Anna, Banana, and the Big-Mouth Bet Read online

  For Jeremy

  (Wanna play trash compactor?)

  —A. M. R.

  To us who believe in magic

  —M. P.

  Chapter One

  That Spells Trouble

  Trouble, I wrote, spelling it out in my head as I printed the word on the test. T-r-o-u-b-l-e.

  O-plus-U and L-before-E were the hard parts in that one, but I was certain I’d gotten it right. Dad had quizzed me on all the spelling and vocabulary words this morning at breakfast, and even Banana was amazed by how quickly I’d breezed through them. And dogs are hardly ever impressed by good spelling.

  I tapped my lucky blue pencil against my lip as I thought about how to use the word in a sentence. Banana once got in trouble for chewing Chuck’s sneaker, I wrote, wrinkling my nose at the memory. Banana doesn’t chew on things she’s not supposed to anymore, but she still loves sniffing at things that stink, including my older brother’s yucky shoes.

  “Pesky!” our teacher, Ms. Burland, exclaimed. She always sings out the words for our tests as though she’s performing them onstage. It makes the quizzes a lot more dramatic, and even kind of fun. “Pesky,” she repeated, this time in a low, booming voice. Beside me, my best friend Isabel giggled.

  I wrote down the word, then used it in a sentence: Those pesky flies won’t leave us alone!

  I glanced over at my other best friend, Sadie. I knew she’d been nervous about the test, so I was worried for her. But Sadie was bent over her paper, scribbling the answer, with her curls spilling into her face. It looked like she was doing fine.

  “No cheating, Anna!” Justin called out from the desk behind mine. My mouth fell open and my heart sped up at the attack. I wasn’t cheating!

  Ms. Burland raised her eyebrows in our direction. “You should all have your eyes on your own papers, please,” she said.

  I looked down quickly. I wasn’t really in trouble, but my cheeks still burned. Forget flies—I should have written my sentence about pesky Justin. He was the worst.

  “Accuse,” Ms. Burland announced, sounding stern. “Accuse!” she repeated, calling it out like a cheerful greeting.

  I narrowed my eyes. Justin likes to accuse innocent girls of cheating, I wrote on my test. There. That ought to clear my name. And I hoped Ms. Burland would notice that I’d also used one of last week’s spelling words, “innocent,” and spelled it correctly. I thought that was pretty clever of me.

  But wait, was “cheating” spelled right? I pressed my lips together, thinking hard, and gasped. I’d felt a tooth move! I touched the tooth with my tongue and pushed it again. Sure enough, it wiggled.

  I was so distracted by the slightly loose tooth, I almost missed the final spelling word. Luckily, Ms. Burland said it once more. “About.”

  I spelled it out carefully and wrote, I can’t wait to tell Banana and Sadie and Isabel about my loose tooth!

  Chapter Two

  Loosey-Goosey

  When the test was over, Ms. Burland asked Isabel and Timothy to collect all the papers. I put my lucky blue pencil that I use for quizzes back down on the desk, in between the regular pencil I use for normal schoolwork and the supersparkly rainbow pencil I hardly use at all. The supersparkly rainbow pencil is mostly too special to write with, but I love to look at it. Sadie gave it to me after the one I’d had before it broke.

  I peeked over at Sadie and lifted both eyebrows to ask, How’d the test go? Sadie grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.

  Usually Theresa, the housekeeper at Sadie’s mom’s place, helps Sadie study for spelling tests. But this week Theresa was away on vacation and Sadie was staying at her dad’s house, and he’s not as good as my dad or Theresa at quiz prep. He does buy us really tasty snacks for sleepovers, though. And he lets us drink soda and watch TV, and doesn’t get mad about pillow fights.

  There’s no soda allowed at my house, and it’s hard to get away with a late-night pillow fight because Banana gets excited and wakes everyone up with her barking. Though my dad said even if Banana hadn’t barked, he still would have heard Sadie and Isabel and me shrieking and giggling at the sleepover last weekend. Now that I have two best friends, we make a lot more noise than when I only had one.

