A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

by Karen Romano Young

  “You’re a tap-dancing Rock Lady!” yelled Pearl.

  “You bet!”

  The last person in the parade approached the stage. She was a tall, thin, dark-skinned woman in a beautiful suit, with a jack-o’-lantern in her hand. Even looking through the raccoon head’s crooked eyes, Pearl could not mistake who she was.

  Pearl bounded onto the stage and thrust herself into the band and grabbed the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen! The Lancaster Avenue library’s biggest fan! Her Honor, the mayor of New York City!”

  45: THE MAYOR

  HALLOWEEN, CONTINUED

  The first thing the mayor did was bestow an honor onto the new Vincent’s head: a yellow baseball cap with the black mask of the Reading Raccoon. The mayor plopped a cap on Her own Honorable head to match.

  When she took the microphone from Pearl, everybody leaned forward to see what her words about their library would be.

  But into the hush, before the mayor could speak, came a horrible noise—a squawking and a scrabbling.

  Ramón said, “It’s coming from the dumpster!” Oleg quickly went to it and lifted the lid. Pearl pushed through the crowd.

  A kaboodle of little kits scrabbled at the bottom of the dumpster, acting desperately unable to get enough traction to climb out. Pearl looked around for a box.

  “Simon,” she said, “your guitar case.”

  Simon nodded, and Oleg grabbed the guitar case, jumped into the dumpster, and squatted down.

  The audience mumbled, excited. What was going on?

  Bold little Arak ducked into the guitar case, and the others followed. Then Oleg zipped it closed and lifted it—with a rabble of rattling raccoons writhing inside—guiding it into Pearl’s arms.

  Well, this was unexpected (to everybody but Pearl). The crowd stepped back, opening a path for Pearl, in her raccoon costume, to walk to the fancy little raccoon doorway she and her friends had made around the hole at the base of the wall. Then she squatted and unzipped the top of the guitar bag to make an opening. Everyone craned and peered and peeked to see what was going on.

  The first raccoon to peek out was Arak. The crowd leaned in to get their first glimpse of whatever was coming out of the bag.

  A raccoon! At the sight of Arak’s little face, the crowd erupted into awws. Then someone said, “Shhhhhh!” and the crowd shushed itself, in love with the little raccoon and desperate not to scare him.

  Arak goggled at the many human feet around him. He put his left paw forward, then raised the right one toward the sign above the raccoon entrance. On the sign were Rs, like on the caps the humans wore.

  Arak made a growling sound, RRR.

  “He can read the sign!” said a little girl, and other small children near her echoed her words. The people murmured in astonishment.

  Arak seemed not to notice them. Next came an A as in ak, then two Cs, then an ending like the Moon’s. Oon. There was only one word that looked that way, and it was the best-looking word in the world to Arak. Raccoon. He knew what that meant, and he puffed out his chest a little and marched proudly down the path and right into the Reading Raccoon entrance like a prince entering a ballroom.

  The crowd went wild.

  One by one, the other kits emerged from the guitar case and made their way through the doorway, the crowd giggling and murmuring with delight.

  With that, the mayor, all but forgotten, picked up the microphone again.

  She praised the artistic jack-o’-lanterns. She praised the children in their creative costumes. She praised the Reading Raccoons.

  “What a neighborhood!” said the mayor.

  Big cheer!

  “What a community!”

  “Olé!”

  “What a library!”

  “Hooray!”

  Then Her Honor led the biggest cheer of all for Vincent and her new head. “Hip-hip-hooray!” she whooped, and everyone joined in.

  Stepping off the stage at last, Pearl slid behind the statue to see things from Vincent’s point of view. Pearl knew she had done her job. She’d kept the party going, raised a chant for the library, told her story, celebrated her hero, saved the raccoons to the best of her ability. Whatever happened to the library now, she’d done her best.

  She tugged off the raccoon head as she made her way to one side of the garden. Out of the spotlight now, she could see the audience, and Mom. There she was, thankfully beaming at Pearl with pride instead of anger about the costume, but also looking around for someone. For Bruce?

