Sophie Flakes Out Read online

  There was a long pause. Sophie was sure Miss Imes was deciding which parent to turn the writing of the script over to. But finally Miss Imes nodded at Mr. Stires and said to the kids, “You heard all of that. Can you take that into consideration as you put your film together?”

  “That’s it?” Fiona said.

  “Yes!” Sophie said, squeezing Fiona’s wrist until she clamped her mouth shut. “We can definitely do that.”

  “That’ll be swell,” Darbie said.

  Film Club heads bobbed. Sophie couldn’t wait to get out of there and celebrate. This wouldn’t be so bad, she thought. A surprise victory.

  Until Miss Imes said, “All right then. And when the script has been completed, I will email it to each of the parents for approval. I’ll contact those who couldn’t be here today and let them know.” She turned to the students, who all looked to Sophie like birthday balloons three days after the party. “Why don’t you go on and get to work, and we’ll wrap up here?”

  Sophie didn’t look at Daddy at all as she led the group out into the hall.

  “We’re right back where we started,” Fiona said almost before the door was closed.

  “And how,” Vincent said. There was no big sloppy grin. “We can write whatever we want, but if they don’t like it, we don’t get to do it.”

  “I bet your parents aren’t like ours,” Darbie said to him. “No,” Vincent said. “Mine are worse. The only reason they aren’t here is because they’re out of town. I’m surprised my father didn’t have himself patched in by satellite.”

  Wow, Sophie thought. These guys are empathizing all over the place. “I didn’t know boys had these kinds of problems too,” she said.

  Jimmy nodded shyly, and Nathan turned red.

  “Does the phrase ‘house arrest’ mean anything to you?” Vincent said. “That’s the way I feel 99 percent of the time.”

  Willoughby put one arm around Sophie’s shoulders and the other around Darbie’s. “My offer is still open,” she said. “Y’all can come to my house anytime you need to escape.”

  “We don’t have time to escape,” Fiona said. “We have a film to do. Only I don’t see how it’s going to be anything close to real now. We might as well do ‘The Three Little Pigs’ or something.” For the second time that day, they all looked at Sophie.

  She could feel Goodsy Malone giving her mind a shove. “No,” Sophie said. “We just have to stick together and help each other through this.”

  “Corn Flake Code,” Darbie said. “Huh?” Nathan said.

  Fiona gave Darbie a poke. “It’s a girl thing,” she said to Nathan. And then she turned to Sophie. “You think we can make it real and still follow all their rules?”

  Something tickled at the back of Sophie’s mind. The image of pinch-faced Pharisees saying, “Look! What you’re doing is unlawful!”

  “Yes, I do,” Sophie said. “And maybe we can convince them that the rules have changed.”

  They all met after school that day and Friday—all except Willoughby, of course—and tried to recapture the fun they’d been having with Goodsy and the gangsters before the Parent Patrol came in.

  But trying to “suggest” a raid on a suspected gang meeting and just “discussing” the bullet holes in the church wall instead of showing how they got there left the group feeling like deflated balloons again.

  Six

  The only thing that gave the girls their bounce back was their sleepover at Fiona’s Friday night. Kitty was there.

  “I can’t believe my mom even let me come,” she said.

  Sophie couldn’t either. Kitty’s mother had made Miss Odetta, Boppa’s new wife, promise to call her if Kitty so much as hiccupped. Miss Odetta, who was one of Fiona’s former nannies (the one who had given demerits for breaking the tiniest rules) was now officially part of the Parent Patrol. Everyone started to sag.

  “Okay,” Sophie said, “I have an idea.”

  “Unless it’s deadly dull, we probably can’t use it,” Fiona said. “No!” Sophie squatted in front of Kitty’s wheelchair. “We can show how heinous the gangsters were without really being violent. We’ll show them kidnapping a poor sick helpless girl in a wheelchair and holding her hostage—but not hurting her.”

  “I can play helpless!” Kitty said.

  A slow smile smoothed the frown from Fiona’s face. “Now that is the ant’s underwear,” she said.

  When the Lucky Charms and Willoughby arrived Saturday morning, they gave the official “Swell” to the idea, and they all started to work. They discovered along the way that if they used Nathan’s twenties slang whenever something rough was called for, and said it out the sides of their mouths, it worked just as well as swearing. Words like lousy and rotten took on a whole new meaning. “Bushwa!” and “Gadzooks!” were by far the best.

