Clementine Read online

  It is unfair that sometimes even spectacularful ideas don’t work out. It is also unfair that bus drivers are allowed to send you to the principal’s office.

  “It’s not my fault,” I explained to Principal Rice before she could say any of those Clementine-why-did-you’s. “Margaret has very slippery head skin.”

  Mrs. Rice fell into her chair, hard. She clapped her hands over her ears and squeezed like her brains were trying to jump out. Part of me wanted to see something like that, but most of me said, Not today, thanks!

  “Margaret’s slippery head skin is not the problem,” she said. “The problem is that you tried to glue your own hair onto Margaret’s head. You’ve been having lots of problems this week. First you cut off Margaret’s hair. Then you colored her head. Yesterday you cut off your own hair and colored your own head. And today this. Clementine, what’s going on between you and Margaret?”

  “How do you spell nitrogen?” I asked Mrs. Rice. Sometimes grown-ups get distracted if you ask them school things.

  But Mrs. Rice just spelled nitrogen for me and went right back to the Margaret thing. “Are you angry with her?”

  “NO!” I said. Okay, fine, I yelled it. But I didn’t know I was going to yell it. And I couldn’t stop my yelling voice. “HERE IS HOW GOOD OF A FRIEND I AM TO MARGARET: I’M NOT EVEN MAD AT HER FOR LAST WEEK AT MY PARTY, EVEN THOUGH SHE BREATHED ON THE M&M ROCKS IN THE BACK OF THE DUMP TRUCK, WHICH WAS THE BEST PART OF MY CAKE, AND THEN SHE SAT ON MY SPARKLE-GLITTER PAINT SET, WHICH WAS MY BEST PRESENT, AND SAID IT WAS AN ACCIDENT BUT I DON’T THINK SO, AND NOW SHE’S TRYING TO LOOK LIKE ME EXCEPT SHE GETS TO HAVE BRACELETS AND I DON’T.”

  “Oh,” said Principal Rice. And then she didn’t say anything at all, just looked at me, which is the worst thing of all that can happen to you in the principal’s office. I sat there swinging my legs back and forth like crazy for three hundred hours and then I said, “Can I be done here now?”

  And she said, “Okay, fine.”

  Margaret’s mother let her come over to play after school.

  “Does this mean she’s all done being mad at me?” I asked.

  “No. She just doesn’t think there’s anything left for you to do to my head. Besides, she says I’m nine years old and I should be able to protect my own head.”

  Then I told her some good news I had just thought up.

  “I am nine years old now, too.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re eight,” she said. “I came to your birthday last week.”

  Which I remembered.

  “No,” I explained. “I was eight at my party. Nine comes after eight, and it is after my party, so now I am nine. And that means we’re the same age!”

  “That’s ridiculous!” yelled Margaret. “I’m almost ten and you’re eight! You are not nine!” She tried to flip her hair, which didn’t work so well without actual hair, and her head got even redder under the scrubbed-off marker.

  “Yes, I am,” I told her. “I’m in the gifted class for math, so I understand about numbers.”

  Then Margaret left and slammed my door. That Margaret—after all I’ve done for her, helping her fix her stupid hair!

  I followed her into the lobby and yelled, “You shouldn’t have breathed on my cake and sat on my present and I don’t want you to look like me!”

  But she didn’t even turn around, so now I had nobody to play with for the rest of my life. But I didn’t care because I was nine.

  Or maybe I was just after-eight, okay, fine.

  Being after-eight reminded me that I hadn’t checked yet that day to see if I’d started growing a beard, so I ran to the bathroom. While I was there I accidentally climbed onto the toilet seat to look out the window into the side alley to see if Margaret went out there. I didn’t see her, but I didn’t care. Especially when I looked in the mirror and saw that I had started growing a nice brown beard on one cheek!

  “Hey, Bill!” I yelled. Bill is my dad’s for-other-people name. “Where’s your razor?”

  Dad came skidding into the bathroom so fast I thought his feet might be on fire, but they weren’t. I showed him my beard.

