“Gah! What do we do?” I panicked and couldn’t think.
“We can’t just leave her!” Max said.
Then Ivan, looking grim, pulled his pocketknife out. Opening the blade, he bent close to her. He said, very deliberately, “Beatriz. I have to. Or we’ll all get caught. I’m so sorry.”
Beatriz looked horrified.
I didn’t understand and cried, “Ivan! What…what are you doing?” I had an insane vision of Ivan slashing her throat so we could get away.
Max squawked, “What’s wrong with you, Ivan?”
When Ivan grasped the tangled braid and said, “It’s got to go,” Max and I heaved huge sighs of relief.
But Beatriz wasn’t relieved, pleading, “Not my hair! My parents will murder me!”
Ivan repeated, “I’m sorry! We’ll think of something to tell your mom!” Lights came on in the house at the back of the lawn.
Ivan sawed and hacked at the braid just below her ear. Then he yanked hard, and her head bounced as it was freed from the spokes. He handed Beatriz the dead braid as Max jerked her bike up. “Your bike’s fine! Quick! We gotta go!”
I asked her, “Can you ride okay?”
“I think so.” But she didn’t sound sure. “My knee hurts.”
I got behind Beatriz to be sure nothing else happened to her. As we pedaled off, a man’s angry voice came from the house: “Who’s out there?”
Max led us across Connecticut, and we vanished into the shadows of a side street. We circled back to the Avalon—the home stretch—and in a few minutes we were back on Connors Lane, cruising to Max’s.
Safely under the climbing maple, we were shell-shocked and shaking. The enormity of what we’d accomplished hadn’t set in.
Beatriz thought she was only a little sore. “My kneesocks kept my legs from getting too scraped.” But she did have a raw place speckled with sidewalk crud on her knee.
“Why didn’t your angels see that bump?” Max taunted.
We all looked at Beatriz, with her one braid hanging sadly. Ivan asked her, “Don’t you think I should cut off your other braid?”
She thought for a second and said miserably, “You might as well. I’ll put my cap back on to sneak back into my house, but what am I gonna tell them in the morning?” She was ready to cry.
“Why don’t you tell them that you saw a picture of a really cute Girl Scout in Seventeen with a short haircut, and that they called her the ‘New American Girl,’ and you just wanted to look more American?” I suggested, having seen that exact feature in Liz’s latest copy of Seventeen.
Beatriz said, “I don’t think my parents want me to look more American.”
Max offered, “Tell them it’s too hot and way too much trouble to have long hair, and that you’d rather spend more time on your cataclysm.”
“It’s catechism. A cataclysm is like when the Russians blow us up,” Beatriz corrected, issuing a snuffly laugh. “I know—I’ll tell them I’ll go to confession, too. I hope they don’t punish me by not letting me go to the Fiesta.”
Ivan whipped out his trusty knife and, with trembling hands, chopped off the other braid, giving it to Beatriz. “Wow,” she whispered. “My head feels so light!”
“I hope you get inside okay,” I said. “Don’t forget to wash the charcoal off.”
“Okay,” she said, smiling. “What an adventure!” She rode back down the lane.
“Uhh…my head feels light, too.” Ivan sat down, then lay back in the dirt. “My chest hurts.”
“Ivan!” I was afraid for him. “We have to get you into bed!” Max and I fanned him frantically with our hands. His white face practically glowed in the dark.
After a few minutes, he said, “I think I’m okay now.” We helped him up the tree, but he was pretty weak.
We tiptoed fast to the bathroom, where we all took elephantine pees, then we stripped down and quietly got in a cold shower, rinsing the charcoal off. In Max’s bedroom the clock said 1:07. Max turned on the fan to obscure any noise. I’d never been so exhausted in my life—well, maybe after I drowned. Ivan seemed rejuvenated—a little—by the shower, but sat on the floor. Max whispered joyfully, “You guys—we did it! Are we not the three coolest cats in the world?”
“Re-mark-able! We heisted the vinegaroon!” We were suddenly jubilant, and Max and I performed a silent victory dance, like naked cavemen after a kill. Ivan only watched, grinning. Then we all put on our underpants and threw ourselves onto Max’s bed.
“I want to see him one more time,” said Ivan.
Max rose back up and grabbed the paper bag from his book bag. “Gah! It still reeks!” He proffered it to Ivan. Ivan unwrapped the paper-sack cocoon and took out the green pill bottle, holding it to the streetlight. The vinegaroon moved a bit, and Ivan said, “Ta-da!”
Max spoke to the vinegaroon. “Aargh, matey! You’ll soon be making Slutcheon walk the plank!” He clacked his tongue, “Tick tock, tick tock!” like the evil crocodile that plagued Captain Hook.
“Max, do you have a Magic Marker?” Ivan asked.
“I think so. Somewhere.” He pawed through a drawer and found one.
Ivan sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over the bottle. Very meticulously he drew a small skull and crossbones on the plastic.
“Like you might forget there’s something poisonous in there?” I said.
“It’s just in case,” said Ivan. “And he’s a pirate vinegaroon. Pirates always have a skull and crossbones on their stuff, right?”
Max said, “Okay, now get that thing outta my bed.”
“Just one good-night kiss.” Ivan smooched at the bottle and replaced it on the sill sideways, shoring it up with the Magic Marker. For a moment we admired our trophy, silhouetted against the streetlight, the bottle glowing like an emerald.
I cautioned, “You better be super careful with him because of the twins and the dogs.”
Wiesie traipsed in, sniffed around, hunching her back and hissing like a Halloween cat, and ran out of the room. Max yawned, saying, “John and I thought for a second you were going to kill Beatriz, Ivan.”
“Oh, brother! Maybe your brains did get poisoned,” he said and laughed. I considered this and started to worry not only about the vinegaroon’s welfare, but about everybody else’s. And I worried about Ivan’s sinking spell. But I was overtaken by a yawn. I should have been very worried, as things turned out.
The clock said 1:26. We conked out, too battle-fatigued to laugh, scratch, or even dream.
12
Two mornings later it was the day of the Fabulous Family Fiesta, and the temperature was already ungodly high. It had stormed during the night, and with my obsessive dread of lightning, I’d woken up in a panic. I hadn’t run to my grandparents’ room to sleep on the floor between their beds like I usually did because I could see, between flashes, the palest beginnings of morning just beyond the locust trees in our backyard. I had a skinny little book that featured illustrations of a phenomenon called black lightning, and a fireball coming through a window and rolling across the floor, just like the A-bomb fireballs we’d learned about in civil-defense drills. I’d planned to saturate the book with lighter fluid and incinerate it in the stone fireplace at the bottom of our yard. I was so afraid of the book that I hadn’t burned it yet.