The Girls Get Even (2 page)

“You know what?” he said to Peter. “The ants don’t even know we’re here. Look.” He put his sneakered foot in the path of a large ant hurrying toward the anthill, and it just scurried on around the toé. Didn’t even look up to see what giant was blocking its path. Didn’t even know that the toe was attached to a foot, and the foot to a leg, and the leg to a body.

‘‘Maybe it’s nice to be an ant,” he added. ‘‘Someone could come along any minute and smash the anthill and they don’t even know it. They don’t even worry, because it never even crosses their minds.”

Peter got up and brought his foot down on the anthill.

Wally stared. “Why did you do
that?”

“You
said!”

“I didn’t tell you to step on it¡ You’ve killed them!”

Peter looked around. “There’s more,” he said defensively, and sat back down.

Wally sighed. He couldn’t help looking up at the sky just then, in case there was the slightest chance of a monstrous foot hanging over him and Peter. He wished that Jake and Josh would hurry and get home from their paper route. On a warm October Saturday like this the battle with the Malloy girls seemed about as important as which ant got to the anthill first. And he, for one, was going to enjoy camping with his brothers—just four guys out in the woods by themselves.

As much as he tried to forget them, however, his mind ran through the inventory of grievances against the girls: the way they had climbed onto the Hatfords’ roof one night when Mom and Dad were away and howled through the trapdoor; the
way they had spied on the boys from the shed, tricked them into washing the Malloys’ windows, and thrown Mom’s chocolate chiffon cake in the river.

Wally was smiling in spite of himself. Watching Caroline’s face after she’d realized it
was
a cake was the most fun of all. Then he blinked.
Fun?
Did he think
fun?
Was it possible that despite all his grumbling, he
liked
having the girls around?

“What are you grinning about?” asked Peter.

“I was thinking of chocolate cake,” Wally told him.

•

“Ham sandwiches, potato salad, Oreo cookies, and apples,” said Mother, handing a large bag to Josh as the boys strapped on their gear in the kitchen. “Plus orange drink and doughnuts for breakfast.”

“I’ll carry the doughnuts,” Peter volunteered.

“No, you won’t,” Jake told him. “The last time you carried the food, you ate all around the edge of two doughnuts. Who’s got the water?”

“I have,” said Wally.

“Tent?”

“Check,” said Josh.

“Flashlight?”

“Check,” said Wally.

“I’ve
got the corn chips!” Peter told them.

They were off. Not only did they not have to brush after eating, Wally thought as he went out the back gate with his brothers and headed down the alley, but they could stay up as late as they wanted, and miss Sunday school tomorrow as well.

The bedroll was snug and warm against his back, the leaves thick on the ground, and Wally decided he had never seen such a beautiful October as this one. He could hear the marching band on the college campus, practicing for the homecoming parade the following weekend. Overhead a hawk soared lazily, its wings not even moving. This was a time for eating your supper on a log, lying on your back under the stars, and dreaming about what you were going to be on Halloween.

His left sneaker was sliding up and down on his heel, and Wally looked down to see his shoelace flopping about. He stopped and bent over to tie it, and then his eyes grew large. Staring backwards between his legs he saw, or thought he saw, three figures with packs on their backs who looked all too familiar.

As he stared, however, the three figures seemed to disappear into the trees on either side. Wally stood up and took a deep breath. And then,
without even turning around, he caught up with Jake and Josh and Peter.

‘‘Don’t anybody look now—don’t stop or turn or anything—but we’re being followed/’ he said.

Peter’s eyes were like two fried eggs, and his back got as stiff as a broom. “Who is it?”

“Who’s the worst you can think of?” Wally said in answer.

“A gorilla?” Peter gulped.

“A motorcycle gang,” said Josh. “With chains wrapped around their fists.”

But Jake’s face registered horror.
“Them?”
he whispered.

“Them,” said Wally. “But don’t look. They don’t know that we know.”

“Who?” Peter demanded.

“Peter, don’t you turn around one second. Don’t even glance back there, or you’re dead meat. Understand?” Jake warned him.

