She had stopped circling the room by then and was sitting in a chair that Tierney had cleared for her by dumping a stack of towels and clothing off onto the floor. She was examining one of the Shirley Temple dolls. The doll still had its original dress and curly blond wig.
“These are very expensive now,” she told Tierney. “Your parents really have spent a lot of money on your collection, haven’t they?”
Tierney shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. They spend a lot of money on me. Trying to prove something, I guess.”
“What are they trying to prove?” Libby asked.
Tierney threw herself down across her bed, sending shoes and books and even a couple of dirty dishes bouncing off onto the floor. “Who knows?” she said. She lay on her back staring at the ceiling for a while before she said, “What are they trying to prove? Well, let’s see. Maybe it’s that they’re not sorry I was born.”
Libby got up and put the Shirley Temple doll back on the shelf and then slowly picked her way back across the floor. While she stepped carefully over and around shoes, wadded-up newspapers, books, clothing, and an occasional valuable collectors’ item, she was thinking about what Tierney had said, and once back in the armchair, she went on thinking about it and dealing with a confusion of thoughts and feelings.
Part of it was something she never in the world would have expected to feel, and that was a little bit sorry for Tierney. But more than sorry—a great deal more—she was feeling curious, which she wasn’t exactly proud of under the circumstances, but maybe she couldn’t help herself. After all, she was a writer and, according to Gillian, all real writers, as well as some ballet dancers, have a God-given talent for curiosity.
The curiosity was winning out, and she was just trying to decide on the best question to start with, when Tierney began to answer without being asked.
Still lying on her back with one arm across her eyes, she began to talk in a tense, angry voice. “Like I said, they’re gorgeous. You saw my mom and Courtney. You didn’t see Heather, she’s away at college now, but she’s the most gorgeous of all. My dad isn’t, but then you don’t have to be if you’re a man. What my dad is, is gigantic, and kind of clunky-looking. But, like I say, that’s okay, for him. And see, they had these two beautiful daughters, but my dad still wanted a big clunky boy like him, so they decided to have another kid, and what did they get? Yours truly, a gigantic, clunky girl. See, my dad is a big important lawyer and my mom has her own business, and it’s like I’m their only failure. Soo—” Tierney waved her other arm in a gesture that included the whole room and everything in it. “Sooo—they have to work real hard at pretending they’re not sorry.”
That night Libby got into bed with her green journal and Graham’s safari writing kit—a little lap-top desk made of wood and leather that opened out from a small, flat suitcase. After she’d pulled the covers up around her, she set up the desk and began to write—and went on writing for a long time. Most of what she wrote was about Tierney Laurent. She even started a limerick. The first two lines went:
TIERNEY LAURENT.
She is big, she is brave, she has money,
And sometimes she’s terribly funny,
But …
She had trouble with the rest of it. She had written and then scratched out several lines ending with mad and sad before she finally fell asleep.
14
Sometime during the next few days Libby made up her mind. She was going to ask Tierney to visit the McCall House. And that meant it would only be fair to ask Wendy too. Having them visit together might not be very pleasant, considering the fact that they obviously hated each other, but it would certainly be the only fair thing to do.
The next consideration was, should she ask them ahead of time or wait and spring it on them at the last moment. The advantage of waiting until the day of the visit would be that perhaps one or the other of them wouldn’t be able to do it on such short notice. If that happened, they couldn’t be angry at her, since it wouldn’t be her fault that they couldn’t make it.
After giving it some careful thought, and writing down the pros and cons in her journal, she decided the “last moment” approach was the best and safest. Right after the next workshop she would ask them both to go home with her that same afternoon.
On the next Wednesday she began her preparations at breakfast by asking the family if it would be all right if she brought a friend home with her that afternoon. Everyone seemed pleased, especially Gillian and Cordelia, who immediately wanted to know if it would be that absolutely charming Alexander boy. Libby said no, it would be a girl this time, and when Cordelia asked her name, she said, “Tierney—or else Wendy.”
Cordelia looked worried. “You’re planning to ask someone to come home with you whose name you don’t even know?”
Libby’s mouth was full of toast at the moment, and before she could answer, Gillian said, “I’m sure that’s not it, Cordelia. It’s just that she hasn’t decided which one of her friends she is going to ask. Isn’t that it, Libby?”
“Well, that’s not what she said,” Cordelia said. “One should be careful to say what one means, clearly and precisely.”
“That’s exactly what she did,” Gillian said. “She said quite clearly that she was going to ask either Tierney or Wendy to come home with her. I didn’t find it a bit confusing.”
“Well, I certainly did and I, for one …”
Both Elliott and Christopher looked at Libby and grinned, and Libby grinned back, got up, and carried her dishes out to the kitchen, without either Cordelia or Gillian noticing she had gone. She had poured herself a second helping of orange juice and was drinking it when Christopher came in.
They looked at each other, and almost in unison they said, “How many angels?” which was part of a private joke that had begun when Christopher had told her about how supposedly sensible people had once argued violently about how many angels could dance on the point of a needle—and Libby had said they’d better not mention the subject to Gillian and Cordelia.
