“Ta-da! A plate-hanger thingie! Just the perfect size.”
“Can we hang it over my bed?”
“Of course.”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
8
Wishes
I WAS READING Anne of Green Gables for the second time. I’d picked that particular book because I already knew I liked it. I hoped it would calm me down and help me get to sleep.
But I’d forgotten all about Diana Barry, Anne Shirley’s “bosom friend.”
I’d been in third grade the first time I read it. And, as Ms. Warrick would say, it totally rocked my world. I wanted to be Anne Shirley. I wanted to live on Prince Edward Island. I think I sort of even wanted to be an orphan—no offense to my very nice parents, of course. For a while I wore my hair in braids, though it wasn’t really long enough (and worse, it wasn’t red like Anne’s).
Then one day a fifth grader, whose locker was across from mine, had asked if I was the kid who always hung out with Abby Strasser. I guess she was interested because Abby’s dad is this big Broadway producer and pretty famous.
I said, “Yes, she’s my bosom friend.”
Well, it was awful. I didn’t realize, till I saw the expression on the girl’s face, just how totally stupid that sounded. By the time the bell rang at the end of the day, it was all over the school. I was marked forever as the weird kid who said bosom.
So, reading the book I used to love now made me unspeakably sad. Not only did it remind me of a horribly embarrassing moment; it also reminded me that, unlike Anne Shirley (and the third-grade Joplin Danforth), I no longer had a bosom friend.
Not even a non-bosom, run-of-the-mill, say-hi-in-the-hall kind of friend.
I had nobody. No one. Nada.
I got up, grabbed a Kleenex, and blew my nose. Then I stood by my bed and looked at my platter, carefully hung by Jen.
It was such a restful scene. A little like I imagined Prince Edward Island to be—pretty countryside, not too many people. The girl by the pond certainly looked happy, and she didn’t have a friend.
She had geese, though.
I thought, Maybe I should get a dog.
“I’ll bet you never had to go to school,” I said to the girl by the pond.
Then it struck me that not going to school wasn’t really such a wonderful thing. Girls back then didn’t have a choice. They probably just stayed home and worked all the time, doing whatever their parents said—until they were married off at, like, fourteen or fifteen, after which they would have to do whatever their husband said. And it would go on like that, just work and more work, plus having tons of babies to take care of, until they died too young of something we could easily cure today.
It made me remember how lucky I was, which lifted the gloom a little.
I knelt on my bed and studied the girl up close. She wasn’t just decoration, like the windmill and the geese. She looked like a real person. She seemed sweet and maybe kind of shy, used to being by herself a lot, taking care of the animals and doing chores.
I wondered if she was lonely too.
“I wish you could be my friend,” I whispered. “Then at least we’d have each other.”
I really do wonder about myself sometimes. How, in a mere six seconds, had I managed to make a U-turn from feeling lucky to wallowing in my loneliness again? I wasn’t trying to be miserable. I didn’t enjoy it. But being upbeat and positive wasn’t going to change the facts. I had become a person nobody liked.
Worse, I now had a big old bull’s-eye painted on my back. Making fun of Joplin had become the hot new form of entertainment. True, things would die down for a while, because being suspended was a drag. But nothing would really change. I’d still be an outcast. If anything, the perps would blame me for “getting them in trouble,” and . . .
Oh, stop it! I told myself, and turned off the light.
Not that I was likely to get much sleep with all those bad thoughts having a riot in my head. But I’d better try, since I had to get up and go to school in the morning. So I pulled out one of my regular sleep-inducing exercises and added extra complexities to it. That way, I’d have to concentrate harder, and the bad thoughts would quiet down.
I decided to list first and last names that began with sequential letters, alternating genders. Extra points for real people.
Alice Bates.
Charlie Davis.
Ellen Frasier.
George Harrison. (Extra point.)
Ida Jones.
Any of you want to be my friend?
Karl Lancaster.
Maria Nuñez.
Seriously—no takers? Not even one? I just wish I had one friend, preferably someone who goes to my school. Is that really asking too much?
Oliver Pickle . . .
The next morning I woke feeling awful. I hadn’t slept nearly enough. Now I was ragged and almost sick. Mom and Jen were already in the kitchen. I could hear their voices and the clatter of dishes.
I went to the bathroom to get ready. When I’d finished washing my face, I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to picture how I must look to other people.
Ordinary, I decided. Average. Plain. Maybe I should let my hair grow long and buy a curling iron.
Young, at least compared to the Fashionistas. They looked fifteen; I looked ten.
Serious and smart. That is to say, nerdy. But mostly it was my expression that made me look that way. Maybe if I smiled more, people would like me better. I tried one of Angelina’s Teen Vogue smiles. The result was not good.
I searched my closet for something to wear that might improve my image but didn’t have much luck. I laid three combos out on the bed, but there wasn’t a winner in the bunch. They all looked like me.
Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something unexpected in the garden.
Something that wasn’t green or brown.
I went to the window and looked out.
Sitting on the bench beside the fountain was a girl about my age.
In all the years we’d lived in our apartment, I’d never seen another child out there (except for the little screamers with their nannies, but they didn’t count).
