Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (29 page)

A breeze flaps the oilcloth over a broken window. The Virginia creeper vines shiver in unison. We finally stop to breathe. I look down. Our shared shadow has turned Technicolor.

We've exchanged the perfect kiss and we both know it.

Dear Dr. Benton,

I have returned my mother's cloud slipper to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Evangeline Wilkerson is keeping it in the safe at the information desk until your next visit. At that time, please put it in the case in the Main Chinese Gallery alongside yours.

Perhaps someday Lien will return to Kansas City and see the mates together. She will know we have found each other.

I pause, breathe, position my wrist and pen, and add my calligraphy signature—one upward stroke of ink full of flame and backbone.

Xie xie!

Thank you,

Catherine Stuber, for educating me on the obstacles and triumphs of being
golden
.

Sister Rosalima Wilkinson, for sharing your astonishing provenance.

Bambi Nancy Shen, for translating Cantonese and Mandarin and for your thoughtful and thorough answers to my endless questions regarding all things Chinese.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, for being my muse, my infinite source of mystery, and my inspiration.

Ann Ingalls, for introducing me to the pagan babies and the abandoned orphanage with its ramshackle, romantic, vine-filled shed. Thanks also to Liz Meyerdirk and Pat Cole.

Anne, for your nonstop, sisterly encouragement and faith that everything would turn out just fine. Thanks also to my amazing critique partners Stephanie Bunce and Judy Hyde, the members of Heartland Writers for Kids and Teens, and to my dear friends and early readers Judy Joss, Nan and Mark Meyerdirk, Jeanie Schmidt, Mina Steen, and Kathy Wells.

Karen Wojtyla, my exceptional editor, and assistant editor Annie Nybo, for so carefully polishing Lily's story. Enormous thanks to my agent, Ginger Knowlton, for your full-out enthusiasm and help.

Andy, Anna, and Austin, for being honest with your mother about your impressions all along the way. I trust you guys completely.

Jack, for our Sunday morning walks when you absorbed, untangled, challenged, and lifted the heart and soul of this story. I love you.

Although
Girl in Reverse
is a work of fiction, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City is real.
The Thinker
by August Rodin sits on the lawn. The colossal, three-ton, Carrara marble sculpture of
Atalanta and Meleager with the Calydonian Boar
by Italian artist Francesco Mosca fills one corner of the Main Sculpture Hall. A world-famous jade, the
Chinese Ritual Disc with Dragon Motifs (Bi)
(one dragon indeed has a broken tail), carved between 475–9 BCE, may also be found there. The bodhisattva sculpture in the story was inspired by the remarkable eleventh- to twelfth-century seated
Guanyin of the Southern Sea
bodhisattva, which has been heralded as the finest sculpture of its kind outside of China. It is said to have been found dismembered, its pieces dusted with snow, in the yard of an antiquities dealer. I added the golden starburst halo.

The characters and events in this story are all imaginary, but Asian art experts did travel northern China in the 1930s. The accounts of their acquisitions and commitment to the restoration of their treasures are legendary. Knowing an artwork's backstory, its provenance, increases its value in much the same way that discovering her true creation story, her
reverse
, inspired and completed Lily.

Construction of the elegant Country Club Plaza, our country's first shopping center, began in Kansas City in the 1920s. It was the vision of real estate developer Jesse Clyde Nichols, not Donald Firestone.

When you visit the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, do not miss the astounding pair of two-and-one-eighth-inch-long Sui Dynasty (581–618 CE) cloud slippers with fancy upturned toes in the lighted glass case of Ming Qi Miniature Ceramics on the second floor.

What a joy it is to weave my love of art into stories.

ALSO BY BARBARA STUBER

Crossing the Tracks

MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2014 by Barbara Stuber

Jacket illustration copyright © 2014 by Sean Mosher-Smith

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

M
ARGARET
K. M
C
E
LDERRY
B
OOKS
is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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.

Book design by Russell Gordon

Jacket design by Russell Gordon

Jacket Photo-illustration by Sean Mosher-Smith

The text for this book is set in Minion Pro.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stuber, Barbara.

Girl in reverse / Barbara Stuber.—First edition.

p. cm.

Summary: “Lillian Firestone is Chinese, but the kids in her 1951 Kansas City high school can't separate her from the North Koreans that America is at war with. Sick of the racism she faces at school and frustrated that her adoptive white family just sees it as ‘teasing,' Lily begins to search for her birth mother”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4424-9734-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4424-9736-8 (eBook)

1. Chinese Americans—Juvenile fiction. [1. Chinese Americans—Fiction. 2. Racism—Fiction. 3. Adoption—Fiction. 4. Birthmothers—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.S937555Gi 2014

[Fic]—dc23

2013024720