Isabelle the Itch: The Isabelle Series, Book One Read online

  He made it sound like a lot.

  “A measly buck?” Isabelle said. She would’ve done it for nothing. Next best thing to having her own route was taking over Philip’s. “Why can’t you do it?”

  Philip put on his dark glasses. “Drama Club practice all next week. We have to get our play into professional shape.” Philip was president of the Drama Club. He also collected stamps and drew pictures of tall, thin naked people wearing galoshes. At least that’s what his drawings looked like to Isabelle. Philip said they could be anything you wanted them to be. “That’s the best kind of picture,” he said.

  “I’ll do it if you’ll let me ride your bike,” Isabelle tried.

  “Nothing doing.” His ten speed bike was sacred. His parents had given it to him for his thirteenth birthday.

  “Will you let me carry the money bag and collect?”

  “That’d be too dangerous,” Philip said.

  “How come?”

  “If any muggers found out a little kid like you was carrying money around, they’d mug you and throw you in the gutter.”

  “Maybe I’d get my picture in the paper then.”

  “Only if you died,” Philip said slowly. “Only if you died.”

  “I’ll do it if you make it a buck fifty,” Isabelle said. “I’m saving up for Adidas and they’re expensive.”

  “It’s a deal.” Philip grabbed her hand and squeezed hard. “Once we shake on a deal, it’s like signing a contract,” he warned. “You can’t back out.”

  “Please can’t I carry the money bag?” Isabelle pleaded. Philip’s money bag, which he used to collect at the end of every week, was a beauty. It was bright orange with a drawstring to keep the coins and bills from escaping. They had given it to him at the newspaper office. It was almost the best thing about having a paper route, Isabelle thought.

  “I couldn’t have that on my conscience,” Philip said solemnly.

  “If I had my track shoes, I could outrun those muggers,” Isabelle said.

  “Right. You might even make the Olympics,” he agreed.

  Isabelle flexed her toes inside her shoes. “They’ll probably make me the fastest runner in the world. Faster than the wind, faster than … than …”

  Words failed her. What, after all, was faster than the wind?

  “You’re a good kid, Isabelle. I knew I could count on you.” Philip went back to the crossword puzzle he was working. Isabelle did a little more footwork, keeping her hands up, but he didn’t notice so she went to the kitchen and punched around at her mother.

  “Cut it out,” her mother finally said.

  “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” Isabelle said, backing off but still punching.

  “Maybe you will and maybe you won’t what?” her mother asked.

  “Do Philip’s paper route for him for a measly buck fifty. He never does anything for me.”

  “Since when is a buck fifty measly?” her mother wanted to know.

  “Can I have a slumber party, Mom?” Isabelle asked.

  Her mother shuddered. “Sometime,” she said.

  “How about tomorrow night?”

  “Daddy and I are going out to dinner tomorrow night.”

  “That’d be O.K. Then you wouldn’t complain about all the noise.”

  Her mother just looked at her.

  Isabelle pulled her spelling paper out of her pocket.

  “I got a D in spelling today,” she announced.

  “Not bad,” her mother said. “She who is on bottom rung of the ladder can only go up.”

  “That’s what you think,” Isabelle said, smiling. “I got an F yesterday.”

  “You’re gaining,” her mother said.

  Isabelle went upstairs and wrote on her blackboard in big letters:

  I HATE MARY ELIZA SHOOK

  Then underneath, in small letters she wrote:

  i’m gaining

  5

  “When I get big,” Isabelle told her father Saturday morning, “I’m either going to be a tap dancer or a truck driver.”

  “Aim for the top,” he said, kneading his bread. He made bread every Saturday. “Some people play golf for relaxation, some take up needlepoint,” he said. “Me, I make bread.” Other kids brought Mrs. Esposito a bunch of flowers or an apple. Isabelle brought her a loaf of her father’s bread.

  Mrs. Esposito was always dieting. She wasn’t supposed to eat bread or cake or anything good. But she couldn’t resist that bread.

  “You shouldn’t!” Mrs. Esposito wailed every time, grabbing the loaf before it could get away. “Tell your father he shouldn’t tempt me!”

