Anastasia Again!

by Lois Lowry

  The others agreed. Anastasia was surprised. She liked having unexpected guests. But apparently the Senior Citizens disagreed.

  She thought for a minute. "Well then, here's an idea. Why don't you drop in on me? I live right next door. And you wouldn't be unexpected, because I'm inviting you. I'll make Kool-Aid and everything. And then..."

  Some of them were beginning to nod their heads. "And then you invite her over!" said the man with no hair.

  "Right! And you can all make friends with her!"

  "I'd come," said the orange-haired woman.

  "Me too," called out some others.

  "When?" asked someone.

  "Well," said Anastasia, "she's getting a permanent on Saturday morning. The first time she's been to a beauty parlor in maybe thirty years."

  "Saturday afternoon, then!" announced the bald man. "How many people could make it Saturday afternoon?"

  Hands shot up, and Fran McCormick counted. Fourteen.

  Anastasia wrote down her address. A thought nudged itself into the back of her head.

  "By any chance," she asked the Senior Citizens, "are any of you named Edward Evans?"

  But no one was. No one had ever heard of Edward Evans. Well, that would have been asking too much.

  ***

  Pedaling home, Anastasia felt pretty good. She was sure her parents wouldn't mind. Her mother would help her make Kool-Aid. Her father would dream up some kind of entertainment, although she'd have to tell him tactfully not to conduct Verdi's Requiem for the Senior Citizens. But maybe he could read some of his poetry to them.

  Then she thought of something and almost rode her bike into someone's shrubbery. Good grief. Saturday.

  What on earth was she going to tell Robert and Jenny?

  ***

  Chapter 2 was not very long, Anastasia realized, reading it over. Only one sentence. But she liked the way it ended, with a mysterious reference to the young girl's Past and her Future. It was important to be very subtle in a mystery novel, so that readers wouldn't know exactly what was happening too early in the book. It was one of the troubles with Nancy Drew books, that they weren't subtle enough. Agatha Christie, now: those were subtle. In Agatha Christie books, you never knew who was bad and who was good. That was important.

  "Chapter 3," she wrote. "In her new life, the young girl began to meet new people. A tall tennis player with blue eyes. An old woman who looked like a witch. A mysterious band of people who held regular meetings, and who were stricken with astonishment when the young girl showed up unexpectedly at their hide-out one day.

  "At the same time, people from her past were still on her trail. The young man with the puzzling briefcase had found out where she lived, and she received a message that he was on his way. He was bringing with him an Irish woman with a chipped tooth."

  There. Now she had a whole cast of characters, and the reader would not know yet who were villains and who were heroes.

  Anastasia didn't know yet, either; but she would worry about that later.

  11

  "No, Absolutely not. I won't, under any circumstances." Anastasia's mother stood in her studio, with a paintbrush behind one ear and her hands planted firmly oil her hips.

  Anastasia glowered. "Why not?"

  "Because it's a lie, and I won't tell anyone a lie on your behalf. And on top of that, it's the stupidest lie I've ever heard."

  Anastasia was astonished. She had thought it was a terrific idea. "What's so stupid? Look, all you have to do is call Jenny, and sound very sad, and tell her that she and Robert shouldn't come on Saturday because you just found out that I have leprosy and I've had to go to a leper colony very suddenly."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "Maybe it's not so ridiculous. Maybe I really do have leprosy, as a matter of fact. My ear lobes itch. They've been itching all afternoon. It's an early symptom."

  "It's a symptom that you haven't washed your ears. With all that hair washing you've been doing lately, you'd think you'd remember to wash your ears."

  "Mom. That's gross."

  "Not as gross as lying to your friends. Why don't you want them to come, anyway?"

  Anastasia groaned and flopped down in an old stuffed chair covered with painty rags. "Oh, it's complicated. I invited some other people over Saturday. Some new people I just met."

  Her mother looked at her, smiled, took the paintbrush from behind her ear, and set it on the table. She sat down on the arm of the chair and stroked Anastasia's head.

