Much Ado About Anne

by Heather Vogel Frederick

  Ashley turns around, revealing a big bow on the back of the dress, and everybody oohs and aahs again. I stare at my friends. I feel like I’m from a different planet. Planet I-Don’t-Get-Fashion. How can people tell what looks good on somebody? I never pay attention to colors or styles or anything like that—I just grab whatever’s clean. Jeans and T-shirts mostly. And if nothing is clean, I grab something out of the hamper. My mother hates it when she catches me doing that.

  “What are you guys doing up here?”

  We all freeze. My sister Courtney pokes her head in the door and smiles at us.

  “Uh,” I reply, stalling for time.

  “Hey! Cute clothes!” she says, coming into the turret for a closer look. “Did you make them, Megan?”

  Megan nods.

  “These are just the samples. The production department at Flashlite will sew the finished ones for the magazine layout.”

  “Really? That is so cool. These are awesome, though.”

  Megan looks at the rest of us inquiringly. I shrug. So do Emma and Jess.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Megan asks Courtney.

  “Sure,” my sister replies. Megan explains about the fashion show and Courtney gets all excited. “If the rest of the clothes are anything like these, I think it will be a big hit.”

  “You really think so?” Megan says shyly.

  “They’re going to sell like hotcakes,” Courtney promises.

  My sister can be a pain—especially when she’s lecturing me about being nice to Stanley Kinkaid—but sometimes she’s pretty nice. By the time my mother shouts upstairs that Mrs. Wong and Mrs. Hawthorne and Mrs. Delaney are here, and that it’s time for book club, we’re all feeling a lot more confident.

  “Maybe you can come to book club again sometime,” says Megan to Becca, after the Fab Three change back into their school clothes.

  “Maybe,” says Becca. “I’m not sure I can talk my mother into it, though. She’s still fuming about what happened at Walden Pond. Between that and Hello Boston!, she’s pretty convinced you guys are a bad influence.”

  I do a little dance around the turret. “Bad Influences R Us!” I chant, and everybody laughs.

  Emma consults her notebook. “Our next meeting will be this weekend, at Megan’s house,” she announces. “All hands on deck to help with the final preparations. Remember to tell your mothers that it’s a sleepover.”

  “Don’t forget I have to leave early for a baseball game.”

  “You and your stupid baseball games,” says Becca.

  “Shut up,” I reply.

  “Guys!” pleads Megan.

  “It’s so nice to see you girls all getting along,” says Mrs. Delaney, as we troop downstairs. She smiles, but it’s kind of a wobbly smile. Poor Mrs. Delaney has been looking really, really tired and sad lately. Jess says she’s just heartbroken about selling the farm.

  Little does she know, I think smugly.

  “What are you girls so tickled about?” asks my mother, after the Fab Three leave.

  “They’ve been looking enormously pleased with themselves lately, haven’t they?” says Mrs. Hawthorne. “You’d almost think they were plotting something.”

  “No kidding,” says Mrs. Wong, shaking her head. “All this giggling and whispering and late-night phone calls!”

  We just smile.

  Our book club meeting ends up being a little shorter than usual. My mother decided at the last minute that since it’s such a nice warm spring evening it would be fun to have a barbecue afterward, especially since she had tons of leftover food from the week’s taping. Even though it’s the middle of May, she and the crew are already working on the Labor Day episode, and they made ribs and homemade barbecue sauce and cole slaw and baked beans and cornbread and yummy stuff like that.

  Just thinking about it makes me hungry, and my stomach growls as Mrs. Hawthorne passes us our handouts.

  FUN FACTS ABOUT MAUD

  1. Lucy Maud Montgomery was petite and lively, loved books, animals (especially cats), gardening, photography, and pretty clothes.

  2. Like her character Anne Shirley, Maud earned a teaching degree and taught on Prince Edward Island. She also worked for a year as a newspaper reporter at the Halifax Daily Echo.

  3. After her grandfather died, she returned to Cavendish to help her grandmother. She lived at home for the next thirteen years, and it was during this time that she wrote Anne of Green Gables.

  4. Although she promised her grandmother she wouldn’t marry while she was still alive, she became secretly engaged to a local Presbyterian minister, Ewan MacDonald. She married him on July 5, 1911, four months after her grandmother’s death, and they eventually had two sons, Chester and Stuart.

