The Glitter Trap Read online

  I blurt out the truth: “I got this moth caught in my hair. Only, it wasn’t a moth, it was a fairy godmother!”

  Madison loves this idea. Her eyes light up, and her lips form into a round ooh shape. “It was?”

  Mom just nods her head. “Right, Lacey.”

  “No, really!”

  “And where is this fairy godmother now?”

  “Julius ate her!”

  Mom nods again. I admit it—I wouldn’t believe me, either.

  Madison pulls Julius out of my arms and tells him, “Bad kitty!” She cuddles him and then looks confused. With her ear at Julius’s stomach, she says, “Mommy! I hear bad words!”

  I grab Julius back and listen to his stomach, too. Yep. Very bad words. I would tell you what they are, but I don’t have enough money to put in my mom’s swear jar. Believe me, there are about a thousand dollars’ worth of curse words coming from inside him.

  I expect Mom to start asking all sorts of questions. Instead, she acts like a grown-up and doesn’t see what’s right in front of her face. “Madison! It’s bath time! Lacey, you stay here in your room. When you want to tell me the truth about where you were, you can come out.” She leads Madison out of the room and shuts my door.

  I pull Julius’s mouth open again and talk into it: “Are you all right in there?”

  Katarina’s voice booms out, moist and echoey like it’s coming from the bottom of a well: “NO! Get me out of this creature!”

  “I can’t!”

  “I’m halfway to the small intestine. GET ME OUT!”

  Julius scrambles out of my arms and darts under the bed. I crouch down and reach for him, but he squirms away from my fingers into the farthest back corner.

  Suddenly I remember this time at the restaurant when a guy was choking on a meatball and my dad did the Heimlich maneuver on him. It’s simple—if someone’s choking, you grab them around the stomach from behind and push up hard.

  It might work. Anyway, I don’t have any other ideas. I lunge for Julius and drag him out by his left hind leg. “I’m really, really sorry,” I say, and then I squeeze the heck out of him.

  PTUI! Katarina flies across the room like a chunk of meatball and hits the wall.

  I can’t believe it worked! When I’m a famous veterinarian, I’m going to have to tell the whole world about the Heimlich maneuver for cats.

  Julius struggles in my arms, so I pet him and say, “I’m really, really, really sorry!”

  A voice comes from across the room: “Don’t worry about that furbag! What about me?”

  Julius and I both look toward Katarina. He’s already forgotten how it worked out the last time, and he tries to get down and eat her again. Cats never learn, but I do. I open my bedroom door a crack and drop him outside in the hall.

  Katarina looks like something the cat threw up. (Because she is.) Squashed wings, slimy clothes, and hair covered with chunks of half-digested cat food. “Don’t just stand there! Clean me off!”

  She’s so gross I don’t want to touch her, but she’s very loud and very bossy. “I said, clean me off now! Pick me up!”

  I try not to shudder as Katarina climbs onto my hand, making tiny slimy footprints on my palm.

  It doesn’t take long to fill the bathroom sink with warm water and strawberry-scented bubbles.

  Katarina smiles for the first time. “Oooh! Bubbles!” She eases herself into the water, still fully dressed. Which I’m glad about—I was afraid she was going to order me to find her a tiny washer-dryer.

  As she relaxes in the foam, I finally have time to think about what’s been happening: I’ve just caught a fairy! Weird, but also kind of cool, even if she was mean to me. Maybe the worst is over, and Katarina and I are going to be friends.

  Nope. Her smile turns into a frown and she glares at me, so not-friendly it’s ridiculous.

  I sigh. “What’s wrong now?”

  “What do you think? I just got eaten by a cat and every bone in my body hurts! They’re all probably broken! I know my wings are!” She splashes the bubbles away. “And I hate strawberries! I only like essence of lilac!”

  “We don’t have any essence of lilac.”

  In a snarky voice that would make Paige Harrington proud, she says, “Of course you don’t. In a household like this? I’ll make it myself.”

  She reaches into her sleeve and then gets a horrified look on her face. “Oh no!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Where’s my wand! I need my wand!”

