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  For my father

  And for A, P, and D

  For MMF and MLR

  And for my mother

  Little friends may prove great friends.

  —AESOP

  Chapter 1

  A LUCKY DAY

  Perched on the edge of the sturdy school chair, her saddle shoes anchored to the metal bar near the bottom, Shirley Alice Burns had high hopes that today would be a lucky day as she wrote in her best cursive at the top of the blue-lined, oatmeal-colored paper:

  Shirley A. Burns

  June 16, 1961

  Class 6-1

  P.S. 606Q

  Spelling Test

  Shirley smiled at the unusual number of sixes. She had always counted on six to be lucky ever since three sixes had won her the top prize in a contest when she was six. Her guess—666—had come closest to the actual number of buttons in the big jar at the Main Street Library. She pictured Miss Chin, the children’s librarian, presenting her with a brand-new copy of Eloise by Kay Thompson, along with the jar of buttons. Shirley had opened the book and read the first sentence with delight—“I am Eloise I am six”—and her grandmother still used buttons from the jar when she needed to finish a blouse or a dress or some shorts she was sewing for herself, for Shirley, or for Shirley’s mother, Anna. Shirley also loved the number six because her birthday was July 6th, and her father’s was March 6th.

  Last night, Shirley had studied the twenty possible spelling words for today’s test at the dinette table in the company of Grandma, who sat quietly clipping the coupons she would present at the checkout the next time she shopped at Smilen Brothers Grocery, and Anna, who sat quietly polishing her fingernails. Shirley had referred to her mother as Anna since forever because Anna was not very Mom-ish. But never to Anna’s face. The gluey smell of the fingernail polish, like Duco cement, was distracting, but Shirley tried hard to concentrate and not smell it.

  After about twenty minutes, Shirley closed her notebook. “Thanks for not talking,” she said to Grandma and Anna.

  “What do you mean, thanks?” her mother asked, extending ten expertly polished coral fingernails. “Your job is to do well in school. My job is to work at Mr. Joseph’s. That’s the way it’s been with us since Hector was a pup.”

  “And my job is everything else,” Grandma piped up emphatically. “We are all on the same merry-go-round. We are all in the same world.” Only Grandma said, “Vee are all on the same merry-go-round. Vee are all in the same vorld.” Grandma was Russian and said her w’s like v’s.

  Shirley sometimes thought her school job was the hardest, especially when there was a test. Tests gave her the jitters even when she was as well prepared as she was today.

  Shirley put a lot of pressure on herself to achieve a perfect score on every spelling test. It was a hard-to-break habit, like her grandmother’s habit of searching for treasures in garbage cans and her mother’s habit of smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

  At 9:18 a.m. the test began.

  “The first word is stoic,” said her teacher, Mr. Merrill.

  The more thoughtful members of Shirley’s class, including Shirley, paused to think before they wrote. There was a no-erasing rule because Mr. Merrill said that people should trust their first instincts, which were usually correct.

  Shirley was aware that she could erase daintily and not be noticed by the usual tattlers in the class—Lannie Kaufman and Cynthia Sparks—but no erasing meant no erasing, and at school Shirley never did what she was not supposed to do.

  After the class finished writing the first word, Mr. Merrill said, “The second word is epitome.” This was followed by abhorrence, audible, petrified, deceased, pivotal, gargantuan, penultimate, and, finally, pugnacious—the ten moderately difficult words that Mr. Merrill had promised from the list of twenty.

  Shirley thought the words were just plain difficult this week. Not moderately. Especially the bonus word, acronym, which wasn’t even on the study list. She pictured the nym part of the word synonym and hoped for the best.

  Ten seconds later, Mr. Merrill declared the test over. “Pencils down. Pass your papers forward.”

  Shirley fidgeted nervously at the finality of his words.

  Then Mr. Merrill said, “There are only two weeks remaining in your sixth-grade careers, and almost every one of you has become a better speller since our first test back in September.”

  Shirley looked across the room at Maury Gordon. Maury was the absolute worst speller in the class, but still the nicest boy. Shirley saw his ears turn crimson. She was somewhat of an expert on the many shades a person could blush, since she did so herself with the same predictability as Grandma taking out her false teeth at night before bed.

  Shirley wished Mr. Merrill had considered Maury’s feelings before he spoke. But she could not undo what her teacher had done. What Shirley could do was be nice to Maury later on the bus ride home to Sparrowood Gardens, where they both lived.

  Maury sat three rows over from Shirley, who shared her double desk with Barry-the-Brain Ben-David, the undisputed class genius. Their desk was in the last row, as far away from Mr. Merrill’s as any of the thirty-six students’ desks could be. At the start of the school year, Shirley hadn’t been at all sure about her assigned seat in “Siberia,” as Grandma would have called it. But she soon discovered some things she liked about sitting so far from the teacher. There was, of course, Barry-the-Brain, who was pretty nice overall and shared his Fritos with Shirley after lunch. It was too bad his hair had cornflake-size dandruff that dropped down onto his bushy eyebrows every time he moved.

