Completely Clementine

by Sara Pennypacker

  “A fashion accident,” she said at last. Then she lowered her head to glare over at her brother. She sharpened her voice and shot him a word-arrow: “It was worth it.”

  My dad secret-handed me a folded-up dollar bill and then nodded toward Raoul. “Tip,” he whispered.

  So I secret-handed Raoul the dollar bill and whispered, “Tip.” I also told him that nobody had ever carried my backpack better than he had—except me, of course—and this made him even happier than the dollar bill did. He bent down and tugged his collar aside to show me a tattoo of a dragon winding around his neck, and then he left.

  When I went over to ask Margaret about her foot, her chin started to tremble. She picked up Mascara and hugged him tight. Then she ordered me into the bathroom so I could admire the Sanitized for Your Protection! tape wrapped around the glasses. I figured it was really so she could wipe any tears off her face—Margaret doesn’t like people to see her when she’s crying—so I stayed in there a little while. And the bathroom was great all right: marble everything, and Margaret had been telling the truth about the individually wrapped soaps. There were other single-serving-size things too—tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner and moisturizer. The towels were folded into crisp fans, and the toilet paper ends were tucked into perfect triangles.

  All the while I was in there, I kept an ear out for my dad, who was still chatting with Margaret’s dad.

  “Well, thanks again for having her,” I heard him say. “We really appreciate it. We’ll give you a call tomorrow.” Then he called out, “Bye, Clementine,” and I heard him leave.

  And suddenly, I didn’t want to be alone in that fancy bathroom anymore.

  Margaret insisted on giving me a tour of the hotel suite from the couch. She read from a la-di-blah-blah hotel booklet and used her crutch to point out the many elegant guest features for your enjoyment.

  While she read, I unpacked my things. I put my pajamas in the bureau, my toothbrush in the bathroom, and my poster beside the bed. And there at the bottom of my backpack was a surprise: my report card. I had forgotten to give it to my parents Thursday night.

  I opened it. It was the usual stuff: all A’s in math, all not-A’s in everything else. But at the bottom was a note from my teacher—the good-bye words he’d been trying to say to me all week. I read it, then crumpled it up and stuffed it into my back pocket.

  “Why don’t you kids go explore the hotel lobby?” Margaret’s dad suggested. “I’ve got some work to do.” He picked up his phone and sat down at the desk.

  Margaret made it out to the hall on her crutches, but you could tell it was pretty hard work. Mitchell and I looked at each other, then we looked at the room service cart across the way, then we looked at Margaret.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not getting on there with all those dirty dishes. That thing is crawling with germs.”

  But Mitchell and I explained that she could curl up on the bottom shelf, which was empty, and she grumbled and said okay. “But put down a sterilized towel first.”

  We did, and then Margaret climbed on. Mitchell and I grabbed the handle, ready to roll. Before we even took one step, though, a bellhop turned the corner in front of us. It was Raoul. He was wearing a frown, but you could tell he was having a hard time keeping it in place. “Allow me to take that off your hands,” he said.

  Mitchell and I helped Margaret off the cart and back onto her crutches.

  Margaret hopped over to the door and slid the key-card through the slot. “You two go. I need to rehearse for my commercial,” she said, flapping her hands at us.

  “There’s nothing to rehearse, Margaret,” I heard her dad call out. “You won’t have any lines. You just have to look happy if you get to go to the water park and sad if you don’t.”

  But Margaret insisted, so Mitchell and I took off. He showed me the vending machine and the ice machine, and a brass-plated mail slot where you could mail a letter right into the wall. Then we took the elevator down to the lobby. And that’s where I saw the best thing of all: two thrones. I am not even kidding about that. Big green leather thrones, set up high on a platform.

  “Wow,” I said. “So kings and queens come here, too?”

  “Nah, Dude-ette,” Mitchell said. “It’s a shoe-shine station. Up you go.”