  "Oh, sweetie, I'm so glad. Dad and I haven't wanted to say anything, but we've been worried about your making friends. Except for Steve, you haven't really met any other kids yet. That's wonderful, that now you have, and I'm delighted that you've invited them over."

  Good grief. Anastasia felt, suddenly, the way she had when Robert Giannini told her about his retarded cousin: as if suddenly, before you knew it, it was too late to explain.

  "No kidding, Anastasia, I'm really thrilled. And Robert and Jenny will fit right in, I'm sure. Listen, we can have a cookout or something. How many people are coming over?"

  "Fourteen."

  "Goodness, that's a lot for a cookout! But I guess we could manage hot dogs. And I could make a big potato salad..."

  "Mom, really, just Kool-Aid will be fine. I told them it would just be for Kool-Aid."

  "Well, whatever you think. But you know, we've been talking about getting a badminton set. We could get it before Saturday, and then..."

  Anastasia pictured the Senior Citizens playing badminton. She pictured the ambulance pulling up, to cart away the ones with broken hips and heart attacks. She groaned.

  "Mom, you know what I'd really like best? I'd really like it best if you and Dad would go off to a movie or something, Saturday afternoon."

  Her mother stopped stroking her hair. Anastasia could tell that her feelings were hurt.

  "You mean that you don't want Dad and me to be here and meet your new friends? All of a sudden you're embarrassed to have us old people around?"

  "Oh, Mom," she groaned, "it's not that. It's ... Oh, for pete's sake, I need to think."

  Anastasia pulled herself up out of the chair and started up to her room. In the hall, Sam was flicking a flashlight on and off. He'd been playing with it all day.

  "Flash!" said Sam, shining the light at her and laughing.

  "Knock it off, Sam," Anastasia muttered.

  Sam's lower lip began to quiver as he decided whether or not to cry. Anastasia walked past him and headed up the stairs to her room. Her ear lobes really did itch. She began to wish that she really did have leprosy. Good-by, cruel world. Life was just too confusing.

  "Flash! Flash!" called Sam after her, blinking his light.

  Anastasia slammed her door and decided to stay in her tower for a long time. Like the rest of her life.

  ***

  But the phone rang. Whenever you decide to lock yourself in a tower for the rest of your life, for pete's sake, the phone always rings.

  Anastasia's mother called from the first floor. "Anastasia?"

  "What? Is it for me?"

  "Come down here a minute, would you? I want to talk to you."

  Anastasia clumped down the stairs. On the second floor, Sam swooped out of his bedroom, yelled "Flash!" and blinked his light at her.

  "KNOCK IT OFF, SAM!"

  Sam grinned and scooted off into a closet. She could see his flashlight blinking beneath the closed closet door.

  "What do you want? Was the phone for me?" she asked her mother.

  "Not really. But it was puzzling. It was someone named Fran McCormick..."

  "Then it was for me!"

  "Well, she said she didn't need to speak to you. She wanted to check with me to make sure that it was all right with me that all these people were coming over on Saturday. I must say, that was considerate of her. I can't remember that any of your other friends ever thought to ask my permission for anything."

  "What did you tell her?"

  "I told her
sure. I told her we were planning to make a big batch of Kool-Aid. But, Anastasia..."

  "What?"

  "Then she said that if it wasn't too much trouble, could we please use artificially sweetened Kool-Aid. Because Edna and Morris and Ernest have diabetes. That seems strange, Anastasia. I remember there was a child in your third-grade class who was diabetic, but for three kids out of a batch of fourteen to have diabetes? Well, that seems very peculiar to me. Where did you meet these kids?"

  Anastasia was tempted to burst out laughing and to tell her mother that the "kids" were all Senior Citizens and that Edna and Morris and Ernest were all in their seventies or eighties. But she was mad at her mother. She was mad at her for worrying about her ability to make friends, for pete's sake.

  "They have a kind of club," said Anastasia airily. "I was walking past where their clubhouse is, and I just decided to stop in. They were all in there playing cards. So we got to talking, and I invited them over. I have a knack for making friends, you know," she added meaningfully.

  "What do you mean, a kind of club? What do you mean, they were in there playing cards? Were they playing poker or something? Have you gotten yourself involved with some sort of gang, Anastasia Krupnik?"

