Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Acknowledgment
About the Author
Also Available
Copyright
I was surrounded by smoke. Thick, black, ashy coils of smoke curled up the walls and around my legs.
I ran to the door of my bedroom. But the door wasn’t there. I turned and saw the fire reaching up the bureau, drawer by drawer. The curtains burst into flames. One by one, my favorite books exploded into a spookily merry blaze, like a scene from Fahrenheit 451.
I backed up, watching in disbelief.
Faintly, I could hear the wail of sirens.
My closet door swung open and my best dress began a fire dance of its own. I smelled leather cooking and knew my shoes were burning too.
I backed away and felt the doorknob against my back. It wasn’t hot. The fire wasn’t outside yet. All I had to do was turn the knob and step out to safety.
But I couldn’t move. The flames seemed to laugh at me: snap, crackle, pop, hahahahaha.
A bottle of nail polish exploded on my dresser, and I jumped and choked out a scream as a little sheet of fire raced across the top of it.
“No!” I gasped as I saw the necklace Logan had given me glow molten red and then begin to melt. “No …”
Something brushed my leg and I screamed. The smoke felt like fur clinging to my legs.
I looked down. “Tigger!” I gasped. I had to save Tigger. I bent to scoop him up and staggered. A wave of dizziness washed over me.
For a horrifying second, as the floor rushed toward me, I thought I was falling. Then I realized that I wasn’t falling — I was shrinking. In nanoseconds, I was eyeball-to-eyeball with my cat.
I stopped shrinking and put my hand against the door to steady myself. Down low, the smoke wasn’t quite as thick and I could breathe a little easier.
The door.
I looked up. Way, way up. There was no way I could reach that doorknob.
There was no way I could get out. No way things could get worse.
But they could.
Because now Tigger was looking at me strangely. His eyes had narrowed. His tail was lashing. His ears were back. He crouched lower and I realized he was about to spring. At me.
I turned to run. I heard him leap and land with a thud behind me!
I spun around and shouted, “No, Tigger!” as I kicked out at him.
He dug his claws into my ankle. Hard.
“Me-OW!” He spat.
“OW!” I cried, and sat up in time to see the ghostly shape of my cat arc through the gray light of dawn as I kicked the covers and him up into the air. Landing with the softest of thumps, he disappeared under the desk.
“Tigger,” I exclaimed. “I’m sorry! But I had such a bad dream!”
I looked around the still-unfamiliar room. Nothing was burning.
I sniffed cautiously. No smoke.
I looked down at myself. I wasn’t a shrunken person.
My dream was just another version of the nightmares I’d had so often since the fire. I’d thought they were going away.
But clearly they weren’t.
I pulled the covers around me, feeling cold and lonely and lost. “Tigger,” I called softly.
But Tigger ignored me. I wondered if cats had nightmares. Did Tigger dream about the fire? Did he wonder what had happened in his old home and why he was living in a strange new house?
In spite of myself, my mind went back to the scene of the fire. I saw us standing in a little knot beneath the apple tree in the yard — Dad, Sharon, and me, clutching Tigger. I saw the fire trucks pulling to a stop, their lights piercing the night in an eerie reflection of the flames that swirled higher and higher through the house.
I smelled the smoke. I heard Sharon sobbing and my father murmuring softly to her. I felt his hand gripping my shoulder and realized that he’d saved my life. I looked down at Tigger, who, uncatlike, wasn’t squirming in spite of the death grip I had on him. Maybe he realized that I’d saved his life.
I saw Mrs. Prezzioso in her purple bathrobe, trotting across the lawn toward us, her face alarmed and sympathetic.
And I almost did what I hadn’t been able to do for the longest time after the fire. I almost started crying.
Stop it, I told myself.
Then I thought about Logan, my ex-boyfriend. Had I done the right thing by breaking up with him? The answer was yes, but the question still wouldn’t go away. Everything reminded me of Logan: videos, walks, books, the smell of french fries, the sports channel on television, my father’s voice reading the baseball box scores aloud from the newspaper in the mornings to Sharon and me …
My cat.
When I broke up with Logan, I thought I’d get my life back. But it seemed as if my life had become just one more thing I’d lost. Everything that had helped define me was gone.
Life was not working out the way I had planned. I seemed to be rattling around in all the space I’d gotten when I’d split with Logan. I wasn’t the all-new, totally confident, self-assured Mary Anne I had expected to be, the Mary Anne who wasn’t described in terms of other people: Mary Anne Spier, daughter of Richard Spier, stepdaughter of Sharon Schafer Spier, stepsister of Jeff Schafer, and stepsister and best friend of Dawn Schafer, who lived in California. I was still all that, as well as the Mary Anne who was a resident of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, student at Stoneybrook Middle School, secretary of the Baby-sitters Club, ex-girlfriend of Logan, best friend of Kristy Thomas, good friend of Claudia Kishi and Stacey McGill and Abby Stevenson. But I still didn’t know who I was.
It was as if I had become the tiny little person in my nightmare — the incredible shrinking Mary Anne.
