Happy Birthday, Sophie Hartley

  Happy Birthday, Sophie Hartley

  Stephanie Greene

  *

  Clarion Books

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston • New York

  2010

  Clarion Books

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003

  Text copyright © 2010 by Stephanie Greene

  The text was set in 13-point Worces Round.

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greene, Stephanie.

  Happy birthday, Sophie Hartley / by Stephanie Greene.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A girl in a large family is looking forward to her first “double digit” birthday,

  but soon discovers that growing up brings some unwanted changes.

  ISBN 978-0-547-25128-8

  [1. Birthdays—Fiction. 2. Change—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.

  4. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G8434Hap 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009023346

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  4500222822

  *

  For Megan Marshall,

  the best consultant ever!

  ONE

  On the whole, Sophie felt that the conversation about her birthday present had gone very well.

  She’d decided to talk to her father about it first. Sophie liked talking to him about things. He could be more reasonable than her mother. Especially when he was watching TV.

  Especially when he was watching football on TV.

  Sophie checked to make sure he had a soda and a bowl of chips before she perched lightly on the arm of the couch next to his chair and whispered, “Dad?”

  She knew from experience that it was a good idea to whisper her requests. When she whispered, he didn’t always answer “What’d your mother say?” the way he did at other times.

  “Dad?” she whispered again.

  Mr. Hartley leaned his head toward her ever so slightly, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the screen, and said, “Hmm?”

  “You know how I always ask for a dog or a cat for my birthday?” Sophie whispered.

  “Hmm?” Mr. Hartley said again. Then he suddenly leaped to his feet, shouted “Go! Go! What are you waiting for, you cowards?” and shook his fist at the TV.

  Sophie waited patiently until he settled into his chair again and took a swig of his soda before she went on. “I don’t want one this year,” she said. “I want a baby gorilla.”

  If she absolutely had to, she was prepared to add, “It could be my birthday present and my Christmas present.”

  Luckily, she didn’t have to make such a rash promise. Mr. Hartley gave a little start, as if Sophie had woken him up from a deep sleep, and cried, “What? Oh, Sophie! Wonderful! Run and get me some more chips, there’s a good girl,” absently patting her knee as he turned back to the TV.

  Sophie hopped up to get the chips. “Wonderful!” he’d said. Her father hardly ever said “Wonderful!” about anything. It was as good as a “Yes” in her book.

  It took a bit of practice, but she finally did it.

  Hunched over the piece of paper on the floor of the family room, holding her pencil between her big toe and the one next to it, Sophie wrote her name in spidery letters with her foot. Her foot kept cramping from the effort, and she had to stop and massage it several times before she could go on.

  It was a good thing gorillas had short names, like Kiki. They were easier to write.

  Sophie had fallen in love with gorillas after watching a program on TV about a baby gorilla that was being raised by people in a zoo. It wore diapers and drank from a bottle like a real baby. Sophie thought it looked like a real baby, except much cuter.

  She had promptly taken out all the gorilla books she could find from the school’s media center. She especially liked the one about the woman who’d moved to Africa to live with gorillas and had died trying to protect them.

  Passionate, the book called the woman. Sophie loved that word. Deep in her heart she knew she was passionate. She would be willing to die to protect something she loved, too. Of course, she didn’t want to have to do it until she was really old, and she didn’t want it to hurt.

  But she was definitely passionate.

  Another book said gorillas had brains like people and were very smart. At one zoo, a scientist named Dr. Pimm was teaching a baby gorilla how to communicate using sign language.

  Because Sophie didn’t know sign language, and because all these animals seemed to do so many things with their feet, she decided to teach herself how to write with her feet, so she could communicate with her gorilla when she got it.

  The idea was a little confusing, even to Sophie, but she kept at it. Her mother wouldn’t be able to resist when Sophie told her that gorillas didn’t scratch furniture or dig holes, and that Sophie was going to be able to write notes to her gorilla telling it what not to do.

  She was about to dot the i in her name when two arms wrapped themselves around her neck and a high-pitched voice demanded, “Wide! Wide!”

  “Not now, Maura,” Sophie said. She grabbed her baby sister’s hands and tried to pry them from around her neck. Maura promptly lifted her feet off the ground, dangling her entire sixteen-month-old body weight down Sophie’s back.

  It was Maura’s newest trick, and very effective. Sophie could barely breathe.

  “Maura, no!” she cried, wrenching her sister’s hands apart and dumping her on her bottom. Maura wailed and kicked her heels against the floor.

  Sophie ignored her.

  It was the only thing to do when Maura had a temper tantrum. She had them a lot these days. Mrs. Hartley said it was because Maura was going through the “terrible twos.”

  “What do you mean?” Sophie had said. “She’s only sixteen months.”

  “Well then, she’s ahead of herself,” her mother said. “Gifted. All of my children are gifted.”

  Sophie personally thought Maura was spoiled. She’d refused to walk for the longest time because so many people in the family were willing to carry her. When Mrs. Hartley made them stop, Maura had started staggering around the house, pulling magazines off tables and books from bookshelves.

