The Everafter (10 page)

T
HIS STUPID PINECONE
…

I’m frustrated enough to imagine myself smashing it into pieces.

But it still doesn’t take me anywhere.

age 11

And I can put this here,
I say to myself, unzipping the center pocket of my backpack and placing my new school planner inside. I’m going to be so organized this year. I’ve already put my whole class schedule into the grid at the front of the book. And if I ever need to know whether I’m supposed to be using the word
affect
or
effect,
I can just flip to the back of the planner and…there it will be.

Next, I unzip the front pocket and toss in my magnetized locker mirror. Getting ready for the first day of school is…nerve-racking.

My stomach is in knots. Middle school is a whole new thing. Will I like it? Will I get lost in this new, bigger building? How much more homework are the teachers going to give us? Will I be able to keep up with it all?

I don’t actually want to go to middle school. I liked fifth grade. I knew everyone. I knew where everything was. I got good grades. I’m supposed to be excited to be moving up to a bigger school…dances and school sports, all that.

No, thanks.

At least I’ve got a planner to help me stay organized, right? At least I will if I manage not to lose it—the way I seem to lose everything.

I’d better check, just to make sure it’s where I think it is…but—

It. Isn’t. There. Where is it? Where? Where?
Where?!

I frantically start unzipping pockets. Not there. Not in this one. I swear I put it in this pocket. Really. I
swear.

“Mommmm!” I’m yelling. “Come here! I need you!”

I hear her charging up the stairs, and then she’s standing in the doorway. “What is it?” she asks.

“I can’t find my new planner.”

She laughs. “And here I thought you actually needed something.”

I hate it when she does that. Gets sarcastic, I mean. And I hate it even
more
when she acts like things that are really,
really
important don’t matter at all.

“I already put the names and numbers of all my friends in it,” I tell her, and then I burst into tears.

“Oh, honey,” Mom says. She comes into the room and sits on my bed, sighing. “Where did you see it last?”

“I thought I put it in my backpack. Just a few minutes ago. And now it’s gone.” I wipe at tears rolling onto my cheeks. I can’t stand the way my face feels all tight if I let tears dry on it.

“Maddy,” Mom says, “I don’t think you’re truly crying over that planner.”

“I
am,
” I insist, sniffling. I suddenly wish I hadn’t asked Mom for help. I can tell from the look on her face that she’s about to tell me how she thinks I’m actually feeling.

As if she would know.

“It’s always been hard for you to make changes, sweetie, and this is a pretty big change. All-new building. New people from other elementary schools. Teachers you’ve never seen before.”

“I don’t have trouble making changes,” I protest. At least I won’t if I have a planner.

Mom makes some kind of noise that sounds suspiciously like a…snort.

“Cut it out. Are you going to help me or what?”

She changes the subject. “All that sadness you’re feeling right now, and all that fear you have about whether everything is going to be okay…all that is good, Maddy. You
should want to feel that way.”

Right. It’s official. My mother is crazy.

“The way you’re feeling right now makes you appreciate all the good times you have. All the pain of change and loss…those make you realize how much you love the things you have. Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about that, you know.”

Oh, please. Emily Dickinson? My mother and her poets drive me crazy. None of my friends have parents who run around pulling out poetry for every occasion. Shakespeare, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot…sometimes I just want to scream when Mom starts reading me poetry. I mean, it was okay when it was about the cat, the fiddle, and a cow jumping over the moon, but now it’s all this deep stuff she reads to me, and she expects me to connect it to my life.

I scramble to think of something I can say to distract her, but I’m not fast enough. Mom’s already saying, “I’ll just go find that book….” She’s on her way out the door.

Why did I ever ask her for help in the first place?

I start looking for my planner again, but all too soon Mom is back. “Here it is,” she says excitedly. “‘For each ecstatic instant / We must an anguish pay / In keen and quivering ratio / To the ecstasy.’”

She looks at me as if I’m supposed to
get
this.

“See what I mean?” Mom asks.

“No. What’s ecstasy?” I ask.

