Taffy Sinclair 002 - Taffy Sinclair Strikes Again Read online

  "Good," I said before anyone could object. "We'll each make up a separate list for every member of the club and name that person's two or three worst faults. Bring them to the meeting Saturday afternoon."

  Everyone was pretty quiet as we ended the meeting and left for home. I suppose each person was thinking over what she was going to put on her lists. I could feel Katie and Christie looking at me, but I wasn't worried. I knew what all my faults were. And anyway, The Fabulous Five were all my best friends.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tuesday morning my four friends and I met a block from school. We planned to enter our classroom together since it was the day we were wearing our Fabulous Five T-shirts for the very first time.

  "I think we should present a unified front," Katie had said as we left the Shirt Shoppe the afternoon before. Everyone started giggling at that. I was still secretly doing my bust-developing exercises, but they hadn't helped a lot so far. Nobody else had improved much, either, except for Melanie, and she had a big everything else to go with her big front.

  "Maybe we should have bought sweat shirts instead of T-shirts," said Christie as we headed for the school ground. "It's getting colder every day."

  I nodded and zipped up my jacket, thinking that I didn't remember it ever being that cold in October. Everybody else zipped up, too. But I wasn't sure if I was shivering because I was cold or because I was nervous. What was Randy Kirwan going to think when he saw that I was one of The Fabulous Five? He had probably never thought of me as fabulous before. But now he would have to. Maybe he would even think that I had been chosen by some important committee and that being one of The Fabulous Five was a big honor, like winning the Nobel Prize. Maybe he would start treating me specially—opening doors for me, carrying my books around the halls, and things like that. Maybe all the cute boys would start treating me specially. I shivered again, and that time I knew why. My life was about to change.

  I felt a sharp jab in my ribs and came out of my daydream. We were already on the school ground, and I looked around to see who had poked me. It was Beth, and she was practically snorting fire and smoke.

  "Would you look at that," she snapped. "It's totally disgusting."

  I glanced in the direction she was looking, and my heart dropped into my shoes. There was Taffy Sinclair with one hand on her hip. She was using the other hand to twirl a strand of long blond hair, and she was looking up into Randy Kirwan's face, batting her big blue eyes like crazy and giving him the one-sided smile she always used when she wanted to hide her crooked bicuspid. It was pretty disgusting, all right, but what was even worse was Randy. He was looking down at her and grinning like a lovesick pup. I thought I would die.

  All my friends were staring at me, to see how I was taking it, and giving me sympathetic looks. Just then I remembered that I was wearing my Fabulous Five T-shirt. And I also remembered that the purpose of our club was for us to be the most gorgeous, popular girls in school. So what if Taffy Sinclair had on designer jeans and a great-looking lavender top? She wasn't one of The Fabulous Five. I unzipped my jacket and stuck out my front.

  "I think it's time Taffy Sinclair found out who's really great around here," I said.

  "Right on!" cried Katie, shaking her fist in the air.

  Suddenly everyone was unzipping her jacket and sticking out her front. "Look out, Taffy Sinclair, here we come," I muttered under my breath and marched straight past her toward the school building with my nose in the air. My friends were all right behind me. I felt like a general leading a battle charge. Only one thing bothered me. I hoped Randy wouldn't get the idea that I was snubbing him, too. I didn't want him to think I was stuck up now that I was one of The Fabulous Five. I wanted him to see me for what I truly was.

  "Just keep going and don't look back," barked Katie when we got to the school door.

  I wanted to look back to see if Randy was watching, but I knew it would spoil the whole effect if I did. I opened the door, and we all piled in.

  "Did you see the look on Taffy Sinclair's face?" Katie asked triumphantly as we headed for our lockers.

  "How could we? You told us not to look back," I said. I hated it when people cheated.

  "I didn't look back," Katie insisted. "I saw her out of the corner of my eye."

  There was no use arguing with Katie so I made a face at her, when she wasn't looking, and worked the combination on my lock. Then I pitched my jacket into my locker and fished my math book out of a pile of papers and books on the shelf. When I turned around again, everyone else had gotten rid of their jackets except Melanie. She was standing in front of her open locker with a funny look on her face.

