YA The Boy on Cinnamon Street (3 page)

Chapter
Five

I can’t believe I’m at school down in the basement in Merit Madson country. The halls in this part of the school smell wet and like chlorine because of the swimming pool nearby. There’s a watery echo in the air, and everybody who brushes by me has wet hair tucked back behind their ears in a busy, belonging kind of way that makes me feel like somebody just clicked the
UN-FRIEND
button when they got to my name.

When I was at North last year, I used to come over here for gymnastic meets. Then these halls were dark and gloomy because we were just the visiting team and we didn’t know anything about the school. I guess I still feel like a visiting team. Like no matter how many freaking showers I take, I can never wash away that feeling of being a visiting team. Even though this is my school now. Even though I quit gymnastics.

The only reason I’m down here today in these halls is because I left a brand-new leotard behind in my old locker in the gymnastics room. I stop now in front of Coach Tull’s office and practice room. There’s this little window high in the door and because I’m small, I have to get on my tiptoes to see in.

Up on my toes, I can see the whole flipping gymnastics team sitting in a circle in there surrounded by the equipment. Coach is talking about “inner poise” and the importance of stretching. Blah. Blah. Blah. I can see Merit Madson and Janie Brevette. They stand out like somebody took a yellow Day-Glo marker and drew a big circle around them. Merit is leaning against the pommel horse with one arm over it in a very loving way, like it’s her personal pet, even though we never use those pommel horses.

Suddenly this seventh grader named Sue McCaleb appears next to me, like out of freaking nowhere. She looks down at me like I’m from Loserland, USA. I have to look
up
at her and this fries me big-time because she can peek in the window with ease while I’m hopping around next to her like a dorky M&M on springs. “Are they starting earlier now? I’ve been in another section,” she goes. “Are we late?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not on the team anymore. I had to quit because of schoolwork,” I say.

“Oh,” she says, “I didn’t know that, Louise.” And then she looks away, like I just died or something. “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do. Right?” she says, winking at me. I hate when kids your own age wink at you. Then she opens the door and sweeps into the circle on the floor in the practice room. For a moment the door stands open and Merit Madson spots me. Her pointed-arrow eyes go shooting through me. Janie starts smirking. All the while I just stand there in the door like I’m frozen, like my feet are iced up and stuck to the floor, like I just landed on planet Jupiter and somehow I forgot my space suit.

Then the lunch bell rings and I am spared. I break away and start running down the hall. When I get through the maze of tunnels and staircases and swarms of kids, I push into the cafeteria. I don’t know anybody who has first-period lunch and I hate trying to find somewhere to sit. I always feel like a lost airplane circling the crowds, trying to find a friendly runway where I can land.

Even though he’s in seventh grade at North, sometimes Henderson is over at South for lunch, which today could be helpful. How this kid ended up as a messenger for the assistant principal here at South, I do not know. This gives him “mobility,” he says, which means he can leave his school at any given moment and show up unexpectedly at South. He carries this leather messenger pouch with kids’ exams and detention notices, and sometimes you see him coming out of some room, usually the cafeteria.

Ah, now I see Henderson. He’s sitting at a table having a big hot lunch. He’s got a gigantic plate of pasta in front of him. Henderson is the kind of kid who doesn’t mind sitting alone. He doesn’t see it as an announcement of his loserhood.

“Thumb!” he says, looking up. This kid never calls me Louise, which I appreciate. Henderson, on the other hand, really likes his name. He thinks it sounds like a cool butler’s name in an old-fashioned movie, like “Bring up the car, Henderson.” Or “That will be all, Henderson.

“Hey, Hen,” I go, sitting down next to him. “What’s in the pouch? Somebody’s No Child Left Behind exam?”

“Very funny,” says Henderson. “I’m not at liberty to divulge the assistant principal’s private papers.” He takes the leather pouch and hugs it against him. His long plaid flannel arms wrap around it. Then he slips it under his chair. “Top secret,” he says. “And I’m starving. Wanna bite?”

“Henderson, you’re always starving,” I say.

“Hey, this is a special day,” he says. “I lucked out as soon as I walked in the front door here. I meet this kid who’s being wheeled off in agony to have a possible appendix operation. He gives me his meal ticket for the day. I kid you not. There’s a sandwich in my backpack you can have if you want.”

“I’m not hungry,” I say. “I’m in mourning over a leotard.”

