Ann Martin - Shannon's Story

"Shannon," said my mother and I noticed that she looked as cheerful as I felt. "Guess what?"

"Good news?" I said. I was glad to see Mom looking happy for a change. It probably had something to do with this Friday night. She and Dad had been planning a night out, just the two of them. He'd been trying to get tickets for a play.

I smiled. That was it. He'd gotten the tickets.

I soon found out how wrong I was.

"I'm going to Paris," my mom said.

It took a moment to register. When it did, I felt my mouth drop open — and all my excitement vanish.

But maybe I was jumping to conclusions.

"To Paris?" I repeated, just to make sure.

"Dr. Patek called me down to school this afternoon. She said one of the chaperones for your trip had to cancel and she thought of me as a replacement chaperone. Wasn't that nice of her? So, I'll be going to Paris with you, honey! Isn't that great?"

I once heard someone say, "The world crumbled around her." Well, it's true. It really happens. I could feel my world crumbling around me.

"To Paris," I said, like a broken recording.

"It'll be such fun, Shanny. We'll go sightseeing and shopping. Oh, I can hardly wait."

Paris. My mother was going to Paris. With my friends and me. On my trip. The trip I'd been looking forward to practically the whole year.

I felt as if someone was playing some huge, awful joke on me.

You know what I wanted to do, right at that moment, more than anything else in the world? I wanted to throw myself down on the floor and kick my feet and scream and hold my breath until I was blue in the face. I wanted to have a major temper tantrum and scream, like Mallory Pike's little sister, Claire, "No fair! Nofe-air! Nofe-air!"

I took a deep breath.

And the phone rang.

"I got it," shouted Maria. A moment later

she shouted, "Mommmm, it's Daddy!"

Mom reached over and picked up the extension in the kitchen.

"Hi, honey," she said cheerfully.

A moment later she said, "Oh." Her voice didn't sound so cheerful.

Then she said, even more flatly, "Are you sure? Can't they get someone else to ... oh. Oh. No. No, never mind."

She listened in silence. All the excitement had drained out of her face. "Sure," she said at last. "Another Friday night. Sure."

She hung up the telephone without saying good-bye.

"Friday night is off?" I said cautiously.

My mother nodded, biting her lip. Then she said, "Something's come up. Your father has to go to some deposition."

"I'm sorry," I managed to say.

My mom shrugged. Then she gave me what looked like a forced smile. "Well, we'll always have Paris!"

My smile was just as forced, but I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I couldn't hurt my mother's feelings, especially not right then.

"I'd better go study," I said.

I studied. I studied French. I studied math. I studied astronomy. I read a short story for English.

I got my French translation right. I solved

every single math problem. I answered the study questions for astronomy. I wrote a paragraph about my favorite character in the short story.

My homework was perfect. I knew all the answers.

So why didn't I know the answer to this one: what was I going to do about my mother going to Paris with me?

No answer for that. No answer because there was nothing I could do.

Grow up, Shannon, I told myself. You are sooo lucky. Most kids, most people, never have the chance to go to Paris at all.

It'll be great. Your friends will be there. You'll have a blast.

But was I listening to myself? I was not. Because I knew it wasn't going to do any good.

My trip to Paris had been ruined.

Chapter 7.

They started arriving at Mary Anne's at one o'clock sharp: dozens and dozens of kids (or at least it seemed that way), all ready and eager to make the perfect Mother's Day gift.

Fortunately, the day was a nice one. The BSC had set up card tables and picnic tables outside in Mary Anne's huge yard. Different tables were for different kinds of projects: making jewelry and special cards and decorating boxes and cans and blowing out eggs to make special Mother's Day ornaments to hang up all year-round. And one of the picnic tables had been converted into a potting table, with Tiffany in charge. We'd collected a ga-zillion coffee cans so the kids could decorate them and use them as flowerpots.

At first it hadn't been easy to convince Tiffany to join in the BSC extravaganza. But when I took her with Kristy and me to the gardening center and started asking for help in choosing the right kinds of seeds for Mother's Day plants, she was hooked.

Stacey met people as they arrived and got their contribution (we charged everyone a dollar to help pay for all the supplies).

"Good crowd," I said to Kristy. We were at the box-and-can decorating table.

"I am going to make an eyeglass case for my mother," announced Karen.

Kristy looked doubtfully at the stack of boxes. "I don't know, Karen. These boxes are pretty big for an eyeglass case."

"I'm going to fold some cardboard," Karen explained. "And glue it so it is shaped like my eyeglass case, see?" She dug in her backpack and produced a bright blue eyeglass case.

"And it's going to be gigundoly beautiful," said Karen. "With sequins and feathers." She paused and studied her own eyeglass case for a minute, then put it on the table in front of her. "And maybe I'll decorate mine, too."

One table away, standing by Mallory, Clau-dia was trying to keep an eye on all the tables at once while helping two of the Pike triplets make a special Mother's Day breakfast menu-and-card combination.

"I think it should look like a real menu," Byron was arguing. "Like those menus in fancy restaurants. You know, the kind with the tassels in them."

"She's not going to order from it," argued his brother Jordan. "It's just a special card, so she'll remember what she had for breakfast. Making a whole big menu for orange juice and waffles and syrup ..."

"Three kinds of syrup!"

"Okay, three kinds of syrup, but that's going to look weird."

Claudia said, "If we write it in really elegant script, I bet it'll look fine."

"Will you write it?"

Claudia thought for a minute, then nodded. "But only if someone else spells it!" she warned.

Tiffany was showing Hannie and Linny Pa-padakis how to plant zinnia seeds in a pot. "They're very hardy," she was explaining. "And they make a nice cut flower."

"I want pink ones," said Hannie.

"Here are some pink ones. Little pink ones. The seeds inside this package will grow up to be just like the picture on the package," said Tiffany. "And look at the seeds. They come from right in the middle of the flower, so when the flowers bloom, look for them. You can even save the seeds from one year to the next."

I smiled to myself. That was the most talking I had heard Tiffany do in a long time.

Claudia left her table to check on the others and make sure that everyone had supplies and knew what they were doing. It was while she was at the jewelry table with Mary Anne, showing Maria how to make feather earrings, that the egg incident occurred.

It started as an accident. A Jackie Rodowsky-the-walking-disaster accident.

We all love Jackie, don't get me wrong. But Jackie has a special knack for causing, well, unexpected things to happen. For instance, he'll walk across a room and somehow a table will tip over and a zillion magazines will go slithering to the floor.

Or he'll hit a baseball and knock a branch off a tree and the branch will fall and break the rearview mirror off a parked car.

He never means for things to happen. They just do.

This time, Jackie (who was at the egg decorating table with Mary Anne and Jessi) and Adam Pike somehow got a couple of the eggs away from one of the cartons. The next thing we knew, they were having an egg race, trying to walk across the yard with an egg balanced on two fingers of one hand.