It's My Party and I Don't Want to Go Page 2

  I added a note to my mental list. Two notes, really. Invitations and venue. I had to be thorough. It could be easy for them to fix one thing that went wrong, less easy to fix a whole bunch of problems.

  Mom said, “You liked your DJ, right, Hannah?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay.” Mom scribbled something down on her notepad. So did I. Well, I scribbled a mental note. “We’ll give him a call and make sure he’s free on the date. Hopefully he is.”

  “Ellie will be able to meet with him, right?” Hannah turned to me for the first time. I had been starting to think she assumed Mom and Dad had purchased an oddly lifelike Ellie statue as a gift for my bat mitzvah. “That was really helpful before my bat mitzvah. I got to tell him all my favorite songs and games and give him a list of what not to play.”

  She glanced sideways at my dad, who grinned. He had a whole song and dance routine to the old country song “Achy Breaky Heart,” which would under no circumstances be performed at my bat mitzvah. I mean, there would under no circumstances be a bat mitzvah, but priorities.

  “Of course.” Mom scribbled another note. So did I. “That leaves the caterers, right? At least for the big things we need to worry about for the moment. We’ll need to order prizes for the games and make centerpieces, but those can be done closer to the date.”

  Hannah wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t like my bat mitzvah food very much.”

  Neither had I. Who liked cold, soggy chicken fingers and limp French fries? Well, the French fries were still kind of good, but to be fair, French fries are always good, in any form, at any temperature. Go ahead, fight me on that. Except not really, because I have noodle arms and would definitely lose.

  “Too bad,” Mom replied. “Goldblum Catering is the only kosher caterer in the area, so we have to use them. They’d better not be booked already.”

  The only kosher caterer in the area. That meant that if for some reason they couldn’t do my bat mitzvah, we’d have no other options for food. Meaning: bat mitzvah canceled.

  “The rest is all on Ellie.” All three of them turned and smiled at me at once. It was a little creepy. “Singing the haftorah and Torah portions and writing some great speeches!”

  “I’ll help you with the speeches,” Hannah chimed in.

  I gave her a small smile in return. That actually was a nice thing of her to offer. And speeches were her specialty. Being up in front of people in general was her specialty. (Mine? Being so quiet some kids in my class still didn’t know my name by the end of the year.) Maybe I was too hard on her. She was trying to help, even if she wasn’t quite getting it. I could’ve gotten stuck with a big sister who beat me up or rolled her eyes at me all the time, so really, I didn’t have it so—

  “It does sound like a good idea,” Mom was musing. Wait. What sounded like a good idea? “I hated the idea of you two sitting around the house all day doing nothing the whole summer.”

  My face paled. This didn’t sound good. Sitting around the house all day doing nothing was the best part of summer.

  Hannah clapped her hands together. That also didn’t sound good. Generally the things that made Hannah happy made me cringe. “It’s going to be so fun, Ellie!”

  “What?” I said, my voice heavy with dread.

  She boggled at me. “Volunteering at the senior center with me and the USY kids! Were you not listening?”

  Oh no, no, no. My breaths started coming quicker and quicker, kind of like Zoe’s dog—Dogzilla—when he did any amount of running. This was a disaster. Volunteering with USY, the Jewish youth group that Hannah belonged to, at the senior center meant not just hanging out with Hannah and her equally as chatty friends (do you know how many times I’ve been asked, “Why are you so quiet?”), but having to talk to random old people. Like, a lot. As in, that was the entire point of Hannah volunteering there. To talk to them and keep them company.

  Oh no, I thought, but it accidentally came out of my mouth, too.

  A flash of hurt crossed Hannah’s face. “I thought it would be fun. We don’t get to spend much time together now that we’re in different schools, and since we’re both so busy …”

  I wasn’t busy. Hannah was busy. There was a big difference.

  But Mom was squinting at me in the way that said, I have set my mind on this thing and will achieve it, so help me God, which meant I had only a second to head her off. I chose that over arguing with Hannah.

