Clementine, Friend of the Week Read online

  “Did Moisturizer come home?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Did you win the competition?”

  Margaret shook her head.

  “But you win everything, Margaret!” I said.

  “I know.” Margaret shrugged. “I didn’t enter.”

  I was so surprised I just stared at her. “But…”

  “I had something else to do. And besides, a hula skirt is made of grass, Clementine,” Margaret said, as if this explained it. “Grass!”

  “What’s wrong with grass?”

  “Hel-lo?” Margaret said. “Grass-germs??” She rolled her eyes and shuddered. Then she turned and pressed the elevator button. “I have to go now. I hope you find your cat.”

  I went inside and washed the macaroni cement off my hands. Then I found my mom. “Margaret brought the posters back. We can put them up now.”

  My mom said just a minute while she finished her work, but it was really about two hundred minutes. Finally she came out and picked up our jackets. I opened the envelope.

  There were no posters inside. Just a thick blue booklet.

  CLEMENTINE: FRIEND OF THE WEEK! the cover read above my school picture.

  I dropped the booklet. My mom picked it up. “How nice,” she said. “Let’s read it.”

  “Mom!” I wailed. “The kids wrote about me on Friday! Back when they thought I was a good friend because I was going to help them decorate their bikes. But I didn’t show up at the rally, so now they think I’m their Enemy of the Year, not their Friend of the Week!”

  I took the booklet and ran into my room and threw it under my bed. My dad calls that space The Black Hole, and for once, I wished he was right—I wished things disappeared under there forever.

  Then I ran up to Margaret’s.

  Mitchell answered the door. “I saw your sign in the lobby. Moisturizer’s gone? Dude, that’s just wrong. I’m going to a friend’s, but if you haven’t found him by the time I get back, I’ll help you look.”

  I thanked him and asked for Margaret.

  “She just left with our dad,” he told me. “She’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  “Well, I don’t really need her,” I told him. “Just my posters—she took all my Missing Kitten posters by mistake. Do you know where they are?”

  “I saw Margaret when she got home—no posters, Rugrat. Just that giant palm tree.”

  “She didn’t bring them back? Are you sure? I need them!” I felt my tomato eyes start to fill up again, and I scrubbed at them so Mitchell wouldn’t think I was a baby.

  “She took your posters? Dude. I’m her brother. It’s her job to be mean to me. But she likes you, Clementine. What did you do to make her so mad at you?”

  “Nothing! I touched her booklet—that’s all! I peeled off the tape you put on it, and when I tried to show her, she thought I was reading it and she went nuts.”

  “Oh, her booklet,” said Mitchell, as though that explained everything.

  “But I didn’t read it, Mitchell! And anyway, it’s not a diary—it’s not private. I didn’t do anything wrong! And she’s so mad she got rid of my posters? So mad she doesn’t want me to find my kitten?”

  Mitchell was quiet for a minute, and I could see he was trying to decide about something. “Okay. Don’t tell her I told you this, Rugrat, but…her booklet is practically empty. She’s embarrassed about that—there are only a couple of pages of stuff in it. That’s all the kids could come up with—a couple of pages.”

  “Oh. Oh.” And I couldn’t think of anything else to say as Mitchell waved good-bye and told me he hoped I found my cat.

  That night, my whole family slept in the living room with me. But on Sunday morning, my mom rolled out her yoga mat and my dad went out for bagels and the Boston Globe. After breakfast, he lay on the couch with the paper and my brother crawled up beside him, pretending to read the comics.

  I couldn’t believe it. My family was acting as if this were just a normal day in our normal lives.

  “Excuse me,” I said, really loud even though the rule is quiet for Sunday morning yoga and paper reading. “Excuse me, but someone is missing here.”

  “Not much we can do about that today, Sport,” my father said. “The police and the Animal Rescue League have the info, and we put up posters. Now I think we just wait it out.”

  “Wait it out? You mean stop caring? What if it were me? Would you just wait it out if I were lost?”

