Durinda's Dangers (2 page)

Annie Huit
Durinda Huit
Georgia Huit
Jackie Huit
Marcia Huit
Petal Huit
Rebecca Huit
Zinnia Huit
Will Simms
Mandy Stenko

P.S. For valentine-making purposes, your teacher's name is spelled
Mrs. McGillicuddy.
"

We blame Annie for what happened later. It was her job to see that all the Important Papers in the Tuesday red folders got read. Or perhaps we should blame the school secretary, for double-spacing between our names when single-spacing would have worked just fine—we are not, after all, stupid—meaning that the last few lines ran onto a second page, which we never saw.

Or maybe the real culprit was Love.

For during Will's speech about how people shouldn't favor the letter
T
and leave other letters out of things, eight hearts had gone
sproing!
in eight chests, and our eyes had filled with something as we looked at him.

And that something was love.

***

It was on the long bus ride home that we came up with our plan.

We didn't love riding the school bus. What we used to love was having Mommy drive us to school in the great big purple Hummer that she, being a scientist and also an outstanding inventor, had doctored so it was an environmentally sound vehicle. But Mommy was no longer around, and even though Annie had tricked Pete the mechanic into teaching her how to drive, she couldn't drive us to school every day, not even if she wore her Daddy disguise that she wore from time to time, because if she did then the People in Authority might catch on.

And that would be very bad.

But not everything in our lives was very bad, because now we were hatching a plan.

"I'm going to make Will the best valentine he's ever seen," Durinda announced.

"No, I am," said Annie.

"No, I am," said Georgia.

"No, I am," said Jackie.

"No, I am," said Marcia.

"No, I am," said Petal.

"No, I am," said Rebecca.

"No, I am," said Zinnia. Then she added, "Do you think he'll give us stupendous presents in return?"

We all glared at one another.

"Speaking of presents," Jackie suggested, "in addition to making valentines for Will, perhaps we should each buy him a special present too?"

But Durinda pointed out that Annie was the only one of us who knew how to use the checkbook and credit cards and forge Daddy's name in order to get money to pay for things.

"It wouldn't be fair," Durinda said. "Annie might only give each of us, say, five dollars to spend, while allowing herself far more. And how would we ever know?"

We all glared at Annie.

"No," Durinda said, "for this to be fair, we need to limit ourselves to each using her talents to create the best possible valentine for Will."

So that was our plan.

We were going to have a competition to see who could make the best valentine for Will.

So we could discover which one of us he loved best.

Once and for all.

CHAPTER TWO

We arrived home expecting to start on our valentines for Will right away.

What we hadn't planned on was arriving home to disaster.

"There's something wrong with the talking refrigerator!" Durinda called out to us from the kitchen, where she had gone with Jackie to make us a snack. Since Mommy had disappeared, it was Durinda's job to prepare our food.

We all raced in to see what she was talking about.

"Those look like drops of some sort of clear liquid. They've made a puddle on the floor in front of the talking refrigerator," Marcia observed. "There are so many of them!"

The talking refrigerator was one of Mommy's inventions. It told us when we were getting low on necessary food items, or even luxury food items, and it always encouraged us to eat more.

Durinda crouched in front of the talking refrigerator. Then she put one of her fingers into the puddle and raised that finger toward her tongue.

"Don't do it!" Zinnia shouted.

"It could have been left there by the ax murderer!" Petal shouted.

"Are you crazy?" Georgia wondered.

"It's her funeral." Rebecca harrumphed.

But it didn't matter what any of us shouted, wondered, or harrumphed, for Durinda at last touched her finger to her tongue. Then she tilted her head back, thinking.

"Tears," she decided at last. "These drops are salty. They taste like tears."

"Salty could be good right around now," Annie said. "I rather fancy a salty snack, if you could come up with a healthy one."

"Well, let's see what we've got," Durinda said, pulling open the door.

But when the door was fully opened, rather than seeing the lovely array of food we were accustomed to, we saw...

"Eek!" Durinda shouted. "Everything is melting!"

It was true.

All our food had little droplets of water on it, like you get when you take a cold peach from the crisper and put it somewhere warmer, like the counter.

And we smelled something foul right away too: the milk was starting to spoil.

"What is going on?" Durinda demanded. "And why isn't the refrigerator talking to us?"

She had a point.

Usually, by this time, the refrigerator would have said lots of things to us. But now? Nothing.

The talking refrigerator had gone silent.

Then we noticed more liquid dripping from the top freezer, and Durinda yanked open that door.

The freezer was melting.

And it wasn't
just
melting. When Durinda opened the door, a river of melted ice came flooding out at us.

We eight stood there, soaked, too shocked to say anything.

Even Georgia and Rebecca were shut up by this.

And then, into our stunned silence, entered a sound.

It was the sound of someone—or some
thing—
sobbing.

"I'm me-e-e-elting!" the talking refrigerator gasped out between sobs.

"What do you think is wrong with it?" Jackie asked, concerned.

"I'm not sure," Marcia said, "but it sounds depressed."

"What's wrong?" Durinda asked the talking refrigerator directly.

Since the kitchen was Durinda's province, the rest of us were content to let her take over the refrigeration interrogation.

