The Good Egg Page 3

  “Holy Barbra Streisand,” April gasped. “That’s a really good idea.”

  “YES.” Mal grinned. “Plus, our group is so cool. Maggie May plays the tuba. Marcy plays the triangle. Malka plays the drums. I play guitar and sing, and Molly plays the accordion.

  “And maybe,” Mal said, elbowing Molly playfully, “Molly will sing.”

  Molly blushed. “Maybe.”

  “You guys figured all that out.” April frowned. “We still haven’t figured out staging! Or casting! Or anything!”

  “Well, what did you spend all afternoon talking about?” Mal asked.

  “THE-A-TER!” April gasped, holding her hands up like Miss Panache.

  April dropped her hands. “Patty Jenkins, we’re behind.”

  Ripley picked up her bowl. “I need more chowder,” she said.

  Ripley didn’t think April needed her to figure out how to make the best play ever.

  Figuring out that stuff was something April did all the time.

  At the counter, waiting in line, Ripley bumped into Barney, who met her with a big Barney grin.

  “Hey, Rip!” Barney chirped. “What play are you doing?”

  “Three bears.” Ripley shrugged. “You?”

  “Sleeping Scout,” Barney said. “I was hoping I would get to be SCOUT-ERELLA, but I guess people think I’m more Butoh than tap? Anyhoo. It’s no big deal.”

  Barney gave a little shrug that almost made them drop the book tucked under their arm. Which was easy to do because it was a really big book.

  Ripley pointed. “What are you reading?”

  “Oh!” Barney’s eyes lit up. “It’s for my next badge! Hatch You Later! Which I am taking in conjunction with my Animal Habitat-ery badge. Which I am taking in conjunction with my Hello Birdie badge for bird watching.”

  All these conjunctions meant Barney was doing a lot of things at once. Which was the Barney way.

  Ripley was so excited, she almost dropped her chowder. “WHAT? That’s so cool! I found a nest! A really big nest! And it’s really big! And the eggs are GOLD!”

  Barney was so excited, they almost dropped their chowder. “GOLD EGGS? That’s amazing! Where is it?”

  “In the woods.” Ripley was bouncing with enthusiasm.

  Barney bit their lip. “This could be an incredible opportunity to practice my ODD skills! Could you take me there? Tomorrow morning?”

  “Are you kidding?” Ripley squealed. “That would be awesome!”

  “I’ll meet you at the edge of the tree line,” Barney said. “At sunrise.”

  Ripley nodded vigorously. “Yep yep!”

  Back at Roanoke’s table, April had pulled out her notebook and was furiously scribbling.

  “Okay,” she said, mostly to herself, “we just need to be more organized. I’ll come up with a chart of basic concepts and genres. And then I can write—”

  “Or we could write,” Jo said, tapping April’s notebook gently with her spoon.

  “Right, right.” April bit her pencil, then continued scribbling. “Holy Lisa Kron, this is going to be great!”

  “Yes,” Jo said.

  Spinning her spoon on the table, Ripley smiled. “Barney and I are going back to see the eggs again tomorrow.”

  Everyone at the table was talking, all at once, a cacophony of noise that swallowed up Ripley’s little voice.

  “What did you say?” Molly asked, turning to Ripley. “Sorry, we were talking about tubas.”

  “It’s okay.” Ripley smiled, digging into her soup. “Tubas are cool.”

  For the rest of the meal, as Ripley polished off her third bowl of chowder and April wrote in her notebook, a song rattled through Ripley’s brain.

  Eggs eggs eggs eggs

  Short eggs

  Tall eggs

  Summer winter fall eggs

  Big eggs

  Small eggs

  First eggs

  Third eggs

  Very very

  Very big bird eggs

  Eggs eggs eggs eggs.

  CHAPTER 6

  The next morning, in the crisp light of early sunrise, Barney stood waiting for Ripley at the edge of the woods, in their cap and newly ironed uniform.

  “Hey, you still have glitter on you,” they said when Ripley appeared. Ripley was looking slightly wrinkled and sleepy and, yes, still coated in glitter but very excited.

  “It twinkles in the morning light.” Ripley grinned, pointing to the sparkles still stuck to her sweatshirt as they headed into the woods.

