My mother sighed. “Yes. So we’ll have to be very careful when we load it up. Also, you and Lexie should each write her a thank-you note for allowing us to use the car.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Pearl?”
“Okay.”
My mother and I made our way to the Dude cabins, which inside and out looked exactly like the Starlette cabins, and we found JBIII’s bunk, with his sleeping bag and duffel and backpack sitting neatly on it in a row. I picked up the sleeping bag and Mom picked up the duffel and backpack and we carried them across Camp Merrimac to Mrs. Mott’s car and stowed them in the trunk.
“Can we go home now?” I asked.
“What? But it isn’t even lunchtime,” my mother replied. “We’ll miss all the activities. The cookout and the display of your work and the show you’re going to put on.”
“I don’t feel like doing any of that.”
My mother looked as if she didn’t feel so sorry for me anymore. “Lexie might feel like it, though,” she pointed out.
I let out a sigh, this one much bigger and louder than my mother’s, and followed Mom through the parking lot and back to the field where the Merrimac campers, all of them, were singing the songs we’d learned during the past month. My mother gave me a little shove toward the performers, but I didn’t feel like joining them. I dropped down onto a wooden bench next to my father and in front of Justine’s parents and sat there with my arms folded across my chest.
I saw my father glance at my mother, then at me, and raise his eyebrows, and I heard my mother whisper, “I’ll tell you later.”
I wondered about JBIII and what was happening to him at that very moment. Was he crying again? Was the doctor putting a cast on his arm? Would JBIII have to spend the night in the hospital?
I could feel tears in my eyes and I swiped at them. My mother tried to stroke my hair then and I pushed her hand away and my father said in his warning voice, “Pearl,” so I flumped off and turned my back on the rest of the performance.
When the show was over it was time for the cookout. I sat by myself at a table with a hot dog that I didn’t want, and watched Lexie walk around and around with her arm linked through a boy’s arm. I knew who he was. Liam, the Apatosauruses’ morning CIT. Once, when Lexie and Liam orbited by my table, I heard my sister say, “Lexie and Liam. Even our names go together! It’s, like, fate.”
So I guessed that my sister had gotten over Dallas. But I knew for a fact that Liam lived in New Jersey, not in New York City, and I wondered how he and Lexie would get to spend any time together and if, when Lexie began to miss him, she would moon around our apartment and put up the NO PEARL sign and play sad melodies on her violin.
* * *
When camp was finally over my parents and my sister and I got into Mrs. Mott’s car and drove home. We dropped off JBIII’s things at his apartment building, and then we returned the car to the garage, and my parents felt so sorry for me that they bought me a gumball from the machine. Later, I sat in my bedroom with the door closed and chewed and decided that I had probably lost my best friend—and he had only been my best friend for a few months. It hadn’t taken me long to ruin everything.
At dinnertime my mother said, “Pearl, I think it would be nice if you called the Brubakers to find out how JB is doing.”
“You call,” I said.
My mother gave me a look and handed me the phone.
I shook my head. “I just can’t.”
So Mom called and it turned out that JBIII was already at home and he was going to be fine. “Pearl feels terrible,” I heard my mother say a few moments later, and then, “Well, thank you for understanding.… Yes … Okay. I’ll check in tomorrow.”
I was glad that JBIII was going to be fine, but it didn’t change what I had done to him.
After supper I tried to write a note to JBIII, but I couldn’t. I scrunched up twenty-four pieces of notebook paper before I realized that there was no good way to apologize to your friend for nearly killing him. So then I just wrote the thank-you to Mrs. Mott.
Dear Mrs. Mott,
Thank you for lending us your clean car so Mom and Dad could drive to camp for visiting day. It was a wonderful day, which wouldn’t have been so wonderful if Mom and Dad couldn’t have driven there. So I’m very greatful for your generosity and for all the storage space for our sleeping bags and duffles. You are a very kind neighbor. Please let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you.
