Miss Understood (8 page)

‘It is pretty cold,’ Mum said. ‘Maybe he doesn’t want to get a chill.’

‘Yeah, but why was he even there? What’s he waiting for?’

Mum shrugged. ‘How would I know, Lizzie? A taxi? A friend? Maybe he works in the display village and he’s getting picked up from work.’

I thought about this. It was possible that she had a point. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Yes, I decided at last, that must have been exactly what was happening.

‘Wait – he doesn’t have a bag or anything with him,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t he have one of those little suitcases that business people carry around?’

‘A briefcase? Well, yes, maybe, but not necessarily.’

I looked back. The man was still standing on the corner, and as I watched, a small red car pulled up beside him.

‘You were right,’ I said. ‘He’s getting picked up.’

Mum nodded. ‘Good. So we can rest tonight, now that the mystery is solved.’

But it wasn’t actually solved at all, because the man was bending over at the window of the car, talking to the driver. Then he handed something to the driver, and when he stood up straight he was holding a flat box with some kind of small package on top.

‘He’s getting pizza,’ I said. ‘Someone just delivered pizza to him on the corner.’

‘Pizza!’ said Richie.

‘Why would they deliver it on the corner?’

‘I don’t know!’ Mum said, all impatient. ‘How would I know, Lizzie?’

I didn’t really expect her to know. I wasn’t asking her to give me an answer that was completely true. I just wanted an answer that
might
be true.

I looked back towards the corner, hoping to see which direction the man had gone. But in the time we’d been talking and wondering, he’d disappeared.

I phoned Jenni before dinner, and told her what Dad had suggested to me at The Green Gecko.

‘So you’re coming back to Sacred Wimple?’ she said. Then she started squealing.

‘Jenni, it’s not definite yet,’ I said. ‘Jenni! Calm down! I need to do some community thing. Like, work somewhere or something.’

‘What, are you in jail?’ she asked, all scoffy.

‘No, but I have to show how responsible I can be. So I need your help to think of a place I could volunteer.’

‘Why can’t you just tell Mr Hilder that you’ve learnt your lesson and you’ll never do anything bad again and you’ll even wash his car every week, or something?’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’d go for that.’

‘He might.’

‘Anyway, we can talk about it some more tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Are you still coming over?’

‘Of course! I wouldn’t miss it for anything. Oh, and by the way, Amanda says she misses you.’

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Me and Amanda Jenkins had never been the best of friends. Actually, we’d never been friends – not since the first day of kindy, when she stole my brand new glue stick and I paid her back by cutting off one of her plaits.

‘Why would
she
miss me?’ I asked. ‘We don’t even like each other.’

‘Hmm,’ Jenni said. ‘
She
doesn’t mind
you
.’

Ouch.

At dinner, I mentioned Jenni’s idea. ‘She thought I could wash Mr Hilder’s car or something. You know, to convince him.’

‘I strongly doubt that he’d agree to something like that,’ Mum said.

‘He might.’

Mum shook her head. ‘He’s not going to accept a bribe.’

‘A what?’

‘A bribe. It’s when someone pays another person, or gives them something so that they’ll do them a favour.’

‘Like what Dad does?’ I asked.

‘What do I do?’ Dad asked as he ground some pepper onto his vegetable lasagna. ‘Tell me.’

‘Well, all those restaurant people give you meals, and then you write nice things about their food.’

Dad shook his head. ‘I don’t even tell them that I’m coming, Betty. I make a booking, just like a regular customer except I use a fake name, and I go along and eat my meal, and they don’t know that I’m there to review their restaurant.’

Mum chuckled. ‘Not until you order three different entrees and a couple of mains. That’s when they start to suspect.’

‘Anyway, the point is that they don’t give me anything for free. If they do, I have to say so at the end of the review – I have to write something like “Marty Adams dined at Yuck Sausage as a guest of the chef”. Just so people know, you see.’

‘But it’s a bit different with Mr Hilder, isn’t it?’ I asked.

Dad shook his head. ‘No, we’re just going to have to tell him that you’ve learnt your lesson, show him the letter you end up writing, and hope for the best.’

‘Have you even talked to him yet?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. We only talked about it this afternoon!’

