“Blond,” Destiny said. “Like mine.”
Jake shrugged. “I think maybe brown. Like mine.”
The outrageous Applewhite family returns in Stephanie S. Tolan’s new novel
APPLEWHITES AT WIT’S END
Chapter One
It was a dark and stormy night when Randolph Applewhite arrived home from New York to announce the end of the world. The whole family plus Jake Semple, the extra student at their home school, the Creative Academy, were gathered at the time around the fireplace in the living room of the main house at Wit’s End, while a wind howled and snow swirled against the windows.
Like everyone else, E.D. had at first taken her father’s announcement to be hyperbole—one of her vocabulary words for that week, which meant “deliberate and obvious exaggeration for effect.” A famous theater director, Randolph Applewhite had a habit of making exactly this announcement whenever something—almost anything—went wrong with a project of his and he felt the need for sympathy. So often had they heard it, in fact, that E.D.’s mother, the even more famous Sybil Jameson, author of the bestselling Petunia Grantham mystery novels, actually said, “That’s nice, dear,” as she struggled to pick up a stitch she had dropped in the scarf she was attempting to knit.
It wasn’t until well into his explanation that she put down her needles and began paying attention. “What do you mean gone?”
“Just what I said! Gone! Embezzled!”
“How much of it?”
“All of it! To the last penny. The Applewhite family is destitute. We shall have to sell Wit’s End and move to a hovel somewhere.”
“What’s a hovel?” asked E.D.’s five-year-old brother, Destiny, who was cheerfully and industriously drawing a bright spring-green pig on a large pad of newsprint.
When the whole story had at last been told—not until long after Destiny had been sent to bed and everyone else had finished a couple of mugs of hot cocoa enhanced with comforting marshmallows or alcohol, depending on their ages—it was clear that while the end of the Applewhites’ world had not yet arrived, it was looming on the horizon like smoke from a wildfire and heading their way.
E.D. had never really understood—nor felt the need to—the financial structure that formed the foundation of her family’s creative compound. She only knew that the whole, extended Applewhite family had left New York when Destiny was a year old and moved to rural North Carolina, where they had bought an abandoned motor lodge called the Bide-A-Wee. They had renamed it Wit’s End and had lived here since, the adults following their particular creative passions and the children, except for E.D.’s own absolutely noncreative self, discovering theirs. All of the adults were famous. Her grandfather and her uncle Archie both designed and created furniture—Zedediah Applewhite’s handcrafted wood furniture and Archie’s “Furniture of the Absurd,” which wasn’t really so much furniture as sculpture and which was regularly exhibited in galleries around the country. Her aunt Lucille was a poet.
What E.D. learned that stormy winter night was that they had come to Wit’s End not just so the family could live together, but so that they could pool their resources in order to continue their work. The vast majority of these resources came from the worldwide sales of the Petunia Grantham mysteries; some came from Zedediah’s beautiful, expensive, and entirely practical furniture; and some came from Randolph’s work directing plays. Nothing else anyone did brought in much money. All of their resources had been gathered together in a family trust. The manager who had handled that trust, and therefore the future of the entire Applewhite enterprise, had turned out to be a crook.
“He’ll go to jail,” Randolph said after his second cup of bourbon-laced cocoa. “There’s that, at least!”
“And what good will that do us?” Archie asked.
“I, for one, will feel better,” Randolph answered. “It will cheer the dark nights in our hovel.”
Zedediah, ever practical, pointed out that the Petunia Grantham mysteries would no doubt continue to sell as they always had, to which Sybil responded that she had only that morning killed Petunia Grantham off. The current novel, which was due to be finished within the week, would be the last in the series. “I killed her because I simply can’t write another one. It would destroy my very soul.”
“Your soul is tougher than that!” Randolph responded. “You can simply resurrect her in the next! They do it all the time in soap operas.”
“My books are not soap operas!”
Only Aunt Lucille had taken the news of their sudden poverty in stride. She breathed a series of long, calming breaths, smiled, and announced that they would get along in some unforeseen way, just as they always had. All they needed to do was trust their creative energies, and they would surely come up with a way to solve the problem. “One step at a time,” she said. “Out of the darkness, into the light.”
“How long do we have?” Sybil asked then.
“If we gather up everything we have in the bank accounts, plus whatever you’re owed when you turn in the current novel, plus the fees for the two directing gigs I have contracts for—assuming that Zedediah’s furniture continues to sell the way it has—we can probably keep the mortgage paid through June. Maybe July. But after that…”
“We’ll think of something,” Lucille said. “Remember Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ ‘O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’”
As it turned out, the winter was unusually harsh and unusually long, or at least it felt that way. By the time the Wit’s End daffodils began blooming in March, the family had become obsessed with saving money in every way possible. The children’s allowances had been not just cut, but actually discontinued. E.D.’s older brother, Hal, unable now to order sculpture supplies online for UPS delivery, had taken to going through the trash to find materials for his projects. “If it gets much worse,” he complained, “I’ll have to go back to painting! At least I have plenty of tubes of paint.”
