Jackie's Jokes (4 page)

***

And then things got really nutty.

Robot Betty, our black and gold robot who was supposed to clean our house but never did it right, was making love-eyes at the flying watering can, which caused Carl the talking refrigerator to break into tears. Even after Betty made it clear she'd only been teasing him—you know, April Fools'!—it took an awfully long time for Carl to pull himself together enough to let Durinda make us a proper dinner.

"Serves you right," Rebecca said to Carl as she extracted a can of pink frosting from him when it was time for dessert. "You thought jokes were fine enough when you were pulling them on other people. Well, if you can dish it out, you'd better learn to take it."

"Kettle, pot," Georgia muttered.

"Excuse me?" Rebecca snapped.

Georgia stood her ground. "I only meant that you're a fine one to talk. You're always being ...
you,
but if anyone acts like you
toward
you, you get all hot under the collar."

Jackie approached the two Eights, placing one hand on each girl's shoulder. "Kettle, pot; pot, kettle. Discuss amongst yourselves."

"Something is very wrong here," Marcia observed out of the blue.

"You mean something worse," Rebecca said, "than robots who never do their jobs properly anyway and talking refrigerators and everyone in the entire world, including your own cats and your own haircutting sister, all playing tricks on you?"

"Yes," Marcia said. "But it's not a wrong something like you're thinking."

"Great," Georgia said. Standing so close to Rebecca for so long was making her as testy as she used to be. "Now you sound just like the McG: 'It's a holiday,' 'No, on second thought, it isn't'; 'It's wrong and worse,' 'On second thought, it's not.' I do wish people would make up their minds!"

"It's just that there's something off." Marcia tried to explain. "I've felt that way all day long. And now, as I'm talking out loud to you about it, I'm coming to realize what that something is."

"Do you think you could tell the rest of us, then?" Annie said, visibly starting to lose patience.

"It's just this," Marcia said. "What hasn't happened yet today that always happens every April Fools' Day?"

What hasn't happened...?

That's when it hit all of us too. Mommy, who was a great scientist and who had created all the inventions in our home, always reprogrammed at least some of those inventions to do crazy things on April Fools' Day. And this year, there had been nothing.

But before we could think any more about that—

The flying watering can came into the room, stopped right over Rebecca's head, and then drenched her.

"Aargh!" Rebecca screamed at the flying watering can. "What are you doing?"

If a flying watering can could be said to smirk, we would have sworn ours was smirking at Rebecca.

Rebecca shook her head, the excess water flying off her hair.

"If I didn't know any better," she said, "I'd say that was another practical joke."

"I wonder if the house has any more tricks up its sleeve," Zinnia wondered. Her eyes danced. "This is kind of fun."

"Maybe for you," Rebecca said through gritted teeth. "I think I'll go to Summer to dry off."

Summer was one of the four seasonal rooms our mother had invented so that we could always go to whatever season we felt like being in at any given moment.

We followed Rebecca, hoping to calm her down, but when we got to Summer...

...it was snowing!

"
What
is going on here?" Rebecca shouted. "Next thing you know, the sun will be shining in Winter."

Durinda shrugged. "Perhaps we should check?"

When we got to Winter, the sun wasn't shining but yet, somehow, there were flowers growing everywhere.

"This is amazing," Petal said. "Who has the power to make snow fall in summer and flowers bloom in winter?"

"Mommy," Jackie said simply. "No one in the world has that kind of power except for Mommy."

"Do you think she's...?" Annie started to say, her voice hushed, but then she stopped. It was as though she was scared to believe what she was thinking: somehow, Mommy was there.

"No, I don't," Jackie said. "But you know how Mommy is. Always planning ahead for things. She probably set this all up before she disappeared to wherever she disappeared to so that we wouldn't miss her playing tricks on us."

That was Mommy all over: always thinking of us first.

Suddenly, we missed her so very hard; we missed Daddy too. He also always put us first, even if his strength was more in looking good in clothes than in inventing things.

Annie, fighting back tears, clapped her hands together. "Right, then," she said brightly. "Why don't we get our homework done?"

So that's what we did. What else can you do when your parents are still missing, you have no idea where they are, and there is still work to be done?

So we worked, after which we got ready for bed.

We were exhausted now.

"My, this has been one long day," Jackie said. "It's taken forever to live through it and so much has happened. But I wonder: Do you think a day will come, I don't know when, where it will be one long adventure from beginning to end, kind of like a whole book taking place in a single day?"

Suddenly we were wondering about that too.

And somehow, we knew Jackie was right. It wouldn't happen in April, and it might not happen in May or June or even July, for that matter, but one day, it would happen.

We were certain of that, if nothing else.

CHAPTER FOUR

April 2 passed uneventfully at school, with no practical jokes played or received, but when we arrived home, the little red light on the answering machine next to the phone was blinking like crazy.