“Not a wonderful Wednesday night?” Kristy asked sympathetically the next morning at school.
I raised heavy-lidded eyes and looked at her. “You can tell?” I asked.
“I can tell.” Kristy charges through life like a soccer fullback and is not always the most perceptive person in the world. But she and I have been best friends since we were babies. We grew up next door to each other on Bradford Court before Kristy moved to her new stepfather’s mansion and I moved with my dad and Sharon to our old (now burned down) farmhouse. So it wasn’t surprising that she picked up on my flattened (or shrunken) frame of mind.
I closed my locker and sighed from the soles of my shoes. “I had a nightmare early this morning. I couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“Oh, no. I thought those weren’t so bad anymore,” Kristy said.
“They aren’t.” I managed a weak smile. “But when I do have them, they’re pretty high on the special-effects scale.”
“Oh, Mary Anne. Good grief.” That was Kristy language for That’s terrible. Is there anything I can do?
“It’s like the fire has become quicksand,” Kristy continued as we walked down the hall. “It’s pulling you down. Keeping you from getting on with your life. You’ve got to fight back. Fight fire with fire, no pun intended.”
“I guess,” I said. I stopped outside the door of my next class. “I’ll try.”
“Good. See you at lunch.” Kristy charged into the mob of students and disappeared down the hall.
At lunch, Kristy had all kinds of advice to offer me. Getting involved in sports was very high on her list of ways to get me out of my funk.
“Kristy,” I sa
id. “Have you ever seen me do anything more athletic than ride a bicycle?”
“Bicycling is good,” Kristy plowed on. “You could train for a bike race. I could help. That would definitely refocus your energies.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but no thanks.”
“But …”
“And sports remind me of Logan.” This was true, because Logan was a sports maniac like Kristy. But it was more true that I didn’t want Kristy deciding this was one of her brilliant ideas. Getting Kristy to let go of an idea is like getting a bone away from a dog.
“Oh. Well …” Fortunately, the warning bell rang before Kristy could think of any more suggestions for returning me to “the confidence zone” (as she put it).
As I sat in the yearbook meeting after school that day, I was thinking about how Kristy somehow managed to stay in that zone. I’ve always loved yearbooks. They’re history books and souvenirs and memory catchers, all rolled into one. I thought about how I loved looking at my dad’s old high school yearbook and about how he and Sharon can be seen smiling out from some of the pages together, since that is when they first started dating.
Then I remembered that the old yearbooks — Dad’s, Sharon’s, and mine — were now just ashes. And then I told myself, Stop it. You still have the memories. A fire can never burn those up.
“Stop it!” Cokie Mason’s sharp voice echoed my own thoughts, startling me into awareness. “Stop talking and pay attention!”
Cokie Mason is one of the people whose picture will be all over the yearbook — in no small part because she is one of the yearbook editors.
This, in my opinion, does not improve the yearbook one bit. When they were handing out kindness and decency, Cokie was probably in the bathroom fixing her makeup and telling her mirror image how much better she was than everybody else.
I know I sound mean, and I hate to be mean about anybody, but Cokie Mason is really one of the most totally un-nice people in the universe. She is petty and devious, and she tried to steal Logan from me more than once in a sneaky, underhanded way.
As one of two editors in chief of the yearbook, along with Rick Chow, Cokie has the right to tell everyone at the yearbook staff meeting to be quiet and listen. But it’s hard for me to do so.
I wish Rick would take charge more, but Cokie has completely intimidated him. Mostly he nods and does what Cokie tells him to do (just like most of Cokie’s friends, come to think of it).
I work on the features section of the yearbook with Abby Stevenson and Austin Bentley. Abby’s a relative newcomer to the school and used to be a member of the Baby-sitters Club (or BSC). She stopped to concentrate on her athletic activities, primarily soccer. I was surprised when she joined the yearbook staff, but she told me she wanted to make sure that sports got a fair amount of coverage, “along with all those dances and things.” Austin has been at SMS longer than Abby. He’s named after two cars, and he laughs when people tease him about it. I know him a little because he’s on the football team with Logan, and I like him because he hasn’t acted weird around me — the way some people have — since Logan and I broke up.
“Okay,” Cokie said, putting her hands on her hips. “That’s better. This is what I think we should do: I think we should get ready to hold the vote for the Class Bests for the yearbook.”
Rick nodded.
“Why?” asked Mariah Shillaber. She and Woody Jefferson are the yearbook copyeditors.
“Why?” Cokie repeated, looking surprised. “Because that’s only the most important part of the yearbook. Voting for Funniest, Most Likely to Succeed, Best-Looking …”
“Nastiest,” I heard Abby mutter under her breath. Then she raised her hand. “I don’t think the results of a popularity contest should be the most important part of the yearbook.”
Cokie frowned. She’s not used to being challenged.
Before she could say anything, Woody said, “It doesn’t have to turn into a mere popularity contest.”
“How are you going to avoid it?” Abby asked.
