My father’s voice drifts over to me. “Why didn’t you tell us that you were failing history?”
It takes me a moment to understand the question. Finally, I say, “Ms. Blount thinks I plagiarized a paper, but I didn’t. She thinks I’m too dumb to write a good essay on ancient Egyptian funerary practices. She said if I ‘wrote my own paper’ by the end of the week, she wouldn’t call you and Mom.”
“You didn’t plagiarize it?”
“No! I worked on it for weeks. I spent every weekend in the Egyptian collection, remember?”
“And something about detentions? And skipping school?”
“I just—I needed to be alone. Sometimes, I get stressed out. And lonely, I guess. It isn’t easy, being at a new school . . .”
“I didn’t realize you felt that way.”
“Well, I would sometimes just go up to the roof. Just to breathe. But that made me late to class a few times. So if I was late once more, they were going to call you. So then I was running late one morning, and it was just easier to skip school and text in an excuse than deal with another tardy. And then it kind of . . . got a little out of control.”
“Why didn’t you let them call us?”
“Because you guys are crazy right now.” My dad makes a little noise, and I realize how bad that sounds. “Busy,” I add quickly. “Crazy-busy.”
“No . . .” Dad’s voice is slow. “I think . . . crazy. I didn’t know you were picking up on all of it.”
“It’s a little hard to miss,” I tell him. We are on the side of the street by the park, and we pass a bench with a woman and a baby in a stroller, then another with a man surrounded by large plastic bags filled with empty bottles. Then there is a free bench, and my dad walks over to it. We both sit down.
I look up and try to focus on the wisp of cloud I see, because I have a terrible, sick feeling that my father and I are going to have a Serious Talk, and if there is anything on earth that is worse than that, I don’t know what it is.
“Callie, there are a few things you should know. When I took the job at the fund, I thought it was legitimate. But I quickly discovered that there were . . . inconsistencies in the accounting.”
“That’s why it went bankrupt,” I say, but my dad keeps on going.
“I reported everything to my bosses, but I was told that this was their accounting and, well, basically, I was told to shut up.”
“But you didn’t shut up.”
“Well . . . no. I did shut up. For a little while. But the market started to take a dive, and—it’s kind of complicated. I started to worry about the people who had invested with us. I just—I had to report it. So I did.”
“You called the cops?”
“I contacted the SEC. The money cops. It turned out that the fund was already under investigation, so I cooperated. But, look—there are two points I wanted to make. The first point is that things might be rough for a while. I might have to pay some money to the lawyer, and the fund isn’t paying me anymore, so we might have to sell the apartment, or work something out. I don’t know.”
“Okay,” I say, although it is not exactly okay. But now I see why my mom has been so stressed out. And what she meant when she said that he always does what he thinks is right, even when it’s hard.
“The second thing I wanted to tell you is that I only regret one thing about this whole mess—I regret not reporting the fund sooner. I knew it was wrong, and I let it go on, and there might be some people who are going to lose their money because of me.” He turns and looks at me.
“But you fixed it.”
“As well as I could. Not everything can be fixed.”
“No . . .” I know that we are both thinking about Grandma Hildy. But I am also thinking about Cassius, and his eyesight. These things that can’t be fixed. “They can be softened, though,” I say, and I know that this did not come out right, but what I mean is that it helps to have people who understand.
“Callie, next time, please don’t wait to tell us if you’re in trouble. We’re your parents. We may not be perfect, but we love you.” My dad picks up my hand, and when we lace our fingers together, I’m surprised that mine are almost as long as his now.
“Dad . . . I feel the same way. I mean, I love you. You can tell me stuff.”
My dad looks surprised for a moment. Then he nods. “Okay, Callie.”
“And I think you should listen to Desmond, too.”
Dad winces. “I didn’t do the right thing with the lunch bag.”
“Neither did I. Neither did anyone. Except—well, except for Desmond.”
“Except for Desmond.”
We both think about that for a while.