  Anastasia looked angrily at her mother. "I suppose you could call it that. You could call it a 'gang' if you want to. I myself don't like to make that kind of stereotyped statement."

  "Anastasia Krupnik, if those fourteen people arrive here Saturday on motorcycles..."

  Now Anastasia almost did laugh. But she was still mad at her mother. She looked down her nose, which was not hard to do because of her height.

  "I don't believe any of them will arrive by motorcycle," she said haughtily, and turned to go back upstairs.

  Sam ambushed her on the landing.

  "FLASH!"

  "MOM!" Anastasia yelled. "Why is Sam blinding everybody with that blasted flashlight?"

  "Sam, put your light away for now," said her mother. "He and Mrs. Stein have a plan," she explained to Anastasia. "They're going to flash lights at each other from their bedrooms after dark. Don't ask me why."

  "Ask me why," grinned Sam.

  "Why, dummy?"

  "Because we're playing Flasher. Gertrustein used to play Flasher when she was a little girl, and she had a friend who lived right in this house."

  "Yeah, I know about her friend. Edward Evans. Some friend. He grew up and married someone else, and now all she has is a goldfish."

  Sam wasn't listening. He had unscrewed the end of his flashlight and was examining the batteries.

  "Anyway, dummy, you know what a real flasher is?"

  "What?"

  "Some jerk of a man who goes out wearing nothing at all but a raincoat, and then he jumps out unexpectedly and opens up his raincoat at people."

  "Oh," said Sam, with interest. "Does he say 'Flash'?"

  "How should I know? I never saw one."

  "Well, I say 'Flash,'" said Sam, losing interest. "I'm a flasher with a flashlight. FLASH!" He shone the light in Anastasia's eyes again and ran off when she made a halfhearted attempt to grab him.

  Anastasia let him go and plodded back up to her bedroom to peel more wallpaper.

  ***

  But the telephone rang again. This time it was for Anastasia. Her mother called her from downstairs. She could tell from her mother's voice that she was still mad. Well, that was okay. Anastasia was still mad, too.

  "Is it the motorcycle gang? Did they ask for the gun moll?" Anastasia asked her mother sarcastically.

  "It's Steve Harvey," said her mother coldly. "I should have told him you were out stealing hubcaps."

  "Ha ha. Very funny." Anastasia took the phone and disappeared into a closet with it.

  "Hi, Steve."

  "Hi. Listen, my mom had an idea. She's been wanting to welcome your family to the neighborhood. So she thought maybe your family and mine could go together for a picnic on Saturday. Maybe to Sturbridge or someplace."

  Oh, rats. Oh, rats. Anastasia had been dying to meet Steve's family. His father was a sportscaster who actually knew a lot of famous athletes personally. His mother was a lawyer with the district attorney's office, and she had prosecuted an ax murderer once. And his older sister, who was home for a visit, was almost six feet tall, Steve said. She was a ballet dancer in New York. Her real name was Anne, but she went by the name Anya professionally. Anastasia thought that was the most terrific, wonderful thing she had ever heard.

  Anastasia had once wanted to be a ballet dancer herself. She had taken lessons when she was nine and ten, but her feet never seemed to work right. One day she had tried to show her mother the dance she was practicing for a recital. She had twirled around on one toe, and her other leg knocked over a floor lamp, which hit the TV and bent the antenna; the antenna knocked a picture off the wall, and the picture hit a cup of coffee, which overturned on a book called Treasures of the Louvre. Anastasia grabbed for the book, but she tripped on a wrinkle in the rug and fell against the coffee table, breaking one of the table's legs and spraining her own ankle. She had to have X rays and to wear an Ace bandage for three weeks, and she had missed the dance recital and quit taking ballet lessons.

  Her father had said, at the time, that she should be in the Guinness Book of World Records because she had done three hundred dollars worth of damage in twenty-seven seconds. But she had checked in the Guinness Book of World Records and found that a tornado in Hastings, Nebraska, had beaten that record in 1947.

  Still, she was dying to meet Anne Harvey. She was dying to meet a female who was almost six feet tall and hadn't become a professional basketball player.

