by Alice Ozma
I shook my head. If he thought we didn’t, we probably didn’t.
He put the carcass back in the freezer and pulled out the box next to it.
“Meatballs,” he said flatly.
“Swedish meatballs,” I corrected him. These were on the list of things I hated—a list that can be very long at ten years old but still felt short in length to the list of things I absolutely loved. Like sledding, and wearing scarves.
“Do you think it will snow?” I asked.
“None of the stations predicted that,” he said as he wrapped the meatballs in a paper towel and pressed 3:33 on the microwave. I was pretty sure that the box hadn’t said to do that, but he’d already torn it up.
I poured myself some milk and sat at the table. He put a few meatballs on a paper plate and I chewed them slowly, using my hands to eat them for no particular reason. The brown lumps were a bit cold in the center. I noticed that my father wasn’t saying anything. I wondered if that meant I should.
“I wasn’t really looking forward to the turkey,” I said finally.
“Neither was I,” he said. “I only really like the mashed potatoes, anyhow.”
He turned on the news and we ate in silence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Day 529
The longer she read the more wonderful and more real the pictures became.
—C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
If your father is an eccentric and excitable children’s librarian like mine, or even if he’s not, you may very well know about the joy of book fairs. Even if your father is a dancer or a plumber or a professional teapot designer, you have probably still experienced a book fair. You need only to have a kid or be a kid to remember the thrill of walking into the library (or gym or cafeteria) and seeing those big silver cases, all lined up in a row, waiting patiently for someone like you to wander over and pick out something nice. And if you’ve ever been there the day before the fair starts, when the cases are still locked shut, you know the anticipation, the agony, of staring at those boxes and wondering what you’re in for this year. If there was a new kid in your class, someone who had never had the happiness of attending a book fair before, it was your duty and your pleasure to fill him or her in on the process. As uncomplicated as it may be, you, or at least I, had to make sure that no one was left out of the fun.
So it was only natural that when my father asked for my help at his book fair one year, I went all out. The book fair lasted several days, including his back-to-school night, which meant that I could attend even though I was in school during his school day. I began where any logical fourth grader knows to begin: plopped down on the floor in front of a pile of white papers and a sixty-four-color box of crayons.
I like to think that I am very handy with a cache of crayons. Although I’ve never quite figured out how to use the in-box sharpener (contrary to its name, it rounds the crayons rather than sharpening them), I make do. Every good fair needs signs, especially a book fair. So I set to work designing signs with characters from some of my favorite books of The Streak: Alice, Dorothy, Sherlock Holmes… anyone who was anyone was going to make an appearance. Then I labeled each poster with the title and the author, so that interested readers could find the books and take them home. That is the best part, after all; even better than holding, touching, smelling, and hugging new books is taking them home and reading them in your own bed, under your own covers, with your own lamp shining beside you until someone yells for you to turn it off and get some sleep.
I put lots of time and effort into those posters, perhaps a full half hour for twenty of them, and when they were done, I was eager to display them as part of my sales pitch. This year, thanks to me, my father would sell more books than ever before. More kids would get yelled at for having the light on in the middle of the night, and more parents would be secretly pleased when they peeked in and saw the beam of a flashlight shining resiliently through the covers. This was my goal: the best book fair ever. With my help and guidance, it was beyond possible. It was probable. It was certain, actually.
“Why does this mummy look like he is scared and looking for a bathroom?” my father asked, pointing to an R. L. Stein character from a book I’d read on my own. He wanted to examine my work and fully understand it before letting me hang it on his library walls. I respected his desire for quality, but I didn’t appreciate the attack on my work.
“Well, you haven’t read that book, have you? That is exactly what it is about.”
“There is a Goosebumps book about a terrified mummy who can’t find the bathroom?”
“Yes, it is less popular than the others, as you might guess, but it has its place with real fans.”
“I can only imagine,” he said, flipping through the rest of my work more quickly.
“Well,” he said when he reached the end, “I think these posters are definitely about books.”
My father will not lie, so he tries to say the best possible thing that is also the truth. He doesn’t realize that this is often worse than just saying what he thinks as nicely as possible. I was used to it and accepted his comments with a shrug, as I did now, but he wasn’t always so lucky. Once, a friend of his made him cookies for his birthday and he accidentally started an argument by saying, when she asked what he thought of them, “I can honestly say that every one of those cookies has chocolate chips in it.”
But because he hadn’t come right out and said he thought my posters were sloppy, I happily gathered them up in my arms, grabbed a roll of masking tape, and headed for the car. On the way to the school we also stopped to pick up a friend of mine. Brittany was usually ready for whatever idea I had at the moment, and helping me host a book fair didn’t even seem particularly odd to her. She didn’t ask what her job would be or when we would be going home. She was a good friend to have.
When we arrived, we taped the posters just about everywhere in the library, to be sure we got the point across. Yes, fitting with tradition, we hung some on the walls. But also, for the sake of surprise, we hung some on the desks. And taped a few to the carpet. And just in case a smaller kid decided to go crawling around on his hands and knees under the conference table covered in discounted paperbacks, there was a poster hanging upside down in there, just for him. We were there to divide and conquer.
