Out on a Limb (24 page)

“What a weird family you have,” Heath said, “to live in a treehouse.”

“It’s because they’re on welfare,” Sienna offered.

Devo approached. “Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Rosamund McGrady of
Bellemonde
Drive. Why all the BS about living in a mansion? Eh, McGrady? Why didn’t you just admit that you live in some crappy little treehouse?”

“Didn’t want to make you jealous,” I replied.

“Jealous? Me?” said Devo.

“All of you,” I said.

“Oh please,” said Sienna.

“Like we’d be jealous of
you
,” said Twyla.

“Thought you might be,” I said. “But maybe not. Maybe you’re all really happy locked up inside your great big houses. Operating your appliances. Breathing your special gourmet air. Guarded by your nannies. Whatever. To each his own.” I brushed between Devo and Sienna.

As I walked away I thought about what had just happened. The people in my class had made fun of my home. It was exactly what I’d been afraid of. It was fear of exactly this that had made me turn my real life into a secret. I had invented a whole phony life to prevent exactly this. And now that it had actually happened, I found out that I didn’t really care all that much. The scorn that I’d been so scared of was just not that big of a deal. This didn’t make me feel any better though. It made me feel worse. It made me feel like I had lost my best friend completely, utterly, absolutely for nothing.

NOTEBOOK: #29

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: The Present

I had some bad days
after that. I tried to talk to Bridget, but her reaction was always the same: no reaction. I couldn’t keep putting myself through it. After a few tries I gave up.

Bridget started hanging out with Twyla, Sienna, Nova and Kendra again. It was some comfort that Bridget didn’t seem to be having a lot of fun with them. It wasn’t much though.

I held myself together at school. I didn’t at home. I spent a lot of time in my middle bunk, face down, with my curtain pulled shut. “Rosie,” Mom’s voice would come through the curtain. “Rosie, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” I’d shout into my foam mattress. I could just imagine the upbeat advice Mom would give me if I told her, and I was already mad at her for it.

Every day, Mom would ask about seventeen times what was wrong, and I always gave the same answer. Nothing. One evening when Dad and Tilley had biked out to pick up pizza, Mom invaded my bunk. “Okay, you,” she said. “I’m not leaving until you tell me about it.” So finally I told. I told her everything. How I had pretended to live in Grand Oak Manor. How Kendra had found out the truth. How Bridget wasn’t talking to me anymore.

“Oh, Rosie,” Mom said, but she skipped the lecture that I expected about pretending to be something I wasn’t. She just stroked the back of my hair. “Oh, sweetheart.” I waited for her to say that this fight with Bridget would probably blow over. I intended to argue about it. Mom didn’t say it though.

“It will probably blow over,” I said, raising my head from the pillow.

“I hope so,” Mom said, and I knew at that moment that it wouldn’t.

Panther-Lamp Day arrived. Great-great-aunt Lydia seemed to be looking forward to it, so I continued with the sale at Grand Oak Manor, even though absolutely everybody knew by then that I didn’t live there. The story about me living in a treehouse was all over Windward. Devo and Kendra and Co. bugged me about the treehouse, but hardly anybody else did. Most people at Windward were just interested, and a lot of them thought it sounded cool. I decided that I might as well add the treehouse to the Panther-Lamp-Day tour.

I spent the first part of Panther-Lamp Day at the treehouse. The turnout was huge. There was such a long lineup to go up the ladder that we had to declare a five-minute limit per visit. Each visit included a turn on the rope swing as the grand finale, but a lot of kids didn’t have the nerve to do it and had to get back down to the ground by ladder. This slowed the tours and by the time I left the treehouse to go help Great-great-aunt Lydia, the lineup trailed across the meadow. I checked the lineup for Bridget. I hoped that maybe on my own territory, she might feel like she had to say something polite, and I could start a conversation. But Bridget was not there.

There were dozens and dozens of Windward people touring Grand Oak Manor, with Mr. Bickert as their miserable guide. I joined Great-great-aunt Lydia at the merchandise table in the dining room. Paige came in and bought a pair of candleholders. As Great-great-aunt Lydia counted out change, Paige chatted about how fabulous Grand Oak Manor was. She seemed kind of nervous. She didn’t mention Bridget. When she finished praising the beautiful inglenook, whatever that is, she said she had to get going. “Goodbye, Rosie,” she said. She stopped and then gave me a big hug, which is something she’d never done before. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth. I just turned and waggled my fingers over my shoulder.

