Girls Rule! by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Read Free Book Online

as a car paused at the end of the driveway, then turned in. “Hey!” she yelled to her sisters. “Our first customer!"
    A man got out of the car. “Where shall I wait while you wash my car?” he asked.
    “Go right up on the front porch and have a seat,” Eddie told him. “We’ll call you as soon as it’s ready.”
    The girls were glad to have him out of the way. They didn’t want him watching on their first job. They opened the doors of his car and picked up all the trash on the floor—gum wrappers and soda cans, leaves and pebbles. Then they brushed off the seats with a whiskbroom and used their mother’s vacuum cleaner to suck up the sand and dirt. After that they closed the car doors and turned on the hose.
    “We need to do a really good job,” Eddie reminded the others, “because this will be a rolling advertisement for the kind of work we’ll do.”
    The words were barely out of her mouth when another car turned in. A woman stuck her head out the window. “How long will I have to wait?” she called.
    Caroline looked at Beth, and Beth looked at Eddie.
    “We’ll get to you right away,” Eddie called back, handing the hose to Caroline. She turned to her sisters and said, “You finish up here and I’ll go vacuum her car.”
    Caroline was so eager to finish the first car and help with the second that she wasn’t careful about where she pointed the hose, and as the lady stepped out of her Ford station wagon, Caroline happened to pass a spray of water over her head.
    The woman shrieked.
    “Caroline!” Eddie shouted.
    “Oops! I’m so sorry!” Caroline said, looking at the woman’s wet shirt, not realizing that now the hose was turned on Beth, who was cleaning a wheel.
    “Caroline!” screamed Beth, rolling out of the way.
    “Are you sure you girls can do this?” the first customer asked as he came to the side of the porch to see what was going on.
    “Oh, yes. We’ll do a really good job!” Eddie told him. And to the woman she said, “Please have a seatup on the porch and we’ll call you when we’re finished.”
    She grabbed the hose out of Caroline’s hand and gave it to Beth. “You do the wheels from now on, Caroline,” she said.
    Caroline hated doing wheels. They were the dirtiest part of an automobile, and her hands got as dirty as the rag. She had smudges of grease on her arms and legs, and every so often spray from the hose drifted down on her head. She didn’t much mind the spray because it was the only way she could keep cool.
    A budding actress should not have to be doing work like this,
Caroline thought. It was a shame no one else had called her to perform at a birthday party.
    “How can it be that no other kids in Buckman are having birthdays in June?” she asked her sisters.
    “Well, maybe they’re having birthdays, but they aren’t having parties,” said Beth. “Or maybe they’re having parties, but they’re not having performances. Or maybe they’re having performances, but they’re not having you, strange as that may seem, Caroline.”
    Impossible,
thought Caroline. Who would
not
want a talented, precocious girl who could become all the different characters in a story? Who would
not
want to say, after Caroline became an actress on Broadway, that they had known Caroline when she was just a little girl back in fourth grade and had seen her perform once at a birthday party?
    “Ready!” Beth called to the man on the porch as still another car pulled into the driveway.
    The man paid his four dollars, but when he slid into the driver’s seat he yelled, “Hey! There’s water in here. Didn’t you girls close my windows?”
    Caroline turned to look and saw a puddle of water on the floor on the passenger side. The window above the seat was open an inch.
    “I…we…I guess we thought you did,” Eddie said. “We should have checked.”
    “For four dollars, you need to do a better job,” the man said, and drove away.
    “We need more help!” Eddie cried. “We