“Fine,” Lindsay echoed. Before turning back to her cookies—I saw that she was the fork person on her team—she smiled over at us. I felt she was smiling mostly at me.
As we were sitting in social studies that afternoon doing some silent reading from our textbooks, Mr. Stuart walked from desk to desk in case anybody had questions.
All the sixth-grade Mayan pyramids were on display on top of the bookcases that stretched around the room. Our pyramid was definitely the biggest and the best. It was too bad that no one built real Mayan pyramids anymore: Ben could have had an amazing career ahead of him.
“You did a great job on your pyramid,” Mr. Stuart told me.
“Ben thought up most of it,” I confessed. Maybe it wasn’t fair to Spencer to say it, but it was the truth.
“You need to give yourself more credit, Cooper,” Mr. Stuart said. “I have a feeling you did your share.”
I didn’t think I deserved very much credit, but then again, I guessed I deserved more credit than Spencer did. It was nice of Mr. Stuart to say it, anyhow.
The Western Hills music extravaganza Friday night was a big success. The sixth-grade band sounded pretty good. We certainly played a lot better than my fifth-grade band last year, even if we didn’t sound as good as the seventh and eighth graders. One trumpet came in too soon and earned a frown from the band teacher. Several of the clarinets squealed on their high notes. But all in all, it was a decent performance.
The sale of the Food Fun cookies raised over three hundred dollars. My mom bought a plate of frosted butter cookies cut in the shapes of stars and bells, and a plate of peanut butter cookies. I studied the cookies critically; I didn’t recognize the crisscross marks as mine, but admittedly it was impossible to tell. I sort of hoped they were Lindsay’s.
Carly’s ballet recital was on Saturday afternoon. I felt a surge of pride as the forty-five ballerina toy soldiers marched out onto the stage wearing their costumes. I wondered how many people in the audience knew the work that had gone into sewing on all those shiny gold buttons, the blood that had been shed. I was glad when, at the end of the performance, the costume-making moms were all handed big bouquets of flowers.
Right then I thought that everything was going to be okay with my mom. I really did.
7
“Chicken soup,” Mr. Pasta said, one Monday late in October. His tone was hushed and reverent, as if he were about to say a prayer. “Imagine a bitter winter day. You are home in bed with the sniffles and a sore throat and a fever of 101.2. Then, in comes your mother to your bedroom, bearing a tray. On the tray is a bowl of chicken soup.”
He sighed deeply. Then he collected himself. “Today, my young friends, you will be making chicken soup.”
Spencer raised his hand.
“Yes, Spencer?” Mr. Pasta asked with mock weariness.
“Why can’t you just heat up some chicken soup out of a can?”
“Some questions,” Mr. Pasta said, “I refuse even to answer.”
Mr. Pasta continued talking about the importance of something called stock—the watery part of the soup, I gathered. The secret to making perfect chicken soup lay in first making perfect chicken stock.
Ben handed me a bunch of celery to chop up and tossed Spencer a large onion. Spencer missed the catch, and the onion rolled across the floor into Lindsay’s cooking station.
Lindsay picked it up, but instead of tossing it back, she came over and handed it to me. I didn’t know if she thought I had been the one who missed the catch or if she just felt like handing the onion to me rather than to Spencer.
“I don’t want to chop the onion,” Spencer said. “I hate chopping onions. My eyes will water, and my nose will run, and it will drip onto everything, and instead of chicken stock, we’ll have—”
“Fine,” Ben interrupted, before Spencer could add any more unappetizing details. “I’ll chop the onion. You can cut up the chicken.”
“I don’t want to cut up the chicken. I hate cutting up dead things.” Spencer pointed to the raw chicken on the plate Ben had set on our counter. “Look, you can see the blood!”
I caught Lindsay’s eye, and we both started giggling.
Now Ben was starting to look irritated. “Cooper, will you do the onion or the chicken, so Spencer can do the celery?”
