Anastasia, Absolutely Read online

  Briefly she wondered if, for a change, she should wear her hair back in a ponytail tomorrow, and tie something around it. In a little dish on her bureau there was a fat piece of yellow yarn that she had acquired someplace. That would look pretty good with the yellow and red sweater, Anastasia thought.

  She walked over to that side of the room, picked up the yarn, held it against her hair, and looked into the mirror. Wasn't there a corny old song that went "And in her hair she wore a yellow ribbon," or something like that?

  Yellow ribbon. Yellow ribbon. What was it that someone—just today at school—had said about a yellow ribbon? It was at lunch. It was Meredith. She was talking about—

  Oh, no. Anastasia sat down on her bed in dismay as the memory of the conversation came back. Meredith had been talking about the police. About the police that morning. Millions of them—well, okay, four of them—at the corner of Chestnut and Winchester streets. Right by the mailbox—the former mailbox, which had now mysteriously disappeared. And an official investigation, probably performed right after the official mailperson from the official mail truck came to officially collect the mail, would have led to the discovery of her gross deposit wrapped in the New York Times plastic bag.

  The dog ambled over to the bed and sat on the floor by Anastasia's feet, looking up at her lovingly. In his bowl on the bookcase, the goldfish swam languidly in looping arcs.

  "Frank," Anastasia whispered in a dispirited, apprehensive voice, "and Sleuthie: stick with me, you guys. I'm in very big trouble with the law."

  "Oooo," Frank mouthed silently with his orange glistening lips. "Oooo." Sleuth sneezed.

  Anastasia Krupnik

  VALUES

  3. Suppose that by sacrificing one year from your own life expectancy, you could save the life of one American baby. But that baby would grow up to be a violent criminal. Would you do so?

  I guess I would. Because maybe it would do some good stuff before it became a criminal. Or maybe it would be a criminal and then get rehabilitated and do good stuff afterwards, like maybe after it got out of prison it would go to medical school and discover a cure for cancer. I don't think they give the Nobel Prize to former criminals but maybe they might. So I guess I would do it. At least I would if my life expectancy was very long, like if I was going to be ninety or something.

  But not if it was going to be a serial killer.

  4

  "What did you put for number three?" Daphne asked. She and Anastasia were walking together into the school building after meeting on the front steps. Anastasia had taken Sleuth out for his morning walk earlier, but she had chosen a completely different route, one that went nowhere near what she thought of now as the scene of the crime. And she had gone the alternative way to school as well.

  Anastasia made a face. "Well, I said maybe I would sacrifice a year of my life for a baby criminal. But I don't know, Daph. I don't think he gave us enough information."

  Daphne shrugged. "I didn't need any more information. I wouldn't do it. Who cares about criminals? I think they should all get the electric chair."

  Anastasia was startled. "Daphne!" she said. "That's terrible! You don't believe in the death penalty, do you? How can you? Your father's a minister!"

  "Gimme a break," Daphne said sarcastically.

  Anastasia sighed as they opened their side-by-side lockers. Poor Daphne; she had developed something of a bad attitude. Anastasia couldn't really blame her. Reverend Bellingham had a girlfriend who was the soprano soloist in his own church, and they held hands in public, which was about as gross as you could get. And Daphne's mother had announced that all men were pigs; she was in law school now, planning to become a feminist lawyer, and she had stopped using deodorant and always smelled kind of unpleasant. No wonder Daphne was losing her sense of humor.

  "I'll see you at lunch, okay?" Anastasia had math first period, and Daphne's schedule was different.

  "Can't. I'm being a library aide during lunch period. I'm going to quit eating, anyway."

  "How come?"

  Daphne giggled. "To get my spirits up. I'm going to get really thin and glamorous. I'm trying to get cheekbones." She sucked her cheeks in and looked at Anastasia.

  Anastasia was horrified. She shuddered. "Don't do that, Daph. It makes you look like a skeleton. It gives me the creeps. And it's not healthy to starve yourself."