“Who
is
it?” Peter cried. “Robbers?”

“A whomper, a weirdo, and a crazie,” Wally answered, reciting the nicknames they’d given Eddie, Beth, and Caroline—Eddie, for the way she could hit a ball; Beth, for the kind of books she read; and Caroline, for turning everything that ever happened to her into a movie.

“Oh, them!” said Peter, obviously relieved. “Are they coming with us?”

“No, they’re not coming with us!” croaked Jake.

The boys tramped on, not daring to look around. “Well, I don’t know, Jake. I think they’re coming whether we want them to or not,” Wally said. “They have packs on their backs.”

Josh let out his breath. “Somebody must have told them we were going camping. What are we going to do, Jake?”

“Do?” his twin replied. “We are going to make them sorry they tagged along.”

“Can I turn around yet?” asked Peter.

“No!” Jake said. “Don’t even move your head.” And then to Wally, “Think¡ What would be the worst thing that could happen to them?”

Wally tried to think of the worst thing that had ever happened to
him
in the woods. “Get lost,” he said.

Jake’s face lit up. “That’s
iti
It’ll be almost dark in an hour or so. We’ll lead the girls every which way until they don’t know which end is up. Then we’ll sneak down to Smuggler’s Cove and have it all to ourselves.”

“Wow!” said Peter, his head never moving an inch.

•

It was when they were crossing the creek for the third time that Wally realized they could have been at camp long ago, enjoying their ham sandwiches, if they hadn’t felt obliged to lose the girls.

Every so often he or his brothers would slip off into the bushes and wait just long enough to see the girls trailing far behind, and then the boys were off again, hoping to get them royally lost before dark closed in completely.

It was chilly now that the sun was down, and Wally began to wish he had brought his ski cap, as Mom had suggested. Fires were forbidden in the woods in the fall, but once they put up the tent and crawled inside their sleeping bags, they’d be okay.

Wait a minute
, he thought. They’d come all the way out here just so he could go to bed at seven o’clock? If he was home he could be watching TV until eleven¡

“We’ve lost them good!” Jake whispered, coming through the bushes behind them. “They’re so far back, they’ll never catch up. Let’s go to the cove and set up camp.”

Eager for dinner, the boys hurried through the trees in the direction of the river, and even though Wally’s foot slipped once or twice in the mud along the bank, he didn’t complain. The last quarter mile or so he turned on the flashlight to see where they were going, and at last they reached the rocky inlet
circled by pine trees where the Hatford and Benson boys used to camp summer after summer. Here the river lapped gently against the bank, and the crevasses between the rocks looked deep and forbidding in the near darkness.

“I’ll bet old Caroline’s bawling her eyes out right now,” said Josh.

“How are they going to find their way home?” Peter wanted to know. He was holding the flashlight while his brothers set up the tent. Every so often he tired of holding it still and scanned the trees with it instead, and then all three boys yelled together: “Peter!”

“How are they going to get home?” he asked again.

“That’s their problem,” said Jake.

“What are they going to eat?” asked Peter, sounding worried.

“That’s their problem too,” Jake answered. “Did we ask them to follow us out here? Not on your life.”

Inside the tent it wasn’t so bad. Not so cold, at least. Just crowded. Four boys in one pup tent was two boys too many, but at least it was warmer that way.

Wally didn’t think he had ever tasted better ham sandwiches in his life. Thin-sliced ham, with yellow mustard on thick slabs of homemade bread.
Big juicy apples. One carton of potato salad with onion and peppers, and a whole box of Oreo cookies to divide among them, not to mention the doughnuts and orange drink for breakfast.

They all felt much better after they had eaten.

“This is the life!” said Jake, stretching out as best he could on his sleeping bag. “Remember the year the Bensons brought their fishing poles and we had fish for dinner?’’

“And the time a mole dug right up into the tent?” said Wally. “And the way Bill Benson used to imitate an owl, and Peter got scared?”

“I did not!” Peter declared. “I knew it was Bill all the time.”