“Sure.” Still clutching the onion, with my free hand I shoved the celery toward Spencer. I didn’t mind chopping the onion. I wished Lindsay could stay to watch me chop it, not that chopping an onion was as glamorous as opening a combination lock. But she just shook her head at Spencer’s squeamishness and returned to her own station to chop an onion of her own.
After school on Friday, Spencer and I were supposed to be working on our report on Uruguay for social studies. For this project, we could only work alone or in pairs. Ben had volunteered to be the one working alone, so Spencer and I were actually going to have to do everything ourselves.
“Can we go to your house?” I asked as we were getting our coats from our lockers after the last bell. With my mom’s new quilt project, our place looked like a fabric store—an extremely messy and cluttered fabric store. When she had made quilts before, her studio was always a disaster area, but not the whole house.
“At my house people are always yelling,” Spencer said.
“Well, at my house people are always . . . quilting,” I countered. It wasn’t what I meant, but I didn’t know how else to say it.
Spencer laughed. “I pick quilting.”
So we went to my house.
All over the living room lay heaps of fabric, in every shade of red and purple.
“Wow,” Spencer said. “Your mother must be making a really big quilt.”
“She says she has to study the fabric first, look at the colors to see which ones go together.”
“Is it okay to step on the cloth?”
It would have been impossible not to. “Yeah. Just take off your shoes first.”
“Boys!” my mom called to us from the top of the stairs. “Do you want a snack?”
As she started down the stairs toward us, I saw her arms, bare to the elbow. They were bright red. For a fleeting second I thought of blood.
“Mom—”
“I decided to dye my own fabric,” she announced gaily. “Don’t faint if you use the bathroom upstairs. I haven’t murdered anybody.”
I looked away.
In the kitchen, Spencer and I helped ourselves to sharp cheddar cheese and Ritz crackers, and tall glasses of apple cider. Then we walked across a carpet of thickly layered scarlet and violet fabric up the stairs to my room. I peeked into the bathroom: the water in the tub was crimson.
“Mom,” I said as she was bending over the tub. “The house is a mess.”
“Don’t worry. Once the quilt is finished, the house will be back to normal in a jiffy.”
“When does it have to be done by?”
“In two weeks.”
“But you haven’t even started it yet.”
She stared at me. “What do you mean, I haven’t started it yet? What do you think I’m doing right now? Why do you think there’s fabric all over the house? Honey, quilting is all about color. I can’t do anything else on the quilt until I get the colors right.”
I gave up. In my room, I found Spencer sprawled on my bed, his mouth full of cheese and crackers. I settled myself at my desk and took a long sip of cider.
“I see what you mean about quilting,” Spencer said once he had devoured what was left on his plate.
“It’s pretty bad.”
“Yelling is pretty bad, too. And now we have to work on our report on Uruguay. Which do you think is worse: quilting, yelling, or Uruguay?”
“They’re all bad,” I said.
“Are you going to eat the rest of your snack?” Spencer asked.
“No. Help yourself.”
I put my plate on the bed next to Spencer. Then I turned on my computer and sadly Googled Uruguay.
“I’m going to draw
how Inchland looks when it’s covered in snow,” Carly told me the next evening as she and I sat together in her room while Mom was out doing some shopping. The first snow of the year was forecast for tonight. I decided that I’d try to finish the map of Inchopolis.
Carly drew for a few minutes in silence. Then she said, “Inchland has a king, King Inchard. The queen’s name is Queen Incharina. I’m drawing the princess, Princess Inchitella. She is seven years old, just like I am. She is very lonely, because she has no brothers and sisters, and no friends, either, because there are no other princesses who live nearby that she can be friends with.”
“Can’t she be friends with regular people?”
“She wants to, but her parents won’t let her. They say that a princess has to have friends who are of royal blood. They’re very strict.”
“What does this have to do with snow?” I asked. “I thought you were drawing Inchland in the snow.”
