The Life and Crimes of Bernetta Wallflower (17 page)

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Jill Santopolo and Laura Geringer, the two wisest editors a writer could hope to have; to Stephen Barbara, my tireless agent; to everyone at the New School MFA program, in particular Sarah Weeks; to Karen, who sat through the first con-artist movie marathon; to Ryan, my go-to film guru; and to my fellow “Longstockings,” Caroline, Coe, Daphne, Jenny, Kathryne, Lisa, and Siobhan, who keep me happy, healthy, and surrounded by words.

Read on to sample another magical story from Lisa Graff

1

Cady

Miss Mallory's Home for Lost Girls in Poughkeepsie, New York, was technically an orphanage, but there were hardly ever any orphans there. In fact, most days, if you peeked inside the window, you would see only one orphan, all by herself but hardly lonely, standing on her tiptoes at the kitchen counter, baking a cake.

Cadence, that was her name.

She was standing there now, Cady, deciding what to add to her bowl of batter. If you squinted through the window, you could just make her out from the chin up (Cady was barely a wisp of a thing). You'd see the shiny, crow-black hair that hung smooth as paper from the top of her head to the bottoms of her earlobes. And you'd see the petite—pixieish, Miss Mallory called them—features of her face. Tiny nose, tiny mouth, tiny ears. Cady's eyes, however, those were large in comparison to the rest of her. Large and dark and round, and set just so on a face the color of a leaf that has clung too long to its tree.

Flour, sugar, butter, eggs. Cady studied the bowl in front of her. She closed her eyes, digging into the furthest reaches of her brain to figure out what would be the perfect addition to her cake. At last her thick black lashes fluttered open. She had it.

Cinnamon. She would make a cinnamon cake.

No one knew exactly when Cady's Talent for baking had first emerged—just as no one knew exactly where she had come from. But one thing was certain: Cady was a Talented baker. She could bake anything, really. Pies. Muffins. Bread. Casseroles. Even the perfect pizza if she put her mind to it. But what Cady loved above all else was baking cakes. All she needed to do was to close her eyes, and she could imagine the absolutely perfect cake for any person, anywhere. A pinch more salt, a touch less cream. It was one hundred percent certain that the person she was baking for would never have tasted anything quite so heavenly in all his life. In fact, what the orphanage lacked in orphans it made up for in cake-baking trophies. Five first-place trophies from the Sunshine Bakers of America Annual Cake Bakeoff lined the front hall, one for every year that Cady had entered from the age of five, when her oven mitts swallowed her up to the elbows. No matter who entered the competition—professional bakers, famous chefs with exclusive restaurants—none of their Talents were able to match Cady's, not for five years running. Cady's cakes were never the most beautiful, or the most stunning. Last year not one but two bakers had crafted fifty-layer-high masterpieces of sugary wonder, studded with frosted stars and flowers and figurines. One even included a working chocolate fountain. Cady's single-layer pistachio sheet cake had looked pitiful in comparison. But nonetheless, it had been the judge's favorite, because Cady had baked it specifically for him.

This year's bakeoff would be held in just one short week in New York City, a two-hour drive away. Miss Mallory had already cleared space in the hallway for a sixth trophy.

The kitchen door squeaked open and in waltzed Miss Mallory, a polka-dot tablecloth folded in her arms. (Miss Mallory's perfect cake, as far as Cady was concerned, was just as scrumptious as she was—a nutty peach cake with cream cheese frosting.)

“What did you come up with?” Miss Mallory asked, crossing the room to peer into the cake bowl.

Cady found the cinnamon in the cabinet above her and popped off the lid. “Cinnamon,” she replied, shaking the spice into the bowl. Cady had no need for measurements. “A cinnamon cake, three layers high.”

Miss Mallory took a deep breath of pleasure. “And the frosting?”

Cady did not even need a moment to think. She
knew
the answer, sensed it the way other people could sense which way to walk home after a stroll in the woods. “Chocolate buttercream with a hint of spice,” she replied.

