Dear Pen Pal

by Heather Vogel Frederick

  “I think we’ll call it a night,” my mother says, hastily putting her book and papers into her bag. “Come on, Emma. Let’s get you home to bed.”

  I don’t even get to say good-bye to Stewart. Great, I think. If that isn’t just the nonexistent cherry on my un-sundae of a day.

  “That was really rude!” my mother scolds as we head down the sidewalk toward home.

  I don’t even try to muster an argument. She’s right.

  “I know you’ve had a rough day,” she continues. “Your father called and told me what happened this morning. But that’s no excuse!”

  She goes directly upstairs when we get home, and I hear the bathwater running. My mother always retreats to the bathtub when she’s feeling stressed. Either that or she makes herself a cup of tea. I think about seeing if I can squeeze some sympathy out of my father, but his office door is closed and he’s hung the DO NOT DISTURB—ON DEADLINE sign over the door handle. Ever since Darcy and I were little, it’s been drummed into us that when we see this sign, we don’t bother him. “Not unless there’s fire or blood,” as my father says.

  He tells me that since I’m a writer too, I’ll understand. And the thing is, I do. I heave a sigh and head upstairs to my room. A meltdown is incredibly lame, but it’s not an emergency.

  Melville is curled up on my bed, and I sit down beside him and stroke his fur. I glance at the clock by my bed. There’s no point calling my friends—they’re probably still at the Chadwicks, talking about what a moron I am. Or on their way to get pizza. Darcy must still be at the rink, and I can’t get ahold of Stewart without risking Becca or her mother answering the phone. There’s no way I want to talk to either of them.

  “I guess it’s just you and me, Melville,” I tell my cat. I talk to him for a while about the injustice of everything. Melville doesn’t say much, but his rumbling purr sounds sympathetic.

  “It’s like all of a sudden everything just went haywire,” I complain. “I thought eighth grade was going to be great. I’m the editor of the paper, and I have a boy who likes me. But my best friend isn’t there, plus I made a complete idiot of myself in front of the whole school today and then I broke my glasses and then, to top it all off, I totally alienated everybody at book club.”

  Melville licks a paw and swats at his ear.

  “I’m sure if you were human you’d agree with me, wouldn’t you?” I murmur, scratching him under the chin. “Being a teenager is horrible.”

  Melville curls up and goes to sleep, which is not exactly the reaction I’m looking for. I really need to talk to someone. My gaze wanders over to my desk. The blue envelope from Bailey Jacobs is laying on it. I’ve read her letter a zillion times already, and looked at her picture almost as much too, but I grab the envelope anyway and take them both out.

  “See, Melville?” I say, holding up her photo. “This is my new pen pal.” Even though it’s a school picture, Bailey looks nice. Like me, she wears glasses and her hair is brown, but hers is chin-length and tucked behind her ears, not curly and short like mine. In the photo, she’s smiling a friendly smile, not one of those fake “it’s school picture day!” smiles.

  I open the letter and start to read aloud:

  Dear Pen Pal,

  My name is Bailey Jacobs and I’m in the 8th grade. My mother and your mother were friends back in college. I guess they liked the same things, because your mother is a librarian and mine owns a bookstore. It’s called Shelf Life, which I think is a pretty good name for a bookstore. We live in a small town near Laramie called Gopher Hole. I know what you’re thinking—stupid name, right? But it’s actually a really nice place. It’s not historic like Concord, where you live. No famous writers ever lived here, and there weren’t any famous battles fought here like there were in Concord. We’re only famous for our tumbleweeds, ha ha. It’s really pretty, though. Every which way you look there are rolling plains that stretch all the way to the Medicine Bow Mountains. Our town has lots of ranchers and cowboys—real ones, not the fake ones you see in movies—and then there are the normal folks like me and my family. My dad is the manager of one of the local banks. We moved out here because he thought Laramie was too crowded. He’s a real country boy, but I really love Laramie. The university is there, and there are shops and restaurants and a really great library. Gopher Hole is so small we don’t even have a middle school. They just stick all of us kids into one building with two rooms—K–5 on one side, 6–8 on the other. It’s practically a one-room schoolhouse. I can’t wait until next year, when I’ll get to take the bus to Laramie High. For now, though, I’m stuck in Gopher Hole.

