and the legs of a centipede.