  “I already have plans to volunteer with Zoe,” I said quickly.

  Mom’s eyes unsquinted. “Doing what?”

  Um. Um. Um. Think, Ellie, think.

  I swear, there was not a single thought bouncing around in my skull. Only the theme song of a cartoon I hadn’t watched since I was five. Why? Good question, brain.

  Wait. We’d gone to an assembly on one of the last days of school. One of the town librarians had come in and talked to us about summer volunteering programs at the library. I hadn’t been listening, because Zoe and I had been texting each other about how Danny Cohen had accidentally brushed her arm in the hallway (or had it been on purpose??? Zoe wondered) but how could I go wrong with the library? The library was quiet. I could handle shelving books and choosing books to put on display and … whatever else librarians did. “Working at the library.”

  Hannah’s face relaxed. “Oh, some of my friends did that in middle school.”

  Right. Okay. “Sorry I forgot to tell you,” I said to Mom. “I have the flyer they gave us in my backpack somewhere.” Along with a banana that was now probably rotten mush, I realized, but I could deal with that later. Also something I’d have to deal with later: telling Zoe that I’d volunteered her for volunteering. She might not exactly be thrilled. I liked the library, but she had big plans for the summer to train Dogzilla to win the Westminster Dog Show. I’d told her a lot that Dogzilla didn’t really have the form or the youth to even enter, but it hadn’t changed her mind.

  “That sounds great, then,” Mom said. “As long as you’re not just sitting around the house.”

  “Right,” said Dad. “Or standing, or dancing, or playing the piano.”

  “We don’t have a piano,” said Hannah.

  “Even more reason why you shouldn’t be playing one,” Dad said. “I don’t want either of you stealing a piano.”

  I shook my head. I had to call Zoe before my mom called her parents. Off to my room. Fortunately my parents didn’t tell me to come back and keep talking about bat mitzvah stuff. Which was good. Because after I called Zoe, I had a plan to make. And not just any plan. This plan had to be foolproof. One hundred percent perfect. No way it could fail.

  I had my own checklist. The same checklist as my parents’, in fact. Only they were looking to build. And I was going to destroy.

  Game. On.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” Zoe said. I’d just finished telling her about my foolproof, one-hundred-percent-perfect, no-way-it-can-fail plan. “In fact, it might just be the worst idea I’ve heard in my entire life. And my brother once thought that farting the national anthem would get him into the school talent show.”

  I remembered that. Mrs. Miller had almost thrown up. “What did you miss about the foolproof, one-hundred-percent-perfect, no-way-it-can-fail part?”

  “What about how your last foolproof-whatever plan ended with us here?” She swept her arm around her, indicating the front of the town library. They’d built it when we were in fourth grade, so it was all shiny glass and new carpet. “Instead of at home in bed?”

  She had a point. “Thanks for doing this, by the way,” I said sincerely. She’d groaned on the phone when I told her about this whole volunteering thing, but I reminded her that she seriously owed me after getting me in trouble a few months ago, when she blamed me for leaving the freezer open after our super-secret midnight sundae plan. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

  She sighed so hard it was like she was trying to get rid of all the air in her body. “Maybe. Okay, let’s go in.”

  Ins
ide, she asked the librarian behind the front desk where to go, and he pointed toward the back. We strolled through crowds of people using the public computers, tall shelves of books upon books, and the teen section with its beanbag chairs. “Anyway, about your plan,” Zoe said. “It is definitely not foolproof or whatever. Do you seriously think your parents will just shrug and be like, ‘Oh, it looks like no one’s RSVPing, guess we’ll just cancel the whole thing’?”

  I swallowed hard, trying to hide the wobble I knew would be in my voice. “If I hide the invitations, and my parents realize nobody’s RSVPing, they’ll think nobody wants to come, and they won’t want to tell me that and hurt my feelings. And you forgot the—”

  “I didn’t forget the part where you were going to pretend to be your mom and cancel the venue.” Zoe crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow at me. We might not otherwise have looked anything alike, but we were eyebrow twins. “You seriously think the country club people are going to think you’re an adult on the phone?”

