Annie's Adventures Read online

  We'd always loved having Mommy drive us to school in her big purple vehicle, which was a Hummer that she'd doctored to make it environmentally sound, but riding the bus was a revelation.

  "This is ... fun," Zinnia said as we bounced along. "Who knew taking public transportation could be so ... bouncy! It's so much more than yellow!"

  Our school was called the Whistle Stop, a name we'd always agreed was stupid. But supposedly the man who had founded the school had made his fortune in railroads, and he liked the name. The lower school building, where we attended classes, was called the Station House.

  The Whistle Stop ran kindergarten through twelfth grade, and it was a private school. We were in third grade there because we were incredibly smart and had skipped a year right upon entry. This was a good thing for the other students in our class; without us, there would have been just two students in that grade. Apparently, there had been a year in which few children were born in our city, or at least few children whose parents wanted to send them to a private school stupidly named the Whistle Stop.

  The other two students in our grade were Will Simms, a towheaded boy we liked very much because he was always willing to get up to all manner of adventure with us, and Mandy Stenko, who we really didn't like at all but who we tried to be nice to because without us she would have had nobody. Mandy was a true redhead who tried to personalize her uniform by wearing little smiley and rainbow buttons on the lapel of her yellow plaid blazer. We had the feeling she didn't like us either.

  Our teacher was Mrs. McGillicuddy, who was a tall blonde with a long nose, on the bridge of which perched horn-rimmed glasses. The McG, as we called her amongst ourselves, was also not a fan of the Sisters Eight.

  "There, there, Phyllis," we'd overheard Principal Freud say to her early in the school year, the McG's bun askew. "What do you expect me to do—hire another teacher full-time so that poor person can get stuck with the eight while you have to teach only the two left? I'm sorry, but it's just not in the budget."

  "But you don't understand!" the McG had cried. "They're not human!"

  At the time, we could tell that even Principal Freud thought this was a bit much. It wasn't like we had done anything to our new teacher, not yet, not really. Yes, there had been that one toad incident, and we could tell it bothered the McG whenever Marcia corrected her grammar. But you couldn't blame poor Jackie for the toad thing—it's practically expected of third-graders, isn't it?—and Marcia couldn't help it if she was really good at grammar or that the McG's own grammar was, well, lousy.

  But here we were, back in school on the second day of January, and things were going great. Will was there (which was not always the case since he tended to get sick a lot); Mandy had yet to say anything mean; and the McG had yet to muddle her grammar, so Marcia had yet to correct her. It was a happy time.

  And then that all changed.

  The McG wanted to have that talk teachers always have the first day back at school: What Did You Do on Your Vacation?

  That part went innocently enough.

  "I was sick the first half," Will said, "but then I got better and I got to go ice-skating. That half was really great."

  "My family went skiing on the Matterhorn," Mandy said. Then for good measure, just in case we had somehow missed the fact that she was living a higher life than the rest of us were, she fluffed her hair.

  "We got snowbound in Utah," Durinda said.

  "How awful," the McG said, adding, "for your parents."

  Thankfully, the idea of being snowbound by a blizzard was exciting enough to the others that we didn't have to say anything else about our vacation, like, say, how our parents had gone poof!

  There was a lengthy pause. Then the McG said, "Isn't anyone going to ask me how I spent my time off?"

  "Of course, Mrs. McGillicuddy," Petal said kindly. "We care."

  "I rested," our teacher said. "I had a huge headache and I rested."

  A headache? For seventeen days? Surely, she wasn't blaming us...

  We were forced to endure a moment of silence in honor of the pain the McG had suffered. The bad part came when she broke the silence by saying, "Now, tell me, what did all you good children get for Christmas?"

  "I got a new set of hockey skates and a stick," Will said.

  "I got a walkie-talkie, binoculars, and a book on how to conduct covert surveillance," Mandy said with another hair fluff, "and a doll."

  "And what did you get, Eights?" the McG prompted.

  "We didn't get anything for Christmas," said Durinda.

  "Nothing?" The McG was openly shocked. "But, surely, even you Eights couldn't have been so awful as to get nothing."

