Previously in the Boy/Girl Battle Series…uh, what did happen? It’s been a while. Oh, right. It was Valentine’s Day — Beth and Josh were going fifth-grade steady, Caroline tried to get Wally to fall in fourth-grade love with her, Peter ate some chocolate, Eddie was a tomboy stereotype, and also abaguchie mania. Good times! This is definitely one of my favorite books in the series — it’s a bit of a sausagefest with nine(!) boys in the book to the girls’ three, and the Bensons aren’t particularly amusing in their own right, but the hijinks are funny, the plot is engaging, and the character interaction is A+. I dig it a lot!
The cover is pretty boring (and my copy is missing the little Dell Yearling logo in the corner) — at least the girls are much more easily identifiable than the boys; that’s clearly Beth decorating a lamp in the corner. Given the baseball cap, that’s probably Jake in the green jacket; the boy crawling into the cellar headfirst is Tony Benson, if we’re going by the events of the book. And of course, the abaguchie is hanging out in the corner, because why not.
I will not lie, it took my childhood self a truly embarrassing amount of time to realize that the series had a book for each month of the year. This book takes place in March, more specifically, over spring vacation. Who’s excited? Everyone, but especially Wally, on account of the fact that Mrs. Miss Applebaum has given them only one assignment over break, which is “to do something [they]’ve never done before”, continuing her grand tradition of giving her students assignments that make zero sense and have no academic value. Amazing. While I’m on the topic, I’m not sure why I referred to her as Mrs. Applebaum for the past five books, even though I got it right in the first. I did a similar thing when I recapped The Phantom of Venice (I spelled Sophia’s name right in part one, and then called her “Sofia” from part two onwards). My brain works in mysterious ways. I didn’t figure it was such a big deal, but since it has been pointed out to me repeatedly (in capslock!), apparently Miss Applebaum’s correct title is really important for…reasons. I guess. Maybe someone used my recaps to write a report instead of actually reading the books, and my inaccuracies got them busted. That’s what you get for not doing your homework, kids!
So speaking of homework — no, just kidding, there’s no more homework talk, I just can’t think of a better segue. Speaking of school, maybe, Wally reminds us that he shares his fourth-grade class with Caroline Malloy, who is now nine and therefore should be considered old enough to be in the fourth grade, but that doesn’t mean we get to skip the obligatory reminder that Caroline is “precocious.” That’s one word for it, to be sure.
So we have a quick rundown of the boys and girls: Josh, Jake, and Eddie (whose real name is Edith Ann) are all in the sixth grade; Beth is in fifth (Wally thinks she’s the prettiest of the sisters, which is all that I guess can really be said about Beth’s lack of personality); Caroline and Wally are in fourth; Peter is in second. Peter and Josh like the girls, Wally doesn’t mind them “in small doses only”, and Jake still hates them for daring to have X chromosomes. I see a fedora in Jake’s future.
Everyone discusses their spring plans — Beth is going to write a book, which is totally something my naïve 10-year-old self tried to do once too, Eddie (and Jake) are going to practice baseball (in retrospect, these books place far more importance on middle school baseball tryouts than I have ever experienced in real life, ever), and Caroline is going to practice her “voices.” In the middle of listing all the voices from Tom Sawyer that she’s going to master over the course of a week, Caroline falls off the sidewalk. The boys all laugh at her (children falling into the middle of the road are hilarious!), but Caroline’s laughing too, and Wally is deflated by her self-awareness. I do love the amount of character development these kids are allowed, especially in a children’s book series.
Wally muses a little over what he’s going to do over spring break, anyway — his favorite things are “weird”, like making designs on the window with his tongue, or contemplating anthills. I have to admit I sympathize a lot with Wally (and to a lesser extent, Caroline, who is basically his counterpart), in that I too enjoyed doing things that weren’t unacceptable, really, but weren’t considered quite within the boundaries of what well-adjusted kids should be doing. I mean, this isn’t something that pops up a lot in children’s books, so it’s neat to see. Wally resolves to spend his spring break doing “nothing whatsoever,” which admittedly doesn’t jive with him being super enthused about the assignment on the previous page. But hey, ten-year-olds are complex creatures.
