Anastasia's Chosen Career (4 page)

"Excuse me, dear." The woman beside her shoved past and hurried off. Anastasia followed.

She had to walk two blocks to the modeling school. Anastasia hitched up her jeans, smoothed her parka, and adjusted her posture—she had been trying since Friday to remember good posture. The evening before, with her parents, she had examined a street map of Boston. With her finger she had traced the direction she would walk. Now she got her bearings and started off.

She wondered what the modeling school would look like. Of course, she had a pretty good idea from TV movies. There would be a tasteful bronze sign attached to the wall beside the front door. Inside, there would be soft carpeting—gray, she thought, or beige—with some colorful cushions, maybe red or yellow, strewn on the soft couches in the waiting room. The lights would be bright, and there would be a gorgeous receptionist in designer clothes at a big semicircular desk. Phones would be ringing constantly. In the background, music would be playing.

She turned a corner and passed a Chinese fast-food place and a typewriter repair shop. A young woman standing beside the typewriter place was stamping her feet to warm them and saying something to people who passed by.

"Got a quarter? Spare a quarter?" the woman asked Anastasia as she walked past.

Anastasia shook her head as the other people had done. She felt a little guilty, because she
did
have a quarter, and she could probably spare it, too. But she had noticed that the woman was wearing L. L. Bean boots. Anastasia knew what those cost, and she was pretty certain that someone who could afford L. L. Bean boots didn't need to scrounge quarters.

Still, she thought, maybe the woman had
found
the boots someplace. Maybe she was really, truly hungry. Maybe she had small starving children....

Anastasia hesitated. She turned and looked back at the young woman again. A man had stopped and was dropping some change into her outstretched hand. Then he walked on. The woman pocketed the money, glanced at Anastasia, grinned, and winked.

Anastasia stared at her in astonishment. Then she readjusted her posture and headed on toward the end of the block, checking the numbers on the buildings.

365. 367. 369. That was it: 369. But it didn't look right. She took the paper out of her pocketbook and checked: 369. It
was
right. But there was no tasteful bronze sign. There was a jewelry store, its window filled with gold chains and plastered over with hand-written signs:
CLOSE-OUT. EVERYTHING MUST GO. GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.
50%
OFF.

To the left of the jewelry store entrance was another door, a windowed door with peeling gilt letters.
TUDI HARM NTE,
they said. Anastasia wiped the moisture from her glasses and looked again. Now she could make out the places where the gold paint had faded and peeled, and she could read what they were intended to say.

STUDIO CHARMANTE

That was it. "Studio Charmante" was what it said at the top of the paper advertising the modeling course. Anastasia gulped, and opened the door.

***

Inside, a dark staircase loomed. A handwritten sign was Scotch-taped to the wall beside the stairs.
STUDIO CHARMANTE, 2ND FLOOR
was scribbled on it, and an arrow pointed up.

Anastasia hesitated. The stairs were very dark, and the pale green paint on the walls was dirty and flaked. She squinted in the dim light and looked at her watch; it was 9:15 and the modeling course was scheduled to begin at 9:30. So she had fifteen minutes to make a decision.

She could go back home, she realized. But she would miss lunch with the bookstore owner, and she would miss her interview with the bookstore owner, and her school project would be wrecked. And she would have to explain to her parents, and to Sonya, and it would be so humiliating.

She could—but her thoughts were interrupted when the door behind her opened. Anastasia jumped and turned, terrified, prepared to face a mugger, a murderer, a person demanding spare quarters.

But it was a girl her own age: a pretty black girl wearing jeans, sneakers, a bright red jacket, and a disgusted look. She was holding a paper in her hand, the same paper that Anastasia held.

"This sure don't look like no modeling school," the girl said loudly. "It looks like Cockroach City."

"I know," Anastasia replied. "I was scared to go up.

