That Girl Lucy Moon Page 3

  After school that Thursday, Lucy Moon and Zoë' Rossignol walked into the Rossignol Bakery. Zoë headed to the back to make piecrusts—Mrs. Rossignol swore that no one made crusts as tender as Zoë's—and Lucy hurried through her bakery chores, sponging down the front tables, refilling the sugar packets and the napkins, and today, grating fresh ginger. Then Lucy shook off her duck shoes, settled on the big red couch, and began to read the Turtle Rock Times.

  After reading the paper three or four times, front to back, back to front, Lucy tossed it on the coffee table and crossed her arms.

  The story of the arrested sledders wasn't there.

  What was a newspaper if it didn't report the news?

  Zoë plopped down next to Lucy on the red couch.

  "What did the Times say?" she said.

  "Nothing," said Lucy.

  "No!"

  Lucy picked up the newspaper and tossed it to Zoë. "You see if you can find it. I've read everything. Did you know that the junior high is fund-raising for a new school gymnasium and erecting a 'Fill the Pencil with Lead' sign to keep track of the money? Did you know that our third-grade teacher is selling a fortune-telling moose at his garage sale, or that there's a talk about 'The Twelve Secret Wives of Shakespeare' at the VFW? I do. Look, my skin is tarred with newsprint!" She spread her ink-covered fingers in front of Zoë's face.

  They sat silently for a second, Lucy frowning as she stared off into space, and Zoë paging through the newspaper.

  Then Lucy raised an eyebrow. "You know what it is?"

  Zoë glanced up and, seeing the look on Lucy's face, grinned.

  "It's a . . ." began Lucy. Zoë and Lucy said the words together,"... cover-up."

  Zoë clapped her hands. "What are we going to do?" she said.

  "Something. . ." said Lucy, rubbing her hands together, "... communicative."

  Zoë gave her a high five.

  The two of them grabbed their stuff and got going. "Piecrusts are in the walk-in, Mama!" Zoë yelled on the way out, the doorbell dinging behind them.

  Since the Turtle Rock Times had decided not to reveal the story, Lucy and Zoë decided to tell it themselves. They would interview the arrested sledders.

  The only trouble was that no one seemed to know exactly who had been arrested. At school, rumors and wild stories spread like weeds: twelve names were bandied about as possibilities, and three of those named actually claimed the honor. These boasters told stories about how they beat back a police officer with sleds and snowballs, how they tried to escape by driving off in the police car, how they spent the night in a Turtle Rock jail cell jam-packed with murderers, arsonists, spies, and counterfeiters, and how they heard their parents begging the police to spare their "dear children" an adolescence of sewing vinyl wallets at the juvenile prison.

  Lucy and Zoë heard these stories and laughed. "As if," said Lucy. They decided to find the sledders' identities by employing a more methodical approach.

  Since they were both serious sledders, Lucy and Zoë knew the Wiggins Hill regulars. So one by one they eliminated each possibility. Then they spotted Lisa Alt arriving at school with her shoulders up near her ears, shivering. She carried her coat balled up in her arms, and no wonder—this was a granny coat with a wide fur collar and enormous plaid buttons. Worse, the coat was the color of ... ? Well, the only descriptor coming to Lucy's mind was "puppet flesh." They watched Lisa hurriedly stuff the coat into her locker.

  Lucy frowned. "Where's that brand-new, powder-blue ski jacket?"

  "That's what I was thinking," said Zoë.

  It didn't take long for them to realize that the new ski jacket—the one Lisa had been showing off at the start of school—had disappeared around the time of the snowstorm. And now that they thought of it, wasn't it odd that Lisa didn't seem to be talking about the loss of her jacket or about the arresting of sledders on Wiggins Hill?

  If Lisa Alt was involved, Sam Shipman was too. The two of them always sledded together.

  After an hour of serious cajoling, Lisa and Sam admitted it—they were the arrested sledders. But both of their parents had threatened to punish them if they talked, emphasizing how Miss Wiggins did not need to be bothered with this. (Lisa's mother had added: "We certainly don't need our name brought to Miss Wiggins's attention.") Lisa and Sam both thought their parents were acting strangely, but seeing how serious their parents were, they'd kept quiet about the whole situation.

  "You weren't arrested?" said Lucy, confused.

