Boys Start the War by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Author:Phyllis Reynolds Naylor [Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ages 9 and up
ISBN: 9780307514851
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 1993-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

It was almost too delicious to think about. All through dinner that evening Wally tried not to smile, but whenever he caught Josh’s or Jake’s eye, he felt the corners of his mouth turning up just a bit at the edges.

“Well, how did the window cleaning go?” Mr. Hatford asked as he passed the peas.

“Did you get better acquainted with the Malloy girls?” asked their mother. “What are they like?”

“A Whomper, a Weirdo, and a Crazie,” replied Peter.

“Just girls, Mom, that’s all,” Wally said quickly.

Mrs. Hatford helped herself to the ravioli in the center clothe table. “Did Mrs. Malloy say anything more about my cake?”

“No.…”

Mom looked disappointed, Wally thought.

There was a little framed motto on the wall of the dining room: If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, it said. Maybe that was true of the Malloys as well. If the Malloy girls were unhappy here in Buckman, their mother wouldn’t be happy either. And if Mrs. Malloy wasn’t happy, she’d probably talk her husband into taking them back to Ohio. Wally hoped so, anyway.

But right now it was Mrs. Hatford who was unhappy.

“I had rather hoped—well, a cake like that wins ribbons in some places!” she said.

“First time you see her, she’ll probably ask for the recipe,” said Father. “Nobody makes chocolate chiffon cake the way you do, Ellen.”

Wally went back to studying the ravioli on his plate. It was only recently Mother had tried anything fancy like ravioli. Usually, the people of Buckman stuck to fried chicken, beef pot-roasts, and pork chops with gravy. But someone had told Mrs. Hatford about the frozen ravioli you could buy at the grocery, and Wally was trying to figure out how they got the meat inside the little squares of dough. Did they make a pocket of dough first and then cut a little hole in the top and pour in the filling? Or did they put the meat between two pieces of dough, like a sandwich, and seal the edges together, or—

“Eat, Wally,” said his father.

Wally quit studying the ravioli and thought about floating heads again. Last year at Halloween, when the Bensons were still here, the boys had frightened the residents of Buckman half to death with their floating heads.

It was the Bensons’ idea, actually. Each boy bought a rubber mask, the scariest he conld find, and each set out with a flashlight long after tricks-or-treats were over for the evening, when children were settling down to count the pieces of candy they had collected and adults were turning off porch lights, glad that another Halloween was over. What each Benson and Hatford boy had done was sneak up to a lighted window, rap on the pane, then hold a flashlight beneath his chin so that the light illuminated the rubber mask and no more.

To a child looking up, or an adult turning around in his or her chair, all that could be seen in the dark outside was a grotesque head, made worse by the fact that the

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