“Perfect,” Miss Mallory said. “Amy will love it.” She snuck a finger out from under her tablecloth to poke a tiny glob from the bowl. “I hope this fog finally gives up,” she said, sighing as the taste of the batter hit her tongue.

Cady had been so intent on her baking that she hadn't even noticed the haze. She peered out the window. Out on the lawn, the thick mist obscured all but the legs of the picnic table, and puddles speckled the steps to the porch.

It had been foggy the morning Cady was brought to Miss Mallory's, too. Cady had been much too young to remember it, but she'd heard the story so many times that the details were as real and comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes. The damp smell of the dew outside. The mystery novel Miss Mallory had been reading when she heard the knock at the door. And most especially, Miss Mallory's surprise at the arrival.

“I'd never seen a baby so small,” Miss Mallory always told her. “And with such a remarkable head of hair. There was a braid woven into it.” Here Miss Mallory would trace the plaits across Cady's scalp, making Cady's skin tingle delightfully. “It was the most intricate braid I've ever seen, twisted in and about and around itself like a crown. Whoever gave you that braid was Talented indeed.”

Miss Mallory snuck one more fingerful of batter from the bowl. “Perhaps we should move the party inside today,” she suggested.

“But Adoption Day parties are
always
outside,” Cady protested, slapping Miss Mallory's hand away playfully. There wasn't much consistency in the life of an orphan—new housemates coming and going like waves on a shore—but Adoption Day parties were always the same. Adoption Day parties took place outside, with presents and card games (it was difficult to play other sorts of games with so few people about) and a cake baked by Cady for the lucky little girl whose Adoption Day it was.

People sometimes suspected, when they learned how few orphans lived at Miss Mallory's Home for Lost Girls, that it must be a sorry excuse for an orphanage. But the truth was quite the opposite. The truth was that most of the orphans at Miss Mallory's found their perfect families astonishingly quickly. Miss Mallory had a Talent for matching orphans to families—she felt a tug, deep in her chest, she said, when she sensed that two people truly belonged together, and she just knew. Most of the little girls who came through the orphanage doors were matched within days of arriving, sometimes hours. Miss Mallory had famously matched one girl only seven minutes after she stepped off her train. They would send photos, those lucky little girls who had found their perfect families, and Miss Mallory would frame them and hang them in the front hallway, just above Cady's row of trophies. Smiling kids, beaming parents.

Cady had studied them carefully.

Cady was the only orphan at Miss Mallory's who had ever stayed for an extended period of time. Oh, Miss Mallory had tried to match her. Over the years Cady had been sent to live with no fewer than six families—loving, happy, wonderful families—but unlike with the other orphans, it had never quite worked out. Cady had always done her best to be the perfect daughter. She
yes, ma'am
ed and
no, sir
ed and ate all her vegetables and went to bed on time. But no fewer than six times, Miss Mallory had come to return Cady to the orphanage long before her one-week trial period was over. “I made a mistake,” Miss Mallory always told her. “That wasn't your perfect family.”

But Cady knew that Miss Mallory didn't make mistakes. Somehow, for some reason that Cady couldn't explain, the fault lay with her. And Cady vowed that if she ever got another chance, with another family, she would do whatever it took to make it work. One day she would have an Adoption Day party of her own. One day she would bake the perfect cake for herself.

“Maybe,” Cady said slowly, glancing outside at the beautifully foggy morning, “maybe today's the day I'll meet my family.” The very idea warmed her through just as much as the heat from the oven. She tugged an oven mitt onto each hand and opened the oven door, then set the cake pans on the center rack. “Maybe,” she said again, “my real and true family will step right out of the fog.”