  Dad squinted and sniffed my cheek. “That’s not a beard, Clementine,” he sighed. “That’s chocolate frosting. As a matter of fact, that smells exactly like the kind of chocolate frosting that your mother put on the cake she made for her book club, which nobody was supposed to touch. Now isn’t that a coincidence?”

  Okay, fine.

  I wiped off the frosting and underneath was a very mad face.

  “Clementine,” my dad said, “you know girls don’t grow beards.”

  “What about The Amazing Bearded Lady at the circus? What about that, huh?”

  “Clementine, I’ve told you a hundred times: you can’t grow a beard.”

  “So Rutabaga gets to have one like yours some day? Down to his knees if he wants? And I don’t? That’s not fair.” Which I have told him a hundred times.

  “First of all, your brother’s name isn’t Rutabaga,” Dad said. “Second of all…well, never mind. Maybe today isn’t the time to talk about what’s fair.”

  My dad and I looked at my mad mirror face with the green-markered top for a long time.

  “I sure am having a lot of trouble with hair these days,” I whispered.

  “I know, Sport,” Dad said. Then he hugged me. Usually this squeezes the mad right out of me. But that time it just mixed it all up with feeling sad and lucky, which was extremely confusing.

  “Hey,” my dad said. “Have you got a little time to spare?”

  I squint-eyed him: it depended.

  “The Great Pigeon War,” he said. “It’s time for evening maneuvers. I could use someone like you on the front lines tonight. Someone with fresh ideas. I’m running a little low on them myself.”

  I said okay, and my dad and I put on our raincoats and went outside.

  First he got out the hose, which he calls the heavy artillery. Then he sprayed off the front steps and the sidewalk in front of the lobby doors. Last, he pointed the hose at the pigeons covering the ledges and windowsills and balconies and roofs of the front of our building. He sprayed them until they all flew away. That’s the best part, because when a million pigeons take off at the same time right above you, you can feel their wing beats exploding inside you, like fireworks.

  My dad handed me the hose. “Want to clean the lion?”

  Which, of course, I did. The carved lion above the front door has really pointy teeth, but I’m not afraid of him because he’s using those teeth to protect us. Plus, he’s just stone. I sprayed him with the hose until he was all shiny in the streetlights.

  “You know, Dad,” I pointed out, “it’s not really the pigeons you’re at war with. The pigeons aren’t the enemy.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “It’s my job to keep the building looking nice, especially the entrance. You’ve seen what those pigeons do.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The pigeons are fine. It’s their mess you hate.”

  “Well, okay, that’s true,” my dad said. “I’m actually at war with pigeon splat. You got any ideas how to get rid of the pigeon splat without getting rid of the pigeons?”

  “How about diapers?” I suggested. “We could wait until all the pigeons are asleep, then sneak up and put little diapers on them!”

  “Brilliant!” my dad cried. “See? That’s what I’m talking about. I can always count on you to see things from a new angle. I’m going to make you a captain!”

  “You made me a captain last week. For the idea about charging them rent,” I reminded him.

  “You can be a sergeant then,” he promised.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Who would change all those diapers every day? Not me.”

  “Hmmmm,” Dad said, “excellent point. Back to the drawing board, Sport.”

  Then we just sat there together watching the pigeons flock back to our building for the night. We listened to them cooing above us, sounding like a millio
n old ladies with secrets.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked. “I mean for real?”

  I knew Friday was going to be a bad day right from the beginning, because there were clear parts in my eggs.

  “I can’t eat eggs if they have clear parts,” I reminded my mother.

  “Eat around them,” she said. “Just eat the yellow parts and the white parts.”

  But I couldn’t because the clear parts had touched the yellow parts and the white parts. So all I had was toast.

  “Have you got all your stuff?” my dad asked as I was leaving.

  “Of course,” I said. “Right in my backpack.” But when I went to show him my homework—three sentences about the planet Saturn, which I had decorated with a picture of some squirrels I’d seen in the park—it wasn’t there!