  5. Maud loved to write letters, and she wrote to two of her favorite pen pals, a farmer from Alberta and a Scottish journalist, for forty years.

  BONUS FUN FACT:

  Lucy Maud Montgomery had a Concord connection! In 1910, she spent two weeks in Boston as the guest of her publisher. While she was in New England, she came to Concord and visited the homes of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott.

  “Gee,” says Jess, “She was right here in Concord. I wonder if she ever drove by Half Moon Farm?”

  “If she did, I’m sure she thought it was just as pretty as Green Gables,” my mother tells her.

  Mrs. Delaney gets that sad look on her face again, and Mrs. Hawthorne quickly changes the subject. We talk for a while about what she calls “a sense of place” and how Lucy Maud Montgomery’s love of Prince Edward Island comes through in her books.

  “You mean the way reading her stories makes you feel almost like you’ve been there?” I ask her.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” says Mrs. Hawthorne.

  I’m still kind of embarrassed that I thought Avonlea was a real place. But how was I supposed to know? The author sure made it seem real. As real as Concord, in fact. I wonder if maybe someday somebody will write a story set here in our town, like Maud set hers in Prince Edward Island. Maybe Emma will, I think, looking over at her. She’s scribbling something in her notebook. A poem, probably.

  “Hey, Mom, the grill’s ready,” says Courtney, poking her head in the living room. “Mr. Wong is starting the ribs. Everybody’s hungry.”

  “I’d better get the tofu hot dogs out of the fridge,” says Mrs. Wong, jumping up.

  We follow my sister out onto the patio. The dads are all there, along with Darcy and the twins, who are chasing Murphy around the gazebo. And Stanley Kinkaid is there too, of course. He spends so much time at our house he could practically be part of the furniture.

  “Hey, Cassidy,” he says, handing me a soda.

  “Hey,” I reply.

  The two of us are back on speaking terms again. Courtney sat me down after the Bruins game and chewed me out for being so selfish. I’m still not sure why it’s so selfish of me to want things to stay the way they are, but she keeps telling me I need to think of somebody else besides myself for a change. The thing is, I do want Mom to be happy, I really do, but does that mean we have to have Stanley Kinkaid stuck to us all the time like gum on the bottom of a shoe? Why can’t my mom just be happy being my mom?

  Dr. Weisman says it’s complicated. He’s right about that. Anyway, I promised Courtney I’d try to be more unselfish, but it’s hard. Stan the man is nice enough, and I know Mom is pretty crazy about him and everything, but I still like our family just the way it is. Just me, and Courtney, and Mom.

  “So Little League’s off to a good start, huh?” says Stanley.

  “Yup,” I reply politely.

  “You pitching again this year?”

  “Yup.”

  “Planning on doing summer baseball camp?”

  “Yup.”

  Stanley’s smile is starting to look a little strained. “I, uh, have some tickets to next weekend’s home game at Fenway Park,” he tells me. “You wouldn’t want to go, would you?”

  I hesitate.

>   “You could bring a friend along,” he adds quickly. “I have three seats. Clemmie can’t go that night—she said she has an early taping the next morning.”

  I resist the urge to gag. I hate it when he calls my mother “Clemmie.”

  “Maybe Courtney could come with us?” he suggests.

  My sister would rather eat glass than watch baseball. Zach Norton, on the other hand, would think he’d died and gone to heaven if I could get him into a Red Sox game. So would Darcy Hawthorne.

  “Let me think about it,” I tell him. “You don’t by any chance do the taxes for the Sox, too, do you?”

  It takes Stanley a minute to realize that I’m joking. He smiles. “No, I’m not their accountant. You don’t need to worry about that this time around.” He claps me on the shoulder awkwardly. “You think about it, okay? Let me know when you’ve made up your mind.”

  “So, do you think they suspect anything?” says Emma in a low voice, after he wanders off.

  “Who, the Red Sox?” I reply, startled.

  “No, you dork, our parents! I’m talking about the fashion show.”

  I shrug. “Probably. We have been acting kind of strange, after all. But I don’t think they have a clue what we’re up to.”

