But even if you think they are not going well, you can still wish, as Bobby Box did. And sometimes those wishes will come true, as his did, and the world will seem filled with light and happiness. That can happen, you know. So never give up hope; never think that things are so bad that they can never get better. They can get better, and they do. And if you have the chance to make things easier for another person, never miss it. Stretch out your hand to help them, to cheer them up, to wipe away their tears. Stretch out your hand as that man and that woman did to Bobby Box. Stretch out your hand and see what happens.
JEANNE DuPRAU
PEARL’S FATEFUL WISH
Pearl’s friends, if you could call them that, were Candy, Bitsy, Farah, Arabella, and Ronette. On the April Saturday when Pearl made what she would later call her Fateful Wish, they had all been at The Stores. It was chilly out, so the vast underground mall was the place to be. All afternoon, they careened down the wide corridors, pressing up against the windows, swarming inside the shops they liked and clustering around the glass displays, arguing about which purse or ring or poster was best, with their voices high-pitched and their hair bouncing and their shopping bags swinging against each other’s legs. Pearl wanted a fuzzy scarf to keep her neck from getting cold, and once she found one—a too-bright chartreuse, which Bitsy said was totally gorgeous—she would have gone home if she hadn’t been with everyone else.
Around four they got on the Y train and rode back home to Asphalt Area Building #31. Two of the eight elevators were out of order, so Pearl and her friends and twelve other people milled around in the lobby for almost twenty minutes, waiting for one that wasn’t too crowded to fit into. The lobby door didn’t close right anymore, so wind came in and blew around the grit and paper scraps on the floor. Pearl kept an eye on the scraps in case any of them might be, for instance, torn-up love letters or messages from terrorists, but as usual they were mostly burger wrappers and pizza ads.
The girls (they were all thirteen) giggled and bumped their hips around and gave each other little punches and slaps, and (except for Pearl) they jabbered without stopping.
“You lie!” shrieked Arabella, and Candy said, “I do not!” and laughed and shoved Arabella against the wall.
“Pearl,” said Farah, “didn’t you just adore that pink purse?”
“Yeah,” said Pearl, trying to remember which purse she was talking about.
“Look, look,” cried Bitsy, holding out her hands. “Did you see my new polish? It’s called Neon Night.”
“I love it!” That was Farah.
“No, yuck! It’s too orange!” That was Ronette.
“You’re just rude, rude, rude!” Bitsy shoved Ronette, and Ronette crashed into a woman carrying three shopping bags, and the woman yelled at her to knock it off, and a man placed his hand under his large, square chin and said he was fed up to here with broken elevators and loud kids. Pearl thought, I am not loud, but she didn’t say anything.
There was a ding, and the up-arrow light above elevator 4 went on. Everyone surged toward the door, which opened and let out at least twenty people. Pearl wormed her way through the outgoing stream. Inside the elevator, she punched the button for Floor 58 and backed into a corner, and all the others squashed themselves in. Candy was in front of Pearl, stepping on her toes, and Farah, who was fatter than usual because of her puffy jacket, pressed against her side. It was hot in the elevator, and Farah’s Phantom Gardenia perfume filled the air.
One thousand, three hundred and nine people lived in Asphalt Area Building #31. Most of them, of course, Pearl didn’t know, but she knew quite a few by sight because of taking the elevators. Today she noted the tall bald man from Floor 28 with the angel tattoo on his shoulder, the Nigerian family from Floor 14, and the old woman who walked with a walker from Floor 59. There was also Mrs. Pollock, who was the cafeteria lady at school, and Mrs. Norman, who had eight kids, and the quiet woman with round glasses, and the unfriendly woman with the skinny dog, and the fat-bellied man who smelled like onions. All of them were squeezed into the elevator, along with five or six people Pearl had never seen before.
Pearl and her friends knew each other because they all lived on the same floor. If they hadn’t, Pearl might not have spent so much time with them, since they didn’t have all that much in common. She liked shopping, sometimes. She liked laughing and teasing, sometimes. But the other girls liked these things almost all the time. That was the main difference between them and her. She tried not to let it show too much.
