Anastasia, Absolutely Page 2

  Walking home, the dog continued to stop and sniff and examine. Everything seemed to be of intense interest. He analyzed the shape of a rock in the gutter. Then he pawed at a crumpled paper, studied it closely for a moment, and tasted it meticulously. He inspected a dead leaf with care. He nudged a twig and turned it over with an investigatory paw. It was almost as if he were a detective, looking for clues of some sort. As if he were a—

  SLEUTH.

  The light bulb appeared! It had the oooo sound she needed. Anastasia grinned and tried it out on the dog.

  "Come, Sleuth," she said. He looked up, cocked his head, and sauntered cheerfully over to where she stood.

  "Onward, Sleuth," she commanded, and they continued along.

  Now and then the shaggy dog stopped to raise his leg. He marked his places along the way, as if, newly named, he needed to reidentify his turf. This is my neighborhood, he was saying. Watch out, world. Sleuth lives here.

  Anastasia Krupnik

  VALUES

  1. Suppose that in order to protect and save a small vegetable garden that would feed a hungry family for an entire summer, you were required to hit a ground- hog over the head with a rock and kill it. Would you do so?

  Although I like animals a lot (I have a dog, myself) I think human beings are more important, in the great scheme of things. And even though I basically don't believe in harming living creatures, if I absolutely had to, I guess I would kill a groundhog.

  But first I would have to be absolutely positive that it was the groundhog that was eating the vegetables. I mean, what if maybe it was actually something else, maybe a person or something, maybe even a starving person who was sneaking in at night and stealing vegetables, and making it took as if a groundhog was doing it?

  And even if it was definitely a groundhog, why would I have to kill it with a rock? I mean, couldn't you give it a painless shot or something?

  I guess I don't think it would exactly be right to kill it, even with a painless shot, but it would be righter than letting a whole family starve to death.

  Even though I don't believe they actually would. They could get food from dumpsters behind the supermarket, if they had to. Or the Solvation Army would help.

  2

  "I named him!" Anastasia announced, dashing into the kitchen after she had unhooked the dog's leash and hung it with her jacket in the hall closet. "His name is Sleuth! It's because he sniffs at everything, like a detective. Like Colombo! And it has the oooo sound!"

  "I like it," Mrs. Krupnik said."Sleuth. Yes. It's good. But I hope tomorrow morning you'll hear him a little sooner, Anastasia. I don't want to have to get up and call you every morning."

  "I'll try," Anastasia promised. She poured dry dog food into the dog's dish on the kitchen floor, beside the door to the pantry, and watched him gobble enthusiastically.

  Then she sliced a banana into the bowl of raisin bran that her mother had set in her place at the breakfast table. In the corner of the kitchen, the dog curled up after eating his own breakfast and immediately fell asleep beside his bowl. It didn't seem quite fair that, after an early morning walk, and after a big bowl of dog food, now he got to go back to sleep while she had to go to school.

  "Did you clean up after him?" her father asked, looking up from his New York Times.

  Anastasia nodded. She gave her father a particular look, which meant to convey the message: This is not a topic I care to discuss at breakfast.

  "What did you do with it?" Mrs. Krupnik asked.

  Anastasia sighed and put down her spoon. "I put it in a plastic bag," she said patiently. "Actually, I used the plastic bag that your newspaper came in, Dad."

  Myron Krupnik looked down at his newspaper. "Oh. I wondered why it was naked this morning," he said. "Well, fine. That's recycling, I guess."

  Sam was stirring his oatmeal thoughtfully. He always played games with his oatmeal. "What did you put in the plastic bag?" he asked.

  "Never mind," Anastasia told him.

  "Then where did you put the plastic bag, Anastasia?" Her mother had gone to the counter to pour another cup of coffee.

  The raisin bran had become less and less appealing now that her entire family seemed to be obsessed by the need to know more about the disposal of dog excrement than she had any interest in telling them. Anastasia put her spoon down and wiped her mouth on a paper napkin. She sighed. "I dropped it in the trash can in our garage," she said.

  "What did you drop in the trash can?" Sam asked loudly.

  "Nevermind, Sam," said his mother. She sat back down with her second cup of coffee.