  A shudder rippled through me, and not only because the air-conditioning vent directly above me had just kicked on with a whoosh of frigid air. “Me, use the phone?” I shook my head as hard as I could. “That’s what email is for.”

  Zoe raised her other eyebrow. “No. No way.”

  “What’s wrong with email?”

  “Don’t be obtuse.”

  I raised my eyes at her for using the word obtuse. Zoe used it all the time with her weiner dog, Dogzilla. Don’t be obtuse, you definitely know what get down from the table means. Don’t be obtuse, you know you’re not supposed to have your head in the garbage can.

  It was a nicer way of saying stupid. Which I was definitely not. I turned my head so she couldn’t see the hurt on my face, staring instead at the display of banned books decorating the wall.

  Zoe continued, “It’s obviously not about the email. It’s this entire plan.” She smoothed her hand over her black braids. “No. No way.”

  “It’s not like I’m asking you to steal a car,” I said. She gave me a dubious look, like she thought that was coming next. “Zoe! You don’t have to do anything that’ll get your hands dirty. I just need you to be my lookout.”

  “Hello, girls!” The voice made us both jump. We turned to find a woman beaming down at us with a mouthful of bright white teeth. She was definitely older than Hannah—maybe in college or something?—and had light brown skin stretched too tight over her face by her high ponytail. “You must be Zoe and Ellie!”

  I nodded, trying to turn my lips up into a smile. Fortunately I had Zoe there, so I didn’t actually have to say anything. “I’m Zoe, and she’s Ellie,” Zoe said, pointing at me with her thumb.

  “Wonderful!” It was like everything that came out of this woman’s mouth ended in an exclamation point. I was exhausted just listening to her. “I’m Andrea Santos, and I’m the volunteer coordinator here at the library! I’m so excited to have you here with us!”

  “We’re so excited to be here, too,” Zoe said flatly.

  Andrea didn’t seem to notice how unexcited Zoe sounded. She just clapped her hands together. “Fantastic! Let me take you back to the meeting room! You’ll be setting up for the crafts session you’ll be running!”

  I froze. Crafts session? That we’ll be running?

  That didn’t sound like shelving books.

  Still, I followed along as Andrea led Zoe and me through the children’s section. We stepped over fluffy stuffed animals strewn all over the carpet, but those obstacles were nowhere near as dangerous as the little kids running and hollering in the aisles of colorful picture books and toys. Weren’t libraries supposed to be quiet?

  The meeting room was just an empty room with a dirty floor and a long table in the middle. The lone window looked out behind the library, where sports fields stretched into the distance. I turned back to the table just in time for Andrea to give us our instructions, punctuated (!) with (!) lots (!) of (!) enthusiasm (!), tell us to find her with any questions, and beat it.

  I wasn’t sure why we needed so many instructions—all we were doing was cutting out shapes from construction paper with blunt-edged safety scissors. We sat down and got started. “What did she mean, we were going to be running this crafts thing?” I asked Zoe.

  She wasn’t having it. “You said you wanted me to be a lookout for your absurd plan,” she said, sawing through the paper with determination. “When someone commits a crime, the lookout also goes to jail. Because they were just as much a part of it.” She sighed. “I was nervous when I got confirmed in the church, too. I had to get up in front of the whole congregation and everything. Remember?”

  Of course I remembered. But she’d been one of many people getting confirmed at once, and she didn’t have to do anything even close to singing an entire opera in front of the congregation. Not that I’d be singing an entire opera, either, but sometimes that’s what the idea of singing my haftorah and Torah portions felt like, since they were in a language I didn’t understand, to a strict, well-defined tune, and in front of an enormous crowd of people.

  Plus, even if Zoe had been nervous, she got, like, normal person nervous, not nervous like me. She didn’t have that fire still burning inside her like I did. Staying quiet and ducking my head kept it burning low, but I always knew it was there.

