Young Adult Books
DANI SERIES BOOK ONE
EMERGENCY PLAN Or DOOMSDAY LIST
Excerpt
Chapter One
The woman in the red cape is walking against the sharp February breeze, wearing a red-hooded cape and black gloves, and carrying a brown paper bag. She’s holding the bag like you might carry a baby to keep it warm. Dani Sentini has seen her many times before. She’s always on the opposite side of the street and in all sorts of weather. It’s like she’s unfazed. And it’s in the afternoon always, like she’s coming home from work and has stopped off at Fletcher’s Market to pick up some things. She comes from the left and moves to the right down Morgan Street, and Dani stands up from her desk, leans over, and watches her go by. The woman keeps going till she goes down behind a row of old maple trees. Who could she be, wearing that red cape like that? It’s like she fell from the sky from an old fairy tale. All she needs is a wolf walking beside her with a big fat smile on his face.
Dani returns to her seat at her desk—an old wooden office desk with an old wooden chair. Both came from a garage sale. The desk is scratched, and you need a blotter or the writing will show the scratches through the paper. A student scratched their name in the corner—Reggie. Chances are good Reggie is dead now. But the chair is a fancy swivel type, but also made of oak, a pedestal chair so old it has only four lateral legs on squeaky steel casters—probably came out of the nineteenth century and perhaps the first swivel chair ever made. Maybe its maker’s name was Swivel—an old guy smoking a pipe. But Dani wanted it the moment she saw it. An old wood chair like that has character with its curving backrest made with square spindles, the curved arms and the solid feel of it. A writer sitting in a chair like that, soaking up all its ancient memories…well, she would simply be a better writer. And for twenty dollars how could one pass it up?
But the man warned her to watch out. “There are only four legs. You could tip over.”
He had looked at her and said it and she knew where he was looking—a girl with such fat hips, a top-heavy girl.
Watch out, you could tip over!
While listening to one of Enya’s CDs, which causes her to feel both peaceful and expansive, she’s been doing her homework, a math assignment. The ninth graders are learning about household economics this semester. On this topic, she is focused on the increase in prices of groceries from year to year when the prices keep rising. This is not an easy topic to understand, even though the book explains it in clear illustrations.
For example, there’s an illustration of a jar of honey which weighs sixteen ounces and costs five dollars. A year later, the jar costs five dollars and twenty cents, but is now only twelve ounces. The problem is a simple word problem requiring a yes or no answer:
If Donald’s wife, William, made five hundred dollars per week last year and this year she makes five hundred and twenty dollars, is her income keeping up with the increase in the actual cost of the honey that her husband, Donald, has to pay?
[ ] Yes [ ] No.
The perplexing problem gives Dani a headache despite Enya. In the first place, why did they reduce the size to twelve ounces? Secondly, figuring out all these percentages isn’t going to help you cough up the extra twenty cents to pay for less honey than you got before. Donald’ll just have to decide if he wants to buy it, and if he does buy it, maybe William can figure a way to use less. Maybe she can mix a little water with it like Mom does with other things, like milk, prune juice, and frozen orange juice concentrate, and hope that her husband, Donald, doesn’t notice.
Dani is allowed to use a calculator to complete her math assignments. Her teacher even lets her use the calculator for the quizzes and exams. In fact, she’s even allowed to use her textbook during exams. But this seems not to be much help as her math grades hover somewhere around B with an occasional C thrown in for good measure.
You’re not trying, Dani!
It’s like a lot of her other classes. Her absolute worst grades are in gym class where she gets constant C minuses to D minuses, and several times she’s gotten F’s for not completing a unit. Units! These are like track, softball, basketball, tennis, trampoline, gymnastics. You get the idea. There’s even a unit for relay races. God help us! And you’re probably smart enough to figure out which ones she fails to complete. Well, if you guessed trampoline and gymnastics, you’d be about right. As for the others, Dani sees mostly C minuses and D’s, and to be honest, those grades are generous.
But you have to think about this. The trampoline? Seriously? For her, climbing on a trampoline would be about the same as walking on a tightrope at a circus—without a net! And the gymnastic equipment? There’s another one. Is there anybody who actually thinks she could swing for more than two seconds on the rings? Or on the parallel bars? If she tries to hurdle the horse, somebody will get a video of it and put it on the internet, where it’ll go viral. Whatever she manages to do on this equipment, she looks like a big fat bounding ball of Jell-O. No thanks!
Oh, then there’s the rope. What a laugh that is! No matter how hard she tries, she can’t climb up the rope to higher than six inches off the floor, which is accomplished not by climbing, but by jumping. The higher she jumps, the higher she can climb. The measurement is augmented substantially if she holds her feet up and curls her toes.
Nor can she do one whole and complete pushup without a little help from placing her knees on the floor. Nor can she conquer even the first inch of one whole and complete chin-up. For chin-ups, it seems standard for most of the class to get a toe-hold on the wall and leverage up. Then there’s the God-blessed laps around the track. This is achieved by making tiny little steps. It’s a trick she learned from several of the other girls whose gym grades are as bad or worse than hers. A bit of solace in that.
But then there’s English. Dani excels at English. That is, she excels in writing. Although, to be honest, her grades rarely go above a B, as she doesn’t follow too many of the rules of grammar. Her teacher, Mrs. Leaf, is a freaking stickler, scoring her down for the tiniest irregularities.
But Dani complains: “I write free style. It’s my own voice. Language is changing, you know. I do know the rules.”
Then she makes up words. Like for example the word for when you have a good and balanced perspective of things—circumspective. Right there is a great word that should be in the dictionary, but it isn’t.
“There’s no such word, Dani.”
“Well, clearly, there ought to be.”
Thank goodness her writing skills are greatly influenced by her talent for writing stories on topics Mrs. Leaf likes to read about and to say things she likes to hear; otherwise, her grade would hover around a C+. For example, her essay on why boys should be allowed to compete in girls’ sports if they identify as girls; and why girls should be allowed to play boys’ sports if they identify as boys. It’s a simple matter of mind over matter. If a girl thinks she’s a boy, she’s a boy. If a boy thinks he’s a girl, so be it—she’s a he and he’s a she. And they should also go to the locker room of their chosen gender. If the mind is the most powerful organ, a child should have a right to decide certain things for themselves.
Following this logic, Dani’s thoughtful essay (Mrs. Leaf’s term) went on circumspectively to assert that students should also grade their own papers and give themselves the score they feel they’ve earned. Therefore, they should be allowed to move to any grade level at will—depending on their having good grades. Most importantly, they should assign onto themselves their own chosen age group. Unfortunately, Mrs. Leaf gave her an A for the paper, not because she recognized it for the spoof that it was, but because she was at least tepidly inclined to agree.
But Dani, God help her, has a new essay to write now. This one for Home Economics class—Mrs. Kanbury: prepare a grocery list, go to a grocery store and buy some groceries for your home, prepare a meal for your family, and, in a minimum of five typed and double-spaced pages, write about your experience. It’s like a term paper due at the end of the semester, and it’s already nearly March! And, reading the assignment again to be sure, it has to be at least five full typed and double-spaced pages long! It was assigned in January, and she’s been putting it off.
FIVE FULL PAGES?!
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