Bridget’s birthday was at the end of May. Her party was laser tag. I know, because I saw Kendra’s invitation on her desk. The party was Saturday, May 29, from six to nine-thirty. On the night of the party Mom said it was too warm and beautiful to be indoors playing laser tag. “Yeah,” I said. It seemed like a lot of trouble to say. I couldn’t do anything that night between six and nine-thirty except lie on the porch, staring past the leaves into space. I watched Venus appear in the sky, and then Jupiter, and then Mars. At nine-thirty, when the far-away party guests were thanking Bridget and Paige, and getting into their SUVs, I picked myself off the porch. I climbed into bed, curled against the hours ahead.

That was a low point. It isn’t all as bad as that. There has been some good stuff too.

Tilley and I made up, for one thing.

“I don’t like Eveline,” Tilley announced a couple of days after Kendra invaded the treehouse.

“Good call,” I said, surprised. “Why not?”

“Cause Eveline told about the tree house! She told Kendra!”

“Why did she?”

“Cause Kendra paid her! I said that was against the contract. Eveline said too bad, cause Kendra paid her lots. I said that wasn’t fair, cause you did all the things we specified. Eveline said I was stupid. I said she was mean. I said she wasn’t my friend anymore.”

As soon as Eveline’s evil influence ended, Tilley turned nice again. One Saturday I got home from washing my hair at the community centre to see all of my stuff moved back up to the top bunk. The yellow-crested something had come back and laid three eggs, and I thought it was nice of Tilley to give up her bedside view of the nest. The eggs have hatched since then. Tilley comes up to the top berth a lot, and we sit and watch the scrawny baby birds being fed.

As soon as Tilley and I were friends again, I told her and Mom and Dad everything I had found out about Tavish and Great-great-aunt Lydia and Mr. Bickert. They were all excited, even Dad, and we all went for afternoon tea at Grand Oak Manor. The tea was a success. Great-great-aunt Lydia offered to learn the language that Mom is developing for ape-human communication, and now Mom is teaching her. It is weird beyond words to witness Mom and Great-great-aunt Lydia greeting each other in this language, but weird in a good way.

I go for tea at Grand Oak Manor a lot. The teas have improved. Great-great-aunt Lydia still has her beige biscuits, but now her three-storey platter is loaded up with these fancy little cakes like what Marie Antoinette would eat. She must be forcing Mr. Bickert to go out and buy them. So far none of the cakes have been poisoned. With all the teas, I’m getting to know Great-great-aunt Lydia pretty well. It doesn’t even bother me anymore when she falls asleep mid-sentence.

So that’s it. That’s the present.

Things change. People adjust.

I guess I still miss Bridget though. I guess that’s the feeling that’s still at the back of my throat.

August 27

I would love to read what Rosamund wrote.

But I’m not to call her that. “Great-great-aunt Lydia,” she asked me one teatime. “Do you think you could start calling me Rosie?”

“You don’t like Rosamund? ”I asked her.

“Not really. It’s sort of an old lady name.” She touched her mouth.

“No offence.”

“No, you have a point,” I said. “I feel the same about being called Great-great-aunt Lydia. It’s rather forbidding, don’t you think?”

So we agreed. I’m to call her Rosie and she’s to call me Auntie Liddie, which I know perfectly well does not suit me in the least. It’s cheerier than I have ever managed to be, but I like it, so Auntie Liddie it is. Rosie remembers most of the time.

She wrote for weeks. Through my binoculars I watched her cross-legged on the treehouse porch, her pen suspended in thought. I watched her sprawled on the meadow, filling page after page, crawling every now and then to follow the shade of the cherry tree. And all those rainy days, I watched her here, in the turret, tucked up in the armchair just across from me. Outside was a waterfall of summer rain, and inside was a rare peace, punctuated only by Mr. Bickert bringing fresh pots of tea.

“You’re quite the writer,” I said one of those summer days. She’d reached the end of a notebook and her face parted the curtain of her copper hair. “Is it a novel you’re working on?”

“No,” she said. She put the notebook in her backpack and took afresh one out. “It’s my true story. About the treehouse.”