Turn the page to read the first chapter of Lisa Graff's novel

LOST IN THE SUN

ONE

IT'S FUNNY HOW THE SIMPLEST THING, LIKE riding your bike to the park the way you've done nearly every summer afternoon since you ditched your training wheels, can suddenly become so complicated. If you let it. If you start to think too hard about things. Usually, when you want to go to the park, you hop on your bike, shout at your mom through the window that you'll be home in an hour, and you're there. You don't think about the pedaling, or the balancing, or the maneuvering of it. You don't consider every turn you need to make, or exactly when your left foot should push down and your right foot should come up. You just . . .
ride.

But suddenly, if you get to thinking about things too hard, well, then nothing seems easy anymore.

When I'd left the house, with my baseball glove tucked into the back of my shorts, and my ball in the front pocket of my sweatshirt (next to my Book of Thoughts, which I wasn't going to take, and then I was, and then I wasn't, and then I did), the only thought in my head was that it was a nice day. A good day for a pickup game in the park. That there were sure to be a few guys playing ball already, and that I should get going quick if I wanted to join them.

And then I got to pedaling a little more and I thought,
Do
I want to join them?

And just like that, the pedaling got harder.

Then the steering started to get hard, too, because I started thinking more thoughts. That was the problem with me. I could never stop thinking. I'd told Miss Eveline, my old counselor back at Cedar Haven Elementary, that, and she'd said, “Oh, Trent, that's silly. Everyone's
always
thinking.” Then she gave me the Book of Thoughts, so I could write my thoughts down instead of having them all poking around in my brain all the time and bothering me. I didn't see as how it had helped very much so far, but I guess it hadn't hurt either.

Those guys had been playing pickup all summer, that's what I was thinking on my way to the park. I'd seen them, when I was circling the field on my bike. Just popping wheelies, or whatever. Writing down thoughts, because what else was I supposed to do? At first I'd waited for them to ask me to join in, and then I'd figured maybe they didn't know I wanted to, and now here I was wondering if I even wanted to play at all. Which was a stupid thing to wonder, obviously, because why
wouldn't
I want to play? I hadn't swung a bat the entire summer, so my arm was feeling pretty rusty. And what with sixth grade starting in three short days, I knew I better get
not
pretty rusty pretty quick if I wanted to join the intramural team. Because the kids on the intramural team, those were the guys they picked from for the real team in the spring, and the competition was tough, even in sixth. That's what my brother Aaron told me, and he should know, since he landed on the high school varsity team when he was only a freshman. The middle school team, Aaron said, that's where you learned everything you needed to know for high school. Where you practiced your fundamentals. Where the coaches got a feel for you.

But here I was, the last Friday before sixth grade began, not even sure I was up for a stupid pickup game in the stupid park.

This is what I mean about having too many thoughts.

So like I said, it was tough, getting to the park. It was tougher still, forcing myself through the grass toward the field. The grass was only an inch high, probably, but you'd've thought it was up to my waist, what with how slow I was moving.

When I got to the edge of the field, sure enough a bunch of the guys were there, my old group, warming up for a game. A couple new guys, too, it looked like. And all I had to do—I
knew
that all I had to do—was open up my mouth and holler at them.

“Hey!” I'd holler. I could hear the words in my head. “Mind if I join you?”

But I couldn't do it. It turned out opening my mouth was even harder than pedaling. Maybe because the last time I'd opened my mouth and hollered that, well, it hadn't turned out so well.

So what was I supposed to do? I dumped my bike in the grass and flopped down next to it, and just so I didn't look like a creeper sitting there watching everyone else play baseball, I tugged out my Book of Thoughts and started scribbling. I guess I was glad I'd brought it now.

This one wasn't the original Book of Thoughts. I'd filled up that one in just a few weeks (I don't think Miss Eveline knew how many thoughts I had when she gave it to me). I was on my fifth book now, and somewhere along the line I'd switched from writing my thoughts down to drawing them. I wasn't a super good artist—I never got things on the page exactly the same way I could see them in my head—but for whatever reason, I liked drawing my thoughts better than writing. Maybe because it felt more like a hobby and less like the thing the school counselor told me to do.