  A Sidebar About News

  The tool that reading raccoons rely on to spread our news is an old-fashioned printing press, courtesy of Tallulah. We help her newsstand stay in business, and she helps us print our news.

  What’s news to raccoons? Just what you’d think: warnings about poisoning campaigns; maps of relocations; reports on coyotes, rats, and other true vermin; outdoor music festivals and street fairs (raccoons love those); and personal ads. Romance is important for raccoons, same as for anyone else.

  Not all raccoons are library patrons. Not all raccoons know Kwame Alexander’s books1 as well as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry. In fact, most raccoons like gossip, not literature. They like to stay on top of who’s tearing down and who’s building up. They need to know about rat poison so they can warn the rats, so that the rats will stay allies, not enemies.

  It’s okay. There’s no need to be a snob. Remember the layers. City or country, library or tree, literature or gossip: We reading raccoons all share one story.

  —M.A.M.

  Suddenly, Pearl’s happiness was knocked down, and she sagged as if she had been taken out at the knees. She remembered: Bruce had stolen the head. What did any of it matter—the library closing, her and Mom moving away, the raccoons and Nichols cast aside—if Bruce was the sort of person who would steal his own statue’s head?

  “Pearl! Pearl!” It was Bruce. “Where are you?” Then he spotted her in the crowd and made a beeline for her.

  She put the head back on to hide, but he picked her up anyway, costume and all, and spun her around so hard, the fur tail flopped wildly.

  “Put me down, Bruce! Put me down!”

  He bounced her onto the grass, whooping. “Did you hear?” he said. “The mayor gave an interview to Jonathan Yoiks. She’s recommending the city keep us open as a library. Not apartments!”

  “What? We’re not condemned anymore?”

  “Oh, we’re still condemned. Things have to be fixed. And maybe they will be.”

  “You mean they might approve your Disney World library?”

  Bruce laughed. “Not likely. We’ll be lucky if the new budget is enough to fix the stairway. And we’ll definitely lose personnel.”

  How could Bruce be happy about that? Pearl was amazed that he wasn’t yelling at her about the raccoon costume. But she had things to yell at him for, too, and now suspicion rose anew: The personnel he was happy to lose was himself. He was leaving them. But why would she want him to stay anyway, since—

  She grabbed Bruce and pulled his face next to hers. “You took Vincent’s head,” she said. “You took it and hid it under your raccoon head and let everyone think it was stolen.”

  “What?” Bruce tried to straighten, but she held his arm and raged on.

  “I stole your costume, and I shouldn’t have, but you weren’t going to let me use it any other way, and now I know why.”

  “Why would I do that, Pearl?” He sounded hurt—beyond hurt. She wanted to believe him, but what else could she believe?

  With no peripheral vision, Pearl didn’t see Mom come up beside her. But she heard her when she spoke. Quietly, calmly, almost peacefully.

  “It wasn’t Bruce, Pearl.”

  “Then who?”

  “It was me who hid the head.”

  “You?”

  Mom?

  Mom?

  1 Such as The Crossover by Kwame Alexander (HMH Books for Young Readers, 2014).

  46: THE HEAD ROBBER

  HALLOWEEN GOES
ON

  Words came pouring out of Mom. “I’m the one who took Vincent’s head and hid it under the costume head. Bruce didn’t know anything about it. If you’re going to be upset, be upset with me. I had a good reason, Pearl. Can you please take off that head so I can see your face?”

  And as soon as Pearl did, she was surrounded.

  “Here she is!” Francine cried, rustling up in the Rock Lady costume, happy and glittery.

  “Hey, Pearl!” Oleg’s face glowed, so proud was he to have found the stone, found the stonemason, broken the bad spell over the library and the garden and Vincent herself, and had his head hoorayed over by the mayor of New York City—Her own Honorable self!

  “Pearl, you were great!” That was Millie, with Khadija and Elsa beside her.

  “You were the star!” Simon seemed joyful: Not only was Pearl a success, but so was he—and Lo’s Coyotes.