  Isabelle practiced her tap dancing as she watched her father cover the loaves of bread dough with a cloth. She shuffled off to Buffalo quite a few times before she got it right.

  “Why do you cover it, Dad?” she asked, fitting a couple of pieces of spare dough around the inside of her friendship ring to make it fit better.

  Dancing in time to the music, she sang,

  You go home and get your panties,

  I’ll go home and get my scanties,

  And away we’ll go,

  Oh ho ho, off we’re going to shuffle, shuffle off to Buffalo.

  “It rises better if it’s covered,” he explained. “Stop jumping around, you might make it fall.”

  He put the loaves in the clothes dryer, which he said was the best place for letting them rise. Once, when he’d first started to make bread, he’d put the dough in. the dryer. Isabelle’s mother, not knowing anything was inside, had tossed in a load of clean, wet clothes and turned it on.

  That was some nice mess. Isabelle really enjoyed the commotion. For once, it wasn’t her fault.

  Isabelle took down the bottle of ketchup and shook a lavish portion on her Ace bandage. Her father watched with interest.

  “Herbie’ll think I’ve been in an accident,” she explained, tying the bandage around her head. “He’ll be scared to pieces.” She looked in the mirror. “Not bad. We’ll probably fight at his house today,” she said.

  Isabelle’s father wiped his hands on his pants, leaving big trails of flour on them. He was a pretty messy cook.

  “If Herbie’s sufficiently scared, maybe you can win,” he said.

  Isabelle shuffled off to Buffalo all the way to Herbie’s house. It wasn’t easy to be a tap dancer, she decided. Maybe, in the long run, it’d be better to be a truck driver. They got to travel a lot and eat in diners all the time.

  Herbie’s mother answered the door.

  “He went to his cousin’s to spend the night. He won’t be back until tomorrow,” she said.

  “He didn’t tell me he was going,” Isabelle said indignantly.

  Herbie’s mother gave a little scream. She had just got the full effect of the ketchup. “What on earth happened to you?” She made a grab for Isabelle. “You had better come in and I’ll call your mother.”

  Isabelle darted out of her reach. In a minute, Herbie’s mother would have her in bed, a thermometer in her mouth, and would be feeling her pulse.

  From a safe distance, Isabelle called, “I’m wounded.” She staggered to show how weak she was from loss of blood. A big glob of ketchup oozed out from under the bandage and landed on Isabelle’s arm. She scooped it up and put it in her mouth.

  Herbie’s mother stared at her, speechless.

  “It’s better when you have a hamburger with it,” Isabelle said.

  Herbie’s mother went inside and shut the door. Isabelle thought she could see her peering out from behind the curtains.

  “Goodbye, goodbye,” she shouted, racing off in search of some action.

  6

  She didn’t have far to go. Halfway down the block, Philip caught up with her.

  “Hey, I want to take you around on my route now,” he said, slamming on his brakes and kicking up a flurry of dust. “So’s you’ll know what to do Monday.”

  “What’s to know? All I need is a list of your customers and where they live,” Isabelle sa
id.

  “It’s not that simple,” Philip said, frowning. “A lot of people think all a paper boy does is throw the paper at the house and leave. People want their paper put a certain place. Some of them are very particular. A lot of them are crabs. You gotta use psychology. Just don’t think it’s a cinch, because it isn’t.”

  He took out his route book. “We start on Red Barn Lane with Mrs. Stern,” he said. “She gives you cookies and she paints.”

  “Like Grandma Moses?” Isabelle asked. “I saw this neat thing on television about her. She was this really old lady and she started to paint cows and chickens and farms and everything and she sold her pictures for a pile of dough and she never even had a lesson,” Isabelle marveled. “She’s famous.”

  “Not that kind of paints,” Philip said in his most insufferable tone of voice. “She paints her kitchen or her living room when she gets bored or sad. Last week she painted her kitchen red to cheer herself up. And you never know what color her front door is going to be. Last week it was pink. Today maybe it’ll be black.”

