by Phoebe Stone
“No, Reni. This doesn’t feel right. This is something different. It can’t be a crush. And how would we find any notebook of his anyway?” I say.
“Well, Benny probably lives around here. Everybody lives near here,” Reni says. “We can take a walk and maybe if we see him you’ll be able to tell how you feel.”
I sit up and wrap my arms around my legs. I put myself in a little ball. I need to do some flips. Fifty flips would straighten everything out. Followed by a bunch of fast aerial cartwheels and a string of handsprings. Henderson walks by the room outside, still with the book over his head. He stops in the doorway. Reni points to me and says, “A basket case.”
Henderson peers out at me from under some pages. I feel like a specimen in a zoo.
“What kind of a basket?” says Henderson. “Indian sweetgrass or pine needle?”
“Ha ha and good-bye, Henderson,” says Reni. Then she slams the door and flops down on the rug and stares up at the ceiling. “You know what? Loving Justin Bieber is a one-way street,” she says. “I do all the giving and get nothing in return, not even a form letter. You, on the other hand, have a handwritten, handmade, one-of-a-kind real letter. The only thing wrong with your situation is you. You’re on the fence. You’re waffling.”
“I’m not really on the fence,” I say. “I like Benny, I think. I mean, maybe a lot, for all I know. It just doesn’t feel like it, that’s all.”
Reni hops up suddenly like a big happy exclamation point. “Of course you do! Let’s go ask Annais where this poor adorable lovesick boy lives,” she says, looking sweetly, joyously at me. Then she starts jumping up and down and squealing. The Elliots all jump up and down and squeal a lot. Except Henderson. He frowns when they squeal. But he also smiles and laughs when he’s sleeping. Reni told me, when they used to share a room, she had to throw stuff at him in the night to keep his laughter level down.
Reni bops into Annais’s room and I follow her. “Guess what,” she says with a smile as big and wide as the South Pottsboro I-95 bridge. “She got a love letter.”
“No way,” goes Annais, giving a corner of her painting a scrub with a sloppy-looking paintbrush. “From who?”
“It’s so cool,” says Reni, still bouncing up and down. She’s so happy, she reminds me of a second grader on her way to a sleepover. “It’s from Benny McCartney. You know? We think he might be lovesick slash embarrassed slash desperate. She hasn’t seen him recently. He may be in hiding. If he doesn’t show up at school, we’ll know he’s hurting because she hasn’t responded.”
Annais’s face begins to match the color on the end of her paintbrush, a dark boiling red. “No, Reni. You are an inexperienced dope. He’s an older guy. He’s in ninth grade. Are you kidding me? You’re encouraging Louise to stalk him. Stalkers get in trouble, big-time.”
“Thumbelina is her name. If you call her Louise, she’s not going to answer you. Right, Thumbelina?”
“This is the real world, girls,” says Annais, “and it sounds to me like you’re both a couple of potential stalkers.”
“Do you think I’m stalking Justin Bieber?” says Reni, rolling her eyes up toward her eyebrows, as if there might be an answer to that question sitting up there.
“No, Reni, how can you stalk someone when you don’t even know where they live?” I say.
“Exactly,” says Reni. “She’s not stalking Benny, because we don’t know where he lives. Do you know where he lives, Annais?”
“Look, girls, I need to paint,” Annais says, stepping back with one hand on her hip, looking at her crazy messed-up canvas from a distance. She’s wearing a cool painting smock with all these artsy paint splashes all over it. “I bet you two think the center of a painting is important. Right?” says Annais.
“Yeah,” Reni and I say in unison.
“Well, to me, all that matters are the edges. I’m working on the textural variations of color along the edges,” she says.
Reni and I look at each other. Then I put my hand up over my mouth to squeeze back a major laugh.
“Thumbelina isn’t feeling well,” says Reni, pushing me out of the room like I’m a loaded laundry cart. “And that’s because we have every reason to believe she’s in love.”
After looking in the phone book, Reni and I set out to walk by a couple of McCartney residences in the area. Paul McCartney of my grandpa’s favorite group, the Beatles, isn’t the only McCartney in the world. There are at least four others in North Pottsboro. But tell that to my grandpa. My grandpa says he’s the most ferocious, dedicated Beatle fan out there. To me, that means fifty years of listening to the same songs over and over again.
