“I do,” said Mom. “They have to. It’s just good business.”
“Then what?”
“Then we’ll have a very short time period to win neighborhood support and make everyone here want to vote for the library over apartments.”
“Listen, here’s my plan,” said Simon hurriedly. “We’re going to have a rock concert.”
“When?” Yoiks said.
“Halloween,” Simon said. “If we can get people to come to the garden, if they like the library well enough, maybe that will convince the neighbors to vote for it.”
“Hey, Francine and I have a Halloween plan, too,” Pearl said.
But just then Yoiks’s cell phone rang. “Yoiks,” he said into it. He listened a moment, then said, “Got it.” He said to the library people, “Gotta dash.” Yoiks pointed up at Pearl and said, “I want you to tell me more. Later.” Then he was gone, Mom following in his wake.
Typical.
Pearl let her feet dangle over the edge of the mezzanine and looked down at Simon. If growing up, for Pearl, was a river, with grown-ups on one shore and, on the other, little kids with no worries about real life and real problems, then Simon was a rock in the middle of the stream, a safe landing spot where she could check whether her little-kid ideas could work with grown-ups, or if they would get ignored or laughed at. But lately Simon seemed different, quieter, busy inside his head, older, more worried. Was this what happened when you were a teenager?
How long ago was it that he’d brought her almond cookies and sat on the floor of the children’s room to read her picture books, the two of them giggling until Alice lost patience?
When Pearl was younger, she had always thought she was Simon’s best friend. Since she had been Simon’s best friend here, she’d thought then, she must be his best friend everywhere.
Now she realized this idea was one of those little-kid ideas, something she’d thought of when she didn’t realize the world existed outside the library. Now she knew Simon had secrets. Lately she felt on the outside of things with him.
But he was still her rock. She wanted to believe that.
Pearl folded a card-catalog card into a paper airplane and flew it down toward Simon’s fiery head. He looked up. His eyes had dark circles under them. “You look like a raccoon,” she said, and immediately thought it was a dumb way to open the subject. “What’s the matter with your eyes?” she asked. “Didn’t you sleep last night?”
Simon shook his head and mimed playing a guitar.
“All night?”
“It felt like it,” he said. “I had to. I have to get better or I won’t get into Berklee.” That was the music school in Boston that he wanted to go to. He put both his hands on his head and rubbed his hair, hard. Then he kept his hands up there and didn’t say anything for a minute.
Poor Simon! She was glad she had something to distract him with. “Speaking of raccoons,” she continued, “have you ever thought about the raccoons around here? How, uh, tame they are?”
“If by tame you mean well-adapted . . . I guess they’d have to be to survive the mean streets.” He was clearly still mad about the way Jonathan Yoiks had described their neighborhood.
“Do you”—she flipped through some verbs in her mind: Think? Believe? Know?—“realize they can read?”
“Reading raccoons? That would be a good one.” Simon wasn’t put off by Pearl’s goofy raccoon suggestion, but his mind was already moving on. “Pearl, remember when you said the bandits? Is that because they look like bandits? Or because a bunch of them is called a band?”
“Hmm. I don’t know what a bunch of them is called.”
(I could have told her. And I would tell her when she asked: A bunch of raccoons is called a mask. Or a gaze. And if you don’t think that’s beautiful, you mustn’t be a lover of words—or raccoons.)
“Well, a bunch of coyotes is called a band,” said Simon.
“Coyotes? Bruce says there are actual wild coyotes around here, but they’re too smart to ever let you see them. Ow-oo!” Her howling didn’t make Simon laugh.
“Why do you ask?” Pearl said.
But Simon wouldn’t answer and seemed distracted. He didn’t seem to have heard her about the raccoons, either.
1 These are all real publications.
25: THE SCHOOL PLAN
SEP 30–OCT 1
On Saturday afternoon, Pearl wanted to work on her story, but got distracted imagining Khadija and Elsa and Millie responding to the performance. Try though she might to focus on the other 779 kids in the school, she couldn’t stop picturing their faces, hearing their voices sneering, thinking she was stupid, or geeky, or ridiculous. She couldn’t get those girls out of her head no matter how much she said to herself, Just do it. Just do it. Just do it.
Suddenly, she thought, why do they matter so much? She had Francine, and she was a friend, wasn’t she?
Pearl also sort of had Oleg. He was coming over to work on the plan with them on Sunday, in preparation for Monday at school. And he was an eighth grader! So what if he was just doing it because he wanted the library to use his replacement head on their statue?
And she had Nichols. Sure, he was a grown man, even further away from her age than Oleg, but he had shown her the reading raccoons. He believed in them, and he believed in her. That made him a real friend, no matter how old he was.
And then there was Mary Ann. Pearl really did have a friend who was a raccoon named Mary Ann.
And that was enough to ease her nervousness about her story and the performance. Pearl slipped down the basement steps and woke up Mary Ann for the second time that week.
Nocturnal, wrote Mary Ann.
Pearl winced. “Sorry,” she said, but was too excited to be sorry for long. “I need Mike Mulligan. And in return I want to tell you my story. Did you read my letter? Will you be my practice audience?”
