I Barfed on Mrs. Kenly Read online

  Back in the van, Emma asked if I was okay and Courtney offered me some watermelon gum.

  “Yes, I mean, I’m fine, no, thanks.” I smiled some more. (Totally fake.)

  We took off and my stomach still felt weird, but I clenched my teeth and sealed my mouth shut: I was SOOO NOT going to barf again.

  Chapter 6

  Nobody, not even Courtney, complained when Mr. Kling sneaked up the volume on the football game.

  “IT’S GOOD FOR FIRST DOWN YARDAGE AND THE BEARS MOVE THE CHAINS AGAIN!”

  “Yes! Atta BABY!” Everyone was pretty quiet except Mr. Kling (and the sports announcer). That’s ‘cause they were all really busy trying to pretend they didn’t notice the pukey smell in the car.

  I was as embarrassed as if I was sitting there naked with a pumpkin on my head.

  It seemed like a year and a half till we got to the club.

  The locker room was all pink with a flowery sofa, hair dryers, cotton balls, and shampoo. It had everything you could possibly need if you just threw up on Mrs. Kenly. I could have stayed in there forever, but I put on my bathing suit, which was really Jenna’s old one. It was turquoise with little chickens on it, but I so didn’t care.

  “The ants came marching

  fourteen by fourteen,

  Hoorah, hoorah ...”

  The other girls started the ant song again. I was glad because then we wouldn’t have to talk.

  The pool was big and warm, and I was happy to slide into the water and stay under till I thought I would pop.

  I thought about Ariel, the Little Mermaid. She would love to be able to go to birthday parties and drive around in vans and chew gum. Right about now I’d switch places with her in a minute, breathe underwater and only talk to fish and never get carsick.

  “Let’s play Marco Polo!” Courtney yelled.

  I played, because I knew I had to pretend I’d forgotten about the barf to get them to forget about it.

  Mrs. Kenly was sitting by the pool, helping with the lifeguarding and talking with Mrs. Kling. She looked normal, like maybe I hadn’t just totally ruined her life or anything. It seemed like she was kind of watching me.

  “Hey, Cleo, didn’t I hear that you were a diver? Show us a trick, kidlet,” she said.

  I didn’t feel like showing off right now. It was the opposite of what I wanted to do, which was be Ariel the Mermaid. But I couldn’t say no to Mrs. Kenly. Also, the diving board was at the other end of the pool away from everyone, which was a plus. I swam all the way there underwater, in one breath.

  It was a bouncy board, so a flip was easy. My stomach did a spin when I went over.

  “Whoa,” said Emma and Maddy and Katy and Courtney.

  “Good heavens! Do that again!” Mrs. Kling shouted.

  I did it again. Then I did the handstand dive. Everyone had stopped swimming to watch me now, even the strangers. So I did the jackknife, then the swan.

  The girls were chanting, “GoooOOO, Cleo! GooooOOOO, CLEO!”

  I noticed I wasn’t feeling a hundred percent horrible anymore, maybe only sixtyfive percent, which was a relief.

  “Atta BABY!” Mr. Kling yelled, like I was a Chicago Bear. “First and TEN, do it AGAIN!”

  I did another flip.

  “AND THE CROWD GOES WILD!” Mr. Kling screamed, and everyone clapped.

  I realized I was sort of freezing, so I got out and grabbed one of the poofy towels from a big neat pile. They all had Chicago Club written on them.

  All the girls were out by now, wrapped in the Chicago Club towels. Their ponytails and earlobes were dripping when they came over to me.

  “Wow, where did you learn that?”

  “You are so good of a diver!”

  You might think they were trying hard to be nice because of the barf, but I could tell they actually meant all they said.

  We sat down for hamburgers and fries, and I told the girls about hairy Mr. Jarvis and how I couldn’t dive backward. I didn’t eat a lot because I remembered we still had a long drive home.

  Mrs. Kling brought out a white cake with about a billion candles on it.

  Courtney said we should all help blow them out. I thought, Poor Ariel, she’ll never have candles on her cake because there’s no fire in the ocean. (Not to mention cake.)

  I noticed my smile was back to being real and everybody was acting like nothing ever happened. Well, the diving happened, but not the you-know-what.

  Mrs. Kenly put her hand on my shoulder while we watched the presents get opened. Courtney really liked the photo album with the C on it that I gave her, so that was good too.

  On the way home, Mrs. Kling let me sit in the front seat. I knew that she knew I’d have less of a chance of throwing up in the front, but she didn’t say that, thank goodness. She just told me to sit there. I focused straight ahead.

  I felt so much better. I even sang the ant song all the way home. But I was careful to keep my eyes glued on the road in anti-barf position.

  They dropped me off and waved good-bye, as if I had never barfed on Mrs. Kenly.

  Chapter 7

  I could hear Quinn and Ray even before I went in the house, yelling and laughing: “YAAAAHHH ha ha ha! YEEEhee hee!”

  “I’m going to EAT YOU ALIVE!” Mom was chasing them with a dragon puppet.

  “YAAAAHHH! YAAAAHHH!”

  Lily sang quietly in the corner, dancing with a Barbie doll:

  “And the tiger caught the mouse, And he brought her in his house ...”

  Jack and Jenna were in the kitchen, feeding our new bunny, whose name is Captain.

  “You have to hold the parsley up over his nose,” Jenna was saying.

  Dad was fixing the kitchen table for about the eight hundredth time, pounding away with a hammer. “How was the party?” he asked between pounds. But just then, Quinn fell over a toy bulldozer and started screaming, which was good. I mean, not good for Quinn, but good for me because I could sneak upstairs and not answer about the party. I was afraid I’d start feeling lousy again if I did.

  I told Mom later, at bedtime.

  “Oh, honey, how awful, poor baby ...”

  I cried a little then. Telling Mom about disasters always makes me cry even when I think I’m all back to feeling fine. She started singing:“The pancakes came marching

  six by six, hoorah, hoorah . . .”

  I smiled a little.

  “The pancakes came marching six by six, hoorah, hoorah!

  The pancakes came marching

  six by six,

  The last one stopped to do diving

  tricks . . .”

  We laughed.

  Mom hugged me tight.

  When she left, I squeezed my eyes shut to squirt out the last, last tear.

  Then I did this thing I do sometimes. I thought of what happened that day like it was a story, like a tiny book inside me. In my mind, I lined up the Mrs. Kenly book with the other ones I have in there. There’s a little book about when we got caught in a blizzard in Colorado. There’s another one about when that giant tortoise got lost in our house. (He was there for my Wild Kingdom birthday party.) There’s the story of how I got stitches in my head, and a lot more.

  When I’m Mom’s age, I’ll have so many stories, my insides will look like a library.

  Chapter 8

  Last night, Mom and Dad had another party with fur coats. Mrs. Kenly came and splashed her coat across the bed with the others. “Hi, kidlets,” she said to me and Lily. She whooshed away into the crowded living room.

  Later, during Dainty Ladies at the Ball, I put on Mrs. Kenly’s coat. I looked at the barf spot. It was so clean, you’d never have known. What a relief; who knew you could get throw-up out of mink? But maybe a fur coat is easy to clean. Maybe it can have a shampoo, like a dog. I mean, it’s small brown animals, after all. And I’m sure they were happy to get the barf washed out of their scalps.