"Carl is heartbroken!" the talking refrigerator said.

"Who is Carl?" Durinda asked, perplexed.

"Carl is ... is...
me!
" the talking refrigerator cried.

We all looked at one another:
Carl?

"Carl?" Jackie voiced all of our thoughts. "But I always thought the talking refrigerator was a girl!"

It was true. We had all thought that.

We shrugged our shoulders. Who knew?

"And why is, er,
Carl
heartbroken?" Durinda asked in a soothing tone.

"Because Carl is in love with Betty...
and Betty never even seems to notice Carl!
"

Betty, like Carl, was one of our mother's inventions. She was a black and gold robot who was supposed to make our life easier by cleaning, but Betty seemed to have gotten her job description all wrong.

As though to illustrate this, Betty came rolling through the room, used her pincer hands to throw a bag of dust rags in the air like so much confetti, and then rolled back out again.

And as though to prove Carl's point, she completely disregarded Carl when he shouted after her, "
Bet-ty!
" like some T-shirt-wearing maniac in the rain outside a building in the South or something.

"There, there, Carl," Durinda soothed, looking for the proper place to pat Carl. "It'll be all right."

"No, it won't!" Carl said. "Valentine's Day is coming! I don't even want to
live
, and I don't see how I can properly concentrate on keeping food cold if I can't have Betty!"

Apparently, the prospect of Valentine's Day had the whole world going bonkers.

"There, there," Durinda said again. "It'll all work out."

"But how?" Georgia demanded.

"We'll all starve!" Petal said. "First we became orphans, and now we're going to be starving orphans!"

"I'll bet Carl could win Betty's heart," Zinnia said, "if he bought her a really great present."

"I wonder if a new refrigerator is in our budget?" Annie wondered. "Perhaps I should just go look at the checkbook—"

"Don't. You. Dare." It was amazing to hear Durinda speak so harshly to Annie, but we supposed that having the talking refrigerator melt from love before your very eyes when your domain is the kitchen could be disturbing. "It'll all work out. No one will starve. Now, everyone except Jackie, shoo. I've got to figure out what to make for dinner, since we've wasted so much of the afternoon on love that snack time is long gone."

***

While Durinda and Jackie set about finding something to make for dinner that did not require foods that had been properly refrigerated, the rest of us set to work making valentines for Will. Durinda and Jackie would get their crack at the art supplies after they served us dinner.

We gathered together all the craft supplies we could find: construction paper, scissors, markers, glitter, feathers, sequins, paste. Of those items, Georgia loved the paste best; Rebecca loved the scissors—which she liked to run with—while Petal and Zinnia fought continually over the glitter, feathers, and sequins. Marcia was happy as long as she had a little bit of everything, and Annie was happy if we didn't kill one another and left her in peace.

You might think it strange that we could devote so much time to worrying about valentine competitions and the love life of a talking refrigerator when our parents were missing. Or dead. But you must realize: (1) our parents had been missing for more than a month; (2) we had no idea where to look for them; (3) it took much of our energy each day merely to survive—get the grocery shopping done, keep ourselves and our eight cats fed and cleaned, learn how to drive cars and pay bills, all while keeping the outside adult world from realizing that there were eight kids home alone; and so (4) it was impossible to remain sad and worried every second of the day.

So we cut, colored, glittered, and pasted little bits of feathers and sequins all over one another until it was time for Durinda to call us in to dinner.

After all our handy-dandy artwork, we were positively famished. Before dinner, we collected Daddy Sparky and Mommy Sally from the drawing room and set them up in the dining area. Daddy Sparky was a suit of armor. Mommy Sally was a dressmaker's dummy. Not long after Mommy and Daddy disappeared, or died, we dressed Sparky and Sally as our parents so that if nosy neighbors like the Wicket peeked in, they would think our parents were home. At mealtimes now, we liked to keep them in the room with us. It felt like having real parents, except they couldn't talk, which was sometimes a good feature for a parent to have.

As we settled at our places around the dining room table, after following Annie's instructions to wash our hands first, we were anticipating a satisfying meal. Perhaps it would be spaghetti and meatballs? Or maybe something truly spectacular, like that Thanksgiving-style dinner Durinda and Jackie threw together once for a celebration? It was all we could do to keep from rubbing our hands together in glee and salivating like dogs as Jackie held open the swinging doors for Durinda and Durinda entered with a silver platter piled high with...

"
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?
" Georgia fish-wifed as Durinda set the platter down in the middle of the table. "You expect us to eat
that?
For
dinner?
"

"I think I'm feeling a nut allergy coming on," Petal said worriedly.

"You don't have nut allergies," Annie pointed out.

"This is wretched," Rebecca said, picking up one of the sandwiches and then throwing it down again in disgust. "What were you two doing in the kitchen all this time? It doesn't take that long to make wretched sandwiches."

Jackie blushed. "We were working on sketching out plans for our own Valentine's Day cards for Will. We didn't want to fall behind."

"Do you have any idea," Durinda said, "how hard it is to keep this family fed every day? How much energy it takes? And do you have any idea how hard it is to find something to prepare that is safe and nutritious but doesn't require refrigeration? You're all just lucky I don't quit."