We get to the main point of the book fairly quickly: Mrs. Hatford tells the boys that the Bensons are coming! They celebrate in their usual over-the-top fashion (“Jake went marching around the kitchen like a prizefighter, fists in the air, and Peter followed, banging a knife against the peanut butter jar. Josh did a little dance of joy…”), because their obsession with the Bensons crossed the line into weird about six books ago. The boys excitedly plan to “run rings” around the girls (I only quote this because they repeat it a lot), and do all the things they haven’t been able to do since the girls swapped places with them in Buckman! “Like what?” Peter asks, and the parade comes to a grinding halt when the boys realize that having the Bensons away hasn’t been quite the fun-suck they keep thinking it is. I mean, I bet Phyllis Reynolds Naylor couldn’t have sold a book series about Hatford/Benson shenanigans.
And of course the boys waste no time in telling the girls that the Bensons are coming, like they expect them to be impressed or something. Beth says she can’t wait, since “they’re all you guys ever talk about.” Say it, Beth. The girls needle the boys about what ~thrilling~ things the Hatford/Benson sausagefest can get up to that the Hatfords can’t do with the Malloys, to which Jake responds, ever so eloquently, “Uh…just stuff!” Heh.
(Another stylistic note: I forgot to mention this during the write-up of book #4, but the kids also start referring to their mothers as “Mom” instead of “Mother” post-book #3. And another thing I picked up from these books as a kid: Eddie asks, “So, what are you going to do with your Benson buddies? Run the town?” which I started saying without ever knowing what it actually meant. 9-year-old Emily was a weird kid.)
Meanwhile, Mrs. Malloy is stressed about the Bensons’ arrival: “Oh, dear! I hope they don’t want to see inside the house. I really haven’t had time to clean it properly the past couple of weeks,” she says, because she’s suddenly June Cleaver. Still, she decides it would “only be polite” to invite the Bensons over. You know what this would be a good opportunity for? Hijinks! The girls decide to decorate their rooms (which used to be the Benson boys’ rooms) with over-the-top amounts of bead, lace, ribbons, and girly wallpaper, which will certainly send any middle school boy (and Eddie) worth his salt running.
Beth wonders if it’s possible that the Benson boys are nice. Has she even met a middle school boy before?
So flash forward a bit, and school’s out! And the Bensons are here! In order: Steve (twelve, which we all know is the worst age — I wonder if this book takes place before or after his seventh-grade emo phase), Tony (eleven), Bill (ten), Danny (nine), and Doug (six). Steve and Tony are Jake and Josh’s friends, Bill and Danny are Wally’s, and Doug is Peter’s. I realize all these kids have to be close in age for plot reasons, but I’m kind of boggling at Mrs. Benson’s willingness to be pregnant for like three years straight. This also adds to my theory that these books are set in some kind of time warp between the 1990s and the 1950s.
(Sidebar: Mrs. Benson’s name is Shirley, which oddly enough I can’t quite see as a female name anymore after reading the later Anne of Green Gables books, wherein she names her son Shirley.)
Anyway, Mrs. Benson mentions that she’d sure like to go over to her old house and see what’s the haps, and what a coincidence — Mrs. Malloy has invited them all over for tea! They agree to go over right quick, once everyone’s all unpacked, so the boys take this time to ~prepare~ their battle campaign against the Malloys. And Tony has a plan! He’s practically Douglas Haig. He whips out a piece of old, yellowed paper, wherein a woman named Kathleen ~creepily~ details the drowning of her sister Annabelle in the year of our Lord 1867. And where did Annabelle drown? In the river that surrounds Island Avenue, of course. And where did Annabelle and Kathleen live? In the Bensons’ house, naturally. And what did Kathleen hear the night after Annabelle died? A ghost tapping out a song called “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” on the wall. Spookie, as the characters might’ve said in the first three books in this series! It also sounds kind of like the plot to a Nancy Drew game.