  By the time Boppa offered to treat them all to ice cream, they had an entire parent-safe script written.

  “Y’know,” Darbie said when they’d all piled into the big Ford Expedition, “I think it would be the bee’s knees if we used our new language in our emails and IMs.”

  “Did you just say ‘the bee’s knees’?” Boppa said from the driver’s seat. He smiled his soft Boppa-smile. “My father used to say that.”

  “Rats,” Fiona whispered as they pulled into the Baskin Robbins parking lot. Out loud she said, before he could open the locks, “Boppa, why don’t you just give me the money, and I’ll bring yours out to you?”

  There was a tiny pause before the locks clicked and doors flew open. Sophie caught a glimpse of Boppa’s caterpillar eyebrows in the rearview mirror. They had a sad droop to them.

  “I feel kind of bad leaving him in the car,” Sophie said to Fiona as they hurried across the parking lot. “I mean, he’s Boppa!”

  “How else are we ever going to have a private conversation?” Fiona said. She stopped at the door, a wad of Boppa’s money rolled up in her hand. “Nobody on the Parent Patrol is going to let us grow up. We just have to do it.”

  Sophie held back as Fiona went inside, and she imagined the kind eyes.

  We aren’t doing something wrong, are we? she said silently.

  Don’t the rules have to change so we can grow up?

  There was no answer. But for a crazy moment, Sophie thought she saw Jesus’ eyebrows drooping.

  When Sophie, Darbie, and Fiona got to first period Monday morning, Mrs. Clayton was standing in the hallway with Jimmy, bullet eyes looking ready to fire. For a second, Sophie wondered if Jimmy had tried “bushwa” on her already.

  “Sophie,” Mrs. Clayton said, “I need to talk to you too.” She nodded to Darbie and Fiona to go on into the room. “Round Table tomorrow during lunch,” she continued when Fiona had craned her neck as long as she could and disappeared through the doorway. “We have an interesting case this time.”

  “Gadzooks!” Sophie said.

  “Excuse me?” Mrs. Clayton said.

  Jimmy shuffled his feet. “She means—”

  “I think I know what she means. I’m just not sure it’s—well, whatever.”

  Mrs. Clayton was still shaking her cement hair-helmet as Sophie and Jimmy went inside.

  “It works,” Sophie whispered.

  “And how,” Jimmy whispered back.

  “Don’t forget, you two,” Mrs. Clayton said from behind them. “Don’t listen to any rumors about this case.”

  There were definitely plenty of them not to listen to. By the time Sophie got to third period, she’d heard everything from somebody stealing a teacher’s grade book to someone tossing a substitute out a second-story window. The Corn Pops were responsible for most of that, Sophie was sure. They passed notes all through the two-hour English/History block.

  The only story Sophie believed came from Willoughby. She cornered Sophie when Coach Yates sent them to the closet for basketballs.

  “I know who’s going to Round Table,” Willoughby said.

  “They’re my friends, and I need you to help them.”r />
  She was twirling a curl so tightly around her finger this time, Sophie was sure the end would pop off.

  “What friends?” Sophie said. “None of the Flakes—”

  “Not y’all,” Willoughby said. She pulled Sophie farther into the closet by her sweatshirt sleeve. “It’s two of my cheerleader friends. I really need you to make sure they don’t get any afterschool punishment, or they’ll get suspended from the squad for missing practice. Will you—please?”

  “What did they do?” Sophie said.

  Willoughby spread her hands like fans. “They didn’t do anything—”

  She stopped, and her eyes widened at something over Sophie’s shoulder. When Sophie turned to look, two heads disappeared from the doorway, but not before Sophie saw that they belonged to the two eighth-grade girls on her bus—the ones with the cell phones. Sophie whipped back around to Willoughby, whose eyes were practically begging.

  “Them?” Sophie said.

  “Victoria and Ginger,” Willoughby said. “They’re really nice, and there’s no way they did anything wrong. Mr. Bentley’s just too strict. He doesn’t understand anything.” Willoughby narrowed her eyes. “He’s worse than any of y’all’s parents.”

