Clementine's Letter

by Sara Pennypacker

  Before I got going with my idea, I went to my dad’s night table to see how he was coming with his book. Not so good. Under

  he had written,

  I picked up the pen and wrote,

  Then I went down to the trash-and-recycling room.

  Sometimes my parents watch a TV show about junk. People get together in a big room with their junk. The host, who is a junk expert, goes around to each of them and tells them how much their junk is worth. Sometimes, he says, “Oh, too bad you fixed this, because now it’s not worth anything.” And then the people act like they don’t care and they say, “I still love my thing and that’s what counts.” This is because they are embarrassed about making the big mistake of fixing it.

  But sometimes the host says, “Holy mackerel! This is amazing—this is an extremely valuable piece of junk and now you are rich!” And then the people clap their hands to their cheeks and make big O-mouths as if they are too stunned to speak. And then the host turns to the camera and says, “You, too, might have treasures in your attic or your basement!” and that’s the end of the show.

  When I’m a grown-up, I will not watch the junk show, because it is B-O-R-I-N-G, boring. But it did give me my astoundishing idea.

  In between the garbage barrels and the recycling crates, there were a bunch of bags. And the bags were filled with…junk! A pipe. A yellow knitted tie. Four place mats made like little braided rugs. A china figurine of a rooster with a straw hat. Some other junky things.

  So that TV host was right—I, too, had treasures in my basement!

  Above the bags, there was a sign: CHARITY COLLECTION—DONATE YOUR UNWANTED ITEMS FOR A GOOD CAUSE.

  Giving my mom a present was a good cause, all right.

  I dragged the bags and a card table up to the lobby, and I taped a sign to the table: PRICE: WHATEVER YOU THINK IT’S WORTH.

  Mrs. Jacobi came in just as I was setting out the first thing—the set of braided place mats. “Look at these charming place mats!” she said. “Mrs. Beetleman is coming for tea this afternoon. These will look lovely with my teacups!” She gave me a dollar.

  I set out the rest of the things. Mrs. Beetleman came in next. “I’m going to have tea with Mrs. Jacobi this afternoon,” she told me. “I’d like to bring her a little present.” She picked up the china rooster and gave me a dollar, too.

  Next was the man from the sixth floor. He bought the knitted tie. Fifty cents.

  The rest of my neighbors came in, and they all bought something.

  The last person to come was Alan. He picked up the pipe. “This is my lucky day!” he said. His face looked just like the junk-show host’s face did when he discovered a treasure. “I lost a pipe exactly like this one last week! It was my favorite!” And then he gave me two dollars and stuffed the pipe into his pocket, still wearing the “Holy mackerel!” face.

  I counted my money.… Twenty-two dollars! I put the card table back, and then I rode the elevator up to the fifth floor to give Margaret and Mitchell back their money from Tuesday.

  Mitchell took his money and thanked me.

  Margaret just looked sideways at the dollar bill I held out to her. “Where have you been keeping it?” she asked.

  “Nowhere. Just in my pocket. See? It’s still clean and new.”

  Margaret snorted. She took it with two fingers and went off to wash it.

  It was too late to go to the art store, so I went outside to watch the masons work. And Margaret was right—I was lucky this week! They were just finishing up for the day, and they let me have the broken bricks and the leftover mortar!

  I had a great idea. I took my apple from my pocket, ate it until I came to the seeds, and then picked a few out. I scraped a little hole in the dirt next to the new brick wall and planted the seeds. Then I built a little brick wall around the spot to protect the apple tree when it grew. And even though the bricks were broken, it looked beautiful.

  I smiled, because when the tree was grown, I’d have all the apples I wanted. And I would invite everyone I knew over and I would say to them, “Help yourself. Use some of these apples for a science experiment if you’d like. Or give some to your hamsters if they’re hungry. Whatever you want to do with them is fine. There will always be plenty more.”