  I climbed up onto the throne and Mitchell pretended to shine my sneakers, and then I pretended to pay him, and then he pretended I didn’t give him a big-enough tip. Then he climbed up on the throne, and I pretended his sneakers were too smelly for me to work on, and that was the end of that game, so we jumped down.

  “How was the wedding?” I asked, as we wandered down the halls, poking our heads into all the rooms that weren’t locked.

  “Oh, fine,” Mitchell answered. “At least until Margaret fell.”

  “Did she ruin the ceremony?”

  “No, they were done with the I do part. Margaret was supposed to walk over and sprinkle them with rose petals at the end. But she insisted on skipping, and boom! Sister down. I had to wear that suit for an extra hour while we waited in the emergency room. But it’s over now. And hey, it’s summer! No school! Ball games every day!”

  I gave Mitchell a Yay! Everything’s GREAT! grin, but I guess he could tell it was fake.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Aren’t you happy it’s summer?”

  “Oh, I am,” I said. “My grandparents are going to come when the baby’s born, and I’ll get to sleep on the couch for a whole week. My uncle’s going to teach me some magic tricks, and I’m going to build a boat with a glass floor, and learn to ride a unicycle. Plus, I’m happy about no school. I just wish I had said good-bye to my teacher.”

  “You didn’t do it? How come?”

  “Well…” I started to tell Mitchell that I hated saying good-bye, but now I knew that wasn’t it. So I told him the real reason. “Because he kept saying how I was ready for fourth grade, and it isn’t true. I haven’t done all the stuff he said—all the growing and changing things. He’s wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like…” I pulled my report card out and read from it. “‘Clementine, you’ve made such great progress in controlling your impulses, and thinking ahead about consequences.’ That stuff. I hate when people say good things about me if they’re wrong.”

  Mitchell skidded to a stop so hard, I almost expected to see sparks flaming out of his heels. “Dude-ette, are you kidding?” he cried. “Margaret says you’ve gone a whole week without speaking to your father—is that true?”

  I looked up at the fancy clock in the lobby. “Well, almost. In an hour and seven minutes it will be a full week. So what?”

  “And you haven’t slipped up once?”

  I shook my head. “I almost did, lots of times. I wanted to talk to him, but then I’d remember just in time that speaking to him would be not not-speaking to him.”

  Mitchell pulled his baseball from his pocket, smiling. “So, let’s see,” he said, tossing the ball up and catching it. “You controlled your impulses to talk to your dad, because you thought ahead about the consequences. For a whole week.” He caught the ball and handed it to me. “It kills me to say this, Dude-ette, but your teacher’s right.”

  Oh.

  My teacher was right.

  I had changed this year.

  Which meant I could have said good-bye to him.

  But now it was too late.

  When we got back, Margaret’s father handed us the room service menus. We chose our meals—a grilled cheese and pickle sandwich and a straw-berry parfait for me—and then I got to call on the phone and order everything. Half an hour later, two waiters brought a cart into the room and started sweeping silver lids off plates, just like on the cooking shows I watch with my mom.

  As we ate, we played a game Margaret invented called Fancy Folks. How you play it is this: hold your fork with your pinkie finger sticking out, squeeze your mouth into a tight O, and take a teeny, tiny nibble. Put your fork down after every bite and tap y
our napkin to your lips three times and say, “Oh, my, isn’t this too scrumptious!”

  That’s the whole boring game, and I am not even kidding about this.

  At seven o’clock, Mitchell and his dad went into their room to watch the Red Sox on their television. Margaret and I went into her bedroom, and she picked up the remote. “My dad says we can watch a movie.” She clicked the TV on and started scrolling down the list.

  “You pick, Margaret,” I decided. “Just not Beauty and the Beast.”

  “Why not?” Margaret asked. “I thought you loved that movie, especially the dancing part.”

  “I do,” I said. “I did. I don’t want to think about the dancing part tonight, that’s all.”

