Exactly
wrote the raccoon.
“Raccoon talk seems like the seagulls in Finding Nemo1,” said Pearl. “They say ‘Mine! Mine!’ but people think they’re just screeching. Your talk sounds like ak-ak-ak to me.”
We’re better than that. It’s not all just squabbling.
The raccoon fell silent, her pen poised. Her sentences even had proper capitalization and punctuation, Pearl noticed.
“I’m Pearl Amalie Moran,” she said. The raccoon nodded. “What’s your name?”
You haven’t guessed?
“Actually, maybe I have—Mary Ann Mallomar.” She finished saying it just as Mary Ann finished writing it. “Yes!”
Mary Ann Mallomar
There was a satisfied silence between them. Then Pearl said, “My initials are P.A.M. Yours are M.A.M.”
Mary Ann nodded. She wrote:
P.A.M. and M.A.M.
“You’re a poet and you know it,” said Pearl. “Like Vincent.”
Vincent. She was the reason Pearl was here—to find Vincent’s head, to save the library—but she knew she needed to go slowly, not demand everything at once. And still she was trying to calm down about the fact that she was holding a discussion with a wild animal. So she made conversation. “There’s a lot of squabbling in my house, too,” said Pearl, trying to pretend this was all normal. “My mother and I don’t see eye to eye on everything, such as cleaning standards.”
Mary Ann’s little white teeth showed for a moment.
My mother gets mad at Arak for making a mess.
“My mother’s the messy one,” said Pearl. “She gets all the control stuff out of her system at the library, Bruce says.”
Does she control you?
“She tries,” said Pearl. “But I have my own plans.”
Like what?
Pearl had thought maybe she could teach the raccoons to talk or do tricks, once she had found out from them who had taken Vincent’s head. Now she found herself wondering if Mary Ann was smarter than she was.
“An investigation. And a marketing campaign, I think.”
She had pulled that phrase “marketing campaign” out of the back of her head.
To save the library?
Pearl nodded. Yes, that was it—saving the library by marketing it. Not to Mr. Bull or Mr. Dozer, either! No, to people who wanted to keep it the way it always had been.
Mary Ann wrote one of the first things she had ever learned to read, a slogan that used to be on an old billboard over Lancaster Avenue.
Just do it.
“I don’t know where to start.”
My grandmother told me about selling papers. The first thing is to let people know the paper’s there. Then you have to make them want it.
“Your grandmother, Mrs. Mallomar?”
Mary Ann nodded.
Just then they heard Mom calling out for Pearl.
Mary Ann put down the Sharpie. She held up her paw.
Pearl held up her hand, too.
A Sidebar About My Cousin Eloise
My cousin Eloise wants to beat me at everything.
She is snotty to me and tells me to get my head out of the books. I tell her, “Knowledge is power.” She tells me to pay attention to the real world and maybe I’ll see some surprising, even disturbing things.
Eloise lives in the tree right above Vincent. She claims she knows who took Vincent’s head, but she won’t tell me who. She says the criminal’s true identity would surprise and disturb me.
“So if knowledge is power,” says Eloise, “then I beat you, brains and all.”
—M.A.M.
Pearl thought, This probably isn’t real.
Just in case it wasn’t, she stood still and said, “Did you see who took the statue’s head?”
The raccoon shook her head. But she took two steps toward Pearl.
“Pearl!” Mom yelled from above. “School!”
Pearl thought, Well, that is real, Mom upstairs. So it must be real downstairs, too. She crouched low, looked into Mary Ann’s deep, dark eyes, and said, “If we could find the head again, it would be a big deal. It might bring people back to the library.” She took a deep breath. “Will you—will you ask around and see if your family knows anything?”
Mary Ann bobbed her head once. Then she stepped back into the shadowy corner of the basement.
Pearl crept up the stairs. She dashed through the foyer, grabbing her backpack from the floor in front of the circ counter along the way.
“I’m walking to school with Francine!” Pearl bellowed to her mother, and was gone.