  "We weren't awful," Jackie piped up. "We were just Jewish."

  "Excuse me?" the McG said.

  "We're Jewish," Jackie said simply, lying with ease. "We don't celebrate Christmas because we're Jewish."

  "I'm quite certain," the McG said, "you are not. I distinctly remember your parents singing carols louder than anybody at the holiday sing-along. And I remember all of you talking about the gifts you wanted."

  "Oh," Annie said, covering for Jackie, "we only did that to make everyone feel better. We didn't want to make everyone else feel as if they had to do something special for us, like sing 'The Dreidel Song.'"

  "No, but—" the McG started to say, but Will cut her off.

  "Oh, but they are," Will said. He really was a miraculous boy. "They are very Jewish. I know. I've seen it for myself. I've been to their house."

  "What are you talking about, William?" demanded the McG.

  He had been to our house, many times, but we wondered too: what was he talking about?

  "Their house." Will gave a slight nervous cough. "There are menorahs and, like, Stars of David ... everywhere! They even have those mezuzah thingies, and they all wear yarmulkes. You can barely move in the place for all of that stuff. Honestly, the Eights are more Jewish than a rabbi!"

  "Shalom," Jackie said for good measure.

  "Mazel tov," Petal said.

  "Gesundheit," Rebecca said with a sneer.

  The McG looked at Will, stunned.

  We were stunned too. Why had Will, who was always so painfully honest, lied on our behalf?

  "Why, Will?" Annie asked, when we all went to recess. "Why did you lie to the McG for us?"

  "I dunno." Will shrugged, as though even he wasn't sure. "Maybe I did it because you looked like you needed saving right at that moment, like it was really important to you somehow." He shrugged again. "Maybe I just did it because you're the Eights."

  We all fell in love with him a little bit at that moment.

  ***

  The rest of the school day passed without major event, and we're sorry to say, the bus ride home was not as exciting as the earlier one. Apparently, the charms of mass transportation wear off quickly, even with the bounces.

  When we got home, Petal and Zinnia raided the cabinets for cookies, while Georgia and Rebecca fought over what we should watch on TV.

  The Summer Room, where we watched TV, was one of four seasonal rooms at the back of the house. The front room, decorated normally, was for your average visitor. But the four seasonal rooms were for us. Mommy had created the rooms because she wanted us always to be able to go to the season we most wanted to be in when we grew tired of the one we were living. Well, we certainly didn't need the Winter Room now.

  "What do you think you're doing?" Annie shouted over the roar of all of us.

  "Eating cookies and watching TV, of course," Marcia said simply, popping a whole cookie into her mouth.

  "But that's not what we do right after school," Annie said sternly. "We always do our homework first, in order to make sure it gets done."

  "But those are Mommy's and Daddy's rules," Georgia said, "and they're not here anymore."

  "Yes," Rebecca said. "There has to be some advantages."

  "Well, this isn't going to be one of them." Annie snapped off the set. "Durinda, make a healthy snack for t
he girls—I'm thinking apple slices and glasses of milk—while the rest of you get out your schoolbooks."

  "You're worse than Mommy and Daddy," Georgia said. "At least they smile when they say those things."

  "Can't we play in the snow first?" Zinnia asked. "It'll be dark soon, and the bus ride was so long."

  "No," Annie said. "Work first. We can always turn on the outside lights if there's time to play outdoors afterward."

  "Sheesh," Georgia said. Then: "Before I start my homework," she offered sweetly, "can I go get the mail for you? We forgot to pick it up. Maybe there are holiday cards waiting out there or even another important note telling us what to do about Mommy and Daddy."

  "Thank you, Georgia," Annie said. "That would be lovely. It's nice to see you finally getting into the spirit of things."

  We were all busy attacking our math homework, Annie at the head of the table supervising, when Georgia returned a few minutes later. She had a huge stack of mail in her hands.

  Annie looked up from helping Zinnia. "Anything interesting?"

  Georgia walked right up and dropped the envelopes on the table in front of her, one at a time.

  "What's all this?" Annie asked.

