Where I'd Like to Be

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “I wish you two would make up and be friends again,” Mrs. Parrish said, making a right-hand turn on Allen Avenue. “It seems like such a waste, the two of you not talking to each other. You’ve worked so hard together. That fort you children built, why, it’s a marvel.”

  She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, her fingers fluttering like she was nervous about something. “You know, I went up there again the other day.”

  “To the fort? By yourself?” Logan asked, clearly astonished.

  “Yes, to the fort. I . . . well, I was worried. Logan, you never seem to go up there anymore, and you won’t say a word to Maddie. What was I supposed to think?”

  I leaned forward. “Did you look inside?” It’d been awhile since I’d been inside the fort. I hoped everything was still okay.

  Mrs. Parrish nodded. Her face in the rearview mirror was suddenly glowing like someone had shone a light on it. “It’s beautiful, what you all have done up there! I’d never really taken a good look around before. The word fort doesn’t do it justice. Why, you’ve built your own house.”

  “Logan did most of the work building it,” I said, wondering if a compliment would soften him up any.

  “No, I didn’t. Everybody worked on it,” he said in a stiff voice, not giving an inch.

  I shrugged. “Well, you were the one who taught us how to do it, pretty much. You and Mr. Potter.”

  “His grandfather taught him, you know,” Mrs. Parrish said to me. “I looked at that fort, and I thought, A part of my father lives on out here. It gave me goose bumps. It honestly did.”

  Logan stared straight ahead, but I saw the back of his neck turn red. And then I saw Mrs. Parrish do something I’d never seen her do before. Still keeping her eyes on the road, she reached over and brushed her fingers through Logan’s hair.

  “I was so impressed, honey,” she said. “I’m really very proud of you.”

  Logan leaned his head into his mother’s hand, letting it rest there for a moment before he sat up straight again.

  I wanted so bad to put my hand on his shoulder, like I could be a part of his family, all proud of him, but I was afraid he’d just shrug it away. I didn’t blame him one bit. I’d be furious with me too.

  But I told myself that soon I would be so caught up in my new life in the theater that I wouldn’t have time to worry about it anymore. After Mrs. Parrish dropped me off, I floated down the hallway to my dorm room, imagining myself on stage receiving bouquets of roses and standing ovations. Donita and Kandy were at their desks studying, and I ignored them and they ignored me and we all ignored each other—and it didn’t matter because I was going to be a star.

  Corinne stuck her head inside the room just as I was unloading my books from my backpack to my bed. “So Maddie, did you meet Penny today?”

  “Who?” I asked. “Oh, do you mean the talent scout?”

  Corinne looked puzzled. “Hmmm, I don’t know about a talent scout. But Penny Korda was supposed to come by your practice today and introduce herself.”

  She looked around the room, then gestured at me to come out into the hallway. “I guess I should tell you what’s going on,” she half-whispered as she led me down the hall to the living room. “Penny contacted the Home a few weeks ago because she’s interested in adopting an older child, not a baby . . . or a toddler. She’s single, but she has a good job and could provide a lot for a child your age, with your interests.”

  I stopped. “She wants to adopt me?”

  “She wants to get to know you,” Corinne said. “To see if you two would make a good match.”

  I didn’t seem to be a good match with anyone these days, so why should things work out with this Penny Korda person? It was probably a lost cause. Thinking about it some more, it came to me that Ricky Ray . . . Ricky Ray was the one who needed a mama. I’d gotten along fine for eleven years without one, but Ricky Ray was still a little boy who needed taking care of.

  “She should adopt Ricky Ray,” I told Corinne. “I bet she’d like him a lot.”

  “She’s looking to adopt an older girl, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Ricky Ray doesn’t fit the bill, I’m afraid,” Corinne said. “By the way, where’s he been lately? For a while I thought he lived here.”

  “He’s off with the rest of the six-year-olds,” I said lightly. “Being six.”

  Corinne put her hand on my shoulder. “You know, you’re eligible for adoption, Maddie. This could be a great opportunity for you.”

  Back in my room I lay across my bed, my theater dreams taken over by the idea of being adopted. I wanted to talk about it with somebody, but Donita was out of the question. She shared Logan’s bad feelings when it came to me. After she and Logan had gone to the fort and found the books gone, she’d come back to the dorm wanting to know what happened to them. I’d led her to where they were buried.

  “Maybe those books were yours to begin with,” she said after staring at the mound of dirt for a few moments. “But they became our books. Ours, as in a group of people who were friends. You had no right to do what you did.”

  “They were just books,” I told her, “just pictures we cut out.”

  Donita glared at me. “That’s a lie, and you know it’s a lie better than anybody else in this world.”

  Then she kicked her toe into the dirt, digging out a little hole. “We should have known all along about that girl, I guess,” she said, almost like she was talking to herself. “She told us right up front she wasn’t who she said she was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First day she was here, she said Murphy wasn’t her real name. Should’ve known the rest of it was lies too.”