  “Of course not,” my dad started.

  “Well then, let’s go. Let’s get looking for him, let’s make some more posters and put them up.”

  “Your dad’s right, honey,” said my mom. “It’s pouring rain out, so even if we got more posters made, there’s no point in putting them up. Besides, I bet Moisturizer’s in someone’s home right now. He’s probably fine. We aren’t going to find him—whoever has him has to find us now. So we just have to wait it out.”

  I didn’t answer. I was never going to speak to anyone in my family for the rest of my life. Margaret either, of course. I brought a pad of paper and a pencil into my bedroom—the only thing I was going to do for the rest of my life was draw pictures of Moisturizer. I was going to be like that famous artist in New Orleans who only paints one thing—a bright blue dog. I always wondered why that artist only painted that one dog, but now I knew. He must have missed that dog a lot.

  I got to work on my drawing: Moisturizer pouncing on a shadow. As I drew, I tried to picture what my mom had said—Moisturizer, fine, in someone else’s house. At first that made me feel better. But then I started to wonder. What if there was another girl in that house? And what if Moisturizer started to love her? And what if he forgot all about me?

  I suddenly thought of one day last week, when Moisturizer had wanted to sit on my lap and I hadn’t let him. Mitchell and his friends were skateboarding in the alley, and I went out to watch them instead. What if Moisturizer remembered that and wanted to love a different girl? A girl who would let him sit on her lap forever?

  That made me mess up the drawing, so I tore it up and started a new one—my kitten on my pillow, looking happy.

  After a while the phone rang, and I ran to answer it. It was only Aunt Claire, wondering if it was currants or raisins in the coffee cake my mom brought over the other day. I told her Mom was doing yoga, and I thought chocolate chips would taste a lot better anyway. Then I told her about Moisturizer being gone. All she said was, “That’s too bad, I hope you find him, and have your mother give me a call. I want to make that coffee cake for my book club Tuesday.” So I was never going to speak to Aunt Claire again, either.

  I went back into my room and started another drawing in my soon-to-be-famous “Orange Kitten” series: Moisturizer Napping on the Windowsill.

  My dad knocked. I ignored him. He came in and brought a section of the paper over to me. “Look at this.”

  I shook my head and kept on drawing.

  “I really think you should look, Sport,” he said.

  I pressed my mouth into a ruler line because suddenly not talking to my father made me want to cry.

  He put the paper down next to my drawing.

  I corner-eyed it, just a peek. I looked again. And then I picked it up to study it, in case my eyes were playing tricks. There, right on the front page of the Boston Globe Living Section was my Missing Kitten poster. Underneath was a picture of my school’s bike rally. All the bikes were covered with sheets of paper.

  My dad held my hand while I read the headline: STUDENTS USE BIKE RALLY TO HELP FIND MISSING PET!

  Just then my mom came in with Lima Bean. “We wondered where everybody was.…” she began. Then she saw the paper, too.

  My dad read the article out loud.

  “‘Missing Kitten posters covered nearly a hundred bicycles in a fund-raising rally on Boston Common, after a concerned student alerted her schoolmates to a friend’s situation…’”

  “A concerned student?” my mom asked. “Who?”

  “I don’t kn
ow. The only one who knew was…but she was…no…” I said, confused. “But she had the posters, and that explains how she got my booklet. Besides, look, here it says the concerned student organized the whole thing. Organized! It had to be Margaret!”

  “Margaret,” we all repeated. “Margaret!”

  “This is wonderful!” my mom said. “Hundreds of people—maybe a thousand or more—saw those flyers!”

  I was so happy. I couldn’t get over what Margaret had done. Just when I thought she was being the meanest to me, she was being the nicest.

  But then I realized something. “That was yesterday. A thousand people found out about Moisturizer yesterday. But nobody called.”

  “But thousands more will find out about him today, from the paper, Sport,” my dad said. “I think it’s just a matter of time now.”

