Shoebag Returns Page 7

  Twenty-four

  EVERY OTHER MONTH, THE Betters sang in assembly. This sunny November morning, after the school song, and before Miss Rattray’s announcements, C. Cynthia Ann Flower led them out on the stage.

  “One, two, three!” she said, and then she waved her arms to get the performance underway.

  We are the Betters

  Better at Everything!

  Better when we dance and when we sing!

  Better at everything!

  Better at science and history,

  Better at solving a mystery,

  Better than a queen, better than a king,

  Better at everything!

  We’re Betters!

  We look better, read a book better,

  Swim a brook better, and we cook better,

  We are the Betters!

  C. Cynthia Ann Flower then found a seat in the audience, right next to Josephine Jiminez.

  “If the Butters had been better, you might have been up on stage yourself, Josephine. But not everyone can be better, particularly a Doll Smasher like you.”

  Josephine said nothing, for she was in a slump.

  She was imagining herself somewhere in Tennessee going to another new school, seeing more unfamiliar faces, hearing some new teacher say, “We have a new girl in our midst, so everyone welcome her,” which no one would do.

  On the other side of Josephine sat Stanley Sweetsong. He leaned over Josephine and said to C. Cynthia Ann Flower, “Just you wait!”

  “Wait for what? Wait for you to get taller so you’ll be the size of other ten-year-olds? For Josephine to lose some of her freckles so we can see her face? Haw! Wait for what?”

  Now Miss Rattray was standing before the assembly waiting for absolute silence.

  “I have two announcements!” she said. “One is that we are losing Josephine Jimenez after Career Day, and we are sorry to lose her.”

  “We are?” C. Cynthia Ann Flower muttered under her breath. “I don’t know anyone who is.”

  “The other announcement,” said Miss Rattray, “is that Stanley Sweetsong will be the personal escort of Gregor Samsa when he comes for Career Day next week. Anyone who wants to shake the hand of this famous spokesboy and actor must go through Stanley.”

  C. Cynthia Ann Flower’s hand went up instantly.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “But a Better has always been the personal escort!”

  “This year, since we are asking a male actor, we shall have a male escort, dear! There is no male Better.”

  “There is no male better than me!” Stanley Sweetsong whispered at C. Cynthia Ann Flower.

  Now there were two of Miss Rattray’s girls in a slump that morning. One with the dread of starting all over again in Tennessee. The other with the dream of meeting Gregor Samsa dimming.

  Twenty-five

  “HOW WOULD THEY LIKE it,” Under The Toaster used to say of humans, “if someday creatures a hundred times their size gassed them — pffft — like they were mindless, heartless, unfeeling flecks of flesh, put on earth only to annoy them?”

  Shoebag’s heart broke remembering his father’s tirades against the human race.

  Ever since he had come flying out of the Dustbuster, into the kitchen wastebasket, he had wondered what would become of him, alone in this place, without a family or another roach anywhere in view.

  How could he think of being Bagg again? Why would he want to become the very enemy who had uprooted his family’s home, invented a noxious substance like Zap (which had nearly killed him), and through the years stepped on his kind, designed lethal Roach Motels for his kind, and always looked upon any critter from roachdom with loathing?

  Still, one thing cockroaches were known for was loyalty. Gas them, they would return. Smoke them out, they would be back. Tear down their buildings, they would remain in the neighborhood.

  And so it was that Shoebag, frail and shaken from everything that had happened to him, found himself finally back in the Changing Room.

  “You have to judge humans individually,” Drainboard was fond of saying. “One in a million is decent.”

  Shoebag believed Stanley was one of those one in a million.

  High in the eaves of the small room were the clothes Bagg had hidden so many weeks ago … before he had been orphaned and Zapped.

  Now came the next step: “Flit, flutter, quiver, quaver, totter,” and as always, on the word “totter” he felt himself begin the change.

  Twenty-six

  SOMETIMES, IF YOU PUT the top of a water glass to a wall, and place your ear against its bottom, you can hear everything that is being said in the room next door to you.

