Girl Scout Troop 185
1982
Nancy Priddle glowed with pride. For the second year in a row, she had sold the most cookies – twelve cartons, Mrs. Russell told the girls with her hand on Nancy shoulder, to which Nancy added, “And I could have sold more if we’d had more.”
Cheryl Peck muttered something about Mr. Priddle making all his K-Mart employees buy cookies before they got paid, but for once Clara did not come up with something equally tart. In fact, she sagged as if to shrink from the circle, her hands twisting her uniform into a spider web of sweaty wrinkles.
One by one, the girls handed over the money they had collected, four dollars per box, twelve boxes per carton. Even Cheryl, whom Mrs. Russell said should be awarded a badge in eye-rolling, placed $192 on the kitchen table.
“Four cartons, Cheryl,” Mrs. Russell said as she sorted the bills according to one’s and five’s and ten’s. “Very good, dear.”
Next was Susan Hannigan. Clara couldn’t look at Susan, with her forest green knee socks pulled tight to mid-calf and her uniform skirt slightly off color because the cloth her mother ordered from the Girl Scouts to make her a skirt that would fit was a little different from the ready-made ones everybody else wore. Having her brown hair pulled back in a pony tail tied with a big green satin bow and she wearing little trefoil earrings made her face moony. In the six months since Clara had moved to Commons Hill, the only words she had exchanged with Susan were “excuse me” when they brushed against each other in the bathroom.
Mrs. Russell double-checked Susan’s entry on her order sheet, then recounted the money. She looked up at Susan and tipped her head.
“There’s a problem here, isn’t there, Suzie?”
Susan nodded her head.
“You ordered three boxes, so you should have $144 here. I’m missing $23, which isn’t even possible at four dollars a box. Do you have cookies to return?”
Susan shook her head.
“What happened to the $24?”
Silence filled the small living room where the 15 girls sat on the floor. Everyone but Clara was studying the floor or their knees, not wanting to be party to what was happening.
“Suzie?”
“I…” Her voice was gravelly with tears. Clara felt that lump in her own throat, a knot at the larynx. “I…” She sniffed loudly. “I ate them. I put nine dollars in. That’s all the money I have.”
Mrs. Russell said nothing, recounting the bills as she thought out what to do. “We have to talk to your mother, dear,” she said, looking at Susan with a sad sympathy that made moved the knot in Clara’s throat to her jaw. “Do you want me to do that for you or shall we speak to her together, after school tomorrow?”
Susan sniffed again and ran the back of her hand across her face. The short white sleeve of her blouse made her upper arm bulge like a water balloon. She nodded her acquiescence and hiccupped a sob she was fighting to stifle.
Tomorrow after school. Clara could imagine the scene in her own house only too well. Her mother with red and blue pencils stuck in her bun of red fly-away curls, marking papers at the kitchen table under her father’s giant painting of tulips that Mom had deemed the “Safe Place” since he left two years ago. That old rock-and-roll stuff on the radio and the smell of toast her mother liked to nibble at would be competing with her brother Michael’s weird science fiction movie on the VCR and epoxy from his latest model space ship. Her jaw tingled just thinking about it. Her mother probably didn’t even remember she was in Girl Scouts and Michael would have to come out and…translate the problem. “Clara owes $33 for cookies that she ate? Why didn’t she just bake some – isn’t that what Girl Scouts do?” Her mom taught college students to be teachers but that didn’t necessarily mean she knew anything about kids as kids. Having Michael as an older brother hadn’t done much to inform her either.
By this time tomorrow, she’d be emblazoned across the pink tulip way at the top: What’s worse? – her mother would scrawl – that Clara owes the Girl Scouts $33, that she doesn’t save her allowance, or that she ate NINE BOXES of cookies?????
Clara’s face flushed. Anybody who looked would see how red she was, which made it worse. At least Susan wasn’t as pale as a piece of typing paper. The tingling grew hotter and her stomach built another knot. But this one wasn’t tears. Clara Carter began the tedious business of hoisting herself to her feet but not in time. The fruit punch and brownies Leslie Cucuzza had brought for snacks, with a hint of the peanut butter sandwich from lunch, flooded her brain, then her nasal passages. And then she threw up on her sash of three badges and Mrs. Russsell’s dun-colored carpet.
That was the day Clara Carter and Susan Hannigan’s lives began.
The house Clara grew up in...
