Dear Pen Pal

by Heather Vogel Frederick

  Zach Norton likes Cassidy Sloane, I think. I mull the thought over, poking and prodding at it the way I’d poke and prod at a loose tooth. The idea doesn’t hurt, so I guess I really must be completely over Zach. Megan and Becca aren’t, though, I can tell just by looking at them. They’re trying to hide their disappointment. Like just about all the other girls at Walden Middle School, they’ve been crushing on Zach since kindergarten.

  I did, too, for a long time. But those feelings are long gone, thanks to Stewart. Zach likes Cassidy, I think to myself again. The idea is staggering. Suddenly, I can’t wait to call Stewart and tell him. That’s what’s so great about Stewart—Zach may be blond and cute and everything, but Stewart will understand the irony.

  Still grumbling, Cassidy grabs a change of clothes and heads for the shower.

  “We should give her a prize,” I tell the others, after she’s left the room. “Something funny, to make her laugh. It will help her feel better.”

  Jess ducks into the nursery and grabs one of the balloons from the big bouquet we tied to the back of the rocking chair. Megan takes a pen and draws a caricature of Zach’s face on it, complete with black eye. We give him really huge lips, all puckered-up and ready to go, and then Becca takes the pen and adds WORLD’S GREATEST KISSER underneath. I tie the balloon to Cassidy’s baseball mitt and set it on her desk.

  Cassidy spots it the second she walks back in the door. “Ha ha ha,” she says. “Very funny.” But she’s grinning, which is a good sign, and she gives the balloon a punch as she passes it.

  “This way you can relive your romantic moment anytime you feel like it,” Jess tells her, and we dissolve into laughter again.

  “Hey, guys!” Courtney calls up to us from the front hall. “They just turned in to the driveway!”

  All thoughts of Zach Norton fly out of our heads. We rush downstairs and gather in the living room with our mothers, and a minute later the door opens and Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid comes in. Stanley is right behind her with Chloe, who’s in a car seat.

  Cassidy’s mom beams at us. “I suspected there might be a welcoming committee,” she says happily. “Stanley’s not very good at keeping secrets. His head turns pink.”

  As if on cue, the top of Cassidy’s stepfather’s bald head starts to glow. Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid leans down—she’s taller than he is—and gives it a kiss. “It’s one of your most endearing qualities, sweetie,” she tells him.

  Behind me, Cassidy sighs. “I’ve had enough of this stuff for one day,” she mutters. But she doesn’t look too upset.

  At dinner, we take turns passing Chloe around. She’s really cute, and not as squinched-up looking as she was at the hospital. Everybody takes lots of pictures, and after dessert—my dad sent over his special Pavlova, this amazing meringue thing with fruit and whipped cream and chocolate sauce that he never ever makes except for New Year’s Eve—we take Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid up to the nursery.

  “Oh!” she says, her eyes shining as she surveys the room. “How beautiful!”

  “It was all the girls’ idea,” my mother tells her. “They were inspired by Just Patty. Remember when the students at St. Ursula’s decided to fix up the cottage for Grandma and Grandpa Flannigan? Well, they came and told us they wanted to do the same thing for you and Stanley and Chloe.”

  Cassidy’s mother settles into the rocking chair. “How can I ever thank you?” she says. “It’s really, truly perfect.”

  Mr. Kinkaid passes the baby to her and she smiles up at us. “I never thought I’d be going through all this again,” she confesses. “Babyhood, I mean. Life is just full of surprises, isn’t it?”

  “And it looks like there are a few more here for you too,” says Mrs. Delaney, pointing to the pile of presents.

  “How about you and Courtney open them for me while I feed Chloe?” her mother says to Cassidy.

  There are tons and tons of toys for the baby, and tiny little dresses and shoes and stuff, and a mobile to hang over her crib and from the Sinclairs, an engraved sterling silver rattle.

  “How did they know the baby arrived?” Cassidy’s mother asks.

  Jess shrugs. “I guess Savannah heard me telling Adele and Frankie about it.”

