Libby on Wednesday (13 page)

   12

That evening, the evening of the day that Alex appeared suddenly at the front gate, Libby climbed up into the Treehouse to write. She did it the proper and approved way this time—up the circular staircase, followed by Salome and Ariel. And as soon as the three of them were settled in the main room of the Treehouse, she got out the green journal, the one she’d been using to record information about Morrison Middle School and the FFW. Her first sentence was exactly what she’d been planning before Alex made his surprise visit. Nothing that happened that afternoon at the McCall House had changed her mind in the slightest about that.

Alex Lockwood
, she wrote,
is the most quick-witted person I’ve ever met
. But when that was written, she just sat there for a long time drumming on the tabletop and thinking about what had happened that afternoon—the things that had been said, and maybe the things that should have been said and weren’t. Ariel jumped up on the table and
batted at her drumming pencil, but she shoved her away and went on thinking.

I didn’t know what to say
, she finally wrote,
when he said that about humiliation. I just sat there staring at him in complete speechlessness. And then he started smiling again and said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” And I said yes, I did, and he said no I didn’t and how could I when I’d lived in this great place all my life with all my fantastic famous relatives and never had any serious problems
.

So, at that point, I got slightly furious and I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. And he said what did I mean, and I said I had a VERY serious problem. And he grinned and said what kind of problem, like mental or physical, or what? So I said, “Well, mostly physical, I guess,” and he stopped grinning and stared at me for a minute, and then he asked what was wrong with me, was I sick, or what
.

So I said, “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m just not right physically for middle school. You know what they call me. Things like Mighty Mouse and McBrain and Little Frankenstein.”

He started grinning then and shaking his head like he was amazed about something. And then he finally said, “That is so funny,” and I said, “What is?” and he didn’t say anything for a while and then he said, did I know what he envied the most about me? “Guess,” he said. “Guess what you have that I envy most.” So I guessed maybe the McCall House or having a famous grandfather and he said no, that what it was, was something physical. “It’s the way you move,” he said. “I noticed it the first time I saw you. The way you
move, like all of your bones and muscles work together perfectly, like a dancer or a gymnast. Like this completely efficient machine. Okay, small maybe, but absolutely efficient.”

So I said that was probably because I’d been taking ballet lessons since I was three years old. And he said that might be part of it, but most of it is something you’re born with. And then he said, “Cerebral palsy is something you’re born with too.”

It was getting late by then and it was cold in the Treehouse, and even Ariel and Goliath had given up and gone away, probably headed back to the warmth of the Great Hall. So Libby made her way up the tree limb to her room and went to bed, but there was more that she could have written if there’d been time, and she went on thinking about it after she was in bed.

Alex had gone on talking for quite a while. He’d talked about knowing that he was different before he started school —knowing vaguely but not worrying about it, because it didn’t seem all that important. But then, when he was six, he found out. Particularly if you’re a boy, he said, you find out what it means to be the only kid in the class who can’t throw a ball or catch one, or run across the playground without falling down. As soon as you start school, he said, you find out who you really are in a hurry.

“You find out you’re a clown,” he said. “A dork, a nerd, a spaz. Somebody who can be laughed at and pushed around and used for a punching bag.” Then he grinned. “And that’s just when you’re six. By the time you’re eight, things
really
start getting unpleasant.”

He laughed about it. Libby found that really intriguing.
She wondered if she would ever be able to laugh about some of the humiliating things that had happened to her at Morrison Middle School.

  The next time the writers’ workshop met, Libby wasn’t the first one to arrive. She’d meant to be, but at the last moment she decided to go to her locker first, and it had taken longer than she’d expected. When she arrived at the reading lab, the rest of them were already there waiting.

As she opened the door, she thought she heard voices, but as soon as they saw who it was, it got suddenly quiet. Libby was hurrying to her seat when Tierney and Wendy began talking at once.

“Hey, Mighty Mouse,” Tierney said. “Where you been?”

And Wendy said, “Hi, Libby. You’re here after all. We thought maybe you were absent. I didn’t see you in the hall this morning, and then you weren’t the first one here like always. We’d about decided you were sick or something.”

Safely in her seat, Libby glanced around. Everyone was smiling. Alex’s grin was, as usual, crooked and jumpy, and Wendy’s was the usual, too, multipurpose bright and shiny. Tierney’s was something new, however, a real smile, even though it looked a little bit painful, as if her face wasn’t used to it. But G.G.’s was the same as always—a dangerous leer.

“I told you she was here,” G.G. said. “I saw her in math class—just like always.” He mugged a frightened expression, and tipping his binder up on end, he ducked his head down behind it.

They all looked at him—but nobody laughed. At least not until Tierney said, “Aww, poor baby. You don’t have to do that anymore, G.G. Your face is almost back to normal.”

Mizzo came in then, and the workshop started. The first thing she did was collect the new installments of “The Island Adventure” and read them out loud. It was pretty easy to tell who had written each one, particularly the one about a bloody war with a fierce tribe of headhunters who lived on the island, and another about meeting a handsome and muscular jungle boy and falling in love with him. But the version that won in the voting was about how all five members of the group struggled through high winds and tidal waves to find a cave in a hillside, where they built a kind of fortress. It was told in short, clear sentences and was extremely tense and exciting—even though some of it did sound a little bit like
Robinson Crusoe
.