  Then I ran inside to get my parents so I could show them my wall.

  When I got back to my apartment, my dad was on the phone. “No, I certainly did not give her that stuff. I didn’t even know about it until just now.”

  He looked pretty mad. But my brick wall would cheer him up. As soon as he hung up, I asked him if he wanted to come with me to see what I’d made.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “I already know what you’ve made. A mess! I’ve been hearing about it for the last thirty minutes!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That was Mrs. Beetleman. When she went to Mrs. Jacobi’s for tea, she saw the place mats she’d given Mr. and Mrs. Heinz on their anniversary. Apparently Mr. and Mrs. Heinz had thrown them out. Now Mrs. Beetleman isn’t speaking to them.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That’s not all,” my dad went on. “Mrs. Jacobi called a few minutes ago. Mrs. Beetleman brought her a little china rooster. Mrs. Jacobi recognized it as the one she had given to the man on the sixth floor for his birthday. So she’s mad at him. When he went up to her apartment to apologize, Mr. and Mrs. Heinz were there, explaining about the place mats. The man on the sixth floor was wearing a yellow tie. Which Mrs. Heinz’s mother had knitted for Mr. Heinz. So now Mrs. Heinz isn’t speaking to Mr. Heinz. And Mr. Heinz isn’t speaking to the man on the sixth floor. Clementine, I’m afraid to ask, but how many people bought things from you?’

  “Everybody,” I said.

  My dad smacked his forehead. “So this could be just the beginning. And they’re blaming me for it all.”

  “Now, Bill,” my mom said. “When they calm down, they’ll see that it’s certainly not your fault. And it’s not really Clementine’s fault, either.” She stopped to think for a minute. “Well, it’s not entirely her fault. But how could she know, after all?”

  My dad didn’t answer.

  “How about if tomorrow after school I apologize to everyone?” I asked.

  “I guess that’s a start, Sport,” my dad said. “And you’ll have to offer to buy back everything you sold.”

  Which was N-O-T, not fair. But my dad still looked pretty mad, so I couldn’t tell him that.

  Later that night, when I was trying not to think about how mad he looked, my dad came into my room. He sat on my bed with his book pad.

  I pointed to it. “That’s why I did it,” I said. “I wanted to buy Mom a present so she wouldn’t feel bad that I did something nice for you.”

  My dad looked at me for a while. Then he said, “But you’ve got that wrong, Sport. Mom would never feel bad because you did something nice for me.”

  “Margaret says it’s a rule: if you do something nice for one person, you have to do something nice for the other person, too.”

  “It might be Margaret’s rule. But it’s not our rule. I’m happy when you do something nice for Mom, and she’s happy when you do something nice for me. When you care about people, you want them to be happy. Don’t you?”

  I thought about that for a while and then I nodded.

  My dad handed me his book.

  “‘Sometimes the building manager’s daughter was too impulsive,’” I read. “‘Sometimes she did things without thinking ahead. Without thinking of the consequences. It got her into a lot of trouble. Sometimes it even got her father in trouble.’”

  I picked up my pen and took the pad.

  I started to show it to my dad, then I pulled it back and added an extra

  And I thought of another thing—

  My dad took the pen from me.

  I looked at that paragraph for a while. Then I wrote,

  My dad took the pen again.

  I slid over and gave my dad a hug. “I think it’s a really good
book,” I whispered.

  “Me, too,” he whispered back. “I think it’ll probably be a best seller.”

  On the way to school Thursday, Margaret asked me how it was going with the substitute.

  “Not so good,” I told her. Then, before she could give me any more bad ideas like copying Lilly, I told her about my dad getting mad at me for a while. Instead of telling me everything I did wrong, Margaret surprised me. She started to cry!

  “What’s the matter?” And then she surprised me even more: she wiped her tears on my jacket even though it was probably crawling with germs.

