The Kindness Club: Designed by Lucy Read online

  For Susan DeLaurentis, Elizabeth Glaser, and Susie Zeegen, who started a kindness club of their own, not so long ago

  ALSO BY COURTNEY SHEINMEL

  The Kindness Club: Chloe on the Bright Side

  Kindness is always fashionable.

  —Amelia Barr

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  “What page do we have to do in the math workbook?” my friend Chloe asked. “Twenty-five?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Chloe nudged Theo. He took off his headphones, and she repeated the question: “What’s the math homework?”

  “Pages twenty-four and twenty-five,” Theo replied.

  Theo is another friend of mine, and together, we’re the three founding members of the Kindness Club. I’d invited them over for an unofficial TKC meeting.

  That’s how we all became friends, by the way. The Kindness Club. A couple weeks ago, it was a homework project for science. The assignment was to conduct any experiment we wanted. It sounds cool—when a teacher tells you that you can do anything. But really it’s incredibly hard, because there are so many possibilities. Almost too many.

  After a lot of debate, we decided to test the effect of kind acts on mean people. Would they turn kind, too? There were mixed results. Chloe was kind to the most popular girls in the fifth grade, who also happen to be the meanest girls, and they didn’t exactly change their ways. They said Chloe could be their friend, but if and ONLY if she stopped being friends with Theo and me. Chloe told them no, and they were as mean as ever before.

  But that was okay, because our experiment worked on another subject—my neighbor, Mary Clare Gallagher. I call her “Mrs. G” for short. She had a disastrous backyard, and a pretty bad front yard, too. Chloe, Theo, and I cleaned it up, and Mrs. G went from being the meanest person I’d ever met to being my friend. That’s because when you do something kind for someone, they get a boost of a chemical in their brain called serotonin. It makes them feel good, and sometimes it makes them act kind right back.

  It’s not that I was a mean person before we started the club, but I wasn’t kind as much as I could’ve been. Unlike Chloe, who always thought up kind things to do. Now I want to be like that, too. After we finished our experiment, we decided to keep the club, and keep up our kindnesses.

  So here Chloe and Theo were at my house on a Wednesday. Chloe flipped open the math workbook to the right page. Theo put headphones over his ears and opened his workbook. I felt very happy having them with me in my living room. Even though we were doing homework, which isn’t the best activity. Having friends there when you do any activity, good or bad, is so much better than being by yourself.

  I used to be by myself a lot. Not by choice. But before Chloe moved to town, and we got assigned the science project together, I didn’t have many friends. To be honest, I didn’t really have any. Some of my classmates thought I was weird because of the outfits I wore.

  Okay, I’ll admit it. My outfits are different than what other kids at school wear. Their clothes are on the plain side, regular jeans and regular shirts. Or if they’re getting dressed up for special occasions, they wear things like you see in a magazine. Which is fine. I’m not making fun of them for copying anything. That’s just not for me. I design things myself. I’m practicing for when I grow up and become a fashion designer, just like Diane von Furstenberg and Carolina Herrera and Donatella Versace. Names that when you hear them, you think: style.

  I’m already a little bit of a fashion designer now. You should see my “Scenes from a T-shirt” collection. They were plain shirts when I bought them, but I painted them. One shirt is a scene from a forest, another is a scene from New York City, and yet another is an underwater fantasyland. I had the best time painting the mermaids and mermen on that one. Every time I finish making an item of clothing, I sew on one of the custom-made tags I ordered off the Internet. They say: “Designed by Lucy.”

  But anyhoo, even if my clothes are on the original side, is that a reason to NOT be friends with someone? I don’t think so. Luckily, Theo and Chloe don’t think so, either.

  “You guys,” I said. “It’s time to call this meeting to order. We have some business to discuss.”

  “What business?” Chloe asked.

  Theo had his headphones on again, and I poked him so he knew to listen up, too. He lifted the left earpiece. “Club business,” I said. “We need to make some rules, like how many kind things do we have to do a day?”

  “Easy,” Chloe said. “As many as we can.”

  “I think we should set a number,” I said. “Something small. Like, three required kind acts a day.”

  “Okay,” Chloe said.

  “And when should we have meetings?” I asked.

  “How about whenever we want them?”

  “Works for me,” Theo said.

  He was about to lower the left earphone back to his head, but I wasn’t done yet. “What about our kindness projects?” I went on. “I think we should do little things all the time, like give compliments, and hold doors open, and drop lucky pennies for people to find. At least three of those a day—and of course you can do more if you want. And we need a big club project to do all together, too.”

  “Mrs. Gallagher’s yard is our big project,” Theo said.

  “It was,” I said. “But it’s basically all cleaned up now. I know we said we’d plant a garden for her, too. But it’s going to be winter soon, and that’s more of a spring project. Meanwhile, what’s our next project going to be? We need to figure it out and get started right now.”

