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A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

Page 17

by Karen Romano Young


  “Jaime,” he said, surprised at her boldness.

  “This is Pearl,” said Francine, not to be outdone. “And I’m Francine.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jaime recovered his poise. “And this is Rock Boy, with rocks in his head, who used to live on South Street. Where you living now?”

  “Clancy.” Oleg grinned in a silly way. They all kept walking toward school. This wasn’t the way Pearl had thought it would go, just talking to one person this way. But she didn’t know how to fix it. “I’ve been at Lancaster Avenue since the start of school. I’m just walking a different way today.”

  “You repeating?” Jaime asked.

  Oleg just smiled and shrugged and said, “I homeschooled all spring and summer. More time for field study.”

  “Rocks!” Jaime hit himself in the head. He was being funny, Pearl realized, not mean. He liked Oleg.

  She cut right in with her act, even though this wasn’t part of the plan. Whatever works. “The most incredible things have been happening on Lancaster Avenue, actually.”

  “Oh, really?” Jaime said, rolling his eyes.

  “Magical things,” said Francine, chiming in.

  Oleg’s turn. “That library’s haunted, you know,” he said, flat as that.

  “What library?”

  “The Lancaster Avenue library,” said Oleg.

  “It is,” Pearl said nonchalantly. “Haunted.”

  Jaime plainly thought they were bonkers. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” Now they were at the school gate. The first bell was already ringing, and Francine hustled away to her classroom—her teacher was stricter than Pearl’s about sitting down before the bell—while Oleg went ahead toward the eighth-grade rooms. But Jaime was still right beside Pearl. He said, “So, are you and Rock Boy, like, going out?”

  What? “It really is haunted,” Pearl said, ignoring his question. “But I don’t have time to tell you about it now.” She took off toward the school door. “Don’t tell anybody about the haunting!” she yelled back to him down the hall, with sudden inspiration.

  He shook his head. He thought she was bonkers, but who cared, he had heard her, which meant he was thinking about the library. It filled her with a bubble of hope that did not pop, because her nervous mind just couldn’t come up with a downside.

  Despite her nerves—she knew she’d remember nothing in class all morning—Pearl felt lighter, elated, excited: Everything had gone just right so far. But the hard part was still three hours ahead: recess.

  Francine stood in the schoolyard, just inside the invisible line between upper school and lower school, in Vincent’s pose. Her left hand extended, open, waiting. One foot forward. And now she did the bravest thing of all: She closed her eyes.

  The closed eyes really made her look made of stone. They were not squeezed shut, just smoothly closed, and she wasn’t smiling. She had Vincent’s serene, still look on her face. She’s good, thought Pearl, and worried whether she herself could meet Francine’s acting standards. Then she thought of what Alice had told them: Be matter-of-fact, just tell it. Truth reeled people in—especially dramatic truth. Think of a headline, Alice had said—not the Moon, but the News and the Star, trashy rags that baited people with drama that might be real.

  Pearl sped toward Francine across the playground. She had to scare all the kids on the playground with just words, that was her job. Pearl’s heart was jumping around inside her chest, but she thought of the library and the worse horror of losing it. Come alive, she told herself. Tell it to the hardest person, and then everyone else will feel easier.

  So she grabbed the nearest person—Millie—by the elbow and said, “Look! It’s the Rock Lady!” Her voice trembled with nerves, but that was the perfect touch. Millie’s eyes widened, and Pearl leaned across her to Khadija and Elsa. The three hardest people. She didn’t let herself think; she just told it. “See?” she insisted. She pointed a wavering finger at Francine, standing there with her eyes shut. “She’s standing like that library statue, you know? That headless one. I think she wants something.” She knew Elsa would come along if she played Millie right. And if she got Elsa, well, then Khadija would follow.

  The girls looked at each other for a second, like, Is she for real? And if Pearl didn’t get this right, Elsa could wreck the whole thing on her own.

  Pearl almost threw up, she felt so anxious. It’s not really me they’re turning away from, it’s the story. In one part of herself, she knew this was a lie; she used the story to get past the fear. “Come help me,” she said, making her voice as desperate as she actually felt, and reached for Millie’s arm again. This time, Millie came. And so Pearl and Millie and Elsa and Khadija advanced toward frozen, eerie Francine.

