“So all this comes together in this story you’re telling on my playground?” Ms. Judge asked.
“Performance,” Francine said automatically. “Story plus dance,” she explained.
Oleg had waited for his moment, and now he took it. “The point is to build interest in the library,” he said, sounding dignified. “It has taken some hits lately and we are trying to save it by bringing in more people.”
“Patrons,” said Pearl.
“Isn’t this the building that’s going to be turned into housing?” Ms. Judge asked gently.
Pearl sat up straighter. “Not if I can help it.”
Oleg said, “Her mother’s the librarian, you know.”
Francine added, “Pearl practically lives there. And I live right across the street.”
Oleg said, “And I live right in back.”
“But there’ve been other troubles at that library,” Ms. Judge said. “Didn’t some homeless man break in just last month? Haven’t there been some problems with wild animals?” She shook her head. “This neighborhood sure isn’t what it used to be.”
Pearl blasted off. “It’s a good neighborhood, and a good library, and a good statue. I’m sick of hearing all this other stuff! There’s more—”
“Then why are you helping to perpetuate this ‘other stuff’? Why are you telling ghost stories about your lovely statue of a poet?”
“To make people come to the library,” Pearl said. “Because if the library doesn’t get enough votes from the neighborhood on Election Day, it’s going to be made into apartments. I’ll do anything to stop that. So this is all leading up to Halloween, when we’re having a new-head ceremony for the statue right before Election Day.”
“You should come,” said Francine. “Since we started telling the Rock Lady stories, we’ve given out fifty new library cards to kids.”
“Really? Because of ghost stories?”
“Yes,” said Pearl. “Circulation is up, and it’s not just children’s.”
Ms. Judge had started off seeming like she disapproved. But now her head was cocked to one side. She said, “Here’s how it looks to me: If your library shuts down, the neighborhood looks worse, and that reflects badly on the school. We don’t want that, do we?”
“Definitely not,” said Oleg. “A school should stand for the whole neighborhood.”
A Sidebar About Mascots
Here in New York, our team mascots aren’t furry animals. We have things: Jets and Nets, and specific kinds of humans: Giants, Yankees, Rangers, Knickerbockers (it refers to the Dutch settlers of New York City). We have one guy with a baseball for a head, Mr. Met. All of these make the teams of humans seem more heroic, inspiring their fans’ imaginations.
Many other teams have animals: lions, tigers, bears, bulls, birds (cardinals, blue jays, ravens). These mascots seem less inspiring, but they create togetherness—kind of a club feeling.
So Pearl picked an action to go with her animal. This made a mascot that was far more interesting, something that made the neighbors feel heroic, inspired, and together.
—M.A.M.
Pearl hadn’t thought of this.
Ms. Judge made a motion as though she was dusting off her knees. “I suppose theater in the service of saving a library—to reflect well on our school—is a worthy effort. They should both stand for the neighborhood. Would you be willing to do your performance for the whole school?”
“Yes!” said Pearl. “Then everyone in the school can come on Halloween. We want the mayor to come with her whole city board.”
“I’ll write Her Honor a letter,” said Ms. Judge. “Education, reading, literacy, art, kids—yes, those are things a mayor should care about.”
“Does she?” asked Oleg.
The principal smiled. “Let’s find out.”
31: DOWN THE BASEMENT STAIRS
OCT 6–9
With the raccoons, it was time for nonfiction.
Pearl wrote a note about her plan to Mary Ann, but it made Mary Ann afraid, to think of seeing her family history written down.
It could lead to more raccoons being trapped.
“No,” said Pearl. “It’ll make people see why raccoons shouldn’t be trapped.”
It’s putting too much attention on the raccoons. And what if
Mary Ann wrote something, then scribbled the sentence out.
What if
“What if we don’t do anything?” said Pearl.
