Beth’s perfectly glossed lips formed a tiny round O, like the idea of being alone had never occurred to her in the entirety of her life. “You don’t mean that.”
Jo looked straight at her and said in a low, serious voice, “You guys have no idea what this has been like.”
“This isn’t just happening to you, Jo. Did you ever think of that?”
Beth stormed away, her long, billowy scarf trailing behind her.
“At least I’m not a walking self-help poster,” Jo said.
Beth and Ginger went back to whispering until Mrs. Snickels came and stood over their shoulders. Eventually, they quieted down and took out their work.
I figured it was none of my business, so I kept drawing.
Jo sniffed. “In case you were wondering what all the drama is about, Max just threw a fit because he couldn’t find his red suitcase. He accused his best friend of hiding it and they got in a huge fight. He was inconsolable and Mom had to come pick him up. Then they found the suitcase in the stupid coat closet, but she took him home anyway.”
I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to say anything. But after her third dramatic sigh, I gave up on my sketch for the time being. “He must have had a good reason. People don’t usually blame their best friends for stuff unless there’s a reason for it.”
“I guess you’re going to find out how weird we are sooner or later.” Jo put her head in her hands and talked down at the table. “Max wraps himself in bandages, like a mummy. He insists he isn’t going to stop until we give him an entombment party, and his friends are teasing him. There, I said it.”
I remembered his bandaged hands on the first day of school and seeing him and Jo talking to Grandma at the pasture fence before that. Talk about commitment.
“That’s pretty brave,” I said.
“Hmph.”
Mama had always told me it was a good deed to help when I could, to share my worldly perspective, having met so many people along the way. “Don’t let any part of yourself go to waste, Gracie May,” she’d say. I supposed it wouldn’t hurt.
“I’ve seen boys do weirder things,” I offered.
“You could not possibly have seen anything weirder than an eight-year-old boy who wraps himself in gauze bandages—which he pays for out of his own allowance, I should add—and insists he will keep doing it until we throw him a death party.”
“I knew this kid named Timmy Parker who swore his mother killed his friend Wrinkle by dropping a bag of groceries on his head.”
Jo looked up from the table. “You are making that up.”
I shook my head. “Nope. Wrinkle was his imaginary friend, but Timmy wouldn’t admit it. His mother didn’t even know what she’d done. She was just setting a bag of groceries on the backseat of the car. Timmy carried on and on about how no one would bury Wrinkle. Told everyone the rotting corpse was giving him nightmares. Spent half the time in the nurse’s office claiming he had post-traumatic stress disorder. His father was a psychiatrist.”
Jo had one elbow propped, her chin resting in her hand. She didn’t look quite so down, like a balloon half-filled.
“So our teacher, Mrs. Lemon, went ahead and gave Wrinkle a proper burial with a eulogy and everything. We dug a hole in the second-grade vegetable garden and laid Wrinkle to rest between the tomatoes and the lettuce. Timmy turned into a regular kid after that.”
Jo pulled her portrait out of the storage tube. “Max will never be a regular kid.”
“Sometimes people have to do weird things before they’re regular,” I said.
“How much weird do we have to put up with?”
“I suppose it’s different for everyone.”
She thought for a minute. “That was a good story.”
Figuring my good deed was done, I went back to sketching just as Stubbie came rushing toward me with a piece of drawing paper in his hand, Archer chasing after. Stubbie threw the paper down in front of me, and I saw a sketch of myself looking out a big window, one hand up to the glass, and smiling at something on the other side. It was as though Archer had drawn me into one of Mr. Frost’s poems. It made me want to climb inside so I might feel what she was feeling.
“It’s not you,” Archer said. “It’s my cousin Wanda.”
“You don’t have a cousin Wanda,” Stubbie said.
Everyone in the class sat there, quiet, giving a moment of silence to the death of Archer’s dignity, but all I wanted to do was ask him if he’d actually seen that girl—had I even smiled in the last five days?—or dreamed her up. I felt a flush come up my cheeks as I noticed Archer’s eyes and how unusual they were, almond shaped and a light grayish green.
After the moment passed, Jo got busy ignoring us, and Stubbie went back to their table, snickering. Archer was suddenly composed, like he might launch into his own Shakespearean monologue instead of Ginger. Which, if he did, would be the most spectacular form of diversion I’d ever seen.
“May I please have my sketch back?” he asked instead.
I handed it to him, sad to see it go, and he went to his desk, where he punched Stubbie in the arm. Stubbie grabbed his arm and pretended to be seriously injured, making faces, sticking out his tongue, being a general spectacle.
Ginger declared, “The measure of a man is made in moments of discomfort and uncertainty.”
Beth nodded and typed something up on her label maker.
“Good heavens, we haven’t had this much chaos around here since Mr. Flinch lost Henry VIII and we found the poor little guy in the supply closet,” Mrs. Snickels said.
“Henry VIII?” I said to Jo.
“A rat. Mr. Flinch feels that we should always name our class pets after ‘rapscallions and historical tyrants.’”
