Eleven

by Lauren Myracle

  I got to my feet. “Be right back.”

  My bedroom was bright and cheerful compared to the attic. I dragged a chair into the closet and pulled an old Easter basket from the top shelf. A pointy black triangle fell down from behind it.

  My witch’s hat.

  I stared at it, then shoved it in the corner behind my shoes.

  “Winnie?” Mom called from downstairs. “We can still hear Sweetie-Pie crying! What’s going on?”

  I stepped into the hall and leaned over the banister. “I need some rope!”

  “What for?”

  Sandra joined Mom at the bottom of the stairs. “Why are you all dusty?” she asked. “Did you fall in, too?”

  Ty came running from the den to see.

  “I just need some rope,” I said.

  “Why?” Ty said.

  I didn’t want to explain in front of Sandra, because I knew she’d burst out laughing. But they were all standing there looking at me. “Because we’re going to tie it to my Easter basket. We’re going to make, like, an elevator so Sweetie-Pie can—”

  Sandra burst out laughing. “An elevator?!”

  The doorbell rang, and Mom’s eyes flew to the door. “Check the drawer beneath the microwave. I think there’s a ball of twine. And tell your father to hurry!”

  I jogged downstairs to the kitchen. The twine was where Mom said it would be, but it didn’t look strong enough to hold both Sweetie-Pie and the basket. I dropped it back in the drawer.

  “Would this work?” Ty asked. He held out a yellow-and-white jump rope.

  “Ty, that’s perfect!” I said. I pulled it between my hands, testing its strength. “I’ll bring it right back!”

  I raced back to the attic, where I knotted one end of the rope around the handle of the Easter basket. “Can I be the one to lower it down?”

  “It was your idea,” Dad said. He aimed the flashlight toward Sweetie-Pie, and I eased the basket into the hole and let the rope slide through my fingers.

  “Hold on, Sweetie-Pie,” I called. “Almost there.”

  The rope stopped moving. Dad and I leaned forward.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  Dad groaned. The basket sat smack-dab on top of Sweetie-Pie’s head. She yowled, and Dad and I shared a look.

  “Your mother is not going to be happy,” he said.

  I jiggled the rope. “Move, Sweetie-Pie.”

  She yowled again.

  I reeled in the basket. “I have another idea,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I dashed downstairs and got a can of tuna fish from the pantry, which I opened and scraped onto a paper plate. From the hall, I could hear people chatting. Something about baby raccoons being trapped in someone’s chimney, which everyone seemed to find extremely hilarious.

  “No luck?” Sandra said, breezing into the kitchen to grab a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Mr. Miles is taking bets on how long it takes you guys to get her out. I told him about the elevator, and he doubled the stakes.”

  I brushed past her. Back in the attic, I told Dad to scoot over and let me have another try. Then I placed the tuna fish on the bottom of the basket, wedging the edge of the plate against the basket’s side so it would stay in place. “Now she’ll want to climb in,” I explained.

  I started to lower the basket, then paused and dropped down a small chunk of tuna by itself. Sweetie-Pie stopped mewing long enough to gobble it up, and I nodded. “You like that, huh? Well, here comes some more.”

  I lowered the basket. Again, it landed on Sweetie-Pie’s head.

  “Hmm,” Dad said.

  I jounced the basket to loosen the tuna-fish smell. “Go on,” I said. “Get in.”

  “Maybe we should call the fire department. They get cats out of trees. Maybe they can get cats out of attics.” He drummed his fingers on the floor. “Have the guests started arriving?”

  I jostled the rope. From beneath the basket, a paw swiped the air. “Come on, Sweetie-Pie,” I whispered. Her head pushed between the basket and the Sheetrock, and in one quick burst she hopped over the wicker edge and onto the paper plate.

  “She’s in!” I said. I started to pull her up.

  “Easy, now,” Dad said. “Take your time.”

  Sweetie-Pie shifted her weight, and the basket lurched to the side. I held my breath.

  “Steady,” Dad said. “Just a little farther.”

  When the basket reached the top of the hole, Dad grabbed Sweetie-Pie and pinned her agaist his chest. “Got her.”

