Diana fidgeted. Her foot jumped up and down.
The pencil in her right hand slapped repeatedly against her left hand.
She tried not to show how nervous she was, but she couldn't help it.
A small hurricane was brewing inside, anxiously waiting to be unleashed,
and it would be five more minutes before the bell rang! It was always hard waiting for school to end, but today was
worse than ever.
Ms. Ormond
kept droning on about English grammar, and Diana wondered how the woman did it. How did she stay awake? "...so direct objects are
influenced in some way by the verb. You
see class, you must choose your words carefully because..."
The boy sitting behind Diana, the class clown, suddenly jumped to his
feet. "Because words have
power!"
Diana burst out laughing along with everyone else, until Ms. Ormond's
suspicious gaze flickered her way and she pushed the laugh down inside with the
rest of the hurricane. Her foot
tapped a little faster and her shoulders started to fidget too. If the bell didn't ring soon, she would explode!
BRRIIINNGGG!!!!!
Yes! The room erupted into
motion as 35 students jumped from their seats and sprang for the door.
Like whipped cream through a nozzle, the first ones were forced through
the door by the pressure building up behind them, and held back by the pressure
of those already in the hall. It
seemed that not only Diana, but the whole school, was in the midst of a
carefully controlled explosion.
She raced through the hallway, and had almost made it to the exit, when a
large hand grabbed her arm. "Hey,
Diana," Ripley Jones said, "what's the rush?"
Diana turned and looked into the face of the most feared boy in the school.
He was big; he was bad; and he was mean.
"Get your hand off me, you big jerk," she said, trying to shake
her arm free.
Ripley just
laughed. "Where's your
brother, Diana banana?"
"You better let me go, or I'll get my other brother, Bobby, after
you."
"Oh! Oh! I'm so scared!"
Oh, how she hated that boy, and he was hurting her too. "Leave me alone!"
The other boys were laughing, enjoying her helplessness and Ripley's stupendous
idiocy, so Diana did the only thing she could think of, kicking the big bully
really hard on the shin. He let go
of her arm and she ran. "Tell
your brother, Eric, I'm after him, Diana! You
hear me!" Ripley's voice died
out in the noise of the hall, and Diana ran for the door.
She spotted her mother right away and waved.
Mom was talking on her cell phone and didn't see Diana until she opened
the door of the car. Then she
smiled and said, "Hi, sweetie. How
was school?...Yes, Jack, I heard you. I
know that's what I said..."
Diana loved her mother, and she knew her mother loved her. She just didn't understand why her mother never seemed to
listen to the answer to that question. Every
day Mom asked how was school, but no matter what Diana answered, her mother
said, "that's good," or something like that, and drove away.
Adults were a mystery. A
little scary too. She did not ever
want to be one.
Eric, her twin brother, was unusually quiet this afternoon. He sat in the back of the car pointedly not speaking, and
Diana wondered if they had had a fight or something that she had forgotten.
Turning in the front seat, she looked at him.
"Ripley Jones is after you."
He just shrugged as if he didn't care.
She smiled. He didn't smile
back. "What?" she cried,
"What's the matter with you?"
Suddenly, his face split with his familiar crooked grin, and he held a toad up
and waved it in front of her face. "Gotcha!"
Diana rolled her eyes and turned around.
Brothers were such a pain.
At home, Diana rushed into the house, dropping her backpack by the door.
She was already in her room pulling out her overnight bag when her mother
called her. "Diana, come back
down here this minute and put your books away.
I've told you a million times that I will not live in a messy house.
Diana! Do you hear me?"
"Yes, Mom," Diana said, resigned to the inevitable. She knew that if she tried to postpone putting the books
away, her mother would keep interrupting her until she did it. It would save a
lot of trouble to do it right away, so Diana went back down the stairs, and
picked up her backpack.
"Clean your room and pack for this weekend," her mother ordered as
Diana hurried back up the stairs. "And
don't take too much, Diana. We'll
only be there for two days."
As if she didn't know that. Why did
her mother always talk to her as if she were stupid or something? Oh well,
packing her overnight bag would be fun anyway.
She needed some sweaters because the nights would be cool.
It was only June after all, not quite summer in New York State, and
upstate New York would be even cooler than Long Island where Diana lived.
Every year, since she was little, she and her family had gone camping up at the
lake. Usually, they went for a week
or two, and Dad had promised that they would take a long vacation at the end of
the summer when he had more time. For
right now, though, they had to be satisfied with just a weekend.
