Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts Read online

  Pippa had never seen her older sister so upset before. “It’s just a grade,” she said.

  “But I didn’t get one single question right,” said Kim. “I just stood there and I didn’t know the answers and I…I just moved my mouth up and down, like I was a goldfish gulping water.”

  “That sounds nice,” said Toby.

  “It wasn’t,” said Kim, swatting at her eyes. “Everyone was laughing.”

  “Are you crying?” Pippa asked.

  “No.” Kim straightened up defensively.

  “You’ll make it up next time,” said Kimo. Kim turned and stared at him. For the first time in her life, she felt how unfair it was that they were only a few months apart in age but that he was in a lower grade. Kimo got to enjoy sixth grade while Kim suffered through seventh.

  “Now you’re just like the rest of us,” said Pippa, who had actually never gotten an F before and was mildly impressed by her older sister’s failure.

  “F is for fart,” said Toby with a snort. They all laughed, and Kim felt a little better.

  “Mr. Petty says I have to stay after school for something called ‘test corrections.’”

  “That’s when you sit and write out the right answers,” said Kimo, who knew something about getting grades that weren’t As.

  “But it was an oral test.”

  “He probably wants to make sure you know everything,” Kimo said. “They give you questions and you can use the textbook.”

  “Why don’t they just do that to begin with?” asked Pippa.

  It was such a good question that no one could answer it, so Kim said, “Hope you guys don’t mind waiting for me.” None of them did. Pippa knew the woodworking shop would be open and was excited to finish her knickknack shelf, and Kimo was happy to put in the time at the track working on the pole vault. Kimo knew that the more he practiced, the more likely he was to break the record. He smiled to himself, thinking about his father, Johnny Trout, opening the newspaper and seeing the news of Kimo’s accomplishment. Johnny might feel proud enough to let the children take back the fishing boat.

  Kim turned to Toby. “Tobes, can you get Penny from day care and hang out with her on the playground? She likes being with you best these days.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Toby said, feeling proud to be the designated babysitter.

  So it was that that afternoon Toby found himself lying in the grass watching the baby tug at dandelions, using her little fists to make them explode. If he looked to his left, he could see—far off across the field—the classroom where Kim was doing her test corrections. If he looked to his right, he could see the entrance to the track where at that very moment Kimo was planting the pole in the pit and launching himself up into the air. It isn’t fair that Kimo gets to break an island record, Toby thought. I want to break a record.

  But what record?

  He began to make a list of the things that he was good at. He looked over at Goldie in his jar in the grass. I’m good at taking care of a goldfish, he thought. And I’m good at taking care of babies. But on second thought he realized those weren’t the kinds of things that counted toward an island record. What else was he good at?

  He was good at chewing gum. In fact, he remembered a time when Pippa—Pippa, who was so hard to impress!—had been amazed that he’d been able to cram all twenty-four sticks from a pack of gum into his mouth at once. And now that he thought about it, he realized that there had been room for more. If he’d had another pack, he would have put that in his mouth too. I wonder if there’s an island record for chewing the most gum? But then he thought about how he would have to convince Kim and Kimo to let him buy a lot of gum, and Pippa was sure to hear about it, and she would probably try it too, and Pippa had a very big mouth.

  There must be something else. What about fingernails? Toby knew for a fact that his fingernails were longer than anyone else’s in his class. And Kim had often said—when she was trying to get him to cut them—that they were the longest nails she had ever seen. What if there was a record for longest fingernails? If there was, didn’t Toby have a chance of winning? Maybe not now, but if he let his fingernails grow for a while. Then he thought about how long it would take. If I try to break the record, it probably won’t happen until I’m a grown-up. And this thought—that he might someday be a grown-up—was so awful to Toby that he groaned out loud. “Ugh.”

  “Ugh what?”

  He turned and found Clarice McGuffin sitting in the backseat of her limousine, staring at him through the open window. When had the limo pulled up and how long had she been watching?