"Appears to me we got choices," the girl said. "My choice is, I go upstairs and check things out for a week in this here slum, or else I go back home and babysit for my sister's kids, with everybody laughing at me for being such a fool."

Anastasia nodded. "Me, too," she said glumly. "I don't have a sister, so I wouldn't have to babysit for a sister's kids. But everybody would probably laugh at me, too, if I go back home."

"You got your hunnert and nineteen dollars?" the girl asked.

"Yeah." Anastasia patted her pocketbook, where in a zippered compartment she was carrying the cash for the modeling course. "It's my life's savings."

"Mine, too. I earned it last summer, babysitting." The black girl stared at the hideous staircase. "Wonder how far we could get on a bus, with all that money. You wanta go over to the Trailways station and see? Maybe we could have us a weekend in Atlantic City or something."

"I don't think so," Anastasia said. "My parents are expecting me home for dinner."

"Mine, too. I was only kidding. What's your name?"

"Anastasia."

"That's cool. Mine's Henry."

"
Henry?
"

"Short for Henrietta. But if you call me that, you die."

"Oh. Okay." Anastasia laughed nervously.

"Only kidding," Henry said. "Hey, I'm going up. You coming?"

"Yes," Anastasia said decisively. "If you will, I will."

Together, they started up the stairs to Studio Charmante. In her mind, Anastasia began to revise the opening paragraphs of her school project.

Anastasia Krupnik

My Chosen Career

Sometimes, in preparing for your chosen career, you have to do some scary stuff. Like, if you want to be a doctor, you have to look at dead bodies.

And if you want to be a lawyer, sometimes you have to go to a prison and talk to ax murderers.

To be a bookstore owner, and to develop poise and self-confidence, maybe you might have to go up a dark staircase where there is a dead cigar maybe smoked by a criminal, lying on the third step.

But you have to be brave as you set out on your chosen career.

Soft lighting? Wrong. It was bare bulbs with pull chains hanging from the ceiling.

Thick beige carpeting? Wrong. It was dirty linoleum, green and white rectangles, with a mashed cigarette butt in one corner.

Long couches with bright cushions? Wrong. Three plastic chairs.

Glamorous receptionist at a curved desk with a bank of telephones? Wrong. It was a metal desk with an ancient typewriter, and an overweight woman talking loudly on the single black phone.

"So I told him this joke," she was saying, "about the two Europeans who went hunting and got eaten by bears, and when the forest rangers killed the bears, they said, 'The Czech's in the male?' But he didn't think it was funny. So I said, 'Well, the check
is
in the mail. I mailed it myself two days ago,' but he—listen, Selma, I gotta hang up. Someone's here. I'll call you back, okay?"

She put the telephone down, turned to the girls, and smiled. There was lipstick on her front teeth.

"Krupnik and Peabody, right?" she asked, looking down at a piece of paper.

Anastasia nodded. So did Henry. The woman checked off their names on the paper.

"Which one's which?" she asked, looking up.

"I'm Anastasia Krupnik," Anastasia told her.

"Then you must be Henrietta Peabo—"

"Call me that and you die. It's Henry Peabody."

Anastasia cringed. She couldn't imagine saying that to anyone, even someone whose front teeth were streaked with lipstick. But the woman laughed. "Gotcha," she said. "Okay, kids, welcome. I'm Aunt Vera. Now first we have some finances to take care of here."

Henry spoke up. "Hold it," she said. "What's with the Aunt Vera? I don't need any extra relatives. I got all the aunts I want already."

The woman chuckled. "You're feisty, Peabody. I like that. Tell you what. If you'd rather call me by my full name you can. It's Mrs. Szcempelowski."

Henry scowled.

"Everybody calls me Aunt Vera. It's easier. It doesn't mean you have to send flowers on my birthday or anything. "

"Well, okay then," Henry said. "I was just checking."

"The other kids are inside with Uncle Charley—that's Mr. Szcempelowski, if you prefer—except for one who hasn't shown up yet. So let's get the finances taken care of, and you can go on in. I need a hundred nineteen dollars from each of you."

