Blue Like Friday

by Siobhán Parkinson

  I don’t know what made me say it. I nearly died of embarrassment as soon as it was out. I could feel myself blushing like mad, but Hal just grinned a bit and said, “You’re deadly, Olivia,” so I knew it was OK, he didn’t think I was proposing to him or anything.

  Eventually we drew apart, and we stood up and put our school bags on our backs again, and walked on, side by side.

  “What’ll you do now, Hal?” I asked as we came to my gate. “Will you tell Alec the game is up, you know she’s not really lost, and ask him to ask her to come back, all is forgiven et cetera?”

  “Well,” said Hal. “Something like that, maybe. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll phone you later.”

  “OK, Hal,” I said.

  I wondered if he expected me to give him a little kiss or something, which was definitely not in my immediate plans, but I didn’t really think he did, so I just grabbed his hand for a moment and gave his fingers a tiny squeeze, and he squeezed back, and I knew everything was fine.

  “See you, Hal,” I said, and I went inside.

  Chapter 21

  Hal didn’t phone. Instead he came around, with his famous kite, to see if I’d come to the Low Strand with him. We were just finishing our dinner, and my mum asked him to sit down and have a bowl of ice cream with us.

  “Is that OK, Dad?” I asked, meaning about going to the Low Strand. He said no, not on a weekday, not at that time of the evening, but I said, “Da-ad,” and I stepped hard on his toe under the table and jiggled my eyebrows at him so he would get the message that this wasn’t any old day in Hal’s life.

  Of course he didn’t get it, but Mum noticed and she piped up, “Oh, Paul, I think it’d be OK just for once.”

  My father swung around to my mother, clearly put out that she wasn’t toeing the agreed parental line, but then she started at the eyebrow wiggling too. My parents are OK, really, I have to say. I mean, there is room for improvement, but as parents go, they are in the honors class, I’d say.

  Suddenly there was this horrible noise, like a cat stuck in a washing machine. Actually, I have never heard a cat in a washing machine, but I imagine it would sound like that.

  “What’s that?” I squawked.

  “It’s my phone,” Hal said, picking it up from the table where he’d left it. It had been throwing a fit, making as if to jump off onto the floor. “It’s on vibrate.”

  “It sounds like …” But I didn’t get a chance to tell him about the cat in the washing machine.

  “Oh hi, Mammy!” he yelled. “Oh hello, hello, oh, Ma!”

  It was his mother.

  He waved at me and mouthed something I couldn’t understand. Then suddenly there were these great big globs of tears running down his face.

  “OK,” he sobbed. “OK, OK, OK. Yes. OK. Yes. Great. OK.”

  Eventually he stopped nodding and saying yes and great and OK and pressed the red key.

  “She’s alive,” he said, with this huge grin across his face.

  “I know,” I said. “I told you. Did you not believe me?”

  “Of course I did, but, to hear her voice …” And he started blubbering again.

  My poor dad didn’t know what was going on. He doesn’t like not knowing what is going on; it makes him jittery. He started humming, always a sure sign.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m glad she’s alive. I wouldn’t be a bit happy if she was phoning you from Beyond the Grave.”

  Larry let out a stranguled snort, which I think was him trying not to laugh and not completely succeeding.

  Hal wiped his face with the back of his cuff. I never let on I’d noticed he’d been crying.

  “She’s coming home tonight,” he said. He turned to my dad. “Could you see your way to letting Olivia come with me for a little while? I’ll bring her back safely. Before dark. Please?”

  My mother was twitching everything on her face—ears, nose, everything—and nodding like mad at him, so he stopped humming, sighed, and said, “Well, be home by half-past nine at the very latest.”

  We grabbed the kite and off we went.

  Chapter 22

  “Well, what happened?” I asked when we were on the way. We were walking because it’s too awkward to cycle with the kite.

  “After school today?” he said. “What happened was I went home.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “And Alec came home after work as usual.”

  “And?”

  “And I just said what you told me to say.”

  “Give me the exact words, Hal,” I ordered. I wanted to get a clear picture of what had happened.

  “‘Listen, Alec, I think we can safely say the experiment has succeeded. So maybe it’s time you rang my mother and told her it would be OK if she came home now. I’m sure you know where she is.’”

  I nearly choked. “Was he astonished?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Hal, “because I just threw it over my shoulder as I was leaving the room. I didn’t say another word, and he never answered.”

  “But he must have done it? Considering your mother rang you there just now.”

  “Yeah, he must have, mustn’t he?”

  “So why are we going to the strand? Do you not want to be at home when your mum comes back? You must be dying to see her.”

  “Hmm,” said Hal. “It’s like this, I have something to do, and I want to do it now. She’ll be there when I get back. I’d say she’ll be dying to see me, won’t she?”

  “Oh yeah, I’d say,” I said.

  “But it was a mean trick,” he said. “It was a dirty rotten thing to do to me. To think of how totally miserable I have been!”

  “Well, it wasn’t very nice,” I agreed. “But I suppose she was desperate. Are you going to forgive her?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I have to, really. She’s my mother. You only have one of those. But all the same …”

  I kind of knew what he meant. It was a terrible thing to do to him. It had worked, though. It had made him and Alec rub along together. She’d got what she wanted. Poor Hal. He had to give in. He didn’t have any choice.

  “So … are they going to get married then?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I suppose so,” Hal said. “They can if they want to. What difference does it make at this stage? But they are not going to get away with packing me off to boarding school. They can forget about that one.” He sounded very fierce.

  “It might be fun, though. You might enjoy it. And there might be one where you could play, oh, volleyball or something. If you’d prefer that.”

