Clementine, Friend of the Week

by Sara Pennypacker

  A little later, just as my mom and Radish came in, Dad came back. “Welcome to Grand Central Station,” he said. “You guys have tickets?”

  “Better than that,” my mom said as she pulled the clothes from the washing machine and stuffed them into the dryer. “We’re here to tell you the dining car will be serving in ten minutes. How about you start packing up so you can come in for dinner, all right?”

  So I stuffed everything into garbage bags and tied them up, ready to go Saturday morning. “Here, Moisturizer,” I called. “Want to eat?”

  He didn’t come, so I went and looked everywhere I remembered seeing him.

  No kitten.

  “Hey, Squash,” I said, “Have you seen Moisturizer?”

  “No kitty,” my brother said. “Blast off?”

  “He’s probably inside the apartment,” my mom said. “We’re having macaroni and cheese. He’s probably sitting by the stove, drooling.” She picked up Potato and headed into the apartment. I followed her and called for Moisturizer again.

  He didn’t come. I grabbed the box of kitty treats and went around the whole apartment shaking it and calling his name. “He always comes for treats, so he’s got to still be out in the basement,” I told my mom in a voice that was a little shaky. “I’m going to go get him.”

  Back in the basement, I called and I shook the box, and I called and I shook the box. I walked around, opening doors and cupboards and boxes, and the bags of decorations. I looked in all the washers and dryers, in the storage room, in both elevators, in the trash barrels and recycling bins.

  “Here, kitty! Moisturizer, here!” I called, faster and faster. I could feel my heart start to beat faster, too. “Where are you?”

  My dad came out. “No sign of him?”

  Suddenly my throat squeezed down. I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s be calm. Let’s think like a kitten here.” And then he began searching in all the building-manager places he could think of—the garbage chute, the old closed-up coal bin, the air shaft, the air-conditioning unit. He shined a flashlight into the heating ducts and behind the hot-water tank and under the furnace. He even opened his toolbox.

  I followed him, calling Moisturizer’s name and shaking his treats.

  No kitten. No kitten!

  My heart started to pound so hard I was afraid I might not hear him if he meowed for me. “Dad,” I cried finally, “what if he got…” I took a deep breath but I still couldn’t make my mouth say the next word.

  Dad squatted down in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I don’t think he did that, Clementine,” he said. “I think he’s just on a little adventure. The basement is a pretty exciting place if you’re a kitten. He’s just found something more interesting than his dinner right now. So let’s go eat ours, and I bet when we’re done, he’ll show up.”

  I said okay, but when I got to the table, it was N-O-T, not. Not even one macaroni would go down—my throat closed just thinking about how much I wished Moisturizer was under the table right now.

  “Can I take my plate to the basement?” I asked my parents. “So he’ll smell it and come home?”

  They said okay, so I did. One by one, I laid the cheesy macaroni elbows on the basement floor, making a trail through all the places we’d been, ending up at our door. Then I went calling through the basement again, begging Moisturizer to come out, and keeping one eye on the trail.

  But Moisturizer didn’t come. And then I knew.

  “Mom, Dad!” I cried as I ran back inside. “He got out!”

  We split up. My mom and I went north, and my dad, wheeling Cabbage in the stroller, went south. Then we went east and they went west. No kitten. Block after block after block. Just too many cars and trucks and taxis and buses—all of them big and fast and none of them watching out for a lost kitten. I stopped everyone we passed and asked if they’d seen him: “Little and orange and fluffy and smart?”

  “No, sorry,” everybody said. “Sorry, no.”

  We searched until the moon was high in the sky and Boston was falling asleep. Finally, my parents said, “Your brother’s been conked out for hours and it’s getting cold and it’s time you got to bed, too, Clementine. Moisturizer is probably asleep now anyway, so we might as well go home.”

  At the lobby door, I called for him one more time while my dad carried my brother inside. My mom stood beside me. “It’s a really big night out there, Mom,” I told her. “And he’s a really little cat.”

  “I know, honey,” she said. “I know.”

  Inside, I dragged my quilt and pillow out to the living room and spread them on the floor beside the door.

  “Clementine, I don’t think…” my mom started.

  “If he’s in the basement and he comes back, I need to hear him,” I said. “Besides, I can’t sleep in my bed if he’s not there.” I thought I would have to use my stingray eyes to convince her, since she’s usually a bedtime-is-a-time-not-a-feeling-and-we-sleep-in-our-own-rooms kind of mother. But tonight she just hugged me and asked my dad to get the air mattress for me and sleep on the couch beside me.

  My dad blew the mattress up. Then he went outside and scratched at the door, to make sure I could hear if Moisturizer came home. The sound made the tears I had been holding back all night burst out.

  “Hey there,” my dad said, closing the door and sitting beside me. “You can’t give up hope. Moisturizer is counting on you. Wherever he is, he’s not giving up hope.”

  I wiped my face. “Do you think he knows I’m coming to find him tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely. From the moment I set eyes on that cat, I thought to myself, ‘That cat is positive. That cat is not a quitter.’”

  “But now he’s all alone in the world without me, Dad! It’s dark and it’s cold, and he thought I would take care of him and I didn’t!”

