Libby on Wednesday (16 page)

Libby sighed and smiled again, and picked up her pencil.

AND
, she wrote,
I decided to show them the Treehouse
. She hadn’t meant to. If someone had told her a few weeks ago, or even a few days ago, that she would ever show the Treehouse to anyone else, especially to anyone from Morrison Middle School, she would have said they were out of their minds. The Treehouse had always been hers alone, that is, after it stopped being Christopher’s, and it had always been personal and private and secret. She didn’t know why she had decided to do it. But somehow, just as they
were almost ready to go home, she had suddenly said, “There’s one more thing I want to show you.” And she did.

Picking up her pencil she wrote,
Wendy said that she’d rather have my Treehouse than a mansion and a limousine and a whole closetful of Liz Claiborne clothes, and then Tierney said that if she could take the tree and everything that was in it back to her own backyard, she’d be willing to trade her whole collection for it. In fact, after they left, I went back out to the Treehouse to look at it again
.

Of course the Treehouse has always been very important to me, but I’m so used to having it that a lot of the time I don’t think much about it So I climbed up again and sat in the big room and imagined I was Tierney or Wendy, and then I went on up to the triangle room and sat there for a while, watching the birds and squirrels eating in the feeders outside the windows. And then I went up to the lookout tower again to kind of reexperience that too. It was interesting seeing it, like from someone else’s eyes. And I saw what they meant. It really is a pretty awesome place
.

Libby went on writing for quite a while that night, but after the part about the Treehouse, what she wrote wasn’t so much about what happened that day as it was about Wendy and Tierney in general. She started a new page and gave it a title, “Opposites.” She began by listing all the ways in which the two of them were completely different—in looks (which included clothes and makeup), and in other ways, including attitudes, behavior, and most interests. About the only thing she could think of that they were both interested in was writing, and even that hardly counted because what they wrote was so entirely different.

The last line she wrote was,
It’s no wonder they hate each other
.

After that she doodled on the margin of the paper, drawing a cartoon Wendy (with long, wavy hair and lots of curves) going up one side of the paper and one of Tierney (large and clunky with spiky hair) going up the other. Then she began to think about the way they’d said good-bye to her on the front steps of the McCall House and gone off up the street together talking in excited voices. She had stayed there listening, catching bits and pieces of comments about the collections and the Treehouse, until after they reached the gate and started down the sidewalk.

She drew them again then, at the top of the paper, this time walking along side-by-side, with their mouths open and big balloons over their heads filled with lots of squiggly words. After she’d finished that drawing, she changed the last sentence to read,
It’s no wonder they hated each other
.

   15

Changing
hate
to
hated
turned out to be an accurate prediction, or at least things seemed to be moving in that general direction. It was on the very next day that Libby noticed Wendy and Tierney saying “Hi” to each other in front of the school and even stopping to talk for a minute.

And a day or so later, when Tierney and Libby were having lunch together in the cafeteria, Wendy came by carrying her tray—and stopped. She didn’t sit down, but she stayed for a few minutes talking excitedly about
her
thirties collection—well, actually more of a twenties collection—which was already getting off to a great start.

“It just happened that way,” she said. “Like, I found out we have all this really rad stuff from the twenties that used to belong to my grandmother, and I started thinking that Libby probably has just about, like, you know, already collected all the really good thirties stuff, and so I started thinking about the twenties, and reading up about it in the encyclopedia, and I found out that the twenties were really, like, pretty awesome, too. You know, like about the flappers
and flaming youth and dancing the Charleston, and the Great Market Crash with all the people jumping out of skyscrapers and all that. And I’ve already found some pictures of flappers and this neat brass lamp, and my mom got this killer dress out of an old trunk that used to be my grandmother’s. It’s, like, a real authentic flapper outfit. You know, real short with this low waistline and then a fringe around the bottom.”

Wendy had to put her tray down so she could use her hands to show where the dress’s neckline and waistline were and make fluttering, fringy motions with her fingers just above her knees. But then, just when she seemed about to sit down in front of her tray, one of her friends yelled at her to come on or they’d stop saving her place—and she picked up her tray and went off. After she left, Tierney grinned at Libby and said, “Wouldn’t you know it?”

And Libby said, “Know what?” although she pretty much knew what Tierney meant.

“The dress bit,” Tierney said. And then using a bubbly, Wendyish way of talking, “Like, you know, wouldn’t you like to see my really rad collection of nineteen-twenties fashions?” But somehow the way Tierney said it and grinned afterward was a lot less nasty than it used to be when the subject was Wendy Davis.

And then, on the very next day, which happened to be warm and sunny, Libby and Tierney went out to sit on the grass in the north patio after they’d finished eating lunch. Wendy was already there with a big group of her friends, but when she saw Tierney and Libby, she waved, and a few minutes later she got up and came over and sat down with them and started talking about the writing group.

First she asked Tierney what she was working on and Tierney told her, and then they all started talking about Alex and how they couldn’t wait to hear what he was going to do next. Then Libby brought up something that had been stuck in her mind lately, like a lump of something in your throat that won’t go down when you swallow—and that was the strange story that G.G. had started reading and then stopped.

“It’s funny, but I just can’t stop thinking about it,” she said, and Wendy and Tierney said they’d been doing the same thing and wondering why G.G. had refused to read any more of it. Mizzo seemed to think he’d written a lot more, and he didn’t deny it either. He just kept saying he wasn’t ready to read it.

“Yeah,” Tierney said. “There’s something real weird about that. It was entirely different than his usual junk. I mean, you didn’t know where it was going, or anything, but you sure wanted to find out.”

