by Phoebe Stone
“Oh no!” I murmur. “I better get out of here.”
I drop to my knees and end up crawling away with my bouquet in the opposite direction from Windel through a jungle of feet and legs. Some of the people above me lean down as I crawl by and say, “What a wonderful group of dresses you created!”
“Thank you,” I mumble from my hands and knees as I scramble forward. At the edge of the room, I slink back up to my feet and look around and I see Windel’s face again. Everyone is a blur, a dab of color, a swatch of paint, everyone except Windel. He still seems to be frowning and waving something that looks like a shadowy hammer. “I need to get away,” I whisper and I push and nudge and crawl until I get to the door.
I roll out into the night, dashing across the lit-up Place de la Concorde surrounded by its glittering domes of gold and the Grand Palace. I run farther and farther down the street until I get to the bridge called Pont Alexandre III. I rush halfway across it, passing cherubs with trumpets and horses with wings and the Seine river, golden and glowing in the nighttime lights.
Suddenly I get another image of Ginger. She holds up her hand to stop me. In my mind I see the little valentine floating, floating in the air. I stop in the very middle of the bridge and take a breath and turn around for a split second.
I see Windel Watson at the beginning of the bridge. He’s starting to cross it. The wind rolls and rumples his shirt and his corduroy jacket flaps. He’s calling out something.
“Petunia!” he shouts. “Wait! Stop. I have something to say. I didn’t write that song for Erin. I wrote that song for you!”
“What?” I whisper.
“I liked you listening to my music. I liked you being there! In fact, I loved it!”
“What?” I say again.
“I loved it. You changed my life!” he shouts into the night air.
“What?” I say in disbelief. And then as Windel gets nearer, I focus clearly on him in the glowing darkness. I look closer at him and realize he isn’t carrying a hammer at all, but a shoe, my missing shoe with the poodle on the toe.
“What?” I call out.
He comes forward in his red high-top sneakers, sweetly, gently, corduroy flapping, dark hair blowing. Somebody gave me a valentine.
“I could never have practiced so long or played so well if you hadn’t been there listening to me. When you crouched by my practice door all those hours, it changed my music,” Windel says.
“You knew I was listening to you?” I say. “You knew I was outside your door at the practice rooms?”
He pauses. Then he rolls his eyes toward me and looks over the tops of his glasses and says, “Yes. They had installed TV cameras a year ago for security in all the practice rooms so people at the pianos know who’s coming to the door. They can see on a TV monitor.”
“Oh no!” I say.
“But you were so adorable, like a little elf out there on the floor. You were listening so intently. You understood what I was doing. You were my first fan! I got better because of you!”
“You saw me? I was on your TV monitor?” I say again.
“Yes,” he says, folding his hands into his grandpa’s big baggy corduroy pockets.
“Oh no,” I say. “I’m so embarrassed!”
“No, no,” he says. “I saw you when you thought no one was looking … I saw the real you and I could watch you as much as I wanted. All the music I played, I played for you.”
“What?” I say, and I begin to feel a little flutter, a pinch of something like unfolding wings inside me.
“Once I came across you in the park in Boston. You were swinging on my little brother’s favorite swing and listening to music with a headset, just like I do. I was on a bicycle but managed to get a photo of you,” he says. “I keep it with me. Look.” He pulls from his jacket a wrinkled picture of me on the swings.
“It’s kind of torn,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “But I carry it around a lot.”
“You mean you were stalking me while I was stalking you?” I say, looking at the photograph, feeling breathless.
“Well, you could put it that way. But when two people are stalking each other, that’s what you call love,” says Windel. “Or double stalking. Same difference.”
“Oh!” I say. And then I reach up to shoo away a beautiful yellow moth fluttering around us. And by mistake, I knock Windel’s glasses off and they go flying over the edge of the bridge and drop into the Seine river. We both stand there peering over the railing as Windel’s glasses float in the current, headed for the suburbs of Paris. “Oh no, I’m so sorry, Windel,” I say.
