The only thing I’ve ever saved before is a baby rabbit when Yeti caught one in the backyard, and I am pretty sure that saving a park is not the same thing as saving a rabbit. You can’t feed a park milk from an eyedropper. You can’t deliver it to the animal rescue lady. Maybe Nanny X would teach me how to do mind control, like she used on Yeti, so I could use it on the mayor and convince him to leave our park alone.
I pulled out a piece of notebook paper and made my own sign: Baseball Is a Diamond. I drew bases with some lines coming out from them, so it looked like they were all glowy.
Nanny X looked at her watch. “Five. Four. Three. Two. Now.”
At “now,” a lady got up onto the stage. She had glasses, plus hair that went all the way down to her butt, and she held up a Be Green Not Mean sign. I wondered if I could count reading those signs for my reading log, too.
“Friends,” Mrs. Green-Not-Mean said into a megaphone. “We are here because it has come to our attention that the mayor is attempting to rush through this park’s destruction, and we thought if you could just see the park, just see our children at play, you would realize that we do not need a factory here.”
“What if I don’t have any children?” a man yelled. He didn’t raise his hand or anything.
Mrs. Green-Not-Mean’s voice got kind of quavery. “Lovett’s children belong to all of us,” she said. “And I am here to tell you that they do not need another fast-food restaurant, they do not need another warehouse. I beg you, look at the children and you will see that this is what they—what we—really need.” She spread her arms and looked at the trees like she wanted to hug them. I moved a little behind Nanny X in case she decided that she wanted to hug me, too, since I was one of Lovett’s children.
Half of the people in the audience clapped. The lady wiped her eyes and sat back down.
“Friends.” A man took out a megaphone that was like the lady’s, only bigger. He had a shiny spot on his head where hair used to be. “My name is Rufus Strathmore, chairman of the Lovett Chamber of Commerce.” He waited for people to clap. “How do you think we support the many fine things our city has? Business. What do we need? Business. Because business means jobs, and that is what will help our children most.”
Then people started yelling, “What kind of jobs?” And everyone held up their signs, including me. I saw Stinky Malloy standing near the front. His sign was on actual poster board, not notebook paper, and it said Slides Are Cool. That’s what he started chanting. Then a bunch more people joined in. “Slides are cool! Slides are cool!” Ali and I chanted, too, even though I would have said the slide was cooler than just the regular kind of cool. It was dry-ice cool! It was frozen-tundra cool! Plus, I would have worked in something about the ball field. And intestines.
The Green-Not-Mean lady got back onstage. “Slides are cool!” she yelled.
“Excuse me, madam, but you know nothing about—”
“Slides are cool!”
“This land will bring industry to the heart of our city,” said Rufus Strathmore.
“This land is already in use!” shouted Mrs. Green-Not-Mean. Her voice got really high on the last word, like those opera singers who can shatter glass. Mr. Strathmore and Mrs. Green-Not-Mean started screaming at each other without even using their megaphones. The mayor jumped onstage and stood between them, like he was trying to break it up, even though we all knew whose side he was really on.
Nanny X pulled a pair of binoculars from the diaper bag. She wasn’t watching the stage anymore, though. She was watching the crowd.
I watched the stage, which is why I saw the big, brown rock flying right toward it. Pow. It hit the mayor in the head.
“Help him!” someone yelled. “Help the mayor! He’s been hit.”
Mr. Strathmore and Mrs. Green-Not-Mean were quiet for about four seconds while they looked at the mayor, who was all slumpy in the middle of the platform. Then they started yelling again.
“Is there a doctor in the park?”
“What kind of stunt is this?”
“Call 911.”
“Your people know all about stunts.”
I wondered if Nanny X was going to take us home. That’s what happens whenever my mom sees grown-ups misbehaving. But Nanny X did not take us home. Instead, she took a diaper out of the diaper bag. I thought she was going to change Eliza, and Eliza must have thought the same thing, because she rolled onto her back and stuck her legs up in the air and wiggled them. But Nanny X took the diaper and walked over to one side of a big tree. She unfolded the diaper and held it up to her face. Her lips moved, like she was asking the diaper if it was having a nice day. If Nanny X expected that diaper to talk back to her, then Ali and I had a bigger problem than the mayor turning our park into a factory.