Sophie didn’t wait for bedtime that night. She went straight to her room after school and started praying then.
Sitting in the middle of her purple comforter, Sophie tried to imagine Jesus. As soon as his kind eyes came into view in her mind, the prayer-thoughts began. Things aren’t going so good. The Fruit Loops are trying to humiliate Maggie. B.J. and Anne-Stuart hate me more than ever now because they think I’m trying to steal the boy they like. And I don’t even LIKE boys! Well, except for you. You were a boy. But I bet you never told any girl that she was a blimp or that she’d never get a boyfriend.
Sophie fell back against her pile of pillows and grabbed one to hug against her. What I want to ask you is — what do I do? I don’t want them making fun of Maggie anymore. Right now, I really wish I WAS a secret agent so I could just turn them in to the government …
Agent Shadow clicked the last pair of handcuffs on the third prisoner. Colton Messik was pale to the tips of his stick-out ears.He SHOULD be ashamed, the agent thought to herself. He tried to make the Owl feel bad about herself when she was in the line of duty, doing important work to do away with the likes of him and his Fruit Loop Mob. Agent Shadow breathed a deep sigh of relief as she shoved Colton Messik and his two accomplices toward the armored car, which would take them straight to solitary confinement in a maximum security prison. There wouldn’t even be a trial. Everyone knew they were guilty …
Sophie opened her eyes and felt a smile cross her face. Putting the Fruit Loops in their place — now THAT was a mission worth going to a dance for.
By Saturday, the Loops and the Pops were miles from Sophie’s mind as everyone climbed into Fiona’s family’s big Ford Expedition to head for Smithfield.
For the first twenty minutes of the trip, Sophie’s attention was on Miss Odetta Clide, who was gripping the steering wheel with the veins on her hands bulging like blue twine. Her wiry gray hair was short and pushed back from her face with the brush marks still in it. That hair wouldn’t DARE fall in her eyes, Sophie thought.
Miss Odetta kept glancing into the rearview mirror as if she didn’t want those eyes to miss a thing somebody might be doing wrong. Before they had even gotten into the car while in Fiona’s driveway, she had made Fiona go back in and put a barrette in her hair.
“She’s just as strict as you said,” Sophie whispered to Fiona in the far backseat.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Fiona whispered back. “But we can’t talk about it now or she’ll give me demerits for whispering. She says it’s rude.”
“Fiona — that’s five demerits,” said Miss Odetta Clide. “A lady does not whisper in the presence of others.” Her eyes, a washed-out blue, were watching them in the rearview mirror.
“What are demerits?” Maggie said.
“Marks for being rude, inconsiderate, or irresponsible,” Miss Odetta Clide said.
Fiona slid down in the seat.
“Do you get in trouble for them?” Maggie said.
“If Fiona accumulates too many she will.”
Fiona slid farther.
“How many is too many?” Maggie said.
“Margarita!” her mom said.
“Not as many as you might think,” said Miss Odetta Clide. And once again she gave Fiona a look in the mirror — although by now Sophie was sure she could no longer see her. Fiona was almost on the floor.
But even that was forgotten the minute they arrived in Smithfield.
“This is a beautiful little town!” Mama said.
“Isn’t it precious?” Darbie’s aunt Emily said.
Sophie didn’t think precious was exactly the right word for the old courthouse that stood on the street like a wise judge — and the country store with two bent men playing checkers out front — and the ice cream parlor where she was sure they still made ice cream the old-fashioned way, whatever that was.
“It’s nostalgic,” said Fiona. She emerged from hiding and pressed her face to the car window between Sophie’s and Darbie’s.
“Look at these gorgeous Victorian homes,” Mama said. “It makes you want to wear a bustle, doesn’t it?”
“You’ll see houses from the Federal and Georgian periods as well,” Miss Odetta Clide said as if she were reading from a textbook. “A few Colonial. This town is over 250 years old. It was the peanut capital of the world at one time.” Miss Odetta parked the Expedition and turned stiffly to the backseat. “A lady listens, Fiona,” she said. “She learns.”