“It’s a special day for other special reasons,” Henderson says, smiling. It’s an inner smile that glows, like there’s this cool private party going on inside Henderson.

“Like what?” I say.

“Like I finished another chapter in my space murder mystery. Now the robots from Mars are aggressive. And the robots from Venus are passive-aggressive.”

“Ha ha, like my grandpa,” I say. “My grandma always calls him passive-aggressive when he won’t take out the garbage. Wanna read me the new parts now or later? And where’s this sandwich?”

Henderson tosses me his backpack, and I go looking for the sandwich. I pass a pair of binoculars. About five candy bars. Some night-sky books. Henderson uses the binoculars to watch birds, especially pigeons. Everybody in North and South Pottsboro hates pigeons. But Henderson loves them.

I find the sandwich in waxed paper. It’s got lettuce and cheese and olives and pickles and everything else in the world on it. Henderson is one of these people who can eat and eat and still be hungry and skinny, which is why his dad calls him “the garbage disposal.”

Now Henderson gets out his novel. He spreads his papers and outlines all over the table. In most of his chapters somebody gets shot and bleeds all over the place. It’s awesome. Even though it’s noisy here, Henderson reads me his new chapter of
The Space Walk Murders.
After he’s done, I say, “Wow, Henderson, you’ve really written forty-five pages?”

And he goes, “Forty-eight pages now.” And we both sit there in awe of all those pages and all the terrible things that happened to the robots and the astronauts.

I have my books for my afternoon classes on the table and Henderson picks up the one on top and starts leafing through it. The pages fall open right away to the place where I tucked the note from the pizza stalker. Every time I see that note my heart does a string of mini flips.

“So,” says Hen, reaching for the note, “here it is.”

“Yup,” I say. “You’re the expert analyzer. What do you think?”

“Hmm,” says Henderson, cleaning his glasses with a napkin. Then he puts his glasses back on, looks at the note, holds it closer, and soon he goes in his backpack and gets out a magnifying glass. I’m sitting here waiting like a patient in a doctor’s office while Henderson studies the note under the lens and jots down a long list in his notebook. Then he looks up. “This kid is a righty, not a lefty. You can tell by the slant of the sentence.”

“A righty?” I say.

“Yep,” goes Henderson. “Twenty percent of the population are lefties. So we just reduced our search among the possibilities by twenty percent.”

“Oh, okay,” I say. “Anything else?”

“I’ll have to take this home for further analysis,” he says. He puts the note in his pocket.

“Hey, take good care of it and give it back soon,” I say. “It’s probably the only one I’ll ever get.”

“Okay, Thumb, I’ll do some tests and get back to you with answers soon.”

Henderson rolls up his novel and stuffs it in his backpack. Then he says, “See that kid over there? He actually pushed me when I walked by him today. My pasta almost slipped into a side pouch of his backpack. I don’t even go to this school. I don’t even know this kid. Therefore, I have to assume he’s a true ork.”

“What’s an ork?” I say.

“Ork is two notches worse than dork,” says Henderson.

“Oh,” I say.

“But I overlooked it this time.”

“Because he’s on the wrestling team?” I say.

“Well, because today is a special day and I didn’t want to ruin it with a broken back,” he says.

“Oh, but Reni and I would have visited you in the hospital,” I say. “Reni would have drawn smiley faces all over your body cast.”

“Sweet,” says Henderson, reaching again into his backpack.

“So why’s today so special?” I say.

“Well, it’s special because a while ago, this gorgeous tiny meteorite fell from the sky in faraway Iowa,” says Henderson, beaming. “This little meteorite could be a piece of the moon or a chunk of Mars or part of a comet. Writers would call it a falling star. And by chance it got put up for sale on eBay. I kid you not. And I was the high bidder last week. I bought it for fifteen dollars.”

“Cool,” I say.

“And it arrived in the mail today. A real piece of the universe from far, far away. It came to me, Henderson Elliot, 14 Nutmeg Street, North Pottsboro, Mass. After all those millions of years of travel through unknown space, a falling star ends up here.” He opens his fingers and there is a little, shiny, gold-flecked rock lying in the center of Henderson’s palm.

Chapter
Six

I’m just getting home from school, thinking about how my grandma says I used to be “very poetic.” Sunsets used to be my all-time favorite. Now I hate them. I used to get all high scores in the artistic part of the gymnastic routine. Now I hate gymnastics. Everything was different before, when I lived on Cinnamon Street.

