Libby on Wednesday

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Libby hung her head, studying her fingernails. She knew that was what Gillian would say—that she wouldn’t blame Mercedes. She herself had never blamed her, until recently. When she was younger, she had always felt it was a decided advantage to have a mother who lived in an exotic place like New York City and acted on the stage, and came home suddenly at unexpected times bringing gifts and all kinds of exciting stories, and making up for being gone so long by being particularly full of good ideas about exciting things to do. But she blamed her now—for Morrison Middle School—but that, of course, was not something she could say to Gillian.

  Libby sighed. “Well at least she didn’t leave until I was civilized enough so I wouldn’t be too much trouble for the rest of you to take care of.”

  Gillian laughed and hugged Libby’s shoulders. “My dear child. You were never any trouble. And as for being civilized—at the age of three and a half you were in many ways the most adult member of the family—until we got Elliott, anyway. And besides, no one could say that Mercedes deserted us. Not when she always comes back between jobs.”

  “I know,” Libby said. “I was just thinking about what some people might say.”

  Gillian put down her book and took Libby by both shoulders and gave her a little shake. “What people might say?” she said. “Will you listen to yourself, child. You sound just like Cordelia.”

  Libby smiled. It was true, in a way. True at least that Cordelia was always worrying about “what people might say.” But this was—different. “This is different,” Libby told Gillian.

  “Different?” Gillian asked with her one-dimple smile. “In what way?”

  “Well, it just is. It’s different because I’m not worrying about it the way Cordelia does. I’m just—thinking about it.”

  And that night in bed she thought about it some more as the storm, still raging outside her windows, sent anxious shadows scurrying around the room and then into her dreams.

  9

  During the next week Libby had something new to worry about—the fact that the discussion of her story would be the first thing on the agenda at the writers’ workshop’s next meeting.

  Sometimes she felt confident. After all, Wendy had liked it, and Alex had more or less said that it was good enough to make a publisher believe that it was written by Graham McCall. That only left Tierney and G.G. ONLY? That was really ironic. That was, without a doubt, the largest only in the whole world.

  At other times she felt—or tried to convince herself that she felt—unconcerned. After all, what if Tierney and G.G. were horrible? It would only be what one had to expect, considering the source. “Considering the source” was a favorite phrase of Cordelia’s. The sources that Cordelia usually had to consider were stupid clerks or rude taxi drivers, and what Cordelia obviously meant was that you simply couldn’t expect anything better from “such people.” And, Libby told herself, you certainly couldn’t expect anything better from such people as Gary Greene and Tierney Laurent.

  But in between the short spells of feeling almost confident or almost unconcerned, there were the other, longer times when small dark moments of dread whispered through her mind.

  The week seemed much longer than normal, but Wednesday arrived at last, and Ms. O called the third meeting of the Future Famous Writers to order by announcing that the first event of the day would be Tierney’s reading of her prizewinning story. Apparently everyone, including the teacher, had entirely forgotten that there hadn’t been time to finish the discussion of Rainbow in the Dust.

  To her amazement Libby found that she was as disappointed as she was relieved. Not to mention a little bit angry. By the time she’d gotten control of the confused tangle of dread, relief, disappointment, and anger, Tierney was well into her story. Frowning fiercely as always, she was crouched over her manuscript and reading fast, in a loud, threatening voice.

  “The next morning I got to the office late, but not late enough. My head still felt like a bass drum in a Fourth of July parade. My footsteps thundered, the door hinges shrieked, and even the sunlight was too noisy. I eased into the room and pulled down the blinds. I was quietly lowering myself onto my swivel chair when the door opened fast and hard. The sound throbbed like a tin drum in an echo chamber. Holding my head with both hands, I opened one eye.

  “She was tall, with a face that belonged on a magazine cover and a body that rated a centerfold. Her smile was an invitation.

  “I opened the other eye. ‘Hatchet,’ I said. ‘Rafe Hatchet. Private Eye.’ ”

  At first Libby thought she had read it before. All those famous detective stories were in Graham’s library, books written in the thirties by people like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Libby had read nearly all of them and had taken some of the most famous upstairs to be a part of her thirties collection. But as Tierney went on reading, she wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t so much exactly like a particular story as quite a bit like a lot of them.