  I rolled over on my bed and put my face in my pillow, which made me think that if I got adopted, I’d probably have nice new sheets on my bed that smelled like fabric softener. The pillowcase where my face now resided was a hand-me-down from someone at church and was probably twenty years old, and it smelled like industrial strength detergent, the kind you use when you’re washing the sheets from seventy-five beds.

  That pillowcase did me in. Two seconds after I rolled off the bed and hopped to my feet, I was knocking on Corinne’s door.

  “Tell that Penny person that the next time she stops by, she ought to say hello,” I said the minute Corinne popped her head out. “Tell her she ought not be such a stranger.”

  Chapter 23

  When I was just a baby, a ghost saved my life. This is according to my Granny Lane, who I lived with at the time in a trailer on Roan Mountain.

  I told this story to Penny Korda about fifteen minutes after I first met her. We were sitting at the table for eleven-year-old girls, eating meat loaf that looked like it wore out its welcome in the oven by a good half hour.

  When I finished telling my ghost story to Penny Korda, I could tell she found me worth getting to know better. I tried to keep her interested by being interested in her. “Tell me about your job,” I said. “What do you do for a living?”

  Penny Korda took a sip of her iced tea and said, “I teach art part time in Knoxville. When I’m not teaching, I illustrate children’s books.”

  “Could you teach me how to draw hands?” I asked her. “I can draw faces, but not hands.”

  “Hands are tough,” Penny Korda agreed. She took my hand and pointed out the various features that make hands one of the harder things to get down on paper, and then she got a pencil out of her bag and started sketching on a napkin. She sketched with her left hand and ran her right hand through her short hair as she drew, making it stick up all over the place. She reminded me of Mr. Willis.

  After dinner was over, Penny asked if I’d be interested in spending a weekend at her house in Knoxville. “You can play with my art supplies,” she said, smiling. “I have a whole room full of them.”

  I tore a piece of my napkin and scrunched it into a little ball. I wanted like anything to go to Penny’s house, but all of a sudden I got to thinking about Ricky Ray again. I couldn’t just leave him
behind, could I? I mean, who would he have left if I up and moved to Knoxville?

  Penny leaned over the table toward me. “We don’t have to decide anything yet, okay? It’s just for a weekend. If that works out, then we’ll try another weekend, and then another weekend.”

  I considered this. “Some weekends, do you think I could bring a friend with me?”

  Penny laughed. “Sure,” she said. “Just give me advance warning so I can make sure I have enough clean towels.”

  “He won’t care,” I told her, my heart lifting up a million miles. I was pretty sure clean towels weren’t high on Ricky Ray’s list of important things.

  At bedtime I tried to go to sleep, but I was too excited thinking about going to visit Penny Korda to even get a yawn out. I tried to imagine what her house might look like, an old Victorian maybe, with hidden rooms and secret passageways. Or maybe it was a new house with cathedral ceilings and a Jacuzzi in the master bath. My hand started itching, it was wanting to cut out pictures so bad.

  Which was why, the next day, I went with Corinne to the Winn-Dixie and picked up three real estate guides from the free publications rack. While Corinne was standing in the checkout line, I raced over to the drugstore to buy a notebook and some scissors and glue and a copy of Southern Living, which always had great house pictures in it. Then, as soon as Corinne pulled into the parking space behind the Older Girls’ Dorm, I was out of the van like a flash and running up Allen Avenue, over Dewey Payne Road, and a quarter mile through the woods that ran along the edge of Hampton’s Dairy Farm. The leaves had all fallen down, so I could see the fort from far away. I ran so hard I could barely breathe, but breathing didn’t matter. I just wanted to get there, to sit down on the floor, to cut out one picture after another until my book was filled up with them.

  I ran and I ran, and the minute I got there I leapt up the steps to the fort and pushed my way through the door.

  Logan, Donita, and Ricky Ray were already there.

  They were sitting on the floor wrapped in their winter coats, laughing and talking, pens and pencils and notebooks all around. And there, on the west window, were my yellow curtains, uneven and pretty, catching a breeze that was blowing through the fort.

  “What are you doing here?” Logan asked. His voice wasn’t mean or angry, which surprised me. Mostly he just sounded curious.

  I held up the plastic bag from the Winn-Dixie filled with my supplies, as though Logan would be able to tell from the weight of it what it contained. “I’m starting a new book,” I told him. “This seemed like the right place to do it.”

  “We started new books too!” Ricky Ray said, his voice sweet and eager. “Only they’re kind of different than the ones we did before.”

  I moved closer to their circle, curious. “Oh, yeah? How so?”

  Logan picked up one of the books so I could see it up close. It was a notebook filled with graph paper, and on the page he showed me, I saw that he’d drawn an elaborate floor plan.

  “I thought it would be fun if we tried designing some houses,” Logan said. “We wouldn’t build them or anything. It’s just fun coming up with the plans.”

  Ricky Ray patted the floor beside him, and I took a seat. “I’m just kind of drawing stuff,” he said. “I can’t do plans the way Logan does.” He showed me each of the pictures he’d drawn: a castle, a mansion, a ranch with a strange-looking horse tied up outside.

