Harriet the Spy: Chapters 10–14

She ran and ran, yelling like a banshee the whole way.

Janie read the passage in a solemn voice.

Harriet thought suddenly, I don’t have to sit here. And she got up and marched off in as dignified a way as possible under the circumstances.

She had a rather grating voice.

The worst was that even though she knew she shouldn’t, she had stopped by the stationery store on the way to school and had bought another notebook.

Feeling better, she attacked her homework with renewed zeal.

“Now, Harriet, I hear you’re keeping dossiers on everyone in school.”
“What’s that?” Harriet had been prepared to deny everything but this was a new one.
“You keep a notebook?”

She had only descended to wrest a piece of toast from the cook instead of having to wait in the dining room.

Clackety clack, her feet went on the parquet floor, then thrump, thrump, thrump up the carpeted stairs.

She had a fleeting sensation of being tired as she stood over the basin washing her hands.

She turned the soap over and over in her hands and felt the warm water on her fingers as she watched a tugboat, yellow with a red stack, bob neatly up the river, the frothy V behind it curling into emptiness.

“You know, Rachel, that you’re KNOWN for never meaning anything you say. You know that, don’t you?”
Rachel looked completely taken aback.

Harriet realized, too late, that she was getting carried away because her arms were flailing around.

She continued to laugh and to back, and only when it was obvious that she was poised for instant flight did she say, “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re wrong there. We have a plan. It’s YOU who’s going to get it. We have a PLAN...a PLAN....” and it echoed behind her as she ran, her heels flying up and almost touching the sash of her plaid dress, she ran so hard.

The door to the school was alive with clamoring children.

Math class droned on and Harriet used the time for thinking.

Several old ladies fed these cats, so there was a lot of tuna fish sitting around in front of some makeshift houses they had also made, which looked like beach cabanas for cats.

Everyone was rushing around with tools and wood and there was the semblance of a house emerging right in front of her. It leaned, of course. In fact the two back walls were the corner of the fence and it appeared to be pulling the fence down; but, never mind, it was a house.

“She has delusions of grandeur anyway,” said Janie, rubbing her head.

But then Harriet looked more closely and saw that she wasn’t exactly drawing, she was making letters on a sign in a very painstaking way.

Furthermore they will clutter up the backyard and also they constitute a nuisance.

The night before it had occurred to her that maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to asking her over that day. Maybe it had just been an oversight.

Harriet sat despondently, blue all over.

Harriet felt sodden. She sat there in her ink and didn’t move.

Harriet threw her a contemptuous glance and looked down at her blue legs.

The next afternoon after school Harriet went stealthily over the fences again to watch.

She took out a piece of paper, feeling listless and bored as she did.

She caught sight of Miss Harris reeling backward away from her as she made such a great leap for the door she might have been pole vaulting.

SOME PEOPLE ACT LIKE A MARTYR AT THE DROP OF A HAT, OR A SOCK, HA HA.

After Miss Elson had come in and they had said good morning to her, she went immediately to Harriet, made her stand up to be searched, then searched her desk. Harriet submitted limply.

She looked around with a mean look for everyone. Nobody saw her. She felt her face contorting.

A terrific wail went up from his prone body, and when he raised his face his nose was bleeding.

She got up and walked quietly out, stepping delicately over Pinky’s writhing body.

She sat, looking Miss Harris forlornly in the eye while the others filed in.

The bell rang, and as Miss Harris scuttled over to Beth Ellen, Harriet walked to the door and down the steps.

She lay quietly for a minute looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it.

She wrote a lot about what she felt, relishing the joy of her fingers gliding across the page, the sheer relief of communication.

Marion Hawthorne went home sick and Miss Elson was on the verge of tears, she was so wrought up. She’ll probably never get over it. She says it was bedlam for hours.

“We are doing this none too soon, I see. But before we all get a lot of newfangled ideas, may I say, Harriet, that you are going to go upstairs right this minute and wash or you won’t be able to sit down for a week.”

Janie turned quickly and was so startled that she dropped the test tube she was holding. She stood there absolutely stricken at the sight of Harriet.