A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

by Karen Romano Young

  “Suspend it?”

  “Yeah, the same way you do if you read In Search of Sasquatch1 even though you know there’s no such thing as Big-foot. Or believe in a flying Snitch when you know there’s no such thing as Quidditch. Just buy it. You, any human, can be a Reading Raccoon—you can read and write and have library cards and support the Lancaster Avenue branch library! Believe me.”

  And it seemed like he did.

  At school, Pearl looked around, thinking about the kids and how they’d respond to the Reading Raccoons. As she pondered her story, she had the feeling she sometimes had when she read certain books where kids did things she couldn’t do—actions with outcomes that just wouldn’t happen in real life. Things that seemed too magic, too convenient, too unrealistic: magically bumping into someone who was just the person you were looking for! Magically looking out the window just in time to see a giant going by! Magically being the one with exactly the magical powers the situation called for, without having done a single thing but be born! That sort of stuff had occasionally made her want to throw a book at the wall. If her own story, now, was in a book, would she believe it? Ha! This worried her more than it would have worried another kid, anyone else not born in a library.

  Maybe in a book she could save the library, but in real life?

  Later that night, Pearl tucked herself into the book elevator, asked Simon to push 3, and ascended to pay Bruce a visit. He was redoing the budget he would present at the library board meeting tomorrow night. He had been redoing the budget for weeks. It had been the reason for debates, fights, canceled plans, gray hairs, and wrinkles, and the excuse for extra coffee, extra doughnuts, extra hours, extra worry, and extra privacy.

  But now Pearl had questions.

  She sprang out of the book elevator. “What would magically fix the budget?” she asked.

  “Magically?” said Bruce, distracted but not grumping. “If the whole world held a lottery and our library won it.”

  “Seriously?” Pearl asked.

  He nodded. “Miss Moran, what is the actual purpose of this visit?”

  Pearl pointed to the top of the file cabinet, to the raccoon head that sat up there. She knew there would be power in actually being a raccoon. And here was the costume, right here, but Bruce was standing in her way.

  When she had first seen the costume five years ago, Pearl had told him he should rename it Mrs. Mallomar. But Bruce would not make jokes about the costume. He was 6 feet 3 inches, and his raccoon costume had been made to fit him. At his old job at the national park, he used to put it on and walk around talking about wildlife to kids. He never wore it anymore, but was fiercely protective about it.

  Now he said, “What about it?”

  “Can I wear it?” she asked.

  “You cannot.”

  “Why?” she wailed. “I need it for school!” School was where she was going to try out the newest part of the story, the part where Vincent would invite the first raccoon who moved into the library basement to read an actual book.

  “It’s a sentimental costume,” said Bruce. “It’s very dear to me.”

  “Am I not very dear to you?”

  He smiled into her eyes. “You are. But I wouldn’t want it to get dirty, and it would.”

  A Sidebar About Fathers

  “Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here.”1 Presumably, you know how babies get made. But to be sure we’re on the same page, the father produces a lot of sperm, and one of them might be lucky enough to fertilize the mother’s egg. The egg stays inside the mother and develops into a kit, or a kid, depending on your species—all with nothing more needed from the father.

  A kid without a dad around might seem to be 100 percent influenced by his or her mother, but that’s not the truth of things. Science says 50 percent is the father, and it shows up in all kinds of ways—like size, strength, voice, sense of humor, eyes, facial expressions. And in other ways, too, ways that only your mama would recognize.

  Sometimes you can simply assume these things. Other times you know for sure.

  But the other thing about absent fathers is that whoever’s near you tends to have an influence that’s just as profound—whether you’re a human or a raccoon. In the end you might conclude that actually having a father around doesn’t matter as much as having somebody.

  Pearl’s somebody was Bruce. And he was talking about leaving. So she worked extra hard to make him mad. How else could she show him how much she cared? How much could she find out how much he cared?

  —M.A.M.

