Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (23 page)

“Yes, I bet you do,” she said. “I had a talk with your parents. It looks like they’ll be attending a seminar.”

“That’s fantastic!” I yelled. “They’ve needed mediation for a while. You’d be great.”

“No,” she interrupted. “It’s a financial seminar. Your aunt Stella suggested it, and I encouraged the idea.”

“That’s perfect. Our Visa bill is huge. We’ve been in the hole for months!”

Mrs. Moses shook her head.

“Camille, I don’t know how things are going to turn out. No one does,” she said. “I just want you to know that you can always come and talk to me. I see this a lot.” While she spoke, she put her hand on my shoulder and softly squeezed it. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re in this alone. You’re not. And I don’t want you to feel like you’re in the middle. These are your parents’ problems, not yours.” The sun was behind Mrs. Moses’s head. Her poofy blond hair held its light. She looked like an angel. Except she didn’t have any wings. In fact, her arms were very skinny. Her legs too. Mrs. Moses was one of the few people I’d met in my life who I thought should eat more.

Mrs. Moses pulled me closer to her and gave me a hug. Some of my makeup stuck to her pale yellow skirt and I felt a little bit bad about that.

“Don’t worry about it. I own spot remover,” she said. “By the way, it looks like someone else wants to talk to you.”

When I turned around, I saw a very worried-looking, feathery-headed Polly.

“I just wanted to make sure that you were okay,” she said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be inside?” I asked.

“Once we disembark from the bus, we can pretty much do what we want until we harvest the garden.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I like what you did. It was nice seeing you stand up for the cats.”

“Yeah.”

After she said the word
cats
, I could tell that we were both thinking about Checkers. Polly stood there and waited for a little bit. But I didn’t say anything else. And she didn’t say anything else. It was pretty awkward. Then she turned around and ran back toward the gymnasium. I knew that I should call after her.

Even though I didn’t think it could happen, Polly Clausen had become my very good friend. But she had my cat. It wasn’t fair. And as bad as I felt about her father dying, I still felt like she should give Checkers back to me. It was a horrible situation. And I didn’t want to tell Mrs. Moses about it because I was afraid
that she’d make the same suggestion that she gave to me and Penny about the rock and offer to cut Checkers in half for us. I didn’t want that to happen, but I had to do something. So I picked up that stupid stick and threw it at Polly.

“Camille,” Mrs. Moses said.

“I’m just trying to slow her down,” I said, smiling. The stick bounced off Polly’s shoe and she stopped.

“I miss Checkers,” I said, running up to her.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Polly said, taking tiny bites of her bottom lip. “My grandma has a time-share in Florida. She gets it part of the time, and other people get it part of the time.”

I thought that sending Checkers to live in Florida with Polly’s grandma was a lousy idea.

“Maybe we could time-share Orca,” she said. “I could have her part of the time and you could have her part of the time.”

“I want to call her Checkers,” I said. “Orca isn’t her name.”

“Why don’t you call her Checkers,” she said, “and I’ll call her Orca.” She was grinning so wide that I could see her upper gums. Usually this sort of thing would gross me out. But her gums looked healthy and pink and didn’t bother me at all.

Looking at Polly and her healthy gums, I wanted to
agree. But I was worried that Checkers might develop a multiple-personality disorder. People on my mom’s daytime talk shows were always developing them.

“Okay,” I finally said. “That sounds fair.” Polly gave me a hug. I turned to run off, but I tripped over another stupid stick! I couldn’t believe it. It was like I was living in a land of tripping sticks.

“Shoot,” I said. “I can’t believe I fell down again.”

“Gracie’s fall was much worse,” Polly said. “She’s still in there moaning.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t even talking about that one.” I stood up and brushed grass off my unitard. (Black is a terrible color to wear if you fall down a lot, because it shows everything.) Then I picked up one of those tripping sticks and I was going to throw it, but instead I just held it. “Sometimes, I feel like there’s something really wrong with me.”

Polly took the stick out of my hands.

“I don’t think anything is really wrong with you,” she said.

“But I always fall down,” I said.

“And you always get back up. That’s what I like about you. You’re never on the ground for more than a minute.”

Suddenly, I felt a little bit better.

“That’s true,” I said. “I always get back up. And a
lot of the time, unless I’ve suffered a contusion, I’m on the ground for a lot less than a minute.”

“You’re right,” Polly said.

I smiled at her. She waved goodbye and I ran toward my parents in the parking lot. I was ready to feel happy. But then I saw my father pop the hood of his pickup. This was bad. Car problems made him blow up.

I frowned. Five minutes earlier, I had experienced a really good miracle. Now, I had to face more problems. Like commercials that I didn’t want to see, they just kept coming.

Chapter 34
The Awful Truth

L
uckily, my dad didn’t blow up. He’d forgotten to turn his lights off and he’d run down his battery.

“Why don’t I drive us all home and we can take care of this tomorrow?” my mother said.

My dad agreed and we all piled into her Chevy. I thought they were already making progress, because they didn’t fight over who would drive. Normally, I liked to sit behind my mom, because she left me more legroom. My dad liked to have his seat rolled back
pretty far and he reclined it so much that it looked like he was in a dentist chair.

When I got into the backseat, I thought they might think I was picking sides, so I sat exactly in the middle. I dug deep into the seat crack to find the seat-belt buckle. I also discovered a bendy French fry and a raisin. Not a lot of people sat in the middle. And I think the reason not a lot of people sat in the middle was because there was an uncomfortable hump. I decided to endure the hump. Home was only twenty minutes away.