  “My father can’t come this month. The actress in his decongestant commercial broke her foot. So now she can’t go running through her garden saying how great it is to breathe freely again. They’ve got to find another actress and start all over.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. And I was. Margaret and Mitchell looked forward to their father’s visits all month. It was all they could talk about.

  “You’re so lucky,” she sniffed. “And you don’t even know it!”

  “What are you talking about? Why am I lucky?”

  “Because you see your father every day.”

  “But you’re lucky, too,” I said. “When your father comes it’s for a whole week. You do everything with him. He doesn’t work when he visits, and it’s like a vacation every time. My dad’s always working.”

  “I guess,” said Margaret.

  “And you get to stay with him in his hotel and call room service and take the wrappings off the cups in the bathroom. And the toilet has a little strip over it that says ‘Sanitized for Your Protection’—you love that!”

  Margaret nodded and brightened up a little.

  “And sometimes you get to go to Hollywood, California, and watch them make commercials! I think that’s lucky. And one day, your dad might even let you be in one!”

  We sat there for a minute, breathing the bus air and thinking about who was lucky.

  “I guess we both are,” Margaret said at last. “Just different kinds of lucky.”

  Except I wasn’t so lucky once I got into school.

  During math, Mrs. Nagel wrote a hard problem on the board and then asked if anyone knew the solution to it. I raised my hand and told her the answer.

  If my real teacher were there, he would have tapped his nose and then pointed at me, smiling. This means, You got that right on the nose! Good thinking!

  Instead, Mrs. Nagel said, “That’s correct, Clementine. But I didn’t ask for the answer. I just asked if anyone knew it.”

  Which was practically the same thing as saying “You are never going to be a successful student.”

  Then she wiped the board clean, and I bet she wiped so hard she practically rubbed the green right off.

  In language arts, she made us read our journal entries out loud.

  “But our teacher doesn’t make us read them out loud,” I told her.

  “But Mr. D’Matz isn’t here,” she reminded me. Which I had not forgotten. “So today we will.” So I had to read my journal entry, which was about why I love bricks so much, and now that’s not a secret anymore.

  Mrs. Nagel was mean to me three more times. The only good thing was that I finally figured it out: why I was getting in so much trouble. I raised my hand and told her I needed to visit the principal.

  She said All right, which probably meant, Good, now I can get a little work done with the successful students. Which made me even madder. I stomped down the hall so hard I probably broke the school basement, and I didn’t care about that.

  Mrs. Rice took one look at my face when I walked in and said, “Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you today?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Do you like tattoos?”

  “Not too much. Do you?”

  “Yes,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Okay, now I want to tell you. I can’t guess Mrs. Nagel’s rules. She has different ones from my teacher and she doesn’t tell them until it’s too late and I’m already in trouble. Which isn’t fair. So I was just wondering if you could make my teacher come back a little early. Like today. Could you call him up and tell him to skip all that getting-ready-for-Egypt stuff for the rest of the week? He doesn’t want to be there anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, Clementine, but no. I just spoke with him, by the way, and he’s having a wonderful time.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and felt my face getting madder and madder.

  “Clementine, do you think it’s possible Mrs. Nagel feels the same way you do? That she can’t guess the rules? It’s hard to be a substitute. To learn the new rules of a school. Do you think maybe you should help her out by explaining how your class does things?”

  “No,” I growled. “I do not.”

  Mrs. Rice just sat there looking at me until finally she hypnotized my mouth to say, “Okay, fine, maybe someone should.”

  I looked at her hard when I said “someone,” but she only looked back at me harder.

  I shook my head. “Maybe a sixth grader. Not me.”

  Mrs. Rice leaned back in her chair. “Well, that’s too bad. I think you’d do a good job of it.” She stood up. “Let’s go back to your classroom. Mr. D’Matz asked me to let you all know how much he liked his Good Luck cards. He also asked me to tell the class what he’s been doing this week.” She handed me her dictionary. “If you look up ‘mummification’ you can help explain what he’s learning about.”