  "Bills, I believe they're called," Georgia said, with a smile that could almost be called evil.

  "And what do you expect me to do with them all?" Annie asked, looking overwhelmed.

  "I expect you to find a way to pay them, of course," Georgia said. "You did want to be in charge of everything, didn't you?"

  And that's when Annie started to scream.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "I can't do it!" Annie ran from the room. "I can't do it!" Her voice echoed back as she raced through the house, away from us.

  "What came over her?" Georgia asked.

  "You did," Jackie said with rare venom.

  "How do you mean?" Georgia was the picture of innocence.

  "What do you imagine it must be like," Jackie said in a more even tone, "having Mommy and Daddy disappear—"

  "But that happened to all of us," Rebecca objected on Georgia's behalf.

  Jackie went on as though Rebecca hadn't spoken. "And then be the one who has the most pressure on her to get everything right, the most pressure to fix everything so the rest of us remain okay?"

  "I can't do it!" Annie cried, running into the room and then out again, a crazed look in her eyes.

  Georgia shrugged. "Annie wanted to be in charge and now she is. I don't see how any of that's my fault."

  "Great," Jackie said. "You don't see. But what do you think will happen to the rest of us if Annie does give up? How long do you think it will be before everything falls apart and we get split up?"

  "She has a point," Rebecca said.

  "Yes, I do see that," Georgia said.

  "Good." Jackie nodded. "Now, what are you going to do about it?"

  "Lead an ambassadorial delegation?" Georgia suggested.

  So that's what we did. With Georgia in the lead, we hunted through the house until we at last found Annie. She was sitting in Daddy's study. The lights were out in there, so we couldn't see her at first, but we knew she was there because we could hear her sobbing.

  Durinda switched on the lights, illuminating the soothing golden-orange walls of the room, and there was Annie in Daddy's oversize blood-red leather chair, her forehead pressed down on the great big mahogany desk as though she might never lift it again.

  "Annie?" Georgia took a few cautious steps forward. Okay, we pushed her. "I wanted to apologize. I'm not sorry I brought you the bills. After all, if we don't pay them, we'll have no lights, heat, or phone, and we'll starve. But I am sorry I brought them to you in such a nasty way."

  It was a long speech for Georgia, who was more given to nasty snippets. It even sounded as though she were sincere.

  Just then a carrier pigeon with a poor sense of how close it was to the nearest object smashed up against the window behind the desk. It was one of Daddy's friends, of course. Why else would it come to Daddy's study? When Daddy was at home, he was often visited by carrier pigeons.

  Durinda opened the window and the pigeon hopped onto her finger.

  "Check to see if there's a note attached to its leg," Jackie advised.

  Durinda unfurled the tiny scroll she extracted from the silver tube attached to the pigeon's leg, but it was empty except for a single red letter that could have been an M or a W or even a funny E or a 3.

  "What should I do?" Durinda asked.

  "Send a note back." Jackie shrugged. "It's what Daddy always does."

  But none of us had any idea what Daddy put in those notes.

  We are all fine here, Durinda wrote. No need to worry.

  "Shouldn't you be putting SOS in that instead?" Rebecca wondered.

  "No, I shouldn't." Durinda let the pigeon go. "We want the world to think we're okay here, don't we?" Then she shut the window.

  "We need you," Georgia went on softly to Annie, who had completely ignored the advent of the pigeon. "We can't do anything without you."

  "It's true." Petal let out a slight sob. "Without you, we'd be orphans."

  "We are orphans," Rebecca corrected, holding up her end of the testiness Georgia had dropped for the time being, "practically."

  "Please, Annie," Georgia half begged, slitting open the envelope of one of the bills, "won't you just look at one of these little bills? I'd do it myself, but I can't make heads or tails of it. 'Minimum balance due,' 'total balance due'—how is a person to know which one to pay?"

  Why, we wondered, hadn't our mother invented an automatic bill-paying system? We knew some people paid their bills by computers, but Mommy didn't wholly trust computers.

