Fishing for Gold

Molly Murphy is helping her friend Allison shoot a video for her Tweenvids channel at the school lockers. Allison, it turns out, is practically famous: she has just topped fifty thousand followers, posts twice a week with her dad's help, and hopes to become a paid influencer with sponsorships and free products. She invites Molly to join her, if only Molly can get her hands on a Gaggle A91, the phone with the amazing camera. Allison even shares her trick for working parents: ask for something huge, then settle for the phone.

Molly tries it at home, buttering up her mom with dishes and trash duty before asking for a big-screen TV, then falling back to the phone. Her mom sees right through her and says no on both counts. Money is tight, and she is not a fan of kids posting videos of themselves online anyway.

Allison has a backup plan: grandparents, who she insists love giving kids things. Molly's only grandparent in town is her grandfather, Detective Polehaus, and there is nothing soft about him. Molly visits him at the police station, hints heavily about her upcoming birthday, and even offers to leave an envelope he could stuff with cash. The detective jokes that she had better leave before he books her for extortion.

Undaunted, Allison coaches Molly in her rules for handling adults: never criticize, always smile, be exceedingly nice, and phrase questions so grown-ups have to answer yes. She suggests Molly find something sentimental to use as a trump card, like the locket her grandfather once gave her. When Molly admits the whole scheme feels fake, Allison shrugs it off. Even her famous silly string fight with her dad was staged. "My dad says life is fake," she explains, and none of what she posts is real, but it is still fun.

Searching for the locket with her mom, Molly gets a surprise. Inside are two pictures: one of Molly as a little girl, and one of her grandmother, who passed away when Molly was small. Molly is quietly ashamed to realize she had forgotten what her grandmother looked like.

Wearing the locket, Molly brings her grandfather a box of her mom's cannolis and turns on the charm, asking him to tell her about himself. He warms up, remembering boyhood summers fishing at Kerner's Creek with bamboo poles and feasting on Mrs. Mallory's homemade molasses cookies, a treat he describes as sweet, smoky heaven. But the detective's instincts are tingling. The locket, the cannolis, the hugs, the sudden sweetness - none of it matches the funny smart aleck he knows and loves, the granddaughter who takes after her mother and her grandmother before her. He asks her point-blank what is really going on.

Molly can't go through with it. She borrows his phone and tells Allison the plan is off: "It's not that I can't manipulate him, it's that I don't want to." She wants a real relationship with her grandfather, not the kind Allison has with her followers, even if it costs her the phone and her spot in the videos.

Days later, Molly's mom mysteriously drops her off on a dirt road in the woods and drives away. At the end of a little path, Molly finds Allison and her grandfather waiting. He has pieced the whole scheme together, and Allison has confessed the rest. Molly apologizes and tells him that even though he is grumpy, stubborn, ornery, and cantankerous, she loves him and never wanted anything to come between them. He forgives her completely and declares the matter behind them and forgotten.

Then he pulls back a tarp to reveal a picnic basket, stools, and bamboo fishing poles. He has even talked with Allison's dad, and they agreed that a break from social media to do something real would be good for her too. He hands Molly a shovel and Allison a pail: he supplied the poles and a dozen molasses cookies, so the girls can supply the worms. Molly sighs, "I knew there was going to be a punishment in here somewhere."