I’m just going up the steps to our condo. Suddenly I stop. Boom. I can’t believe this. Someone has drawn a big heart in pink chalk on the cement porch in front of our door. A heart? What?

I step back, turn my head away, and then I look again just to make sure it’s really there. It is. Well, it could just be that some kids were playing out here, making hopscotch boards. In the snow? I look around. I don’t see any sign of any kids. I step right in the middle of the heart, my snowy boots making footprints all over it. My own heart does a couple more flips. The pizza stalker strikes again.

I don’t know anything about Benny McCartney. I think I have to take matters into my own hands. I
have
to get to know him better, even though he makes me dizzy and wobbly when I see him. I have to trust Reni in the crush department because Reni wrote the book on crushes, at least the one called
Crushing Justin Bieber: Ten Ways to Cry Your Heart Out
.

When I get upstairs, I go in my room and shut the door. My grandparents always look so hurt when I go in my room, like why didn’t I want to sit on the couch with them and discuss our rising condo fees? I decide to get out my cell and call Reni. “Reni,” I say.

“Hey ho,” she goes. (All the Elliots say hey ho instead of hi. It’s an Elliot family trait.)

“Reni, hi. Help!” I say. Reni is the kind of friend you can count on. I mean ever since I spotted for her in gymnastics class and she fell off the balance beam and I caught her, we’ve been cool. Well, I didn’t exactly catch her. She landed on me. “Reni, somebody drew a heart on the outside porch of our condo building.”

“Wow. This is getting intense. You weren’t imagining it, were you? I mean maybe you’re just seeing hearts cause you’re crushing Benny.”

“No, this was an obvious heart. An intentional heart. I think.”

“I have an idea. Listen to me. Order another pizza. Then you can see Benny again.”

“Do I want to see him again?” I say.

“Of course you do. How many letters like this do you think you’re going to get in your life? How many hearts are you going to find on your doorstep?”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay, I’ll order another pizza, but I might not get Benny. Sometimes I get this kid from South who carries the pizza on its side so all the mushrooms end up huddled in the corner. I think his name is Newton Mancini. If my parents named me Newton, I’d apply for new parents. Is that possible?”

“I doubt it,” says Reni. “You’d have kids applying all over the place.”

“True,” I say. “Reni, can I come over? I need more consultation in the crush department. I mean, I’m lost here.”

“Yeah, but we can’t disturb my sister. She has a poetry slam and an art show coming up at the Chaff and Plow Café in a month.”

“No problem, Reni. I’ll ask my grandma to drop me off, okay?”

“Okay,” says Reni, “but we have to be quiet. Annais is sooo creative.”

My grandma puts on her long brown vintage coat with the fake leopard collar. She loves vintage clothes. “How does it look?” she says, turning toward Grandpa.

“Should have bought the hat, beautiful,” he says.

Grandma smiles back at me. “Good thing he’s part blind,” she says. “Get your satchel.”

“What’s a satchel?” I say. “You mean my backpack, Grandma? What for?”

“Aren’t you studying over there?”

“No, Grandma, Reni and I aren’t even in the same school. Um, well, her brother, Henderson, um, wants to read us a few pages of his outer space murder mystery. He’s applying to some writing camp.
That’s
why I’m going over there.”

“Ah, Henderson,” says Grandpa. “Every time I hear that name, I always wonder whatever happened to all the old regular names like Tom and Jack and Harry and Bob. I guess the Bill Smiths of the world are an extinct species these days.” Grandpa looks kind of sad and he puts on his dorky plaid wool cap that looks like some dog took it and ran with it around the block five times, dropped it in a puddle, and then brought it back to Grandpa.

“You can stay here, honey bear. I’ll buzz her over,” says my grandma, and then Grandma and Grandpa get all smoochy like she’s going away for some extended trip to Europe or something.

We pull up in front of the Elliots’ house on Nutmeg Street. The streets in North Pottsboro are all named after spices. My mom and dad and me used to live on Cinnamon Street. It’s three streets over from Nutmeg. I think Coriander and Paprika are in between. I mean, how cool is North Pottsboro? I mean, it makes South Pottsboro look like a dump, which it is.

I hear someone coming to the door when I push the bell. My grandma is waiting in the car, all nervous that nobody’s home. “Darling,” she calls from the car window, “ring the bell.”

