“Voilà!” Gabriella said. “C’est fini!”
“Perfect,” Amelia said. She and Roshni were sitting side by side on kitchen chairs. She stuck her legs out and admired her toes. She had found the exact lime green she had wanted among Gabriella’s assorted bottles of nail polish. Roshni had picked black in the end, and when Amelia had asked her why, she’d looked mysterious. Copying some star in one of her magazines, Amelia had thought with a grin.
“How long do we have to keep the cotton balls between our toes?” Roshni said.
“Fifteen minutes. And then you can get up, but make sure you wear your flip-flops. Sneakers will smudge the polish.”
Gabriella’s phone rang, and she picked it up. “No, he is not here…What?…What?…Oh…I guess so, yeah, I will tell him…”
She frowned. “Merde! That was that woman from the community center. Duke was supposed to do a show there next week for the kids’ camp, and he would have got a hundred bucks for it, but they are going to cancel. So many kids are sick. Colds! C’est incroyable! How do children get colds in the summer? That would not happen in France.”
Duke came in the door, carrying a metal cage. He set it on the floor and said, “Someone brought it back to the pet store. They can’t resell it, so they said I could take it for free.” He glanced at the girls. “Cool toes.”
He wandered into the living room and came back with Lysander cradled against his chest. Gabriella was arranging her bottles of nail polish in rows in their box, but Amelia didn’t think she was really paying attention—she was banging the same bottles around in circles. Gabriella looked up at Duke and said, “So?”
“I was too late for the Tim Hortons job. They hired someone already this morning.” Lysander crept up onto Duke’s shoulder and nibbled his ear. “Hey, kisses only, Lysander!”
“So that is it,” Gabriella said.
“No,” Duke said, prying Lysander off his shoulder. He rolled him over on the palm of his hand and rubbed his white tummy. “I went all over the place. The guy at the Husky on Boundary said I might get the graveyard shift on the weekends, but I have to wait till the manager gets there. He said he’d call me later today.”
“Might,” Gabriella said tightly. “And today that woman from the community center phones—”
Amelia pulled the cotton balls out from between her toes and slid into her flip-flops. “Come on, Roshni,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”
When Roshni was ready, Amelia closed the door softly behind them. She hated listening to Gabriella and Duke fight about money. It made her feel mixed up inside. Freaked out and helpless, all at the same time.
Roshni flopped on Amelia’s bed and said, “Graveyard shift? What does that mean? It sounds spooky.”
“It just means working at night.” Amelia was sometimes shocked at the things Roshni didn’t know. “Gabriella and Duke are broke.”
“Oh. Like, really broke?”
“Yeah.”
Roshni pulled a magazine out of her backpack and propped herself up against the pillow. Amelia walked to her window and looked down at the street. At the house right across from them, a woman with a blond ponytail was hanging laundry on a clothesline. A long row of T-shirts and blue jeans that looked like they had been spattered with white paint. Amelia had seen her before, climbing into the truck parked in front of her house that said Rachel’s Renos—No Job Too Small.
The woman with the triplet stroller wheeled past, hunched over as if she were on a mission. Amelia thought she might stop and say hi to Rachel, but she didn’t. That’s what it was like here. Nobody talked to anybody.
In her old neighborhood, Starla’s mom always organized a barbecue on the last day of school, right in their front yard, and everyone brought lawn chairs, salads and drinks. People would spread across the grass and onto the sidewalk. It was probably going on right now.
“If we had a barbecue here, no one would come,” Amelia said.
“Huh?” Roshni said.
“Nothing.” Amelia flopped into her beanbag chair and admired her toes again.
“Okay. Listen to this,” Roshni said. “Smokin’ Mirrors. Made in more than one shade! Celebs brighten their days with Ray-Ban’s mirrored aviators.” She turned the magazine toward Amelia. “Don’t they look fantastic? That’s Hilary Duff.”
“I know what Hilary Duff looks like,” Amelia said.
