A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

by Karen Romano Young

  “I’m doing what you told me to do. I’m going to get that mayor and bring her back here!” He strode off through the alley and turned in the direction of the subway.

  Pearl’s knees felt weak. At the same time, something had lit inside her, like a jack-o’-lantern with a candle that had just met its match.

  “Simon, why does it have to be me?” He just looked at her for a second, his mouth in a firm line. Then he towed her over to Oleg, who was setting up an apple-biting game with Alice.

  Simon said, “Tell Pearl what you told me. Tell her about the kids in the audience at school.”

  Oleg pointed a finger at Pearl. “You—it’s you who scared them. Yeah, Francine freaked them out, but you were the one who scared them and made them want to come and see.” He waved his hand at the library, at Vincent. “You made them feel like it would be cool to come. Like they were invited.”

  Pearl puffed out her cheeks. Hadn’t she practiced and worked precisely for this moment? She told the nervous part of herself to shut up and got ready to scrape the sky.

  Mom butted in. “Simon, get those microphones set up. Pearl, throw that costume on, and come back down here in it, pronto.”

  Pearl squeezed the Headless Horseman bag and made a decision, but not the one Mom thought. “I’m going,” she told Mom.

  “Our little Pearl, the Master of Ceremonies,” said Alice, rotund in her Humpty costume. “Perfect.” And she huffed as though at least one thing was in order. Mom put an arm around Alice’s egg-costumed shoulders and walked her down the driveway, past the glowing jack-o’-lanterns.

  Pearl went into the library, but she didn’t go upstairs to get ready. She went downstairs to the basement. Mary Ann and Arak were wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  “It’s a go,” Pearl said. “Will you be ready?”

  Together the raccoons gave her thumbs-ups, their teeth showing.

  “Haven’t seen Mr. Nichols, have you?”

  Mary Ann shook her head.

  Pearl charged back up the stairs and emerged into the hallway.

  “Pearl! Are you going to get ready or not?” It was Oleg.

  “Right this minute,” she promised. “What about you?” He was just wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. “You don’t look like someone who is about to present the library with a new head.”

  “Oh, I’m ready.” Oleg whipped a Day-Glo rag out of his back pocket and pulled it over his head. In glow-in-the-dark letters, it said ROCK STAR.

  “Where’d you get that?” Pearl said in admiration.

  “Francine helped me make it,” he said. “Now go!” He turned and walked away, too.

  Pearl stood there alone.

  Okay! she thought.

  She threw the Headless Horseman bag into the yew bushes, and made a dash for the library door. The place was mobbed. A crowd of people blocked the foyer, waving library cards as they approached. Ramón was manning the back hallway, selling beautiful prints of Yoiks’s ghostly headless Vincent portrait. A steady stream of people flowed from the front door through the back hall. Pearl dodged them all, sprinted upstairs before anyone had time to notice her.

  She passed the eerie second floor, with the caution tape crossing the reading room entrance, a plastic sheet covering the doorway. Bruce’s office was dark, but Pearl didn’t need to turn on the lights. By now the entire neighborhood was there, all of Lancaster Avenue, and a bunch of people from neighborhoods beyond. Babies in frontpacks, toddlers in backpacks, teenagers in packs, grown-ups in pairs. Loads of little kids in costume were straining at their parents’ hands or running amok, even climbing the statue. She scanned the crowd for Nichols. Would he really miss this? How could he?

  Other than Nichols’s absence, it was great: Elsa was Harriet the Spy. Someone was a pig, maybe Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web.1 A little kid in a stocking hat was Peter from The Snowy Day.2 There was a robot with blinking lights on top of some familiar-looking sloppy socks: Millie? It figured she would know how to wire that—even if Pearl wasn’t sure which robot book it was from! Khadija was dressed as the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, that was pretty cool. Some kids were even acting out the Rock Lady thing, chasing each other up and down the paths. Pearl couldn’t believe she’d somehow convinced all these kids—the same ones who couldn’t spare a moment to think about her at school—to be here, doing this, for books. It was some version of a dream come true.

