Flora & Ulysses

The Giant Do-Nut smelled like fried eggs and donuts and other people’s closets. The dining room was full of laughter and donut dunking.

A waitress sat Flora and her father at a booth in the corner and handed them glossy, enormous menus. Flora surreptitiously (The Criminal Element recommended surreptitious action at all possible junctures) removed the lid from the shoe box. Ulysses poked his head out and looked around the restaurant. And then he turned his attention to the menu. He stared at it with a dreamy look on his face.

“Get whatever you want,” said Flora’s father. “Order your heart’s desire.”

Ulysses emitted a happy sigh.

“Pay attention,” whispered Flora.

A waitress came and stood over them. She tapped her pencil on the order pad.

“What can I get you?” she said.

Her name tag spelled out her name in all-capital letters: RITA!

Flora narrowed her eyes. The exclamation point made Rita seem untrustworthy, or, at the very least, insincere.

“Well,” said Rita. “What’s it gonna be?” Her hair was piled up very, very high on her head. She looked like Marie Antoinette.

Not that Flora had ever seen Marie Antoinette, but she had read about her in a TERRIBLE THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO YOU! issue on the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette, from the little bit that Flora knew about her, would have made a very bad waitress.

Flora suddenly remembered that she had a squirrel in her lap. She tapped Ulysses on the head again. “Lie low,” she whispered to him, “but be prepared.” She arranged the washcloth so that he was almost completely hidden.

“Whatcha got there?” asked Rita.

“Where?” said Flora.

“In the box,” said Rita. “Got a baby doll in the box? Are you talking to your baby doll?”

“Talking to my baby doll?” said Flora. She felt a flush of outrage crawl up her cheeks. For the love of Pete! She was ten years old, almost eleven. She knew how to administer CPR. She knew how to outwit an arch-nemesis. She was acquainted with the profound importance of seal blubber. She was the sidekick to a superhero.

Plus she was a cynic.

What self-respecting cynic would carry around a doll in a shoe box?

“I do not,” said Flora. “Have. A. Baby. Doll.”

“Let me see her,” said Rita. “Don’t be shy.” She bent over. Her big Marie Antoinette hair scraped against Flora’s chin.

“No,” said Flora.

“George Buckman,” said Flora’s father in a worried voice. “How do you do?”

“Cootchie-coo,” said Rita.

Flora felt a very pointed, very specific sense of doom.

Rita poked her pencil into the shoe box slowly, slowly. She pushed the washcloth around. Slowly. And the washcloth (oh, so slowly) fell back and revealed Ulysses’s whiskered face.

“George Buckman,” said her father in a much louder voice. “How do you do?”

Rita screamed a long and impossibly loud scream.

Ulysses screamed in return.

And then he leaped from the shoe box.

At this point, things stopped proceeding at such a leisurely pace.

The squirrel was airborne, and time swung back into action with a vengeance.

At last! thought Flora. It’s Incandesto time!