5

At lunch, Emily could talk of nothing but Grace Anderson.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!" she moaned piteously to her ham sandwich. "I thought I was in love those other times, but they were nothing compared to this."

Jane didn't want to talk about Ms. Anderson with Emily. She wished Emily hadn't seen her first. She wished Emily hadn't said that she was in love with her first.

"What do you want to do after school?" Jane asked to change the subject.

"Nothing," Emily said in the same lovesick voice that was beginning to get on Jane's nerves.

"We have to do something," Jane insisted.

"I guess we could mess around with our science fair project," Emily said. "For some reason, I'm suddenly interested in anything to do with science."

Jane grimaced then she noticed that Emily had said, "our science fair project," not "our science fair projects." Emily was naturally counting on doing her project with Jane, since she and Jane always did stuff together, except when Mr. Putnam came up with some horrible surprise of his own. Why do twice as much work when you could do half as much work, and do it with your best friend, too? But for the first time ever, Jane didn't want to do a project with Emily. Not the science fair project.

Everything Jane and Emily worked on together turned out to be a disaster. Jane didn't want her work for Ms. Anderson to be a disaster. She wanted it to be something that would make her look at Jane again the way she had looked at her in class that morning. It was probably useless to dream of doing a project that would win the school science fair and be chosen for the regional science fair, but there was no law against dreaming. Something about Ms. Grace Anderson made her want to dream.

"Um—what kind of project do you have in mind?" Jane asked. She didn't know how to tell Emily that she didn't want to work together this time.

"Something easy and simple," Emily said. "Better yet something that involves food."

"Like what?"

"Like, we could take turns blindfolding each other and doing taste tests on different brands of potato chips or ice cream. Like, we could see if low-fat potato chips tasted any different from regular potato chips. Or if ice milk tasted any different from ice cream or something like that."

"That doesn't sound very scientific," Jane pointed out.

"Sure it does! Besides, when Ms. Anderson was in our group, she said that any real question about the physical world was a scientific question."

She had said the same thing to Jane's group, regarding Lucy's question. Jane didn't like the idea of Ms. Anderson repeating herself to anyone else.

"Look," Emily went on, "it's not like we're going to win, anyway. We want a project worthy of Loser Club. And one we can eat. Right, Jane?"

"Right, Em," Jane said. She forced herself to return Emily's grin. But she couldn't help noticing that Loser Club wasn't even twenty-four hours old, and already one of its two officers was trying to figure out how to break a rule.

~*~

After lunch, Jane and Emily sat together in study hall, in the school library. But they didn't study. Only Lucy Adams studied in study hall.

Emily drew pictures of Grace Anderson in her notebook. They made her look like a long-haired Barbie doll, Jane thought. She doodled pictures of random things in her own notebook. But she felt too restless to draw. Maybe she ought to pretend to be doing some library research, so she could have an excuse to get up and walk around.

"Hey," she whispered to Emily. "Let's pick out the books for our next book reports, okay?"

Emily put down her pen. "Ms. Reeds said they had to be at least one hundred pages. I'm going to find one that's exactly a hundred pages."

Actually, Ms. Reeds had said more than that. Jane still remembered the scathing tone of voice in which she had remarked, after their last book reports, "I have to say that it is very disturbing to find a high school students still choosing books on an elementary reading level."

The words had stung. Jane didn't read at an elementary level. She just happened to like short stories. But Ms. Reeds had implied that she was some kind of a slow learner.

Jane and Emily walked over to the fiction shelves. Emily started with the A's, taking down every skinny book and turning to the end to check the number on the last page.

"Ninety-five. Too short. One hundred fifteen. Too long. One hundred five. Getting warmer. One hundred nine. Colder. Okay, here it is. A Girl and a Dog. One hundred pages."

Jane walked up and down the shelves, half looking at the titles, half looking at nothing.

"Here's another one," Emily called over to her in a loud whisper. "A horse of Her Own. Exactly one hundred pages. Do want it? Or do you want A Girl and a Dog instead?"

Jane shook her head. "It sounds like a children's book."

"It looks like a short book. Okay, here's another one. One hundred and three pages. There's a dog on the cover too."

Jane felt a strange idea forming in her brain.

"It might be kind of funny, one time, to read a really long book." She silenced the thought that now she was suggesting breaking a second Loser Club rule.

Emily stared at her.

"It would just be a joke," Jane said quickly.

"You mean you wouldn't really read it?"

"No, I'd read it, but it's like, Ms. Reeds said our other books were too short, so I'd be showing her, 'You want a long book? Okay, here's a long book.' How long was Lucy's book last time?"

"I don't know. Three hundred something."

"Well, I'll find a book with three hundred pages. Or four hundred. I'll be showing Ms. Reeds and Lucy, too. Lucy won't be able to stand it that I read a longer book than she did."

Jane was standing next to the classic section. "Here's one. Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities. Four hundred twenty-two pages."

Emily put the dog and the horse books back on the shelf. Jane wondered if Emily would tell her that she couldn't be vice president of Loser Club if she read a Tale of Two Cities for her next book report. But Emily didn't say anything.

Back at their table, Jane opened a Tale of Two Cities to see how bad it was going to be. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," read the opening line. Charles Dickens could have been talking about Jane's own life.