The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy Page 6

  “Well, we’re just as proud as all get-out,” Mom said. “And you should be proud of yourself too.”

  “That’s what Ms. Lollyheart said. Actually, she gave a whole speech about it after the show was over.”

  It was amazing how perfectly I remembered that speech, like I’d had a tape recorder bolted into the back of my head too. I swear I could have given it to my parents word for word if I’d wanted to. I didn’t though. That would have been a little too weird.

  “A whole speech about you?”

  “Pretty much. She said I shouldn’t put myself down.”

  “When have you ever done that?” said Dad, laughing.

  “When I got to Allbright and was surrounded by geniuses.”

  “Oh, come on, Franny. You’re every bit as smart as—”

  “Don’t worry, Dad. I was just trying to be funny. And after today my self-esteem is in really, really great shape. Ms. Lollyheart told us that they’d been doing the robot exercise at Allbright since the school was founded, and in all that time, only two kids had ever built the robot perfectly. Me and some guy who graduated years ago. Is that cool, or what?”

  At the other end of the line I could hear Mom sniffling, like she was blowing her nose. Dad sounded like he was choking back tears, but finally he managed to speak. “Wow!” he said. “Yes, that is cool. You must be walking on air!”

  “I’m strangely calm, actually. I just feel really good.”

  “I wish I could hug you,” Mom said.

  “I’ll hug myself and pretend you did.”

  “We miss you guys so much,” she said then. “Any chance you and the twins could come home this weekend?”

  “Gosh, no!” I said. “Saturday is the last day of orientation. And after that, there are all these weekend field trips and lots of activities. And once classes start, there’s going to be homework to do. It’s going to be hard to get away for a while. But we’ll see you at Thanksgiving. That’s only a couple of months away.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Zoë is busy too,” Mom said glumly. “And J. D. hasn’t called once. If you see him, would you please remind him he has parents?” I could tell she was upset. “I have to say, it really bothers me that you don’t have phones in your rooms.”

  “They say phones would distract us from our schoolwork. And they’re probably right. I think of all those hours I used to spend talking to Beamer, despite the fact that I saw him at school every day! Maybe that’s why I didn’t make better grades.”

  “Franny, that’s not the point. We need to be able to reach you when we want to.”

  “You have the numbers of the phone booths,” I reminded Mom. “They’re in your parent information booklet. Someone can always run upstairs and get me if I have a call.”

  “Oh, sure,” Mom said, with an edge in her voice. I knew what she was thinking: It would be a real pain for the person who’d have to climb three flights of stairs to knock on my door. Mom wouldn’t call me on that pay phone for anything less than the house on fire or Dad in the hospital.

  “You couldn’t reach us all that easily at camp, either,” I said, knowing instantly I had stepped over some line.

  “Right,” Dad said, kind of snappish. Now he wasn’t happy with me either. “Well, I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m buying cell phones for the three of you. This pay-phone business is totally unacceptable.”

  “Dad, cell phones are strictly forbidden at Allbright.”

  “Sorry, hon. Sometimes parent rules trump school rules. And this is one of those times.”

  “But it says, specifically, in the student handbook—”

  “Is this Franny I’m talking to? Since when were you such a stickler for rules? Look, they don’t want kids taking phone calls in the middle of English class or text-messaging answers to their friends during tests. I can understand that. But they can’t object to kids staying in touch with their parents! Just keep your phone in your room, keep it charged, and check it for messages once or twice a day, in case we’re trying to reach you. Every now and then you can use it to actually place a call to Dad and me. This is not negotiable, by the way.”

  The conversation kind of petered out after that. I said that my suite mate was waiting upstairs to teach me how to play chess, so I’d better go.

  “We really miss you,” Mom said pointedly.

  “Don’t worry,” I answered. “We’ll be home in a couple of months.”

  It wasn’t till I was climbing the stairs to my room that I realized what I ought to have said, what Mom fully expected me to say: “I really miss you too.”

  9

  Thanksgiving rolled around and the family was all together again, for four days at least. Aside from the fact that Cal was staying with us for the holiday weekend, everything was back to the usual routine—we were sleeping in our own familiar beds, sitting at our regular places at the dinner table, making the same dumb jokes. You’d think this would all seem perfectly natural to me, that it would make me comfortable and happy. But it didn’t. I felt awkward and ill at ease, because now I saw everything through different eyes.

  Since I’d been at Allbright, it had become important to me to have everything around me look nice, and be clean, and be in order. Now I saw, for the first time, that 17 Creek Lane was a mess. I don’t mean that it was dirty or anything; there was just a lot of stuff strewn around. And things that used to look okay—like the new chenille throw Mom had bought last year to drape over the back of the couch and the decorative pots by the front door that had been filled with red geraniums—didn’t look okay anymore. The chenille throw was lying in a pile on the couch where someone had used it the night before. And the flowerpots were still there, only now they held nothing but dirt. How hard could it be, I wondered, to fold up a blanket or haul those pots to the garage for the winter?