Did any of this happen? Of course not. Tony got an aged-paper kit for his birthday and changed some of the words to an old story around. I am impressed with this bit of realism, because those paper kits were totally ~all the rage~ in Scholastic book orders circa 2002. The memories. Anyway, Alfred Milner Jake is skeptical: Caroline is in Tony’s room now (how does he know that? Please, God, don’t tell me the boys are secretly continuing their Peeping Tom ways), and it’s not like they can just roll in there while she’s sleeping, so how are they going to use a piece of paper to prank the girls? Tony reassures him that the Spring Offensive is well-planned. I need to stop reading WWI books.
At Casa Malloy, T-minus 30 minutes to the arrival of the Bensons, Mrs. Malloy discovers the girls have redecorated their rooms. “Caroline Lenore! Bethany Sue! Edith Ann!” she shrieks at them. While we’ve all been aware of Caroline and Eddie’s full names since the first book, I think this is the first time we’ve heard Beth’s, not to mention the reveal that Beth is short for Bethany, not Elizabeth. (By the way, “Bethany” reached its peak popularity as a name in the 1980s.) Anyway, Mrs. Malloy is all appalled that the girls would dare to decorate the rooms that they now live in and makes them keep the doors closed, which you know will only want to make the boys want to open them all the more. “And that was worth all the work the girls had put into decorating their rooms so atrociously.”
You know, I have to admit, while I totally believe that Eddie and possibly Beth would be horrified by anything stereotypically girly, I’m kind of confused by Caroline “Lace Collar” Malloy being disgusted by decorating her room with dolls and ribbons. Didn’t the boys give her a mirror with a bunch of dolls carved around it a few books ago? On a similar note, this may be just my faulty memory, but I do feel like a lot of children’s books from the ’80s to about the mid-2000s had a lot of female characters eschewing traditionally girly likes and hobbies, probably in the name of encouraging little girls to Dare to Be Different. I do think that now that people, particularly women, around my age are growing up and writing books, female characters are a lot more inclusive in their personalities and hobbies. I mean, I get that it was important to show that no, not all girls were into frilly dresses and dolls, but ain’t nothing wrong with girls that are! (I mean, I totally was one of those girls myself.) It’s interesting, is all I’m saying.
Anyway.
Caroline opens the door to see the Hatfords and Bensons, and is surprised at how cleaned-up and “angelic” they look. “On impulse, she curtsied.” Hee! ILU Caroline. The boys are all freakishly polite, and the girls gather in the kitchen to gossip about how ~cute~ the Benson boys are. Even Eddie! She’s got a thing for Steve, apparently, while Beth can’t choose between Tony and Danny. Rough life for Josh, who you will recall was Beth’s boyfriend only one book ago. Has she already forgotten those stolen moments by the swinging bridge, where Josh would pretend to tie his shoe so Beth could catch up to him? The binder paper love notes passed at recess? The Whitman’s chocolates that Peter half-ate on his way to deliver them? Harsh, Beth. Caroline prefers Bill, although if he’s anything like Wally, he’ll be appalled at their one-year age difference. Go for Danny, Caroline!