  “We’re going to have to tell them soon.”

  Emma’s right, of course. We can’t keep it a secret forever. And actually, I’m looking forward to telling them. I can’t wait to see the expressions on everybody’s faces. Especially the Delaneys.

  I look over at the picnic table, where everyone’s gathering around the food. Mr. and Mrs. Delaney are standing slightly apart from the group, quietly holding hands. Jess is leaning up against her mom.

  “Emma, what if our plan doesn’t work?” I ask, gripped with a sudden panic. “What if they have to sell Half Moon Farm?”

  Emma turns and looks at me. Her round face is serious. “It has to work,” she says solemnly. “It just has to.”

  Jess

  “True friendship is a very helpful thing indeed.”

  —Anne of Avonlea

  I awaken to the sound of a bulldozer.

  My heart clutches with fear. Has it started already? Throwing back the covers and racing to my bedroom window, I open it wide and lean out as far as I can, craning to find the source of the noise.

  The bulldozer is on our neighbor’s property, not ours. The Thompsons must be starting to dig the foundation for their new addition.

  I kneel down and rest my arms on the windowsill with a sigh of relief. The early morning sun is warm on my face, and I close my eyes and soak it in. It’s going to be a beautiful day. The lilacs growing next to the porch below me are in full bloom, and I inhale their sweet, familiar scent, trying to calm my pounding pulse. Spring has always been my favorite time of year. I love how everything is fresh and new, and I love to watch the trees and fields slowly turn from brown to green. Emma always says they’re “putting on their spring clothes,” which is very poetical, as Anne Shirley would say.

  I open my eyes and gaze out at the barn and the fields beyond, and my anxiety returns. What if this is my last springtime at Half Moon Farm? What if today is a big failure?

  I stand up and cross the room, shutting out the hateful mental image of our fields being plowed up to make space for condominiums. Propped against the mirror on my dresser is a notecard with a picture of Green Gables on the front. Mrs. Sloane sent away to Canada for them, and she gave us each a packet of them at our last book club meeting, along with these cool little pens that have a tiny wagon floating inside. Anne Shirley and Matthew Cuthbert are in the wagon, and when you tilt the pen, they drive from the railroad station home to Green Gables. Cassidy thinks they’re dumb but I love mine.

  I open the notecard. Inside, I wrote down one of my favorite Lucy Maud Montgomery quotes: Green Gables is the dearest, loveliest spot in the world. That’s exactly how I feel about Half Moon Farm. I close the notecard again and give the picture on the front a kiss for luck. Today just has to be a success.

  There’s a tap at my door. My mother pops her head in. So do Sugar and Spice. “You awake?” she asks.

  I nod. Dad offered to do my chores for me today so I could sleep in and get plenty of “beauty rest,” as he called it, for the fashion show. “I don’t want my princess looking too ramshackle today of all days,” he joked last night.

  The dogs push their way into my room, tails wagging happily. Why is it that dogs are always so cheerful, no matter what? I wish I could be more like our Shelties.

  “Better get dressed, then,” my mother says, smiling at me. “It’s going to be a long day, and there’s still a lot to do before tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  She glances at the notecard on my dresser, then back at me. Sometimes I swear my mother can read my thoughts.

  “Everything okay?” she asks.

  I shrug.

  “Jess,” she says, smoothing my hair back off my forehead, “no matter what happens today, our family will be fine. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” I reply. “It’s just that . . .” my voice trails off.

  “Just that what?”

  “It’s just that I don’t ever want to have to leave here.”

  My mother puts her arms around me and pulls me close. “I don’t ever want to have to leave here either, sweetheart,” she whispers. “But if I do, there’s no one I’d rather be with than you, and your dad, and the boys.”

  I breathe her in for a moment. She smells like lavender.

  “Now pull your socks up, and let’s try and be positive about all this, okay? It’s going to be a great day, whatever happens. All the hard work you girls have put into planning this—well, I couldn’t be prouder of you, that’s all.”