E.D.’s sister, Cordelia, had given up drinking her seaweed-and-protein health drinks. “I can’t even afford the gas to get to the store, let alone the cost of the supplements! How am I going to maintain the energy to keep up my dancing?”
Winston, their food-loving basset hound, was now living on kibble instead of canned dog food, and liver treats had become a thing of the past. Zedediah’s parrot, Paulie, could no longer count on fresh peanuts, and meat had become an occasional indulgence instead of the centerpiece of most dinners for the humans in the family. Pot roast, everybody’s favorite dinner, had not been seen since the end of the world was announced. E.D. thought she had seen Uncle Archie at the goat pen from time to time, staring longingly at Wolfbane and Witch Hazel, Lucille’s rescue goats.
E.D. herself had begun using the back sides of papers from the recycling box to write her research papers for school. And Zedediah had sped up production of his furniture, appearing in the kitchen late for dinner, still wearing his sawdust-covered work apron, and going right back to the woodshop afterward. So busy was he that Paulie had begun picking his feathers out from loneliness and perches had to be established for him throughout Wit’s End. The last person to leave a room was supposed to take Paulie along so that he wouldn’t be left by himself.
It was an evening in early March when Randolph, having just been paid by the theater in Raleigh where he’d directed a production of the musical Oliver! with Jake, his newly discovered star, playing the role of the Artful Dodger, called a family meeting. He waved his check in the air. “This will cover another mortgage payment,” he said. The Applewhites couldn’t always be counted upon to celebrate one another’s successes, but this time they broke into spontaneous cheers and applause. “Even better, I have a plan to save Wit’s End!”
The cheers and applause died away. No one entirely trusted Randolph’s ideas. “What is it?” E.D.’s mother asked suspiciously. She had steadfastly refused—citing the arrival of her Petunia Grantham royalty check as her fair contribution to the family bank accoun
t—to resurrect Petunia or begin another book, as she felt the need to rest her brain. “Your plans have been known to require considerable effort from the rest of us.”
“All for one and one for all,” Randolph said. “Just listen to me, everyone. You’re going to love it!” He turned to Jake, who was sitting on the floor rubbing Winston’s ears. “I owe a part of this idea to Jake. I was sitting in the theater, listening to him sing ‘Consider Yourself at Home,’ when it came to me. The next line of the song invites Oliver Twist into the family, just as we’ve invited Jake into ours. So there I was, looking at this stage full of singing and dancing kids—Fagin’s pickpockets—and it occurred to me that we could create just such a family.”
“A family of pickpockets?” Archie said. “I hardly think that’s the best way to solve our problem!”
“A family of creative kids! We invited Jake to join the Creative Academy. Why couldn’t we take in a whole lot more? Not all year round—just in the summer. We’ll start a camp for creative kids. I’ve even got a name for it. Eureka!” Randolph looked expectantly around the room. “Well? What do you think? People pay big money to send their kids to summer camp. Just regular summer camp. Think what they’d pay to have their kids spend eight weeks with a family of professional artists. Famous professional artists!”
“Kids? Living here with us?” Hal said, his face going pale. “How many?”
“I’m thinking just twelve this first year, a pilot group.”
“And what would we do with these twelve kids?” Archie asked.
“Teach them. Encourage them. Share with them our love of art, our own individual creative passions. Set them on the path to becoming creative, productive adults! Eureka! would not only bring in big bucks, it would be a humanitarian endeavor—helping to groom the next generation of American artists. It will be a whole family project. There will be something for everyone to do.”
“Me, too?” asked Destiny.
“Of course you, too. You can be the camp mascot!”
E.D. doubted that Destiny knew what a mascot was, but the title was enough to satisfy him.
Randolph turned to his wife. “Now that Petunia Grantham’s dead, you’re going to need something to do! You can’t rest your brain forever!”
“Twelve children? Twelve other people’s children?”
“Yes. Think of it. Twelve delightful children into whose meager little lives we will bring the joys of art. We do art—and children—uncommonly well. Just look at our own four, and Jake, too, of course! Who would have thought when Jake first came to us that we could turn him into a musical-theater star in a matter of weeks? We could do that sort of thing with twelve more!”
E.D. suspected that Jake wasn’t willing to give the Applewhite family all the credit for his newly discovered talent, but she could see that he was listening carefully as Randolph laid out the details of the camp. Each of them would share with the campers what they liked to do best, Randolph told them—their own creative passion—including Jake. As the only one besides Destiny able to sing at all, he could be the singing coach.
“And what would I share with them?” E.D. asked.
“A play needs a stage manager, a camp needs a—a—an executive assistant, the person who handles the schedule and the details and makes sure everything runs smoothly. You do that wonderfully well, E.D—you know you do!”