  As long as we had a project, I knew we’d have a club. And if we had a club, I had built-in friends.

  But without a project, I was worried the club would disappear. And then maybe Chloe and Theo would decide there wasn’t a reason to come over to my house on a Wednesday, or any other day for that matter.

  “Sorry,” Chloe said. “Right now I have to do my homework. My dad likes me to get as much as possible done before dinner, so he can spend time with me.”

  Chloe’s parents are divorced. That’s why she moved to Braywood and started at our school this year. She lives with her mom, except for every other weekend and every Wednesday night, when she is with her dad.

  “How about if we do homework and think about a club project,” I said. “We’ll multitask.”

  “The ability to multitask is really a misconception,” Theo informed us. “The human brain can’t perform two high-level functions at once. You can do various low-level things all at the same time, like breathing and blinking and pumping blood.” He held up a finger and waved it toward me. “But only one high-level task at a time.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Homework it is.”

  Theo re-donned his headphones. Chloe flipped the page in her math book. I opened mine, too. When we finished, we e
ach moved on to reading the chapter in our social studies textbook, though my mind was wandering to thoughts of our club. Maybe I could prove Theo wrong and actually do two “high-level” tasks at the same time—my homework and come up with a new kindness project. There’s a first time for everything, right?

  Hmmm … what could our kindness project be?

  We could write letters to kids around the world. Though that might be tough, because we didn’t speak all of the world’s languages.

  We could pay the meters for all the cars parked on Main Street. But that would take a lot of quarters—more than we probably had.

  We could read to the younger kids in school during story time. Except our teacher, Ms. Danos, probably wouldn’t let us out of class for that.

  Maybe if I came up with a club motto, the idea for a project would follow. That happens sometimes when I’m designing outfits. I don’t know what to make, but then I think of a color or a pattern, and the rest follows.

  So … a motto …

  It had to be catchy, and it had to capture exactly what the Kindness Club is all about. I supposed it could just be “Be Kind,” but that was so basic, like wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans. Sure, it counted as being dressed up for the day, but it wasn’t exactly inspiring.

  But I didn’t want our motto to be too complicated, either. Then we’d never remember it.

  I thought and thought and thought. It turned out that Theo was right about multitasking. The thoughts of the perfect motto kept me from reading more than a paragraph in my social studies text. But the good news was, by the time Chloe and Theo had to head home, I’d come up with the answer—a perfect motto. In fact, it was more than a motto; it was a full-out cheer. As my friends packed up their bags, I taught it to them:

  “I’ll say, ‘Our brand is,’ and you say, ‘Kindness!’ Ready?”

  “Yup.”

  “Our brand is—”

  “Kindness!”

  “Our brand is—”

  “Kindness!”

  “Cool,” I said. “That’s great, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” Chloe said, “and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “See you.”

  CHAPTER 2

  My brother Oliver is away at college, and he left me in charge of feeding his betta fish, Poseidon. Poseidon is five and a half years old, which is old for a betta fish. He’s Ollie’s prize possession. But since Ollie and I are not only brother and sister but also best friends, he trusts me to take care of him.

  I fed Poseidon his dinner, and then I went downstairs to the kitchen to have dinner with Grandma June. She’d set another place for my dad, but he didn’t get home from work in time to eat with us.

  “This is the fourth night in a row he’s missed,” I told Grandma as I put tinfoil over his plate. Well, a bowl, really. Inside were rice noodles with beef on top. Keeping it fresh for Dad could count as one of my kind acts for the day. I knew it was one of his favorite meals that Grandma cooked.

  My grandmother has lived with my family since my mom died nine years ago. She had a problem with her heart, and the doctors said she’d be okay. But then she got sicker and she died. I was only a year old when it happened, too young to remember anything. All my life that I can remember, Grandma June has done the cooking in our house, and that means a lot of Japanese food. Which is fine, since it’s mostly stuff I like—except when she makes salmon. That’s my least favorite kind of food. Maybe because Poseidon is orange colored, too. I’d never eat him!

  “Your dad has to work late, you know that,” Grandma June told me.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  Dad owns a bowling alley in our town, and if you’re thinking that’s the coolest thing a parent could do as a job, you’d be right. At Tanaka Lanes, there are speakers set up so music is pumped into the room from morning till night, and the lanes flash different colors. Sometimes on weekends, Dad makes up a theme, like Disco Fever or Eighties Night, and the whole place is transformed. My favorite was Sock Hop Night. I made my own poodle skirt from a pattern I found online. It was baby pink and shaped like a triangle with a wide bottom. Plus the pièce de résistance: I stitched a little black poodle into the bottom right corner, with its leash curling up into the waistband.

  But anyhoo, back to my conversation with Grandma. “It stinks that Felix left before Dad had a chance to hire someone new and train them,” I said. Felix had been the manager at Tanaka Lanes until he’d up and quit a week earlier. Dad always used to say Felix was more like his partner than his employee; Dad was the “ideas guy,” and Felix was good at carrying things out and keeping it all very organized. “Aren’t people supposed to give two weeks’ notice?” I asked Grandma.

