Libby on Wednesday

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Mizzo came in then, and the workshop started. The first thing she did was collect the new installments of “The Island Adventure” and read them out loud. It was pretty easy to tell who had written each one, particularly the one about a bloody war with a fierce tribe of headhunters who lived on the island, and another about meeting a handsome and muscular jungle boy and falling in love with him. But the version that won in the voting was about how all five members of the group struggled through high winds and tidal waves to find a cave in a hillside, where they built a kind of fortress. It was told in short, clear sentences and was extremely tense and exciting—even though some of it did sound a little bit like Robinson Crusoe.

  It turned out to be Tierney’s, and she really looked pleased when she found out that she had won, and when Mizzo asked her to be the first reader of the day, she didn’t argue. She got out her manuscript quickly, and before she began to read, she looked around at everybody with what was definitely a “wait-till-you-hear-this expression” on her face.

  As soon as she started reading, it was obvious that she had written another mystery, but this time it wasn’t of the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe variety. The new mystery, which was called “The Case of the Purple Parrot,” was set in a town that seemed to be very similar to Morrison, instead of in Los Angeles, and the detective was a teenage girl.

  The girl in the story, whose name was Jade, was sixteen years old, but she lived all by herself in a luxurious apartment and drove a silver Ferrari. She was extremely beautiful and intelligent and courageous, and she solved a mystery about a murder that happened in a pet shop near where she lived. It turned out that the pet shop owner had been selling drugs, and the girl detective broke up a drug ring and solved a crime that had been baffling the police and the FBI for months.

  It was a long story, and reading it took a lot longer than the usual time limit, but every time Mizzo started to interrupt, Tierney just glared at her and read faster. When the mystery was finally solved and the story ended, she folded the manuscript, lifted her chin, and looked around the room with a triumphant frown, as if she were daring anyone to say anything critical.

  Wendy began, and with a self-righteous expression on her face like someone saying the right thing even if it killed her, she said she liked the main character and that she thought the story was exciting. G.G. was next and he said he liked it, too, except for the murder itself, which should have been the best part but instead was kind of vague and uninteresting.

  When it was Libby’s turn, she pointed out that the story was well plotted, so that there were some early clues that helped the readers solve the mystery if they were paying attention, which is very important in mystery writing. But then she asked Tierney how it happened that Jade lived all by herself if she was only sixteen and how she got the Ferrari and everything. And Tierney said it was because she was an orphan, a rich orphan, whose parents had died and left her gobs of money. So Libby suggested that maybe that should have been explained in the story to make it seem a little more realistic, because it really was a pretty unusual situation. She got a little carried away, in fact, and said more than she meant to, but Tierney didn’t seem to get too angry.

  When Mizzo asked Alex to comment, he went into a kind of nervous fit, twisting his head and grinning and rolling his eyes around. Libby turned her eyes away, knowing he didn’t have to act that way and wishing he wouldn’t. At last he got a sheepish expression on his face and said, “Now, look, Tierney. I don’t want to make you mad or anything, but I just want to say that I think you’ve written another really great parody. I mean, what I think is that you just have a natural talent for writing really neat parodies, and that’s a compliment and—”

  Wendy suddenly bounced in her seat and raised her hand. “Yes,” she said without waiting to be called on, “it is. It is, Mizzo, isn’t it? It’s a parody, like of Nancy Drew, isn’t it?”

  But Tierney ignored Wendy and went on glaring at Alex. “Now you look, Lockwood,” she practically shouted. “This is not a parody, and if you don’t shut up about your stupid parodies, I’m going to parody you one, right in the nose.”

  Everybody laughed, especially Alex.

  There wasn’t much time left, but it was G.G.’s turn next, and Mizzo asked him if he’d like to read some of what he’d been working on.

  “Me?” he said. “My turn?” He started to open his binder and then quickly closed it and put both hands on it as if he were holding it shut. “No,” he said. “I didn’t write any more. I’ve had too much other stuff to do lately.”