  “Ugh what?” she asked again, pushing a loose strand of hair back with her finger.

  Toby saw that her fingernails were much, much longer than his. Of course they are, he thought. She’s probably been growing them since she was my age. But he didn’t say this. “Ugh nothing,” he said, then added, “Why are you here?”

  “Good,” Clarice said. “Getting right to the point. I like that.”

  “Wimo,” said Penny. She had stopped playing with the dandelions and was pointing at Clarice. “Wimo.”

  “How precious.” Clarice smiled her tight-lipped smile. “She likes me.”

  Toby hadn’t forgotten all the things his siblings had said about Clarice. “It’s your car she likes,” he said gruffly.

  “Perhaps she wants a ride,” said Clarice.

  “Is that what you want?” asked Toby. “Because you haven’t answered my question.”

  “You’re right,” said Clarice. “The truth is that my company…”

  “Baby Loves,” Toby interrupted. “You’re the President and CEO—whatever that is.”

  Clarice looked a little surprised. “That’s right,” she said. “Baby Loves is having a contest.”

  “I love contests,” said Toby, smiling down at Goldie. He had won the goldfish in a contest at the laundromat.

  “I know you do,” said Clarice. “That’s why I think you should enter this one. There’s only one catch. You can’t enter the contest without a baby.”

  “I have a baby,” Toby said matter-of-factly, and as if on cue, Penny reached out her arms to him. The boy scooped her up and pulled her close. “What do you think,” he asked the baby, “Do you want to enter a contest?”

  CHAPTER

  8

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Pippa drove the nail down into the wood, hammering together the pieces of her knickknack shelf. Each time a nail was hammered in, she took another nail from her pocket and positioned its tip on the wood, then raised her arm and brought the hammer down. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Occasionally as she worked, she looked over at the image of the three-masted sailing ship. She had set the piece of carved bone on the workbench as inspiration since she was building the shelf to hold it. Even so, when Bronco Bragg came over, gestured to the bone, and gave a long, low whistle of appreciation, Pippa was surprised. She had forgotten that anyone else could see it.

  “Quite a beaut,” he said. He was chewing on a long piece of dried ginzo grass and wearing a big straw cowboy hat. “Can I pick ’er up?” he asked, reaching for the piece of bone.

  “Sure,” said Pippa, feeling her heart clench. She didn’t really want anyone else to hold the bone or even to know about it. But the shop teacher was careful as he turned it over in his hand, admiring it. “I found one last summer,” he said. “I was riding Serendipity—my favorite mustang at the time, real spirited mare—and I saw somethin’ lying in the grass. Bright white, which you don’t often see in the red dirt of the mountain. Serendipity musta seen it too ’cause she stopped right where she was. I slid off ’er, reached for it. It was a piece of scrimshaw just like yours.”

  “Scrimshaw,” repeated Pippa, remembering the passage Kim had read about Captain Baker’s house. “Is this scrimshaw?”

  “Am I a buckaroo?” Bronco Bragg asked. Pippa didn’t know w
hat a buckaroo was, but she assumed that the answer was yes. It occurred to her—not for the first time—that grown-ups always went out of their way to make communication difficult. “What is scrimshaw exactly?”

  “It’s old,” he said. “Comes from long ago, back in the terrible times when men on ships used to hunt whales. They’d sometimes keep pieces of the bones and carve pictures of things from the whaling life into them.”

  “So that boat, carved on mine, it’s a whaling ship?”

  “Has a horse got hooves?” he said with a smile.

  Another question that already had an answer, she thought, but she smiled back and said, “Whaling ships and scrimshaw, those happened around the time of Captain Baker, didn’t they?”

  “Is rain wet?” Why doesn’t he ever just say yes, Pippa wondered as he plucked the dried stick of grass from his mouth and tossed it on the shop floor. “Piece I found had a picture of a harpoon on it. Harpoon’s what they used to use to kill the whales.” He shuddered and took off his cowboy hat, holding it to his chest. It was a sorrowful gesture. “That was back before people knew better than to hurt wild things. Now we know we got to do what we can to help ’em.”

