Rebel McKenzie

• One: Never Wear Seven Pairs of Underpants
  
• Two: Doublewide, the Wonder Cat
  
• Three: The Bully Wore Ankle Socks
  
• Four: Bambi Lovering's Expert Beauty Tips
  
• Five: Better-Off-Dead Pest Control and Bridal Consignment
  
• Six: Stealing the Deal
  
• Seven: The Marriage Turtle of Terrapin Thicket
  
• Eight: Kissy
  
• Nine: Christmas Lights in July
  
• Ten: Friday Night's Dream
  
• Eleven: Lunch with God
  
• Twelve: The Great Wiglet Escapade
  
• Thirteen: The Ten-Pound Three-Ounce Baby
  
• Fourteen: Dobulewide Seeks His Fortune
  
• Fifteen: The Bump Road
  
• Sixteen: The Guessing Man
  
• Seventeen: Bambi the Second
  
• Eighteen: Dryer Sheet Curls and Vaseline Teeth
  
• Nineteen: An Unexpected Contestant
  
• Twenty: The Return of Job
  
• Acknowledgments
  

For my sister patricia, hot dog spaghetti chef and hairdresser extraordinaire


C
onvicts can spot a runaway right off the stick. I found that out too late.

I was trudging down Coolbrook Road, a big fat lie of a name if there ever was one. The brook was invisible, unless you counted the dried-up gulley running alongside. And I would have had to catch on fire first to cool off.

It was late afternoon. I'd missed the stupid once-a-day Greyhound by hours, but staggered on before vultures circled. A five-hundred-degree sun sizzled overhead. I was so thirsty, the back of my throat felt peeled, like paint off an old barn. I would have killed—absolutely
killed
—for a blueberry Slurpee.

“Runnin' away, girlie?” said a soft voice. I looked up.

A man hefted a shovelful of leaves and dirt. He wore a navy blue jumpsuit with a loose orange vest, like a highway worker.

“I run off oncet.” He grinned, showing crooked dark-brown teeth. “See where it got me. Cleanin' ditches with a bunch of jailbirds.”

Down the road, men in the same outfits scraped leaves and trash out of the gulley. A guard with a rifle leaned against the fender of a white bus with grilled windows.

My heart bumped. I had walked smack into a road gang.

“I'm not running away,” I said, only partly lying. “I'm…out for a walk.”

“Wearin' half your clothes? You look swolled up like a tick.”

It was true I had on seven pairs of underwear, four pairs of shorts, and five T-shirts, another reason I was about to spontaneously combust. The rest of my earthly possessions were crammed in the big straw purse slung over my shoulder.

“You shouldn't make fun of chubby people,” I said, sounding offended. “What did you do to land in jail? Rob a bank?”

“Your face is red as a pepper pod, and I bet you got blisters the size of cow pies in them flimsy tennis shoes. You're a runaway, all right.”

How did he know so much?

All morning I had cleverly snuck down back roads, figuring the police would patrol the main highway. I stopped only once after crossing the old Bull Run Bridge, to dip my sore feet in the river. The water was muddy and warm as a birdbath. When I pulled my feet out, dozens of tiny black suckers clung to my ankles.

I smacked the leeches off, trying not to faint from sheer gross-outedness. Then I slipped my sweaty sneakers back on and hobbled down the road.

“Take my advice,” the convict said. “Go home and quit worryin' your mama.”

“I'm not running
away
,” I said to set him straight. “I'm going
to
someplace.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I signed up for the Ice Age Kids' Dig in Saltville, and my mother said, ‘We'll see.' Sometimes her ‘we'll sees' actually mean yes.” I shifted my purse to the other shoulder. “But our fridge croaked, and Mama said
our
ice age problem was more important and she didn't have the money to send me.”

“So you're goin' anyways. Do you know how far Saltville is? Clear on the edge of yonder.”

“I was going to take the Greyhound from Red Onion with the rest of my birthday money.” Ten dollars should buy my ticket, I figured. “But I missed the bus.”

“It's a fair piece from Frog Level to Red Onion. A good eight miles.”

“I have work to do,” I said. “I'm a paleontologist.”

“A what?” The convict leaned on his shovel.