  Mrs. Stern’s front door, still pink, opened as they approached. A very small lady with wisps of white hair escaping from the bandana she wore on her head came out.

  “I started in on the green,” she said to Philip, “and now I’m not absolutely sure I like it. Come and see.”

  “This is my sister Isabelle, Mrs. Stern,” Philip said, very formal. “She’s doing my paper route for me next week and I’m showing her the ropes.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister. Very nice to meet you, Isabelle.” Mrs. Stern put out her hand. Isabelle stuck out her left hand and immediately realized her mistake. You were supposed to shake with your right. She always got mixed up. Mrs. Stern smiled and shook Isabelle’s left hand as if it were the proper one.

  “Do you two fight? I had three brothers and we fought as long as there was breath in our bodies. It didn’t mean anything. We liked each other fine. There it is. What do you think?” Mrs. Stern had led them to a small room with a lot of books and half-painted walls.

  “You have to be careful with green, you know. You don’t want to feel as if you’re twenty thousand leagues under the sea,” she told them. “On the other hand, the illusion of being in a huge meadow with the sun shining isn’t to be sneered at.”

  She put her head to one side and squinted. She reminded Isabelle of a little bird. Her eyes were very light blue and sparkly. Her sneakers had holes in both toes.

  “It looks great,” Philip said.

  “It’s pretty nice,” Isabelle agreed.

  “The good thing about paint is,” Mrs. Stern said, leading them into her red kitchen, “if you don’t like it the day after, you just do it over. Have one.” She passed a plate of brownies. Isabelle took a long time selecting hers.

  “I bet you’re looking for the one with the most nuts,” Mrs. Stern said. “That’s what I always did.”

  “We have to get going,” Philip said, chewing. “There’s a lot of things I have to explain. She’s only ten.”

  Isabelle pinched him. Ten wasn’t a baby.

  “Ten is a nice age,” Mrs. Stern said. “I wouldn’t mind being ten again. Ten or eighteen or maybe even fifty. In retrospect, fifty wasn’t bad either. Stop and see me on Monday, Isabelle. I should have the paint job finished by then.”

  “She has silver eyes,” Isabelle said, running alongside Philip’s bike. “How old do you think she is? Why didn’t you tell me about her? She’s special.”

  “She’s old,” Philip said positively. “She’s a lot older than Mom or Dad or even Grandfather, I think.”

  “What’s ‘retrospect’ mean?” Isabelle asked.

  “Look it up,” Philip said, which meant he didn’t know either.

  “I wish you’d told me about Mrs. Stern,” Isabelle said.

  Philip shrugged. “I have forty-eight customers,” he said. “You can’t expect me to fill you in on all of them.”

  “But she’s special,” Isabelle insisted.

  “In that house there, for instance,” he said, ignoring her, “is old Dragon Lady Cudlip. You watch out for her. If you don’t put her paper in between the screen door and the front door, she comes screaming out of the house and makes you do it. You know what she gave me last Christmas? One whole nickel, that’s what.”

  Philip paused dramatically. “A paper route teaches you a lot about human nature. It also teaches you how to separate the cheap skates from the rest of the world, I’ll tell you.”

  They turned into Cottage Street. “Mr. Ball, on the corner, he likes his tucked under the mat with just a corner sticking out.”

  “Why’s he want the corner sticking out?” Isabelle asked.

  “That way he doesn’t have to open his door on cold nights to see if it’s there. He knows whether it is or isn’t. It’s psychology,” Philip said, tapping his forehead. “I’m not sure you’re up to all this.”

  Isabelle had been thinking exactly the same thing but she didn’t want Philip to know. She frowned and thought of things like Monday’s spelling test and pollution and stuff like that to make herself look older. After she finished thinking, she thought she must’ve aged a lot.

  Philip had three more customers on Cottage Street. “Better give Mr. Johnson his paper next. He lost his job a couple of weeks ago and he likes to see the want ads to see if he can find another one.”

  “How do you know he lost his job?” Isabelle asked.

  “He has this kid, four or five I guess she is, her nose is always running and she tells me everything. They ought to put a gag on her, she tells so much.”