  The bell rang for recess and we lined up to follow Ms. Burland down the hall. Sadie, Isabel, and I ran straight for the small merry-go-round as soon as we got outside. Usually third graders don’t go on the small merry-go-round because it’s made for little kids, but we wanted to play a new game Isabel had invented called Spin Me a Tale.

  The game is, one person sits in the center of the merry-go-round and holds on to the bars while the other two spin her around. As the person is spinning, she has to make up a story and tell it really quick, before the merry-go-round slows to a stop. But spinning on the merry-go-round makes our brains dizzy, so the stories usually come out pretty silly.

  If someone shouts “Switch!” we spin the merry-go-round in the other direction, and the storyteller has to switch something important about the story—the evil fairy becomes good, or the puppy turns into a goose, or the princess doesn’t want to marry the prince after all. Switch is my favorite part.

  Yesterday I made up a story about Banana chasing a squirrel made of cheese, and when Isabel yelled “Switch!” I changed it to the cheese chasing Banana. We laughed so hard that Isabel snorted. Justin heard the snort and started making piggy noises, which only made Isabel laugh even harder, but Sadie still told him to go away. Sadie likes Justin and sometimes giggles at his jokes, but she doesn’t like anyone making fun of her friends.

  I felt like Justin had been giving us an extra-hard time this week. I wished I knew how to get him to bug off.

  “Whose turn is it?” Isabel asked as we reached the merry-go-round. We try to take turns and be fair with games and stuff.

  “Mine!” Sadie said, climbing into the middle.

  “Wait,” I said. “I have something to show you. Look!” I dropped open my jaw and wiggled the loose tooth with my finger. It was a bottom tooth—one of the extra-pointy ones.

  “Oooooh, loose tooth!” Isabel said.

  Sadie peered in closer. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “It isn’t super loose yet,” I explained. “But it will be.”

  Isabel bounced on her toes. Her face was full of excitement. “I wonder what the Tooth Fairy will bring you,” she said.

  I shrugged. “I usually get a few coins and a treat, like sparkly stickers or a cool hair tie.”

  “Isn’t it funny how the Tooth Fairy brings different things to different houses?” Isabel said. “I always get a letter with my prize, but my friend Cassie from Ms. Lahiri’s class last year only gets money. Maybe it’s because I leave the Tooth Fairy a note and a drawing along with my tooth, so she writes back.”

  I squinted at her. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Isabel is joking. Chuck had told Sadie and me the truth about the Tooth Fairy years ago. Surely Isabel’s big sisters would have told her by now too. But Isabel looked completely serious.

  I glanced at Sadie, expecting her to inform Isabel that there is no Tooth Fairy, but Sadie went with it. “The Tooth Fairy comes to both my houses,” she said. “Last time I got money under the pillow at my mom’s house and a whole box of chocolate caramels plus a letter at my dad’s.”

  I remembered those chocolates. They’d been delicious. Sadie and I had shared one every day for the next two weeks, at whatever random moment Sadie had declared it to be Chocolate Time. That was before we became friends with Isabel. I’ve known Sadie forever, but we only just met Isabel in Ms. Burland’s class this year.

  If Sadie wasn’t going to say anything to Isabel about the Tooth Fairy, then I
wouldn’t either. But it was kind of embarrassing that she didn’t know the truth.

  “Let’s play the game,” I said to change the subject. I’d spotted our classmates Amanda and Keisha skipping rope nearby. They didn’t look like they were listening to us, but I didn’t want to risk them overhearing. If they caught on that Isabel still believed in the Tooth Fairy, they might think she was babyish. What if they thought I was babyish too?

  Not that it mattered what Amanda thought—she sometimes picks her nose in public—but who knew who she’d tell. If Justin found out, he would never let us hear the end of it. The last thing we needed was more teasing from him.

  “Spin me!” Sadie commanded.

  Isabel and I grabbed on to the merry-go-round and the story began.

  Chapter Three

  More Than a Mouthful

  I showed Banana my loose tooth first thing after school, before clipping on her leash for our walk around the block, and I wiggled it with my finger all through doing my homework, to try to make it even looser. It seemed to be working. By dinnertime I could move it back and forth in the same rhythm as Banana wagging her tail.