  Pearl stood in the middle of her amazing friends. How could she tell them what had happened to Vincent? What would happen if they knew about Mom’s theft?

  She couldn’t bear to look at her mother.

  So she focused her energy on her friends. She acted. “You guys were the stars,” she said. “You were a great Rock Lady,” she told Francine. “The new head looks spectacular,” she told Oleg. To Millie, Khadija, and Elsa, she said, “Thank you for building the raccoon door. It was a hit!” To Simon, she said, “You Coyotes can really rock.”

  Pearl stayed with her friends, letting them float her away, avoiding Mom. Pearl’s fury kept her from letting Mom into her thoughts, but she could feel Mom near, knew Mom’s worried eyes were on her. Pearl didn’t want to hear whatever Mom had to say about Vincent. She had never wanted to hear anything less in her life!

  Jonathan Yoiks elbowed his way into the group, clutching his camera.

  Bruce lifted his chin toward the reporter. “What are you covering tonight?”

  “The mayor pushing the library on Election Day, what else? It’s breaking news, after all.”

  “We’ll still have to do work on the place,” said Ramón. “It won’t just be the reading room that has to be brought up to code, but the whole basement beneath it.” Pearl wondered what Mary Ann would think of that. As for this winter, she hoped the chimneys—or the trees—would be okay for such adaptable raccoons.

  Pearl asked him, “What will you write?”

  Yoiks tapped his chin. “How the public libraries of the city contribute to their neighborhoods and should have higher budgets, especially ones with legends about reading raccoons.”

  “It’s not a legend, it’s real,” said Pearl.

  “All the best legends are,” Yoiks said. “By the way, your principal mentioned something to me about raccoon reading recommendations?”

  “Rax Rex!” said Pearl.

  “Think we could publish them in the Moon?” he asked. He slung his camera bag over his shoulder.

  “You shouldn’t promise to publish things if you’re not going to,” said Pearl.

  “Oh, Pearl,” Yoiks said softly. “You ought to know by now that people don’t always get to decide what happens, even if they feel like they know what’s best. My boss—”

  Pearl didn’t want to hear about any more decisions being made by people in authority. “A raccoon writes Rax Rex,” she said. “Isn’t that unique?”

  Yoiks smiled and bobbed his eyebrows at her. “Well, some good reader writes them. Ta-ta!”

  The night was winding down at last. Alice and Danesh had finished blowing out the jack-o’-lanterns and were walking up to the back door when Ramón nearly collided with them, holding out a white catalog card for them to read:

  “Who wrote that?” said at least five voices.

  “Vincent,” said Francine.

  “Mary Ann,” said Mom.

  A Sidebar About Ethics

  I may be “just a raccoon,” but I’ve been taught to think for myself, and one of the things to think about is doing the right thing. That’s what “ethics” is supposed to be.

  Good ethics means you’ll do the right thing even in a bad situation.

  But what if you do a bad thing—say, steal a statue’s head—for a good reason? That’s where ethics gets confusing.

  Feel free, have a debate. Take a stand on whichever side you choose: for Mom stealing the head, which created drama and got press and brought more people to the library? Or for her not stealing it and the library being condemned and repurposed as apartments for just a few humans?

  I know where I’ll be standing.

  —M.A.M.

  “No,” said Pearl. “Mary Ann doesn’t write in all capitals. That’s Mr. Nichols.”

  They looked at each other in dismay. Pearl was right. Nichols still had not been seen all evening, and look, here was his note, just as the library had found out who he really was. Now that the truth could finally be told about Nichols Construction, Nichols himself was gone.

  Pearl stood still. Her heart went out to Mr. Nichols, wherever he was now, her dear friend who held so many secrets—his own as well as hers. Had he left this note on purpose tonight, when he knew he could be lost in the crowd? She wondered if and when Yoiks’s article about Mr. Nichols’s innocence would appear, and hoped it would be right away, before he had a chance to get so far away that the Moon wouldn’t be his local paper anymore.

  Like the sudden blart of a voice through a microphone, a realization blasted into Pearl’s head. Mr. Nichols had known all along that Mom had taken Vincent’s head.