Maybe a new family had moved into one of the brownstones. With a girl my age who liked gardens. How amazing was that?
I dressed in a rush, no longer caring what I wore, and hollered to Jen to ask if I could go through her room to the garden.
Jen called back, “Sure!”
Mom added, “Make it snappy!”
I said I would.
When the door opened, the girl turned and smiled at me. I went over and sat beside her on the bench.
At a glance I noticed how pretty she was. Angelina would die for that beautiful skin, not to mention the natural blond hair. If the girl did something with it, besides wearing it in braids, she could be a Fashionista.
But judging by her dress, I had the feeling she wouldn’t want to. It was plain blue cotton and looked suspiciously like her mother had run it up on the sewing machine. There was something white folded up beside her, tucked under her skirt. I couldn’t tell what it was. Probably a collar or a jacket, which her clueless mom thought was absolutely adorable but the girl knew would be the last nail in her coffin, fashion-wise. So she’d taken it off.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Joplin—after Scott Joplin, the ragtime composer, and Janis Joplin, the rock singer. There’s also a Joplin, Missouri, but I’m not named after that.”
The girl blinked, confused. Too much information, I guess. I do tend to run off at the mouth whenever I get nervous.
“I live over there,” I added, pointing. “At number twenty-three.”
When she just stared at our back door, I decided I should ask questions instead of telling her stuff. That way she’d have to talk.
“Are you new here?” I tried.
“Yes,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
She hesitated for a couple of beats, which struck me as
kind of weird. “Sofie,” she finally said.
“Do you live near here?” I made a circle with my finger, taking in the backs of the brownstones that walled in the garden.
“Yes,” she said again.
Maybe she was just super shy, but I couldn’t seem to get the conversation going. Also, I was starting to worry because Mom would be mad if I stayed out here too long. But I was afraid to leave for fear I’d never see Sofie again. I just knew that once she opened up, she’d be my new bosom friend.
“Listen, Sofie,” I said, “I have to go get ready for school. But if you want to hang out or something this afternoon”—oh, cheez, that sounded so lame!—“I’ll meet you here.”
“All right,” Sofie said. She was grinning, so I figured she really meant it.
We said good-bye and I hurried back inside, careful to lock the door so I wouldn’t get fussed at, and joined Mom and Jen for breakfast.
“You look cheery this morning,” Mom said, sounding pleasantly surprised.
I shrugged. We all knew how I felt about going back to school.
I could see that Mom was just dying to give me all sorts of annoying advice but sensed that it would only stir things up. Jen sensed it too and changed the subject.
“I asked one of my colleagues at work if he’d ever heard of Hans van der Brock. He said no, but he’d do some research. I’ll ask him again today.”
“Thanks, Jen. You do nice things.”
Jen beamed. Mom did too. I was exceeding all their expectations. I deserved at least three gold stars.
And the truth was, I did feel a bit more hopeful. Whatever happened at school, I’d have Sofie waiting when I got home. And there was the chance—maybe a really small one, but a chance just the same—that she’d turn out to be the friend that Abby used to be.
I went to my room to get my backpack. Also to make sure Sofie was still in the garden.
That was affirmative. I waved at her and she waved back.
Then I turned to say a brief good-bye to my very own original seventeenth-century masterpiece by the mysterious Hans van der Brock—and froze. It was like an electric current had passed through my body and stopped my heart.
The scene was the same as before: pond, geese, grass, trees, clouds, windmill.
But the girl was gone.
9
The Boy with All the Hair
“YOU ALL RIGHT?” JEN GAVE me this searching look when I came back into the kitchen. It must have been all over my face.
“Just nervous.” My voice sounded strange—breathy, like I couldn’t quite push the words out.
“Joplin—” Mom started in. But I didn’t let her finish.
“Gotta go,” I said, grabbing my lunch off the counter, stuffing it into my backpack, and hurrying out the door. Once I was safely outside, I stopped on the sidewalk to get my breathing under control.
A small clump of die-hard photographers were loitering across the street. I glared over, daring them to take so much as a step in my direction. They didn’t move an inch, and somehow that little triumph tamped down my panic just a smidge. I headed off to school, walking fast.
I’d already reached some really freakish conclusions about my new neighbor. But I needed time to absorb and consider them. The trick was to keep my head from exploding in the process—which, let me tell you, wasn’t easy.
On the one hand, it seemed really obvious: The girl had disappeared from my platter and a girl who looked just like her suddenly appeared in our garden. They had to be the same.
But that worked only if I threw scientific logic and a lifetime of experience right out the window. Girls didn’t come and go from platters. They just didn’t.
And yet, how else to explain what I saw?
So it went, round and round.
Needless to say, I didn’t learn a thing at school that day. And maybe the fact that I was so distracted is the reason my reentry went as smoothly as it did. The other kids—not the perps, who weren’t there, but the rest of them, the ones who’d just sat there while the whole thing went down, who hadn’t tried to help, who maybe even thought it was kind of funny—well, they left me alone. They could tell that my mind was somewhere very far away, certainly not on them. And they were probably sick to death of the Joplin Danforth saga anyway.