  Dad walked into the kitchen, where I was finishing up my fractions and division worksheet and Banana was finishing a nap in a sunbeam. “Hey, kiddo. Hey, dog-o,” he said as he took off the tie he always wears while he writes and put on the apron that Mom gave him last Christmas. It’s red, his favorite color, and the front says, STIRRING UP TROUBLE.

  “Hey, Dad-o,” I said back.

  Dad lifted the lid off a pot that was heating on the stove, and I caught a whiff of something delicious. Banana smelled it too and went over to stand near Dad’s feet, in case he decided to drop her a taste.

  “If you go tell your brother and your mother, ‘Dinner in ten minutes,’ I’ll let you off the hook on helping set the table tonight,” Dad said as he took four plates out of the cabinet.

  “Deal!” I said, jumping up fast before he could change his mind. Ten minutes was also long enough to watch the baby horse video Sadie had been telling me and Isabel about, if Mom would let me borrow her phone.

  When I came back downstairs after seeing the video twice, a giant bowl of yummy spaghetti was sitting in the center of the dinner table. Unfortunately, so was a bowl of brussels sprouts.

  Banana and I do not like brussels sprouts.

  At least it wasn’t beets, which I hate so much that Chuck always specially requests them for his birthday dinner, just so I’ll have to eat them that night.

  I knew Banana was disappointed that there were no turkey meatballs that might roll off the spaghetti and into her mouth, but she still watched hopefully as Dad heaped the noodles and tomato sauce onto our plates. I wrinkled my nose as he put a scoop of brussels sprouts on my plate too, but I knew better than to object. My parents love launching into the “In This House, You Eat What You’re Served” lecture. Thank goodness it was just a small helping.

  I pushed my brussels sprouts around in the tomato sauce, hoping that might cover up the taste, as Chuck told us about a home run he almost got during kickball in gym class, except in the end he was tagged out instead.

  “Anna, how was the spelling test?” Mom asked when Chuck’s story was finished. She passed me the loaf of garlic bread and I took a big slice. Dad’s garlic bread is delicious.

  “Great,” I said, deciding not to mention how Justin had accused me of cheating. “I think I spelled everything right. And I got a loose tooth!” I opened my mouth to show them the tooth and how much it wiggled. It was already much looser than it had been at school.

  “Uh-oh,” Dad said. “You weren’t supposed to chew on the test.” I giggled.

  “Yeah,” Chuck said. “Next time just lick it, or soon you’ll be toothless.”

  I kicked Chuck under the table. He stretched his lips over his teeth and said, “Hi, I’m Anna, and I have no teeth,” but it came out sounding like, “Hi, I’m Amma, am I hab mo peepf.”

  Banana barked in my defense.

  “When all your teeth fall out, you’ll only be able to eat mushy foods, like fish brains and gruel,” Chuck said. “Also, mashed beets. Mmm.”

  I stuck out my tongue at him. “No, I’ll eat nothing but ice cream,” I said. “You can keep your stinky fish brains.”

  Chuck laughed and sucked in his cheeks to make a fish face at me, but Mom shot both of us a stern look. We’re not supposed to fight at the dinner table.

  Luckily, Dad came to the rescue. “Do you know what those pointy teeth like your loose one are called? Canines!”

  “That means ‘dog,’ ” Chuck said with his mouth full. He swallowed before anyone could scold him, and gave me a wicked grin. “So maybe when the tooth falls out, you’ll be less of one.”

  “Chuck!” Mom said. “That’s enough. Don’t be mean to your sister.”

  But I didn’t mind being called a dog. I knew Chuck meant it as an insult, but I love dogs. Being a dog would be great.

  If I were a dog, I could nap in a sunbeam and play tug-of-war and chase butterflies and squirrels with Banana all day. I’d never have to do homework or chores, or eat brussels sprouts, and if Justin came along and bothered me, I could bite him. Or at least bark and growl at him until he went away.