  “Better go check The Black Hole,” he said.

  I gave my dad a “that’s-not-funny” look, but I went back into my room to check. The Black Hole is what my dad calls the place under my bed. He says things mysteriously disappear there. I do not think fathers should be comedians.

  My homework paper was not under my bed.

  And the rest of the day got worse.

  On the bus, Margaret walked right past our usual seat and sat down next to Amanda-Lee, even though all Amanda-Lee can talk about is going to the mall, which is boring. Plus, anyone with a name as beautiful as Amanda-Lee probably made it up.

  Then, as soon as I got to school, the teacher said, “The following students are excused from recess so they can catch up on their journal writing,” and I was one of the following students.

  Three times during journal writing the teacher said, “Clementine, you need to pay attention.” And every time he said it, I was paying attention. I was paying attention out the window where the fourth-graders were playing Pickle in the Middle. Whenever the ball came anywhere near Margaret and Amanda-Lee, they grabbed each other and shrieked like they were being murdered, which everyone knows means “We are best friends!”

  When my teacher moved my seat away from the window I was G-L-A-D, glad. And I wrote all over my journal page, I DON’T CARE! so hard my pencil broke.

  When I got home from school, I was planning on going straight to my room to draw a picture of me with a new best friend. But my dad was putting on his raincoat and it was not raining out.

  “Fighting pigeons is not for the weak-hearted,” he said. “It takes superhuman courage. And resourcefulness and cleverness.”

  When my dad talks like this it means he has a new idea. “You have another battle plan?” I asked.

  “Yup,” he answered. “And it’s a doozy. I’ll probably be promoted to general for this one.”

  “You already are the general, remember?”

  “Oh, right. I’m so modest I sometimes forget. Well, I bet I get the Medal of Honor.”

  “Dad.”

  “I might even be knighted for this one.”

  “Dad!” I said. Sometimes my dad needs help staying serious. “So what is the new battle plan?”

  My dad looked around, like he thought there might be spies sneaking up on us. Then he bent over and whispered in my ear. “Psychological warfare!”

  This sounded like a good one, so I followed him out and sat on the steps to watch. I could do that drawing later.

  First my dad hosed off the sidewalk, then sprayed the pigeons until they flew away. All the time he was muttering things like “Oh, they’re crafty all right. But I’m craftier!” and “It’s a little-known fact that pigeons were the eighth deadly plague to visit Egypt.”

  Then he pulled a brown plastic owl from a bag. He got a ladder and climbed up and put the owl right on top of the lion’s head over the lobby door.

  I asked him what that was for.

  “The pigeons will take one look at that owl, and then they’ll head for the hills. Well, for another building. Pigeons are deathly afraid of owls. Yep, I’ll probably be knighted.”

  “It’s plastic,” I reminded him.

  “But the pigeons don’t know that. That’s the brilliance of my plan.”

  I didn’t see what was so brilliant. I didn’t see how a little plastic owl was going to frighten off a flock of pigeons who fought over who would get to sit on the head of a roaring lion.

  And while we stood there, Dad admiring his brilliant battle plan and me worrying about it, the pigeons came back. They settled on their regular perches all over the front of our building, except for a few who decided to sit on the owl’s head.

  What my dad needed was something real.

  “Polka Dottie would have scared them off.”

  Dad put the ladder and his raincoat away and came over and sat beside me. “You still miss her, don’t you, Sport.”

  I nodded. “I miss seeing her when I get home from school. I miss patting her where her fur was so soft under her neck. I miss hearing her purr when I fall asleep. I even miss the smell of her cat food.”

  “That’s a lot of missing,” my dad said.

  “And she would have scared off those pigeons, wouldn’t she?”

  “Absolutely. That was one terrifying cat.”

  “Dad. She would have been terrifying to pigeons,” I said. And then I had one of the most astoundishing ideas of my whole career.

  I jumped up and gave my dad a kiss right where his beard stops being crunchy. Then I ran back into the apartment, went to my bedroom, and reached under the mattress where I keep my favorite picture of Polka.