  Heads turned as they crept past people. Pearl stopped a few feet from Francine and held the others back with one hand. “Wait!” She circled behind Francine, who hardly seemed to be breathing. She spotted Oleg across the yard, near Jaime. He started toward them and—yes!—Jaime and some boys trailed along with him. Let it catch on, Pearl prayed.

  Francine opened her eyes but still did not seem to see, staring as though a spell had been cast over her. Some girls from seventh grade gathered.

  “What’s with her?” Millie asked Pearl, giggling.

  Oleg arrived then, just in time for Pearl to roll her eyes at him and say loudly, “Francine’s at it again.”

  “Oh, no,” said Oleg, as rehearsed.

  “She’s at what?” said Jaime, bumbling into the circle. “Hey, kid! Snap out of it!”

  Francine turned slightly toward Jaime, but her expression didn’t change. Her eyes glassy, she reached her hand toward something invisible straight in front of her. Jaime giggled nervously and waved his hand in front of Francine’s eyes. She didn’t blink.

  “She’s possessed,” Pearl informed them all. More kids gathered. Oleg walked around Francine, examining her, then shook his head.

  “Possessed by what?” asked Khadija, rolling her eyes.

  “The ghost of her lost brain,” said Elsa, trying to steal the spotlight. Everybody laughed uncertainly, but Francine never changed, and Oleg and Pearl stayed serious.

  “Nope, it’s Vincent again,” Oleg said, as though confiding to Pearl.

  Pearl nodded solemnly. “Same as it was all summer,” she told the group. A few more kids came over now.

  “Who’s Vincent?”

  “A statue,” said Pearl.

  “A poor, headless statue,” Oleg added.

  “What statue?”

  “At the Lancaster Avenue library,” said Pearl.

  “Where’s that at?” someone asked.

  “Lancaster Avenue, stupid,” someone else answered.

  Khadija asked, “Are you trying to say it’s haunted or something?”

  Oleg and Pearl stopped, hearing the cue they’d planned. They looked at each other over Francine’s head, forcing themselves to look worried and sad despite the triumph. “I’d say so, wouldn’t you?” said Pearl. “At least, she’s under a spell.”

  “Probably, yeah,” said Oleg regretfully.

  “Just tell us, already. Who’s Vincent?” asked Elsa.

  “Vincent is powerful,” Pearl said, not exactly answering.

  “And angry,” said Oleg.

  “I guess you’d be angry too,” Pearl said thoughtfully, musingly. “If you’d been beheaded.” Boom!

  “Beheaded!” came the group response.

  “Who’s Vincent?” Millie called out, her face full of excitement.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Sure,” said Millie.

  Pearl told. Only she didn’t just reel off the plot, the way she had when she’d retold Harry Potter. She told it as if it had never been told before. She made it scary. She made it a story.

  “Vincent—sweet, brilliant Edna St. Vincent Millay, world-renowned poet, beautiful romantic—becomes tired of being encased in stone, alone in the garden, as imprisoned as a princess in a tower.”

  To her del
ight, everyone leaned in. Pearl realized that although she had stopped writing her story to rehearse yesterday, the story had gone on developing in the back of her head all night and even now, as she saw it acted out before her, as she spun it in hushed tones to the crowd that had built into a thick circle around them.

  “People who work at the library or in the neighborhood are constantly inspired to read a certain book or learn a certain fact—and all these people understand that it’s Vincent who’s inspiring them. She wants people to come to her garden,” Pearl’s story went on, “so she sends out messages to convince them: poems, stories, plays, songs. Nobody understands how she’s sending the messages, but they receive them anyway. That’s how people get ideas to read what they read. That’s why people love Vincent. That’s why people have always loved Vincent, for years—decades.”

  “And then the disaster happens.” Pearl let her voice slow here. “My mother and I are coming to work one summer morning, and we sense a disturbance in the garden. When suddenly—” Pearl paused. She cleared her throat. And then she let out a silent scream, making it clear from her facial expression just how anguished she had been. “I discover the remains of our beheaded beloved statue.”

