The Good, the Bad & the Beagle (21 page)

“I love cooking,” Sylvie said. “It’s like arts and crafts you can eat.”

Veronica didn’t know any other eleven-year-old who made food like Sylvie did. Today Sylvie had prepared pumpkin ravioli with brown butter. Veronica wondered if her mother liked pumpkin ravioli. It seemed like something her mother would like. But she would want to get it in the fall and from the farmers’ market. Her mother loved things that were seasonal and not available all the time. Sylvie said the sauce was just butter, but browned.

“Doesn’t your mother cook?” Veronica asked.

“No,” Sylvie said. “She’s dead. She died when I was three.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Veronica said, stunned. “I don’t know what to say,” was all she could manage.

“Sometimes,” Sylvie said, “and I don’t mean this in a mean way, Veronica, but sometimes there is nothing to say. That’s why I don’t talk much.”

Veronica believed Sylvie didn’t mean it in a mean way, but she still felt like she’d been told off. Talking too much ran in her family.

She wanted to hug Sylvie, to compliment her, to say something. But she didn’t know how to express anything that would be worth expressing, so she took Sylvie’s advice and didn’t say anything. She rinsed the silverware instead.

At home she couldn’t take her eyes off her parents. Her parents who she took for granted and complained about all the time. They both drove her crazy. But that was her life: two kinds of craziness and knowing that she was loved. Poor Sylvie.

“Mary called your mother and me today,” Mr. Morgan said. “She’s doing wonderfully and apparently giving the nurses a run for their money.”

“She asked about you, honey. She misses you,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Do you think you can make it at Sylvie’s for one more week?”

“I guess so,” Veronica said.

“Has it been awful?” her father asked.

“No,” Veronica answered. It hadn’t been awful at all, but she didn’t care to elaborate. She couldn’t stop thinking about Sylvie. Sylvie who cooked for herself and who cooked so well for Veronica, Sylvie who didn’t talk much. Sylvie who didn’t have a mother.

The Light at the End of the Hall

Veronica and Sylvie decided to arrange their data like a graphic novel. Veronica’s sketches would go in the panels and Sylvie would add all the data in a manner that was both scientific and narrative. Veronica couldn’t help but feel the plants were telling a bigger story.

She was very conscientiously outlining each frame, and the care she put into making them reminded her of the way she used to put dashes between each letter in each word she spelled when she was in kindergarten. Her mother had tried to make her see that instead of adding clarity, she was making her writing illegible. But Veronica never saw it that way.

She had one more frame to make when the lead of her pencil broke. She dug into her pencil case and came up empty. “Oh, no,” Veronica said, “I broke my lead.”

“There’s a sharpener in my room,” Sylvie said without looking up.

Veronica left the living room wondering what strange things lurked in the uncharted areas of the Samuelses’ apartment. Maybe showing people around your apartment was the behavior of grown-ups. Her mother always took people on tours of their apartment and got so excited to go on tours of other people’s. Kids generally didn’t do that. But still, it was strange to have spent every day here and not know anything about what was beyond the living room. She’d never actually been anywhere except the living room, a powder room, and the kitchen.

Veronica made her way down the hall. Toward the end was a light, like someone had left a TV on, which struck her as odd. But this light was many colors. It throbbed and bounced off the wall, which made the source impossible to identify. What was it: a lava lamp? An interactive artwork? She was mildly disappointed to discover the source of all these colors was just an ordinary laptop.

On the desk in Sylvie’s room an open laptop played a slide show. Each image held for a second or two before morphing into the next. Sylvie’s life was exposed for Veronica to examine.

Some babies look like old men when they are born. Sylvie was adorable. And the way her mother gazed upon her was startling. There was so much love in her eyes, so much joy in her face. None of the pictures of Veronica and her mother had that kind of mother-daughter-precious-moment-captured-forever-on-film quality because Mr. Morgan took the pictures and it always took him so long to operate the camera that by the time he finally pressed the button, whatever spontaneity had prompted the picture in the first place was long gone.

The pictures on Sylvie’s laptop told a beautiful story, but it was too short. The oldest Sylvie looked in the pictures was two or three. The last picture of them together was taken at a beach. They were standing in the surf holding hands. And even though the picture was taken from behind, Veronica was certain they were smiling.