Bye, bye, bye, they all said to each other, see you tomorrow, let’s go to The Stores again! Let’s go get ice cream! Don’t forget, Bitsy, I want to borrow Neon Night. Farah, don’t tell anyone what I told you! I hate you, Ronette, unless you lend me your shoes, don’t forget! They flounced down the doorway-lined halls in different directions, some to the east wing, some to the west, and Pearl went right and then left and then right again to apartment 5819.
Her brothers, Ray and Cam, didn’t look up as she came in. Robot cartoons were on TV. The baby, Tessy, banged an empty plastic pop bottle on the floor. From the kitchen came the sound of a spoon clinking against a pan and the voice of the radio news. Pearl went in and sat at the kitchen table.
“There you are,” said her mother without turning around. “Would you do something for me? Take this can opener back to Fran? I borrowed it from her. Ours broke.”
“Okay,” said Pearl. “In a minute, all right? Can I have a glass of orange juice?”
“Be my guest,” said her mother.
Pearl got her juice and drank it slowly, listening to the radio. The announcer said that on this day, somewhere in the world, the nine billionth human being had most likely been born. “We’ve reached that remarkable figure sooner than expected,” the announcer said. “Forecasters predicted we’d get there by 2050, and here we are with six years still to go.”
Pearl tried to fit the concept of nine billion people into her mind. In the Asphalt Area, there were fifty buildings just like #31, and fifty more in the Gravelyard Area, and fifty more in the Hardpack Area. And these were just places out on the edge of the city. In the city lived thousands and thousands more. Millions more. How many millions were in a billion? Pearl couldn’t remember. She had the feeling that often came over her, as if a swarm of flies were buzzing around in her head.
Whenever this happened, she knew it was time to get away to someplace quiet, where she could replace the buzzing with interesting thoughts. She liked to invent stories about the lives of the people in the building. The man with the angel tattoo, for instance, might actually be an angel in disguise who flew at night from one building to another, solving troubles and granting wishes. The unfriendly woman with the skinny dog could be hiding twelve refugees from Transylvania in her apartment. Pearl also liked to ponder large questions, like “What happens after you’re dead?” and “What would it be like if gravity suddenly let go?” She couldn’t think this way when she was around her friends or her family. She had to be in a quiet place. The problem was finding one.
“Trans-city report,” said the kitchen radio. “H train currently stalled between 383rd and ZZ Avenue. Expect forty-minute delays.”
“Back off!” shouted a cartoon robot on the TV. “Zap, zap, out of my way!”
Pearl washed out her glass, standing at the sink next to her mother, who was pouring soup from cans into a pot. “Here you go,” her mother said, handing over the can opener. “Dinner in ten minutes, or as soon as your father gets home.”
Fran lived in 5804 and was Candy’s mother. When Pearl rang the bell, Candy answered the door. “This is your mom’s,” said Pearl, holding out the can opener. She heard Candy’s two sisters arguing about something in loud voices.
“Want to meet up after dinner?” Candy said. “We could go down to Basement 5.” In Basement 5 of #31 were two Ping-Pong tables, eight video game machines, and some concrete ramps where you could skate.
“No,” Pearl said. “I have homework.” This
was true and not true. She did have homework, but she was planning to do it some other time.
“Don’t be so boring!” Candy said.
“I can’t help it,” said Pearl.
There was a lot of commotion at dinner because Ray made a fuss about eating his broccoli and Cam went on and on in a loud voice telling the plot of yesterday’s Tank Wars episode, and the baby spilled her grape juice, which dripped over the edge of the table onto the rug, so Pearl’s mother had to get a wet rag right away and clean it up. In the background, the radio explained recent hurricane patterns.
Pearl ate fast and set down her fork. Her mother was still in the kitchen, washing out the rag. “Candy wants me to go down to the basement with her,” Pearl said to her father, which was not a lie.
