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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NORMA FOX MAZER
“Mazer is one of the best of the practitioners writing for young people today.” —The New York Times
“It’s not hard to see why Norma Fox Mazer has found a place among the most popular writers for young adults these days.” —The Washington Post Book World
A, My Name Is Ami
“A satisfying novel about the ups and downs of 12-year-old Ami’s relationship with her best friend Mia … The writing is light but consistently sensitive and realistic, as the joys and disasters of the characters flow towards a moving and memorable ending.” —School Library Journal
“The atmosphere and the girls are right on target.… An accurate slice of teenage life.” —Publishers Weekly
B, My Name Is Bunny
“[Bunny] is a likeable, true-to-life character who hates her name and wants to be a professional clown. Her friendship with Emily is the source and depth of this simple story of two teenagers learning about life … [a] story of growth and acceptance with accurate and touching emotions.” —School Library Journal
C, My Name Is Cal
“Deftly sketched … Mazer’s skill in telling the reader more about Cal than he knows about himself, while narrating Cal’s unique, taciturn voice, is especially memorable.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Readers will recognize themselves.” —Booklist
Dear Bill, Remember Me?
A New York Times Notable Book and a Kirkus Choice
“Highly accomplished short stories, variously funny and moving, about ordinary, contemporary girls and their relationships with mothers or boyfriends.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Eight short stories, powerful and poignant, about young women at critical points in their lives.” —The New York Times
“Stories that are varied in mood and style and alike in their excellence.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
Summer Girls, Love Boys
“Featuring female protagonists, the stories mix the bitter and the sweet of life while encompassing a variety of narrative techniques, settings, themes, and tones.… Mazer writes honestly and provocatively of human emotion and circumstances while she demonstrates her versatility as a writer.” —Booklist
Good Night, Maman
“Mazer writers with a simplicity that personalizes the history.… Direct … honest.” —Booklist, starred review
E, My Name Is Emily
Norma Fox Mazer
For my niece
Lucy Northrop—
also a friend
Chapter 1
As soon as I got off the school bus I heard my best friend, Bunny Larrabee, calling me. “Emily, Emily!” I peered around for her. I’m nearsighted. Dr. Weiss says I should wear my glasses all the time, but I hardly ever do. I don’t like the way I look in them, but it’s not just vanity. I have a theory that the less I use my glasses, the more my eyes will improve from the muscles being forced to work. In the meantime, though, I have to admit that anything more than five feet away is kind of blurry.
“This way,” Bunny was yelling. “Over here, Emily.” Just as I finally located her in the crowd of kids, she ran toward me and grabbed my arm. “Emily, look at us!”
“Oh, no!” We were wearing practically identical outfits, flowered jeans, black cotton sweaters, and black boots.
“I can’t believe this,” Bunny said. “I went for these clothes half asleep; I didn’t even think about what I was going to wear.”
“I did.” I’d stayed in bed ten minutes after the alarm, figuring out my clothes exactly. Of course, being best friends, it wasn’t the first time we’d ever come to school dressed alike. We used to do it all the time when we were in the sixth and seventh grade, but at least then it was planned.
“Well, our earrings are different, anyway,” I said. I was wearing dangly purple bead earrings that I’d bought on sale. Bunny had on the Guatemalan ones her father had given her after one of his trips. They were handmade little knitted dolls in native costume: a tiny man in her left ear and a tiny woman in her right ear.
“Let’s braid my hair,” Bunny said as we went up the stairs into the building.
“Then we really will look like twins.” I’d done my hair in a single braid down my back, with a bow at the top.
“I should only be so lucky. You gorgeous thing!”
I blushed. Bunny is always doing that, talking as if I’m a beauty queen or something. Even though I’m aware that it’s just her way of building me up, building my confidence, it sort of works. When I’m with her, I do feel much prettier than usual.
In the girls’ room, I started brushing and braiding her hair. It’s thick and honey-colored. Mine is sort of wispy and dark. I like her hair much better.
“Did you watch Meridith Finkle’s show last night?” Bunny sighed. “If I could ever be one tenth as funny!”
Bunny wants to be a clown or a comedian. She has a million jokes and a rubber face. I think she’s going to be famous someday.
“I love her voice and the way she walks and everything about her. Her timing is exquisite.… I wanna grow up to be Meridith Finkle!” she honked in a flat voice, just like Meridith Finkle’s.
I laughed. “You’ll have to get fat first.”
“Oh, don’t say it!” She puffed out her cheeks. “Shad made fudge last night. My whole diet down the drain. Now I’ll have to be extra good all week.”
Shad is Bunny’s nine-year-old brother. She also has an older sister, Star, who’s away at college studying physics. They’re all smart in that family, but Shad is so smart, I think he might get to college before either Bunny or me.
“I was eating my fudge and I was eating Shad’s fudge,” Bunny went on. “I couldn’t stop. I had a fudge hunger, a fudge craving, a fudge obsession. Shad got so mad he tried to beat me up.” She snickered. “That skinny little pacifist didn’t know who he was tangling with.”