Veronica understood now that Sylvie Samuels wasn’t weird or cold or creepy. Sylvie had a hole in her heart where her love used to be. Sylvie Samuels was sad, just like Veronica.

The Right Moment

That night Veronica hid her flashlight and all her colored pencils in bed. After her parents turned off the lights she set up shop. She copied Esme’s Rainbow Bridge story for Sylvie. She made each line a different color and it took a long time.

The next day after school, they met up as usual. Veronica wondered when the right moment would present itself. She had an idea that there would be a perfect time for giving the story to Sylvie. She considered handing it to her when they were waiting for the light on the corner of Ninety-Sixth and Third. But there was so much traffic and it was so loud she thought better of it.

When they got to Sylvie’s building and Sylvie was busy in the lobby opening the mailbox with her little key, Veronica fished the story out of her backpack. And while they stood next to each other in the elevator, watching the numbers light up as it climbed, Veronica worked up the courage to hand it to Sylvie.

The minute the story was out of Veronica’s hand she knew it was the dumbest thing she’d ever done in her whole life. How could she have compared a dead animal to a dead mother? How could she have used so many bright colors and glitter? What was wrong with her? No wonder she had no friends.

Veronica watched Sylvie read the story, wondering if their short friendship was over. But when Sylvie was finished reading, she hugged Veronica.

“Oh God, I thought you were going to hate it. It feels corny now—like a greeting card.”

“Yeah, but I’m corny.”

“Oh God,” Veronica said again. She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“There has to be somewhere they go,” Sylvie said. “It can’t be the end of my mom. I don’t believe in heaven exactly, but there has to be somewhere they go. I think they are waiting for us.”

“I hope so,” Veronica said. She hadn’t thought she would see Cadbury again, but that was the point of the Rainbow Bridge, after all. “Maybe they’re together.”

“Maybe my mom is playing with your dog,” Sylvie said. The elevator reached the ninth floor and the doors opened.

It was nicer to imagine that Cadbury was waiting for her instead of focusing on how miserable she was without him. Maybe behind Sylvie’s deadpan personality was a glass that was half-full.

After eating and cleaning up, the girls examined the leaves of the healthy plant.

“Why does Auden Georges always get such good grades?” Veronica asked. “I read her Monet paper. No offense, but I thought it was boring.”

“It was. All her work is. But what it lacks in creativity it makes up for with accuracy. Teachers like that. Go figure.”

Sylvie had gone to school with Auden Georges since kindergarten, so she should know.

“Time to make our freshly contaminated water,” Sylvie said. Veronica and Sylvie had developed an actual recipe, which they measured and made fresh each day. As research scientists, they had to be consistent.

“I bet her parents beat her if she doesn’t do better than everyone else. Why else would she cry when she doesn’t get a perfect grade? She is worse than Melody that way,” Sylvie said.

Veronica doubted Sylvie had any idea how important doing well on this project was for her credibility. Auden Georges didn’t have to worry about credibility. Her English accent always made her credible. But Veronica was in a full-blown credibility crisis.

“I feel like a murderer,” Veronica said, pouring the poison water on the closet plant. It was Friday and Veronica hoped the closet plant would die over the weekend so when they handed the project in on Monday their results would be crystal clear. It made her feel mean. She had hurt the plant’s feelings daily and robbed it of all nutrition. She was a plant murderer. That was how badly she wanted a good grade.

“Wow, your sketches are so good, Veronica,” Sylvie said.

Veronica had to agree, even though what Sylvie was admiring were just the minisketches. She’d made bigger, better ones for the graphic novel presentation.

“Can I see them for a minute?” Veronica handed the sketchbook to Sylvie, and Sylvie flipped through it, making the pictures of the plants come to life. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Sylvie said.

“I don’t know, what are you thinking?”

“A flipbook!” Sylvie flipped each page with her thumb and their entire experiment sprang to life before their eyes. Veronica had been very careful to measure exactly equal quadrants on her paper and had put her illustrations inside each quadrant. By cutting the pages into four squares and attaching them, they could make their graphic novel into a perfect flipbook. Veronica was psyched.