“All the other children are outside playing in the snow. Princess Inchitella wants to play with them, but she can’t. So she’s watching them from the window in the highest tower in the castle. She’s so lonely she starts to cry, and when she cries, her tears freeze onto her cheeks like diamonds. You know, because she has the window open. Only when a princess’s tears freeze, they don’t just get hard like diamonds. They turn into diamonds. Two tears roll down each cheek, so that means she has four diamonds, all her own.”
“Didn’t she already have heaps of diamonds? If she’s a princess?”
“Of course. But all those other diamonds really belong to her parents. Like if you and I had diamonds, they’d really belong to Mom, don’t you think? These diamonds belong to her, just to Princess Inchitella, because she cried them out of her own eyes.”
“Then what happens?” I asked, interested in Carly’s story in spite of myself.
“Then,” Carly said solemnly, “she takes her four diamonds and wraps them up in her royal silk handkerchief, and she puts on her warmest coat and hat and warmest boots and mittens. And she runs away.”
“Doesn’t anybody stop her?”
“No. All the royal servants are outside shoveling snow. Nobody sees her go.”
“Not even King Inchard and Queen Incharina?”
“Nobody,” Carly said. “Nobody at all.”
8
I was on the phone in the living room the next Saturday, telling Gran-Dan that it might snow again and that school was fine. To stall for a minute before he’d ask to talk to Mom, I told him about the upcoming project in Food Fun, making dinner for the homeless people at the Community Table.
“Must be nice,” Gran-Dan said. “Don’t have a job, don’t work, don’t earn any money, and then get a bunch of kind souls to come cook dinner for you every night.”
“Maybe they can’t find jobs,” I said.
“Maybe they drink too much to look for one.”
I gave up. “Anyway, that’s what we’re doing in Food Fun.”
“Well, it’s always a good thing to learn how to cook. I still miss your Gran-Ellen’s meals something terrible.”
I knew he missed a lot more than her meals, but that kind of thing was hard for Gran-Dan to say.
I had been dreading what Gran-Dan said next: “Now, put me on the phone to your mother.”
“She’s out. Doing errands.” I didn’t want to admit that she was out shopping: her favorite fabric store was having a huge sale, with the doors opening an hour early. If she bought any more fabric, I was going to hole myself up in my room and never come out. There would be no place else for me to be.
“At eight o’clock in the morning? Isn’t everything closed? What kinds of errands can she be doing at this time of day?”
“I don’t know.” I felt a flash of sympathy for Mom. Last summer Gran-Dan had been upset with her because she slept so late; now he was on her case because she was up and about so early.
“I guess I should go,” I said.
“Okay, Cooper. Have fun cooking. Tell your mom I called. And tell those bums to get a job!”
I knew he meant it to be a funny line, but I didn’t think it was funny.
An hour later Mom returned home, coming in from the garage burdened with three enormous shopping bags.
I was about to escape to my room when she called out to me. “Coop, honey, I need your help. I can’t carry everything in all by myself.”
“There’s more?” I asked. She had always been so worried about money, turning the thermostat down to save on the heating bills, clipping coupons for the grocery store, driving an ancient car with a hundred fifty thousand miles on it.
She looked irritated. “Yes, there’s more. There’s a lot more. I’ve never skimped on buying your school supplies. Well, these are my work supplies.”
“Never mind. I didn’t say anything.” I headed out to the car and lugged in the four remaining bags, bulging with fabric.
“Where should I put them? In your studio?” Every surface there was covered with the work in progress on the competition quilt.
She waved her hand. “For now, just put them anywhere.”
I dropped them on the floor next to the kitchen table, which was still buried under bolts of red and purple fabric, artwork of Carly’s that Mom wanted to frame, two weeks’ worth of newspapers, and stacks of unopened junk mail. Peeking out from underneath it all were scraps of felt and gold braid left over from the toy soldier costume project.
One of the fabric bags, stuffed too full, tipped over. As I righted it, I picked up the credit card receipt, which had fallen onto the floor. $637.21. My mother had spent six hundred dollars at one store in one morning.