No one but Destiny had yet accepted the idea. So Randolph went on, refusing to be daunted by their stony faces. “For heaven’s sake, people. We’re talking only eight weeks here! Practically no time at all. If we charge twelve families what I expect to charge them, we could save Wit’s End, bring meat back to the family table, and restart allowances. Would you really rather sell out, leave here, and move to a hovel in Hoboken?”
Chapter Two
When Jake had first come to live at Wit’s End, he had been determined to get away as soon as possible. Having been kicked out of the entire public school system of the state of Rhode Island, then out of Traybridge Middle School after he was sent to North Carolina to live with his grandfather, he had expected to get himself kicked out of the Applewhites’ Creative Academy in a matter of days. The first problem with that had been that the Applewhites weren’t the least bit bothered by his multiple piercings, his scarlet spiked hair, his black clothes, or his cursing—all the things that established his identity as the bad kid from the city. The second problem was that he really had no place else to go. His parents were both serving time in minimum-security prisons for having attempted to sell their homegrown marijuana to an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, and there were no foster families back home in Providence willing to take him in. E.D. had almost gleefully pointed out that his only alternative was Juvie. So he’d been forced to stay.
It had turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Becoming a musical-theater star in a matter of weeks had surprised Jake as much as it had surprised the Applewhites. He’d never suspected that he had a talent for singing and acting until Randolph recruited him to play Rolf in The Sound of Music. The show had been a success and Jake had gotten good reviews, but that hadn’t been nearly as important as his discovery of what the Applewhites called a “creative passion.” Never in his life had Jake been anywhere near as happy as he was onstage, in front of an audience, becoming a person quite different from himself. He loved singing. He loved acting. And later when Randolph cast him as the Artful Dodger in Oliver!, he’d found out that he loved dancing, too. Everything about musical theater, in fact, turned Jake on.
Because the Creative Academy was a home school, he had been able to take off the whole month of February to be in Oliver!; and not only that, he’d been able to get school credit for doing it. He was theoretically in the seventh grade with E.D., but he didn’t have to be stuck all the time doing what she did and being shown up by her obsessively organized, determinedly academic, and viciously competitive version of education. This was a girl who drove herself relentlessly toward perfection and couldn’t bear the thought of getting (actually, thanks to the way the Applewhites did home schooling, giving herself) less than an A in anything. She and Jake might be very nearly the same age, but they were wildly and impossibly different. Thanks to the Applewhite philosophy of life, which passionately celebrated individuality, that was completely okay.
Randolph’s end-of-the-world announcement had scared Jake clear down to his toes, though he’d done his best to hide it. What would suddenly poverty-stricken Applewhites do with him? He himself had no money. His grandfather was providing him with a small allowance so he could pay for clothes and a few incidentals, but otherwise he’d really been taken in as if he were a family member. He wasn’t. He was another mouth to feed. Jake couldn’t stand to lose his place here—it would mean losing himself. His new self. The only one he’d ever really known or cared about!
The morning after that dark and stormy night he’d worked up the nerve to ask Archie and Lucille—it was their Wisteria Cottage that he lived in—if they thought it was going to be possible for him to finish the school year.
“Don’t be silly, Jake!” Lucille had proclaimed, “You’re a full-time student. Of course you’ll finish the year.”
But as time went on and the austerity measures the Applewhites had adopted began to really pinch, Jake had started worrying about what would happen in the summer. Like regular schools, the Creative Academy’s year ended in June. There’d be no reason to keep him here after that, so he figured they would probably send him to the grandfather he barely knew, a grandfather who had no clue about creative passion and who had only seen one musical in all his life: The Sound of Music last October at Wit’s End Playhouse.
So when Randolph announced his idea for Eureka!, Jake had mostly held his breath until he heard the words he’d been hoping for: that he was to have a job to do at the camp. He didn’t care that he didn’t have the first clue about how to be a singing coach. He only cared that he wasn’t going to be sent off to spend the summer alone on a ramshackle fa
rm outside of Traybridge with his grandfather. Whatever camp turned out to be, it had to be better than that! He figured he was the happiest person in the room when the rest of the family had finally agreed to it.
CHAPTER TWO CONTINUES…
Other Books by STEPHANIE S. TOLAN
APPLEWHITES AT WIT’S END
THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
FLIGHT OF THE RAVEN
A GOOD COURAGE
LISTEN!
ORDINARY MIRACLES
PLAGUE YEAR
SAVE HALLOWEEN!
WELCOME TO THE ARK
WHO’S THERE?
Copyright
SURVIVING THE APPLEWHITES. Copyright © 2002 by Stephanie S. Tolan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tolan, Stephanie S.
Surviving the Applewhites; by Stephanie S. Tolan.
p. cm.
Summary: Jake, a budding juvenile delinquent, is sent for home schooling to the arty and eccentric Applewhite family’s Creative Academy, where he discovers talents and interests he never knew he had.
ISBN 978-0-06-441044-1
[1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 2. Theater—Fiction. 3. Family life—North Carolina—Fiction. 4. North Carolina—Fiction.] I. Title.
Surviving the Applewhites Page 15