  Then I ran to the copy shop at the corner.

  “Can you make this bigger?” I asked.

  “How big do you want it?” the clerk asked back.

  I took out my wallet and laid all my birthday money on the counter. “How big can you make it for this much?”

  The clerk counted my money and thought for a minute. “I can make that cat the size of a German shepherd for that much money.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Then he took the money and the picture of Polka and told me to come back the next day at four.

  I ran home and let myself into the apartment. My dad and mom were in the kitchen.

  “…one left,” my dad said.

  “One’s all we need,” said my mom. “Do you think we should do it?”

  “I think so,” my dad answered. “I think it’s time.”

  “Okay,” my mom said. “I’ll call tomorrow.”

  One’s all we need?! I slammed the door behind me so they would know I was there. If they were talking about getting rid of me so they’d only have one kid—the easy one—I wanted them to S-T-O-P, stop. Not that I was worried. They probably weren’t even talking about me anyway.

  “Shhhh!” my dad said. “She’s home.”

  Okay, fine, I was worried.

  Here is a secret good thing: Sometimes I like journal writing at school because I can remind myself of things I might forget when I’m a grown-up. Like that I plan to smoke cigars. And I do not plan to get married. Cigars, yes; husband, no. What if I forget these things?

  One more thing to remember when I am old: if I ever do get married, which I will not, I will only have one kid. The first one. She is plenty good enough. Even if she’s the hard one.

  Nope, no need for another kid, even if he’s the easy one. Although thinking about my brother and thinking about my journal gave me an astoundishing idea on Saturday.

  Last week Turnip had to get a shot at the doctor’s and he was so mad about it my parents let him rent a video and eat Gummi Worms even though they are usually the Sesame Street–and-carrot-sticks kind of parents. So I pretended I had to write in my journal even though I didn’t because it was the weekend, and I pretended I was mad about it so my parents would feel sorry for me, too.

  As soon as they came into the room I scringed my eyebrows down like arrows and stuck my bottom teeth out as far as they could go. Here is a picture of that:

  If my teeth were pointier I would have looked fierce, like our stone lion. Still, see how mad I looked?
r />   But guess what my parents did? Nothing. Because they are not so good at paying attention.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I am very mad about this journal. May I please have some Gummi Worms and a video?”

  They stared at me like I had spoken in the secret language Margaret and I use, which I was almost sure I had not.

  “You let Zucchini have Gummi Worms and a video when he was mad about his shot,” I reminded them.

  “First of all,” my mother said, “your brother’s name isn’t Zucchini. Second of all, he’s three years old.”

  “And third of all,” my father said, “considering all the trouble you got into this week, I don’t think it’s quite the time for special treats, do you?”

  “Okay, fine,” I said.

  But it wasn’t.

  In the afternoon, my mom had to go to her yoga class and my brother had to go to his Saturday play group. My dad was around, but he was up on the second floor taking care of a “plumbing issue.” Usually on Saturday afternoons Margaret and I play together, but now Margaret was not my friend anymore. So I had nothing to do, not even eat Gummi Worms and watch a video, for three whole hours until I could go back to get the big Polka picture.

  Then I realized I didn’t exactly know where I should put the picture once I got it.

  What I needed was one of the top windows, right in the middle of the building, where it would scare off the pigeons. Margaret’s apartment was on the fifth floor, but I didn’t think Margaret’s mother was about to let a common criminal use her window. The man who lives on the sixth floor smells like mothballs, so I never visit him. The people who live on the seventh floor were away on vacation while their apartment got painted.

  Which reminded me.

  I flew up to the seventh floor to see if the painters wanted help yet. Nobody answered the apartment door when I knocked, but the painters’ stilts and all their brushes and paint cans were out in the hall. The hall hadn’t been painted yet, which gave me a great idea: I could do it for them! Then, when they got back on Monday, they’d smack their foreheads and make “Wow! I must be dreaming!” faces. They’d wonder who had done such a great thing until I went up and told them, “Oh, it was just me.”