Annie Barrows Read online

  “I guess so.”

  “I’ll break a glass by screaming,” said Bean. “I’ll be the youngest person ever to do it.”

  “What? You scream and throw a glass?” Ivy looked confused. “You already did that with a plate.”

  “No—the scream breaks the glass. This lady in the book did it. She screamed so loud that a wine glass shattered. But she was old. I could probably scream louder because I’m young. I’ll be a record breaker.”

  “That’s a good record,” said Ivy. “That’ll be fun.” She bounced a little on Bean’s bed.

  “Okay,” said Bean, “I’ll need a wine glass. I’ll go get it.” She jumped up. And then she sat down again. Her dad was still sweeping up little pieces of plate. He probably wouldn’t be very happy to find out that she was planning to break something else. Maybe she could find something made of glass upstairs where he wouldn’t need to know about it. Not a mirror. That was bad luck. But there had to be something she could use. “I’ve got it!” she yelled.

  “Got what?”

  “Nancy’s glass animals. I’ll shatter one of them. It’ll be even better than a wine glass.”

  “Won’t Nancy get mad?”

  Bean pictured Nancy’s face and then quickly put it out of her mind. “No. She has gazillions of them, and besides, I’ll glue the animal back together when I’m done. She won’t even notice.” I hope, she added silently.

  Ivy went on a spying mission down the hall, past Nancy’s room.

  “The coast is clear,” she reported when she came back. “She’s not in her room.”

  “Okeydoke,” said Bean. She took a deep breath and headed for the door on super-quiet tiptoe.

  Nancy’s room was very organized. All her books were neatly arranged by color. Her yarn for knitting was rolled into tight balls. Her friendship bracelets were lying side by side on her dresser. And her glass animals were lined up in two long, straight rows across the top of her bookshelf. It was like a glass-animal army. Nancy had been collecting them since she was five. She had plain china cats and dogs and turtles—the kind that you can get at the drugstore—but she also had some fancy animals, too: tiny dolphins and horses and butterflies. She had a beautiful unicorn with a blue glass horn, and a peacock made of glass that shimmered like rainbows. Bean wasn’t going to hurt him. But right in the middle of the army was a gloopy-looking octopus with eight squiggly legs. That was the one, Bean decided. Its legs were thin. They would probably pop right off if she gave a good scream. And they’d be easy to glue back on. Nancy would never have to know.

  Bean grabbed the octopus and stuffed it down her shirt, just to be safe. She tiptoed back to her room.

  “Got it,” she said, setting the octopus on her dresser. She took a few short breaths to get in the mood and looked hard at the little octopus. Its gloopy head dangled on one side. “Prepare to die,” she told it and opened her mouth. Then she paused and looked at Ivy. “You might want to cover your ears.”

  “Okay.” Ivy stuck her fingers in her ears.

  Bean screamed as loud and high and shattering as she could.

  The octopus just sat there. It didn’t even crack.

  So Bean screamed again, louder than she had ever screamed before. But even through her scream, Bean could hear another sound. It was the sound of her father running up the stairs, very, very fast.

  A second later, he burst through the door. “What?! What’s the matter?!” he shouted. His face was whitish gray.

  Bean stopped screaming. “Nothing,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  WATCH YOUR TAIL, MARY ANNING

  It was cold outside. The two girls squished into Bean’s tiny playhouse.

  “How long do we have to stay out here?” asked Ivy.

  “I don’t know. He said until dinner, but I don’t think he meant it.” Bean sighed. She knew he meant it. “Is your mom home?”

  “Not yet, I don’t think.”

  “Bummer.”

  “He’ll let us in if it starts raining, won’t he?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s going to rain,” said Bean, peering out the bitty window at the sky.

  “Mary Anning used to go out hunting for fossils in storms. She didn’t mind,” said Ivy. “She built her own wooden tower next to the cliff where she saw the skeleton, and she lay down on it and chipped the ichthyosaur out of the cliff even though the tower was shaking and the rain was pouring down on her.”

  “Why didn’t she just wait until it stopped raining?” asked Bean.