  But Pippa had stopped listening. She was thinking about Captain Baker, about the fact that he’d once had a scrimshaw collection. She wondered what had happened to it after he’d died. Had it been washed down the mountain by the wind and the weather, just like the glass windows and the wood walls in the Captain’s house? If so, was it possible that the piece she’d found was from his collection? It seemed more than possible to her. It seemed likely. What else would a piece of scrimshaw be doing up on Mount Muldoon so close to the house’s ruins?

  Bronco Bragg was still talking. “Which is why a group of us wranglers offered to help when there was all that trouble at the Wildlife Safari Park last summer. Flooding tore the fences down. There were wild animals everywhere—zebras, elephants, giraffes. Imagine. They had to be rounded up. For their own safety. A group of us went out with our lassos. Rode around the mountain on horseback. That’s when I found the scrimshaw.”

  “Wait,” Pippa stifled a gasp. “You’re saying you found your piece near the Wildlife Safari Park? On Mount Muldoon?”

  “Is the moon cheese?”

  Oh boy, thought Pippa. He found a piece of the Captain’s collection too. So the collection must be scattered over the mountain. It must be waiting to be discovered, piece by piece. Then she registered what Bronco Bragg had said. Is the moon cheese? “The moon isn’t cheese,” she said to him. “But you do mean yes, don’t you?”

  “Giddyap,” he said, giving a nod. Pippa smiled but inside she felt weary; it was very hard work talking to a grown-up.

  “Nice job,” said Bronco Bragg, gesturing to Pippa’s knickknack shelf. “It’s real purty.”

  “Thanks,” Pippa said. She was already thinking about how she would use the shelf to hold all of the pieces of scrimshaw that she was going to find. She would start that night. She would find an excuse to leave the Castle and go for a walk. She wouldn’t tell anyone what she was doing. She would just take a flashlight with her and keep her eyes peeled for the telltale white of a scrimshaw bone. It would be her secret. And soon she would have a whole collection of scrimshaw to show for it.

  * * *

  —

  Name four plant species that Captain Baker brought to the island on the Billy Goat. Kim felt a flush of humiliation as she remembered Mr. Petty asking her the question and how she had just stood there, not able to speak. She’d been thinking, orchids, surely, and apples, maybe. Roses? Tomatoes? Were those the answers? She hadn’t even been able to get them out of her mouth when she’d taken the test in class that afternoon. Now she opened the teacher’s copy of the textbook and began to scan it, looking for the answers. She noticed a damp feeling on the skin of her forearm. She lifted it and found that the sweat on her arm had made the red ink from her test bleed off the paper, leaving a big red F on her skin. How appropriate, she thought. Now I’m marked with the letter for failure. She knew she needed to concentrate on the words in the textbook.

  Maybe dandelion is one of the plants Captain Baker brought, she wondered. Thinking this made her think about Penny and Toby playing on the grass near the playground, pulling up dandelions. If she lifted herself up in her seat and craned her neck, she could see the two of them sitting there. Oh, how she wished she was with them now, teaching Penny to crawl or tying dandelions into a lei for the baby to wear around her neck. Penny would giggle and grab the lei and pull it apart. Kim would have to take it from her before she tried to eat it. In fact, now that she thought of it, she hoped Toby knew better than to let the baby eat dandelions. Hoping to catch a glimpse of them, Kim lifted herself up in her seat and peered out the window. But the baby wasn’t there anymore. Neither was Toby. Perhaps they’d gone to play on the playground. Kim ran her eyes over the climber, the slide, the seesaw, but there was no sign of Toby or the baby. Where could they have gone?

  “Everything all right?” Mr. Petty looked up from his work and frowned at Kim, who was hovering out of her chair.

  Kim sat back down. “Fine,” she said, even though everything wasn’t fine. Kim had no idea what four plants the Captain had brought on the Billy Goat, she had dozens more questions to answer, and now she didn’t know where Toby and the baby were.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked the teacher, straightening the collar of his shirt. “Why can’t you talk in public?”

