All Four Stars (7 page)

EVERYONE WANTS A PIECE OF GLADYS

OVER THE WEEKEND, GLADYS CONVINCED
herself that Rolanda must be right—in a few days, no one in Ms. Quincy's class would remember her essay. But when she walked into school that Monday, the strangest thing happened.

Someone said hello to her.

It was Joanna Rodriguez. “How was your weekend?” Joanna asked with a smile. Gladys glanced over her shoulder, but there was no one else Joanna might have been talking to.

“I had to have Sunday dinner with my grandparents,” Joanna continued, falling into step beside Gladys. “My
abuelita
made her carne asada, but she
always
cooks the meat for too long, so it comes out all dry. It's, like,
too
asada, you know? But if anyone told her that, they'd get disowned by the family.” Joanna sighed and tucked a curly lock of hair behind her ear.

“Your essay gave me an idea, though,” she went on. “Maybe I could write an anonymous review of her cooking! I could type it up and leave it in her mailbox.”

“But wouldn't she guess it was from you?” Gladys asked.

“Nah,” Joanna said. “I've got, like, fourteen cousins—it could be from any one of us! So hey, if I write a draft, could you maybe look at it for me?” She shot Gladys a hopeful smile. “I want to make sure the description of the meat is really nasty, like that super-gristly steak you wrote about in your essay.”

“Um, sure,” Gladys said.

Gladys thought this request had to be a fluke—but somehow, all week, she found herself having similar conversations. During their break between math and social studies the next day, Ethan Slezak scooted his chair up to hers.

“So, Gladys,” he said, “my church is having a potluck this weekend, and my dad always makes this boring onion dip. The last time I complained about it, he was like, ‘Then make your own dip, kid!' So, um . . . I said I would.” Ethan shook his head, like he'd never made a more stupid promise. “Got any ideas?”

“Sure!” Gladys said, and before she knew it she'd written him out a recipe for homemade hummus.

Then on Thursday, Gladys was just getting settled in across from Parm at the lunch table when Leah Klein grabbed the seat to her left. “Hey, Gladys!” she said brightly. “What have you got for lunch today?”

Gladys pulled her sandwich out to check. “Looks like some kind of meat with mustard on white,” she said with a sigh. Then, in an effort to be friendly, she asked, “How about you?”

“Um, I've got this fancy cheese my mom bought—it's called Brie, I think?—on this really crusty bread . . .” Gladys's mouth watered as Leah pulled a long, thin section of baguette out of her bag. “But she put fig jam on it
again.
”

“I'll trade you!” The words were out of Gladys's mouth before she even had a chance to think.

“Really?” Leah said. She looked as if Gladys had offered to do her homework for the rest of the year. “No one ever wants to trade with me. But after I heard your essay I thought, well, maybe Gladys might . . .”

It was the best lunch Gladys had eaten in a long time. She would have written a rave review of the sandwich during recess, too, if the other kids hadn't come up to her spot at the fence to talk to her.

“Hey, Gladys, how come my mom's cupcakes always fall apart?” Mira Winters demanded.

“She's probably mixing the batter too much,” Gladys answered.

“Gladys, the pears my dad packs in my lunches are always so hard,” complained Peter Yang.

“Make sure he lets them ripen on the counter until the stem area gets dented when he pushes it in,” Gladys advised.

“Yo, Gladys, what's the best restaurant in town to take a girl to on a date?” Owen Green asked.

Gladys was stumped by that one. If East Dumpsford had a romantic restaurant, she'd never been there.

“Oh, shut up, Owen,” Parm said. She flicked the sleeve of his Dumpsford Dribblers jacket like he was an overgrown fly. “No girl would ever go on a date with
you.
”

“Parm flicked
Ow
-en!” Mira chanted in a singsong voice as giggles moved through the crowd. Owen and Parm both glared at her, though Gladys thought she saw a tiny smile cross Owen's lips before he loped off toward the swing sets.

This pattern continued over the next couple of weeks, until it seemed like the only people who hadn't approached Gladys for cooking advice were Charissa and her cronies.

“That's probably because they don't eat,” Parm whispered as she and Gladys made their way out onto the playground one frigid afternoon. The far field had gotten too snowy for soccer, so lately Parm had become Gladys's “assistant,” organizing her questioners into a straight line and turning them away ten minutes before the end of recess so Gladys still had time to write in her journal.