  Your friend,

  Bailey

  I smile at the little sketch she made beside her name of a girl stuck in a gopher hole. It looks just like one of the line drawings from Judy Abbott’s letters in Daddy-Long-Legs. I like Bailey’s sense of humor, and I like having her for a pen pal.

  I reach over to my desk and grab some paper and the special fountain pen that Cassidy and her mother gave me for my birthday a couple of years ago, and I start to write.

  Dear Pen Pal,

  Did you ever have one of those days where everything goes completely, horribly wrong?

  WINTER

  “Getting an education is an awfully wearing process!”

  —Daddy-Long-Legs

  Jess

  “It isn’t the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh—I really think that requires spirit.”

  —Daddy-Long-Legs

  Cassidy’s front door swings open wide.

  “Happy Thanksgiving!” cries her mother. Mr. Kinkaid has his arm around her waist, and they’re both beaming.

  “Happy Thanksgiving!” we chorus back, crowding into the front hall.

  For once, there’s no camera crew around. Nobody’s going to be filming us today for Cooking with Clementine—it’s just the turkey, the stuffing, and us. “Us” meaning everyone in our book club and their families.

  “Is anyone else here yet?” I ask, looking around.

  “Nope,” Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid tells me. “You’re the first ones, and just what we need to get this party started.”

  My little brothers peel off their coats and drop them on the floor. Ignoring my mother’s protests they thunder upstairs, heading for the turret. They love Cassidy’s house. Especially the turret. I know the feeling. I wouldn’t trade Half Moon Farm for anything, but it doesn’t have a turret.

  Shaking his head wearily, my father picks up their coats and hangs them in the closet. “Boys,” he says, shaking his head.

  Cassidy’s mom and Mr. Kinkaid look at each other and smile.

  As usual, Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid has decorated the house within an inch of its life. She loves holidays. There are carefully arranged piles of dried gourds on the lower stair steps and on the front hall table, and the banister is twined with Bittersweet vine—Celastrus scandens is its Latin name, which I know because of my Latin class at school. I’ve been practicing at home on the weekends by memorizing the scientific names for all the plants around our farm. I love the way everything in the natural world has an official-sounding Latin name—plants and animals, clouds and stars. It makes the world seem so orderly. I finger the Bittersweet vine’s bright red and orange berries, which match the colors of the gourds and the autumn leaves that are artfully scattered on the front hall table.

  “It looks pretty, doesn’t it?” says my mother. “I should make more of an effort at our house.”

  Like she has time for that kind of froufrou stuff these days. Mom’s had to pick up a lot of slack around the farm now that I’m not there during the week to help out, which makes me feel bad. She says it’s completely worth it, though, to have me at Colonial Academy. My parents are still excited that I’m going there. “I think our house always looks nice,” I tell her.

  “Thanks, sweetie.” She smiles at me, then glances over my s
houlder and lets out a yelp of surprise.

  I whip around, expecting to see, I don’t know, maybe a live turkey or something, but it’s only the mannequins. Cassidy’s mother has a quirky sense of humor, and she has these life-size mannequins she got somewhere that are always lurking around on holidays. They weren’t around this Halloween, for some reason, but last year Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid dressed them up as vampires and hid them in the bushes by the front porch. They scared the socks off Emma and me when we came over to pick up Cassidy to go trick-or-treating.

  Today they’re standing by the entry to the living room, dressed in Pilgrim outfits. The girl Pilgrim is holding up a sign that reads: HAPPY and the boy Pilgrim is holding up another one that reads: THANKSGIVING.

  Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid laughs. “I didn’t mean to startle you, Shannon.”

  “No harm done,” my mother replies. “You know I love your mannequins. They’re always hilarious!”

  “Creepy is more like it.” Cassidy thuds down the stairs. She hates the mannequins.