“Fine,” said her father. “Have fun.”
On her way out the door, making sure no one noticed, Pearl grabbed her jacket and her new scarf from the bench where she’d left them. She went down the hallway, turning left, then right, then left again, passing 5820, 5821, 5822, and all the other apartments where people she knew and people she didn’t know were eating their dinners, watching their TV shows, having arguments, laughing at jokes, or discussing the state of the world, and when she got to the elevator, she pressed the up button. After five or six minutes, the elevator arrived, the doors opened, and she went in, not noticing that Candy, Ronette, and Arabella were just coming around the corner from the east wing.
They noticed her, though. “Hey, look!” Candy said, pointing at Pearl as she stepped into the elevator and its doors closed. “She is coming down to the basement after all. She told me she had homework.”
“But look, the elevator’s going up,” said Arabella, pointing to the lit arrow above.
“Why would she go up? Nothing’s up there but the roof.”
“The roof is so boring,” said Candy.
From the south wing, Bitsy and Farah showed up. “Pearl’s gone to the roof,” said Candy.
“Maybe not,” said Arabella. “Maybe she’s gone to see someone on Floor 59 or Floor 60.”
“Maybe there’s a cute boy up there and she doesn’t want us to know about him,” said Ronette.
“Selfish!” cried Bitsy.
“I hate her!” cried Farah.
“Let’s go up! Let’s find her! Come on!” Candy poked the up button, and they waited, practicing dance steps and cheerleading moves, while the elevator went up and then came down again.
Pearl by then was on the top floor of the building, which was 61 but had no official number. It was the floor where the air-conditioning units were, and rooms for big vacuum cleaners and carpet steamers and repair tools. At the end of a hall was the door to the stairs. A sign on it said NO ENTRY, but it wasn’t locked. Pearl opened it and went in. She flipped the light switch, and a dim fluorescent glow lit up the small room, which always gave her the beginning of a peaceful feeling. To her right stood some green trash bins as big as football players; to her left rose the stairs, which she climbed. At the top of the stairs was another door. This one simply said ROOF. Pearl opened the door and looped her new scarf over the inside doorknob and then over the outside doorknob, so it wrapped around the edge of the door and kept it from closing. It was the kind of door that locked from the inside, which in Pearl’s opinion was dumb—as if burglars might climb up the side of a sixty-story building to get in.
She stepped onto the roof. It was a huge expanse of graveled tar paper, uncomfortable to sit on and ugly to look at, with short sticky-looking pipes poking up from it here and there and a few white splotches of bird poop. A high railing of vertical bars stood around the edge to keep people from jumping off the building and killing themselves. A couple of big rectangular structures housed some kind of machinery that made hoarse breathing sounds in the summer. There was nothing at all to do on the roof. Nobody ever went there, and that was why Pearl liked it.
She walked to the edge and looked out through the railing at the vast view, past the huge upright rectangles of the buildings like her own, out to more and more buildings beyond them, and then to the winding silver wire of the river and the clusters of tall thin skyscrapers far away in the center of the city. Highways curved and crossed down there, and though she was too high up to make out separate cars, she could see motion on the highways, like blood cells inching through clogged arteries.
Above all this was the sky. It was not the same sky you saw from ground level. That sky was chopped into pieces at the edges and looked small and far away and somehow sad. The sky you saw up here made you remember the hugeness of the Earth and the even greater hugeness of the universe. This sky was the only place big enough for Pearl’s mind to stretch out in, the only place quiet and empty enough to give her imagination room to work. If she didn’t come here now and then, her brain filled up with that swarm of buzzing flies. She realized that she was odd in this way. No one else she knew felt the same, and that meant that even though she was surrounded by people all the time, she often felt lonely.
Right now, the edges of the sky were a smudgy gray-pink, and the tremendous sky-bowl overhead was dark blue, like a deep, deep lake upside down (or so Pearl imagined, though she had never seen a lake). A few stars shone. Pearl gazed at them, trying to imagine the distance between the stars and the Earth, which was even more impossible than trying to picture nine billion people. She wondered if planets circled any of those stars, and whether people might have to go to another planet when this planet couldn’t hold them anymore.