  There’s another present with the rattle, a copy of Goodnight, Moon, and Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid opens the card that’s taped to it. “This was my favorite when I was little. I hope your baby likes it too. Love, Savannah.”

  “How nice of Savannah,” she says.

  I glance over at Jess. I think about my encounter with Savannah by the post office, and it occurs to me that maybe Megan is right. Maybe this is all some sort of peace offering. But Jess avoids my gaze, and her expression is guarded.

  Finally, there’s just one present left—the biggest one of all. It’s in an enormous box wrapped in plain brown paper and postmarked “Gopher Hole, Wyoming.”

  “It must be from your pen pals,” says Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid. “How sweet of them to think of us.”

  Cassidy rips off the wrapping and opens the box.

  “It’s a quilt,” she says. Behind me I hear Megan whisper to Becca, “Summer Williams strikes again.”

  “What a lovely gift!” says Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid. “Let me see it.”

  “Wait, I think there’s something underneath,” says Courtney, lifting the quilt out.

  Cassidy dives into the box and emerges with a little rocking horse. “Cool!” she says. “It has a real leather saddle and everything.”

  “There’s a card, too,” says Courtney, plucking it from the bottom of the box. She passes it to her sister. “You read it, Cassidy.”

  Cassidy opens the envelope. “Congratulations to the whole book club on your new edition,” she reads, then shakes her head in disgust. “Sheesh, how corny can you get?”

  “Honey!” her mother protests.

  “Sorry,” says Cassidy, and continues, “The Gopher Hole Gang hereby invites the newest member of the Concord, Massachusetts, Mother-Daughter Book Club to bring her big sister, her mother, and all her book club friends to spend a week at Gopher Creek Guest Ranch this summer.”

  Cassidy stops and looks up at us. “Hey, I think we just got invited to Wyoming!”

  “Let me see that.” Her mother holds out her hand, and Cassidy passes the card to her. Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid reads it to herself. “It’s true, they really want us to come,” she tells us. “Winky’s mother says they have plenty of room, especially toward the end of August if that works for us.”

  “Will that be too soon for Chloe to travel?” asks Megan’s mother.

  “She’ll be almost three months old by then,” Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid replies. “She’ll be fine.” She looks around the room at the rest of us. “What do you say, girls? Do you want to meet your pen pals?”

  I nod enthusiastically, but my mother presses her lips together. “We’ll have to see,” she replies. “It’s a lovely, generous invitation but I’m not sure if this is the right time for our family.”

  “I know what you mean,” says Mrs. Delaney. “Things are a little tight for us right now, too. Michael and I are expanding our cheese production, and we just invested in a second refrigerator.”

  “Nonsense,” Gigi declares. “Of course we’re all going! It wouldn’t be the same without the whole book club. How about I supply the plane tickets? You wouldn’t believe how many frequent flier miles they give you when you fly anywhere from Hong Kong. Paris, too.”

  “But what if you need those miles?” protests Jess’s mom. “We can’t use them.”

  “You can and you will,” says Gigi, holding up her hand as my mother starts to argue with her too. “I won’t hear another word about it. This book club is the most fun I’ve had in years, and this is the perfect ending to our year together.”

  I look at my mother hopefully. Am I finally going to get to meet Bailey?

  She hesitates a moment longer, then gives in. “Well, okay, I guess I can’t argue with that logic. Thank you, Gigi.”

  Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid looks
around the room and smiles. “It looks like the Mother-Daughter Book Club is heading west!”

  Jess

  “I’ve only just come and I’m not unpacked, but I can’t wait to tell you how much I like the farm. This is a heavenly, heavenly, heavenly spot!”

  —Daddy-Long-Legs

  Wyoming is awesome.

  My family doesn’t get away from Half Moon Farm very often, but I’ve been a few places besides Concord. Different parts of New England, mostly—Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, where my aunt and uncle live. And New York City, of course. Wyoming is the farthest I’ve ever been from home, though. Mom says it looks like the set of a Western movie, and she’s right. Looking out the bus window, I keep expecting to see a covered wagon coming toward us across the plains.

