Completely Clementine

by Sara Pennypacker

  Text copyright © 2015 by Sara Pennypacker

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Marla Frazee

  Many thanks to the entire Ramirez family for their help in chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 12.

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  The illustrations for this book were done with pen and ink on Strathmore paper.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-4333-1

  Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Collect all the Clementines!

  For Ms. Marla, Clementine’s art and soul

  —S. P.

  To Stephanie Lurie, who took Clementine’s hand

  —M.F.

  As soon as I woke up Monday morning, I flopped onto the floor with my drawing pad. I drew a cow with a sagging-down mouth and rivers of tears flowing from her eyes. When I was finished, that cow looked so sad, my own eyes started to cry a little bit. I wiped them so I could admire what a great job I’d done, and then I smiled.

  Because—oh, yes—this drawing was going to crack my father’s heart, all right.

  I drew about a hundred more teardrops splashing down, and added a couple of ducks paddling around in the puddle of cow-sadness. Then I got dressed and went out into the kitchen, where everyone else was already at the table.

  “Okra, would you please pass this to our father?” I asked, sitting down.

  My brother, who is obsessed with dinosaurs these days, took the drawing in his teeth and passed it over.

  “Hmmm…” my dad said. “That is not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all. A cow with hose-eyes. That could come in handy for…well, for putting out fires in a dairy barn, I suppose.”

  I grabbed the drawing back and stomped into my room to label it “The Crying Cow.” Then I crossed out “Crying” and changed it to “Weeping.” This is because weeping is a lot sadder than crying; it’s tragical, really. I like to use exactly the right word for things.

  Then I stomped back and handed it to my brother again. “Collard Greens, please pass this to our father,” I growled into my orange juice.

  My brother pawed at my drawing and slid it across the table.

  This time, my dad didn’t even look at it. “Clementine, try to understand,” he said. “It was very nice of Mrs. Jacobi to bake that meat loaf for us. She knows how tired your mom is these days, with the baby due so soon. She wanted to help out. It would have been rude not to eat it.”

  I zipped my mouth into a straight ruler line so it wouldn’t say What about that cow in that meat loaf? Don’t you think you were rude to her? Because an important part of not speaking to someone is not speaking to them.

  “I’m so mad at my father,” I told Margaret as soon as I got on the bus. “Since I turned vegetarian, my mom and Pinto Bean haven’t eaten any animals either. But my dad won’t do it. He ate meat loaf Saturday night. I’m so mad I can’t even talk to him. It’s been one day, thirteen hours, and”—I leaned over and checked Margaret’s watch—“twenty-one minutes.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Margaret said. “The silent treatment.”

  “The silent treatment? It’s a treatment?”

  Margaret nodded hard. “Very effective. Hold out for a lot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The last time I used the silent treatment was in the spring, when my mother told me what kind of wedding she wasn’t having. I’m still getting stuff out of that one.”

  A couple of years ago, Margaret had watched a real prince and princess get married on television. Since then, she’d considered herself an expert on royal weddings. So when she learned her mother was getting remarried, she figured she’d get to run the wedding. “I wasn’t there for her first one, to my father,” she’d told me, “but I can make up for that now. This one with Alan is going to be a doozy.”

  She got a little carried away, planning this and planning that. One problem: she forgot to tell her mother about any of it.

  When Margaret’s mother finally heard about the special wave from the balcony, the satin train with fourteen footmen to carry it, the carriage ride, and the hundred other details, she said, “NO.”

  “What part NO?” Margaret had asked.

  Margaret’s mother had meant NO to all of it, which made Margaret go berserk. “Three whole days I didn’t talk to her,” Margaret said. “On the last day, I even added my invisible treatment.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You act as if the person is invisible to you. I looked right through her, as if she weren’t there. You should use it with your father.”

  “I don’t think I could do that,” I told her after I’d tried to imagine it for a while. “My father’s the opposite of invisible.”

  “Too bad—it’s very powerful. It made my mother give in. She agreed to have a flower girl—me—and to get me a new dress, whatever I want. And tomorrow, I’m getting the best part: new shoes.”

  This was so ridiculous I snort-laughed. “Shoes? Margaret, getting new shoes isn’t winning anything.” I thought back to when I had to get new sneakers last fall. “In fact, I think shopping for shoes is a punishment.”

  “Oh, these shoes are winning something, all right. These shoes are going to be high heels.”

  I felt my jaw fall down. It took all my power to crank it back up to my chin by the time we pulled in to school.

  First thing when I walked into Room 3B, my teacher asked, “Yet?” and I answered, “Not yet.”

  We have been “Yet?”ing and “Not yet”ing each other about waiting for babies since spring. First it was me “Yet?”ing him, but after his baby was finally born in May, he started “Yet?”ing me and I started “Not yet”ing him back.

  “And Not yet about a name, either,” I answered to his next question as I took my seat.

