The Romeo and Juliet Code (28 page)

Right now my grandpa and I are going outside to the steps to put up a flyer on the glass front door. It says
YARD SALE TODAY
:
EXERCISE BICYCLE
,
DISHES
,
BOOKS
,
AND A BALANCE BEAM
. Okay. The balance beam is mine. I used to be in gymnastics until about a month ago. Okay. It used to be my life. I spent a million hours a week on that balance beam. I lived on that freaking beam. But it was my idea to sell it.

It’s cold out here. My grandpa’s scarf (which he calls a muffler) blows around. My grandpa blows around in the wind. When he leans over, a silver letter opener falls out of his pocket onto the snow. “Hey,” says my grandpa, “nobody was gonna buy a letter opener anyway. Nobody writes real letters anymore. Right, pal?”

“Whatever, Grandpa,” I say. Right now I would like to do a cartwheel, but I don’t. This cartwheel feeling wells up in me constantly, the same way my breath comes up out of me. I used to do cartwheels like the way other people say yes or no. Cartwheels used to
be
my yes and my no. From here I can see my balance beam. It’s lying there waiting for me to run toward it, waiting for my handsprings and my double twists. I turn away. My grandma was like, “Are you sure you want to sell this, Louise?” I didn’t answer her.

Henderson says that hikers freezing to death on Mount Everest don’t feel a thing. He says they think they’re falling asleep next to a warm fire when actually they’re lying in a snowbank, their body temperatures dropping to below zero while they are slowly becoming blocks of ice.

Soon enough the front doors open and a whole herd of revved-up South Pottsboro shoppers pour in. “Bingo!” says my grandma, twinkling at all the customers milling around. I swear my grandma stepped out of
The Wizard of Oz
. This includes the Munchkin vocabulary.

“She’s a pro. Your grandma’s no space cadet, that’s for sure,” says my grandpa, swinging his arms around.

Now people start picking up things: my grandpa’s ripped magazines, my grandma’s sweaters, beat-up rusty pots and pans. There’s a row of old shoes under the table and in the lineup I see a pair of my mom’s. They’re kind of worn to the side and you can see where her toes rested against the soft leather. They’re sky blue and each shoe carries with it the shape of my mom’s foot and the whole shift and feel of her weight. A little girl is jumping around holding them now because she wants them for her dress-up box. “Okay,” says the lady with her. “We’ll buy them.” When the lady hands my grandma two dollars, my grandma looks down. Her face gets lost and blurry and she holds the shoes in her hands for just a second too long.

I look up now and Mrs. Stevenson is sitting on my balance beam. She’s Terry Stevenson’s mom. “Sold,” she says, glaring at some man who is walking by. “Sold,” she says again when he turns around. “How much is the balance beam?” she calls out. “I’d like to buy it for my daughter. You’re not part of the team anymore, Louise?” She looks over at me with a blank smiling face, the kind of empty, almost hurt smile other people’s mothers always give you, as if they cannot bear to give any part of a real smile to anybody but their own child. I don’t answer. I don’t feel like answering anybody today.

My balance beam is one of the first things to sell, but it is one of the last things to leave. It sits in the foyer late into the afternoon. Then the snowstorm gets worse and the electricity goes out and it’s all shadowy and dark down there. Then it’s a good thing that beam is pushed off to the side because anybody could stumble over it in the dark and really get hurt. You could tell how much Mrs. Stevenson wanted that beam because she sends over four high school kids to get it during the worst part of the storm.

After the yard sale, I decide to order a pizza. This is a no-brainer as I practically live on pizza. Palomeeno’s Pizza is very dependable. They would deliver pizza even if there were a tornado in South Pottsboro with roofs flapping around and houses flying off their foundations, like in
The Wizard of Oz
.

For some dumb reason, I am thinking about my mom’s sky blue shoes when I place the order on my cell. My dad liked those shoes. They were the kind of shoes you had to follow across the rug because of that color. I can’t remember anything else. Zippo. Squat. I’m glad that kid bought those shoes because now I won’t have to see that color by mistake when I open a closet door. Lake blue. Pond blue. Dark sky blue.

When the doorbell buzzes, my grandma is there before I am. She’s always hoping to nose around and get chatty with some boring dork. My grandpa is right behind her, looking for a chance to barge in on what she’s doing. So with a lineup like this, there is no chance I’ll even
see
this pizza for a while. I lean against the refrigerator, ho-humming to myself.

My grandma throws the door open, and under normal conditions, an hour later, after we’ve heard the guy’s entire life history, she’ll hand me the pizza. But not this time. No, this is different. The door is standing open and my grandma sort of freezes when she sees the delivery kid. Then she crumples against my grandpa and backs away.

“Okay, thank you, son,” my grandpa says too loudly. I hate when he calls total strangers
son
. He takes the pizza and hands it to me, saying, “Thank you. Thank you. You got correct change, pal?” He leads my grandma to the couch with his arm around her. I can hear them now murmuring and whispering together in the living room.