Henry and Anastasia looked at each other. Anastasia was thinking of the alternatives. There didn't seem to be many. Her other choice was to go home and feel sorry for herself for a week. Henry's, she knew, was to babysit with her sister's children.

They each handed over their money to Aunt Vera, who counted it carefully and wrote out two receipts.

"Okay," she said, "you go on in through that door. I'll wait out here till the last one arrives and then I'll join you. Hey," she added, looking at their glum faces, "brighten up, will you? This is going to be
fun!
"

As Anastasia followed Henry through the door, she could hear Aunt Vera dial the telephone. "Selma?" Aunt Vera said. "So anyway, like I was saying, I told him I'd mailed the check, and he said..."

The room was brightly lighted, but Anastasia could see that it was lighted with fluorescent lights. She hated fluorescent lights. They made you look so ugly. Even if you didn't have a single flaw in your face, fluorescent lights created them. Her mother agreed. Mrs. Krupnik said that fluorescent lights made your face look wrinkled and
old.
When they had moved the summer before into the big old house where they now lived, electricians had come and changed the lights in the bathrooms because Mrs. Krupnik said she would fall into a depression if she had to look at herself every day in a mirror with fluorescent lights above it.

At least, Anastasia thought, peering into the room, there were no mirrors.

As a matter of fact, there was not much of
anything.
Just a brightly lighted room with the same green and white linoleum on the floor and a few metal folding chairs. Two girls about her own age were sitting there staring at their laps. A huge bald man was fooling with some video equipment in the back of the room.

"Come on in!" he called in a booming voice. "I'm Uncle Charley! Find yourselves a seat and introduce yourselves. Let's all be friends here! By the end of the week we'll be bosom buddies, right?"

"No way," muttered Henry. "Sit by me, Anastasia, okay?"

Anastasia followed Henry into the room and they sat down beside each other, far away from the other two girls. One didn't look up. The other, a plump redhead, glanced over with a hostile look. Anastasia smiled nervously at her; Henry glared.

"Watch out for that one," Henry whispered to Anastasia. "That one's evil."

Uncle Charley puttered some more with the video camera that stood on a big tripod. "Damn rental equipment—it never works right," he said. Finally he announced, "There. I think I got it." He came to the front of the room, grinning. "Welcome, ladies. We got one more coming and then we'll get started. A few introductory words from me and Aunt Vera, and then we're going to have us some fun with the camera. You'll all be TV stars, how about that?"

The redheaded girl said in a bored voice, "I've already been on real TV. I was on
Community Auditions
last year."

Anastasia could hear Henry, beside her, give a low groan.

"Well, that's real nice, honey," Uncle Charley boomed. "It'll be real helpful to have someone with so much experience in the class." He walked to the doorway and called, "Vera? That last one show up yet?"

Aunt Vera answered something, and Uncle Charley called back, "Good. Bring him on in so we can get started!"

Him?
Anastasia looked at Henry in surprise. A
boy?
Henry rolled her eyes.

Aunt Vera appeared in the doorway, smiling with her lipsticky teeth showing. "Find a seat, son," she said, and stood aside to let a short, stocky boy through. Anastasia didn't want to stare, so she glanced over quickly. She saw a pair of blue trousers. A white shirt and necktie.
Necktie?
That was weird. She and Henry and the other two girls were all dressed casually in jeans. She glanced again at the boy. He had something in his hand. A leather briefcase.
Briefcase?
The only boy she had ever known who carried a briefcase was—

The boy looked at Anastasia and his face lit up. "Anastasia Krupnik!" he said.

Oh, no. Oh,
no!
It couldn't be. But it was.

It was Robert Giannini.

Anastasia had known Robert Giannini since they were both five years old. They had gone to kindergarten together, and every grade through sixth, until her family had moved away from Cambridge the summer before.