Bunny went on talking, but suddenly I sort of blanked out. Did you ever have that happen to you? Someone innocently says a word, and all at once there’s this moment from the past in your mind that pushes everything else away. It was the word tangle that did it. That, plus braiding Bunny’s hair, I think, because the memory was about braiding: my father combing and braiding my hair one morning about seven years ago.
It was so strange. There I was, in the girls’ bathroom, calmly pulling one strand of Bunny’s hair over the other, and yet I seemed to be there, too, back in the living room of our old house on Oak Street. The feeling was so vivid my cheeks got hot, my whole face flared up.
In my mind I could see little things like a crumpled tissue on the floor near the brown couch and a loose thread on my father’s sweater, and I could feel the boniness of his knee as I leaned against him. I heard him calling me Miss Tangles and saying that Mom wasn’t out of bed yet, so he’d braid me this morning. And I remembered how I was convinced my father was the tallest man in the world and the nicest and definitely the most fun.
“My hair doesn’t look good this way, Em,” Bunny said. “We gotta take it out.”
Her voice startled me. My stomach jumped. It was like being awakened from a dream. As suddenly as it had come, the memory, the whole thing, the realness of it was gone.
“You can wear a braid, Em, because you’ve got great bones,” Bunny was saying, “but pulling my hair back makes my front teeth look even huge-er.” She started yanking out the braid. “I hate these teeth! They stick out.”
“They do not.” I pushed her hands away from her hair. “Let
me do that, you’re making a mess.… Did I ever tell you how my father used to make up songs for me?”
“Only about a million times. And my teeth do too stick out. It’s the curse of my life.”
“I remember one he used to sing. ‘Frogboy is comin’ to visit Emilybird, ooh la ooh la, bring her some green guggy food, ooh la ooh la …’”
Bunny looked at me in the mirror. “Pardon me if I don’t comment; I don’t want to insult your father’s talent. I like him too much. Remember when he took us up in the balloon?”
I nodded. “He never writes,” I said.
“Oh, Em, don’t start getting depressed.”
“He never calls, either.”
“When my father goes away on a trip, he doesn’t write or call, either.”
“My father’s not away on a trip, Bunny.”
First bell rang. Bunny put her arm through mine. “Smile. Or I’ll have to tell you a joke.” I forced my lips up. “You gotta do better than that,” Bunny said. “I see a joke is needed here.”
“Bunny, shut up, please.” Why couldn’t I just be gloomy and depressed if that’s the way I happened to feel?
“Did you hear what the ceiling said to the wall?”
“Nooo.”
“Hold me up, I’m plastered.”
“Drunk joke, ugh.”
“A guy spent thousands of dollars to have his family tree checked out … he discovered that he was a sap.”
“Bun-ny.” But I laughed that time. “That was a terrible joke. I laugh at anything.”
“You are my best audience,” she admitted.
I dug into my sack and pulled out a copy of Great Bones, the book I’d finished reading last night. “You have to read this.”
“Who’s the cute guy on the cover?”
She always wanted to know that. “You’re going to love this one. There’s one part in there that’s so hilarious, where the girl says, ‘My name is Jan Bones. Call me Jan or call me Bones.’”
Bunny looked at me, raising her eyebrows. “That’s as funny as it gets?” She flipped through the pages. “Any hot scenes?”
“A few.”
“How far do I have to read to get to them?”
“On page fifty, they kiss—”
“Fifty! Not before that?”
“Bunny, it’s worth the wait. When they kiss, it’s so romantic. When I read that part, I could imagine myself being Jan. They’re near a waterfall and I could practically hear the water, and it was like I was Jan—”
“You have a great imagination, Em.”
“—and I was trying to tell him I wanted him to kiss me.”
“What do you mean, you wanted him to—I thought you said they did kiss.”
“They did, but first she had to convince him.” I stuffed the book in her knapsack. “Promise you’ll read it this weekend.”
“I’ll read it, I’ll read it.”
Chapter 2
I hate Sundays. We all just hang around the house. Mom acts tired. The twins fight. And I do homework. “I can’t think of an opening for this essay,” I said. “Does anyone want to help me?”
It was almost suppertime, but the lunch dishes were still on the table. I cleared a space for myself at one end. The twins had been playing Monopoly until Wilma got mad because Chris was winning. Now she was in the living room, shrieking over her favorite TV show. I call it Stupidest Home Videos. What’s so funny about a woman getting her head stuck in a toilet? Or a man on a ladder with his pants falling down?
Chris was lying on his back in the middle of the kitchen floor, playing with his Original Melted Snowman paperweight. Dad gave it to him ages ago. Inside the glass are a tiny black hat and two carrots floating in water. Get it? We’re all fairly sick of the joke, but Chris won’t go anywhere without the Original Melted Snowman.
Did I say my sister and brother were twins? Not identical, naturally. Fraternal. Two eggs. “Two very different eggs,” Mom says. Chris is like her, slow and sort of dreamy. I think I’m like my father, but Wilma is just—Wilma! “She’s a force of nature,” Bunny says.
“Can someone help me with this essay?” I repeated. I meant my mother. She can have good ideas about writing. She got A’s in college. But right now she had her head stuck in the refrigerator—like another scene from Stupidest Home Videos! Lately, she irritates me a lot. The way she doesn’t finish her sentences. And the way she dresses. She’ll go outside to wash the car or get the newspaper in anything, even her green running pants with the baggy seat.