“Someone ought to name a rat after Stubbie Wilkins,” I said. Jo looked over at him and he raised his bushy red eyebrows, up and down, up and down.
“He’d probably take it as a compliment,” she said.
We shared a smile, and for one slippery moment, I felt like my Before self.
• • •
My prowling around at night and general sleeplessness finally must have caught up with me, because I fell asleep in Mr. Flinch’s class. I woke up with the rest of the seats empty. Talk about an Alice in Wonderland moment.
The first thing I saw was an origami crane made from newspaper on the bookshelf beside me, which then made me feel even more disoriented. Like I’d dreamed a bird into being. It sat on a stack of newspapers, blending in.
I wiped the drool from my cheek, mortified, and looked up to see Mr. Flinch grading papers. The banana clock over his head read twelve thirty-five. I’d slept through his fourth-period social studies class, and into lunch.
“Has this always been here?” I said, pointing to the crane.
“Ah! Another country heard from! Did you sleep well?”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“We didn’t have the heart. Stubbie Wilkins suggested we get out the indelible markers, but he is a heathen.”
Great. Every single seventh-grader saw me drooling all over my desk. “Did I snore?”
“Ha! No. You are a very quiet sleeper.”
He was tall and thin, his legs stilt-like as he crossed the room toward me. He wore sweaters with elbow patches, but in unexpected colors, like sage or plum. Jo had told me he’d taught Shakespeare at a really big college on the East Coast, but he gave it up because he “preferred shaping the clay of young minds” and “left his heart in Auburn Valley,” as he’d grown up here himself. He and Ginger sometimes launched into dueling Shakespearean monologues. His were probably real. But if I was being fair, Ginger had something going for her in that way good actresses did. There was something about her that made you pay attention. Plus she was goofy.
I picked up the crane and looked it over. It was smaller than the one from the bushes
.
“It’s probably an extra,” Mr. Flinch said, nodding toward the little bird.
“An extra?”
“May I?” he said.
I handed him the crane.
“Do you know anything about origami?”
I shook my head and used my sweatshirt to wipe the little puddle of drool I’d gotten on the desk. He handed me his handkerchief in a well-folded square and pointed to my chin, where I’d missed a spot.
He went back to his desk, where he took out a piece of canary-yellow paper. Then he sat down next to me and began to fold.
“Each year, we talk about Sadako and her thousand paper cranes. Sadako was a girl who lived in Japan during World War II. She was two when the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, leveling everything. She lived for ten years before getting sick with radiation poisoning.”
“Did she die?”
He nodded, still folding. “There’s a Japanese legend that says if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish. Sadako started folding and got to six hundred and forty-four, but didn’t finish, and so the children she went to school with finished for her.”
“That’s really sad.”
“Today, from all around the world, people send batches of one thousand paper cranes to Japan as a gesture of peace.”
Mr. Flinch folded and folded and eventually an origami crane sat perched in his hand. Like magic. “There are some who say this town was founded on the luck of a crane.”
“I thought people came here for the gold.”
“They did. But it’s said that a man—a lone miner who had traveled the world in search of his fortune and, while doing so, lost his one and only love—came to California during the gold rush. He strayed away from others who were working farther down the hill, and when he came upon a crane at Wolf Creek, he stopped, taking it for a sign of luck. He discovered what ended up being the richest mine in California, married again, and had ten daughters. You won’t find that in the history books, but the story has come down over generations. If you look, you can find cranes in odd places.”
He set the bird down on the desk in front of me.
“My mama believed that birds were a signpost, and if you needed it, they might just point the way.”
“Your mother was in good company with her beliefs. The crane is a mystical bird. Some think it carries souls up to heaven on its outstretched wings. Some believe it signifies healing and hope.” He tapped its wing. “That’s a lot of responsibility for a little bird, wouldn’t you say?”
I nodded.
“Feel free to take them both. I’m sorry you missed the lesson. It is always quite inspirational.”
I tried to hand him his handkerchief.
“Keep that too. One never knows when one might need a handkerchief for dramatic flair.”
11
Three
Small Bites
After I started writing in my notebooks, I realized the poems Mama had been reading to me out of A Boy’s Will weren’t just pretty words, but they actually made some kind of sense. When I asked her to help me piece them together, she put a finger to my forehead and told me that some people had to learn to think and other people had to learn to un-think, and I was one of the last kind. Thinking can steal the magic right out of a thing. The trick is finding a good balance. She went on to tell me that those poems were like colorful bits of laundry all pinned to a line and blowing in the breeze. Let the pictures come from the words, Grace. It’s the seeing that stays with you. You might see something different on a different day.
Later I’d told her that was why we made a good team. She believed in magic, and I liked to think, so between the two of us, we had it covered. She’d laughed and told me she’d find a way, someday, to make me see the magic of a thing. Now, I figured, she was having her way.
Before crawling into my sleeping bag, I put the two new origami cranes—the one made out of newspaper, and the yellow one Mr. Flinch had made—into the Kerr jar. Then I took out the unfinished crane from Mama’s toolbox, pressing my finger into one of the sharp corners until there was a dent in the pad of my finger. I thought about Grandma wanting me to finish it, but I didn’t know if I could find the heart for it. I didn’t know how to choose the pieces. Plus I couldn’t decide which would be better—leaving it as is or finishing it in the likeness of the others Mama had made, as a tribute to her.