It’s snowing again. My feet are freezing. I’m thinking about that woman mountain climber Henderson told me about. Why didn’t anyone hike down the cliff and look in all the ice crevasses for her? Why did they let her fall off the mountain and freeze to death? I need to ask Henderson. But I couldn’t today because when someone has an open book covering his head, it’s hard to strike up a conversation.
Reni and I are walking down Nutmeg Street and crossing over to Coriander. Snow is dancing around us, and Reni just keeps trudging along. I’m not sure where we’re going, but we’re making a little path in the lost whiteness all around us. Our voices are puffy and muffled in the quiet snow falling. This is my old neighborhood. I used to be “a Cinnamon Street kid.” I had billions of blue ribbons and white ribbons for tumbling, for cartwheels, for walkovers…. I was a daddy and mommy’s girl. I had a daddy and a mommy. We had a house with two porches. Kids used to come over after school. I used to be a normal size too. I wasn’t little. I was average. I liked being average. It was fun being everyday and ho-hum and just like everybody else. That was before everybody started growing and I stopped.
Reni gets ahead of me and soon she becomes a bright blur in the soft, falling heavy whiteness everywhere. “Come on,” she calls, “I think he lives on Coriander Street. This way.”
The houses are covered in snow and have pointed roofs and chimneys puffing and little winding paths like in a fairy tale. We get on Cinnamon Street and we pass number 14. It’s a green house. “Reni,” I call out. “There’s my old house.”
I stop in the snow and stand there and look at the house. It’s unoccupied. Empty. I feel its emptiness in my stomach.
“This is where you used to live?” Reni says, puffing back through the snow toward me. Her cheeks are Reni red and her Reni round face is full of light. “That’s a cool little house. I didn’t know this was your house.”
“Yup,” I say.
The tree is still in the backyard. I can see its sprawling arms, its twisted branches. It’s all knotted and gnarled just by the back door. I guess I once climbed that tree and wouldn’t come down for five hours. My grandpa had to get up there and pull me out of it. They said I was screaming. You’d think I’d remember something so weird as that. But no. My grandma says I have blocked a whole week out of my conscious mind. She says I have forgotten everything that happened. She says I’m protecting myself. But how could I do that when I don’t even know what a conscious mind is?
Reni and I sit on the snowy front steps of number 14 Cinnamon Street. We don’t say anything much. If Reni were to ask me what happened here, I wouldn’t tell her. I would run away and never speak to her again, if I could remember. But I can’t remember. Reni might even know what happened, but she doesn’t talk about it.
“You had a lot of friends then,” she says.
“Yup,” I say.
“You don’t want to talk to them anymore.”
“Nope,” I say.
“You were so so good at gymnastics.”
“Yup,” I say again. And then I don’t feel anything except the soft snowflakes landing lightly on my frozen face.
Chapter
Seven
Someone is outside cleaning the sidewalk below our condo right now with a very noisy snow blower. It sounds like our building is being dive-bombed.
“For goodness�
� sakes,” goes my grandma, “why don’t they just use a shovel to clear the sidewalk? That noisy thing is doing nothing but blowing snow around and polluting our ears. Men,” she says, frowning at Grandpa.
“Well,” says Grandpa, “when I invented that machine, I should have made it quieter. Same thing with the wheel. I should have made it rounder, right, pal?”
“Ha ha, Grandpa,” I say.
“Ready to go?” says Grandpa, doing a few dumb Tai Chi moves and then grabbing my nose and pretending to steal it, like I’m a first grader or something. I don’t laugh and I’m not going to act like a little kid, even though I may look like one.
Then my cell rings and I open it. Whenever Henderson calls, his photo pops up showing him wearing a cardboard spray-painted space suit, his costume for a party last year at Halloween.
“Hey, Thumb,” he says.
“Hey, Hen,” I say. “What’s up?”
“Well,” he goes, “this is breaking news. This is confidential. This is top secret data.”
“What?” I say.
