The Education of Ivy Blake

Also by Ellen Airgood

Prairie Evers

NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2015 by Ellen Airgood.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Airgood, Ellen, author. The education of Ivy Blake / Ellen Airgood.

pages cm

Companion book to: Prairie Evers.

Summary: When eleven-year-old Ivy Blake leaves the nice farm family where she has been living in upstate New York and moves back in with her mother, she is finally forced to face up to the fact that her alcoholic, dysfunctional parent will never be able to provide her with a stable home—and if she wants to achieve her dreams, she is going to have to take charge of her own future.

1. Mothers and daughters—Juvenile fiction. 2. Children of alcoholics—Juvenile fiction. 3. Dysfunctional families—New York (State)—Juvenile fiction. 4. New York (State)—Juvenile fiction. [1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Alcoholism—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Family life—New York (State)—Fiction. 5. New York (State)—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.A28114Ed 2015 813.6—dc23 [Fic] 2014036182

ISBN 978-1-101-60394-9

For every Ivy.

Ivy Blake
drummed the eraser end of her pencil on page 162 of
Science Grade 5.
A spring breeze reached in the open kitchen window and patted at her face.
Polar bears have no natural enemies, except humans,
she read. She gazed at a photograph of two polar bears standing face-to-face in a snowfield, their arms stretched out to each other. The bigger one rested his paws on the little one's waist; the little one's paws were on the big one's shoulders. He had one leg kicked out to the side like he'd just done step two of the box step, which Grammy had tried to teach her and Prairie last weekend.

Ivy turned the page.
Polar bears depend on ice floes for their survival. They use them to hunt from, live on, and as a place to rest when swimming. The warming of Earth's climate has caused these ice floes to thin and grow smaller.

In this picture a polar bear stood on an ice floe not much bigger than the front porch, staring at the mountain range that lay in the distance. Ivy put her fingertip on the bear's nose, and then on his porch-sized ice floe. She had a feeling she knew how he felt.

“Ivy!” Prairie called from outside. She was jogging up the path from the barn. “I-
vee
!” She burst into the kitchen, smacking the door up against the inside wall. “What're you doing?”

“Studying.”

“Still?”

Ivy made an apologetic face.

“But you studied at lunch and on the bus
and
before dinner. How can you stand to study any more? And anyway—” Prairie made a helpless gesture toward the outdoors. Ivy knew what she meant. You didn't need a winter coat, finally.

But studying in the kitchen in the early evening was always one of her favorite parts of the day. The room wrapped itself around you like one of Mom Evers's blankets. Along the walls, there were colorful wooden chairs that Dad Evers had repainted and quilts stacked in piles waiting to be sold at the farmers' market. The windows were filled with plants and Dad Evers's painted birdhouses, and a dusty catnip mouse lay abandoned by her cat, Pup, on the floor. Tonight Mom Evers was working at her sewing machine, Grammy was reading, and every now and then Dad Evers came in for a sheaf of stencils or a smaller paintbrush. It would've been perfect, the hum of the sewing machine the sound track to their quiet industry, except for Prairie. Her cheeks were red, her eyes sparked, she smelled like air and dirt.

“That test tomorrow is not going to be easy, you know,” Ivy said. “I just want to do well.”

“Well, okay, but can't you take a break? Come outside, I'm making a goat pen.”

Ivy smiled at her best friend. Over the winter, Prairie had decided she wanted to raise goats, and she wasn't the kind of person to wait around for the actual animal itself to show up to get started. “In a while, maybe.”

Prairie rolled her eyes. “You're going to ace the test, anyway, you always do.” She banged back outside and Ivy went back to work.
Polar bears show angry behavior when they lose their prey. They might kick snow or growl when they're disappointed.

Grammy looked up from her reading. “You have hit those books a good long spell, Knasgowa.”
Knasgowa
meant heron, in Cherokee. Grammy was part Cherokee and she had started calling Ivy that over the winter. She called Prairie Tatsuwa sometimes. That meant raven. Other times she called her Saligugi, which meant snapping turtle, and anyone could see why.

Ivy smiled without looking up.

“There is such a thing as overdoing it.”

Ivy tipped her head. “But I have to know this stuff. There's a test—”

“Prairie's right, you know. You are going to ace it. You always do.”

“Because I
study.
”

Grammy rolled her eyes. “That you do. But you also overstudy.”

“That's not even poss—”

“A person can overdo anything. It's like exercising too hard. Does more harm than good. I'm not telling you what to do, mind you—”

Ivy made her face very polite but she couldn't help the skeptical glint in her eyes.

