Maggie Malone Makes a Splash Read online

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  Copyright © 2015 by Jenna McCarthy and Carolyn Evans

  Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Series design by Jane Archer

  Cover illustration © Lilly Lazuli

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: When I Realize I Need to Find My Thing

  Chapter 2: When I Decide to Take the Plunge

  Chapter 3: When I Belly Flop Before I Even Hit the Water

  Chapter 4: When I Make a Splash (and Not in a Good Way)

  Chapter 5: When I Discover I’m Swimming with a Shark

  Chapter 6: When I Turn into a Big, Fat Liar

  Chapter 7: When I Step into the Coolest Flippers Ever

  Chapter 8: When I Wake Up in the Middle of the Ocean

  Chapter 9: When I Meet My New Best Surfer Friend

  Chapter 10: When I Have My Own Swim-with-a-Dolphin Movie Moment

  Chapter 11: When the Coast Guard Shows Up

  Chapter 12: When I Start to Get into the Swim of Things

  Chapter 13: When Things Get Fishy on the Sea Angel

  Chapter 14: When I Realize the Timer Might Be Ticking

  Chapter 15: When Things Go from Bad to Worse

  Chapter 16: When I Take a Dive with Ursula the Sea Witch

  Chapter 17: When I Realize Zac Has My Back

  Chaptre 18: When the Truth Bubbles to the Surface

  Chapter 19: When I Don’t Get to Say Good-bye

  Chapter 20: When I Have to Deal with What I Left Behind

  Chapter 21: When It’s Back to Being Invisible for Me

  Chapter 22: When Things Get Worse at the Mountain View Pool

  Chapter 23: When I Save Myself

  Chapter 24: When the Whole Truth Comes Out

  Chapter 25: When I Have to Bite My Tongue. Again.

  Maggie Malone’s Totally Fab Vocab

  About the Authors

  Back Cover

  We dedicate this book to Bindi Irwin, whose work with her late dad, wildlife expert Steve Irwin, inspired the character of Marina Tide.

  Dear Maggie,

  I know you’re wondering why I sent you some dirty, old cowboy boots for your birthday. Your dad will tell you it’s because I’m crazy, but the truth is they were mine when I was your age. I’ve carried them around the world with me twice, just waiting for your twelfth birthday. They might look like a boring pair of boots to you, but trust me when I tell you things aren’t always what they seem. These boots will change your life, Maggie. If you let them, that is…

  Love,

  Auntie Fi

  Chapter 1

  When I Realize I Need to Find My Thing

  Fridays are my second favorite day of the week for obvious reasons, but today started out even better than most.

  For one thing, I woke up having a killer hair day without even trying—which, with my crazy head of curls, happens about as often as I win the lottery. Then my mom made me pumpkin pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Of course, I ate them together sandwich-style, even though my BFF Stella says that’s the most disgusting combination in the entire food universe.

  I’ve tried arguing with her—hello? What about Cheerios and clam sauce? Banana pudding and onions? Chocolate chip cookies and gravy? But Stella can be as stubborn as any mule you ever met, and she insists she’d pick any of those over my dream-team breakfast. Someday I may have to make her a hot-fudge-and-fish-sticks sundae. I’ll bet she comes around.

  The third awesome thing about today is we’re having a huge pep rally first thing. It’s supposed to get us all pumped up about this weekend’s big basketball game against Washington Middle School, but I’m excited because I hear the pep rallies at Pinkerton (my new school since my dad lost his job) last, like, three hours, and that means I get to miss social studies. Don’t get me wrong; normally it’s one of my favorite classes. But the teacher, Mrs. Grossbottom, throws a “surprise” pop quiz every Friday (which makes it not much of a surprise, but it’s not like anybody is going to point that out). I’m definitely not bummed to be missing out on that action.

  I cruise on my bike into the Pinkerton parking lot, and the first thing I notice is a huge group of boys wearing suits. I’m talking about business suits, like my dad used to wear every day, with ties and everything. That’s weird, I’m thinking when I notice a different group of guys and girls wearing bathrobes. Even weirder! What is this, dress-crazy day? I’m locking up my bike when Alicia pulls up next to me.

  Alicia is my PBF (Pinkerton best friend). It’s not that she’s not as cool as my BFF Stella, but I haven’t known Alicia very long. Besides, you can only have one BFF and Stella scored that title a million years ago. Anyway, Alicia is funny and cool and practically the mayor of Pinkerton. Usually she’s a stylish dresser, but today she’s wearing soccer shorts and a Pinkerton Pit Bull jersey. Yeah, our school mascot is a dog that’s not known to be the friendliest breed around. Don’t get me started.

  “You ready to rally?” Alicia squeals, slinging her backpack onto her shoulder and holding up her hand for a high five.

  “What’s with the outfits?” I ask, giving her hand a hearty smack. My palm stings after I do it, but I firmly believe if you’re going to do something, no matter what it is, you should give it your all.