“Duh, Grandma,” I’m thinking. She keeps waving good-bye from the car and then she beeps the horn and it’s so loud, I’m ready to crawl under the Elliots’ porch and die.

Reni opens the door and she’s all bubbly and happy to see me. She looks at me, checking for outward signs of a crush, and then she nods her head in a knowing Reni way. I walk in the door, and Reni’s mom is in the living room watching a DVD and stirring a bowl of cake batter at the same time.

The Elliots are an awesome family. There are three kids plus a mom and a dad, and it looks to me like everybody’s entire wardrobe is strewn around the living room. There are sweaters, shirts, shoes, and jeans all over the floor. Reni’s mom has on a pair of slippers with big teddy bears on the front.

“Hi, Louise,” says Reni’s mom, and those words have such a nice warm ring to them (even though she’s got my name all wrong). She doesn’t even turn her head to see it’s me. She
knows
it’s me, like it’s as natural as breathing that I’m at the door, like I’m just part of the family. Reni’s mom is all bubbly too by nature. The Elliots are just a big bubbly family. I love love love love Reni’s mom.

I walk into the living room with Reni, and I stand there. Reni’s mom gets up and heads toward the kitchen, still holding her big mixing bowl. I open my arms and she puts down the bowl and gives me a hug. “Mrs. Elliot, adopt me, please,” I say looking up at her and putting my hands together like I’m praying.

And she goes, “Okay, you’re adopted.”

And I go, “Seriously.”

Mrs. Elliot has been baking in the kitchen. When she hugs you, you feel like a double vanilla carrot cake just wrapped its arms around you. She goes on to the kitchen, saying, “You’re not staying too long, are you? I want Reni to help Annais with her laundry in a little while. Okay, Louise?”

“She’s not Louise anymore. Her name is Thumbelina,” says Reni. Then she throws her arms around me too and says, “Isn’t it cool? It’s like a fairy tale. Cause she’s small, Mom, get it?”

“What about that room down in the basement?” I whisper to Reni. “Did you ask your mom and dad if I can move in there? I’d fix it up and make it pretty and everything.”

“I didn’t ask yet,” says Reni. She leads me up the soft carpeted stairs. The banister is definitely a part-time coatrack and closet, and on every step, I find somebody’s stray shoe.

Mrs. Elliot comes to the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t bother your sister. She’s painting. Her show at Chaff and Plow Café is next month. Coming to the opening, Louise?” Reni’s mom says.

“Of course, Mrs. Elliot, I’ll be there. I can’t wait. I mean, I’m part of the family, right?” I say.

The carpet is soft and warm on the stairs and everybody in Reni’s family is soft and warm. Even Henderson, except he’s not chubby, he’s tall; and right now he’s on his computer in his room, but I see he just got a buzz cut and his ears seem bigger than usual. He looks pink and new, like somebody just threw a bucket of water over him. “They mangled him up at Cutting Edge today,” says Reni. “Next time you see Henderson, he’ll be wearing a baseball cap.”

“Ha ha,” I go.

“Henderson,” Mrs. Elliot calls, taking a few steps up the stairs. “Can you please explain what happened to all my striped purple tulips in the sunroom? They just started blooming and somebody has cut them all and taken them away. Do you know anything about this?”

Henderson comes out into the hall, holding a big book over his head. “Hey, Thumb,” he mumbles through the pages. Then he shouts down the stairs, “What? Why do you always ask me this stuff? Like whenever something happens, it’s always me. I’ve been on my computer all day. I thought I saw Mrs. Barker out the window after she was here for coffee. She was dashing away with a bunch of tulips under her coat.”

“Ha ha,” Reni says and puts her hands on her hips and frowns at Henderson. Then she pulls me down the hall and whispers, “He’s a spy. I know it. He’s a thirteen-year-old spy. He’s got this camera and he doesn’t show anybody what he’s photographing and stuff keeps disappearing around here. He’s part of the CIA. I know it.”

“Is that possible?” I whisper back. “Do they hire kids?”

We pass Annais’s room. She’s in there painting. She’s got a Diana Krall disc going, playing the song “Peel Me a Grape.” Reni’s older sister is in ninth grade and she’s considered the most talented girl at North. Everyone just loves her paintings and her poems. Her mom says, “Annais is ten years ahead of her times and that’s being conservative!”

