A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

by Karen Romano Young

  “No, hon,” said Nichols. “It’s not even noon.”

  “You’re not leaving for good, right?” asked Pearl. “That isn’t what you meant? Going back where you—”

  “Where I came from? No,” he said. “I don’t have anything back there.”

  “What do you have here?” Francine asked.

  Pearl could have killed her. But Nichols smiled his sweetest smile. “All this!” he said, spreading his hands again. “But Pearl, your mother is not happy with me.”

  “She’s just worried about the library’s reputation,” said Pearl. She’d woken up to Bruce and Mom arguing about “how this will look to the neighborhood” that morning.

  “Fortunately for me, I think Mr. Bull and Mr. Dozer have the hotter story,” Nichols said.

  “Vincent’s the hot story,” said Pearl desperately, knowing she was wrong.

  “Not that many people are interested in an old statue,” he said carefully.

  “But the statue started all this,” said Francine. “Didn’t she?”

  “Among others,” said Nichols.

  “Like who?” said Francine.

  “How about you?” said Nichols, to Francine. Pearl couldn’t believe Francine would get all the credit, again.

  “Me?”

  “You’d never been to the library before the head went missing, right?” And with that Nichols turned and went down the driveway, his heavy, worn-out backpack over his shoulder, the umbrella under his arm.

  The girls watched solemnly. Francine might not know everything about Vincent and the library, figured Pearl, but she knew that Nichols was homeless and liked him anyway. Grownups always told you not to talk to the homeless people that slept on the street. But what was so bad about not having a home? Shouldn’t everyone feel sympathetic to people who didn’t have a place to live?

  She could tell that Francine, too, was wondering where Nichols was on his way to, maybe asking herself where he was going to sleep, and that made Pearl warm even more toward her.

  But then Francine said, “Do you think he stole the head?”

  “What? That’s stupid. Why would he?” Pearl stalked off, leaving Francine kicking at the grass.

  “I don’t know! Everyone seems to think the stolen head is what made me come to the library. But it wasn’t. It was you, screaming.”

  “Drama, in other words,” said Pearl with great scorn. She threw her arms around Vincent’s pedestal and wondered what was going to become of them all.

  “Drama? I thought someone was being killed!”

  “That’s not drama?”

  “No, that’s caring. I thought maybe you were hurt. I thought maybe you needed saving.”

  Pearl snapped, “And you thought you could save me?”

  Francine looked so hurt. But she changed to mad really fast. “Save you? No, obviously. You do everything yourself. You could save yourself yourself.” She wasn’t even making sense. And with that she was gone, running down the driveway, her tap shoes clacking no rhythm at all.

  Pearl was left behind, alone and thinking about Francine wanting to save her. Was it drama? She, Pearl, had screamed for a real reason. And Francine’s reason for running to her rescue—to help—was actually quite noble. And the rest of the neighborhood? Had they had such good intentions?

  Take Gully, for example. He was a neighbor. He had known her mom forever. It was natural that if something went wrong at the library, he would want to know what was up. Maybe caring was what made him want to know what happened. But drama was what had made him come and see for himself. It was Pearl’s scream—the whiff of drama—that had brought him to the library the day Vincent’s head got stolen. (Or was it worry that his business was going to be affected by that drama?) It was flashing lights—scary and awful to Pearl, but drama to the max for Gully—that had pulled him out of bed at three in the morning.

  Pearl got an idea like a glimpse of light through a dark window. If drama had made Gully come running, what did it do for other people? Answer: It made them do things they would normally not do, for one reason or another. Like come to the library.

  Pearl hadn’t meant to scream, but she had created drama that once. Realizing this felt like a little jolt of power. She wondered—could she do it again? And how?

  13: ALMOST FLATTENED

  SEP 15–16

  For the next week, the library staff reacted to the Nichols incident by being extra careful at closing time. One after another, they checked Nichols’s chair behind the atlas stand, not wanting to shut him in again. From across the street, on his stool behind the register at the Buck-a-Buy, Pearl could see Gully watching, too, his curiosity or need for drama or business security unsatisfied. One night Simon had to accidentally-on-purpose crash the book cart into the atlas shelf and wake Nichols so he could leave in time for closing.