  How magnificently Pearl whispered of their entrance to the garden, the horrible discovery of Vincent’s headlessness, and the continuing heartache and fears of the unsolved mystery. She wasn’t acting at all. “Now Vincent wants her head back. At least we think that’s what she wants. She’s holding out her hand for something, but we can’t figure out what.” She hadn’t made up the next part yet, but she let the moment stretch out as if she did know.

  “Have you tried money?”

  “Candy?”

  “A pretzel?”

  “How about a beer?” They laughed themselves silly about that one.

  Pearl waited patiently. “It’s serious,” she said when they stopped. “It’s starting to affect others, like Francine.

  “Francine used to—” Pearl acted choked up. What did she have to lose? “She used to be normal.” Pearl hid her face in her hands. “Now we’re afraid. We’re so afraid. If other people come near the statue . . .” Then what? She didn’t know herself, but again, she didn’t need to. People teetered on the edge of their own imaginings of what came next.

  (That meant the story was working.)

  “You mean—” said Khadija.

  “Ooh. It’ll rub off?” asked Millie.

  Pearl said, “The trouble is . . . don’t you see? Would you want to be turned to stone? The spell could strike other people. And if the thief comes back, they could lose their heads, too.”

  27: MORE DRAMA

  STILL OCT 2

  The upper schoolers started coming to the library that very afternoon. Jaime barged in first, with Oleg and two other eighth graders trailing him.

  “Where’s this statue?” Jaime demanded.

  Ramón startled at his desk. Nichols peered over the top of his paper. Mom paused in the stamping of date-due cards three weeks in advance: OCT 23.

  Pearl leaped up. “I’ll show you,” she said. “But you have to have a library card to come in here.”

  Mom slid her eyes toward Pearl.

  “I don’t have any money.” Jaime reached into his navy-blue uniform pants pockets.

  “It’s free,” sang Pearl. “Just fill out this card. All you need is your address.”

  Jaime grabbed one, and the other boys followed their leader and started filling out applications of their own.

  “Cool,” said Simon, showing up for his afternoon shift, looking like all this was normal. “You can check books out once you’ve taken the oath and signed the register.”

  “Oath? Register?” asked Jaime. “For books?”

  “It’s a library, yo,” Simon said, trying to impress the younger boys.

  “All right, bro,” Jaime said. Pearl figured he saw through Simon, but he did it with a grin, the way he did everything.

  Simon stayed serious. He stood rigidly by the circ counter and held up his hand. “When I write my name in this book . . .” He paused.

  “When I write my name in this book . . . ,” Jaime repeated, still smiling, his hand high, and his friends followed suit.

  When the oath was finished, Simon turned it into a high five. Then he made the boys put their names in the register book, which they each did with a flourish, as if they were signing autographs. Pearl acted barely patient through it all, then flapped her hand toward the back hall. “The garden is that way.” She sighed as though weary of all the difficulties a headless statue could bring to a library. “Try to stay out of trouble!”

  That was Francine’s cue to appear in the doorway to the garden, where they could see her—but where Mom wouldn’t, Pearl hoped, notice her from the desk just yet. Mom was already suspicious about the whole thing.

  Just then, Millie burst through the foyer, pulling Khadija by the arm, with Elsa slinking along behind.

  Yes! “Come!” Pearl said grandly. “This way!”

  “Without a library card?” thundered Mom. She swooped down behind Millie and her friends and propelled them back to the circ desk. Pearl stood jiggling her knees, nervously waiting in the doorway for the girls so that Mom wouldn’t feel the need to escort them. Finally they were done. “Back here,” said Pearl, now feeling shy. Walking backwards, she drew them through the hallway to the garden door. Francine stood just outside the door, with a spellbound sort of stare on her face.

  To Pearl’s relief, the girls laughed and went out the door.

  Francine led the kids across the garden to Vincent as though she was being pulled there by a magnetic field. And Pearl, who found herself tongue-tied at school, got carried along by her own story, narrating as if Vincent really was sending her inspiration. (And who says she wasn’t?)

  “See, the statue draws Francine near,” Pearl said to the kids huddled at the foot of the pedestal. “Vincent was a poet,” she said. “But now . . .”

