Libby on Wednesday

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  The other girls left then, and Wendy walked with Libby clear to the door of her first-period class, and when she left, she said, “See you at lunch.” But it didn’t turn out that way. At lunch Tierney saw Libby first and dragged her over to where she’d been sitting with two of her friends.

  Tierney didn’t talk about visiting the McCall House either, at least not while her friends were there, but she did talk about her collection of stuff from before the Second World War. Her friends, a scrawny boy with almost no hair and enormous black shoes, and a tall, thin girl with tattoos and lots of earrings, didn’t seem to be collectors like Tierney. But they were very interested in Libby and in the fact that Graham McCall had been her grandfather.

  However, both Tierney and Wendy continued to hint about visiting the McCall House every time they had a chance to talk to Libby alone. And Libby still had good reasons not to invite them. Not the same ones she’d had at first, perhaps, but good reasons nevertheless.

  Right at first she had been determined not to let any of them visit the house because she was sure they only wanted to have something new to laugh at and make fun of. They’d laugh all right, she’d been sure of that, the way they laughed and poked fun at anything and anyone who was different. And the McCall House was certainly different. The enormous old crumbling castle with its overgrown yard and dangling shutters was certainly not at all like the homes of most Morrison Middle Schoolers. And her family of four and sometimes five adults—including one nonrelated adult male and a mostly absentee actress mother—would probably seem weird to them too.

  But now she wasn’t so sure about their reasons for wanting to visit. She believed Wendy now when she said she’d been fascinated by the house for years because it was so outrageously mysterious and she’d always loved mysterious old houses. And she almost believed Tierney, too, when she raved about how much she wanted to see Libby’s thirties collection. But there was another problem about inviting either of them.

  Since the whole thing had been Wendy’s idea in the first place, it wouldn’t be fair to ask Tierney and not Wendy. To ask Wendy and not Tierney would probably be downright dangerous. And to ask them both at the same time would obviously be extremely uncomfortable, to say the least, considering how they felt about each other. So Libby tried to avoid talking to either of them alone, and meanwhile a couple of weeks passed and the FFW kept meeting and everyone was working on new stories and reading them in the workshop.

  Alex was working on a new parody.

  “It’s a blast,” he told Libby one Wednesday afternoon while they were waiting for the others to arrive. “I suppose you’ve read Watership Down, haven’t you.”

  Libby nodded. Elliott had brought it home from the bookstore for her a long time ago.

  “Yeah, I thought you probably would have. Well, I’m writing this parody about this noble and heroic bunch of gophers who live in a vacant lot in the city until it’s paved over to make a parking lot. And then they escape to a miniature golf course and set up a great society with gopher senators and gopher poets and gopher four-star generals and like that.”

  Libby said she couldn’t wait to hear it, and Alex grinned and said he couldn’t wait to hear her next one either, and what was it about? So she told him that she’d still had more chapters of “Rainbow” to read, but that she’d started work on something new that she wasn’t ready to talk about yet.

  They took their seats then and got out their manuscripts. Libby noticed that Alex’s looked terribly professional, as if it had been printed on a printing press instead of a typewriter. When she asked him about it, he said it was done on a word processor and that he had one of his own at home.

  “Don’t you have a word processor?” he asked in a surprised tone of voice.

  “Me?” Libby said. “No. I started learning how to use one at Elliott’s store—he’s a friend of ours who lives with us. But I don’t have one at home.”

  “You ought to get one. They’re the greatest,” Alex said.

  “I know. But they’re too expensive. We can’t afford it.”

  Alex widened his eyes, twisted the corners of his mouth down, and wagged his head back and forth.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Libby asked, frowning.

  “That,” Alex said, “is supposed to be ‘wild surmise.’ ” I’m looking at you with ‘wild surmise.’ ”

  Libby went on frowning for a moment—and then giggled. “What are you surmising?”

  “That I must be wrong about you being a millionaire. I thought you must be one. I mean, your grandfather was famous and everything and you live in that great big rocky mountain of a house that everyone’s so absolutely crazy to see.”

  Libby shook her head. “My grandfather was rich once. But he always spent money faster than he made it, even when he was alive and famous. And his books don’t sell very well now. And my father is a poet. Poets don’t make much money.”

  “Yeah. So I’ve heard. But anyway, you ought to get your own word processor as soon as you can. But at least you have a typewriter. I used to work on a typewriter. It was better than nothing, but not nearly as great as a word processor.”

  “Well,” Libby said. “I don’t really have a typewriter either. Not of my own anyway. But there’s this old one that used to be my grandfather’s and—”

  “Wow!” Alex said, grabbing Libby’s manuscript out of her hand. “You mean this was actually typed on Graham McCall’s own typewriter? Wow.” And then as Tierney stomped through the door, “Hey, look at this. This was actually typed on the same original typewriter that Graham McCall wrote Milk and Honey on. Wasn’t it, Libby?”

  Libby said it was, as far as she knew, but she couldn’t be sure since she hadn’t been around at the time. Tierney seemed to be very impressed.