  “Oh my gosh, didn’t I tell you?” Alicia asks, looking worried. “On pep rally days everyone wears their team uniforms! Oh Maggie, I feel terrible! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m not on a team anyway.”

  “But Maggie, you have to be on a team! Otherwise where will you sit at pep rallies? The teams all sit together. Plus, being on a team is really fun. Hey, are you any good at soccer? We could use a few more strong players!”

  “I’m positively awful at soccer,” I admit as we make our way through clusters of cheerleaders and flocks of feather-headed marching-band kids.

  “Bummer,” Alicia says.

  “What’s with the bathrobes?” I whisper.

  “Swim team,” she explains.

  “And the suits?” I ask.

  “Debate team,” Alicia says. “You’d be good at that!”

  “I don’t really like arguing,
” I tell her. “Besides, I hate having things tight around my neck. I’d suffocate in a tie.”

  “The girls don’t have to wear ties,” she says, laughing. “They wear these cute little scarf thingies.”

  “I just don’t think I’m debate team material,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Fair enough,” Alicia agrees. I give her a weak smile. “Don’t worry,” she adds. “You’ll find something.” I look around and don’t see a single kid not wearing some sort of team getup. A marching band guy next to me bends down, and his feather pokes me right in the nose.

  “It looks like I’m going to have to find something,” I tell her.

  We’re gathered with everyone else outside the Pit Bull Arena, which is the name for the school gymnasium. The energy in the crowd is intense and people are getting pretty impatient. I’m starting to worry there’s going to be a stampede or something when I spot Mr. Mooney, the principal, waving his arms at the front of the throng.

  “Can I please have your attention?” he shouts. Nobody stops talking or even pays him one lick of attention, so the office secretary, Mrs. Dunst, hands him a giant megaphone. I cover my ears.

  “Can I please have your attention?” Mr. Mooney bellows into the thing, and this time you could hear an ant hiccup.

  “Thank you very much,” he continues, his words echoing off into space. “Everyone, please line up with your teammates and I’ll call you in alphabetical order. We’ll start with the band and then the baseball team.”

  Everyone starts milling around and forming into matching groups, and I have no idea what to do. Does every single kid at this school belong to a team? And what if you belong to two or three, say soccer and yearbook and chess club? I guess you go with the one that comes first in the alphabet. Or maybe the one with the coolest uniform.

  I feel a tug on my arm. It’s Elizabeth, the other new-ish girl who moved to Pinkerton the same week I did.

  “Are you on a team?” she whispers. Elizabeth is a super-quiet talker, so a lot of the time I only get about every third word. But today I know exactly what she’s saying because I was about to ask her the same thing.

  “Nope,” I say. “You?”

  She shakes her head sadly.

  “What do we do?” she asks. “Where do we sit?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I guess we go in last.”

  We stand there looking—and feeling—totally lost. The computer club is called and then the cross-country team. Elizabeth and I watch helplessly as group after group is admitted to the arena: Lacrosse. Math team. Quilt club. Spanish. Volleyball. Wrestling. Yearbook. Finally the only ones left are the teachers and me and Elizabeth, and maybe a dozen other kids. We shuffle into the gym and make our way to the only seats left: nosebleed section, far corner. I settle in next to Mrs. Shankshaw, my million-year-old biology teacher.

  “Tums?” she says, reaching into her sweater pocket and offering up a lint-covered roll.

  “Oh, I’m good. Thanks,” I lie. My stomach is actually a mess—but I don’t think it’s anything a dusty Tums will fix.

  Chapter 2

  When I Decide to Take the Plunge

  I ride my bike home from school thinking about how weird it is that I have to join something at this new school just to be somebody. I mean, not to brag or anything, but I can be anybody I want whenever I want. I’ve already been a famous rock star and a for-real princess in England. I could wake up and be an astronaut tomorrow if I felt like it! I bet if they knew that over at Pinkerton Middle School they’d be singing a different tune.

  It may sound ridiculous, but it’s true. For my twelfth birthday, my crazy Auntie Fi sent me something that looked totally lame but turned out to be better than all the double-dipped doughnuts in the world: a pair of Mostly Magical Boots. They’re called MMBs for short. They look like boring, old hand-me-down cowboy boots, but when I put them on and say the magic words, I get to be anybody in the world for an entire day.

  Sure, they came with some rules, like I have to do something good during my borrowed day…and I can’t tell anybody about the MMBs or the magic will disappear right off them… Oh yeah, and I’m not supposed to jump into them just to avoid something stinky that’s happening in my real life. Which brings me back to my current dilemma: I need a team to join, like, lickety-split!

