Amy sat at her desk at school, trying to find her colored pencils. She wanted to make a card for Wiggy, who was coming home from the hospital today.
She had had a whole set of twenty-four brand-new colored pencils when school started nearly five weeks ago, and now all she could find was light blue, brown, purple, and yellow. There must be twenty other pencils in the desk somewhere, but it was impossible to find them.
A few weeks into every school year, her teacher would take one look at Amy’s desk and say, “Trying to find anything in your desk, Amy, would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
As the rest of the class filed out for morning recess, Ms. Ives stopped by Amy’s desk.
“I can’t find the rest of my colored pencils,” Amy told her.
Ms. Ives leaned over the desk. “How can you find anything at all in that desk? Trying to find a pencil in your desk, Amy, would be like—”
“Trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Amy finished wearily. She was tired of needles, tired of haystacks. She was tired of having a messy desk.
“You’ve heard that line before, I take it?” Ms. Ives asked.
Amy forced a smile.
“Okay, Amy, I have an idea. During recess today you and I are going to clean this desk.”
If there was one thing Amy didn’t want, it was Ms. Ives helping to clean her desk: seeing her poems, her scraps of paper with all her secret thoughts, the gum wrappers from the gum she wasn’t even supposed to be chewing in class.
“I can do it by myself,” Amy protested.
Ms. Ives looked dubious. Amy didn’t blame her. She wasn’t at all sure she could do it by herself.
“I’ll help her,” Violet piped up. “My mother always helps me clean my room. I’m great at cleaning.”
“You don’t want to miss recess, too, do you?” Ms. Ives asked her.
“I hate recess,” Violet said. Violet’s voice started to wobble on the last word, and her eyes filled with her usual reservoir of tears.
“Oh,” Ms. Ives said. She clearly didn’t know what to say next.
Not too long ago, Amy also hadn’t known what to say when Violet came out with a statement like that. Now she just ignored it and moved on quickly to a happier thought.
Apparently Ms. Ives was learning, too. “Well, in that case … Okay, girls, good luck!” she finished brightly. Then she returned to her desk, and the two girls were left alone.
“Where do we start?” Amy asked. The job really looked hopeless.
Violet pulled a trash can, a recycling bin, and an empty
plastic crate over to the side of the desk. “First we take everything out. Everything. Just dump it on the floor. And then everything goes either here”—she pointed to the trash can—“or here.” She pointed to the recycling bin. “Or it goes in this box, to be carried off where it belongs.” She pointed to the plastic crate. “Or back in the desk.”
Amy stared at Violet in awe. This was hardly the girl who couldn’t sprinkle glitter on a pinecone without someone to tell her how many glitter specks to put on each little scale.
Violet scooped up a handful of plastic wrappers. “These go in the trash. They should have gone there in the first place. This library book. Are you finished reading it?”
Amy nodded. Violet placed it in the plastic crate.
“Your math notebook. Your social studies notebook. We’ll start a neat pile for notebooks here on the left side of your desk.”
Violet held up two crumpled paper balls. “What are these?”
Amy tried to remember. “Oh, the NO SOLICITATIONS signs.”
“You saved those?”
Why had she saved them? “They’re sort of like evidence, like proof.”
“Proof of what?”
“Proof that Julia and Kelsey and I aren’t friends anymore. Probably we never were friends. Not real friends.”
Amy opened the two crumpled balls and smoothed them out. The two signs looked exactly the same, even though she was sure Julia had made one and Kelsey had made the other. Even though Julia was tall and Kelsey was
short, and Julia had long blond hair and Kelsey had brown pigtails, they now seemed to her identical in almost every single way. They were more like twins than she and Todd were.
From the dwindling heap on the floor, Amy retrieved a note Julia had sent her:
Hi, Amy! What do you think of Tanya’s hair?
JuliaAnd a note Kelsey had sent her:
Hi, Amy! Can you believe Randi’s new shoes?
Kelsey“Look at these,” Amy said to Violet.
Violet read the notes. “Um … is there something interesting that I’m supposed to be noticing?”
“Look at their handwriting.”
“It’s neat. It’s round. They both put circles for the dots over their i’s. They look pretty much the same to me.”
“That’s what I mean,” Amy said. “They look almost exactly the same. Here, write me a note on this piece of paper.” Amy handed Violet a scrap of paper from the floor.
“What should it say?”
“Anything. Try: ‘Hi, Amy! What do you think of Frizzy Fred?’ And then sign your name.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Just do it.”
Violet wrote the note and handed it to Amy.
“See? Your writing looks completely different from theirs. You write a lot smaller, like … like …”
“Like I don’t want anybody to notice me,” Violet finished.
“And your writing slants backward, like you’re …”
“Afraid?”
Afraid even of Wiggy!
“Here, analyze mine.” Amy scribbled the same sentence on a new piece of paper and thrust it at Violet. “What can you tell about me?”