  "Not technically," said Sam, "but close enough!"

  Then Lisa and Sam glanced at each other, and shut up.

  Lucy began to lose all hope for an interview.

  But Zoë worked a minor miracle: she sold Lisa and Sam on the idea of an interview by explaining that if they did it, the story of the arrested sledders would die down, and it wouldn't be so hard to keep quiet. Lucy quickly added that no names would be used and that the story would only be circulated among junior-high students. "I promise, your parents will never find out," Lucy told them both. Finally, Lisa and Sam agreed.

  After school on Friday, Lucy conducted the interview in the basement of Lisa Alt's house. This is the story Lucy heard (and saw in her mind's eye):

  As usual, Lisa and Sam fought about sleds while they trudged up Wiggins Hill on Friday, October 3rd. The wrong sled ruined—utterly ruined—a good run. This they agreed upon. But the problem was that each of them, according to the other, owned the wrong sled. According to Sam, Lisa's plastic saucer spun out of control and had no padding. (Padding was essential because of all those roots on Wiggins Hill.) But according to Lisa, Sam's inner tube was too bouncy, and impossible to grip. She called it an "overblown butt pad,"because it looked a lot like what her grandmother had to sit on after a doctor removed her hemorrhoids. At this, Sam turned red and walked faster. But as was often the case on Wiggins Hill, within a half an hour of sledding, all arguments were forgotten.

  Time passed. Snow Jell harder and harder. Sam and Lisa dimly registered that the streetlamp had flickered on, illuminating the snow pink and blue. Lisa and Sam sledded and sledded and sledded and sledded.

  When the police car came, Sam was standing at the sugar maple, waiting for Lisa to push off from the top. Through the falling snowflakes, Sam saw the spinning lights as the car pulled up to the side of the hill. The red of brake lights flashed. Then the car door opened and a police officer got out. He slammed the door shut and walked toward the hill.

  Sam pulled the inner tube close to his body and stood tight against the sugar maple, hidden by its thickness.

  That was when Lisa came over the edge of the hill on that orange saucer sled, bright enough for deer hunting season.

  Oh, no, Sam thought. Right toward the police officer! As discreetly as he could, he tried to wave her down and get her to stop. But Lisa didn't see him, it seemed. He even tried sending psychic messages: POLICE! POLICE! STOP! HIDE!

  He was screaming (in his mind), but it did no good. Lisa was screaming for real—a happy yell, a yodeling— the usual sound of someone traveling down Wiggins Hill at breakneck speed. It was just inappropriate now.

  INAPPROPRIATE! Sam jelled in his head. (It was the first time he had used the word, and later he reflected that maybe "inappropriate" had too many syllables to be a good psychic message.)

  Sam saw the police officer moving toward the place Lisa's orange saucer would eventually land.

  "Liiiiiiissssssaaaaal" yelled Sam, abandoning his inner tube and hiding place. He ran, tripping on the snow and grasses.

  Lisa turned to look for him, and that's when one of those maple roots got her. The saucer banked and she soared into the air, a powder-blue alien wrangling an orange saucer.

  Lisa went up high, higher, and higher still, and Sam knew he was seeing something legendary, especially when, suddenly, Lisa . . . stuck.

  The saucer banked and whirled off, riderless, down the rest of the hill.

  For a moment, it seemed the whole hill stood still. The snow came
down in sheets, and Sam heard the wind rattle the limbs of the maple above him.

  And Lisa hung on a stout maple branch, like a great blue fruit.

  It was her brand-new, powder-blue ski jacket that kept her suspended in midair. This was the jacket—the jacket that was supposed to hold new ski lift tags when she got her first downhill lessons at Blizzard Bluff.

  Now the new jacket groaned under the strain of holding Lisa four feet above the ground.

  Sam was at Lisa's dangling feet in an instant. So was the police officer.

  The jacket gave final tearing sound, and Lisa was caught in the man's arms.

  "My jacket! "Lisa cried.

  "You're lucky that tree didn't take your head off," the police officer said, putting her down. "You okay?"

  Lisa gazed up into the tree. The collar of her new jacket now hung twelve feet in the air, impaled on a branch. "Oh,"she said, touching the frayed fabric around her neck. "My mom is going to kill me."

  Then another thought occurred to her.

