Frankie Sparks and the Lucky Charm Read online

  For Judith Kurtz, creator of the original Wonder Wall

  CHAPTER 1 Dog Tricks

  ARF! ARF!

  When Frankie Sparks heard the dog, she smiled. She walked to Maya’s house and into the backyard. Maya’s dog, Opus, bounded around on the lawn. When he saw her, he barreled toward her and almost knocked her over.

  “I’m teaching him to do tricks!” Maya explained. She stood in the center of the yard, holding a Hula-Hoop.

  “Is the trick to knock down your best friend?” Frankie asked with a laugh.

  Frankie and Maya had been best friends forever, and Frankie loved Maya’s dog almost as much as she loved her own pet, a rat named Buttercup. Opus stopped and gave Frankie a good sniff before starting to sprint again.

  “He’s supposed to jump through the hoop,” Maya said with a shrug. “But mostly he runs around me and around in the yard.”

  Frankie called Opus to her. He skidded to a stop at her side. “Maybe if you hold the hoop, and I call him from the other side, he’ll jump through it.” She told Opus to stay and then crossed Maya’s lawn so that Maya and the hoop were between her and Opus. It was early spring, and the ground beneath her feet was squishy soft.

  “Ready?” Frankie asked Maya.

  Maya nodded.

  “Here, Opus! Here, boy!” Frankie called.

  Opus’s ears pricked up. Arf! He ran toward Frankie. Frankie clapped and called him again. She was certain Opus was going to jump right through the hoop.

  Faster and faster Opus ran, right up to the hoop, and then—swish—Opus veered to the right, ran around the hoop, and then turned back toward Frankie. “No, Opus!” Frankie said. “Not like that.”

  “He’s been doing that all afternoon. Just when I think he’s going to do it—boom! He goes off in the other direction.”

  This sounded like a challenge, and there were few things that Frankie liked more than a challenge. “Hmm,” she said. “Maybe if I were a little closer to the hoop.”

  They tried again with Frankie standing closer to the hoop. Opus ran and ran and… skidded right under the hoop.

  “No, Opus,” Maya moaned.

  Opus looked back at them with a confused expression on his face.

  “It’s okay,” Frankie said. “You’re a good dog.” She turned to Maya. “He just doesn’t know what we want him to do.”

  “Let’s show him, then!” Maya said with a giggle.

  Oh no. Frankie knew where this was going.

  “Come on, Frankie!” Maya called. “Go through the hoop!”

  “Woof!” Frankie said. She jogged up to the hoop and stepped through.

  “Good girl!” Maya said, and patted her on the head.

  Arf! Opus said.

  But when they called him through again, he just went around the girls. He sat down behind them. Arf!

  “Opus!” The girls laughed.

  Then Frankie snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it!” It really felt like a light bulb turning on when she got a good idea. Sometimes the light came on all at once, as if with a flick of a switch. Other times it was more like someone was turning up the light slowly, slowly, slowly. This idea came on all at once. “Hold the hoop on the ground,” she said. “Then he can just walk right through. Then you can slowly raise it up until he’s jumping through.”

  “Brilliant!” Maya said.

  “Brilliant” was just about Frankie’s favorite word.

  Opus, though, had other ideas. When he got to the hoop, he barked at it; then he took off on his sprint around and around in the yard.

  “I guess old dogs really can’t be taught new tricks,” Frankie said.

  “It was a great idea, though,” Maya told her.

  They watched Opus go around and around. Then, all of a sudden, he dashed toward the garden shed in the back corner of the yard. He pressed his nose into the ground.

  Arf-arf! Arf, arf, arf, arf, arf!

  “What is he barking at?” Frankie asked.

  “Oh, that’s our leprechaun hole,” Maya explained.

  Frankie laughed. Maya must be joking, she thought. Everyone knew there was no such thing as a leprechaun.