Blah blah, the boys vacuum up all the food and Mrs. Malloy, “not having sons”, is shocked, shocked, by how much boys can eat. I feel the need to point out here that growing girls are just as hungry as growing boys are, it’s just less socially acceptable for us to stuff our faces like that. Also, the girls go into the kitchen to help her prepare more sandwiches while Papa Malloy stays outside to entertain the Hatfords and Bensons, which I’m putting down as another “weird 1950s time warp moment.” I know my parents never expected me to help make food when people my age were over, and none of my friends’ parents did either. And then the ladies talk about “what pie was being offered at Ethel’s Bakery this month” while the menfolk talk about football scores. I’m just going to leave this here:
Anyway, the boys all go up to the second floor to use the bathroom, but pretend like they didn’t look in the girls’ rooms, thus depriving the Malloys of a wacky reaction to their interior decorating. So that happened. Then, presumably in a move to make us try to believe that this book takes place in the ’90s, Tony mentions that they kept their computer in the basement. (Hee! Remember when there was a “computer room” in the house, because there was only one computer? Good times.) The Malloys don’t keep their Windows 95 down there, but they do have table tennis and a pachinko table, which…what? The only person I know who plays pachinko is my Japanese grandpa. Is one of the Malloys secretly Asian? Is Buckman not lily-white after all? I have so many questions.
Anyway, the kids all head down to play table tennis, and now that they’re away from their parents, the Hatford/Benson Powers put their plan into motion, by loudly whispering that Caroline totally looks like Annabelle, don’t you think? And Caroline, of course, can never leave well enough alone, and plays right into their hands: “Who’s Annabelle?” The boys are like, “NOBODY. A GIRL. She might’ve lived in your house.” Caroline helpfully tells them that there was, in fact, an Annabelle living in Buckman — you will remember she was played by Beth in the Buckman community play, in the lead-up to Beth and Josh’s middle school romance. The boys tell them about the diary page they found in Tony’s room — “That’s Caroline’s room now,” Wally supplies, and none of the girls think to ask how the hell he knows that — and promise to show it to the girls sometime. The girls are hooked.
After tea, the boys cackle over their ingenious plan, and also, they drew all over the girls’ room decorations. Nice. Anyway, Wally is still skeptical about the master plan: they have a diary page and all, but how is that going to help them prank the girls? To which Tony reveals possibly the most convoluted plan ever devised by an 11-year-old:
- He’s going to tell the girls that every March 22nd, he was woken up by a tapping on the wall, and the ghost of Annabelle looking for her sister, Kathleen. Of course, Annabelle’s always left Tony alone, because he’s a boy and has cooties and everything, but Caroline isn’t, sooooooo~*~*~
- And March 22nd is Tuesday, so~*~*~ (Hilariously, the boys ascertain this by looking at a Mark McGwire calendar. The ’90s!)
- So Tony is going to make Caroline hear tapping noises coming from her wall…
- Because the room next to Caroline’s is the bathroom…
- And Tony “just happens” to know that if someone is tapping on the pipes in the basement, the sound travels upstairs…
- And when they were in the basement playing table tennis earlier, Tony complained that it was too hot, and opened a window…
- And didn’t lock it again, so they can get back in later.
Jesus. Tony needs a life in the worst way.
So on Sunday, after the Bensons go to church — which I’m kind of surprised by, since apart from saying “Lordy” a lot, the Hatfords and Malloys are weirdly nonreligious, for white people living in a small town — the boys set off to help Jake (and Josh, but mostly Jake) practice baseball so they’ll make it onto the “Buckman Badgers” when school starts up again. That’s…yeah. There really isn’t much to do in Buckman, huh? Do they even have a TV?
Anyway, the baseball diamond is already occupied. By Eddie, naturally. The boys are all taken aback that a giiiirl is good at baseball, and Tony makes another Mark McGwire reference. Hee! Anyway, the girls immediately stop playing to pester the boys about the diary page — Steve and Tony protest for a bit and tell Eddie how awesome she is at baseball, but the girls aren’t having it — so Tony fishes it out and tells the girls about how he was “waked” up every year by Annabelle. He heard creepy tapping noises! He felt cold fingers stroking his forehead! (Maybe Annabelle was checking to see if he had a fever. She was looking out for you, Tony!) And when did this all happen? March 22nd, of course. The girls have a better inner calendar than the boys do, because they realize that’s Tuesday without having to check with Mark McGwire.