She took a long breath of cool air. Then the roof door burst open, and Candy shrieked, “She is here! I knew it!” and at once voices were all around her. You went up! We saw! Why are you up here? It’s so boring! It’s cold! Farah thought you found a cute boy on 59! Ha, are you kidding, there’re no cute boys in this whole building!
Arabella grabbed the sleeve of Pearl’s jacket and tugged. “You know Amy from Floor 59? We saw her in the elevator. She just got that new movie! We’re going to her place to see it!”
“It’s called Crystal Kisses!”
“Lymon Barry is in it!”
“And Rissa Peele!”
“Come on, come on, we can do our toenails while we watch!”
“Hurry up!”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Come on!”
Pearl felt fury boiling up in her like lava from a volcano, and though she tried for a second or two to stop it, she could not. Out of her mouth came a blast of truth.
“I don’t want to!” she cried. “I do—not—want to!” She raised her voice, and the fateful words flew out: “I wish you would all just leave me alone!”
The girls shut their mouths. There was a moment of silence. They’d never heard Pearl talk this way. They were stunned.
Candy was the first to recover. “Okay!” she said. “We hate you too!” She whirled around and headed for the door, and the rest of them followed.
Ronette looked back over her shoulder. “Have fun! Don’t come looking for us!”
Bitsy was the last one out the door. “Love your scarf,” she said, sweeping it off the doorknob where it was hanging. She slung it around her neck.
“Wait!” yelled Pearl, but Bitsy just flipped the end of the scarf, and the door closed behind her.
And locked.
Pearl ran to the door and pounded on it, but no one came.
For a moment, she stood still, facing the locked door, her hands balled into fists. Her heart was drumming. She took a few breaths and stepped back. She told herself it didn’t matter that she was marooned on the roof. She wanted to be here, after all. She had said she wanted to be left alone, though maybe she hadn’t said it in the nicest way. Anyhow, someone would come and get her eventually. Her father would remember that she’d said she was going to the basement with Candy, and he’d go and look for her and Candy would tell him—but wait. He wouldn’t find Candy because she wouldn’t be in the basement, she’d be at Amy’s. Oh, well. One of her friends would come and open the
door, sooner or later. If they were still her friends, now that she’d screamed at them to leave her alone. She probably shouldn’t have yelled. Being marooned was her punishment for yelling, probably. She felt like one of those people in fairy tales whose wishes came true in terrible ways.
But she was stuck here at least for a while, there was no way around it. So she decided she might as well enjoy her stuckness, and at first she did. She took in the view from all four sides of the building, and as the sun sank, she watched the orange glow in the west fade to a dusty peach. Somewhere out there, far, far away, were the city limits. She imagined a road called The City Limits Highway that went all around the entire city, with buildings and pavement on one side and fields of grass and yellow flowers on the other. She could see it exactly in her mind. There would be benches next to the fields where people like her could sit and think. Or read. Or make up songs. There would be birds that weren’t pigeons or crows.
After a few minutes, the sun went behind the horizon and became no more than a rusty smudge of light far away, and Pearl’s neck, with no scarf around it, began to get cold. When the sun disappeared completely and a small, sharp wind came up, all the rest of her got cold too. The roof became a field of darkness. Her imagination, usually her friend, turned its other side and began showing her the bad things that could happen: she could freeze; she could trip over a chimney pipe and break her leg; she could stumble and fall against the railing, and the railing could collapse, sending her sixty stories straight down.
She would have to find a way to get off the roof, because she knew that soon she would start to be afraid.
In apartment 5819, Pearl’s mother brought out chocolate pudding for dessert. “Where’s Pearl?” she asked.
“She went down to the basement with her friends,” Pearl’s father said.
“Oh, all right,” said her mother. “Here, Tessy, have some pudding, and try not to get any in your hair.”
What You Wish For Page 3