  CHAPTER 2 Wonder Wall

  MS. APPLETON ROCKED HERSELF IN the chair in the reading nook in the library. Frankie settled back against the risers, already feeling the sweet, dozy sensation that she got when Ms. Appleton read. Even when it was a funny story, Frankie still felt at peace when someone read aloud to her. It was her favorite part of the school day. Her favorite thing to do was invent, but listening to stories was pretty great too. They were like strawberry ice cream and cookie dough ice cream—both delicious.

  Frankie almost got distracted thinking about ice cream and how good a sundae would be. She could practically taste it!

  Then Ms. Appleton held the book up to her nose and gave it a good sniff. “Smells like adventure!” she announced. She leaned forward and gave her head a good shake, making her curls jump.

  She opened up to the first page of the book and read the title: The Wee Lad and the Not-So-Lucky Leprechaun. “This, my friends, is a fairy tale. And, like most fairy tales, it begins ‘Once upon a time.’ ”

  Frankie quite liked the story. The boy in the book wanted to catch the leprechaun to get its gold, but the leprechaun kept playing tricks on him. There was even a scene where the two of them got caught in a barrel and tumbled down the cliffs right into the ocean, where a whale scooped them up. The boy never got the leprechaun, of course, but it was a funny book all the same.

  When it was time to look for books to check out, Frankie said to Maya, “Too bad leprechauns aren’t real. I would like to find a pot of gold someday.”

  Maya’s eyebrows jumped up underneath her bangs.

  Ravi asked, “What would you do with all that gold?”

  “I could buy so many tools and materials. I could invent just about anything. I bet I could even figure out how to make a real, working hover board!” Frankie exclaimed.

  “They are real,” Maya said.

  “Hover boards?” Frankie asked. “There are some pretty close ones, but not a real, legit hover board.”

  “No,” Maya said. “Leprechauns. I told you. One lives under our shed. Or maybe it’s a gnome. We’re not quite sure.”

  Frankie felt her eyes go wide. “You were serious about that?” Frankie asked. “I thought you were joking.” Her best friend couldn’t possibly believe in mythical creatures!

  “Yes, I am serious. We have a leprechaun living in our yard.”

  Frankie shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. It’s probably an opossum or a skunk or something.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous,” Maya insisted. “Matt and I saw his footprints. Little feet, like humans have, but with only four toes.”

  “No way,” Frankie said.

  “Yes way,” Maya said. She led Frankie into the story area, where Ms. Appleton had left her book. Maya pointed to the label on the spine. “See, it has numbers on it.”

  Ms. Appleton had taught them that the nonfiction books in the library always had call numbers on them.

  Maya read out the numbers: “ ‘Three ninety-eight point two.’ ”

  “Are you looking for more books on leprechauns?” Ms. Appleton asked.

  Maya shook her head. “I’m proving to Frankie that leprechauns are real,” Maya said. “Because they’re in the nonfiction section.”

  Ms. Appleton smiled. “I’m afraid it’s not quite as simple as that. I guess I should have been clearer. There’s actually a Dewey decimal number for fiction. We just put leprechaun books in their own section to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for. That call number—three ninety-eight
point two—that’s for fairy tales.”

  “Ha!” Frankie said. “So they are not true.”

  “Well,” Ms. Appleton said, “I wouldn’t necessarily say that.”

  “So leprechauns are real?” Maya asked.

  “I wouldn’t say that, either.”

  “What would you say?”

  Ms. Appleton pointed to the big bulletin board in the library. The words “I wonder” were cut out, letter by letter, and stapled to the bright blue background. Kids could write things that they wondered about on slips of paper and stick them to the wall. Then, if you had time after doing the library activities, you could pick an “I wonder” and try to answer it. It could be your own wondering or someone else’s. Frankie had already answered two: I wonder why pumping on the swing makes you go higher and I wonder who invented the toilet. She knew that Luke had written the second one as a joke, but Ms. Appleton had taken it seriously, and so had Frankie.