So they were polite, they didn’t stare, and I went back to being invisible. Meanwhile, inside my head, it was like an old-fashioned pinball machine, thoughts pinging off each other, flying in every direction. But no one seemed to notice how worried and distracted I was. Or, if they did, they thought they knew the reason why.
As usual, I went to the library for lunch and Ms. Finney smiled when I came in. Also as usual, I took my regular seat at the far right corner table, artfully placing my backpack to act as a shield, and taking out my brown-bag lunch.
Not quite as usual, Ms. Finney waited a discreet amount of time, then came over and sat beside me.
Silently, my spirit groaned.
“I’ve been thinking,” Ms. Finney said, once again blind to all evidence of illegal food consumption in the library.
“What about?” I said, swallowing with a gulp.
“There’s somebody I think you need to know. He’s older than you, in sixth grade, but you’re mature for your age. And you have a lot in common. I think you’d get on like a house afire.”
I blinked. That was so unexpected.
“Mind if I play matchmaker?” I just gaped at her, so she kept on trying. “He’s the Sherlock Holmes fan, remember?”
Of course I did. The boy with all the hair. He was adorable.
“He’s still waiting for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Maybe if you offered to lend him your copy, it would break the ice.”
Is she trying to set us up on a date?
“C’mon, Joplin. Live large. Take a chance.”
Since things couldn’t possibly get any weirder, I said, “Sure.”
Moments later she was back with my date.
He was way tall, even for a sixth grader. I bet people were always asking him if he played basketball. And he had a really nice face under all those dorky curls.
“Joplin Danforth, this is Barrett Browning. Barrett, Joplin has a full set of Sherlock Holmes. If you’re really nice to her, she might lend it to you.”
Barrett seemed thrilled to hear this. “Have you read them all?” he asked, taking a seat across from me, folding his arms, and settling in like we were old friends.
I said, “Yes, I have.” I said, “Sherlock Holmes is awesome.” I said, “I’ll be glad to bring the set to school on Monday.”
The ice, as Ms. Finney put it, was broken and melting fast.
I hadn’t felt such an instant connection since meeting Abby at the Presbyterian church preschool. I couldn’t remember the actual moment. I was, after all, only four at the time. But I do remember how we both liked building castles with oversize Legos. We spent way more time in the science-and-discovery section than any of the other kids. And we were the first to learn how to write our names. Right from the start it had felt like we belonged together.
It was the same with Barrett Browning now, only better. It was easy to talk to him. I could just be myself and not worry that he would think I was weird.
I bet I could even have said “bosom friend” and he wouldn’t have turned a hair.
Since we’d started with Sherlock, we talked about books for a while. He’d read different ones than I had, but they were the same kind of books, mostly old, like Anne of Green Gables or The Count of Monte Cristo. And mostly they hadn’t been written for kids. I guess you’d call them “classics.” I made a list of his favorites. I knew I’d like them.
I told him that my aunt Jen—who wasn’t actually my aunt—had majored in art history in college and worked at Christie’s, which was a big auction house for art, so she knew all about it. Sometimes she took me to the Met Museum and gave me a personal tour.
Most kids, if I told them that, would give me a blank stare or ro
ll their eyes. But Barrett thought it was cool. He liked the Met too. His favorite part was the Egyptian section, especially the wooden models of boats and houses. He said that at first glance they weren’t nearly as impressive as the mummies and temples. But he liked them best because they showed the everyday lives of ancient Egyptians, not just the pharaohs. Also, wasn’t it amazing that wooden models could have survived for five thousand years?
I said yes, it was totally amazing. Jen said it was because the land in Egypt was so dry that the wood didn’t rot.
Then Barrett told me about this three-thousand-year-old mummy of a temple singer from Luxor, and how they did a CAT scan on it, then used this special software, made for designing cars, to turn the data into 3D images of her body. Now they were planning to digitally re-create her singing voice.
While he was telling me all this, another electrical surge ran through me, and once again it felt like my heart had quit beating. I made a strange choking sound. Barrett stopped talking and stared at me.
“Barrett,” I said, “can you keep a secret?”
He sat up a little straighter. “Sure.”
My heart was beating again, only now it was pounding and I could hardly breathe. At the same time, I felt this sudden wave of relief: There was someone I could tell!
“You’ll think I’m making this up, but I promise I’m not.”
“All right.” I loved his expression. He was interested, waiting, serious. His mind was wide open.
“There’s this old Dutch platter. Really old, like from the 1600s. It belonged to my grandparents, but it was broken years ago, back when my mom was little. After my grandfather died, I found the pieces in an old cookie tin. My mom said I could have it. And my aunt Jen found an expert to glue the pieces back together.”
Barrett listened patiently.
“It’s beautiful, a scene in the country with a pond and trees and a windmill and stuff. And by the pond is a girl and some geese.”
“I can picture it.”
The bell rang. We ignored it.
“So we hung it on the wall over my bed.” I took a deep breath. “Then last night I was lying there, feeling kind of sad and lonely. I started thinking about the girl in the picture and thought she looked lonely too. I wished she could be my friend. And then later, while I was trying to get to sleep, I wished I had a friend at school.”
Joplin, Wishing Page 5