Fiona moaned — although not loud enough for Miss Odetta Clide to catch her. Sophie couldn’t even imagine how many demerits that would be worth.
But after they parked and started down Main Street, past the bakery and the antique stores and the houses with their wide porches, Sophie found herself sidling closer to Miss Odetta to hear what she was saying.
“British merchants started settling here in about 1752,” she said in her brisk-for-an-older-lady voice. “Brought in by the sea captains up the Pagan River.”
“Look at those roses,” Mama said.
They stopped to look up at a house with thick white columns on its porch.
“Now this one is Civil War era,” Miss Odetta said. “Might have been owned by a steamboat captain. They brought their boats up the river too, after the war, trying to build things up again.”
“Would their wives have waited for them on that porch?” Sophie said.
Miss Odetta Clide squinted down at her as if she’d just noticed Sophie was there. “It would be safe to say they might have. The reason they built the porches so deep was to accommodate the women’s dresses. A hoopskirt could reach from the front door to the railing. And the women were even more extravagant in the Victorian period. You need only look at their homes.”
She clipped around the corner with everyone right behind her. Miss Odetta stopped in front of a pale blue house that had towers and turrets like a castle, stained-glass windows, and trim that reminded Sophie of a fancy gingerbread house.
“This is Victorian,” Miss Odetta said. “The ladies who first lived in this place wore the bustles Mrs. LaCroix spoke of, and corsets pulled so tight they could barely draw breath.”
“Why would they want to do that?” Maggie said. “Sounds brutal.”
“That is precisely what THEIR daughters said. In the 1920s they threw away the corsets and replaced them with short dresses that had everyone scandalized. No one had ever seen a woman’s legs in public before.”
“What’s ‘scandalized’ mean?” Sophie whispered to Fiona.
“It’s like shocked right out of their Sketchers,” Fiona whispered back.
Miss Odetta turned from the Victorian mansion to gaze down at the Corn Flakes. Sophie tugged at her sundress to make it look longer.
“I understand we are looking at party dresses today.”
“Mama and I are just getting ideas,” Sophie said. “Ma’am.” She wondered if Fiona’s friends could get demerits slapped on them too.
“Smithfield is the place to do that. You will see every kind of garment from a Colonial ball gown to a Roaring Twenties flapper dress. The possibilities are endless.”
They visited the Isle of Wight Museum, which was set up in a country store from the early 1900s. There were displays of cheese wheels and thread and shoes and cake boxes and washboards. They followed Miss Odetta to some sassy dresses that hung on the wall.
“The forerunners of the miniskirt,” Miss Odetta said. “Vintage 1921.”
Some had fringe, others sequins, and still others were draped with feather boas that must have left some poor ostrich naked. All of them were straight, falling from the shoulders to the knees in one long line. They didn’t do much for Sophie’s imagination.
But Darbie ran right up to them, arms outstretched — until Miss Odetta told her a lady didn’t touch antiques. Still, Darbie stood there with her hands clenched behind her back, the sequins sparkling in her eyes.
“I ADORE these!” she said. “Aren’t they just CLASS?”
“And just a little out of our price range, Darbie honey,” Aunt Emily said.
Senora LaQuita put her hand on Aunt Emily’s arm. “I can design this for Darbie,” she said, trilling the “r” in the way Sophie loved.
Darbie looked at her aunt, biting her lower lip.
“I don’t know what to say,” Aunt Emily said. “That’s such a nice offer.”
“Say yes,” Maggie said. “My mother wouldn’t offer if she didn’t mean it.”
“Well — if that’s what you want, Darbie.”
“I do! These were MADE for me!”
“That’s one, then,” Miss Odetta said. “Shall we continue?”
From there it was decided by the Corn Flakes that they would each choose a dress from the time period that, as Fiona put it, “spoke to them.” It was just what secret agents would do to conceal their identities from an enemy mob like the Fruit Loops, Sophie was sure.
