Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (18 page)

“Feast your eyes on this!” she repeated, tugging the sheet so hard that the volcano flipped right off her desk and into the lap of Zoey Combs. Blue lava oozed out of the volcano’s cone and onto Zoey. Unfortunately for Zoey, she was wearing a knee-high skirt and no tights. She had a lot of exposed skin.

“Ahhh!” Zoey yelled, flipping our volcano onto the floor. “It’s gooey!”

I didn’t react. Just like Tony and Boone’s fish before it was resurrected, I was perfectly still. Nina dove after our volcano and dropped her flag on the floor.

Tony jumped to his feet. “You’ve got to burn that flag now,” he said. “When you drop an American flag on the ground you have to burn it. It’s in the Constitution.”

“It’s not in the Constitution,” Mr. Hawk said, walking toward Zoey with a wad of paper towels in his hand.

“This stings! What’s in it? Is it acid?” Zoey hollered, furiously wiping the lava off her.

“I think the stars are poking you,” I said.

“They are! They are! The stars are poking me!”

Nina tried to scoop the lava from the floor back into the volcano’s center. She scooped and scooped. If I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve thought Nina was a professional lava scooper, competing in the Lava-Scooping Olympics. Blue lava stuck to Nina’s red shirt in many interesting patterns. And the more she scooped, the more she sweated. Beads of sweat dropped off her forehead and onto her shirt, staining the fabric a deeper red. And circles began to grow near her armpits—wet, dark, and stinky ones.

“Help me!” Nina yelled as she struggled to set the volcano back on top of her desk.

I took ahold of one end of the volcano and slid it onto her desk. But I pushed too hard and the volcano slid off the desk again. The spilled lava had made everything very slippery. Every time we moved, our shoes squeaked. When the volcano slipped this time, I decided to be the one to dive after it. I should have stuck to being a dingo and sat down in the corner and admired myself. But I felt obligated to do something more.

I jumped in the general direction that it was heading, but I tripped over Nina’s fallen flag. The last thing
I saw before my head hit the fishbowl was the expression of terror and despair on Boone Berry’s face. You might think that knocking a fishbowl onto the floor with your head would be terribly painful. But it’s not. Not when you have five pounds of hair to soften the blow.

Chapter 26
Meltdown

W
hen my head smashed into the fishbowl and I knocked it onto the floor, it was like a miracle had happened. Because the glass didn’t break. It landed right-side up and bounced a little. But then the miracle ended and the bowl tipped over onto its side and cracked open. Water gushed everywhere, and the resurrected fish floated onto the floor. It flopped on top of several shards of broken glass.

“Save it!” Tony yelled.

Boone scooped the fish up with the plastic spoon and dumped it into a cup filled with water.

“Is it okay?” Zoey gushed, grabbing at her heart.

“She killed it,” Tony yelled. “Camille McPhee’s big hippo head killed our fish.”

“Tony,” snapped Mr. Hawk.

I could feel tears forming in my eyes.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I slipped.”

“Fish killer!” Tony yelled. “You should travel on a motorized scooter. There’s no telling when you’ll fall again. Mrs. Zirklezack is nuts to put you on top of a bucket.”

This made me very sad. I looked down at the sloppy floor. I already felt a lot of pressure about standing on my bucket. Now it was worse.

“It’s okay,” Boone said. “It’s not the end of the world. I mean, it is the end of the world for our fish, but it’s okay.”

I had blue lava smeared all over my arms. I was a mess.

“Do you want me to mop it up?” I asked Mr. Hawk.

“That’s all right, Camille. Why don’t you girls go visit Mrs. Blaze.”

Zoey let out a frightened squeak. Mrs. Blaze was the school nurse. She had a reputation for putting stinging medicine on open cuts and knocking people’s knees
with a hammer. I’d visited her a bunch of times. But never with a group. We walked down the hallway and stood outside Mrs. Blaze’s door. Pictures of healthy things were taped on it. Apples. A toothbrush. A tall glass of milk. And a clown wearing a Band-Aid on its cheek.

“That clown looks creepy,” Zoey said. “Like it’s been in a fight with another clown.”

Mrs. Blaze heard us talking and opened the door.