“What’s wrong with someone being chosen for something because she’s popular?” Cokie demanded.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to do this, in part because the Most and Best section is part of the features section, which means it would be up to Abby, Austin, and me to run the elections. That would be a huge amount of work. And it would take up chunks of the pages allotted to the section, pages that we’d already discussed using in what I thought were much more original ways.
Abby generally has a quick answer and she had one now. “Cokie,” she said, “the yearbook is supposed to represent everybody, not just the kids who have the nicest teeth or best ears, like in some dog show.”
“Dog show!” Cokie looked outraged.
Woody said, “It doesn’t have to be a dog show, Abby. What we need to do to make it more student-friendly is add categories that will include all students, like Most Artistic, Most Creative, Most Likely to Accidentally Invent a Time Machine.”
“Not a bad idea,” Mariah said.
“And of course we’ll keep Most Beautiful and the other important categories that everyone expects.” Cokie sniffed.
Abby opened her mouth and Woody once again intervened. “I’m sure Cokie meant the other more traditional categories.”
“Right,” said Cokie. “Everyone in favor, hold up your hand.”
I voted against it, and I wasn’t the only one, but the overwhelming majority voted to have an expanded Most and Best section in the yearbook.
When the voting was over, Cokie looked at me and smiled her evil-politician smile. “It looks like you’ve got to do some real work in the features sections now, Mary Anne,” she said.
“I just hate to see it take up space we could use for other features,” I said, trying to sound neutral.
“Oh. I thought you were upset because you and Logan are no longer eligible for Best Couple,” Cokie purred.
Several staffers laughed at that.
“Stuff it, Cokie,” said Abby.
Cokie pretended she hadn’t heard Abby.
I smiled weakly and tried to think of a comeback. But I couldn’t. I felt about two inches tall.
The incredible shrinking Mary Anne was getting smaller by the minute.
“No, I’m upset because we’ll have to use your picture in the Most Likely to Become an Ax Murderer category,” I said. “No, but why don’t you go jump in the lake? No, I’m not upset… . Yes, I am.”
I was talking to myself. I admit it. I was setting the table and talking to myself.
I was trying to think of the perfect comeback for Cokie’s spiteful remark. And so far I hadn’t been able to do so, even though I’d been brooding all afternoon about what she’d said.
“Mary Anne?”
I looked up to see Sharon, my stepmother, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Are you okay? Were you talking to yourself?”
“I guess I was,” I said, feeling dumb.
Sharon smiled. “I hope it was a good conversation.”
“So far, no.”
“Well, we can make it three-way if you’ll go get Richard. Dinner is ready.”
I slid the last spoon into place and found my father in the tiny third bedroom of our rental house, which he was using as a study. He was sifting through a box of books.
He smiled warmly at me when I peered around the open door. “Hi,” he said. “I’m telling you, I’ll be glad when we’re back in a house that has real bookshelves. Having to move these boxes around is driving me crazy.”
My dad is a neatnik. In his old study, his books had been arranged by category and alphabetized. Now the books he’d gotten since the fire just sat in labeled boxes, except for a few of the main law books.
“Dinner’s ready,” I said.
“Good. I’m hungry.” After he stood up and stretched, we walked back to the kitchen to help Sharon finish putting food out on the dining room table.
“Smells great,” my da
d said. “What is it?”
“Mixed-noodle casserole,” Sharon replied. She looked pleased.
“What’s that?” I asked. Sharon is kind of disorganized, which makes her an erratic cook. She’s been known to put sugar into a dish instead of salt, season everything twice, or absentmindedly neglect to turn the oven off in time — or not turn it on at all.
The aroma rising from the casserole was good, though.
Sharon plopped a spoonful of mixed noodles onto my plate. I saw macaroni elbows, corkscrews, spirals, ziti, and ragged sheets of lasagna poking out of a tomato sauce spiked with broccoli, string beans, what might have been eggplant, and what looked like — lima beans?
“It’s what was left in all those boxes of noodles mixed together with all the leftover vegetables we had. Plus a nice eggplant. And basil,” Sharon explained.
“Sounds great,” said my dad.
Cautiously, I took a bite. “Delicious,” I said.
“Oh, I’m glad,” said Sharon. “I was afraid I might have forgotten something.”
“I like the nights you’re the cook,” my father said. “It’s always an adventure.”
Sharon laughed. She is so easygoing. She and my father are perfect for each other.
“I stopped by the house today,” said Sharon.
“No kidding,” my father teased gently. We’re remodeling our old barn into a new house, and Sharon goes by there at least once a day to check on the progress.
“It looks fabulous,” said Sharon. “The frame’s finished now, and you can see where all the windows are going to be. Total light. It’s going to be amazing.”
“I can’t wait,” said my dad.
“I can’t either,” I heard myself say. “This house is too small.”
“Too small?” said my father. “Well, I guess we could use more bookshelves.”
Dad didn’t understand. I meant that I was feeling crowded, even though I had a room of my own. My father had been acting like Super-Protective Dad since the fire. After we’d moved into our rental house, he seemed to check on me all the time, tapping on the door of my room to see how I was doing, asking me repeatedly where I was going and when I’d be back, even for something routine, such as a BSC meeting.
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