“Working at the library here, reading, I’ve discovered that dinosaurs never disappeared at all,” he whispers.
“They didn’t?” I say.
“No, they didn’t and you’re not to tell the Dinosaur Research and Development Foundation if they call, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. “And I was just about to give them a buzz.”
“Well, don’t bother,” he says. “This is top secret. Listen. You can hear some dinosaurs outside right now singing in the snowy trees.”
“What?” I go.
“They’re birds. Birds. They became smaller and smaller over millions of years. Dinosaurs evolved into birds.”
“Cool,” I say. “But we don’t have any trees or birds over here in South Pottsboro anyway. I haven’t seen a bird in years. Ha ha.”
“Ho ho,” says Henderson. “By the way, as I was leaving school today, no joke, this kid in my English class out of the blue gives me a gift certificate to Starbucks for two mocha Frappuccinos and two stale cookies. And I don’t even know the kid. That’s the way things have been going in my life since I bought that meteorite on eBay. So we can have a tall Frappuccino tomorrow afternoon, thanks to a beautiful little falling star, and I can read you another new chapter.”
“Oh, okay,” I say.
“Oops, gotta go, Thumb. They’re closing the library. Hey, wait! Excuse me. I’m still here,” he calls out. “Wait, come back.” I hear pounding on a door. Then Henderson clicks off and his photo disappears.
Henderson is always getting shut up in that library. Once he had to stay all night locked up in there. He slept in the rowboat full of pillows in the children’s reading room. But he blogged about it later and got a lot of comments. (Reni says he planned the whole thing.)
About this dinosaur stuff. Henderson always has all kinds of facts and all kinds of nonfacts. I mean, if you want to know the population of Pokeweed, Pennsylvania, Henderson knows, which is sometimes cool and sometimes like, “Uh, did you just get off the train from Dorkville, USA?”
Just now my grandma is saying, “Henderson is cute, but immature. Boys are always a little behind girls until later. Right, Grandpa?”
“I was way cool,” says Grandpa. “I was never immature.”
“Oh, right,” says Grandma, crossing her arms and smiling. She and Grandpa are planning to go out for sushi tonight, so they’re both all cheerful. Grandpa and Grandma get all excited about any kind of dinner on the horizon. When they go out, they always drink French wine and they go on and on about the woody barrel flavors and the overtones of boring fruity peelings. Meanwhile they’re both getting red in the face and rowdy in a senior kind of way.
Grandpa wants to make reservations at the sushi restaurant, but before he does, he wants to know what the restaurant looks like. He wants to check it out in person. It’s a new place that just opened up in, you guessed it, North Pottsboro.
Because I have no conflicting appointments (how unusual), I accept their invitation to go along. As we walk in the mall entrance, Grandma and Grandpa are holding hands again and I’m pretending to whistle and look at the floor. Being small and short, I usually see a lot of the floor anyway. I’m always the first to spot knotholes, nicked nails, and stuck bubble gum. A valuable asset. Ha ha.
Then suddenly we pass by my dream store. It’s called My Princess Prom and this store was created just for me. Whoever made this store knew me and knew I would die and go to heaven every time I walk in there. If Reni and I were billionaires, we would buy every single dress they have.
But the problem is not the dress. The problem is the guy. Which brings me back to the letter and the pink chalk heart on my doorstep. I mean, I have to admit I do have a tingly hopeful feeling because of this. I wouldn’t describe it as happy because, since last year and what happened, that word is not part of my daily vocab. I guess the best word to describe all this is confused.
“Louise,” goes my grandma. She smiles and spins around as we stop in front of My Princess Prom. “Louise, wouldn’t it be fun to go in there? You could try on some dresses. We could buy you one. What do you say, Grandpa?” Sometimes when my grandma talks to my grandpa, her voice goes up a notch higher than usual and she tries to look all cute and helpless around him. And my dumb grandpa falls for the act every time.
I smile at the store and nod at my grandma and grandpa in a very approving way. So we walk in the door of My Princess Prom. Then my cell phone rings. I look at my grandma and she shrugs her shoulders, so I answer it. “Hey ho, Reni,” I say.