“Did somebody say they’d been in a fight?” Mrs. Blaze asked. She reached out toward us and told us to come inside. She had gray hair and gray eyes and she was also wearing gray pants. And to look official, she had on a white doctor’s coat.

“Camille,” she said. “How are you? I haven’t seen you since your big sugar crash last spring.”

She rubbed my shoulder with concern.

“Actually,” I said, “the last time I saw you was in December. Because I ran into problems cutting out my snowflake.”

“Right,” she said. “How is your finger?”

I lifted it up and looked at it. Then I bent it four times.

“Normal,” I said.

“It looks like you girls have had an accident,” Mrs. Blaze said.

“Yes! My skin burns!” Zoey interrupted. “I might
need to go to the emergency room and take a special bath!”

“I doubt it,” Nina said. “I used nontoxic ingredients for the volcano. Because I have very sensitive skin.”

“That’s true,” I added. “When she washes, she uses a special bar of soap.”

“Okay. Okay,” Mrs. Blaze said. “Tell me what happened.”

I let Nina describe the situation. She was still very proud of her volcano. Even though it was basically junk now.

“That’s a very dramatic science fair,” Mrs. Blaze said. She wrung out a bunch of washcloths and handed them to us.

“Science is disgusting,” Zoey said, wiping the lava off her legs.

Zoey and Gracie had built a mold terrarium. They’d stuck a bunch of different foods in a glass jar and let it rot. They wanted to show off all the different types and colors of mold. Their lemon grew a blue-green powder. Their strawberries sprouted a gray fuzz. And their bread produced mold that looked very white and puffy. So I wasn’t surprised that Zoey thought science was disgusting. Because not only was her project gross, it was also a real bummer.

“Science can be very interesting,” Mrs. Blaze said. “That was my college major.”

“Really?” Nina asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Blaze said. “I studied the nitty-gritty truth about how things operate. In plants. And animals. And people. I loved it!”

“I think I want to be a scientist!” Nina said.

I looked at Nina like she was sort of crazy. Because from what I knew of her, she wasn’t ready for the nitty or the gritty.

“But Mrs. Blaze, we lost,” I said.

“What did you lose?” Mrs. Blaze asked.

“The science fair,” I said. “And there was a cash prize. Also, I killed that fish. I feel very terrible.”

I handed her my washcloth and she threw it in a hamper.

“I know. That’s too bad,” Mrs. Blaze said. “Can I give you some advice?”

“Okay,” I said. Because I trusted Mrs. Blaze. She wore a neat bun
and
had a jar filled with tongue depressors. I was sure what she was about to tell me would be very inspiring.

“Don’t worry about this too much. Because one day you’re going to look back on it and laugh,” she said.

She smiled at me and handed me a scratch-’n’-sniff sticker with a bunch of grapes on it. I thought that was pretty bad advice. Because, even if I did feel like it one day, laughing at a dead fish seemed like a mean thing to do. I scratched my sticker, but the smell wasn’t very
strong. Nina got a blueberry one that gave off a very powerful stink. And Zoey got a banana that smelled so much like a real banana that it made my stomach grumble.

“Don’t be afraid to come back and visit,” Mrs. Blaze said.

“Okay!” Nina said. She sounded very thrilled and it bugged me.

“Stickers are for babies,” Zoey said. But I saw her sniffing hers anyway.

Every second of that day, all I could think about was how my head had led to the death of an exceptional fish. My mind was like a laser beam. Even when I walked through my front door.

“Camille!” my mother cheered when I came home. For some reason, my sadness was turning into anger. It ticked me off that my mother sounded so happy. Why was she so happy? What was there to be happy about? We had a big Visa bill. She and my father were separated. Her only child, me, obviously wasn’t doing too well, because I had just taken the life of a resurrected fish. Plus, I’d dug up my dead cat to try to win the science fair. And I was being forced to play the part of an unwanted cat while standing on a wobbly, elevated surface. Not to mention my calling-card disaster. Could my life get any worse?

My mother didn’t even ask me about my day. Instead, she handed me a DVD.

“I rented us a movie,” she said. “It’s called
The World’s Deadliest Swarms.”

I handed the DVD back to her.

“I’ve got homework,” I said, stomping down the hall. I hadn’t been able to finish my spelling at school, due to the fact that I’d been covered in lava and had to visit Mrs. Blaze.