  Even better was watching what other kids in the seats in front of her were doing when they had no idea that anyone was looking. Like Marcy Bronson reaching into her desk for Milk Duds during silent reading and Lannie Kaufman removing a tiny rubber band from her braces and shooting it at Cynthia Sparks’s Girl Scout uniform. Or Beth Ann Lanier sneaking a note to Robin Miller this very second.

  It was probably about the party tonight at Sharon Levitt’s house, Shirley guessed. The one she wouldn’t be going to, even though she had been invited, as she always was. Shirley’s family didn’t own a car—a wise thing for sure since her mother had never learned to drive and neither had her grandmother.

  Anna wouldn’t let me go even if we had a car and she knew how to drive, Shirley thought. Or even if we lived within walking distance. It was all about Anna’s strictly enforced Safe-at-Home Doctrine, which Shirley respected but did not necessarily appreciate. Shirley wondered if Maury was going to the party.

  Then, just as he did every week, Mr. Merrill called for volunteers to share their Listening Post essays on current events, which he had collected from the class on Tuesday and passed back now. He also sent their essays to the radio station WNYC so each could be considered for a Listening Post Award the following week. If you were a winner, your name was announced on the radio. So far
, only one member of Class 6-1 had been recognized: Barry-the-Brain, back in April.

  Shirley strategically positioned herself behind puffy-haired Jocelyn Needleman in case no one volunteered and Mr. Merrill randomly called on people. Fortunately, half the class raised their hands.

  Shirley had chosen her topic from the New York Post that Anna had bought on her way home from work on Monday. Shirley went through the entire paper looking for a subject that interested her before returning to an article about a new organization that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had established called the Peace Corps. Its purpose was to spread peace and understanding among the world’s people. Serving in the Peace Corps was very appealing to Shirley.

  It was the last Listening Post essay of the year, and Shirley had tried to make hers truly compelling. She had worked on it for hours.

  “Peace and understanding are two vitally important elements that we need in order to survive. They are as vitally important as the air we breathe,” she had written. “The Peace Corps will be a boon to mankind from its inception, and I intend to volunteer as soon as I am old enough. Writing these words today is my pledge to realize them tomorrow.”

  Shirley saved meaty words she read or heard spoken—like boon, inception, and realize—for future use. It was another habit of hers, one she saw no need to break.

  She hoped that by the time she was eligible to volunteer for the Peace Corps, she would be proficient in French, her favorite subject. Shirley included that in her essay, too. Then she named all of the exotic places (aside from France) where French was spoken: Mali, Morocco, the Congo, Switzerland, French Guiana, Algeria, Haiti, and parts of Canada. Then she wrote, “The word corps—pronounced ‘core’—is even a French word. It means ‘body.’ The Peace Corps is a Body of Peace. The world can never have enough peace—or enough peace-loving people to spread it.”

  After some of her classmates shared their essays, Mr. Merrill said, “I want to stress how important it is that these essays are your own. That all essays you ever write are your own. Not your mother’s. Not your father’s. Not Walter Cronkite’s. Not Ernest Hemingway’s. Yours. I suspect that one student in the class is squirming in her chair this very minute for using someone else’s words in her essay this week. That is called plagiarism—from the Latin plagiarius—meaning ‘kidnapper.’ In this case, a kidnapper of another person’s words or ideas.”

  Everyone in Class 6-1 saw Mr. Merrill stare directly at Shirley. Some of them turned around and stared at her, too. Shirley saw Maury look down at his desk.

  I know I am blushing the purple-red of a beet, she thought. She knew she should just stand up and say, Those are my words. Those are my ideas. Every one of them came out of my head and off my pencil. School is my job. Not my mother’s. Not my grandmother’s. Not Walter Cronkite’s. Not Ernest Hemingway’s.

  But instead, Shirley said nothing and slunk so low in her seat that she could see into Barry’s desk: pencils, erasers, a ruler, workbooks, textbooks, an extra pair of eyeglasses, Microbe Hunters for silent reading, the corner of a photograph.

  The bell rang for lunch and Mr. Merrill collected the essays. Because it was Friday, the class ate at their desks so they could listen to WNYC broadcasting the past week’s current events. At the end of the radio show, the Listening Post winners were revealed, but no one from Class 6-1 was mentioned. There had been a long drought since Barry-the-Brain.

  Finally, it was time for recess.

  Shirley’s fingers rushed to the waist pocket of her dress, where a blue ball waited to be pulled out and slapped against the concrete handball wall in the schoolyard. Grandma sewed most of Shirley’s dresses with a custom-made pocket for her ball—except when the dresses were hand-me-downs from Helen Katz, her aunt Claire’s neighbor. Shirley stood up, eager to escape the stifling classroom and get outside.

  But not so fast.

  Mr. Merrill, holding a big manila envelope, was lowering himself into the chair just vacated by Barry. “I would like a few words with you, Shirley,” he said.

  Shirley’s best friend who was a girl, Edie Hill, wanted to stay behind with her, but Mr. Merrill said, “Please go outside, Edith. Shirley will join you shortly.”

  Shirley kept her hand in her pocket on top of the blue ball as she sat back down. She had never seen a person look as serious as Mr. Merrill did now—his face pink with purpose, his nostrils flared open like a dragon’s.