  Now Ms. Appleton looked at Frankie and Maya. “I think it’s a great ‘I wonder,’ don’t you?”

  “I do,” Maya said. She took a black marker and wrote on a green square of paper in her neat handwriting: I wonder if leprechauns are real. She used a thumbtack to pin it to the bright blue paper.

  Before Frankie could say anything, Ms. Cupid, their teacher, asked them to check out their books and get ready to go. Frankie quickly found a book about internal combustion engines to check out.

  “I’m looking for a straight, quiet line,” Ms. Cupid said. Frankie zipped her lips. Sometimes Ms. Cupid chose a mystery walker, and if that person was quiet the entire walk back to class, they would get a special prize. Frankie had never been the mystery walker, but she desperately wanted to be. Or, she worried, maybe she had been, but she had been chatty and so she hadn’t gotten her prize. She didn’t mean to be chatty. She just had so much on her mind and so much to share.

  This time she was quiet the whole way.

  And of course Lila Jones was the mystery walker. Lila chose a sticker of a glittery mermaid with googly eyes that wiggled back and forth when Lila shook the sticker. Lila put it right into her pencil case, where no one else could see it.

  Frankie was fuming and had nearly forgotten all about leprechauns, but then she remembered the words on the paper—I wonder if leprechauns are real—and she knew right then that this was going to be the third wonder she solved.

  CHAPTER 3 Science to the Rescue

  ALL DAY LONG FRANKIE’S BRAIN spun. She felt like she had a washing machine in her head, stirring her thoughts back and forth and round and round. If leprechauns were real, she reasoned, surely someone would have seen one. Surely someone would have caught one by now.

  On the other hand, there were lots of things that people hadn’t understood at first, and then science had figured them out. Like the giant squid. When people first saw them in the ocean, people thought they were sea monsters or maybe mermen. Later, scientists identified them by their remains as real animals, but it wasn’t until decades later that someone got a picture of one. Maybe leprechauns were as hard to find as giant squid.

  Frankie thought about it as she ate her applesauce at lunch; she thought about it while Ms. Cupid read aloud; she thought about it while they were supposed to be working on their math facts.

  By the end of the day, her brain was exhausted.

  She took the bus to her father’s nursery. He had the place decorated for Saint Patrick’s Day, with pots of clover out front and a cutout of a leprechaun in the window. On his message board he’d slid in the letters to say:

  CAPTURE THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

  GET YOUR GREEN TODAY!

  While her father helped a customer pick out the best kind of roses for her garden, Frankie perched on a stool behind the counter. She was helping her dad by organizing seed packets. Her dad had once told her that seeds had been at the start of figuring out genetics—how parents pass along traits like hair color to their kids. Frankie guessed that genetics was another thing that people had wondered about until a scientist had stepped in and figured it out.

  A light bulb went off above her head. The light-bulb feeling was much more common for Frankie, and much more pleasant, than washing-machine brain. She was an inventor, which was a kind of scientist. She had a question in front of her, and she needed to use science to find the answer. She took out a piece of paper. Do leprakans exist? she wrote. Prove or disprove.

  Then she stared at the paper. She stared at it some more.

  Maybe this wasn’t going to be so easy after all.

  Her dad came back to the counter and saw her staring at the paper. “ ‘Do leprechauns exist?’ ” he read over her shoulder. “That’s an age-old question.”

  “I’m going to answer it,” Frankie said. “I think.”

  “What’s your hypothesis?” he asked.

  Frankie nodded. A hypothesis was like a prediction for how you thought an experiment would turn out—your educated guess about how things would work, before you investigated them. “My hypothesis is that they don’t exist,” Frankie said.

  “I see,” he said. “And how do you plan to test your hypothesis?”

  Frankie slumped. That was her exact problem. She didn’t know how to test her hypothesis. There were lots of ways to prove something did exist, but how did you prove that something didn’t exist?