“Are you going to—can you forgive Grandma Hildy?”
“Forgive her? I don’t have to forgive your grandmother. I’m not mad at—”
“Then how come she’s not ever allowed to give me or Desmond money? How come you never visit her, unless you get a call from the school? How come you didn’t tell her about the fund?”
Dad looks at the cobblestones. “I—” But he can’t finish the thought, and throws up his hands. Then he folds them across his chest. “Maybe I do need to forgive her.”
“I don’t know.”
Then he holds my hand again. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to tell your mother.”
“Hm,” I say. “Let’s make sure she has a glass of wine first.”
We sit there for a long time, holding hands, and having a moment as well as anyone can have a moment in New York City. A squirrel scampers past us with half a giant bagel in its mouth, and a bald guy wearing a business suit and a crown of flowers hails a taxi, and a tiny blond woman pumping small dumbbells power-walks by, followed by her muscle-bound trainer in a T-shirt that reads “BEAST,” and I feel like my dad and I are an island at the center of the stormy ocean. In the immortal words of Cyndi Lauper, the calm inside the storm is something only life can bring.
That, actually, would make a good mug.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if Grandma married Mr. Johnson, and she moved into his apartment, and then we moved into her apartment?” I say suddenly.
My dad’s eyebrows rise up toward his hairline. “That . . . is not very likely.”
“It could happen, though,” I say. “I mean, if they ever start dating. And if we have to sell our apartment anyway.”
“It could happen,” my dad admits.
I think about maybe concentrating on this idea a little, and maybe trying to Althea-Orris it into happening. But then I decide to forget it. That whole positive-thought thing hasn’t really helped at all. In fact, it has kind of only made things worse. And sometimes bad things just happen—bad thoughts have nothing to do with it. Look at Cassius. Look at Uncle Larry and Grandma Hildy. Look at Desmond. Look at everyone in the world.
“I can hope, though,” I say aloud. “I can dream.”
“You?” My dad smiles at me. “I don’t think you can stop.”
I look up again, trying to catch sight of the wisp of cloud I saw earlier, but it’s gone. I can still see other clouds passing across the sky, up there beyond the new leaves. One of the amazing things about the sky is that it’s always worth looking at. You never look at the same sky twice, you know what I mean?
So that, I guess, is what I would say to people, if I had an official philosophy: don’t forget to look at the sky, because it’s still there, even when you are stuck in the subway.
Okay, that’s kind of deep, but still not perfect.
I’m working on it.
Acknowledgments
WHENEVER I TEACH A workshop or give a lecture, someone asks where I get my ideas. Here is the thing about ideas: they pop up all of the time, absolutely everywhere. But, unfortunately, not all of those ideas are good.
The problem is that I can’t always tell if an idea is bad. Sometimes, I don’t know if it’s a dead end, or if something that looks like a bad idea actually has a story lurking inside, or if a bunch of lousy little ideas have
sneaked their way into my mostly good-idea novel and mucked it up. For that, I have to rely on my friends and colleagues. I am very lucky to be surrounded with people who are much more talented than I am—people who have a gift for honestly (yet kindly) assessing the good and the bad in a novel.
When I came up with the idea for Apartment 1986, I didn’t have much faith in it. But when I described it to my longtime friend and former editor, Helen Bernstein, she put her hand over her heart at the ending. “Write that one,” she said. “Write that next.” So I wrote a bit of it, but I wasn’t sure if it was funny. I sent a few pages to Ellen Wittlinger, a fantastic writer with whom I have been in a critique group for the past ten years. She wrote, “Lisa, it’s hilarious! You must write this.” So I kept going. The next step was a working retreat at the Writing Barn in Austin, Texas, where author Nicole Griffin gave me feedback on the first fifty pages and helped me hammer out my plans for the rest of the story. Once I had a finished first draft, the manuscript went to my critique group, where Ellen, Liza Ketchum, Pat Collins, and Nancy Werlin offered their incredibly helpful input. Another two months of work, and it was time for my agent and editor to look at it. Rosemary Stimola and Kristen Pettit offered their invaluable insight and support, and I got back to work. I sent a copy of the almost-finished manuscript to Johanna Silva, who read it in three days and gave me feedback and information on life for someone with limited vision. Two more rounds of revisions from Kristen and . . . finally . . . I had a novel.
