Criss Cross (25 page)

An exceptional first novel. You feel at heart that this is a story of an artist being born.”
— The Horn Book
(starred review)

“A poignant story written with sensitivity

and tenderness.”
—School Library Journal
(starred review)

“Debbie’s first-person narrative is sharp, funny, uneasy, spiteful, fragile.” —ALA
Booklist
(starred review)

“Perkins gives the significance of friendship its due, and then some.”
—Kirkus Reviews

O
ur town is called Seldem.

My dad likes to add, “If ever.”

The bronze plaque in Memorial Park says that our town was founded by Lord Henry Seldem, from England, in 1846. No one knows who he was or why he came here. The next town west is Hesmont, also named after a lord. It’s hard to imagine any lords living here now, though. The biggest house in town probably has four bedrooms. Maybe Lord Seldem’s house was torn down when they put in the Seldem Plaza or the Thorofare. Or maybe he never lived here at all; maybe he just founded the town, and the next day he looked around and decided he’d be better off in Deer Church or River’s Knob.

Memorial Park is a tiny green triangle on Pittsfield Street. Besides the bronze plaque, which is bolted onto an oily slab of coal from the Hesmont Mine, it has a flagpole, a war monument, a bench you can sit on to wait for the bus, and enough grass for one dog to lie down on under the sign that says WELCOME TO SELDEM! A COMMUNITY OF HOMES. When the dog stands up, it might want to trot two blocks south to the river and wash off because the grass (and everything else here) is coated with a light film of fly ash from the power plant in Birdvale, to the east. The dog would be kidding itself, though, because the river itself is fly ash (and who knows what else) mixed with water.

My dad says that we are descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, who started New York City, and Lord Baltimore, who used to own Maryland. My mother doesn’t believe this, but my dad says, “That and twenty-five cents will get you a cup of coffee.” So we would seem to be up to our armpits in royalty and noble heritage, not to mention real estate. Nothing has made it all the way to 1969, though, except for some names. And names don’t mean that much. If you think about them in a certain way, they can mean anything.

For example, my dad told me the other day that the stuff on the outside of our house is called Insul-Brick. It’s supposed to look like bricks, but it’s just a brick pattern, printed somehow onto thick sheets of a tar-papery, shingly-type material. No one would be fooled into thinking it’s really bricks, but it looks all right. It keeps the rain out.

Now pretend you don’t know that, and listen to the word: Insul-Brick. “Insulbrick.” It sounds like a royal name, a name for a castle in Scotland or England.

I can picture it in gold, shining letters on a paperback book, with the gorgeous couple in flowing robes falling in love at sunset on horses in a garden with the castle, Insulbrick, in the background.…

Debbie of Insulbrick is not the gorgeous woman, though. Debbie is the girl up in the tower who has to finish ironing all the flowing robes before she can send carrier pigeon messages to her friends. That would be me.

In the first chapter, Debbie of Insulbrick’s mother would be saying, “Why do
you
always send the first carrier pigeon message? Why doesn’t Maureen ever send one to you, first? They have pigeons, too, don’t they?”

Debbie would breathe an inward sigh of exasperation with her mother for expecting Maureen always to do the same things that ordinary people might do, like make phone calls. I mean, send carrier pigeon messages. But aloud Debbie would just say, “She does, sometimes.”

Which I think was true, before last summer. Before last summer Maureen and I were best friends.

I know we were in May.

I’m positive we were, in April. At least I think we were. I don’t know what happened exactly.

As people who get hit by trucks sometimes say, “I didn’t see anything coming.”

“[A] quirky, delightful novel."—
KLIATT
(starred review)

“Brilliantly captures the adolescent-level Zen that thoughtful kids bring to their assessment of the world.”

—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (starred review)

“Best of all are the understated moments, often private and piercing in their authenticity, that capture intelligent, likable teens searching for signs of who they are, and who they’ll become.”

—ALA
Booklist
(starred review)

“Written with humor and modest bits of philosophy, the writing sparkles with inventive, often dazzling metaphors.”

—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Like a lazy summer day, the novel induces that exhilarating feeling that one has all the time in the world.”

—The Horn Book
(starred review)

“[A] gentle story about a group of childhood friends facing the crossroads of life and how they wish to live it. Young teens will certainly relate to the self-consciousnesses and uncertainty of all the characters.”

—School Library Journal (starred review)

“Part love story, part coming-of-age tale.” —
Publishers Weekly

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