  As the story went on, it turned out, of course, that the beautiful girl needed a detective. Her brother had mysteriously disappeared, or that’s what she said, at least. So Rafe Hatchet took the case and, right away, people started being killed. A policeman was shot, a mysterious man burst into Rafe’s office with a knife in his back, and finally an old friend of Rafe’s was strangled.

  For a while Libby was busy asking herself which incident came from which book. Most of them sounded vaguely familiar but she couldn’t quite place them, since some of the original stories had blurred together in her mind. But when it came to the ending, there was one thing she was certain about. That was when it turned out that the beautiful girl herself was the murderer. That one was right out of The Maltese Falcon.

  It wasn’t until the story ended that Libby suddenly realized that she’d been so busy listening and trying to remember where she’d read each part before that she’d forgotten to think about some other important considerations. Considerations such as what constructive remarks could be made about Tierney’s story. And how in the world Tierney Laurent happened to have written a detective story that sounded as if came right out of the thirties.

  She had just begun to deal with the question of what her comment would be when she noticed that Alex was shaking his hand in the air and grinning all over his face. “Mizzo,” he kept saying. (Everyone was calling her Mizzo now.) “Mizzo. Call on me.”

  Ms. O laughed. “Well, Alex. Since you seem to have something urgent to say, I guess—”

  But before she could finish, there was an interruption—a loud one.

  “Hey, Laurent,” Gary Greene said. “Where do you get off talking about my stuff having too many killings? You got as many as I do.”

  Tierney’s eyes narrowed, and her spiky hair quivered. “I do not!” she yelled. “You had a lot more. I counted. You had at least twice as many.”

  “Yeah! Well, so what. Yours are at least twice as boring.”

  Tierney’s jaw jutted and her eyes were down to slits, and for once she was sitting up straight. Unwound from her usual slouch, she looked amazingly tall, and angry and dangerous. “Oh, yeah! Well, let me tell you something. This—” She slammed her manuscript down on her desk. “—This happens to be a classical detective story, and in detective stories you have to have murders. And unlike the senseless gore in some people’s junk, my murders have something to do with the plot of the story. And besides that …”

  G.G. was talking at the same time, yelling something about laser guns and disintegrators being a lot more exciting than out-of-date stuff like knives and guns, and Mizzo was shouting “Tierney! Gary! That’s enough.”

  When they finally stopped yelling and were just sitting there glaring at each other, Mizzo shook her head and sighed gloomily. “I’m certainly glad that Mr. Axminster isn’t here to see what’s happening to this group that he had such high hopes for,” she said. And then she went off into another lecture about how sad it was to see five such incredibly talented and intelligent young people who had so much to offer a
nd yet had so much difficulty relating to each other and each other’s work—and so on and so forth. It wasn’t until she’d covered the subject very thoroughly that she turned back to Alex.

  “What was it you wanted to say, Alex? Or have we made you wait so long that you’ve forgotten?”

  He hadn’t forgotten and he was still squirming with excitement. “Yes,” he said. “I mean no. I mean, what I wanted to say was that I thought it was great. And I thought I was the only one who wrote parodies. How come you didn’t say you did too?”

  Tierney’s scowl, which until that moment was still focused on G.G., turned toward Alex. “What do you mean, parodies? I don’t write parodies.”

  Alex looked startled, and unbelieving. “You mean, that wasn’t a parody? I thought—well, it seemed to me like a great parody of—”

  “Well, it wasn’t!” Tierney sizzled between clenched teeth. “It’s a detective story. My detective story. It’s not making fun of anything. It’s an original detective story.”

  “Oh, well, okay,” Alex said, looking embarrassed. But then his jiggly smile seeped out through the embarrassment. “You mean all that great stuff like his name—you know, Hatchet—as in Spade, Hammer, and Cannon and like that. You mean that isn’t …” His jittering eyes paused for an instance on Tierney’s white-hot scowl, and his voice trailed away. “Okay. Okay,” he finished. “My mistake.”