They both knew the answer to that: The ball was already rolling, and it might as well have been a wrecking ball. The raccoons had a bad reputation, thanks to the Star and thanks to Gully—and having enough raccoons around to trap six of them had hurt the neighborhood’s reputation, and the library’s, which could mean a “no” vote in November, which could mean no more library.
Pearl was determined to fight back, to show that the raccoons were not just good, but great and exceptional, and so was the neighborhood, and so was the library. She wasn’t the only one getting into the fray. The news that the neighborhood people would be the ones to choose between apartments and the library had sent the whole staff into a fever of scheming, each in his or her own way.
Simon and his still-nameless band took on extra rehearsals in preparation for the concert at the new-head ceremony. Alice put up announcements on the library website and on local bulletin boards about the Halloween book-character parade.
And tonight, Pearl was left to do her homework after hours at the reference room desk while Mom sat in Bruce’s office working on math formulas: numbers of new library cards times new families, or the cost of new books divided by people taking them out, or the electric bill as a ratio of number of people using the library per hour . . . Oh, the problems could give a rocket scientist a headache! Right now Mom questioned whether the library could come out looking like a decent business, at the exact same time as Bruce insisted it was a symbol of the city’s heart. Pearl thought they both were right, she didn’t understand either of their positions fully, and the whole thing made her want to cry from worry. When she told them her own ideas, they only seemed to half listen. It was too easy to imagine everything falling apart.
Pearl listened to the grumbling tone of Mom’s and Bruce’s argument from the foot of the stairs, then went to the basement to check in with Mary Ann. Mary Ann’s What if card was still on the stairs—
—with Mrs. Mallomar hunched over it, as if she’d been waiting for Pearl. She tapped a claw on Mary Ann’s words, asking for an explanation.
Pearl sat down on the step like it was nothing to get called out by the editor in chief of the midnight Moon, but she was more nervous than she had been when she’d had to go to Ms. Judge’s office.
“Mrs. Mallomar,” she said, “I just want to tell people a story about the reading raccoons, about the reading and the writing and the midnight Moon and everything. I think that would make them love the library and want to save it.”
Mrs. Mallomar made a low sound, and Mary Ann came out of the nest and sat like a cat, her paws beneath her, nervous, too, about what a big step this would be, outing the reading raccoons.
Pearl announced, “My idea is, if Mary Ann wrote it, it would sound more real. She’s the reporter, and she’s a reading raccoon.”
Did a signal pass between grandmother and granddaughter? Mary Ann reached for the pen.
Letting people know we even exist is a risk. You never know what they’ll do once they know you’re there.
Pearl couldn’t decide for them. They all sat there, waiting each other out.
Mary Ann flipped the card over and wrote. Mrs. Mallomar watched what she wrote and made no move to change anything.
You want to share a byline?
Mary Ann’s eyes were on Pearl’s.
Byline? “You mean you would write with me?” Pearl asked. “We could be”—she tried out a new word—“coauthors?”
She exhaled. So did the raccoons. Mary Ann’s teeth showed in a smile. Pearl felt the lift of excitemen
t and a tug of friendship. She pushed aside her nervousness about being called crazy.
“Nobody’s going to believe it anyway,” she said, “They’ll think I wrote it all by myself and made up a raccoon coauthor. Same as nobody believes raccoons really write the midnight Moon.”
The raccoons looked at each other and shrugged. It didn’t matter. The effect would be huge because people wanted to believe incredible stories.
It was decided.
“The raccoons will be heroes for once, not vermin,” said Pearl. “We’re going to save the library together.”
Darkness came earlier now, which meant raccoons were awake earlier. On this particular raccoon morning (in human life, it was afternoon), Mary Ann was the first one up.
As kids were leaving the library, warm from running around the statue, carrying books they’d taken out with their new cards, Mary Ann was reading Pearl’s contribution to the raccoon exposé, chewing on her Sharpie until she bit through the plastic barrel and got a mouth full of black ink.