As Callie would say, it takes a village to write a book.
So I would like to thank all of these people for the hard work and care they put into assessing my work, their honesty, and—most of all—their encouragement. I could never have written this book without you, mostly because I wouldn’t have wanted to. You all are the part of writing that I like best.
Excerpt from A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic
Read on for a peek at Lisa Papademetriou’s A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic!
NOBODY HAD EVER TOLD Kai that she should hold her breath when passing by a graveyard, but she did it anyway. She held it and gripped the door handle of the massive powder blue 1987 Dodge pickup as her great-aunt barreled bat-crazy past a large iron gate and up the driveway. Kai gaped through the smudgy truck window at ancient crosses and crumbling white grave markers that hunched, lurking, behind the sagging iron gate. “You live by a graveyard?” she asked, squeezing the door handle like she might just jump out.
“Quiet neighbors!” Great-Aunt Lavinia yelled so Kai could hear her over the Jay-Z song blaring through the radio. The Big Ol’ Truck spat gravel as Lavinia slammed the brakes, lurching to a stop. She leaned against the steering wheel and turned to face Kai. “And they never complain about my music.” Lavinia cranked up the volume for a moment, rapping along, then switched it off with a wink. “Most people round here like country, but I can’t stand it.”
“Okay,” Kai said, because she thought she should say something. Conversation wasn’t really her strongest subject, to tell you the truth.
“You like country?”
“Uh, no.”
“Well, all right, because you ain’t gonna hear much of it in my house.” Lavinia yanked open the door and spilled out. With a deft move, she put one foot on top of the rear tire and hauled herself over the edge of the cargo bed, grabbing Kai’s bag and violin case.
Kai wasn’t nearly as swift—or as smooth. Gingerly, she pulled back the handle and looked down at the gravel driveway. It seemed like it was about forty feet below her.
“Do you need me to come and get you, sugar?” Lavinia called from the front steps.
“Coming.” Clinging to the door, Kai managed to awkwardly half swing, half sprawl onto the pavement. She dusted off her hands and slammed the truck door, giving it a pat as she hurried toward the house.
And what a house!
It had a high peaked roof, and a front porch that had been nearly swallowed up by creeping vines and aggressive shrubbery. A bush with flowers big enough to sit in bloomed just beyond the vines’ reach. Everything seemed to join together at odd, tilted angles, as if the house had come home late and rumpled from a particularly wild House Party. A tired picket fence lined the property, and a crooked gate complained at every breeze. The whole place looked like it belonged in a book, but perhaps one that wasn’t very nice. I’m talking one where the children get gobbled up in the end.
A mailbox crouched at the end of the footpath. A name was painted on the sign in elegant silver letters. Quirk, it read.
You got that right, Kai thought.
So far, her great-aunt Lavinia was a bit . . . odd.
“Your father always called her Auntie Lavinia, but she’s actually your great-great-grandfather’s cousin, so she must be eighty or ninety years old by now,” Kai’s mother, Schuyler, had said right before putting Kai on a plane. “She probably needs a lot of help around the house, the poor, frail old thing. You’ll try to be helpful, won’t you?”
Let me tell you that Great-Aunt Lavinia was about as frail as a Sherman tank. Kai was never good at judging heights, but I am, and I can tell you that Lavinia was over six feet tall. She carried Kai’s suitcase like it was a pocketbook. Kai guessed that she was sixty, but this was one thing that Kai’s mother had right: Lavinia would turn eighty-seven at the end of the summer. She had a few wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and she had gray hair. But the gray hair was long, almost down to her waist, and held back in a thick braid. Lavinia wore jeans. Not the grandma kind, either, but dark-wash skinny jeans, and red Converse sneakers. Her fingers were full of chunky turquoise jewelry. She looked hip and fashionable, despite the fact that she was shaped a bit like a turnip and one of her eyes was bigger than the other.