  “It’s…well…” Kim wanted to explain that it hadn’t always been this way. That she’d only just started to have this feeling of self-consciousness. “It’s…” she tried again. “It’s like…” When she started to talk, it was like the words were right there about to come out, but then they got stuck, and once they got stuck, they moved backwards; they slid further away. They slid deep down inside her until they were so far down that they were impossible to retrieve.

  Standing in front of her teacher now, she found that she couldn’t say any of this because she was experiencing it. The words were sliding further and further away. She gulped and felt a squeak come out of her wordless throat. She turned bright red and slammed her mouth shut.

  “Just say it,” said the teacher impatiently, but Kim shook her head. “Spit it out.” Tears prickled in her eyes. Mr. Petty looked annoyed. “I may as well tell you now that tomorrow I’m going to be giving the class a public speaking assignment. You’ll write a speech, memorize the speech, and then give the speech to your classmates. If you want to get a passing grade in this class, you’d better practice.”

  Kim felt her heart gallop with terror at the thought of giving a speech. A whole entire speech. Now all she could manage to choke out was the word, “What?”

  “What topic? You’re going to give a speech on why table manners are important.” Kim blinked and nodded her head, although she wasn’t entirely sure she knew what table manners were. The teacher must have sensed this because he grimaced and said, “Eating properly with a knife and fork, napkin in your lap, no elbows on the table…you know the rules. I’ll give you some tips for practicing your speech.” He shook his head again, then added, “You’re obviously going to need them.”

  As soon as Mr. Petty turned back to his own work, Kim craned her neck and looked for Toby and the baby. But they were nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to do except sit back down and keep working on the test. Toby and the baby would be fine. They were probably on the track, jumping on the big foam mattress beneath the pole vault. Stop worrying about everyone else, she told herself. Concentrate on yourself. Your own problems. The test. The four plants that Captain Baker brought…she began to read again.

  * * *

  —

  But Toby and the baby weren’t at the pole vault pit. Only Kimo was there and he had no idea that he should be wondering where they were. He was caught up in a challenge of his own. After his big weekend spent c
arrying groceries and sailcloth up Mount Muldoon, he’d assumed that his muscles would be larger and that he would jump higher than he ever had before. But that hadn’t happened. In fact, he had made two jumps so far and both of them had been fourteen feet, nine inches. That was two inches shorter than he’d jumped on Friday afternoon. Two inches. How can I be worse at jumping now than I was on Friday?

  Maybe my steps were off, he thought.

  It was important in pole vault to count your strides perfectly so that you could land the pole in the best spot in the pit. If your pole was too far forward, your launch would fall short; too far back, and it wouldn’t happen at all. Each time before he jumped, Kimo had learned to stick the pole in the pit and to work back from there. He would mark the spot on the track where his foot needed to be in order for the pole to be placed right, and then he would count his strides backwards to a starting point at the top of the track. He knew that there were exactly seventeen strides from the top of the track to the point where he should plant his pole.

  Now he stood in that spot at the top of the track and stared at the bar that was set at fifteen feet exactly. He visualized his sprint. If he took seventeen strides at the right speed, the pole would land where it should, and he would push his left hand forward on the pole, and pull his right arm back on the pole and that would launch him into the air higher than he had ever gone before.

  But he had to clear his mind. Something as small as a stray leaf on the track could throw him off, and if he was at all distracted, he was likely to destroy his rhythm and ruin the jump. So it didn’t help now that as he stood there, looking at the high bar, an image came into his mind: his fishing boat—the boat that he had won at the North Shore Summer Fair—dangling in the air above the ocean. He tried to wipe this image away. He tried to think about what he needed to do; he needed to sprint for seventeen steps and plant his pole in the right spot so he would soar. But this calculation only led Kimo back to the image of the boat high up in the air, dripping seawater as it hung from the crane.