Under the Watsons' Porch

by Susan Shreve

  And she doesn't. I'm on the floor checking a mosquito bite on my ankle that I got on the walk home, which I scratched and now it's bleeding.

  I look over at my mother, who's sitting very still, watching me.

  “I'm going to watch TV with Milo,” I say, and turn to leave.

  “Just a moment, Ellie. I need to ask you something first.”

  The light is on beside my bed, a ballerina lamp although I never was a ballerina nor ever wished to be one. It's gotten dark out, not black but dusk, and there're shadows across the floor of my bedroom. My mother has changed positions. Her arm is lifted, her palm up in a gesture of offering, and on her palm is something familiar.

  “Do you know where this came from?” she asks.

  She's holding the teardrop-diamond necklace Tommy gave me for my birthday. I lean against the wall, suddenly weak.

  I can't remember where I must have left it. The other day when Milo climbed in bed with me, I slipped it under the sheets. But today I think I left it in my underwear drawer, under the clothes, so she must have gone looking for it. I have to be calm since I don't know whether I'm going to tell her the truth and am trying to take deep breaths while I make a decision.

  “I was putting away your laundry, straightening up your underwear drawer, and I found this under your new camp panties.”

  I'm sensible enough to know that I can't lie about it now. The necklace certainly couldn't have gotten in my underwear drawer by magic, so I wait for the next question.

  “What are you going to tell me?” she asks quietly.

  I take a breath and hope there are words waiting when I start to speak.

  “Tommy gave it to me for my birthday,” I say.

  “He did.” It's a statement, so she must know already that he gave it to me.

  I nod.

  “This is the present you meant when you told me that P.J. had left a present on the front porch for your birthday.”

  “Yes.” I slip down to the floor. “I didn't tell you because you didn't want to know.”

  “I understand why you would have thought that,” she says.

  “You never liked Tommy Bowers,” I say.

  “Did he tell you that he took this necklace from his mother's jewelry box?”

  I take a deep breath and let my eyelids collapse over my burning eyes so I don't have to see her.

  “Do you remember the police at the Bowerses' house the other day?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were there because someone had stolen Clarissa's necklace from her jewelry box.” She hesitates for a moment and then gets up from the bed, walks over to where I'm sitting, and drops the necklace in my lap.

  “They're real diamonds, you know,” she says.

  “That's why he wanted me to have it,” I say. “Because they're real.”

  She's standing now, leaning against the closet door, her arms folded across her chest.

  “What's going to happen?” I ask, already thinking of what I'll need to take with me when I run away from home.

  “Now you're going to call Tommy and tell him what has happened and explain that you have to tell Clarissa and want to tell her with him, and then I'll come with you to the Bowerses so you can return the necklace.”

  “I don't want you to come with me,” I say.

  “That's fine,” she says. “But you have to talk to Tommy now and go over right away.”

  I put the necklace around my neck, fasten the clasp, and look at myself in the mirror.

  “I don't know why you never liked Tommy,” I say.

  She hesitates, answering carefully.

  “It's true I worried about Tommy but I was also beginning to like him.”

  “You should trust me,” I say to her. “I'm your daughter.”

  She doesn't reply to this but I can tell just by the expression on her face that she is thinking about what I said.

  “Eleanor?” She stops to open the bedroom door. “Did Tommy tell you where he got the necklace?”

  I'm not sure what to say. I'm not going to tell her that he told me he bought it at a jewelry store. And I won't say I don't know where he got it, either.

  It's better for me to say nothing than to betray Tommy.

  “Perhaps you ought to take the necklace off,” my mother says.

  I turn away, heading for the sunporch.

  “Not yet,” I reply.

  19. The Sunporch

  I'm sitting on one of the cots on the sunporch and Milo is sleeping in the cot next to me, the covers over his head so my flashlight doesn't keep him awake. I'm writing a letter to Tommy, who I can see through the window straight across from me. He's been sent to his room, probably for the rest of his life.

  Tommy and I have plans to run away tomorrow morning as soon as his parents leave the house. But sitting here next to Milo, I know that I can't leave him alone in the house without me. So I'm trying to figure a way we can keep the Lollipop Garden without running away from home.

  * * *

  Things didn't go well at the Bowerses' house tonight. I went over by myself, carrying the diamond necklace in a plastic baggie and Tommy met me on the front porch.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asked first off.

  “I'm not at all mad,” I said, which was true. “I liked that you wanted me to have a beautiful necklace.”

  He opened the screen door and I followed him into the living room, where Clarissa was sitting on a small pink flowered chair with her legs crossed and Mr. Bowers was reading the Sunday paper in a large chair with a footrest. Clarissa watched us cross the room but Mr. Bowers seemed to be more interested in the sports section than in our criminal activity and didn't look up until I handed the necklace to Clarissa and sat down next to Tommy.

  “Pretty swell jewelry for a—What is it you are, thirteen years old?”

  Tommy gave me a funny look. “Twelve,” I said.