  Daphne laughed, and her sunken cheeks disappeared. "Only kidding," she said. "I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my backpack," she explained. "Mrs. Leonard said I could eat in the library as long as I don't mess up any books."

  "Are you coming to Values class?"

  Daphne nodded. "I still wouldn't bother giving up any of my own life to save a baby criminal, though. I don't know why you had a hard time answering that question." She grinned and closed the metal door to her locker. "See you later."

  ***

  Talking to Daphne, thinking about the questions for Mr. Francisco's class, Anastasia had put her own problems out of her mind briefly. It was odd, she thought, how for whole blocks of time she could forget her own terrible secret: that she had not yet confessed to the post office and that they were probably sorting through clues, looking for the lawbreaker.

  She was fairly certain that fingerprints wouldn't play a role. Even if her fingerprints were on the blue plastic bag—and they probably were—she didn't think they would be able to match them up. Her fingerprints would not be on file with the FBI, she was quite certain.

  And she didn't think they could do anything with DNA. They could get the dog's DNA, probably, from the contents of the blue plastic bag; but the dog's DNA wouldn't be on file anyplace, except maybe...

  At the vet's? But so what? There were a zillion vets in the Boston suburbs, and the post office wouldn't know where to start. They'd look in the same town as the mailbox, and they'd never find him; instead of the town where he lived, Sleuth was a patient of a veterinarian in Cambridge, because that's where Anastasia's dad worked. Ha.

  And even if by some remote chance they found out who Sleuth was, they could probably never link him to Anastasia Krupnik. If they hauled Sleuth into the police station, she'd say she never saw that dog before in her life. She'd look right at him, into his devoted eyes, and say—

  Devoted eyes? That was a joke. Sleuth had so much hair covering his face that the only way to see his eyes was to conduct an intense search through the underbrush, maybe with a comb.

  Anyway, devoted eyes or not, there was no way that Anastasia could pretend that he wasn't her dog. She was a loyal person. If they identified and apprehended Sleuth, she decided, she would have to confess, out of loyalty.

  It pleased her, thinking of that. Loyalty was a good quality. It sort of balanced her bad qualities, like wishy-washyness.

  But before she could stop herself, she found herself thinking, just for a brief and guilty moment, that she would have been better off if she had gotten a canary instead of a dog.

  Anastasia sighed, pushed the whole problem once again to the back of her mind, thought about the math homework, and entered her first classroom of the day.

  It was early afternoon. Mr. Francisco came into the room and Anastasia opened her notebook and turned to the Values questions.

  "So, guys," Mr. Francisco said to the class, "now that we've buried the groundhog, what're we going to do about these babies? Gonna sacrifice a few days of your own lives?"

  He sat on the desk at the front of the room, and Anastasia thought again about what an attractive man Mr. Francisco was. Anastasia didn't ordinarily notice what clothes men wore. She couldn't remember what her father had been wearing at breakfast that morning, even though he had probably been dressed in a very dignified fashion, maybe even with a necktie, for jury duty.

  But for some reason she noticed that Mr. Francisco was wearing a plaid shirt, which she had seen in the L.L. Bean catalog, with an oatmeal-colored crewneck sweater over it.

  She sighed. Mr. Francisco never seemed to notice her very much. He
concentrated his attention on the people who had strong opinions. He liked to provoke them into arguments. Then, before they knew what had happened, he had turned the whole argument around so that their opinions had changed.

  Her own opinions could never change, she thought glumly, because she didn't have opinions to begin with.

  As usual, her classmates were digressing. They were talking about criminal behavior, and whether you could identify it early. The discussion caught Anastasia's attention. After all, she herself now fell into the category of criminal, even though nobody knew it yet. Most of the boys were raising their hands and telling about murderers they had read about, or had seen interviewed on TV.

  "They're always loners," someone said. "The newspaper always says, 'Neighbors described him as a loner.'"

  Anastasia wondered if neighbors would describe her as a loner. Probably not. They would describe her as someone who was always with either three girlfriends, a small brother, or a leashed dog who resembled a mop.

