Out on a Limb (15 page)

“But that’s what her stationery says,” Bridget said. “On the letter we’re decoding. I remember it from my cell phone pictures. Lydia Florence Augustine McGrady, Grand Oak Manor, Number 9 Bellemonde Drive.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, but that stationery is old. Greatgreat-aunt Lydia used to live at Grand Oak Manor. Before the split in the family. Before she ran away.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this before!” Bridget put her brownie down. She still hadn’t taken a bite. “If she ran away from Grand Oak Manor when the family split up, and you found the letter at Grand Oak Manor, then of course the letter’s old. It’s obvious!”

“Oh, yeah,” I said cluelessly.

“A big split in the family?” asked Paige. “There’s nothing about that in my book.”

“What does your book say about Grand Oak Manor?” I asked. I needed to know. I was finding out that lying is harder than other kinds of making things up. In creative writing, for example, you can make up whatever you want. Lies, however, must be carefully designed to fit together with fact.

Paige told us what the book said. My great-great-grandfather, Magnus, the lumber baron, had bought the Grand Oak grounds to log them, but when his bride fell in love with the property he built the Manor instead. He liked to show off his wealth, according to the book, so he spared no expense, and when the Manor was finished he had lots and lots of fancy parties. After his children Lydia and Tavish were born, Magnus showed off some more by building the largest treehouse in North America.

“It sounds amazing,” Paige said. “A real cottage in a tree! You must know something about the treehouse, Rosie.”

They loved the sound of the treehouse. They wanted to know more about the treehouse. There would never be a better chance to tell Paige and Bridget that I lived in the treehouse. And my urge to tell them was strong. Lying was so stressful. But lying, like everything else, gathers its own momentum. Once you start it’s hard to stop. What words would I use to introduce the truth? There was no time to compose. My response was overdue. “Umm,” I said. “Yeah. I think I’ve heard something about it.”

“So it’s not there anymore. It wasn’t clear from
Our Architectural History
. It just gives the past, not the present.”

“Too bad the treehouse is gone,” Bridget said. “That would be the coolest thing ever.Wouldn’t you just love it, Rosie? Can you imagine how much fun we’d have up there?”

“Yeah,” I said. I could totally imagine how much fun we’d have up there, if I hadn’t gone and screwed everything up.

“The Manor looks pretty cool too, though,” Bridget said. “Those little turrets look so cozy.”

“Umm,” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Do you have those hidden passageways for servants?” “Umm,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Cool!” Bridget said. “My house is so new and boring. I want to see
your
house. Let’s go there tomorrow.”

“Umm. Yeah. Except that my parents stay out at the university every day until dinnertime, and they won’t let me have friends over unless they’re home. They’re, like, over-the-top paranoid strict.”

“Really,” Paige said. “I wouldn’t have guessed it from meeting them.”

“What about your grandma,” Bridget said. “Can’t you have friends over when she’s there?”

“My grandma? My grandma isn’t there.”

“Well, who was that old lady you were hugging when we drove you home?” Bridget meant Great-great-aunt Lydia. “Oh,” I said. “Oh. My grandma. She was there
yesterday
. But she isn’t there anymore. She’s....”

“She’s from out of town?” Bridget asked, just as I was about to say, “She’s dead.”

“Out of town, yeah,” I said. “She’s from out of town.”

As November wore on, I realized that I needed another excuse for not inviting Bridget over. My parents staying out at the university until dinnertime explained why I couldn’t invite her after school. But what about Saturdays and Sundays? What explanation could there be for never, ever,
ever
inviting her over?

All the explanations I came up with had problems. Like, that I had an uncle living in the mansion, who was nice most of the time, but who ran around waving a meat cleaver when he was drunk, or on drugs, or insane, or in a really bad mood. But that explanation might make Paige call the child protection authorities. Or how about that my house had been quarantined because a family member, maybe the same pretend uncle, had cholera or saxs or black plague? But if that was true, I wouldn’t be allowed to go outside myself, would I?

Then one Saturday the explanation came to me. Bridget and I had been making fudge out of sweetened condensed milk and melted chocolate. We were cleaning up the kitchen when Paige opened the office door and came into the family room off the kitchen. “Well, it feels good to have that done,” she said, switching on the gas fireplace. “I finally finished the plans for my client’s renovation.” Renovations, I thought! Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

“We’re renovating too,” I said. “I keep wanting to have Bridget over. But Mom says I can’t until our renovations are finished.”