  “I've already spoken with Tommy,” Clarissa began, and for some reason, I couldn't take my eyes off her very sharp, narrow nose, which seemed to be growing as I watched. “And I believe you are really free of involvement in this necklace ordeal, isn't that right?”

  “I don't know what you mean,” I said, watching the way her nostrils flared when she spoke as if they were made of such thin material that the slightest movement of air made them billow.

  “Tommy gave you a present and told you he'd purchased it at a jewelry store, isn't that correct?”

  I don't think I like Clarissa. Other people like her and my mother thinks she's fair and kind, but she seems prissy to me.

  “So, thank you for bringing back the necklace and there's no need for you to linger. The necklace is my problem with Tommy.”

  “Except,” I said, “I knew from the start that he'd borrowed the necklace from your jewelry box.”

  Looking over at Tommy with his chin out and his head high, so young and proud and strong, I wanted to be in trouble with him.

  “Ahhhhh,” Clarissa said, drawing hard on the h. “That puts another light on things.”

  Soon my parents were in the Bowerses' living room and Mr. Bowers had put away the sports page and Tommy's punishment of solitary confinement had been levied and the Lollipop Garden had been closed down by proclamation of the Bowers family.

  “Somehow, El,” my mother said as we walked across the driveway that separates our house from the Bowerses', “I don't believe you did know about the necklace.”

  I didn't reply.

  “I think you were protecting Tommy,” she said.

  “I love Tommy Bowers,” Milo said. He was waiting for us in the driveway.

  I was glad of this. Milo was an outside observer, as my father would say, an innocent bystander. He had nothing to gain by coming to Tommy's defense, so maybe my mother would listen to him.

  “I don't want to close the Lollipop Garden,” I said. “I don't understand why Clarissa can make us do that.”

  “She's trying to find a punishment for Tommy equal to the harm she feels h
e's caused,” my mother said, and by the way she spoke I could tell she didn't agree.

  “Maybe you should tell her to be nice to him, extra nice,” I said. “He's not had very good luck with mothers.”

  “That's true.”

  We sat in the kitchen while Mom made lemonade from scratch. “But he does have a habit of getting into trouble like this. Like stealing.”

  “I don't think of what he did as stealing,” I said.

  “He took something that didn't belong to him,” she replied. “That's stealing.”

  “He's never had things and never had money, so he's had to learn how he can have things that he wants to have.”

  “But it's wrong.”

  I fold my arms across my chest, unwilling to argue.

  “Have you ever seen him steal anything else?” my mother asked.

  “Never,” I replied.

  “Ellie?”

  I finished my lemonade and went upstairs to bed.

  Which is where I am now sitting, on a cot on the sunporch with a sleeping Milo, writing a letter to Tommy.

  Dear Tommy,

  We will figure out a way so we don't have to close down the Lollipop Garden. We have to keep it for the sake of the kids. They need us. And I'm not at all mad about the diamond necklace and how it got to be mine and then had to go back to Clarissa's jewelry box even though I know she never wears it.

  Just to let you know, I've saved fifteen dollars of my allowance to buy lollipops to plant for next Saturday and that's enough candy to last us until the end of July, so you don't have to worry anymore about having enough because I do and will give it to you and that's that.

  I've got a lot of things I've been thinking about but I'll wait till next time we see each other tomorrow or run away to wherever, maybe New York because Alaska is so far. And cold. Please call me pronto.

  Love, Eleanor Russell Tremont

  Tommy must have noticed the flashlight moving around on the sunporch because he's standing by the window. The window is closed and he's making no effort to open it, just standing there looking in my direction but not at me although I've turned the light of the flashlight toward my face so he can see that it's me.

  I wave and call his name but softly. I certainly don't want my parents to wake up. Or, especially, the Bowerses.

  But Tommy just stands there for a while, a shadow, an outline of a boy, and then he turns and climbs back into bed, shutting off the light.

  20. Under the Watsons' Porch

  It's Saturday, the last Saturday in June, the second week in which lollipops have grown in the garden and there're eighty-four of them glittering in the sunlight streaming through the lattice under the Watsons' porch.

  Tommy and I are stretched out on the beach chairs and he has an unlit pipe between his lips. We haven't been talking since we got here, which was early morning, but we were later than we'd planned and had to plant the lollipops. Besides, we talked all week, every day, sitting in the potting shed or at the counter of M&J Root Beer on Vanderbilt Avenue or on my front porch or on Tommy's. Clarissa put out some porch furniture for us and made cookies and limeade and said she wanted us to make ourselves comfortable.

  Perhaps he was beginning to like her better than he had.

  “Clarissa is a good woman, Ellie,” Mom said to me the night after the crime discovery. “She's trying to be a good mother but she's inexperienced. We have to give her a chance.”

  “Not my problem,” I said. “She's not my mother.”

  “Well, why don't you help Tommy out with her. He needs to understand that Clarissa is trying.”

