19
The week of the fight was fabulous for everyone except for Donut, who was very, very nervous, and for Miranda and Maude, who were too angry to enjoy the last week of their creative endeavor.
On Tuesday, Hillary added four hundred more things to her Things to Do List. On Wednesday, Fletcher introduced a thunderclap, a reverse turn, and a feather step to his dance routines. On Thursday, Desdemona perfected her front handspring and her back walkover.
Norbert wrote three new acts three days in a row!
“I have too many lines,” Donut told him on Friday morning. “Can’t you make Banana Pants shorter?”
“No,” Norbert said firmly. “Every single word is important!”
Agatha had spent most of the week sewing yellow buttons onto a pair of yellow pants.
But Agnes preferred gold buttons to yellow, and she had sewn hers onto the spaces Agatha had missed.
“Those pants look heavy,” Donut told them. “How many buttons are on those pants anyway?”
Agnes did some quick math. “Nine hundred,” she said.
“And the left leg looks longer than the right.”
“Agnes did that side,” Agatha said.
“Did not,” Agnes said, sewing on another gold button.
Felix had constructed a mountain of planks so high and wide it blocked nearly half of the stage. “Your sets are so big, no one can see my props,” Miranda told him quietly. But she didn’t care about her props anymore, now that she and Maude weren’t talking. She glanced over at Maude, who was onstage in front of the curtain she still hadn’t been able to raise, being an onion. Or maybe she was garlic.
Curled up on the dusty stage, Maude couldn’t remember if she was an onion or a clove of garlic, since Norbert had given her several additional minor roles. She didn’t care about creative endeavors anymore.
But when they weren’t working on Banana Pants, school was even worse for Miranda and Maude that week.
They both got bonked on the head during gym class because, for the first time in their friendship, they were on opposite sides of the net and couldn’t yell “duck” when Coach Corsica hurled balls at them. Then they both got horrible headaches during music class because hearing their classmates play their recorders was unbearable without someone to complain to about how unbearable it was.
Lunch for both girls was especially miserable on Friday. Miranda sat on the left side of the table. Maude sat on the right, slowly eating soup and trying not to look at Miranda’s enormous, most-likely delicious lunch. Staring into her bottomless container of soup, Maude wondered if a cast party would have been a good idea, if only to make a dent in the never-ending soup situation. She also tried not to think about her brother out with all his friends while her dad was home alone with his already-discovered beetle. What had Michael-John meant about looking up? I see plenty of people. Don’t I? Right now, she could see Miranda happily enjoying her enormous, delicious lunch with Felix and Norris.
But Miranda was not enjoying her enormous, delicious lunch. Sitting next to Felix and Norris was not nearly as much fun as sitting with Maude. She didn’t laugh once, and she had so much lunch left, since Felix and Norris, unlike Maude, wouldn’t break any food-sharing rules. Miranda got up from the table and walked over to the back of the cafeteria. There was a lot less garbage there, now that the trash cans weren’t piled up with Styrofoam trays. Maude is probably happy to see this, Miranda thought. But it’s too bad there isn’t a better place to put this food, she thought as she dumped her leftover lunch. At the castle and at Maude’s house, there’s a compost bin, she thought, walking back to the table. Why can’t there be a compost bin at Mountain River Valley? Miranda’s heart jolted. She’d thought of another cause! Should she tell Maude? No, she thought. She’d never tell, because Maude thought all of her causes were better! And anyway, Miranda reminded herself, they were in a fight!
