“Not back yet. I promise to let you know the minute it comes in. I won’t let anyone else check it out.”
“Thanks. Sorry to interrupt.” He backed away apologetically.
“Huge Sherlock Holmes fan,” Ms. Finney whispered.
“Me too. Maybe he could borrow ours. We have the whole set.”
This was true; we did have the whole set. But I only said that to change the subject. I was really, really sick of talking about Martin J. Camrath.
Ms. Finney tilted her head and gave me this very odd look. And I was wishing she wouldn’t do that, because it made me feel weird, when the door opened and a crowd of fifth graders came piling in.
Travis and Ryan were in the lead, followed by three or four other boys. Trailing behind were the Fashionistas, giggling softly. They were looking around in this totally dopey way, like they weren’t sure what a library was for.
But I knew better. They were looking for me.
The minute Ms. Finney turned her head, I swept the remains of my sandwich off the table and into my lap. When I looked up again, it was clear they had spotted me.
Ms. Finney, who wasn’t born yesterday, guessed what was about to happen. So she got to her feet and stood, arms crossed, blocking the path to my table.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
Travis was glowing with that stupid joy known only to bullies who are about to play a really awesome prank. “We’re looking for a book,” he said with this face-splitting grin.
“Well, you came to the right place. Any particular subject?”
Travis couldn’t control himself. He barely got it out before he started laughing. “Something about the abdominal snowman!”
The crowd went wild. Snorts and guffaws.
“You mean abominable, right?”
Apparently that was the funniest thing that any of them had ever heard. They totally lost it, spewing snot and spit, choking and coughing, laughing so hard I was afraid one of them might throw up on the carpet.
“Why don’t you try the Lower School library?” Ms. Finney said. “Look in the picture book section.”
That just made it worse. Travis was now incapable of speech, so Jason took over. “Anything on the Wolf-Man?” he asked.
All this time I’d been searching for Abby but hadn’t found her. If she was there, which I hoped with all my heart she was not, she must have been hidden in the back of the crowd.
It would be easy for her to do. Abby was about the size of a peanut.
Suddenly, there was a loud slam!
I jumped.
The boy with all the hair jumped.
So did the kid with the huge stack of Harry Potter books and the girl who always did her math over lunch.
Travis jumped and Celine went, “Eeeek!”
Then it was just shocked silence.
Ms. Finney, who had dropped a dictionary onto her desk from about shoulder height, had definitely gotten their attention.
She was still smiling, but her voice was as hard as ice. “Now, I want you little children to take your infantile jokes and appalling manners out of my library. And you may not come back, not even to do research for a school assignment, until you’ve brought me a note of apology signed by your parents.”
As they turned to go, giggling nervously, I caught a flash of chestnut hair at the back of the crowd. I saw her face for just a second.
And then she was gone.
6
Show-and-Tell
I GOT TO MATH JUST before the bell. Everyone else was already there, seated and waiting for class to start. Mr. Crocker didn’t look up. As usual, he was grading papers.
I could tell something was up, though. It was much too quiet in there. And as I made my way down the row of desks, I spotted more than one tight-lipped, wicked grin. Finally I got to my seat, and I swear every student in the room stopped breathing.
This was the moment they’d been waiting for.
A pyramid of dry dog food had been neatly arranged on my desk.
Unlike the barks and growls and the scene in the library, this little prank had been planned in advance. Someone had scooped the pellets into a baggie, put the baggie into his backpack, and carried it to school. Worse, I saw that there were three or four different brands, varying in color, shape, and size. That meant it had been a group effort, several people bringing whatever they had at home. There would have been phone calls to hatch the plot and work out the details. Which class? How should they do it? Wouldn’t it be hi-larious?
All of that, just to humiliate me.
I was so heartsick I couldn’t move. I couldn’t leave. I was frozen to the spot.
Then the bell rang.
“Okay, class,” Mr. Crocker said. “Time to get started.”
Was it possible he hadn’t noticed—me still standing in the aisle, all those snorts and giggles?
“Everybody get up and move your desks against the walls. We need to make space here in the middle.”
No one did anything at first. It was such a strange request.
“C’mon. We don’t have all day.”
So we moved our desks. I tipped mine so the pellets spilled onto the floor.
Mr. Crocker grabbed his chair and set it down in front of his desk. “Make a circle,” he said. So we did. “Now sit.”
“On the floor?” Caroline asked.
“Yes. Cross your legs and keep your little hands to yourselves.”
“What is this?” Ryan asked.
“Show-and-tell,” Mr. Crocker said, as if it should be obvious.
“Seriously?”
“This is kindergarten, right?”
It felt like a slap, the way he said it. I hadn’t realized till then how angry he was. Even I was scared, and I was the victim.
“Today we’re going to talk about our little furry friends. Travis, do you have a pet?” He said it in a baby voice, like he was speaking to a three-year-old.
“This is stupid,” Travis said.
“Is that your dog’s name? Stupid?”
“No.”
“But you have a dog.”
“Yes, I have a dog.”
“I thought so. Will you pick up his food, please? Somehow it has strayed into my classroom.”