I give the kid the money from the pizza money jar. He seems to be about fourteen years old. I think a junior from South drives the pizza van and I’m guessing this kid does the running around. To me he doesn’t look like a serial killer. He looks all happy in a pizza delivery dude sort of way because he found the place easily, didn’t get lost, and isn’t having any trouble getting paid. The pizza smells promising. It’s the perfect thing to order during a snowstorm after you have just sold the most important thing in your life. Ha ha.

I look again at the kid in the cheerful red jacket with the pizza name tag on the pocket. I look at his face and suddenly out of nowhere I feel like I’m falling or sliding. Henderson saw this film taken on Mount Everest and this woman climber forgot to hitch back on to the rope and she went flying off the mountain a million miles an hour, grabbing at the snow. They filmed her falling. The thing is, after that, the other hikers had to keep on going, trying to get to the summit.

I take the pizza box. It feels so warm. It smells so hopeful. By the time I get to the living room and flop down on the couch and open the lid, my grandma and grandpa are fully recovered from whatever it was. My grandpa, as usual, is being a couch hog. But still, my grandma looks at me and says, “You okay? Everything all right, sweetie? That pizza looks delicious!” which is weird and getting weirder because my grandma hates pizza.

My grandpa reaches for a slice. My grandma frowns. “What?” he says, looking down at his old slippers. “They’re comfortable. Who cares what they look like?”

“Men. I’m not talking about the slippers,” says my grandma, taking the slice of pizza out of his hand and putting it back in the box. “You’re having wild salmon for dinner.”

“Grrr,” says Grandpa. “Watch out for me. I’m a party animal.” He tightens his arm around my grandma and nuzzles against her. She’s wearing her green organic sweatshirt that says,
I’M ECO MEAN AND GLOBAL GREEN
. And she’s got Grandpa squeezed into one that’s too tight for him and has a hood, which he’s wearing now. It makes him look like a big pizza-stealing elf.

“By the way, pal,” says my grandpa, “there’s a note for you sticking out from under the doormat in the hall.” He puts his arm around me too and then he says, “Two beautiful dolls and I’m here in the middle. I call that luck.”

“Grandpa, you’re sitting on my skirt. I can’t get up,” I say, pushing him away.

Out in the hall, I look down at the wool doormat. It has a picture of a sheep featured on it and below it says,
WOOLCOME HOME
. I see the white paper poking out from one of the corners. I know the routine. How many of these letters and notes did I used to get from Merit Madson? Every time I turned around, I would find another. And what did they say? Oh, cute little things like
Quit the gymnastics team or your toast.
(It should have been “you’re toast,” but Merit Madson can’t spell.) Last month I felt something in my boot, something scratching my ankle. I reached down and pulled out a freaking letter from Merit Freaking Madson. It said something really encouraging about me finding another after-school sport.

I do see the note, but I don’t want to pick it up. On the other hand, I don’t want my grandpa to read it. Since he’s been retired, my grandma says, he has nothing to do but nose around in other people’s business.
My
business. So I reach for the note and open the folded paper.

I look down at it and read,
I am your biggest fan
. I reread it to make sure I got it right. I did. It says clearly,
I am your biggest fan
.

What? I mean, seriously, what?

My grandpa comes to the open door and so does my grandma. They look like Mr. and Mrs. Mouse with these curious eyes peering out at me. I’m not your baby mouse, Grandpa. I don’t eat corn like you do and I want to go back to Cinnamon Street and live there. Alone.

“Louise?” says my grandma.

“I’m not Louise anymore. I changed my name,” I say and I push by them and go in my room and slam the door.

Outside my window, the snowstorm is whirling and raging like white anger and when I push my face against the glass, I can see millions and billions of snowflakes dancing and diving past my window. Henderson says snowflakes are little universes unto themselves. Each snowflake a little world different from all the others. And then he tells me to stick my head out into a snowstorm and look straight up, to understand
everything
. This is how he talks, I’m not kidding you. I think about the pizza delivery guy again. In my mind I look at the name tag on his jacket. It says Benny McCartney. Did Benny McCartney leave me the note? Does Benny McCartney
like
me? Or has there been some kind of cosmic mix-up, some kind of mistake, a big mistake, like forgetting to hitch back on to a rope when you’re halfway up Mount Everest in the middle of winter.

Phoebe Stone
spent a year in the United Kingdom when she was ten years old, and came back with a British accent and a love of all things English. Her novel
Deep Down Popular
was hailed by
Booklist
in a starred review.
Kirkus Reviews
called the book, “sweet and winning.” Phoebe lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

Copyright © 2011 by Phoebe Stone. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. S
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ANTERN
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Arthur A. Levine Books hardcover edition designed by Whitney Lyle, published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., January 2011.

This edition first printing, May 2012

Cover photography © 2011 by Kate Powers
Cover design by Whitney Lyle

e-ISBN 978-0-545-44309-8

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