  Without thinking, I picked up some newspapers from the kitchen table—old papers, I noticed, from the day before—and arranged them in a neat pile on the counter. Dad shot me a curious look, kind of playfully shocked. I smiled and gave a nervous little shrug. I’d need to watch myself, I thought. This was their house, and if they wanted magazines and newspapers strewn all over it, then that was their right. I’d be back in my own room at school by Sunday night.

  And anyway, I had bigger things to worry about: Thanksgiving dinner. As I feared, Mom had labored over a meal fit for a plowman (if he happened to be a very important plowman she was determined to impress). In addition to the turkey, there were two kinds of stuffing (one with oysters, one with chestnuts), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy, and white rolls with butter. Basically, it was your traditional holiday meal of meat, bread, bread, bread, potatoes, potatoes, and grease. The only vegetables on the table consisted of beans drenched in butter and sprinkled with bacon bits. Out in the kitchen, I knew, there lurked at least two kinds of gooey pies.

  It was one of those impossible situations: I knew from my PD lesson on table manners (and from plain old common sense) that it is unacceptable to refuse food that has been lovingly prepared in your honor, unless it will actually cause you to vomit or will send you into anaphylactic shock. On the other hand, from my nutrition lessons in health class, I knew that virtually every item on the table was sure to clog my arteries, send my blood sugar into overdrive, or simply make me fat.

  What to do?

  Think before you speak, I told myself. (We were working on impulse control in PD.) Say something gracious.

  “Gosh, Mom, this is fabulous!” I gushed, and began moving my food around on the plate in such a way that it looked like I’d eaten more than I had. This is a trick they teach you in PD manners class.

  “So yummy!” Zoë agreed, doing the exact same thing.

  “It’s really a treat, Mrs. Sharp,” added Cal. “A real home-cooked meal! Thank you so much for going to all this trouble.”

  J. D. looked up from his plate, studied the three of us for a minute with a baffled expression, did a
little eye roll, then went back to chowing down. Clearly he wasn’t the least bit concerned about the condition of his arteries.

  What? I almost said—and definitely would have said back in the days before I’d learned the importance of curbing my impulses. But I held my tongue, because it’s unpleasant to fight with your brother at the dinner table, and especially when you have a guest.

  “I don’t know what to do about the food situation,” I said to Zoë after dinner, while Mom was washing the dishes and Dad was on the couch, sleeping off the four thousand calories he had just ingested. “If this goes on for another two and a half days, they’ll have to admit us to the hospital.”

  Zoë thought about it for a minute, then looked up at me and smiled. “Mom’s going overboard because she hasn’t seen us in a while. She wants to give us a treat. We need to make her feel okay about cooking healthy food. And I know just how to do it.”

  Later that night, before we went to bed, we took Mom aside and told her that Cal had recently lost a lot of weight—which was, in fact, the truth—and that she really needed to watch her diet. A master stroke on Zoë’s part, I must say! Mom was totally sympathetic and her feelings weren’t hurt at all. I predicted that on the following night, we could safely expect broiled skinless chicken breasts and steamed broccoli.

  Brooklyn had promised to come by the house on Friday morning—we were such a regular trio that Cal and I missed him already—and I’d invited Beamer to join us too so he could meet my new friends. I’d been looking forward to it all week. Only now, coming home had strangely unsettled me. Suddenly I was terrified that Brooklyn and Cal would find Beamer ordinary—the way they probably thought my parents were loud and my house was messy.

  But the thing that worried me the most was that I might see Beamer through new eyes too. What if I actually felt embarrassed by him in front of the others? What if I didn’t like him anymore? The very thought made my stomach flip. He was the best friend I’d ever had.

  Brooklyn arrived first, around ten.

  “Omygosh!” I croaked as I opened the door. He’d had a haircut; the dreads were gone.

  “Brooklyn, why?” asked Cal. “They looked so cool!”

  “Too fussy,” he said, passing his hand over what remained of his hair. “Too—defining. I am not, after all, my hair.”

  “You put it so well,” I said. “You must be a writer.”

  He would never admit it, but I suspected the haircut had had something to do with his PD video. Probably he’d noticed (or his counselor had pointed out) that the dreadlocks were kind of flashy. And the more I thought about it, I realized that they were the first thing you noticed when he walked into a room. With his new look, you couldn’t tell right off what sort of person he was. You’d have to talk to him awhile to find out that he was a poet. I had never considered this before—how strange it had been for Brooklyn to go around advertising himself to the world like that. Yeah, the more conservative look had definitely been the way to go.

  Beamer was due any minute, and since I already had hair on my mind, I remembered how he tended to go for months and months between haircuts, till he got all shaggy and hippie-like—then he shaved it all off and looked like a Marine recruit for a while. He had, basically, no vanity whatsoever about his appearance. This had never bothered me before. I used to tease him about it because I thought it was funny. Now I realized that he was sending strange messages about himself to everyone he met: This is who I am, a person who doesn’t give a flip about how he looks. I wondered if there was some subtle way I could get this across to him without hurting his feelings.

  Just then the doorbell rang and Beamer blew in like a storm.

