The dubious pranks of sh.., p.1
The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman, page 1
This is an Arthur A. Levine book
Published by Levine Querido
www.levinequerido.com • info@levinequerido.com
Levine Querido is distributed by Chronicle Books
Text copyright © 2023 by Mari Lowe
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931661
ISBN 9781646142644
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64614-339-9 (Reflowable epub)
Published November 2023
The text type was set in Centaur
For Batsheva, my partner in surviving sixth grade,
And for all the readers still muddling through it.
. גם זה יעבור
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
SOME NOTES ON THIS BOOK’S PRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
The lights next door are flickering, casting moving shadows on the stillness of my backyard while I try to stand on shaky Rollerblades. I know that it’s not a storm that’s interfering with the lights. It’s clear outside, and I can see all the stars from here. No, it’s probably Gayil and her sisters and brothers having a dance party. I saw the packaging for a disco ball poking out of their recycling garbage can yesterday morning when I left for school, and I always hear them playing old Miami Boys Choir songs at night on top volume.
It’s quiet in my house. I have one sister, not five, and Bayla is four years older than me and generally considers me a pain in the neck, as she complains to Ema when I’m around. We’ve never had a dance party, and if I put on music in our room, she tells me to stop because she’s studying. Tonight, I haven’t even tried. Instead, I’m doing something new.
Everyone rollerblades now. Fairview is basically built for it, with all our quiet developments and wide sidewalks. On Shabbos, the streets are empty except for the mail trucks, and little kids ride plastic bikes up and down them for the whole afternoon with no supervision. I see Gayil and Devorah and Rena skate to school every morning with their brand-name Heelys, speeding past me and weaving between minivans picking up their morning carpools.
I’ve never been great with Rollerblades. I like my feet planted on solid ground, thank you very much. I’ve tottered around on ice skates and held on to the wall the entire time, and I’ve always been shaky on a bike too. But I came back from summer camp and discovered that every sixth grader at Fairview Bais Yaakov rollerblades now except for me. I don’t know when it happened or how, but I’m the last to figure it out. Again.
So now I have to get good at rollerblading overnight, and I dug Bayla’s old Rollerblades out of the closet and forced them onto my too-wide feet. I clomp around our flat wooden patio in them, wishing that I had some of those Heelys that Gayil wears. They’re just regular sneakers with wheels that snap out of the soles, and I had begged my mother for my own pair earlier this week.
I’m not spending that much on a pair of shoes you aren’t going to wear, Ema had said, and I’m determined to show her that I can do it and earn those Heelys. Except the rollerblading isn’t going that well. My legs split and my knees bend and I’m falling off the patio and onto the grass, my arm slamming into a clod of dirt that feels suspiciously wet.
“Ow! Ugh.” I try to wipe my arm off on the edge of the patio and succeed only in smearing it around my arm even more. “Oh, gross. This better not be cat poop.” We feed the local cats and they like to hang out in the backyard, wandering down the strip of grass that we share with a dozen other neighbors along the street. Gayil always shrieks and runs when she sees them, but I like the cats. Except this, if it’s what I’m afraid it is.
I hobble to the back door in my Rollerblades and push it open with my clean arm, wiggling out of the Rollerblades and going to wash up. Maybe I’ll practice more tomorrow morning before school. I can’t stand the thought of another morning going by, walking with my head down into the school building as other girls zip by on their skates. Chubby Shaindy just isn’t athletic enough for Rollerblades, I imagine them thinking. Awkward Shaindy doesn’t even know that everyone has Heelys now.
No one is mean to me aloud, of course. We’re one of those classes that everyone likes to talk about, a model Bais Yaakov class that is so sweet and bright and respectful that every teacher looks forward to having us. But I’ve never really fit in with everyone else. I’m the girl who waits on the side when we do group projects, hoping someone will invite me into their group before the teacher has to assign them to me. I follow other girls around at recess, trying to join their conversations and always falling flat. I just don’t have the kind of magic that Gayil has, that energy that makes everyone want to be her friend.