  What if it’s still inside Julius? Maybe it’ll come out the other end, but I’m not going to dig through his litter box to find out. I don’t want to say this to Katarina, so I copy the low, soothing voice Mom uses on Dad when he’s lost the remote control again: “All right, all right. We’ll find it.” I sound so much like Mom it’s amazing. Maybe I could be an actress.

  Then a faint bleep! bleep! comes from my bedroom.

  “What’s that sound?” I ask.

  Katarina looks at me like I’m the stupidest girl in the world. “Wand alarm. Go fetch it!” She presses a jewel on her dress, making more bleep sounds.

  I go into my bedroom, but there’s no sign of the wand.

  “I don’t see it,” I yell.

  Bleep! Bleep! The sounds come again. “I still don’t see it!”

  BLEEP! BLEEP! BLEEP! BLEEP! BLEEP!

  I say, “You can bleep all you want. I still don’t see it!”

  “Don’t see what?” Mom says from the bathroom. Uh-oh. She must have gone in through Madison’s door.

  I hurry into the bathroom and find Mom turning on the water in the tub while Madison stands on tiptoe so she can peer into the sink. “Oooh, bubbles!” she says, sounding exactly like Katarina.

  “Don’t see what?” Mom asks me again.

  Madison starts poking around in the bubbles, and there’s a flash of butterfly wing beneath the foam. I’ve got to do something.

  “Oh there it is!” I reach into the sink and grab Katarina, covering her up with my hand. “I’ve been looking everyplace for my butterfly hair clip. And now I remember I was washing it.”

  Madison gives me a funny look. “You don’t have a butterfly hair clip.”

  “I do, too! Sunny gave it to me, and it got dirty, so I washed it.” Then I tell Mom, “Well, I’d better go stay in my room like I’m supposed to.”

  Mom looks at me suspiciously. Maybe I couldn’t be an actress.

  “Put me down this instant, before I bite you again,” Katarina says once we’re safe in my bedroom.

  “But you’re dripping,” I say, blotting her with the bottom of my Hungry Moose T-shirt.

  “Ow! Don’t be so rough!” Then she takes a closer look at the green fabric. “What an ugly color!”

  “I know!”

  I put her down on top of my dresser, and she frowns when she sees herself in the mirror. “Just look at me! I made it through the Great Fire of London without a smudge of soot! I was on the Titanic and I didn’t even get wet! I helped that girl win Survivor, and my wings looked fabulous the whole time!” She stamps her feet in fury. “This is all your fault. You and your glitter trap!”

  “Not so loud! Mom will hear us!” I turn on my TV to cover the sound of our voices.

  Katarina pokes at her tattered wings. “You’re just lucky I didn’t spontaneously cocoon when your beast attacked me!”

  “Cocoon? Like a butterfly?”

  She ignores my question as she tries to tug her wings into shape. “This is ridiculous! I need my wand!” She pushes the jewel on her dress again. Bleep! Bleep!

  We both look at the floor. She points. “There!”

  “Where?”

  “There!”

  I finally see the pin-size wand sticking out of the carpet. When I pick it up, a small, sharp zap shoots through me, the kind of electric jolt you get when you touch a doorknob after you’ve rubbed your feet on the carpet.

  “Give me that!” Katarina snatches the wand out of my fingers and chants:
“Do your duty! Bring back my beauty!”

  I’m thinking she wasn’t all that beautiful even before Julius ate her, but I’m smart enough not to say this out loud.

  Katarina starts to raise her wand above her head, then grimaces. “Ow! My arm!” She lowers her arm and tries chanting it again, “Do your duty! Bring back my beauty!” Her arm barely moves. “OW!”

  She grabs her right elbow with her left hand and chants one more time, her voice high-pitched and scared: “Do your duty! Bring back my beauty!” She shoves her elbow up as hard as she can and then SHRIEKS in pain. Katarina drops the wand, and I have to catch it before it gets lost in the carpet again.

  To try to make Katarina feel better, I use my soothing Mom voice again. “It looks like you sprained your shoulder. That happened to my dad once playing basketball. He was fine in a couple of weeks.”

  “Weeks!” Katarina wails. “That will be too late! The full moon will have come and gone!” She puts her head in her hands and sobs like the world is ending. Not just the world—the galaxy and the universe, too.