  “But how about what you were working on in class yesterday?” Mizzo said. “It looked to me as if you’d written quite a lot.”

  “Oh, that,” G.G. said. “Well …” He stared down at his binder for a moment and then opened it slowly and looked at the first page. He looked at it for quite a while before he began to read.

  “ ‘Eric,’ “ he read. “That’s the title. See, that’s this guy in the story’s name. I haven’t thought up any other title yet. Okay?

  “ ‘ERIC’

  “Eric got home from school late that day because his bicycle had a flat and he spent a long time trying to get it fixed, and finally he had to give up and walk it home. When he got to the house, he put the bike in the garage and went in the back door. The house was empty as usual, but there was a note on the kitchen sink. He read the note quickly and then looked at the clock on the stove. He was late. He couldn’t do what the note told him to do because it was too late.

  “He stared at the clock for a minute and then he ran into the living room to check the clock on the desk, because it didn’t seem possible it could be that late. But the desk clock said the same thing.

  “There wasn’t anything he could do about it, so he just went ahead and fixed himself some leftover spaghetti in the microwave and went into the living room to watch the tube while he ate. When he was finished, he went back to the kitchen and read the note again. But it was still too late, and there still wasn’t anything he could do about it.”

  The story went on telling how Eric watched television some more and then went to bed and waited. It didn’t say what he was waiting for, but just that he waited and listened and told himself that there was no use worrying because there wasn’t anything he could do about it and whatever was going to happen would just have to happen. While he was waiting, he heard noises in the house that turned out to be the refrigerator or the furnace, and noises outside the house that came from cars and the neighbors having a party.

  As G.G. read, his voice got softer and higher pitched, so you had to listen carefully to tell what he was saying. The last sentence he read was, “It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when he heard the sound he’d been expecting. Exactly what he’d been expecting.” Then he suddenly slammed the binder shut, and said, “That’s it. That’s as far as I got.”

  Libby caught her breath. It was as if she’d been listening so hard she’d almost forgotten to breathe. She felt drained and blank with listening. The others were blank-faced, too—no smiles or grins or frowns. Libby tried to think why. The story was short and nothing much happened, unlike G.G.’s other stories, where everything happened in horrible detail.

  Mizzo was just starting to ask for comments when the bell rang for the end of class.

  13

  A few minutes later that same afternoon Libby was at her locker getting the books she needed to take home when right behind her a startlingly loud voice said, “Hey, Mighty Mouse. You going home now?” Of course it was Tierney.

  Since the last class of the day had just ended, the answer to Tierney’s question was pretty obvious. It did occur to Libby to say that, no, she was actually just arriving early for Thursday morning. She didn’t say it, but she was pleased she’d thought of it. What she did say was, “Yes, I guess so. Aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” Tierney said. “At three-twenty I’m outta here. Come on. Let’s split. I want to talk to you.”

  Libby knew what was coming,
or at least she thought she did. Tierney was about to make another pitch for a visit to the McCall House. This time, however, it turned out to be something different, or perhaps a slightly less direct approach to the same thing. What Tierney had in mind was that Libby should come home with her to see the stuff she’d collected and just to “hang out for a while.”

  At first Libby tried to think of a good excuse not to go. But then, while she was still trying to decide which excuse sounded most convincing, she suddenly realized that she didn’t particularly want to get out of going. She was, in fact, a little bit intrigued, not only with the idea of seeing what kind of a collection Tierney had but even more so with finding out where she lived and perhaps some information about the home environment of a person with pink hair.

  “Okay,” she said. “But I can’t stay very long unless I call home and let them know where I am.”

  “Sure,” Tierney said, and then, in a high, squeaky alien-type voice, “Mighty Mouse call home. If E.T. can call home, why not Mighty Mouse. What planet are you from, anyway? If it’s the same one as E.T., all we need is a few clothes hangers and an old record player. Right?”