  It occurred to Libby that she could see what Alex meant. It could very well have been a parody, and a pretty good one too. But whether it was or not, there was something else about it that she found fascinating. A lot of things actually. People and places and events that Tierney had mentioned in her story. Her hand shot up, and almost before Mizzo nodded, she started asking Tierney how she knew about some of the things in the story, things like Laurel and Hardy, and Packard cars, and the World’s Fair in San Francisco. Tierney stopped frowning at Alex and looked at Libby suspiciously for several seconds before she shrugged and said, “I like all that old stuff—you know, like before the Second World War. I read about it a lot and I collect stuff too. It’s kind of a hobby.”

  “Mine too!” In her amazement, Libby forgot to work on keeping the squeak out of her voice, or even to notice if it was there. “Mine too. I have a whole collection of things from the thirties at home. Books and pictures and phonograph records and a lot of other things.”

  “Yeah?” Tierney suddenly looked different, almost like someone else. It took Libby a moment to realize that the difference was that, for once, she wasn’t frowning. “So do I. And films too. I got lots of old movies on video. Black-and-white. I’ve got a lot of Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy, and a real early Shirley Temple.”

  “And Big Little Books,” Libby said. “You know, those fat little books with lots of pictures like they used to have in the thirties. I have a lot of Dick Tracy and Tarzan, and some—”

  “Yeah? Really? Big Little Books? Great! I’ve been looking for those in old bookstores for a long time, but they’re real scarce. Maybe we could trade. I’d trade you a movie for some Big Little Books if they’re real good ones.”

  “Girls,” Mizzo said. “Girls!” She sounded stern, but she was smiling. “If you could postpone this transaction until after class, perhaps we could get back to the business at hand. Wendy. What do you have to say about Tierney’s story?”

  Wendy turned her face slowly toward the teacher and smiled her confident, shiny smile. “Yes,” she said, and then she shook back her wavy hair and rolled her eyes thoughtfully. Libby watched her with interest, wondering about the way she took her time, even though everyone was looking at her and waiting. At last she smiled again and said, “Well, I think Tierney’s story is, like, a good example of a certain kind of detective story.” She turned and smiled at Alex. “You know, just like Alex said. It was just such a good copy of that kind of thing. I don’t read much of that kind of book but I’ve seen the movies on TV, and the people talk just that way—you know, tough-guy-sounding and very short sentences.” She paused and smiled again at Mizzo. “I think Tierney did a really good job of copying those old-fashioned detective stories.”

  Tierney was scowling again like crazy. G.G. was grinning, and Alex’s eyes were darting from Wendy to Tierney and back again. Alex’s mouth wasn’t laughing, but something else in his face was. He turned his face toward Libby and twitched the corners of his mouth before he whispered so softly that she almost had to lip-read. “Revenge. Sweet revenge. Sugarcoated, in fact.”

  When Wendy finished, Mizzo looked at her sternly for a moment as if she were trying to decide whether to bawl her out for being unconstructive, but Wendy just went on smiling her doll-faced smile and Mizzo finally stopped scowling. Libby didn’t blame Mizzo for letting herself be fooled. It was hard to believe there was anything nasty behind a smile like Wendy’s.

  After that Mizzo did her own critique on Tierney’s story by saying that it was a very professional job in many respects, with a well-planned plot and lots of action. But then she went on to say that she would have to agree that it did seem to be a little bit derivative.

  Mizzo went on, then, all about how good all the stories had been, and while she was talking, Wendy poked Libby and whispered, “Derivative?” Libby whispered back, “Well, ‘copied,’ but more polite,” and Wendy smiled not quite as sweetly as usual and said, “I thought so.”

  No one else had time to read that day. Mizzo went on for quite a while about how good all the prizewinning stories had been and how much she loved working with such a talented bunch. “Incredibly talented bunch,” she said actually. Mizzo tended to use the word incredible a lot, particularly when she was talking about the Future Famous Writers. Then she said she was going to tell them a secret.