‘Can you do it soon? Please?’

‘Yes,’ Mum said, and when I glanced at her, she was giving Dad quite a stern look, as if she’d already asked him to do it a million times, and it was super-important.

That was when he took a deep breath and sighed and looked all tired. ‘I’ll add it to the list,’ he said.

‘Well, it is a bit of a priority, I think,’ Mum said. ‘You know, under the circumstances –’

‘Yes, I understand that,’ Dad replied. The way his words came out was kind of short and cross. ‘I’ll get onto it.’

T
he next day was Saturday and Jenni came over, just to hang. I hadn’t seen her since I was expelled, but it was like we hadn’t even been apart (except for the Amanda Jenkins thing from the night before, but even though we were both thinking about it, neither of us said anything). We just lay around on my bed and played on our phones and talked and laughed and listened to music and made stupid jokes and baked muffins and forgot to clean up the kitchen and had to be reminded three times by Mum and played with Muppet and had to be reminded about the kitchen again. We also tried to think of somewhere I could volunteer that would show Mr Hilder how responsible I could be, but there wasn’t anywhere. Well, nowhere that sounded like much fun, anyway.

As well as all the talking and baking and lying around and giggling, we had three lots of people knock on the front door asking if they could take a look through our house. The first time Mum answered the door and asked them (politely) to go away. The second time Dad asked them (less politely) to go away. The third time, Jenni handled it.

Here’s how.

We were at the door, putting on our shoes so we could take Muppet for a walk, when we heard the security screen rattle. The screen was locked but the main door was wide open, and we could see two ladies in the doorway. One of them was shaking and rattling the door like a chimpanzee in a cage.

‘Oh, not again,’ I said, but Jenni was totally cool.

‘Watch this,’ she said. Then she went over to the security door. ‘Helloo,’ she said, in a low, spooky voice. ‘We’ve been ex-
pect-
ing you.’

‘You have?’ said the blonde lady who’d been shaking the door. Then she turned to her friend – a younger, thinner lady with short red hair – and said, ‘Did you make an appoint–’

‘Oh no!’ Jenni interrupted. ‘We were expecting you because of the prophets. Oh yes, they foretold your coming, and now the preparations are almost . . . complete.’

‘Preparations?’ the red-haired lady said, and she and her friend looked at each other with a scared kind of expression. ‘What . . . preparations?’

‘Oh, that’s not for you to worry about,’ Jenni said, still in her spooky voice. Then she unlatched the security door and swung it open. It kind of creaked, which felt like totally the right sound for the situation. ‘Please come in – the high priestess awaits you in . . . the crypt.’

‘Um . . .’ the blonde lady said, shuffling her papers. ‘I’m not sure if we’ve got the right . . .’

Her friend looked as if she’d just eaten something disgusting. ‘Yeah, I don’t know. Look, is this house part of HomeFest?’

Suddenly Jenni’s voice was normal again, and all chirpy. ‘HomeFest? Oh no, the house next door is the last display house. This one is the home of . . . the Adams family!’

The ladies rolled their eyes at one another, at exactly the same time, which looked a lot weirder than it sounds.

‘Come on,’ said the blonde one. ‘Let’s go back and take another look at the one with the mezzanine atrium.’

‘Okay,’ said the other. But then she tipped her head over to one side so she could see past me and Jenni into our entryway. ‘Still, this looks quite –’

‘Not display,’ Jenni said. ‘This one
not
display. Bye now.’ And she closed the door.

‘That was awesome!’ I said. Then we did a bit of a ring-a-rosie around our entryway, laughing like crazy kids about Jenni’s high priestess story. ‘Where did you get the idea for that?’

Jenni gave me this big shrug. ‘I don’t know. My head just collects stupid stuff, I guess.’

‘It was really clever,’ I said. ‘Especially the bit about the Adams family.’

‘I know, right?’

The rest of the day we kept doing the voice, and talking about the high priestess in the crypt. I don’t know if it sounds all that funny to you, hearing about it like this, but we thought it was, and a couple of times Jenni started laughing so hard that I thought she was going to stop breathing.