Later, the girls discuss — Beth can’t believe how nice they are (because she wants to hold hands with Tony on the way to the playground), Caroline can’t believe Annabelle slept in her room, and Eddie can’t believe it actually happened. Beth loses it and is like, “I WANT TO BELIEVE” because she’s a loser. So the girls decide to do some investigating, and indeed, there’s a panel right by the light switch where Tony said it would be. Caroline is fully into this story now, and begs Beth and Eddie to sleep with her on March 22nd. They agree, but totally aren’t taking it seriously.
It rains the rest of the week, and finally it’s Tuesday. Meanwhile, Beth and Eddie are like, pining after the Hatfords. “The thing of it was, Caroline realized, the more the boys ignored them — politely, of course — the more her sisters wanted to see them.” Ha! Middle school love. They eventually decide to go to Oldakers’ Bookstore, in the hopes of running into the boys. Beth is like, “Let’s act casual, because we totally aren’t looking for them” and Eddie agrees, all, “We don’t want them to think we like them!” And Caroline’s like, “But we are looking for them, and you do like them?” because she doesn’t quite grasp middle school dating rituals yet. (I remember in sixth grade, one of my friends liked this guy in another class, and she used to make us go with her in this big group to say hi to him, and we basically all had to act like it was our idea to say hi and we had just ~dragged~ her along, even though she was the only one who even knew who he was. I mean, there are some complex social interactions at work in middle school.)
Anyway, so the girls ~casually~ run into the boys at Oldakers’, but pretend not to notice them in the store (they’re checking out Jerry Spinelli books! YA author of my youth, right there, along with Lois Lowry). This also reminds me of the summer between sixth and seventh grade, when my friends and I went to the mall and ran into a group of boys from a public school (we went to Catholic school), and we were sort of following each other around the mall, and one of my friends was like, “Okay, when we walk past them, we have to be casual” and I accidentally was like, “SURE, CASUAL!” really loudly as we went by them and my friends never let me hear the end of it.
Sorry, where was I? Right. Caroline trips over Wally’s feet, and Danny Benson helps her up, and Caroline basically falls in love on the spot (and none for Bill, bye!). Meanwhile, Eddie is ~flirting~ with Steve, while Beth is making googly eyes at Tony. Hee!
So the girls tell the boys about their plan to sleep in the same room that night, and Steve says that he thinks Tony might be imagining things, because he went to the Nancy Drew School of Throwing People Off Your Trail. Beth, who ~wants to believe~, isn’t having it.
Night comes and the girls all pile into Caroline’s bed together — Mr. Malloy is like, “Uh, that bed can barely fit two people” but Mrs. Malloy is like, “Eh, it’s spring vacation. Do what you want,” which is the weirdest justification for anything ever. But I mean, okay. The girls make snacks and paint each other’s nails and recite poetry (o…kay) together and not gonna lie, stuff like this always made me want a sister when I was little. Anyway, eventually they all drop off to sleep around eleven (weaksauce tbh), but then Caroline is ~waked up~ by…tapping on the walls! “IT’S COMING FOR ME!” Caroline shrieks. Ha! I love her.
Casa Hatford, a few hours earlier. Jake, Josh, Steve, and Tony naturally don’t want Wally, Bill, and Danny coming along to the Malloys’ house, because they’re, like, a whole grade younger. They’re practically fetuses! Wally insists that they should all come along, “to help Tony make his getaway.” Heh. The older boys finally agree, but say that they’re going over around one in the morning (which is totally a lie), and of course WBD can’t stay awake that long. Wally doesn’t even want to go anyway — he can’t exactly say he broke into one of his classmates’ houses for his spring project, and it’s not like hanging out with the Malloys ever ends well for any of them (especially him) anyway. But he wants to look cool in front of Bill and Danny, bless. Mrs. Hatford asks if WBD want to have popcorn with Peter and Doug, and Wally is all annoyed that she’s treating them like babies. He gets even more annoyed when she asks the older boys if they want a snack, but doesn’t make them have popcorn. “Naturally, they got to choose whatever they wanted!” Wally is getting his seventh-grade angst phase on early, I see.
