Ivy and Bean Doomed to Dance

dead,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Completely sure,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate. “Any other questions?”
    The second-graders shook their heads. Fish prints sounded like fun.
    “Now who is our supply person today?” asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.
    “Eric!” shouted the second grade.
    Eric leaped to his feet, waving his hands in the air. “Thank you, thank you!”
    “Eric, please put one fish at each table,” said Ms. Aruba-Tate, handing him a big plastic box.
    Eric went around the room, carefully choosing the right dead fish for each table.
    “Hurry up!” shouted everyone. Paint and dead fish. This was the best science yet.
    Bean was itching to begin. When Eric reached her table, there were just two dead fish left in the box, but he couldn’t decide between them. He looked at one and then the other. “Which one should I give you? The little one or the big one?”

    “Just give us one!” shouted Bean.
    “Maybe I should ask Ms. Aruba-Tate which one I should give you,” Eric said.

    Bean reached into his box and grabbed a dead fish.
    “Ms. Aruba-Tate! Bean took a fish!”
    Dang. Bean looked at her teacher. Was she going to be sent to the rug? Was she going to miss out on dead fish and paint?
    But Ms. Aruba-Tate smiled at Bean. “Next time, don’t grab, Bean.”
    Bean loved Ms. Aruba-Tate with all her heart.
    Carefully Bean smeared her fish with green paint. She looked down and saw the fish’s eye looking up. Poor fish. She decided to make the most beautiful fish print in the world, to make it up to the fish for being dead. Slowly she laid the fish on her paper and pressed. Then she pressed harder. It had to be good.
    “Bean! Watch out!” squawked Vanessa.
    Oops. She had pressed a little too hard.
    The fish was kind of bent. She lifted it up and peeked at her print. That was kind of bent, too.
    “You wrecked it!” said Vanessa. “And your fish print is all lumpy.”
    “It’s not lumpy,” said Bean.
    “It’s about to have babies,” said Ivy.
    “Yeah!” said Bean. She handed the fish to Ivy. “I did it on purpose,” she said to Vanessa.

    While Ivy made her fish print, Bean drew an undersea environment for her fish. Kelp. An octopus. A sea anemone. A wrecked ship with ghosts. Science was her favorite subject, for sure.

TIGHT TENTACLES
    Ivy and Bean worked so hard on their fish prints that they forgot about getting sick. It was only on the way home that they remembered. Ivy looked down Bean’s throat.
    “It’s pink,” she said.
    “It’s always pink,” said Bean. She felt her forehead. “I have a headache,” she said.

    “That’s good,” said Ivy encouragingly.
    But when they got to Bean’s house, Bean’s mother said that a person with a headache was too sick to eat an ice-cream bar, and that’s when Bean realized that she didn’t have a headache after all. She felt fine.
    She still felt fine the next day.
    And the day after that.

    Ivy touched a kid with a rash. Nothing. Eric sneezed on Bean eight times. Nothing. Half the kids in the first grade had lice, but Ivy and Bean decided that lice wouldn’t help. Their mothers would make them be squids with lice.
    By the end of the week, Ivy and Bean were completely unsick. They needed a new plan. But what? Usually Bean didn’t worry much. In fact, grown-ups sometimes said she didn’t worry enough. But that weekend, even while she was doing fun things like going to a fair that included a giant slide, Bean worried. Mostly it didn’t feel like worry. What it felt like was fun with a little bit missing. When Bean came whooshing to the bottom of the giant slide, she thought, Why don’t I feel totally great? And then she remembered. Because I have to be a squid in front of everyone.

    Ivy worried, too. Ivy usually didn’t worry about real life. Ivy usually worried about things like the Permian extinction, when a whole lot of animals died. The Permian extinction was very upsetting, but it had happened 250 million years ago, so it wasn’t real life anymore.
    This weekend Ivy didn’t think about the Permian extinction. She thought about how she would feel being a squid on a stage in front of a whole lot of people. She knew how she would feel. Stupid. She would probably trip, because she usually did. And even if she didn’t trip, she would be a squid. Everyone would know that Madame Joy had made her a squid because she was the worst dancer in the class. Too bad the Permian extinction didn’t wipe out squids, Ivy