Parents started to trickle in, some with kids and some alone. In no time the room was buzzing with potential customers. Now was a great opportunity to try out my sales pitch: I stood on a chair, cupped my hands like a megaphone, and began making announcements. Parents must be immune to the voices of obnoxious children, because they were able to tune out such messages as:
“BOOKS ARE COLLECTORS’ ITEMS, ESPECIALLY IF YOU COLLECT BOOKS.”
And the cryptic, mock-prophetic,
“NOW IS THE TIME TO BUY. NOT LATER. NOW! BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.”
And my crowning glory, one that I spent over a week mulling over and reworking,
“ATTENTION PARENTS: EVERY BOOK PURCHASED TONIGHT AUTOMATICALLY COMES WITH THE LOVE AND APPRECIATION OF ONE IMPORTANT CHILD—YOURS.”
The last was loosely based on an ad about feeding homeless children, but it did make people pause and look up at me curiously, wondering who I was and why this nice librarian was letting me stand on his chairs and yell things at his customers. Sometimes a good sale calls for some mystery.
A few hours into the sale my voice was getting hoarse and my signs were falling down. I stopped by my father’s makeshift cash register for some shop talk. Sales were good, he admitted, but not as good as I’d predicted.
“If this is really going to be the best book fair ever,” he said, “you’d better have another trick up your sleeve. So far it is maybe the second or third best. You don’t want people to think you were slacking on the job, do you?”
I decided to go to the school’s office and make an announcement over the intercom, since the events of the evening were officially over and I would not be disturbing anyone any more than usual. B
rittany followed, making suggestions over my shoulder and occasionally taking the mic herself when my thirty-second promos were starting to lose steam. Hearing your voice amplified is secretly a treat for almost anyone, but especially kids. We made several trips to the office that night.
“I think the customers are really starting to get the message,” my father said at one point.
“Do you mean that I should stop? Or should I make them shorter? I think they’re just right.”
“Maybe your next announcement should be your last, to give people time to fully process the advice. Then they can really reflect on your words and meditate on the book fair experience.”
Before he could finish letting me down gently, though, he was interrupted by a boy who had been trying for the last half hour to get a second free book out of a buy-one-get-one-free sale.
“But I’m not me this time. I’m my brother,” I heard the boy explaining as I closed the door.
Brittany and I wandered back into the office and rehearsed a script before taking to the airwaves. The last broadcast had included singing, but this one focused on a bit of “candid” discussion about my father’s library skills. Somewhere along the way I had changed the project from marketing the book sale, to marketing the library, to marketing my father as a librarian. Then, even if book sales were low, people would think back to the fair and remember what a great man my father was.
“Wow,” Brittany said into the microphone when we were ready, “this service is great!”
“Yes,” I said, trying to disguise my voice so people wouldn’t dismiss my compliments as biased, “Mr. Brozina is a great librarian. He is ready and waiting to help you pick out a book at the book fair!”
“But what if I don’t know what to chase?” Whispering and rattling of papers. “I mean choose!”
“There are helpful posters all over the library, and Mr. Brozina has even more good ideas.”
“Wow, I should get going. I don’t want to miss the fair. Do I have time? Where is it again?”
“The library is on the second floor at the top of the stairs. You have until nine. Run, run!”
I turned off the microphone and pointed at the door. During our announcement, an office worker had squeezed past us, turned off the lights, closed the door, put a key in the lock, and done something. I wasn’t sure what. I assumed she’d locked the door, but I also assumed it didn’t lock from the inside. It couldn’t have, or else she wouldn’t have locked it—she had made eye contact with us and smiled. She knew we were in here. Actually, there was no doubt the whole school knew we were in here. But as soon as I put down the microphone I ran to the door and checked the knob, just to be sure.
“Locked!” I shouted. Brittany came over and pulled on it herself. We wrenched the handle, leaning our body weight on the door as we pushed and hanging without our feet touching the ground when we pulled. I imagine we looked like Atlas trying to hold up the world instead of open a door.
When I finally realized that we weren’t going to make any progress on the door itself, we tried screaming through the crack under it. The evening events were coming to a close, and no one was anywhere nearby. So we started combing the room for possible escape routes. We were on the second story—the windows were out of the question. And we couldn’t see a door on the other side of the room. It quickly became apparent that whoever built this office had never been locked in it.
“Maybe this was part of the Underground Railroad,” I suggested, thinking back to my social studies class. “And there is a door, but we can’t see it because they had to hide it. Maybe it’s a secret little door, hidden behind the fax machine.”