  That night after dinner, Josephine Jiminez could.

  She heard everything C. Cynthia Ann Flower had to say to Stanley Sweetsong.

  Butter sat on her bed watching this strange behavior, his yellow eyes alert and curious.

  “I just dropped by to see how you are, Stanley.”

  “I am okay, C. Cynthia Ann. Why do you ask?”

  “I ask because I’ve been thinking about you. … You know, Stanley, the Betters have never had a boy member.”

  “There has never been a boy, until me, at Miss Rattray’s School for Girls,” he said.

  “If a boy was a Better, things would be better for him than they ever have been before.”

  “How would they be better?”

  “You would sit in the front row at all school performances. That’s better, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s better.”

  “You would help Miss Rattray decide what new students to enroll next year … possibly another boy. That’s better, isn’t it?”

  “Possibly another boy?” said Stanley Sweetsong. “That really is better!”

  “Even if the Butters were not melted down, they could never get another boy enrolled here. They had no power,” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower. “We have all the power!”

  “This is true,” Stanley Sweetsong agreed.

  Josephine Jiminez’s eyes filled with tears.

  “And something else might happen, too,” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower. “I am the president of the Science Club, so possibly you could send for something from Bugs Alive, and I could vote for it to win a prize.”

  “Then I would belong to both clubs,” said Stanley Sweetsong. “And then I would have a key to the Science Room!”

  “Then you would. Then you would not miss that freckle-faced frump from next door at all!”

  Josephine Jiminez felt her ears burn.

  “And she will be gone, anyway, Stanley,” said C. Cynthia Ann.

  “This is true. She will be in Tennessee.”

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower. “And all I ask in return is to meet Gregor Samsa.”

  Josephine Jiminez could not stand to hear another word. She set the water glass down hard on her desk, causing Butter to flinch and whip his tail.

  Monroe was still not packed, though all the other dolls were. Monroe was her favorite of all the Cast of Characters. He was the only one she never smashed against the wall. She sat down on her bed and put the small Kewpie doll on her lap.

  “You are the only friend I have,” she told it. “Right this very moment the friend I thought I had is making friends with my worst enemy. He didn’t even wait for me to be gone, Monroe.”

  Monroe’s gruff voice answered, “Well, if you’re not in, you’re out. … Who knows that better than the two of us?”

  Then suddenly, Butter saw a shadow under the floor, something just outside.

  He leapt from the bed, crouched low, ears cocked forward.

  “What is it, Butter?”

  The cat let out a high little mew, eyes narrowed to green slits.

  “Is someone there?”

  Josephine Jiminez flung open the door.

  “Who are you?”

  “Stuart Bagg.”

  The two of them stared at each other, for who with red hair and freckles would not stare back a
t someone else with red hair and freckles?

  Twenty-seven

  JOSEPHINE LIKED STUART BAGG a lot. She liked him because he looked like her. She liked him because Butter seemed to like him, too, following after him, rubbing against him. She liked him because he did not kill the jumping spider who had let down his dragline over her bureau.

  The only thing she didn’t like about him was the faint odor of his clothes.

  “Raid?” she asked.

  “Zap,” he said. “They fumigated the area downstairs by the kitchen where I came in.”

  “Yes, because Cook saw some roaches near the Macintosh they’re returning to my family,” said Josephine.

  He was such a polite boy and, for a boy, unusually curious about her family — where they lived and why the computer was being sent to them.

  She sat on the bed beside him, telling him all about it … and more, as well. She told him about life as an Army brat, and about all the moves her family had made, all the schools she had been in and out of, and how now there was yet another move, just as she was making friends.

  “Just as I became a president,” she said. “Are you a new boy? I thought there was only Stanley Sweetsong enrolled here.”

  “I am a new boy, but not here,” he told her. “I am Stanley’s pal.”