1 Finding Nemo, Disney/Pixar movie, 2003.
22: CHARISMA
STILL SEP 29
Pearl ran across the street and buzzed Francine. As she stood on the sidewalk waiting, she didn’t care about Gully watching out his window, didn’t care about anything. I had a conversation with a raccoon, she thought, and laughed to herself. I have a friend who’s a raccoon. How bizarre! And this raccoon friend was going to help Pearl find Vincent’s head.
“What’s up with you?” said Francine, coming out. Pearl was practically bouncing up and down.
“Nothing,” said Pearl, and giggled to herself.
Francine was not in any such giddy mood. As they walked along, she said, “I looked out my window last night, and you’ll never guess who I saw walking down the street. Mr. Gulliver himself.”
“So? I hope you threw a flip-flop at his head.”
“And,” whispered Francine. “I saw you. You and Mr. Nichols. Holding hands and walking down the street.”
Pearl wished a crack would open in the sidewalk and swallow her up. But she confided, “Mr. Nichols was in the garden last night. I think he sometimes sleeps there, so I was checking to see if that was true.” Francine gaped, but Pearl rushed on, “He didn’t have anywhere to sleep, and if Gully thinks he’s trespassing on library property, he’ll get him sent to a shelter. You heard what he said that time we were in the store: He wants Mr. Nichols and all the other homeless people out of the neighborhood. So you can’t tell anybody you saw us, Francine, you just can’t, not if you’re my friend.”
She felt exhausted, and they weren’t even at school yet. “Can’t you see? Holding his hand showed Gully Mr. Nichols wasn’t trespassing.”
She wanted to say, “I’ve been talking to raccoons.” But a harsh, prickly mood was coming from Francine, and Pearl felt compelled to smooth it. So instead she said, “I showed my mom the loading dock, too.” She searched her imagination for some appropriate words. “You did a good thing, showing me. Maybe something good will happen for Mr. Nichols now. Maybe we can do something good, I mean.”
“Oh,” said Francine. Then, “Okay.”
The silence fell again. Had Pearl been too formal? Did Francine think she was being weird? Or crazy for walking around at night hand in hand with Nichols? She searched her imagination again, this time for a peace offering, and brought up a subject she knew Francine wanted to talk about. “What’s the scariest story you know? I mean fictional, not nonfiction. Not real life.”
“The Rock Lady dance,” said Francine.
“I said story,” said Pearl. Then she worried that she was being a book geek again. “You like being scared by stories, right?’
Francine nodded, a little embarrassed.
“Then I need you to help me make the story about Vincent even more dramatic. I know you’ve been working on that Rock Lady thing.” Just like that, Pearl let go of her ownership of Vincent, forcing her chin up, even if it strained her neck. If Mary Ann could help, maybe so could Francine.
Francine tapped her toes, even though she only had her school shoes on, and smiled at last. “After ignoring all my ideas, now you want me to act out the Rock Lady dance? What for?”
“You said you came to the library because you were scared by my scream, right?”
Francine nodded.
“We’re going to scare more people into coming to the library.”
; Francine smiled, and wiggled her eyebrows.
All day, Pearl kept reminding herself of the morning conversation with Mary Ann, checking in to see if it still felt real. It didn’t, but it was. And she kept thinking about Mary Ann’s idea for a marketing campaign to save the library, and all of Francine’s Rock Lady ideas that maybe weren’t so crazy after all. Pearl wasn’t sure what would make adults come to the library, but she knew she ought to be smart enough to figure out kids.
At school Pearl was all eyes, silently observing everything that went on around her. Since the first day of school, Elsa hadn’t asked Pearl to give any more story summaries for Millie or anyone else—none of the girls had even spoken to her.
Pearl still didn’t understand why they excluded her. It made her leery of trying to tell them any story, really. But the plan she was devising with Francine’s inspiration could only have a story at the center. And dimly, in her heart, Pearl knew that the problem wasn’t the story (after all, Harry Potter had taken over the world; it wasn’t his fault those girls wouldn’t let Pearl jump rope with them); no, the problem was her.