Of course, Libby hadn’t asked for permission to bring both Tierney and Wendy, because by then she’d convinced herself that it would be highly unlikely they’d both be able to come. After all, they both had other friends they might be planning to meet, as well as things like orthodontist appointments and afterschool lessons. And as for what might happen if they both did come—Libby preferred not to think about it.
But regardless of what she might have preferred, she did find herself worrying about it from time to time, and all during the workshop it was right there like an uncomfortable itch at the back of her mind.
Mizzo started the meeting off by reading “The Island Adventure” episodes that had been written during the last week. The one that won was about how some bloodthirsty pirates landed on the island and how the Incredible Five (the FFW members) scared the pirates away by rigging up a dancing skeleton from some old bones they’d found in a cave. The story happened to be Libby’s. It was the first time her “Island Adventure” chapter had won, but even during the reading and voting and winning, she was still vaguely aware of the itchy images of what it would be like to spend the afternoon with two people who felt the way Tierney and Wendy did about each other.
Except for that nagging worry it was a good session for Libby. She was beginning to read a new story that day, called “The Pierce Arrow Palace.” It was set in the thirties, and she had written it over a year ago and just recently decided to rewrite it a bit and read it in the workshop. It was about a girl from a farm-worker family during the Depression, who built herself a secret hideout in the body of an abandoned car. She’d only finished a couple of pages but the critique was mostly very good, except for G.G., who said it was boring to have the old tramp turn out to be a nice guy instead of something interesting like a psychopathic killer.
Wendy read next, a short excerpt from her new story, another one about a mysterious old mansion. It occurred to Libby to wonder if she had some kind of fixation on big old houses, or if she w
as just trying to drop some more hints about wanted to visit the McCall House. But it was a good story, pretty scary in places, and the main characters actually had some problems that didn’t have anything to do with clothes or boyfriends. Everyone seemed to like it quite a bit except Tierney, who said some rather sneaky things about how much Wendy’s writing had improved and managed to make it sound like what she meant was that “it had to get better, since there wasn’t any way it could have gotten worse.”
After that Mizzo gave a little pep talk about how INCREDIBLE they all were and how much they had improved since the workshop started, and then dismissed the meeting. Libby waited until Wendy had gone out the door. Then she took a deep breath, went over to where Tierney was still slouched in her chair, and asked if she wanted to visit the McCall House that afternoon.
“What?” Tierney said, lurching to her feet so fast she almost knocked the chair over. “Are you kidding? Let’s go.” Grinning a wraparound grin, she started gathering up her books, but when Libby mentioned that she was going to ask Wendy, too, the smile immediately inverted itself into a fierce frown. Pulling down the corners of her mouth and making her eyebrows almost meet in the middle, she said, “What do you want to ask that wind-up Barbie doll for? She doesn’t know anything about thirties stuff. Hey, come back here.”
But Libby had already ducked out the door after Wendy. Catching up with her halfway down the hall, she asked her the same question. “Could you come to see the house today? You know, the McCall House. Tierney’s coming, and I thought maybe you could come too.”
“Today?” Wendy said. “You mean like this afternoon? Like, right this minute?”
Wendy seemed more surprised, stunned even, than pleased, and for a minute Libby thought her plan was working and that Wendy was about to say she couldn’t make it. But then the strangely blank expression evolved into the familiar TV-hostess smile. “Hey, great!” she said, “Awesome! Just wait five minutes while I go call my mother. Okay?”
Trying to keep a desperate “what do I do now” feeling from showing on her face, Libby agreed to meet on the front steps in five minutes. Then Wendy raced off toward the pay phones, and Libby went back to the reading lab. Tierney was still standing in the same spot and scowling the same scowl.
“Is Miss Congeniality going?” she said.
Libby nodded warily.
“Well, then I’m not.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Libby said, hoping she sounded as if she meant it, and she was sorry in a way. She had really wanted to show Tierney her thirties collection. But, on the other hand, it was a great relief. She told Tierney she would ask her again, maybe next week, and was halfway out the door when something grabbed the back of her coat and almost yanked her off her feet.
“Wait up,” Tierney said with her evilest grin. “You don’t think I’d let you go off alone with that dorf, do you? Without me along to protect you, you’d probably catch a fatal case of brain rot. Here, give me those.” She grabbed some of Libby’s books and put them on her own binder. “I’ll carry these. No wonder you’re such a midget, carrying all that heavy stuff around all the time.”
Wendy was waiting on the front steps, and they started off toward the bus stop with Libby in the middle. For quite a while they all three looked straight ahead and no one said anything at all. Tierney was stomping even more than usual, and Wendy was making a humming noise that was probably meant to sound relaxed and casual but actually was more like the sizzle just before something explodes. Libby found she was breathing with difficulty, as if the air were thick and heavy with tension.
Finally Tierney said, “Hey, Mighty Mouse. What movies do you want to see when you come over again?” and Libby said she didn’t care except she really liked Laurel and Hardy.
While Tierney and Libby were talking movies, Wendy looked the other way as though she didn’t even hear them, but as soon as they stopped, she started in about how some of her friends were talking about Libby the other day and saying that she was really cute and in a year or two she was going to be a real killer. But she had to keep talking louder and louder because Tierney had begun to sing at the top of her lungs.