  “There you are, honey,” says her mother, handing her a stack of small cards. “Would you and Jess mind doing the place cards?”

  Cassidy and I head for the dining room. There are going to be a lot of us here for dinner, and all the extra leaves have been added to the table, along with a second table that sticks out a little into the hall.

  “Let’s put the dads out there,” I suggest. “They won’t mind.”

  Cassidy gives me half the stack and starts plunking hers down in front of each place setting. The place cards are cute, with a picture of a big turkey beside each of our names, which are written in Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid’s swooping cursive.

  “Be sure to put Emma next to Stewart,” I remind Cassidy.

  I wait until she’s at the other end of the table to put my last two place cards down: Darcy and Jess. I feel a little thrill of anticipation at the thought of sitting next to Emma’s brother, and hope Cassidy doesn’t notice what I’ve done. Not that she would—she’s pretty oblivious when it comes to boy stuff.

  When we’re done, Cassidy heads back upstairs and I follow her. As we pass the narrow stairway on the second floor that leads up to the turret, my brothers’ voices float down toward us. They’re squabbling, as usual. They’ve invented this complicated game called “ogre in the tower” that they play every time we come over to Cassidy’s. I have no idea what the rules are, but they always end up fighting. Cassidy and I go into her room and close the door. I spot a scruffy tail sticking out from under the bed.

  “Hey, Murphy,” I coax, kneeling down on the floor beside him. “You can come out now. The coast is clear.” Murphy is not fond of my brothers.

  “Leave him alone,” says Cassidy, flopping down onto the bed on her stomach.

  “You’re grumpy today,” I tell her. “Hasn’t anybody ever told you that Thanksgiving is a day for being happy and grateful?”

  She shoots me a look.

  “How’s hockey going?” Hockey is Cassidy’s favorite subject, so I figure maybe this will cheer her up.

  She merely grunts in reply. I perch on the edge of the bed beside her and try another angle. “Have you heard from Winky recently?” I kind of wish I’d gotten Cassidy’s pen pal. Winky Parker likes animals too, and she even has a horse. One that’s meant to ride, not plow fields like Led and Zep, our big Belgian drafthorses that my dad named after Led Zeppelin, his favorite rock band. I really can’t complain about them anymore, because I get to ride almost every day now. At Colonial Academy, the equestriennes are each assigned a horse to share with two or three other girls for the year, and mine is a beautiful dark gelding named Blackjack.

  My pen pal, Madison Daniels, is fine and everything, and she’s been really nice about sending me CDs of her music—she’s in a band called “Moonrise,” which I think is a really cool name for a band—but her letters are super short and I don’t feel like I know her very well yet at all. The letters Emma gets from Bailey and Cassidy gets from Winky are long and chatty and full of details about life in Wyoming, which sounds like a great place to live. Winky’s family’s dude ranch is really interesting—kind of like Half Moon Farm, only with tourists.

  Without lifting her head off the pillow, Cassidy snakes out an arm and grabs an envelope from her desk. She slaps it down beside me on the bed. I take the letter out and start to read:

  Dear Pen Pal,

  Don’t you just love Daddy-Long-Legs? I don’t usually like to read much, and at first I thought this whole book club idea was really stupid, but I have to admit I really love this book. And I especially love Judy Abbott. She makes college sound like so much fun. I can’t wait to grow up. I love it here on our ranch, but I want to see the rest of the world too. The farthest I’ve ever been is Denver. I wish this letter was as funny as one of Judy’s, but I’m not a very good writer and I sure can’t draw. I think her little pictures are hilarious, don’t you?

  Our guest season ended a couple of weeks ago, and now we’re getting the ranch ready for winter. The summer help is gone, so my brothers Sam and Owen and I have been pitching in to help Daddy and Pete with repairs. We’ve got fencing to mend and all the harnesses and saddles to clean and put away for the winter and the chicken coop to scrub and whitewash plus lots of roofs to check for leaks. Then there are all the guest cabins to sweep out and close up and stuff like that, so I’m keeping really busy after school.