  Pearl found herself considering Francine’s idea that maybe Nichols had stolen Vincent’s head. No way, Pearl told herself. What on earth would Nichols want with Vincent’s head?

  “At least it’s not cold in September,” Mom said, after he’d gone one night.

  “It will be in October,” said Pearl.

  “Hey, the college students are back,” said Alice, looking for something cheerful to say. There were always a few ragtag students who adopted the public library because it was quieter and cozier than their massive university stacks. They even took books out, which lifted circ a few more percentage points.

  “Hope we’re still here at midterms,” said Ramón.

  “You don’t expect the starving students to pitch in for our miserable heating bill, do you?” asked Bruce.

  “Or the spiral staircase. It’s wobblier than ever,” Simon observed.

  “So use the straight stairs,” said Pearl, who would admit nothing wrong with her library.

  “If only there was more money in the world,” said Ramón.

  “There are so many amazing new children’s books coming out,” Alice said to herself. “But when’s the last time a new school-age kid came in here?”

  “It’s the library’s image,” said Mom. “Teens and tweens are too cool for it. The library is for moms and toddlers and old people.”

  Pearl felt the burn deep in her tween heart. “And homeless people.” To change the subject, she asked, “What does Mr. Nichols eat?” She’d always wondered, but never felt like she could ask. Now, post–“break-in,” things felt different. She wanted Nichols to be okay.

  “There’s that soup kitchen in the basement of the firehouse,” Mom reminded her.

  “Who pays for that?” Pearl asked.

  “The city,” said Simon.

  “Money for soup kitchens, but not libraries?” asked Pearl.

  Mom gave her a frown. “Food or books, Pearl?” she asked. “Which would you choose, if you’re the mayor?”

  Bruce touched Pearl’s shoulder. “Or police protection?’

  “Or fire protection?” asked Ramón.

  Pearl swallowed. How could anyone choose? “Houses,” she said. “Warm, safe houses with food and books.”

  Alice said, “That’s what they want to put in here.”

  “Everybody should have both,” said Pearl.

  “Amen to that,” said Mom, and hugged her.

  “Amen,” they all agreed.

  But to herself, as she and Mom packed their tote bags and headed home, Pearl thought: Agreeing on needing houses and books was one thing. Waking Nichols to ask him to leave at night was another. Pearl started to think about the library at night, how it just sat there empty once Bruce finally left. Why couldn’t Nichols sleep there?

  That night after dinner, while it was still light, Pearl walked to Tallulah’s for the Moon. She had a banana and a granola bar in her pocket, and she stopped at the library to pop the snacks into the little shed-shaped box she’d found, where the old clothes and the stack of letters were. It was almost dark by the time she walked back, wondering if a certain someone would find the food she’d left.

&nb
sp; She had just passed Gully’s when she heard a thin, savage scream.

  (Another scream? Yes. And another turning point, too.)

  Pearl spun around. She glimpsed movement along the foundation of the library. A raccoon—a tiny one, nowhere near as big as the one she and Mom had seen from the stoop, even smaller than the one Pearl had seen in the basement. A baby?

  At that moment, all of the following things happened. First, she heard a loud ak-ak-ak chattering, as if an animal was scolding. Second, a taxi came whizzing down Lancaster Avenue. The little raccoon was in the headlights in front of it, staring into the beam. The scream was nearer now, louder, coming from another raccoon in the alley, a larger one. It was screaming at the little one, trying to stop it.

  “No!” Pearl shouted, darting into the street.

  Pearl bounded into the headlight beam, scooped the wild animal into her hands, and jumped back to the sidewalk. Brakes screeched. The taxi driver gave a furious yell. “Stupid kid!” The taxi peeled out, and the traffic raced on.

