8 Days in DUMBO

By Margaret J. McMaster

12-year-old Phoebe Sproule may be embarrassed by her mother's blog (featuring every laughable fact of her existence!) but its 2 million followers prove useful in solving the mystery of Peter Philby's disappearance from the Starbrite Diner in Brooklyn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mansbridge Dunn Publishers
• Release date: Mar 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781999114435

Margaret J. McMaster

Margaret J. McMaster published her first book of middle-grade fiction, Carried Away on Licorice Days, in 2008. It was nominated for three literary awards: the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year for Children Award, the 2010/2011 Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award, and the 2011 Rocky Mountain Book Award. In 2009 she started writing the Babysitter Out of Control! series. These amusing, fast-paced adventures include: Babysitter Out of Control!, Looking for Love on Mongo Tongo, The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane, What Happened in July (a Best Books for Kids & Teens selection), The Sinking of the Wiley Bean, and, The Queen of Second Chances. The Complete Babysitter Out of Control! Series, published in 2015, was long-listed for the 2016 Silver Birch Award, a Best Books for Kids & Teens selection, and the 2015 Moonbeam Children's Book Award Early Reader/1st Chapter Books winner. McMaster is a past contributor to the Canadian Children's Annual and her creative non-fiction piece, After All These Years, was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Award. So Much Potential, a novel set in the Lake Erie fishing industry, was published in 2013. It was a Best Book for Kids & Teens *Starred* Selection. The first book in her Phoebe Sproule series, 8 Days in DUMBO, was named one of *The Year's Best* by Resource Links and won an Honorable Mention in the 2019/2020 Reader Views Literary Awards. The sequel, The Haunting of Cedar Hill Plantation, was released in 2020. It won the Bronze Medal in the Reader Views Literary Awards.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Wednesday

My bad. I wasn’t paying attention. But how could I, really? Like most kids, I started out gumming board books - until my mother starting reading picture books to me. By the time I was five I could make out quite a lot of the words myself. Then I was launched into something called Early Chapter Books, which still had pictures but looked like regular paperbacks. It’s not as if I was reading The New York Times or The Washington Post. I didn’t know what was going on in the world. I didn’t even know what was going on in my own household. But let’s be honest, how many of us really know what our parents are up to? I didn’t even know anything when I got into Juvenile Fiction!

I was born in the back of a taxi in Brooklyn, New York, my mother and father’s first, and only, child. That part was accidental.

My parents had rented a flat in the section of Brooklyn known as DUMBO, which stands for DOWN UNDER THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE OVERPASS. Apparently the bridge is an impressive backdrop for a selfie if you stand at the corner of Washington and Water Streets, but I see it all the time so I don’t need a picture.

My story doesn’t start in DUMBO though. It starts at Grandma Sylvie’s house in Brooklyn Heights. My parents, Chuck and Abby Sproule, were eating dinner there when Abby felt a little queasy. According to her, there weren’t any warning signs that I was on my way, and Abby knew all the warning signs. For the previous nine months she’d been studying up on pregnancy like there was an exam at the end. The whole bottom shelf of my bookcase is filled with her Guide to Pregnancy books. She’d started tracking the progress of her pregnancy, complete with nutrition, exercise routines, and bizarre cravings, as soon as she saw the test strip.

Abby politely excused herself from the dining room table saying, ‘I think I need to lie down’, seconds before her water broke all over the floor. In hindsight she could have popped me out on Grandma Sylvie’s bed, but she’d taken all the classes and toured the hospital birthing room and she knew, for a fact, that labor took hours. Chuck had been trained to coach her breathing through the different types of contractions and feed her ice chips. But Grandma Sylvie was concerned. ‘I had a fast labor with you,’ she said as she phoned for the taxi.

As she slid into the taxi Abby said she thought the baby was coming … and, sure enough, I was born at the next intersection. So far that’s the only time I’ve been the master of my own destiny.

Abby and Chuck brought me home to DUMBO the next day after the hospital declared I was healthy. I left wearing a yellow polkadot onesie that Grandma Sylvie had brought over.

I don’t remember any of that, of course. I don’t remember any of my childhood until I was three years old and fell down the steps of our apartment building. That was the most surprising and painful thing to happen to me until Serena cornered me at school today.