Ten minutes later, sweaty and exhausted from moving the cumbersome piece of equipment, I decided that a fax machine was an absolutely worthless piece of machinery, especially if it wasn’t even being used to cover up a secret door. I announced that we should look around for a wardrobe, in case the Wood School office had anything in common with the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a book my father and I had just recently started and one that I found particularly thrilling. Why should Lucy—or Alice or Dorothy, for that matter—be any different from me? If they could find portals to other worlds in their everyday lives, so could I. In fact, it seemed almost certain that I would someday. I checked my closets often, but they didn’t seem nearly mysterious enough. This office would perhaps prove more inspiring. It was certainly hiding something.
“Would a wardrobe look like a closet filled with paper and staplers and stuff?” Brittany asked.
“No, it would be more like a magical portal to another world. There would be fur coats.”
“No, nothing like that in here,” she said, reaching her hand into a closet to feel around, “But I did find a barrel of flavored Tootsie Rolls. Just the lemon ones; someone ate everything else.”
“Count them,” I said, “We are going to need rations. I need at least seven lemon Tootsie Rolls to last until morning. If they were orange, I could live on four. But lemon doesn’t stick to your bones.”
“Last until morning? It’s not even nine o’clock yet! Why wouldn’t we get out of here until morning?”
“If you’ve got a way out I’m happy to hear it,” I said, folding my legs pretzel style and carefully unwrapping my first lemon Tootsie Roll. I ate it slowly, savoring each bite, sure it would be my last.
“Why don’t we just make an announcement?” she said, walking back to the microphone.
“Huh?”
“Just make an announcement that we’re locked in here. We already know how this thing works.”
“Why didn’t you say this before! I was preparing to face my death!”
“I noticed,” she said. She handed me the microphone and switched it on.
I thought for a moment. I wanted to be sure that whatever I said didn’t create too much panic.
“ATTENTION, THERE ARE TWO SMALL CHILDREN TRAPPED IN THE R.D. WOOD SCHOOL OFFICE. PLEASE SEND SOMEONE TO SAVE THEM IMMEDIATELY.”
I stepped away from the microphone and huddled close to Brittany for warmth until she reminded me that it was actually unpleasantly hot in the office. I ate another Tootsie Roll.
Finally, my father appeared through the office window, laughing and talking to a janitor.
“Dad!” I yelled through the door. “We’re in here! We’re in here! Open the door!”
“What do you think I came down to the office for? To see what I thought of the wallpaper?”
He opened the door and I ran to him.
“You saved us!” I yelled, jumping up and down and grabbing his hand.
He laughed and started walking back to the library, and we ran to catch up.
“Someday, I will tell my children this story,” I continued. “Of how I risked my life for the book fair. And it will make them think about the importance of books, and how wonderful they are.”
“No, it will make them realize their mother was a complete loon,” he corrected me.
Then he opened the cash box and took out a sheet of paper with the total sales: the highest in ten years.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Day 646
“Well, I am pretty,” replied Charlotte. “There’s no denying that. Almost all spiders are rather nice-looking. I’m not as flashy as some, but I’ll do.”
—E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web
I don’t think they’re actually spiders,” my dad said, as we turned the porch light on for a better look.
“What else would they be? Long legs, little body… he looks like one.”
“Well it’s probably a she. And maybe it’s an arachnid?”
“Aren’t arachnids spiders?”
I was eleven and as full of answers as I was questions.
“We could look it up in the encyclopedia,” he said, “Though I’m not sure what they’re really called. I kind of doubt they would be listed under ‘daddy long-legger.’ ”
The little creature crawled slowly up the supports of our porch, tapping h
er legs like long fingernails, making her look impatient.
“I like her colors,” I said, reaching out to stroke one of the legs.
“Careful, you’ll hurt her!” He didn’t stop my hand, but I pulled it back.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” I whispered.
I wasn’t sure where her eyes were, but I imagined that they were looking at me with trust. Spiders, or in this case, spiderlike things, should have known to trust us. My father and I were the protectors, advocates, and general fans of any and all spiders. The absolute best spot for spiders was our front porch. The light attracted other bugs, who usually looked big and clumsy to me. The spiders would catch them and wrap them up tightly, as though they were going to exchange them as gifts. I think that spiders are always afraid that someone is going to invite them to a birthday party at the last minute, and they want to be ready. The little white dots in the corner of a web are always so tidy, and kind of lovely. Then a horrible thought occurred to me.
“Dad, you don’t think Bertha will eat her, do you? I mean if this thing’s not a spider, is she in danger?”
Bertha was the crowning glory of our porch. An absolutely gorgeous, thick, dark brown beauty resembling a miniature tarantula, she was the topic of many excited conversations. I named her the first night I saw her, because if you’re going to have a guest, you might as well know what to call her. Bertha must have felt quite welcome. She had already been on our porch for over a month, weaving her web by moonlight every evening, waiting for “customers,” as my father called them. No matter how early we got up, though, the web was gone every morning. We couldn’t imagine that she’d actually taken it down—they were always intricate and beautifully, painstakingly symmetrical. But they also looked too sturdy to blow away in the breeze, so we couldn’t explain where they went. They were as mysterious as she was. Right now, however, the web was up, Bertha was seated near the center of it, and no customers had come yet. I was worried for our new friend, the not-spider.
