Twist My Charm (3 page)

When our tower is over a foot high, Larry picks up the last piece like it's the Olympic torch. “Today, my friends, we have built not only a ridiculous tower; we have built friendship and understanding.” He pauses dramatically, raising the “torch” higher. “But only one of you can have the special privilege of placing the ultimate piece—”

Sam grabs it out of his hand and puts it on top. “There!” she says, slapping both hands on her hips and nodding in satisfaction.

I would be mad if Samantha ruined my moment (if I ever tried to create one), but Larry laughs. “Nice, Sam, taking charge!” Then they high-five!

What
is going on here? I've never seen them get along like this. It almost seems like Samantha…
likes
him! And not in the way
I
like him. She's looking at him with dreamy sparkles in her eyes, like she's watching her first Ryder Landry music video. But this is
Larry.
One time not that long ago, Sam told me not to even be his friend. How could she go from thinking he was “Scabby Larry” to
liking
him so quickly? But I think she has!

“We did it!” Larry shouts, drumming his hands on the table. The tower shakes.

Sam drums too, yelling, “Earthquake!”

“Be careful!” I warn them. “It'll fall over!”

That only makes Larry and Samantha laugh and drum harder. “Who cares?” says Larry. “We still have the knowledge of a job well done, with three great leaders!”

“Well, two,” Samantha cracks.

I'm too worried about our tower to even care. “It doesn't matter how well it's done if Roberta doesn't see it!” I try to stop them, but I only have two hands to their four, and…CRASH! The tower falls into what looks like a million pieces.

“Oh no!” I shout. Across the room, I see Roberta walking toward us. “Roberta, we were finished! Really, we were!”

“That's okay. I saw.” Roberta knows we finished our tower and is happy we all learned about different styles of leadership. Larry and Sam scoop up the blocks and return them to the supply closet in the back of the Focus! room, laughing and chatting like old friends the whole time.

Old friends…or two people falling in love.

I'm starting to get an idea.

L
ike almost every day when Dad drives me home from school, I run to the house while he checks the mailbox. He usually grumbles that there's nothing but advertising and bills (“Wasting paper!” he says), but today his voice stops me before I reach the front door.

“Cleo! There's something here for you.”

I turn around. Something in the mail can only mean one thing—Uncle Arnie! No one else has ever sent me anything.

I practically tackle Dad to the ground, grabbing at the pile of papers in his hand. “What is it? Which one? Where, where?”

He gives me his famous “calm down” look. It's so easy to spot, he should trademark it, like Larry with his sarcasm. So I put my hands by my sides and bite my bottom lip, but I still can't help bouncing around a little on my toes. And Dad can't stop the voice inside my head from saying,
Come on, come on, come on!

Finally, after what seems like a million years, he hands me a postcard and walks inside.

The side with the picture is facing up. It's actually two photos next to each other. One shows a cute little pink cottage with a white porch in front, and the other shows a room stuffed with books from floor to ceiling. The words in the corner of the card say “Maple Street Bookshop, New Orleans, Louisiana.”

I turn the postcard over and immediately recognize the scrawl. It's the same writing from my voodoo doll instructions.

Knowledge is power, said somebody important. Blaze your own trail, said somebody else. Go, go, go, my friend Cleoooooo!

There's no signature.

Uncle Arnie for sure.

I turn it over again. What is he trying to say? Is he telling me a story? Giving me a clue to something? Is the meaning of life hidden here somewhere?

I look at the photos more carefully. There's an orange cat stretched out on the floor in front of the books, and an owl perched on the top bookshelf. But the owl's not real; it's wearing glasses and a hat with a tassel like it's graduating from high school.

“Cleo, time to start homework!” Dad's muffled voice is coming from inside the house, and suddenly I realize I'm still standing out on our front path.

I run inside, straight to my room, and carefully place the postcard on my dresser, standing it against my bottle of love potion. Are the two things related? They must be!

With all this in my head, I have a hard time working on my storyboards for the Immersive Interactive Art Installation. I sketch and sketch, but Pandaroo ends up flying around in space with a friendly, smart-looking owl, which isn't exciting at all. Storyboards are the building blocks of movies; they need to have action!

When Dad calls me for dinner, he asks to see the postcard, which I've brought to the table. “Don't get your messy vindaloo sauce on it,” I warn him as I daintily hand it over.

“I'm not eating with my hands,” he mumbles as he takes the postcard. He looks at the photos, then turns it over and reads the other side super quickly. He laughs and hands it back. “I think that's bacon,” he says.

“No, it's chicken vindaloo.”

“I mean the quote. ‘Knowledge is power.' ”

Dad is just as confusing and strange as Uncle Arnie! “If it's a quote, how can it be bacon?” I ask.

“No, Francis Bacon. A writer from the fifteen hundreds. He might have been the first one to say it. But a lot of people have said it since.”

“What about ‘Blaze your own trail'?” I ask.

“Lots of people have said that too.”

“So, what does it all mean?”

Dad finishes chewing, then shrugs. “What does your uncle Arnie ever mean?” He scoops up some rice with his fork, and I edge the postcard farther away from him. “I think it's up to you to decide.”

