Iva Honeysuckle Discovers the World Read online

  Text copyright © 2012 by Candice Ransom

  Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Heather Ross

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion Books, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  ISBN: 978-1-4231-7456-1

  Visit www.disneyhyperionbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Iva Honeycutt was scolding her Cadet Blue crayon when Heaven’s shadow fell across the porch.

  “Did I tell you to stand next to Sea Green?” Iva said, not looking up. “You’re supposed to be with the blues.”

  Heaven loomed over her. Her cousin was hard to ignore. She was a head taller and weighed fifteen pounds more than Iva. And she was a mouth breather. Heaven huffed wetly next to Iva’s ear.

  Iva shifted so she was sitting on the one thing she didn’t want Heaven to see. The Shame of Her Third Grade Year.

  Of course, Heaven saw. Her eyes were as sharp as a lizard’s.

  “I see a little corner. Is that your map?” she said. “You said you lost it.”

  Iva stuck the wayward Cadet Blue in the time-out row at the back of her sixty-four-crayon box, where crayons with peeled wrappers and broken tips were sent to think about why they were there.

  “Did you fib to me? I’m going to tell Aunt Sissy.” Heaven cut her eyes toward the door. She was the only cousin who didn’t have the Honeycutt light brown eyes. Heaven’s eyes were a shifty gray, like oysters in a mason jar.

  Iva thought about sad little Cadet Blue. Maybe she’d been too hasty. She plucked the crayon from the time-out row and said, “Stand beside Cerulean and learn a few things.”

  Iva had spent all afternoon straightening out her crayons. On the first day of third grade, she’d marched into Miss Callahan’s class with her brand-new box of sixty-four.

  But Miss Callahan had a rule. No one could have more than twenty-four crayons, just like in second grade. Iva didn’t think her teacher was very forward-thinking, as her great-grandfather Ludwell Honeycutt used to say.

  She went home that day, picked her favorite colors from the box of sixty-four, and packed them into her old twenty-four-crayon box. All year the other kids asked Iva how she could have a Dandelion colored sun or a Robin’s Egg Blue James River, when their suns were plain old Yellow and their James Rivers were dull old Blue.

  Now school was over for the summer, and order was at last restored in Iva’s crayon box.

  “I’m talking to you.” Heaven punched Iva in the arm.

  “I hear you.” Iva wiggled away, accidentally uncovering her map.

  “You got an Incomplete!” Heaven shrieked, spit flying. She always spit when she got excited.

  “I did not!” Iva flipped the construction paper over.

  “I saw it, Iva. In-com-plete. I got a B plus on mine.”

  Iva knew this. She knew every little thing about her almost-the-exact-same-age double-first cousin. Heaven lived right next door. Iva’s bedroom window looked into Heaven’s bedroom window. When Heaven sneezed, Iva reached for a Kleenex.

  This year Iva had been able to escape from her cousin in school. Heaven had been assigned to Miss Park’s third grade. Everyone in both third grades had had to make up continents, and their maps were displayed in the hall outside the two classrooms.

  All but one.

  “I’m telling Aunt Sissy,” Heaven said again.

  Iva stuck her little finger in the plastic sharpener in the side of her crayon box. She liked testing the limits of her power. The sharpener didn’t even hurt.

  “Mama knows I got an Incomplete.” Iva hated that word. It made her feel half finished.

  Her map had serious problems. Number one, she had not invented a continent, like they were supposed to. Why make up countries and rivers and mountains when there were so many real ones to discover?

  Heaven had named her continent Cloudland, which Iva thought was stupid. Who could live on a cloud without falling through it?

  Instead of making up a continent, Iva had drawn a map of the world. But she had made the United States too big. Russia, Japan, and China were scrunched along the far edge like squashed cockroaches. She had put Australia next to Hawaii, in the wrong ocean.

  Iva didn’t label half of the states. She had gotten bogged down in all those square ones. Kansas, Nebraska—who could keep them straight? And what about those states that began with I? The state discoverers should have come up with better names.