  “I got so excited after we talked,” Barney admitted, stepping carefully over the loose branches on the ground. “I was up until midnight looking at books in the library. I looked at some of Miss Jane Petunia Massy Acorn Dale’s old notes from some of her original texts, which are just . . .” Barney sighed, “truly fabulous specimens of ODD methodology.”

  “Yeah,” Ripley said. “Um. I meant to ask you what that is . . . the ODD thing?”

  Sometimes Ripley didn’t like asking people what stuff was because it seemed to make people think Ripley didn’t know stuff (which she did). But Barney was a good person to ask questions because Barney was one of the few people that Ripley had ever met who actually liked to explain things. It made them happy. Also, Barney didn’t ever assume Ripley didn’t know something.

  “That’s a great question.” Barney smiled. “ODD is the process, that is, the methodology or method, of scientific analysis, which is a way of looking at things in a scientific way. This specific way was invented and innovated by Miss Jane Petunia Massy Acorn Dale. ODD is an acronym for Observe, Document, and DO NOT TOUCH. Yes?”

  Miss Jane Petunia Massy Acorn Dale—stamp collector, jump roper, figure skater, groundbreaking gluten-free baker, and esteemed biologist—was also, actually, gloriously odd in the regular way as well, but Barney had never met her and so did not know this.

  Jane was also, just as an aside, the former reigning champion of most (gluten-free) pancakes eaten in one sitting, before Ripley.

  “The ODD approach,” Barney said, with great pride, “is what we’re going to use to research this nest!”

  “Amazing! Did Miss Jane Petunia Massy Acorn Dale ever write about any gold eggs?” Ripley asked, bouncing.

  Barney shook their head. “She did not. But she did see plenty of large birds. She was even the first person to spot a Wawa Bird, which is twice as big as an ostrich and very silly.

  “I was thinking about what you said, though,” Barney noted, “about the eggs you found being really really big. And it made me think of our first Lumberjane adventure together, which also involved a big bird, a very very big bird, which got me thinking . . .”

  “Yup yup.” Ripley nodded. “Thinking is awesome.”

  “I was thinking,” Barney continued, “that the eggs you describe could be from a creature that is not necessarily something you would find in the pages of a regular biology book.”

  “Oooooooh.” Ripley hopped over a tree trunk. “That would be super cool.”

  “I mean,” Barney said, pushing their black hair out of their face as they strolled through the woods, “I get the impression a Lumberjane can NEVER rule that sort of thing out, since I am staying in a cabin that is the cabin of a Greek god.”

  “Where is Diane?” Ripley asked, twirling.

  “Family reunion.”

  Suddenly, Ripley had an amazing idea. “MARY BLAIR! DO YOU THINK THE EGG IS A UNICORN EGG?!”

  “Hmmmm,” Barney considered. “Although there are some creatures other than birds, like turtles, that lay eggs, there aren’t a lot of equine creatures that lay eggs. That I know of.”

  “Jumpin’ Judy Garland, this is exciting,” Ripley cheered.

  The two picked up speed, weaving through the trees as birds took flight and scattered out of their way.

  As they closed in on the nest, Ripley’s mouth popped open.

  “OH MY GOSH!”

  “OH, HEY!” Barney said. “They hatched!”

  CH
APTER 7

  The nest was full of massive shards of broken shells, scattered throughout the nest like the remnants of a raucous tea party.

  “Aw,” Ripley said, her hands on her cheeks. “I mean . . . yay.”

  It wasn’t that Ripley didn’t want the eggs to hatch. Obviously, she did. That’s what eggs do, after all.

  Ripley’s mom once told her that every person is an egg who will one day hatch and go on to become whatever it is they were meant to be.

  Still, it’s sad when hatching means that something you liked, like an egg called Eggie, is gone.

  Barney stood back and pulled a notebook out of their back pocket. “This,” they said, “this is a truly incredible discovery, Ripley. Even with the eggs hatched, this is an amazing opportunity to employ the ODD approach and learn more about what creatures made and laid eggs in this nest.”

  “Okay.” Ripley turned to Barney. “What do we do first?”