“They come in blue, green and orange. Green, Amelia. They could match your toes. It says you can get them at sunglasshut.com.” She paused. “Oh.”
“What?”
“A little pricey. One hundred and fifty bucks. We could collect pop cans or something.”
“I wouldn’t waste a hundred and fifty bucks on sunglasses! A hundred and fifty bucks would probably buy a brand-new aquarium. Or ten bags of gecko food. Or six UV bulbs!” Roshni was staring at her with her mouth open, but Amelia kept going. “A month’s supply of frozen rats!”
Roshni reached into her backpack and pulled out another magazine. She tossed it to Amelia. “Read.”
Amelia flipped the magazine open to the middle. In big block letters at the top of the page, it said, CELEBS PUT ANIMALS’ BEST INTERESTS FIRST. Photos of celebrities and their pets were spread in a collage across two pages—Angelina Jolie with a dog with a squished-in face, Taylor Swift with a cat, Justin Bieber with a little white dog, Britney Spears holding some kind of parrot, Jennifer Aniston with a German shepherd, Lady Gaga with a poodle.
There were other celebrities Amelia didn’t know—a woman with a snake and a man with…wait a sec. A ferret on a leash! It looked a bit like The Accountant.
Her eyes stopped on a photo of a man holding a tortoise. “Roshni, look at this.” She hopped up onto the bed. “These are all celebrities’ pets, and that guy has a sulcata tortoise. I’m positive it’s a sulcata tortoise! It’s identical to Winston.”
Roshni peered at the magazine. “That’s not just some guy. That’s Leonardo DiCaprio.”
“Whatever. This is interesting.”
Dotted among the photos were captions and blurbs of information. Amelia read bits out loud to Roshni. “Nicolas Cage has a king cobra called Sheba, and Charlie Sheen has a Chinese water dragon! Lady Gaga’s poodle is called Fozzi. Justin Bieber supports something called peta, which means—it says here at the bottom—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And Simon Cowell likes something called the World Society for the Protection of Animals.”
She took a big breath. “Wow.”
“What’s so wow?” Roshni said.
“I just didn’t think famous rich people would care about stuff like that.”
“It’s good pr.”
“No, I think they really do care. Oh! Jennifer Aniston’s dog came from the Best Friends Animal Society.” Amelia felt excitement growing inside her in leaps and bounds. “Roshni, I’m positive it was fate that I turned to this page. We could write to them. Ask them for donations for Duke and Gabriella. Duke’s got a website and an official name and everything, so they’d know it wasn’t a fake.”
Roshni stared at Amelia. “Like, email them?”
“Well, yeah.”
Just then Diane tapped on Amelia’s door.
“Don’t tell Mom about this,” Amelia said. She shouted, “Come in!”
Diane opened the door and poked her head inside. “Hello, Roshni. I didn’t know you were here. How was Awards Day?”
“Boring,” Roshni said.
“Well that’s too bad.” Diane turned to Amelia. “We’ve just been invited, spur of the moment, to a barbecue. I want you to get ready. We’ll go in about twenty minutes. Sorry to kick you out, Roshni.”
“Starla’s mom phoned?” Amelia said.
Diane looked surprised. “No. Why would she phone? Jeannie’s invited us. She and Frank are getting a bunch of people together, and she said there’ll be some other kids your age.”
Great. She wouldn’t know one person there (Frank didn’t count), and she’d have to listen to Jeannie laugh her head off at everything her mother said. And she was dying to get started on this celebrity thing.
Roshni jumped off the bed, scooped up her magazines and stuffed them into her backpack. “I’m outta here. I’ll ask Liam. He’s got a computer in his bedroom we could use.”
“Thanks!” Amelia said.
“See you tomorrow.”
When Roshni had gone, Diane said, “That’s ridiculous, a twelve-year-old boy with his own computer in his room. Don’t his parents realize how many predators are out there?” She paused in the doorway. “And what do you need Liam’s computer for anyway?”
“Nothing.” Amelia looked at her mother. “What?”
“We’re leaving in twenty minutes,” Diane said and left.