  Pearl was shaking. The little raccoon was going nuts in her hands, spinning and twisting and doing its own miniature version of the ak-ak-ak noise. The alley rang with the scolding of the bigger raccoon. Scolding Pearl now, she guessed, a mama worried about her baby.

  Pearl let the raccoon down gently onto the sidewalk. It dashed away into the shadow of the library, and both raccoons disappeared into the darkness. Pearl stood staring after them, but by the time her eyes adjusted from the glare of the street, nothing was there.

  “Got the paper?” Mom asked as Pearl came in the door.

  “Right here,” said Pearl. She kept the baby raccoon, the big raccoon, the taxi, the banana, and the granola bar to herself, not knowing why.

  The speeding taxi and the screeching raccoon had sent her dashing into the street toward a near-death experience. Why had she done something so risky?

  Drama—and caring. The magic combination.

  Gully caught Pearl’s eye as she passed his door on the way to the newsstand the next morning. He waved the paper at her, looking triumphant. Dread grew in her stomach when she saw the front-page headline: TROUBLED NEIGHBORHOOD, ELUSIVE REMEDY. Yoiks’s editor had won again.

  “What’s elusive?” asked Pearl.

  “Hard to find,” said Ramón. “Slippery, like an eel.”

  “And are we troubled?”

  “Well, he makes the neighborhood sound sad.”

  (In fact, Yoiks made the neighborhood sound more like it was trouble. You could only hope the story was part one of a multi-part series, and that the next parts would be solutions or celebrations.)

  The story was about a lot of little things that Yoiks made a big deal out of. It mentioned the animal graffiti that was suddenly all over Lancaster Avenue, as if there was something bad about street art. It mentioned the mugging outside Big Foods, as if one mugging was the symptom of a disease. And it lumped together “a would-be library patron tripping the night alarm” and “vandalism of a historic statue”—as if those things were connected—under the heading of mysterious midnight creepers (as if there was something naturally bad about being out at night.) All of this made it sound as if the theft of the head and an intruder—Nichols!—and the mugging and the coyote graffiti were all one big connected crime.

  When Ramón was done reading the story aloud to the staff, Pearl said, “Thanks a lot, Gully.” It was obvious from several anonymous quotes that he had been a willing source for the story.

  “Is there a picture?” asked Simon. There was a small photograph of Vincent looking especially pathetic and headless, and a picture of a howling dog painted on a wall. No poems. No pictures of the library or its staff.

  The caption: Lost on Lancaster Avenue: one stone head, much neighborhood pride

  “We’ve lost our pride? This is like the last rites,” said Bruce. “Next time we make it into the paper, it will be an obituary.”

  Mom hugged him, right in front of all of them. It was unusual, and Pearl felt like pebbles of light were exploding in her heart. Mom said, “Look, we tried to get the media on our side, and that hasn’t worked. We’ve just gotten lumped in with other crimes.”

  “Here’s another way to look at that,” Ramón said. “He starts by making the reader be concerned about the neighborhood. He sets up a scenario where people are looking for a way to fix it—the remedy. Maybe the first step to improving a scenario is to bring attention to it.”

  “Those newspaper people aren’t interested in helping us save our library,” said Bruce, and that made Mom walk back out of his arms.

  (Bruce was wrong, anyway. Yoiks didn’t like the headline any better than we did. He’d been overridden by his editor, which sometimes happens.)

  Mom said, “We have to turn it around, that’s all, find a way to make the library vital to the community. That’s how we get the votes we need to stop the apartments.”

  “Vital to the community!” Bruce looked weary. “That’s a tall order.”

  Mom said, “If we can just get more library cards into people’s hands . . .”

  “What people?” said Alice. “Children?”

  “Teenagers?” asked Simon.

  “Young women?” asked Mom, looking at Alice, thinking of mothers.

  A Sidebar About Cannoli

  I love words. I love being able to write exactly what I mean. Take the word “sweet.” It has two meanings that are different but not so far apart.