Paige turned from the gas fireplace. “You’re renovating?” she cried. “What renovations are you doing?”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I stood at the kitchen sink, staring. “We’re making a family room,” I said. “By the kitchen. With a gas fireplace.”

“Are you expanding out the back? Or just taking out an interior wall?”

“Umm. Interior wall?”

“Oh, good. It would be a crime to change the exterior.”

“Yeah. No. Just that interior wall thing. But the reno is one big disaster area.”

“Well, yours is a big house, lucky for you. A kitchen reno still leaves you with lots of livable space.”

“No, it’s all pretty unlivable, actually. There are power tools all over the place. Like, everywhere. Just waiting to saw an arm off.”

“So you’re doing more than just a kitchen reno, then?”

“Ummm. I guess. Yeah.”

“What if we just ran around in the secret hidden passageways,” Bridget suggested. “Away from all the construction.”

“Hmmm. Well. Actually. Actually, I think we might be renovating the hidden passageways, too.” I sounded like an idiot.

Paige went upstairs then and Bridget and I got out our copies of Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter.“Let’s look up ‘SORSCO’,” Bridget said, taking the dictionary from the bookshelf. “I bet it has something to do with sorcery.”

“That would fit,” I said. I was thinking about Greatgreat-aunt Lydia burning weird stuff in the garden on Halloween night, and about the bunch of dead plants she’d stabbed to the tree.

“Why?” Bridget asked, and I remembered that she didn’t know about those things. I hadn’t told her because there was no way of doing it without a lot more complicated lying.

“Umm,” I said. “It would fit with the word ‘CHHAR-M’.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It would.” But SORSCO wasn’t in the dictionary. ‘ULDDO’ wasn’t either. Neither was ‘SOMU’.

“Bridget, I have to get going,” I said, as she flipped through the OED. Outside the kitchen window the sky was darkening. Ever since the time that Paige had driven me up to Great-great-aunt Lydia’s front gate, I’d been careful to leave Bridget’s place before nightfall.

“Right this minute?” Bridget asked.

“Sorry, but yeah. I have to go. My parents said I had to be home by ...” What time was it anyway? “By right about now. You know how they are. Crazy strict. I can’t be late.”

“My mom will probably drive you.”

“No!”

“Oh right, carbon emissions, right? Okay, I’ll check the fudge.” Bridget opened the fridge and tested with a fingertip. “Not hard enough to cut,” she reported.

“That’s okay,” I said. “You can keep it.”

“No way! You’ve got to get your half. I’ll find a container.” We looked in a cupboard full of loose Tupperware bowls and lids. Lots of them looked like they would match, but none of them quite did.

“It’s okay Bridget,” I said as she rummaged for the right lid. “Keep it.”

“That wouldn’t be fair.”

“I don’t mind. Really,” I said, worried about the gathering darkness.

“What about a bag?”

“Whatever’s quickest,” I said.

Bridget was spooning the half-set fudge into a sandwich bag when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Paige was coming down.

“I’ve gotta go,” I cried, rushing for the front door. “

But your fudge!”

“’S okay,” I called from the Hanrahan’s front doorstep.

“Rosie!” Bridget ran down her front walkway in stocking feet. “Here!”

She handed me the fudge. I grabbed it as though I was running a relay. “Thanks,” I called as I sprinted up the sidewalk. “I’ll phone you.”

“Okay,” Bridget said, but there was a question in her voice.

I knew I was acting weird, but I had no choice. I had to get where Paige couldn’t offer me a ride. I ran, my plastic bag of fudge swinging from my fist. I turned the corner, and there was Devo. Matt, Zach and Heath were with him.

“Look. It’s McGrady, out stealing dog poo,” Devo said, but he used a ruder word.Then he said a bunch of things too gross to repeat. They all laughed and laughed. I should have said something sarcastic, but all I did was walk past dangling my bag.

“She is one very weird person,” Devo concluded. And of course they all agreed.