  And Libby said, “Right!” even though she had never seen E.T. and didn’t really know what Tierney was talking about.

  Tierney lived on Balsam Avenue, only a few blocks from the school but on the other side of Main Street. On the way through the downtown section they stopped once or twice to look in shop windows—a pet shop first and then a Gap outlet that had some new baggy-looking denim jackets in the window.

  While they were looking in the pet shop window at some guinea pigs and white mice, Libby started grinning, and she noticed that Tierney was doing the same thing.

  “Yeah,” Tierney said. “The gopher thing. I was thinking about the same thing. That was really rad. I mean that Lockwood character is really a rad writer. Too bad he’s such a nerd.”

  “Nerd?” Libby asked.

  “Yeah. Squirmy. Jumpy. You know. The square root of uncool.” She hitched up one shoulder and did a nervous tic thing with one side of her face.

  “Yes,” Libby said. “Well, he has cerebral palsy, for one thing.”

  Tierney stopped grinning. “Yeah? Is he going to die, or what?”

  Libby shook her head. “You don’t die of cerebral palsy. It doesn’t get worse or anything. It’s just something you’re born with and it doesn’t go away.”

  Tierney went back to looking in the window. After a while she said, “Hey. Look at that guinea pig. The Blob—with fur.”

  They’d walked on down the street for about half a block before she said, “Hey, I didn’t know that—about Lockwood, I mean. You should have told me before.”

  The next time they stopped, to look at the denims in The Gap, they were standing in the sunshine, and the shop window was almost like a mirror. They looked at their reflections for a minute, and then they looked at each other and grinned.

  “Hey, Mighty Mouse,” Tierney said. “Would you mind walking on the other side of the street? People are going to think I play with kindergartners.”

  “Yes,” Libby said. “Or else they’ll think I’m with my mother.”

  Tierney pretended to hit her and then they both convulsed with laughter. What made it so funny was that, no matter how big she was, Tierney—with her spiky pink hair and safety-pin earrings—certainly didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a mother. They laughed, and stopped, and looked at each other in the window and laughed again. It took several minutes for them to sober up enough to start off again down the sidewalk.

  Libby wasn’t familiar with the Balsam Avenue area where Tierney lived, since it was on the other side of town from the McCall House. The homes on Balsam were fairly new and quite large, and Tierney’s house was one of the largest. Low and rambling with diamond-paned windows and a steep shake roof, it would have looked like a country cottage if it hadn’t been so big—as if someone had been trying to build the largest country cottage in the whole world.

  “Well, here we are in the land of Oz. Cute, isn’t it,” Tierney said as she took out a key and unlocked the front door. “You better brace yourself.”

  “Brace myself?” Libby asked. “What for?”

  “For my gorgeous family. For my totally overwhelmingly gorgeous family.” The sneer was suddenly back in Tierney’s voice, and when Libby checked, she could see it on her face too. What Tierney was saying about her family was obviously ironical and probably sarcastic too. As the two of them walked down the hallway toward the sound of voices at the rear of the house, Libby tried to brace herself. She didn’t have any idea what to expect, but the picture in her mind was of some other very large people with crazy hairdos and weird clothing.

  They found Tierney’s family, at least two members of it, in the kitchen, and the amazing thing was—they really were gorgeous. Tierney’s sister, whose name was Courtney and who was a senior in high school, was tall like Tierney, but very slender. She had sleek, heavy dark hair, a fashion-model figure, and a long, lovely face. Her mouth was as big as Tierney’s, but somehow in Courtney’s face it looked as if it were meant to be that way, instead of the result of an accident. And Mrs. Tierney looked very much like Courtney only slightly older. They really were fantastic-looking, both of them—and they were also polite and friendly, even though Tierney wasn’t.