  Bruce did not know what to do after Yoiks’s sad article about the neighborhood was published in the Moon, so he did something sweet, in one meaning, with something sweet, in the other meaning: a box of cannoli from Little Italy.

  A cannoli is a crunchy pastry tube, kind of like a cookie that comes out of the oven soft, then gets rolled around a spoon handle to make a cylinder. It dries hard, then it’s filled with a mixture of mascarpone cheese (a soft sugary mush) and crushed chocolate chips.

  If you want to do something both-meanings-sweet for me, go to Mulberry Street and buy half a dozen cannoli, cart them back to the library, put the box in the book elevator, push B, and forget about it. I’ll take care of the rest.

  I’m breaking my own rule about advancing the plot. This sidebar doesn’t. It’s just an ode—a praise—to cannoli. And to bringing food to hungry people. And to sweetness. Caring. Pick your own exact word.

  —M.A.M.

  “How about lonely people?” asked Pearl. “Or people who need someplace to go.” She was thinking of Mr. Nichols, going off alone into the dark with just that backpack. And, she had to admit this, too, that she was thinking about Francine’s sad, hurt face when she’d told Pearl why she’d come to the library the first time—to help someone. To help her, Pearl. “Lonely people have more time to care, maybe,” Pearl added.

  PART TWO: THE PLOT THICKENS

  “Oh, if instead she’d left to me

  The thing she took into the grave!

  That courage, like a rock, which she

  Has no more need of, and I have.”

  —“THE COURAGE THAT MY MOTHER HAD”1

  BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

  1 From the poem “The courage that my mother had,” from Mine the Harvest by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper, 1954).

  14: THE ROCK BOY

  SEP 18

  The boy in the Day-Glo green T-shirt was inside the library. He stood with his fingertips on the edge of the circulation desk. Before Mom even noticed he was there, he announced, “I found a new head for your statue.”

  Pearl sat up straight so fast she bumped her head against the globe, setting it spinning. “Vincent doesn’t need a new head!” she yelled across the reference room, startling an old lady who was poring over pictures of tulip bulbs in a big National Geographic.1

  The first thing she noticed about the boy, now that he was near, was his eyes. They were a light bright green in his pale, pale face and were almost as oddly lit as his shirt and his white-blond hair. The light didn’t come from the color of his
eyes, and it wasn’t reflecting from his shirt. The light had something to do with what he was saying, or how he was saying it.

  He came over to her nook behind the atlas shelf. “It’s granite,” he said. “There’s lots of granite around here. It’s native to this part of the country. So if you want to get the new head carved, I’m a good man with rocks—” Here his voice rose, all hopeful, out of a low beginning-teenage voice to a still-in-middle-school one. “And I’ve found the perfect piece of granite.”

  The front of his shirt said

  GO

  CLIMB

  A

  ROCK

  The back said

  YOSEMITE CLIMBING SCHOOL.

  Pearl asked, “Did you go to Yosemite Climbing School?” Yosemite was a national park like the one Bruce used to work in. It was in California or somewhere.

  “When I’m sixteen,” the boy said, “I’m going cross-country. I’m going to buy a car and just drive until I get there.”

  He talked in that way of someone who was really smart about one topic and made you pay attention even if you weren’t even interested. Pearl wasn’t interested (in Vincent, yes; in raccoons, definitely; but granite? no), yet she couldn’t help being impressed. She had never thought about what she’d do—just herself without Mom or anybody—but this boy had his plans made already.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  A Sidebar About Geeks

  “Everybody’s a geek for something,” Granny had told Francine the other day. And it was true. You could usually tell what every person was a geek for. Pearl was a geek for books. So was her mom. So was Alice.

  You could be a geek for words, like Ramón. For music, like Simon. For nature, like Bruce (though it might have been better for him if he was a geek for libraries). For me it’s writing, but it was reading first.

  That boy who’d just moved to the neighborhood with his screechy mother was a rock-climbing geek, according to my cousin Eloise, who lived in the tree and could look right into his apartment. He had posters of mountains on his bedroom walls.