  She began a rebuttal, but he held up his finger. “Besides, you’re not tall enough for it. It was made for me. It would trip you up and the eyes would fall out of position and you’d be blind and it would make you fall and get hurt, and that would be catastrophic. And the costume would be ruined.”

  For a moment Pearl was silent. Then, “That’s kind of dramatic. Did you ever think of being an actor?”

  “I’ve had enough careers,” said Bruce. “Anyway, if I go back to the parks I’m going to need that raccoon costume. It has to stay mint.”

  “I don’t believe you’re going back to the parks,” said Pearl. She refused to, in fact. “What would you do without us? What would we do without you?”

  Bruce got up from his chair and walked to the window and stood looking down at poor, lovely old Vincent. Pearl couldn’t see his eyes because the light was behind him when he turned his back to the window.

  “Pearlie girl, don’t you know—you’re getting taller, have you noticed? Like a sprout. I bet you’ve grown two inches since school started.”

  She had to admit, “I went up a shoe size.”

  “Right, and you know what’s next? College!”

  Her shoulders drooped and she threw her head back and gazed at the ceiling. Then she said, “And I’m tall enough to see over the top of the atlas, even while I’m sitting down. So maybe it will fit me now.”

  “Be small for a while longer,” Bruce said, his voice husky all of a sudden. “Stay innocent. Be the librarian’s child while there’s still a library to be the child in.”

  Pearl couldn’t help hugging him. “I’m going to ask again, you know,” she said into Bruce’s ear. “I’ll wear you down.”

  “Ask a thousand times,” said Bruce. “And a thousand times I will say no. Nothing’s going to change about that.”

  She couldn’t help stepping away and slumping into a chair. “Everything changes,” she said. “Isn’t that what you all keep telling me?” She slithered out of the chair and onto the floor. She crawled across it on hands and knees, difficult in a long uniform skirt. On her way past the coatrack, she whipped up the tail of the raccoon costume so it swung and swooshed. In the doorway, she hopped to her feet and was gone.

  1 In Search of Sasquatch by Kelly Milner Halls (HMH Books for Young Readers, 2011).

  1 From the poem “Baby,” from A Victorian Anthology, by George Macdonald, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman (Riverside Press, 1895).

  32: ROCK STARS

  OCT 11

  Three third-grade kids were checking out books when Oleg burst in to say that the rock had arrived. When the kids saw Pearl and Francine go out the garden door, they followed.

  Ramón’s pickup truck was backed into the driveway, and the tailgate was down. The stone rested in the bed of the truck.

  “We’re taking it to the stone carver,” Oleg said to the gathering staff. “But I wanted Pearl to see it first.”

  Oleg was right about the stone, Pearl saw. It was head-shaped. Oleg stood next to the truck as proudly as if he had invented rocks himself, and Simon and his band friend Joey—who’d gone along to help with the rock—looked almost as pleased with themselves. Ramón, his hand on the tailgate of the truck, had an air of outdoors and adventure. Pearl was jealous. They could have asked her to go, too.

  Nichols came out the back door. “Where’d it come from?” he asked Oleg.

  “Out Brickyard way. In the
Catskill mountains.”

  Nichols put his hands in his pockets. “Brickyard. What a swimming hole that is. Can you still walk behind the waterfall on dry days?”

  The boys said yes.

  “How do you know?” Pearl asked Nichols.

  A Sidebar About Jonathan Yoiks

  It used to be that Mr. Jonathan Yoiks had two jobs: One, he considered art—his Unique New Yorker column, which allowed him to write about the kinds of brilliant creative artist weirdo geeks he would have liked to be if only he didn’t have to pay the rent. The other, he considered good for paying the rent—reporting on the events of the city, plain and simple, for better or worse. And it was often worse, because the kind of stories his editor liked the best were the kind Yoiks told himself were battles between good and evil. Except that it was the evil his editor really liked the best. Crime paid, because it made good copy, and good copy sold papers.