I shouldn’t have said what I said next. “Mom, are you sure you can afford this? I mean, you haven’t been doing much paid work lately—”
She cut me off. “And how much paid work have you been doing lately? Cooper, when it comes to making art, the question isn’t: can you afford to do it? The question is: can you afford not to?”
I gave up and fled to join Carly in Inchland.
Carly was sitting at her little table, drawings spread out in front of her.
“What’s happening in Inchland?” I asked.
“Remember how the princess ran away? After the snowstorm? The snow is all melted here, but it’s still snowing in Inchland, and the princess is cold and hungry and has no place to sleep.”
“Why doesn’t she go back to the castle?”
Carly didn’t answer for a minute. She reached for a piece of paper and her colored pencil. “She can’t. King Inchard and Queen Incharina will be so angry. And everything will be just the way it was before. She’ll still be lonely, with no friends.”
I remembered something. “Doesn’t she have diamonds with her? Can’t she spend them to buy some food?”
It was too bad Mom didn’t have some diamonds to pay her credit card bill.
“She tries.” Carly drew the outside of a building that looked like a shop. “She goes to the bakery to buy some bread, but when she takes out a diamond to pay for it, the man in the store laughs at her. I mean, Cooper, what if you went to King Soopers to buy some bread and tried to pay with a diamond?”
“The man probably thinks it’s fake,” I said.
“How could he think it was real? Nobody carries around real diamonds in their pockets.”
“The same thing happens when she goes to the inn to get a room,” I continued. “They send her away, even though it’s still snowing.”
“But there’s a boy who works at the inn, a poor, ragged boy who is seven years old, just like Inchitella. His name is . . .”
“Parsley.” The name came to me suddenly.
“Parsley sneaks out to follow Inchitella, and he tells her she can sleep in the stable, like Mary and Joseph, when there was no room for them at the inn. Parsley helps her make a little, tiny bed of straw, covered with an old blanket.”
“He gives her food, too, that the innkeeper was going to throw away. Some crusts of bread, and half an ap
ple, and—”
“Barley soup. In an old, broken bowl. It tastes so good because it’s hot and steamy, and Inchitella is so cold.”
“Is she sad, having to sleep in the stable?” I asked.
“No. She’s happy. All her life people have waited on her and given her everything, because she was a princess. Parsley doesn’t know she’s a princess. He gives her the blanket and the barley soup just to be kind. No one has ever been kind like that to her before. So that’s where she lives now.”
I started working on the floor plan of the little stable house, showing where all the furniture would go. Carly drew a picture of Inchitella and Parsley holding hands.
“Are they going to get married?” I asked.
“Cooper, they’re only seven! But maybe someday.”
I knew I should be working on my report on Uruguay, but it was better to stay in Inchland with Carly, where outside the princess’s snug little stable house, the soft Inchland snow kept silently falling.
The second grade was putting on the play Hansel and Gretel. When I arrived home from school on Wednesday afternoon, Carly was full of news about it.
“We’re having auditions—is that the word, Cooper? Like real actors for a real play. You have to stay after school and read lines for Mrs. Brattle. And then, after everybody has read, she’s going to post a list that tells if you got the part or not. Don’t you think that would be the scariest thing that could ever happen to you? Looking at the list to see if your name is on it? When everyone else is looking at it, too?”
“I don’t think I approve of auditions in the second grade,” Mom said, as she handed Carly a cup of hot chocolate and set a plate of gingersnaps on the one remaining empty corner of the kitchen table, shoving aside the dirty dishes left over from breakfast that morning. “You have the rest of your life to have stress like that. Why not just give everybody a part?”
I agreed. I couldn’t bear the idea of Carly waiting for the cast list to be posted, and then maybe finding out that she didn’t get any part at all.
“Everybody is going to get a part,” Carly said, “but some of the parts are little, and some of the parts are big. The little parts are the birds who eat the bread crumbs, and squirrels, and two friendly foxes, and a bear. They help Hansel and Gretel in the woods. The big parts are Hansel, Gretel, the father, the stepmother, and the witch.”
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