Chapter Two

 

“What a boring morning,” Philip said as he got behind Emery in the lunchroom line to get his milk on Monday.

“Are you getting chocolate or white milk?” asked Emery.

“You know I never get white milk,” Philip said, bending into the refrigerated bin to take a milk carton.

“My mother makes me get white milk,” Emery reported sadly.

“How’ll she know?”

Emery shrugged. “She finds out everything.”

Philip ignored Emery’s complaint and slid next to him on the bench of their lunch table. “We’re partners in the project, right?”

“Yeah, but what are we going to do? It doesn’t sound very interesting. I have the list. We’ll look at it after we eat.” Emery opened his lunch box. “Peanut butter and jelly again. I wish my mother wasn’t so busy in the morning with the two babies.”

“Why don’t you pack your own lunch?” Philip asked as he opened his. “Hey! Where’s my sandwich?” He emptied his lunch box onto the cardboard tray the lunch ladies had given him with his milk.

“All you have is an apple and two fig bars?” said Emery, biting into his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and moaning. “Grape jelly, as usual.”

“Where’s my sandwich?” Philip said, louder than before.

“You sure you had one?”

“Of course I had one.” Philip remembered watching his mother make the sandwich. She wrapped it up and handed it to him. He put it into his metal lunch box himself. He left the house and walked to Emery’s. He went inside to wait for Emery and left his heavy book bag and the lunch box next to the big bush near the sidewalk. It took about five minutes for Emery and him to come out. He picked up his lunch box and book bag and went to school. He put his lunch box on the shelf in the coat closet, along with everybody else’s. Mr. Ware never let anybody go to the closet until lunchtime, and now his sandwich was gone.

“You know,” said Emery, “I can see the empty house, a little of it, from my bedroom window.”

Hmmmm, Philip mused. The haunted house.

“Emery, I put my lunch box down outside your house today when I went in to get you, and now my sandwich is gone. I never lost a sandwich when people lived in the house.”

“How could an empty house steal your sandwich?”

“Then you tell me where it went.”

“It’s probably still at home on your kitchen table. Want half of this?” Emery held out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “You can have it for your fig bars.”

“Both of them?”

“Well. Okay, one. I don’t like it much anyway.” They made the exchange and finished their lunches in silence, Philip trying in vain to figure out what happened to his cracked pepper turkey sandwich.

The two boys found a spot in the schoolyard out of the chilly November wind, and Emery took the project list from his back pocket. He unfolded the wrinkled paper.

“So what’ll we do?”

Philip still had his mind on his missing sandwich. Thinking about it made him hungry again. Half of Emery’s sandwich didn’t fill him up. He’d make another sandwich when he got home if he could find any cracked pepper turkey in the refrigerator.

“Mr. Ware said this Community Service project is half our social studies mark, and he spent an awful long time talking about it,” said Emery. “My mother’s fussy about marks.”

“Of course. So’s mine. So’s everybody’s.” Philip had sunk into a bad mood because of his missing sandwich. “What’s on the list?”

“Okay, listen. Visit sick people in the hospital.”

“Yuck. We might catch something, and besides, they didn’t even let me in once when my mom and dad went to visit somebody. I had to sit in the lobby and look at a hundred-year-old magazine about furniture.”

“All right. Skip the hospital. Hospitals are scary anyway. Visit a homebound elderly.”

“A what?”

“A homebound elderly.”

They looked at one another in silence.

“Did Mr. Ware explain this one?” Philip wanted to know.

“I think he did. I think it’s like some old person who lives alone and never goes out of the house.”

“Never?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So what do they do all day?”

Emery shrugged. “Look out the window, I guess.”

Philip paused. “You want to sit and look out a window for social studies?”

“Not much. Sounds pretty easy, but I guess it’d be boring.”

“Way boring. I don’t want to sit and look out a window. What else is there?”

“Raise money for a charity.”

“You mean like sell cupcakes or candy.”

“I guess.”

“Do they give us the candy?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to have you sell candy.”

“Why not?”

“Remember you got in trouble before when you sold the candy and kept it after it came. You didn’t give it to the people who bought it. You hid it and wanted to eat it all.”

“What else is there?” said Philip impatiently, not wanting to be reminded. He hated to eliminate something so promising, though.

“Beautify the neighborhood.”

“Go on. What else?

“That’s it.”

“Only four things?”

“I read the whole list,” said Emery, folding up the paper and stuffing it back into his pocket.

“An awful short list,” said Philip. “What’ll we do?”

“The only thing we didn’t cross off was beautifying the neighborhood.”

“How do we beautify the neighborhood?”

Emery shrugged. “Maybe you could cover your face.”

Philip stared at Emery.

“That was a joke,” Emery explained.

“So why didn’t you laugh?”

“I’m not supposed to laugh. I made the joke. You’re supposed to laugh.”

“Ha,” Philip burst out, his stare boring into Emery.

“Never mind. You have no sense of humor. Look, let’s ask our parents tonight and see what they say.”

Philip knew his dad could always come up with something when he got stuck with a school project. He recalled the prize his dad helped him win in the Walk-Mor Shoe Store poster contest. “Good idea. Oh,” Philip moaned. “There’s the bell already.”

Emery and Philip left the sheltered corner of the school building and stepped out into the chilly wind. They ran to where Mr. Ware waited for the class to line up.