Travis didn’t move.
“I said, pick it up. Now!”
Travis did the only thing he could. He picked up the pellets and played it for laughs. But he didn’t get any. No one wanted to stick out because no one wanted to be next. So he sat back down and dropped the dog food into the well between his legs.
“Thank you, Travis. Now, let’s see—Ryan! I’m just guessing here, but I’ll bet you also have a dog. You don’t strike me as a cat or a canary person.”
Ryan didn’t answer. He just got to his feet, scooped up a handful of dog food, and sat back down again.
“Angelina?” he said. “How about you?”
This was a total shock. I had no doubt that Mr. Crocker, while supposedly grading papers, had been watching the culprits as they built the pyramid of dog food on my desk. He knew who had done it. But never in a million years would I have suspected any of the Fashionistas, and especially not Angelina.
She wasn’t a clown. Her thing was being cool and beautiful. She wouldn’t do dog food.
And yet.
“I have a cat,” Angelina said brightly, running her fingers through her thick mane of honey-gold, salon-highlighted hair and flashing Mr. Crocker her best Teen Vogue smile. “Her name is Colette.”
“It would be. Is this some of Colette’s food we see before us?”
“Oui,” Angelina said, “bien sûr.”
“Then pick it up, s’il vous plaît.”
A few jokers giggled over Mr. Crocker’s French, but Angelina rose with the grace of a ballerina and picked up her share of the mess without once losing her cool. I watched in awe. I could almost see why Abby wanted to swim in Angelina’s exclusive little pond.
Only then did it occur to me that Abby wasn’t
there. She should have been. I knew for a fact that she was at school. And she was in Mr. Crocker’s class.
“Merci beaucoup,” Mr. Crocker said. “Jason—dog or cat?”
“My little sister has a dog. His name is Fluffy.”
He was trying to be funny, but Mr. Crocker was not amused. “Just pick it up, Jason. You can’t blame this on your sister.”
Jason gathered up a handful and sat down.
Mr. Crocker scanned the circle. “Now, where is Abigail?”
I couldn’t help it. I gasped. My classmates gave me pitying looks.
“Abby went home,” Celine said. “She wasn’t feeling well.”
“Really? She seemed just fine ten minutes ago.”
Celine shrugged.
I got up, grabbed my backpack, and walked out of the room.
I didn’t ask to be excused.
I didn’t go by the office to sign out.
I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving.
I just went.
7
Fake Apologies
MY MOTHER WASN’T HOME WHEN I got back to the apartment. She was up at the publisher’s office with Jackson Sloan, working on the Camrath papers. This wasn’t something I’d considered when I left school early. But at least I had a just-in-case key safety-pinned to the inside of my backpack. It was the first time I’d ever had to use it.
The minute I walked in, the house phone rang. I let the machine take the call. Not surprisingly, it was the principal, Mrs. Chaffee. She sounded amazingly calm as she left her message.
The next thing Mrs. Chaffee did was call my mother’s cell. I knew this because, not long after, the phone rang again. This time it was Mom. When once again I chose not to answer, she left such a scorching message that I ran over and picked up midsentence.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Half an hour later, she was home.
“Sit,” she said in her serious voice. “We need to talk.” She didn’t seem angry, just really upset. That, at least, was a relief.
“Mrs. Chaffee told me what happened at school. But I suspect there’s a whole lot more. Joplin, I want you to tell me everything.” As she said it, she reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. I don’t think she actually cared about my grooming. She just wanted to touch me. And for some reason, that just did me in. I completely fell apart.
“Oh, baby,” she said. “I’m so sorry!”
But I wasn’t crying about what had happened at school. Not even about Abby. I was crying because I had my mother back. If only for a moment, she was talking to me, thinking about me, and caring about my feelings. I just sat there sobbing in her arms. I only let go when the hugging and weeping had started to get embarrassing.
After I’d washed my face with cold water and blown my nose about a hundred times, I launched into the whole gruesome story. My mom was already shocked by what she’d heard so far, but when I came to the part about Abby, she gasped and pressed a hand to her heart, like she was literally wounded.
Abby had been a part of our family since I was four years old. And though Mom knew our friendship was over, I hadn’t told her about the “bomb” or any of the things Abby had said. Now that I was spilling my guts, it all came out.
“That is so wrong,” Mom said, drooping back into her chair.
“We’re a mean species,” I said.
“No, sweetie. Not all of us. Just some.”
“I can’t go back there.”
She nodded. “Not for a while anyway. You need to take a few days off, wait for the dust to settle.”
“What kind of dust?”
“You know—the school’s response. Calling the parents, suspending the kids, questioning the teachers, setting new rules, a lot of general soul-searching.”
“Oh,” I said, thrilled to miss it.
And for a very short time I comforted myself with the fairy-tale notion that it’d all be over before I went back to school. Then everything would go back to normal.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Chaffee—meaning well, I’m sure—had come down hard on the five perps, aka the five suspended students. They would be allowed to return to St. Mark’s only if they phoned me and apologized. A parent had to supervise the call. And they had to speak to me in person. Leaving a message or sending an email wasn’t okay.