  Pearl took a moment to think what Bruce would do if he knew what she was about to do. She decided things couldn’t get any worse than they already were. She couldn’t take any more moments. Now was the one that counted.

  The raccoon costume was even heavier than it looked, and the second she undid the hook at the neck, it fell from the hanger with a rip of opening Velcro. Pearl pointed the toes of her sneakers and maneuvered them through the legs of the costume, hoisting the torso up around her waist. It was way too big for her, just as Bruce had said. She tried to tuck some of the leg material inside her sneakers, and settled for rolling them under at the ankles. Then she hefted the furry shoulders up over her own and hooked the costume at the neck.

  Pearl’s stomach was doing funny things, but there was no time to get out of the costume now. She thought of one of the first things Mary Ann had ever told her. Just do it. The slogan didn’t say anything about waiting until the moment was just right and getting into huge trouble if you miscalculated.

  No guts, no story, thought Pearl. It was time for the final step: the head.

  A Sidebar About Surprise

  You go along and along and you think you know what to expect—a sort of rule of routine that comes with having been in one place a long time. And then, whammo, something comes out of the blue and you do one of three things:

  1. Freeze

  2. Leap into action

  3. Zigzag

  Pearl did all three.

  —M.A.M.

  She pulled a step stool over to the tall cabinet and began to climb up.

  She reached the top step and lifted the hollow raccoon head off the upside-down metal garbage can that supported it. The head was bulky, heavy, high—hard to lift off the can.

  Come on, muscles! She tugged harder on the head. Just one more careful pull—

  The raccoon’s head loosened suddenly, and Pearl fell backward off the step stool and landed in a sliding pile of books and magazines. She gripped the head tight with one hand, her eyes squeezed shut in horror. She wouldn’t drop the head, she couldn’t, and she didn’t. She anticipated the clanging, bashing fall of the garbage can, but it didn’t come.

  “PEARL!” Francine hollered from far away at the foot of the stairs.

  Pearl pulled the raccoon head over her own head.

  “Coming!” she yelled, her voice muffled inside the head. She stood still for a moment and ran through her story in her mind. She thought of Vincent, sending out power from her hand to make the books fly into the air, the stories raining down, their characters coming to life in the kids wearing costumes down below, the raccoons who had taught themselves how to read—and herself, a beautiful, fat, furry, striped, masked Reading Raccoon.

  Bruce had been right about the mask being hard to see through. Pearl peered around the room: books strewn everywhere, budget plans, book posters. And there, on the file cabinet, sitting where the raccoon head had been, was not the metal garbage can—but Vincent’s stone head.

  1 Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, illustrated by Garth Williams (Harper & Row, 1952).

  2 The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats (Viking, 1962).

  44: FOUND

  STILL OCT 31

  Pearl screamed.

  She screamed just as loud as she had when she first saw the head was missing.

  But this was a different scream, a very different scream.

  For one thing, nobody heard it. Why?

  One, she had the raccoon head over her face.

  Two, Bruce’s window was closed.

  Three, everybody outside was making so
much noise, they wouldn’t have heard her even if the window was open.

  And, four: Pearl cut her scream short. She choked on it. Because the raccoon head had been hiding Vincent’s head. So someone must have put it there. Who? And when? And why oh why?

  The thought of it ripped through Pearl’s imagination.

  All the old ideas about the crime—college student, neighborhood punk, homeless man—seemed innocent, funny, so much better than this: the possibility that Bruce, her Bruce, Mom’s Bruce, their Bruce, had left his office one night when he was working late and made his way to the garden in the dark. What could he have been thinking when he pulled the stone head off the spindle? How could he have done this?

  Then again, who else was here in the dark at night? Who else had the strength to carry the head? And who else would Nichols work so hard to protect—because Bruce had been so kind and protective of him?

  “Pearl?” That insistent yell came from Francine, stuck waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

  Pearl went thundering down the stairs, clutching the rail, half blind and half dazed. What was she going to do? Who was she going to tell? Francine? Alice? Mom?