“I need help,” I said.
Mom had finally shut the refrigerator. But now she was looking out the window over the sink. We live on the second floor of a three-family apartment building. It’s a tall, narrow house. Mr. Linaberry, our landlord, lives downstairs from us, which makes Mom constantly worry that we’ll be too noisy and disturb him. The Falansons live upstairs. There are only two of them, but when they’re home it sounds like a herd of galloping horses trampling over our heads. They never seem to worry about being too noisy and disturbing us.
Where we live now is nothing like the house we had until the divorce. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was bigger than our living room here. Mom doesn’t even have a bedroom now. She sleeps in the living room, on the convertible couch. Our real house was better in every way. Everything was better then. Even the street name and number were better! 215 Oak Street, on the east side of the city. Now we live downtown at 9½ Degler Avenue. 9½? Degler?
Last month, on the twelfth, was two years my parents have been divorced. It’s not exactly a joyous anniversary. I’d be just as happy if I didn’t remember the date. After Dad moved out, he called and came to see us a lot. Then he and Marcia moved to Chicago. They’re both lawyers. “Your father has a new life,” Mom told us. Right. After that, for all we saw of him, he might as well have been at the North Pole and named Robert Edwin Peary instead of Maxwell Boots.
After my half sister, Rachel, was born, I was curious if she was like me or Wilma. Or completely different. When Dad sent pictures, you couldn’t tell. She was just a baby and sort of blobby. We were supposed to visit them a couple times, but it never worked out. Things kept coming up, like Dad having extra work and the baby getting sick.
I glanced at the clock. “If I don’t have an opening line, I can’t write this!”
“Line …?” my mother said. Finally!
“Yes! For my essay.”
“You want me to, ah—”
“Yes! It’s due tomorrow morning.”
“You shouldn’t put things off to the last moment.” Mom leaned over my shoulder. “And the topic is—?”
“A Wish, a Dream.” That was the only thing on my paper so far, besides Mr. Pelter’s name and room number.
“‘A wish, a dream,’” Mom repeated. “Well, when I was going to school, what I did was take the title and go with it … and you know it worked, so …” Her voice dropped away. “It’s …” She nodded. “Yes. Useful method.”
Bunny claims my mother has never, ever finished a whole sentence in her life. Slight exaggeration, but you do have to know how to read between the lines. Usually, I don’t have any trouble. “You did what with the title?” I tapped my ballpoint on the table.
Mom took a pile of dishes and stepped over Chris to the sink. “How about spaghetti and …” She ran water over the dishes.
Spaghetti and … probably meant spaghetti and meatballs for supper. Though it could be spaghetti and butter. Or spaghetti and garlic. I tried to think about my essay, but how could I with the TV blasting and Chris mumbling to himself and Mom crashing dishes around in the sink?
“Mom, what was your suggestion for my essay?” She was looking out the window again, pinching her upper lip. What was so fascinating out the window? I stepped over Chris and looked out the window, too. All I saw was the scrawny little backyard, Mr. Linaberry’s red pickup truck, the shed where he had his welding business, and Mr. Linaberry himself, raking up leaves.
“Don’t you miss our rea
l house?” I said to Mom.
“Sometimes.”
In the yard below, Mr. Linaberry was cleaning matted leaves off the rake prongs. I didn’t know much about him, except that he was an awful grouch and a widower and had one son who lived in Denver, Colorado. I also knew he was very neat and clean. Right after we first moved in, Mom had sent me down to his apartment once or twice to ask things, like where the fuse box was. That’s when I’d seen his apartment, neat neat neat and dark dark dark. It looked like nobody lived there. It was full of old furniture with wooden arms and claw feet.
I didn’t see how Mom could even stand to look out the window at him. He was so ugly, short, with a potbelly and a balding head. And he never smiled, never. Not once in almost two years had I seen him smile, and whenever Bunny came over, no matter how many times I politely introduced her, he didn’t say Hello or Glad to meet you, or anything like that. He just barked, “Hello, you!”
I sat down again. “Mom, you were telling me something for my essay, and you never finished.” I started out sounding reasonable. Then I yelled, “Mom!” I was in such a bad mood, and I had to do something to get her attention.
She turned. “Emily?” she said, as if she’d just realized I was in the room.
“My essay, Mom. My essay!”
“Oh, yes. Well, what I would do is try to incorporate the title in the opening paragraph. Start right off with …”
“You mean start with wishes and dreams?” I stared at my paper. I was still blank.
The phone rang. “I’ll get it, nobody take it, it’s for me,” Wilma called. She came running into the kitchen. “It’s Max,” she said. “I called him this morning.”
“You called your father?” Mom said. “When did you do that?”
“When you were taking a shower this morning. I talked to whatsherface. I told her Max should call me.”
“Marcia’s her name,” I said.
The phone rang again. “Oh, I just know it’s Max,” Wilma said. “Oh, please, I’m praying that it’s Max.”
E, My Name Is Emily Page 1