NOTEBOOK: #20

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: Smithereens

Darkness came even earlier in December. I therefore had to leave Bridget’s even earlier to avoid a ride to my so-called home. Sometimes this got awkward. For example, the time that Bridget and I were making a gingerbread house. We were at a crucial stage: the egg-white icing was thick but not hard. With both hands I held my half of the roof and Bridget held hers. As the icing dried the December sky darkened. It was almost completely dark when the headlights of Paige’s minivan swung through the family room. She was returning from the supermarket.

“Bridget, I’ve gotta go,” I said. I pushed my chair back from the table, abandoning my construction duties.

“Don’t go now,” said Bridget. “Wait ’til....

“I can’t!” I said at the sound of the automatic garage door.

“But I can’t hold your side of the roof too! The chim-ney’s gonna fall off if I let go! Can’t you just wait until....”

“I can’t,” I said. I heard Paige’s footsteps in the mudroom, trudging toward me like doom. “I really can’t. Sorry.”

“But....”

I grabbed my jacket. My half of the roof slid off the gingerbread eaves and broke into a half-dozen brittle pieces.

“Our roof!” Bridget yelled.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said, running for her front door.

It took days to repair the damage to the gingerbread house. We made more dough, and we made more icing. Bridget didn’t seem to blame me, but I worried she’d start thinking I was crazy.

Soon after the gingerbread house we made Christmas ornaments. I fled the moment we had set out all the supplies. Another afternoon, I ran off before I’d finished decorating my first gingerbread man. “I’ve gotta go,” I cried in routine panic. My gingerbread man gave me a puzzled look with the Smartie eyes that were his only feature.

It was frustrating. I knew just how Cinderella felt, running away from a good time to stop people from finding out about her living conditions.

The last thing I wanted to do was tell any more lies, but I had to explain my habit of running off right in the middle of our fun. As an excuse for leaving early, I told Paige and Bridget that my parents had signed me up for five o’clock lessons. I thought up all kinds of subjects for my pretend lessons, like Mandarin and clarinet and highland dancing, but I worried that I would be asked to demonstrate my skills. I decided on pretend lessons in cooking.

I hated lying. I wanted what I said to be the truth, so I started taking my five o’clock cooking lessons seriously. I taught myself. I got cookbooks from the library, and picked recipes to make for dinner. It made me feel like less of a liar, and it made my parents happy too. Late one December afternoon I was in the supermarket buying alfredo sauce when my cell phone rang. It was Mom, saying that she and Dad were staying at the university to hear some special lecture, so could I please pick Tilley up at Eveline’s? I wrote the address on my hand and backtracked to Eveline’s. The cold evening air tingled in my lungs.

Eveline’s was a house a lot like Bridget’s, not too far away. I pressed the doorbell and listened to the long complicated chime. The door opened and there, at the threshold, was Kendra. Her mouth closed and her eyes looked me up and down. As for my own face, I was staring too. I was totally surprised to see Kendra there. It had never occurred to me that Eveline was one of the Smithereens.

When Kendra and I saw each other at school each day we’d narrow our eyes and close our mouths and silently declare ourselves enemies. But I did not feel that I could behave the same way on her doorstep. “Oh, uh, hi,” I said, as if it was normal for us to speak. “I’m here to pick up my sister, Tilley.”

Kendra walked off. “Tilley, your
sister’s
here,” she yelled.

A Mrs. Smith–type person came to the front door. “Come in, come in, they’re just in the family room” she said, and I had to follow her. Two boy Smithereens sat with Kendra on the family room couch, in the jumping blue light of the TV. Tilley and Eveline were standing there twining arms like they couldn’t stand to part.

“Now girls, you can play again tomorrow. They are the
best
of friends,” Mrs. Smith said, turning to me. “We’re very fond of Tilley. She’s just been telling me how you all live in a treehouse.”

“Ha, ha,” I said, appalled. “Tilley has a great little imagination.”

Tilley turned from Eveline to look at me.

“Well, I
wondered
,” Mrs. Smith said. “But my goodness, all the
details
she came up with! She made it all so
vivid
.” Kendra seized the remote and turned down the TV volume.

“She always did have a great imagination,” I said, and I patted Tilley’s head.

Tilley ducked her head from my hand. “I do NOT have a great imagination!” she said indignantly.