Finding Ruby Starling

by Karen Rivers

  And NEVER say the n word. Not even jokingly. If you’ve ever said it, shut this book right now and get out of here. OUT.

  Aaron-Martin, Isadora (Tink)

  That’s me.

  Tink Aaron-Martin.4

  I am an exotic mystery of mixed heritage, half Dad’s and half Mom’s. Obvi. (My mom is a white redhead. She’ll come up later, as Jenna Martin under the Ms. Sorry. I cannot help it if my family is alphabetically inconvenient. If you are dying to know all her details, you can skip ahead. I don’t mind.)

  When people ask me what I am, I usually say, “I’m a human being.” Then when they say, “I mean, what RACE are you?” I say that I am African while fixing them with a patented look that I like to call my Are You a Racist? Face. Then I point out condescendingly that we are all African. I mean, think about it! Cradle of civilization? Look it up if you don’t know what I’m talking about! Use the Internet. I’m sure you have access to it5 and are free to use it with reckless abandon.

  More about me: I used to think I was funny. At school whenever you are forced at teacher’s gunpoint to describe yourself in five words, I would always pick easy things like “nice,” “biracial,” “smart,” and “ambidextrous.” And “funny.” Because I thought I was.

  But, then, I found out that I wasn’t.

  See, I had one joke I liked to tell all the time that usually made people laugh themselves senseless.6 Then I got this note from Freddie Blue Anderson on the magnet board in my locker. The note said: “That joke is embarrassing. I’m sorry. It’s too babyish. I love you. And I’m only telling you this because you are my BFF, so don’t get mad. AND DON’T CRY.”

  Freddie Blue is too nice to come right out and say that I’m just not funny at all, but I can read between the lines. I am an expert at reading between the lines. For example, when Mom says, “You have such an unusual face. If you were taller, you could be a model!” What I know she means is, “You are not pretty enough to be a model.” Not that I’d want to be a model. I wouldn’t! I can’t imagine anything more boring or depressing, if you want to know the truth. But I’d like for it to be an option, and it isn’t.

  This is at least partly because of the Freckles. The Freckles are so dark, they look like a constellation of black holes. I realize it’s hard not to stare, but staring is rude and you should know better.

  My eyes are blue like Mom’s. Just regular blue. Not anything anyone will ever compare to a lake or the sky or even a pair of jeans, unless the jeans are faded and drab.

  And I’m short. Really short. So short that sometimes, depending on the chair, my legs dangle. The leg dangling is one of the major banes of my existence.

  I just asked my dad what else he would tell people about me, if he had to describe me, and he said, “You’re as sharp as a bag of tacks!”

  “Dad,” I said. “Be serious.”

  He scrunched up his face and scratched his head as though he was about to say something terribly wise. Instead, he said, “I’d tell them that you want a pony.”

  “DAD,” I said. “I wanted a pony when I was FOUR.”

  “How old are you now?” he said.

  “Dad,” I said. “I’m almost thirteen.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Do you still want a pony?”

  “No,” I sighed. “Forget it.”

  “I’m sorry, bunny,” he said. “I would tell them that you don’t want a pony.”

  “DAD,” I shouted. “YOU AREN’T HELPING.”

  “Don’t go off,” he said. “I’d tell them that you are the Peacemaker.” He hugged me. “And that you always smell like bubble gum.”

  I pushed him away. “Great,” I said. “Very helpful. Thanks bunches.”

  There is a lot of fighting in the Aaron-Martin household, and I can end it by holding my hands up in the middle of the room and screaming, “STOP IT!”7 over and over again while holding my breath. Sometimes this causes me to fall over as my brain struggles desperately for air. Usually, when I fall, they stop. Which is what Dad means when he says I’m the Peacemaker.

  “It’s the Peacemaker,” he says. “We better stop before she dies!”

  I hate that my dad calls me this. I do not want to be “the Peacemaker.” I especially don’t want them to think it’s funny. Or cute.8

  But mysteriously, sometimes (not always), they stop.

  The fights are almost always about Seb. Seb — my brother — is the sun around which this whole family revolves. I’m one of the far distant planets that no one can see, like Uranus or Neptune — I forget which is farther away.

  The thing that would probably surprise you most about me is that I love a tree. One specific tree, next door. The people there are away most of the time, so it’s as good as mine. Freddie Blue says that it’s cool to love a tree but that maybe I shouldn’t tell too many people. I don’t know what it is about that tree. I don’t even know what kind it is; it’s an unknown species. A mystery. Sort of like me.

  I have twenty-six life goals. I keep them on a list that I have taped to the back of my closet door, so if I ever die horribly by being run over by a bus, you can take a gander at them. I will tell you that number seven on my list has to do with the tree next door.

  Number two is “Don’t be weird, dorky, or geeky. At least when anyone is looking. BE NORMAL.”

  The most embarrassing one is thirteen: “Get a boyfriend before FB. The Boyfriend Race is on!” Not only is it embarrassing, but Freddie Blue is my BFF! I should be happy if she has a boyfriend first. I shouldn’t even care! But I do. Maybe I’m a kind of terrible person. I seem nice enough on the outside, but it’s possible that deep down inside, I’m all shriveled up like a raisin, dark and chewy.

  I hope not.

  I’m not going to tell you the rest of the twenty-six. They’re private and I’m already so embarrassed that my face is likely to melt and slide right off my skull, leaving me as blank-headed and terrifying as a horror movie ghoul. And that would be no way to end this entry, would it?