  Yoiks was jealous of the brilliant creative artist weirdos because they couldn’t help being their geek selves, who somehow still managed to pay the rent. He couldn’t see how they did it until he saw the stone that Oleg brought home from the Catskills. Then it hit him hard. Not the stone (it was big enough to crush him), but the idea of this object brought in from the wild that so obviously looked as if should be shaped into a woman’s head. Not just any woman. Vincent. He’d seen only photographs of her and her statue. And he didn’t know anything about stone carving, though he was going to find out.

  What was inescapable to him was the destiny of that stone to be what it had to be.

  The stone carver who’d said yes for free because she just had to be the one to carve Vincent into the stone—who was she, if not Unique?

  So when Yoiks finally found the story and the Unique New Yorker he wanted to write about, he finally quit worrying so much about paying the rent—and just turned into what he was meant to be: someone who wrote about brilliant creative artist weirdos because that’s what he was a geek for.

  —M.A.M.

  P.S. You may wonder how I know. Let’s just say reporters all face the struggle over what makes good copy. So naturally I had my beady little eyes on Jonathan Yoiks.

  “I used to go out there when I was in college.” He leaned both arms on the truck, his eyes seeing something far away. “I remember one day after my history exam. It was at least ninety-five degrees, and I’d sweltered through the whole test. After it was over, we drove out to Brickyard and jumped right in. Nothing like it.”

  “You went to college?” said Simon quietly.

  “To the university up there,” Nichols answered.

  The little kids pulled on Oleg’s pockets. “Was that rock a donkey before it was here?” a girl asked. She had her favorite picture book under her arm: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble.1

  “You mean like Sylvester the donkey?” Pearl asked.

  “Who?” said Francine, and Pearl and the girl began to tell the story about the donkey who finds a magic wishing pebble and accidentally turns himself into a rock so that nobody knows he is there.

  “The Rock Lady is a better story,” sniffed Francine, and Pearl, although she disagreed, bowed.

  “Thanks for the call,” Jonathan Yoiks said, striding up. Bruce had called him about the arrival of the stone. “I sure wish I could give the library more coverage.”

  “Actually, you were a bit of a shark at first, when it came to this library—more interested when there was something a little, shall we say, dark going on.” Bruce was standing tall, being cool, looking down his nose at Yoiks.

  Yoiks shrugged. “There’s more light than dark on Lancaster Avenue since I met you. If only I were a millionaire, I’d start my own paper.”

  “‘If only I were myself again,’” quoted Nichols, saying what Sylvester the donkey said when he was the rock. Nichols was walking away, looking sad.

  Pearl moved to get in front of him, and made him look at her. “What were you?”

  “An architect. An artist who designs buildings.” He stared off toward the pines.

  Mom came up behind them and put her hands on Pearl’s shoulders. “What are you all talking about so seriously?”

  Nichols didn’t turn to look at Mom. “Safety,” he said.

  Pearl thought, No, we weren’t.

  1 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig (Windmill Books, 1969).

  33: REAL LIFE

  STILL OCT 11

  The evening Moon held a picture of Vincent with Oleg standing beneath her, along with his uncarved rock, and the caption:

  Library statue gets taken for granite by Clancy Street boy.

  Pearl sat at the circ desk and stared at the photograph, unable to believe there was another picture of the library in the paper with a kid who wasn’t her. She would have to do something about that, but in the meantime she was just irritated.

  “This doesn’t even make sense!” she said to Mom. “We didn’t take her for granted. We love her!”

  “It’s a pun, Pearl.”

  “It’s a cheap pun!” snapped Pearl. “It makes people think Oleg stole the head.” Pearl hated to admit it, but Vincent was pretty creepy-looking in the photo.

  Mom took the newspaper up to Bruce, ready to say good night, then stayed up there long after a quiet gloom had settled over the empty lower floors. Pearl opened the basement door and heard nothing; the raccoons must have already woken up and gone out.

  She rode the book elevator upstairs to spy, and pushed the elevator door open slightly to hear Mom relating Pearl’s conversation with Nichols and Yoiks.

