Double Dog Dare by Lisa Graff Page B

Ginny.”
    Francine just shrugged. She wasn’t in the mood for chatting.
    But apparently Ginny was. “What’s your name?” she asked.
    “Francine.”
    “I like your hair.” Ginny kicked her feet in the air.
    “Anyone want a snack?”
    Francine looked up. Lulu was standing in front of them with a bowl of granola bars. “I always like to keep a few for my students. Just in case they need a little sustenance after class.”
    Francine shrugged again and dug a granola bar out of the bowl.
    “Ginny?” Lulu said, offering her the bowl.
    Ginny shook her head. “I’m allergic.”
    Francine ripped open her granola bar as Lulu went to talk to the parents. Next to her, Ginny kept swinging her legs. Francine sort of wanted to ask her to stop, because she was shaking the whole bench, but that would involve talking, and Francine wasn’t really in the mood.
    “Have you ever seen
The Parent Trap
?” Ginny asked suddenly.
    Francine looked up.
    “My friend Stephanie at school was talking about it,” Ginny went on. “I’ve never seen it. It sounds really good.”
    Francine nodded. She’d seen that movie, years ago. It was about twin girls who tricked their divorced parents into falling in love again so they’d get remarried. She took a bite of her granola bar. “Yeah,” she said in between chews. “It’s okay.”
    “Mrs. Muñoz said she’d rent it for me. I wanna watch it ’cause my parents are getting divorced.”
    Francine stopped chewing. “Oh,” she said.
    “Stephanie said in the movie they make their parents have, like, a really romantic date, and then they remember how much they love each other. You think something like that would work on my parents?”
    Francine plucked a granola crumb from where it had landed on her T-shirt. “Maybe,” she said, popping the crumb in her mouth.
    “I bet my brother’d help me,” Ginny said, back to swinging her feet again. “He’s real nice. He loves helping me. Except when he’s doing his homework. He has homework a lot. He’s real smart. What would you do if your parents were getting divorced?”
    Francine licked the stickiness off her fingers. “How can you be allergic to granola bars?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”
    Luckily, Ginny didn’t seem to notice that Francine had changed the subject. “It’s not really granola bars,” she explained, swinging her legs even higher. “It’s peanuts. If I eat a single bite of a peanut, my face’ll blow up red and hivey, and I have to go to the hospital right away or I could keel over.”
    “But then you should just get one that’s not peanut flavor,” Francine replied. “See?” She held out her granola bar wrapper for Ginny to examine. “Chocolate chip.”
    Ginny shook her head. “There’s peanut traces. Everything has ’em, almost. Granola bars, bread, chocolate, chili sometimes.” She counted them off on her fingers. “I gotta check everything. Mom says I’m a pain in the neck to shop for.” She grinned.
    “You can’t eat
chocolate
?” Francine had never heard of anything so terrible.
    “Check the wrapper if you don’t believe me. I’ll bet you a headstand.”
    Francine flattened the wrapper to read the ingredients. Sure enough, Ginny was right. It was right there on the label: “This product may contain peanut traces.”
    “Headstand!” Ginny cried.
    Even after a full hour of yoga, Francine couldn’t do a headstand to save her life. She tried it with her eyes closed. She tried it holding her breath. She tried it with her back braced against the wall. Each time, she fell—
plop!
—on the floor in a heap. After the fifth try, Ginny joined her, but she turned out to be no better than Francine. Soon theywere both giggling, tumbling out of one headstand, then another. They decided to make up their own yoga poses instead, and Ginny told Francine more about her older brother, who sounded smart and funny and brave.
    “He’s super good at basketball too,” Ginny told her as she