Your friend,
Pearl Littlefield
I didn’t mean the last part of the letter at all and hoped Mrs. Mott wouldn’t take me up on my offer. I left the insincere note on my mother’s desk and went to bed without saying good night to anyone.
15
VII. My family went on a lame staycation.
A. We pretended to be tourists in our own city.
Remember the staycation my parents mentioned? Well, they were still planning it. In fact, they were very excited about it. Almost every day for the past month, Lexie and I had found another flyer or newspaper article or photo of the Brooklyn Bridge lying on the kitchen counter to get us excited.
SKYSCRAPER!
See Three Major Attractions for One Low Price!
PLAN YOUR VISIT NOW!
Wonder of the Age: Master Painters (that was an article about an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Meet the Tree Toad (that might have been for something at the Museum of Natural History, which I hoped we wouldn’t have to go there)
Mom and Dad sure wanted to keep Lexie and me entertained on our Wild West–free summer. The staycation was to begin the day after camp ended.
True to their word, Mom and Dad were taking vacation for nine whole days—a weekend, a week, and the weekend after that. No writing for Mom and no job hunting for Dad. I tried to find some enthusiasm for the staycation, but two things were wrong:
1. I couldn’t stop thinking about JBIII. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since I had broken his elbow and also not apologized for any of the things I had done to him so far this summer.
2. I’m sorry, but I still really wanted to go out west. At the very least, I wanted to see a ghost town. A tree-toad exhibit just didn’t measure up to cowboys and panning for gold and graveyards with moonlit tombstones.
But …
“We can be tourists in our own city!” said Mom on Saturday, the day after camp ended. “We’ll do all the things here that we never seem to have time for.”
“What are we going to do today?” I asked. I tried to smile.
“We were thinking of starting off slowly, maybe just having Movie Night tonight,” replied Dad. “One of the nice things about a staycation is resting and relaxing. After all, we’re on vacation. We’ll rent some DVDs and make popcorn after dinner.”
“And look,” said Mom, opening up a cupboard. “They were having a sale at BuyMore-PayLess, and I got giant plastic cups for our sodas.”
“Tomorrow we thought we’d go to the Empire State Building,” added Dad, “and then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Excellent!” said Lexie. “I haven’t been to the Empire State Building since I was a little kid. Hey, I have an idea. You know that article on the pastel portraits at the Met? Could we spend a whole day at the Met? There’s so much to see. Pearl, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s an art museum and all.”
It’s true that I like art(s and crafts), but I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be an exhibit of sock monkeys at the Met. I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, though, since I’d been doing an awful lot of that lately, so I said, “Oh, yes!” and tried to sound sincere.
After breakfast, since it was vacation, Mom and Dad made coffee and sat in the family room and read the paper, spreading it out all over everything and looking as happy as if they were actually in an old hotel in the Wild West. Dad’s cell phone rang and he didn’t answer it. A package arrived at our door and Mom looked at it and said, “It’s wo
rk,” and stuck it on her desk without opening it.
Lexie didn’t even bother to get dressed. “I’m going to spend the whole day in my pajamas,” she announced, and she looked as happy as Mom and Dad.
I was already dressed and I don’t enjoy reading the paper (or anything else) so for a while I just lay on the family room floor patting Bitey. Finally he bit me, so then I said, “I’m bored,” and everyone looked at me in alarm.
“Get out your art supplies,” suggested Dad.
“Call JB and see how he’s feeling,” said Mom.
“Write a postcard to Daddy Bo and tell him about our staycation,” said Lexie.
“I don’t have any postcards,” I replied. “Could I walk to the corner by myself and buy some at Steve-Dan’s?”
“No,” said both of my parents.
“I’ll go with you,” Lexie offered.
I shook my head. “That’s okay. I’ll write him a letter.”