  “First,” Barney said, pointing at the nest, “we OBSERVE whatever creature or natural wonder we have come upon.”

  “So, the nest?” Ripley sounded a little unsure.

  “Yes.” Barney pulled out their notebook. “Second step, we DOCUMENT by taking down notes, sketching, or photographing the phenomenon or habitat or creature in question.”

  Ripley nodded. “Oh-kay!”

  “And finally,” Barney noted, hovering over the nest, careful not to touch it with their kerchief, “and most importantly, we DO NOT (no matter what else we do) DISTURB whatever it is we are looking at.”

  Ripley took a careful step back from the nest. “Right. That’s good. Don’t do that. Got it.”

  “This is especially crucial when it comes to nests and burrows,” Barney explained, “because a nest is a home. And a good researcher, as much and however possible, respects the integrity of all creatures.”

  Ripley nodded vigorously. Ripley knew that you don’t just go bouncing around someone else’s home, even if they’re not there.

  Not if you’re a proper Lumberjane.

  “Yes!” Ripley cheered. “Holy Jane Goodall, this is soooooo cool!”

  Barney stood, looking.

  It looked like Barney had become a Barney statue.

  “Um.” Ripley shoved her hands into her pockets. “So, what are we doing?”

  “We’re observing.” Barney stepped closer to the nest, careful not to touch the sides.

  “Oh,” Ripley said. She hadn’t realized this observing thing took so long.

  She turned to look at the nest.

  And looked at the nest.

  Nest, she thought. This is. A nest.

  Ripley looked back at Barney.

  Barney seemed to still be hard at work, observing. In a way that Ripley was not.

  Ripley grabbed onto her elbow and pushed her toe into the soft dirt around the nest. “Uh. Barney?”

  “Yes?” Barney looked up, bright-eyed.

  “What’s an observation?” she asked. “Because, I think maybe I’m just looking . . . at the nest.”

  “That’s another great question!” Barney smiled. “Ripley, you have such great questions! Actually, they’re very similar. Looking is seeing with your eyes, and observing is looking and then using what you see to understand something about what you’re seeing. So really, observing is like looking, but more carefully. It’s looking at details.”

  Barney stepped in front of the nest and pointed at it with their pencil.

  “So, for example, there are a lot of details about this nest we can observe. Like, it’s really big. In this case, roughly twenty feet in diameter,” they noted. “Another detail is that it appears to be made of mostly local flora and tree branches, including pine and oak.”

  “Now”—Barney stood up on their tiptoes—“let’s look inside the nest. Do you remember how many eggs there were?”

  Ripley closed her eyes and tried to flip the pages of her brain back to the day before. “Five,” she said. “Four big eggs and Li’l Eggie.”

  “Eggie?”

  “The big eggs were all big like me,” Ripley explained. “But Eggie was smaller, like half as big.”

  “Now that”—Barney winked—“is some eggspertise.”

  Ripley grinned. Puns always made Ripley think of April, the pun master.

  Barney stepped up on a rock to get a closer look inside the nest. Ripley did the same.

  “What do you notice about the shells?” Barney asked.

  “They’re cracked. And they look like pizza pieces,” Ripley said. “They’re gold and shiny, but . . . inside the shell they look silver.”

  Barney nodded, quickly jotting all the details into their notebook. “Anything else?”

  Ripley hopped off the rock and started walking around the nest.

  “Feathers,” she said. “Soft-looking feathers.”

  The nest was now full of downy fluff, fine fluffy feathery snowflakes ranging in color from ivory to a soft pink, she noted.

  “Plus some very big feathers,” Barney added, pointing to a single, long, golden feather sticking up out of the center of the nest like a sail. “Which could mean, but may not mean, a big bird.”

  Ripley took another few steps around the nest. Looking and observing.

  “OH, LOOK!” she cried. “A hole!”

  “A what?” Barney looked up from their sketch of several of the larger pieces of shell.

  “A hole!” Ripley pointed. “In the side of the nest!”

  Barney hopped down from their perch and looked closely. There was a gap between the branches, about the size of a bowling ball.

  Barney turned and spotted what was clearly a trail of bent grass, a path, starting at the hole in question and leading down into the greeny thick of the forest.