As they twirled and giggled and squealed through the antique shops and the art galleries, Maggie decided she liked the dresses the Victorian girls wore. Fiona went for a Civil War look with ruffles and a full skirt. Miss Odetta Clide nixed a hoopskirt, but she agreed that they could use Fiona’s dress money to have Maggie’s mom design one for her.
When Sophie stood for five minutes in front of a painting of a Colonial family, gazing at the young girl in the gold dress with lace around the scoop neck and sleeves that flared out deliciously at the elbows, Mama whispered to her, “I’ll see what I can do, Dream Girl.”
When they got back to Poquoson, it was too hard to go their separate ways, and they wanted to share their news with Kitty so she wouldn’t be left out. Their faces were long as they pulled into Fiona’s driveway.
Boppa met them and told Miss Odetta Clide she might need to go inside and do some damage control, since he had been with Fiona’s little brother and sister all day. When she was gone, Boppa said, “These girls are going to go into mourning if we don’t let them have a sleepover tonight. What do you say, ladies? I’ll make them go to bed early.”
Mama smiled. “So you’re afraid of her too, huh, Boppa?”
Within the hour, the Corn Flakes had returned with pajamas and sleeping bags and Kitty, and they were busily writing down script ideas when they heard a knock at Fiona’s bedroom door. They were afraid it was Miss Odetta telling them to turn out the light. But it was Boppa, smiling his soft smile and wiggling his dark caterpillar eyebrows and running his hand over the top of his bald head.
“Anybody up for some dancing lessons?” he said.
“Dancing lessons, Boppa?” Fiona said as they all skittered after him down the hall to the door that led out to the deck.
“I hear you’re going to a dance. You’ve got the dresses taken care of — now you need to learn how to dance.”
Boppa had the picnic table scooted out of the way with a boom box on it, and there was a string of white lights twinkling in the May night.
“I know you kids THINK you know how to dance,” he said.
“I don’t,” Maggie said.
“But I’m going to teach you some real dances. We’re going to start with the bop.”
“I like that word!” Kitty said, giggling. “I want to bop!”
“Come on then,” Boppa said. He poked the play button and held out his hand to Kitty. She plunked hers right into it just as a man on the CD started singing about a hound dog.
“I know this song!” Kitty squealed. “My grandma taught me how to play it on the piano!”
“This is Elvis Presley, ladies,” Boppa said. “The King of Rock ’n’ Roll. Come on — grab a partner.”
Before the song was over, Sophie and Fiona had the bop down, and Darbie and Maggie, while they were still slamming into each other at times, were getting close.
After that Boppa taught them to waltz and then cha-cha. The waltz was Sophie’s favorite — she could imagine herself in the gold dress with the flared sleeves, sweeping across the floor — but she was doing more stumbling than sweeping.
“Help me, Boppa!” she said, after she stepped on Fiona’s foot for the thirtieth time and Fiona refused to be her partner until her bruises healed.
“Miss Odetta Clide, do you waltz?”
They all looked up to see Miss Odetta in the doorway, arms folded. “Of course I waltz. Every well-trained lady knows how to waltz.”
“Then please do me the honor of helping me with a demonstration.”
Boppa held out his hand to Miss Odetta. Kitty giggled. Maggie blinked like an owl. Fiona slithered down onto the picnic table bench.
But when Miss Odetta Clide slid her hand into his and placed the other one on his arm and they began to move in a smooth one-two-three, one-two-three across the deck, all mouths fell open. “That is class,” Darbie whispered.
Boppa and Miss Odetta were floating, looking directly into each other’s eyes like they didn’t even have to be aware of the feet that carried them in swooping circles across the ballroom floor.
Agent Shadow lifted her eyes from the skirt of her golden dress to the face of the Unknown Dancer and let him take her hand. Gracefully they swished past the awestruck crowd. “I must remember to keep my mind on the mission at hand,” she told herself. But just then, she couldn’t remember what it was.