“Vanessa told us we could come in. She’s playing in the front yard.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“We just wanted to see how you were doing.” Claudia sounded kind of meek.
“Oh, that’s fine. You won’t tell me what Charlotte’s talent is, but you’ll come over here to spy on us.”
“We’re not spying!” said Charlotte indignantly.
“Besides, everyone knows what Margo and Claire are doing,” Claudia pointed out. “You said so yourself.”
“You didn’t know about their costumes, though.” I paused thoughtfully. Then I said, “Charlotte, I’ll bet you have a real nice costume.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” she said. “Claudia and I made it. It’s all —”
Claudia clapped her hand over Charlotte’s mouth.
“Wmphh, wmphh, wmphh,” Charlotte finished up.
“Pretty sneaky,” Claudia said to me.
“So are you.”
Claudia took her hand away from Charlotte’s mouth.
“Are you going to have a fight?” Charlotte asked us worriedly.
Claudia and I looked at each other. “No, of course not,” I said, relaxing a little. “I’m sorry I got so upset.”
“And I’m sorry we came over and interrupted you,” replied Claud. “I guess we were sort of spying. We’ll get going now.” Claudia looked as tired and as rattled as I felt.
“Okay,” I said. “See you tomorrow. Good luck, Charlotte.”
“Thanks,” she said. “And good luck, Claire and Margo!” she yelled toward the dining room.
“Thanks!” the girls shouted back.
As soon as Claudia and Charlotte were gone, I called to Claire and Margo, and we got back to work. Margo started the poem over from the beginning, which nearly killed me, but I knew she wanted to rehearse.
Then it was Claire’s turn. She sang her song once through and then began a little dance I’d taught her. I’d made it up myself, but it looked sort of like the sailor’s hornpipe. When she finished the dance, she sang the song again — with hand gestures. She demonstrated dropping dangly worms into her mouth and spitting out their germs. She made horrible faces. It was pretty funny. Maybe she’d win in a humor category or something.
I helped the girls change clothes once again — into their outfits for the beauty parade. These outfits were the most dressy, and the girls looked great. They were wearing velvet dresses. The dresses were old hand-me-downs from Mallory and Vanessa, I think, but they were in beautiful condition. Since they were actually Christmas dresses, Margo’s was green and Claire’s was red. Each had a lace collar.
The girls rehearsed walking and smiling some more.
Then I said, “Okay, the very last event of the pageant will be questions, one for each girl. You’ll stay in these outfits for that part. Now start thinking about nice, good, helpful things, and I’ll ask you some questions. Okay?”
“Okay.” The girls were sitting side by side on the living room couch. They looked tired, but determined. I hoped they could hold up during the pageant. The next day would be a long one.
“Margo,” I said, “What is your greatest wish?”
“Global peace,” she replied immediately.
“Yes, but say it in a nice sentence.”
“My greatest wish,” Margo said, looking rapturous and angelic, “is for global peace. That would be very … nice.”
I only hoped the judge wouldn’t ask her to explain what she meant. Margo didn’t have the vaguest idea what global peace was.
“Great,” I told her. “Now, Claire, if the house were on fire and you had time to rescue three things, what would they be?”
“I would rescue,” Claire began sweetly, “my family members, global peace, and the fire extinguisher.”
I sighed. Claire and I had a lot of work to do. But I didn’t mind. It kept me from thinking about what was going to happen that evening.
Claire and I talked and talked about how to answer those questions. I decided she was in pretty good shape when I said to her, “How could you change the world to make it a better place?” and she replied, “I would help everybody get to be friends and I would give them all free French fries at McDonald’s.”
Close enough.
Anyway, it was 5:30 and time to go home.
I said good-bye to the Pikes and walked home with as much enthusiasm as if I were walking to my own execution.
“Jeff?” I called as I entered our house.
“Hi! Hi, Dawn! I’m upstairs!”
Jeff was ecstatic and I was a mess.