  “Those are really good, Ricky Ray,” I told him. I snuggled up to him a little, and suddenly he was sitting in my lap. “I’m real sorry about everything,” I whispered to him, and he nodded.

  “I know it,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  Penny Korda was going to like Ricky Ray, I just knew it. And if she didn’t, well, that was too bad. Because I wasn’t going anywhere without him; I was pretty sure about that.

  You’re taking a big risk, a voice inside of me said. You might be stuck here forever.

  I looked around the fort. It wasn’t the house of my dreams, but as long as my friends were here, it would do. Maybe we could still paint that mural we’d been talking about. Maybe one day we could invite some folks over for a party.

  I smiled, thinking about who we might invite. Mr. Potter, for sure, and could be we’d extend an invitation to old Mr. Trivette and to Mrs. Dugger over at the library. And Penny Korda was welcome to come visit too. I had a feeling she might like it out here in the middle of the woods.

  Thinking about a party and all the friends we’d invite, well, I felt that hole inside of me get a little bit smaller. I leaned over toward Donita, my expression daring her to ignore me. “So are you doing house plans too?”

  She shook her head. “I’m more interested in what’s inside the houses,” she said. She flipped through the pages of her notebook until she found a picture she liked enough to show me. It looked like a design for a theater set, showing where every chair should be put and where the table was and so on.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s great.”

  Donita shrugged. “I’m not that good at drawing. But it’s fun to come up with the plans. I like to think about how different people would set up their houses in different ways.”

  “What do you have in the bag, Maddie?” Ricky Ray asked, poking his pencil at it.

  I dumped out the real estate guides and the scissors and glue and the notebook. “I was going to start another Book of Houses,” I told him. “But now I don’t know.”

  “You should do our idea,” he said.

  “It’s a good idea,” I agreed with him. I walked over to the trash can to throw away my bag. Seeing those glittery, gold swirls and twirls made my throat feel tight. “I bet Murphy would have liked it, too,” I said, squeezing my hands together hard, hoping that a little hurt might keep out a bigger one.

  “You think she’ll ever come back, Maddie?” Ricky Ray asked. “You think we’ll ever see her again?”

  “Who cares?” Logan said. “She was a liar and a fraud.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But she knew how to tell good stories.”

  That cracked Donita up. She laughed so hard she was wiping tears out of her eyes. “I guess you got a point, Maddie,” she said finally. “Liar, storyteller . . . it’s all the same thing, ain’t it?”

  “It kind of is,” I insisted, not sure what I was trying to say. “Maybe she had to tell those lies to make herself feel better. And after awhile she believed them so much they were the truth to her.”

  “But they were still lies,” Logan said, not budging. “She wanted us to believe things about her that weren’t true.”

  “No,” said Donita, serious now, figuring things out. “She wanted to believe things that weren’t true. Maybe it wasn’t all that important whether we believed ’em or not.”

  I nodded my head. That was it. That’s why I couldn’t hate Murphy. All those stories she told, each one was a little dream she had about herself, about who she might’ve been, if her luck had been better, if those parents she wanted to believe in so badly had ever come back to get her.

  “I heard you’re getting adopted,” Donita said, turning back to her notebook. “By that lady who ate dinner with us last night. Is that true?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Can I come stay with you sometimes?” Ricky Ray asked.

  “Just you wait and see,” I told him, leaning into him.

  I picked up my notebook and reached over Donita to grab a pencil. I smiled at her as I sat back down, and she smiled at me. “My mama’s coming to see me next weekend,” she told me. “Maybe I’ll get to go home before too long.”

  “Is Rita coming too?” I asked.

  Donita rolled her eyes. “That girl is such a mess. She better come. But she’s got this boy now; he’s all she can talk about.”

  Logan laughed. “You’re just jealous she’s got a boyfriend and you don’t,” he said. Donita leaned over and socked him on the arm, and I opened my notebook to the first page. I was going to try to draw a picture of Penny Korda
’s face from memory. I’d give it to her when she came to pick me up to take me to her house in Knoxville, and she’d be so impressed she wouldn’t mind that Ricky Ray was coming along for the ride.

  I drew one picture and then I drew another. First I drew Penny’s face, and then, for the first time since I don’t know when, I made a sketch of Granny Lane, her hand on her hip, her mouth opening to give Mr. Willis some sass. A parade of people started coming out of my pencil: Randy Nidiffer, Mr. Willis, Logan and Donita, the two of them cutting up about something as usual.

  I drew as fast as I could, trying to keep up with my imagination. A house burst onto the paper. That’s where everyone was walking to, and there was me and Ricky Ray on the front porch, waving as they strolled up the driveway.

  In my mind I could see my mama walking up the street, her light brown hair floating around her face, and there was a man behind her who I just knew was my daddy, his blue eyes just like mine.

  It was a family reunion; I saw it clear as day. Which was why it was no surprise when Murphy flew onto my paper, her head thrown back, her arms stretched out against the sky.

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Frances O’Roark Dowell

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Russell Gordon

  The text of this book is set in Aldine 401.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3227-2 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dowell, Frances O’Roark.

  Where I’d like to be / Frances O’Roark Dowell.

  p. cm.