I went to my room, closed my door a little louder than was truly necessary, sat at my desk, and began a note:
Dear Daddy Bo,
We are suposedly on vacation, but if we were really on vacation I would be seeing cactuses and rattlesnakes outside my window right now instead of a brick wall. Oh by the way yesterday I broke JBIII’s elbow.
Of course I didn’t send the note. I didn’t even finish it. I wadded it up and added it to the twenty-four apology letters in the wastebasket. I was sitting grumpily at my desk, my chin resting in my hand, not doing a single thing, when I heard a knock on my door and Lexie called, “Can I come in?”
“Don’t you mean ‘May I’?” I asked.
The door opened and Lexie waltzed in, sat on my bed, pointed at the spot next to her, and said, “Sit,” which of course reminded me of treating JBIII like a dog.
“Pearl,” she said, “I know you’re upset about JBThree and that you’re mad because we can’t go on our trip. But could you stop and think about Mom and Dad for a minute? They feel bad about our trip, too, and they feel even worse thinking that they’ve disappointed us. Not to mention that Dad already feels bad about losing his job. You know what? It’s kind of like you and I have a job now, and our job is to not make things worse than they are. When you moon around the apartment because you wish we were going on our trip instead of taking a staycation, it reminds Dad of the reason we have to stay at home.”
I dropped my head and stared at a wrinkle in the bedspread.
“Mom especially needs this vacation,” Lexie went on. “She has to do more work now to try to make up for Dad’s salary. She talked to her editor and she’s going to write a whole series of books. Plus do some other things. So she’s going to be really busy as soon as she goes back to work. Mom’s pitching in, and we have to help, too. The least we can do is not complain.
“As for JBThree,” my sister went on, “why don’t you just call him? You’d feel better if you talked to him.”
I shrugged.
“Well, could you please be grown-up about the staycation? Mom and Dad are doing their best. They’re planning all sorts of things for us. I think we’re even going to go out to dinner one night. You don’t want them to feel bad, do you? It isn’t like they’re doing this to punish us. They couldn’t help that Dad got fired.”
“I know,” I said at last.
“At least pretend to have fun, okay?”
I looked at Lexie and managed to put a smile on my lips, a real smile. “Okay.”
Lexie smiled back at me. “Start with not acting bored today. Come on. This is summer vacation. No school! You’d better take advantage of it. You have a whole free day.”
This was true. When it was February and I’d been in school for months and months and couldn’t wait for summer vacation, I didn’t want to remember today and think that I’d wasted it.
Lexie went back to lounging around in her pajamas, and I emptied my bank, walked into the family room, and said (smiling), “I’m taking your suggestion, Dad. I’m going to get out my crafts supplies. But first could we go to Steve-Dan’s? There’s something I really want, and I have enough money for it.”
Dad could have been rude (like me) and said, “Are you sure you won’t be embarrassed to be seen in public with your father?” But instead he said, “That sounds like fun. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
So Dad and I walked to the crafts store, where I bought a box of brads shaped like flowers to use for what is called “embellishing” when you’re making cards or scrapbook pages, and on the way home I held Dad’s hand even though that is not something an almost–fifth grader normally does, but I figured probably no one from my class would see us.
I spent all morning working on my summer scrapbook, except for when I got caught spying on Lexie. I was taking a little break from the scrapbook when I walked by Lexie’s room and heard her talking and couldn’t help peeking through her mostly closed door. The first thing I noticed was that my sister was sitting at her desk wearing her pajama bottoms with a very nice new blouse. I was about to ask about her suspicious outfit when I noticed another thing, which was that her computer was on and Liam’s face was grinning out at Lexie. They were Skyping.
Lexie’s back was toward me, so I stood and watched.
“… Movie Night tonight,” my sister was saying to her new boyfriend. “Tomorrow I probably won’t be able to talk to you during the day because we’re going to go to the Empire State Building and then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Cool,” said Liam, and suddenly I realized why my sister was wearing a blouse. It was because she didn’t want her boyfriend to see her pajamas.