Violet studied Amy’s note for a few seconds. “You’re messy.” She looked down at the remaining heap on the floor, and both girls laughed. “But you’re poetic, too.”
“How can you tell I’m poetic? Are you just making that up?” Amy hoped her writing really showed that she was poetic.
“It’s the way you make the capital A in Amy. Kind of like medieval writing, you know, extra large and flowery.”
Amy felt the first stirrings of a wonderful idea.
“Are you girls cleaning Amy’s desk or are you just gabbing?” Ms. Ives called over from the pile of papers she was grading.
“Neither!” Amy said triumphantly. “We’ve just discovered our new project for Mini-Society!”
Violet’s face lit up. She really did look pretty when she was smiling.
“Handwriting analysis,” Amy said. “For one hundred minis, we’ll read your character from your handwriting. What do you think?”
Violet’s newfound smile grew even wider. “For two hundred minis,” Violet said.
Wiggy was home! Amy sat beside her on the couch and held up her welcome-home card so Wiggy could see it. Amy had used twenty-three colored pencils—she and Violet had never found the twenty-fourth pencil, even after Amy’s desk was completely clean, neat, and as organized as a desk could be. Sometimes, Amy had learned over the years, pencils just vanished.
Todd was playing Wiggy’s favorite piece of music on the stereo: the 1812 Overture. At least, they thought it was her favorite piece of music, because she always thumped her tail during the cannon parts. She wasn’t thumping her tail right now, but Amy knew Wiggy was glad to be back with the family who loved her.
Amy’s father had made another terrific thirty-minute meal: chicken with white wine and tarragon. He had made dinner every night since he discovered the thirty-minute cookbook. And he had baked Wiggy a welcome-home cake: not a cake for Wiggy to eat herself, but one for the rest of them to eat in celebration.
“Did we have any chocolate cake mix?” Amy’s mother asked him, sounding puzzled, as she took the first bite of the rich chocolate cake covered thickly with chocolate frosting.
“I didn’t use a mix,” he said.
“You baked it from scratch?”
“You follow the recipe. It wasn’t hard. Just a lot of measuring and stirring. But it was all pretty straightforward.”
“Will wonders never cease!” her mother said faintly. “If only …”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but Amy knew she wanted to say: If only you could get a job and earn some money, too. Amy was glad she didn’t say it. For a fleeting moment Amy wondered if her father could get a job making thirty-minute meals somewhere, but that was probably a silly idea.
“If only what?” her father asked sharply
Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t!
“Nothing,” her mother said. But Amy knew that her father knew exactly what her mother was thinking.
Then, as they were all scraping up their last crumbs of cake, Amy’s mother turned to Amy. “Amy, I have a confession to make.”
Amy stopped petting Wiggy. “What is it?” she asked.
“I borrowed your idea,” her mother said.
“What idea?”
“Your idea about pinecones.”
Amy wasn’t in the mood to be teased about pinecones. “I never want to hear another word about pinecones as long as I live!”
But her mother’s smile wasn’t a teasing smile. “For the crafts class I’m going to be teaching at the store this Saturday, I thought we’d do all different kinds of crafts with pinecones. Everyone’s yard is filled with them this time of year.
Todd looked as skeptical as Amy felt. “But, Mom,” he began. Amy knew he wanted to warn her away from pinecones without coming right out and stating what a terrible failure the Divine Decorations had been. “Are you going to dip them in glue and glitter?” was all he said.
“Maybe. I thought the pinecones Amy made with Violet turned out real cute.”
“Well, you’re the only one who did,” Amy snapped.
“With a narrow red velvet ribbon on them, for Christmas,” their mother said dreamily, “they’d make lovely Christmas tree ornaments.”
“I told you so,” Todd said to Amy.
“Nobody bought any!” Amy shot back.
Their mother was evidently too absorbed to hear them. “And what about a pinecone bird feeder? Smeared with suet and sprinkled with birdseed and sunflower seeds? Great to hang on a tree branch right outside a window. Or pinecone wreaths?”
She was clearly on a roll now, envisioning an endless stream of pinecone creations.
“Pinecones glued to a Styrofoam core and then shellacked. Lovely on a front door or as a seasonal centerpiece. A plain unfinished wooden box could be transformed into a pinecone treasure chest. Tiny pinecones could work as earrings.”
“Mom,” Amy said, interrupting her reverie, “nobody I know wants to wear pinecone earrings.”
“Maybe you and I know different people.”
If her mother knew people who wanted to wear
pinecone earrings, she definitely didn’t know the people Amy knew.
“Wiggy,” Amy demanded, “do you want to wear pinecone earrings? Thump your tail once for no, and twice for yes.”
Wiggy thumped her tail three times.
“Thank you, Wiggy,” their mother said. “Three times means Wiggy wants to wear pinecone earrings more than anything in the world.”
Amy knew it meant that Wiggy was glad to be home again. But her mother would have to find out the truth about pinecones the hard way.