  "What's the matter, Melanie?" asked Christie. "Hurry up or we'll be late."

  Without a word, Melanie zipped her jacket all the way up to her chin, her eyes getting bigger by the minute. My three other friends and I looked at each other and shrugged.

  Finally, Melanie spoke. She said only one word, but we all understood.

  "Wiggins!"

  Wiggins is Miss Winifred Wiggins, and she's not only our sixth-grade teacher, but also the terror of Mark Twain Elementary. She is tall and skinny with flaming red hair. She's so old she taught a lot of our parents, and she runs her classroom like a prison camp. She's not like other teachers who scream a lot and hand out detentions, and she's certainly not like dreamy Mr. Neal, who was my fifth-grade teacher. Not good old Wiggins. You never know what she's going to do. The only thing you can be sure of is that it will be different, and none of us had even stopped to consider what she would do when she saw our Fabulous Five T-shirts. She would want to know what The Fabulous Five stood for, and knowing Wiggins, she just might worm it out of us. I could see it all now, the five of us admitting to her and to the whole class that we had a self-improvement club. What if somebody even slipped and told about our bust-developing exercises? We all started scrambling to open our lockers again and put our jackets back on and zip them up. Just then the first bell rang.

  I had the terrible feeling that nothing was going to go the way we planned that day, and I was right. I remembered how we had thought we would make a grand entrance in our Fabulous Five T-shirts. Instead, we tiptoed in, trying to get to our seats before Wiggins finished writing the day's assignments on the board and turned around. Of course, we didn't make it. We were just about even with her desk when she whipped around so fast that the red corkscrew curls bobbed up and down all over her head.

  We froze in unison. You would have thought we had just been caught red-handed stealing the crown jewels.

  "Good morning, ladies," she said in a wheezy voice. "I see you're wearing your jackets to class. Are you planning to leave before the end of the period?"

  I could feel my ears getting hot as everyone stopped talking and stared at us. My friends all looked scared. I supposed their ears were getting hot, too. But we couldn't take off our jackets now. There was no telling what Wiggins would do once she saw what was underneath. To make matters worse, we were standing right between Wiggins's desk and Taffy Sinclair's. Taffy always sat in the front row so she could make points with the teacher. Right then she was looking at each of us in turn and there was a big smirk on her face. She knew why we had our jackets on.

  "Oh, come now, girls," said Wiggins. "Surely it's no secret. Won't one of you please explain to us what's going on?" She hesitated a minute, and I could feel her eyes on me. "How about you, Jana?"

  My ears were getting hotter than ever. In fact, they were burning so much I was afraid they would blast right off my head like Roman candles.

  "There's nothing going on," I said, trying to think fast and sound innocent at the same time. "We just decided to wear our jackets because the weather's extra cool today."

  Wiggins gave us a suspicious look and waved us to our seats. I had to walk right past Randy Kirwan to get to mine. I was so embarrassed I thought I'd die.

  Wiggins didn't say any more about our jackets even thought we kept them on all day long. The only bright spot in the
whole day happened right after she took morning roll.

  "Class," said Wiggins, "before we start our school work, I have an important announcement to make. I've reserved the school gymnasium for Halloween night so that we can have a party for our class."

  Everybody started yelling and applauding like mad, and Wiggins had to hold up her hand for us to get quiet again.

  "I'll be telling you more about the party plans as we get closer to Halloween. Now let's all open our math books and turn to page forty-two."

  You would have thought an announcement like that would have been enough to make us feel better, but it wasn't. I got so hot wearing that nylon Windbreaker zipped up to my chin that I almost exploded, and I could see that my four friends were miserable, too. I knew my face was probably about as red as a beet by second period, and perspiration was pouring down my back. Not only that, I could hear the steam heat clanging and whistling in the school's old pipes. I couldn't understand what had happened to the custodian. He never ever turned on that much heat. Didn't he know about the energy crisis?