  “And that is another thing,” — Josephine was in a mood to confide — “Stanley Sweetsong has already switched his loyalty to my great enemy C. Cynthia Ann Flower, and I am not even gone yet. So you can’t count on him to stay your pal.”

  “Yes, you can. He would not be taken in by her.” Now Butter was sitting on the down comforter licking his lips and staring at Bagg, as though Bagg was not a boy but a can of Fancy Feast.

  “Things change in this life, Stuart Bagg. Things do and people do.”

  “That’s the only way to get over it and get on with it,” said Stuart Bagg.

  “I’ll never get over Stanley Sweetsong making friends with my enemy,” she said. “And I’ll never get over not being a P again.”

  “You might become a Q. A Q is better than a P. And a Q comes after a P.”

  “A Q?”

  “A queen. You might be queen of something.”

  “In Tennessee? There are no queens in Tennessee.”

  “I know a little about change myself,” said Stuart Bagg, “and here is what I know. I know you think you won’t like what’s ahead, but what’s ahead can be magical.”

  “In Tennessee?”

  “Even there. Magic can happen anywhere.”

  “The only magic in my life is what I make myself, and I don’t have the heart for it, anymore.”

  “Magic can, magic is, magic will, will, will …”

  “Will what?”

  “Will, will, oh, oh. Oh, oh.”

  Butter sprang from the bed, for his eye had suddenly caught a wee cockroach scrambling along the floor.

  The jumping spider saw it, too. It stopped in its tracks, its two front legs raised expectantly.

  Where Stuart Bagg had sat, there was only a slight indentation left on the bedspread, one that soon disappeared just as he had — pffft.

  On the bed, with Josephine, there was only Monroe.

  On the floor there was a pair of Gap khakis, a green Lands’ End shirt, white boxer shorts, and Doc Martens.

  Twenty-eight

  CAREER DAY WAS SO close to Thanksgiving, few parents attended.

  Retired General Pedro Jiminez and his wife came, of course, for they were there to fetch Josephine.

  The Flowers were present, of course, for the Flowers were so proud of their daughter, C. Cynthia Ann, that they never missed a school function.

  Ethel Lampert’s mother came, for she was curious about the great change that had come over her daughter so suddenly. A child who had once lived for stamps was now little interested even in the rare purple-and-white Klotzhorn stamp from Austria. What was that all about?

  As the parents gathered for tea in Miss Rattray’s salon on the main floor of the Upper School, Stanley Sweetsong walked toward the Music Room with Josephine. There was to be a last-minute meeting of the underground Butters.

  “Whatever’s become of Stuart Bagg?” said Stanley. “He was right when he told you I would never fall for C. Cynthia Ann’s malarkey.”

  “That wasn’t how he put it. He was too mysterious to say ‘malarkey.’”

  “He’s probably so mysterious he’s not even real.”

  “He has to be if we both saw him.”

  “I never saw him just pfffft disappear before my eyes like you did. But those are my clothes he left behind. And I still have his Hootie & The Blowfish shirt.”

  Josephine said firmly, “He’s real.”

  “Then why hasn’t he been back to see us?”

  “Because nothing real lasts,” said Josephine.

  “What about me being in this school? Won’t I last?”

  “That’s unreal. One boy in an all-girls’ school.”

  “What about our plan to give the tarantula a better life?”

  “Are you sure you want to do it? Are you sure you don’t want to be a Better, and a member of the Science Club?”

  “The only reason I was nice to C. Cynthia Ann was so it will be easier for me to get the key from her.”

  “Aha! The key to the Science Room! That was what you were after!”

  “I have everything ready for the Mexican blonde. I’ve covered the tank with Bagg’s lucky T-shirt, too.”

  “I hope he doesn’t need it.”

  “He said clothes weren’t important where he lives.”

  “But lucky clothes might be,” said Josephine.

  “Maybe that’s why he left it behind. So I’ll get lucky.”

  Into the Music Room the pair went to make plans for the Butters’ first public act.