I tucked the bird under my pillow, hoping the answer might come in my dreams. If I might have some good ones for a change.
• • •
As I went running out the shed door in the morning, excited for my Lacey call, I noticed the Brannigans’ stormy-sky horse stood at the fence across the pasture as she did most mornings. She neighed and shook her head from side to side. Because I was feeling generous after my recent discoveries, I went back and grabbed an uneaten apple out of my backpack and trudged across the high weeds of the pasture, getting my jeans wet with dew.
Mrs. Brannigan drove their white truck down the driveway on the far side of their pasture, Max and Jo beside her. She stopped and the window rolled down. “We’re headed to Spoons; do you want to come?”
Jo wore a black beret and small round sunglasses. She leaned over her brother and yelled, “I’m doing an interview for the documentary. Beth flaked and I could use some help!”
“I’ve got stuff to do,” I called, hiding the apple behind my back. “Sorry.”
With a wave from all three, Mrs. Brannigan rolled the window up and turned right onto Ridge Road. I watched them disappear from view before heading the rest of the way to the fence.
I’d never fed a horse before and realized with a shudder that my whole arm could fit in her mouth. But I was committed, so I figured I’d just do it the way I’d seen it done on some animal show on TV. I put out my hand, flat, and she brought her muzzle down, her lips like velvet across my skin as they gathered up the apple. She had big teeth.
After she finished, she nudged my hand for more. “Sorry, girl. Besides, it looks like you’ve been eating plenty.”
I patted her round belly through the wire fence, and then her belly kicked my hand. I pulled back, startled. Once I realized what I’d felt, I pressed both hands against her belly, where I felt more movement. A baby.
I stood there and stroked her nose until her eyes were droopy, imagining being connected to Mama that way. There was a sudden rush of sadness that got so big, I was sure it would munch me up in three small bites.
• • •
Tiny drops of fine mist covered Grandma’s bun-tight head, caught there the way mist will catch in a spider’s web. She had just come in from the garden, of course. The table was set with plain white dishes and jelly jars for juice glasses. There were white cloth napkins, small bowls of brown sugar and raisins, and the bear-shaped bottle of honey. The newspaper sat next to Grandma’s plate, and beside the newspaper was a family-sized box of latex gloves.
“Morning,” Grandma said. She took a pot off the stove and set it on an orange knitted hot pad, eyeglasses swinging on a chain around her neck. “I understand you have a phone call this morning.”
“In fifteen minutes,” I said.
“Later this afternoon, I’ve got a delivery of manure coming, and I could use some help with it,” Grandma said.
“Manure? Really?”
“Really.”
“What time?”
“Around one. Why? Do you have plans?”
I couldn’t tell if she sounded hopeful or if it was just a pesky question. Either way, one o’clock didn’t give me much time to get to town, investigate Threads and Margery, and get back.
“I’ve got homework.”
“Well, you can get to that after the manure. Maybe you can bring it back here to the kitchen. Your mama used to do her homework right there where you’re sitting.”
I laid my hands on the hard wood
of the chair while Grandma served us each a heaping bowl of oatmeal. Then she sat down and snapped on the little rubber gloves. I’d seen enough television to know that criminals wore those little gloves when they didn’t want to leave fingerprints behind. For a second, I thought I might be a goner, that maybe she’d figured out about Plan B.
She caught me looking at her all goggle-eyed but didn’t say a word. Instead, she popped open her newspaper as though all the world wore rubber gloves to the breakfast table.
“Something interesting happened a couple of days ago,” Grandma said.
“My laundry detergent was replaced with dish soap. Good thing I caught it, or we would have had an explosion of bubbles.”
“Good thing,” I said, studying a crack in the wood table.
“And all my lightbulbs were unscrewed.”
“Really?” I said.
“Are you really going to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
I looked up, suddenly furious. “Why would you think I did it?”
Grandma gestured out the bay window. “Although they have been known to get into mischief, the raccoons around here probably aren’t taking my laundry detergent or unscrewing lightbulbs.”
I crossed my arms and huffed. “How do you know? I’ve read about cats taking people’s shoes. That’s weirder.”
This was not going the way it was supposed to. She was supposed to be spitting mad, not half-amused. Because once she was good and mad, I could own up to it so she would know I was a nuisance. Then I was supposed to keep being a nuisance until she gave up on me and sent me back to Mrs. Greene’s. But her blaming me, just assuming that I could be a nuisance without any proof, made me spitting mad. After all, I wasn’t the type of kid who usually did pokey, bothersome things. It was her fault I’d stooped so low.
“Well, I can only hope the raccoons don’t organize a coup,” she said.
I could tell she was looking at me, but I wouldn’t raise my eyes from the oatmeal. After a while she went back to reading the current events. “The horse’s name is Beauty,” she said.
The Secret Hum of a Daisy Page 7