I was storing this up to maybe tell JBIII if we were ever friends again, when I heard Liam say, “Who’s that?”
“Who’s who?” Lexie replied.
“That person peeking into your room.”
Lexie whirled around. “Pearl!” she cried.
Uh-oh. I had forgotten that the Skype camera could see me, even if Lexie couldn’t.
“Hi, Liam!” I said brightly. “It’s me, Pearl, from the Camp Merrimac Starlettes. Sorry. I just wanted to ask Lexie a question, but it can wait until later.” I closed the door in a hurry and hoped that by the time Lexie and her boyfriend were done, Lexie would have forgotten about my behavior (which that is exactly what happened).
The rest of the day passed and by the end of it my scrapbook was looking pretty good, and also my mind had been taken off of JBIII, except that I wished I had a friend to talk to. And no, I do not mean a boyfriend, although it did seem a little unfair that among the many things Lexie possessed—computer, cell phone, etc., etc., etc.—was a true and honest boyfriend. I just wanted someone I could call up and discuss the staycation with. I could have phoned Justine, I guess, but I would have had to start the conversation by defining “staycation” for her, and sometimes things like that take a while.
By dinnertime everyone had had a very nice day. Mom and Dad said we could have a picnic supper on the family room floor (a true picnic supper with everything laid out on a checked tablecloth, not just me crouched over a pile of dishcloths, trying not to spill). So we did, and after that, Movie Night began. Dad made popcorn and Mom got out the enormous movie-theater soda cups. She had also bought two giant-sized boxes of candy when she’d rented the DVDs, and we lay on the floor with our refreshments and watched three movies in a row—Shrek, The Wizard of Oz, and last of all, something called Wuthering Heights, which Lexie cried through and I fell asleep in the middle of.
The next day we became New York City tourists. After breakfast, we left our apartment and walked up Fifth Avenue until we came to the Empire State Building at 34th Street. We rode an elevator to the 102nd floor, which is the highest floor of the building, and learned that we were 1, 250 feet above the ground, almost one quarter of a mile. Also, we learned that the Empire State Building was completed in 1931 and that it is the third-tallest skyscraper in the United States and the fifteenth tallest in the world. We walked around and around, and I looked out a
t all the shorter buildings like I was a hawk flying through the air. The people on the streets were as teensy as specks of pepper.
“Maybe we can see our apartment building from up here!” I shouted to Lexie. (It was very windy 102 stories in the air.)
We looked and looked, and counted the streets down to our block, but couldn’t find our building.
Lexie took a million pictures with her cell phone and said she would print some out so that I could put them in my scrapbook. We stopped at the gift store on the way back down and Mom and Dad bought T-shirts for Lexie and me. When we were in the bright sunlight on Fifth Avenue again we bought sandwiches at a little café and ate outside, and I pretended we were in Paris and said “Merci beaucoup” to the waiter when he served me my grilled cheese sandwich.
Our day wasn’t over yet. Next we took the subway downtown and found the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, which in case you didn’t know, is over 125 years old and is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. It spans the East River and is just a little more than a mile long, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. We walked slowly to the middle of the bridge, and for the second time that day I felt like a bird as we looked down at the water far below and at the tiny buildings ahead of us and behind us.
We walked and walked, and when we reached Brooklyn, I said, “Now what do we do?”
And Dad replied, “We go to the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory.”
Well. That sounded like fun. And it was. Sitting at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge with a vanilla milk shake was almost like being in another country. Suddenly I could sort of see the point of a staycation.
We finished our ice cream and then we walked around Brooklyn for a while, but finally we got tired so we took the subway back to Manhattan.
“Mom, Dad,” said Lexie on the way home, “this was the best day ever!”
“It was great!” I added. “I can’t wait to get back to my scrapbook.”
But as it turns out I was a little tired from our adventures and took a two-hour nap when we got home. The next morning, I was ready for Day Three of our staycation.