“I wonder if they’ll ever move back,” Wally said, thinking of Bill, Danny, Steve, Tony, and Doug down in Georgia, having a “Georgia peach” for a teacher, and a whole new state to explore. What if their father decided he liked teaching in Atlanta and wanted to stay? What if the Malloys decided they liked being in the Bensons’ old house and bought it from them?

It took a lot of fixing and rearranging to get all the sleeping bags squeezed into the pup tent. Everyone complained when Wally took off the sneaker that had got wet and muddy, so he put it back on again, right over his smelly sock.

When they were settled down at last, Wally
turned off the flashlight, and put his hands under his head, staring up into the darkness of the tent. He was wedged between Peter and the left side of the tent, but he was warm at last—and feeling really good with seven Oreo cookies in his stomach.

What did people do who had no brothers? What if he had been born into a family of girls? Three
Malloy
girls¡ It was a thought too awful to think.

Jake and Josh were trying to make up another verse to “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” once you got down to “one bottle of beer on the wall,” but after a while Jake’s voice faded out, then Josh’s. Peter had long since fallen asleep, one arm slung over Wally’s chest. Finally even Josh stopped singing, and then it was just the sounds of the woods at night—rustling in the bushes, the shrill call of a night bird, the wind blowing through the branches overhead, a deep snore from Josh….

Wally played around with the flashlight awhile, making circles of light on the ceiling of the tent; practiced making distress signals, dots and dashes, with the light. But his eyes began to close, his fingers lost their grip, and finally he tucked the flashlight behind his head and settled down to sleep.

He didn’t know when he awakened whether
he had been asleep only a few minutes or an hour, but he felt something moving along his side.

He lay still as a stone. A snake? A
poisonous
snake? Should he move? Should he very, very slowly sit up and wake the others?

Maybe it was another mole. A mouse, perhaps. A harmless little field mouse.

Carefully, carefully, trying not to move his body at all, Wally reached back behind his head for the flashlight. Slowly raising his head so that he could see, he aimed the flashlight toward the moving creature by his side and turned it on.

A hand. A human hand. Wally yelled bloody murder.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •   •
Three
•
The Bargain

C
aroline was half convinced they would all three die in the woods, and their bodies would not be found until spring. Beth was so tired of going up and down hills and jumping across creeks and climbing over fallen trees that she seemed to be listing to one side rather dangerously. It was also growing dark sooner than they’d thought.

“I think we should all just lie down beside each other with our arms folded over our chests and die peacefully,” Caroline said in a hoarse whisper, ever the actress.

“I think you’ve got rhubarb where your brains should be,” Eddie scolded. “Quit whining, you two, and turn on the flashlight.”

Beth got out the flashlight. It shone on the path ahead, but the trees still loomed up dark on either side.

“We could all write a farewell note to Mom and Dad, and tell them to give our possessions to the orphans,” said Caroline, her voice trembling dramatically.

Eddie wheeled around. “Caroline, will you just shut up? You’re not helping things a bit.”

“Well, I don’t see any point in going any farther when we don’t know where we are,” Beth said. “We lost the boys a half hour ago, so we might just as well camp here. It’s almost dark, and we’re starved.”

“Listen!” Eddie said suddenly, and the girls stood still.

Caroline listened so hard, she felt her ears were growing, but all she could hear was her own pulse throbbing in her head. And then, far, far away, she thought she heard noises.

“Voices!” Beth confirmed. They listened some more.

“Are you sure they’re
human
voices?” Caroline asked. “It could be animal voices. What do raccoons sound like?”

They remained very still and listened again, ears to the wind.

“It almost … sounds like singing,” Beth said.

They waited.

“It
is
singing,” Eddie declared. “It’s—”

“ ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall, ’ ” Caroline finished.

“The boys!” the three girls said together.

It took almost fifteen minutes more to get to the place where they could see the tent. First the singing seemed to be coming from one direction. Then the wind changed, and it came from another. Beth got her foot caught in a vine and they had to take her shoe off to get her foot loose. Then it took several more minutes to find the shoe.

By that time the singing had stopped altogether, but Caroline caught sight of a light, a little circle of light, and finally they could hear the river and make out the beam of a flashlight from inside a small tent.