Slam Book
Page 11
Paige ducked inside, Savanna held out her arms, and Paige rushed to her.
“I’m really going to miss you, Savanna,” she said. “And I won’t see you for ages. Probably not until next Christmas if Mother really intends to spend the summer with me in Europe.”
“Well, we’ll make it one fine Christmas, then,” said Savanna. She released Paige.
Paige looked searchingly into her eyes, then turned and fled outside. Dwight had just finished putting the trunk in the car.
“Thanks, Dwight,” said Paige. She buckled herself into the front seat, and Dwight slid behind the wheel.
As they drove away, Paige stared down at her hands. She didn’t want to think about what she was leaving behind, only about what lay ahead.
Randy never admitted to anybody except her mother that she was relieved her little clique had been broken up.
“It was getting scary,” she told Mrs. Taylor. “It was intense. And I felt trapped with them. Anna and Jessie are still my friends, but I think what happened was for the best.”
“How’s Anna doing?” asked Mrs. Taylor.
“It’s harder on her than it is on me. She misses being the center of attention. Without her clique, she’s not Miss Popularity anymore. But she and Gooz are still going out, and somehow she just seems … calmer. She started writing for the newspaper, and she said she’s going to try out for the basketball team.”
Randy paused and looked sadly at her mother. “But you know what I feel like sometimes?” she asked.
“What?”
“I feel like a shell on the beach. A common shell that no one notices. And a wave comes along and washes over me, then recedes, and I’m still right there on the beach, no one noticing me.”
“Oh, honey,” said Mrs. Taylor. “If other people could put that feeling into those beautiful words, they’d do it. Because every adult remembers feeling that way. And every teenager does feel that way. It’s part of being fourteen or fifteen or sixteen and trying to become your own person. I guarantee it’ll change.”
“You guarantee it?”
“I do.”
Randy grinned. “Good. What a relief.”
The phone rang, and Randy jumped a mile. “I’ll get it!” she screeched.
“Expecting a call?” asked Mrs. Taylor.
“Yeah,” replied Randy. “There’s this new boy in school …”
Ring, ring.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s your sister, stupid!”
Anna giggled. “Sorry. I was expecting—”
“Gooz?”
“Well, yes.”
“Listen, I’m sorry I’m not Gooz, but I’ve got something to tell you.”
“What?”
“You’re an aunt again.”
“Aughh! I don’t believe it! Where are you? In the hospital? You mean you already had the baby?”
“Yup. She came a little early.”
“She? Oh, excellent! It’s a girl. I can’t believe it! Seth’s got a sister! How are you? Is the baby okay? When did you have her?”
Hilary laughed. “I’m fine, Tom’s fine, the baby’s fine, and I had her at one o’clock this morning. She weighed six pounds, six ounces.”
“Ooh, she’s little.”
“But perfectly healthy.”
“What did you name her? You wouldn’t tell us the names you’d picked out.”
“That’s because if the baby was a girl, we wanted to surprise you.”
“Surprise me with what?”
“Her name is Anna. Anna Wallace Rogers.”
“Oh Hilary … Thank you. I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing, sweetie. Just promise you’ll come visit your namesake soon, and put Mom and Dad on the phone, okay?”
“Okay—and I promise!”
Anna called her parents to the phone and then wandered into her room. She sat on the bed, thinking. Her namesake. She’d teach the little Anna all sorts of things. She’d teach her how to cross the street safely and not to talk to strangers. She’d teach her how to bake chocolate-chip cookies and how to hit a baseball. And she’d tell her stories about Hilary before Hilary became a mother. She’d read all her favorite childhood books to her, too. But she’d tell her that no matter what, she should never open a slam book, because it was like Pandora’s box. The big Anna would tell the little Anna to stick to Winnie-the-Pooh and Charlotte’s Web and Doctor Dolittle. They were much, much safer.
A Personal History by Ann M. Martin
I was born on August 12, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey. I grew up there with my parents and my sister, Jane, who was born two years later. My mother was a preschool teacher and my father was an artist, a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other magazines.
When I was younger, my parents created an imaginative atmosphere for my sister and me. My dad liked circuses and carnivals and magic, and as a teenager, he had been an amateur magician. My father would often work at home, and I would stand behind his chair and watch him draw. When he wasn’t working, he enjoyed making greeting cards.