After Dad says that, I really can't concentrate on homework. And I definitely have a hard time getting to sleep that night. As I stare at my ceiling in the darkness, I keep asking the same question:
Uncle Arnie, why are you so confusing?

I fall asleep without an answer. But when I wake up, I'm bursting with a fantastic idea. I don't know where it came from, but I know it can be accomplished—today!—when we go on our school field trip to the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

All I need to do is find a book of love potions (“Knowledge is power!”) and pick one that will make Larry and Samantha fall in love. Somehow in the middle of the night, I realized Uncle Arnie doesn't want me to wait for his instructions; he wants me to do it myself!

My heart is almost exploding with happiness because this is such an awesome, positive thing I can do for the girl who was once my best friend. She already likes Larry for sure. He seems to like her too. And even though sixth-grade boyfriends and girlfriends usually make me as sick as a bucket of lumpy papier-mâché does, I could accept those two as a couple…because they'd
both
be my friends then! If Sam is hanging out with Larry, she'll talk to me more and more, and eventually she'll be my friend again. I'll have the group I've always wanted.

Today I'll blaze my own trail, just like Uncle Arnie wrote. With Madison's help, I hope.

When it's time to go to the library, we get in a line and walk out to the school parking lot, where a big yellow school bus is waiting for us.

It feels like I'm going back in time as I climb up the stairs. The tall steps are just like the ones in Ohio; the seats are the same shade of green, with the same thin, uncomfortable padding. I've done this a million times, but for the kids in my class, it's a weird treat. They don't ride school buses; they've always been dropped off by parents and nannies and au pairs. “Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm in one of those old teen movies!” Madison says, looking around with the amazement I might feel if I were on an actual movie set. “Where should we sit?”

Finally I'm an expert at something! “The backseat,” I say. “It's the bounciest, so it's the most fun, and we get to see everyone come on.”

We sit down and watch as Lisa Lee and Kylie Mae walk on together, with Ronnie and Lonnie Cheseboro behind them. “Weirdness! It's totally like in the movies!” Lisa Lee announces.

Madison looks at me and smiles. “I guess I still have some things in common with them,” she says. Madison never totally stopped being friends with Lisa Lee and Kylie Mae; she just started having lunch and hanging out with me more often. They all still text sometimes and even do things on the weekends, but Madison doesn't tell me anything about it. So I don't ask.

The popular lovebirds hold up everyone else in line by standing in the middle of the bus and giggling about who's going to sit where, and whether the girls are going to sit with the boys or each other. Finally they decide that the boys will sit behind the girls. I can only imagine the teasing and poking and giggling that will follow. Ugh.

“Is this seat taken?” asks Larry, plopping down into the seat across from me and Madison without waiting for an answer. He stretches his legs out like he's going to take up the whole space, but when he sees Samantha looking around for a free seat, he shouts for her to come back toward us.

“Do you have room here?” she asks Larry. She almost seems shy—which is not normal for Samantha!

“Sure.” Larry pulls his feet back and lets her sit down. “As long as you're not allergic to monkeys.” He lifts his monkey figurine out of his backpack and holds it up.

“Oh, cute! I've been wanting to see this little guy close up!” Sam is talking in a high-pitched, enthusiastic voice I've never heard before. Something is definitely up.

This is exactly why my love potion idea is so brilliant! Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell Madison my plan with Sam sitting two feet away, so instead I ask if she's read about Ryder Landry's tour of Asia this summer. Of course she has. It was on the
WickedHappyTeenTime
blog this morning. She also knows his favorite Asian food (Korean barbecue) and the color of the sleep mask he wears on long flights (blue).

“Are you a Lander, Cleo?”

Like most school buses in the world, this one is rickety and noisy, especially with windows open and horns honking and cars passing by. But I swear that question came from Sam on the other side of the aisle. I turn and see she's smiling.

“
You're
a Lander?” I ask.

“Yeah! I didn't think you knew who he was. Your dad listens to all those boring podcasts and old music.”

“Madison told me all about him, and now I'm his biggest fan,” I tell her.

“Except for me,” Madison says.

Larry leans across Sam toward us. “Except for me!” he says.

We all look at him in silence. Ryder definitely has boy fans, but Larry is not the kind of boy who likes anything normal and popular.

“Okay, I'm lying,” he says. “Actually, I can't think of a human being I want to know less about. I built my little sister a whole fort out of pillows in our basement so she could sing his idiotic creepo-teen-robot tunes as far from my ears as possible.”

“Well, that's too bad, Larry,” says Sam, launching into some Ryder Landry lyrics—loudly!
“When I need to talk, or take that long, long walk, you're the one who won't say no.”

I recognize the song right away. I have a lot of favorites already, but it's one of my
favorite
favorites. Madison and I join in.
“Because you're my friend, my friend, my friend to the end of the Earth!”

It's a little weird to be singing this song of deep and lasting friendship with my best friend and the girl who used to be my best friend, but it's ridiculously funny to see Larry plugging his ears with his fingers and howling like a coyote with a stomachache, so we keep going. Larry shouts and begs for us to stop…which we don't, until we arrive at the library.

That might have been the most fun bus ride I've had in my life.