Chicken Chicken (3 page)

Cole slipped an egg from his pocket. His eyes flashed mischievously.
“Think fast!” he cried. He tossed the egg at Anthony.

Anthony cupped his hands and caught the egg. Without a pause, he tossed it
back to my brother.

“Oh, please,” I begged. “Not this stupid game.”

Cole had to stretch—but he caught the egg in one hand.

This is one of their games that drives me crazy. They throw an egg back and
forth, back and forth as they walk. Each time they throw it, they stand a little
farther apart from each other.

The idea is to see how far they can toss the egg without breaking it.

The answer usually is: not too far.

One of them always ends up with egg splattered all over him. Once I made the
mistake of trying to dive between them and intercept the egg. Too bad I
intercepted it with my
forehead.

“Please, guys,” I begged. “Go do your egg toss somewhere else—okay?”

Cole backed up into the middle of the street. A few feet away, Mr. Horace’s old hound yawned and rolled onto his back. I saw
two men in overalls pulling enormous burlap bags of feed from the Feed Store
across the street.

“Yo!” Cole called—and heaved the egg high in the air.

Anthony raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. He backed up, back,
back—nearly to the grocery store.

And the egg plopped down on top of his head.

What a disgusting
craaack
it made. Really gross.

“Huh?” Anthony uttered a startled gasp. And yellow goo started to flow down
his forehead and the sides of his hair.

“Sorry. It got away from me!” Cole cried. But he couldn’t keep a straight
face. He burst out laughing.

Anthony let out an angry growl and charged at Cole.

Cole dodged away from him and ran up onto the sidewalk.

“Stop it! Stop it!” I shouted.

Roaring like an angry lion, Anthony dove at my brother and pinned him against
the grocery store window. “You did that on purpose!” he shouted.

“No way! It was an accident!” Cole replied, laughing.

Anthony lowered his egg-gloppy head and head-butted Cole in the chest.

“Ooof!” My brother let out a groan.

Anthony pulled back his head and prepared another head butt.

Cole glanced down at his T-shirt. It was drenched in sticky egg yolk.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Shrieking at them, I dove between them. I grabbed
Anthony’s shoulders and tried to tug him off Cole.

I didn’t see Vanessa step out of the grocery store.

None of us did.

“Get
off!
” I begged Anthony. I gave him a hard tug.

And all three of us bounced hard into Vanessa.

First I saw her black dress. Then I saw her pale face. Saw her dark eyes go
wide with surprise.

I saw her mouth fall open. Her hands fly up.

And two bags of groceries bounced to the sidewalk.

I heard one bag rip. And I heard cans and bottles clatter onto the street.

The sound of shattering glass made me turn to the street. I saw a puddle of
deep red ketchup that had leaked from a broken ketchup bottle. A carton of eggs
lay open and shattered in the gutter.

I still had Anthony’s shoulders gripped in both hands. A shiver ran down his
body. He pulled free of me with a hard jerk.

“Sorry!” he cried to Vanessa. “I’m really sorry!”

Then he jumped over some of her groceries—and went running into the street.

“Whooooa!” Anthony cried out as he tripped over the hound dog. He went down
face first on the pavement on top of the dog.

The dog didn’t make a sound. It hardly moved.

Anthony struggled to his feet. Then he roared off behind the Feed Store. He
disappeared without ever looking back.

“Oh, wow,” I murmured, staring down at the ruined groceries all over the
street. “Oh, wow.”

Cole stood beside me, breathing noisily, shaking his head.

The dog loped over slowly, favoring one leg. He lowered his head and began
licking egg yolk off the pavement.

I turned to Vanessa and nearly gasped when I saw the look of fury on her
cold, pale face.

As her eyes locked on mine, I felt as if I’d been stabbed—by an icicle.

A shiver of fear made me take a step back. I grabbed Cole’s arm. I started to
pull him away.

But Vanessa stepped forward, her long black dress sweeping along the
sidewalk. She pointed to Cole with a slender finger tipped in black nail polish.
Then she pointed at me.

“Chicken chicken,” she whispered.

A smile spread over Vanessa’s black-lipsticked lips as she rasped those words
at us.

“Chicken chicken.”

I gasped as if I’d been slapped.

The street tilted in front of me. Then it started to spin.

What on earth did she mean? Why did she say that?