  “I think you do, Sport. Your mother and I noticed that. We never have to remind you to feed him—never, not even once. He didn’t get out because you were careless. He got out because he was curious. Kittens are curious.”

  That reminded me about a certain terrible saying about curiosity and cats, which I am not going to repeat. I saw my dad see me remembering it. He wrapped his arms around me just as I burst into tears again.

  “‘But satisfaction brought him back.’ That’s the end of that saying, remember,” he said.

  “I hope so, Dad,” I said into his shoulder. “Because I really want him back.”

  I don’t want to talk about Friday because there was so much crying. I did not know one person could hold that much water. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

  Okay, fine, I’ll tell about some of Friday. The parts that weren’t as bad.

  I must have missed Moisturizer while I slept, because I woke up crying. My parents took one look at me and called the school to say I wasn’t coming in, which was good because I had decided that already.

  I wiped my face. “Okay, let’s get going,” I said. “Let’s start searching for him again.”

  “Hold on,” said my dad. “I think we can be a little smarter than that. Let’s get some more people looking.”

  “You’re right!” I cried. “Let’s call the police, and the FBI and the CIA and—”

  My dad didn’t call the FBI or the CIA because he didn’t think a crime had been committed. But he did call the police and the Animal Rescue League and the vets in the area. Then he told me the best part of his plan—posters! Which sounded like a great idea, until I thought of something terrible. “Oh, no! We never took any pictures! I forgot to take pictures of him!”

  More crying. My dad put his arm around my shoulder. “That’s a challenge, all right. But you know what I think? I think Moisturizer is one lucky kitten right now. Because he belongs to a remarkable artist.”

  “You think I could draw him?” I asked. “You think I could do a good enough job?”

  “I do, Sport. I think it will be the drawing of your life.�
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  “Me too,” said my mom. “But first, let’s get you some tissues. You can’t splash tears on a drawing this important.”

  So I dried my tears and then my mom let me sit up at her drawing table to make the poster. She handed me her good markers and a stack of her good paper. “Use as much as you need, honey,” she said. “Get it right.”

  Let me tell you, it was very, very hard. Not the drawing part. The not-crying-on-the-paper part.

  When I tried to draw his ears, I remembered how they twitched whenever someone opened a can, and my eyes filled up. When I drew his fluffy fur, I remembered how soft it was to pet, and the tears ran down my face. And when I sketched in his whiskers, I thought about how sometimes he walked around with little dust bunnies on them, and I almost fell off the chair from crying so hard.

  Okay, that’s enough about the crying!

  Finally, what I did was repeat over and over while I drew, “This cute kitten is coming home soon! So I am very happy!” I held a tissue up to my eyes with my left hand while I drew with my right, just in case.

  I had a little problem deciding what expression to put on Moisturizer’s face. I love it when he’s curious, but also when he’s laughing, and also when he’s yawning. In the end, I decided to make him look a little afraid, because that’s how he’d probably look when a stranger found him.

  Finally, the drawing was done. And look how good it was!

  I added our phone number to the bottom, and then my dad and I walked to the copy shop on the corner.

  “How many would you like?” the clerk asked.

  “How many can I get for this much?” I asked back. And I put all the money I owned on the counter.

  My dad scooped it up and gave it back to me. “This one’s on me,” he said. “Now how many posters do you think we need? Fifteen, twenty…?”

  “A hundred,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t think a—” Dad started.

  “You’re right,” I interrupted. “Two hundred. No—three hundred. At least.”

  My dad looked at me hard for a minute. Then he turned to the clerk. “Three hundred copies, please. This is a very special cat.”

  Let me tell you, it is a lot of work to put up posters, especially when you have a three-year-old brother trying to help. Luckily, Parsnip decided around lunchtime that it was more fun to stick tape on himself than on the telephone poles, so we got a lot more done in the afternoon.

  “How many do you think we put up?” I asked my mom as the afternoon faded.

  She eyed the stack. “Maybe fifty?”

  “Well, only two hundred fifty left,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

  Mom shook her head. “Your dad is working. He can’t answer the phone in the apartment. We should go home in case someone calls.”

  So we went back, and my brother peeled tape off himself, and my mom made dinner while I sat by the phone and waited for someone to call.

  Nobody did. Well, except for a stranger who wondered if I had enough mortgage protection. I told him about Moisturizer being gone and he said, “Oh dear, that’s a shame, I hope you find him real soon.”

  After that, the phone didn’t ring at all. And the whole apartment was quieter than it had ever been before—it was missing the sound of the phone and the sound of Moisturizer being there.

  When it was time for bed, I dragged the air mattress over to the door again. My dad went to read my brother his bedtime story and my mom came out with a pillow and a blanket. She lay down on the couch. “I thought you could use some company,” she said, and she shut off the light.

  “Mom,” I said into the darkness after a while. “You know how Pea Pod says, ‘You broke my feelings,’ when he means they’re hurt? Well, that’s how I feel—like all the feelings inside me are broken.”