Now she’s laughing. As if any of this is funny?

“It means extreme happiness. Giddy happiness. The best happiness in the world. She’s saying that for every moment of wonder and excitement, you have to pay with an equal amount of pain.”

Somehow, this doesn’t seem fair. I don’t understand why God would make you pay for your happiness with pain. Seems like we should just get to be happy. I tell Mom this.

“Hmmm…” she says. “I can see why you might think that’d be nice. Maybe the word
pay
isn’t quite the right description of it. I don’t think it’s an exchange like that. It’s more that…well, the two emotions are connected. They are one thing. And in coming together they make each other what they are. Without pain, you wouldn’t understand happiness. And without happiness, you wouldn’t feel the pain.”

“Let’s just get rid of all happiness and feel nothing if it means we don’t have to feel pain,” I say.

“You might find that boring,” Mom says as she starts opening all the pockets of my backpack. Then she’s laughing again and pulling out my new planner. “Here it is.”

“You found it!” I shriek, reaching for it in excitement.

“Just think…if you hadn’t experienced all those bad feelings about losing this, you wouldn’t get to feel this way right now,” Mom says, handing me—

Yeah. I get Mom’s point now. I think I have ever since I started going back to the Daddy-Daughter Dance. The loss of that ticket brought pain but also joy.

The Universe wants me to understand that I do have some choices. One of the most important ones is whether I accept painful moments and move beyond them. Forcing pain out of life isn’t always the right choice.

How come my mother (not to mention Emily Dickinson) got to figure all this out while she was still alive?

I had to be dead to get it.

age 12

“I wish I could get these stupid nails to stay on my fingers,” I tell Sandra and her grandmother.

“Yeah, well, at least you don’t have to wear this idiotic wig. It feels like I’ve got a boat balancing up there.”

“And my hat’s supposed to be any better?”

We both break out in laughter. We might be complaining, but we can’t wait to get out there and trick-or-treat. Years of Halloween have already provided us with standard procedures regarding candy trades. We both keep all the M&M’s we get because we love them. But SweeTarts always
go to Sandra. I hate them so much, I never even ask for a trade. Now, Tootsie Rolls, though, I like enough to demand an exchange for. I get her Snickers bars for them since Sandra hates peanuts.

We’re in the living room showing our costumes to Sandra’s grandmother before we take off for the evening. She hugs us both. “Y’all sure look terrific,” she drawls.

Sandra’s grandmother is fantastic. I’m glad, too. With the mother Sandra has, she deserves to have—and does have—the best grandmother in the world. I just don’t get it, though. How could this wonderful woman have been the parent of Sandra’s mother? It’s like trying to get your mind around the possibility that Mary Poppins could be the mother of Cruella De Vil.

Grandma Belle, as Sandra calls her (that’s short for Bellerue, her grandmother’s last name), is a true Southern lady. The most important thing in her life is her family, and she’ll do anything to make them happy. I get to see quite a bit of her because Mrs. Simpson is always sick (or at least she thinks she is), so Grandma Belle will fly up to Michigan and take care of Sandra and Mrs. Simpson whenever her daughter complains that she has the littlest headache. Mr. Simpson is polite to her, although Sandra thinks her dad doesn’t actually like having Grandma Belle around quite so much.

I can’t see how
anyone
could not want Grandma Belle
around. She makes marvelous cookies, and she compliments Sandra and me at least twenty times a day. She just sort of makes me happy to be alive. She’s always expected me to call her Grandma Belle, too, so I do.

“I’d look better if these nails would stay on my fingers,” I complain.

Grandma Belle picks one of the long green nails off my finger and examines the cheap adhesive on its back.
“Hhmpf,”
she grunts. “I’ll just find us some glue, Madison, for those nails of yours. That’ll take care of them. They’ll stay on when Grandma Belle’s finished with them.” She temporarily sticks the nail back on my finger.

We hear her rummaging around in the kitchen. I try to straighten Sandra’s clown wig. It’s sliding off to the left, and strands of her curly hair are starting to escape. “How about a bobby pin?” I ask. “Maybe that’ll keep it on.”