  “Does Nichols think the library isn’t safe?”

  Bruce’s answer reached Pearl’s ears clearly. “He might be right. How are we going to tell Pearl that the library board is researching the apartment proposal before the district vote?”

  Pearl didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it sounded good for the apartment proposal and bad for the library.

  “If the paper would just quit publishing the downside of everything . . .” Bruce groaned. “Yoiks has been saying he’s writing a story about Vincent, but that’s never what gets in the paper!”

  (Even the best writers still get cut.)

  Instead of joining the conversation, Pearl scooted into the Memorial Room, which used to be a place for writing workshops, speeches, ceremonies, and recitals. Did anybody even know it was here anymore? The founders looked down at her from their frames, dull and dusty above the cold fireplace. She sat on the windowsill. She could see all the way south to her school, and all the way north to the intersection with Eighth Avenue, where buildings were lower and the houses were smaller and even scruffier than here.

  If only they could pick up the building, garden and all, and put it somewhere else, relocate it someplace where people wanted a pretty building and good books and raccoons and a statue with a story. It would be the happy ending The Little House got.

  But look! Pearl pondered the situation. The head had been stolen; that was true. But now they were getting a new head made, and they were going to have a celebration for it. And Simon and his band would play music at the celebration. Pearl knew if a few cool teenagers did something, others who wanted to be cool might follow.

  And more kids from the middle school and elementary schools might come on account of Pearl’s stories and Francine’s dances and the Rock Lady game and the Reading Raccoons. More people were getting library cards every day, so circulation had to be going up again, it just had to.

  Pearl had to admit that all this wouldn’t be happening if Vincent’s head hadn’t been stolen. The first story, about the theft, wouldn’t have gone in the Moon. That might not have attracted the attention of Mr. Bull and Mr. Dozer. Bruce and Mom might not have found out there was an alternate plan for the library in time to request a district vote. Other library branches had been shut down without so much as a warning to their management.

  If Vincent’s head hadn’t been stolen, Pearl might never have gone creeping around looking for it in the dark back bu
shes of the garden, and wouldn’t have found Nichols’s things. She wouldn’t have gotten to be such good friends with him, and he might not have had any reason to show her Matilda, Mary Ann, and Arak in the reading room after hours. She might never have met Mary Ann or learned about Mrs. Mallomar and the midnight Moon. . . .

  Bring back the head, and where would they all be? Pearl turned back time to spring, when Bruce used to come for dinner without fighting. Pearl thought of Bruce and Mom’s stony summer silences. Now, in the stressful autumn, at least they were talking.

  And above all else, if Vincent’s head hadn’t been stolen, Pearl wouldn’t have screamed, and that meant Francine might never have come to the library. Pearl’s only friends might still be the library staff. Pearl wouldn’t have made her first friend her own age.

  A Sidebar About Magic

  Magic is a trick.

  (If you’re wondering how I know this, well, raccoons have been to plenty of birthday parties, lurking in the high weeds of backyards and parks, watching the magician, waiting for the wonderful leftovers: cake, pizza, lemonade, Tootsie Rolls. Have you ever seen a raccoon eat a Tootsie Roll? It is not a pretty sight, but they are delectable.)

  Magic looks like it’s real, but it doesn’t behave by the rules of reality. You can’t reach into an empty hat and pull out a rabbit. The trick succeeds by confusing you. The magician drapes a shiny scarf over the hat and while you’re watching that, he lets the rabbit out of a secret compartment in the table. What you see is what you think you get, but that’s only because you looked away at the crucial moment. The trick seems real—and you want it to be real—so you believe it.

  When you put fantasy into a story, it’s like a magic trick: You have to make everything around it as real as possible. And you also have to make people want it to be real—want it to be real so much they could cry.

  —M.A.M.

  Pearl left the Memorial Room. Mom must have gone downstairs, because there were no more voices. Pearl went into Bruce’s office and stood stroking the back of the raccoon costume.