  1. This was inspired by my dad, who took it upon himself to read the entire set of encyclopedias last year, which he began by buying a set of ancient books at a garage sale for $7. He did not get past A, although he lies and says he got to C. I know he is lying because if you ask him, for example, about Burundi, he just stares at you blankly and then says, “Is that a spider in your hair?” which is Classic Avoidance. I tried valiantly to outdo him – after all, imagine the accolades I would get for READING THE ENCYCLOPEDIAS! But after the first hundred or so entries I slipped into a deep and nearly irreversible coma triggered by severe boredom. I am just lucky I survived! And now know more than most people about Achill Island and the acoustic nerve.

  2. I assume all aardvarks are suicidal. Because, really, what do they have to live for?

  3. Dad’s dad is Jamaican. His mom is from St. Lucia, but actually she was born in England. It’s complicated, except I guess it really isn’t, as that’s all there is to it. If they were white people from Poland and South Dakota, no one would be ooohing and aaahing at the exoticness of Dad’s heritage, and Mom and Dad would just be a regular white couple who no one stared at in restaurants.

  4. Aaron-hyphen-Martin because Mom didn’t want to take Dad’s last name when they got married and thought it would be perfectly nice to have her kids going through life sounding like they were named after a British sports car. Neither realized that it should have been “Martin-Aaron” because tradition says the dad’s last name goes last, besides which Mom says it “sounds better” this way.

  5. UNLIKE ME. There is only one computer in our house that has Internet access, and that is Mom’s. In her office. Which she keeps locked. Unless it is truly an Internet “emergency” and/or Seb wants to use it. Seb is allowed. The rest of us? Not so much.

  6. The joke was this: “What does a ghost say when he sees a bee?” “Boo, bee.” You have to say it out loud in order for it to get a laugh, which it usually did, back when I used to tell it.

  7. I am sure that act
ual peacemakers in Afghanistan or Africa do not use this technique. At least, I hope they don’t. If they do, it probably explains a lot about why there is no peace in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter.

  8. When you are very, very short, there is grave danger in people viewing everything you do as adorable, in the way that everything that toddlers do is adorable. Also, some people – like your parents – forget that “short” does not mean “young” and treat you accordingly. Not good.

  Writing this book has been a huge lesson to me in being both a leaf on a river, and the river itself. Neither thing probably means what I think it means, but I suspect that it means that sometimes you have to just entirely give up control. By giving up my idea of what this book should be, it became what it was meant to be all along, which turned out to be a surprise, even to me. The best kind of surprise. For that, I have to thank my brilliant and ever-patient editors: Cheryl Klein, who consistently wows me with her gentle rerouting of my crazy tributaries, streams, and great crashing waterfalls of (occasionally terrible) ideas; and her Canadian counterpart, the always amazing Sandy Bogart Johnson.

  It never ceases to amaze me how many people are involved in the process of taking a book from concept to fruition, and my gratitude to all the people who are hidden behind office doors, working magic, is boundless. I’d name names, but I don’t know most of them, and I don’t want to miss anyone. So let’s just make it a big, all-round, and whole-hearted THANK YOU to the copy editors, the marketing team, the designers, and everyone.

  I’ve been supported over the last decade or so by both the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council. The money may have been for other projects, but any and all grants are a vote of confidence that inspires long after the funds run out and the other projects are complete.

  My endlessly patient friends who sometimes don’t see me or hear from me for months at a time, but are still there when I need them; my always-supportive family; my former agent, Marissa Walsh, and my current agent, Jennifer Laughran; and, of course, all the people in my life from whom I mercilessly steal turns of phrase and lovely accents. Thank you.

  As always, for Mum and Dad, and for my two amazing kids: I hope I make you all proud.

  And to all my exceptionally wonderful readers: THANK YOU. You can always find me at karenrivers.com and let me know what you thought of the book. I’d be so pleased to hear from you.

  Kate, it’s your turn to write.

  Karen Rivers is the author of many wonderful novels for children, teenagers, and adults, including The Encyclopedia of Me, in which Ruth Quayle, Jedgar Johnston, and several other characters from this book first appeared. Born in British Columbia, Canada, Karen went to college for ages and ages and studied a little bit of almost everything before she became a writer full-time. She now lives with her family in Victoria, British Columbia, where she loves taking long walks and lots of pictures. Please visit her website at www.karenrivers.com and follow her on Twitter at @karenrivers.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Karen Rivers

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rivers, Karen, 1970– author.

  Finding Ruby Starling / by Karen Rivers. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: Through e-mails, letters, blog entries, and movie scripts, twelve-year-old Ruth, an American girl, and Ruby, an English one, discover that they are long-lost twins.

  ISBN 978-0-545-53479-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Twins — Juvenile fiction. 2. Sisters — Juvenile fiction. 3. Electronic mail messages — Juvenile fiction. 4. Blogs — Juvenile fiction. 5. Mothers and daughters — Juvenile fiction. 6. Adoption — Juvenile fiction. [1. Twins — Fiction. 2. Sisters — Fiction. 3. Email — Fiction. 4. Blogs — Fiction. 5. Mothers and daughters — Fiction. 6. Adoption — Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R5224Fi 2014

  [Fic] — dc23

  2014002269

  First edition, September 2014

  Cover art © 2014 by Michael Frost

  Cover design by Jeannine Riske

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-53482-6

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.