  When I get home, I head straight for my desk and start making a list of possible activities. I’m not the cheerleader type. Chess makes my brain feel swimmy, and serving a volleyball hurts the inside of my wrist so much it makes me squeal like a stepped-on puppy. It’s kind of embarrassing. I’m really good at math, but I’m not about to become a mathlete and spend my weekends competing in pre-algebra TriMathlons all over the state. (I’m pretty sure my parents wouldn’t be too into that either.) When Stella brought me to her soccer team’s “bring a friend to play” day, I did score a goal. Unfortunately, it was for the other team.

  I’m scrolling through the extracurricular activity list on the Pinkerton website when Stella busts into my room and scares the daylights out of me. I think technically that expression means you faint, and I didn’t actually go lights-out. But almost. I’ve got to hide that hide-a-key in a new place.

  “Wassssup, Mags?” Stella says, flinging her backpack into the corner next to mine and flopping onto my bed.

  Before I can catch my breath and answer, she says, “Willis Freedman is a total turd. You should be so glad you don’t have to deal with him anymore.”

  Stella and I are totally opposite looking on the outside, but a lot the same on the inside, which my mom always says is the only part that really matters. Stella has shiny, pitch-black hair that’s stick straight. I, on the other hand, was blessed with mounds of crazy strawberry-blond curls and a milky white complexion. Did I mention Stella has a tan even in the winter? It’s so not fair.

  Neither is the fact that I don’t get to see Stella nearly as much as I used to since I had to leave Sacred Heart and switch to Randolph J. Pinkerton. I’ve made some good friends, but it still feels like something is missing. Maybe it’s because Pinkerton is so big, or maybe it’s because I’m still pretty new there. My dad says I just need to give it more time, and he’s probably right. Besides, I don’t really have a choice in the matter. If you ask me, that’s probably the most unfair part of it all.

  “What did Willis the turd do this time?” I ask, sprawling on the bed next to her. By the way, Stella has had a crush on that turd since the second grade. Oh, she totally denies it, and even though she Willis-bashes every chance she gets, anybody with two eyeballs can see she gets all loud and giggly whenever Willis is in earshot. That’s a dead giveaway, if you ask me.

  “Oh, you’ll love this,” Stella says, sitting up. “In French class, Mrs. Bernard made Willis a team captain so he got to choose three people for his Tour de France team, which is so stupid, but anyway. He was all, ‘Sssssammy Strickland, Sssssarah Munson, and Sssssss…’ He was looking at me the whole time—you know I’m the only other S in the class. He must’ve dragged that letter out for a full minute before he finally said, ‘Leonard Kurtz.’ I came this close to jumping on him like a spider monkey.”

  “Except that you wouldn’t do that ’cause you heart him!” I say, jumping off the bed before Stella can pounce on me.

  “Do not!” she protests. “Just because I gave him my leftover Valentine’s candy two years ago does not mean I like him! The box only had those gross chocolate-covered cherries left in it!”

  “Whatever you say,” I say, letting it go because that’s an argument I’m never going to win with Stella.

  “Whatcha looking at?” Stella says, peering over my shoulder and happy to change the subject.

  “I think I need to be more extracurricular,” I tell Stella. “Everybody at Pinkerton is on some sort of team, so I’m trying to figure out something fun to do.”

  “Softball’s fun,” Stella
suggests, grabbing a Tween Scene magazine off my desk and flipping it open.

  I give her the eyebrow. “Have you forgotten about the famous Fourth Grade Concussion Incident?”

  “Oh, right. Sorry,” Stella says. “Student council?”

  “Already elected for the year,” I tell her. She nods and keeps flipping pages.

  “Wait, does Stink—sorry, Pinkerton—have a swim team?” Stella asks. “You’re a great swimmer! Remember last year when you held your breath longer than Ginger Poole and Madison Greenway at Ginger’s end-of-summer party? Man, she was so mad!”

  “I do remember that,” I tell Stella. “And you’re right. I am a pretty good swimmer. Remember at Itchy Bitey I got a ribbon for being the only camper who could swim to the farthest buoy underwater without coming up for air?” The camp is actually called Camp Ichemytee after some famous springs that were discovered by Native American settlers. But mosquitoes are a major problem at Camp Ichemytee, so everyone calls it Itchy Bitey. It just fits.

  “And,” Stella shouts, “remember how we won first place in the synchronized swimming competition with our routine, the one where you stood on my shoulders at the end and did the giant jazz-hands belly flop? We were amazing, weren’t we?”

  “We really were,” I agree, remembering the pink belly burn I got from my award-winning belly flop. That thing lasted for hours, but it was totally worth it.

  “And get this,” Stella says. “My cousin is on the swim team at her school in Florida, and they got to meet Marina Tide and even touch Skipper! That’s a pretty sweet perk. In five years all my soccer team has ever gotten to do was tour the sock factory downtown. I only went thinking maybe I’d score some cool free socks, but they didn’t give us squat. Talk about lame.”

  “Who’s Marina Tide?” I ask, way more interested in somebody with a cool name like that than a sock-factory field trip. Stella looks at me like my neck just grew another head.