  “I’ll bet it’s a great big tall thing with keys that come up like on these big levers, like Dashiell Hammett and everybody used back in the thirties,” she said. And, of course, she went on to say how much she’d like to see it, and when Wendy came in, she said she would too. They were both still looking at Libby expectantly when Mizzo came in and called the class to order.

  That turned out to be the first day they worked on the joint writing project that Mizzo called “The Island Adventure.” It was Mizzo’s idea and when she first explained how it was going to work, no one else was very enthusiastic. She was going to start things off by reading the first episode of a story, and then everyone would take the story from there and write a short second part at home during the week. The following Wednesday Mizzo would read everyone’s chapter without saying who wrote which and they would vote on which one was best. Then she would reread the winner, and during the next week they would all go on from that point in the story.

  Libby thought she knew what Mizzo was trying to do. She was trying to make the members of the FFW understand and appreciate each other more by having them work on something together. Libby wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. In fact she really doubted that the way Tierney and Wendy felt about each other, as well as the way Alex and G.G. felt about each other, was going to be changed that easily.

  Mizzo’s first “Island Adventure” described a violent storm at sea. The five members of the FFW are on a ship going to a convention of young winners of writing contests in another country, but they obviously are not going to make it. The ship is sinking. But at the last possible minute they locate a lifeboat and the five of them climb aboard and lower themselves down into the sea. After a few dangerous hours the boat washes up on the shore of an island.

  Mizzo’s story ended there, but there were a couple of questions before they moved on to something else. Alex wanted to know about point of view—if you had to write from your own point of view, “In my case the point of view of Alexander Lockwood, for instance, or if I can be omniscient and get inside the heads of the other four”—he looked around the room, grinning— “characters? And in this case characters is exactly the right word.”

  Then Tierney sa
id he’d better stay out of her head if he knew what was good for him, and that she had a question, too. Tierney’s question was, Would it be all right if she killed off some of the characters?

  It was obvious that Mizzo was trying to keep a straight face as she said that point of view would be up to them, but she thought she’d better rule out killing off other characters or there would soon be no one left to write about. Then she went on to call on Wendy to be the first reader of the day.

  Wendy’s new story was about a family who had just moved to a huge old house that was supposed to be haunted. The first chapter was full of creaking doors and ghostly glowing lights, as well as quite a bit about what kind of clothes everybody was wearing and what color their eyes and hair were and who they were in love with.

  During the critique the comments were better than the ones about her “pink” story. Most of the comments were favorable, except that Tierney did suggest that the title should be “The Ghosts of Sweet Valley High.” But no one said anything very insulting, not even G.G.

  Gary Greene, as a matter of fact, didn’t seem to be behaving normally at all. He was sitting quietly with his head down and turned away, so all Libby could see was that he was wearing dark glasses and there was what looked like a dirty spot on his left cheek.

  “I liked it okay,” he said when Mizzo asked him to comment on the story. “Better than that pink-dress thing, anyway.” At least that was what he seemed to be saying, but his voice was so mumbly and indistinct it was hard to be sure.

  Alex poked Libby and twitched his head toward G.G. “Wonder what happened to the ghoul,” he whispered. “Maybe one of his victims turned out to be a karate expert.”

  Alex was grinning and so was Libby, but when Mizzo called on G.G. to read and he turned to face the group for the first time, their smiles faded.

  “Good heavens, Gary,” Mizzo gasped. “What happened?”

  Both of G.G.’s lips were split and swollen and there were bruises on his jaw and darker ones that spread down his cheeks from behind the dark glasses. While everyone was staring at him in horror, he shrugged his shoulders and made a laughing noise without moving his lips. “Football game,” he mumbled. “Me and two hundred pounds of high school hotshot collided. You should see the other guy.”

  Libby ducked her head and looked around at the others through her hair. Tierney was grinning gleefully, but all the others, Mizzo included, looked as if they were doing the same thing Libby was—which, to be specific, was that she was gloating a little because G.G. certainly deserved to get the worst of it, for once—and, at the same time, feeling guilty because what had happened to him was too terrible to wish on anyone, even Gary Greene. Of course, Mizzo had to excuse G.G. from reading, and when she asked if there were any volunteers, the only one was Alex.

  So Alex read next, and everyone liked “Watertrap Down,” the story of the gopher colony in the miniature golf course. They all laughed like crazy, particularly in the part where the gophers sent out a war party to raid a nearby pet store and rescue a bunch of white mice from the cruel pet store owner, who was planning to feed them to a ten-foot boa constrictor. And when the boa constrictor followed them back to their golf course, they set up a golf-ball catapult and bombed him with Omegas and Spalding Top-Flites until he gave up and retreated down a sewer pipe.

  There was another part of the “Watertrap Down” parody that Libby particularly liked. Just as in the original story, one of the important episodes concerned the colony’s search for some females to join their new settlement. There was a heroic march and battle to free the females and then the journey back to the golf course. And all the way back the lady gophers, who had names like Tootsie and Sweety Pie, were crying and giggling and talking baby talk and doing all kinds of stupid things.