“I know. I know!” Wendy said. “It really made, like, the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Didn’t it?” And both Tierney and Libby agreed that it did.

That night Wendy called Libby up to talk some more about G.G.’s story, and Alex and various other topics. And from then on she called almost every evening, and soon afterward Libby started stopping off at Wendy’s house now and then on her way home from school.

Unlike the Laurent family, who were, as Tierney said, overwhelmingly gorgeous, the Davis family seemed to be overwhelmingly average. Their house was only medium-sized, Wendy’s two little brothers were ordinary seven- and five-year-old boys, and Mrs. Davis certainly looked and
acted like an absolutely average housewife—a little bit overweight and not at all glamorous. Mrs. Davis talked about recipes and needlework, and Mr. Davis talked about business and bowling, and the two little brothers hardly ever mentioned anything except cars and trucks.

Trying to describe Wendy’s family in her journal, Libby found it hard to select many adjectives. None of the ones from Mizzo’s character sketches seemed to fit—certainly none of the negative ones like
cruel, angry
, or
aggressive
and, on the other hand, none of the really positive ones like
elegant
,
impressive
, or
witty
. In fact the only adjective that seemed to fit the Davis family was one that Mizzo hated because it was so boring.
Nice
is a boring word, Mizzo always said—but where the Davis family was concerned,
nice
was just about as good as it got. Except, of course, for Wendy, herself, who was—whatever else she really was, besides beautiful and self-confident and poised. Libby was still trying to decide what Wendy Davis really was.

By that time, early in April, the writers’ workshop had become one of the things Libby thought about on purpose when she couldn’t sleep at night. But that was only the workshop. The rest of the week at Morrison Middle School hadn’t changed all that much. Especially in math class, where G.G., who pretty much left Libby alone in Mizzo’s workshop, still gave her lots of attention—as one of his favorite victims. But not the only one. There were six or seven other people in the room that G.G. liked to pick on. Sometimes Libby wondered about the others.

Most of them were shy, quiet people, who just suffered in silence the way Libby did when G.G. went after them. But one was a kid who had a very quick temper and who
yelled and swore when G.G. baited him and sometimes got sent to the office while G.G. managed not to be blamed. But two others, a boy named Tyler and a girl named Dawn, were part of the in-group, and they were both very confident and self-assured and funny. When G.G. started running them down, they gave him back as good as they got.

“Hey, look who’s stylin’ now,” G.G. said once when Tyler came in wearing a new bright-colored shirt. And then something like, “Where did you get that c-u-u-ute shirt, dude? Your mommy buy it for you?”

And Tyler looked very surprised and said, “Why, no, G.G. I borrowed it from you. Don’t you remember?”

But one thing G.G. didn’t do anymore was imitate Libby by scurrying to his seat and hiding behind a book. He stopped doing that all of a sudden after Libby came in the door one day and he started doing his imitation and something—perhaps it was watching Tyler and Dawn—gave her the courage to imitate him back. When everyone had finished watching G.G. and turned to look to see how Libby was taking it, she did the same thing only even more exaggeratedly. Everyone laughed—only this time it was
with
instead of
at
Libby, and that must have spoiled it for G.G., because from then on he didn’t do it anymore.

It was one Wednesday morning in mid-April when Libby ran into G.G. in the hall on her way to math class. When he saw her, he headed in her direction, and she braced herself for some new kind of torture, but for once he seemed to have something else on his mind.

“Hey, McBrain,” he said. “You hear the good news? The O lady is missing.”

“What do you mean?” Libby said, trying to edge past him.

“I mean there probably isn’t going to be any ol’ workee-shoppee this afternoon, because Madame O is gone—absent—out to lunch. I have her for English first period and we had a substitute this morning.”

“Well, there’ll still be a workshop, won’t there?” Libby said. “The substitute will just take Mizzo’s place.”

G.G. shrugged and said, “Yeah, maybe,” and walked off.

Libby didn’t like the idea of having someone else running the FFW workshop, but since it wouldn’t be her turn to read anyway, she didn’t mind all that much. And having the substitute would be better than just canceling it. At noon she talked to Tierney and Alex, and they both agreed that the substitute would probably take charge of the workshop too. “That’s part of her job,” Tierney said.

“Yes,” Alex said. “Mizzo wouldn’t let her substitute cut the workshop. I think it’s probably her favorite class.”

“Yeah,” Tierney said, “She wouldn’t let anything interfere with her ‘incredible’ FFW.”

But it seemed that Alex and Tierney were both wrong, because when the bell rang for the beginning of seventh period, there was no substitute in the reading lab, and five minutes later she still hadn’t arrived.

At first everyone just waited and talked. Tierney was telling Alex that she was going to read today and if he even so much as
thought
of the word
parody
, she was going to borrow one of G.G.’s laser guns and reduce him to very fine ash. And Wendy was telling Libby about the new story she
had just started that took place in the 1920s. After a while G.G. got up and put his binder back into his backpack.

“I don’t know about you dudes,” he said. “But I’m outta here.”

He was almost to the door when Tierney said, “Hey G. Man. Where do you think you’re going? You might as well stay here. You can’t leave the school grounds until three-twenty anyway.”

Holding the door open with one hand, G.G. turned around with a lip-twisting sneer on his pudgy, freckled face—and just at that minute another face appeared in the doorway right above his. It was Mr. Shoemaker, the principal.

“Sure I can,” G.G. said. “I do it all the time. Over the fence behind the gym. You just climb up the drainpipe at the corner of the building until you’re as high as …” His voice faltered as he began to realize that the other FFW members were staring past him—instead of at him. “As high as …” he said again in a tight voice and whirled around to find himself face-to-face with the principal.