She’d have to swipe another one. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to make too many edits to this story. She could see it had come from the heart, and thanks to her, Mary Ann herself, the contributing reporter, the factual pieces were mostly in place: the way Mrs. Mallomar had figured out how to read, the date the first midnight Moon had been published, the number of readers it had. Facts like that seemed to give the fantasy-fiction parts some solid nonfiction legs to stand on.
Sure, there was always a tweak or two that could be made to improve the pacing or heighten the drama—a cliffhanger here, a plot twist there—but Mary Ann was confident that she and Pearl could whip it into shape by October 13, the day of the school performance.
What Mary Ann felt less sure about was that the story could put her family in danger. This story was not just a baited hook to lure people into the library. It was a campaign to make them feel proud of what was already here. It was a campaign to save the library for the sake of the building, for the sake of the books, and for the sake of the reading raccoons. But it also called attention to the raccoons—which might very well not be a good thing for them.
Mary Ann worried that this attention might make them a target of people who didn’t think raccoons were any better than vermin. If people realized the legend was actually true, what would happen to the actual reading raccoons?
This kind of thinking could give anybody a headache.
Here was what Mary Ann’s family was doing this evening: Mrs. Mallomar was putting the midnight Moon to bed. Mary Ann’s mother, Matilda, was still asleep in the nest. She would be getting up soon to do a stint at the printer with Tallulah, then a shift at the newsstand. Mary Ann would stay here with little Arak, teaching him his letters and working on her next assignment for the paper. “Resolutions Worth a Mention,” she thought she’d title it, a sort of countdown to Halloween and the announcement of the raccoons’ resolutions for the next spring.
Nothing whatever had been heard from Eloise.
The more Mary Ann thought about where Eloise was and what she was doing and how she was living, the more she realized that she, Mary Ann, did not have a clue about how to live in the country, or even just some big park, and neither did her mother or grandmother or Arak. And the more Mary Ann talked with Pearl, the more she realized that the end of their residence in the library was possibly extremely near—as near as Election Day. All this could be over with the swing of a wrecking ball, and then what? The Mallomars could die out there in the country. They were city folk.
(But there wasn’t room to share any of these irrational fears. And Pearl had enough to worry about without adding raccoon fears to her human ones.)
Pearl’s plan to take the reading raccoons public might turn out to be a disaster, but it might also be the raccoons’ best chance. The sooner the word got out about reading raccoons, the sooner people would want to save them, and the library. Mary Ann decided to believe this: That the people—the neighbors—would want to help the raccoons and the library. Both.
With what was left of the ink in the Sharpie, she wrote a somewhat drippy message above Pearl’s story:
OK! Print it!
At the staff meeting, Pearl told everyone the next new part of her story. Ramón was there, and Alice, her hand over her stomach, and Bruce and Simon, and Francine, who had her tap shoes on but somehow stayed quiet, not drawing attention to herself. Nichols was in earshot in the reference room. (I was in earshot three-quarters of the way up the basement stairs.)
“You know that we have a morning Moon and an evening Moon. Well, there is also a newspaper for nocturnal—uh, creatures—called the midnight Moon. And it’s published by someone nocturnal, a grandmother raccoon named Mrs. Mallomar.”
No guffaws of laughter, no smirking.
She went on. “Raccoons can read, of course. The ones on Lancaster Avenue can, that is. Because where do you think Mrs. Mallomar got her name from? Of course it was from the cookies. Like kids reading the cereal box!” She told them about how Mrs. M. had first seen a Mallomar box, and how she’d learned to connect letters with sounds.
“And how do you think they learned to write?” Pearl explained about Vincent—before she was a statue, and the neighborhood cats and the milk and the reading out loud and the tossed-away lousy poems. “Because, well, you know how raccoons are so good with their hands—uh, paws? They can actually write.”
Mom smiled; Bruce rolled his eyes.