  Libby saw what Alex was doing, but some of the others didn’t at first. “That stuff about getting the females was dumb, though,” Tierney said during the discussion. “How come the male gophers were all so great and wise and intelligent, and all the females were bubble brains? You some kind of a male chauvinist, Lockwood?”

  Alex bounced and twitched with excitement. “No,” he almost shrieked. “You’re missing the point. I’m not chauvinistic. But the book is. Watership Down is, I mean. You read the book? The female rabbits weren’t exactly mental giants, were they?”

  Tierney thought for a moment, and then she began to nod her head. “Yeah,” she said, “they weren’t, were they? I get it.” Then she grinned her evil grin at Alex and said, “So, you can stop squeaking at me, Lockwood. I get it!”

  That afternoon, on her way home, Libby thought a lot about “Watertrap Down” and Alex Lockwood. As she walked along, she started trying to figure out what she would say if she were writing something about Alex.

  He’s weird, she would write. Nervous and twitchy and almost crazy-acting sometimes. From what I hear, he has to go to special classes part of the time, as if he were retarded or something, and he told me himself that he can’t write, although he must have been kidding. At the same time, HOWEVER, he’s just about the funniest, most talented person I’ve ever met. And the most quick-witted, too.

  That quick-witted part fascinated her almost more than anything else, because that was something she knew she wasn’t. She knew she was smart. The family had always told her so, and she knew she was able to learn things that a lot of people her age couldn’t—if she could do it more or less on her own and at her own rate of speed. But she had also discovered that if she were nervous or under pressure, she sometimes couldn’t remember things that she knew very well, let alone making up clever and witty new things on the spur of the moment.

  Alex Lockwood, she would write in her journal, is the most quick-witted person I’ve ever met. That was definitely what she would say, she decided. She would go out to the Treehouse as soon as she got home and write it in her journal—the green one with all the rest of the stuff about the meetings of the FFW.

  She had just finished making that decision when she turned the corner onto Westwind, and there he was waiting for her, leaning against the McCall House front gate, wearing a baggy green jacket and his nervous, jiggly grin.

  11

  Libby’s shocked surprise quickly turned into indignation. Alex Lockwood had no right to be there. Putting her hands on her hips, she frowned fiercely, but he only went on grinning and jabbering all kinds of nonsense.

  “Hey,” he said with a grand gesture. “It’s here. The movie you’ve all been waiting for. Mighty Mouse Meets the Lone Stranger. Or how about … The Strange Loner? Hey, that’s good, if I do say so myself. The strange loner. Perfect typecasting.”

  “How—” Libby began, and was immediately interrupted.

  “No, no. Wrong part. That’s Tonto’s line. You’re Mighty Mouse.”

  Libby laughed—briefly, and then frowned again. “No, I’m not,” she said. “What I was going to say was, how did you get here?”

  “By bus. Simple as anything. You just climb on number seven down by the library. But you know that, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” she said. “But—”

  “I know. I know your next question. Why? That’s simple too. I wanted to see the McCall House. Wendy wants to see the McCall House. Tierney wants to see the McCall House. Everybody wants to see the McCall House. Moi aussi. That means me too.”

  Libby’s frown deepened. “I know what moi aussi means,” she said. “My grandmother teaches me French. What I want to know is why you didn’t ask me if you could come?”

  “That’s simple too. I didn’t ask because you’d just have said no. But now that I’m here—now that I’ve come all this way …” Suddenly he dropped down on one knee, clasped his hands in front of him, and twisted his narrow, bony face into a ridiculous, tragic mask. “Surely you won’t send me away—all alone—out into the cold, cruel world.”

  Libby struggled against an urge to laugh, and another urge—to give him a good kick. She settled for kicking the air near his shinbone. “Get up, y
ou idiot,” she said, glancing up and down the street to see if anyone was watching.

  “Aha! I saw it. A smile. That means you’re not angry. That means you’re going to invite me in. Okay. Here we go.” He jumped up, picked up his book bag, and pushed open the gate. “Après vous, mademoiselle.”

  Libby was still trying to stop him, still trying to explain why he couldn’t come in, when she suddenly realized that he wasn’t listening at all. Standing in the middle of the path, he was staring up at the house, his face quiet and still.

  “Fantastic,” he said softly. “It looks just like him.”

  “Like who?” Libby said several times before she got his attention.

  “Like Graham McCall.”

  “What does?”

  “The house does. It looks like what he would build. I mean, if you’ve read his books, you just know that he’d build this exact kind of a house.”

  Libby nodded. She’d always felt something like that, almost as if the house itself, in some strange way, were her grandfather. “I know,” she said, and then frowned again. “How do you know? You haven’t read his books, have you? They’re not for kids.”

  “Sure I’ve read them. Why not? You have, too, haven’t you? And you’re younger than I am.”

  “But that’s different. He’s not your grandfather.”

  “True,” Alex said. “Very true. But then, I read quite a lot of stuff that wasn’t written by my grandfather.” He tipped his head back and looked up again at the high stone pillars, the overhanging balconies and turreted roof. Then he jerked his shoulders up and down several times in a stuttery shrug. “Come on. I think he’s waiting for us,” he said, and led the way up the front steps. Libby followed.