  Heaven tapped a drawing on one corner of the map. “Lily Pearl?”

  “Yeah.” Iva had tried to erase her sister’s drawing of a witch wearing a diamond tiara and spraying an arc of rays. The caption read, Fancy Witch. Get You a Ghost in Lily Pearl’s scratchy kindergarten scrawl. Lily Pearl’s masterpieces were always in ink.

  “Howard doesn’t dare touch my stuff,” Heaven said, snorting through her left nostril. Once Iva had heard Aunt Sissy Two tell Iva’s mother that Heaven must have adenoids the size of tennis balls. Iva figured an adenoid must be that little punching-bag thing she’d noticed in the back of her throat. Heaven must have two of them. She would.

  “I’ll make a new map,” Iva said. “Better than this one. My honor is at stake.”

  Heaven kicked off her ladies’-sized pink flip-flops. “You still got the worst mark of anybody in the whole third grade.”

  “I don’t care,” Iva said, though she really did. “I’m a discoverer. Discoverers find places nobody has ever seen before.”

  Heaven pointed her big toe at the map. “Chicago isn’t a state.”

  “It should be. Who ever heard of Illinois?” Yet this was the very thing that worried Iva.

  How would she ever be a famous discoverer like George Washington or Admiral Byrd or her great-grandfather Ludwell Honeycutt if she didn’t even know Chicago was a city? She was almost nine. She’d better get busy discovering.

  With a black crayon, she scribbled her initials on one of the porch posts. “I bet Ludwell Honeycutt knew all the states and their capitals by first grade.”

  Heaven snorted through her right nostril. “Mama says our great-grandfather was a crackpot, who never paid his light bill. And he would drive a hundred miles an hour out of his driveway and then poke along on the wrong side of the road.”

  “He was not a crackpot!” Iva said. “Why are you here, anyway? Did you come over just to bug me?”

  “You want to go with me to Cazy Sparkle’s yard sale tomorrow? I’m looking to get me some embroidered pillow slips for my Hope Drawer. Special ones that say ‘Good Morning’ on one side and ‘Good Night’ on the other. That way I won’t get bored making the bed.”

  Iva was bored just listening to Heaven. “Cazy Sparkle is a crook.”

  “She is not!”

  “Then how come she has yard sales at weird times, like Tuesday morning and Thanksgiving?”

  “Because she’s looking for things to sell all those other days, that’s why.”

  “You know where she gets that stuff?” Iva said. “She sneaks into old people’s houses in the middle of the night and steals their pot holders and tea towels. Then the
y come to her yard sales and buy their own tea towels back.”

  Heaven jumped up. “You never want to do anything I want to do!”

  “You never want to do anything good, like discovering.”

  “You’ll never be a discoverer,” Heaven said, snorting through both nostrils. “You can’t even pass geography.”

  “A fat lot you know!”

  From inside Iva’s house Mrs. Honeycutt said mildly, “Girls. Be nice, now.”

  Heaven aimed her tattling voice at the screen door. “Aunt Sissy, Iva won’t come yard sale-ing with me tomorrow.”

  “I wouldn’t go with her to the corner!” Iva called back.

  “And she wrote all over the porch,” Heaven threw in for good measure.

  Iva stood up, grabbing her map and crayons. Once Heaven started telling on her, she wouldn’t quit till Christmas. Iva stamped inside the house, slamming the door.

  “I’ll be here at eight,” Heaven yelled after her.

  “I’m not going!”

  Heaven flip-flopped down the steps. “Eight on the dot. Don’t be late.”

  Iva stormed down the hall.

  Her mother was scrubbing Lily Pearl’s latest creation, Party Witch, off the wall. “Did you and Heaven fall out again?” she asked.

  “No. We never fell in.” Iva thought that was funny.

  Her mother didn’t laugh. “Iva, Aunt Sissy Two and I always wanted to have our babies at the same time so you all would grow up best friends.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a job to me.”

  Her mother was still talking. “Arden and Hunter. Lily Pearl and Howard. The others are best friends, but you and Heaven…”

  “I can’t help it, Mama. I don’t like her, and that’s that.”