  Anyway, the hotter I got, the sleepier I got, and by language arts period after lunch I had to cross my eyes to keep them open. I thought about asking to leave the room to get a drink. Then I could splash cold water on my face and wake up. I would have done it, except I couldn't raise my hand. It was too heavy to get in the air. Across the aisle from me Melanie's head was nodding, and I knew she was getting sleepy, too. Probably the whole class was getting sleepy since the room was so hot. And probably the whole class was perspiring like crazy, too. All except Taffy Sinclair, of course. She never perspired at all. She probably didn't even have sweat glands. Every once in a while Taffy would look over her shoulder at me with a little smile that told me she knew I was suffering.

  A minute later Wiggins struck again.

  "All right, class!" she shouted. "Everyone stand at attention."

  She startled me enough so that my eyes opened all by themselves, but I could see that standing up was going to be a problem. I had to do it, though. Nobody disobeys Wiggins.

  "Class," she repeated, "I am here to help you improve your minds, but in order to do that, I have to get your attention. And in order to do that, it seems I will have to wake you up."

  She paused, staring at us over her old-fashioned metal-rimmed glasses and let her threat sink in. Everybody looked worried. There was no telling what Wiggins planned to do.

  "And SOOOOOOOO," she shouted, "we will start with a little fresh air."

  Wiggins has the southeast corner room on the second floor of the school, and there are exactly eight windows along the side of the room and exactly six across the back. That makes exactly fourteen windows in one small room, and she opened them all, but not just an inch or two. Not Wiggins. With a flourish, she flung each one of them all the way to the top.

  The cold wind swept in like a giant paintbrush coloring every pair of lips blue in a matter of seconds. The temperature must have dropped fifty degrees. The perspiration inside my jacket was turning to ice. But Wiggins wasn't finished yet.

  "Now, class," she said triumphantly, raising her arms into the air, "we've got to pump some blood up to those poor sleepy brains. Arms up! Follow me. Touch your toes ten times. One! Two! . . ."

  Some kids grunted. Others giggled, but everyone touched their toes ten times. How else could we get warm? All except Melanie. She was lucky to see her toes, let alone touch them. But I had to admit the exercise did wake me up. With a shiver, I sat back in my seat, wondering what frostbite would do to the brain.

  By the time the bell rang at the end of the day, I had warmed up again, but I felt like a soggy mess. Maybe being one of The Fabulous Five wasn't going to be so fabulous after all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Saturday afternoon, which was the time for our meeting, I had finished the four lists of my friends' faults. By then, too, I had almost forgotten about The Fabulous Five T-shirt disaster. But one thing I had not forgotten was how Randy Kirwan had been looking at Taffy Sinclair. I could hardly wait to get my lists of faults so I could start improving myself, and pretty soon he'd be looking at me that way, too. Actually I had already started improving. All week long I had practiced not being a klutz.

  Just before the meeting, I got out my Fabulous Five notebook and made copies of the lists to give out to my friends. I had worked hard on those lists, and I was pretty proud of the way they had turned out.

  The first one was for Katie. Beside number one I had originally written "feminist," but I had crossed that out. There was certainly nothing wrong with being for women's rights. In fact, I was for them myself. Somewhere I had read that women who took part in demonstrations and made a lot of noise about the ERA were called "radical feminists," so I put that on line one. But I knew that wasn't right, either. Whenever I heard the word radical, I thought of those people I saw on TV with long hair and sandals who were always being carted off to jail for blocking traffic during a protest. Katie Shannon was certainly not like that. She didn't even have long hair, so I had to scratch out "radical feminist," too. What I finally decided on took a little more space. I wrote, "Gets carried away with the women's movement and lectures too much."

  Next was Christie. I knew she couldn't help being a brain any more than I could help being a klutz. It was just something we were born with, and it was awfully hard to tell someone that something really not her fault had become a problem. But since I was willing to work on my problem, I was sure she would be, too. Besides, she didn't have to show how smart she was all the time. So for Christie's fault I wrote, "Shows how smart she is all the time."