  The day took three hundred hours. I checked the newspaper to make sure the right phone number was in the story, and I checked the phone every few minutes to make sure it was working. I stood by the window watching for little kitten paws to walk by in the rain, until my legs ached. And I did a lot of drawings of Moisturizer: stretched out in the sun, swatting a fly, tangled up in ribbons, falling into the garbage can. Each one made me miss him more.

  My family went on acting like it was a normal Sunday, I went on watching out the window and drawing my kitten, and the phone went on not ringing.

  Until late in the afternoon, finally, finally it did.

  My mom picked it up. She listened for a while, and a smile grew on her face. For just a minute I was mad at her; how could she smile on a day like this? Then I heard her say, “I think the person you want to talk to is my daughter.”

  I grabbed the phone.

  “I have a kitten here,” said a man’s voice on the other end. “A very curious kitten. I saw the article in the paper and wondered if he’s the one you’re looking for?”

  “Is he…?” And then my throat squeezed shut from how much I wanted it to be Moisturizer.

  My mom saw that I couldn’t talk. She took the phone again. She hoisted me up onto her hip like I was three years old, and I didn’t even care about that; I just listened while she talked.

  “Is he orange and fluffy, about four or five months old?” she asked the man. “Does he look really well taken care of?”

  I buried my head in my mom’s neck, and I was shaking too hard to hear the man’s answer.

  “That sounds like him,” my mom said. “Where do you live?”

  My mom listened and then her whole body slumped. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s too bad. The kitten we’re looking for was lost in Boston Thursday night. I don’t think he could have gotten that far.…”

  My mom looked at me with an I’m-sorry face. I looked back at her with an I-don’t-care-we-have-to-find-out-anyway face.

  “It’s probably not our kitten,” my mom told the man on the phone. “But let me get your address—we’d like to take a look.”

  My dad drove me, and all the way there he kept warning me not to get my hopes up. “This kitten showed up on his doorstep Thursday night,” he said. “In Quincy. That’s almost fifteen miles from here. Even if Moisturizer could walk that far, he could never have gotten fifteen miles in just a couple of hours.” I tried not to listen to him.

  Finally we got to the address. We knocked on the door. A man answered. In his arms was a kitten.

  “George!” my father cried to the man.

  “Squirt!” George the plumber cried to me.

  “Moisturizer!” I cried to my kitten.

  Moisturizer jumped into my arms and then we all talked at once, figuring out what had happened.

  “It never occurred to me!” George kept saying. “I got home Thursday night, took out my key to unlock the door, looked down, and there was this kitten. I figured he was from around here. It never occurred to me he might have been in the van.”

  “He must have climbed into your tool bag,” I said. “He loves exploring.”

  “He’s been pretty curious here, too,” George said. “Cute little guy. Peppy. I’m going to miss having him around. But I guess I can visit him sometimes, now can’t I!”

  We drove back home with Moisturizer draped around my neck. He purred into my ear until he fell asleep, which was probably because he was exhausted from pretending to be happy in someone else’s house.

  My dad glanced back at us in the rearview mirror and pretended he’d been blinded. “I wish I’d brought my sunglasses,” he said. “They might as well shut the power down in Boston—you could light up the whole city tonight with your smile.”

  I laughed, but secretly I flashed my smile around the backseat, and he was right, it did light things up.

  Mom had dinner waiting, and she pretended not to notice that I snuck Moisturizer little bites of meat loaf under the table. Afterward, my parents asked if they could read my Friend of the Week booklet. I said okay and crawled under my bed to get it. We all went into the living room.

  The booklet was full of long paragraphs about stuff I hardly remembered doing.

  Once, when I was in first grade, I lost my crayons, Joe had written. Clementine broke every one of hers in half, so I could color.

  Waylon wrote, I like having Clementine in class because she believed me when I told her about my superpowers. She is the only one I will teach how to become invisible—as soon as I learn how.