Mary Ann wrote, What makes you think we have Mike Mulligan?
“I saw it, thief!” said Pearl. She was a bit shocked at herself, acting like Mary Ann was just any human, talking to her like that.
But Mary Ann was laughing, showing her little teeth.
“Please,” said Pearl. “You’ll get input on the story, too. You’ll get to be an editor, like your grandmother.”
Mary Ann wasn’t writing anything, but maybe that was because she had been awakened from a sound sleep and she wasn’t used to a human talking to her directly, making demands and offering deals.
“You’ll get to help make kids come to the library, if the story’s good enough,” continued Pearl. “I’m trying to do what you said. You know—just do it.”
Mary Ann seemed to be considering the plan.
“I need someone impartial,” Pearl went on. “Francine and Oleg are too close to the story to be impartial. And at school, nobody likes me because nobody cares about books as much as I do.” Something about talking to a raccoon allowed her to admit this truth out loud for the first time.
When you do something other people don’t do, they think you think you’re special.
“Is it my fault I’ve read more books than any other fifth grader in the whole city?”
Listen to yourself.
A Sidebar About Editors
An editor’s job is to stop you from drowning in fear that your own writing is terrible. Yes, the editor is supposed to stop you from messing up. But he or she is also responsible for pushing you in the right direction.
Sometimes it’s simple enough to just praise the writer for the good parts.
Other times, time is simply up and the story has to be finished. That’s when things just have to be the best you can make them. And then it’s time to get up and tell the story. See, a good editor makes a writer feel like he or she has wings and will not crash.
The morning I sent Pearl to school to tell her story even though it wasn’t exactly finished and perfect—even though it was full of holes and gaps and pitfalls—was like that.
—M.A.M.
Ju
st then, there was a moaning sound, and a bigger raccoon loomed out of the gloom.
Finally! Wait until Pearl told Mom she had actually met Matilda, the daughter of Mrs. Mallomar.
Pearl stared as the older raccoon leaned close to her daughter and whispered, ak-ak-aking. Then she heaved a sigh, like Mom sometimes in the middle of the night, and went off—back to bed, presumably.
Pearl whispered, “What did your mother just say?”
She said to take the editing job.
“Yes!” said Pearl.
When do we start?
“Today,” said Pearl.
I’m going back to sleep.
“It’ll be here when you wake up.”
Pearl worked on her story until closing, and well after Mom and Bruce had locked the front door, and while they sat hunched over the circulation numbers. She typed on Ramón’s computer until she didn’t know what more to write.
Of course it wasn’t all going to make it into the performance, but it gave the performance background. The foreground—what the audience would see—Pearl filled with suspenseful silence, shocking sounds, and ghostly visions. For herself, she wrote the background, the back-and-forth between her and Oleg, punctuated by bizarre moves from Francine.
And then she sneaked down the basement stairs and left it on the bottom step for Mary Ann: three printed sheets, double- sided, triple-spaced to allow room for edits, as Mary Ann had instructed her.
Sunday morning it seemed like fall had arrived at last: bright, cold, sunny, windy. Pearl put on jeans and socks and the cool secondhand clogs Mom had bought her at Housing Works the week before. She clopped as she and Mom walked to the library, then took the clogs off in the back hall and went down the basement stairs in her sock feet.
There was her story manuscript, folded in half the long way on the second stair from the top. Ecstatic, Pearl snatched it and ran up the stairs two at a time, put her clogs back on, and took a couple experimental skipping steps across the foyer toward her nook.
“Don’t tell me you’re taking up tap dance,” said Mom.
Pearl snorted and settled down behind the atlas. Her papers were now covered with notes and cross-outs and arrows from Mary Ann. Pearl worked on the story all morning, scrawling changes, adding ominous asides, posing questions that she’d let her audience answer in their own imaginations, and getting rid of boring stuff that led nowhere.
At noon, Pearl went up to the nonfiction stacks in the children’s room, peering at the photographs and other illustrations in biographies of real people who had fought the way things were—civil rights fighters in the South, girls and women in other countries fighting laws that kept them from going to school, LGBTQ people right here in New York City. She studied the signs people held and the slogans on the signs and the names of the groups that were marching.
There was a loud emotional sigh, and Pearl looked up to see Alice looking grouchy, her hand on her stomach. Then she came and lay right down in the aisle and groaned.
Pearl was greatly alarmed. “Are you all right?”
Alice just laughed. “I’m seven months pregnant,” she said. “I feel like a cow swimming through rice.”
Pearl looked at the mountain that was Alice, lying there. She patted Alice’s hand and said, “Want me to read to you?” She read a line from one of the open books: “‘You must be the change you want to see in the world.1’”
Alice said, “Free spa treatments and chocolate for all pregnant women. That’s the change I want to see.”
Chocolate made Pearl think of Halloween, and costumes made her think of a parade Alice had always wanted to have. “What’s your idea for that children’s book costume parade?” she asked. “We could add that to Halloween, too!”
Alice groaned some more. “Who’s going to organize that mess?” she asked. “Not me.”