  Sophie’s stomach squirmed. Mr. Bentley had never sent anybody to Round Table unless he was really sure they needed help with their attitude or something. But Willoughby looked convinced—

  “Will you help?” Willoughby said. “I told them we could count on you.”

  “Where did you go for those basketballs, the factory?” Sophie had never been glad to hear Coach Yates’ voice before, or happy to see her ponytail-pinched face scowling at her.

  “Sorry,” Sophie said. She grabbed a bag of balls.

  She headed for the closet door, dragging the bag. Willoughby tried to follow with another one, but Coach Yates said, “I need to talk to you, Wiley.”

  Willoughby’s face snapped into a smile as if someone were about to take her picture.

  “Go start handing those out, LaCroix.” Coach Yates waited until Sophie was out of hearing range before she turned to Willoughby, who was still wearing a smile as fake as the Corn Pops’.

  There was no time to tell the other Flakes about any of that before lunchtime, not with Miss Imes’ math test fourth period. And Sophie needed to talk to them before her stomach tied into a square knot.

  But when the bell rang for lunch, Willoughby was waiting in the doorway to the cafeteria. She hooked her arm around Sophie’s and towed her inside—but not toward the Corn Flakes’ usual table. Willoughby dragged her past the entire seventh-grade section with Fiona calling, “Gadzooks! Where are you going?” in the background.

  “Here she is!” Willoughby said, and thrust Sophie into a chair. She was surrounded by eighth-grade girls, but the only two Sophie really saw were the Cell Phone Twins.

  “You must be Sophie,” said the very blonde one with the striking blue eyes. “I’m Victoria.”

  “Oh,” Sophie said. She could feel her whole self turning into a very large sore thumb.

  “I’m Ginger,” said the one who looked like an elf. She put out a thin hand toward Sophie. Sophie stared at it for a long, embarrassing minute before she realized Ginger wanted her to shake it. When she did, it felt like a feather in her palm.

  “Haven’t I seen you around?” Victoria said. She nudged a cardboard tray of nachos toward Sophie. “Have one.”

  “You ride my bus,” Sophie said. “Or I ride your bus—or something.”

  “That’s it.” Victoria smiled with the ease of a star on a talk show. “Do you know you have the cutest haircut?”

  Ginger nodded as if she were going to grab scissors immediately and try to copy Sophie’s ’do on herself.

  “She used to be bald,” Willoughby said. “She shaved her head for our friend who has cancer.”

  Sophie waited for the curled lips that usually came after that announcement, but Victoria and Ginger both nodded as if they were in awe.

  “When you said she’d do anything for a friend,” Ginger said to Willoughby, “you weren’t kidding.”

  Her voice was low and throaty, and nothing much on her moved when she talked. It made Sophie feel like she herself was going to do something spastic any minute. She was afraid to even reach for a nacho.

  Victoria leaned forward, so that her blonde hair slipped silkily onto her chest. “Listen,” she said. Her blue eyes were serious, like a grown-up’s. It occurred to Sophie that she seemed even older than Lacie. “Thanks for helping us tomorrow. We thought once Mr. Bentley got us on his hate list, there was nothing we could do.”

  “’Til Willoughby told us about you,” Ginger said. She put both slender arms, clad tightly in pink, around Willoughby. “We love her.”

  Willoughby smiled until tears sparkled in her eyes. Sophie could feel the knot in her stomach making another loop.

  I haven’t said I’d help yet! Sophie wanted to scream. I don’t even know what they did. Or didn’t do. Or anything!

  But Willoughby was gazing at her as if Sophie had just offered to give her a lifesaving kidney.

  “We need to celebrate,” Victoria said. She leaned in, and everyone else leaned too. “There’s no school Thursday or Friday, so let’s have a party Wednesday night.”

  And then, like someone had just given them a cue, the entire table looked at Willoughby.

  “Okay,” Willoughby said. “We’re out of soda, though.” “Oh, we’ll definitely bring more over,” Ginger said.

  The party’s going to be at Willoughby’s? Sophie thought. She couldn’t have been more confused.

  “You come too, Stephi,” Victoria said.

  “Sophie!” Willoughby said, with a half-poodle-shriek.