  "What did that look like?” she asked Sam.

  But the officer didn't let them continue.

  "Excuse me, guys,"he said, "but I've got to take the two of you down to the station."

  This stopped Lisa and Sam cold.

  Sam was about to ask if they were under arrest or something, but then all three of them heard a noise—a scream from somewhere at the top of the hill.

  This wasn't a scream of pain or of surprise—no, this scream sounded wild, half out of its mind.

  "Move," said the police officer, grabbing Lisa and Sam by the shoulders and pulling them closer to the trunk of the sugar maple.

  And out of the white came the front of a sled—round, wooden, shined, made of boards turned up in a curl. They saw the soles of snow boots sticking out to either side. . . .

  It was a toboggan with a single rider.

  Several years ago, a Turtle Rock Times headline declared, "TOBOGGANS KILL!" The headline ran through Sam's and Lisa's minds, along with the accompanying illustration of seven skeletons riding a toboggan into the fiery pits of H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

  Dressed in black (black snowmobile suit, black leather gloves, and a black knit ski mask), it seemed that this rider had rocketed straight from those fiery pits. The only detail that didn't suggest "demented" was the purple tie on the neat black ponytail trailing from the nape of the rider's neck.

  But this seemed a small point. Lisa and Sam gaped in awe.

  The toboggan skidded around the sugar maple and swooshed to the bottom of the hill, up the culvert, and over the road, before disappearing from sight.

  "Come on," said the police officer. Sam and Lisa found themselves trying to sprint down the hill after him.

  Within minutes, they had hauled their sleds into the trunk of the police car, climbed into the backseat, and were on the chase of the toboggan. The car fish tailed onto the street, went around the block, and ended up at a lilac bush—Tom Berg's prize lilac bush, the one shipped from France. It had a toboggan-sized hole in it.

  The toboggan and rider were gone.

  Sam and Lisa found themselves thinking about one thing—how to get themselves a toboggan.

  Lucy typed up the interview on a library computer and then gave it to Zoë, who worked on the design on the Rossignol Bakery's back-office computer. Late in the afternoon, Zoë handed Lucy a copy. “Voilà," she said.

  It looked just like the Turtle Rock Times: the headline, The Turtle Rock Times Shuts Its Eyes, was in a font similar to the newspaper's. There was even the same image of a sawmill in the upper right-hand corner. The weather report was there: "Friday, October 3rd, Wiggins Hill, SNOWSTORM—28 inches of the white stuff!"

  Lucy smiled as she read through the interview, finally reaching the last bit of the story:

  INTERVIEWER: So what happened down at the station?

  BOY SLEDDER: We sat in a kind of waiting room while the police officer called our parents. Then she (he points at the girl sledder) told the officer at the front desk that she needed to be locked up.

  GIRL SLEDDER: I got locked up!

  BOY SLEDDER: She begged to get locked up.

  GIRL SLEDDER: And this other police officer in the back hears me begging and he takes us to a cell and puts us in it.

  BOY SLEDDER: He won't lock the door, though, because he says the cell is not a toy.

  GlRL SLEDDER: And I take the top bunk and he takes the bottom.

  BOY SLEDDER: I wanted the top bunk.

  GlRL SLEDDER: The toilet was indecent—you had to do it in front of everybody. It was just sitting there. We didn't have anything to bang on the cell bars with—that was kind of irritating, but we yelled, "We want out! We're innocent!"

  BOY SLEDDER: We want OUT! Innocent! Innocent! Innocent! (Both sledders get up and demonstrate. They are jumping around, waving their arms.)

  BOY SLEDDER: And then the other police officers come by and they bring orange sodas and cookies and weird snacks, like soy nuts. They tell us stories about who was in the cell that we were in. There was even a ghost in that cell once. . . .

  INTERVIEWER: Really?

  BOY SLEDDER: Yeah, the ghost wanted the bottom bunk. In the morning, the prisoner woke up on the top bunk.

  GIRL SLEDDER: That is such a lie.

  BOY SLEDDER: Truth—he said it was the truth.

  GIRL SLEDDER: Lie.

  INTERVIEWER (interrupting): And then what happened?

  GIRL SLEDDER: The officer who arrested us came in and got mad at the guy who put us in jail. Anyway, our parents picked us up. They weren't very happy. My mom practically screamed when she saw my new coat.