Tierney was singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and as soon as Wendy stopped talking, Tierney stopped singing and asked Libby if she had that song in her thirties record collection.
Then they all went back to marching in silence and Libby went on feeling more and more tense and nervous. But then, without any warning at all, the tension built up until something snapped, and an entirely different emotion suddenly took over. Stopping dead in her tracks, she stomped her foot and yelled, “All right!” And when they both turned around to stare at her, she went on yelling.
“This is ridiculous,” she shouted. “You’re both being ridiculous. If you don’t stop it right now, you’re both uninvited and I’ll never ask either one of you to come home with me again, and I don’t care if you never speak to me again because I’m not going to speak to either of you again. Not ever!”
Her anger evaporated then—instantly—as if the yelling had pulled a cork and let it escape, and she was about to turn around and run when Tierney grinned at Wendy and said, “Well, would you look at that! A mouse tantrum. A genuine mouse tantrum right here before our very eyes. I’m pretty scared. Aren’t you?”
And Wendy laughed and said to Libby—and to Tierney — “She’s right, too. We were being ridiculous. I mean, like, really infantile. Right?”
And Tierney said, “Right! Agreed! Truce? Okay?”
And Wendy said, “Okay, truce.” And just then the bus went past them and they all ran the rest of the way to the bus stop and scrambled on and went bumping and giggling down the aisle and squeezed into a backseat together. All three of them.
During the bus ride they both started asking Libby questions about the McCall House, like when it was built and whether she could remember her famous grandfather and if she was born right there in the house.
So she told them that her parents had been living in New York when she was born, and no, she couldn’t remember Graham McCall. “My grandfather had just died and I was only a year old when my parents came here to live,” she said. And then, because she knew it was going to come up soon anyway, she went on, “And then when I was three, my mother went back to live in New York.”
Wendy shrugged. “Half the people I know have divorced parents.” And Tierney said, “Yeah. Me too. It’s like nowadays you’re practically underprivileged if you only have two parents instead of four.”
“But my parents aren’t divorced,” Libby said. “It’s just that my mother is an actress, a stage actress, and she can’t live anyplace except New York.”
That really interested them both. Wendy was excited about Mercedes being an actress, even when Libby told her that she was more of a character actress and usually didn’t have starring roles. And Tierney said it was really rad that her mother could live where she needed to for her own career instead of following her husband around like some kind of personal slave, like most women had to. By the time that conversation was over, they’d reached Westwind Avenue and the McCall House.
——
That night in bed Libby wrote about the visit in her new journal.
They liked everything, she wrote, even Cordelia. Then she put down the pencil and leaned back on the pillows, remembering and smiling. Tierney had acted almost as excited about the house as Wendy did, and if they noticed that it was a little—well, more than a little—shabby and rundown, they didn’t mention it. And they were absolutely fascinated by the thirties collection. By all the collections, really, but particularly the thirties. Wendy had been so intrigued that she’d asked Libby and Tierney if they’d help her get started on a thirties collection of her own. And they’d both been super nice to the family. Afterward Gillian and Cordelia said they were both charming and asked them to come again. And the surprising thing was that Christopher did, too, because he usually wasn’t all that thrilled about meeting new people.
AND, she wrote, I decided to show them the Treehouse. She hadn’t meant to. If someone had told her a few weeks ago, or even a few days ago, that she would ever show the Treehouse to anyone else, especially to anyone from Morrison Middle School, she would have said they were out of their minds. The Treehouse had always been hers alone, that is, after it stopped being Christopher’s, and it had always been personal and private and secret. She didn’t know why she had decided to do it. But somehow, just as they were almost ready to go home, she had suddenly said, “There’s one more thing I want to show you.” And she did.
Picking up her pencil she wrote, Wendy said that she’d rather have my Treehouse than a mansion and a limousine and a whole closetful of Liz Claiborne clothes, and then Tierney said that if she could take the tree and everything that was in it back to her own backyard, she’d be willing to trade her whole collection for it. In fact, after they left, I went back out to the Treehouse to look at it again.
Of course the Treehouse has always been very important to me, but I’m so used to having it that a lot of the time I don’t think much about it So I climbed up again and sat in the big room and imagined I was Tierney or Wendy, and then I went on up to the triangle room and sat there for a while, watching the birds and squirrels eating in the feeders outside the windows. And then I went up to the lookout tower again to kind of reexperience that too. It was interesting seeing it, like from someone else’s eyes. And I saw what they meant. It really is a pretty awesome place.
Libby went on writing for quite a while that night, but after the part about the Treehouse, what she wrote wasn’t so much about what happened that day as it was about Wendy and Tierney in general. She started a new page and gave it a title, “Opposites.” She began by listing all the ways in which the two of them were completely different—in looks (which included clothes and makeup), and in other ways, including attitudes, behavior, and most interests. About the only thing she could think of that they were both interested in was writing, and even that hardly counted because what they wrote was so entirely different.
Libby on Wednesday Page 11