  It’s good to have Clementine in class because you always know we will be laughing, wrote Willy.

  His twin sister Lilly wrote it was good I was there, because otherwise my brother would be in trouble the most.

  And Maria’s page said, When my mom found out my lizard’s name, she said, “That child has been watching television!” And my dad confessed that sometimes he let me watch golf when she was at bingo, and then she said, “Oh, fine, I give up, I guess she’s old enough to rot her brain if she wants to.” So, thanks to Clementine, I can watch TV now! Which just goes to show you that you never know when you’re doing a good deed.

  None of the kids even mentioned my promise to decorate their bikes! But a lot of them did say they appreciated how I shared my artistic abilities. Which made me feel guilty for a minute about letting them down Saturday. But then it gave me an astoundishing idea.

  “Pet portraits!” I told my mom and dad. “That’s how I’ll thank them for helping me find Moisturizer! One for every person in my class. I’ll draw their pet, or, if they don’t have one, I’ll draw the pet they want to have someday.”

  I got started right away. First I did one for Margaret, because I wanted to thank her best of all. I drew Mascara curled up in the big straw hat I’d decorated for Margaret once, which is his favorite place to sleep.

  Next I did a beautiful portrait of Flomax for Maria—up on the glass aquarium wall with his tiny foot suction cups showing, and dashes in the air around his tongue to show it darting in and out.

  Then, for the rest of the kids, I wrote out fancy “I.O.U. One Pet Portrait” certificates.

  My parents came to take a look. “That’s so nice of you, Clementine,” my mom said. “Your classmates are lucky to have you for a friend.”

  My dad put my Friend of the Week booklet on the fireplace mantel, between my parents’ wedding picture and the baby pictures of my brother and me. “We want it right up here,” he said, “where everyone can see it and know how proud we are of you.”

  And then suddenly I had another wonderful idea.

  I ran to the phone and called up Mitchell. “Is Margaret home yet?”

  “She just got back,” he answered. “Batten the hatches, matey.”

  “Can you sneak her Friend of the Week booklet out for me?”

  “Sure!” said Mitchell.

  This is a great thing about Mitchell. Whenever you ask him to do something, he says “Sure!” even if it’s something he could get in trouble for. If I ever want a boyfriend—which I will not—he will say “Sure!” to anything I suggest.

  Mitchell was down in a few min
utes. He grabbed Moisturizer from me and high-fived his paw. “Little dude! You’re home!”

  Then he followed me to the kitchen table and watched as I flipped the booklet open and started to write: Margaret is the best friend a person could ever have! And then even though my hand was exhausted from drawing all those pictures of Moisturizer, two pet portraits, and seventeen I.O.U. certificates, I wrote and I wrote about what she did on Saturday. I filled up her booklet and I didn’t even have to write extra big.

  “Margaret did that?” Mitchell asked, reading over my shoulder.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “The Margaret who’s my sister?”

  “That Margaret,” I said. “Let’s go put it back now. I’ll do it so you don’t get in trouble.”

  I hung Moisturizer around my neck, because I didn’t feel ready to leave him for even a few minutes. Then we went up in the elevator, Mitchell muttering all the way, “My sister did that? Margaret?”

  We hurried to the living room. Margaret wasn’t in sight, so I pulled out the spelling bee plaque and was just about to tuck the booklet behind it, when I heard her voice.

  “You got him back! You got him back!” She ran over and hugged Moisturizer while I stood frozen. Then she looked down.

  She turned pale. She took the booklet from me, trembling.

  “I did not read it,” I said quickly. “N-O-T, not. I’m sorry I took it, but I only wanted to write something. I wanted to thank you…”

  Margaret shushed me. She opened the booklet and began to read. She scowled and then she nodded and then she scowled again and she nodded again. Lots of times.

  Finally she looked back at me. “Grateful just has one l, Clementine,” she said. “And hero just has one e. And there were only 239 posters, not 250. And—”