  “She was afraid that the bones would get washed away in the storm,” explained Ivy.

  “Wow.” Bean pictured herself lying bravely on top of a shaking wooden tower with rain falling in her eyes.

  “It took her a year to get the whole body out,” Ivy added. “Chip, chip, chip, a tiny bit at a time.”

  “A year!” yelped Bean. “Didn’t she get bored out of her mind?”

  “No,” said Ivy. “It takes a lot of patience to dig up fossils.” She sat up and peered out the other bitty window of the playhouse. “Dinosaurs lived all over, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “There were dinosaurs around here, too. Not ichthyosaurs, but other kinds.”

  “Maybe just little ones,” said Bean.

  “Maybe just little ones,” said Ivy. “But still, dinosaurs.”

  “I’ve always liked those little ones with the deadly claws,” said Bean.

  “Mary Anning found fossils right on the top of the ground, but sometimes they’re buried deep in the dirt. We might have to dig for a long time before we find one.”

  “That’s okay. We’re patient,” said Bean. She was beginning to get it.

  “Where do you keep your shovels?” said Ivy. Bean loved to dig. Her shovel flashed, and dirt flew through the air. Soon, there was a nice, wide hole next to the trampoline. Ivy knelt beside it and ran her fingers through the dirt.

  “We have to inspect every bit of it,” Ivy said. “Even slivers of bone are important to paleontologists.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s us,” said Ivy. “The people who dig up dinosaurs are called paleontologists.”

  “Cool.” Bean felt cheerful. She loved the crunch of her shovel as it went into the earth. She loved hurling the dirt behind her without looking. Whee!

  “Hey, watch out! You got dirt in my hair!” cried Ivy.

  “We’re paleontologists! We can’t be afraid of a little dirt!” yelled Bean. The hole was almost 2 feet deep, and the dirt was getting darker and wetter. She flung a big hunk of it over her shoulder.

  “Ouch!” Something bounced off of Ivy’s head and landed next to her knee. She picked it up, brushing away the mud that was stuck to it. What was it?

  It was about as long as her hand.

  It was narrow at one end and flared out at the other.

  It was grayish brown.

  It was a bone.

  “Bean!” Ivy gasped. “Lookit! I got one.”

  Bean’s shovel crashed to the ground, and she rushed to Ivy’s side. Ivy handed her the gray brown bone. Bean stared at it and then gave a long whistle. “Watch your tail, Mary Anning!” she said. “Here we come.”

  IVYBEANOSAUR

  They dug for half an hour without finding any more bones. Bean was on the edge of giving up. She figured that one bone was a lot more than most people found. But then she thought of Mary Anning chip, chip, chipping for a year. She didn’t want to be wimpier than Mary Anning. Or Ivy. So she dug and dug.

  Ivy’s nose was running, and she had mud all over her. Also, her feet had gone to sleep from being kneeled on. But she didn’t give up either. She combed through each new load of dirt with her fingers, feeling for bones. She found a lot of rocks. She found a marble. She found a piece of blue plastic.

  Then her fingers, burrowing into the mud like worms, plucked out another bone. This one was shorter and thicker, but it was definitely a bone. “I got another one!” she called. Bean dropped do
wn beside her and looked at the gray brown lump.

  “We rock,” she said.

  “No. We fossil,” giggled Ivy. She dusted the bone carefully and put it next to the first one. “We can put them together later,” she said.

  “How do you put them together if you don’t know which dinosaur it is?” asked Bean.

  “It’s like a puzzle, I think. You look for pieces that fit together,” said Ivy. “We can look in dinosaur books, too, so it’s a lot easier for us than for Mary Anning. She didn’t have any pictures to look at. But,” she remembered, “Mary Anning found the whole ichthyosaur, so she didn’t need to put it together.”

  “It’s sort of cheating to find the whole thing,” said Bean. “Oh man! Here’s a big one!” She fished around in the dirt and pulled out a thick, heavy bone. It was a very serious-looking bone. Bean held it up. It reached from her hand to her elbow. She whistled. “This is no little, cute dinosaur. This is a big, scary dinosaur.”

