I walked slowly outside. The back of the house was cherry red from two-thirds up to the roof and one-third down to the ground. Only the middle was still gray. Pigeon gray? Clay gray?
“Aunt Bonnie? Where’s Claybury?”
“Claybury, Connecticut?” Aunt Bonnie said from the ladder. “It’s where Uncle Joe’s school is. It’s, oh, four or five towns, hmm, east of here. Past New Haven. Why, what’s happening there?”
I shrugged. “Just wondering. It was on the radio.” Hadn’t she heard? No. They’d been clanking the ladder around. And the radio was inside anyway. For me.
“What about it?” asked Aunt Bonnie.
I shrugged again and went back inside, deposited myself back into Dad’s chair, picked my book up from the arm where it was lying on its face.
In the kitchen the Beatles were singing “Eleanor Rigby,” a creepy song that Dad liked, about some woman who had died. I closed my eyes. Mom came in, called, “Are you all right?” to me, and set about making lunch. Soon Aimée would be home from her camp.
“A Claybury eighth grader is the target of a county-wide search. Last seen at five o’clock last night, Wendy Boland”—I went into the kitchen, turned the radio down, turned it up again—“brown hair and blue eyes. Witnesses or anyone with information should call”—down again, up again—“the driver of a green station wagon—” I slammed the off button and ran up to my room.
The sun was dull on the Ascontis’ maple trees.
When I heard the newspaper truck, I got up and went down to fold. “How do you feel?” said Mom.
“I’ll live,” I said.
“Cramps go with the territory,” said Aunt Bonnie.
Well, what about this Wendy kid? I couldn’t say it.
I went and did my route.
Wendy Boland was on the front page of the Bell. She was a thin girl with braids like mine, except that they were brown. She smiled a little crookedly out of a black-and-white newspaper copy of her last year’s school picture. CLAYBURY GIRL MISSING.
Her father, the Bell said, was a foreman (like Dad) at the submarine yard. The police did not suspect any connection with his employment. I didn’t understand, then wondered if submarines were needed as much as helicopters in Vietnam.
The article said that the girl had left the area, either on foot or “by some other means.” Like what? Like running away? And what did other means have to do with a green station wagon?
At six I was sitting at the kitchen table. Mom and Aunt Bonnie and I were having iced tea at the counter. Aimée and Pammy were squishing Play-Doh on the back steps. I wanted to ask Mom to turn off the radio but I couldn’t. I watched the clock.
Notes. Typewriter keys. Loud and clear in the middle of the kitchen on a warm, sunny summer evening. “Police are looking for clues in the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Wendy Boland of Claybury—” Mom reached over and switched off the radio, as casually as if she’d gotten tired of the static. I jumped.
“What’s a witness?” I spooned up eggs.
“Somebody who sees a crime,” Mom said. “Why?”
Hadn’t she heard? Didn’t she know?
Wendy Boland, I wanted to say. I couldn’t make my mouth form the name. I shrugged. “Just wondering,” I said.
CHAPTER 8
WE HADN’T BEEN PLAYING HIDE-AND-SEEK LATELY. Everyone waited for Dave and me to get up a game, but Dave didn’t come to get me. For the first time ever, I felt embarrassed to go get him. He might say no.
Once when I was sitting on the Rankins’ steps, making a spool wagon with Aimée and Pammy, Sandy had come over to the circle to try to get up a game. He stopped and looked at my work and nodded his head as though he knew what I was making. “Hide-and-seek?” he simply said. I left my stuff on the Rankins’ steps and went with him through the two backyards.
When we got to the Ascontis’ back door, there was yelling inside—Pete’s voice and Uncle Joe’s—so Sandy and I backed away without knocking. He and I had looked at each other, and he’d smiled a little as if the fighting were funny, but maybe it wasn’t, he wasn’t sure. We went away again. I’d liked him better since that day. At least he’d been willing to walk up the steps with me, and we had something in common from walking down them.