  When the Pledge was over, Mr. D’Matz called us for Circle Sharing Time. “As you know, this is the last week of school, and we have a lot to accomp—”

  Mr. D’Matz waited while all the kids cheered about school being over. All the kids except me, that is. I’m happy about no school for the whole summer too, of course—I’ve got a lot of great stuff planned. What I’m not happy about is the rest of it. The Starting-Over-with-a-New-Class-in-the-Fall part, and the What-If-I-Don’t-Get-a-Nice-Teacher part. And most of all, the Saying-Good-bye-to-Mr.-D’Matz part.

  I do not like saying good-bye.

  “Thursday is the last day of school,” Mr. D’Matz started up again, “so we’ve only got four days. We’ll have to hurry to get our work finished, because I know we’ll want to leave plenty of time to say good-bye.”

  At recess, Rasheed and Maria ran up to me. “What did Margaret say?” they asked.

  Maria and Rasheed have been asking me this every day since they fell in love this spring. Actually, it was Rasheed who fell in love, and Maria just said I don’t care, sure, whatever, about being in love back. When they heard that Margaret was an expert in royal weddings, they started passing along questions about how to get married.

 
; “Margaret said you should have about a thou-sand lights, but you shouldn’t see the wires,” I told them. “When Princess Diana got married, they used ferrets to run the wires through pipes under the ground.”

  Rasheed sighed. “I don’t know anybody with a ferret. And my cat’s too fat to go through under-ground pipes.”

  “No problem,” said Maria. “Flo-Max will do it. Lizards like to go into skinny places. Once he got loose and a week later he crawled out of the bathtub drain. But ask Margaret about those arm-gloves she said I had to wear. Do I need them if it’s summertime, or are they just for winter?”

  When they ran off, I took a marker from my pocket and added a new exclamation point to the arm reminder I’ve been keeping since all this started: NO WEDDINGS FOR ME!!!!!!!

  Tuesday morning I had to put my newest sad-animal drawing beside my dad’s coffee cup, because he was already off at work. “Petrified Piglets” was my best one yet: baby pigs running away from a farmer holding a hot dog roll and a jar of spicy mustard.

  “I wish you could hurry up and have our baby,” I told my mom as I slid into my seat. “I wish you could have it before Thursday, so I could let my teacher know what a good baby is like.”

  My mom handed me an English muffin and a jar of almond butter. “You mean his new little boy isn’t a good baby?” she asked.

  I shook my head as I spread the almond butter into a perfect circle. “He sounds like a dud,” I answered. “Mr. D’Matz is always telling us things like ‘Wow, yesterday he drank an extra ounce of milk!’ and ‘He really loves to look at his mobile!’ as if those were the most exciting tricks any human in the world ever performed. I think it’s just that he doesn’t know any better—this is the only baby he’s got. So I wish I could tell him about ours.”

  My mom patted her belly. “You think our baby’s going to be more interesting than his, is that it?”

  I nodded. “And more fun.”

  “Well, it might not be all fun,” my mom said. “At least not in the beginning.” She went into her bedroom and came out a minute later with a folded-up piece of paper. “Do you remember this? It’s a letter to your brother when he was a week old. You dictated it to me and we went to the post office so you could mail it to him.”

  I took the note and read it:

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I do remember. Yam was kind of a dud too. Still, could you try to have the baby early? There are only a few more days of school left, and it would be great to brag about it—I mean share about it—at Circle Sharing Time. So how about you try to have it on…” I got up to check the calendar. “Auurrgghh! Not today! Try really hard not to let the baby be born today!”

  “Why not? What’s today?”

  I couldn’t believe she had forgotten something this important. “Mom! Today is the second anniversary of when I threw up on the subway! This would be a terrible day for the baby to be born!”

  My mother laughed. “Well, it would also be a terrible day because we’re not ready here.” A panicky look came over her face then. “We’re not ready yet. We’re not ready yet!” she cried. She grabbed the edge of the table and squeezed until her knuckles went white, then she took a couple of deep breaths. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said in a Calm-Down-Now voice. “July second is still two weeks away.”

  July second is our baby’s due date. This is not like a library due date, because we’re not just borrowing our baby. And it’s not like a sell-by date on groceries, because our baby isn’t going to start to get moldy and rot after that. What it is, is the date our baby’s aiming to be born. My mother doesn’t keep a calendar inside her belly, but somehow, our baby is going to know that around July second we’re going to be expecting to see it.

  I figured that by July second, our baby would be expecting something too. “Did you decide on a name yet?” I asked as I put my backpack on. “Because I’ve got some new thing-names for you.…”

  When I first heard about a new baby coming, I wanted it to have a food name. My name is a fruit, which I used to hate but now I like. I call my brother vegetable names to make it fair, which he used to hate but now he likes too. So I thought our new brother or sister should have a food name too, so he or she wouldn’t feel left out.

  My dad said yes, because he’d always wanted a kid named Noodle. “It’s so good,” he pleaded, “for either a boy or a girl!” But my mother said Absolutely not!