Anyway, Peter and Doug pass out at nine-thirty, the parents Hatford go to bed at ten, and at around ten-forty, Wally realizes the older boys have snuck out without them. Aw, that’s just rude. Wally is the John French of this operation, apparently. They scramble on over to the Malloys’ house, where the older boys have already broken into the basement. Blah blah Tony taps on the pipes for a while blah. All the boys have a hearty chuckle, until Jake is like, “Hey, Wally, quit bumping against me” and Wally’s like, “I’m all the way over here though?” and then they realize the abaguchie is like, literally right next to Jake. Abaguchie mania! It’s been 60 pages, I was getting worried. The boys all run like crazy, although Tony is mostly just annoyed that the abaguchie ruined his Spring Offensive. Tony! Have some perspective!
Back at Casa Malloy, the girls are still freaking out. Caroline decides to try to talk Annabelle out of her presumably murderous ghost rampage, because she is the best. “She would be known far and wide as Caroline Lenore Malloy, the girl who talked to a ghost. Well, she’d be known around school, anyway.” Hee! Of course, in the middle of her speech, Papa Malloy walks in and is like, “Are you talking to yourself?” Eddie asks why he’s up, and he says he heard a sort of knocking sound. The ghost is real, you guys! Anyway, he tells him that it’s almost midnight, and by the time he leaves, it’s already March 23rd. Caroline and Beth are disappointed that the ghost isn’t coming back for another year, but Eddie is suspicious. There’s a mystery afoot! I’m not sure Eddie is the type to read Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys, though. She seems more like a Three Investigators girl to me.
The next morning, Caroline is scandalized to realize that she’s woken up at two past ten. “She’d slept away half the morning!” Oh, Caroline. Just wait until you’re a teenager. Beth crawls out of bed at around ten-thirty, by which time Eddie has already gone to and come back from the library, where she’s been doing some fact-checking. And as it turns out, Tony, much like Douglas Haig, has not planned his offensive very well. “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” wasn’t written until 1876. Island Avenue didn’t have a road bridge in 1867 (which makes sense when you realize that 1867 was still the time of horse-drawn buggies and all). Also, the Malloy/Benson house didn’t even exist in 1867 — it’s apparently 90 years old. If this book is set around the same time that it was published (2001), that would make it built in 1911. (This actually disproves my time warp theory, since 90 years after 1867 would be 1957.) Beth and Caroline are disappointed, naturally, but Eddie has a plan. She’s the Ludendorff to Tony’s Haig, I guess.
Roll back to last night, where the boys are still all aflutter from having seen the abaguchie. The boys realize they can’t tell anyone about this, seeing as they’d then have to explain why they’re hanging out at the Malloys’ house in the middle of the night. They really do seem to get in this predicament a lot, don’t they? They all troop back to Casa Hatford, but of course the window in the older boys’ room has been shut somehow, and the door is locked. Tony’s like, “No worries, I have a skeleton key” but wait! It’s gone!
“‘We are in deep, deep doo-doo,’ said Bill.” Indeed.
And then Mr. Hatford, “in his striped pajamas”, opens the door and busts them. Heh. He asks if they were horsing around at the Malloys’ house, and Josh is like “Sort of?” and then Mr. Hatford says, “And did the Malloy girls sort of come outside and horse around with you?” to which “Wally was surprised to see the older boys blush.”
Errrrrrr…what?
I mean, in hindsight, I feel like this is probably just an oblique reference to the older boys having crushes on the girls or something, but I remember reading this at the age of eleven or so and being absolutely scandalized.