  But instead, on Saturday, instead of going to Sturbridge with the remarkable Harvey family, Anastasia was going to be serving Kool-Aid to fourteen senior citizens, and to creepo Robert Giannini, and to traitor Jenny MacCauley, who had gone to see Casablanca without her.

  She felt like having a tantrum, the way Sam did sometimes, kicking the floor and shrieking.

  But twelve was too old for that; and anyway, she didn't want Steve Harvey to hear her kicking the floor and shrieking. Steve had already said, once, that she seemed very sophisticated for twelve.

  She had explained, when he said that, that probably it was because she grew up in Cambridge, which was a more sophisticated place than the suburbs.

  Steve had agreed. But then he had said something surprising. He had said that before he met Anastasia, he had thought everyone who lived in Cambridge was weird. He had thought that they were all intellectuals who sat around in the evenings drinking rose hip tea and playing recorders.

  Anastasia had confessed that before she met him, she thought that everyone who lived in the suburbs was boring and preppy, that they all wore shirts with alligators and went to Bermuda for spring vacation.

  Steve said that he'd never been to Bermuda in his life, and that he always ripped the alligators off his shirts.

  Anastasia said that she hated rose hip tea more than anything in the world except liver.

  It had been kind of nice to find out that they were wrong about each other, that they had—it now occurred to her—made premature assumptions.

  So she certainly wasn't going to screech and kick the floor now, even though she sure felt like it.

  Instead she said, "I'm really sorry, Steve, but we won't be able to on Saturday. I have a couple of friends from Cambridge coming out to visit that day, and there are some other people stopping by, too."

  "Well, maybe some other time," Steve said cheerfully.

  Sure, thought Anastasia glumly. She happened to know that his sister was going back to New York on Sunday, to start rehearsals for a new ballet. Probably with Nureyev, for pete's sake.

  "My life is ruined, and it's all your fault," she muttered to her mother, who was in her studio again, painting different shades of blue onto a large canvas. She had a blue daub on her chin.

  "Why my fault?" called her mother after her, as she headed back up the stairs.

 
; Anastasia didn't really have an answer for that. Since Steve Harvey couldn't hear her, she gave a very unsophisticated answer.

  "Because I didn't ask to be born!" she bellowed.

  And her mother had a very unsophisticated answer to that. "Nyah nyah," she called, and stuck out her tongue.

  ***

  "Who was the young man with the mysteriously blinking light?" wrote Anastasia, at the beginning of Chapter 4.

  "And what role was the cruel, subversive woman with blue paint on her chin going to play in all of this?" she went on.

  It didn't seem fair to leave out her father. So she continued Chapter 4 by writing, "The tall, bearded stranger sipped thoughtfully at a beer, with his eyes closed, listening to Mozart."

  In an Agatha Christie book, Anastasia realized, there had always been at least one murder by Chapter 4.

  So she wrote ominously, "Mozart was dead."

  12

  Anastasia woke up early on Saturday morning, and before she opened her eyes, she heard a sound that sounded like Frank Goldfish.

  "Frank?" she said sleepily. "What are you doing? Cut it out. It's too early to be playing. Go back to sleep."

  But the sound continued, and Anastasia woke up a little more, opened her eyes a tiny bit, and realized it was raining. High up here, in her tower room, wet tree leaves were blowing against her windows.

  Anastasia grinned. Terrific. Robert and Jenny wouldn't be able to ride their bikes out here in the rain. Probably her dad would be willing to drive Gertrustein down to the beauty parlor. Maybe the Harveys wouldn't go to Sturbridge, and maybe Anastasia could walk over and meet Anne, at least, before she went back to New York. And in the afternoon, all the Senior Citizens could come; Fran McCormick would bring them in the van that was painted with a gross name: Oldster Roadster.

  She turned over, hugged her pillow, and went back to sleep.

  But when she woke again, later, the rain had stopped.

  ***

  Downstairs, her mother was brushing Sam's hair.

  "Sam's going with Mrs. Stein to the beauty parlor," she said, "so I thought he'd better look glamorous."