  The moment they were inside, all the other Butters stood and clapped for Josephine.

  It was their way of showing respect for the P who would soon be leaving them.

  Josephine had never received a standing ovation before and she was so overwhelmed Stanley had to begin the meeting.

  “Here is the plan,” he said. “I will tell C. Cynthia Ann Flower she can take my place as Gregor Samsa’s escort after he speaks in assembly. Since everyone will then go to the Science Room to see the prizewinners, I will take the key, unlock the door, and welcome everyone.”

  “I get it!” Josephine spoke up. “She will think you have made that arrangement so she can be alone with her idol!”

  “Exactly!” said Stanley. “And while Gregor gives his speech, I will have to get the Mexican blonde up to my room safely.”

  Cleo Kanowitz spoke up. “But she will know you swiped the tarantula from the tank!”

  “She may know it,” Stanley said, “but, remember, members of the Science Club are not supposed to lend their keys to anyone! She will not want to admit she lent it to me!”

  “Very clever!” said Ethel Lampert. “Will you leave a Butterfinger in the Mexican blonde’s tank?”

  “I will. And let everyone try to figure out what that means!” Stanley said.

  “What if no one does?” Cleo asked.

  “It is our first aboveground action,” said Stanley. “There will be others, always with the Butterfinger on the scene. It will be the Butter Surprise. Eventually, someone will get it!”

  “Rumors will spread,” said Ethel Lampert.

  “Whispers will be whispered,” said Josephine, “and talk will start. Too bad I’ll be in Tennessee and miss out on all of it!” She had meant it as a breezy, little nothing remark, but her voice had broken when she got to “Tennessee” and now she was thinking of war and famine and lost dogs to keep from crying over her own sad situation.

  “TOO BAD!” everyone chorused.

  “But I will write you all about it,” Stanley promised.

  “We all will!” they said. “We will never forget our P.”

  Ethel Lampert said, “We will not even appoint a new P. The But
ters will be run by the VP.”

  “I will run the Butters,” Stanley vowed, “but you will still be our P, Josephine.”

  The great outpouring of affection was too much for Josephine Jiminez. As a rush of stinging tears blinded her, she ran from the Music Room into the hall, where she collided with Dr. Dingle and his wife.

  “I have never seen you cry before!” he told Josephine, his eyes wide with wonder.

  His wife reminded him, “She is leaving today, dear. It’s only normal —”

  “Achoo!” Dingle sneezed. “Achoo!”

  Twenty-nine

  AS HAPPY AS SHOEBAG was to witness the Butters’ tribute to Josephine Jiminez, he could not feel cheerful about his own wretched condition.

  With his entire family now moved in the Macintosh to Tennessee, he was orphaned.

  Not only was he an orphan, something was interfering with the formula that took him back and forth from roachdom to the world of humans.

  How had it happened that so suddenly, in the midst of his conversation with Josephine Jiminez, he had been pffft-changed back to his familiar self?

  The only explanation Shoebag could come up with was that the dose of Zap had upset his system.

  The Zap had also upset the natural order of bug life in the school. It always sent roaches scurrying to nearby buildings, other Orthopetera running for cover, and arachnids fleeing to safer ground.

  That was how the jumping spider had found its way to Josephine Jiminez’s room.

  If there was anything more loathsome than a jumping spider, Shoebag had never met up with it. Back in Brooklyn, a jumping spider (with one leg missing, thanks to a Persian cat) had killed Coffee Cup, Shoebag’s little brother. He had also used his dragline to tie up Drainboard. Only a miracle had saved her from becoming the jumping spider’s breakfast.

  Now another one of those nasty things was in hot pursuit of Shoebag. It had all eight of its legs, many eyes, and the old familiar spider’s warcry: DEATH TO ALL INSECTS! Since spiders were arachnids and not insects, they enjoyed pointing this out when they charged their enemies.

  Shoebag sulked and skulked around the halls and walls of the Lower School, often with Butter prowling around after both creatures.