Maybe it’s not worth it, learning how to rollerblade. By the time I get my Heelys, everyone else will be done with them and I’ll be the one who caught on too late.
I head up the stairs to my room, getting an irritated “Can you not stomp so loud?” from Bayla at the desk before I dump the Rollerblades in the closet again and climb up onto my top bunk to read a book. I’d rather read than rollerblade anyway.
Still, I peer out my window, wondering if I might be able to see the Itzhaki girls dancing next door. My window looks directly at Gayil’s, and I figure that the disco ball must be set up there.
But it isn’t. The flashing lights are coming from downstairs, and Gayil’s room is dimly lit, only a lamp near the window illuminating it. Gayil is standing in her room, staring out the window with distant eyes.
She doesn’t see me at first, because I’m near the top of the window, stretched over the side of the bunk bed to see out of it. Then, she must have noticed the movement, because her eyes flicker up and catch mine.
They hold my gaze, and there is something strange glittering in them that I don’t understand. I lift a hand and wave to her, halfhearted, because I know that I’ll just get a strained smile and a little wave in response from someone who doesn’t want to be around me.
But I don’t. Gayil crooks a finger as though she is beckoning me, and I blink at her in surprise. It must be a mistake. Maybe I’d misread what she was doing. I pull back, baffled, and Bayla says from the desk, “Can you stop that thumping? This Ramban is killing me.”
“Study somewhere else, then,” I say, climbing down the ladder of the bunk bed just to annoy her. I peek back at the window, and I jump, startled. Gayil is still standing there, frozen in place like a picture. Her brown eyes look almost golden in the lamp’s light, and her light brown skin is shadowed.
Carefully, I walk across the room, a cool breeze wafting in from outside and tingling at my skin. I close the window where it’s cracked open, an excuse to walk over to it, and I feel the steadying sensation of the hard plastic under my fingers, the faint smell of the fresh yellow paint by the wall. I dare to look up again.
Gayil is still there, a smile on her face. It’s almost teasing, almost coy, transforming her face into something mischievous. I pause, transfixed, and I know that she can see me staring at her. She lifts her hands, and I see that there’s a paper in them, words written in stark black marker against the white background.
The sign says, WANT TO KNOW A SECRET?
Gayil raises her eyebrows invitingly, and I am helpless to do anything but nod.
CHAPTER 2
Our backyards are all connected. There’s one neighbor who had enclosed his, had broken the river of grass that stretches down the block, but the rest of them are free for all of us. In the development where we live, most families have at least five or six kids and two families live in each house, and the kids rule the neighborhood. I’ve been walking to school alone since I was seven, alongside a crowd of other girls and boys heading in the same direction.
There’s a big trampoline behind Gayil’s house where my classmates hang out after school some days, and I know that Gayil will be waiting there. Carefully, I head downstairs. I have to dodge Abba where he’s learning gemara in the kitchen as he eats soup, a bit of it dripped onto his red-brown beard. His shoulders are stooped from years of sitting in front of his gemara and his tortoiseshell glasses are caught between two fingers, but he straightens to smile up at me. Ema is entertaining our basement neighbor in the living room. Ema’s chubby like me, but it makes her look warm and friendly instead of awkward, and her dark hair peeks out past the purple-hued headscarf that she wears on her head. She doesn’t glance at me, but she knows I’m there, because she calls out, “Don’t be out too late,” as I pass her. “It’s a school night.”
I duck out the back door. Ema never has to worry about me being home on school nights—I’m not exactly a social butterfly—and I’m not going far.