“But it’s Friday,” she said.

I had forgotten that it was Friday. This was pretty good news. And to be honest, a program called
The World’s Deadliest Swarms
sounded interesting. I liked education best when it was about dangerous and gross animals.

After we talked, my mom flew out the door. She had a kickboxing class to teach. I was surprised that people wanted to go to the gym and work out on Friday nights. But my mother said that she had a core group of followers. She said they were addicted to her Friday-night Turbo Kick It & Bam It class. I just didn’t get that.

While my mom was gone, I tried to call Aunt Stella. But I just got her machine. So I left a message.

“It’s Camille. I was hoping we could talk about school, because science isn’t going so great for me. Did you ever build anything for a science fair? I had a partner. So I didn’t get to make exactly what
I wanted. Hey, Aunt Stella, did you know that it’s possible to freeze a fish and resurrect it? Well, it is. Science is teaching me a lot of new things. Talk later. Hey, I love you.”

After I left my message, I moved the couch and coffee table so we could watch the movie on the floor. I kept hoping that my dad would call so that I could talk to him again. I had made a promise to myself that I would have a conversation with him this time and that I wouldn’t press the 9 button. But the phone never rang.

When my mom got back, she hopped through the front door dripping with sweat. Once she was cleaned off, she popped the disc into the DVD player.

“It’s a reenactment of the ten worst swarms of the century,” my mother said energetically, plopping herself down beside me on the floor.

I was impressed that my mother had rented this film. Bugs weren’t really her thing. Anytime she came across something buglike in our house, she always squished it with a tissue and flushed it down the toilet. She was also an expert fly and mosquito swatter. A lot of times she struck them down with a magazine in midair.

My dad always caught bugs with his bare hands and then took them outside and let them go. He said he was liberating them. My mother didn’t see it that way.
She said she was helping them rest in peace. I missed my dad.

“I almost forgot,” she said, hopping back up and running into the kitchen.

My mother brought out some snacks and set them down on the floor between us.

“They’re low-sodium soy nuts,” she said, patting me on the back.

“What about popcorn?” I asked.

“You don’t want to stuff yourself with carbohydrates and sodium,” she said, pinching my cheek. “Not at this time of night.”

Then my mother proudly put the soy nuts in front of me.

“I only got us one ice water. We’ll need more hydration than that,” she said, smacking the heel of her hand to her forehead. She sprang off the floor and dashed to the kitchen.

Everything inside of me felt bad. I was sure that if a doctor had unzipped my skin, he would have seen all the anger and sadness stuck near my heart. I breathed hard. And thought of the many things I wanted to yell.
Let me eat popcorn! I don’t care about stinking carbohydrates. Or sodium. I’m ten! When you’re ten, you eat carbohydrates and sodium. Even when it’s late. And you don’t worry about hydration. EVER!
But I didn’t yell any of these things. Instead, I reached out and knocked
the bowl of soy nuts over. Then I poured the glass of ice water on them and smeared them around.

When my mother came back, she stepped right in the mess, soaking both of her socks.

“What happened?” she asked. “Our new carpet!”

But before I could answer, she flew down the hall to get a towel. Then, with a lot of enthusiasm, she cleaned up the mess and replaced both the soy nuts and the water.

Three tears rolled down my cheeks. I counted them. Two tears came from my right eye and one from my left. It was so dark that my mother didn’t notice that I was crying.

Watching the deadliest swarms didn’t cheer me up at all. It just showed how unfair life was all over the planet. In nine of the cases, everybody lived and was okay, even a boy who fell into a den of rattlesnakes. Even a man who was stung by more than a hundred jellyfish. But a little girl’s mother was killed by a swarm of bees. They weren’t even killer bees. They were regular old honeybees.

“This is horrifying!” my mother said.

I watched her lift handful after handful of soy nuts to her mouth. Then I turned back to the television. In the reenactment, the mother wrapped her own body around the girl to keep her from getting stung. The mother held her really close and whispered in her ear.
She told her that they were going to be okay. And I believed her. But when the paramedics showed up, they announced that the girl’s mother was dead. I felt horrible. I cried three more tears.
How awful and unfair
, I thought,
to promise someone that there was hope when nobody really knew for sure
.