  "And look," Marcia said, holding up a gray and white puffball. "Anthrax is here too, and I'm sure she'll sit at your feet for as long as you need her." Marcia held Anthrax up; we could all hear her purr.

  Annie still hadn't spoken, but at the sound of Anthrax's purr, she forced her forehead off the desk and looked at us. Tears streaked her face. It was horrible to see Annie looking like that.

  Angrily, she wiped the tears from her cheeks. Then, with a weary sigh, as though she were the oldest person in the world and not just in this house, she held out her hand.

  We wondered, did she want us to hand her the cat?

  But she snapped her fingers and then pointed at the bill in Georgia's hands. "Let me see it," she commanded. "I can at least look."

  Now that Georgia had what we had wanted, she looked hesitant. Perhaps she was worried that when Annie looked at the bill, she'd have another breakdown and run screaming into another room.

  But at last, with a tiptoeing step followed by a hasty retreat, Georgia deposited the bill into Annie's hand.

  Annie studied it for a moment without speaking, and we studied Annie.

  "I think I'll ride the car for a bit," Petal announced nervously.

  Petal wasn't referring to the car in the garage. She was referring to the miniature pink convertible that had been one of our gifts on our sixth birthday. The rest of us had long since outgrown it. Not Petal, though. She still liked to tool around in it whenever she was nervous about something.

  "Fine," Annie said, waving her away. She was still thinking, studying the bill. Then a smile broke across her face.

  "This is easy!" she said. "If we don't want to pay it all, the minimum balance is the least amount we can pay without getting in trouble. But look at this rate here. If we don't pay the entire balance, they want 19.4 percent interest—that's usury! They're crooks!"

  None of the rest of us knew what usury was, but from the look on Annie's face, we could tell it wasn't anything good.

  "But how do we know if we can afford to pay it all?" Durinda asked. "How can we pay any of the bills Georgia delivered?"

  "I didn't make the bills come!" Georgia objected as Petal zipped in and out of the room in her car. "It was that wretched mailperson who—"

  But Annie cut her off with another snap-point of her fin
gers. "Georgia." Snap-point. "You get me the rest of the bills and then hand them to me one at a time as I tell you to. Zinnia." Snap-point. "Get me a pen. Jackie." Snap-point. "You get me the calculator. Rebecca." Snap-point. "Go to Mommy and Daddy's bedroom and get the strongbox. Remember they always said to grab it in a fire? Well, I'll bet anything the money stuff is in there. Petal." Snap-point. "You keep riding your car."

  We all ran to do her bidding. But for once our actions weren't grudging. We were happy to help, even Rebecca; happy to be told what to do.

  When we returned with the things she'd asked for, Annie opened the strongbox and discovered a black leather ledger. It was the checkbook.

  "This is exactly what I wanted!" she said. "Now, if only there's enough money in here to keep the bill collectors from the door for another month."

  "What if we're broke?" Petal stopped her driving long enough to ask. "We'll have to pick pockets like those street urchins in that movie Oliver! Mommy had us watch."

  "I'll bet I could pick a pocket or two," Rebecca said.

  Annie opened the ledger very slowly, as though scared to see what was there. Well, who could blame her? What if we really were broke?

  But then another huge smile spread across her face and she laughed out loud.

  "What is it?" Georgia, now seated in a chair to the right of Annie's desk, asked anxiously. We were all worried our sister had gone nuts.

  "We're rich!" Annie said.

  "We're rich?" Zinnia was puzzled, as were we all. "What did Mommy and Daddy do for a living to make us all rich?"

  "Don't you remember?" Annie said. "Daddy was a model and Mommy was a scientist."

  "Huh. Really?" Zinnia asked. "I thought Mommy just cooked and cleaned and Daddy read books."

  "Where do you think all these inventions came from?" Annie asked. "They were all Mommy's from, you know, being a scientist."

  "Who knew," Durinda said with wonder, "that there could be so much money in modeling and science?"

  "Durinda." One last snap-point. "You go prepare the biggest feast you've made yet." Annie rubbed her hands together, then picked up a pen. "I have a feeling that when I'm done here, I'll be very hungry."