  “I know just what you mean,” my mom said. “I think that just about sums it up. But they’ll be fixed again, I promise.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re a human being, right? Human beings have feelings. Everybody feels that sad sometimes. People write stories about it, and poetry; they paint pictures and compose music about it. To share how it feels.”

  I didn’t answer. Nobody in the world could ever have felt the way I did right then.

  “For instance,” she went on, “do you remember last year when we read Ginger Pye out loud? Remember how those kids felt when their dog was missing?”

  I nodded into the dark.

  “And do you remember how long it took to find him? And how they never stopped looking, and how finally, finally, they got him back?”

  “Mom,” I said. “That was a book. This is real life.”

  Early Saturday morning I heard knocking. I sat up and my ears got excited—maybe someone had found Moisturizer! I jumped up and opened the door.

  It was just Margaret.

  “Is your dad home?” she asked. “It’s my big recital today. I need the storage keys so I can get—Hey! Did you go blind? Is that why you weren’t in school yesterday?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your eyes! They’re red and all swollen. They look like tomatoes.”

  “Never mind,” I said. My dad was in the kitchen making breakfast with my mom. I told him Margaret needed him, and then I ran into my room and flopped onto my bed.

  After a few minutes my dad came in and sat beside me. “Did you tell Margaret about Moisturizer?”

  I kept my head buried in the pillow as I shook it.

  “She’ll be back in a few minutes with the keys. It might help. To talk to a friend…”

  “Margaret isn’t my friend. She’s mad at me and I don’t even know why, and she said my eyes look like tomatoes.”

  My dad rolled me over to look. Then he made a pretend horrified face.

  I laughed a little, even though I didn’t want to. “Anyway, she’s on her way to her big hula-dancing recital—she won’t want to talk to me. Besides, if she did, she’d just tell me it’s my fault. She never loses anything. She’d tell me I shouldn’t have lost Moisturizer.”

  “She might surprise you. Maybe you should give her a chance.”

  I sighed and went to the front door. Margaret came back in a few minutes, dragging a giant blow-up palm tree under her arm. She handed me my dad’s keys and started to leave. Then she turned around. “I saw your bike,” she said. “It looks good.”

  “The rally! I forgot!” I wailed. I felt my chest hitching up for another day of crying, so I wrapped my arms around myself to keep it all in.

  “So what?” Margaret said. “You have time. Go get ready. And wear sunglasses.”

  “I can’t. I can’t!” And then, when I was trying not to say why I couldn’t, the words all came out.

  “Moisturizer’s gone?” Margaret gasped. “He’s gone??” Then her face got all scowled up again, like it did when she was so angry at Mitchell and me the other day. Even her palm tree looked furious.

  I ran back into my room and threw myself onto my bed again. After a minute, my dad came in. “Well,” he asked, “did Margaret surprise you? Did it help to talk?”

  “Yes, she surprised me,” I said, after I thought about the way she had acted. “But no, it didn’t help. Dad, I let everyone down, everyone.”

  He sat down on my bed. “What are you talking about?”

  “I let Moisturizer down by losing him. And you and Mom—I let you down because you gave him to me. Right now, I’m letting everyone down about the rally. And Margaret—you should have seen her face.”

  “You’ve never let us down once, Sport. That’s not how your mother and I see all this.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “We’ve got a pancake factory out there. Come on out and eat some. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’ve got a big morning ahead. A lot of posters to put up. I think you should eat something.”

  So I got up and ate some pancakes, even though they all reminded me so much of Moisturizer I might as well have been
eating cat food. One looked like his head and another like his tail, and the rest looked like his paws. Probably everything from now on was going to remind me of him.

  After breakfast, my mother and I put on our jackets. “Oh dear,” Mom said, frowning down at the table beside the door. “Margaret asked me for some posters as she was leaving, so I took a few out and left them here for her. But she must have taken the whole envelope by mistake.” My mom saw my face and quickly made a smile. “She’ll bring them back. Let’s take these few for now and get started.”

  Five posters. We put one up in the lobby and then there were only four. We walked around all morning, calling down alleys, looking under cars and behind trash cans and up trees. We put up the four posters, which didn’t take long. I was so sad about that, I didn’t pay attention to which way we were going home.

  And then suddenly we turned a corner and I saw them right across the street—a huge group of kids clustered together with their bikes on Boston Common.

  “Mom, run!” I said, grabbing her hand and pulling her away. “I can’t let them see me! They’re going to be so disappointed with me!”

  “Wait,” she said. “Let’s go talk to them. Let’s explain what’s going on.…”

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to see their undecorated bikes and their Clementine-let-us-down faces. I ran all the way home.

  When I got there, I decided I couldn’t bear to see the trail of crusty lumps of macaroni and cheese anymore, either. I got a spatula and a plastic bag and started scraping them off the floor. It took a long time because they had hardened like cement. As I was finishing up at my doorway, Margaret got out of the elevator. Holding a big manila envelope!

  “Oh, thank you!” I cried.

  She came over to give it to me, but she stopped when she saw what I was doing and arrow-eyed my hands. She opened our apartment door and put the envelope on the table instead. One nice thing I have to admit about Margaret—she takes good care of everything, not just her own things. So I knew the posters were going to be just fine.