Now Sandy was at the junior high camp. I didn’t know if he’d been there other summers. I hadn’t paid attention to what Sandy had done, other summers. Dave had always gone to Park and Rec camp. To him and Nathan and Ziggy, it was a chance to play baseball. I left the mothers to their mysterious painting activity (I bet Dave and Pete wondered how Aunt Bonnie got red paint on her) and braved camp. It did take bravery, too, not just on account of being afraid to go out in case someone came and caused me to disappear, but on account of Pete.
I thought about walking, but then I thought about Wendy Boland. I got on Reshna and flew instead. Down Marvin Road to the corner and then left onto Chauncey Road. It was a mile, up hills and down, to the park. Little twinges of cramps still touched my insides, like a hot thing to be avoided. It was either this or stay home and listen to more no-news news reports about Wendy Boland.
The first time I met Joanie Buczko was at the bike rack, where she was unloading a stack of white T-shirts from her baskets.
“Help you?” I offered, because the shirts were falling.
“Thanks,” she said, handing over a pile of shirts. “Old Frank can handle a big load like this better than I can.”
We walked toward the picnic tables by the baseball field. I was first-day nervous. “Your bike has a name?”
Joanie looked at me warily. “Yeah.” She sounded so tough that something told me her mother made her say “yes” the way mine made me say “derrière.”
“So does mine,” I said. “Reshna.”
“Reshna means?”
“‘Dragonfly.’”
“Frank means ‘free,’” said Joanie.
Joanie was clean, clean and pink, with dark, curly hair in a tight ponytail and dark, sparking eyes. That’s sparking. She went to Bridgefield Junior High, not St. John Vianney’s. So I’d seen her, but I didn’t know her, until now.
“My name’s Joanie,” she said.
“I’m Chérie,” I said, and she practically gasped.
“What a good name,” she said.
Not weird. Not foreign, or French. Good. I felt almost giggly, I liked her so much.
Joanie and I dumped the shirts on a table, and then she stood talking to an older girl who was standing there. “Take a seat,” the older girl said, waving her hands at the crowd of kids. I looked back to see Joanie still standing there, gabbing. Her Keds were whiter than any I’d ever owned, except for the first five minutes I owned them. My own toes were poking out of my new lime green flip-flops, already sandy and damp from the morning grass and the road. I found a spot at the end of a bench. After a moment a brown-haired girl came and sat on the bench a foot or two away.
The boys all were sitting on the picnic tables over there under the trees, and the girls were meant to stay over here, sitting on the picnic bench or the fence railing that separated the picnic area from the baseball field. That was the way it started, but it didn’t stay that way. Joanie squooshed in between me and the girl next to me. “Hey, Rosa,” she said to the girl. “This is Chérie.”
“Hi,” said Rosa.
Now there were two people I knew, but Joanie knew everybody.
At first I thought Joanie Buczko was just an enthusiastic camper, but soon I began to think she was overdoing it a bit. She raised her hand for capture the flag, basket weaving, tie-dyeing, badminton, and sand casting and jumped right off the picnic bench when the head counselor, Micky, announced that there was gimp.
“Oh! I love gimp! Don’t you?” she squealed to Rosa and me.
I looked inside the cardboard box of gimp. Big spools, thick and tightly wound with the flat plastic string: sea green, pale blue, white, pink, red, royal, purple, black, yellow. Fantastic.
“Micky’s real name isn’t Mick
y,” Joanie confided. I shrugged. “He looks like Micky Dolenz from the Monkees,” she went on. “That’s why we call him that. And that’s Bunny and Pie—” She pointed out the two girl counselors. One had white-blond hair and big teeth. Bunny. I couldn’t imagine why the other girl, a friendly-looking college girl with a ponytail, big blue eyes, and freckles, should be called anything weird like Pie.
“What about Pete?” I asked.
“Him? The new guy! You’re right! Thanks! Hey!” Joanie waved a hand in Pete’s face. “Chérie here is right. You need a nickname. All the counselors have one.”
“Pete is a nickname,” said Pete stiffly. I didn’t dare laugh.
“Oh, come on! There’s got to be something else we can call you. I’ll help you think of one. What’s your last name again?”
He told her.
“Your initials are PA! Like the PA system at school!”