“Your short hair is so pretty,” he says, looking at me. “Really pretty. And don’t worry about the glasses. They have clear lenses. I just wear them to look more serious. There’s this guy from some band years ago and I didn’t want to …”
“Well then,” I say, “let them go.”
“Remember Halloween? I mean, why do you think I took Fritz trick-or-treating on your street?” he says softly.
“Oh, Windel. I didn’t realize. I didn’t know,” I say. “But I am glad I got to meet your grandpa that night.”
“Thank you,” says Windel, closing his eyes.
“And I am so sorry I lost your overcoat,” I say.
“Hey,” he says, “that was my fault. I forgot to bring my coat that night. We got a ride to the school and I didn’t notice. I thought I’d left it at the coat check. When I got home my coat was on the couch.”
“It was?” I say. “Then whose coat did we mail to you?”
“I don’t know,” says Windel, “but it was a nice coat and it fit me too.”
“Oh,” I say, suddenly worrying a little bit about Veronica Brown and Melanie Tanly, wishing them luck with Ginger’s Crush Management Service.
Then Windel shakes his head and looks at me very sadly. “That night at the Stewarts’, there I was singing the song I wrote for you and I didn’t even know you were there behind that book. I figured it out after you had gone when Fritz called your mother Mrs. Beanly,” says Windel, looking down. “Then I got really upset.”
“Oh,” I say, wondering if my knees are going to fold up under me and collapse. Windel leans back against the railing. Papers, sheets of written music, slip out of an inner pocket and scatter all across the bridge, flying away into the wind. Windel shrugs his shoulders and smiles at me.
“All those months you listened to me play, I didn’t want to say anything. It was so special, I didn’t want to break the spell,” says Windel.
“The spell?” I say, feeling as if the little bird inside me is opening her wings now wider and wider.
“I hope you’ll want to go to my concert next week. I need you there. I put a ticket for you inside your shoe.”
“Oh, thank you, Windel,” I say, taking my shoe.
“And by the way, that’s one great little poodle sitting there on the toe,” he says.
“You noticed! You knew it was a poodle!” I say. And the little bird inside me seems to spread her wings full span.
“What else would it be?” he says. And suddenly he wraps his extra-long, floppy, corduroy Windel arms all around me, and I fall against him. My head knocks into his iPhone in his shirt pocket and I hear a click.
“Oops, I think I just took a photo of the inside of your shirt pocket, Windel,” I say.
“Hey, there aren’t enough pictures of shirt pockets in this world. And yes,” he says, looking down at me, “you are my small surprise. Because you shouted ‘Surprise!’ as you ran away from me.”
And then he kisses me on the end of my nose. And the end of a nose is the perfect place to be kissed when you’re on the middle of a bridge full of lights and cherubs and golden winged horses. And my heart begins to soar finally like the nightingale when it flew from the courtyard up, up, up into the sky.
Ginger’s mom says bumblers are just people who haven’t yet found a way to succeed at something. And perhaps she is right, because I didn’t seem to bumbl
e much else in my life after that night. Maybe I never bumbled anything in the first place. I just thought I did.
And it was all because of our trip to France and Dad’s sabbatical. And no, a sabbatical is not a book bag, not a backpack, not a suitcase. No, as far as I am concerned, a sabbatical is just a great big gift given to the whole family, out of the blue.
That year I never got around to writing my book How to Be a Younger Sister and in fact I guess I don’t have any clear-cut advice. It isn’t always easy. Just hang in there. And if you do, the rewards are great. I mean, who changed the mixed-up course Windel and I were on? If Windel hadn’t come to the fashion show that night, he would have soon gone back to America and he and I would never have found each other. So who invited him?
Well, if I had been a small child sitting outside a flower shop on the corner of the Avenue Mozart one afternoon, I might have seen a tall, short-haired blond girl wearing a dark raincoat and sunglasses, sneaking secretly over to the Hôtel Magique. I might have seen her dart into the lobby and then quickly leave an invitation on the desk for Windel, signed in her hand without anyone knowing … Hope you can come to this. Can’t wait to see you. Love, Petunia Beanly.