  But it was too late for that. Margaret picked a movie about some princesses who formed a rock band, and we watched it twice—once on the floor and once in our beds, and then we fell asleep. But in the middle of the night, Mascara jumped up onto my bed and woke me up. And there, in my head, was the dancing part of Beauty and the Beast.

  So I thought, Okay, fine—I give up. I will think about the Beauty and the Beast time.

  When I was little, my father took me to see the movie. There was nobody else in the theater, because it had been playing so long everybody on the whole planet had already seen it. I had already seen it, too—six times. But I wanted to watch it again, because I loved the part where Belle and the Beast dance while the teapot sings. Since there was no one there to yell at us, when that part came, my father took me up onto the stage in front of the screen, and we danced. My father and I danced right there with Belle and the Beast.

  On the way home, I thanked him and thanked him.

  My dad laughed. “Let’s hope you remember this when you’re really mad at me about something.”

  “I’m never going to be mad at you,” I promised, surprised that he could even think up such a bad thing.

  My dad had pulled the car off the road and parked. “Yes, you will,” he said. “Look, you’ve got me for a father, and I’ve got you for a daughter, for a long, long time. It’s a life sentence. And since we’re two different people—which is good, by the way—we’re going to have lots of disagreements. We’re going to get really angry with each other sometimes.”

  “No, we won’t, Dad! I’ll always remember you let me dance with Belle and the Beast, and I’ll never, ever, be mad at you.”

  “That’s not how it works in families, Sport,” he’d said. “I’m going to want you to be you, and you’re going to want me to be me. But that will mean arguments, and sometimes they might be awful. But how about this: when we’re really, really furious with each other, we’ll remember dancing with the movie, and we’ll figure a way around whatever we’re mad about. Deal?”

  I had shaken hands with him, and we’d gotten back on the road. As we drove home that afternoon, I’d decided that he was just wrong—we weren’t going to argue about stuff and get angry at each other.

  This week, though, I found out he’d been right: we were different people, and it sure did make me mad at him. And now, as I sat in that fancy hotel room with Mascara’s purring making me miss my own kitten, and with the midnight noises of hotel strangers making me miss my own family, I was really hoping he was right about the last part, too.

  As soon as I woke up the next morning, I asked if I could call home. I had decided during the night that I was ready to try saying one word to my father. Hi was a nice short one to start with.

  “Let’s wait,” Margaret’s father said. “Your father said he’d call when they were ready.”

  So we ordered room service breakfast, and like before, two waiters brought it up and made a big production about uncovering everything, even though it was just regular blueberry pancakes.

  This time we ate playing a game Mitchell invented, Raised by Wolves, which I probably shouldn’t tell how to play. It was a lot more fun that Fancy Folks, that’s all I’m going to say about that.

  After breakfast, Margaret positioned herself in front of the television to rehearse her commercial. “Just pretend you’re seeing me inside the screen, not in front of it. With makeup on. And without the crutches.”

  Margaret stretched her face around for a while, and then she asked me what I thought.

  “Great!” I said. “You looked really sad you couldn’t go to the water park!”

  “You’re not paying attention,” Margaret grumbled. “I was being one of the lucky kids who does get to go.”

  But I was paying attention: I was paying attention to the phone that kept on not ringing. Which—okay, fine—wasn’t really fair to Margaret. “Try again,” I said. “I’ll really watch this time.”

  Margaret made a lot more faces, then she asked me what I thought again.

  “I don’t know, Margaret,” I said. “You still looked kind of…horrified, actually.”

  “Well,” Margaret admitted, “that was part of it, I guess. I was imagining being really happy to go to that water park, then I started imagining all the germs that must be swimming around in that water….” Margaret rolled her eyes and shuddered hard.

  And then I thought of something Margaret was N-O-T, not going to like. “Um, where are they going to film this commercial?” I asked carefully.

  “Oh, at my father’s studio, I guess,” Margaret answered. “Or, wait…maybe…no, not at the…” She turned white. “Dad!” she yelled into the other room, “I changed my mind. I want to play one of the kids who doesn’t have to go to the water park!”