“Everybody calls Annais chubby-beautiful,” says Reni. “How come guys love her and she’s overweight like me?”

“Maybe it’s because Annais acts pretty,” I say.

“How do you act pretty?” says Reni.

Finally we get to Reni’s room. There’s a pink bedspread on her bed and a light with a pink lampshade on the table. Reni collects everything pink. I used to collect penguins. I once had a penguin wristwatch and penguin sunglasses. I throw myself down on her soft rug and look up at her ceiling. She has a poster of Justin Bieber pinned up there. This is a very cool idea.

“Reni,” I go.

She goes, “Yeah?”

“Do I really look like I’m crushing somebody? I mean, can you really tell from the outside?”

“Yeah,” goes Reni, “of course you can tell. You’re, like, all pale and weird-looking. I think we should try to get ahold of some of Benny’s notebooks to see if he’s writing your name in the margins.”

“No, Reni. This doesn’t feel right. This is something different. It can’t be a crush. And how would we find any notebook of his anyway?” I say.

“Well, Benny probably lives around here. Everybody lives near here,” Reni says. “We can take a walk and maybe if we see him you’ll be able to tell how you feel.”

I sit up and wrap my arms around my legs. I put myself in a little ball. I need to do some flips. Fifty flips would straighten everything out. Followed by a bunch of fast aerial cartwheels and a string of handsprings. Henderson walks by the room outside, still with the book over his head. He stops in the doorway. Reni points to me and says, “A basket case.”

Henderson peers out at me from under some pages. I feel like a specimen in a zoo.

“What kind of a basket?” says Henderson. “Indian sweetgrass or pine needle?”

“Ha ha and good-bye, Henderson,” says Reni. Then she slams the door and flops down on the rug and stares up at the ceiling. “You know what? Loving Justin Bieber is a one-way street,” she says. “I do all the giving and get nothing in return, not even a form letter.
You,
on the other hand, have a handwritten, handmade, one-of-a-kind real letter. The only thing wrong with your situation is
you.
You’re on the fence. You’re waffling.”

“I’m not really on the fence,” I say. “I like Benny, I think. I mean, maybe a lot, for all I know. It just doesn’t
feel
like it, that’s all.”

Reni hops up suddenly like a big happy exclamation point. “Of course you do! Let’s go ask Annais where this poor adorable lovesick boy lives,” she says, looking sweetly, joyously at me. Then she starts jumping up and down and squealing. The Elliots all jump up and down and squeal a lot. Except Henderson. He frowns when they squeal. But he also smiles and laughs when he’s sleeping. Reni told me, when they used to share a room, she had to throw stuff at him in the night to keep his laughter level down.

Reni bops into Annais’s room and I follow her. “Guess what,” she says with a smile as big and wide as the South Pottsboro I-95 bridge. “
She
got a love letter.”

“No way,” goes Annais, giving a corner of her painting a scrub with a sloppy-looking paintbrush. “From who?”

“It’s so cool,” says Reni, still bouncing up and down. She’s so happy, she reminds me of a second grader on her way to a sleepover. “It’s from Benny McCartney. You know? We think he might be lovesick slash embarrassed slash desperate. She hasn’t seen him recently. He may be in hiding. If he doesn’t show up at school, we’ll know he’s hurting because she hasn’t responded.”

Annais’s face begins to match the color on the end of her paintbrush, a dark boiling red. “No, Reni. You are an inexperienced dope. He’s an older guy. He’s in ninth grade. Are you kidding me? You’re encouraging Louise to stalk him. Stalkers get in trouble, big-time.”

“Thumbelina is her name. If you call her Louise, she’s not going to answer you. Right, Thumbelina?”

“This is the real world, girls,” says Annais, “and it sounds to me like you’re both a couple of potential stalkers.”

“Do you think I’m stalking Justin Bieber?” says Reni, rolling her eyes up toward her eyebrows, as if there might be an answer to that question sitting up there.

“No, Reni, how can you stalk someone when you don’t even know where they live?” I say.

“Exactly,” says Reni. “She’s not stalking Benny, because we don’t know where he lives. Do you know where he lives, Annais?”

“Look, girls, I need to paint,” Annais says, stepping back with one hand on her hip, looking at her crazy messed-up canvas from a distance. She’s wearing a cool painting smock with all these artsy paint splashes all over it. “I bet you two think the center of a painting is important. Right?” says Annais.