  Francine said, “That’s you, Pearl, right? Hey, you got the costume!”

  “You bet,” said Pearl. Her voice inside the raccoon’s head sounded echoey, shaky.

  “Check it out, Pearl!” That voice was Oleg’s. She turned her head, saw his blond hair through an eyehole, saw a brand-new stone head in his arms. “Vincent’s here!” Oleg was quivering, thrilled and proud.

  “Come on!” Francine said. “Everyone’s out there waiting for us.” She put a stony grip on Pearl’s furry elbow and hauled her across the back hall. Pearl was in danger of tripping over her own furry tail. Francine said, “The mayor’s not here and Bruce is not here, but Simon says you’ve got to get up there now and do whatever you’re going to do or people might start leaving. Rock Lady, then the costume parade, and then the band’s going to play.”

  Where was Mom? Pearl’s stomach quaked. Her face inside the costume head was sweaty from the thousand crazy feelings running through her.

  But Francine was already pushing open the garden door, walking like a statue barely coming to life. The change of pace caught everyone’s attention. People laughed and gasped and stood aside. Little kids pointed and screeched. Pearl held on to Francine’s hand and pulled her through the crowd.

  At the edge of the circle of space around Vincent’s pedestal, Simon handed Pearl a microphone. “Just push this button,” he said.

  Pearl goggled at Simon through the eyeholes of the raccoon head and bellowed in his ear, through the raccoon’s mouth, “Simon! I have to tell you—”

  Francine whacked Pearl on the elbow. “Turn that mike on and start!”

  The round cut-out raccoon eyes didn’t let Pearl see peripherally, so she had to turn her whole head to see all the people. There were an awful lot of them.

  She carefully lifted her baggy, furry legs to step onstage. And accidentally, suddenly, Pearl felt herself push the button.

  She began the way she always began: “So. Once there was a poet.”

  She had been telling herself pieces of this story about Vincent for so long, she didn’t quite know where all the rises and falls were, but she never had any problem starting off. This time, Pearl made the starting point in her story a blackout.

  “Imagine: The power is out, and there is no television, no radio, no internet,” she intoned. “The people of the city have become desperate for stories, for news, for poems, for songs, for words that aren’t their own, to give them new ideas and new pictures in their heads. Vincent, the famous poet of New York, reaches out her hand, points a finger, and all along Lancaster Avenue, a different kind of power takes hold.”

  Francine stood to one side, leaning forward as though cradling a book. Gradually, the audience shifted their focus to her, while keeping an eye on Pearl, too.

  Pearl intoned, “She wants—”

  She turned to Francine, who stretched out a wavering hand.

  A Sidebar About New York City

  My grandmother once told me that New York had layers—layers of people, layers of animals. You couldn’t tell just by looking what layers somebody had, how unique they were. And nobody was only one layer. You might be a homeless girl who worked in a kitchen by day and danced ballet with a hip-hop boy in the subway at three in the morning, or a well-fed fat cat who still preferred hunting rats at night, or a princely long-locked man with a fuzzy-headed daughter who spent afternoons at a climbing wall. New Yorkers are really like that.

  But the other thing I’ve learned about New York is that sometimes the layers disappear, stop mattering, and for no reason at all—or every reason—everyone seems the same.

  —M.A.M.

  “She wants—” Pearl said more urgently. Now everyone’s eyes turned to Francine. Her glimmering raised palm begged insistently toward the crowd, refusing to be ignored.

  “What does she want?” said Oleg on cue, and others took up the cry.

  “What does she want?” the audience called. “What does she want? What? Does? She? Want?”

  This was Oleg’s big moment. He strutted along, the crowd dividing to let him pass, then pressing in again quickly to see the new stone head he was carrying. Simon and Mom appeared and helped Oleg lift the head, and the other band members came forward to help them raise it higher. The teenagers climbed up the pedestal and lifted the head into place. The crowd clapped and cheered.

  “In the blackout darkness, Vincent rained down stories,” Pearl continued.