My parents were very interested in my sister’s and my artistic abilities, and our house was filled with art supplies—easels, paints, pastels, crayons, and stacks of paper. Coloring books were allowed, but only truly creative pursuits were encouraged, and I took lots of art classes.
Our house was as full of pets as it was of art supplies. We always had cats, and, except for the first two years of my life, we always had more than one. We also had fish, guinea pigs, and turtles, as well as mice and hamsters.
When I think about my childhood I think of pets and magic and painting and imaginary games with my sister. But there is another activity I remember just as clearly, and that’s reading. I loved to read. I woke up early so I could read in bed before I went to school. I went to bed early so I could read before I fell asleep. And from this love of books and reading came a love of writing.
In 1977 I graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. I taught elementary school for a year, which is what I had wanted to do, and used children’s literature in the classroom. I loved teaching, but by the end of the school year I had decided that what I really wanted to do was work on children’s books. So I moved to New York City, entered the publishing field, and at the same time, began writing seriously. In 1983, my first book, Bummer Summer, was published.
In 1985, after the release of my first three books—Bummer Summer, Inside Out, and Stage Fright—an editor at Scholastic asked if I’d be interested in writing a series about babysitting. She had a title in mind—the Baby-Sitters Club—and she was thinking of a miniseries consisting of four books. So I created four characters: Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne, and planned to write one book featuring each girl. The series was supposed to start in 1986 and end in 1987. Instead, it ended fourteen years later in 2000, with over two hundred titles and four related series, including Dawn’s spinoff, California Diaries.
Saying good-bye to the Baby-Sitters Club was sad. It had been nice not to have to let go of the characters at the end of each book. But by 2000, I had found that I wanted more time to spend working on other kinds of stories (though I did return to the series to write a prequel, titled The Summer Before, in 2010).
I felt myself drawn to the 1960s, the most important decade of my childhood. I think this interest was due in large part to the fact that my mother’s diaries came into my possession, and I spent a good deal of time reading them, especially the ones that covered the 1960s. The next thing I knew, I had written three books set in that decade. The second, A Corner of the Universe, is the most personal of all the books I’ve written. It’s loosely based on my mother’s side of the family, and in a way, it started on a summer day in 1964 when I learned that my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, who had died shortly before my parents first met, had been mentally ill. Stephen was the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe. The book won a Newbery Honor in 2003.<
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The life I lead now is not terribly different from the one I led as a child, except that I no longer live in Princeton. I moved to the Catskill Mountains in New York a number of years ago. Animals are still very important to me. Influenced by the many stray cats I’ve known, and inspired by my parents, who used to do volunteer work for Princeton’s animal shelter, I became a foster caregiver for an animal rescue group in my community. I also still have cats of my own, and only recently said good-bye to my dog, Sadie, the sweetest dog ever. She was the inspiration for my book A Dog’s Life.
Although I grew up to become a writer, my interest in art never left, except that now I’m more interested in crafts, and especially in sewing and needlework. I like to knit, but I most enjoy sewing, especially making smocked or embroidered dresses. And of course, I continue to write. In 2014, the fourth Doll People book, The Doll People Set Sail, will be published, as well as Rain Reign, a novel about a girl with Asperger’s syndrome and her beloved dog, Rain.
Here I am as a newborn in the hospital in August 1955.
Me at age two at my home in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1957.
This is the house where I grew up on Dodds Lane in Princeton.
My family always had cats—and except for when I was in college, I’ve always had at least one. This is a photo of Kiki, Sweetheart, Tigger, and Fluffy from my childhood home (Kiki is a little hard to see).
Reading at bedtime with my mother (and cats Sweetheart and Honey) when I was about seven, circa 1962.
On the left is my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, with my grandfather and my uncle Rick. Stephen was mentally ill and the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe.
Graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1977.
Here I am at home in New York City in 1989, surrounded by fan mail.
This is my house in New York, around 1993. It recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday.
Wildlife plays a larger role in my life now than when I was young. I will often find deer, wild turkeys, and garden toads in my backyard. Here is a black bear investigating my hose!
My dog, Sadie, one week after I brought her home in 1998.
At home in the country in 2000 with Peanut, one of the many kittens I’ve fostered.
This is the room where I do all of my sewing and card-making.
A few of my handmade greeting cards!
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Ann M. Martin
Cover design by Andrea Worthington
978-1-4532-9803-9
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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