  “Oh my gosh,” Barney said, looking through the hole into the nest. “Do you think one of the eggs rolled out . . .”

  Ripley was already bounding down a grassy hill, following the path deeper into the woods.

  Egg! Egg! Egg! Egg!

  By the time Barney caught up, Ripley was standing in a sun patch of soft, leafy ferns next to a clearly unhatched runaway egg.

  A golden egg the size of a basketball.

  Eggie!

  In the sun, the egg looked like a magical glittery orb, which cast a golden glow on Ripley’s smiling face.

  “It’s Eggie!” Ripley cried, holding up her arms.

  “It must have rolled out of the hole in the nest somehow,” Barney mused. “Maybe it got knocked or pushed when the other eggs were hatching?”

  “Maybe because he’s small,” Ripley said. “The mama bird didn’t realize it could fall out of a hole.”

  “Small?” Barney raised their eyebrows. “This is a pretty big small egg.”

  “Eggie was the smallest of the eggs.” Ripley wrapped her arms around the egg. “And now we have to protect him.”

  The egg was the temperature of a kitchen that had cookies baking in the oven. It warmed Ripley’s cheek. “Don’t worry, Eggie,” she whispered. “I got you.”

  Barney looked up at the sky, spotted the sun, and made a quick calculation. “It’s after breakfast,” they said. “We have to get back. Or we’re going to miss the theater workshop.”

  “But Eggie,” Ripley whimpered, pointing.

  “We’ll come back during lunch,” Barney said.

  Eggie was so important, it didn’t even occur to Ripley that she’d be missing two meals.

  “Okay,” she sighed.

  Ripley grabbed Barney’s hand, and the two bolted back to camp.

  “I’ll be back,” Ripley called over her shoulder. “Don’t go egg-ywhere!”

  CHAPTER 8

  “THE-AH-TAH!” Miss Panache, in an embroidered and bedazzled purple velvet smock and gold boots, strode back and forth in front of the assembled scouts, her hair high and frosted. “THE-A-TAH is a practice of MIND, BODY, and SOOOOOUL. Yes.”

  “Look at that hair,” Mal sighed.

  “Magical,” Molly agreed.

/>   “Yes,” Jo added.

  April nodded solemnly.

  Jo wondered how big Miss Panache’s closet was and whether she categorized her outfits by material: velvet, sequin, brocade, silk (and so on).

  “And SO,” Panache continued, reaching out into the crowd as though attempting to connect mind, body, and soul, “today we will begin by warming up all three by ACTING OUT. Yes. ACTING. OUT.”

  There is no hard science for how a person goes about preparing for theater creating. Panache’s approach was certainly ODD, in the original nonacronym meaning of the word.

  In their warm-up for the workshop, scouts ACTED like they were monkeys in a snowstorm, giraffes in a hailstorm, hedgehogs at the dentist, and, finally, octopuses having a tea party on a trampoline.

  Bouncing and waggling her arms, Jo solidified her feeling that she was not cut out for the theater.

  “I mean,” Jo grumbled, as much as Jo could grumble, “REALLY. Explain the scientific justification of being an octopus.”

  Molly was equally embarrassed. Acting made Molly feel very exposed.

  “Hey!” Ripley said, arriving as octopus bouncing hit a fever pitch. “What ARE you doing?”

  “Acting.” Molly blushed, wiggling her arms, her cheeks as red as cherries.

  “Oh,” Ripley said, wiggling her arms back at Molly, still worried about Eggie but also a little pleased to see everyone so bouncy.

  “Where were you?” Molly asked. “You missed breakfast.”

  Before Ripley could answer, Miss Panache snapped her fingers.

  “FAAABULOUS, FAAABULOUS,” Miss Panache cooed. “Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m loving this and this, all of this. It’s yes. It’s now. It’s a very successful warm-up, scouts. And NOW, gather with your groups and let your creative juices FLOW.”

  Now that all their muscles and souls were warmed up, team Goldi-Scout and the Three Bears gathered on a grassy spot just west of the mess hall and got down to the business of Show Business.

  “I hope my soul and mind are warmed up,” April noted.

  Jo was happy to no longer be pretending. “I’m willing to risk it.”