  There are horses everywhere too. I’ve counted at least fifteen ranches so far on the drive to Gopher Hole, and all of them have horses. Even some of the plain old ordinary-looking houses have corrals in their backyards. People out here must really love to ride.

  We flew in to Cheyenne this afternoon and the whole Gopher Hole Gang was there to meet us. They were just kidding when they called themselves that on the invitation they sent with Chloe’s baby present, but the name has kind of stuck. They came to get us in a school bus, of all things. I guess having the mayor of your town as one of the book club moms can come in handy, because Mrs. Winchester talked the principal of the school into lending her their bus to come pick us up. It’s a good thing she did, too. You should have seen everybody’s faces when they saw all of our luggage. Gigi practically needed an entire bus just for hers, plus it turns out that babies need a lot of stuff when they travel. Somehow we managed to cram it all in.

  Once we got out of the city—if you can call Cheyenne a city, because even though it’s the capital of Wyoming it’s nothing like Boston—it was like the whole world opened up. I’ve never seen so much sky in my entire life. Back home you can see the sky, of course, but there are hills and valleys and tons of trees that sometimes block part of the view. Out here, the view goes on forever, maybe because practically everywhere you look there are bare, windswept plains stretching out toward all those distant snow-capped peaks. The sky is endless. I know Montana is the state that gets called Big Sky country, but it might as well be Wyoming, too.

  I’m sitting next to Madison in the back of the bus. Emma and Megan and Cassidy and Becca are back here too, all of us paired up with our pen pals. The Concord moms and the Gopher Hole moms are sitting up front with Gigi and Eva Bergson and Chloe and Stanley, who was allowed to come along even though he’s a guy and he’s not in our book club, because someone needed to help take care of the baby. Plus, from what Cassidy tells us, he got down on his knees and begged her mother, which must have been pretty hard to resist. Stanley is crazy about his new little daughter.

  The adults are all laughing and talking like they’ve known each other forever. It’s taking a little longer for the rest of us back here. Well, except for Emma and Bailey, of course. You’d think they’d lived next door to each other for their entire lives, the way they’ve been chattering away.

  I sneak a glance around at the rest of my friends. Behind me, Winky is pointing out landmarks to Cassidy, and they seem like they’re getting along okay. Across the aisle, Summer is talking Megan’s ear off about quilts, and Megan looks like she’s going to fall asleep but she’s trying really hard to be on her best behavior because even though Summer is a little obsessed with quilting, she’s also incredibly nice. “Summer’s so sweet she makes my teeth hurt,” Cassidy whispered to me back at the airport after we all met.

  Plus, Megan’s mom gave her this big lecture on the plane about minding her manners. Actually, we all got that one.

  Behind them, Becca and Zoe Winchester are pretty quiet, mostly because they got into an argument at the airport about which of them has the coolest cell phone. Cassidy’s already started calling Zoe “Becca West.” And then there’s Madison and me.

  “So this is your first trip to Wyoming?” Madison asks politely.

  I nod.

  “Yeah, I’ve never been to New England before either,” Madison tells me. “The farthest I’ve been is to Chicago, and once when I was eight we visited Disney World.”

  “Cool. I’d like to go there someday.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I watch the front of the bus, where Professor Daniels is talking to my mom. Madison’s mother is tall, almost as tall as Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid, and she has the same perfect posture that Cassidy’s mother does. Her skin is as deep brown as Madison’s, and she wears her hair in these loose braids that are pulled back into a ponytail. I’ve been trying not to stare, but it looks really pretty and I keep wondering if I could get my hair to do that. She’s casually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but she’s wearing this really interesting jewelry—big chunky orange triangle earrings and a matching bracelet. I see Megan watching her too. She’s probably getting ready to pull out her sketchbook.

  Professor Daniels laughs at something my mother says, a low-pitched laugh that sounds like music. When I tell this to Madison, though, she thinks it’s hilarious.