We'd stopped answering the phone and turned off the machine shortly after Mommy and Daddy's disappearance because we didn't like always answering calls from telemarketers, but we'd since turned the machine back on because Annie had said it was irresponsible not to. What if someone had an emergency and suddenly needed the help of eight little girls?

"You'd better do something about that," Rebecca said to Annie. "That little red light looks mad."

We still didn't like to actually answer the phone when it rang because we got tired of all the lies we had to tell people: that Daddy was in the bathroom and that Mommy was in France, or vice versa. So we just let the machine catch everything. It was Annie's job to take down the messages, but she didn't usually like doing that because she said no one we were interested in talking to ever called.

This was true. The people we most wanted to hear from, Mommy and Daddy—well, we didn't really believe that that was how we'd first hear from them again. Although we did like to imagine...

Hi, girls!
we imagined Mommy's voice saying.
Daddy busted his ankle on the runway in Milan, then we got detained in Venezuela when I tried to help the South Americans develop a better postage stamp, but we'll be home soon. Hope you've been behaving!

It was a nice dream, but we knew it wasn't reality.

As for the other people in our world, our two classmates never called, because we saw them every day at school, and Pete, well, we always called him rather than the other way around. This meant that Annie was right: no one we wanted to talk to would call on that phone.

Annie tried to ignore the phone, just walked right past it.

"I don't think you should ignore it this time," Rebecca insisted. "Look at that blinking red light—the thing looks like it's about to explode!"

And then the phone started to ring.

"Answer it!" Rebecca commanded. We looked at Annie, wondering if she'd hit Rebecca. Let's face it, no one ever commanded Annie to do anything.

"No," Annie said simply, but she did turn up the machine's volume so we could all hear whoever was calling and picked up the pencil and pad that were beside the phone so she could take down the message.

"Robert?" a man's voice said, sounding both confident and harried at the same time, sort of like if Principal Freud and the McG were rolled into a single person. "Alan Watts here. You do remember me, don't you? Your CPA?"

"What's a CPA?" Petal asked, but Annie shushed her.

"At any rate," this Alan Watts person continued, talking to our father, who wasn't there, "surely you've received the many e-mails I've sent you. Unless they've all disappeared into the ether, as e-mails sometimes do? Although I can't believe that happened to every single one. Still, I've given up on that, which is why I've been trying to reach you by phone all day. You do realize it's Tax Day in just thirteen days, right?"

There were those words again!

Tax Day!

We all mouthed the words.
Tax Day.
What could it be? We'd never heard of it before. Perhaps the McG had been on to something important after all, we thought.

"You haven't hired a new CPA, have you?" Alan Watts said, sounding less sure of himself. "No, of course you haven't," he insisted. "At any rate"—we were beginning to realize that Alan Watts said
at any rate
an awful lot and that it was annoying coming from him—"give me a ring as soon as you get this message." He said his number, and Annie wrote it down. "We'll set up an appointment for you to come into the city. I hope you have all your papers in order. You and Lucy make so much money, and if you don't file your taxes on time—heh, heh, heh—you'll lose it all in late fees. So, at any rate—"

But Annie turned down the volume then so that we wouldn't have to listen to Alan Watts natter on anymore.

"I don't want any part of this ...
Tax Day!
"Annie cried, throwing down the pencil like it had burned her.

"But I don't think we should ignore it," Zinnia said.

"No," Petal said, her lip starting to quiver. "That man said we could lose all our money. Then not only will we be orphans, we'll be really poor orphans!"

"I think we should call Pete," Jackie said decisively, and she headed off toward Mommy's private study.

"Pete?" Marcia asked. "But why? I mean, he is very nice to us all the time, but I don't think we should be hitting him up for a loan."

"He's our friend," Jackie said, "and he's an adult. He should be able to explain all this stuff about taxes to us.

She picked up the phone and hit the speakerphone button so we could all hear whatever got said.

"What's the number for Pete's Repairs and Auto Wrecking?" Jackie asked Annie.

"Do you really think it's that easy," Annie said with an almost sneer, "to call Pete?"

"Yes, I do," Jackie said. Then she added in a commanding voice, "Number?"

"Jackie has gotten ...
forceful
"Zinnia whispered with real admiration.

"I think it must be the hair," Georgia whispered back.

"The number's programmed into speed-dial," Annie said grudgingly. "To call Pete, you just press one."

So that's what Jackie did.

The phone rang two times, then we heard the familiar voice say, "Pete's Repairs and Auto Wrecking."

"Mr. Pete?" Jackie said. "This is Jackie Huit speaking."

"Well, this is a first," Pete said, his voice brightening. "Usually, it's Annie calling. By the way, did I tell you how nice your hair looks?"