  As she read, Lucy felt her happiness spark and then roar into a bonfire.

  "Yes!" yelled Lucy, holding the paper in the air. "You've totally outdone yourself with the design, Zoë. This rocks. The truth will not be ignored!"

  CHAPTER FOUR

  School Bus 260—the one that took the Country Road D loop around Turtle Rock Lake—arrived first at the junior high that Monday. It wheezed to a stop beside two girls (one with braids down to her hips) who stood on the sidewalk. "Arrested sledders!" Lucy Moon held a flyer above her head as she yelled at the students getting off the bus. "Arrested sledders!"

  "The Turtle Rock Times Shuts Its Eyes. . . . Read about what happened to two of our own on Wiggins Hill!" Zoë Rossignol said loudly, a few feet behind Lucy. Of course Zoë was with Lucy—they'd been inseparable for as long as anyone could remember. Zoë's smile suggested that nothing was more amusing than watching reactions to the two of them.

  The sixth graders pushed past Lucy Moon. The curious ones pinched a copy from the pile stacked next to Zoë. Most of the seventh and eighth graders pretended that they couldn't be bothered. Yet, one or two stopped in front of Lucy, glared down at her tiny, birdlike frame, and held out their hand. Lucy met their gaze and handed them a copy. As they headed inside, kids huddled around single copies. That was when some of them circled back to get their own.

  By the time the fourth school bus came to school that day, Lucy Moon and Zoë Rossignol had run out of copies of The Turtle Rock Times Shuts Its Eyes.

  All morning, Lucy saw The Turtle Rock Times Shuts Its Eyes in back pockets, folded into books, or passed hand to hand in the hallways. The copies appeared and disappeared like light from fireflies. Lucy breathed deeply. Even the air tasted sweet!

  The Turtle Rock Times had ignored the story, but she, Lucy Moon, had stepped in and filled the gap.Yes!

  In the cafeteria, Lucy found Zoë sitting with the oddballs (as Lucy had come to think of them). Lucy swung her sack lunch onto the table and plunked down next to Zoë.

  Edna leaned back and said, "Everyone is reading The Turtle Rock Times Shuts Its Eyes. Everyone—even the seventh and eighth graders."

  Quote Girl interrupted them:" 'Her joy with heaved-up hand she doth express. And, wordless, so greets heaven for her success.'"

  It seemed a sort of pronouncement.

  When Quote Girl rai
sed an eyebrow at her, Lucy forced a smile.

  "It's Shakespeare," Quote Girl filled in. Then she picked up her fork and began to separate some Tater Tots from other Tater Tots.

  Lucy glanced at Zoë, who shrugged, amused.

  A moment later, someone else told Lucy she wasn't a bad writer; Edna began to ask more questions; Cape Guy gave her a thumbs-up; and another kid patted the top of her hat on the way to his table.

  Obviously, her status had gone from nonexistent to somebody, and Lucy couldn't help herself—she started grinning like an ape. For once, Zoë ate in silence.

  After lunch, when she and Zoë were alone in the hallway, Lucy said, "I did it, Zoë. I can't believe it. I did it! I did it!"

  For a moment Zoë frowned at Lucy. But then Zoë's face broke into a tiny smile. It was the kind of smile a parent gives a small child, though Lucy barely noticed because zings of happiness were skating up and down her spine.

  When Lucy took off skipping, she heard Zoë's laugh echoing in the hallway behind her.

  * * *

  By the time the cafeteria workers had finished serving up roast beef, Tater Tots, and cheesy green beans, The Turtle Rock Times Shuts Its Eyes was all anyone was talking about— very few of those flyers ended up in the recycle bin.

  And so, like dandelion seeds in a good wind, those pieces of paper strayed far beyond the junior high. One even found its way to Miss Ilene Viola Wiggins.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lucy Moon actually became popular! And Lucy stared into popularity's headlights like a deer at dusk on a country road. She gloried in the mind-numbing dazzle; a mantra skipping through her head: I did it! I did it! I did it! Lucy's mouth muscles ached from all the smiling— entire days of smiling. A few kids actually sought her opinion, and Lucy gave it freely and generously. It made her feel like someone out of a novel: an aristocrat tossing gold coins into a crowd of peasants. It was delicious.