There! Her overnight bag was
packed. She was ready to go.
She picked it up, carried it downstairs, and left it by the front door.
"Mom," she called out, "when are we leaving?"
"As soon as your father comes home," her mother replied.
Diana followed her voice and found her in the kitchen.
"When is he coming home?" she asked.
"Oh, he should be home about five or six.
He had a meeting with the Listers."
"I guess I'll go watch TV for awhile."
Diana hated waiting, but waiting seemed to be what she was destined to do this
afternoon. Why didn't Dad get home
so they could leave? Maybe she
should go outside and find her brothers. At
least, they would keep her occupied for awhile.
Eric and Teddy were crawling through the bushes, trying to hide from another
boy, that kid from down the block, Scott. Diana
called him Snot, because she couldn't stand him.
Ugh. She didn't want to play
with them. Walking through the
yard, she sat down in her swing and lazily let it drift back and forth.
There was no fence between her yard and the next door neighbors', and
Penny, the girl next door, was sitting on her back porch.
"Hey Penny," she called out, "What are you doing?"
Penny didn't respond. Well,
that was typical. Penny was very
quiet and sometimes didn't answer people when they talked to her. She was two
years older than Diana and really pretty with long blond hair, but Diana guessed
she wasn't that happy being that she lived with her grandmother instead of her
mom and dad.
Penny was very serious. She was
always alone and usually reading a book, and today was no different.
Diana got up and walked over there.
"What are you reading," she asked.
At first Penny didn't even look up, but Diana just kept talking.
"We're going camping this weekend."
Penny lifted her eyes from the page. "I
hate camping."
"I love camping. We go out on
a boat and swimming and my Dad catches fish and we sing songs around the
campfire. I can't wait."
"It's too cold to go swimming," Penny stated, looking down at her
book.
"Why are you always reading?"
"I like to read."
"Do you want to do something?"
"Would you just leave me alone!"
Diana had a pretty thick skin--you had to when you have three brothers--so she
wasn't bothered by Penny's remark. "Don't
you like me?" she asked. "I
like you," Diana said. "What
happened to your mother and father?"
"What do you think happened to them?"
"I don't know...I..."
Just then a stream of water hit Penny squarely on the cheek, and the three boys,
Eric, Teddy and Scott, jumped out of the bushes hysterical with laughter.
"Hey Penny, what kind of name is that?"
Scott yelled.
"Yeah, Penny. You related to
dollar Bill?" Eric whooped.
He thought he was so funny. Diana
jumped up and screamed at her brothers. They
didn't often listen to her, but sometimes her voice got a dangerous edge to it
like it had now, and they knew that they'd better disappear or their goose'd be
cooked. "Get out of here, you
stupid boys!" she yelled. "Leave
her alone!"
No one was more shocked than Diana at her reaction, not even Penny.
"Don't pay any attention to them.
They're just stupid. My mom
says that someday I'll like boys, but I really doubt it.
Not with three brothers."
Penny looked at her thoughtfully. "All
the boys tease me. They think I'm
weird. I am a little weird I
guess."
"So what? Nobody's really the
same as anybody else. They're all
just pretending to be the same so they won't be alone."
"Who told you that?" Penny
wanted to know.
"My father."
"I have to go in now," Penny said, and taking her book, she sprang to
her feet and opened the door. Diana
started to ask her to stay, but the door was already closing and then it was too
late. Oh well, Diana thought, maybe
next time. Bounding off the porch
she raced back into her own yard.
Inside the house, nothing had changed. Dad
still wasn't home. Diana opened the
refrigerator to get some ice cream, and was just putting the spoon in her mouth
when her big brother, Bobby, came up behind her and clapped his hands together.
It sounded like a rifle shot. She
jumped. "Bobby!
Don't do that!"
"Hey Cat, you ready to go camping?"
He always called her Cat because when she was a baby and her Dad had
called her kitten, he'd disagreed, saying that she was far too tough to be
anybody's kitten. Diana, he said,
had claws, and she was his little Cat.
"Everybody's ready. We're just
waiting for Daddy to get home."
"You know we won't be leaving here till after dark."
"No. Mommy said we'd leave
about five or six."
"Trust me, Cat, it won't be until eight or nine."
Diana groaned and flopped into a chair. "Don't
worry," Bobby said, now that he'd made her worry, "we'll get
there."