  And he had kept the secret from Pearl!

  But she wasn’t angry at him for that; he’d kept something from her that he knew would have upset her very much. That, she realized, was caring. She cared about him right back; if only she’d been able to do something to help him.

  Oleg picked up his boulder-sized pumpkin to take home.

  “Oleg!” said Pearl. “You’re the man!” He took a bow again and disappeared.

  Pearl’s classmates had already left. That left Francine standing there. “And you,” Pearl began, then was overcome with shyness.

  “I’m the stone woman?” Francine suggested, laughing.

  “Well, you’re definitely covered in stone,” said Pearl. Francine had at last been extricated from the Rock Lady costume, and seemed much reduced—tiny with her braids all frazzled, and her whole self covered in silver-gray dust. Francine was looking down at herself and brushing at some of the silvery coating, and that made it possible for Pearl to say, “You’re the hero of the library.”

  Francine grinned, and shrugged, and said, “But I’m not the head Reading Raccoon.”

  And now Pearl found herself alone in the back hall. She stood there biting her finger hard to stop the tears from coming. She became aware how quiet things were. It was the kind of quiet she had once been used to in this building: the quiet of a few librarians, a page, a book elevator creaking slowly upward, and a lot of books. She had so often been the only noise here. Now lately she’d only been here with other people. Things had changed. She was not just the librarian’s child anymore. She was Pearl. And that was good.

  “Pearl?” Simon came into the light from the circ counter with his backpack on, his bike lock around his neck. “We did a good job. Everything’s good. As much as we could hope for.”

  “Yeah,” said Pearl. “I guess so.”

  She thought back on the evening, on the day, on the weeks and months of trying and thinking and planning that had come before. They all had tried to do something, every one of them.

  Only Mom was a real live criminal, the kind that people had associated with this neighborhood all along. The idiot punk vandal head robber was—her mom!

  Pearl bit her finger again but couldn’t stop the tears from coming out.

  Simon gently shook her shoulders and hugged her. “It’s going to be okay now, don’t you see?”

  She nodded and tried to stop crying. Simon hugged her again. “Pearl, you’re a knockout actor and storyteller. I don’t know what’s wr
ong, but so long as you’re you, you’re going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  “Simon,” Pearl said. “You’re a knockout coyote. And a rock star.” She bolted the front door behind him and watched him unlock his bike from the rack and ride off down Lancaster Avenue.

  “Pearl? You down there?” It was Bruce, calling from upstairs.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get up here, I need a hand.”

  Pearl climbed the stairs. She knew what she was going to find: Vincent’s head sitting on top of his file cabinet.

  47: WHO’S MISSING NOW?

  HALLOWEEN FINALLY ENDS

  Bruce waited in the doorway of his office, leaning a hand on each side of the doorjamb. Behind him, of course, sat Vincent’s old head.

  Pearl tried to push him out of the way. “Where’s Mom? What did she do with the new head?”

  “Huh?” Bruce dropped his hands to his hips.

  “The new head. When’s that going to be the victim of some crime?”

  Bruce said softly, “I don’t think your mother is taking any more heads anywhere, Pearl girl. The new head is still outside on the statue.”

  Pearl put her hands on her hips and said, “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  She saw his throat move as he swallowed hard.

  “But Pearl,” he said. “You thought it was me, didn’t you? Hiding it there in plain sight in my office?”

  Pearl’s eyes filled. Could you cry from anger?

  She asked, “How could you not know Vincent was there all along? Did you and Mom have that plan together? Is that why you didn’t want to lend me your costume?”

  “No. No to all that. Your mom acted alone.” Bruce gave her a minute to absorb the information, and to consider its implications. He didn’t sound angry, just defeated.

  Pearl leaned on the windowsill and looked down onto Lancaster Avenue.

  “Pearl, do you have any idea why your mother did it?”

  Pearl sighed deeply. She didn’t want to think about this.

  “I know two reasons: because she loves you, Pearl, and because she loves the library. It isn’t what you think.”