I think that when you’re uncomfortable, it’s easier to make confessions. Because all of a sudden, for no real reason at all, I started to spill the beans about everything. I told my parents about falling underneath the bus, pretending to be a dingo, calling 911, almost kicking Officer Peacock, sitting underneath the hornet, Tony Maboney poking me, digging up Muffin with Nina, my international calling card, hating Japan, and killing the resurrected fish. I also told them about all the evil things I wanted to do to Tony and I asked them if they knew where to buy fish guts. Then I told them that I’d found Checkers.

“I wasn’t going to bring this up, Mom. I was going to try to move on. But I can’t. I’m stuck. I loved Checkers. How could you give her away?”

My mother almost swerved off the road.

“I didn’t give your cat away,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“Camille, I need to tell you something,” my father said. He reached into the backseat and put his hand on my knee. “It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. But I knew that we could get you another cat. Polly had become very attached to Checkers, and her father had died so recently. The cat was a special link between them. Life isn’t fair, Camille. It’s just not, and so I gave Polly your cat.”

“You lied to me?” I asked.

I knew that I lied to my father, but I had no idea he lied back.

“And you lied to
me
?” my mother asked.

Then it was sort of quiet. And all three of us just sat there for a minute and thought about what enormous liars we’d been this year. Then my mother broke the silence.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “We gave that cat a funeral. We bought two more cats to replace that cat. It’s like we’re playing God with cats! Talk about bad kismet!”

And even though I should have been very mad, in the spirit of forgiveness and giving everything, including doomed cats, second chances, I decided to let this go. It seemed like the fair thing to do.

“Luckily, Polly and I have worked out a cat time-share,” I said.

I could only see the back of their heads, but I was sure that both of my parents were smiling. Then I told them about how Polly and I worked this out on our own, and didn’t even need Mrs. Moses’s help. I told them about the pink rock and my fear that Mrs. Moses would want to cut Checkers in half.

“That Mrs. Moses is one smart cookie,” my mother said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m aware of that.”

“So why do you hate Japan?” asked my father.

Thinking about Sally and Japan and my international calling card with only three minutes left made me so mad I almost kicked the back of my dad’s seat.

“It’s not good to hate another country,” said my mother.

“I hate Japan because Sally moved there and she never wrote me or sent me my kimono.”

“Camille,” my mother said, “I just got three letters today. She put the wrong zip code on them. They’ve been in postal limbo.”

I didn’t know where postal limbo was, but I thought it was rotten that they kept mail that didn’t belong to them. My father reached into my mother’s purse and handed me the letters. They were in baby blue envelopes and had funny-looking stamps on
them. Sally had dotted my name with a heart over the
i
in
Camille
. This made me very happy.

As we drove home, I peeked at one of the letters and saw that Sally had written down her e-mail address. I didn’t know she had one of those. I guess her parents changed their rules about computers. This was a thrilling development. I held my letters and took several deep breaths. Reading in cars made me feel like puking. I decided to stop peeking and read the letters when I got home. I didn’t think Sally had stuffed a kimono in one of them, but maybe she’d sent me a coupon or something.

It had been a long day.

“Let’s pull over here,” my mother said, turning into a parking lot by a grocery store we’d never been to before.

“Why?” my father asked.

“They make great pepperoni pizza,” my mother said, reaching over and touching his knee.

“Pepperoni pizza,” I said, closing my eyes and smiling.

“Look,” my father said. “Right next door. There’s Dan’s Fish Shack. I bet they have fish guts.”

I opened my eyes. In front of me, a giant plaster slice of pizza stood on top of a small white building. Next to it, a large green fish attached to a metal pole
swam in the air. I tucked my hair back behind my ears and giggled.

“Fish guts,” I said.

My mom turned off the car and we opened our doors. The air outside smelled just like a pepperoni pizza. I took a deep breath. That’s when I caught a whiff of the fish guts. But that’s life. Sometimes you get pizza. Sometimes you get fish guts. Sometimes you get both at the same time. I stepped out of the car and smiled. A cloud moved over the sun, darkening the day. But I didn’t care. My mother took one hand and my father took the other. And at last the world felt a little more fair.

A Little Bit About the Author…

Kristen Tracy
grew up in a small town in Idaho, where she could see the Grand Tetons from her house (though it wasn’t a very good view). She’s lived in many places since then, including Los Angeles; Provo, Utah; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and Montpelier, Vermont. She currently resides in San Francisco, where she writes young adult and middle-grade novels, to-do lists, and poems. She has a lot of degrees, including a PhD in English.

The opening scene of this book was inspired by an actual event in Kristen Tracy’s eventful elementary school years.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.

Copyright © 2009 by Kristen Tracy

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc
.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tracy, Kristen
.
Camille McPhee fell under the bus / Kristen Tracy. – 1st ed
.
p. cm
.
Summary: Ten-year-old Camille McPhee relates the ups and downs of her fourth-grade year at her Idaho elementary school as she tries to adjust to the absence of her best friend, maintain control of her low blood sugar, cope with the intensifying conflict between her parents, and understand the importance of honesty and fairness.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89098-7
[1. Conduct of life–Fiction. 2. Schools–Fiction
.
3. Friendship–Fiction.     
  4. Family problems–Fiction. 5. Idaho–Fiction.] I. Title
.
PZ7.T68295Cam 2009
[Fic]-dc22          
2008024903

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