  "They never look like murderers," Ben Barstow said with authority, as if he were a college professor. "They look like accountants. They always wear weird shoes."

  Anastasia gulped. She did look like an accountant. She was sure of it. She wore big round horn-rimmed glasses, exactly like the guys—the accountants—from Price Waterhouse who brought out the names of the Oscar winners at the Academy Awards ceremonies.

  She glanced down at her shoes. Hiking boots. Were they weird? Anastasia didn't think so.

  "Yeah, but even if they don't look like murderers, you can tell!" Steve Harvey insisted. "My mom says you can tell. Like that guy in the movie, Hannibal Lecter? You could tell by how weird he acted."

  Steve's mom—the Harveys were neighbors of the Krupniks—was a prosecuting attorney, so she knew lots of criminals. She was always going to crime scenes and stuff, and she had to conduct interviews in prisons and police stations. It had always seemed to Anastasia that Mrs. Harvey had a very scary but exciting job.

  Mr. Francisco began to direct the discussion away from criminal identification, back to the original question and the problem of how to make decisions on difficult issues.

  Anastasia's mind wandered again. She wondered if M rs. Harvey would be the one to prosecute her when she was caught. If she were caught.

  She wondered if her father would be a member of the jury. Probably not. Probably it would disqualify him, having his daughter be the criminal.

  The accused criminal, Anastasia reminded herself. Her parents had often talked about how people in America were innocent until they were proven guilty.

  She wondered if maybe she ought to confess, and plea-bargain, or should she proclaim her innocence—which would involve lying, something Anastasia did not ordinarily do—or maybe even go for an insanity defense?

  It had been, she thought, a completely insane thing to do. Maybe a psychiatrist would testify on her behalf.

  "The defendant has been seriously disturbed since early adolescence," the psychiatrist would testify, looking at his notes on the witness stand. "She had an unnatural relationship with a goldfish dating back to fourth grade."

  The jury would gaze at her with loathing.

  "Anastasia?" Mr. Francisco's voice called her back from her thoughts. She looked up. He was still sitting on the desk top, swinging his legs. (He wore loafers, she noticed, comfortable-looking, tastefully scuffed loafers.) "What did you decide?"

  Anastasia read her answer to question three, the question about sacrificing some of your own life for the sake of a future criminal, aloud. "It's a wishy-washy answer, isn't it?" she asked Mr. Francisco.

  "Hey, it was a tough question. Isn't that right, class? These decisions aren't easy. We always want to say, 'But what if...?'

  "Think about the what ifs while you take a look at the next two questions for Monday's class, guys. And have a good weekend, okay?"

  ***

  Anastasia walked partway home with her three best friends, as usual. One by one they separated as they came to their respective streets. Daphne Bellingham headed off first, toward the apartment building where she lived with her mother.

  "See ya," she said, at her corner. "I'll call you all tonight."

  "What are you going to do this weekend?" Meredith Halberg asked her. "Should we all get together? We could rent a movie or something."

  "Okay," Daphne said. "I have to spend Sunday with my dad, but I could come over tomorrow. In the afternoon or evening, okay? I'm going to spend the morning working on my looks."

  "Your looks?" Sonja asked, puzzled. "What's wrong with your looks? You're one of the best-looking girls in the eighth grade. Everybody says so."

  "Right," Anastasia and Meredith both agreed, nodding. Daphne made a face.

  "You're not really going to starve yourself into cheekbones, are you?" Anastasia asked suspiciously.

  "No," Daphne explained. "Actually, I'm just working on my wardrobe. My mom said I could have all of her feminine clothes. She's only going to wear—what did she call it?—genderless clothing from now on. She's changing her style, so I get a whole lot of new clothes. Everything that has a ruffle or a ribbon or a piece of lace."

  "How can you change your style of looks?" Anastasia asked, mystified. "You look like what you look like. I look like an owl, for example. No matter what I do to change it, I'll always look like an owl. I've resigned myself to that."

