“I guess I’ll look at a few places out here, but I really miss California.”
Cassidy kicks a rock and sends it flying across the still-green lawn of the quad.
I point out my dorm and the windows to my room, and then I lead everybody down the back road to the stables and introduce them to Blackjack, who nickers softly when he sees me.
“Hey, boy,” I say, pulling from my pocket the apple that I brought with me from Cassidy’s house. “Miss me?”
I explain how those of us who choose riding as our sport are each assigned a horse to take care of, and how we’re learning everything from basic horsemanship to dressage. “Right now I’m still doing a lot of flatwork—you know, transitions from walk to canter and stuff like that—but I hope I’ll get to do some jumping soon.”
Darcy holds Dylan and Ryan up so they can pat Blackjack’s neck. Blackjack leans over the stall and whiffles in my hair.
“He likes you, doesn’t he?” Darcy says, smiling down at me.
I smile back at him, but before I can reply, Becca appears.
“Come on, Darcy,” she says, tugging at his sleeve, “there’s a really cute horse over here I want you to see.”
Since when does Becca Chadwick like horses? She stays glued to Darcy’s side as we all start back up the road toward the quad. Emma and Stewart are glued together too, shoulders touching, although they’re not holding hands. If they think they’re fooling anybody, they’re wrong. The grown-ups are all watching them, giving one another knowing nods and winks. Megan is talking to Cassidy and Courtney, and my brothers are whirling around like two little autumn leaves, their arms stuck out as they chase each other, pretending to be airplanes.
“Let’s all share what we’re grateful for,” suggests Mrs. Hawthorne, tucking her hands in her pockets. “This is Thanksgiving, after all. I’ll start—I’m grateful for family and friends.”
“I’m grateful for fleece,” shouts Dylan, whizzing by.
My mother sighs. “Honey, surely you’re thankful for something besides fleece.”
Cassidy watches my brothers as they kick at a pile of horse droppings. “I’m grateful that my mother isn’t having twins.”
Everyone laughs except Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid, who gives Cassidy a pained look.
Mr. Chadwick is grateful for a wonderful day and a wonderful meal, Mrs. Wong is grateful that we’re all happy and healthy, and Mr. Hawthorne is grateful that his novel is coming along so well.
“I’m grateful for all my beautiful girls,” says Mr. Kinkaid, smiling at Cassidy and her mother and sister. Then he leans over and cups his hands around his mouth and speaks directly to Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid’s tummy. “And I’m grateful for whoever’s in there!”
We all laugh at this, and at Mrs. Chadwick, too, when she twirls around dramatically in her purple cape, which matches her purple dress, and shouts, “I’m grateful for purple!”
Becca’s face turns beet red and I smother a grin. Serves you right, I think.
“I’m grateful for friends,” says Emma, looking at me and at the same time carefully not looking at Stewart. Her cheeks are pink, though, so I know she means him just as much as she does me and the rest of the book club.
“Let me guess—I’ll bet Megan’s grateful for school uniforms,” jokes Mr. Wong.
“Da-ad!” Megan protests.
“I’m grateful our daughter has this wonderful opportunity to attend Colonial Academy,” says my mother, putting her arm around my shoulders again and giving me a squeeze.
“And I’m grateful to whoever nominated her for the award and made it possible,” adds my dad.
My heart sinks. I want so much to please my parents and make them happy and proud of me, but a big part of me wishes I could still be at Walden Middle School with my friends. I know I shouldn’t worry about it yet, but I have a feeling my parents are going to want me to go to Colonial Academy for high school, too, if my scholarship is extended, and all my life I’ve been looking forward to Alcott High. I’d be there for two whole years with Darcy before he leaves for college!
Dad keeps telling me I’ve got the best of both worlds right now, because it’s not like I had to go away to boarding school or anything, I’m still here in Concord. Still, I really miss sitting in classes with Emma, and eating lunch at our table, and I even miss Kevin Mullins. Well, sometimes, anyway.