Even Mr. Crocker had to apologize. In fact, he was the first. He said he’d handled the situation badly. He’d allowed his anger to direct his behavior and failed to consider how his little exercise was going to make me feel. He took full responsibility for what must have been a terribly difficult moment for me, and blah-blah-blah.
I didn’t want to have that conversation with Mr. Crocker. And I definitely didn’t want to talk to the others, to listen to their fake apologies and give them my fake forgiveness.
But they had no choice, and neither did I.
The calls came in like clockwork, between five and six that evening. Mrs. Chaffee must have given them a schedule.
I think Mr. Crocker was genuinely sincere. But he was the only one. The boys—Travis, Jason, and Ryan—seemed sort of confused. They really couldn’t understand why everybody was making such a huge deal about a stupid little joke. And they totally couldn’t believe the consequences. Suspension? You’d think they’d committed murder or something!
They didn’t say any of this, of course. Not with their parents looming over them. But I could hear it in their voices.
Angelina was a whole other story. She wasn’t any sorrier than the boys, but not for the same reason. She knew perfectly well that what they’d done was way out of line. She just didn’t think the rules applied to her. Because she was special.
She worded her apology so cleverly that the call was over before I realized what she’d actually said. She’d made it all about me and how I’d responded to the prank. She’d said, “I’m sorry you were so upset by what we did.” In other words, she was “sorry” I couldn’t take a joke. Using the word upset instead of hurt was pure genius.
Say what you will about Angelina, but she is really smart.
The call from Abby came last, and it was thumbscrews all the way. She started out in this squeaky, breathless, little-girl voice, like she was being squeezed by a giant anaconda. Then she progressed to sobbing and gulping out words. She kept saying, over and over, “I didn’t want to! I didn’t want to do it!”
“Well, who made you, then?” I snapped back.
But as soon as I said it, I knew. Angelina had made her do it. That was the price of admission to the inner circle.
Of course Abby couldn’t answer my question because she was crying too hard. And I really couldn’t bear another second of her hysteria.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I forgive you.”
Then I hung up the phone.
All this time, Mom had sat beside me, holding my hand. It felt so good I almost wished there were going to be more calls, just so we could stay together like that.
But there weren’t and we didn’t.
“There, that’s done,” she said. “Now it’s over.” She gave my hand one last squeeze, then went into the kitchen to start dinner.
The next morning Mom left early for her conference with Mrs. Chaffee. She assured me that I’d be safe. There were agents watching our apartment and she’d be back as soon as the meeting was over.
She’d always been like that—crazy overprotective, like she thought I might disappear if I was left alone for five minutes. And so it didn’t surprise me at all that, except for the meeting at school, she stayed home all three days.
But she might as well have been on Mars for all the good it did me. She was always in her room with the door shut, banging away on her father’s antique Royal Quiet DeLuxe. I asked her why she was using an ancient manual typewriter when she owned a perfectly good—and genuinely quiet—laptop computer. She said she wanted to know “how it felt.”
I can tell you how I felt, and it wasn’t good.
My brief, h
eady moment of parental attention was clearly over. It was like she’d turned into a zombie, like all her feelings and spirit had been sucked right out of her, leaving her empty inside. Or rather, she still had feelings—but just the sad ones.
By the time Thursday rolled around, it was a real toss-up as to which was worse—staying home with Mom or going back to school.
Our plan had always been for me to go back on Friday. The perps would be suspended till Monday, so they wouldn’t be there. And I’d have the weekend to recover from the reentry. I’d agreed that this made sense, but I definitely wasn’t looking forward to it.
That night Jen came home early carrying a bulky package in a large canvas bag.
“Is that my platter?” I asked.
“It is indeed. And wait till you see. Lucius Doyle himself couldn’t have done a better job.”
She set the package carefully on the kitchen table, got some scissors out of a drawer, and went to work on the tape that fastened the cardboard supports and the swaddling of Bubble Wrap. It took a while and made a mess, but finally there it was—my platter, in all its glory, lying in a nest of plastic wrapping.
It didn’t look like an old broken thing that had been glued back together. It looked like a work of art. The pond, the sweet little girl driving her geese to water, and behind them the trees and the clouds overhead, and a tiny windmill off in the distance—all of it felt amazingly real. To look at that scene was like traveling back to a faraway place in some long-ago time, before America was even a country.
Mom stood back, like she couldn’t allow herself to be happy or excited about anything. But curiosity finally got the best of her. She came over and had a look.
“Well,” she said after a long silence. “That certainly is a beautiful thing. I’m glad you saved it, Joplin. I was just a little kid when it was broken. I guess I never looked at it properly. It’s wonderful.”
“Didn’t Mrs. Berenson do a splendid job?” Jen was very proud of herself.
“Yes, yes!” I said, giving her a big squeeze. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“Wait!” Jen said. “There’s more!”
She reached into the canvas bag and pulled out something else. It was also wrapped in cardboard and plastic, only this was the kind of packaging you get when you buy stuff in stores.
Joplin, Wishing Page 4