  “Hmm,” Hal said. “Well, we’ll see. But they are not going to make me go if I don’t want to, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s right, Hal,” I said. “You tell them!”

  Well, you can just imagine who was at the strand when we got there, can’t you? Old Tweedle. He’s practically a permanent fixture, I’d say, like St. Peter at the gates of heaven.

  He raised his hat at us as he bustled by with his tiny dog. I wasn’t sure if he was just being polite, or if he remembered us from before, when he gave us all the advice about the kite.

  Hal unraveled the kite slowly, as he walked, and I strolled along beside him. It was nearly eight, but still very light. That’s the good thing about June, the afternoon goes on all evening. I stopped to unstrap my sandals and take them off. Hal had already let the kite off by the time I caught up with him again.

  The wind was slight, and the kite bobbed uncertainly for a while in midair. I looked around while Hal worked on getting it to rise. Tweedledeedum had stopped to watch. I think he must have recognized us after all.

  Then Hal gave a certain twitch to the string, and the kite started to mount the blue air. It hung for a moment, above our heads, its two gorgeous tails dangling straight down. The bright red border etched its shape against the sea and sky, as Hal had meant it to do, and then the breeze lifted it higher, and it turned lazily, like a swimmer lying back to float, and the tails
were glorious multicolored streamers, flying along almost horizontal now behind it.

  Higher it went, and higher, so high my neck ached with watching it. I wished I could fly with it, way out over the sea, and look down on all the countryside. Higher, higher, I’d never seen it climb so high before.

  I turned to Hal and said, “Look how high it is. It’s way, way up in the sky. I didn’t think the string was that long.”

  “It isn’t,” he said, and he held out empty hands.

  He’d let go of the string.

  “Hal! Your lovely kite! You’ve lost it!”

  I grabbed one of his hands, to comfort him, but he was smiling. “No,” he said, “I haven’t lost it.” He hung on to my hand all the same. “I’ve sent it, up into the blue.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why, after all your trouble with it? Why did you just let it go?”

  I have to admit I had a little twinge of worry on behalf of the environment, too. I mean, if people went around letting off kites … But then I thought, well, I suppose they don’t, really, do they?

  “It was Sonya’s idea,” he said, “in a way.”

  “Have you been talking to Sonya?” I yelped.

  He swung my arm and we ran a few excited steps along the strand. Then we stopped and continued to crane and squint at the sky. The kite was still visible, but only just as a streak of color now.

  “No,” he said, in answer to my question. “I just mean, I solved the clue she gave me.”

  “I don’t get it, Haldane,” I said.

  He laughed because I’d called him by his full first name, and he swung my arm again. He was smiling all over his face. All over his body, almost.

  “On Qing Ming Jie,” he said, “you know, the Festival of Pure Brightness, people sometimes let go of their kites. They let them sail up into the heavens, to the realm of the ancestors.”

  “The ancestors?”

  “The dead people. The ones who have died before us. The ones whose children we are.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s a kind of present, like the statue to the poet in the square.”

  “Oh!” I said. It began to make sense. A bit of sense, anyway.

  “I knew the kite had to be blue,” he said. “I knew that all along. But I couldn’t work out why.”

  “And now you know why?”

  He didn’t answer. “It’s free now, Olivia, look, it’s on its way,” he said softly, and we both stood for a few moments and watched as the tiny colored speck finally disappeared into the blue of the sky. “And now it’s just blue,” Hal said. “Like Friday.”

  Glossary

  a-lanna my child (anglicization of Gaelic leanbh, used as a term of endearment to a girl)

  apple-pie bed short sheeted bed; folding the bed sheet so that a person cannot stretch out his or her legs

  Balnamara fictional seaside town (anglicization of Gaelic Baile na Mara or Béal na Mara, “sea town” or “mouth of the sea”)

  ban-gharda woman police officer boreen narrow, unpaved road

  East Enders a British soap opera

  Garda the Irish police force (abbreviation of Garda Síochána, literally Peace Guard)

  garda police officer (Gaelic word for “guard”; plural, gardaí)

  guard police officer (English translation, often used colloquially instead of “garda”)

  (the) guards (the) police

  hurling popular Irish sport, a little like field hockey, played with long sticks and a small ball

  Kimberley a lightly spiced cookie with a marshmallow filling, popular in Ireland

  Mikado a pink coconut-marshmallow cookie with a jam filling, popular in Ireland

  rath barrow, ancient burial mound, fairy fort

  sprat small herring fish, usually canned like a sardine

  SESE social, environmental, and scientific education, a subject in the primary school curriculum in Ireland

  sherbet sweet, fizzy powder, eaten by sucking it through a licorice straw or licking it off a lollipop

  skip dumpster

  slán (Gaelic) good-bye

  sliced pan sliced loaf bread

  TG4 popular Irish-language (Gaelic) television station

  ye/yiz “you,” plural (colloquial or dialect)

  Copyright © 2008 by Siobán Parkinson

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Roaring Brook Press

  Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings

  Limited Partnership

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

  www.roaringbrookpress.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2007 by Puffin Books, London

  Book design by Jennifer Browne

  eISBN 9781429982870

  First eBook Edition : January 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parkinson, Siobhán.

  Blue like Friday / by Siobhán Parkinson.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When Olivia helps her quirky friend Hal, whose synesthesia causes him to experience everything in colors, with a prank intended to get rid of Hal’s potential stepfather, there are unexpected consequences, including the disappearance of Hal’s mother.

  ISBN: 978-1-59643-340-3

  [I. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction.

  3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Family life—Ireland—Fiction.

  5. Synesthesia—Fiction. 6. Ireland—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P23935Blu 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007031106

  First American Edition March 2008