  “Don’t cry! It can’t be that bad!”

  She looks at me, tears streaming down her face. “Can’t be that bad! Can’t be that bad!” Then she wails even louder.

  “You’ve got to be quiet! Please!”

  Katarina takes a couple of deep breaths, trying to pull herself together. “Well, I hope you’re happy! You ruined my life. You ruined Paige Harrington’s life. And you ruined your life.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t have any idea of the cosmic forces you’ve unleashed! You and your glitter trap.”

  “That was an accident!”

  “It doesn’t matter?! Let me spell it out for you. I’m a fairy godmother. I was sent to help Paige Harrington get her dream. Follow me so far?”

  I sigh, but she repeats, “Do you follow me so far? Answer me!”

  “Yes, I’m following you.”

  “You stopped me from helping Paige by trapping me in your hair. That was bad enough, but I could have recovered from that. Then you allowed your cat to maim me!” To demonstrate the “maim” part, she raises her arm a little and winces.

  Wow, she’s really rubbing this stuff in. Plus, you don’t “allow” cats to do anything—they do exactly what they want. I just say, “I’m sorry you’re hurt. You can stay here in my room till you get better.”

  “I won’t be better for weeks. Therefore, Paige won’t get her dream by the night of the full moon, and I will have failed. And when I fail, I will be demoted. Possibly to tooth fairy. But most probably to dryer fairy.” Katarina shudders at the thought.

  “What’s a dryer fairy?”

  “Where do you think all those socks go? Dryer fairies. It’s an endless cycle of sock stealing and lint. And I’m allergic to lint.”

  “What did they do before there were dryers?”

  “Clothesline fairies. At least then, you had sunshine and fresh air. Now it’s all basements and fabric softener.”

  “That does sound pretty bad.”

  “Bad for me—worse for you.”

  I’m starting to freak out. “I’m going to be a dryer fairy?”

  Katarina, her old crankiness returning, says, “Of course not! Will you please let me finish?” She stares at me to make sure I’m not going to say anything else, and then continues. “Because you stopped Paige from getting her dream…none of your dreams will come true. Not for the rest of your life.”

  I’ve never heard of anything so unfair! Paige was the one who put too much glitter on the poster and messed up my hair. And if she hadn’t ordered takeout, I wouldn’t even have been at her house!

  Katarina seems happy about how mad I look. “Karma sucks,” she says.

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  “There’s nothing to do. We’re doomed.”

  “There must be something!”

  “There’s nothing. And now if you don’t mind, I’m very tired, and I’m going to bed.”

  She opens the lid of my jewelry box and climbs in, tossing out my bracelets and rings, which land on the dresser with a clatter. I can’t believe she’s going to bed when we’re doomed!

  I say, “But we need to talk about this!”

  “No, we don’t. Good night!”

  Click! She closes the jewelry box and vanishes from sight. I feel like shaking it or throwing it out the window.

  Or maybe I’ll just curl up in a ball on the floor and cry.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sunny asks in homeroom the next morning. I guess she’s noticed the black circles under my eyes.

  You’re probably thinking I was up all night worrying about the whole dreams-not-coming-true-for-the-rest-of-my-life thing. That’s not it at all. I couldn’t sleep because Katarina was snoring. I mean, SNORING! I thought fairies were supposed to be dainty and ladylike. Geez!

  The snoring was so bad that Julius wouldn’t even sleep on my bed, where he’s slept ever since I brought him home from the animal shelter when he was eight weeks old.

  Sunny has probably also noticed that I’m typing away on the class computer instead of gossiping with her like I usually do. But that’s because my essay for the zoo intern contest has to be e-mailed by noon. I was going to finish it last night, but I had fairy problems.

  Sunny repeats, “Lacey! What’s wrong with you?”

  I’m tempted to tell her the whole story, but between you and me, Sunny’s not good in a crisis. Last year, her pants split at recess, and she got so upset she had to go home. That happened to me once, and I covered it with my sweater like a normal person. So I don’t know how Sunny would react if she found out I had accidentally trapped a fairy godmother in my hair and would never have a dream come true.