  “What if that’s just its little finger?” said Ivy dreamily.

  “Monsterosaur!” said Bean.

  “IvyBeanosaur!” said Ivy. “You’re supposed to name them after the person who discovered them.”

  Bean giggled. Then her shovel hit something hard. Another bone appeared, this one smooth and rounded. “Whoa, Nellie!” cried Bean. “I think I got a piece of its skull!”

  A few minutes later, Bean found another small bone. Ivy found two more—one big, the other medium. There was no doubt about it: The backyard had been swarming with dinosaurs.

  “You know,” Ivy said, holding up her ninth bone. (They didn’t even call out when they found them now.) “Mary Anning was twelve when she found her ichthyosaur. We’re only seven. We’re probably the youngest paleontologists in the world.”

  Bean stopped digging and leaned on her shovel. The youngest paleontologists in the world? “Ivy, you know what that means?”

  “Huh?”

  “It means we’re record breakers!”

  Ivy stopped rubbing dirt. She and Bean grinned at each other. “Youngest paleontologists in the world,” said Ivy. “That’s way better than spoons.”

  By the time Ivy had to go home, the girls had found 17 bones. They were all different sizes, but they were clearly from the same dinosaur because they were all the same shade of grayish brown.

  Bean’s father called her in for dinner. Bean washed off most of the dirt and sat down at the dining room table. She smiled, thinking about the dinosaur skeleton she and Ivy were going to build. They were totally awesome. They would probably be on TV. Her parents would have to let her watch TV if she was on it. Bean noticed that Nancy was sneering at her. She was still mad about the octopus.

  “If I ever catch you looking at one of my glass animals again, you’ll be sorry,” Nancy hissed while their father served up their pasta.

  “What am I supposed to do—put a blindfold on when I go into your room?”

  “You’re not supposed to go into my room,” said Nancy. “Because it’s my room. Daddy, can I get a lock on my door?”

  “No,” said Dad, bringing in their bowls.

  Bean stared at her pasta. It looked funny, but she decided not to say so.

  “This pasta looks weird,” said Nancy.

  “That’s what I thought, but I didn’t say it,” said Bean. “Mom says if you can’t say something nice about your food, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  Nancy lifted one eyebrow and said, “Little children who break dishes, steal other people’s stuff, and screech their brains out have no right to talk about what other people do.”

  “How about if we don’t talk at all for a little while?” suggested Dad.

  “Fine with me,” said Nancy.

  “Me, too,” said Bean. So she didn’t tell them anything about the amazing dinosaur find in the backyard. Serves them right, she thought. I’ll be the youngest paleontologist in the world, and they won’t even know it.

  BELIEVE IT OR NOT

  “Breaking a world record is harder than it looks,” said Emma the next day at recess. The second-graders who had gathered around The Amazing Book of World Records the day before were huddled under the play structure again. Without the book. “I could get two spoons stuck on my cheeks, no problem,” Emma went on, “and for a second, I got three. But that’s all. I wish the book said how that kid did it.”

  “Did you try your nose?” asked Drew.

  “Sure I tried my nose,” Emma said. “It slid right off.”

  “Maybe he has a very sticky face,” said Ivy. “Maybe he even puts something on his face to make it sticky.”

  “Maybe,” said Emma, “but forget it. I’m tired of trying to put spoons on my face.”

  There was a silence. Bean didn’t want to be a braggy kid. Everyone hates braggy kids. She would wait to tell about the dinosaur bones until someone else told about breaking a record. “How’d the cartwheels go?” she asked Zuzu.

  “Super-great,” said Zuzu.

  “You did it?” asked Ivy. “A hundred and eleven cartwheels?”

  Everyone looked impressed. “Wow!” “That’s great!” “Are you going to be in the book?”

  Zuzu pulled the zipper on her jacket down and up. “I didn’t do a hundred and eleven cartwheels. I did thirty-two.” She looked around at the faces watching her. “That’s a lot. I set the record for Emerson School, for sure.”