  “I am very disappointed in you, Shirley,” said Mr. Merrill. “Your choice of words, the way in which you put them together, and the overall focus of your essay are not in character with anything you’ve ever written. Some of the writing is just too polished … too adult … to be your own. I want you to be the best writer you can be, Shirley, but plagiarizing is not the way.”

  Shirley wanted to explain how hard she’d tried to be different this time, but her throat tightened as if a boa constrictor had wound itself around it. Yes, she had read the newspaper article, but the meaty words she’d chosen were ones she’d been saving for a long time.

  “Since you have no explanation, I will infer that you are aware that what you have done is equivalent to cheating and that you are sorry,” said Mr. Merrill sternly.

  Shirley stared at the big manila envelope, which said Listening Post.

  “Still no answer?” asked Mr. Merrill. “You realize that I cannot send your essay to WNYC this week. It wouldn’t be fair to the other students—or to you.”

  There was a long and agonizing pause.

  Mr. Merrill then held out a piece of paper. “I am returning this to you.”

  Shirley saw that it was her essay, folded in half as if ashamed of itself. She reached out her hand to receive it.

  “You are free to go outside now.”

  Shirley put her essay in a notebook and walked toward the door to the schoolyard. Untrue. Unfair. Unreasonable. She wished Mr. Merrill were Mrs. Greif, who came to school every Wednesday for the sole purpose of sharing her love of everything French with Shirley’s sixth-grade class. Mrs. Greif thought Shirley’s accent was excellente (French for “excellent”—say: “ec-say-lahnt”). Shirley thought everything about Mrs. Greif was excellente. She loved when Mrs. Greif called on someone in class, addressing him or her as monsieur or mademoiselle. It felt so grown-up. Mrs. Greif would never accuse me of cheating, Shirley thought, when I did an assignment exceptionally well.

  Edie ran over to hug Shirley in the schoolyard. “Mr. Merrill can be so mean,” Edie told her. “You’re such a good writer, Shirl. You would never steal anyone else’s words.”

  No, I wouldn’t, Shirley thought. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

  Shirley loved Edie. She didn’t get to see her outside of school because she and Edie lived too far away from each other.

  Edie and Shirley walked over to where Benny and Maury were playing handball. Of all the boys in the class, only those two didn’t play easy just because Edie and Shirley were girls.

  “What did Mr. Merrill want?” asked Maury, stopping the game.

  “Nothing,” said Shirley. “Let’s just play.”

  So against the giant cement wall in the schoolyard, Shirley lost herself to handball for whatever time remained of recess. She expelled much of the anxiety she’d kept inside while she listened to Mr. Merrill accuse her of plagiarism. Of kidnapping. Because when Shirley played handball, nothing else mattered. Not a single thing.

  I could beat the handball champion of the world, she thought, even though her fingers ached and swelled to the size of a baseball glove—which Shirley wished she had since she also loved to play baseball, but couldn’t unless she borrowed someone’s glove. Her mother insisted on buying her dolls and ballet slippers and bracelets and charms from fancy stores with the money she earned as a saleswoman at Mr. Joseph’s Emporium of Fine Old Things, but Shirley had never told Anna that she’d trade them all in two wags of a dog’s tail for a baseball glove.

  Shirley did not want to go back to the classroom when recess
was over. But she had no choice. That was the rule.

  On Friday afternoons, Mr. Merrill had two or three students read and talk about their book reports. Ronald Sackheim, who had one blue and one green eye, started with his. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain,” he said confidently, knowing how much Mr. Merrill loved Mark Twain.

  Shirley sat up in her seat; it was harder than a rock. But Mr. Merrill insisted that everyone practice good posture at all times, and Shirley was in no mood to be singled out again.

  After Ronald, Shirley listened to Maury do his report on a book about Alexander Graham Bell.

  When it was Barry-the-Brain’s turn, he began, “The Old Man and the Sea was a very profound tale of strong wills.”

  Shirley heard one brilliant word after the next with admiration, but it was still hard to listen to when all she wanted to do was go home.

  Shirley wished away the last minutes her watch said were needed to get to the end of that Friday afternoon, twisting the stem until it wouldn’t twist anymore. It’s all wound up like I am, she thought. She decided she might need to choose a new lucky number after all. This could be the worst day of my life.

  But then Barry was concluding his report. Hooray. Shirley slid forward in her chair and planted her saddle shoes firmly on the gray linoleum floor. When the bell rang, she gathered her things and stood.

  “See you all on Monday,” said Mr. Merrill. “Happy Father’s Day to all of your fathers.” Mr. Merrill’s dragon nostrils found Shirley as she filed out the door with the other kids who took the bus home.

  Shirley smiled weakly at Mr. Merrill and thought, Anna would want me to be respectful to my teacher, even when I don’t want to be.

  Chapter 2

  AT LEAST NOW I KNOW

  Shirley climbed onto the school bus and sat down next to Maury. He always kept his tan book bag on the seat next to him and moved it to his lap only when he saw Shirley get on, even though their pesky neighbor, Beryl Abbie, a fifth grader who was the size of a third grader, tried to tug it onto the floor so she could sit next to him.