I went up to Jeff’s room and looked around. Jeff was sitting on his bed, grinning. (He’d been grinning for days.) His room looked the way it did right after we’d moved in and hadn’t unpacked yet: bare. Most of his things had been put in trunks or cartons and shipped back to California. All that remained was a suitcase full of the clothes he’d been wearing the past few days and a knapsack that he was going to take with him on the plane that night. It contained a couple of books, a Transformer, his Walkman, some tapes, and a few things I could categorize only as junk.
Jeff was sitting on his bed looking through a pile of colorful papers.
“What’s all that?” I asked him.
“Good-bye cards,” he replied. “Ms. Besser gave me a going-away party today, and everyone in my class had made a card for me. It was their homework last night. Ms. Besser assigned it while I was in the boys’ room yesterday. The party was a surprise.”
“That was really nice of Ms. Besser,” I said.
“I think she’s glad to get rid of me.”
I looked at the cards. They all said things like, GOOD-BYE, JEFF, and GOOD LUCK, JEFF, and I’LL MISS YOU, JEFF.
My curiosity overcame me. “Where’s Jerry Haney’s card?” I asked.
Jeff sorted through the pile and handed one to me. On the front it said simply GOOD-BYE, JEFF. But inside, in the middle of a complicated drawing, in letters so tiny Ms. Besser wouldn’t have noticed them, were the words AND GOOD RIDDANCE.
“I’m taking all the cards with me — except Jerry’s,” Jeff told me. I watched him tear Jerry’s card to bits and throw the pieces in his trash can.
“Hi! I’m home!” called my mother’s voice.
“Hi, Mom,” Jeff and I replied automatically.
“Come on downstairs,” she said. “We have to eat an early, fast dinner.”
“Okay!” I shouted.
“Dawn, can you carry my knapsack?” Jeff asked as he stuffed the cards in it. “I’m all packed. I might as well take my stuff downstairs when we go.”
Jeff didn’t even give his room a good-bye glance as he left it. Maybe boys don’t care about those things…. Or maybe Jeff hated his life in Connecticut so much that he didn’t want to remember it.
Jeff’s last dinner with us was leftovers. “Sorry,” said Mom, “but it’s the fastest kind of dinner to have. I want to leave for the airport in forty-five minutes.”
“I can’t believe you’re letting me take a night flight,” Jeff commented happily as he shoveled in a forkful of reheated brown rice.
“I can’t, either,” said my mother. “But I think it’s the easiest way for you to go, in terms of jet lag. You’ll leave here around nine —”
“I know, I know. And arrive at eleven o’clock California time.”
“Right. You can sleep a little on the plane, and you’ll still be able to get in a pretty good night’s sleep in California.”
“That is, if Dad and I don’t stop to do something fun.”
Mom and I exchanged a glance. “Jeff,” Mom said seriously, “don’t expect life with your dad to be like your vacation with him.”
“I won’t,” he replied. But he still looked awfully excited.
Didn’t he have even mixed feelings about leaving Mom and me? Didn’t some tiny part of him think, Gosh, I’m going to miss Mom and my sister?
I had a feeling that the answer to both questions was no. And I was very,
very hurt.
That night we didn’t bother to do the dishes. We just cleared the table and put everything in the sink. Mom was nervous about the drive to the airport. “You never know about traffic jams,” she said.
We were on the road before 7:00.
I let Jeff sit up front with Mom. I figured she’d have last-minute things to say to him like, “Obey Dad,” or “Don’t forget to lock the door if you use the restroom on the plane,” or “Call us anytime. Call collect if you want.”
But the ride to the airport was silent except for when a car cut in front of us and Mom hit the horn and muttered something I couldn’t hear.
We reached the airport an hour before Jeff’s plane was supposed to take off. As we stood in the white light of a streetlamp in the parking lot, I saw Mom blinking back tears. I glanced at Jeff, who was busy hauling his suitcase and knapsack out of the trunk of the car. He was whistling.
I took Mom’s hand and whispered, “It’ll be okay.” Then I gave her a quick hug.
Crash. Jeff slammed the trunk shut.