  Nothing was safe from her grasping hands: pots and pans, dishes on the table, toilet paper, which she delighted in unrolling until all that was left was the cardboard tube. All Mrs. Hartley ever did was say “No, Maura” in a lot nicer voice than she used with everyone else in the family.

  For Sophie, the final straw had come the week before. When Maura walked across one of Sophie’s wet paintings in her bare feet, Mrs. Hartley had made it sound as if it were Sophie’s fault.

  “For heaven’s sake, work at the kitchen table!” her mother said as she sat Maura on the edge of the sink and held her red, blue, and green feet under the tap.

  “But I always paint lying on the floor,” Sophie protested. “I think better when I’m on my stomach.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to think sitting up until Maura’s older,” her mother said. “Honestly, Sophie, use your head.”

  Sophie was insulted. She went straight up to her room and drew a picture of a baby with a red face, a huge circle for a mouth, a few teeth, and waterfalls of tears gushing out of bo
th eyes. She wrote DANGER: FLOOD ZONE under it and taped it to Maura’s bedroom door.

  She also decided that since it was obvious her mother wasn’t going to teach Maura any manners, she’d have to do it herself.

  Lesson number one would be patience.

  “You can’t have everything you want, the minute you want it,” Sophie said, crouching over her paper again. “I’ll give you a piggyback ride when I’m finished.”

  Maura stopped kicking the floor and started kicking Sophie’s back instead. Sophie scooted sideways on her bottom until she was out of Maura’s reach and, using her best teacher-like voice, said, “I’m not going to play with you until you learn patience.”

  “Patience? Who’re you kidding?” Sophie’s older sister, Nora, had made her entrance. She tossed her backpack on the couch and made for the family computer. “Number one, you don’t know what patience is, Sophie,” she said scornfully. ‘And number two, Maura’s still a baby.”

  As she sat down, Nora frowned at the pencil between Sophie’s toes. “What’re you doing?” she asked. Then, very quickly, “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  It was too late.

  Sophie was so used to Nora’s not wanting to hear what she had to say that she took even an idle question as encouragement. If Sophie stopped talking whenever someone in her family wanted her to, she’d never get to explain any of her ideas.

  Sophie thought her ideas were interesting.

  “One of the biggest differences between primates and Man is that primates don’t have thumbs,” she explained to her sister’s back. “No, wait. Gorillas do have thumbs. They even have thumbs on their feet.”

  Sophie cheerfully bopped herself on the forehead a few times and shook her head to rattle her ideas into their proper place in her brain before she went on. “But they can’t write, so scientists are teaching them how to speak.”

  She cheated a bit by steadying the pencil with her hand as she wrote. “Well, not speak, exactly, but make signs people can read. Sign language, it’s called. I thought I’d try to write using my feet to make it equal.”

  Nora had stopped typing. She was sitting with her fingers poised above the keyboard, staring at Sophie over her shoulder. When Sophie felt her sister’s eyes on her, she looked up and smiled.

  It was gratifying to think Nora found gorillas as interesting as she did.

  “When I get my baby gorilla, I mean,” Sophie told her. “For my birthday.”

  “Do you have any idea how little sense that makes?” At thirteen, Nora had a way of disdainfully curling her mouth whenever Sophie talked, as if Sophie were saying something ridiculous. “Gorillas are learning sign language, so you’re going to write with your feet?” she said. “I mean, like, none, Sophie.”

  Sophie tried to think back to what she’d actually said. She’d been so intent on putting a little smiley face over the i in her name that she couldn’t remember. It had sounded all right inside her head.

  “I don’t know why Mom doesn’t have you tested,” Nora said, sighing heavily as she turned back to the keyboard. “Half the time, the front part of what you say doesn’t have anything to do with the end part, and the rest is so insane, none of it makes sense.”

  “Tested for what?” Sophie said gamely. She found tests interesting. If she didn’t always answer the questions the way she was supposed to, it wasn’t her fault. Lots of times, there seemed to be more than one answer.

  On those horrible end-of-grade tests, Sophie didn’t do nearly as well as she thought she should. She blamed the tests.

  “I don’t know, but there’s got to be an explanation.” Nora was typing furiously in response to the little boxes popping up all over the computer screen like tiny message bombs. “It’s as if you’re not dealing with a full deck or something,” she said, pecking away.

  “Mom said I was gifted,” said Sophie. “So there.”

  “Idiot savant is more like it.” Nora typed a bit more, then suddenly jumped as though the seat had shocked her and cried, “Omigod!” in a pleased voice. “I don’t believe it!”

  “What? One of your boyfriends again?”

  “It’s none of your business!” Nora cried, plastering her arms and upper body across the computer screen. “Stop reading my mail!”

  It wasn’t as if she were holding a pair of binoculars to her eyes, Sophie thought disgustedly. Nora had been acting nuts lately. It was all because she had become boy crazy over the past few months.