  I looked up the word, and then we went back to my classroom.

  Mrs. Rice told everyone how much Mr. D’Matz appreciated our nice cards. She said he was having a wonderful week and that today he’d learned more about mummification. “And now Clementine will explain what that means.”

  “First they scoop out the guy’s guts with a big spoon,” I said. “Then they go for the brains through his nose. If the mummy starts sneezing when they do this, there are brains flying everywhere. They have to scrape them off the ceiling with a shovel—”

  Beside me, Mrs. Rice cleared her throat.

  “All right, no. I guess that doesn’t happen a lot. But it’s pretty disgusting. And besides,” I said, “under all the wrappings, those mummies are naked!”

  Mrs. Rice sighed a huge sigh. “Thank you, Clementine, for that enlightening look at mummification.”

  When I got home from school, I put the twenty-two dollars in my pocket and started for the top floor.

  “Hi-Mrs.-Jacobi-I’m-sorry-I-sold-private-giveaway-stuff-here’s-your-money-do-you-want-it-back?”

  Mrs. Jacobi just looked at me like I was crazy. “I love my place mats,” she said. “I don’t want my money back.”

  At the next floor it was the same thing. And the next. And the next. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy. Everybody was happy with what they’d bought. Nobody wanted their money back. I went to Margaret and Mitchell’s apartment last, because Alan doesn’t show up until four o’clock.

  Mitchell answered the door. “Hi, Clementine!” he said. He had a huge grin on his face.

  “Is Alan here?” I asked.

  “Nope!” he cried. His grin got even bigger.

  “Why not?”

  Mitchell’s face nearly split in two. “You know that pipe you sold him? The one he said was just like one he lost? Well, it was his. He hadn’t lost it—my mom had thrown it away! So now he’s mad at her, and he’s not coming over. Thanks, Clementine!”

  Usually when someone thanks me for something, I feel good. Not this time. But I said, “You’re welcome,” anyway.

  Then I realized something—I still had the money for my mom’s present! “We have to go back to the art store now,” I told Mitchell.

  “Okay,” he said.

  This is a good thing about Mitchell—he never asks why, he just does stuff for me. If I’d asked Margaret, she would have asked me a hundred questions and then told me a hundred reasons why my idea was stupid and she had a better one.

  Not Mitchell. He just says Okay. If I ever have a
boyfriend, which I will not, it might be him.

  “Let’s bring your brother,” Mitchell said. This is another good thing about him—he likes my brother. And my brother likes him.

  So we went down to my apartment and got Scallion and strapped him into the stroller. Mitchell leaned over. “Stroller derby?” he asked.

  My brother just shrieked, which is how he says yes when he’s too excited to speak. He shrieks a lot around Mitchell.

  Mitchell took off with my brother, running as fast as he could without actually flattening anybody on the street. My brother kept shrieking the whole time because he loves stroller derby so much, and because he likes to hear his voice shake when they hit the sidewalk bumps. I had to run to keep up, and we got there in just a few minutes.

  Inside, I slapped my money on the counter, out of breath.

  “You’re back,” the clerk said. Then he asked me how my great-aunt Rose was.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I haven’t seen her this week. But I guess she’s normal.” Then I asked him how his great-aunt was.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen mine this week, either. But I guess she’s normal, too.”

  Then we were all done being polite, so the clerk wrapped up the art supplies organizer. I strapped the package onto the seat beneath my brother, and we headed home.

  “No stroller derby, this time,” I warned Mitchell.

  Mitchell and my brother looked at me like they were both too heartbroken to speak. But I stayed firm. “Sorry,” I said. “Not with something so valuable in the stroller.” This is called Being Responsible.

  My mother had left a note:

  Daikon Radish was conked out from all that shrieking, so I strollered him out back and sat down on the bench next to my dad.

  He lifted my brother onto his lap. “What’s in the bag?” he asked.