  I’d miss Isabel and Sadie while they were at school all day without me, though. And I didn’t think I’d like eating dog food. So maybe it was good that I was human, except for my canine teeth.

  Chapter Four

  Things Get Twisted

  I twirled the spaghetti with my fork and chewed it carefully, on the opposite side of my mouth from the loose tooth, while Mom asked Dad about his day and Dad talked about the new novel he’s working on. Writing used to be Dad’s hobby, but now it’s his full-time job, besides being our dad, of course. He quit his other job after Mom got a huge promotion at work, way back when Chuck was in kindergarten.

  Dad says Mom is the family breadwinner, which I guess means she earns all the money for our spaghetti, even though Dad does most of the grocery shopping. He’s proud that Mom is the boss at her office, but I don’t see what the big deal is. She’s kind of the boss at home, too. Banana thinks so, anyway.

  Even though Dad has written a whole lot of books that are in libraries and bookstores and everything, he says that each new story still poses a different challenge. Apparently, the big challenge to this one was figuring out what would happen next. Dad says every good novel needs a plot twist, which is when something unexpected happens that makes the story more complicated and interesting, like when the sailor everyone thought had drowned shows up alive, or it turns out the poor servant girl is really a princess.

  Figuring out a plot twist sounded a lot like playing Spin Me a Tale. I thought maybe Dad should try writing his books on a merry-go-round.

  “I’ve got an idea. Aliens invade!” Chuck said. “That’d be a plot twist no one saw coming.”

  “That would be surprising,” Dad said, “since this is supposed to be a historical romance novel.”

  “Aliens are very romantic,” Chuck said. We all cracked up.

  “The girl could fall in love with a caveman,” I suggested. “That’s historical. Or, wait, at first she doesn’t like him at all, but then she caves in. Get it?”

  Chuck snorted. Mom smiled. Dad shook his head.

  I looked down at Banana and she nudged my foot with her snout. She was still hoping for the kind of plot twist where someone drops an entire plate of spaghetti on the floor so she can eat it. But by now all our plates were empty. I’d even managed to swallow down the brussels sprouts, thanks to my tomato sauce trick.

  “Maybe the hero gets a loose tooth and he falls in love with the Tooth Fairy,” I said as Chuck and I stood up to clear the table.

  “And they get married and go live in a castle made of teeth,” Mom said.

  “Yeah, and host imaginary tea parties with the Abominable Snowman and the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot as their guests,” Chuck added.

  Even Dad laughed at
that one. Chuck is pretty funny sometimes.

  “Well, thanks, family,” Dad said, pretending to take our jokes seriously. “That should be enough twists for the next three or four books.”

  Mom kissed him on the cheek. “Should we celebrate with dessert?” she said. “I brought home some ice cream.”

  That sounded like the best idea of all.

  Chapter Five

  Toothy Trouble

  The next morning Mom drove us to school on her way to work so that Chuck wouldn’t have to walk carrying the project he’d made for history class. It was a diorama of the insides of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, and it looked really cool. Chuck had drawn real hieroglyphics on the walls, and Banana and I had helped by wrapping a plastic doll in thin strips of toilet paper to turn it into a mummy. I bet it would be the best diorama in the whole sixth grade.

  When we got to school, I found Isabel out on the playground, sitting on a rock near the swings with her nose in a book. She looked up and smiled when she saw me. “Hi!” I said. “Where’s Sadie?”

  Isabel shrugged. “Her bus isn’t here yet.”

  “Whatcha reading?” I plopped down on the rock next to her and peeked over her shoulder.

  Isabel reads about a million books a week. Her three older sisters are bookworms too, and her Abuelita is a librarian, so her house is full of good books. The one she was reading today had a spooky graveyard on the cover. “I started it last night,” she said. “It’s not as scary as it looks, but it’s pretty good so far. How’s your tooth?”

  “Much looser,” I said. I wiggled it to demonstrate.

  Isabel closed her book and beamed at me. “Soon the Tooth Fairy will come!” she singsonged.

  I grinned. “Yeah, right after she finishes her tea party with Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman and all her other imaginary friends,” I said, repeating Chuck’s joke.