  Just then, there was a knock on the door. When Margaret’s dad came out and opened it, there stood two cleaning ladies. Between them were a serious-looking vacuum and a big cart loaded with linens and cleaning supplies. Margaret crutched across the room so fast she nearly toppled over. When she leaned over to see what was on the cart, she looked like a cartoon pirate opening a treasure chest.

  Mitchell and his dad left to go get the Sunday paper, but I stayed behind to watch Margaret watch the cleaning ladies. Also—okay, fine—I stayed behind in case the phone rang. Which it didn’t.

  Margaret followed the cleaning ladies around, asking questions and jotting their answers down in a notebook, which was a hard trick, since she was balancing on crutches. Every time she asked if she could help them, they looked at each other and shook their heads No. But finally, when they were almost finished, Margaret begged to vacuum the last bit of carpet, by the door, and they said, Okay, if it means that much to you. I propped her up so she could balance on one foot, and she vacuumed piles of imaginary dirt from that floor.

  This put Margaret in such a good mood that when Mitchell came back she let us play with her crutches. This time, I invented the game. How you play What Happened to Your Foot? is this: One person is on crutches, and the others pop into the room and gasp, “What happened to your foot?” Then the crutch person has to come up with a new story every time, really fast.

  Margaret quit after just a few turns, saying, “Oh, who cares how it happened?” and hopped over to flop onto the couch. But Mitchell and I kept it up for a really long time.

  “I don’t know! I woke up and it was missing!”

  “Parachute didn’t open!”

  “Trapeze broke!”

  “Cannibal socks!”

  “Bone-melting aliens!”

  “Runaway steamroller!”

  “Alligators in my bathtub!”

  “Elephant stampede!”

  “Toe sharks!”

  “Heel bees!”

  “Heel bees?”

  “Heel bees!”

  I finally won when Mitchell tried, “Flying catch, World Series!” for a second time.

  This game made us all hungry for lunch, so we ordered room service again, and this time we didn’t play any game at all, we just ate. After that, Margaret and I watched the rock band princesses movie again, and then finally, finally, the phone rang.

  Margaret’s father answered it, and he winked over at me to let me know it was my family. I figured my parents mu
st have had a really great date, because he smiled while he listened, and then he said, “Great,” “Wonderful,” and “Congratulations,” lots of times.

  “No, I won’t,” he said next, still smiling. “Not a word.” Then he hung up. “Time to go home, Clementine,” he said to me.

  I stuffed my things into my backpack and hurried over to the door.

  “I always take the little bottles from the bathroom when I leave,” Margaret said. “You can take them this time.”

  I went into the bathroom and brought them all out. “The shampoo will be for my mom, and the conditioner is for my dad. I’ll give the bar of soap to my brother, to give him the hint he should get clean once in a while. The bottle of moisturizer is for my kitten, since that’s his name.” I dropped them all into my backpack and thanked Margaret for being so nice.

  “What about something for yourself?” Margaret’s father asked. “Something to remember your stay?”

  “There’s nothing else in the bathroom,” I said. Margaret’s father beckoned me to follow him over to the desk. He pointed.

  And there was the best thing of all: a sheet of creamy writing paper and an envelope that both said The Boston Park Plaza in fancy lettering.

  “Really?” I asked. “I could have that?”

  “That’s what it’s there for. The Park Plaza would be delighted.”

  At my building, I said “Good-bye, thank you!” to Margaret’s dad as fast as I could and ran down to my apartment. When I opened the door, something felt different, but I couldn’t tell what it was at first. My kitten was asleep on the windowsill, my dad was conked out on the couch, and my mom was curled up against him. She put a shhh!-finger to her lips, then she looked down and smiled. On her lap was a loaf of bread, tightly wrapped up in a soft yellow blanket.

  I looked again.

  The loaf of bread had a little squished-up face.

  “Oh!” I whispered. Very carefully, I climbed up on the couch beside my mom.