  Besides…maybe Katarina is wrong. Maybe she’s making the whole thing up to give me a hard time, just like she did this morning when she wouldn’t come out of the jewelry box even when I brought her two blueberries and a Frosted Mini-Wheat for breakfast.

  So I look Sunny straight in the eyes and say, “Nothing is wrong! I’m just working on my zoo essay.”

  “Oh, right. Want me to help check the spelling?”

  “You’re a terrible speller.”

  “I am not.”

  “Okay—I’m writing about getting a baby giraffe for the petting zoo. Spell giraffe.”

  Sunny looks at me like I just stabbed her in the heart. She says, “Never mind! I only wanted to help.”

  I feel bad, but I tell myself that Sunny will get over it. So I keep working until I finally type And that’s why, if you choose me, I will make a wonderful zoo intern.

  The bell rings right as I hit send. Smiling for the first time today, I look up to tell Sunny I’m done. But she’s already gone.

  In science class, I listen to Mr. Carver talking about Pluto and how it’s not officially a planet anymore. Most days, this would be interesting, but today I’ve got bigger things on my mind than a chunk of rock.

  The classroom door opens, and Paige walks in. “You’re late,” Mr. Carver says.

  She hands him a hall pass and says, “Principal Nazarino said it was okay. I was working on an emergency football poster. Somebody wrecked the last one I did.” She gives me a dirty look, and I shrink down in my chair.

  Mr. Carver frowns. “Your education is more important than a football poster.”

  “Yeah, if you’re a total geek,” Paige says under her breath. When the popular kids snicker, she gets a funny expression on her face. If it were anyone except Paige, I’d say she looks like she feels a tiny bit bad. But she’s probably just wishing she had said something even meaner.

  At lunchtime, Sunny is waiting for me at our usual table in the courtyard. “Hey, Lacey! Heard from the zoo people yet?”

  “If they like my essay, they’ll call me in for an interview. But that won’t be till next week, at the earliest.”

  I’m happy she’s even talking to me. They don’t call her Sunny for nothing—she
just can’t stay mad very long. As I sit down, I put a cookie on her tray. “This is for you. I didn’t mean it about the spelling.”

  “But chocolate chip is your favorite, too!” Sunny hands me half, and I eat it in one bite. She just nibbles hers. She can make a cookie last longer than anyone I know. Then she says, “G—I—R—A—F—F—E. Giraffe.”

  “I knew you could spell it.”

  “I looked it up in English class. Why does it start with a G and not a J?”

  “Good question.”

  Then Sunny asks, “Did you know that people used to call giraffes camelopards, because they thought they looked like camels with leopard spots?”

  “No. That’s cool,” I say, picturing a camel with spots on its hump.

  Sunny reaches the last chunk of cookie. “This is for Seymour.”

  Peering up in the tree above us, I wonder where he is. Seymour is an almost-tame squirrel that we feed every day at lunch. He’s really smart and brave—and usually jumps on the table as soon as we sit down. But he’s not jumping on the table today. We both start calling, “Seymour! Seymour!”

  Sunny points. “There he is!” He’s in the highest branches of the tree, looking down at us with his little black eyes.

  I hold up the chunk of cookie. “Come on, Seymour! It’s chocolate chip!”

  But he just chatters at me angrily. It’s the same sound he makes when he tries to scare away crows.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I say.

  He chatters a little more, and then he disappears into the branches.

  I turn to Sunny, worried. “Maybe some of the eighth-grade kids were teasing him.”

  “I know what’s wrong with him! He’s gone…squirrelly!” Sunny laughs at her own bad joke, and I can’t help laughing, too. I’m sure Seymour will be fine tomorrow.

  As Sunny and I finish our lunches, we hear the faint sound of a piano. Sunny cocks her head. “Are those the auditions? Finally!”

  I listen, too. Our music teacher, Mr. Griffith, has written a rock-opera version of “Cinderella” that is going to be this fall’s school play. He was supposed to finish it six weeks ago, but he kept telling us that musical genius can’t be rushed. Maybe genius can’t be rushed, but now the play’s going to be. No matter what, the audience is showing up a week from Saturday. The school has been sending out e-mails for months, and the posters are up all over town.