Anyway, I drew a lot these days.

After a while of drawing I decided to look up. See how the game was going. See if any of the guys were about to ask me to play (not that I was sure if I wanted to). They didn't look like they were, so my eyes got to wandering around the rest of the park.

I saw the side of her face first, the left side, while she was walking her fluffy white dog not far from where I was sitting on the side of the baseball field. I didn't recognize her at first, actually. I thought she might be a new kid, just moved to town. Thought she had a good face for drawing.

Big, deep, round brown eyes (well, one of them, anyway—the left one). Curly, slightly frizzy brown hair pulled back away from her face. Half of a small, upturned mouth. She was dressed kind of funny—this loud, neon-pink T-shirt blouse thing with two ties hanging down from the neck (were those supposed to do something? I never understood clothes that were supposed to
do
something), and zebra-print shorts, and what looked like a blue shoelace tied into a bow in her hair. The kind of outfit that says, “Yup. Here I am. I look . . . weird.” But that wasn't the first thing I noticed about her—her weird outfit. The first thing I noticed was that the left side of her face was awfully good for drawing.

Then she tilted her head in my direction, and I saw the rest of her.

I recognized her right away. Of course I did. Fallon Little was a very recognizable person.

The scar was thin but dark, deep pink, much darker than the rest of her face. Raised and mostly smooth at the sides, with a thicker rough line in the center. The scar started just above the middle of her left eyebrow and curved around the bridge of her nose and down and down the right side of her face until it ended, with a slight crook, at the right side of her mouth. That was where her top lip seemed to tuck into the scar a little bit, to become almost part of it.

Fallon had had the scar for as long as I'd known her. She'd moved to Cedar Haven back in first grade, and she'd had the scar then. Some people thought she'd been born with it, but no one knew for sure. If you asked, she'd tell you, but you knew it was a lie. A different story every time. Once I'd been sitting next to Hannah Crawley in chorus when Fallon described how she was mauled by a grizzly while trying to rescue an orphaned baby girl.

(Hannah believed her, I think, but Hannah was pretty dense.)

Fallon Little saw me looking at her, from across the grass.

And she winked at me.

Quick as a flash, I turned back to my notebook. Not staring at Fallon Little and her fluffy white dog at all.

Drawing. I'd been drawing the whole time.

Still, while I was drawing my thoughts on the paper, I couldn't help wondering how I'd never noticed the rest of Fallon Little's face before. It was like I'd just gotten to the scar, and then stopped looking.

Like I said, it wasn't a terrible face.

I guess I was concentrating on my drawing pretty hard—I do that sometimes, get lost in my Book of Thoughts—because when I finally did notice the baseball that had rolled into my left leg, I thought it was the one from my pocket. Which didn't make a whole lot of sense, obviously, because how would the baseball jump out of my pocket and start rolling
toward
me? Plus,
my
baseball was still in my pocket, I could feel it.

But sometimes my thoughts didn't make a whole lot of sense.

So it wasn't my baseball, obviously. It came from those guys in the field. Which I figured out as soon as a couple of them started walking over to retrieve it. Jeremiah Jacobson. Stig Cooper.

And Noah Gorman.

Noah Gorman didn't even
like
sports, I knew that for a fact. I used to be the one who dragged
him
to pickup games, so what was he doing here without me? Not that I cared. Not that it mattered if Noah wanted to spend all his time with
Jeremiah Jacobson,
the biggest jerk in the entire world.

Jeremiah Jacobson was pretty scrawny (my brother Aaron could've snapped him like a toothpick—heck, give me another month and
I
could do it), but he acted like he was the king of the whole town. His parents owned the only movie theater in Cedar Haven, so he never shut up about how he and all his stupid friends could get in to all the free movies they wanted. Free popcorn and sodas, too. Even candy. I heard that there were pictures up behind the counter of Jeremiah and all his friends, so the high school kids who worked there would always know not to charge them. It might've been a lie, but you never know. Maybe that's why Noah was hanging out with him now—for the popcorn.