  Iva went into her room, put her map and crayons on her desk, and flopped down on her bed by her tree.

  She had asked for the tree for her fourth birthday. She remembered describing it with her hands—slender trunk, soft papery leaves. Her mother had said, “Iva, honey, wouldn’t you rather have a baby doll? Or a teddy bear?” No, it had to be the tree or nothing. She got her fake tree, tall in its wicker pot, thick with silk leaves.

  When she was a little kid, Iva had whispered her secrets to her tree. Now she clothespinned notes to the leaves. Slips of paper, scribbled with her hopes and dreams, places she longed to visit, people she liked and disliked.

  Friends, neighbors, teachers, and especially relatives were either in favor or not, depending on how they’d treated her. The names of people she was mad at were clipped to leaves drooping at the bottom of the tree. The ones she liked earned spots on the top branches.

  Most people rotated from the top to the bottom and back again. Except Heaven. She was assigned a permanent leaf at the very bottom, close to the floor. Her name-paper curled at the edges and was furry with dust.

  Iva checked the bottom branches. Slips of paper were pinned to two leaves—Lily Pearl for messing up Iva’s map, and Heaven in her usual spot. Iva moved Lily Pearl’s name to the top of the tree.

  That left Heaven all alone at the bottom. Which she deserved.

  Iva made up her mind. This summer she would start on her life’s ambition. And Heaven would not accompany Iva on her mission. Let her cousin arrange guest soaps in her Hope Drawer.

  Iva Honeysuckle had a bunch of discovering to do. First on her list, finding the buried gold her great-grandfather Ludwell Honeycutt had spent his whole life looking for.

  The next morning Iva sat up in bed with her pillow propped behind her back. Her dog, Sweetlips, dozed next to her, snoring lightly. She had named him after one of George Washington’s foxhounds. Most people didn’t know that George Washington was a discoverer before he became president.

  Iva held a small black book with crumbling edges. Weber Tire Company Record Book, Browning 8-8770 was printed on the front cover. At first Iva thought Browning 8-8770 was a code. Then she figured out it was an old-fashioned phone number.

  She touched the book reverently, as if it were an artifact from King Tut’s tomb. Earlier that year, Iva’s father had cleaned out their attic. He came across some of his grandfather’s belongings. He gave Iva her great-grandfather Ludwell Honeycutt’s tire record book, a geography bee medal dated 1923, and a stack of old National Geographic magazines.

  At night she leafed through the musty magazines, marveling at the black-and-white photographs of people living in foreign lands. One night as she was reading, two things fell out of the July 1949 issue.

  The first was a letter from the secretary of the National Geographic Society in Washington,

  D.C. It was addressed to Lowell Hunnicutt. Iva had frowned at the misspelling of her great-grandfather’s name. In the letter, the secretary told Ludwell he needed to actually discover something to be considered for membership.

  Iva realized Ludwell must have written to the National Geographic Society, asking to belong.

  She knew he never became a member of the Society.

  But she would. She would carry out Ludwell’s great dream.

  Now she opened the cover of the black book. All the inside pages were labeled Tire Pressure. She picked up a mechanical pencil she had swiped from Arden. Iva believed mechanical pencils were reserved for geniuses, but why her older sister had one was a mystery.

  On the first page, Iva crossed out Tire Pressure and printed The Book of Great Discoveries Made by Iva Honeycutt. She clicked the pencil against her teeth. Something didn’t look right. She erased her last name and wrote something above it.

  Now the heading read, The Book of Great Discoveries Made by Iva Honeysuckle. That was the name she’d called herself in first grade. When she made her great discoveries, she wouldn’t have the same last name as Heaven Honeycutt. Nobody would guess they were even related.

  Iva leaped out of bed and dressed in corduroy shorts and a T-shirt. The National Geographic magazine pictures always showed discoverers wearing shorts.

