Free Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan Page B

Jeremy Bernstein out to the wood shop.He could do interviews with Zedediah and Archie out there, where the power tools overwhelmed any other sounds.
    It wasn’t that E.D. didn’t like the music. She did. But the constant repetition had worn grooves in her brain. Even in those few blessed hours when Randolph took the CD and went off to Traybridge for what he called his “eternal, unending, utterly futile auditions,” there was no respite. The music kept playing over and over in her mind. She would catch herself humming it. Whistling it. It wasn’t just the hills that were alive with this music, it was the trees, the grass, the house, the universe! Even worse, Jake had taken to humming it as well, so that if she did manage to drive it out of her mind briefly, he might bring it rushing back at any moment.
    Randolph Applewhite didn’t very often direct musicals, and when he did, he usually went somewhere else to do it. Some other city in some other state. If he ever got this show cast and if the family survived the rehearsal period, E.D. was going to suggest they make a family rule against his ever again directing a musical from home.
    Partly to get away from the music and partly because it had become an obsession, E.D. had spent a good part of the week in the meadow, by the pond, in the pine grove, anywhere and everywhere on their sixteen acres—looking for a great spangled fritillary.When she came back each day, the unused camera on its strap around her neck, her net empty, Jake’s smirk seemed to get bigger and broader. E.D. didn’t give up easily, but she was beginning to lose hope. September was the last month they were supposed to be out there, and they were listed as rare during the second half of the month. There were only six more days in September.
    It was beginning to look likely that the Butterfly Project would end with a gaping hole in the chart. It drove her nuts. The great spangled fritillary was a common butterfly. The book said so. She should have found one weeks ago. It was just some nasty twist of fate that she hadn’t found one. It was like a curse. If Jake Semple hadn’t come into her life, she was absolutely certain she would have found one by now. But he had come, and then he’d challenged her. She’d told him that she would find one, and now if she didn’t, Jake Semple would win!
    Everything else about the project was finished. The papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis were sitting on a shelf in the schoolroom, painted according to the pictures in her book, and she’d scheduled the Teaching Opportunity about metamorphosis for the first of next week. She was going to explain to Destiny how the caterpillar turned itself into the chrysalis and then she would cut the chrysalis open and explain how the monarch butterfly that she had a photographof on the chart had climbed out of it and flown away. The Teaching Opportunity and a paper describing the project and its results were what she called the Culminating Events. Her paper was almost done—it was just waiting for a paragraph on the great spangled fritillary or else the statement that she had had to give up on finding one. A statement of defeat she couldn’t bear to think about.
    There were no official grades at the Creative Academy, but E.D. always graded herself on her projects. It gave her a sense of where she was, what she had done, and most of the time a comforting feeling of accomplishment. But without the great spangled fritillary, she was going to have to give herself a B in science for the first half of this term. She was not used to getting Bs. She worked and worked until she felt sure she had earned an A. This fritillary thing wasn’t something she could do by hard work. It was totally out of her control.
    Worse, she’d been so determined to find one that she had fallen behind in every other subject. Including math. Her math tutor had sent her an e-mail asking if she was sick. She was doing her best to catch up now. But the