  She would never understand. All it would take was a fan of the flames—lots of eyes on me, or someone asking me to stand up—and it would roar back to life. She hadn’t been inside my body while it was gasping for breath and sweating out all the liquid inside. She hadn’t been there in social studies a few months after Hannah’s bat mitzvah, when I had to get up in front of the class and I forgot my speech with all those eyes on me and I started sweating and shaking and feeling like I was going to pass out … or a few months after that, when all the girls I usually sat with at lunch were absent and I had to find somewhere new to sit and the flames roared up inside me and tried to burn me alive.

  I literally could have died.

  “There’s nothing you could say to convince me,” Zoe said. “Nothing. I’ve made my decision.”

  Well. That sounded like a challenge to me.

  I cocked my head and studied my best friend like I’d never seen her before. What did she love?

  The answer came to mind right away: Dogzilla. Everything was clear now. All I had to do was kidnap Dogzilla and she’d do whatever I said.

  No. Ellie Katz, you are not a dognapper.

  But maybe there was some merit to that line of thinking. Not the life of crime part; the animal part. Because Zoe didn’t just love animals, she loooooooved them. Like, she used to be one of those girls who are totally obsessed with horses, even though she’d never actually ridden one. She had a full set of those chapter books about girls who rode horses together, and she always wore her hair in a ponytail because it had pony in the name. And she’d tickle me to death if I ever told anyone about it, but when we were younger, she pretended one of those sticks with a stuffed horse head on the end was a real horse. She “fed” it carrots and everything.

  Stick-horse was buried somewhere in the back of her closet, but Zoe still liked to wear one of those cat-ear headbands. And she liked to dress Dogzilla up in her old clothes. (That dachshund could really pull off a dress.)

  “B’nai mitzvah cost a lot of money,” I said. She stared at me, her face unreadable, but we both knew it. We’d overheard my parents talking about it. “But why spend all that money on a big party when we could put it to better use?”

  “Like what?” She was frowning at me now, but she was also leaning in toward me. She was interested, which was a good sign.

  Of course, Andrea chose that moment to pop her head in the door. “Hey, guys!” she chirped. “The kids are almost ready! Are you?”

  “We’re almost done,” Zoe said.

  Andrea popped back out, leaving my stomach to bubble. What happened to shelving books quietly all day? Now I had to deal with a bunch of sticky kids pasting things t
ogether? This wasn’t what I’d signed up for.

  But I had more important things to worry about. I almost had Zoe on the hook. “How about the animal rescue?” I said. She perked up immediately, so I kept going. “Every bat mitzvah has a charity project attached, usually to collect money or items for some topic the kid is passionate about.”

  “I know.” Of course, I already knew she knew. She told me once she wished she had a bat mitzvah so she could run a drive for the animal rescue nearby where she’d found Dogzilla years ago. She could still try to do a charity drive, but money was a traditional gift for b’nai mitzvah.

  Time for the clincher. I pulled myself up, angling my face so that I seemed to be looking down at her … even though she was at least four inches taller than me. “If I manage to get this bat mitzvah canceled … I bet some of those funds could be shifted to the animal rescue.” A beat of silence. Another beat. I held her gaze, trying to look like I had any authority at all to “shift” my parents’ “funds.”

  Maybe I would’ve been good at drama club after all.

  Unfortunately the effect of my great acting was ruined, because just then the door flew open and a pack of kids poured inside. Little kids. Like, kindergartners. And somehow they were all shouting.

  Zoe nudged me on the shoulder. “Ellie,” she hissed. “I’m pretty sure that one little kid is Danny Cohen’s brother.”

  I fought back a sigh. Zoe’d had a crush on Danny Cohen all year. She sat behind him in math and science, and liked to beg me for intel from our Hebrew school classes together. I almost never had anything interesting to tell her. He spent most of our Hebrew school classes sitting in the back of the room with his friends, laughing every time someone’s chair made a fart noise.

  This little kid did look vaguely like Danny Cohen, though all little kids looked kind of alike to me. “How do you know?”