Anyway, it didn't take a genius to figure out that when those guys came to get their ball, they weren't going to ask me to join the game.

“Hey, you,” Jeremiah said, as soon as he was within hollering distance. “Give us back our ball.”

Seriously, that's what he said. “Give us back our ball.” Like I had
stolen
his idiotic ball or something, instead of him practically chucking it at me, which is what happened. Didn't even use my name either. Trent Zimmerman. We'd lived in the same town since we were
babies.
And it was a small town.

Well.

As soon as he said that, I got that fire in my body, the one that started like a ball in my chest, dense and heavy, then radiated down to my stomach, my legs, my toes, and out to my neck, my face, my ears. Even all the way to my fingernails. Hot, prickly fire skin, all over.

I snatched the ball out of the grass and clenched it tight in my fiery hand. Then I stood up so Jeremiah could see just how tall I was.

Taller than him.

“This is my ball,” I told him as he and the other guys got closer. That was a lie, obviously, but they were pissing me off. And when I got pissed off and the fire was up to my ears and down to my toes, well, I wasn't exactly in charge of what I said. “Go find your own.”

I didn't look at Noah. Who cared what he thought about anything? He was hanging out with Jeremiah Jacobson. His thoughts didn't matter anymore.

Jeremiah cocked his head to one side. “You serious?” he said. “That's our ball. Don't be a turd.” Only he didn't say “turd.” “Give it back.”

“Yeah,” Stig said, “give it back.” Stig Cooper was the fattest kid in town. Dumbest, too. Not to mention an enormous jerk.

Noah stood just behind the two of them, shrugging at the ground, like he didn't really care if he got the baseball back or not.

“Make me,” I told them.

I think Stig might've actually tried to fight me, and even though he was thick like an ox, I bet I could've taken him easy. Quick and mean, that's what Dad said about me when he was teaching me how to defend myself. He meant it as a compliment.

Stig didn't get the chance to get pummeled, though, because Jeremiah Jacobson, for all his faults, was a lot smarter than Stig was, and he could always find a way to get to you that didn't involve punching.

My Book of Thoughts. I'd left it in the grass, like some kind of moron.

“Hey, look,” he told the other guys, snatching the book off the grass, “I found the little girl's
diary.
” And he held it over his head and started flipping through the pages. Even though I was taller, I couldn't grab at it, because Jeremiah's bodyguard, Stig, kept blocking me. “The little girl's an
artist,
” Jeremiah said as he flipped. Stig hooted like that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, and Noah Gorman didn't laugh and he didn't help with the bodyguarding, but he didn't go away either. The ball of fire in my chest was getting hotter and hotter, till I almost couldn't stand it. But I couldn't get that notebook.

Then all of a sudden, when Jeremiah had flipped through maybe five or six pages, he stopped flipping. He didn't give back my thoughts, though. Instead, his eyes went wide at me and his face went long and he said, “What's
wrong
with you?”

Well.

“Give it back,” I said, still trying to pummel through the Wall of Stig to get my notebook. “It's mine.”

“What's in it?” Stig asked.

Jeremiah went back to flipping. “He's like, sick, or something,” he said. “It's all messed-up stuff.”

It's not messed up,
I wanted to say.
It's just my thoughts.
But of course I didn't say that.

“It's all, like, people getting attacked,” Jeremiah went on. Still flipping. “A guy getting eaten by a shark, a guy smushed under a tree, a guy falling off a building.”

It was a tightrope, like in the circus. The guy was falling off a tightrope, not a building. I knew I was no great artist, but that seemed obvious.

The grass on this end of the park must've been super fascinating, because that's what Noah was staring at.

“What's wrong with you?” Jeremiah asked me again.

It was the kind of question you really couldn't answer.

“Leave him alone.”

Well.
That
was a voice I hadn't expected to hear.