Free Sample Chapter 1
Who is Fashion Fighter?
I named my tree. No one else knows her name. I used to tell Mom all about my life but not anymore because she’s got a big mouth (that’s what Dad says). And she still calls me Fashion Fighter (my real name is Kylie or “Cheeks”). She especially does it when my aunts and uncles are over, and the whole family’s kicking back, waiting for Dad’s coals to glow red so we can barbeque chicken thighs, hamburgers, and turkey dogs in the backyard.
I can tell by the laughing that Mom’s reminding people about the time I got all dressed up like a superhero wearing as many of my skirts and dresses that I could fit into all at once. I put Mom’s colorful scarf over my head like a movie star and donned sunglasses and high-heeled shoes until I looked smashing in the full-length mirror hanging on my door.
I guess it was taking me a long time to get ready and the whole rest of the family had already left, so Dad yelled, “Hurry up or we’ll miss the fireworks!”
I jumped out of my room like a superhero.
“I am Fashion Fighter,” I yelled back.
Dad thought it was funny. He laughed so hard he rolled on the wooden floor like a puppy dog. And we were really late to the fireworks after that, but neither of us got into trouble with Mom. (Not that time.)
The whole thing was just so embarrassing because I wasn’t Fashion Fighter anymore. I was Fashion Fighter when I was four. I was seven now and all grown-up with more important things to do.
Today my mission was top secret. That’s why it was so important that no one saw where I was building my fort. So I looked over my shoulders to check for witnesses before spidering up and across the alley fence and roof of the backyard storage shed to my secret hiding place beneath Fluffy’s branches. Fluffy was my Mesquite tree, but I wished she was a ferret because I always wanted a ferret as a pet, not a tree. But I didn’t tell her all that, and she was always happy to see me. I could tell because she wriggled her drippy branches to say hello every time.
“Hello, Fluffy,” I’d say every day, climbing beneath her wispy hair and into her arms to the place I was building my fort on the storage shed roof. Sometimes, I would close my eyes and fall asleep against her rocking trunk as breezes kissed my sweaty face. I always felt safe with her, and I was doing my job: being invisible. Being invisible helped Mom with her stress because I wasn’t “under her feet.”
Dad called the storage shed roof “soft as a newborn skull” and “a piece of crap.” He forbade my sisters and me from playing on it. But I’m not worried about getting caught up here because Dad was too busy and, like I said, I wasn’t Fashion Fighter anymore. I wasn’t a superhero who got all the attention. I was the opposite. I was invisible. I was like the ants in the vacant lot sneaking around in their tunnels with crumbs for the winter.
Sometimes, when I wanted to make myself visible so that everyone could see me, all I had to do was skin a knee and cry. Then everyone saw me. They would say, “Oh, Kylie, are you okay? Don’t cry.”
Or I could crawl up into Daddy’s lap, pucker my lips, and make my hands into lobster claws opening and shutting. “Lobster kisses,” Daddy would say, making his own lobster face and claws and kissing me back. But I was only visible when I wanted to be. All the other minutes in the day when I was working on my top secret mission, I was the opposite. I was invisible.
I sat down on the milk crate in my fort and pulled my right pocket inside out, spilling pennies all over the pieces of used carpeting I’d brought up from the trashcans in the alley. Pennies were my favorite. Just like me, they were everywhere, and nobody noticed. I could fill a pocketful of unwanted pennies every day and never get into trouble. The word stealing didn’t seem to apply to pennies, so I was always scooping them up every chance I got. I’d learned my lesson about the silver stuff. But never had anyone ever mentioned missing pennies. Not even Maisy, my second oldest sister. So it’s more like a rescue mission.
I pulled my left pocket inside out. A broken piece of chalk, two toothbrushes, and some fuzz fell out. I rescued the chalk from school. Most of the classrooms had whiteboards and markers. But the ladies in the cafeteria still wrote the school menus in blue chalk. I put the stubby piece that I rescued from the cafeteria floor in a shoebox containing its brothers, sisters, and some of its cousins: pieces of yellow, white, pink, and orange chalk. I started rescuing these little guys to help me draw out my top secret strategies on the lap-sized chalkboard I kept hidden under one of Fluffy’s bendy elbows. The blue chalk seemed happy, especially next to the pink.
“Hi, guys. I missed you,” I imagined Mr. Stubby Blue Chalk saying.
“We missed you too,” I imagined Ms. Pinky Crumbly Chalk replying.
The toothbrushes looked new. I’d rescued them just in time, their hair and imaginary faces still in place. I put them with their family members in a dry fishbowl. (I also put marbles in there, but I didn’t find any today.) I delighted at the toothbrush colors: pink, neon orange, and green; navy blue, light blue, and neon blue; and yellow. And red and purple … So many colors made me smile. I was doing my job. The small, invisible things were being rescued, and my top secret mission was going ahead perfectly. |
 |
Enter to Win!
You could win your very own eBook of "Fashion Fighter" by Deborah O'Dowd.
Sign up for the Deborah O'Dowd Mailing list and be entered to win.
|