  Isabelle said, “I think I’ll wear my hat when I deliver the papers. And you better teach me how to fold them.” Philip had this really neat way of folding each paper into a square.

  “It took me about a month to learn how to fold them,” Philip said. “I’m not sure you could do it.”

  “I can try,” Isabelle said.

  “You want to watch out for the Olsens’ dog.” Philip pointed to the Olsens’ house. “He knows me, but he might think you were a robber or something. He almost bit me the first couple of times, but I fed him an old banana I had in my pocket and we’ve been friends ever since.”

  Isabelle shivered. There was more to this paper route stuff than met the eye.

  But then Philip winked at her.

  “You’re teasing! Dogs don’t eat bananas. You’re only teasing, aren’t you?” She punched Philip on the arm with her friendship ring.

  “You ever see me tap dance?” she asked. “I might be a tap dancer when I grow up.” The expression on Philip’s face showed that he wasn’t impressed. It took quite a lot to impress him. Isabelle jumped into the air, waved her arms, and crossed her eyes.

  “That’s how Mary Eliza Shook looks,” she said.

  “Crazy,” he murmured. He checked his list. “I guess that about covers it. Oh, just don’t give the paper to the little Carter creep. He waits for me every day, like he thinks it’s a big deal to bring the paper in to his mother himself. Half the time he drops it or can’t remember where he put it or he leaves it outside and it blows away. What the world needs is more creeps like that one.

  “One more thing. Don’t forget to count the papers in the bundle when you pick them up at the drop-off box. Some crooks, if they don’t have the right number of papers in their bundle, swipe yours so you’re short. And when a customer doesn’t get his paper, he calls up and hollers.”

  “What’ll I do if I’m short a paper?” Isabelle asked.

  “Buy one out of your own money. Or two, however many you’re short. I’ll pay you back. And use my bag because those papers get pretty heavy.” He handed her the bag, which was old and faded and said “Courier-Express” on the side in dim letters.

  With that bag on her shoulder and her hat on her head, Isabelle knew she’d feel like a king.

  “If only I could collect,” she said in one last effort.

  “Give up.” Philip turned the corners of h
is mouth down.

  “I might ask Herbie to help me deliver,” Isabelle said.

  “If he does, tell him to leave his boil at home,” Philip warned. “My customers might complain.”

  “O.K.,” Isabelle said, “I’ll tell him.”

  7

  Philip rode off on his bike and Isabelle headed for the playground. There was usually something going on there Saturday morning.

  In the distance, a figure appeared, leaping, twirling, waving its arms. It was Mary Eliza, practicing her ballet for the entire world to see.

  “She is disgusting,” Isabelle said aloud. “She is about the most disgusting person on this planet.”

  Saturday was garbage collection day. Luckily an empty can lay on its side. Isabelle crawled into it and put her chin on her knees, waiting for Mary Eliza to go by. It smelled of old orange peels and coffee grounds and other things.

  Presently a pair of feet stopped on the pavement outside Isabelle’s hiding place. The toes of the feet pointed daintily in her direction.

  “Oh my,” Mary Eliza’s voice said, “I expect I’ll get the lead in The Nutcracker Suite my ballet class is putting on and get my picture in the paper.”

  Point, point. Mary Eliza’s feet spun round and round and round. They made Isabelle dizzy.

  A face looked inside the garbage can.

  “My goodness, what are you doing there?” Mary Eliza asked, amazed. “I thought you were going hiking with your father today.”

  Isabelle was speechless for the first time in her life.

  “Isn’t it icky in there?” Mary Eliza wrinkled her nose disdainfully. “Your mother’ll have a fit when she finds out you were inside a garbage can.”

  “How’s she going to find out?” Isabelle got her voice back.

  “How do I know?” Mary Eliza raised her eyebrows. “Hey,” she hissed, looking over her shoulder, “here comes a lady and I think you’re in her garbage can. You better get out fast before she finds you.”

  Isabelle scrambled out. All she could see were some teenagers whose car had stalled.

  “I think it’s the carburetor,” one said, peering inside.