  She felt light inside her heavy costume. The drama in her voice seemed to come from a deep, thrilled place it had never come from before.

  “The stories were heard by the raccoons first. They were closest to the statue, and felt its energy. After all, they had learned to read from Vincent’s own poems. They had moved into the library building for shelter, and expanded their literacy to our whole library.”

  Some faces looked sort of blank, some skeptical, others seemed rapt. Pearl carried on.

  “Before long, Vincent the person was gone, and her statue took her place—here in this very garden. Here under these trees, where the raccoons made their homes. It was Vincent who brought them to the library, as she brings the human Reading Raccoons of Lancaster Avenue here tonight.”

  The crowd cheered.

  “And now Vincent has come to life again through this dancer”—Francine, the stone statue, made a slow, heavy twirl—“and through this rock hound and his stone carver friend”—Oleg pulled a young woman into the light, earning a rousing cheer, and together they took a bow—“and through this rock band”—Lo’s Coyotes struck a chord.

  Pearl finished: “Today Vincent is once more turning the library into a place of refuge—only this time, it’s a literal as well as literary shelter for people who need stories. Nocturnal animals with a newspaper of their own, reaching out with nighttime news. Daytime people needing information, education, or entertainment. Raccoon kits—and human kids!—learning to read and falling in love with books. Who are they? Who? Who?”

  “Reading Raccoons!” Simon roared. Francine, now standing on the amp, pumped her fist.

  “Human and animal, they want stories!” Pearl called.

  “Reading Raccoons!” the crowd called back.

  “They want to know what the new head looks like,” said Pearl, “to see if it’s really Vincent, and her family of . . .”

  “Reading Raccoons!”

  “They’re getting library cards because they’re part of the library now, just like the . . . ,” invited Pearl.

  “Reading Raccoons!”

  “They’re reading books and getting educated!”

  “Reading Raccoons!”

  “They’re smart and getting smarter!”

  “Reading Raccoons!”

  Pearl recited the rhyme she’d made up:

  “Their nose in a book

  and a book in their paws
,

  turning the pages

  with their toes and their claws.”

  “Are you here?” yelled Oleg.

  The crowd roared. “Yeah! We’re here!”

  Then Pearl began a new chant. “Reading Raccoons are here!” A roar went up across the garden. Pearl pumped both paws in the air. “Reading Raccoons are here! Reading Raccoons!” The audience chanted with her, and she felt the power of them lifting her. Simon pulled a big book—in fact it was the New York State atlas—and put it into Pearl’s hands.

  Pearl stood tall, stretching her arms out toward the library, and held up the atlas, flapping the covers above her head as if the book was a bird. It was a signal to Mary Ann and her relatives in the trees.

  Just then, there was a rolling sound, a flutter of flapping paper, and a series of gentle whoomps as the strung-up, scrolled-up props, made of cardboard painted to look like book covers, filled with old pages from the Moon, bounced down on strings from the treetops. The big books flapped above the crowd. “The books opened their covers like wings and flew! And out of them came stories.” Pearl extended a hand toward the audience. “Book characters! Let’s march!”

  Shouting, laughing, chattering, the kids ran toward her. With one paw, Pearl grabbed the hand of a girl in a mermaid costume—and with the other, she lifted the microphone and held it steady.

  “And now,” she said, “introducing the pride of Lancaster Avenue. Lo’s Coyotes!”

  The band sprang forward from the shelter of the amps. Simon took the mic. “One, two, three, four!” he cried, and the music blasted out.

  Everyone in the costume contest—and quite a few who weren’t—formed a long conga line to dance to Lo’s Coyotes’ jolly Halloween music.

  Here was pink-haired Rosita from the Rosebud bodega, Tallulah, Khadija, Elsa, and Millie, and Jaime and his little brothers, plus Gully himself. And who was that little lady on his arm? Francine’s granny! Humpty Dumpty Alice and Mad-Hatter Danesh joined the conga line. Last of all marched Francine, dancing better than anyone else, and certainly louder.