  “Sweetie-Pie!” I said. I scratched behind her ears, picking bits of fluff from her fur. Sweetie-Pie purred and butted my hand.

  “Excellent job,” Dad said. He heaved himself to his feet and motioned for me to grab the flashlights. “Come on. We’ve got a party to get to.”

  In the den, I passed around pizza eyeballs and tried to look modest as Dad told the story of Sweetie-Pie’s rescue. Everyone seemed impressed when he got to the part about the tuna fish, and they laughed when he described how Sweetie-Pie tried to dash back up to the attic the minute he deposited her in the hall.

  “Caught her by the tip of her tail,” Dad said, shaking his head. “Crazy cat.”

  I looked at him from across the room. He winked at me, and I glowed with pride.

  “My daughter has four cats,” someone said beside me.

  I turned to see Mr. Devine sipping a cup of punch.

  “One of them got trapped in the pantry once. Took Dinah hours to hunt her down, because for some reason that cat doesn’t meow. Never has.”

  “Huh,” I said. It wasn’t very exciting, a cat in the pantry. And what kind of cat didn’t know how to meow?

  “You should have seen her when Dinah finally found her,” he said. “Purring and licking Dinah’s face like Dinah was the greatest thing since chopped liver.”

  I smiled politely. Mr. Devine is short and pale, like Dinah, and he’d come to the party in blue-and-red Superman tights, which was kind of embarrassing because I could see the line of his underwear underneath. But he seemed nice.

  I thought about Sweetie-Pie, how scared she was in that hole. I thought about Dinah’s cat, so happy to be among people again.

  “Um, Mr. Devine?” I said. I hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Do you think you could go get her? Dinah, I mean. I meant to invite her earlier, but I forgot.”

  “Sure,” he said, nodding in a happy way. “She was thinking about watching the Peanuts special, but I know she’d rather come here.”

  That last part I pretended not to hear. I would die if Dad told anyone I watched the Great Pumpkin on TV. But maybe Dinah and I could watch it, if she really wanted to. I had enough Halloween to share.

  November

  AT HOME, MOM IS THE ONE who cooks our Thanksgiving meal, although Dad helps out by keeping us kids out of her hair while she bustles around. But for the big Thanksgiving feast at school, we kids did everything ourselves. The younger grades were in charge of decorations, the fourth graders made applesauce, the fifth graders churned butter, and the sixth graders baked bread. On the day of the feast itself, everyone wore clothes that were fancier than normal, and it was fun to see everyone all polished and spiffed up. I wore a black corduroy skirt and a soft white cardigan, and I put on my ring with the greenish-blue stone that I saved for special occasions.

  “Ooo,” Amanda said when she saw it. “It’s the color of the ocean after a storm.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I stared at her hair. Yesterday it reached below her waist, but today it fell in smooth layers around her face, just like Gail’s. She’d even gone to Gail’s stylist to get it done—a place I’d never heard of called the Van Michael Salon. “I can’t believe you cut it,” I said. “You’ve been growing it for so long.”

  “The stylist said a shorter style would be better for my face. Don’t you like it?”

  I didn’t have to answer, because right then Gail bounded up and threw her arm over Amanda’s shoulder.

  “Amanda, come on! Ms. Russell’
s doing the seating chart for the feast, and I’ll die if she doesn’t put us together.”

  “You guys have to have a seating chart?” I said. “Mr. Hutchinson said we were mature enough to choose our own seats.”

  Gail looked me over. “Winnie,” she said. “Hi.”

  “Show Gail your ring,” Amanda said.

  I held out my hand, and Gail stepped closer. “Is it an emerald?” she asked. She peered at the stone. “Oh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just ... it’s not an emerald, that’s all.”

  “So?”

  “So, nothing.” She flipped her hair away from her face. “My birthstone’s an emerald. I feel really lucky, because what if it was, like, an opal? Or a garnet?”

  “Mine’s a sapphire,” Amanda said.

  “Mine’s an aquamarine,” I said. I wiggled my ring. “That’s what this is.”