When Jenni’s mum came to pick her up later that afternoon, she and my mum had to have a cup of tea (of course), but me and Jenni didn’t really mind, because we weren’t even sure when we’d get to see one another again, especially since we still hadn’t managed to think of a place for me to do the volunteer thing to tell Mr Hilder about.

After half an hour or more, my mum and Jenni’s mum had finally had enough tea and done enough laughing and talking about people I didn’t know, and we all went out the front to say goodbye. As Jenni and her mum pipped their horn and drove off, a taxi stopped out the front of Miss Huntley’s house. Then, when it drove away, there was Miss Huntley, standing beside her letter box. I guess she must have forgotten that it was Saturday, and that the mail doesn’t get delivered on the weekend.

‘Afternoon, Ivy,’ Mum called out, and Miss Huntley turned slowly, looking around to see who was calling her name.

‘Oh, hello there, Denise,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit chilly, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it’s definitely getting cooler,’ Mum replied. ‘Did you have a good day?’

‘Oh, you know how it is. Quite busy, I suppose.’

‘You’re doing good work,’ Mum said.

‘Thank you, dear. I do wonder if I’m getting a little old for it, though. All those boxes to sort through, trays of cutlery to lift, that kind of thing. We closed at three today, and I’m only just getting home now. Sometimes I think that I should give it away, so I can take the time to get this garden right. There’s still so much to do around here.’

I glanced at Mum. Really? So much to do? Her garden looked amazing!

‘You should do it, then,’ Mum said. ‘Leave, I mean.’

Miss Huntley gave this big sigh. ‘If I left, they’d be so short-staffed down there, and who’d do it all?’

‘Well, you take it easy,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t overdo it, Ivy.’

The second we were inside, I asked Mum where Miss Huntley worked.

‘She works at the charity shop,’ Mum said. ‘You know, the one next to the office supply place.’

‘Helping Hands?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Do they pay her?’

‘Oh, no, they’re all volunteers down there, I think. That’s how it works – people donate clothes or books or shoes or whatever, and the Helping Hands shop sells the clothes and things, and then gives the money to a charity. But the people who work there don’t get paid at all.’

‘Interesting,’ I said, as I began to have an idea.

I bet you already know what it was.

*

You know how sometimes when you’re waking up and you’re still half-asleep, maybe even a bit more than half, and you have a really good idea for a story you want to write or a picture you want to draw or a party you want to organise? And it’s such an awesome idea, and in your half-asleepness you get really excited about it, because it’s the best idea for a story or a picture or a party that anyone’s ever had? But then, after you’ve completely woken up, you think about it some more and you realise that it might be the stupidest idea for a story or a picture or a party that anyone in the history of those three things has ever had?

Well, that’s kind of how it was for me, except instead of being half-asleep, I’d been outside listening to Mum talk to Miss Huntley about the Helping Hands shop and having the idea that you’ve already guessed, and instead of being completely awake it was the next morning, and I’d decided that it was a dumb idea and I couldn’t do it. It would be too scary, and not at all exciting, or if it was a bit exciting, it wouldn’t be exciting enough to make up for it being scary. Plus it would take up too much of my spare time.

Besides, Dad hadn’t even called Mr Hilder yet, so all that worrying about whether the idea was a good one or a stupid one was probably going to end up being for nothing anyway. So it was easier to just call it a dumb idea and get on with thinking of something else.

I didn’t get much chance to think about it that Sunday anyway, because our whole family went on an adventure.

I knew it was going to be an adventure when I heard the voice Dad was using to call out to Mum. I was lying in bed reading a book. (I like to sleep in on Sundays and read a book in bed until Mum comes and says she’ll make me breakfast if I’ll just get up and stop being a slob. It works almost every time.)

‘Denise!’ I heard Dad shout from his study. He sounded pretty excited. ‘Denise! What are we doing today?’

‘What?’ Mum called up the stairs.

‘Do we have plans?’

‘For when?’

‘Today.’

‘What about today?’

‘Do we have plans? Do. We. Have.
Plans
?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like anything!’

I heard Mum’s footsteps coming up the stairs. ‘What are you bellowing about, Marty?’ she asked.

‘Did we have plans for today? Because look at this email. Read it.’

This was annoying. It’s really hard to listen in on someone’s exciting conversation when part of it involves someone reading an email in the next room.