This lady, Kai thought as she trotted after her great-aunt, does not need my help around the house.
Kai hesitated in the doorway a moment, but Lavinia was already jogging up the wide wooden staircase, calling, “Your room is up here, sweets!”
Kai followed, but she didn’t hurry. She ran her hand along the dark banister. It was the kind she had always wished for—perfect for sliding down. Back home, Kai lived in a square gray apartment building with an unreliable elevator.
At the top of the landing, Kai found a long hallway. “This one here is the guest room.” Lavinia’s voice floated to her from a room on the right. Kai followed the sound and stepped into a lovely white room with a dark wood four-poster bed and matching bureau. An old, smoky mirror reflected gentle light, and crammed bookshelves lined an entire wall. An overstuffed chair lounged in the corner near a window seat that overlooked the front lawn. At home, Kai slept on a mattress on the floor, and shoved her clothes into oversize plastic storage boxes. Her mother didn’t believe in spending money on furniture—every spare penny went to Kai’s college fund. To Kai, this seemed like a room from a magazine, or a pleasant dream.
“Pretty,” Kai said.
“Ain’t it?” Lavinia put the suitcase down by the bed and turned to face Kai. “So, listen. I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just gonna come out and say it. I can’t help it if it hurts your feelings.” Lavinia’s fingertips dipped into the smallest pocket of her jeans. “I don’t know what to do with kids.”
“Me, either.”
Lavinia cocked her head, as if she couldn’t tell whether or not Kai was teasing her. She wasn’t. Kai really didn’t get most kids. They didn’t get her, either.
“All right, sugar.” Lavinia gave Kai a pat on the arm. “I’m just going to do . . . what I do. I’m not going to entertain you.”
“Fine. Great, actually.”
Lavinia stood perfectly still for a moment. So did Kai. Around them, the house was enormous and silent. “Okay, then,” Lavinia said at last. “There’s food in the fridge. I don’t keep any soda or junk, though. If you want that stuff, you can go walk to the Walgreens.”
“By myself?”
“Why not? You’re twelve, ain’t ya? I was walkin’ to the store by
myself at age five.”
The thought of walking around in a strange town all alone made Kai feel fizzy, like a can of soda that’s been shaken up. “Can I poke around the house?”
“Suit yourself.” Lavinia fussed with a curtain for a moment, and then she walked out of the room.
Kai stood beside the window for a moment, just smelling the air in the room. It smelled like clean, old things. She walked over and scanned the books on the shelves. A leather-bound book with gold lettering on the spine caught her eye. The Exquisite Corpse, it said. Kai pulled it out. She didn’t mind creepy titles. She kind of liked them, in fact.
Greetings, salutations, and welcome to the Exquisite Corpse! It began. Just as your grandmother and grandfather used to play the old parlor game in which one person would draw a head, and then fold it over, and another would draw a body, and another would draw legs, and so on—you will breathe life into a creature of your own making. You are about to embark on a journey of magic beyond your powers of discernment, imagination, and belief! All it takes is one person bold enough to set the story in motion!
Let the magic begin!
Beneath this, someone with excellent handwriting had written the name Ralph T. Flabbergast.
There was something about the book that made her shaken-up feeling come back again. And then Kai did something that she never really understood. She pulled a pen from her pocket. After Ralph T. Flabbergast, she wrote, was a complete fool.
She looked down at the page, dread pricking across her skin on little insect feet. I shouldn’t have done that, she thought. That was rude. Not that Ralph was likely to care. He’d been dead for almost fifty years.
Outside, the sun shone bright and high. She had been sitting in an airplane for almost four hours, which made her restless. There was no reason to stay indoors. Kai decided to go explore the neighborhood.
It was her second mistake.
About the Author