  In the corner, Sleuth stirred. He raised his head, sniffed, stood up, sneezed, turned around in a circle, lay back down, and fell asleep again. Mrs. Krupnik looked over at him.

  "I don't know," she said, a little uneasily. "It bothers me that he looks like a mop. If he had a handle sticking out of his back, you wouldn't be able to tell him from a dust mop. And I am not someone who enjoys having a mop in the corner of the kitchen. It makes me feel guilty for being a lousy housekeeper."

  The dog yawned.

  "Mops don't yawn," Anastasia reassured her mother.

  "I don't think I've sneezed once in the twenty-four hours we've had him," Myron Krupnik announced. "I think it's going to work. And I like his name, Anastasia. Good choice. There was once a terrific play named Sleuth, incidentally. It had Laurence Olivier in it. And they made it into a great movie. I'll rent it for us sometime."

  "Is it about a dog?"

  "Nope," her father said. "It's about a sleuth."

  "The dog sneezed, though," Sam pointed out. "He sneezed last night and he just sneezed again. Maybe he's allergic to us!"

  "Dogs always sneeze," Anastasia said. "They sneeze when they're happy. My dog book explained that."

  Sam stirred the last of his oatmeal and took a final bite. With his mouth full, he said, "But then how come there's a Sneezy and a Happy in the Seven Dwarfs? Because if you sneeze when you're happy, then Sneezy and Happy would be the same one, and—"

  Anastasia interrupted him. "It's only that way with dogs, not dwarfs, Sam.

  "Bv the way," she said, turning to her parents, "would you guys kill a groundhog if it were eating a garden that belonged to poor, hungry people?"

  "I'd call the Humane Society," her mother said.

  "I'd go to the hardware store and get a Havahart trap," her father said. "Then I'd trap it and let it loose someplace, maybe in New Hampshire or Vermont or something. Of course they wouldn't love that in New Hampshire or Vermont. Maybe I'd try to sell it to a pet store."

  "I'd kill it," Sam said happily. "I'd shoot it with a shotgun. I'd blast its head right off." He aimed his toast at Anastasia and made a shooting sound. She noticed that he had bitten his toast carefully into the shape of a handgun.

  "Maybe it could be a cute little pet, Sam," Anastasia suggested, hoping to enhance her brother's values. "You wouldn't shoot a pet, would you?"

  Sam frowned. "No," he said. "I guess not." He ate the handgrip of his toast gun.

  "But actually," Mrs. Krupnik said, stirring her coffee thoughtfully, "if a whole family was depending on that garden, maybe—"

  Myron Krupnik looked up from his paper. "Killing wildlife for food isn't morally unsound," he commented. "Primitive societies do it all the time."

  "But what if—" his wife began.

  "See?" Anastasia wailed. "We're all of us indecisive! We ought to be named the wishy-washy family!"

  Her mother's eyes lit up the way they sometimes did when she was working on a particularly creative illustration. "What a great title for a children's book! The Wishy-Washy Family! No, wait. How about just: The Wishy-Washies? I might suggest that to a publisher. Wouldn't it—"

  Anastasia groaned. "I have to feed Frank Goldfish and get dressed for school," she said. She took her bowl to the sink and started toward the stairs.

  Instantly the dog, who had been snoring, was awake, alert, on his feet, and at her side.

  "Okay, Sle
uthie, come on," Anastasia said, laughing, and headed to her room.

  Anastasia sat at her desk in Mr. Francisco's class and glanced surreptitiously at her watch. She didn't want to hurt the teacher's feelings, but Values was actually a pretty boring class. They had been discussing groundhogs for thirty-two minutes—no, thirty-three minutes actually, she thought, watching the hand on her watch face jump ahead. That was about thirty-one minutes more than she had ever thought in her entire life about groundhogs, up to now.

  It was amazing how everybody in the eighth grade seemed to have had a groundhog experience at some time—and even more amazing how they seemed to want to describe it.