Gladys followed Parm's gaze to where Charissa stood, scowling by the seesaw with Rolanda and Marti at her flanks. She didn't want to be on that group's bad side. Who knew what kinds of desperate measures Charissa might be plotting to win back her popularity?

As it happened, Gladys didn't have to wait long to find out. The moment her usual queue formed by the fence, Rolanda and Marti scurried over and began whispering to all the girls. One by one, they peeled off the line and crossed the playground to the spot where Charissa was now climbing on top of a mound of pebbles. Curious about what was going on, the boys quickly followed until only Parm and Gladys were left by the fence.

The whipping wind carried Charissa's voice over to them. “Attention! Attention!” she cried. “I have a
very
important announcement to make about my awesome birthday party in March!”

“Ugh, what nerve,” Parm hissed into Gladys's ear. “I bet she's only making such a big deal of this because she's jealous of the attention
you've
been getting.”

“Yeah,” Gladys agreed, but it was hard for her to muster up the level of indignation that Parm was showing. Honestly, she almost felt relieved to see the crowd migrate over to the other side of the yard. Having to talk to that many people every day was starting to make her feel like an empty coffee mug, with nothing but dregs left at the bottom.

“Well, at least the swings are open,” Parm said. “Shall we?” Gladys nodded, and Charissa's voice faded as they hurried toward the empty swing set. A minute later they both kicked off, laughing as the wind pushed at their backs and lifted them higher.

Charissa can keep the attention,
Gladys thought. It felt good to be free.

THE THIRSTY INTERN

FIFTY MILES AWAY IN NEW YORK CITY, AN
intern at a certain large newspaper was trying to break free from her obligations, too.

When Anastasia had shown up for work at the
New York Standard
office that morning, the first thing she saw was that the coffee machine near her desk was broken. But before she could sneak off to a kitchen on another floor, Carol Wilkins, the secretary who managed all interns, charged around the corner breathlessly.

“Anastasia!” she cried. “I've been looking all over for you! Come quickly, there's an important assignment we need your help on!”

At the sound of these words, Anastasia tore her eyes away from the “Out of Order” sign on the coffee machine. An important assignment? Maybe this was the project she'd been waiting for, the project that would get one of the newspaper's editors to notice her. Maybe she would finally be sent to a City Hall press conference or a war-torn foreign country! Despite her sleepiness, Anastasia the Intern (and soon-to-be Reporter?) perked up as she followed Carol back to her desk.

“The
New York Standard
sponsors a statewide sixth-grade essay contest, and the entries have arrived,” Carol began as she shimmied herself into her office chair. “They're completely disorganized, though, and the judging panel needs to have them by the end of today.”

“Sixth-grade . . . essays?” Anastasia asked disappointedly.

“Yes!” Carol cried, and went on to explain that Anastasia must 1) go to the mail room immediately to collect the entries, 2) organize all of the entry titles in a computer file, 3) make three photocopies of each entry, and 4) deliver the essays to the judges.

It was Anastasia's four least favorite tasks all rolled into one.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Carol asked impatiently as she reached for the ringing phone on her desk. “Go!”

Twenty minutes later, after retrieving an enormous pile of envelopes from the mail room, Anastasia sat in her cubicle, holding her head up with one hand and typing slowly with the other. She only looked briefly at each essay as she logged it in on the computer. But halfway through this second tedious task, something caught her eye.

The essay currently at the top of the pile didn't look like an essay at all—it was typed on pink stationery rather than handwritten on lined paper like the others. In fact, it looked much more like a cover letter applying for the position of restaurant critic.

Anastasia sighed. This wasn't the first time the mail room had given her the wrong mail. She plucked the cover letter out of the pile of sixth-grade essays and stuck it on the other side of her desk. For a moment, she thought of looking through her recycling bin to see if she could root out the corresponding envelope. But just then Carol flew by the cubicle and, seeing the size of the pile still to be logged in, used one of the intern's least favorite expressions. “Chop chop, Anastasia, chop
chop
!” she cried, which sent Anastasia into another flurry of cataloging.