  “Ah, I see,” her dad said. “Listen, I’ve known you a long time.”

  Frankie put her chin on the counter, but lifted her head to look at her dad. “My whole life, practically,” she said.

  “Your whole life exactly,” he responded. “And here’s what I know about you: When you have a problem, you figure it out. This one might seem like a tough challenge, but I have faith in you.” He reached out and tousled her curls.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said.

  He picked up a small potted fern. “Just don’t count on a trip to Ireland, okay?” he said with a laugh before making his way back out into the aisles of the greenhouse.

  Frankie knew that she couldn’t go all the way to Ireland, but her dad had given her a good idea. She should write down everything she knew about leprechauns. She took her little red inventing-and-ideas notebook out of her backpack. She started her list with where leprechauns lived:

  They come from Ireland

  They like green places-lots of trees and grass and stuff

  Frankie looked around. There weren’t many places that had more green than her dad’s nursery, and she had never in her life seen any evidence of a leprechaun there. That seemed like proof that they didn’t exist. Then again, Maya’s lawn was greener than just about any other lawn that Frankie had ever seen. So, if leprechauns did exist, Maya’s backyard would be a place that they’d like.

  Frankie kept writing. Most of the ideas she wrote down came from the book that Ms. Appleton had read, but others came from TV shows or other stories she had heard. She added idea after idea until she had almost the whole page filled up.

  They are small

  They wear green

  They like gold

  They are triky

  They are smart

  Most have beerds

  Job: fixing shoes

  Hobby: hiding gold at the end of the rainbow

  When she was done, she looked at her notes. Pretty impressive! She wasn’t sure if she had spelled all the words correctly, but that was okay. The problem was, she wasn’t any closer to figuring out how to prove that leprechauns didn’t exist. Proving they did exist would be easy. She would just need to catch one. But she was still stuck with the same question: How do you prove that something doesn’t exist?

  And then it hit her! If you could prove a leprechaun existed by catching one, then you proved one didn’t exist by not catching one. She had to make a trap. Not just a regular leprechaun trap. She had to make the most amazing leprechaun trap ever. And when that amazing, stupendous, magnificent leprechaun trap didn’t catch a single leprechaun, that would prove that they were not real.

 
CHAPTER 4 The Perfect Trap

  THE NEXT MORNING WAS A Saturday. Frankie got up early and went to her invention lab. It had been a closet, but her parents had helped her convert it into her own special space for designing and building her inventions. She rolled her chair out from under the desk, sat on it, and started slowly spinning herself around.

  Normally, when she invented, she was inventing to help someone. Like when she’d made a card holder to help Maya, who’d gotten nervous onstage for their magic show, or when Frankie had invented a way for Buttercup to feed herself. She liked being helpful. This was different. The trap was meant to catch the leprechaun. It was for a leprechaun, but it wasn’t meant to help it. Frankie would have felt a little bit bad about that if she had thought that leprechauns were real.

  When she invented for people, she thought about what that person liked and what that person needed. She took out her inventing-and-ideas notebook, opened to the list of things she knew about leprechauns, and read it over. Some of the details were more important than others. She circled the facts that she thought were most important.

  When she was designing the trap, she would need to think about these things and incorporate them into her design.

  Next she decided to think about what she knew about traps. She drew a picture of a box with a stick holding it up. The stick had a string attached to it. Under the box was a treat. She had seen this kind of trap in cartoons. When the bunny or whatever went to get the treat, the person pulled the string, and the stick fell down. The box fell too, and trapped the bunny. That was how the trap was supposed to work, anyway. Sometimes in the cartoons she watched, things got a little silly.

  From her drawing she knew that she needed three things for her trap. She wrote these down in her notebook as well:

  Some sort of bait to attract the leprechaun

  Something to set off the trap

  Something to make sure the leprechaun can’t get out once the trap goes off