  It reminded Anastasia of a day in second grade, six years ago, when she was only seven. A lady who wrote children's books had come to visit the classroom. She had brought with her a picture book that she had written about a zoo. And she had done the pictures (which she explained were called illustrations) in the book, too. She showed the original paintings of various animals and she showed the pages on which she had written the story, with all the crossed-out words, and she explained how she had rewritten it again and again. She told about how she chose the title: Zoo Who. Then she described how the book was published.

  Finally, she asked if there were any questions. Every second grader in the room, including Anastasia, raised a hand.

  The lady looked very pleased. She smiled. "Yes?" she said, and pointed to Jenny MacCauley.

  "I went to the zoo," Jenny said, "and we saw a whole lot of monkeys, and they smelled really bad, and my mom said she didn't want to have lunch because the smell made her stomach feel sick."

  "That's very interesting," the lady said. "I enjoyed doing the illustration of monkeys because they're so lively. Does someone have a question about writing books, or about my book? Yes? You over there, in the blue shirt." She pointed to Daniel Cirelli.

  "I went to the zoo with my cousins," Daniel said. "And my cousin Joey? He kept punching me in the car, and his mom said if he didn't stop we wouldn't even be allowed to go to the zoo, and we'd go back home instead, so Joey—"

  "Isn't it fun," the book-writing lady said, "to visit the zoo? I spent a lot of time at the zoo when I was doing the research for my book, Zoo Who." She held it up. "Who can guess how much research I needed to learn about all the animals? Would you guess one day, or one week, or one month? You there with your hand up, in the yellow sweater." She pointed to Lindsay Cavanaugh.

  "I went to the Franklin Park Zoo," Lindsay said, "and the elephant had a big scab on its leg."

  Remembering the second-grade afternoon, Anastasia smiled. The lady hadn't called on her, even though she had her hand up, but she had wanted very much, she recalled, to tell about the time she had gone to the zoo.

  And now the same thing was happening. Every student in Mr. Francisco's class wanted to tell about the time their uncle shot a groundhog, or their cousin poisoned a ground-hog, or their next door neighbor whacked a groundhog over the head with a croquet mallet.

  Anastasia had no interest in groundhogs, or any groundhogs tales to tell, and she thought the class was quite boring; but she did enjoy watching Mr. Francisco, who was extremely handsome.

  He was new to the school. He was more patient than the other teachers. He was younger. He joked a lot, and knew the names of rock groups, and he'd seen movies like Wayne's World, which Anastasia assumed no adult had ever seen.

  He was the kind of teacher a kid could befriends with. In fact, very recently Anastasia's friend Daphne Bellingham had gone to see Mr. Francisco in his office, after school, to explain that she hadn't done the assigned reading because she'd been visiting her father over the weekend and had forgotten to take the book with her. Daphne said that they'd sat there in his office talking like a couple of equals, instead of the usual Powerful Teacher/Humble Student conversation that kids were accustomed to. In fact, Daphne confided, Mr. Francisco had said that while they were in his office—though never in class—Daphne could feel free to call him Barry.

  Barry. Anastasia thought about the name, saying it to herself under her breath in class. It was an okay name, she guessed. Not great, but okay.

  She wondered if he would say the same thing to her if she ever went to his office. "Call me Barry."

  She couldn't respond "Call me Anastasia," because of course he already did call her Anastasia. So what would she say?

  Just: "All right, Barry."

  It felt a little weird. Even thinking about it felt a little weird. She decided that she wouldn't go to his office.

  "Time's about up, guys," Mr. Francisco was saying. "Work on the second and third questions tonight. All those of you who think it's no big deal to murder a groundhog? You might find tonight's questions a little tougher."

  The bell rang and the students picked up their books. Anastasia closed her notebook and headed toward the door to meet Daphne and Meredith. They had gym together the next period.

  "Forget the stupid vegetable garden," she overheard Ben Barstow say to a group of his pals. "They oughta just eat the groundhog!"

  "Protein! Right! Yeah!" the other boys responded enthusiastically. One of them began making loud chewing and slurping sounds.

  Anastasia rolled her eyes in disgust, caught up with her waiting friends, and headed down the corridor.

  "Cool name," Meredith said. "Sleuth. You're really lucky, Anastasia." They were in the cafeteria eating lunch after gym class. "I wish I could have a dog, but my mom hates them."