And Reni goes, “You are never gonna believe this. I was in the school library earlier and guess who I saw?”
“Who?” I say.
“Who do you think? Benny McCartney! He was sitting there so sweetly filling out a form, and guess which hand he was writing with?”
“His left hand?” I say.
“No, his right hand,” says Reni. “Benny’s a righty! He’s a righty.”
“Oh no, I can’t believe this,” I say. “I have to sit down. I feel dizzy. I’m at My Princess Prom with my grandparents. They’re gonna buy me a dress.”
“Perfect,” says Reni. “Couldn’t be better. You’re going to need that dress. Buy it for Benny. He’s going to love it.”
“Fine,” I say. “Okay. I think.”
When we get off the phone I look up and the dresses seem to swirl around me, ribbons and lace and silky flowers. My mom used to like to wear pretty fluffy dresses. Blue was her favorite color. Not a dark blue but a pale blue. An eggshell blue, faint and breakable like a morning sky.
I believe I have already mentioned that I am, uh, immature-looking for my age? I am thirteen, but I usually have to look in the children’s department for clothes. Kids who are big want to be small, and kids who are small want to be big. Trust me. I know. I’m small and I hate it. Because teachers think I’m in fourth grade and guys look right over my head, thinking I’m somebody’s twerp little sister. The fact that Reni is very big and I am very small causes her dad to call us Abbott and Costello, these two stupid not-funny comedians from a hundred years ago. Ha ha.
I guess I should have stayed on the gymnastics team because there my small size is what my grandma calls “an asset.” She goes, “Oh, we all have to learn to use our ‘assets.’ The fact that I’m seventy-two is an asset when I’m looking to teach seniors. See what I mean?” But since I’m not on the team anymore, I have no need to be small. So I want to grow. Now.
They have all these gorgeous dresses arranged by color. Which one would Thumbelina have worn when she sat in the center of a delicate flower with her beautiful prince, getting married finally after suffering great hardships living with a bunch of weird animals who didn’t get her? I mean, if a big ugly mole came up and asked me to marry him, I would pass out cold and have to be taken to the ER in North Pottsboro. Pronto. To be quite honest, I do NOT want to die in South Pottsboro.
Maybe I should get a dress to match Benny McCart
ney’s eyes. I think Reni would approve of that. I mean, he wouldn’t have to know why I was wearing it. No pressure or anything like that. But I’m not even sure what color his eyes are.
“Look, honey,” says Grandma, “isn’t this one a dream?” She pulls out a net-covered light green silk dress with a matching crown of flowers. Grandpa is smiling. He has what my English teacher calls an “amused smile” on his face.
“Ah, maybe he doesn’t hate being retired after all,” Grandma says, putting her arm around me and looking up at Grandpa. I’m not listening. I hold the flower crown in my hands. It’s so perfect! Nobody could call me Abbott and Costello if I had that on my head.
“Oh, I love this dress,” I say. “Do you think you have one in my size?”
The girl selling the clothes is probably three years older than me but she thinks I’m just some little kid. It’s totally annoying. She has this look on her face, a frown covered up with a smirk, covered up with a smile.
“Well, we do have a few very small sizes on this rack,” the salesgirl says. Grandpa smiles at her like she’s so cute and sweet and so adorable. I hate Grandpa. I’m never speaking to him again.
“Here’s the same dress,” says Grandma, “in a size one. We are very lucky to find this.” She winks at the salesgirl. While I go into the dressing room with the to-die-for pale green dress, Grandma and Grandpa get all cozy chatting away with the stuck-up snotty salesgirl. Grandma is out there talking about my size issues. It’s like she’s telling that girl my deepest, darkest secrets and fears. Then Grandma ups and says, “Well, she hasn’t developed fully yet, and finding clothes in her size can be challenging.” It is the “fully developed” part that I am dying over. Thanks a lot, Grandma.
I try the dress on and it fits me perfectly. I look in the mirror and it seems like I was born to wear this dress. Like I’m meant to wear it. Once you have found your inner fairy tale, you can’t help but act it out! Don’t laugh, Merit Madson. I turn in a circle alone in the dressing room.