  For her first great discovery, she could find the missing boundary line. Their town was called Uncertain because it was next to the invisible line that divided Hopewell County from Dinwiddie County. No one had ever figured out where the line was. That would be an easy job for Iva.

  But she had something much more important to discover.

  She took the second special thing that had fallen from the National Geographic magazine and tucked it in her pocket, along with a packet of tinfoil.

  As she opened her bedroom door, something pink streaked down the hall.

  “Lily Pearl!” Iva hollered. “Better not let Mama catch you!”

  “I’m Naked Witch!” Lily Pearl flashed past, a rhinestone bracelet spinning around her thin wrist, white-blond hair flying behind her like a bird.

  Iva walked into the kitchen. Arden was slouched at the table, her alto sax in her lap. Arden’s almost-exact-same-age cousin, Hunter, Heaven’s older sister, sat across from her reading a Nancy Drew book. Hunter’s summer project was to read every single Nancy Drew in order.

  Iva’s mother stood at the stove, flipping corn cakes. Lily Pearl zipped by, snatching a piece of bacon from the plate on the table.

  “Lily Pearl!” Mrs. Honeycutt yelled. “Quit running in your naked strip and put some clothes on!”

  “Can’t! I’m Naked Witch!”

  Iva slid into her chair and helped herself to a piece of bacon. “Can I have three corn cakes, Mama?”

  Her mother looked at her. “What are you doing wearing corduroy when it’s hotter than the inside of the devil’s belly button? I’m having a heat stroke just looking at you.”

  “These are my discovery shorts. All discoverers wear shorts.” Iva chewed her bacon thoughtfully. “Well, except Admiral Byrd. He would have froze to death at the South Pole if he had on shorts. Mama, I was reading one of Ludwell’s National Geographic magazines last night. It was from October 1933!”

  “Mama, you really ought to burn those moldy old things,” Arden said.

  Iva stuck her tongue o
ut. “Anyway, I was reading about this place called Chosen.” Iva pronounced it as it looked, “chosen.” “It’s called Korea now, but in the old days—”

  Arden put the sax reed to her lips and blew. A wrenching sound came from it, like a rusty nail yanked from a board.

  “Could you tell that was ‘Ring of Fire’?” she asked.

  “Oh, honey, I don’t think you can play ‘Ring of Fire’ on a saxophone.” Mrs. Honeycutt set a platter of corn cakes on the table.

  Iva forked three of the crispy, brown-edged cakes onto her plate before Arden could beat her to it. Arden was a huge pain, but probably all twelve-year-old girls were.

  This summer, Arden was in love with an old country-western singer, Johnny Cash. His songs wailed from her room night and day, and so did the screeching from her sax as she tried to play “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues.”

  “I need lessons,” Arden said. “Somebody to teach me to play real good.”

  “Nobody in the world can do that,” Iva said, slathering butter on her corn cakes.

  “Do you hear anything?”Arden said to Hunter.

  Hunter turned the page of her book. “Must be the wind.”

  Lily Pearl darted through again, her hair like the tail of a comet.

  “Lily Pearl!” Mrs. Honeycutt yelled at Lily Pearl’s naked back. “Is that my good rhinestone bracelet?”

  “Mama, this place Chosen used to be the Land of Morning Calm. Isn’t that pretty? And there’s another place called the Hermit Kingdom—”

  Arden’s sax shrieked so loud, the lid of the sugar bowl jittered.

  “Will you be quiet!” Iva shouted.

  “No yelling,” her mother said, then bellowed, “Lily Pearl! Get dressed right this minute, missy!”

  “—and people go to the Diamond Mountains and they find diamonds on the ground. They just pick them up.” Iva glared at Arden, daring her to interrupt again.

  “Listen to this,” Hunter said. “‘Carson Drew emptied the tumbler at one draught and fastened his eyes on Nathan Gombet.’ What’s a draught?”

  “Mama, the Chosen ladies beat their clothes on rocks in the river. And then they club their clothes to make them smooth, on a sticklike thing. Mama, can we do that? Wash our clothes in the river? We could go down to Calfpasture Creek and—”