Boys Rock! (2 page)

Sucking on an orange Popsicle, he sat down on the glider beside Jake. Because both Mr. and Mrs. Hatford worked during the day, Peter’s three older brothers were responsible for him until their parents came home.

“What’s everyone doing?” Peter asked.

“Planning a newspaper,” said Jake. “Want to help?”

“Will I get my name in it?” Peter asked.

“Absolutely,” said Jake. “On the very first page.”

Well, if even Peter was going to be in on it, Wally decided, he would be too. This was probably one of the last things the Hatfords and the Malloys would do together. If he was going to be nice, it had better be now. If he was going to be polite, that meant starting today. If he was just going to get along, well … he could do that, too.

Two
Call from Jake

C
aroline perched in her father’s big chair and didn’t move a muscle. Her eyes were closed, her hands folded, and she sat very straight, shoulders not even touching the back of the chair. Her long brown ponytail came almost to her waist, but it didn’t move either. Not a fraction of an inch. She looked like a sculpture in an art museum.

When twelve-year-old Eddie walked into the room, apple in hand, Caroline said softly, “Eddie, did you sense anything just now?”

Eddie stopped chewing. “Huh?”

“Before you came into the room, did you sense that I was here? Do I have an aura or anything?”

“An
aroma
, you mean? Are you asking if you smell?”

“No, I was reading a book about famous actresses, and it said that some of them—like Greta Garbo—had
a certain aura about them. People could tell almost before they entered a room that she was in it, or that she had just left.”

“Probably her perfume,” said Eddie.

Caroline, who longed to be in the movies herself or to be an actress on Broadway, shook her head. “A good actress sends out vibrations,” she said.

“Well, don’t send any vibrations my way, Caroline,” her sister told her, plunking herself down on the couch. “I want a peaceful summer.”

Caroline sighed. It was hard being precocious. It was difficult enough to have skipped a grade and to have to go through school with kids a year older than you— Wally Hatford, to be precise—but even worse when your own family couldn’t understand what you were talking about.

She concentrated again on producing an aura. She imagined every cell on her scalp tingling at the approach of another person, every hair on her head giving off electricity. Perhaps if she hummed very softly—one long, low note—it would help people sense her aura before they ever entered the room.

“
Hmmmmm
, ”she hummed.

Beth, the middle sister, came into the living room just then. Not only did she not hear Caroline’s hum, she didn’t see Caroline’s feet and stumbled over them as she crossed the rug. Of course, Beth tripped a lot because she always had her nose stuck in a book. She and Eddie were as blond as Caroline was dark, and the two older girls often joked that Caroline must have been
found along the side of the road, because she didn’t resemble anyone else in the family.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering with your summer reading list,” Eddie said, looking at Beth. “I’m not bothering with mine because we probably won’t even be here in September.”

“But if Dad decides we’ll stay in Buckman, you’ll be in big trouble, Eddie,” Beth told her.

Eddie only shrugged. “We’ll know by August. If we stay, I’ll catch up on my reading then. Besides, the seventh graders here get credit for three books if they produce three newspapers on Buckman’s history. I’d rather do the newspaper.”

Caroline stopped humming and turned around in the armchair. “So why don’t you, Eddie, whether we go or stay? I’d like to help write a newspaper. That might be fun!”

Beth lowered the mystery book she was reading,
Cave of the Spider Women
. “Yeah, let’s do it, Eddie! I could write an article on the haunted houses of Buck-man,” she offered.

“
What
houses?” asked Eddie.

“I don’t know, but there have to be some! Buckman’s an old town, and all old towns have ghosts. Besides, if a newspaper’s not interesting, no one will read it. And that would make it interesting!”

Eddie wiggled one foot while she thought it over. Finally she began to smile. “Oh, what the heck, let’s do it. Let’s start a newspaper.”

Caroline clapped her hands.

“I get to be editor, of course,” Eddie added.

“Of course,” said Beth.

“Then what would
I
do?” asked Caroline. “Something interesting, Eddie.”

“Janitor?” Eddie teased.

“Something important!” Caroline demanded.

“I suppose you could write obituaries,” said Eddie.

“What’s that?”

“Little stories about people who have died,” said Beth.

“All right!” said Caroline. “Could I be like a reporter? Go around interviewing their relatives and everything?”

“Sure, if you can find any,” said Eddie. “Knock yourself out. But these have to be historical people, you know. They can’t just have died yesterday.”

At that very moment the phone rang, and Caroline went into the hall to answer.

“Hey!” came Jake’s voice. “Could I talk to Eddie or somebody?”

“
I’m
somebody!” said Caroline.

“I mean somebody normal,” said Jake. “Let me talk to Eddie.”

Caroline held out the phone. “Phone call for a normal person!” she called. “Eddie, it’s for you.”

Eddie swung her legs off the couch and ambled over.

“It’s Jake,” Caroline whispered to Beth, who had followed them out into the hall.

Eddie held the phone away from her ear as the girls always did when they talked to a Hatford. They wanted the others to hear.

“Hi,” Eddie said. “What’s up?”

“Josh and I were looking at our summer reading list, and we’ve decided to do the newspaper. We wondered if you guys were interested,” Jake told her. “You know, go in on it with us.”

“Why would we be interested when we might be moving back to Ohio?” said Eddie, winking at Beth and Caroline.