Cole and I didn’t wait to ask her. Our sneakers thudded the pavement as we
took off, running at full speed.

I glimpsed the old hound dog, still lapping up egg yolk from the street. And
I glimpsed Vanessa’s angry face for one more brief second.

And then Cole and I whipped around the corner, sped past the post office and
the dry cleaner, and ran all the way home.

I didn’t glance back once. And I didn’t say a word until we were safely in
the kitchen.

I collapsed onto a kitchen stool. Cole ran the cold water in the sink and splashed it over his face and hair.

We were both panting and wheezing, too breathless to speak. I wiped the sweat
off my forehead with my arm. Then I crossed to the fridge and pulled out a small
bottle of water. Twisting off the cap, I tilted it to my mouth and drank it
down.

“We should have stayed,” I finally managed to sputter.

“Huh?” Cole turned to me. He had water dripping down his red face. The front
of his T-shirt was soaked.

“We should have stayed and helped Vanessa pick up her groceries,” I told him.

“No way!” Cole protested. “She’s crazy! Did you see the look on her face?”

“Well… we knocked down all of her groceries,” I said.

“So? It was an accident,” my brother insisted. “Accidents happen all the
time, right? But she… she wanted to
destroy
us!”

I rubbed the cool bottle against my pounding forehead. “Why did she say that
to us?” I asked, thinking out loud. “Why did she whisper like that?”

Cole changed his expression. He reached out his hand and pointed a finger at
me. Then he did a pretty good Vanessa imitation. “Chicken chicken!” he rasped,
shaking his finger at me.

“Stop it!” I snapped. “I mean, really. Stop it, Cole. You’re giving me the
creeps.”

“Chicken chicken,” he whispered again.

“Come on. Give me a break,” I pleaded. I crushed the plastic bottle in my
hand. “It’s just so weird,” I murmured. “Why did she say that word? Why?”

Cole shrugged. “Because she’s crazy?”

I shook my head fretfully. “She isn’t crazy. She’s evil,” I said. I wrapped
my arms around myself. “I just have this feeling that something horrible is
going to happen now.”

Cole rolled his eyes. “Crystal—what could happen?”

“Did you buy a present for Lucy-Ann?” Mom asked at dinner.

I swallowed a forkful of spaghetti. “Well… actually… no.”

She gazed up at me in surprise. “But I thought you went into town to buy her
a CD.”

“Pass the Parmesan cheese,” Dad interrupted. So far, those were his only
words this evening. Guess he had a bad day at work.

“I don’t understand,” Mom insisted. “What did you do after school, Crystal?”

“Nothing, Mom.” I sighed. “Can we change the topic?”

“You have spaghetti sauce all over your chin,” Cole pointed out.

I made a face at him. “Very helpful,” I muttered. “Guess I’ve been sitting
across the table from
you
for too long. I’m picking up your habits.”

He stuck out his tongue at me. He had half a meatball on his tongue. Very
mature.

“I forgot to ask you about basketball practice yesterday,” Dad chimed in.
“How did that—”

“Bad topic!” I interrupted.

Mom set down her fork. She blew a strand of hair off her forehead. “Guess
every topic is a bad one tonight, huh?”

“Maybe,” I grumbled, lowering my eyes to my plate. I shook my head. “I was
terrible at practice. Coach Clay gave me a chance, and I played like a perfect
klutz.”

“No one’s perfect,” Cole chimed in.

“Cole, be quiet,” Mom scolded.

“Doesn’t anyone want to hear about my sprained thumb?” Cole whined.

“No,” Mom shot back. “Be quiet.” She turned back to me. “You didn’t play
well?”

“I—I tripped over my own dribble. Twice,” I stammered. “And I missed an
easy layup. The ball didn’t even touch the rim.”

“Well… next time…” Dad started.

“But this was my big chance to show I can be a starter!” I cried. “And I blew
it. I just felt so tired. I hadn’t slept the night before. And… and…”

“You’re still the sixth player,” Mom said soothingly. “You’ll get a chance.”

“Do you have team practice tomorrow?” Dad asked, helping himself to more
salad.

I shook my head. “No. Tomorrow afternoon is chorus practice. Cole has it,
too. You know. The chorus is performing for the junior high graduation next
month.”

“I get to sing two solos,” Cole bragged. “I’m the only fifth grader in the
chorus—and I’m the only one with perfect pitch.”

