water glass to a wall, and place your ear against its bottom, you can hear everything that is being said in the room next door to you.
That night after dinner, Josephine Jiminez could.
She heard everything C. Cynthia Ann Flower had to say to Stanley Sweetsong.
Butter sat on her bed watching this strange behavior, his yellow eyes alert and curious.
“I just dropped by to see how you are, Stanley.”
“I am okay, C. Cynthia Ann. Why do you ask?”
“I ask because I’ve been thinking about you. … You know, Stanley, the Betters have never had a boy member.”
“There has never been a boy, until me, at Miss Rattray’s School for Girls,” he said.
“If a boy was a Better, things would be better for him than they ever have been before.”
“How would they be better?”
“You would sit in the front row at all school performances. That’s better, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s better.”
“You would help Miss Rattray decide what new students to enroll next year … possibly another boy. That’s better, isn’t it?”
“Possibly another boy?” said Stanley Sweetsong. “That really is better!”
“Even if the Butters were not melted down, they could never get another boy enrolled here. They had no power,” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower. “We have all the power!”
“This is true,” Stanley Sweetsong agreed.
Josephine Jiminez’s eyes filled with tears.
“And something else might happen, too,” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower. “I am the president of the Science Club, so possibly you could send for something from Bugs Alive, and I could vote for it to win a prize.”
“Then I would belong to both clubs,” said Stanley Sweetsong. “And then I would have a key to the Science Room!”
“Then you would. Then you would not miss that freckle-faced frump from next door at all!”
Josephine Jiminez felt her ears burn.
“And she will be gone, anyway, Stanley,” said C. Cynthia Ann.
“This is true. She will be in Tennessee.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” said C. Cynthia Ann Flower. “And all I ask in return is to meet Gregor Samsa.”
Josephine Jiminez could not stand to hear another word. She set the water glass down hard on her desk, causing Butter to flinch and whip his tail.
Monroe was still not packed, though all the other dolls were. Monroe was her favorite of all the Cast of Characters. He was the only one she never smashed against the wall. She sat down on her bed and put the small Kewpie doll on her lap.
“You are the only friend I have,” she told it. “Right this very moment the friend I thought I had is making friends with my worst enemy. He didn’t even wait for me to be gone, Monroe.”
Monroe’s gruff voice answered, “Well, if you’re not in, you’re out. … Who knows that better than the two of us?”
Then suddenly, Butter saw a shadow under the floor, something just outside.
He leapt from the bed, crouched low, ears cocked forward.
“What is it, Butter?”
The cat let out a high little mew, eyes narrowed to green slits.
“Is someone there?”
Josephine Jiminez flung open the door.
“ Who are you? ”
“Stuart Bagg.”
The two of them stared at each other, for who with red hair and freckles would not stare back at someone else with red hair and freckles?
Twenty-seven
J OSEPHINE LIKED STUART BAGG a lot. She liked him because he looked like her. She liked him because Butter seemed to like him, too, following after him, rubbing against him. She liked him because he did not kill the jumping spider who had let down his dragline over her bureau.
The only thing she didn’t like about him was the faint odor of his clothes.
“Raid?” she asked.
“Zap,” he said. “They fumigated the area downstairs by the kitchen where I came in.”
“Yes, because Cook saw some roaches near the Macintosh they’re returning to my family,” said Josephine.
He was such a polite boy and, for a boy, unusually curious about her family — where they lived and why