  There was a short silence while everyone thought about that. Then Bean said, “Did you fall down or what?”

  “I crashed into the fence,” said Zuzu. “Got a bunch of splinters.” She held up her knee. It looked like she had pepper under her skin.

  “Ouch,” said Ivy. She hated splinters.

  “If my backyard was a mile long, I bet I could have done it,” said Zuzu.

  “Eric’s not at school today,” said Vanessa. “I wonder if he ate five hundred M&M’s.”

  “He didn’t,” said Dusit. “He ate a hundred and twelve, and then he threw up.”

  “But a hundred and twelve is hardly anything.”

  “He didn’t chew,” said Dusit. “He just poured them down his throat.”

  “Yuck,” said Emma. “That’s gross.”

  “His mom is really mad,” said Dusit glumly. “She took the rest of his money away.”

  “What about you, Bean?” asked Vanessa. “Did you get all those straws in your mouth?”

  “Straws?” Bean had almost forgotten the straws. “Oh. No. But Ivy and I broke another record—”

  “How many did you get in?” asked Zuzu.

  “What? Oh. Forty-four. But guys,” said Bean, “Ivy and I broke another record yesterday afternoon.” She stopped and waited.

  “Well?” said Vanessa. “What record?”

  “We became the youngest paleontologists in the world!”

  There was a little pause.

  “What’s a paleontologist?” asked Drew.

  “A person who digs up dinosaur bones,” said Bean. “And that’s what we did! We dug seventeen dinosaur bones out of my backyard yesterday. And today we’re going to get more. And then we’re going to put them together and make a dinosaur skeleton!”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Isn’t that cool?” said Bean. What was the matter with them?

  “You did not,” said Dusit, finally.

  “We did too!” cried Bean.

  “Seventeen dinosaur bones? No way,” said Emma.

  “Yes way,” said Bean firmly.

  Zuzu and Emma gave each other a look. Bean felt her face get hot.

  “People don’t just find dinosaur bones,” said Vanessa in a grown-up voice. “Dinosaur bones aren’t just lying around.”

  “Sometimes they are,” said Ivy. “That’s how Mary Anning found them.”

  “Until yesterday, Mary Anning was the youngest paleontologist in the world,” said Bean, trying again. “Now Ivy and I are.”

  “You can’t just say you broke a record and get in the book,” said Vanessa. “You have t
o prove it.”

  “We can prove it,” said Ivy. Her face was getting a little pink, too. “We have the bones!”

  “How do we know that they’re not chicken bones you stuck in the ground yourself?” Vanessa said.

  “They’re not chicken bones. They’re big. You can come over and see them if you don’t believe us,” said Bean.

  “Okay,” said Vanessa. “I will.”

  “In fact, you can all come over,” said Bean. “I invite you all over for a dinosaur-bone viewing. So there.”

  “Fine. When?” said Emma.

  “You can come this afternoon.” Bean decided. “But don’t come early, because Ivy and I have paleontology to do.”

  “You’d better come and see them today,” said Ivy. “When they’re in the museum, you’ll have to pay! Come on, Bean.” They turned their backs on the play structure and walked toward the classroom.

  A BONE TO PICK

  Bean could hardly wait for the end of the day. Finally, Ms. Aruba-Tate said, “Put up your chairs, boys and girls,” just like she always did. Bean and Ivy put up their chairs—wham, wham—and hurried out of the classroom.

  “Wait, you guys!” Leo ran down the breezeway and stood in front of them. They waited.

  “Did you really?” he said.

  “What?” said Ivy in a huffy voice.

  “Find dinosaur bones?” He looked at them with narrow eyes.

  Bean’s face got hot again. Leo was their friend, and friends believed you. He shouldn’t think they were lying. It made her mad. “Yes! We did!” she yelled. “And we have proof! Anyone who doesn’t believe us can come over and see! Four o’clock! Today! My house! Dinosaurs!” She glared at Leo. “Bring everyone you know! Bring your stupid soccer team! I don’t care!”

  “Jeez,” said Leo. “Lighten up.”