  We were sitting in my bedroom. Mom was on the floor in a yoga position with her legs wrapped around each other, her arms in the air, and her face pointing in the direction of the sun, but that didn't seem to ruin her concentration on our conversation.

  “I thought I wasn't supposed to be a friend of Tommy's any longer,” I said. “I thought you and Dad decided he was too much trouble.”

  Mom unwound her legs, rested her arms, and turning to face me, she shook her head. “We've changed our minds,” she said, stretching her arms above her head. “We listened to other people and that was wrong, especially for a couple of teachers who ought to know better that a kid isn't necessarily what you hear about him from other people.”

  I couldn't believe my ears.

  “Tommy's won us over with his good heart,” she said. I didn't argue. Parents are strange people, hardly like regular humans sometimes, and I'm not going to even try to figure them out.

  “Does this mean we can keep the Lollipop Garden?”

  She looked at me, a sweet, devilish expression on her face, like a girl's.

  “You don't need to ask my permission to keep the Lollipop Garden, El,” she said. “You're going to keep the Lollipop Garden anyway whatever we say.”

  “I bought the lollipops in case you were wondering,” Tommy says. “I got them yesterday at the five-and-ten, three bags for six dollars, and that saleslady was there and recognized me and asked me to avoid loitering.”

  I start to say “good boy” like Mom says to Milo but changed my mind.

  “I also got you this.” He reaches into his shorts pocket and takes out a small box and hands it to me. “I got it yesterday at Wake Up Little Suzie with my own money.”

  I know what it is without opening the box, but I take the lid off slowly, making a ceremony of it. My bare arms are shivery and so is the inside of my stomach, a flush of red burning my cheeks like blush.

  To Eleanor Russell Tremont from her best friend, Tommy.

  The sparkly necklace I had wanted for my birthday is sitting on a mound of yellow tissue paper.

  “It's beautiful,” I say. “It's the most beautiful necklace I've ever seen.”

  “And this time,” Tommy says, smiling at me, “it's real.”

  We are beginning to hear the kids in the neighborhood, shouting and laughing and talking as they come up the hill to the Watsons' house. Tommy checks the lollipops, straightening a few that are bending toward the ground, and we stand in the doorway, our shoulders touching, looking down the driveway. There they come, tumbling toward us full of excitement, our little charges, our monkeys, our team.

  “Everything worked out, didn't it?” Tommy says, catching my hand in his.

  “Perfectly. And I don't even have to go to Camp Farwell tomorrow,” I say, looking over at Tommy's face, which is dappled by the light coming through the slats under the Watsons' porch. “I never would have dreamed this garden by myself.”

  TROUT AND ME

  by Susan Shreve

  Ben has always been a good kid; it's just that things keep happening that get him sent to the principal's office—ever since first grade, when he tried to flush Mary Sue Briggs's favorite purple teddy bear down the toilet after she made fun of his lisp. Now that he's in fifth grade, things are a little better, until the day Trout shows up in class and attaches himself to Ben like Velcro. At first Ben is afraid Trout's badness will rub off on him, but soon he starts to enjoy Trout's pranks, and then they're in more trouble than ever. When the school and parents decide it's time to do something about the boys, it's up to Ben to come to his friend's rescue and show everyone that Trout isn't all bad: he's just a kid. And Ben is just a kid too, trying his best to do what's right.

  “Funny and honest.”

  —Booklist

  “In this moving novel … Shreve introduces

  characters of uncommon dimension and complexity—

  and leaves readers with subtle issues to ponder.”

  —Publishers Weekly, Starred

  THE FLUNKING OF

  JOSHUA T. BATES

  by Susan Shreve

  It's the worst possible end to a great summer vacation: Joshua Bates finds out he has to repeat the third grade. His teachers say he needs another year “to mature.” What do they expect from a nine-year-old? A beard?

  The first day of school is a complete nightmare. The fourth graders think he's a freak
, the kids in his new class are babies, and his teacher looks like a two-ton tank. Joshua is totally miserable. Will he ever catch up—or is he stuck in the third grade forever?

  “Touching, funny, and realistic.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Crisply humorous.”

  —The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

  JOSHUA T. BATES

  TAKES CHARGE

  by Susan Shreve

  Joshua T. Bates is no stranger to bullies. After he flunked third grade, Joshua became big Tommy Wilhelm's prime target. But it's fifth grade now, and Tommy and his gang, the Nerds Out, have a new victim: Sean O'Malley, the dorky kid with the Mickey Mouse lunchbox. He's little, he's wimpy, and—to Joshua's relief—he's taking up all the gang's time. The trouble is, Sean thinks Joshua is his new best friend. Now Joshua has a tough decision to make. Should he stick up for the geek—and risk his own neck?

  “Welcome back, Joshua T. Bates!”

  —School Library Journal

  “A perceptive story that makes it plain what it's like to be an outcast and also what it takes to be a hero.”

  —Booklist

  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  Text copyright © 2004 by Susan Shreve

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers.

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