Libby on Wednesday (10 page)

“What was it you wanted to say, Alex? Or have we made you wait so long that you’ve forgotten?”

He hadn’t forgotten and he was still squirming with excitement. “Yes,” he said. “I mean no. I mean, what I wanted to say was that I thought it was great. And I thought I was the only one who wrote parodies. How come you didn’t say you did too?”

Tierney’s scowl, which until that moment was still focused on G.G., turned toward Alex. “What do you mean, parodies? I don’t write parodies.”

Alex looked startled, and unbelieving. “You mean, that wasn’t a parody? I thought—well, it seemed to me like a great parody of—”

“Well, it wasn’t!” Tierney sizzled between clenched teeth. “It’s a detective story. My detective story. It’s not making fun of anything. It’s an original detective story.”

“Oh, well, okay,” Alex said, looking embarrassed. But then his jiggly smile seeped out through the embarrassment. “You mean all that great stuff like his name—you know, Hatchet—as in Spade, Hammer, and Cannon and like that. You mean that isn’t …” His jittering eyes paused for an instance on Tierney’s white-hot scowl, and his voice trailed away. “Okay. Okay,” he finished. “My mistake.”

It occurred to Libby that she could see what Alex meant. It could very well have been a parody, and a pretty good one too. But whether it was or not, there was something else about it that she found fascinating. A lot of things actually. People and places and events that Tierney had mentioned in her story. Her hand shot up, and almost before Mizzo nodded, she started asking Tierney how she knew about some of the things in the story, things like Laurel and Hardy, and Packard cars, and the World’s Fair in San Francisco. Tierney stopped frowning at Alex and looked at Libby suspiciously for several seconds before she shrugged and said, “I like all that old stuff—you know, like before the Second World War. I read about it a lot and I collect stuff too. It’s kind of a hobby.”

“Mine too!” In her amazement, Libby forgot to work on keeping the squeak out of her voice, or even to notice if it was there. “Mine too. I have a whole collection of things from the thirties at home. Books and pictures and phonograph records and a lot of other things.”

“Yeah?” Tierney suddenly looked different, almost like someone else. It took Libby a moment to realize that the difference was that, for once, she wasn’t frowning. “So do I. And films too. I got lots of old movies on video. Black-and-white.
I’ve got a lot of Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy, and a real early Shirley Temple.”

“And Big Little Books,” Libby said. “You know, those fat little books with lots of pictures like they used to have in the thirties. I have a lot of Dick Tracy and Tarzan, and some—”

“Yeah? Really? Big Little Books? Great! I’ve been looking for those in old bookstores for a long time, but they’re real scarce. Maybe we could trade. I’d trade you a movie for some Big Little Books if they’re real good ones.”

“Girls,” Mizzo said. “Girls!” She sounded stern, but she was smiling. “If you could postpone this transaction until after class, perhaps we could get back to the business at hand. Wendy. What do you have to say about Tierney’s story?”

Wendy turned her face slowly toward the teacher and smiled her confident, shiny smile. “Yes,” she said, and then she shook back her wavy hair and rolled her eyes thoughtfully. Libby watched her with interest, wondering about the way she took her time, even though everyone was looking at her and waiting. At last she smiled again and said, “Well, I think Tierney’s story is, like, a good example of a certain kind of detective story.” She turned and smiled at Alex. “You know, just like Alex said. It was just such a good copy of that kind of thing. I don’t read much of that kind of book but I’ve seen the movies on TV, and the people talk just that way—you know, tough-guy-sounding and very short sentences.” She paused and smiled again at Mizzo. “I think Tierney did a really good job of copying those old-fashioned detective stories.”

Tierney was scowling again like crazy. G.G. was grinning,
and Alex’s eyes were darting from Wendy to Tierney and back again. Alex’s mouth wasn’t laughing, but something else in his face was. He turned his face toward Libby and twitched the corners of his mouth before he whispered so softly that she almost had to lip-read. “Revenge. Sweet revenge. Sugarcoated, in fact.”

When Wendy finished, Mizzo looked at her sternly for a moment as if she were trying to decide whether to bawl her out for being unconstructive, but Wendy just went on smiling her doll-faced smile and Mizzo finally stopped scowling. Libby didn’t blame Mizzo for letting herself be fooled. It was hard to believe there was anything nasty behind a smile like Wendy’s.

After that Mizzo did her own critique on Tierney’s story by saying that it was a very professional job in many respects, with a well-planned plot and lots of action. But then she went on to say that she would have to agree that it did seem to be a little bit derivative.

Mizzo went on, then, all about how good all the stories had been, and while she was talking, Wendy poked Libby and whispered, “Derivative?” Libby whispered back, “Well, ‘copied,’ but more polite,” and Wendy smiled not quite as sweetly as usual and said, “I thought so.”

No one else had time to read that day. Mizzo went on for quite a while about how good all the prizewinning stories had been and how much she loved working with such a talented bunch. “Incredibly talented bunch,” she said actually. Mizzo tended to use the word
incredible
a lot, particularly when she was talking about the Future Famous Writers. Then she said she was going to tell them a secret.

The secret was that Mizzo herself was a writer. A closet
writer, she called herself, and she had been working on a novel for more than two years. It was a secret, Mizzo said, because she didn’t want the rest of the school—the other faculty and Mr. Shoemaker particularly—to know until she was published, if that ever happened. She was hoping to finish the rough draft by the end of the school year and she already had an agent who thought he could sell the book as soon as it was finished. Libby wasn’t surprised. There was something about Mizzo’s intelligent cat eyes and the expression in them when she talked about writing that pretty much gave it away.