Anyway, that weird moment aside, Wally takes the opportunity to change the subject by telling Papa Hatford that they saw the abaguchie — or the cougar as it’s now called, so I might as well switch to that terminology too. Mr. Hatford immediately forgets his sons’ weird obsession with visiting a bunch of girls in the middle of the night and peeping into their windows, and yells at them for going out at night when there’s a cougar around. The boys are all relieved that Mr. Hatford didn’t get too mad, although Tony is still sulking about his key chain. Whatever, Tony.
Casa Malloy, where we left off. As soon as Mrs. Malloy is out of the way (she’s off to a meeting of the “faculty wives” which, again, sounds so fantastically ’50s I don’t know what to make of it), Eddie rings up the Hatfords and begs them to come over, because the girls are just too scared to be on their own. The boys smugly agree, and show up beaming. The girls, of course, have made up a story about seeing Annabelle’s ghost, who was looking for someone, but they couldn’t figure out who. She left behind a clue, though: a horseshoe key chain. Tony’s like O_O and all the boys are like “Dude! Annabelle is coming for you!”
Of course, then a thumping sound starts in the pipes for real, and Wally, who is mortally afraid of the ghost (and probably of being sued by her somehow), suggests that maybe they should go. And then Caroline, bless her, ruins the whole thing by shrieking, “Don’t go! That was for real!” Oh, Caroline. You will recall, of course, that Tony dropped his keys on his way out of the Malloy house, and Eddie found them in the basement later. The thumping continues, and someone knocks at the door, and all the kids basically have a collective heart attack.
Anyway, at the door is a guy from “Upshur County Water and Sewer”, who was bleeding the air from the pipes since Papa Malloy complained about weird tapping noises. The kids all let out a hearty chuckle, and the Bensons immediately start making fun of the Malloys for not knowing that the thumping noise was air in the pipes, because duh, naturally. And then the Malloys start making fun of them for doing inadequate research (I bet Tony’s social studies grade isn’t too great), and Steve sort of playfully swats Eddie with a newspaper, because he liiiikes her. The boys tell the girls about seeing the cougar, and after a moment, Steve is like, “What if we caught the cougar, though?” And then they all start hatching a plan to trap the cougar in the Malloys’ garage, because there’s nothing like the collective dumbness of a bunch of middle schoolers. They decide to put a chicken in the garage, then have someone in the loft who can close the garage door by leaning out of the window with a fishing pole (or something, idk). Wally is becoming hip to the jive, because he immediately knows it’s going to be him stuck in the loft. And it totally is (spoiler!). Although Eddie, for her part, points out that a giiiirl could totally be the person in the loft, too! But sorry, Eddie. It wouldn’t be a Hatford/Malloy book without something hilariously terrible happening to Wally.
So now having joined forces, which ruins any more WWI jokes I was going to make, the boys and the girls start planning. They have to switch the loft plan, since the likelihood of Wally being able to lean out the window and work the latch opening of the garage doors with a fishpole in the dark is…not the greatest. So, new plan! Now Wally will just hang out on the back porch (you know, where both his parents and the Malloys are really tired of finding the Hatfords) until the girls give him the signal, at which point he’ll run to the garage and close the door. See? This is what happens when kids don’t have TV.
Meanwhile, the girls go off to buy a chicken for the cougar to eat. Eddie makes a joke about using Caroline as bait. I feel like she’s not quite grasping the gravitas of the situation. That night, Mrs. Hatford sends over some KFC for the kids to eat in the garage, which I think is the second or third time these books have name-dropped KFC. I’m assuming there’s money in this for Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. The kids have a “boisterous picnic” which, you know, okay. I’m sure they did. And then the boys head on home, though Jake and Josh assure Wally that sneaking out won’t be a problem — his parents barely notice him when he’s at home, so it’s not like they’ll notice when he’s gone, lol!
So Wally comes back at around 10, but forgets to turn off his flashlight when he’s in the loft, which definitely won’t wake the parents Malloy up. Caroline heads out and sees the cougar heading into the garage — they haven’t even put the chicken bait out yet, but the cougar is apparently after the KFC. This is truly excellent product placement for KFC.