  Beth Barry was the easiest, probably because she was my best friend and I had been thinking about her fault for years. Under her name I wrote, "Overdramatizes every little thing and upstages everybody." I was sure she would be grateful to me for pointing that out. She would probably even ask me why I hadn't mentioned it before.

  If Beth was the easiest, Melanie was certainly the hardest. How do you tell someone diplomatically that she's fat? I worried about that for a couple of days. I certainly didn't want any of my friends to get mad at me. I thought about lots of ways to say what I meant, but none of them sounded right. "Fat" was definitely out. So were "overweight," "slightly overweight," and "unsexy figure." Those were things that would only hurt her feelings. Finally I settled on, "Doesn't know when to stop eating" and crossed and uncrossed my fingers three times that she'd understand.

  Before I put my Fabulous Five notebook away, I looked at the page where I had started writing down my own faults. Number one, "klutz." Number two, "bossy." I smiled to myself. Then I remembered to add number three, "hopelessly stereotyped." I could probably save my friends the trouble of making lists.

  Just then the doorbell rang. I threw the notebook back into the boot box and shoved it under my bed again. When I opened the door to my room, Mom was letting all four of my friends into the apartment as she left to go grocery shopping. I thought about Mom for a minute. She had faults, the same as anyone else. I wondered what she would think if I mentioned them to her?

  Then I got this great idea. What if everybody in the whole world told everybody else what his or her faults were, and then what if everybody tried to improve? There probably wouldn't be any more crime or even any wars. I could see it all. The world would become a wonderful place, and it would all be because of The Fabulous Five and what we were starting that day. I couldn't understand why no one had thought of it before. Just then my daydream was interrupted by my four friends piling into my room.

  "What's the matter, Jana?" asked Christie. "You have a weird look on your face."

  I was so excited about my great idea that I started to tell her, but then I decided to wait. Everyone would appreciate the possibilities a lot more when they saw how well the whole thing worked.

  "Nothing's the matter," I said. Just then I remembered that I had left my lists I had copied face up on the desk. I scooped them up before anyone saw them and folded each paper three ti
mes. Then I sat on my bed. Everyone else was flopping around on the floor trying to get comfortable. Everybody, that is, except Katie who was standing beside my stereo and tapping her foot impatiently.

  "Since we don't have a president to do it, I'm calling this meeting of The Fabulous Five self-improvement club to order," she said.

  Everybody stopped squirming and got quiet. I could tell they were all as anxious to find out what was on those lists as I was.

  "The moment has finally come," Katie went on, "to put our club into action. Today is the day we start to become the most fabulous girls in Mark Twain Elementary."

  Everybody was giggling and nodding except Beth. "Are we going to read our lists out loud?" she asked. There was a funny quiver in her voice, which surprised me, because Beth always seemed so confident. I had thought that when it came time to tell her what her faults were, she would act as if she were getting an Academy Award.

  "Why not?" I said. "We're friends, remember? We're only trying to help each other. Isn't that what The Fabulous Five is all about?"

  Beth nodded and so did everybody else, and a minute later we were scrambling around on our hands and knees handing out our lists. I sat looking down at the pile of folded papers in front of me getting more and more excited. I didn't know which one to open first. It was as if I were looking at a bunch of valentines, one from every cute boy in the sixth grade.

  Suddenly I heard this awful noise. It was Christie. Her eyes were bugged out, and she looked like she had just swallowed a wasp. "What!" she said as a shriek. "Who said I'm a show-off? Who could say such a terrible thing?"

  I gulped hard and grabbed for one of my lists, pretending to be busy with it. That might have been mine she had read. I only meant to help her. How could she have misunderstood? I could hear funny grumbling sounds coming from my other friends. What was happening? I was afraid to look up. Instead, I slowly unfolded the paper in my hand. I could see two items on it, one above the other. Klutz and bossy, I thought, trying to reassure myself. But when I read the words, I nearly lost my breath.