Grammy laughed. “I'm just saying, I think you might've hit that magic point where you know the material and ought to just let it simmer away in your brain for a while.” She winked and returned to her book, and Ivy went back to hers.

Polar bears look white, but their fur is actually transparent. When light bounces off them, they appear to be the same color as the snow around them. They blend in easily with their Arctic environment.

Ivy drew a little polar bear at the bottom of her notebook page. She sketched an ice floe underneath it, then shaded in the surrounding open water with the side of her pencil lead. She made two mountain ranges out of the words
May
and
June.
May was close; June wasn't very far behind it. June, when the school year ended. On the plus side: the school year ended. And she was going to North Carolina with Grammy and Prairie for a two-week vacation, which was pretty much the most exciting thing she'd ever dreamed of. On the minus side: the school year ended. And then what? What would her mom decide? Would Ivy have to move back in with her and George in Poughkeepsie? Did Ivy even, in a way that made no sense to her, sort of want to?

She studied her drawing, her lips pursed. Then she flopped her books shut and slid them into her backpack. She grabbed her jacket off the hook beside the door and went to find Prairie.

Once she was holding a splintery plank up against a post so Prairie could nail them together, she realized that the best part of her day had just changed, from studying in the kitchen, to this.

Saturday night,
Ivy sat in the old brick theater in Rosendale with a giant tub of popcorn in her lap. The theater's velvet-covered seats were small and narrow; everybody's arms and elbows banged gently together.

Ivy scooped up a handful of popcorn without taking her eyes from the screen. It was repertory night and the movie,
Hugo,
was about an orphaned boy who lived in the walls of a train station in Paris, France, in the 1930s.

Ivy watched Hugo race through the station, fleeing the stationmaster who'd have him flung into an orphanage if he caught him. Her eyes were wide. If someone had poked her with a pin, she might not have noticed, she was so wrapped up in the story. She felt like she'd ducked under a fence and crossed a border, out of her own life and into his.

• • •

She read the credits at the end of the show carefully. Every hair stylist and prop manager, every gaffer and best boy, every cable puller and coach was a link in the chain it took to make a movie, and the land of making a movie was a place—like a foreign country you yearned to visit— she'd been fascinated by forever. Maybe because her dad had loved movies.

On her right, Grammy leaned forward and squinted. On her left, Prairie tapped her thumb on her knee contemplatively. Beyond her, Mom and Dad Evers sat with their heads tilted at identical angles. Only when the houselights came up did everyone start fishing their arms into their coat sleeves.

“That was a real fine show!” Grammy said as she shuffled past the seats. “I never saw such a contraption as that mechanical man. And those clocks—I guess I never gave much thought to how they work, but now my curiosity's piqued. It'd be fun to get one of those clock kits, see what makes it all tick. Tick—
ha
! Get it?”

Ivy said
uh-huh
as a boy came up the aisle with a broom and dustpan. He was thirteen or fourteen, probably, with tea-colored hair held back in a ponytail. Grammy nodded at him and he smiled as he stopped to let her pass.

You could tell a lot about people even when they didn't say a word, and this boy was nice. It was in his eyes, for one thing, hazel with crinkles at the corners, and in his smile, which started at one side of his mouth and slowly spread across to the other. Also in the way he didn't make a production out of waiting for a slow old lady. Plus, he wore a faded yellow T-shirt that had the Nestlé's Quik bunny on it, saying
Stir up some fun!
Ivy thought that only a really nice boy would wear a shirt like that.

“I didn't know as I'd like a show made for kids, but I did,” Grammy boomed. “I liked it fine. I might even come watch it again. Might be up here every night of the week, now you've got me started. Walton and Loren'll have to come pluck me off the seat like a berry off a bush.” Her voice got louder every moment, like someone was turning her volume up, and the boy's grin became wide and delighted.

It wasn't like Ivy, really—life had taught her to be cautious—but she smiled back at him. He winked, and in that instant they were friends.

Grammy finally noticed that Ivy wasn't behind her. “Ivy-girl! What're you doing? Get a move on, child, the train's gonna leave the station.”

There was no train, really. They'd ridden to Rosendale in the Everses' new-to-them car, and of course Mom and Dad Evers and Prairie wouldn't leave without them.

Ivy took one more look at the boy. He arched his eyebrows. A smile stole out quick from Ivy before she ducked her head and hurried up the aisle.