Pete looked at her blankly. “The public-address system, dopus,” Joanie explained. “You’re going to be making a lot of announcements, right?” She laughed a long bubbling laugh. “So we’ll call you PA.”
“He’s got the mouth for it,” I said. Pete glared at me but stayed on his best behavior. He wanted this job.
“He’s so cute,” Joanie whispered as he walked away.
“You!” Dave now said every time he saw me. He said it with his finger pointed at me, from his front steps, from his bike, from the car window. It made me feel lonely. He said “You” to me, but he didn’t say anything else. Ever since school had ended, there hadn’t seemed like any reason to go for walks in the woods. I guess the book Dave had in his bike basket—The Outsiders—wasn’t something he wanted to act out.
“Pete’s been teasing him,” Aunt Bonnie said. She was on her way home from painting our house to painting her painting. I was folding and banding my papers on the front Steps: HUBERT H. HUMPHREY HEADED FOR DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION. Humphrey wasn’t Kennedy. That’s what the grown-ups said.
I looked questions at Aunt Bonnie, but she just shook her head and kept going home. Her painting was coming along. The pine trees were becoming more detailed, with some pinecones glinting dimly under the moon, but the house in the center was still shadowed, with just the outlines of windows.
I used Aunt Bonnie’s pastels to draw my mother as she planted pachysandra around the yew bushes by our front porch, her stomach like a ball she held in her lap as she reached toward the ground.
I saw Pete come walking along Marvin Road. But instead of coming toward his lemon yellow house he walked up the path of the cherry red house and started helping my mother plant. It froze me for a minute. I should have been doing that. But I stayed where I was, pasteling. When I saw Pete hug my mother and turn to cross the road, I quickly closed the pastels and tucked them into Aunt Bonnie’s shelf. She was already downstairs, starting dinner.
I scooted down the stairs, yelled, “Bye! Thanks!” in my cheery-fake voice, and whisked past Pete.
“Hey, Pete,” I said, “I know who likes you.” Even to myself I sounded like Pammy—or like Joanie Buczko herself.
“Yeah? Give me some news.” He kept going, sounding grumpy, as if he already knew all the females who were mad for him.
I rapidly folded my papers. I brought my mother a beautiful, big glass of ice water. Then I took off on Beshna to deliver papers whose headlines did not tell me that Wendy Boland had been found and was well and happy. SEARCH CONTINUES, the Bell said.
Joanie kept on flirting with Pete and didn’t seem to figure out that she was wasting her time. Maybe she just thought it passed the time. Camp wasn’t terribly interesting, after all. It was great that there were enough kids to get up good bunchy games like capture the flag or steal the bacon, but generally it was too hot to play for long anyway, and we’d end up slumped over the picnic tables and fences, playing cards or weaving baskets or making lanyards out of the plastic gimp string or tie-dyeing the shirts that Joanie had brought.
Pete didn’t flirt back. It wasn’t because he was at work, but because he just wouldn’t. I’d known him to like only one girl, and it wasn’t Lucy, but a dark-haired girl who quit walking home through Marvin Road sometime last winter. Dave said Pete did a great job keeping the snow shoveled off the front walk all season. I didn’t know if he ever talked to her.
He sure didn’t want to talk to Joanie, but she kept trying. She always sat next to me, and at first I thought it was just because I knew the Ascontis. But after a while I think she realized that I was just as good with gimp as she was. When I started making elf swings from Popsicle sticks and gimp, she got interested.
It was Dave who leaned over and said, “Who could swing on that? Barbie?”
Joanie took a look and shot right back, “Of course not. Her butt’s way too big.”
“You should know,” Dave said.
When he went away, she said, “Who, then?”
And because I’d seen her trying to weave the long, stiff grass that grew at the edge of the baseball field into a tiny basket like the big ones we’d made, I told her.
By the end of camp we were friends, good friends, who rode bikes to each other’s houses and wished we were going to the same school in the fall. But first, before camp ended, Joanie made an enemy.
“I’ll bet you can’t keep your mouth shut until lunchtime.”
Joanie shuffled her deck of cards. “Hmm?”
“If you can do it, you can have two rolls of gimp. Two whole rolls, any color.”