Lately he’s gotten bolder, riding his bike around the quad and leaving notes for me with Mrs. Crandall. Incredibly stupid notes, like “Do you know the square root of pi by heart?” and “I got an A on my math test” and stuff like that. He found out that my parents got me a cell phone, and somebody—Becca, probably—must have thought it would be funny to give him my number. My phone will ring in the dorm sometimes and nobody is there, but I know it’s him because I can hear him breathing, and besides, like I’m not going to know who it is when I see MULLINS on my Caller ID?
Lately I don’t bother answering his calls, which is probably mean but I don’t want to encourage him, plus Savannah Sinclair would have a field day if she ever got wind of the fact that a pipsqueak like Kevin has a crush on me.
Now, if it were Darcy Hawthorne leaving me notes and calling—but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. Darcy will probably always just think of me as his little sister’s friend. I glance over to where he’s talking and laughing with Courtney and Becca. Darcy has the nicest smile. It really lights up his brown eyes.
Mrs. Hawthorne interrupts my daydream. “How about you, Jess, what are you grateful for?”
Right now, it would be easier to tell her what I’m not grateful for. I slant a glance up at my dorm room windows. Savannah Sinclair. Chadwickius frenemus. Switched place cards.
But it’s Thanksgiving, and I sigh and muster a smile. “Dessert,” I reply. “I’m grateful for dessert. Let’s go back to Cassidy’s.”
Megan
“A woman, whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge—is fundamentally and always interested in clothes.”
—Daddy-Long-Legs
The school bus drops me off at the bottom of our long driveway and I trudge up toward the house, tucking my chin into the collar of my jacket and wishing I’d worn a hat and scarf. It started to snow a little as we left Walden Middle School, and the icy January wind whips the flakes around me, stinging my cheeks.
Fingers numb, I fish my house key out of my pocket and slide it into the lock. “I’m home!” I call out, slinging my backpack onto the front hall bench.
“In here!” a voice calls back. It’s my grandmother.
I follow my nose to the kitchen, which smells amazing. Gigi sure knows how to cook. We’ve been feasting ever since the day she arrived. My dad didn’t work late a single night for the entire month of December, he was so eager to get home for supper. Last night I heard him complaining to my mother that he’s gained five pounds, but he sure sounded happy about it.
My grandmother looks up from the counter where she’s busy chopping onions. She pauses, wrinkling her nose. “It really is awful, isn’t it?”
“The onions?”
“The uniform.”
I glance down at today’s outfit—khaki pants with a long-sleeve maroon polo shirt and a maroon sweater with a mustard-gold stripe around the V-neck—and grimace. “Yeah.”
“We’ll just have to see what we can do about that,” Gigi tells me, turning back to her onions.
I plunk myself down at the kitchen table, where a glass of milk and a plate of peanut butter cookies are waiting for me. My grandmother’s doing, of course. If my mother had left a snack it would have been rice cakes and carrot juice, or maybe something made out of seaweed, her latest and possibly most horrible discovery.
“A real American girl snack,” says Gigi, winking at me. “Clementine gave me the recipe.”
“Thanks, Gigi.” I take a bite and give her a thumbs-up. Looking pleased, my grandmother returns to he
r chopping. I watch her, wondering if she dresses up like this when she cooks back at home in Hong Kong. As usual, my grandmother is dressed to kill—a gray wool pencil skirt that is definitely designer and probably cost as much as the stove she just baked the cookies in, high heels, a white silk blouse accented with a double rope of pearls and a pink flowered silk scarf for a pop of color, and a gray cardigan that I’m sure is cashmere.
“Your mother’s at one of her meetings this afternoon, I can’t remember which one, something about landfill, maybe? She said she’d be home in time for your book club. Oh, and a letter came for you today.” Gigi points her knife at a stack of magazines and mail at the far end of table. Right on top is an envelope that’s covered with stickers—teapots and kittens and flowers and stuff. I don’t even have to open it to know who it’s from. I stare at it glumly.
“You’re not happy to get a letter?”
I shrug. “It’s just my book club pen pal.”
“Maybe you could read it to me. Give me something to think about while I chop.”