After that Mizzo talked about some of the techniques she used for her own writing, and one of them was what she called her character chart. She had made up the chart for her own use, to remind herself to think of all the things she needed to know about the people in her stories. But now she had decided it might be a useful device for the members of the FFW, so she passed out several copies to each of them.

The chart listed all kinds of physical characteristics, such as eye and hair color, height and build, as well as dozens of mental and emotional traits, such as
intelligent, treacherous, practical kindhearted, aggressive
, and
bad-tempered
. There were boxes to check the ones that applied to each character and a place to write a sentence or two about the ones you checked. Looking over the list, Libby found herself mentally checking off characteristics for the other members of the FFW—checks beside
brilliant
and
strange
for Alex, for instance, and
beautiful
and perhaps
phony
for Wendy. She was still deciding on checks for the others when the bell rang for the end of the period.

Libby was on her way to her locker a few minutes later
when she heard hurrying footsteps behind her. A moment later Wendy caught up and fell into step. “Hi,” she said. “Wasn’t that the pits? Tierney’s story, I mean. Like, she must have just about copied it out word-for-word.” And then before Libby could answer, “I’ve been, like, sooo totally excited about maybe getting to see your house. Have you thought about when I could come over? Like, maybe I could ride home with you on the bus someday. You do ride the bus, don’t you? I mean, I could go most anytime as long as I call my folks first. I’ve told them all about it. You know, about us being in this workshop together, and they think it’s just so exciting that—”

It was at that moment that loud, clumping footsteps startled Wendy into silence and suddenly Tierney was walking on the other side of Libby. “Hey, Mighty Mouse,” she said, “that really blew me away. About you being a thirties freak, I mean.” She didn’t say anything to Wendy or even look at her. “And I can’t believe you really have all those Big Little Books? Man! I guess you know that for serious collectors Big Little Books are, like, what it’s all about. You think I could see your collection someday?”

“Well …” Libby said, stalling for time while she tried to think of a good excuse. “I think that—maybe—after Easter vacation I might …” They’d reached the hall intersection by then, but when Libby started to turn, Tierney grabbed her wrist and jerked her around the corner. “Your locker’s down by the science lab, right? I’ll walk down with you.”

Trotting and stumbling as she tried to keep up with her right hand, Libby could only look back briefly over her shoulder at Wendy, who was standing in the middle of the
hall staring after her. She tried to wave, but her other arm was full of books. Wendy was still standing there a few seconds later when Libby flew around the next corner behind Tierney, like a puppet on a string.

   10

After that day the pressure for a visit to the McCall House was really on. And not just on Wednesdays when the FFW met, either. Not now that Libby had started seeing quite a lot of Wendy and Tierney on other days of the week as well.

It started one day when Libby was arriving at school. Wendy and three of her best friends were standing in the hall not far from the front entrance, and when Libby came in, she called, “Hey, Libby. Come over here.” Libby thought of pretending she hadn’t heard, but in the end she decided it was obvious that she had, so she made her way, warily, across the hall through the crowd of arriving students.

Wendy’s friends were wearing baggy acid-washed jeans and Reeboks and huge men’s jackets and other stylish things, and they all had figures and the right kinds of hairdos. For an awful moment Libby thought Wendy might be planning to try to get an invitation for her whole gang to visit the McCall House. She didn’t, though. In fact she
never even mentioned the house while her friends were around. Instead she just introduced Libby to everybody. And when one of her friends, the one with frizzy blond hair and spandex pants, whispered something about McBrain, Wendy called her a dorf and asked her why she didn’t just get lost.

The other girls left then, and Wendy walked with Libby clear to the door of her first-period class, and when she left, she said, “See you at lunch.” But it didn’t turn out that way. At lunch Tierney saw Libby first and dragged her over to where she’d been sitting with two of her friends.

Tierney didn’t talk about visiting the McCall House either, at least not while her friends were there, but she did talk about her collection of stuff from before the Second World War. Her friends, a scrawny boy with almost no hair and enormous black shoes, and a tall, thin girl with tattoos and lots of earrings, didn’t seem to be collectors like Tierney. But they were very interested in Libby and in the fact that Graham McCall had been her grandfather.

However, both Tierney and Wendy continued to hint about visiting the McCall House every time they had a chance to talk to Libby alone. And Libby still had good reasons not to invite them. Not the same ones she’d had at first, perhaps, but good reasons nevertheless.

Right at first she had been determined not to let any of them visit the house because she was sure they only wanted to have something new to laugh at and make fun of. They’d laugh all right, she’d been sure of that, the way they laughed and poked fun at anything and anyone who was different. And the McCall House was certainly different. The enormous old crumbling castle with its overgrown yard and
dangling shutters was certainly not at all like the homes of most Morrison Middle Schoolers. And her family of four and sometimes five adults—including one nonrelated adult male and a mostly absentee actress mother—would probably seem weird to them too.

But now she wasn’t so sure about their reasons for wanting to visit. She believed Wendy now when she said she’d been fascinated by the house for years because it was so outrageously mysterious and she’d always loved mysterious old houses. And she almost believed Tierney, too, when she raved about how much she wanted to see Libby’s thirties collection. But there was another problem about inviting either of them.

Since the whole thing had been Wendy’s idea in the first place, it wouldn’t be fair to ask Tierney and not Wendy. To ask Wendy and not Tierney would probably be downright dangerous. And to ask them both at the same time would obviously be extremely uncomfortable, to say the least, considering how they felt about each other. So Libby tried to avoid talking to either of them alone, and meanwhile a couple of weeks passed and the FFW kept meeting and everyone was working on new stories and reading them in the workshop.

Alex was working on a new parody.

“It’s a blast,” he told Libby one Wednesday afternoon while they were waiting for the others to arrive. “I suppose you’ve read
Watership Down
, haven’t you.”