“So, thanks to real Vincent and some of her lousy poems, and thanks to Mallomar packages, they could read. And because of the book Vincent carried in her arm, they got inspired to try to read the books. They started with the easy readers, and moved on to the chapter books, and then, sure enough, they could read everything. They’ve passed the tradition down, and even the youngest of them is learning his letters as we speak.”
Bruce and Alice both had their mouths slightly hanging open.
“How did our raccoons learn to read?” said Pearl. “Because our neighborhood is special. It could only happen here. And that’s why our mascot should be Reading Raccoons. The library’s mascot—and the neighborhood’s.”
She stopped. She felt shaky. It was the first time she’d tried to tell this part aloud, and even though Mary Ann had written up the nonfiction part on paper, it sounded different coming out as speech, with the fate of the whole library depending on it.
It was Simon who reacted first. “Wow, Pearl,” he said, and for a terrible, terrible second, she thought he was going to laugh at her, that they were all going to laugh at her, that they didn’t believe in her plan and wouldn’t let her tell her story, that they just wanted her to stop and give up. But no. Simon threw his arms around her so suddenly and completely that she stumbled backward. “That’s working,” he said. “They’ll buy that. That’ll work.” Simon, lanky and cool and elegant with his fiery hair, his black T-shirt that said NERD. She felt her face grow hot with pride.
“Okay, I’m going to get the coffee. Come on, Francine,” she said, suddenly needing to race away from all of them. “Who wants what?”
“Since when do you need an order?” Alice said.
Pearl was already out the door and halfway down the steps, but she stopped and turned back. Her whole library family was standing at the circ counter under the big clock, and they were all still looking at her.
Bruce said, “We’ll give it a try, Pearl. No regrets—that’s my motto. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have given it your all. We’ll know you did, and so will the raccoons.”
Was it going to be good enough for the library?
But then Ramón gave her a fist pump from behind Bruce’s shoulder.
“Here’s to the raccoons, for giving you so much to work with,” said Mom, who had told her the stories in the first place.
“We believe in you, Pearl,” said reliable Alice.
Mr. Nichols, who had shown her the real reading raccoons, said, “I’d buy it.”
That word again. “Y
ou’d buy it?” Pearl repeated. “Is that the same as believing it?”
“Better,” said Ramón. “It’s like you’ve made a deal.”
“Of course it’s a deal!” yelled Francine as she ran to catch up with Pearl on the steps.
It was in this moment that Pearl realized she needed Francine, relied on her, and knew she could rely on her, the scrawny little weirdo-neglected kid that she was.
They got to Cozy Soup and Burger.
“What do you want?” Pearl asked Francine as they opened the door. “I’m putting it on the tab. You’re part of the library now.”
Monday morning Pearl and Francine planned to walk to school together like always, but Pearl buzzed Francine’s door half an hour before schedule. Into the intercom she called, “Can you hurry? Something’s come up.”
While Francine was clattering down the stairs, Pearl stood peering through the metal grate that kept Gully’s store safe from robbers while it was closed. Francine came and gazed at the cheap stuff inside, too.
“What are you looking at?”
Pearl pointed into Gully’s window. “We need to make the neighborhood into raccoons, too.”
“You’re going to make me into a raccoon?” said Oleg, coming up behind them.
Oleg was Pearl’s chance to test her new part of the story, to start building it into the performance. “This neighborhood is known for extra-smart raccoons. Didn’t you know that?”
“No.” Scientific Oleg looked skeptical.
“They’re self-educated, actually. They descend from the legendary Mrs. Mallomar. And you know what makes them special?”
“What?” asked Francine eagerly, as if she hadn’t already heard the story.
She’s such a good performer, Pearl thought.
“They’re reading raccoons,” Pearl said.
“They can read?” asked Oleg.
“Sure,” said Pearl. “Suspend your disbelief.” It was something Alice told her readers to do when they read fantasy.
A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Page 20