I open the envelope. Out falls a picture of a quilt. Of course. Summer must sew in her sleep. She’s written me three letters so far, and each one’s come with a picture of a different quilt she’s just finished. I mean, quilts are fine and everything, but they’re not exactly my style. It’s hard to work up much excitement about a blanket.
Dear Pen Pal,
I took the copy of Flashlite magazine you sent me, the one with your interview in it, to school last week and showed it to everybody. All my friends think it’s incredibly cool that we’re friends. Even Zoe Winchester, and she doesn’t think anything is cool. I feel sorry for Becca, getting stuck with Zoe for her pen pal. Zoe thinks that just because her mother is the mayor of Gopher Hole, that puts her in charge of everything. But I suppose that’s gossip, and my mom always tells me not to gossip, so I guess I should write about other stuff instead of Zoe.
Did I tell you that my last quilt won second place in the Holiday Fair in Laramie? I gave it to my sister Ellie for Christmas to put in her bedroom in her new apartment. She and my sister Tessa go to the University of Wyoming over in Laramie, and they decided they didn’t like the dorm so they found this cute little apartment to rent. My brother Andy’s going to live with them next year too. The rent is pretty cheap, and they all have part-time jobs, so they figure they can afford it, which is good because my mom says she’s already stretched pretty thin paying their tuition.
With Ellie and Tessa off to college now, Rose and I have the bedroom all to ourselves. It feels like we’re living in a fancy hotel—I’ve always shared a room with all of my sisters, and for the first time in my life I actually have my own closet. Not that I have anything to put in it. Mostly I wear my big sisters’ hand-me-downs.
My mother says she doesn’t feel quite like the old woman in the shoe anymore, even though there are still six of us at home sharing two bathrooms. My mom and Rose and I share one, and Andy and Peter and Danny and Tim share the other one. Guess which one is neater?
Business at the Cup and Saucer is slower now that winter’s here. Wyoming winters are pretty fierce, and most folks are happy just to stay holed up at home and eat their meals in their own warm kitchens. We still get a fairly good breakfast crowd, though, especially people commuting to Laramie. I think my mom’s hot coffee and fresh donuts are pretty hard to resist. It’s a good thing our diner is just down the street from our house, because we’ve had so much snow already this winter there are some mornings it’s all the boys can do to shovel a path down the sidewalk so Mom can open up.
Have you finished Daddy-Long-Legs? Didn’t you love it? My favorite part was the ending. Did you guess what was going to happen? I don’t have a boyfriend yet, do you?
Your friend,
Summer Williams
I snort. Summer always signs her letters like that, with her full name. Like maybe I’ll have forgotten it or something. I keep reading:
P.S. This is the new quilt I worked on over winter vacation. I think it’s my best one yet, and I’m going to enter it in the State Fair next summer. My mom let me use a bunch of scraps from some old trunks up in the attic. She says there’s a story behind every patch, so I’m calling it “The Story Quilt.”
I fold up the letter and put it back in the envelope, feeling annoyed, which is how I always feel when Summer writes me, but also envious. Does everyone on the entire planet except me have brothers and sisters? How many does one person need anyway? I can’t even keep track of how many kids there are in Summer’s family.
“That wasn’t so bad,” says Gigi. “She sounds like a nice girl.”
“I guess.”
“She didn’t say anything about her father. Does he help with the restaurant?”
“Her parents are divorced. He lives in Denver, I think.”
“Ah. That must be difficult for Summer. May I see the picture she sent? You’ll have to hold it for me because my hands are all onion-y.”
I fish the picture out and Gigi leans over my shoulder to look at it. She smells good. My grandmother always smells good, thanks to the enormous bottle of expensive perfume on her dresser.
“A Victorian crazy quilt!” she cries. “How beautiful! Look how intricate the stitching is. Summer is right to enter it in the fair—I’m sure she’ll win a prize.”
I shrug, and Gigi kisses the top of my head. “Count yourself lucky to have such nice friends, Megan. Friends are one of life’s richest blessings.”
This sounds like something my mother would say, but somehow it doesn’t irritate me as much coming from Gigi.