  “Now her head is gone,” said Oleg, jumping from the fence to the dumpster to the yard in two bounds.

  “Gone where?” Francine grabbed Oleg by both arms and stared tearfully into his face.

  “Nobody knows,” said Jaime solemnly.

  Finally, thought Pearl. Once kids started spreading the story themselves, Pearl would know it was really working.

  “She wants it back!” Francine said.

  “She wants more than that. She wants—” Pearl waited, knowing there would be suggestions.

  “Blood?” asked Elsa.

  “People,” said Francine, in the tone of someone crossing a desert, desperate for water.

  “What, to eat?” asked Elsa. She mockingly reached a hand toward Francine.

  “Stupid, she can’t eat,” Jaime told Elsa. “She’s got no head.”

  “So what does she want people for?” asked Khadija.

  “To share her sorrow over her lost head,” added Francine in a hushed voice. “To love what she loves—the building, the books.” She put a comforting hand on Vincent’s foot. Elsa laughed, just one “ha,” but Millie and Khadija reached out and touched Vincent’s foot, too. Pearl wondered what they were feeling.

  A Sidebar About Vermin

  Look it up: “Vermin” means wild animals that are troublemakers because they cause harm or carry disease.

  Of course, nobody asks the so-called wild animals what they think is harmful.

  “Varmint” is more than just another way to say “vermin.” It’s what people say when they want to add intention—mischievous intention—to the definition above. But it has another definition besides wild animals. “Varmint” can also apply to mischievous, troublemaking children.

  —M.A.M.

  “What can we do?” whispered Millie.

  “Bring more company!” Francine was so emotional that she couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

  Pearl got inspired. “She wants to know that you’re receiving her messages.”

  “How do we do that?”
asked Jaime.

  “Check out a book,” said Oleg, taking the words right out of Pearl’s mouth.

  “A book?” Elsa reacted as though Oleg had asked for an offering of spiders. “That’s all she wants, a lousy book?” She tossed her head back, flipping around her hundreds of tiny braids. She was flirting with Oleg, Pearl realized. Well, whatever it took!

  “Vincent loves stories,” said Pearl. “She wasn’t just a poet. She was an actor and a playwright, too. She wants people to have stories. If people take out books, she calms down. She can live with—being dead.” Pearl let the word “dead” come down with a thud, and Khadija stifled a shudder.

  Thank goodness Mom, Simon, Alice, and Bruce were in the doorway now, and Pearl could move things along.

  “Library cards?” she whispered frantically to Mom.

  “Right here!” Mom held up a card. “Ludmila Perez?”

  Millie stepped forward and took her card. She didn’t put it away, just held it in her hand. Ceremoniously, the other kids stood in a semicircle, took the oath, and watched while Mom distributed cards to them as if they were medals.

  “Do you guys want to get books now?” asked Oleg.

  “Young adult is on the second floor. The books are just to the right of the candy up there,” Alice said, winking. As they all dashed off, she said, “Come for the ghosts, stay for the candy.”

  Pearl led the girls up the spiral stairs.

  “There may be ghost books,” Elsa told her, “but there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  Pearl ran a finger along a shelf. “I think it’s a matter of what you’re open to,” she said, daring herself to sound as spooky as Francine. Elsa stuck her tongue out. But she took down a book.

  “What about miniatures?” asked Khadija. “Do you have books with dollhouses in them?”

  “What about robots?” asked Millie.

  For once in her life, Pearl had to choose between people to talk to. She pointed Khadija toward the craft books, and told Elsa to check the 130s. Then she led the way to the 629s, where the robots were.

  That afternoon, it was a struggle for Pearl to stay nonchalant as the five new library patrons walked down the steps, mouths full of Starburst, library books under their arms along with their school bags. She wanted to hug her team, but Francine was in the garden, tapping in slow motion, trying to stay in character until the kids were gone, and Oleg had disappeared somewhere, maybe trailing Simon around. So she trotted briskly up the spiral stairs into the children’s room, bounced across the floor to the windows, and, seeing the kids walking away in the distance, leaped into the air, then came down to earth and hugged Alice.

 

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