Pearl was afraid that any story she told would suffer from her being the one to tell it.
(She was going to need Francine’s help after all.)
At recess Pearl sat alone, holding up her book, pretending to be examining some illustration, while actually peering around the playground. Games of four square that always had four players already. Three-girl jump rope that she wasn’t allowed to join. And the boys playing H-O-R-S-E or just shooting baskets. In that group was Oleg Boiko.
Now Pearl observed Oleg over the edge of her book. New to the school, a dropout from somewhere else, he didn’t seem to have any trouble making friends. He hooted and shot and leaped with the rest of the eighth graders as if he had known them all his life.
On the way home, Pearl mentioned this, and Francine said that Oleg Boiko had charisma. “Granny says it’s a quality you have to have if you’re going to be a good performer, like if you’re going to be a tap dancer.”
Pearl could see what charisma meant: an odd green shirt and a lit-up expression, and then you were allowed to join H-O-R-S-E games. But also, she figured, while Oleg was playing H-O-R-S-E, he would have to be talking about basketball, because that’s what H-O-R-S-E is, so he wasn’t necessarily talking about rocks the whole time. That gave her a sort of clue to life. People didn’t mind you being geeky if they already liked you for yourself.
“Did Granny say you have charisma?” asked Pearl. “Because I think you do, and it’s nothing to do with the tap dancing.”
“Personally, I think I could light up any stage as the Rock Lady.”
Pearl hoped Francine’s confidence could carry them both. “Are you coming over? Are we going to work on this dance or not?”
“The dance? The story? You know what it is? It’s a performance,” said Francine. “And a performance needs more people.”
Pearl’s heart sank: She didn’t dare ask anyone else! Well, wait, maybe one: “Let’s go ask . . . Oleg,” said Pearl.
Francine was astonished. “But he’s an eighth grader,” she said.
“So he is.”
A Sidebar About Reading
Sometimes reading comes gradually. Sometimes it comes like a smack upside the head. For my grandmother, it happened the second way.
Before she moved to 221/2 Beep Street, she lived in the library basement where we live now. One night, my grandmother and her friends scared off a swarm of rats that had stolen a box from a carton behind orange-haired Rosita’s Rosebud bodega and dragged it to the foot of the statue in the garden. The attraction was a soft cookie, a dense dome of fluffy, succulent marshmallow, covered in dark chocolate as light and brittle as an eggshell, and meltingly delectable.
The Ms were the key to her reading. As she said the name “Mallomars”1 over and over to herself, she studied the letters. Two humps meant “mmmmmm.” Two vertical lines said “ullllll.” An A was an open mouth. After a certain amount of repetition, R and S also released their sounds to her. She learned the sounds of the rest of the letters by studying every word that had the letters she already knew.
Her first name was a raccoon word: Mrzx. Now she became the first raccoon to claim a last name like the ones humans use—in fact, a human word: Mallomar. My mother, Matilda, came along soon after, and then her sister, Eilonwy. I’m my mother’s daughter, named after her favorite steam shovel, a book Vincent sent my mother in which a basement plays an important role. I am the one who found the nonfiction book that gave my brother his name, in the course of doing research about what humans think of raccoons.
Both Mrs. Mallomar’s children were taught to read, but not all embraced this human-style learning. Even Aunt Eilonwy, a reader who lives in the tree above Vincent, had a rebel—her daughter, my cousin, Eloise. Eloise the exotic, who wants to see the world. Eloise the illiterate, who barely knows the words she’d need to find her way across town on the subway.
—M.A.M.
“And he’s . . . popular.”
“So he is,” said Pearl again.
Francine whispered, “So he might not want to have anything to do with—”
Pearl interrupted. “SO?”
Francine shut up, so Pearl shut up and waited, too. But she couldn’t ever shut up for long. She let go of her pride and said, “So come on.” Two people with charisma plus one without it (her)? Fine. They walked around the corner to Clancy Street and rang the bell to Oleg’s apartment.