  “Mom can’t sing for beans. Music just isn’t her thing—except for listening to it.” She tells me she gets her musical talent from her dad, who’s an orthodontist but who likes to play piano at home in his spare time. “I get my looks from him too, I guess,” she adds a little ruefully. “Dad calls it the ‘Daniels’ moon face’ and tells me to wear it proudly.”

  I laugh. “I think it’s a nice face,” I tell her, which is the truth. I like her hair, too, which is braided in horizontal rows across her head, different than her mom’s, but just as pretty.

  We fall silent for a few minutes, listening to the flow of conversation around us. Becca and Zoe are finally talking to each other again, and I can hear them discussing Beccca’s favorite topic: boys.

  “So have you had a good summer?” I ask Madison.

  “Pretty good,” she replies. “I went to guitar camp in Denver for a week, and over the Fourth of July weekend my band got to play at Laramie Jubilee Days.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They have it every year. There’s music and a parade and fireworks and carnival rides and even a rodeo.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “It is. How about you? What did you do this summer?”

  I shrug. “The usual. Summertime is kind of a lot of work when you live on a farm.”

  “Yeah, Winky talks a lot about what it’s like on her family’s ranch. It sounds pretty busy. But she likes it just fine.”

  “Me too,” I reply. “I love all our animals, and I don’t mind helping out with the farm stand and the goat cheese and jam and all that stuff. Emma hangs out with me a lot. The two of us volunteered at the Concord Animal Shelter twice a week too.”

  Madison scans our bus-mates. “Emma’s the one with the curly hair and glasses, right? Bailey’s pen pal?”

  “Yup. She’s my best friend.”

  “She looks nice.”

  “She is. How about you? Are you good friends with anyone in particular?”

  Madison purses her lips, considering. “Well, it’s a little different because I live in Laramie, and mostly only see these guys once a month at our meetings.”

  “How did you and your mom get invited to be in the book club?” I ask, curious.

  “My mom loves Mrs. Jacobs’s bookstore,” she explains. “They got to be friends, and she invited us to join. I’m glad, because it’s been really fun, even though I wasn’t so sure at first. Reading’s not my favorite thing to do.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “But the books have been pretty good, and I like Bailey a lot. Summer Williams, too, even though we’re really different.” She gives me a sidelong glance. “A person can only listen to so much talk about quilting, you know?”

  I smother a grin. Madison is turning out to be a whole lot more fun in person than she was in her brief letters.

  �
��Are you girls managing to break the ice back here?” says Mrs. Hawthorne, coming down the aisle toward us.

  Mrs. Jacobs is right behind her with chips and sodas. “This should help tide you over until dinner,” she tells us. “We’ve got only about another half hour to go. The Parkers have a special meal planned for us tonight, right, Winky?”

  “You bet,” says Winky. “Our welcome barbecue is always really good.”

  We pass through the outskirts of Laramie, and Madison points out the Medicine Bow Mountains in the distance, and the neighborhood near the university where they live.

  “Do you want to go to University of Wyoming someday?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “Nope. I’m aiming for Juilliard.”

  Mr. McNamara, our MadriGals director, is always talking about Juilliard. “That’s in New York, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s a really good music school, plus I think it would be fun to try living in a big city for a change. My mom says I have to have super-good grades to get in, though, so I’ll have to work really hard in high school.”

  I’ve thought about college, but I don’t have any idea yet where I want to go. Kevin Mullins has his entire future mapped out already, of course—Harvard or MIT or Cal Tech—but he’ll probably end up graduating early and I want my full four years of high school, especially since two of them involve Darcy Hawthorne. If I go to Alcott High, that is. I haven’t heard yet whether my scholarship at Colonial has been extended, and if it is I’m not sure I want to stay, even though this year turned out a lot better than I thought it would. Colonial Academy has a lot of things going for it—small classes with really great teachers, MadriGals, and horseback riding, for starters—but it also has two big drawbacks. No Darcy, and way too much Savannah Sinclair.

  “So whatever happened with that roommate of yours?” Madison asks, as if reading my thoughts.

  “Savannah? Oh, we managed to make it through to the end of the school year without killing each other,” I tell her.

  She laughs. “That bad, huh?”