So Caroline locks the cougar in the garage with Wally. Nice.
Earlier at Casa Hatford. Wally gears up to go wait for the cougar — he’s wearing two pairs of pants and three shirts. That seems excessive. On the upside, the cougar probably wouldn’t be able to bite through all those layers. Anyway. Blah blah gladiator facing the lions blah. Wally is so dramatic. He and Caroline are really meant to be, tbh. Wally waits, the cougar comes, Caroline locks them in the garage. Wally, for once, isn’t afraid of being sued, but instead of the cougar eating his chin. That’s weirdly specific.
Caroline, meanwhile, has gone the sensible route of screaming until everyone in the house is awake. The Malloy parents call 911, and they all go outside to stare at Wally in the loft, or whatever. The police and fire department show up, as does Mr. Hatford, Buckman’s resident postman-policeman. Mr. Hatford is like, “If I live to be a hundred, I will never understand our kids,” and Mr. Malloy concurs. Man, maybe if you guys bought a TV or hooked the Internet up to your computers, maybe they’d have something to do in their free time besides capture wild animals. Playstations existed in the year 2001!
(Even weirder, now that I think about it — if the series’ setting is meant to be around the time that they were published, that actually makes Caroline and Wally around my age. I was 8 in 2001. Weird.)
The firemen put up a ladder and get Wally down, and they get animal control to come and tranquilize the cougar. That ended well! The kids all high-five each other and get their picture taken for the newspaper. Wally is presumably not traumatized at all by any of this. He’s actually pretty thrilled, and is excited to have something to tell to the class for Miss Applebaum’s project. What if Miss Applebaum assigned actual homework? Like, with learning and stuff? Maybe that would keep them busy.
The next day, the paper comes out, and Caroline and Wally are the only kids to be mentioned by name. They are the main characters, as much as this series has main characters, after all. Mr. Hatford is like, “What were you thinking?” and Wally is like, “That I was about to die.” Ha! Mrs. Hatford wails over how she’d miss Wally if he died. Aw! Also, Mr. Benson mentions that the kids are also on TV. So they do have a TV! They watch the local news, which I think is the first and last mention of a TV program in this series. (Danny “yelps” when he realizes they’re going to watch TV, presumably because he’s never seen a TV show in his life.) TV doesn’t look like a word anymore.
The boys troop over to show the girls the newspaper, which is basically a flimsy excuse to see them — Mr. Benson even offers to take them to the movies, which sounds like it should be pretty exciting to a bunch of kids that don’t watch TV or go online, but nope. Instead, they hang out with the girls, and Wally is scandalized to see that Steve and Eddie are sitting next to each other. “They were practically touching!” THE HORROR. The potential cooties!
Finally, the day comes that the Bensons have to return to Georgia. The boys all come over to say goodbye. Tony teases Beth about seeing ghosts because he liiiikes her. Steve was going to slip a note under Eddie’s door, because they are totally seventh-grade dating now. Which is way more serious than sixth-grade dating, you know. And Caroline is making everyone crazy by bragging about her role in capturing the cougar, because it’s Caroline, and Bill needles her a little about hoping she gets laryngitis and isn’t able to talk for a month. Oh, Bill. And then the boys head out, and Beth and Eddie sigh over missing them. Caroline’s like, “But isn’t it nice to not have them around tracking mud everywhere and generally being dicks?” And Beth and Eddie are like, “No.” Heh.
Caroline hears tapping again that night and freaks out for five minutes, but it turns out to actually be water in the pipes. Yeah.
School starts again, and the kids walk to school together. Beth and Eddie walk with Jake and Josh, and Wally walks with Caroline. Real talk, when I was nine, the fact that they ~walked to school together~ was enough to make me ship them for days. Baby Emily was a sap. Caroline tries to talk Wally into reenacting their capture of the cougar in front of the class (featuring Peter as the cougar, lol), and he just kind of smiles and rolls with it. Friendship!
THE END.
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