Anastasia worked at her computer right through lunch, then moved on to the copy room where, thankfully, the enormous copy machine seemed to be working properly for once. While the automatic feeder did most of the work, Anastasia thought about dashing off to another floor for coffee, but by now it was nearly three o'clock, and any coffee left would probably be cold.

Finally, the machine shuddered to a stop and it was time for Anastasia to deliver the materials to the three judges.

“Just leave the copies in the editors' mailboxes, and
don't
bother them,” Carol said as Anastasia staggered by her desk holding her biggest pile of the day.

One of the contest judges was Wendell Pettit, editor of the newspaper's famous crossword puzzles. His office was in the basement, next to a shelf of enormous dictionaries. Another judge was Jean Sallow, a political columnist with an office on the building's fourteenth floor. Finally, there was Salome Mendez-Lopez, a news reporter on the City desk, which was located on the ground floor. Keeping this in mind, Anastasia stopped back by her cubicle for her hat and coat so she could leave the building immediately after delivering the final batch of essays. But as she slung her coat over her shoulder, she once again noticed the pink cover letter sitting on the edge of her desk.

Protocol
was a word that Anastasia knew well, since it was everywhere in the interns' manual she had received on her first day at the
New York Standard.
Protocol was the series of steps that employees (including unpaid interns) were supposed to follow when faced with any number of unusual circumstances. If you found the coffee machine out of order, for instance, first you hung a sign on it that said O
UT OF
O
RDER
, then you went and told the nearest secretary, who then called Maintenance, who usually got around to fixing it after a week or two. Or if you were assigned to research a story for the newspaper in a town that was only accessible by elephant, the protocol was to rent the elephant first with your own money, then submit a form that listed your elephant rental expenses so you could be paid back after your story was published.

Anastasia had never used either of these two examples. Nevertheless, she was familiar with the protocol for finding a piece of mail clearly meant for one department mixed in with the mail of another. What she should have done was first taken the letter to her boss—Carol—to confirm that it really did not belong with the sixth-grade essays. Then she should have brought the letter back down to the mail room so it could be redirected.

But without her coffee, Anastasia didn't have the energy to make two extra stops. And she knew that once it was examined in the mail room, the letter would be rerouted to the Dining department—which happened to be located on the fourteenth floor, where she was heading now.

So, after delivering the first stack of essays to Jean Sallow, Anastasia stopped by the office of Fiona Inglethorpe, chief editor of the Dining section. The pink letter went straight into the editor's mailbox, and Anastasia the Intern went on her merry way, back to the elevator bank, down to Crosswords in the basement, up to the City section on the main floor, and out the building's front door.

FOOD FIGHT!

GLADYS WOKE UP ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY
26, with a stomach that felt full not of the creamy mushroom risotto she'd been dreaming about cooking, but of butterflies. Today was the day that the
New York Standard
would publish its winning essay. Had her entry been good enough?

Gladys's mom had an early appointment and spent the morning bustling around the house, searching for her briefcase and keys and hat. This was lucky, since it kept her from noticing how Gladys was hardly touching her bowl of Sugar O's. Even luckier, by the time she found everything she needed, she was running so late that she agreed to let Gladys ride her bike to school even though the streets were still slushy from a recent snowstorm.

“Be careful!” her mom shouted as she backed the car out of the driveway. Gladys finished strapping her watermelon-patterned helmet over her woolly blue hat and jumped on her bike, gripping its handlebars through her thick mittens. The wind was strong against her face as she kicked off, but Gladys felt so happy to be riding that she hardly felt it. Would her luck hold throughout the day?

As she pedaled down the street, Gladys wished that her mother had left a little earlier—then she might have had time to make a detour to Mr. Eng's, pick up a warm croissant for breakfast, and sneak a look at the newspapers by the front counter. But since the streets were a mess, there were only enough minutes to ride to school.

Stomping the slush off her boots in the school lobby, Gladys wondered whether the teachers kept copies of the
New York Standard
in their staff room, or whether she could go to the computer lab at lunch to look at the newspaper's website. But it turned out not to matter. She had barely arrived at the door of her classroom when Ms. Quincy rose from looking at an open copy of the paper on her desk and beckoned Gladys back into the hallway.

