The Pumpkin War Read online

  I was ready.

  Dad handed me the saw.

  I tightened my grip and flipped the switch. With a high-pitched whine, the blade whirred to life. I lined it up and carefully pressed it against the hard orange skin of my Atlantic Giant. As little squirts of pumpkin pulp shot out, I followed the black line I’d drawn.

  Marylee, Cami, and Turtles stood back and watched with their hands over their ears.

  When I was done, I flipped the switch, yanked off my plastic goggles, and handed Dad the saw. My hands and fingers were all tingly from the vibrating blade.

  “Remember,” Dad said. “When you lift off the top, everyone work together.” He was thinking of the time when we got off balance and dropped the top. It slid to the ground and cracked the side of the pumpkin.

  Cami, Turtles, Marylee, and I lined up around the pumpkin. We all slithered our hands into the slice I’d made.

  “All together,” Dad said.

  “One, two, and three,” I said.

  We tried to lift off the top of the pumpkin, but it didn’t budge.

  “It’s too heavy,” I said.

  He just smiled and leaned against the fence, sipping his coffee.

  “Try harder,” he said. It took three tries, but we managed to drag off the top and dump it near the fence. Up the hill, Sam worked alone on his pumpkin, sawing off the top by hand.

  Last year, Sam and I gutted our pumpkins together. This year, Cami went to help Sam, while Turtles, Marylee, and I teamed up to scrape out the slimy innards of my pumpkin. Long, wet, stringy strands that never seemed to end. Working together, Dad and Grandpa filled up bucket after bucket of pumpkin spaghetti and dumped them behind the barn.

  Next, we lined the hollowed-out inside with rough, brown burlap flour sacks, clamping them down with thumbtacks. You didn’t want to be out on the water inside a slippery pumpkin, because you could turn into a slimy pinball really fast.

  While we worked, Dad started humming the Irish songs I’d heard since I was little. After a while, Grandpa began to sing the words, his voice frail.

  Finally, Dad started singing, too. As they sang, I saw a look pass between them.

  I watched, and then I figured it out.

  It was a kind of love.

  Like a song on the radio turned really low, but not so low I couldn’t hear it.

  * * *

  It was time to load up our pumpkin boat and take her down to the lake. A dozen giant pumpkins on flatbeds had already passed by our farm, headed that way.

  Cami and I carefully slipped a nylon harness around my racing pumpkin—a giant sling with a metal hook at the top.

  Dad came back with the tractor and the flatbed. He lined the flatbed up by the gate before he unhooked it from the back of the tractor. Then he edged the tractor closer. He’d taken off the bucket he used to move brush and till the soil, and replaced it with a giant hook bigger than the anchor on his fishing boat. When I glanced up the hill, I saw Sam and his mom getting ready to load his pumpkin, which looked bigger than mine. His mom was just hooking up their flatbed to their tractor.

  “Stand back, guys,” Dad yelled to Cami and Turtles and Marylee. I stood by the side of the pumpkin, holding up the hook attached to the nylon sling. When Dad got the tractor close enough, I grabbed the hook dangling from the tractor arm and guided it.

  “A little closer,” I yelled over the chugging motor.

  He edged the tractor closer so I could slip the tractor hook onto the sling hook.

  I gave him a thumbs-up and skipped over to Cami and Turtles and Marylee. All Dad had to do now was gently lift the pumpkin and load it onto the waiting flatbed. We held our breath as he slowly moved the gearshift and the arm lifted. The nylon straps grew tighter and tighter.

  And then the pumpkin was off the ground, suspended in the air like a giant orange globe. Dad carefully put the tractor into reverse and angled it so he was lined up with the flatbed.

  Just as Dad was about to lower my pumpkin onto the flatbed, I looked down to swat away the mosquito sucking blood from my arm.

  That’s when it happened.

  Thunk.

  The sound of a big punching bag landing hard on cement.

  My head jerked up.

  My pumpkin had cratered, crumpling in on itself with big, raggedy chunks.

  We stared in silence.

  “The rain did that one in,” my dad said. “Too waterlogged.”

  A flash of movement caught my eye up the hill. It was Sam, staring across the meadow at my crumpled pumpkin.

  It was the rain.

  That’s what Sam said to me last summer, out on the lake.

  And just like last spring, we’d had a really rainy summer.

  For the first time, I asked myself a question I should’ve asked a year ago.

  What if Sam wasn’t lying?

  I hadn’t actually seen him hit me. I just felt it. I was leaning forward, my eyes locked on the finish line, digging deep with my paddle.

  That’s when it happened.

  Thunk.

  What if my pumpkin broke apart all on its own?

  What if Sam wasn’t a cheater and a liar?

  What if I was just a girl who was quick to blame and slow to forgive when things didn’t go her way?

  The shoreline spilling down to the lake was packed with people perched on plastic lawn chairs and sprawled on blankets. Unless you were in the hospital with some contagious disease or on your deathbed, every man, woman, and child on Madeline Island showed up for the annual pumpkin race.