“What are you making?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Dim sum,” she replies. “For your book club tonight.”
“Oh man! You rock, Gigi!”
She smiles. “I assume that means thank you, so you’re welcome.”
I love dim sum—although I’d never had it homemade before my grandmother came to visit. I’d only had the kind they serve at the restaurant in Boston my parents like to go to on the weekends sometimes. I love the way the food comes around on trolley carts in those cool little bamboo baskets, and you get to pick what you want. My mother never cooks Chinese, except for these stir-fry things she makes up involving lots of tofu and weird vegetables like kohlrabi and rutabaga and kale. But that’s fake Chinese, not the real stuff.
I put my empty plate and glass in the dishwasher, then lean against the counter to watch. “It looks complicated,” I tell her.
She laughs. “Dim sum just takes patience, that’s all. It means ‘a touch of heart’—did you know that? Perhaps because it’s a labor of love.” She hands me an apron. “Here, I need an assistant. Good thing my beautiful granddaughter is here to help.”
That’s another thing I love about my grandmother. She always says really nice things to me. My mother, on the other hand, always seems to be on the lookout for things to pick on or correct.
“Look how tall you are!” Gigi adds, tilting her head and smiling up at me. She’s petite, like Jess and her mother. “I think maybe you grew while you were at school today.”
I have to laugh at that. It’s true, though, that I’ve grown a couple of inches this past year. I’m the same height as my mother now.
We work together chopping and slicing for a while, and I glance out the window over the sink. It’s still snowing, Nothing major, not enough to close school, but enough to make everything look pretty, like the coconut my grandmother is busy sprinkling onto the no mai chi we’re going to have for dessert. Snowballs with peanut filling. Perfect.
“A good night to stay inside and enjoy hot food,” says my grandmother. “I like the snow, though. It’s pretty. We never get winter weather like this back in Hong Kong.”
Gigi always seems to know what I’m thinking. She’s more like a friend than a grandmother, which I still find surprising. I know she’s a surprise to my friends, too. I’m sure they were expecting one of those little wrinkled peasant ladies like they always show in m
agazines and movies about China, the kind who dress in those pajama outfits. Instead, they got—well, Gigi. Who’s got fewer wrinkles than I do, dresses in couture from Paris, wears pearls even when she’s sleeping, and wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of yoga pants, ever.
“I have something for you when we’re done,” she tells me, her dark eyes sparkling.
“What?”
“You’ll see,” she says with a mysterious smile.
Half an hour later, the food is finished. We put everything on trays in the fridge, ready to be cooked after our friends arrive. Then we head downstairs to the guest quarters. That’s what my mother calls the entire lower level of our house, which is more like an apartment than a regular guest room. It even has its own little kitchen and everything. My mom stocked it with food before Gigi arrived, but my grandmother only uses it for making tea. “Why would I want to eat down here, away from my family?” she said when she first saw it.
I spend most afternoons after school down here now, and I was here for most of winter vacation, too. Emma and Jess and Cassidy came over a lot to watch movies (Gigi has tons of DVDs of old musicals, which are corny but fun), and Cassidy says Gigi is a kindred spirit, mostly because she’s really competitive when it comes to playing cards and board games. And Becca and Ashley love it when Gigi lets us go through her jewelry and clothes and try everything on. Like Summer said about her new quilt, there’s a story behind nearly everything my grandmother owns, from shopping triumphs (she loves bargains) to encounters with famous designers. Gigi travels to Paris every spring for Fashion Week, and she says she wants to take me sometime too.
“Is that the surprise?” I ask, pointing to two packages on her bed.
She nods. “But first, let’s see what we can do about that awful uniform.” She riffles through her closet. “Here,” she says, plucking an exquisite silk shirt from its hanger and handing it to me. It’s a shade of maroon that the sweater I’m wearing could only hope to be in its wildest dreams, deep and rich and vibrant, like a perfectly ripe plum.
“I wish,” I tell her regretfully, looking at the label, which I never ever thought I’d actually see in person, “but we can only wear polo shirts.”
Dear Pen Pal Page 9