When I was a young girl I lived with an American family on the rue Michel-Ange in Paris. I cannot begin to describe the magic and wonder I felt being in Paris then. All my life I have longed to stay once again in that apartment with the balconies on the rue Michel-Ange. And so it was a great joy to join the Beanlys in my imagination and to live there again with the piano in the salon and the red-haired concierge and the nightingale.
Later, as a grown-up, I stayed in Montmartre with a Frenchwoman and her daughter who raised finches in a lovely large cage in her kitchen. From the window at night there you could see the lit-up dome of the Sacre Coeur just across a courtyard. The Frenchwoman’s name was Collette. Although my Collette is very different and much older than she was, still I was inspired and touched while I stayed there.
And finally, a few years ago my husband and I rented an apartment for four months in Paris. We lived just off the Avenue Mozart at the top of a little building on a side street. I could walk to the Auteuil Market that I remembered as a teenager and I could even linger on the rue Michel-Ange.
It is so mysterious how stories happen. Reality, memory, longing, and imagination all seem to sing together a little song and if you listen closely, sometimes you can get some of it down on paper.
Thank you so much to Rachel Griffiths, my talented editor, to whom this book is dedicated. As I am always saying, “What would I do without you, Rachel?” Special thanks also to the incomparable Arthur Levine. I just feel so much at home and so happy to be part of the family at Arthur A. Levine Books.
In fact, thank you to all my friends at Scholastic. How lucky I am to work with all of you! That is, Kelly Ashton, Sue Flynn, Jana Haussmann, Jazan Higgins, Ann Marie Wong, Lizette Serrano, Antonio Gonzalez, Bess Braswell, Tracy van Straaten and the publicity team, Mary Claire Cruz, and Elizabeth Krych. And thank you to the adorable and funny Nikki Mutch!
I also want to thank my readers, that is, my dear friend Sarah Wesson, Yvette Feig, and Bob Murray, and my sister Marcia Croll, who listened to the book over the phone as my beautiful mother once did! I am also grateful to my French friends Antoine Polgar and my truly charming and brilliant French teacher at Middlebury College, Mireille McWilliams. Georgette Garbes Putzel has also been a terrific French teacher. Thank you! Many thanks to Karen Kane, who helped me find my way in Paris. And to Ron Fisher, my brother-in-law, a fine French speaker. Thank you to François Theimer and Florence Theriault for their wonderful books on collecting and appreciating Jumeau dolls. And I am grateful for the doll shops in Paris and their owners, who were always willing to talk to me and answer all my questions.
I also want to thank writer and critic Leslie Fiedler and his wife, Margaret, for taking me to Paris to live for three months when I was a young girl. Thank you. I miss you!
And finally, thank you to my husband, David Carlson. The poem he wrote to me many years ago called “Dragonfly” inspired the lyrics to Windel’s song “Small Surprise.” Thank you for the poem and for your friendship and love, which have kept me afloat in all kinds of storms.
May I say to all of you: “Thank you! Love you! Where would I be without you?”
Phoebe Stone is the beloved and acclaimed author of several middle-grade novels, including The Romeo and Juliet Code, which was hailed by the Boston Globe as “quite simply the best novel for young readers ... since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” She received four starred reviews for The Boy on Cinnamon Street, and another star for her novel Deep Down Popular. Booklist awarded a starred review to Romeo Blue, the follow-up to The Romeo and Juliet Code, calling it “compelling, and with plenty of heart and soul.” Phoebe and her husband live in Middlebury, Vermont.
Copyright © 2016 by Phoebe Stone
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, May 2016
Cover design by Mary Claire Cruz
Cover photo by Michael Frost, © 2016 Scholastic Inc.
Stock images ©: somchaij/Getty Images (Eiffel Tower)
Dan Brownsword/Corbis Images (front cover balloons) YinYang/iStockphoto (back cover balloons)
e-ISBN 978-0-545-63408-3
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