  Twenty-four giant pumpkins already bobbed in the lake, tethered to shore, ready to race. I saw Sam right away. He’d painted his pumpkin blue and gold, our school colors.

  The only pumpkin missing was mine.

  Grandma, Grandpa, and I waited by the water’s edge, squinting against the sun, as we watched my dad’s tractor chug down the road to the water, hauling my second-choice Atlantic Giant. It wasn’t as big as the first one, but it had a nice oval shape, perfect for cutting through the water.

  I saw Mayor Philby trudging over with his clipboard. As he walked, he yanked a red-and-white hanky out of his pocket to wipe away the beads of sweat dripping off the tip of his nose. He looked like a human ladybug, with his belly and spindly arms and legs, except you didn’t want him in your garden like you do with a real ladybug.

  When Grandma laughed at something Grandpa said, Mayor Philby looked over and scowled. But the scowl didn’t hide the sadness I saw in his eyes. He wanted to make my grandma laugh, too. But he couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re going to have to start the race.”

  Funny how people can act mean when maybe they’re just hurt.

  “Her pumpkin is almost—” Grandma said.

  “Rules are rules,” Mayor Philby said, cutting her off.

  “Ever heard of Brian Boru?” Grandpa asked, his eyes locked on Mayor Philby.

  “Nope.”

  “He was the High King of Ireland. He drove a bunch of bloodthirsty Vikings into the sea—”

  “Tell your story to someone who wants to hear it—”

  “The blood of Brian Boru flows in my veins. So if you think I’m going to let you wreak havoc on the spirit of my granddaughter, who has never done you an ounce of harm in her entire life, you’re greatly mistaken.”

  Grandpa never even raised his voice, but the mayor still looked like he was having a stroke. His lips were moving, but no sound came out.

  “You have two minutes,” he said. As he huffed off, he pulled the starter gun out of his belt and headed for the dock.

  I turned, shading my eyes, and saw Dad backing the flatbed into the water. In forty seconds, my pumpkin floated freely. Cami, Turtles, and Marylee waded through the water, guiding her to our starting spot, like li
ttle human tugboats. I grabbed my kayak paddle, and Grandma and Grandpa lifted me into my pumpkin, where I slid into position.

  BANG!

  The shot from the starter gun echoed across the bay and through the woods. Our paddles slammed into the water, like a horde of pelicans all dive-bombing at once. I paddled as hard as I could. A slow burn climbed up my arms and spread to my shoulders. Cami and Turtles yelled from the shore.

  “Harder! Harder!”

  Easy for them to say.

  I saw Sam ahead of me. He was wearing his dad’s old life vest, so he looked bigger. His pumpkin cut easily through the water. He was working hard. There were eight racers ahead of me. Including Sam. Inch by sweaty, burning inch, my pumpkin pulled ahead.

  Sam threw a look over his shoulder, smiled, and went faster, taunting me. I started to paddle harder and slowly closed the gap between us.

  I made it around the buoy.

  The halfway point.

  Now we were blasting back to shore. The crowd was cheering like this was the Pumpkin Olympics. After a flurry of ferocious paddling, I drew alongside Sam.

  Our eyes met.

  And that’s when I laughed.

  I don’t know where that laugh came from, but it felt like it had been waiting to come out for a long time.

  Sam looked surprised. And then he laughed, too.

  It was like the old days, when we laughed together all the time.

  I stopped paddling.

  “What’re you doing?” he yelled.

  “Just go!”

  He stopped paddling. Racers splashed past us, a wild jumble of bobbing pumpkins.

  “It’s no fun without you,” he said.

  We stared at each other, breathing hard as the cheers from shore washed over us.

  “Have you been letting me win all these years?” I asked.

  He looked at me.

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re lying,” I said quietly.

  It seemed like he wanted to say something else, but then he just shrugged and slowly paddled back to shore.

  As I followed, I thought of Einstein.

  He said if you look deep into nature, you will understand everything better.

  I guess that’s a fancy way of saying “Go look in the mirror.”

  * * *

  That night, after dinner, I sat on the porch with a pencil and a piece of paper to scribble on. Since Einstein was a scientist and math is the language of science, I decided to apply some math to the physics of Sam and me.

  We’d been friends practically since we were born.

  That was twelve years.

  If you multiply 12 by 365, that comes to 4,380 days. If you multiply 4,380 by 24 for the hours in a day, you get 105,120 hours. Then, if you multiply 105,120 by 60, the minutes in an hour, you get 6,307,200. If you figure we were asleep for half that time, you could say we’d been friends for over three million minutes. And last summer, because of what happened during one of those minutes, I gave up on our friendship without a fight.

  And what happened during that one minute? A boy won a race. And a girl stopped talking to him because she wanted to win.

  In the relative scheme of things, what I did was wrong.

  And Sam was right.

  I liked winning. People you don’t even know cheer when you win. Winning gets your face in the paper and free ice cream. Winning makes you feel special. Other people think you’re special.

  But if I always had to be the one holding up the blue ribbon, what did that say about me? And what did it say about me that I threw away my best friend over a pumpkin race?