  “An aquamarine’s not a gem, though,” Gail said. “Not actually.”

  That was one of the most ridiculous things I’d ever heard. Aquamarines are beautiful. They’re what mermaids would wear if mermaids wore jewelry. Anyway, what about the Aqua Girls, whom Gail had been so fired up about just two months ago? A real Aqua Girl would definitely wear an aquamarine.

  I opened my mouth to point this out, then changed my mind. Gail could say whatever she wanted. I wasn’t going to let her take my ring’s specialness away.

  Gail tugged on Amanda’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “The bell’s going to ring any second!”

  I watched them sprint down the hall and tried not to feel left out. Who cared if Gail and Amanda had better birthstones than me? And who cared if they’d be eating bread and applesauce side by side, giggling and fluffing their twin haircuts?

  But it hurt to think of them doing things together. Whispering at the salon, waltzing out arm in arm with their fresh-smelling hair. Other stuff, too—I knew because twice I’d called Amanda over the weekend, and both times her mom said she was at a friend’s. “Who?” I asked the first time. The second time, I just said “oh” and hung up. It made my stomach feel hollow, realizing there were parts of Amanda’s life I no longer knew about.

  Then again, there were parts of my life Amanda didn’t know about, either. Like the fact that this afternoon I was going home with Dinah Devine, and that her dad was going to drop us off at the mall so we could visit the kittens in the pet store. We both thought it was terrible how those kittens had to be penned in a cage for their entire lives, or at least until someone bought them. We knew we couldn’t take them home with us—Mom said absolutely no more pets, and Dinah’s dad said four cats were enough, thank you very much—but we could still talk to them and make scratchy noises with our fingers. We figured that had to count for something.

  If Amanda hadn’t dashed off with Gail, would I have told her about Dinah? Not that it mattered, since she did dash off.

  The warning bell rang. I hitched my backpack over my shoulder and hurried down the empty hall.

  “Here you go, girls,” Dinah’s dad said, handing us each a ten-dollar bill. “Have fun. I’ll pick you up at five-thirty in front of the Chick-fil-A.”

  “Don’t forget about your dry cleaning,” Dinah said. “And you’re supposed to call Charlie about the roof, remember? Tell him Saturday’s better than Sunday, but not until after ten.” She waved until the car was out of sight, then turned to me. “So. Kittens first, or shopping?”

  I didn’t answer. I stared at the money in my hand, and then at her. “Here,” I said, thrusting the bill in front of me.

  “What? No, it’s yours.”

  “What for?”

  She shrugged. “To spend.”

  “But—” I shut my mouth. If Mr. Devine wanted to give me ten dollars, fine. But it made me uneasy, like the time I visited Great-Grandmother Robinson in the nursing home, and she gave me a wrinkled five-dollar bill from her plastic change purse. Like she thought she had to pay me for coming to see her.

  “Kittens,” I said at last, stuffing the money in my pocket. “Let’s go.”

  The cutest kitten in the bunch, we both agreed, was a tiny white puffball with gray eyes. Her paws were the color of soot, so we named her Cinders, short for Cinderella.

  “Which is perfect,” Dinah said. “After all, she’s kind of an orphan, too, just like the real Cinderella.”

  “Poor thing,” I said. “Can you imagine how horrible it would be to be this teeny, little thing and not even have your mother to take care of you?”

  Dinah got all quiet, and I realized what I’d said.

  “Not you,” I blurted. “I mean, yes, you, but—”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  I felt bad even though she said that. I wrapped my arms around my ribs and said, “Do you ... remember her? Your mom?”

  She pressed her knuckle against the side of the glass cage. “A little.”

  I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t say anything more. I turned back to Cinders. “Look. She’s trying to bat your finger.”

  “I wish I could hold her,” Dinah said. She squatted so that she was closer to the floor of the cage. “Do you know how to say ‘I love you’ to a cat? You blink three times really slowly, like this.”

  She blinked three times, and Cinders meowed.

  Dinah smiled. “See? You have to think the words I love you as you do it. Otherwise, it won’t work.”

  “You girls want that white one?” the owner of the store asked. He regarded us from over the tops of his glasses.