  Somehow we managed to keep the fashion show a secret until right before Emma and Becca’s article came out in the Walden Woodsman. After Emma accidentally left a galley proof out on her desk and Mrs. Hawthorne spotted it, though, the cat was out of the bag. Mrs. Hawthorne e-mailed Mrs. Wong and Mrs. Sloane and my mom, and the four of them called an emergency session of the Mother-Daughter Book Club that day after school in the Hawthornes’ pink kitchen.

  “You planned this all by yourselves?”

  Mrs. Wong looked incredulous after we explained.

  “Yup,” Cassidy said smugly. “Well, actually, it was Becca’s idea. She and Jen and Ashley helped out too.”

  “The Fab Three?” Mrs. Hawthorne’s eyebrows disappeared behind her bangs.

  “So this is what all the secrecy has been about,” said Mrs. Sloane, shaking her head.

  For a minute there we couldn’t tell if our mothers were mad or glad. And then my mom burst into tears.

  “You girls are amazing!” she kept saying.

  And of course once she started crying, the other mothers all started crying too.

  “So I guess you like the idea?” I’d said.

  “Like it?” my mother had replied, giving me a big hug. “We love it! It’s fantastic!”

  Of course they wanted to know all the details of how we came up with the idea, and what Flashlite had said, and how we’d planned everything.

  “Well, I think it’s going to be a huge success,” said Mrs. Wong when we were done. She beamed at Megan. “And such a worthy cause!”

  “A chip off the old block, eh, Lily?” said Mrs. Hawthorne, and Mrs. Wong nodded proudly.

  As soon as the secret was out, our families all pitched in to help. Mrs. Delaney called her actor friends in New York, and half the cast of HeartBeats reserved tickets for the show. Mrs. Sloane insisted on doing the catering—“You can’t have a fashion show without a party,” she’d insisted, “and you can’t have a party without good food”—plus she offered to put in a surprise appearance on the runway if Megan wanted her to. Megan is so excited she can hardly stand it. She’s been going around school bragging that the world-famous Clementine will be modeling one of her outfits. She’s even designing a special dress just for Mrs. Sloane, a
nd she won’t let any of us see it.

  Mrs. Wong, who is on the board of trustees for just about every charitable organization in Concord, used all her connections to help get the word out, and so did Mrs. Sloane’s boyfriend, Stanley Kinkaid. He sold a bunch of tickets to his clients, and some of the Boston Bruins are even going to come and bring their families. When Emma heard about the hockey players and the actors from HeartBeats, she decided to write another press release. Now she’s calling it a “star-studded gala,” and her plan worked, because a lot of the newspapers around Boston have run articles about our show, and are sending reporters to cover it. So are most of the local TV stations, including Channel 5, who managed to talk Carson Dawson into giving us another chance. He said okay, as long as nobody expected him to eat or drink anything on camera.

  At first when Mrs. Chadwick found out Becca was involved, she wasn’t too happy. She still thinks we’re a bad influence. Then she discovered that half the tickets had been sold already, and that the show was going to be on the news and featured in Flashlite, and that Becca was going to be one of the models. Suddenly she changed her mind and started barking orders at us.

  “You can’t have a fashion show in a barn, for goodness’ sake,” she’d decreed. “The goats might eat the clothes.”

  Actually, she had a point. It wouldn’t be the first time. Sundance once devoured a T-shirt that I accidentally left in her pen.

  So Mrs. Chadwick made a few calls—twisting arms comes naturally to snapping turtles, Mr. Wong joked—and badgered somebody into letting us use this huge tent for free, along with a portable stage and a hundred folding chairs.

  A truck delivered everything last night, and all of us—plus our dads and Darcy and his best friend Kyle Anderson, and Cameron and Third and Zach Norton and Kevin Mullins and the Chadwicks and the Websters and the Sanborns—helped set it up. Mrs. Sloane and Courtney brought over these huge platters of enchiladas and chips and salsa and guacamole and stuff, and fed us while we worked. My little brothers mostly got in the way, until Mrs. Wong made Mr. Wong take them downtown to Vanderhoof’s Hardware Store for twinkle lights. He came back with about a mile of them, which we twined around the tent poles and across the canopy. When we were done, my mom let the twins plug them in and the whole inside of the tent lit up. It looked absolutely amazing—like something out of a movie. Everybody clapped and cheered, and then we all piled in our cars and drove to Kimball Farm for ice cream.