  A friend who once read me Winnie-the-Pooh forty-two times in a row after I got my tonsils out?

  A friend who had helped me with my math homework every single time I had asked since first grade.

  A friend who always laughed at my “knock-knock” jokes, even when they weren’t funny. And they were never funny.

  A friend who told me I looked cute after I got braces in fifth grade.

  A friend who was always, always, always there for me, even when I was mean.

  Shouldn’t there be room for other people to shine in my universe?

  I mean, even stars take turns. In summer, Vega shines the brightest. In winter, Sirius shines the brightest.

  As I asked myself these questions, I began to look in my own mirror.

  And I didn’t like what I saw.

  The first day of seventh grade was not what I expected.

  Not.

  At.

  All.

  First of all, Mr. Vernon said he wanted to find out what we didn’t know, so he made us take a pop quiz, which he promised was “just informational” and “didn’t count.”

  If it didn’t count, why did we have to take it?

  I hunched over my paper at my brand-new desk. He had equations up on the board with mixed numbers and decimals. He had questions about means, like what is the mean of 11, 10, 7, 9, and 13. He wanted us to add and subtract fractions and mixed numbers with different denominators.

  As soon as we finished, we passed our papers up to the front, and Mr. Vernon left the room without a word. We had just enough time to start whispering before he returned with Ms. Bagshaw trailing after him.

  “So,” Mr. Vernon said. “Who figured out the stumper?”

  Thirty-eight eyeballs drifted around the room. No takers. You didn’t need to be an Einstein to predict that.

  Ms. Bagshaw looked down, her lips lightly pressed together, as she clasped her hands and raised them to her chest, like she was praying. She wasn’t mad. Just really, really disappointed.

  I pictured the quote she kept on the whiteboard. I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think. I finally understood why she’d given us the stumper. She didn’t care about the answer. She cared about making us see that learning about the world is like peeling back the layers of an onion. She knew that one question always leads to another question, and sometimes when you get to the answer, it can make you cry.

  I hadn’t wanted to do the Einstein homework. But I did it because Sam gave me the Einstein book.

  And maybe I was secretly afraid I’d turn into an idiot if I didn’t use my brain over the summer.

  “Anyone?” asked Ms. Bagshaw.

  Next thing I knew, my hand was in the air.

  “Billie?”

  My fingertips rested on the top of my desk as I tried to think fast.

  “Albert Einstein was working on his theory of everything on the day he died.”

  A few bored eyeballs landed on my face.

  Sam was staring out the window.

  “You’re probably wondering, What exactly is a theory of everything?” I said.

  “I wasn’t wondering,” Jamie Denton mumbled under his breath.

  “Einstein wanted to figure out how everything in the entire universe worked, with one simple equation less than an inch long.”

  I glanced at Ms. Bagshaw. She looked surprised.

  “Einstein figured out how the world worked on the grandest scale. And he was convinced that the littlest things in the universe should act just like the biggest things. Only, they didn’t. Atoms and electrons and neutrons don’t act like planets and stars and galaxies. The world of atoms is mysterious and unpredictable and random and uncertain. And that drove Einstein crazy. He was convinced the laws of nature that ruled the world had to be predictable and understandable and reliable.”

  My classmates were actually starting to listen.

  “I’m like Einstein. I don’t like uncertainty. It’s a little scary. But I also love that the world is unpredictable and random. Because that means things can change in an instant. Like me.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Last summer, I lost a p
umpkin race, and I blamed my best friend.”

  In a single swoop, every single eyeball in the room landed on me.

  Except for Sam’s.

  “He’s the kind of best friend anyone would want.”

  I felt my eyes fill with tears, but what I had to say was more important than a few salty molecules of H2O sliding down my cheeks.

  I took another deep breath.

  “I hope he can forgive me and give me another chance to be the kind of friend he’s always been to me.”

  My face was burning hot.

  “Thank you, Billie,” said Ms. Bagshaw.

  Sam kept staring out the window.

  * * *

  I really didn’t think Sam would be waiting for me under the flagpole after school like he used to, but I was still hoping. When he wasn’t there, I gulped down my disappointment.

  So much for my grand gesture.

  Marylee and I took the smallest ferry over to the island, which was good because it was the fastest, but it was also the bumpiest, which was bad because Marylee has a tendency to get seasick. It’s never fun when someone throws up on you, so I made sure to stay out of her line of fire.

  Pretty soon, the ferry pulled up to the dock and we headed home on foot. When we came up the last hill, I saw Sam across the meadow, painting a new square on the lopsided periodic table of elements on the back of his barn.

  I got an idea.

  Leaving Marylee behind, I ran up our driveway and blasted into the house. I could hear my mom in the living room singing to Joey. I took the stairs two at a time and shot into my bedroom, where I threw open the closet door and dug around until I found what I was looking for.

  The telescope.

  Just as I was about to head down the stairs, I walked over to my bulletin board and looked at all my blue ribbons. One by one, I took them down and laid them in a neat row on my desk. I opened my closet door again.