Abigail Rath Versus Bloodsucking Fiends

after. You want to come?”
“I dunno,” said Marty.
“It’ll be fun,” I said.
“I’ll have to call my mom.”
I put my arm around her shoulder. “Vince is meeting us there. Also Coral, and her brother Austin Von Trapp.”
“Oh,” said Marty, her own eyes sparkly. “It’ll be like a double date.”
“Yes! Just like a double date with three girls,” I said. “Let’s get out there.”
I practiced my backwards skating, like the other advanced students. While we weren’t supposed to engage in horseplay at the rink, this was an important skill for competitive skaters to master. Marty fell down a lot, so the goalie gear was looking to be a smart idea. Her mom green-lighted the ice cream experience. After class we bundled into the car with Dad chauffeur style, both of us tucked in the back seat.
Marty decided it would be a good time to talk about my Huck Finn paper.
I am a diligent student. From my mighty vocabulary, you might guess that I am a literature lover, but English is so boring. The teacher, Mr. Stogdill, who everyone calls Stodgy Stogdill because their moms all did, is a boring guy. He always has his own idea of a poem or story, and no one can ever understand it, except for a few students he likes. Jo and Marty get points from him, and I can’t see any difference in the quality of their answers and mine. Except mine come from me. Which might answer my own question.
I’ll admit this much—perhaps the essay I turned in about how The Scarlet Letter had a great deal in common with Puritans of Purgatory was not anything that he was looking for, but I think that the originality of the essay alone should have gotten me more than a C+.
Most of Thursday’s detention I scribbled away on my next English assignment: discuss Huck and Jim’s relationship in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Marty read my paper for me so I could get some pointers from the expert. I helped her with science, she helped me with English.
“He’s not gonna like it,” she pronounced.
“Why?”
“You don’t talk about Huck and Jim at all.”
“I do!”
Dad parked the car in a parking lot fairly close to the beach. It was the off-season, so we were lucky. When school got out, this place would be packed.
“Okay. You do mention Huck.” Marty opened the car door. “’Why didn’t Huck push the King and the Duke into the water?’”
I had thought that one of my better questions. “I want to know the answer.”
“Abby, it’s not the assignment.”
“What did you write?”
“I wrote about how Huck and Jim were outsiders, and how they only had each other.”
I snorted. “You and everyone else.”
“It’s what he wants. It’s the answer Mr. Stogdill wants. There’s a reason everyone writes about it. It was one of Mark Twain’s main points.”
“I will not sacrifice my originality and spirit of inquiry for a mere grade. Besides, how do you know Mark Twain meant that?”
“Research. You should try it.”
“I am not compromising my work.”
“Suit yourself,” Marty sniffed.
“That’s my girl,” said Dad.
We were across the street from Kaplan Kone. A line snaked out the door, down the block, and onto the pier. I hiked my backpack over my shoulder and led the way to behind the last person. At the end of April, every kid looks forward to the reopening of Kaplan Kone. The current generation of ice cream loving Kaplans is the third. Like monster hunting, running an ice cream shop is a tradition. It’s in your blood.
Most of Kaplan’s business comes in from beach clientele and their drive up window, but there is an old-fashioned ice cream parlor attached. The Kaplans visit their grandchildren in Grand Rapids for the winter, which is definitely the wrong way to do it, if you ask this Californian. Then they only open on the weekends up until Memorial Day while Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan catch up with their friends and stuff.
Vince and I had made the pilgrimage to the first day of Kaplan Kone ever since we were seven. I began to wonder if Mr. or Mrs. Kaplan were monster hunters because we were allowed to come unescorted. Come to think of it, was anyone at Wolcroft in the profession?
Dad poked his nose back in his book. The line went pretty fast. I waved at a couple of guys I recognized from skate night, and then Marty and I were through the door. I didn’t see Vince around, although he could have already got his order and snagged a table. The three of us popped into the shortest counter line. I noted the medium marshmallow shake, the whitest shake of them all, had only gone up twenty cents. It was whiter than new snow in the mountains with the delicious taste of vanilla-y sugar. Yup, I could write dessert menu copy, which could be another choice for a career, now that monster hunting was maybe a no go.
I glanced at Dad. “This is on us, right Dad?”
“Yes. What would you like, Martha?”
Marty swallowed. Another thing that brought us together had been our old-fashioned names, but I liked mine. She did not like hers. “The hot fudge sundae,” she said.
“Good choice,” I said. “Velvety rivers of hot fudge flowing over glaciers of vanilla ice cream.”
“Abby,” said Marty, “that’s goofy.”
“Nope,” I said, “that’s delicious.”
“I’ll have a twist cone,” Dad said.
“Way to get into that first day vibe,” I said.
I scanned the crowd one more time. Vince was here after all. Across from him at the little table in a wire-backed chair was Coral Petrova. The two of them were sharing a soda and two straws. That was sappy and disgusting. What the heck was happening to Vince? This boy-girl stuff might be more dangerous than zombies.