“A scientist who ‘specializes in reading the record of past life in rocks,'” I quoted from
The How and Why Wonder Book of Prehistoric Mammals
. “‘Understanding the past is crucial to understanding the present.'”

The convict scratched his nose. “I reckon.”

Just then the guard glanced in our direction and gripped his rifle.

“Skeeter!” the guard barked. “No talking to civilians! You, girl, get a move on.”

Skeeter dropped into the ditch. “Bet you're nabbed within the hour.”

“Bet I'm not,” I said. “I've dodged the cops all day.”

“Twenty bucks?”

“You're on!” I leaned over the ditch. “How will I know where to find you? To collect my money?”

He grinned up at me. “You can send
my
money to Red Onion Correctional Unit. Eighteen hundred Ray of Hope Lane. I won't be goin' nowhere soon.”

I hitched up my purse and headed down the road. The guard gave me hard eyes as I sidled by.

“Visiting my grandma,” I said, making out I was Little Red Riding Hood. “You have a nice day, now.”

Skeeter won the bet.

A half-dead fly bumbled behind my Venetian blinds. I was flat on my back in bed, my knees propped on a pillow so my heels wouldn't touch the mattress. Mid-afternoon sun sifted through the blinds. I lay still as a lizard, with Tusky, my faithful stuffed mammoth, at my side. I didn't intend to ever move again.

My door opened. I glared at the intruder. “Doesn't anyone ever
knock
?”

Mama bustled in. “Don't take that tone with me, missy. I didn't tell you to run off and get your feet in this sorry state.”

The policeman alerted by that blabbermouth convict guard had picked me up and brought me home three days ago. Mama had shrieked at the sight of my blood-caked tennis shoes. I soaked my feet in the tub while she gently tweezed gravel from my blisters. Then we went to the doctor. He prescribed a special ointment and antibiotics.

Mama pried one corner of the bandage from my right foot. “The infection looks better already. But you were an inch away from gangrene, you know that?” She picked up the tube of ointment on my dresser.

“You remind me every five minutes.” I winced as she applied the ointment.

“The doctor says you'll have scars. And forget about closed-back shoes.” She smoothed a new bandage over each heel.

“Who cares about shoes? Who cares about anything?”

My whole summer was ruined. Mama and Daddy had grounded me the rest of my born days for worrying them to a frazzle. I would never go on a field dig with real paleontologists or eat Bison Bacon (not real bison) and Ground Sloth Gravy (not real ground sloth) or listen to stories about the Ice Age around a campfire.

I wanted to excavate a woolly mammoth skeleton and stake my place in paleontology history. I'd be famous, like that English girl who found a dinosaur skeleton in a cliff a long time ago. Instead I was stuck in podunky Frog Level, doomed to wear bedroom slippers until I graduated from college.

Mama plucked bandage wrappers from the chenille counterpane. “You did this to yourself, Rebel. If you had told us you wanted to go to camp that bad, we would have worked something out.”

“I
did
tell you! But the new refrigerator was more important! Everything is more important than me!” Tears stung my eyes.

She pressed the back of her hand against my forehead like she had when I was a little kid. “No fever. You've been cooped up in this room too long. Come on out.”

“Don't feel like it.”

She tidied my dresser. “I'm fixing potato soup and corn fritters. Your favorites.”

“Not hungry.”

With a sigh, Mama left, cracking the door open.

The brochure for the Kids' Dig was thumbtacked to the bulletin board over my dresser. The picture showed excited-looking kids tucking into Paleo Pancakes and Mastodon Sausage, stoking up before a day in the field.

I'd miss the June Kids' Dig. No chance of getting to the August one, either. I might as well be trapped in the blue-gray clay with the Saltville Ice Age animals.

The fly threw itself futilely at the window. I fell asleep, my face buried in Tusky's worn fur.

“She pulled this stunt just to get attention.”

A familiar voice woke me up.

“Now she's laying in there like the Queen of Sheba so you can wait on her.”

My mother's voice drifted from the living room. “Rebel is high-strung. Both you girls are. I don't know why I didn't have boys. They aren't nearly as worrisome.”

“I never caused you half the trouble Rebel does, and you threatened to send
me
to reform school. One time you even got my suitcase down from the attic, remember? Maybe Rebel needs a dose of reform school.”