I’d volunteer to go up and get one out of the bathroom for her, but Mrs. Simpson is upstairs lying down because—of course—she’s just not feeling well. Another mystery ailment that the doctor can’t identify. When I went up there to get something ten minutes ago, she emerged from the bedroom and said, “My, what a lot of noise you can manage to make, Madison.” Then she looked me up and down and said with a Southern drawl, “What a great witch you are.”

And let me tell you, that
wasn’t
intended as a Halloween compliment. Somewhere along the line, Mrs. Simpson
learned the art of using a compliment to deliver underhanded insults. She’s the queen of it. And she manages to use a tone of voice that really lets you know that you’re being insulted behind words that otherwise seem harmless, even friendly.

I can still hear Grandma Belle out in the kitchen rummaging around for the glue. Then the intercom on the phone buzzes. Grandma Belle drops everything and runs upstairs. Her daughter needs her.

“Forget the nails,” Sandra tells me. “Let’s just go.”

She hands me a pillowcase for what I hope is going to be the mother lode of candy. That’s when I notice that another one of my green nails has fallen off. “Oh, skunk!” I say. “Another one’s gone.”

Sandra and I get down on the floor to look for the nail, but we can’t find it. After a few minutes, I say, “Oh, just forget it. Let’s go.”

I rip off all the other witch’s nails, too, and leave them sitting on the coffee table in the living room.

Maybe Mrs. Simpson will want them for the finishing touches on the costume she should be wearing every day.

age 17

My arm gets tangled up in the phone cord as I’m trying to hang it up.

Stupid thing…

Stupid school policy, too. Why can’t we just use our cell phones? It would be so much easier for me to call my mother on that than to have to get a pass from a teacher to use the office phone….

Stupid…oh, all right…stupid me. I wouldn’t even be making a phone call if I had remembered to bring my homework to school. I’ve just had to listen to Mom drone
on and on about how she was
not
happy to discover she’d have to leave work, drive home to pick up my homework, and bring it back to me…all by sixth hour. I’m certain to have to listen to more of the same over dinner tonight, too.

I grunt out my frustration as I pull my arm out of the super-long, must-be-able-to-go-anywhere-in-the-office phone cord. Vice Principal Patterson’s office door opens, and the air current whisks my pass right off the counter and onto the floor of the forbidden territory lying beyond the Great Counter Divide.

Must have pass to go back to class.

Must not cross the border into the sovereign territory of principals and secretaries.

Now what?

Wait…why are the cops coming out of Mr. Patterson’s office? This does not look good.

Tammy follows the police, and Mr. Patterson brings up the rear.

This looks even worse. Somehow, Tammy’s gotten caught. The question is, at what? She’s done enough illegal stuff that it’s anyone’s guess. But mine is the whole drug thing.

My great deductive skills are confirmed when she catches my eye as she walks through the gate separating the Land of Office Staff and the Land of Students. Her eyes flash at me with something so…feral…I’m terrified. Maybe she’s smarter than to threaten my life verbally in front of the
police, but she communicates effectively with her eyes. The message
You’re dead
stabs me with knifelike force.

I swallow.

I look away.

Tammy follows the policeman out of the office, but even as the door closes behind them, I can still feel Tammy’s eyes on me through the glass window between the office and the hall. She thinks I’ve told someone about what I saw in the bathroom a few weeks ago.

“Can I help you?” one of the secretaries asks me.

Probably not. Unless you’re good in hand-to-hand combat. Or have a weapon I can use to protect myself.
“Ummm,” I say, “my pass? It fell onto the floor on that side. I need it to get back to class.”

She glances around at the floor. “I don’t see it here. Are you sure it fell on
this
side?”

“Yeah.”

She looks around for a few more seconds and then gives up and writes me a new one.

All in all, I’m glad it’s taken a little extra time to clear up the pass issue. It’s pretty certain that the police have gotten Tammy out of the building by now.

I’d rather not see her at the moment.