  In fact Tierney just stomped through the room without saying anything, and when her mother asked her to introduce her friend, she just said, “Mighty Mouse. Her name is Mighty Mouse,” without pulling her head out of the refrigerator.

  Libby said hello and was starting to explain that Mighty Mouse was only a nickname, when Tierney came out of the refrigerator with two cans of 7-Up, shoved one of the cans into her hand, and started dragging her out of the room. They had already started down the hall when Mrs. Laurent called to ask if they’d like some cookies, and Tierney went back to get some, leaving Libby alone in the hallway. She couldn’t quite hear what Mrs. Laurent was saying to Tierney in the kitchen, but she heard Tierney’s answer clearly.

  “Well, you didn’t have to stare at her,” she said. “And besides, she’s a lot bigger than she looks.”

  Libby couldn’t help giggling—even though she was still feeling embarrassed over the way Tierney had acted in the kitchen. She wanted to know how on earth a person could be a lot bigger than she looked, but when Tierney came stomping, back down the hall, scowling fiercely and muttering something under her breath, she decided not to ask. By the time they got to her room the frown was completely gone.

  “Here we are,” she said as she threw the door open. “Step out of the time capsule, ladies and gentlemen, and into the past.”

  It was a large room, and they were in it for several minutes before Libby realized that it was actually Tierney’s bedroom. For one thing there were so many other pieces of furniture in it—all kinds of tables, cabinets, shelves, and display cases. And for another the bed itself was almost invisible, buried under a huge pile of debris. Besides a general scattering of clothing, shoes, books, and magazines, there was the collection—Tierney’s “old stuff” collection that not only packed every cabinet and display case but also spread out over every other flat surface in the room.

  There were dishes, and figurines and toys, including a Shirley Temple doll and a full set of Dionne-quintuplet dolls. There were early types of telephones and toasters and radios, and even a model of Amelia Earhart’s airplane. The walls were covered with posters of old movies and stage plays, and opposite the bed was a large TV set with a VCR and a whole shelf of videotapes of old movies—a lot of Marx brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy, and even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Gone With the Wind.

  “You want to borrow some of the videotapes?” Tierney asked.

  “Well, I’m afraid it wouldn’t do me much good. We don’t have a VCR.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well I guess you’ll just have to come back here sometime for a thirties retrospective. A whole lot of my movies are from the
thirties. Not all of them, but a lot. We can watch old movies and eat popcorn, and I’ll even give away a door prize like they used to do back in those days. Here, sit down. And that telephone works if you have to”—Tierney changed her voice to high-pitched Alienese—“call home.”

  The phone did work, even though it was a real antique with the mouthpiece at the top of a long stem and a bell-shaped receiver hanging down just below it. Actually Libby knew it wouldn’t be necessary to phone home if she left fairly soon. By taking the bus instead of making her usual leisurely stroll, she could still be home before anyone would start worrying. But she called anyhow because she wanted to see what it would be like to use the old phone. Gillian answered, and after Libby told her she might be a little late, and put off her curious questions, she went back to exploring Tierney’s room.

  The collection was really fantastic. Tierney had a great many rare things—all kinds of objects that Libby had seen in antique and collectors’ books and wished that she could buy.

  “Where did you get these? Did they belong to your grandmother?” she asked when she was examining the Dionne-quintuplet dolls, with their frilly dresses in different shades of pastel and little golden name pins that told which doll represented which quintuplet. She was really feeling envious, because dolls were in short supply in Libby’s collection. They were one thing that Graham apparently never thought of collecting back in the thirties, when he was buying nearly everything else in sight.

  “No,” Tierney said. “My dad bought them for me in an antique store in Boston when he was back there on business.” And as Libby went on asking, she found that most of the other things in the room had been purchased for Tierney by various members of her family. It was very obvious to Libby, who for years had been avidly scanning the collectors’ books and magazines in Elliott’s store, that a great deal of money had been spent. She decided to mention the fact to Tierney.