“Think of some good costumes,” said Pearl. “That’s all you’d need to do.”
“Easy peasy,” said Alice. “The playing-card gardeners from Alice in Wonderland2—just cardboard and string. A mouse with mouse ears and a giant cookie made of poster board for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.3 Harriet the Spy4 with glasses and a notebook and a flashlight.”
Pearl wrote things down in her own notebook. Halloween was the second part of the plan. But they had to get through tomorrow before she could focus on the Halloween part.
Tomorrow was the big day, the day of the plan at school.
They had their last rehearsal that afternoon, the whole team nervous. Francine had come early, and Pearl got worried Oleg would blow them off, so she made Francine walk over to Clancy Street to get him. She felt somehow that he was the key to convincing people at their school to see her differently. Maybe it was because he was a boy, or because his grades weren’t that good but he still liked the library, or because he was athletic and strong. Whatever it was, his allegiance would make Pearl look different to the kids at school.
The moment Pearl heard Oleg’s footsteps pounding up the steps and saw the smile he had for everyone, including her, she felt herself smiling back. And for the rest of the day, it was almost like she really did have charisma. Their act went off well every time they ran it through.
It was only later that the jitters returned: Would “well” be good enough? That evening, after their practice, Pearl climbed into bed with her manuscript, fighting a nauseated feeling in her stomach at the thought of executing the plan. Well, the fact was, time was up. Whatever she had now was what they’d go with tomorrow. Again she saw Elsa’s eyes, and Millie’s. But then she thought, at least it won’t be just me they’ll be looking at. There were three of them. And, looking down at her manuscript, with Mary Ann’s edits written on it, she thought: no, four.
She read the story over and over until she knew it backward and frontward by heart. Then she turned off the light. For a while she tried to keep her fingers crossed, to put a good-luck spell on herself for the morning. But falling asleep, she knew her fingers would come uncrossed, and there was nothing she could do about it.
1 This common quote is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, who actually said, “As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. . . . We need not wait to see what others do.”
2 Actually: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Macmillan, 1865).
3 If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff (HarperCollins, 1985).
4 Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (Harper & Row, 1964).
26: THE HAUNTING OF LANCASTER AVENUE
OCT 2
School that Monday morning felt frighteningly normal. When something strange is going to happen and you’re the one who’s going to cause it, you feel weird and wary inside. Pearl knew she was going to have to pull some kind of magic trick to make the kind of change she wanted to see. But first, settle down, she told herself. Just follow the plan.
She went and buzzed Francine, and when they got to the corner, Oleg was there waiting for them. Some kids were coming from the other way. Go time!
Francine led off: “It might not be haunted the way it is in our story, but somebody’s haunting it in their own way.”
It was part of the plan for each of them to say exactly that, at various points along the route to school—loudly, so everybody in earshot would hear them, making everybody who heard wonder what was haunted. Then they’d move on to the next spot, stand there as if they were waiting for somebody, letting the school traffic pass until there was a new set of kids nearby, then they’d say it again.
Pearl hooked her thumbs in her backpack straps and held down the blowing sides of her vest with her elbows. Besides her nerves about the plan, she found herself slightly embarrassed at being with Oleg, an eighth grader. In the school’s pale yellow uniform instead of his customary Day-Glo, he seemed oddly formal. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow; he wasn’t one of the kids who could afford short-sleeved shirts as well as the required long ones.
A Sidebar About Home
&n
bsp; I may be two years old, but I’m more mature than Pearl. And Eloise, who is three, is more mature than me. Eloise is mature enough to want to leave home.
“But it’s also a matter of sophistication,” Eloise explained to me snootily, more than once. “There are better places than this, Miss M.A.M.”
“Travel all you want,” I told her. “But when you decide you want to come home, wouldn’t it be great if you still had a home to go to?”
“What makes you think I’d want to come back?”
I gasped. “Anything could happen out there in the world. What would you do if you didn’t have anywhere, and you needed it?”
I’ll never know what thought flitted through Eloise’s small mind, but she paused and looked nervous. I didn’t hesitate: “You’ve got to tell me, once and for all, who took Vincent’s head. Otherwise we could lose the library!”
“Why do you suddenly want to know about that statue so much?” said Eloise.
“Well, I’ve been curious all along.”
Eloise leaned in suspiciously, and made an accusation. “You don’t care what happens to me. You just want to know so you can break a real news story.”
“Well, news is the family business,” I said. “If only you’d care about that.”
Eloise tapped her toenails on the tree, rat-a-tat. (She’s growing them long for the country, she says.) “I have nothing at all to say about it,” she said, and disappeared into her nest.
“You’d better hope they don’t build a parking lot here and tear down your trees!” I called after her brutally. “Then where will you make your home?”
“Haven’t you heard, Mary Ann?” Eloise shouted. “There are plenty of trees in the world!”
—M.A.M.
“Hey, Rock Boy!” A big round-faced boy clapped Oleg on the shoulder.
Pearl recognized him as an older student from her school. “What’s your name?” she asked the boy.
A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Page 16