“It would be something to do,” said Jake.

“Who would do what?” asked Eddie.

“Josh says he’ll draw a cartoon and Wally’s going to be distributor and take the papers around,” Jake said.

“That figures,” said Eddie. “What about you?”

“Editor, of course,” said Jake.

“Yeah?” said Eddie. “Who elected
you
editor?”

“Well,
somebodys
got to be in charge. What would you like to do for the paper?”

“I don’t know,” said Eddie. “Beth and Caroline might go along with it, but I’m not sure I want to be a part of this.”

“Why not?” said Jake.

“Because all the good jobs are taken.”

“No way,” said Jake. “There are plenty of things you could do.”

“If you get to be editor, then can I choose something else? Any job at all?” Eddie asked.

“Sure!” said Jake.

“Positive?”

“Yeah! Just name it. What do you want to be?” Jake asked.

“Editor in chief,” said Eddie.

Three
Under the Floorboards

T
here was a cloudburst just after dinner, and Wally went back out onto the porch to watch. He loved being on the porch during a hard rain, water cascading out the downspouts, the air thick with a damp-earth smell.

He liked to figure things out, and once the rain had stopped, he wanted to watch water drip through a crack in the gutter overhead. As less and less water ran down the shingles and into the gutters, the drips came farther and farther apart. Wally was counting the seconds between drops. “One … two …. three …. four …… five ……. ”

Out came Jake and Josh and Peter. Just once in his life, Wally thought, he would like to enjoy a rain or an anthill or a spiderweb without interruption. He would like to count drops or drips or ants or all the separate
sections of a spiderweb without one of his three brothers barging in to ask, “What are you
doing
, Wally?”

Wally was on the porch floor, actually, lying on his back, trying to see exactly where in the gutter the drops were leaking out.

“Counting,” said Wally, and got up, crawling over to the steps again. No one ever understood when he tried to explain things to them, so he wasn’t going to try.

“Well, we’ve got problems,” said Jake. “Eddie’s going to be editor in chief, so she gets to run the whole show.”

Wally looked up, surprised. “How did
that
happen?”

“She’s tricky, that’s what! But here’s our ace in the hole, here’s what hotshot Eddie never thought about: if she asks any one of us to do something we don’t like— something really awful—it’s all for one and one for all. We’re in this together, and we strike. If the workers on a newspaper go on strike, it means no newspaper, unless the editor in chief does it all herself.”

“What if she doesn’t care?” said Wally. “What if she figures she won’t even
be
here when September comes and you have to turn in your summer reading reports?”

“She’ll care,” Josh put in, “because I’m going to make posters and put them all over town announcing the newspaper.
The Hatford Herald
, the signs will read.
Coming July Sixteenth! Eddie Malloy, Editor in Chief
.”

“The
Hatford Herald
?” asked Wally in amazement. “Did Eddie agree to that?”

“Nope,” said Jake. “She doesn’t even know. But by the time the posters are up all over Buckman, with her
on the masthead, she’ll have to go along with it. If she tells people she never agreed to the name, it will look as though she’s not in charge. And Eddie could never stand for that.”

“Anyway,” said Josh, “as the new distributor, would you go down to the bookstore and ask Mr. Oldaker if we can leave a pile of newspapers in his store each week for people to pick up? You know … explain the whole thing to him. Turn on the
charm
, Wally.”

One … two …. three…. four…… five……. six……. seven………The water drops were really slowing down now. Wally wanted to see how long it would take after the rain had quit for the water in the gutter to stop dripping altogether. This always happened. If there was something fun to do, he didn’t get to do it. But if there was work or a walk or a mess or a fuss to deal with, guess who got stuck?

He didn’t have any charm, and the bookstore probably didn’t have any room for stacks of homemade newspapers that kids brought in. What if twenty other kids who were entering seventh grade decided to make one? That was why someone had to go talk to Mike Oldaker in person. That was why someone had to turn on the charm. That was why Wally had to give up an interesting evening on the porch to try out some charm he didn’t have on a bookstore owner who didn’t have any space.

He thought of telling the twins that he’d changed his mind. He didn’t want to be part of this newspaper after all. But if his brothers were busy for the rest of the
month looking up words in the dictionary and writing stories, guess who Dad would choose to clean out the shed? If Jake and Josh were going back and forth to the library to find historical stuff, guess who Mom would pick to mow the grass? Why wasn’t counting drips from a rain gutter as important as drawing a comic strip? Wally wanted to know.

“All right,” he said, his voice flat. “I’ll go.”

While Jake and Josh and Peter went upstairs to play computer games, Wally went down the steps and started toward the business district. The Buckman River, to his left, seemed to have no more energy than Wally did. Despite the earlier rain, it flowed so slowly that it appeared hardly to be moving at all. Everything seemed to have come to a standstill this summer, one of the hottest on record.

Lights shone now along College Avenue, however, and more people were out and about now that the air was a little cooler. Some of the shops stayed open till seven or eight or nine o’clock, and as Wally turned onto Main Street, he was sort of glad he had come. At least he could look over the comic books while he was in the bookstore.

When he came to Oldakers’, he had to walk up one row of books and down another before he found Mike Oldaker, the owner, who was unloading a box of mystery books and putting them on a shelf.