Serena is the exact opposite of me. I tend to mind my own business and can entertain myself for hours with all the stuff going on in my head. Serena minds everybody’s business, thinks she’s right about everything, doesn’t wear braces, and has thick brown hair she can wear up or down. She’s always bragging that her parents bought a warehouse in DUMBO before it was trendy and turned it into loft apartments and now they’re on Easy Street. By contrast, Abby and Chuck rent our apartment and will probably never have the down payment to buy one, but what do I care? It’s not like you get good grades or better parents or more love for owning your own place. And I don’t care if Serena and her group snub me, because I don’t want to be their friend anyway. Which is probably why Serena did what she did: to find a way to get under my skin.

‘Hey, girls,’ she said in a taunting sort of way, in the cafeteria. ‘Did you know that Phoebe barfed all over her mother on the Good Morning America show?’

I was sitting at the table behind hers with my two best friends, London and Washington. London looked at me and said in her posh British accent, ‘Febes, when were you on the Good Morning America show? You didn’t tell me!’ and I rolled my eyes and said, ‘I think it was the same year I won the Powerball Lottery.’ And Washington cackled, ‘You gonna share somma that with me, Lamb Chop? Cuz I’m a little shorta lunch money this week.’

Serena didn’t like that. She flipped her whole head of hair, in one piece as though it was glued together, and she was furious. Livid. Her lips were curled under like a mad dog’s.

‘Never been on Good Morning America, FEBES? Not even on November 3rd, 2007? Are you sure? Really sure?’

‘Serena, honey,’ Washington said as he pointed his breadstick at her. ‘You gone off your meds again?’

‘Shut up, you prickly little fuzzhead,’ Serena spit back. Then she rounded her attention back to me and said, ‘Maybe you don’t even know you’re the Brooklyn Potato. You don’t, do you? Or is it your mother who’s the Brooklyn Potato? It isn’t quite clear to me.’

So pathetic. I shook my head and stuck my fork back into my chickpea salad. You’ll never get to me, I said silently to myself.

That’s when I discovered that you really don’t know what your parents are up to, and that Serena had just scored big with the Brooklyn Potato revelation.

Washington sent me the link:

The Care and Feeding of a Brooklyn Potato - a blog written by Abby Sproule. Featuring: EVERY LAUGHABLE FACT OF MY EXISTENCE!

Chapter 2

‘The Care and Feeding of a Brooklyn Potato? What does that even mean?’ I screeched.

Abby was peeling carrots for soup when I got home from school. London had offered to come in for moral support, but I said I could handle it. I’d already passed through the seven stages of humiliation and was now just plain angry.

‘Did you ever think of telling me so that I wouldn’t hear it from someone at school?’

Abby lined the carrots up on the cutting board and chopped them into uneven pieces before plopping them into the Dutch oven on the stove. Then she filled two glasses with ice water. ‘I think we’d better have a chat,’ she said as she passed one to me.

We took up our positions on opposite sides of the kitchen table. She looked as though she didn’t know where to start.

‘It’s a Mommy Blog,’ she said at last. ‘I started it when I got pregnant with you. It was a way to share experiences with other women.’

‘At my expense?’

‘You were still in my uterus.’

‘I wasn’t in your uterus when I was on Good Morning America!’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Yes, that. How did I get on National TV?’

‘A friend of your Dad’s is one of the producers and she was looking for guests. She thought I had an interesting blog. That Good Morning America segment gave me a million and a half new subscribers.’

‘Because I threw up?’

‘Babies throw up all the time. The main thing was that I didn’t freak out about it on air and a lot of women loved me for it.’

‘I don’t understand. Why were you still writing it after I was born?’

Abby fiddled with her hair. ‘Because it meant I could stay home with you. Companies that deal in baby products started sponsoring me.’

I locked her in a stare. ‘You were making money off it?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, actually. It was my job.’

‘Mom, a job isn’t where you go out and blab about your kids! I’m twelve now! People are using it against me!’

She frowned. ‘Using it against you? Who’s using it against you?’

‘Serena! Pretty soon everyone at school will know!’

‘Phoebe, it’s not that bad. It’s