  I’m not sure I’d ever seen him that keyed up before. He reminded me of his dogs, the way they would jump up on him and dance in circles and bark hysterically whenever he came home in the afternoons. Beamer didn’t bark, of course, but he talked too loud and hugged me within an inch of my life. He greeted Cal and Brooklyn like they were long-lost friends instead of complete strangers. And when Zoë and J. D. came in, he gushed over them, too. He was totally out of control. (My only consolation was that he was in slightly post-Marine-recruit hair mode.)

  There was no sitting down for a casual chat. He absolutely had to show me the documentary he was working on for his film class. He insisted everybody go immediately into the den, where he hooked up the camera to the TV so he could show us what he had so far. He didn’t ask if we actually wanted to watch it. He just assumed we did. I burned with embarrassment.

  “Beamer’s in a special magnet school for the arts,” I explained. “That’s why he’s taking filmmaking.”

  “Cool,” Brooklyn said.

  “Our assignment is to do a documentary on ‘what makes us happy,’” Beamer said. “I know that sounds totally sappy, but my teacher says that beginning filmmakers are always doing this dark, depressing stuff because they think it makes them seem profound, when it’s actually a lot harder to make a film that’s positive and upbeat without being sickly sweet. At the moment I’m still gathering the images. I’ll pull it all together and add music at the end, when I do the editing.”

  “I can tell you really like your new school,” I said, hoping I had hit the right note, simultaneously signaling to Cal and Brooklyn that I thought he seemed a little over the top while sounding encouraging to Beamer. It was the sort of subtlety that took a lot of practice to do well, and I wasn’t too sure of myself yet. I was afraid maybe I sounded like a total fake.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said, looking at me curiously, the wind out of his sails a little. “I feel like I belong there.”

  “That’s great,” I said lamely.

  Beamer’s dogs came up on the screen. They were out in the backyard and it was a bright, sunny day, so the shadows from the trees were very dark. The dogs were running in and out of the sunlight, and something about the camera setting made them almost disappear in the glare of the sun, then reappear when they went into the shadows.

  “Wow,” said J. D., who was now lying on his back (still under the table), watching the TV upside down. “That’s so neat!”

  Beamer smiled. “Me and my dogs, you know—I couldn’t make a film about things that make me happy without them…”

  I winced to hear him call his video a “film.” It sounded so pretentious.

  “…but with dogs, it’s hard not to get too cute, you know? That’s the challenge. I was trying to find a different way of seeing them.”

  “I think it’s wonderful, Beamer,” Zoë said.

  “Wait, you’ll love this.” The scene switched to his living room. The camera must have been set to film automatically, because Beamer was in the picture, sitting on the couch. Again, he’d been thinking about the light, because the window to the west had Venetian blinds and the sun was streaming in, casting a shadow of stripes across him, changing shape with the contour of his body.

  Now his largest and oldest dog came into the picture, a white English setter with caramel speckles. He walked stiffly over to Beamer, sat down, and laid his head dreamily in Beamer’s lap, closing his eyes contentedly.

  “Sweet Sandy,” I said.

  “Franny’s a big Sandy fan,” Beamer explained with a happy smile. “Of which he has many. Everybody loves a soft dog.”

  The camera panned in for a close-up.

  “How’d you do that?” Brooklyn asked. “Is somebody else holding the camera?”

  “He’s got a remote control in his left hand,” J. D. said.

  “Very observant!” Beamer reversed the picture to show us. “See?” Then he pressed PLAY again, and Sandy made a second entrance.

  The scene changed again. Now we were with Beamer’s grandfather out in the garage, where he did his “inventing.” I guess Beamer was worried that his subjects were all too ordinary (What makes me happy? My dogs! My family!), so he was trying to show them in fresh and original ways. In this case he moved from his grandfather’s craggy profile to his working hands, coming in clos
er and closer till you saw only the fingers.

  “I’m thinking, when I have enough footage, that maybe I’ll cut each section into bits, and mix them all up. Not just three minutes of dogs, followed by three minutes of Grandpa, and like that. I think I can find natural transition points in each bit that leads to another bit. I’ll use music to help me establish a visual rhythm.”

  At that point Beamer’s “film” ended abruptly.

  “So, that’s it,” he said, smiling shyly. “A work in progress.”

  We all clapped politely, and Beamer looked pleased. I have to say that it was a lot better than I’d expected it to be—though I shouldn’t have been surprised. Beamer’s very talented.

  “Great stuff, man,” Brooklyn said.

  “Really!” Cal agreed.

  Beamer was unhooking the camera from the TV and packing the cables away in his bag. “But I can’t do this thing without including Franny.”

  “What? You don’t need me,” I said.

  “Yes, actually, I do,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “Because you are one of the things that makes me happy.”

  “Persons. Persons who make you happy. I am not a thing.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  He said he wanted me to go up to my room to get my copy of David Copperfield. We had done a book report on it together in sixth grade, for extra credit. Actually, I had read the whole thing out loud to him while he worked on his sculpture, since I’m a better reader than he is. It had been the real beginning of our friendship.

  “Beamer, nobody wants to watch a movie of me reading a book. How boring is that?” I knew, of course, that I had just been extremely ungracious, and my PD counselor would have been horrified. But I felt confused and self-conscious with everybody watching. This was getting to be too much about Beamer and me, and I was leaving my friends out.