“How about me?” I volunteered. “I’ll do it.”
“I mean Joanie,” said Pete. “You I can shut up anytime.”
“Cannot!”
“Shh, Chérie!” He had his finger to his lips, shushing.
“You can’t—”
He put his hand over my mouth, hard. I kicked him.
Joanie said nothing, and that was saying something, I realized. Pete did, too. “Then you’ll do it?” he said. She nodded, her nose in the air, eyes on her cards. He put his finger in her face. “All morning,” he said. “Not a word until lunch.”
He walked away.
I jumped onto the fence beside Joanie. “What are you, crazy?”
She shook her head, shuffled her cards.
“You’re not going to let him do this, are you?”
She nodded.
“Why? It’s a free country. You can talk if you want.”
She pointed at the gimp box.
All morning she didn’t even say “Gin,” just turned her cards over face-up on the table and waited for everyone to notice she’d gone out. Then, when they all said, “Oh! Joanie!” she just smiled.
Pretty soon she got tired of it. She couldn’t laugh out loud or yell at her partner or even name trump. She made charades-like motions for the hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds. True to form, she made those motions into teasing for Pete, using the heart to tell him she loved him, motioning toward an imaginary diamond on her hand, pretending to hit him on the head with a club. But they all were stumped about the last motion she made, until Ziggy guessed “I dig you” instead of “I spade you.”
I went and said in Dave’s ear, “Your brother is paying Joanie Buczko gimp not to talk until lunch.” He smelled of warm grass and Bazooka bubble gum. He just walked away. Nathan followed him to the baseball field, glancing back at Joanie twice as he went. Eventually Ziggy went to play baseball, too, and the camp was split boy-girl as usual, except for Sandy, who stuck around. Curious, I guess.
When Bunny and Pie and Micky (who didn’t know) were all off doing other things, Pete started goading Joanie to talk. He called questions to her, trying to fool her into answering. Then he started telling Sandy that Joanie would never get through the morning without talking. “She’s just naturally got a mouth on her,” Pete said.
“Just ignore him,” I told Joanie, passing three cards from my hearts hand to Rosa. Even to myself I sounded like my mother.
Two of the other girls rolled their eyes at each other. One said smugly, “I’m
glad I’m not some boy-crazy flirt.”
Rosa caught Joanie’s eye and said, “Gimp. Think gimp.”
Twenty minutes before lunchtime we all had given up the card games and were sitting around, waiting for lunch. The baseball players, red and sweating, had begun trickling back to the tables under the trees. Joanie stared off into space, watching the end of the game of keep away going on in the outfield. Pete began poking her. He took her elbow and hauled her on top of the picnic table. Normal Joanie would have made an announcement or a joke, but silent Joanie sat on the table and just waited.
“What’s your problem, exactly, Ass-conti, huh?” I asked.
Pete pushed Joanie back and forth, making her rock on the tabletop. “Talk to me, Joanie. You’ve got the vocal cords.”
“Leave her alone!” I shoved Pete away with both hands. Joanie waved her hands at me, gesturing: Don’t, it’s okay. Pete spun around, put his fist against my chin.
“Come on, Pete,” said Sandy DeLuna, of all people. The last time Pete had grabbed somebody by the chin, it had been Lucy.
“If you lose, you’re going to have to give away gimp that’s not yours,” I told Pete. “It’s Park and Rec’s, not yours.”
Stupid Sandy said, “Park and Rec will just think the group sure used a lot of gimp.” Whose side was he on?
“Stay out of it, Sandy,” said Dave. Pete was now punching my chin ever so gently, a preview of coming attractions.
“You wouldn’t want to get involved, would you, Davey?” I muttered.
He glared at Pete. “What my brother does is his business.”
Pete waved his finger in Joanie’s face. “Make it all day,” he said, “and you can have five rolls of gimp.”
“Don’t, Joanie,” I said. I elbowed Pete away from her.
Joanie shook her head.
“That’s okay,” said Pete. “Everybody already knows you’re a big motormouth. You couldn’t shut up if your life depended on it.”
I wouldn’t have cried, wouldn’t have let myself cry, but Joanie did.
Outside In Page 6