The trampoline is near the back of the fence that closes off our development from the one being built behind it. One of the neighbors has put a flower bed near the trampoline, the colors dim in the dark but the scent lingers in the air. I can see an unmoving crane just
past the fence, towering over the trampoline and casting a triangular shadow across me. Gayil is sitting at the side of the trampoline beneath the crane, long legs splayed out in front of her, and I climb up the ladder into the trampoline, bouncing a little as I crawl across the mat to her.
Gayil doesn’t look at me. She’s staring at something in her hand, and I squint at it in the dim light in the backyard. I can just make out a rectangular shape, hard plastic that looks vaguely familiar. I edge down along the trampoline beside her, the hard plastic textured enough that I can feel it on my knees through my grey pleated skirt, and I venture, “Did you want me to come out here?”
Gayil startles, lurching back on the bouncy mat. “Oh,” she says, and she brightens, straightening out her own skirt over her knees. She’s already changed from her uniform skirt to a trendier black one. She grins at me, white teeth gleaming beneath her braces. I’ve never seen her look so excited to see me. “Shaindy. There you are. What took you so long?”
It’s been five minutes. I blink at her. She says, “Never mind. I have the wildest thing to show you. I found it right outside the school building—just lying there yesterday—and I was popping the wheel out of my Heelys when I spotted it. One of them has a stuck heel, right here, see?” She sticks her shoe out to show me, and I watch, baffled at what I’m doing out here.
Gayil and I aren’t friends. When she first moved in next door, our parents set up a few playdates. We were five, and we were about to start in the same school, so it seemed a no-brainer that we would become best friends. But I was a shy kid, and I guess Gayil lost interest during those first few playdates. Within a few weeks, we’d started school and Gayil had immediately drawn in the rest of the class while I’d lurked in corners and watched. I never quite caught up with everyone else.
It’s not like we hate each other—our class is too nice for that—but Gayil has never shown much interest in hanging out with me. This feels like a sudden, precious moment, a turning point for me. Either that, or there’s been a horrible mistake.
I say, “There’s a Thumbtack jammed into the pocket where the wheel slides in. That’s why it isn’t popping out easily.” I can see it glinting in the light of the Itzhaki patio lamp, silver against the smooth red-and-blue of the wheel.
“Whoa, really?” Gayil blinks at me, then pulls off the shoe and tugs out the tack. She tosses it carelessly over the net of the trampoline, into the high grass that crawls up the fence on our side, and then tries popping the wheel in and out again. “Genius,” she says, grinning, and my cheeks warm. “Anyway. I saw this then.” She sticks out her hand and opens her palm, and I see that hard plastic rectangle in it. It’s a bright teal, flat and thick, and it isn’t labeled, but I know exactly what it is. I’ve seen teachers use them for years outside the big grey-brick building where I spend most of my waking hours.
It’s a key fob, one that only faculty has, and it’s the key to enter the school building. There’s security too, and they’ll buzz people in most of the time. But the fob is for after hours, for late evening events and early arrivals, and every teacher has one.
“Is it Morah Neuman’s?” I wonder, going through the number of teachers who might be near our classroom. “Or Mrs. Beim? There’s also Morah Adelman next door, and Mrs. Gelman is always forgetting her bag everywhere so it might be—”
“Shaindy,” Gayil says, cutting me off, and I stop before I can embarrass myself again. I think quickly, hesitate, and run through the possibilities. Gayil isn’t bringing me here because of something she can fix by bringing the fob to the school office. She hadn’t brought me here just to share either. I’m not her confidante.
Which means … “You want to use it, don’t you?” I breathe, a breeze tickling at my hair as I stare at the fob. “What are you planning? Some kind of … like, a school spirit thing?” It’s under a week until Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and maybe Gayil is organizing a surprise for the class before it starts. Gayil does stuff like that all the time, little projects to make the class excited or to help a teacher out. She’s the perfect Bais Yaakov girl, one of our teachers had said last year, and we’d all laughed and known it was true. The perfect Bais Yaakov girl is an elusive concept, someone respectful and understanding and energetic and modest, friends with everyone and giving of her time, and Gayil is as close as it gets. She dresses the part too, straight hair pulled back with a headband at all times and her uniform fitted so it’s clean looking and flat without being too tight. Even her nonuniform skirt makes her look more like one of our younger teachers, mature and graceful, and I could see Gayil arranging something that the teachers would have done otherwise.