“Ah. And an interesting story it is.” I let her get back to her writing.

Then days went by when Rosie did not have her pen and notebook. “Have you stopped working on your true story,” I asked one teatime.

“I finished.”

I said what I’d been wondering. “Am I allowed to read them? Your notebooks?”

Rosie looked at me. “I don’t have them anymore.”

“Not have them! Why? Why not? What’s happened to them?”

“I gave them to Bridget. Sort of. I left them outside her front door. In a cardboard box. With a note.”

“Your true story was all for Bridget?”

“Yeah, it was. Because I told her all those fake stories. And she doesn’t understand why. I was trying to explain.”

“That’s a long explanation.”

“I know. I never thought it would get that long. Like, I definitely did not expect to write 29 whole notebooks. But once I got started, I just felt like telling her everything. You know? Because she really wanted to know me. When we were friends, she wanted to know everything about me, and how often does that happen? And I blew it. I totally blew it. I wanted to be my real self with her, at least once, and the notebooks were my last chance.”

“You’re right that it’s a rare thing,” I said finally. “For someone to want to really know you.”

“But she doesn’t anymore. Now she’s just mad at me. I don’t know if she’ll even read the notebooks. She’ll probably just dump them in the recycling.”

“Tell me that you at least kept a copy.”

“Like a photocopy? No. I didn’t. It would have been really expensive.”

I took a moment. “I would have paid for the photocopying,” I said. I would have paid a lot, for a story in which I had a role.

“Oh. Well. I didn’t know,” Rosie said. “I guess it’s too late now.” Both of us gazed into the vacant space of the turret until Mr.Bickert entered with a tray of the petits fours that Rosie likes so much.

The weeks went by. Neither of us mentioned the absent notebooks again. The summer rains stopped, the clouds went their separate ways, and the sky became a continual blue.And then came that August afternoon.

I keep seeing what Rosie described. I can see her wading through the tall blonde meadow grass in the shimmering heat.I can see her picking daisies and bachelor buttons, using two hands to tear the tough stems. I can see her sorting her flowers as she enters the green shade of the giant oak. She looks up and sees Bridget.

Rosie opens her mouth and closes it. Bridget says, “I read your notebooks.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I read them. And. I came to see the baby birds. The yellow-crested somethings?”

“Oh, yeah. Them. They’re gone.”

“They flew the nest?”

“A long time ago.”

“Oh,” Bridget shrugs. “They sounded cute.”

“Do you want a tour?” Rosie says. “While you’re here?”

“Okay.”

“It’s this way.” Rosie points up the tree trunk. “I guess you know that.”

Rosie climbs the ladder and Bridget follows. They go through the trap door and the arched doorway. “The bunks,” Rosie points. “The bunk curtains. The propane fridge.”

“It’s just like in the notebooks.”

“The cast-iron stove. The camping stove.” Rosie is expressionless, but she can’t help it. The same thing seems to be wrong with Bridget.

“Hunh,” Bridget says.

They go out on the porch. “The water pump.” Rosie says. “The porch. I guess that’s obvious. The trap door. But you saw that on your way up. So. I guess that’s about it.”

“Hunh,” Bridget says, and for a moment there is just the soft hum of insects. “Well, I guess I should get—”

“I forgot the rope swing.”

“Right.”

Rosie leads Bridget up the ladder that rises from the trap door. On the platform she hoists up the wooden seat. “Like this.” Rosie jumps. She falls and falls, then the rope tightens, and she sails toward the sky with every emotion ripped free and left behind. When the swing slows, Rosie climbs back to Bridget.

“I guess it’s my turn,” Bridget says. She straddles the seat and looks down and the minutes go by. Then she jumps and screams and the rope snaps tight and her breath is snatched away. When Rosie gets to the bottom of the ladder Bridget is still arcing back and forth. Finally she jumps to the ground. She looks as though she might cry. “Omigosh! That was SO much fun!” Bridget is grinning ear to ear and instantly Rosie is too. It’s broken, that curse of being unable to produce a smile.

Rosie notices something. “Bridget! You got braces!”

“Two days ago. I hate them! They’ve got built-in screws to increase the pressure. Like medieval instruments of torture.” Bridget opens wide, and Rosie peers inside her mouth.