  Dinah stood up. “We’re just looking.”

  “Well, other people want to look, too. You’ve been camped in front of that cage for half an hour.”

  Dinah spread her hand out flat against the side of the cage. “Don’t worry,” she said to Cinders. “Someone nice is going to buy you. Someone who’ll take good care of you, I promise.”

  “She’s deaf,” the store owner said. “Can’t hear a word you say.”

  I glanced at Dinah, who was holding her mouth in a stiff kind of way. “How can you tell?” I asked. “I mean, are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. White cats are almost always deaf—some sort of screwy wiring in their genes.” He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Too bad, but that’s the way it goes.”

  Dinah stood before the cage for another minute, then let her hand fall from the glass.

  At The Gap, Dinah inspected a pile of sweaters while I rifled through the sales rack.

  “Look,” I said, holding up a lime-green button-down. “Isn’t this cute?”

  She stepped out from behind the sweater display, and I remembered what of course I’d known before: that Dinah is not the person to consult when it came to matters of fashion. Today she wore a sagging yellow dress with a nubbly blue cardigan buttoned over the front. On the pocket of the cardigan was a pony.

  She squinted at the shirt. “It’s nice. Do you want to try it on?”

  “Nah. It’s a large—it would be too big.” I almost suggested she try it on, but I caught myself at the last second. I couldn’t help thinking, though, what a difference it would make if she wore normal clothes. Not to me, but to the other kids at school.

  “Hey, want to go look at the jeans?” I said. “We could both try some on. It would be fun.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. She glanced around the store, then giggled and jammed her hands under her armpits. “Okay, sure.”

  I grabbed a pair of carpenter jeans for me—I knew they’d swallow me, but who cared—and helped Dinah pick out two pairs of relaxed fits, one with frayed cuffs and one just plain normal. We chose adjoining stalls in the dressing room, and as I stepped out of my corduroys, I could hear Dinah giggling in that same nervous way as when I first brought up the idea.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  I heard the sound of a zipper being zipped, followed by a grunt. And then more giggles.

  “Dinah?”

  “I don’t think this is the way they’re supp
osed to look. Will you come check?”

  I pulled on my jeans, clutched the fabric at the waist so they’d stay on, and slipped into the hall. “Let’s see.”

  She cracked her door and yanked me in. “They’re too big, I’m pretty sure. Or maybe too small? And why are they so long? Is that normal?” She glanced at my face, and her cheeks turned red. She started undoing the buttons. “That bad, huh? I should have known. I guess I’m just not a—”

  “Wait!” I said. “Just ... wait! The jeans are fine. It’s just ...”

  I exhaled. It was just that she’d taken off her dress in order to try them on, which meant she was naked from the waist up. Naked and smooth and white, except for two pink nipples like dots of jam.

  I focused on her hips, on the bulge of flesh above the waist of her jeans. “I’ll get a shirt for you to try them with. Be right back.”

  I grabbed the first shirt I saw, a soft blue V-neck printed with tiny daisies. But I stopped outside Dinah’s stall and pressed my back against the wall. Occasionally I saw Mom naked, like if I needed to ask her a question when she was taking a bath, but even then she was mostly underwater. And Sandra always shut her door before undressing. Amanda and I turned our backs if we changed in the same room, and if one of us happened to see anything, we quickly looked away.

  It wasn’t that being naked was bad. It was just embarrassing. Other kids knew that without being told. Why didn’t Dinah?

  Gail Grayson, if she saw Dinah without a shirt on ...

  I didn’t want to think about it. Once Maxine came back from the bathroom with the bottom of her skirt tucked partway into her tights, and Gail gasped and said, “Maxine! You’re showing!” If she whispered it, that would have been one thing, but she said it so loud that everyone in the cafeteria turned to stare.

  I knocked on Dinah’s stall and passed the shirt over the top of the door. Five seconds later, Dinah came out and stood before the three full-sized mirrors at the end of the dressing room. She stared at herself straight on, then turned sideways and examined her profile. Her hands flitted from her stomach to her hips, gentle as little birds.