  I took Bingo out for a ride up to Lonesome Ridge yesterday morning early, and on the way back it started to snow. It was snowing so hard by the time I got home that Mom declared a ranch holiday and let us stay home from school because they were predicting a blizzard. She fixed us a second breakfast, and served it up in the dining hall like we were guests. It was awesome. Daddy built a fire in the big stone fireplace, and we all sat around afterward talking and then we played Sorry and I won which made my brothers mad. Pete got out his fiddle and “strangled the cat” as he calls it when he plays (did you know that some violin strings are made from sheep innards called “catgut”? Is that gross or what?!), and my brothers and I pushed back the tables to make room and practiced roping chairs until Mom said to quit it and sent the three of us outside. We had a snowball fight and Sam and Owen got me back for winning at Sorry and then we came back in for hot chocolate and now I’m writing to you.

  I hope everything is fine in Concord. Tell me more about hockey. I’ve never played.

  Your friend,

  Winky Parker

  I fold up the letter and put it back in its envelope. “Winky’s letters kind of makes me wish I lived on a ranch.”

  “In Gopher Hole, Wyoming?” Cassidy throws her pillow at me. “Please.”

  “Well, it would be better than being stuck at Colonial Academy with Savannah Sinclair.”

  Cassidy perks up a bit at the mention of Savannah. All my friends are weirdly fascinated with my roommate. “So what’s Julia up to now?” she asks. Since our last book club meeting, we’ve all started calling Savannah “Julia,” after Julia Pendleton in Daddy-Long-Legs.

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” I tell her. “She’s made sure everyone on campus knows I’m there on a scholarship, not because my family can afford to send me, and she’s always finding other things to needle me about. Like the fact that I’m stuck here in Concord over Thanksgiving weekend while she’s jetting off to Aruba with her family.”

  “Who cares about stupid old Aruba?” says Cassidy with relish.

  “Exactly. And she loves to point out that she’s better at horseback riding than I am, but that’s no big surprise since she’s had her own pony since she could barely walk and I’ve spent my life riding Led and Zep, who are more like elephants than horses.”

  “I love Led and Zep!” Cassidy protests.

  “I know, I know, I do too,” I reassure her. “But for real riding, Blackjack is a lot better. Except when Savannah hides dried thistles under my saddle.”

  “She did that?”

  I nod. “Uh-huh. Right before my last ridin
g lesson. When I mounted him, Blackjack bucked me right off and I landed in a pile of horse apples.”

  Cassidy looks puzzled.

  “You know,” I tell her, holding my nose.

  “Oh,” she says. “I get it. Apples—that’s funny.” She grins, the first smile I’ve seen from her all day.

  “You wouldn’t think so if it had been you!”

  The thing is, if it weren’t for Savannah, and for the fact that I really miss my friends, especially Emma and Cassidy, Colonial Academy would actually be okay. I like all my teachers and classes, and my new friends Adele and Frankie are really nice. They’re the exact same height and from the back it’s hard to tell them apart, because they both have short dark hair. But Adele has bangs and Frankie doesn’t, and Adele has blue eyes and Frankie’s are dark. They both love to sing, just like me, and the three of us are in Chorus together. We’re all thinking of trying out for MadriGals, Colonial’s elite a cappella group.

  Frankie and Adele have been at the school since sixth grade, and this year they’re roommates. Their room is just down the hall from Savannah’s and mine, and I spend most of my free time hanging out there with them. Adele has a TV, so sometimes after evening study hall we watch movies and stuff, but mostly we just talk. Frankie is hilarious, and she does a wicked Savannah imitation.

  The other great thing about Colonial Academy is the equestrian program. I love riding. Blackjack is awesome, and I’m learning really fast. My instructor says at this rate I may be able to start jumping soon.

  The doorbell rings downstairs. My heart does a little somersault as I hear Mrs. Hawthorne’s voice followed by Darcy’s deep laugh. A few seconds later Emma comes bursting into the room, bringing the aroma of roast turkey wafting in behind her.