“No one’s perfect,” I reminded him. I know. It was a really lame joke. No one
laughed.

Mom lowered her eyes to Cole’s hand. “How did you sprain your thumb?” she
asked.

“I didn’t,” Cole replied. “I was just trying to get into the conversation.”

Mrs. Mellon, the music teacher, was a tiny, birdlike woman. She always wore
gray sweaters and gray skirts or pants. With her feathery gray hair and snipped
beak of a nose, she always reminded me of a sparrow. Or maybe a chirping
chickadee.

She called us her canaries.

Greene County Middle School wasn’t big enough to have a music room. So the
chorus met after school in a corner of the auditorium stage.

There were eight kids in the chorus. Four boys and four girls. Mostly sixth
graders, with a few younger kids like Cole thrown in. It was hard to put a
chorus together in such a small school.

Mrs. Mellon was late. So the boys shot paper clips across the stage at each other with rubber bands. And the girls talked
about how dumb the boys were.

When Mrs. Mellon finally arrived, her hands fluttering tensely at her
feathery hair, she wanted to get right down to business. “Our performance is two
weeks from tonight,” she announced fretfully. “And we really don’t know what
we’re doing—do we?”

We all pretty much agreed that we needed a lot more rehearsal time. Lucy-Ann,
who is our only soprano, raised her hand. “Maybe we could lip-synch some songs,”
she suggested. “You know. From records.”

Everyone laughed.

I studied Lucy-Ann. I wasn’t so sure she was joking.

“No fooling around this afternoon,” Mrs. Mellon said sternly. “Let’s see how
much we can get done when we’re being serious.”

We sang our warm-up scales. We were interrupted when a large black spider
dropped from the rafters into Lucy-Ann’s curly blond hair. She shrieked and
staggered back. And she began shaking her head wildly and tugging at her curls
with both hands.

Finally, the spider dropped onto the stage floor, and Cole tromped on it.

“Isn’t that bad luck or something?” a boy named Larry called to my brother.

Cole shrugged and scraped the sole of his shoe against the floor.

“Let’s begin with ‘Beautiful Ohio’,” Mrs. Mellon suggested, ignoring the
whole spider problem. She shuffled sheet music on her music stand. “That’s the
one that gave us so much trouble last time.”

“It’s the high part that’s the problem,” Lucy-Ann chimed in.

“It’s your
voice
that’s the problem!” Larry teased Lucy-Ann. I think
he has a crush on her. He’s always insulting her.

Mrs. Mellon cleared her throat. “Please, folks. Serious. Serious.” She turned
to Cole. “Have you been practicing your solo?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure,” my brother lied.

“Then let’s try it,” Mrs. Mellon suggested. “Remember, Cole—you wait
three
beats before you come in.”

“No problem,” Cole told her.

At the last rehearsal, he didn’t do it right
once.

Mrs. Mellon raised her arms. Smiled. And fluttered her hands, her signal for
us to start.

We began to sing “Beautiful Ohio”. It’s kind of a drippy song, but I like to
sing the high part.

“Very good. Very good,” Mrs. Mellon encouraged us as we sang, a tight smile
on her face.

It
did
sound pretty good.

Until Cole began his solo.

I saw him take a deep breath. He stepped forward. Waited for three beats.
Opened his mouth.

And sang: “BLUCK BUCK BUCK BLUUUCK BLUCK.”

“Huh?” Mrs. Mellon gasped.

We all stopped singing. I stared hard at my brother.

He had a confused expression on his face. He kept clearing his throat.

“Sing the words, Cole,” Mrs. Mellon instructed sternly. “You
do
know
the words—right?”

Cole nodded.

“Let’s begin with the chorus just before Cole’s solo,” she told us.

We began again. As I sang, I kept my eyes on my brother.

I saw him count off the three beats. Then:

“BLUCK BLUCK BLUCK CLUCK BUCK!”

What was he trying to prove?

Larry laughed. But no one else did.

Cole kept rubbing his neck and clearing his throat. His face was bright red.

“Are you okay?”
I mouthed the words to him.

He didn’t answer me.

“Cole—please!” Mrs. Mellon pleaded. “Stop fooling around. We really haven’t
time.” She frowned at him. “You have a beautiful voice. I know you can sing
this. Will you please do your part?”