I sat up. The person who wanted Mama to ship me away was my older sister. I slipped off the rumpled counterpane and limped into the living room.

Lynette sat on the sofa across from Mama, twisting a piece of her blond hair. Her orange lipstick and fingernail and toenail polish matched her miniskirt. She looked like an ad for Florida orange juice.

Pasted by her side was a spindly-legged boy with cowlicky brown hair and a narrow, ferret face. His skin was so pale, I could see veins pulsing in his temples. He put me in mind of one of those plants that grow under rocks.

My nephew, Rudy.

I'd been an aunt since I was five, which had always felt weird. I hadn't seen my sister or Rudy for three years. They were forever moving. Ohio. Tennessee. Kentucky.

“When did you get here?” I asked Lynette, slumping in the rocking chair. “And since when are you a blonde?”

“Day before yesterday and since yesterday,” she replied. “Nice to see you too.”

“Lynette's back for good,” Mama said. “She's renting in Grandview Estates.”

“Really?” I said. “Great. I guess. But where's Chuck going to race his monster truck? I thought that's why y'all left Frog Level in the first place.”

Lynette's shoulders stiffened. “Rebel, say hi to Rudy. It's been donkey's years since you saw him last. You're a big boy now, aren't you, Poopsy Poodle?”

“Hey, Rudy,” I said. “How old are you? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Aw, Rebel. I'm only seven.” He pronounced it “seben.”

He grinned, showing one front tooth, big as a billboard. The other tooth stuck straight out like an opened garage door. Adhesive-taped glasses slid down his pug nose. He knuckled them back in place.

“Where's Chuck?” I asked.

“Last I heard, still in Alabama.”

“Daddy's racing Mud Hog this weekend,” Rudy put in.

“Just like he does every weekend.” Lynette flicked her hair behind one ear. “I'm tired of playing second fiddle to a truck on growth hormones. So I packed up Rudy and came back to Virginia.”

I knew my brother-in-law always wanted to be a NASCAR driver. He flunked pit crew because he couldn't change tires fast enough or something. Then Chuck bought himself a monster truck. He raced Mud Hog in county fairs and monster jams, which never sounded like much of a job to me.

“What are your plans?” Mama asked Lynette.

“I enrolled in Dot's Pink Palace Beauty Academy. Everybody says I'm good with hair. I have to stand on my own two feet since I can't put no depends in Chuck. I have to think of Rudy.”

“Beauty school is fine, but it won't put bread on the table,” Mama said.

“I also got a job as a shampoo girl. And Chuck will send money. But I can't leave Rudy all day while I'm at school in the morning and Hair Magic in the afternoons.” Lynette turned to me. “That's where you come in, Rebel.”

“Me?”

“A lady a few mobile homes down keeps an eye on the neighborhood kids, but she's not a full-time babysitter,” my sister replied. “I need you to live with us this summer and watch Rudy.”

Mama shook her head. “Rebel's too young—”

“She's twelve!” Lynette insisted. “Time she had some responsibility. Instead of worrying you with her foolish notions, let her
work
.”

“I don't know,” Mama said, weakening just the slightest. “Rebel's young for her age.”

“I am not!” I was a paleontologist, practically.

“Mama, this will be
good
for Rebel.”

“Do
I
have any say in this?” I asked the air.

Mama stood. “I'll call your daddy and see what he thinks.” She went into the kitchen.

“If I do this—” I said to my sister. “
If
… how much will you pay me?” I might swing that second Kids' Dig trip after all.

“Nothing,” Lynette said bluntly. “I can't afford it.”

“I'm not going to work for nothing! That's slavery!”

Mama came back. “Okay, Rebel, your daddy says you can go. Lynette, make sure she uses that cream and changes her bandages.”

“I'm not going!” I yelled. “She's not paying me one red cent!”

“You are going,” Mama said. “Your sister needs you.”

What choice did I have? It was either go to Lynette's or rot in my bedroom.

While Mama slapped clothes in my duffel bags, suddenly eager to get rid of me, Rudy told me more about their trailer.

“Our new house came with two surprises,” he said. “A bed filled with water!”

“The water bed is nice,” Lynette said. “The cat is not.”

“His name is Doublewide, and he's the fattest cat I've ever seen! He can do tricks!” Rudy's eyebrows nearly leaped into his hairline.