“Okay, let’s go!” he cried. “Can I buy some candy from a vending machine, Mom? Please?” (Jeff’s one health-food downfall is chocolate.) “And can Dawn and I take our pictures in the photo booth? You get four. We could give two to Dad and you could keep the other two.”
“Now, I like that idea,” Mom told him. She smiled. It was hard to stay upset around someone who was so cheerful.
We walked into the airport and checked Jeff’s suitcase through.
“I hope it actually ends up in California,” I said, “and not in Albuquerque like the last time we visited Dad.”
“Oh, well,” said Jeff mildly, “it’ll get to California sometime. And my other stuff should be there by now. Right, Mom?”
“Right.”
“Just think,” said Jeff as we wandered toward a gift shop. “I’ll have my old room back. My room. The room here was never my room.”
“Of course it was,” I said sharply. “Who’d you share it with?”
Mom put her hand on my shoulder, silently telling me to calm down.
“Nobody,” Jeff replied. “It just wasn’t mine the way the one in California is. I can’t explain it.”
“Let’s look in this store,” said Mom, not too subtly changing the subject. “Do you need anything for the flight, honey?” she asked my brother.
Jeff looked thoughtful. “I don’t think so. I’ve got two books and my Walkman, and anyway, I’m supposed to go to sleep,” he added, glancing slyly at Mom. “But could I get a Mars Bar from a vending machine?” Jeff just loves vending machines and photo booths and those machines that plasticize things for you.
“Sure,” replied Mom. “We have time to kill.”
We found a corridor, luckily on the way to the gate from which Jeff’s flight would leave, that looked like Vending Machine Alley.
“Oh, boy!” exclaimed Jeff.
“I hope you have a lot of change, Mom,” I said.
She did.
Jeff bought a Mars Bar and tossed it in his knapsack. Then he and I squeezed into a photo booth and tried to smile and look grown-up as the camera took our pictures. The photos turned out quite well and we gave Mom first dibs on them. After the photo session, we still had time to kill, so Jeff plasticized nearly everything in Mom’s wallet.
When he was done, Mom said, “We better get to the gate, kids. They may board you early, Jeff, since you’re traveling alone. A stewardess will accompany you on the plane, and we’ve got to find her.”
The gate was a mob scene. An awful lot of people were taking the night flight to Los Angeles. Jeff and I sat down while Mom spoke to a man behind the check-in counter. While we waited for her, I looked at my brother. He was rummaging through his knapsack. My baby brother, I thought, even though he was no more a baby than I was. Jeff and I may have had our share of fights, and Jeff may have been nearly impossible to live with lately, but he was my brother and I was going to miss him.
How could we let him go? Hadn’t Jeff and I huddled together in my room in California during Mom and Dad’s noisy fights? Hadn’t I protected him from bullies and nightmares and imaginary monsters? Hadn’t he taught me how to climb ropes when my gym teacher said I was hopeless? How could I grow up the rest of the way without knowing him?
“Don’t go,” I whispered.
“What?” said Jeff.
“Nothing.”
Most families stay together. A lot don’t — the parents split up. But in our case, we couldn’t even keep the kids together. My insides were aching. And I knew that Mom felt like a failure.
My mother sat down with us to wait, and a few minutes later a stewardess approached. She smiled at Mom, then turned to my brother.
“Jeff Schafer?” she asked.
Jeff jumped to his feet, ready to go.
“I’m Elaine,” said the stewardess. “I’ll help you board now, and I’ll give you any help you might need during the flight. Okay?”
“Sure!”
Mom and I stood up. The hugging and crying started. All us Schafers were hugging, but Mom and I were the only ones crying. No tears fell from Jeff’s eyes.
The stewardess watched us with some surprise. I’m sure she didn’t know that Jeff had no return ticket. Most boys who leave their families plan to come back.
“Good-bye! Bye, Jeff!” Mom and I called as Elaine led him away.
When he was out of sight, I sank onto my chair. I was sobbing right in the middle of that crowded room. So was my mother. We held on to each other for dear life.
Mom tried, for the umpteenth time, to assure me that Jeff might not think he was going to miss us, but that he really would. I had trouble believing her.
When we calmed down, we linked arms and walked out of the airport together.