  “How do you know about two weeks’ notice?” she said.

  “I saw it in a movie.”

  Grandma opened the fridge to put away the water pitcher. “Well,” she said, her back to me as she rearranged the top shelf, “it’s your father’s name on the sign out front. If someone is unavailable, it’s up to him to fill in the missing pieces.”

  “And you too,” I told her.

  “What?” She closed the door and turned around to face me.

  “And you too,” I repeated. “You’ve been helping Dad out.”

  “That’s what family does.”

  “Maybe I should, too,” I said. “I bet Chloe and Theo would come with me. We need a project for the Kindness Club!”

  “That’s sweet of you to offer your services to the bowling alley. But for now I think your dad and I have it covered.”

  “Tell us if you change your mind.”

  “I certainly will.”

  I brought my plate to the dishwasher, but Grandma stopped me from opening it. “No, mago,” she said. That’s the Japanese word for “grandchild,” which is what Grandma always called Ollie and me, the way other grandparents may say “honey” or “dear.” “Just leave it in the sink. I’m going to hand wash everything. The dishwasher broke this morning.”

  “It broke?” I asked. “How?”

  “It got old, that’s all,” Grandma said. “It’s the same dishwasher that was here when I moved in, which makes it older than you are, most likely.”

  “You always tell me how young I am,” I reminded her.

  “People and appliances age at different rates,” Grandma told me.

  “I get it,” I said. “Like Poseidon. Five and a half years old for him is like a hundred in human years. Older than you!”

  “I’m getting up there,” Grandma said.

  “No, you’re not, and besides, you look great for your age,” I said, which was sixty-eight.

  I was being nice when I said that, because to be honest, I couldn’t tell if she looked good for her age, or average, or even on the old side. But whatever it was, I loved the way she looked. In old pictures, I could tell her hair had once been jet black, but now it was mostly gray and cut to just above her shoulders. She usually had it pinned up very neatly on either side. Her skin was tan and smooth and soft as a peach, except for right around her eyes, where the skin was on the crinkly side, and her elbows, which were really crinkly. When I was a little kid and she’d hold me in her lap, I would reach out to play with her elbow crinkles. I can’t explain why, but it made me feel cozy.

  “You don’t look a day over sixty-five,” I told her.

  Grandma smiled her trademark closed-mouth smile. She doesn’t like her teeth so she hardly ever shows them. The right front tooth sticks out a little bit over the left one. It’s something that I kind of like about her mouth. It’s different, and it makes her mouth just so her. Sometimes she’ll forget and smile with her teeth, and seeing it is like discovering a secret.

  We stood next to each other at the sink. Grandma turned on the tap to super hot and gave me a pair of rubber gloves to wear so my skin wouldn’t burn. I squirted a circle of dish soap onto her dirty dinner plate. It looked a bit like a head, so I added a few dots for two eyes, a nose, and a little open mouth.

&n
bsp; “I think you have enough there,” Grandma said.

  I put down the soap and picked up the scrub brush. “When do you think we’ll get a new dishwasher?” I asked.

  “Tired of this chore already, I see,” Grandma said.

  “No, I was just wondering.”

  “I guess whenever your dad or I have time to go to the store. But it’s all right. I’ll take it from here. Sometimes washing the dishes relaxes me.”

  “Are you stressed out?” I asked. “Maybe you shouldn’t have so many jobs. You’re working at the bowling alley, and you volunteer a lot. You do so much around here. Plus you just took that job at Quinnifer’s. I think it’s too much!”

  “Nonsense,” Grandma said. “It’s good to keep busy and stay useful.”

  “But I’m worried about you.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me. What you do need to worry about is your own work. How was piano today?”

  “Mrs. Negishi is visiting her nephew,” I reminded her, feeling worried all over again. “That’s why Chloe and Theo got to come over on a Wednesday.”

  “But you promised to practice in her absence.”

  “Yeah, I know. I will. I promise. It’s so boring, though. Mrs. Negishi has had me playing the same piece for like a year.”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t been a year,” Grandma chided. “But if you’re still on the same piece, she must feel you haven’t mastered it yet. Keep practicing. Piano is good for concentration and coordination. In the end, you’ll learn more than just music.”

  “Right now I’m learning the facial expressions Mrs. Negishi makes when I hit a wrong note in ‘Für Elise.’ ” I turned to her and tried to imitate them, a scrunched-up nose and turned-down mouth, like I’d tasted something gross.

  Grandma smiled—closed mouthed. “And what about your homework?” she asked. “Did you and your friends get that all done?”

  “Everything except social studies,” I told her. No point in telling her that Chloe and Theo had finished. I’d get it done, too. “I have to finish the chapter on westward expansion and answer some questions.”

  “That sounds interesting.”