  Sonja nodded in assent. "I'll always look like a porpoise," she said, sighing. "My whole family looks like porpoises. I think we're called a pod."

  Meredith frowned. "How come you all know what you look like and I don't?"

  The other three all gazed at Mer for a moment. She was tall and thin, a very pale blonde with light blue eyes.

  "You look like an Afghan hound," Anastasia said, finally. "I'll show you a picture in my dog book. Why don't you all come over to my house tomorrow night? I told my parents I'd baby-sit for Sam; they're going to the theater."

  "Can we rent a movie? You have a VCR, don't you?" Daphne asked.

  "Sure. Hey, I have an idea. We can rent a movie my dad knows about; he said it's a good one. It's called Sleuth, same as my dog."

  They waved to Daphne. At the next corner, Sonja said good-bye and headed to the sprawling house where her large family lived and where, in a separate wing, her father had his medical office; then Meredith turned toward her own brick house in the block before Anastasia's.

  Anastasia walked on alone to her own house. It was certainly not the most elegant house on the street, but it was a house that Anastasia loved, with its Victorian turret that housed her third-floor bedroom, its large yard and porches, and the glassed-in room on the side which was her mother's studio. She thought about how pleasant it would be to have her friends over for the evening tomorrow night. There was some Paul Newman popcorn in the cupboard, she remembered, and maybe she could make some cookies in the morning, and let Sam help.

  Of course, it meant that she would have to postpone her other plans a little. She had almost convinced herself to call the post office this afternoon and confess.

  But Mr. Francisco had been correct. If you started thinking about the "But what ifs," it all became hopelessly complicated.

  For example, what if she confessed, and she had already rented the movie, and they wouldn't let her take it back before she went off to jail? Well, of course her father would probably return it for her, but she had asked him lots of other times to return movies for her, and he had always been grouchy about doing it.

  And what if after she confessed, her picture was in the newspaper, and it would be one of those terrible mug shots that they take at the police station, maybe they would even use the profile one, and Anastasia had a terrible profile, even on a not-too-bad-hair day, and no lawyer would want to represent someone who looked like that, not even Alan Dershowitz, even though her dad had met him at a party in Cambridge once?

  Who would feed Frank Goldfish while she served her sentence?

  And what about Sleuth? W
hat if her parents weren't willing to walk Sleuth while she was imprisoned, even though it would probably be a fairly short prison term, because after all, it was only tampering with the mail, not mass murder or anything? What would happen to Sleuthie then?

  What if she got a terrible cellmate? Anastasia didn't even like summer camp because there was no privacy. She couldn't imagine being shut up in a tiny cell with some other person (she supposed it would be a female, at least) who maybe sleepwalked or, even worse, smoked?

  To confess or not to confess. To confess today or wait till after the weekend.

  I am not going to be wishy-washy about this, Anastasia decided. I have absolutely come to a decision. I am a person with values, and confessing is the right thing to do. It's the honorable thing. I will confess.

  I just won't confess yet.

  Anastasia Krupnik

  VALUES

  4. Suppose that you happened to see a stranger shoplifting in one of your favorite stores. Would you report it to the store manager?

  Well. I guess I would report it. Because the prices of things in stores go up if there is a lot of shoplifting, since the store has to make up for the loss of income. My favorite store is Strawberries, where I buy CD's, and they are already too expensive. So I would do my part to put a halt to shoplifting.

  Also, of course, stealing is wrong, and I would report it for that reason, too.

  On the other hand, though, I wouldn't want the person to know I reported them, because what if they were a hardened criminal or something, and would take revenge on me? If they were just shoplifting a CD, it wouldn't be worth it to risk my life.

  If they were shoplifting a whole stereo system, then maybe it would be worth it. But what if they took revenge on my whole family? Even my little brother?

  5

  "Sit, Sleuth. Now stay." Anastasia could hear her mother's voice from the studio where Katherine Krupnik worked. She walked down the hall, through the dining room, and opened the door that was the entrance to the huge, octagonal, multiwindowed room attached to the side of their big house.