Pageant Day!
I was dead tired, not having slept much the night before. Even so, I was glad of the busy day ahead. It would be a long one, an exciting one, and I needed that in order to keep my mind off Jeff.
The pageant was to begin at 1:00. It would be held in the auditorium of Stoneybrook High School. But the contestants were supposed to be at the school by 11:30. I had told Mrs. Pike I’d come over to their house around 10:00.
At 9:45, as I was getting ready to leave, I said, “Mom, can’t we call Dad and Jeff now? Just to make sure Jeff got there okay?”
“Honey, it’s only a quarter to seven in California,” she replied. “They’d kill us. Besides, if Jeff didn’t get there we’d have had a frantic phone call from your father hours ago.”
Mom was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. She looked awful. I didn’t think she’d slept at all the night before. I wasn’t even sure she’d gone to bed, although she was in her nightgown and robe, and her hair was a fright.
“I know,” I said. “You’re right. Hey, Mom, why don’t you come to the pageant today? I know you don’t like the idea of them, but this one might be funny — I mean, fun — and you’ll know a lot of the girls in it.”
“Maybe I will,” she replied.
“You could sit with Mr. Spier. He’s going because Mary Anne helped Myriah Perkins get ready for the pageant.” (My mom and Mary Anne’s dad are old friends.)
“I’ll think about it,” said Mom, and she actually smiled. “Now, you scoot.”
I scooted.
When I rang the Pikes’ doorbell, it was answered by Mallory, looking positively murderous.
“I hope you can calm Claire and Margo down,” was the way she greeted me. “They are driving us bananas.”
From upstairs I could hear, “… that kissed the maiden all forlorn, that milked the cow with the crumpled horn, that tossed the dog …” mingled with, “… I live in a garbage can. I eat all the wor-orms …”
“Just look at their room,” Mallory added ominously as I started up the stairs. “Oh, by the way, Mom said to say she’ll be up in a minute to help you.”
“Okay,” I replied.
I stood at the entra
nce to Claire and Margo’s room. I swear, I thought an earthquake had hit. Hair ribbons and shoes and socks and barrettes and rubber bands were everywhere. The girls were trying to rehearse in the middle of the mess. The only good thought that came to mind was that, by the afternoon, the pageant would be over.
“What is going on?!” I exclaimed.
Claire and Margo ran to me.
“Oh, you’re here!” cried Claire.
“Mommy said to get all our stuff together,” Margo tried to explain. “And we were nervous. And we didn’t want to forget anything, and …”
It took almost an hour, but Mrs. Pike and I managed to get the girls organized. First we dressed them in jeans and T-shirts for all the pre-pageant stuff. Then we laid out their outfits separately and put each one in its own bag — except for the dresses, which we placed on hangers to try to keep them neat.
“What else do we need?” asked Mrs. Pike, looking around.
“Curling iron!” I said.
We remembered a few more items, put them in yet another bag, and were on our way to the high school. Mrs. Pike drove us. As we traveled through town I kept saying things like, “Remember to smile — all the time,” “Remember to give nice answers to the questions,” and “Don’t worry if you forget your lines while you’re performing. Just start over again or make something up. That’s the professional thing to do.”
Mrs. Pike dropped us off in front of the high school with her own set of reminders for the girls. She and the rest of the Pikes wouldn’t see Claire and Margo again until the show started.
“We’ll sit as close to the front as we can!” Mrs. Pike called as she pulled into the street.
The girls and I struggled into the high school building with our bags. Someone showed us to the auditorium, and we walked through a doorway labeled Stage Door.
Chaos. Pure chaos.
There were going to be fifteen contestants in the pageant, and most of them seemed to have arrived already. Backstage was a sea of little girls waiting to be told what to do. Some were rehearsing, some were checking their wardrobes, some were patiently having their hair curled or braided or brushed.
Claire and Margo immediately panicked.
“Look at that girl!” exclaimed Margo in a loud whisper. “She’s wearing nail polish. Daw-awn …”
Little Miss Stoneybrook... And Dawn Page 7