The second bell rang, and kids rushed down the hall. Ms. Quincy (who was wearing a pair of purple rubber boots that might have seemed weather-appropriate until you noticed their frighteningly high platform heels) stooped to talk to Gladys face-to-face. Gladys saw her teacher's expression and knew that her luck had run out.

“I'm sorry, Gladys,” Ms. Quincy said. “But it looks like you have not won the essay contest.”

Gladys's face, which moments ago had felt so cold in the icy winds, suddenly felt very warm. “Oh” was all that she could say.

Ms. Quincy continued. “The winning essay was written by a boy—or perhaps a girl—from upstate named Hamilton Herbertson. I've read it, and to be honest I'm a bit surprised that the judges chose an essay about
fighting zombies
in the future.” She sniffed. “I thought that your topic was much more original.”

“Thanks,” Gladys said, afraid that if she uttered more than one syllable at a time her voice might crack.

“You did your best, and this class was proud to have you as its representative.” Ms. Quincy placed a hand on Gladys's shoulder. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes,” Gladys said.

“Good. Chin up then.”

And that was that.

Gladys felt strangely empty for the rest of the morning (though her lack of breakfast may have had something to do with that, too). She didn't raise her hand during math or social studies, and thankfully Ms. Quincy didn't force her to participate.

At lunchtime, Parm tried to put things in perspective. “The odds were against you the whole time,” she said as she poured milk over her Wheaty Squares. “Like I said from the start, it's just a game of numbers. And honestly, do you think those
New York Standard
people really read every single entry? They probably just picked one paper randomly from the pile and gave it the prize.”

“Uh, thanks, Parm.” Gladys took another bite of her sandwich. Leah and her gourmet lunch were absent today, so she was stuck with low-fat peanut butter and sugar-free jelly on white.

“Parm, you are such a
downer,
” Owen Green said, flicking a piece of lettuce across the table in Parm's direction. The boys' section of the table started just one seat away from Gladys, and apparently he was close enough to hear their conversation. “Just leave Gladys alone. If she wants to cry over losing the contest, let her cry.”

Gladys swallowed her sandwich bite in a hurry. “I wasn't cry—”

“Oh, please,” Parm countered. “I'm just explaining how the
real world
works. How it's full of
disappointment
and
heartache.
She's going to have to get used to it one day, and so are you.”

Owen was pulling his sandwich apart, looking for more ammo. “I know how the real world works!” he muttered. “My grandparents live in the Bronx. Last week there was a shooting right down the block from their apartment. It doesn't get realer than that!”

“You think that's bad?” Parm scoffed. “Try going to India sometime! You should see what's down the street from where
my
grandma and grandpa live!”

Parm's hand was clenched into a fist around her spoon, and Owen was aiming a tomato slice in her direction, his flicking finger at the ready.

“Food fight!” Nicky McDonald squealed.

For a split second, time seemed to freeze—and then, all at once, the air over the sixth-grade lunch table was filled with flying food. Soggy vegetables soared out of Owen's sandwich in graceful arcs while milk-moistened Wheaty Squares shot off Parm's spoon like boulders from a catapult. Nicky launched baby-carrot missiles at Peter Yang, whose pear (perfectly ripe, Gladys was glad to see) splattered on the wall behind Nicky's head. Over at the other end of the table, Charissa and her cronies were shrieking and backing away from the melee, but some of the other girls were game. Joanna Rodriguez gleefully shouted “Snotbomb!” as she flung an open cup of green Jell-O at Marina Trillesby, who was quick to counter with a pudding cup of her own.

As her classmates' shrieks and the sharp whistles of the lunch aides accosted her ears, Gladys felt all of the day's frustrations coming to a peak. She had not won the contest; she did not have five hundred dollars to pay off the fire damage or an award-winning essay to prove that she really was a good cook. All she had was this dreadful peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the promise of many more to come.

Then, before she knew it, Gladys was on her feet, tearing the two halves of her sandwich apart and hurling them with all her might toward the wall on the other side of the room. The jellied half slid off immediately, but the peanut-buttered half stuck with a satisfying squelch.

The red-faced lunch aides closed in, and Gladys felt sorry for them—she didn't usually approve of cafeteria mayhem, especially when it involved wasting food. But just this once, as she admired the new peanut-buttery wall art she'd created, she had to admit that she felt a tiny bit good, too.