  “You don’t have to bring your own drinks, though,” Victoria said to Sophie. She gave her a you’re-in-on-the-secret smile. “I figure it’s the least we can do.”

  “You’re not eating,” Ginger said, inching the nachos closer to Sophie. “Are you trying to keep that cute little figure?”

  Sophie looked down at her still-flat chest. Willoughby nudged her.

  “See?” she said. “I told you they were nice.” She rolled her eyes. “There’s no way they would ever give Coach Yates attitude.”

  “Is that what—” Sophie said.

  Willoughby gave a little poodle-yelp. “That’s like something Julia and them would do.”

  Victoria froze with a dripping chip halfway to her lips. “Those little princess wannabes?” she said.

  There was unanimous disgust around the table. “No way we’re like them,” Ginger said.

  For the first time, Sophie found herself nodding. Maybe, just maybe … if these girls saw the Corn Pops for what they were, they might actually be as nice as Willoughby said.

  They haven’t put me down one time since I’ve been at the table, she thought. Corn Pop Julia couldn’t get through one nacho without making me feel like I’m a piece of lint—

  “I want to know how you got up the courage to shave your head,” Victoria said. She was smiling right into Sophie. “That was so brave.”

  Squinting suspiciously, Sophie focused hard on Victoria. When one of the Corn Pops was being that nice to her, she could smell the fake factor. But Victoria actually looked impressed. It was worth checking out—

  “Kitty’s my friend,” Sophie said. “I didn’t want her to be all alone.” Now came the final test. “Wouldn’t you do the same for Ginger?”

  Victoria’s eyes widened, as if she were surprised. Then slowly she looked at Ginger, and she bit her glossy lip. “I think I would,” she said. And then she gave Ginger a hug.

  By the time lunch was over, Sophie had determined that Victoria and Ginger couldn’t have committed the sin of backtalking to a teacher. And after all, Coach Yates had been grumpier than usual lately. Even Coach Virile had said so.

  So the next day at the Round Table meeting, Sophie did her best Goodsy Malone—like defense of Victoria Peyton and Ginger Jenkins before
they even came in.

  “Sounds like a case of misunderstanding,” she told the council. “This can be worked out, see? We don’t need to bring in the big guns. Just a sit-down-and-talk. With a neutral party present.” She turned to Coach Virile and wished she were wearing a fedora so she could push it back for dramatic effect. “Somebody like Coach here.”

  Mrs. Clayton looked around the table. “Anyone else?”

  “Sure, whatever,” said Hannah. She was the eighth-grade girl on the council, a serious brunette with contact lenses that always seemed to bother her. She blinked rapidly at Oliver, the eighth-grade boy. “Sounds like she had it all figured out before we even got here.”

  Oliver plucked at the rubber band on his braces and nodded.

  Miss Imes’ eyebrows were aimed at her forehead, but Coach Virile nodded. “I think it’s worth a try. I can meet them—”

  “How about during lunch tomorrow?” Sophie said.

  “It’s big of you to arrange Coach Nanini’s schedule for him, Sophie.” Mrs. Clayton’s voice was flat.

  “It’s okay,” Coach said. “I’ll set it up with Coach Yates.” Sophie tried not to make her long, relieved breath too obvious. Victoria and Ginger wouldn’t miss any practice. Willoughby would be happy.

  And I upheld the Corn Flake Code of loyalty, Sophie thought.

  It was the bee’s knees.

  Seven

  Not everybody was as happy with Sophie as Willoughby was. “Don’t I know you?” Fiona said when Sophie sat down next to her in fifth-period science. “Didn’t you used to eat lunch with us?”

  “I had Round Table today,” Sophie said. “And yesterday—”

  “You were helping Willoughby. I get that.” Fiona lowered her voice as the bell rang. “I’m just missing you. And Willoughby. Why’s she all about those eighth graders now? What’s wrong with us?”

  Darbie leaned over from the desk on the other side of Sophie. “We’ve got bigger problems than that,” she said. She looked at Fiona. “Did you tell her?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Mr. Stires called an emergency Film Club meeting while you and Jimmy were at Round Table,” Fiona said. “He and Miss Imes emailed our script to all the parents, and one of them said the kidnapping scene was too ‘scary’ for kids our age.”