  "My mother loves dogs," Daphne said, nibbling the cheese from the edge of a pizza slice, "but our dumb apartment building doesn't allow them. Remember my dog? Barkley? I only get to see him when I visit my father on weekends. He barely remembers me. Barkley, I mean, not my father. Boy, they talk about divorce hurting kids. How about dogs? Didn't anybody ever think about dogs?"

  Sonja Isaacson, sitting next to Anastasia, poked her finger into the side of a Twinkie, squeezed slightly, and watched the cream filling ooze from the hole. She made a face and put the Twinkie down on her tray. "We have dogs," she reminded her friends, "but they really belong to my brothers. My brothers have to feed them and everything. My dad's always yelling at them because they forget."

  "Dogs are a lot of work," Anastasia pointed out. "I had to promise to feed mine twice a day, and walk him twice a day. And he wakes up really early. This morning I was out on Chestnut Street with Sleuth and it was barely light. The sun was just coming up.

  "Anybody want my chips?" she asked, looking at her tray and deciding that she'd eaten enough.

  "Me. Thanks." Sonja leaned over and scooped up the handful of potato chips. "If you were on Chestnut Street, did you see the police?"

  "Yeah, I did," Meredith said, even though the question hadn't been meant for her. "I saw them on my way to school. There were millions of them. I bet anything somebody got murdered." She wadded up her paper napkin, aimed at the trash can, and tossed the napkin in. "Two points! Yay me," she said.

  "There weren't millions, Mer," Daphne corrected. "You always exaggerate. There were two cruisers and four policemen out on the sidewalk. I saw them, too. I would have stopped to watch but I was already late for school."

  Anastasia picked up her tray to take it to the window where empty trays and used utensils were returned. "What are you guys talking about?" she asked. "What police? I didn't see any police."

  "On Chestnut Street, at the corner where that insurance agency is," Sonja described. "By the brick building with the parking lot? It was crawling with police at a quarter of eight this morning."

  "No kidding." Anastasia balanced her tray in one hand and picked up her schoolbooks with the other. "Darn it. I was there about six-thirty. There's a mailbox on that corner. I mailed some stuff there, for my mom. But when I left for school later, I went the other way. I always miss everything interesting."

  Sonja shrugged. "It wasn't all that interesting, actually. There wasn't a body or anything. The police were just standing around talking to each other."

&
nbsp; "There weren't even any of those yellow ribbons tying off the crime scene," Meredith added.

  "Nobody was handcuffed," Daphne said. "I looked at everybody's wrists when I went by."

  "Well," Anastasia said, reassured that she hadn't missed a major event, "Sam would have loved it. All those policemen with guns."

  "Hi, Sam. Whatcha doing?" Anastasia asked from the back steps. She had just arrived home from school, and her brother was coming through the kitchen door with something in his hand. "What do you have?"

  Sam opened his fist and showed her the brown fish-shaped morsels. "Cat treats," he said. "I'm going to the garage to visit my kitten."

  "I don't like looking at those, Sam," Anastasia said. "They make me think of Frank Goldfish."

  Understandingly, Sam closed his hand so that she wouldn't have to view the cat treats.

  Poor Sam. Anastasia felt sorry for him that his kitten now had to live in the garage, even though the kitten itself didn't seem to mind at all. Anastasia suspected there might be mice in the garage. The half-grown kitten was getting a little pudgy. "Uh-oh," Mrs. Krupnik had said, and asked the vet to check. But no, the kitten wasn't pregnant. It was a male kitten, and simply overeating. Probably it shouldn't even have the nasty-smelling little fish-flavored treats, Anastasia thought, but she didn't tell Sam that. He looked so cheerful, going for a visit to his pet.

  "I'll come with you, okay?" She put her schoolbooks down on the porch steps.

  "Okay," said Sam, and took Anastasia's hand in his own.

  The gray kitten scampered out from behind some garden tools when they entered the garage, which was messy and dimly lit by the daylight filtered through cobwebbed windows. The Krupnik car now lived in the driveway so that the kitten could have a safe home; Anastasia's father said that it was the least he could do, to sacrifice his car's place, since it was he who was allergic to the kitten.