  The secret was that Mizzo herself was a writer. A closet writer, she called herself, and she had been working on a novel for more than two years. It was a secret, Mizzo said, because she didn’t want the rest of the school—the other faculty and Mr. Shoemaker particularly—to know until she was published, if that ever happened. She was hoping to finish the rough draft by the end of the school year and she already had an agent who thought he could sell the book as soon as it was finished. Libby wasn’t surprised. There was something about Mizzo’s intelligent cat eyes and the expression in them when she talked about writing that pretty much gave it away.

  After that Mizzo talked about some of the techniques she used for her own writing, and one of them was what she called her character chart. She had made up the chart for her own use, to remind herself to think of all the things she needed to know about the people in her stories. But now she had decided it might be a useful device for the members of the FFW, so she passed out several copies to each of them.

  The chart listed all kinds of physical characteristics, such as eye and hair color, height and build, as well as dozens of mental and emotional traits, such as intelligent, treacherous, practical kindhearted, aggressive, and bad-tempered. There were boxes to check the ones that applied to each character and a place to write a sentence or two about the ones you checked. Looking over the list, Libby found herself mentally checking off characteristics for the other members of the FFW—checks beside brilliant and strange for Alex, for instance, and beautiful and perhaps phony for Wendy. She was still deciding on checks for the others when the bell rang for the end of the period.

  Libby was on her way to her locker a few minutes later when she heard hurrying footsteps behind her. A moment later Wendy caught up and fell into step. “Hi,” she said. “Wasn’t that the pits? Tierney’s story, I mean. Like, she must have just about copied it out word-for-word.” And then before Libby could answer, “I’ve been, like, sooo totally excited about maybe getting to see your house. Have you thought about when I could come over? Like, maybe I could ride home with you on the bus someday. You do ride the bus, don’t you? I mean, I could go most anytime as long as I call my folks first. I’ve told them all about it. You know, about us being in this workshop together, and they think it
’s just so exciting that—”

  It was at that moment that loud, clumping footsteps startled Wendy into silence and suddenly Tierney was walking on the other side of Libby. “Hey, Mighty Mouse,” she said, “that really blew me away. About you being a thirties freak, I mean.” She didn’t say anything to Wendy or even look at her. “And I can’t believe you really have all those Big Little Books? Man! I guess you know that for serious collectors Big Little Books are, like, what it’s all about. You think I could see your collection someday?”

  “Well …” Libby said, stalling for time while she tried to think of a good excuse. “I think that—maybe—after Easter vacation I might …” They’d reached the hall intersection by then, but when Libby started to turn, Tierney grabbed her wrist and jerked her around the corner. “Your locker’s down by the science lab, right? I’ll walk down with you.”

  Trotting and stumbling as she tried to keep up with her right hand, Libby could only look back briefly over her shoulder at Wendy, who was standing in the middle of the hall staring after her. She tried to wave, but her other arm was full of books. Wendy was still standing there a few seconds later when Libby flew around the next corner behind Tierney, like a puppet on a string.

  10

  After that day the pressure for a visit to the McCall House was really on. And not just on Wednesdays when the FFW met, either. Not now that Libby had started seeing quite a lot of Wendy and Tierney on other days of the week as well.

  It started one day when Libby was arriving at school. Wendy and three of her best friends were standing in the hall not far from the front entrance, and when Libby came in, she called, “Hey, Libby. Come over here.” Libby thought of pretending she hadn’t heard, but in the end she decided it was obvious that she had, so she made her way, warily, across the hall through the crowd of arriving students.

  Wendy’s friends were wearing baggy acid-washed jeans and Reeboks and huge men’s jackets and other stylish things, and they all had figures and the right kinds of hairdos. For an awful moment Libby thought Wendy might be planning to try to get an invitation for her whole gang to visit the McCall House. She didn’t, though. In fact she never even mentioned the house while her friends were around. Instead she just introduced Libby to everybody. And when one of her friends, the one with frizzy blond hair and spandex pants, whispered something about McBrain, Wendy called her a dorf and asked her why she didn’t just get lost.