  She and her friends giggled and shrieked about boys so much, you would have thought they’d never seen one before. Sophie didn’t understand why Nora found them so interesting. Especially after living with their brothers, John and Thad.

  Boys were—well, boys were either boring or annoying, as far as Sophie could see. The boys in her class walked around flapping their arms with their hands in their armpits to make farting noises. They read joke books, too, then told dumb jokes that nobody laughed at except other boys.

  “I don’t see why you make such a big deal about boys,” Sophie said. “They’re exactly the same as girls. You’re being sexist.”

  Sexist was a new word some of the girls in Sophie’s class were using. It meant someone who thought boys were better than girls. The girls said boys were sexist. And here was Nora acting sexist herself.

  “Right, Sophie. Exactly the same,” Nora said. “That shows how much you know, you baby.”

  Sophie was about to defend herself when Maura grabbed a fistful of Sophie’s hair and tried to pull herself to her feet. Sophie yelped and yanked her hair out of her sister’s hands, sending Maura onto her bottom again. At that second, their mother appeared in the doorway.

  It was Thursday, which meant Mrs. Hartley had started work at 7:30 in the morning, picked Maura up at daycare at 4:00 and dropped her at home, and then gone to pick up John at his tae kwon do class at 4:45. She was always tired by the time she got home on Thursdays.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sophie,” her mother said. She snatched Maura up before she could utter her first scream and took a quick sniff of Maura’s diaper. “You’re getting too old to fight with a two-year-old.”

  “She pulled my hair,” Sophie said, rubbing the back of her head.

  “That’s because you dig in.” Her mother glanced at the pencil between Sophie’s toes as she turned to leave. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Communicating with apes,” Nora told her.

  “That, I can believe,” said Mrs. Hartley.

  TWO

  Sophie decided to announce the news at dinner to give everyone plenty of time to think of good gorilla presents for her birthday. She was very glad to hear they were having spaghetti. Everyone in the family loved spaghetti.

  When she heard they were having apple pie with vanilla ice cream for dessert, Sophie decided to announce it then. Knowing how good apple pie with vanilla ice cream made her feel, she was sure they’d all be in such generous moods, they’d come up with wonderful present ideas.

  She sat all through dinner with a smile on her face, anticipating how excited everyone was going to be when they heard her news.

  “There’s an awful lot of hammering going on in the garage, Dad,” Thad said as he helped himself to seconds. “Can’t build a new car out of wood.”

  “Got a few big birthdays coming up!” said Mr. Hartley, twirling his spaghetti around his fork. “I seem to remember you loved that set of wheels I built for you when you were little.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m big now,” said Thad. “Go-carts don’t cut it in high school. I need the real thing.”

  “Besides,” Nora said, “with all due respect, Dad, if Thad drove anything you made, he’d be putting his life in danger.”

  “You’re telling me,” John said glumly.

  Ever since Mrs. Hartley gave Mr. Hartley a table saw last Christmas, he’d spent most of his spare time in the shop behind the garage. So far, when he wasn’t driving his truck somewhere for the moving company, he’d built a bookshelf
with crooked shelves, two tables with uneven legs, and a bench for the mudroom.

  John had been the only member of the family brave enough to give it a try. It collapsed the minute he sat on it.

  Mrs. Hartley immediately went out and bought Mr. Hartley a book on building. He hadn’t shown up in the house with any new projects in quite a while. The Hartley children still exchanged nervous looks whenever they heard the whine of the saw.

  “Go ahead. Make fun of me,” Mr. Hartley said now. “I’m getting the hang of this thing.”

  “You can make something for my birthday, Dad,” Sophie said, thinking that even he couldn’t ruin a cage.

  “Why don’t you make something for Maura’s room?” Nora suggested as she reached for the last piece of garlic bread. “She can’t tell the difference.”

  “Nice, Nora. Setting up your baby sister,” said Thad. He snatched the bread from under her hand.

  “Thad! That’s mine!”

  ‘Apparently, it’s mine.”

  “Tom…” said Mrs. Hartley.

  “Right.” Mr. Hartley snatched the bread from Thad and ate it himself. “Mmmm,” he said. “Delicious.”

  The flabbergasted silence that followed was too good to pass up. They could celebrate her news over dessert. Sophie opened her mouth to speak, but another voice beat her to it.

  “I’m moving up to the attic.”

  Everyone, including Sophie, looked at Nora.

  “I am,” Nora said. She sat up straight and looked defiantly around the table. “Mom said I could.”

  “Moving?” Sophie said. “Why?”

  “I need my own space.”

  “Why don’t you move to Montana?” said Thad. “I hear there’s plenty of space out there.”

  “But you have your own space,” said Sophie. “In our room.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I need my own space, too,” said John.

  “You have your own room, John.” Mrs. Hartley pointed to his plate. “Finish your salad or no dessert.”

  “There’s no heat in the attic, is there, Dad?” Thad said hopefully. “Any chance Nora will freeze to death?”

  “The room on the left gets some heat through the vent,” said Mr. Hartley. “But Thad’s right, Nora. It’ll be a bit chilly in the winter.”