Oleg looked out a second-floor window and called, “The buzzer doesn’t work.”
“Come over to the library!” Francine yelled up. “We’ll be in the back, by the statue!” She ran away giggling. Pearl, feeling gawky and over-serious, trudged back to the library behind her.
The girls stood in the garden and watched the driveway until they heard a noise behind them and turned to see Oleg balance for a moment on the brim of the library’s dumpster and jump between two trees to land gymnastically on the grass.
“Hello,” said Pearl, acting as though everyone entered the garden this way. She took charge of the situation before Francine had a chance. “Okay, look. We’ve got this plan for school, and we need you to help us spread the news about the library.”
“About how it’s getting made into apartments?” said Oleg.
“If you spread that news,” warned Pearl, “then you’ll never get to help with Vincent’s new head.”
Oleg’s face fell; he sure wanted to be a hero. “Yoiks doesn’t think the statue matters,” he admitted. “But the librarian does.”
“My mother?”
“She’s your mom?” Oleg focused on Pearl. “Oh yeah, I can see it. Same intense eyes. Anyway, she’s working on an idea to tell people who—Vincent, you call her?—was. She’s thinking about trying to get sponsors—you know, ‘buy an ear’ or something like that.”
“People are going to buy one of Vincent’s ears?” Pearl said, hearing panic come into her own voice. From the way Oleg was eyeing her, she knew she needed to settle down.
She was relieved when he smiled and answered. “Sure, like buying a brick outside Citi Field. It helps the Mets. Or, my cousin’s school in Pennsylvania, they put money on a square of their football field, and somebody lets a cow on the field, and the square where it lets one go—”
“What?” shrieked Francine.
“True,” said Oleg, grinning. “It’s called a cow-patty raffle.”
“So people buy an ear, or an eyeball, or her skirt—and the head gets paid for.” Pearl was trying to understand. “Peculiar.”
“Your mom thought of that?” asked Francine.
“And,” continued Pearl, working Mom’s plan into her own, “people might especially want to buy parts of something that’s haunted.”
“Haunted? The statue or the library?” asked Oleg.
“Both!” said Francine.
“And that’s what we need you for,” said Pearl to Oleg. “Here’s the plan: I’m wr
iting the scary story. Francine’s going to turn it into a performance.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Oleg asked.
“You’re the plant,” said Francine, as if she were bestowing an honor.
Oleg looked blank. “I’m a geologist,” he said. “At least let me be a rock.”
He was funny. They laughed.
“She means you’re going to be in the audience. Planted there. Your job is to help people believe it,” said Pearl. “It’s easy. All you have to do is believe it yourself. After the performance, you ask kids, ‘Have you heard about the library? I heard it’s haunted.’”
“I hardly know anybody at this school yet,” said Oleg.
“What? You’re friends with everybody on the basketball court,” said Pearl.
“It’s just basketball,” said Oleg. Pearl was surprised to see he looked uncertain.
“You’ll be fine,” said Francine. “Look at the entrance you just made here.” She gestured to the dumpster. “You’re a born performer.”
“We’re like reporters.” Pearl nodded at Francine. “We’re the ones who have to make the story real.”
“Make it true,” corrected Francine. “And scary.”
“But without the audience, we’re nothing,” said Pearl. “They have to be able to envision what we’re seeing.”
“That’s where you come in,” Francine said to Oleg. “You act scared. You tell them what they should be scared of.”
“Why should they believe me?”
Pearl said, inspired, “Because it’s real to you.”
He looked into her eyes and nodded. “It’s official,” he said. “I’m a plant.”
1 Mallomars are cookies that have been around since 1913, mostly in New York. Think graham cracker cookie plus marshmallow plus a thin, crisp, delectable outer coating of dark chocolate—which is why you can only get them September to March. Otherwise they melt. That’s just one reason they’re precious.
A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Page 14
