Free The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy by Diane Stanley

hanksgiving rolled around and the family was all together again, for four days at least. Aside from the fact that Cal was staying with us for the holiday weekend, everything was back to the usual routine—we were sleeping in our own familiar beds, sitting at our regular places at the dinner table, making the same dumb jokes. You’d think this would all seem perfectly natural to me, that it would make me comfortable and happy. But it didn’t. I felt awkward and ill at ease, because now I saw everything through different eyes.
    Since I’d been at Allbright, it had become important to me to have everything around me look nice, and be clean, and be in order. Now I saw, for thefirst time, that 17 Creek Lane was a mess. I don’t mean that it was dirty or anything; there was just a lot of stuff strewn around. And things that used to look okay—like the new chenille throw Mom had bought last year to drape over the back of the couch and the decorative pots by the front door that had been filled with red geraniums—didn’t look okay anymore. The chenille throw was lying in a pile on the couch where someone had used it the night before. And the flowerpots were still there, only now they held nothing but dirt. How hard could it be, I wondered, to fold up a blanket or haul those pots to the garage for the winter?
    Without thinking, I picked up some newspapers from the kitchen table—old papers, I noticed, from the day before—and arranged them in a neat pile on the counter. Dad shot me a curious look, kind of playfully shocked. I smiled and gave a nervous little shrug. I’d need to watch myself, I thought. This was their house, and if they wanted magazines and newspapers strewn all over it, then that was their right. I’d be back in my own room at school by Sunday night.
    And anyway, I had bigger things to worry about: Thanksgiving dinner. As I feared, Mom had labored over a meal fit for a plowman (if he happened to be a very important plowman she was determined to impress). In addition to the turkey, there were twokinds of stuffing (one with oysters, one with chestnuts), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy, and white rolls with butter. Basically, it was your traditional holiday meal of meat, bread, bread, bread, potatoes, potatoes, and grease. The only vegetables on the table consisted of beans drenched in butter and sprinkled with bacon bits. Out in the kitchen, I knew, there lurked at least two kinds of gooey pies.
    It was one of those impossible situations: I knew from my PD lesson on table manners (and from plain old common sense) that it is unacceptable to refuse food that has been lovingly prepared in your honor, unless it will actually cause you to vomit or will send you into anaphylactic shock. On the other hand, from my nutrition lessons in health class, I knew that virtually every item on the table was sure to clog my arteries, send my blood sugar into overdrive, or simply make me fat.
    What to do?
    Think before you speak, I told myself. (We were working on impulse control in PD.) Say something gracious.
    â€œGosh, Mom, this is fabulous!” I gushed, and began moving my food around on the plate in such a way that it looked like I’d eaten more than I had. This is a trick they teach you in PD manners class.
    â€œSo yummy!” Zoë agreed, doing the exact same thing.
    â€œIt’s really a treat, Mrs. Sharp,” added Cal. “A real home-cooked meal! Thank you so much for going to all this trouble.”
    J. D. looked up from his plate, studied the three of us for a minute with a baffled expression, did a little eye roll, then went back to chowing down. Clearly he wasn’t the least bit concerned about the condition of his arteries.
    What? I almost said—and definitely would have said back in the days before I’d learned the importance of curbing my impulses. But I held my tongue, because it’s unpleasant to fight with your brother at the