Sylvie kept flipping the pages.

“That is exactly my life this year,” Veronica said as the closet plant died again and again before her eyes.

“It is?” Sylvie said.

“Yup. I was all alive and vital and then people ignored me and were mean and I wilted.”

“You have a funny way of looking at things,” Sylvie said.

Veronica was incensed.

“I remember you from the first day,” Sylvie said. “Your parents were so friendly and you just stood there looking at me like you hated me. Sort of like you’re doing right now.”

Veronica did nearly hate Sylvie right now. “But you didn’t say anything to me,” she said.

“You didn’t say anything to me either. And you had everything a person could want—two parents, for starters, who were taking you to school. My dad hasn’t had time to take me to school in years.”

Veronica remembered that morning too. But the way she remembered it, Sylvie wasn’t the new girl. Veronica thought it was up to Sylvie to be nice and say hello first. When Sylvie didn’t, she assumed Sylvie didn’t like her. But Mary always said things weren’t as they appeared, and obviously there was a whole other side to the story that Veronica hadn’t even considered. The side that was not her side. Oops. She didn’t ponder that side as often as she should.

Sylvie got up and returned with a dilapidated Barbie doll. She put it on the coffee table for Veronica to examine. Its face was filthy, it was missing a leg, and its hair, what was left of it, was matted and tangled. The doll had lots of empty holes along its scalp where tufts of its hair were missing. It was a mess.

“I just had an idea,” Sylvie said. “Do you have any Barbies?”

“I don’t know if I still do,” Veronica said. “Why?” Part of her didn’t even want to talk to Sylvie. She was so embarrassed by her assessment of their first meeting.

“Our experiment shows what happens to a plant when it is not treated right, right? Well, we could hypothesize that people are the same way. If you treat a plant badly and ignore its needs it dies, so the same would happen to a person. If you mistreat a person it ends up like this Barbie.”

Just like me,
thought Veronica. “Oh, Sylvie, I love it. If I can’t find a Barbie, I will buy one and it can be the happy, popular Barbie who is treated well and yours can be the sad misfit Barbie. Can we somehow implicate Sarah-Lisa Carver in this theory?” Veronica asked.

“That is hilarious, Veronica. You threw a shoe at that girl and cut her sweaters to bits and you want her to be the mean one?”

“Okay, fine! I won’t implicate Sarah-Lisa. I’ll take a more humanitarian approach. But I still want to make little Randolf uniforms. What if I made little uniforms?”

“You don’t mind working over the weekend?”

“I want to work over the weekend!” Veronica said.

“Me too,” Sylvie said.

They sealed the deal with another hug. It was awesome.

I’m Afraid to Tell You

Veronica rifled through her room looking for a Barbie doll. She dug in drawers, old crates, and under her bed. She could see the doll in her mind, but she couldn’t remember where it was. It was so frustrating.

“Mom!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. She had to yell, she was under her bed.

“I’m right here, Veronica! Don’t shout!” her mother shouted. “Honey! I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Come in the kitchen!”

Oh sure. It was okay for Mrs. Morgan to yell halfway around the globe, but the rules were different for Veronica Morgan. Veronica crawled out from under her bed and walked begrudgingly into the kitchen. Her mother was standing in the middle of the room looking confused.

“I don’t know what to do for dinner.” She sighed. “Any ideas?” It was a silly question since they both knew the answer.

“Hunan Delight?” Veronica said.

“A girl after my own heart.” Her mother moved toward the phone.

“I love you, Mommy.” All of a sudden Veronica was overwhelmed by the idea of her mother dying and not being there to order Chinese food. She really was so ungrateful sometimes.

“I love you too,” her mother said. “What brought this on? Is everything okay?”

“Yes. Mommy?”

“Yes, my darling.”

“I want to do something with a Barbie. Didn’t I used to have one? Do you know where it is?”

“You know what?” her mother said as she smoothed Veronica’s hair. “I actually do. Or at least I’m pretty sure I do.”

This was amazing news because organization was not her mother’s strong suit. Veronica’s grandmother had everything labeled and packed in plastic protective sleeves and orderly rows but she hadn’t passed that gene down. Veronica’s mother was very good at putting things in places and forgetting the places she had put them.