Gayil laughs. “No,” she says, and there is a strange note to her voice, a shift that is mischievous and secretive at once. “Nothing like that. I thought we might do a few pranks.”
“Pranks?” I echo, baffled. I don’t know Gayil well, but none of what I do know about her really fits with this image. “Like practical jokes? On the teachers?”
“No way,” Gayil says, horrified. “Not on teachers. That would be so disrespectful.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s been a rough start to the year, right? Sixth grade is hard.”
I nod in bewildered agreement. Sixth grade is hard. There are suddenly six teachers—two for Hebrew subjects and four for English—and they all have different rules, different schedules, different homework. It feels like there’s a test every day, and I’m always scrambling for the right notebook or binder. It’s a lot of work, but people like Gayil always sail through it.
Maybe I’ve overestimated Gayil. Maybe Gayil is just as lost as I am. “This could be a fun distraction,” she says. “A mystery that no one else will be able to solve. I bet it’ll make everyone a little less stressed.” She grins. “I think we should start with Rena Pollack. She could use a laugh.”
Rena Pollack is one of Gayil’s closest best friends, a tall girl with curly dark ringlets that are always held back in a headband, neat and modest, just like our teachers want our hair to be. In summer camp, she used to bring a stack of hair products to the shower, each one carefully applied. I sit behind her in math class and spend a good portion of every period imagining how those ringlets would spring back into place if I tugged them. If Gayil is starting with Rena, then this is harmless, a little bit of fun between friends.
I’ve been invited along because I’m not a friend, I realize suddenly. I’m the outsider who would never be targeted in something like this. My classmates are too nice to be bullies, and this would feel too much like bullying if I were the one who had the practical jokes played on her.
But I’ve never gotten a chance like this. Once, back in summer camp, I’d been the one with the plan that the other Fairview girls had followed enthusiastically, but that had been because Gayil had disappeared for a little while. I’m not a leader, and I’m not the girl who anyone picks to be their coconspirator. This is a chance to be like Gayil, to spend time with the most popular girl in school, and it sounds like it’s going to be exciting too.
I don’t think twice about it. “And you want me to come with you?” I blurt out, still unsure about it. “Not one of your friends?”
Gayil scoffs. “They can’t keep a secret,” she says, tossing her gleaming black hair. “They’ll start giggling about it the minute that Rena finds out what we have in store for her. You though …” She pokes a finger at my face, prodding my forehead, and she tilts her head and takes me in. “I have no idea what’s going on in that head of yours,” she says thoughtfully. “I bet you’re good at secrets.”
She clambers to her feet, popping out the wheels of her shoes and gliding across the trampoline mat. “Come on,” she says cheerfully. “Are you in?”
I follow behind her, bouncing once to throw myself to the middle of the trampoline, and once more to land near the ladder. Gayil watches me, eyebrows raised, and I say, “Yeah,” trying to seem cool and disinterested. “I’m in.”
Inside, I’m on top of the world.
CHAPTER 3
Fairview is one of the most Jewish towns in the whole United States. When my parents had been kids, it had been a small town that had been maybe half Jewish. Now, it’s huge. All those kids had grown up and had their own kids, and there had been no more space in the town, just lots of empty land around it to develop into more neighborhoods. My neighborhood isn’t far from a highway, but you wouldn’t know it from the quiet streets and picture-perfect developments. Ours is three blocks long: a U-shaped turn with about fifty identical houses, each one with a separate apartment in the basement, and five hundred people living here in all. Twelve of them are classmates at Bais Yaakov, but only Gayil and I live on our block, the center of the U.