It turned out to be Tierney’s, and she really looked pleased when she found out that she had won, and when Mizzo asked her to be the first reader of the day, she didn’t argue. She got out her manuscript quickly, and before she began to read, she looked around at everybody with what was definitely a “wait-till-you-hear-this expression” on her face.

As soon as she started reading, it was obvious that she had written another mystery, but this time it wasn’t of the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe variety. The new mystery, which was called “The Case of the Purple Parrot,” was set in a town that seemed to be very similar to Morrison, instead of in Los Angeles, and the detective was a teenage girl.

The girl in the story, whose name was Jade, was sixteen years old, but she lived all by herself in a luxurious apartment
and drove a silver Ferrari. She was extremely beautiful and intelligent and courageous, and she solved a mystery about a murder that happened in a pet shop near where she lived. It turned out that the pet shop owner had been selling drugs, and the girl detective broke up a drug ring and solved a crime that had been baffling the police and the FBI for months.

It was a long story, and reading it took a lot longer than the usual time limit, but every time Mizzo started to interrupt, Tierney just glared at her and read faster. When the mystery was finally solved and the story ended, she folded the manuscript, lifted her chin, and looked around the room with a triumphant frown, as if she were daring anyone to say anything critical.

Wendy began, and with a self-righteous expression on her face like someone saying the right thing even if it killed her, she said she liked the main character and that she thought the story was exciting. G.G. was next and he said he liked it, too, except for the murder itself, which should have been the best part but instead was kind of vague and uninteresting.

When it was Libby’s turn, she pointed out that the story was well plotted, so that there were some early clues that helped the readers solve the mystery if they were paying attention, which is very important in mystery writing. But then she asked Tierney how it happened that Jade lived all by herself if she was only sixteen and how she got the Ferrari and everything. And Tierney said it was because she was an orphan, a rich orphan, whose parents had died and left her gobs of money. So Libby suggested that maybe that should have been explained in the story to make it seem a
little more realistic, because it really was a pretty unusual situation. She got a little carried away, in fact, and said more than she meant to, but Tierney didn’t seem to get too angry.

When Mizzo asked Alex to comment, he went into a kind of nervous fit, twisting his head and grinning and rolling his eyes around. Libby turned her eyes away, knowing he didn’t have to act that way and wishing he wouldn’t. At last he got a sheepish expression on his face and said, “Now, look, Tierney. I don’t want to make you mad or anything, but I just want to say that I think you’ve written another really great parody. I mean, what I think is that you just have a natural talent for writing really neat parodies, and that’s a compliment and—”

Wendy suddenly bounced in her seat and raised her hand. “Yes,” she said without waiting to be called on, “it is. It is, Mizzo, isn’t it? It’s a parody, like of Nancy Drew, isn’t it?”

But Tierney ignored Wendy and went on glaring at Alex. “Now
you
look, Lockwood,” she practically shouted. “This is not a parody, and if you don’t shut up about your stupid parodies, I’m going to parody you one, right in the nose.”

Everybody laughed, especially Alex.

There wasn’t much time left, but it was G.G.’s turn next, and Mizzo asked him if he’d like to read some of what he’d been working on.

“Me?” he said. “My turn?” He started to open his binder and then quickly closed it and put both hands on it as if he were holding it shut. “No,” he said. “I didn’t write any more. I’ve had too much other stuff to do lately.”

“But how about what you were working on in class yesterday?” Mizzo said. “It looked to me as if you’d written quite a lot.”

“Oh, that,” G.G. said. “Well …” He stared down at his binder for a moment and then opened it slowly and looked at the first page. He looked at it for quite a while before he began to read.

“ ‘Eric,’ “ he read. “That’s the title. See, that’s this guy in the story’s name. I haven’t thought up any other title yet. Okay?

“ ‘
ERIC
’

“Eric got home from school late that day because his bicycle had a flat and he spent a long time trying to get it fixed, and finally he had to give up and walk it home. When he got to the house, he put the bike in the garage and went in the back door. The house was empty as usual, but there was a note on the kitchen sink. He read the note quickly and then looked at the clock on the stove. He was late. He couldn’t do what the note told him to do because it was too late.

“He stared at the clock for a minute and then he ran into the living room to check the clock on the desk, because it didn’t seem possible it could be that late. But the desk clock said the same thing.

“There wasn’t anything he could do about it, so he just went ahead and fixed himself some leftover spaghetti in the microwave and went into the living room to watch the tube while he ate. When he was finished, he went back to the kitchen and read the note again. But it was still too late, and there still wasn’t anything he could do about it.”

The story went on telling how Eric watched television some more and then went to bed and waited. It didn’t say what he was waiting for, but just that he waited and listened and told himself that there was no use worrying because there wasn’t anything he could do about it and whatever was going to happen would just have to happen. While he was waiting, he heard noises in the house that turned out to be the refrigerator or the furnace, and noises outside the house that came from cars and the neighbors having a party.

As G.G. read, his voice got softer and higher pitched, so you had to listen carefully to tell what he was saying. The last sentence he read was, “It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when he heard the sound he’d been expecting. Exactly what he’d been expecting.” Then he suddenly slammed the binder shut, and said, “That’s it. That’s as far as I got.”

Libby caught her breath. It was as if she’d been listening so hard she’d almost forgotten to breathe. She felt drained and blank with listening. The others were blank-faced, too—no smiles or grins or frowns. Libby tried to think why. The story was short and nothing much happened, unlike G.G.’s other stories, where everything happened in horrible detail.