  Then I tried a compromise, which means nobody wins, but nobody loses, either. “How about a thing-name then? Let’s give the baby a name that’s also a thing, at least.”

  My father loved this idea too. My mother rolled her eyes at all his suggestions: Lug Nut, Pencil, Q-tip, and Noodle again. But she didn’t hate the thing-name idea. “Dawn,” she said. “That’s a lovely name. Or maybe Colt, if it’s a boy.”

  “So, do you want to hear them?” I asked.

  “Maybe later. We still have two weeks. I have a feeling the perfect name will show up by then.” She patted my backpack and turned me toward the door. “Right now, it’s time for school.”

  At recess, I gave Maria the bad news about the gloves: Yes, summer or winter. “But Margaret says if it’s a summer wedding, you could skip the fur cape. She also says you should start practicing the royal wave.”

  “The royal wave?”

  I put my hand up beside my face to demonstrate what Margaret had taught me. “Just a swivel of the hand, nothing flappy. And always above the shoulder and below the crown.”

  While Maria was practicing the special wave, Rasheed came over, dragging Joe. “Joe’s going to be my best man,” he said. “But he says he’ll only do it if his dog Buddy can be in the wedding too. Ask Margaret if that’s okay.”

  “Tell Margaret that for a dog, he barely slobbers at all,” Joe added.

  And right then, I saw something I’d never seen before. Something really amazing.

  “Joe!” I yelled. “I see your knees!”

  Joe ignored me and went on telling about some great tricks his dog could do to entertain the wedding guests.

  I grabbed him by the shoulders and looked straight into his face. “Joe,” I said again, “you don’t understand. I. SEE. YOUR. KNEES!!!”

  And then his eyes got so big I thought they were going to pop out of his head. “You mean…”

  Very slowly, as if he was afraid he wasn’t going to see what he was really, really, hoping he was going to see, he looked down at his legs. When his eyes saw his knees peeking out from under his shorts, his mouth fell open. He hugged me, then he hugged Maria and Rasheed. Then he apologized for hugging us. Then he took off around the playground high-fiving everybody else. When he ran out of kids to high-five, he leaped up and punched the air. “Yes!” he screamed when he got back to us. “It’s started! My growth spurt has started!”

  Joe has been the shortest kid in our class since kindergarten. He’s been praying all year for a sudden growth spurt, and now he looked happier than I’d ever seen him. “If you keep this up, you’ll have to bend over to hand Rasheed the ring at the wedding,” I said.

  Joe smiled bigger still, and I think even his teeth had gotten taller.

  “They might have to raise the fourth-grade door-ways by the time school starts in September,” I said.

  Joe’s grin nearly split his cheeks off. “I should probably warn Principal Rice, just to be fair.”

  “You should,” I agreed. “Your growth spurt is astoundishing.”

  Joe’s smile collapsed. He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, astoundishing? That’s not a word.”

  “Of course it is. I use it all the time.”

  “I know you do. But it’s still not a word.”

  “Oh, yeah? How come you never told me before?”

  Joe shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t tall enough before,” he said.

  As soon as I got inside, I asked my teacher if I could use his grown-up dictionary, the one with all the words in the world, while the other kids began cleaning out their desks.

  “
It’s not here!” I cried, after I’d searched and searched. “I found astounding and astonishing, but not astoundishing. It’s missing.”

  And then my teacher said something I did N-O-T, not want to hear. “That’s because it’s not a real word.”

  I closed that dictionary so hard I probably flattened a bunch of words. “But it has to be! It’s a great word.”

  Mr. D’Matz put his coffee cup down. “Well, let’s think about this interesting question: What is the job of language?”

  When my teacher says, “Well, let’s think about this interesting question,” it means he’s too lazy to figure out a lesson and he wants a kid to do it for him. Usually I try to help him out, but just then I was too upset, so I folded my arms and waited for him to answer it himself. Which he did.

  “Language’s job is to communicate as clearly as possible. On the one hand, we have rules—like grammar, and spelling, and a set of words we agree to use—so everybody can understand each other easily. But on the other hand, language has to grow and change, too. People make up new words to describe new things. So maybe you’ve made up a new word. You shouldn’t use it in a school paper, and you’d get it marked wrong on a spelling test. But you can use it with me, all right? Because I agree that it’s a great word.”

  Mr. D’Matz put the dictionary back in its place. “And speaking of things that grow and change…”

  I clapped my hands over my ears, fast, because I knew what was coming. All last week, he had tried to tell me about what a great year I’d had, and how I was ready to say good-bye to him and head off for fourth grade. He’d been getting trickier about sneaking up on me about this, but I was getting trickier about avoiding it. “I just remembered I might have left a bologna sandwich in my desk in September,” I said. “So I’d better go clean it out now.”

  On the bus ride home, Margaret asked me how the silent treatment was going.